Flores's succinct account/observations on Ferdinand de Saussure:
For Saussure, there are no objects (words/texts/others) that carry inherent, autonomous, "positive" meaning: there are only points of view whose meanings depend on their interrelatedness: Saussure states that "in language there are only differences without positive terms.” Signifiers (sound images) and signifieds (concepts/meanings) are not fixed and universal and do not simply reflect prior categories (the world/ideas/forms): language articulates or makes such categories and concepts possible. Because there is no necessary or inherent relation between words and objects, the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (e.g., similar meanings correspond in practice rather than in some natural or essential way to different words across languages or across time as words change). Yet because the sign's structure is arbitrary, it is subject both to history and to a synchronic study of its relational function within a signifying system (la langue) that is not arbitrary but conventional and socially constructed. To explain a signifying action (individual utterance, speech act, parole) is therefore to relate it to the underlying system of norms (conventions/practices) that makes it possible: hence, a structural rather than a strictly causal explanation (synchronic rather than diachronic/historical).
Saussure offers an analogy between language and chess: "The respective value of the pieces depends on their position on the chessboard just as each linguistic term derives its value from its opposition to all the other terms. . . . Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others . . . .Signs function, then, not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position" (cf. Literary Theory: The Basics 82-86). Hans Bertens, writing about Claude Lévi-Strauss, is helpful here: "Cultural signs position themselves somewhere on a gliding scale between pairs of opposites and in so doing express a relation between two terms, one of which represents a presence while the other represents an absence" (Literary Theory: The Basics 63-64).
The supposed union of sound-image (signifier's abstract form) and its signified, however, may still suggest that signs mediate or represent a world of phenomena and ideas via a system of differences (language/discourse, though the production of meaning via such relational differences also suggests that language is prior to thought, and that we apprehend or determine reality via language). But if we think of the sign as the possibility of distinguishing signifier from signified, then the structure of the sign can be understood as an effect of difference or "différance" rather than as something stable and unified. "Language works--gains meaning . . . through opposition [and] identity as a function of difference" (Jane Tompkins 736). Linguistic values/meanings depend upon their relations to other terms within particular frameworks/contexts. "Although meaning is in first instance produced by difference, it is at a more fundamental level produced by the structure: by the relations between signs that make up a language, or, to give this a wider application, between the elements that together make up a given structure" (Literary Theory: The Basics 60).
In contrast, rather than identifying or uniting the signifier with the signified, Jacques Derrida portrays the sign as deferring the presence of the signified (a poststructural view).

New Historicism
Here are some key assumptions of new historicist theory and practice as summarized by H. Aram Veeser (qtd. in Critical Theory and Practice 115) and Steven Lynn (Texts and Contexts 131):
1. that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;
2. that every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
3. that literary and non-literary texts circulate inseparably;
4. that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature;
5. that a critical method and language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe;
6. that history is knowable only in the sense that all texts are knowable--that is by interpretation, argument, speculation;
7. literature is not simply a mirror of historical reality; history in fact isn’t a mirror of historical reality. Literature is shaped by history, and even shapes history; it is also distorted by history, and is even discontinuous with history.
8. Historians and critics must view “the facts” of history subjectively; in fact, the “facts” must be viewed as their creation.
Such premises invite you to explore how a specific literary text represents a particular cultural/ideological (social, political, economic, class, religion, gender) perspective peculiar to its historical context. In his essay “Culture” (Critical Terms for Literary Study) Stephen Greenblatt asks:
a. What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?
b. Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
c. Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading?
d. Upon what social understandings does the work depend?
e. Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work?
f. What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected?
Draw upon (and respond to) Greenblatt by explaining, distinguishing, and illustrating his concepts of “mobility,” “constraint,” and “exchange [circulation]” in relation to a particular literary text.

Louis Montrose’s “New Historicisms” essay is too complex to summarize here, but among his concerns is the characterization of new historicism as “an academic site of ideological struggle between containment and subversion. This struggle may be reduced to the following scenario. Critics who emphasize the possibilities for the effective agency of individual or collective subjects against forms of domination, exclusion, and assimilation have energetically contested critics who stress the capacity of the early modern state, as personified in the monarch, to contain apparently subversive gestures, or even to produce them precisely in order to contain them” (Redrawing the Boundaries 402). Montrose wants to move beyond the containment/subversion binary opposition to understand how these concepts are mutually complicit, and to suggest that while our subjectivity/identity is produced by discourse and material forces and relationships, we also may discover facets of individual agency and the capacity for resistance: “Thus my invocation of the term subject is meant to suggest an equivocal process of subjectification: on the one hand, it shapes individuals as loci of consciousness and initiators of action, endowing them with subjectivity and with the capacity for agency; and, on the other hand, it positions, motivates, and constrains them within—it subjects them to—social networks and cultural codes, forces of necessity and contingency, that ultimately exceed their comprehension or control” (Montrose 414-15).

