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

84 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
Style will jut out, then, like a spur…
With its spur, style can also protect against whatever terrifying, blinding or
mortal threat might present itself or be obstinately encountered: i.e., the
presence, and hence, the content, of things themselves, of meaning, of truth
(1977, p. 176).
What Derrida affirms here is his hope that Nietzsche has escaped the ontological
grip of woman, essence, truth, and remained a bachelor. Derrida’s intentions are
transparent in “Force and Signification”: “The structure was thus a receptive one,
waiting, like a girl in love, ready for its future meaning to marry and fecundate it”
(1978c, p. 18). Derrida’s ambiguous “feminine” style will be his weapon as he
attacks matter, matrix, meaning, presence. The fear of the vulva, the abyss, is the
fear of the feminine ship, the uterus. Derrida one-ups Nietzsche’s virgin male
motherhood and immaculate self-conception by avoiding the O of Origin: ovum. An
Aristotelian sperm in the heaven of ideal forms, he is never fixed by conception,
never identified by birth, never originating and never presence/present The closer
man is to the uterus, the closer he is to death. To be present in the world is to be soon
absent. If the price of identity is mortality, différance, indeterminateness promises
infinity. Absence/presence, anterior/exterior in Derrida and Foucault are, then,
significantly linked to pudenda origo: how to master the matrix of meaning, solve
man’s materialization via the female form and win the secrets of genesis.
If Derrida deconstructs self-presence, the voice of God as thought becoming deed,
and the phonetic speech form as self-authenticating truth (logocentrism), he does so
to undo the primacy of speech over writing, not man over woman. “[W]riting,” says
Derrida in Of Grammatology, “the letter, the sensible inscription, has always been
considered by Western tradition as the body and matter external to the spirit, to
breath, to speech, and to the logos” (1976, p. 35). Body/spirit and other dualisms are
traced to the letter/spirit opposition and a problem of writing. Derrida supplements
the spirit with the letter of patriarchal meaning; masculine in origin and destination.
Derridean mystery/ mastery only appears equivocal. He collaborates. The literal
infans disseminates. Derrida, sperm dodger, jealous narcissist, orders: there will be
no getting pregnant! No more mothers! God is a satellite keeping his distans from
ova/matter/woman.
Barbara Johnson puts it differently, of course, in her introduction to
Dissemination:
To mean…is automatically not to be. As soon as there is meaning, there is
difference. Derrida’s word for this lag inherent in any signifying act is
différance, from the French verb différer, which means both “to differ” and
“to defer”. What Derrida attempts to demonstrate is that this différance
inhabits the very core of what appears to be immediate and present (italics in
original, 1981a, p. ix).