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The Example of Barbara Johnson Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons English: Faculty Publications and Other Works Faculty Publications 2006 The Example of Barbara Johnson Pamela Caughie Loyola University Chicago, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/english_facpubs Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Caughie, Pamela. The Example of Barbara Johnson. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 17, 3: 177-194, 2006. Retrieved from Loyola eCommons, English: Faculty Publications and Other Works, http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-018 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in English: Faculty Publications and Other Works by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. © Brown University & differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2006 The Example of Barbara Johnson Twenty-five years ago the first explicitly feminist issue of Critical Inquiry (Winter 1981), called “Writing and Sexual Difference,” opened with an epigraph from Barbara Johnson’s The Critical Difference (1980): If human beings were not divided into two biological sexes, there would probably be no need for literature. And if literature could truly say what the relations between the sexes are, we would doubtless not need much of it then, either. It is not the life of sexuality that literature cannot capture; it is literature that inhabits the very heart of what makes sexuality problematic for us speaking animals. Literature is not only a thwarted investigator but also an incorrigible perpetrator of the problem of sexuality. (173) Elizabeth Abel, editor of this special issue and author of the introduction in which this quotation appears, never comments directly on the epigraph, nor does she mention Barbara Johnson by name in her introduction, though with the hindsight of a quarter century, we can see that Abel’s second sentence, “Deconstructive criticism has made us attend to notions of textual difference,” indirectly addresses Johnson; for over the years, Johnson’s name has become identified with deconstruction. But that connection could hardly have been apparent to many readers then when Johnson’s first book had only recently been published.1 Perhaps another place where hindsight might have us locate Barbara Johnson in this introduction is the last sentence of the first paragraph, for there Abel states that the volume presents the “scope of feminist inquiry” in essays that focus on the various ways sexual difference figures in the study of literary texts. And yet, would Johnson have been identified with feminism in 1981 given that her first book 1 focused on male writers and, as Abel says, difference had “only recently emerged as a focus of feminist criticism” (1)? It strikes me as significant that the first feminist issue of what is arguably the most prominent journal in literary theory begins with Barbara Johnson, and yet the significance of that epigraph remains opaque, raising the question of just why and how Barbara Johnson serves as an example in this text. This question is taken up by Jane Gallop in “The Difference Within” (1982), her response to Abel’s special issue.2 Gallop presents a close reading of the epigraph from Johnson, but quickly turns (in deconstructive fashion) from trying to figure out what the statement means to questioning its function within the volume. Johnson’s presence in this special issue, Gallop suggests, serves not just to illustrate but to produce the effects of “the difference within,” the very concept with which Johnson is now most clearly identified.3 The epigraph, Gallop says, functions as “a dis-Abel-ing ‘difference within’ the entire issue” (13), subverting “the very idea of identity,” such as the identity “feminist” that the volume represents (13). Commenting on the fact that Abel leaves the epigraph unexplained, Gallop notes the difference between what Johnson says in that epigraph and what Abel says in the sentence that comes closet to explaining the relation of the epigraph to the special issue: “The analysis of female talent grappling with a male tradition,” writes Abel, “translates sexual difference into literary differences” (2).4 Gallop responds, “Where The Critical Difference enigmatically implies that literature is already operative within sexuality, Abel suggests [. .] sexuality is prior to literature” (15). Barbara Johnson, invoked in the epigraph as an authority whose insight captures the scope of this special issue, is actually saying something different from what the editor thinks, and thus, Johnson’s enigmatic presence in the introduction turns a difference 2 between into a difference within. It is Barbara Johnson’s presence in the text, more than the meaning of her words, that produces a deconstructive effect, that makes a difference by assuring that the first feminist issue of Critical Inquiry, like feminism itself (contrary to what a special issue on feminism might suggest), isn’t all the same. Rereading Gallop’s “The Difference Within” with my students this term, and thinking about this special issue of Differences, I was struck by how Barbara Johnson functions as an example, not just in Abel’s issue and Gallop’s essay but in so many other works as well. Although neither Abel nor Gallop is concerned with what Johnson’s epigraph means, both reveal the profound effects that even a short citation from her writings can have on our reading of a text. From the beginning, from her first book (The Critical Difference), Barbara Johnson has served as an example. Yet what she exemplifies is never quite clear nor is it consistent from one context to another: deconstruction, feminism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, French theory, academic writing, women in theory, even theory as woman.5 It may be in the very diversity of these invocations that Barbara Johnson comes to stand for the difference within. Abel’s early use of Barbara Johnson as an example may well have set the example for others. Another essay that opens by invoking Barbara Johnson is Diane Elam’s online essay, “Feminist Theory and Criticism: Poststructuralist Feminisms.” It begins: “The question of gender is a question of language.” This statement is Barbara Johnson’s (World 37), and her succinct formulation of the relationship between gender and language does much to characterize the approach of a group of feminists who draw upon the discourses of poststructuralism. This feminist work 3 takes as its starting point the premise that gender difference dwells in language rather than in the referent, that there is nothing “natural” about gender itself. Here Johnson represents a type of feminism rather than deconstruction more generally, but she still exemplifies the difference within. More to the point, it is her “succinct formulation of the relationship between gender and language,” just as it is her succinct formulation of the relationship between sexual difference and literature, that makes her serve so well as an example for Elam as for Abel.6 In this case, however, the quotation from Johnson is easily explained, while in Abel’s essay it remains mysterious. But like Abel, Elam never discusses Johnson’s writings in any detail, and cites her again only in passing, in a string of references to poststructuralist feminist works. If the quotation Elam uses to open her essay is a “succinct formulation,” the quotation Jeffrey Nealon uses to close his book is positively minimalist. Nealon’s conclusion to Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction (1993) opens with an epigraph from Barbara Johnson: “Yes and no (what else?)” (160).7 This epigrammatic statement creates a similar effect as Abel’s epigraph, for like Abel, Nealon never mentions Johnson by name nor discusses her work (she’s even missing from the index, though she does appear in the Works Cited). He does, however, discuss the meaning of that epigraph in some detail, noting that “yes and no” are “three words that are expected from a ‘deconstructionist’” (161)—though “what else?”, I would suggest, is what we expect from Barbara Johnson. So in Nealon’s chapter, Johnson explicitly serves as an example of deconstruction, as she does implicitly in Abel’s essay. In both pieces, as Gallop says of Abel’s essay, French male theory is represented by an American woman writer (15). Again, Johnson’s presence figures the difference within. 4 It occurs to me that in a recent article I too have used Barbara Johnson as an example. In the introductory paragraph (which I quote here in full), I begin with an anecdote about Barbara Johnson to set up an essay that has nothing to do with Barbara Johnson, or at least, that never discusses her writing. In 1990 Barbara Johnson gave a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on psychoanalysis and African American literature. In those days many feminists were exploring the question of whether or how post-structuralist theories could be applied to multicultural literatures. At the time I was an untenured assistant professor heavily influenced by Johnson's style of deconstruction, so you can imagine my discomfort when I learned that the second lecture in that series, entitled "No Passing," was to be a reading of Nella Larsen's Passing, the very novel I was then writing about in an essay that would turn out to be the inception of Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (1999). So at the reception following the first lecture, I cornered Barbara Johnson and anxiously spewed out all the ideas I was exploring in that essay, seeking to convince her (and possibly myself) that I hadn't gotten my ideas from her lecture that I hadn't yet heard.
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