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

128 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
place: we can remember and imagine nothing, we can remember and imagine with
nothing else, nothing or else. There is only penetration, or lack of penetration.
Derrida’s search is for the immaterial, secret and unsayable one hundredth name of
the Phallus. Rousseau’s maxim, “man was born free, but is everywhere in chains”
turns into a signifying chain of death for women. With the philosophers of desire,
man finally comes to fill his empty void of femininity, in that mastery of matter and
sense that is their “erotic”. The failure and unworthiness of being resonates in the
work of Foucault and Lévi-Strauss. Nietzsche as eternul return asserted the death of
God, Lévi-Strauss as high priest arranged for the dissolution of man. Foucault
followed up with the death of man, and Derrida’s wizardry never comes to mean
more than the infinite intercourse of Eros and Thanatos, repetitions of né, n’est. 15
The punning of masculine and feminine in meaning is presided over by this male
alchemist 16 who has arrogated and fetishized powers of female creation and source.
Like Dionysus, who fetishizes by adding female potentiality to a male will power,
Nietzsche, Derrida and Lacan disguise themselves as women, 17 to face life (death).
To face woman, it is necessary to wear a mask. For woman masks death, woman is a
mask, a mask who nevertheless threatens to destroy the disguise. She is what is the
matter, the non-/Being who has the power to annihilate masculine logos and b/Being.
Nietzsche and de Sade were major influences on the work of Foucault and
Derrida. Lacan also turned to de Sade’s Système du pape Pie VI in Juliette, where
Sade elaborates the theory of man’s participation in natural creation through crime
(1986, p. 248). De Sade is not simply the cover art for L’éthique de la psychanalyse.
In the key sections of Juliette and The Philosophy of the Bedroom, the murder of the
mother is necessary to male creativity. The section attributed to the fictional Pope
Pious VI which Lacan quotes at length and makes central to his theory of ethics and
desire appears in the English edition 18 as follows:
No destruction, no fodder for the earth, and consequently man deprived of the
possibility to reproduce man. Fatal truth, this, since it contains inescapable
proof that the virtues and vices of our social system are nought, and that what
we characterize as vices are more beneficial, more necessary than our virtues,
since these vices are creative and these virtues merely created; or, if you
prefer, these vices are causes, these virtues only effects; proof that a too
perfect harmony would have more disadvantages than has disorder; and proof
that if war, discord, and crime were suddenly to be banished from the world,
the three kingdoms, all checks upon them removed, would so flourish as to
15. Né means born, and n’est is not.
16. See Burfoot (1989) for a discussion of medieval alchemists and contemporary reproductive
engineers.
17. See Janice Raymond (1979) The Transsexual Empire, The Making of the She-Male, for a critique
of the contemporary medical version, and the analysis of men who become “women”. Raymond
argues that men seem to want to procreate but actually wish for that which is truly creative: women’s
Be-ing.
18. Lacan uses the edition of Juliette published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, IV(78). The quote appears
on page 248 of L’éthique de la psychanalyse.