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

134 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in
humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills (1974, p. 72).
De Beauvoir believes that women enviously embrace the universal values created
from masculine experience and participate vicariously in male violence as an
ap plauding audience. “He it is who opens up the future to which she also reaches
out. In truth women have never set up female values in opposition to male values…”
(1974, p. 73). She denies the value of female reproductive experience and endorses
the premise that links self-realization to violence. A lesser female potential for selfaffirmation
and authenticity is linked to woman’s inferior capacity for and access to
violence. Woman’s body “escapes her control, it betrays her…” (1974, p. 688). The
distinction is between those who give life, and those who give value to life through
violence, and clearly the latter are superior in de Beauvoir’s existentialist model.
Any attempt to combine life and transcendence, to reject the isolated conceit of the
male self, contradicts the major tenet of existential philosophy: there is no value in
the natural world. De Beauvoir urges women to emulate the existential despair of a
dualist, imperialist consciousness and the anti-physis movement of history. It is an
act of bad faith 26 when women find “more verity in a garden than a city, in a malady
than in an idea, in a birth than in a revolution…” (1974, p. 688). Luce Irigaray’s
disappointment with reproduction is less absolute: “the maternal has become
relegated to procreation and is not the place for a productive matricial function”
(1987c, p. 84). In “Is the Subject of Science Sexed” she argues that production and
programming of language and discourse are sexed, and what is lacking is “the fertile
ground of a sexed speech, of a sexual creation and not simply procreation” (1987c,
p. 87). In Parler n’est jamais neutre, the production of language is the motor of
history central to the formation of subjectivity. But the original matrix, reproduction,
is still outside history and consciousness. Irigaray turns the mirror on the father,
takes his looking glass, his monocle/manacle, and makes explicit the deformation of
masculine subjectivity. Insisting on her sex, she aspires to the sexualization of
culture, a mother/daughter symbolic genealogy to stop the suffocation of women’s
collective and individual consciousness by the people of man. For Irigaray, the body
of the mother as the Other is Origin, and can be reached through language and
Lacan, sex and symbol. This is the consciousness and the perspective of the infant,
in contrast to O’Brien’s mother-centred reproductive consciousness.
Mary O’Brien’s (1981) philosophy of birth reclaims this female experience from
the existentialist category of unconscious immanence. This historical, materialist 27
and dialectical approach grounds patriarchy and the hegemony of masculine values
26. Bad faith is the attempt to escape the existential anguish of self-definition.
27. Barbara Deming sketches another materialist view of the “Great Mother, who is Death Mother
and Life Mother, both; who experiences innumerable transformations and who remains eternally the
same, able always to engender all things over again. In The Mother, all things exist. The words
‘matter’ and ‘mater’ (mother) are of course very close. Something for materialists to muse about I
think. Beyond all contradiction, female and male are matter and are also mater, flesh of their
mother’s flesh—the male as a fetus in the beginning female, too; then becoming a variation of the
female. Until this truth is accepted, the so-called materialist is not really a materialist” (1977,
pp. 73–74).