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

NEUTRALITY AND DE/MEANING 85
The essential strategy of Derridean “undoing” of Western metaphysics and dualism
is the negation of presence and in particular, that of woman and mother. 20 In his
study of Rousseau’s Confessions in Of Grammatology, he considers Rousseau’s
Mamma and Thérèse. Of the two women he says: “in what one calls the real life of
these existences ‘of flesh and bone’…there has never been anything but writing”
(1976, p. 159). This reading of Mamma and Thérèse is the foundational moment of
Derrida’s new science of writing:
[T]here have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations
which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the “real”
supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and
from an invocation of the supplement, etc. And thus to infinity, for we have
read, in the text, that the absolute present, Nature, that which words like “real
mother”, name, have always already escaped, have never existed; that what
opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural
presence (1976, p. 159; italics in original).
Différance, the dangerous supplement, and all Derrida’s readings repeat as Barbara
Johnson does: “our very relation to “reality’ already functions like a text…. Nothing,
indeed can be said to be not a text” (1981a, p. xiv; italics in original).
Derrida shows how writing and masturbation are both supplements for a presence,
for real intercourse/discourse. Same difference as Plato’s structure of desire, or
Socrates debate with Agathon on the question of love in The Symposium. Socrates
asked: “Does Love desire the thing that he is love of, or not” “Of course he does,”
answered Agathon. “And does he desire and love the thing that he desires and loves
when he is in possession of it or when he is not” “Probably when he is not,”
Agathon replied. “If you reflect for a moment, you will see that it isn’t merely
probable but absolutely certain that one desires what one lacks, or rather that one
does not desire what one does not lack…. Love will be love of beauty…then, if Love
lacks beauty, and what is good coincides with what is beautiful, he also lacks
goodness” (Plato: 1956, pp. 76, 78). The dangerous supplements, writing or
masturbation, are supplements for a dangerous presence. Rousseau fears that a
perfectly fulfilled heterosexual desire would annihilate him: “If I had ever in my life
tasted the delights of love even once in their plenitude, I do not imagine that my frail
existence would have been sufficient for them. I would have been dead in the act”
(Derrida: 1976, p. 155). Rousseau’s desire for a woman he called “Mamma” was
threatened by her presence: “I only felt the full strength of my attachment to her
20. He also “takes on” the role of the mother: in Glas (1986), Derrida searches for the mother; in
“The Law of Genre” he plays in a mother/daughter role. Thus, he mimics the mother as much as
Nietzsche. My interpretation goes against the grain of Hélène Cixous’ Derridean reading of Derrida
and dualism. In “Sorties,” a section of The Newly Born Woman, Cixous (1986) does speak very
briefly of masculine dreams of motherless filiation, but she does not recognize misogyny in Derrida.