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

110 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
come about with the publication of “When Our Lips Speak Together” in This Sex
Which Is Not One (1977/1985d). In this interview, Irigaray asserts: “What I think is
the most important to reveal now is the discovery of the woman as lover, and of the
couple as a loving couple. The couple that shapes the world” (1983, p. 199). When
asked: “When you refer to a loving couple, do you mean particularly a man and a
woman” she responded: “I think that man and woman is the most mysterious and
creative couple. That isn’t to say other couples may not also have a lot in them, but
man and woman is the most mysterious and creative” (1983, p. 199). Clearly,
Irigaray is saying that the heterosexual encounter is most potentially creative of new
ethics and values. But this encounter cannot take place until women love themselves
and other women (1983, p. 199). Irigaray has certainly spurned Lacan’s deadly
unconscious at great personal and political cost. Yet she believes in grammar, in
these new gods, and in the new man. This is her Bridal chant of lyrical exchange
between two sexes and between the human and the divine. It is closet hysteria. She
has forgotten the politics of sexual difference. Reader, she married him.
But I feel I must pause in my exasperation with Irigaray’s perfumed
reconciliation, healing the domination of women with that old magic: sorcerer love.
Let us compare Cixous’ project to transmute the worlds of love and war. Her couples
are Achilles and Penthesileia (Queen of the Amazons), and Anthony and Cleopatra:
all warriors who fall in love brutally. They betrayed one another—either by
devouring the other or inhaling last breaths—until a final ecstatic merger in the
selfsame. “Achilles is Penthesileia is Achilles” (Clément and Cixous: 1986, p. 112).
This is very far from the tender moments of Irigarayan sexual difference where
caress, not injury, transforms. Cixous’ “Sorties” in The Newly Born Woman does not
exit the male fantasy of female power because it is bound to a Lacanian conceit of
the fatal, in a Dionysian theatre where all stars must be crossed. Cixous’ heroines are
truly heroic: they replicate a masculine ideal of tragedy, glory and quest. Irigaray’s
actions now appear more radical, yet neither she nor Cixous are newly born women,
except in as much as they may be doubly-born: Dionysian.
Écriture féminine, launched by Cixous’ (1976) manifesto “The Laugh of the
Medusa,” claims to access another writing/being and is open to men as well as
women. 17 I argue that Cixous should take a Women’s Studies course, and some
anglophone feminists should resolve their colonial mentalities. In Cixous’ own work,
two men, Kleist and Achilles, are sometimes the Queen of the Amazons. A
Cixousian feminine text may have male or female authors. Indeed, it is virtually only
male authors who fascinate Cixous in The Newly Born Woman: Kleist, Shakespeare,
17. A note on the pedagogy of l’écriture féminine. In “Le ‘comment-don’,” Rosi, a foreign student
attends Hélène Cixous’ doctoral seminar on l’écriture féminine at the university from which Luce
Irigaray was expelled. Rosi is taught that detailed readings of Virgil and Ovid elucidate the logic of
masculine writing and demonstrate the space for another, feminine voice. This soon leads to the
notion that Ovid, Virgil and women’s bulletins are part of the same combat. Indeed, the textual
practices elaborated from a reading of Virgil and Ovid are then used to examine feminist slogans and
to conclude that feminists, whom Cixous denounces for lacking an understanding of the unconscious
and psychoanalysis, suffer from “unilinear, anal thinking” and “absolute imbecility”. Particularly
offensive to her is the feminist slogan, “The ayatollah dumps Iran, Lacan dumps the Unconscious.”
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