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

OUT OF OBLIVION 131
Lacan has gone beyond Sade’s leisurely destruction of matter, and the Baconian 22
mastery of nature to provide a theory of history where there is pure destruction and
creation without matter. This is accomplished from Freudian discontent. Lacan
restricts the collective to the unconscious in order to normalize individual ill will and
turn the conscience into an Oedipal signifier. The irrational absorbs the real and the
rational; the masculine psychotic is immune to change, and female suffering will be
eternal and absolute. A justification for the claimed unpredictability and
uncontrollability of male violence
Distinct from the Marxist conception of dialectical materialism, Lacan proposes
that “production is an original domain, a domain of creation ex nihilo, in as much as
it introduces into the natural world the organization of the signifier” (1986,
p. 253). And thought resides in the spaces between, in the intervals of the signifier
(1986, p. 253). Nature and history are separate. Consciousness comes ex nihilo. The
immateriality of structure is realized. Matter is no longer part of history or thought.
Lacan proclaims the eternal return of the ex nihilo. Lacan did not forget Plato’s
lesson and metaphysical logic, that only a lack makes it possible to think of the real
world. It is from the death of mat(t)er that they seek to create. It is dead matter that
they seek to create. It is the death of ma(t)er that they seek to create. Lacan provides
the psychoanalytic authorization for Sade’s relationship to matter, creation,
procreation. The suppression of gestating women is tied to the previous annihilation
of mass:
“What the devil do you plan to do with these articles”…[Juliette]…inquired
of the Grand Duke. “You shall see before very long,” he replied. “I am the
father of the infants they are ready to whelp, and I sired them solely for the
sake of the delicious pleasure I shall have in destroying them. I know of no
greater satisfaction than causing a woman I have ingravidated to miscarry, and
as my seminal product is uncommonly abundant, I impregnate at least one a
day to insure the wherewithal for my daily destructions” (Sade: 1797/1968,
p. 618).
Standing on the threshold of the modern period, the Marquis de Sade inaugurated a
new dimension in the attack on woman-mother through a forcible separation and selfdomination
of female sexuality and procreativity. Power is sex, not birth, he claims,
and wives and mothers are defiled by anti-mother father’s daughters who are
insatiable for male sex. The lesson girls would learn in de Sade’s “School of Love”—
the final chapter to The Philosophy of the Bedroom (1795/1965)—is selfdomination.
In an ideological reversal of man’s domination of woman, a daughter
rapes, infects and infibulates her mother, following her father’s specifications and
under the Schoolmaster’s gaze. She is taught that to have male sex/approval and
appeal, she must negate the maternal body. This Orwellian story, full of political
22. See Francis Bacon, (1603) The Masculine Birth of Time, in Benjamin Farrington (1951),
“Temporis Partus Masculus: An Untranslated Writing of Francis Bacon.” Centaurus, 1, pp. 193–205.