In addition to the discussion on ideologies in Critical Theory & Practice (124-34), you might find James H. Kavanagh's comments on ideology helpful:
Ideology is less tenacious as a "set of ideas" than as a system of representations, perceptions, and images that precisely encourages men and women to "see" their specific place in a historically peculiar social formation as inevitable, natural, a necessary function of the "real" itself. . . . there is no such thing as social discourse that is nonideological. . . . Ideology is a social process that works on and through every social subject, that, like any other social process, everyone is "in," whether or not they "know" or understand it. It has the function of producing an obvious "reality" that social subjects can assume and accept, precisely as if it had not beenb socially produced and did not need to be "known" at all. The "nonideological" insistence does not mark one's freedom from ideology, but one's involvement in a specific, quite narrow ideology which has the exact social function of obscuring--even to the individual who inhabits it--the specificity and peculiarlity of one's social and political position, and of preventing any knowledge of the real processes that found one's social life. ("Ideology" 310-12 Critical Terms for Literary Study)

Deconstruction
Rather than striving to show that a text’s ambiguities can be resolved to cohere in a unified whole (e.g., New Criticism), or to presume that all discursive meaning accords with an existing, determinable system of terms/relations/rules (structuralism), deconstruction attends to contradictions that threaten to undermine such unity or structural stability. A deconstructive analysis exposes figures and oppositions that privilege particular positions and meanings. For example, deconstruction notes how binary oppositions (nature/culture, literal/figurative, male/female, self/other) demonstrate a particular logic or philosophy of meaning (constituting a rhetorical argument, a culturally positioned arrangement that serves a particular order of things) and then proceeds to question the priority of one term over another, to show their interdependence and to suggest how “such privileging imposes an interpretive template on the subject being examined” (Approaching Poetry 242, see summary of method on p.244). Once the hierarchy is questioned and even reversed, the opposition may be displaced into a different context to challenge the function of the opposition itself (e.g., reading/writing may not only be opposed and inverted, but considered from another view/context as radically destabilized in even determining what is written or read--the illusion of a stable, essential transcendental signified is created by the opposition itself (e.g., Prospero’s white, male, aristocratic magical power vs. Sycorax’s female, black, witchlike power).
In 5.6 and 5.7 of Critical Theory in Practice (212-21), focus on Derrida’s use of the term “différance,” to ponder how “we are always colluders in the construction of meaning” (218), so that what we seek to analyze or to critique becomes part of and to some extent structures our efforts to dismantle or to understand (master) it, until we can no longer confidently distinguish between the literal and the figurative, between our interpretive efforts or strategies and the text’s anticipation of them.
Summing Up Derrida (or Oh My Transcendental Signified!) Flores
Structuralists tend to view the sign as a union of the sound image (signifier's abstract form) and the concept (signified). But viewed in this way, the sign tends to seen as a representation, a grid or system of differences between us and a world of phenomena and of ideas. If we think, however, of the efficacy of the sign as hinging upon the possibility of distinguishing signifiers from signifieds, then the sign’s structure can be understood not as a union but as difference itself rather than a means to referentiality.
Rather than identifying signifier with the signified, Derrida thinks of language and the sign as deferring (the presence of) the signified. Ordinarily we believe that the signifier is derived from the signified—that it serves to mediate the (presence of) the signified, and that the signifier is thus secondary or provisional in relation to the signified. But Derrida attacks this notion by recalling Saussure's statement that in language there are only differences without positive terms. Without the difference between signifiers we would have no concept of the signified. Derrida concludes that the signified concept is never present in itself in an adequate presence that would refer only to itself.
To begin his critique, Derrida asks us to think of the "system" of language as a structure, within which there is only the freeplay [play] of differences between signifiers. To control this play to produce meaning, we would have to posit some origin or center to the structure that could serve as its organizing principle. But this unique center would govern or control the play of difference only by virtue of the fact that the center itself was not structured, that it must somehow remain outside the structure of language and beyond the play of difference.
One way of thinking of this center is through the terms "presence" and the "signified." Instead of seeing the presence of the signified as simply deferred by the way the signifier substitutes for the signified, we now have a way of thinking of language as a play of differences in which the presence of the signified is always deferred and cannot be appropriated either by knowing the system in its totality (cf. Levi-Strauss) or by speaking confidently of the controlling presence of a center or transcendental signified controlling the play of differences.
Drawing upon the work of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida enables us to note that our experience of reading often seems incomplete, as if the text intended to say something more but couldn't (or the corollary experience that we are somehow inadequate interpreters). This is an experience of something in excess of the signifier (the signifying), a feeling that the signified is surpassing the signifier. But might this experience of excess, perceived in terms of gaps or silences in the text, be a function of the signifier or the play of language creating or revealing a lack in itself? The idea of this lack created by the signifier and the presence or supplementary meaning we tend to posit (and to substitute to fill the lack) as existing outside the system or play of signifiers is Derrida's point of attack and departure from Merleau-Ponty.
Derrida uses the term différance to denote neither a word nor a concept but rather the gap that is the difference between signifiers and the movement that is the deferral of the hypothetical signified. Presence is never present but always deferred. Différance, therefore, is the condition of possibility for experiencing the absence of the presence of the signified. Différance is the freeplay of signifiers that creates a trace of the other which is n(ever) absent. The experience that there is too much, more than one can say, is not due, argues Derrida, to the empirical impossibility of knowing language in its totality. Language excludes totalization because it is a field of play (play of signifiers in differential relations), of différance that permits the lack that creates the movement of supplementarity—the move to supplement a lack on the part of the signifying (and thus a lack "perceived" in the elusive/illusive signified). As Ross Murfin notes in commenting on Derrida’s critique of Rousseau’s privileging of speech over writing, “writing is a supplement to speech that is at the same time necessary. Barbara Johnson, sounding like Derrida, puts it this way: ‘Recourse to writing . . . is necessary to recapture a presence whose lack has not been preceded by any fullness’ (Derrida, Dissemination xii). Thus, Derrida shows that one strand of Rousseau’s discourse made writing seem a secondary, even treacherous supplement, while another made it seem necessary to communication” (Murfin Turn of the Screw 182).
Murfin elaborates: “This is how deconstruction works: by showing that what was prior and privileged in the old hierarchy (for instance, metaphor and speech) can just as easily seem secondary, the deconstructor causes the formerly privileged term to exchange properties with the formerly devalued one. . . . Once deconstructed, literal and figurative can exchange properties, so that the prioritizing between them is erased. . . And, just as literal and figurative can exchange properties, criticism can exchange properties with literature, in the process coming to be seen not merely as a supplement—the second, negative, and inferior term in the binary opposition creative writing/literary criticism—but rather as an equally creative form of work. Would we write if there were not critics—intelligent readers motivated and able to make sense of what is written? Who, then, depends on whom? (Turn of the Screw 186)

