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In this thesis, I explore and challenge the devaluation of mother-work (defined as the unpaid, domestic activities involved in child rearing) in New Labour social policy discourse, looking specifically at the ' Sure Start' programme. This project is rooted in Luce Irigaray's deconstructive psychoanalytic feminism/feminist philosophy but employs NVivo, a 'positivistic' computer aided qualitative data analysis software programme to structure a feminist critical discourse analysis of Sure Start policy documents. Harnessing the productive tension arising from these seemingly alien bodies of knowledge, I locate and undermine the devaluation of mother-work within the policy texts. I first trace Irigaray's development of the critique of phallogocentricism which she reaches through a feminist engagement with, and reformulation of, dominant western philosophical and psychoanalytic theories. I then expand and elaborate upon this critique, drawing out and developing the tropes of Matricide and the Sacrificial Economy. These tropes, I argue, are mechanisms that sustain the phallogocentric organisation of western culture. After considering the epistemological puzzles which arise from pairing Irigaray's theory with my methodological tool of Nvivo, the project culminates in a feminist critical discourse analysis of Sure Start documents. I use NVivo to highlight the silences, slips, occlusions and conflations that occur in Sure Start documents which construct phallogocentric, but socially and politically meaningful messages about mother-work and paid employment. This method allows me to detail where Sure Start documents use the phallogocentric mechanisms of Matricide and the Sacrificial Economy, split into down into 'mother node', 'father node' and 'parent node' to reinscribe the ideological notion of the intrinsic worth of paid employment and the devaluation of mother-work, thinking this valuation to the phallogocentric fear of the maternal body and of relationality.

This thesis undertakes a critically constructive examination of the relation of love and justice in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, concentrating principally upon what for Levinas is the “revelatory” status of this relation, which, when enacted, gives witness of the Infinite. Although the term “revelation” in Levinas’s work is often employed with specific reference to the ethical relation between human beings, without any apparent religious connotation, he also maintains that the revelatory character of the ethical relation constitutes the “breach that leads to God”. Importantly, this is not to be understood as an impassable chasm between immanence and transcendence but rather as a “breach” within immanence itself, at the enactment of which the unthinkable and unthematisable God first “comes to mind”. Through the analysis of love and justice, as the mutually constitutive and interdependent enactments which give witness of this breach, familiar themes in Levinas’s work will also be shown to be associated with it: for example, asymmetry, diachronic time, the “saying” and the “said”, nothingness and being, and the “passing” of the infinite in the finite. In light of this analysis, the thesis will then seek to address a specific and often-debated problem in Levinas’s work about whether, and if so how, the God who “comes to mind” in the ethical relation (where the term “God” retains the character of an irrepressible ambiguity) can be identified with the biblical God; and further, to evaluate the implications this question may have with regard to understanding the role and significance of the unavoidably thematising discourse of theology, which Levinas calls “the intellection of the biblical God”. In this regard, it is of particular interest that the “revelatory” character of the relation of love and justice features in Christian theology with similar prominence in the work of Saint Augustine. In order to provide a basic framework, therefore, through which both the opportunities and difficulties in approaching revelation through the relation of love and justice can be examined, the thesis begins with a succinct analysis of Augustine’s account which, despite the opportunity it presents and its continuing relevance, nonetheless can be shown to rely upon a Neo-Platonic mode of metaphysics, and thus on certain philosophical and cosmological commitments that are difficult to reconcile with the contemporary mindset. We will suggest that Levinas’s account provides an opportunity to return to the relation of love and justice for approaching revelation but in a new way, insofar as his account of the “breach” that leads to God formulates a model of “intelligibility” for revelation, a model in which the “welcome” given to the other person gives witness of a heteronomous command that is obeyed before it is understood. We will also suggest that such an approach creates an indispensable ethical ground for theology to engage with the biblical God.

This thesis addresses the controversial question of a religious or theological 'turn' in Derrida's later work. Emphasising both the consistency of Derrida's work and the significance of mode and genre, I consider Derrida's atheistic rethinking of God, investigating the way that the relationship between God and writing determines the configuration of ethics, politics and religion in his later work. The thesis consists of four chapters, each focusing on a different mode of discourse. The first chapter, Confession, tracks Derrida's 'double reading' in 'Circumfession', arguing that it both subverts the constitutive economies of structure, subject and God, and itself confesses deconstruction's alliance with an 'athetic writing' which rethinks God and subjectivity through non-identity. The chapter briefly turns to 'Envois' to consider the political implications of confession. Chapters Two and Three address the relationship between deconstruction and negative theology. The first of these, Dialogue, argues that the dialogical mode defines deconstruction, ensuring consistency between Derrida's early and later work and refuting claims of a 'turn'. Reading 'Saufle nom (Post Scriptum)" I argue that the dialogical nature of the text enables a 'post-writing' which articulates non-ontotheological conceptions of God and gestures towards the political implications of deconstruction. The third chapter, Silence, explores the link between God and language, arguing that Derrida espouses a relativistic or linguistic silence as a way of bearing witness to a linguistic God, and noting, however, a residual tension in Derrida's work between the singularity of religious commitment and the universality of ethics. The last chapter, Reason, reads 'Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of "Religion" at the Limits of Reason Alone', analysing both the interdependence of reason and religion, and the 'Enlightenment to come', and arguing that the text's neglect of the question of God creates a tension between the private and the public or political. Assessing Richard Rorty's depiction of this tension, I argue that by connecting democracy and public space with singularity and secrecy, Derrida's conception of literature challenges this dichotomy. Finally, in the Conclusion, I reiterate the non-identical and non-sovereign concept of God which emerges from these texts, and stress its significance for any assessment of the ethics and politics of deconstruction.

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No description available.