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The two competitive currents in French philosophy initiated by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze tackle the difference between empiricism and idealism in contrary motion. In Derrida, the move is toward a critique of representation. In Deleuze, it is toward recovery of the real. Nevertheless, this paper nominates their meeting in a kind of ‘radical empiricism’. Both Derrida and Deleuze engage with empiricism at certain points in their work, although many who go by that label would be surprised to hear it.

Deposited with permission of Cultural Studies Review. An image, originally published with this article, has been removed.

Is history a category of reason, or is reason a category of history? These opposing questions have divided the structuralist from the materialist—but neither question is wrong. Analysis of the logic of oppositions challenges feminism, in particular, to find a logic—and a poetics—in which to render its values without historical or theoretical naiveté. I explore the question of the timing of feminism through Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

Pinjarra in 1970 lay on an extraordinary cusp. It lagged along a fault line between one order and another; or rather, it squatted at a precipice, over which its cherished values had already been dashed to pieces. In 1967, Aboriginal people were at last, by national referendum, declared citizens of Australia. In 1969, Alcoa began to prepare the site in the hills behind Pinjarra for the open-cut mining of the largest bauxite deposit so far discovered in the world. The past met the future, and they didn’t recognise each other.

Book Information A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray. A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray Penelope Deutscher, Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2002, 228, US $17.95 By Penelope Deutscher. Cornell University Press. Ithaca. Pp. 228. US $17.95

Higher education on the corporate model imagines students as consumers, choosing between knowledge products and brands. It imagines itself liberating the university from the dictates of the State/tradition/aristocratic self-replication, and putting it in the hands of its democratic stakeholders. It therefore naturally subscribes to the general management principles and practices of global corporate culture. These principles – transparency, accountability, efficiency – are hard to argue with in principle. But an abstract argument in political economy comes down to earth in the challenges facing the arts and humanities, after the ‘Education Revolution’, to justify their modes of life.

(1993). Why bother? Defending derrida and the significance of writing. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 71, No. 2, pp. 121-131.

The paper argues that psychoanalysis and deconstruction offer more to feminist theory than contestation. The common feminist criticisms of the work of Lacan and Derrida are not as compelling as may be thought. Among the possibilities for feminist theory using psychoanalysis and deconstruction is the scrutiny of theory as theory—and this will inevitably include scrutinizing feminist theory itself.

The semantic field of the border is a rich one. It opens out onto edge, margin, embroidered decoration.

There is something fortuitous in Kathleen Petyarre's work 'looking like' abstract art, 'modern art', at the same time as it arises under and gains its celebrity in the genre of 'Indigenous art', which is precisely not modern, as far as the map of the art commodity goes. In James Clifford's schema, the reception of art objects into a culture is defined by whether they contribute to self-image or as images of the other. The latter participate as 'artefacts' and belong to appropriation through the collection under the sign 'to have'. Whereas 'art' works in the mode of the dominant culture's self-definition under the sign of 'to be'.1 That fortuity tells us something important about the creation and reception of art, as it does about the creation and reception of political categories like 'Indigenous', 'feminist', and so on.