Let’s review and proceed further; in much of what follows I draw upon, add to, and quote liberally from Hans Bertens’s account of poststructuralism (Literary Theory: The Basics, 2001). With the structuralists, we assume that “the structures of language and culture speak through us” (Bertens 122) but unlike structuralists, poststructuralists address/recognize the problem of trying to analyze such structures even as we speak/write/discern from within those structures in ways already structured by that we wish to make the subject of our statements and analysis. There is no position outside language/structure from which to speak.
We may feel that such arbitrary and conventional arrangements are experienced as quite natural, and this doesn’t bother us unduly because “we see language as only an instrument” (122) for self-expression, used to express something that is prior to language: “something that exists in our minds before we resort to language to give what is already present to us an appropriate expression and shape in words, and basing our trust in language upon the confidence of daily practice in our use of it, particularly in terms of our sense of our own intentions and choices (someone else may lie or misrepresent or fail to understand us but that’s their problem!). If someone says, “be honest with yourself” we may very well think that is possible, a matter of will rather than a problem of knowledge or representation (I think therefore I am and I know what I think or say or write).
Derrida argues that because words in their differential relations are detached from the world, there is no stable anchoring connection that fixes meaning in relation to some real absolute point of reference. Instead, because meaning is produced through difference, “that meaning is always contaminated” (Bertens 124) by the traces of other words (in a signifying chain) that precede and follow, with meaning deferred along such relations of difference, which are the conditions for meaning to be possible, which in turn puts into question the possibility of distinguishing what is truly present (as opposed to what is absent either in the past, present, or future).
Derrida dismantles the structures of the structuralists, but agrees with them in rejecting the idea of authentic truth, or presence, or voice related to some essential concept of being, of self/presence—instead, we “make use of a language that simultaneously uses us” (127). Speech is, argues Derrida, already a form of writing (writing defined broadly as language in its condition of différance). The play of différance produces a surplus of meaning that we tend mistakenly to assume can be pursued successfully to the truth of its ultimate origin or outcome (the transcendental signified).
How do we cope with such excessive, surplus of signification? “Poststructuralism’s answer is that texts set up one or more centers—derived from the language they make use of—that must give them stability and stop the potentially infinite flow of meaning that all texts generate. If there is a center, there is also that which does not belong to it, which is marginal. Setting up a center automatically creates a hierarchical structure: the central is more important than the marginal [binary opposition, with one term in the dyad privileged, the other subordinated and/or absent]” (128). But such binary oppositions “are a good deal less oppositional than they would seem to be. Within binary oppositions we do not only find an oppositional relationship between the two terms involved, we also find a strange complicity” (129). The supposedly inferior term is an important condition for the opposition as such.
“No matter whether a text is literary or non-literary, it can always be deconstructed and can be shown to rely for its internal stability on rhetorical operations that mask their origin in difference and the surplus meaning that is the result of différance. . . .the text remains a field of possibilities” (131).
There is “no getting away from différance and infinite uncertainty [undecidability]. But for politically motivated criticism uncertainty is a poor starting-point. If I want to achieve certain political ends there is not much help in the thought that all meanings—including the values that have led to my political stance—are merely the result of difference and have no solid foundation” (135).
Madan Sarup sums up: "Derrida has made a close study of many philosophers: Nietzsche, Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and others. He argues that they have been able to impose their various systems of thought only by ignoring or suppressing the disruptive effects of language. One of the ruling illusions of Western metaphysics is that reason can somehow grasp the world without a close attention to language and arrive at a pure, self-authenticating truth or method. Derrida's work draws attention to the ways in which language deflects the philosopher's project. He does this by focusing on metaphors and other figurative devices at work in the texts of philosophy. In this way Derrida underlines the rhetorical nature of philosophical arguments.
Deconstruction stresses the irreducibility of metaphor, the difference at play within the very constitution of literal meaning. It should be remembered that deconstruction is not simply a strategic reversal of categories which otherwise remain distinct and unaffected. It is an activity of reading in which texts must be read in a radically new way. There must be an awareness of ambivalence, of the discrepancy between meaning and the author's assertion. Derrida discovers a set of paradoxical themes at odds with their manifest argument. His method consists of showing how the privileged term is held in place by the force of a dominant metaphor and not, as it might seem, by any conclusive logic. Metaphors often disrupt the logic of an argument.
Derrida writes that we have a metaphysical desire to make the end coincide with the means, create an enclosure, make the definition coincide with the defined, the 'father' with the 'son'; within the logic of identity to balance the equation, close the circle. . . . Derrida wants us to 'erase' all oppositions, undoing yet preserving them" (51-52).

