Book Chapter

Commentary: Postponing Politics

Ferguson, Margaret W., Margaret W. Ferguson

1989

Overview

This commentary is necessarily marked by its original occasion, a 1985 conference session on \"the feminist politics of interpretation\" in which an audience heard, for the first time, two difficult and fascinating papers and then listened to my oral response to texts that I had read several times. The situation placed me in a position of potentially abusive power vis-à-vis both the audience and the authors of the papers, who had read each others' work but not my commentary, and who had to sit quietly and listen to me after finishing their presentations. They did however then have a chance to interrogate and dispute my commentary and, eventually, to revise their essays in response to it, and in the light of the discussion in which members of the audience also participated. The written text that follows was itself revised in response to some revisions that Nancy Miller made in her text; but my commentary remains very much an occasional essay- which is to say that certain strands of its critique now seem \"fallen\" to me, faded, dated. They will nonetheless, I hope, hold some archeological (or, to borrow a word from Nancy Miller, arachnological) interest for feminist readers. In any event, the untimely strands of my critique cannot be easily disentangled from those which seem to me, and to the editor of this volume, still timely enough to transport to a new discursive field.

• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN: 0415635217, 9780415635219, 9781138007970, 1138007978