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

102 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
A reconsideration of the economy of space and time is central to Irigaray’s focus
on sexual difference: “the feminine is lived as space, but often with the connotations
of abyss and night (God being illuminated space), the masculine is lived as time”
(Irigaray: 1984, p. 15). Irigaray accepts sexual difference in feminine depth/darkness
and shining masculine temporality, in contrast to the feminine temporal
consciousness theorized by O’Brien (1981; 1989a). What is at issue here is a concept
of the space and time of patriarchy as the corruption of sexual difference by Gods,
versus the theory of the appropriation of the dialectics of reproduction by an
ideologizing masculine consciousness. Irigaray maintains that ethical and moral
questions must consider the law of the couple, and the family. Here she introduces
divine law, which she sees as historically of feminine origin, and based in gynocratic
societies where religious and civic realms were once one. A maternal genealogy of a
feminine sacerdotal order was replaced with the mother-son culture by the people of
man: “in the beginning, divine truth was communicated to women and transmitted
from mother to daughter” (1987b, p. 422). Yet Irigaray’s political and cultural
solution to this primacy of man is simply representation of the mother-daughter bond
in aesthetics and language (1987a). Here she remains Lacanian and perhaps
Cathartic: her idealization of the mother-daughter relationship omits actual birth.
Perhaps this is a fear of the charge of “biological determinism,” or a common
prejudice that reproductive consciousness cannot be put into words. Certainly,
Irigaray is more interested in the divine phenomenology of relationships between the
mother-child or male-female lovers than with reproductive consciousness, which
Mary O’Brien (1981) has elaborated as historical, materialist and dialectical.
Because Irigaray agrees with Lacan that the subject is constituted strictly in and
through language, she can only return to the mother and the maternal through
language. Now the production of language and not things is central to the formation
of subjectivity.
Irigaray considers the temporal and spatial implications of the mucous differently
than Sartre’s vision of women as holes and slime, although Irigaray’s use of the in
itself and the for itself reveals a partial existential heritage. She contests de
Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s hostile consciousness, but returns to a religious
existentialism, via a celebratory, divine, loving consciousness. Irigaray reintroduces
the notion of the feminine dialectical divine: “In other words, this mucous in its
touch, its properties, would hinder the transcendence of a God foreign to flesh, of a
God of stable and immutable truth” and represents “the overthrow or perhaps the
fulfilment of dialectics” (1984, pp. 107, 108). The mucous is never simply material
to be worked on, transformed: it cannot be negated, its traces remain. Love, song,
breathing are the mucous, it cannot be reduced to consumption, or “to the production
of any child” (1984, p. 108).
It is through a reading of Aristotle’s Physics IV that Irigaray introduces the
matrice, the place and the interval. She considers at length in what ways the woman
is a place for the child or the man, and never for herself. Morphologically, how can
the man become a reciprocal place for the woman, become the maternal feminine
nostalgia of original matrice, a receptacle for that which is given “For a meeting to
be possible between man and woman, it is necessary that each one become a place,