Here are some resources to supplement our texts/readings, including some notes. Consider, in particular, how the concept of the “subject” or “subjectivity” challenges the notion of an autonomous, personal self (individualism, purely private desires). For example, Kaja Silverman suggests that the term “subject” or our “subjectivity” can be regarded as the “product of signifying activities which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious . . . . it suggests that even desire is culturally instigated, and hence collective” (qtd. in CTP 142). Or consider why and how the “literary critic occupies thus at once the place of the psychoanalyst . . . and the place of the patient” (Felman qtd. in CTP 144). If you want to take up Lacan’s contention that all subjectivity (knowing/desire) is predicated on loss, absence, and failure, refer to Madan Sarup’s excellent introduction to Lacan (An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, second edition). A Lacanian reading recognizes that what one discovers within the discourse of anOther--the unconscious—is a trace of what is actively reading within oneself; in effect, the text reads the reader (subject) who unconsciously repeats its structures and thereby dismantles distinctions between subject (critic) and object (textual other), master/slave, reading and writing. When such apparently mutual recognition occurs—when I feel that I understand the text and that it seems to understand, even to interpret me, I experience how reading and interpretation are also forms of desire, where my interpretive narrative or its story become “love” stories exchanged in the interest (of knowledge of) each other. Freud and Lacan argue that this process of “transference” and counter-transference is at work within, or structures, all communication, particularly acts of “interpretation.” Can you show within a work or in your relation to a work how a reading/interpreting Subject projects his or her desire(s) onto another (text), and show how that which the Subject perceives as Other may be his or her culturally-inflected, unconscious desires already active within himself/herself?

