Abstract

Situated between contemporary feminist theory/deconstructionist poetics, and Kabbalistic discourse, "Of Poetic Thinking: A 'Pataphysical Investigation of Cixous, Derrida and the Kabbalah" theorizes the aesthetics of, and contextualizes, two writing praxes concerned with interrogating a Eurocentric myth of Meaning, a regime of Truth, Authenticity and Representation; deconstructing an apparatus of Power and the gendered-political fallacy of genre purity. Focusing on the writing of Helene Cixous, Jacques Derrida and the major texts of Kabbalistic discourse, through a re-evaluation of ethnicity, gender, power and language, this thesis challenges ways meaning is produced. Though Kabbalistic discourse posits itself as a mystico-religious doctrine, and contemporary feminist deconstruction and post-structuralist philosophy aim to question Western metaphysics, notions of property and Being, through a re-politicization of socio-historic linguistic structures, this research reassesses the "mystical" or "metaphysical", not as an onto-theologically insulated discourse validated by transcendency, but as that without specific meaning and heterogenous to all hermeneutic totalization. Rather than engaging in a Derridean reading of Kabbalah, but through the linking of modalized presents, this thesis tracks ways in which seemingly "oppositionary" exegetical praxes restage cultural temporalities into the invention of tradition: how they question inheritance as that which is not natural, transparent or universal, but an intervening space, a space of syncretism, juxtaposition and integration; an irreducible legacy inscribed through cultural memory, iterability and palimpsestic processes of prosthetic supplementarity, and foreground how difference is performed at the liminal edge of identity. This analysis is significant in that, through re-staging two interpretive strategies, it problematizes the metaphysics of the "propre" of logocentrism, linguisticism, phonologism, the demystification or the de-sedimentation of the autonomic hegemony of language, and becomes a network of echoes, traces; displaced in a palimpsestic abscess, and, thus, argues how language becomes an agency of cultural construction.