Abstract

A politics of women's writing, then, if it is not to fall back on a biologically based theory of sexual difference, must address itself, as Luce Irigary has done in "Pouvoir du discours, subordination du feminin," to the position of mastery held not only by scientific discourse , not only by philosophy, "the discourse of discourses," but by the logic of discourse itself. Rather than attempting to identify a specific practice, in other words, such a feminist politics would attempt to relocate sexual difference at the level of the text by undoing the repression of the "feminine" in all systems of representation for which the other must be reduced to the economy of the Same .Mary Jacobus is an associate professor of English and of women's studies at Cornell University. She is the author of a book on Wordsworth as well as the editor of a collection of feminist criticism, Women Writing and Writing about Women. Currently she is at work on a study of Thomas Hardy and a collection of essays on Romantic poetry and prose