Post-Structuralist Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice
Derrida suggests that we conceive of the play of différance before thinking of and as prior to such oppositions as absence/presence or subject/object; this différance "holds us in a relation to what exceeds . . . the alternative of presence or absence. A certain alterity--Freud gives it a metaphysical name, the unconscious" ("Différance" 152).
If we move to Lacan's reading of Freud, we find the self articulated as or through the discourse of the Other (via unconscious activity that indicates the difference within consciousness between consciousness and itself). Lacan offers a way to envision the social and linguistic construction of the self: We become social by appropriating language, or rather, it (also) appropriates or constitutes us as subjects (selves). The individual and society appear in opposition but should not be dichotomized: social discourses inhabit each subject (self).
But such discourses work largely through unconscious activity that remains untranslatable; we can only diagnose and infer the structuring process of this language-like activity from the perspectives of "consciousness"—again, these are unconscious processes that Lacan compares to the structuring activity of language. This relation and this figure (linguistic metaphor/comparision) are particularly apt for literary studies, especially in terms of the analyst/critic's interpretation of the analysand's narrative/story and the attendant disguises/displacements of meanings (repression). Language is the condition for unconscious activity, producing its figurative detours and deferrals of signification (for example, via metaphoric condensations of meaning and metonymic chains of part for whole associations).
The Oedipus complex and its resolution mark a transition for a child into a cultural arena where he (she?) becomes self-aware, conscious of an identity and a position or name in relation to family and others—ultimately a place within culture and its laws, discourses, and organization, but also a position disrupted by possibilities that seem to exceed and to challenge predominant ways of naming and knowing (for example, the rule/Name-of-the-Father, illusion of 'phallic' power, authority figures who supposedly have the power to name and to recognize one).
Hence, for Lacan the Subject ('self') is always split by that which is Other, which the Subject experiences as something lacking/missing, which in turn creates desire (compare this to the Derridean move to supplement lack on the part of the signifier/signifying). Desire is not primarily literal or only sexual: it describes a struggle for wholeness, a pursuit of fullness of meaning and being. The Subject projects desire onto an(Other), who tends to see him/herself in the Subject. The unconscious is that which the Subject does not recognize to be himself and which he experiences as other from himself. Thus the way that the Subject (reader/critic/writer/text) projects upon and views an Other will yield clues concerning his or her relationship to unconscious wishes and desires (lack). The unconscious is thus in the place of the Other, the place where the subject does not recognize herself. Unconsciousness emerges as otherness within consciousness. Instead of the rational, autonomous assertion of the unified Cartesian self--"I think, therefore I am"(cogito ergo sum) --Lacan announces that "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think," or "I think where I cannot say I am."
Our largely unwitting dependence upon others (texts too) for self-recognition can become threatening, prompting aggressive self-assertion or a pursuit of Mastery over others even as we may also long poignantly for full intersubjectivity, for complete understanding and union with others (a wish-fulfillment analogous to Dr. Spock's Vulcan mind-meld).
As Hegel argued (Phenomenology of Spirit, esp. section on Self-Consciousness and Lordship and Bondage), desire is directed towards another's desire, another (desiring and desired) Subject. Desire reveals our desire to be desired, to be valued and recognized by another, perhaps by the way another's desire will be seen to confirm or to substitute metaphorically for our own (for us). Desire proceeds from unconscious activity and the lack that it generates (or by which it is comprised and construed, its condition for being). We may demand recognition/love/meaning from others (texts), but we can never be certain that others recognize or speak to us in particular, though we try metaphorically and metonymically to compensate for such lack; desire is insatiable, and we may feel subordinated to the symbolic order and activity of language, as it produces desires for particular meanings that continue to elude us, alienating us from ourselves and others even as our relation to others informs and creates our desires.
The arguments above suggest that as we read literature, we locate meaning in the text as Other, which we then hope to master through our interpretation. Interpretation supposes "if not a conception of the unconscious itself, then at least some mechanism of mystification or repression in terms of which it would make sense to seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one" (Jameson, The Political Unconscious 60). A conventional "Freudian" reader would then supply the answer to the text that has evidenced its "sexual frustration and repression." But a Lacanian reading recognizes that what one discovers within the discourse of the other—the unconscious—is a discovery of what is actively reading within oneself, just as, for example, Freud read his own unconscious reading him within the hysteric's discourse. In effect, the text reads the reader who unconsciously repeats its structure and thereby dismantles distinctions between subject/object, master/slave, reader and that which is read.
The text's untranslatability, its silence, is what it won't tell and what the reader cannot tell himself. The structure of such narrative is transferential, with reading presented as the repetition of a love story "addressed to and directed toward the knowledge of the Other" (Felman, "Turning the Screw of Interpretation" 159). To attempt to master such knowledge is to blind oneself (like Oedipus), to repress the divisions within meaning (self, unconscious), and to disguise the will to power as a will to knowledge.

