Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

72 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
Ah! (He abruptly lets go of his foot. He slaps himself on the head.) I’ve
got it! (Slyly:) I’ve got it! I’m going to tickle my wife to death. There! 1
Man’s relationships to his God, his love of God God is love, and He is cruel. God’s
love of man, man’s love of woman. Perhaps it all comes back to a question of
origins Freud says that identity is formed through the Oedipal contest for a
mother’s love, a contest no woman can win. In his description of an ontological,
“already always” inscribed biological possibility of knowing and being, men come to
consciousness, but women come to nothing. This is why we don’t amount to much.
Lacan puts out the I’s of this theory, reconciling the patient to permanent discord and
disunity. Derrida uses the mysteries of initiation for his Gothic theology believing,
like the medieval alchemists, that the word is not sufficient to communicate magical,
arcane knowledge. His work is not unlike that of the Christian mystic Meister
Eckhart, who distinguished between the Godhead, which is undefinable, and God,
which is a human image and a way of talking about the Godhead. This abstracts
from the “maialogical perspective” of Robbie Pfeufer Kahn (1989) which sees the
maternal body as the matrix, the body-in-relation, through which the unworded
young enter social relations and language. 2 For speaking does articulate: link to
others. What does deconstruction disarticulate Derrida parades his receptivity to
différance, writing of the hymen. Sexual difference is not Derrida’s concern;
indeterminacy and hermeneutics are his focus and woman is his style. Or, as he says
in “Becoming Woman”:
The title for this lecture was to have been the question of style. However, it is
woman who will be my subject. Still, one might wonder whether that doesn’t
really amount to the same thing— or is it to the other (1978a, p. 128).
Woman’s value is she represents textual difference. Certainly, the theological origins
of the interpretation of texts in wars of religion and scriptural struggles should be
remembered when reading Derrida. It is the use of the feminine that is at issue here,
but in order to take this up we must return to origin, and the Word of God. 3
Good, or evil God, or feminine pleasure The sacred, or the profane Who is
sacred, and who profane It was Lévi-Strauss who was the first to raise the question
of the sacred, of the being of myth and ritual, in a twilight of the gods where
patriarchal man aspired to be reborn as a god of mythic structure. Lévi-Strauss was
also original when he included cultural experience in a theory of communication.
His structures sought the Other, in an Oedipal quest for self (same) subjectivity, by
positing Man as a tool in harmony with language and the voice of god. The question
1. Paul Margueritte, Pierrot Murderer of his Wife, published by Calmann-Lévy, 1886 and quoted by
Jacques Derrida (198la) “The Double Session”, in Dissemination, pp. 200–201, in his discussion of
Mallarmé’s Mimique.
2. Kahn (1989) also questions the model of the “androgynists” Chodorow and Dinnerstein, and the
Freudian notion of the ineluctable trauma of separation.
3. I capitalize God only in order to ironize the theology of the supposedly anti-ontotheological
deconstructionist approach. Of course, I am also pretending that irony is still possible in these
circumstances.