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

106 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
Irigaray’s interpretation, love is originally a divine conduit between the mortal and
the immortal; it is creation. It assures a living immortality to each love, it is a fertile
intermediary, it is the presence of the immortal within the living flesh. “Love is
fecund before all procreation” (1984/1989, p. 37), insists Irigaray. Diotima
“miscarries” (1984/1989, p. 38) when she makes the end of love the child, when
“she seeks a cause of love in the animal world: procreation” (1984/1989, p. 38,
italics in original French). When love thus loses its demonic and intermediary
mediation, a schism is opened between the mortal and the immortal. This she sees as
the “founding act of the meta-physical” (1984/1989, p. 38). There will be lovers of
the body and of the spirit, and the place of movement of love will be occupied by the
child as mediation, and the passage to immortality which lovers bestow on one
another is closed. “Love loses its divinity, its medium-like alchemical qualities
between couples of opposites” (1984/1989, p. 38). This methodological error of
Diotima has fixed it on the time-space plane, and lost a vital conduit from living
beings to the transcendental. The quest for immortality is postponed until after death,
when it is in fact the one transmutation that requires our attention in the present.
Irigaray rejects both teleologies for love: the child and future immortality, for love is
not a means, it has no purpose other than incessant becoming.
In “L’Amour de soi [Self-Love]” (1984), Irigaray argues that love has been
annihilated in the One when Two are necessary. In order to discover the two, the
maternal and paternal functions must no longer be hierarchized. Love and eroticism
should not be separated, there must be many aspects of the feminine, and a feminine
divine must exist. This section of Éthique de la différence sexuelle presents the
tradition of God the Father engendering his son through a virgin mother (1984,
p. 70). The maternal feminine mediates the father-son genealogy which occults the
mother-daughter relationship. Traditional interpretations of the Gospel
underemphasize the feminine social celebration of the evangel, the ties between
Mary and Elizabeth, Mary and Anna, and the attention Christ paid to women (1984,
p. 71). The centrality of the glory of God in traditional interpretations is disrespectful
of the Scriptures and is founded on the masculine nostalgia for the original One (the
matrice of the womb) usurped by God the Father. All bridges to the transcendental
have been taken away from women, and it is no longer a horizon that corresponds to
woman’s morphology, of the mucous and the porous.
In “L’amour du même, l’amour de l’Autre [Love of the same, love of the Other]”
(1984, pp. 97–111) Irigaray argues that the love of the same stems from the sense of
indifferentiation with the first place, the matrice, the womb that nourished, the earth
— mother (1984, p. 97). (Men and women must get over the same matter where is
Irigaray’s sexual difference) Lacan returned incessantly to Freud’s horror before the
maxim, Love thy neighbour as thyself. Irigaray’s same is the fluid, blood and matter
of the original, the maternal other. Forgotten, unrecognized, assimilated,
indifferentiated, yet it has constituted the living subject. “This priceless same, and
the Other in his relationship to the same, is without doubt that which menaces us
with the greatest peril today” (Irigaray: 1984, p. 98). Das Ding with a (sexual)
difference Irigaray seems to be putting forward a das Ding theory of the Origin(al)
mat(t)er; a female das Ding which menaces us all. And yet she claims to take the