Tracing Matter: Derrida, New Materialisms, and Feminist STS

This paper stages an interdisciplinary dialogue between deconstruction and feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) through Jacques Derrida's theorization of the trace. Deploying Deborah Goldgaber's reading of the iterability of generalized writing in Speculative Grammatology, I show potential ways of intervening into Jane Bennett's notion of vital matter and Deboleena Roy's analysis of bacterial writing in order to formulate a more rigorous understanding of life processes and materiality. Pushing against STS critiques of deconstruction as a correlationist philosophy of language, I read Derrida's Life Death alongside the works of Dawne McCance and Francesco Vitale to demonstrate how Derrida's conception of the iterability of the trace succeeds precisely where it is presumed to fail: as a robust theorization of both matter and ideology.