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BODIES THAT MATTER
to her, only to call into question the exclusionary rules of proprietariness that govern the use of that discourse. This contestation of propriety and property is precisely the option open to the feminine when it has been constituted as an excluded impropriety, as the improper, the propertyless Indeed, as Irigaray argues in Marine Lover [Amante marine], her work on Nietzsche, "woman neither is nor has an essence," and this is the case for her precisely because "woman" is what is excluded from the discourse of metaphysics.20 If she takes on a proper name, even the proper name of "woman" in the singular, that can only be a kind of radical mime that seeks to jar the term from its ontological presuppositions. Jane Gallop makes this brilliantly clear in her reading of the two lips as both synecdoche and catachresis, a reading which offers an interpretation of Irigaray's language of biological essentialism as rhetorical strategy. Gallop shows that Irigaray's figural language constitutes the feminine in language as a persistent linguistic impropriety.21 This exclusion of the feminine from the proprietary discourse of metaphysics takes place, Irigaray argues, in and through the formulation of "matter." Inasmuch as a distinction between form and matter is offered within phallogocentrism, it is articulated through a further materiality. In other words, every explicit distinction takes place in an inscriptional space that the distinction itself cannot accommodate. Matter as a site of inscription cannot be explicitly thematized. And this inscriptional site or space is, for Irigaray, a materiality that is not the same as the category of "matter" whose articulation it conditions and enables. It is this unthemati-zable materiality that Irigaray claims becomes the site, the repository, indeed, the receptacle of and for the feminine within a phallogocentric economy. In an important sense, this second inarticulate "matter" designates the constitutive outside of the Platonic economy; it is what must be excluded for that economy to posture as internally coherent.22 This excessive matter that cannot be contained within the form/matter distinction operates like the supplement in Derrida's analysis of philosophical oppositions. In Derrida's consideration of the form/matter distinction in Positions, he suggests as well that matter must be redoubled, at once as a pole within a binary opposition, and as that which exceeds that binary coupling, as a figure for its nonsystematizability. Consider Derrida's remark in response to the critic who wants to claim that matter denotes the radical outside to language: "It follows that if, and in