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

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life and death, and choose annihilation as the foundation of their masculine
metaphysics. This is their ontology and epistemology. Sartre’s formulation
“existence precedes essence,” is post-Gnostic then, 12 and perhaps Lévi-Strauss is neo-
Aristotelian. What is central, however, is that in each case things are known ideally
and dualistically, form is prior to, superior to matter. This originates in a masculine
reproductive experience which denies birth and the maternal body (O’Brien: 1981).
Is there, then, a masculinist continuum Marianne DeKoven (1989) points to the
repression of the mother’s body at the origins of modernist form, and how its
recovery was the project of female modernists, such as H.D. Perhaps postmodernism
is the insignia of paranoid semiosis, a self-righteous fear of the mother/world and
revenge 13 Postmodernism, eclectically Platonic and Gnostic but essentially
masculinist and contra-mundane, posits a system of matter and form, material and
force. The nature of knowledge in this system is the certainty of death. A reidealized
and ungrounded dialectic sees destruction and power’s corruption as
Reason in History: a search for annihilation and loss of mass as natural, as The
Order of Things.
Foucault and Derrida are heralded as major writers on the body and différance, but
the body is male: same difference. The emphasis on the lived body protests too
much. This alienated theory is a defunct body of work: Lacan’s fatal truth, Derrida’s
mortal truth, Sartre’s truth of death, Foucault’s nihilistic pleasure. Is death the
primordial murder of the father for the mother, she who is the object of desire as
Freud first argued Or is it the knot of desire and law, the fundamental horror of
Lacan’s entredeux-morts The thanatic, phallic consciousness of violence and
sexuality is the politics of this fixation. But whose death is it The female body is
sometimes the sacrifice, sometimes the great crime which brings art into the world,
the body on which men such as de Sade act like gods, or like Nietzsche’s Superman.
Who is being murdered In the nouveaux romans of Hubert Aquin and Alain Robbe-
Grillet, the victim is always feminine, female (Dardigna: 1981). What I want to
emphasize here is the false heterogeneity of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Sartre.
Their only truth of life is death: Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet. 14 A
preoccupation with lack is central to Sartre’s thought on need and scarcity. Lacan’s
image is absence. For Lacan there is no truth except fragmentation, disunity and
discord, and there is no will to any other truth save this; the will to certainty is a
denial of Castration. There is only a phallic unconscious. Phallocracy is always in
12. The existential anguish of Primal Man who has sunk into nature, who is conscious now but will
know death: this is both the Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus (Jonas: 1967, Chapter 7 and
“Epilogue: Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism”) and Being and Nothingness (Sartre: 1978).
13. “Mary, Maia, Miriam, Mut, Madre, Mere, Mother, pray for us… This is Gaia, this is the
beginning. This is the end. Under every shrine to Zeus, to Jupiter, to Zeus-pater or Theus-pater or
God-the-Father…there is an earlier altar. There is, beneath the carved superstructure of every temple
to God-the-father, the dark cave or grotto or inner hall or cellar to Mary, Mere, Mut, mutter, pray for
us” (H.D., The Gift, typescript, Collection of American Literature, The Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University, p. 10. In Kloepfer: 1984, p. 27).
14. Manilius: From the moment of our birth we begin to die, and the end of our life is closely allied
to the beginning of it. Each moment of existence is a step towards the grave.