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

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(1989, p. 27–28). Matricide is necessary to the survival of the self: “The lesser or
greater violence of matricidal drive, depending on individuals and the milieu’s
tolerance, entails, when it is hindered, its inversion on the self; the maternal object
having been introjected, the depressive or melancholic putting to death of the self is
what follows, instead of matricide” (1989, p. 28). Women must slay the mother and
rid themselves of the dead maternal “Thing”; repudiate the pre-semiotic swamp of
immanence and take the path of Electra and Eugénie. Kristeva argues that “For man
and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first
step on the way to becoming autonomous.
In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir attempted a systematic and comprehensive
critique of the ideology of male supremacy. However, she accepted the anti-physis
male model of transcendence, apologizing that woman was predisposed to
immanence and inauthenticity because of her lesser capacity for violence against the
natural world, and her enslavement to it. De Beauvoir used de Sade’s spirit to argue
that woman would find authenticity in crime, in murder (Ascher: 1979, p. 2). This
would be the source of genuine transcendence, unlike the immanent and disgusting
biological act of birth. Any attempt to find value in matter, in the natural world,
contradicts existentialism’s first principle: existence precedes essence. Woman’s
weakness is her lack of understanding of rerum concordia discors. To be great is “to
regard the universe as one’s own, to consider oneself to blame for its faults and to
glory in its progress…to regard the entire earth as [one’s] territory” (De Beauvoir:
1974, p. 793). Surely a feminism which relies on a fatal theory and delusional
domination becomes ideological, for what would it mean to be integrated into our
own negation, except the realization of patriarchal fantasy. To pursue an anti-mat(t)
er, anti-physis approach is to repeat patriarchal ideology.
De Beauvoir’s existential account of the historical domination of Woman and
Nature is based on a model of human consciousness which is dualistic and achieves
affirmation only in opposition. In her model of human consciousness, “The category
of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself” (1974, p. xix). Consciousness is
also not necessarily dominating, for there is “in consciousness a fundamental
hostility toward every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being
opposed—he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential,
the object” (1974, p. xx). Thus, the enslavement of women is a result of the
imperialism of human consciousness, seeking always to exercise its sovereignty in
objective fashion. Woman lost this intersubjective struggle for domination because
“the male will to power and expansion made of woman’s incapacity…[giving birth]…
a curse” (1974, p. 88). Weakened and disadvantaged by her reproductive function,
woman has not been socially creative, has no history, and has created no values. It is
man, who risked his life in hunting and warfare, who made choices and developed
subjectivity and universal values. It is by risking his life and killing that man realized
himself as an existent. As a warrior and a hunter:
he proved dramatically that life is not the supreme value for man, but on the
contrary that it should be made to serve ends more important than itself. The
worst curse that was laid upon woman was that she should be excluded from
these warlike forays. For it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is