Feminist Criticism/Theory
As Ch. 6 of Critical Theory and Practice notes, feminist criticism offers diverse, heterogeneous perspectives on such important but problematic issues as the “definition and stability of a gendered identity” and how to characterize, recognize, and critique the “gender-based struggle for power over definition and meanings” (CTP 229). As Germaine Greer argued in the early 1970s, feminine stereotypes are acts of—or effects of—commodification within a system of patriarchal capitalism that deals in the display and exchange of women. Should “feminist” critics today continue to explore such exchanges of representations of women in literary texts? In the mid 1980s, Hélène Cixous argued that the “feminine” is largely absent from the patriarchal order of language, appearing only as negative, subordinated terms in a series of figurative, binary oppositions that produce and are produced by phallogocentrism (CTP 245). Rather than dwelling upon the “otherness” of feminine discourse, Luce Irigaray insists on the subversive, parodic, multivalent potential of écriture féminine. How do such assertions and observations affect your sense of what’s at stake in coming to terms with the genders of discourse? If we acknowledge the instability of subjectivity—with Julia Kristeva and other anti-essentialists—what happens to efforts to make a difference-—a collective, political difference—in the name of “women” or “feminism?” Do the difficulties of defining “lesbian” writing (CTP 250-53) also inhabit feminist criticism in general? Criticism in general? What relations do “gender studies” or “men’s studies” bear to “women” studies? Myra Jehlen states that “speaking of gender does not mean speaking only of women. As a critical term ‘gender’ invokes women only insofar as in its absence they are essentially invisible. And it brings them up not only for their own interest but to signal the sexed nature of men as well, and beyond that the way the sexed nature of both women and men is not natural but cultural. In this sense, gender may be opposed to sex as culture is to nature so that its relation to sexual nature is unknown and probably unknowable: how, after all, do we speak of human beings outside of culture?” (Critical Terms for Literary Study 265). After discussing the “performative” nature of gender, Jehlen declares provocatively: “It is logically impossible to interrogate gender—to transform it from axiom to object of scrutiny and critical term—without also interrogating race and class” (272). Can you explain, emulate, illustrate what Jehlen means?

A series of quotes to ponder

Foucault: "The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning" (24).

“The very notion of ‘opposing terms’ is made possible only because of the far more radically problematic structure of undecidability that can be said to structure (as it were) every structure” (116). “It is textuality (rhetoric) . . . that makes it possible to say whatever can be said about referentiality (dialectic)” (139). “literature has no fundamental identity and therefore that it cannot be opposed to something fundamentally other than itself”—also applies to politics or justice. It is impossible to make statements that are exclusively literary or non-literary. The “very impossibility of a non-textual distinction between the literary and the non-literary has politically democratic implications, in contrast to the sorts of political tyranny that are well served by a lack of doubt pertaining to the difference between rhetoric and dialectic” (140). “A decision . . . is what calls for something to be ‘cut off’ or arrested. If the cut-off point were not always a question, if it were not always possible in other words for a decision to risk being wrong, to cut in mistakenly at an inappropriate time or place, it simply would not be a decision. . . . every decision risks becoming fickle or dogmatic” (156). We hope to actualize an ideal as if the decision were made outside of a particular context—it is only in retrospect that we decide whether our decision was “correct” whether it was ‘right’ or not. (Lucy, Niall. Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction, Blackwell, 1997.)

Derrida writes: “A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable. Even if a decision seems to take only a second and not to be preceded by any deliberation, it is structured by this experience and experiment of the undecidable” (Limited Inc 116).

Ferdinand de Saussure: "in language there are only differences without positive terms."

