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

112 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
demonstrated how that which has been discovered as valid for the universe is
bearded.
Psychoanalysts Lacan and Irigaray believe in the primacy of language, but indeed
they do not speak the same one. If Lacan’s genre is Gothic, Irigaray is a Harlequin
writer. Tania Modleski describes the two faces of literate love, gothics and
harlequins:
Both deal with women’s fears of and confusion about masculine behaviour in
a world in which men learn to devalue women. Harlequins enable women to
believe that devaluation is only apparent, a mask, as it were, hiding the man’s
intense and ferocious love for the woman…. In Gothic novels, the woman
often suspects her husband or lover of trying to drive her insane or trying to
murder her or both. Clearly, even the most disturbed reader would have
difficulty attributing this bizarre behaviour on the part of the male to a
suppressed though nearly uncontrollable passion for the heroine. Another way
of expressing the difference between the two types of narrative is to say that
the Harlequin heroine’s feelings undergo a transformation from fear into love,
whereas for the Gothic heroine, the transformation is from love into fear
(1982, p. 60).
Socratic Lacan, the Ladies’ man, who desires nothing always, has said our desire and
disobedience are rooted in an electricity, a raging passion for the phallus—pas drôle.
But then, “any woman who does not let herself be raped or attacked placidly by
pretending not to be aware of anything, especially the identity of the rapist, can
paradoxically be accused of a secret, interior, hidden complicity. That is sufficient to
absolve the aggressor. He simply acted as that which reveals the hidden desire of this
woman” (Dardigna: 1981, p. 156). We must point to his direction of female desire
and reveal that the Word of Father Lacan is a lie: “Thy desire shall be to thy
husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Love as rape is Lacan’s Gothic moment;
masculine Eros lives in Erebus, in darkness.
In the final section of L’éthique de la psychanalyse on Antigone, Lacan discusses
the essential links between ethics and aesthetics. We should note however that this is
achieved through Antigone’s transition to a Dionysian death. In Sophocles and the
seminar of Lacan, the cathartic moment comes at the point of her death: she is entredeux-morts.
This cathartic “birth” comes when the heroine finds beauty/desire in/and
death. And language, which is the chorus, the witness and the heroic entry of the
tragedy into time points to the limit which must be crossed so that desire may be
lived. For the law of desire is death. Desire is suspended entre-deux-morts. At the
critical moment the play’s chorus invokes the god Dionysus three times, for
Antigone here represents pure desire, pure desire for death. In Éthique de la
différence sexuelle, Irigaray refers without acknowledgement to Lacan’s work on
Antigone. Irigaray is discussing the love of self, and the genderically different
possibilities for its creation. Feminine desire does not speak the same currency as the
masculine, does not run the risk of erection. Woman can take pleasure indefinitely
with and through touching, and this coming again is not pathological. Irigaray
counters Lacan, “As Antigone says: her desire wants everything immediately or to