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

NEUTRALITY AND DE/MEANING 83
women, and let men speak of the feminine. 16 Aphasiac, absent, without speech, we
should be the source of their writing. Does not Lacan also say of women speaking of
women/woman “they don’t know what they are saying, which is all the difference
between them and me” 17 (1985a, p. 144) But what if this truth was a little dressedup
lie, the truth of a man becoming his idea of a woman 18 Suppose Derrida/
Nietzsche/ Lacan was a man, what then
Derrida takes up Nietzsche’s femininity with style. In the revision of “Becoming
Woman” in The New Nietzsche, Derrida dresses not only himself in drag, but also
Nietzsche, Freud, and Abraham; part of the process of promotion for the choirboy is
to robe the priest. Of Spurs 19 (Derrida: 1981b) Jane Gallop remarks: “Being
antiphallic becomes the new phallus, which women come up lacking once again”
(1988, p. 100). Women not being impotent, I would add.
Here is Derrida, being charming:
The title for this discussion will be the question of style. But my subject shall
be woman.
The question of style—it is always the question of a pointed object.
Sometimes only a pen, but just as well a stylet, or even a dagger. With their
help, to be sure, we can resolutely attack all that philosophy calls forth under
the name of matter or matrix, so as to stave a mark in it, leave an impression
or form; but these implements also help us to repel a threatening force, to keep
it at bay, to repress and guard against it—all the while bending back or
doubling up, in flight, keeping us hidden, veiled (1977, p. 176).
Derrida lingers over Nietzsche’s approach to woman, presenting him as a feminine
saviour whose grip on truth and woman spurned presence for distance. And Derrida,
ambiguous adventurer into the abyss, borrows the mask of the feminine, playful
traveller:
16. Kathleen Barry describes this new “placement” over women, a revamped masculinist practice:
“Tootsie men have gone far beyond the need for feminist women…. He is feminist and logically
much more of a feminist than feminists—that is, women who have identified feminism as a political
condition” (1990, p. 491).
17. Originally appeared in Jacques Lacan, “Dieu et la jouissance de La femme,” Livre XX, In Le
Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XX, Encore, (pp. 61–71), Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller,
Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975, p. 68.
18. Nancy Jay’s study of blood sacrifices and patrilineal descent seems relevant to the practices of
postmodernism: “The only action that is as serious as giving birth, which can act as a counterbalance
to it, is killing. This is one way to interpret the common sacrificial metaphors of birth and rebirth or
birth done better, on purpose and on a more spiritual, more exalted level than mothers do it. For
example, the man for whose benefit certain Vedic sacrifices were performed dramatically re-enacted
being born, but he was reborn as a god, not a helpless infant. The priest, in officiating, in enabling
this ‘birth’ to take place, performed a role analogous to that of a mother. Some of these metaphors
are astonishingly literal: In the West African city of Benin, on the many occasions of human
sacrifice, the priests used to masquerade as pregnant women, having sent all the real women out of
the city” (1985, p. 294).
19. Spurs (1981b) is a lightly revised edition of Derrida’s “The Question of Style” (1977).