Derrida: "There is no outside-text"“There is nothing outside the text (Of Grammatology 158), there is no outside text; there is nothing outside context; there is nothing but context.
“The undecidable remains caught, lodged, at least as a ghost—but an essential ghost—in every decision, in every event of decision” (“Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority’” 965)
“A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable. Even if a decision seems to take only a second and not to be preceded by any deliberation, it is structured by this experience and experiment of the undecidable.”
Derrida: “my most constant interest, coming even before my philosophical interest I should say, if this is possible, has been directed toward literature, towards that writing which is called literary” (The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations” 37)
“an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures” (Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, 28)”
Derrida: “Difference is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each so-called ‘present’ element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of a past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the presence by means of this very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not: that is, not even to a past or a future as a modified present. An interval must separate the present from what it is not, in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and in particular the substance or subject” (“Différance” 13). “there is no subject who is agent, author, and master of difference . . . Subjectivity, like objectivity, is an effect of difference” (Positions 28).
Derrida: différance "holds us in a relation to what exceeds . . . the alternative of presence or absence. A certain alterity--Freud gives it a metaphysical name, the unconscious."

Sigmund Freud: "The motive of human society is in the last resort an economic one.”
And: “The idlest self-observation shows that ideas may occur to us which cannot have come about without preparation. But you experience nothing of these preliminaries of your thought, though they too must certainly have been of a mental nature; all that enters your consciousness is the ready-made result. Occasionally you can make these preparatory thought-structures conscious in retrospect, as though in a reconstruction” (“The Question of Lay Analysis 197”).

Jonathan Culler: "If we must adopt some overall principle or formula, we might say that meaning is determined by context, since context includes the rules of language, the situation of the author and reader, and anything else that might conceivably be relevant. But if we say that meaning is context-bound, then we must add that context is boundless: there is no determining in advance what might count as relevant, what enlarging of context might be able to shift what we regard as the meaning of a text. Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless." (Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction)

Louis Montrose: “Thus my invocation of the term subject is meant to suggest an equivocal process of subjectification: on the one hand, it shapes individuals as loci of consciousness and initiators of action, endowing them with subjectivity and with the capacity for agency; and, on the other hand, it positions, motivates, and constrains them within--it subjects them to--social networks and cultural codes, forces of necessity and contingency, that ultimately exceed their comprehension or control.”

Rene Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”
Jacques Lacan: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think," or "I think where I cannot say I am."

Fredric Jameson: Interpretation supposes "if not a conception of the unconscious itself, then at least some mechanism of mystification or repression in terms of which it would make sense to seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one.”

James Kavanagh: “Ideology is less tenacious as a "set of ideas" than as a system of representations, perceptions, and images that precisely encourages men and women to "see" their specific place in a historically peculiar social formation as inevitable, natural, a necessary function of the "real" itself. . . . there is no such thing as social discourse that is nonideological. . . . Ideology is a social process that works on and through every social subject, that, like any other social process, everyone is "in," whether or not they "know" or understand it. It has the function of producing an obvious "reality" that social subjects can assume and accept, precisely as if it had not been socially produced and did not need to be "known" at all. The "nonideological" insistence does not mark one's freedom from ideology, but one's involvement in a specific, quite narrow ideology which has the exact social function of obscuring--even to the individual who inhabits it--the specificity and peculiarity of one's social and political position, and of preventing any knowledge of the real processes that found one's social life.”

Niall Lucy: “The defence of reason should not have to exclude the critique of reason; indeed without the possibility of critique, any defence of reason could never be anything other than an expression of faith or superstition. This is the lesson, it could be said, which poststructuralism gives us to contemplate; a lesson, or a challenge, which is inseparable from a certain ideal of the Enlightenment and of the promise of democracy to come. The poststructuralist critique of structure, in other words, is neither unreasonable nor democratic.”

Judith Butler: “Through what language does Antigone assume authorship of her act, or rather, refuse to deny that authorship?” (8) As Antigone begins to act in language her performance embodies the norms of the power she opposes—she counters Creon’s sovereignty and agency as well through her avowal of the deed, but this avowal “requires a sacrifice of autonomy at the very moment in which it is performed: she asserts herself through appropriating the voice of the other, the one to whom she is opposed; thus her autonomy is gained through the appropriation of the authoritative voice of the one she resists, an appropriation that has within it traces of a simultaneous refusal and assimilation of that very authority.”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “. . . in every textual production, in the production of every explanation, there is the itinerary of a constantly thwarted desire to make the text explain. The question then becomes: What is this explanation as it is constituted by and as it effects a desire to conserve the explanation itself; what are the ‘means devised in the interest of the problem of a possible objective knowledge’?
I wrote above that the will to explain was a symptom of the desire to have a self and a world. In other words, on the general level, the possibility of explanation carries the presupposition of an explainable (even if not fully) universe and an explaining (even if imperfectly) subject. These presuppositions assure our being. Explaining, we exclude the possibility of the radically heterogeneous.
On a more specific level, every explanation must secure and assure a certain kind of being-in-the world, which might as well be called our politics. . . . what inhabits the prohibited margin of a particular explanation specifies its particular politics” (In Other Worlds: Essays in cultural politics 143-44).

