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

NEUTRALITY AND DE/MEANING 87
laughter. Only this long white Pierrot with his cadaverous face could have
come up with the idea of this torture fit for the damned. And, miming the
action, he represented before us the whole scene, simulating the victim and the
murderer by turns” (Derrida: 1981a, pp. 198–199).
Woman/meaning is masturbated to a mimed death, and we are to be amused at the
lesson (very pedagogical) that there is no language for a female presence, there is
only the signifying chain to a bed/dream. We are not real, we are read/dead.
Humiliated in being forced to laugh at our murder, and to be mimicked to death.
This methodology that centres on literary sensations rather than literal acts is
similar to Ovid’s “male narcissistic identification with the female victim” described
by Amy Richlin (1987). Her reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses shows that
Philomela is raped by her brother-in-law and her tongue is cut out so that she cannot
tell her sister of her abduction and assault. Richlin’s reading shows that in Ovid’s
story, “the act of rape is a blank: Ovid explores the sensations of the woman raped.”
Masculine delight in this terror and enjoyment of a certain frisson is related to the
fear of the female. Ovid, then was the first deconstructionist. Derrida’s
Metamorphoses 23 is a mock epic of satire and degradation which maintains the
authority of disorder and proposes the death of the reader. There is no escape from
the dictionary, from texts, from this lit of reflected, refracted, fractured meanings,
with mirrors. In this, Derrida agrees with Lacan’s theory of the eternity of the
signifying chain to hysterical death. There was a murder but no one significant died.
Jacques the Riddler Foucault depoliticized sexual relations between men and
women, and Derrida supplements this: there can be no escape from male textual or
sexual relations. At the trial, form represents matter. Derrida claims woman: we
must remain the unwritten page, the hymen, the membranes of his metaphor,
writhing, not subjects of our own writing. Columbine’s words are choked away by
deadly stimulation/dissimulation: the Joker’s misogynous confusion of female
senses/meanings. Such a sophisticated murderer as Pierrot does not leave marks.
This is the language of batterers when in Dissemination Derrida says: “It is the
hymen that desires dreams of piercing, of bursting in an act of violence that is (at the
same time or somewhere between) love and murder” (1981a, p. 213).
Is deconstruction a subtle displacement of the hierarchies of Western philosophy
and literature with the archi-écriture of a snuff film Is it more dissimulation, sordid
clowning behind a mask which does not even reflect in the Lacanian mirror Logos
and graphos: the spoken dictat is supplemented with it is written. New masks for the
dictator, new authority for the law, engraved, inscripted and veiled like a threat.
Fascinated with the mystery (sic) of his inequity, he feigns neutrality: nothing
matters moves to everything is permitted. There is presence: masculine dominance.
23. To pursue this parallel, refer to Amy Richlin (1983) Chapter 6, “Catullus, Ovid, and the Art of
Mockery,” in her The Garden of Priapus, Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humour, New Haven:
Yale University Press.