Some texts:

Nathalie Sarraute, “Tropism XVIII”

On the outskirts of London, in a little cottage with percale curtains, its little
back lawn sunny and all wet with rain.
The big, wisteria-framed window in the studio, opens on to this lawn.
A cat with its eyes closed, is seated quite erect on the warm stone.
A spinster lady with white hair, and pink cheeks that tend towards purple,
is reading an English magazine in front of the door.
She sits there, very stiff, very dignified, quite sure of herself and of others,
firmly settled in her little universe. She knows that in a few moments the bell
will ring for tea.
Down below, the cook, Ada, is cleaning vegetables at a table covered with
white oilcloth. Her face is motionless, she appears to be thinking of nothing.
She knows that it will soon be time to toast the buns, and ring the bell for tea.

Stephen Dunn, “ON HEARING THE AIRLINES WILL USE A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE TO CATCH POTENTIAL SKYJACKERS”

They will catch me
as sure as the checkout girls
in every Woolworth’s have caught me, the badge
of my imagined theft shining in their eyes.

I will be approaching the ticket counter
and knowing myself, myselves,
will effect the nonchalance of a baron.
That is what they’ll be looking for.

I’ll say “Certainly is nice that the
airlines are taking these precautions,”

and the man behind the counter
will press a secret button,

there’ll be a hand on my shoulder
(this will have happened before in a dream),
and in a back room they’ll ask me
“Why were you going to do it?”

I’ll say “You wouldn’t believe
I just wanted to get to Cleveland?”
“No,” they’ll say.
So I’ll tell them everything,

the plot to get the Pulitzer Prize
in exchange for the airplane,
the bomb in my pencil,
heroin in the heel of my boot.

Inevitably, it’ll be downtown for booking,
newsmen pumping me for deprivation
during childhood,
the essential cause.

“There is no one cause for any human act,”
I’ll tell them, thinking finally,
a chance to let the public in
on the themes of great literature.

And on and on, celebrating myself, offering
no resistance, assuming what they assume,
knowing, in a sense, there is no such thing
as the wrong man.

Donald Justice, “The Missing Person”

He has come to report himself
A missing person.

The authorities
Hand him the forms.

He knows how they have waited
With the learned patience of barbers

In small shops, idle,
Stropping their razors.

But now that these spaces in his life
Stare up at him blankly,

Waiting to be filled in,
He does not know how to begin.

Afraid that he may not answer
To his description of himself,

He asks for a mirror.
They reassure him

That he can be nowhere
But wherever he finds himself

From moment to moment,
Which, for the moment, is here.

And he might like to believe them.
But in the mirror

He sees what is missing.
It is himself

He sees there emerging
Slowly, as from the dark

Of a furnished room
Only by darkness,

One who receives no mail
And is known to the landlady only

For keeping himself to himself,
And for whom it will be years yet

Before he can trust to the light
This last disguise, himself.

Seamus Haney, “FROM THE FRONTIER OF WRITING”

The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover

and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration—

a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of tarmac road

past armour-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

Eve Wood, “Recognition”

The woman on the subway touches my hand by mistake, and in that instant an autumn leaf presses flat against the wet window of the car. She is paler than a snow ferret, and I can see in her face the gentle eagerness of a woman admired all her life solely for her beauty. The leaf inches up the glass, and I feel the heat in her legs radiate out from her body which bumps against mine each time the train lunges forward. I would be so proud if she were my mother, small, bland token of my life, surely an example to follow, yet her mothering would not be enough to keep me. I would want more than is right. Rain leaks in through a crack in the window, and I wish she would look me in the face like the woman who trains dogs on television, who locks the red Doberman’s snout between her thumb and forefinger, commanding his attention. I imagine she believes in ghosts and inexplicable passion, and I can do nothing but gnaw the inside of my lip to keep from moving closer. She could start a conversation. She could give herself over. We could hold hands in the rain and not care. The trees blur by, and the mist holds the windows together like a wide gray blanket we might lie down on in summer. Her yellow raincoat hurts my eyes as she leans against me in the wake of the train. She wears me out, and I am still so far from knowing anything.