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

136 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
work of de Beauvoir, 29 Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre and other post-war French
theorists examined. Only Irigaray proposes a different self-other relationship.
Caroline Whitbeck (1989, p. 56) suggests that “If a mother saw the emerging person
who is her child in the way that Hegel describes, human beings would not exist. The
failure of Hegel’s scheme to apply to the mother’s experience in the primordial
mother-child relation is a significant failure.” In “A Different Reality: Feminist
Ontology,” Whitbeck (1989, p. 56) outlines an “understanding of differentiation that
does not depend on opposition and a life and death struggle.”
Death and matricide, or life and birth. The first is the core of postmodernism’s
epistemology, the other is the matrix of materialist, radical feminist theory. In
postmodernism’s Orwellian world, death is life, murder is recreation, love is death.
Birth is not creative, has no history, no meaning. Fertility, generation, the creativity
of birth, are absorbed and mastered by the emptiness of das Ding, which, as
Heidegger and Beckett know, never comes. The confusion in masculine creativity is
profoundly related to an avowed crisis of patriarchal consciousness. They claim God
is dead, but the fatal truth is this consciousness is alive. Postmodernism is simply
another crisis in masculine being and knowing, a clash of the Titans. The fortunes of
men, Gods, theologies and theories change. Continual crises of certainty and palace
revolutions are the nature of patriarchal consciousness. The King is dead, long live
the King! Science, the new god, was used by Lévi-Strauss to create a
Frankensteinian structure from history. Others see the Being of language as the new
divinity. Lacan believes in das Ding, Foucault follows the implacable march of the
Demiurges. None of it is really very new. In the beginning, God said he made the
word flesh. With the modern alchemists, the flesh is made word. And woman
remains essential(ist): their speech requires our silence, their aesthetics requires our
sacrifice, their writing requires our form.
What should our reaction be to their claim that God is dead It is not to stand at
the foot of the cross singing Stabat Mater 30 like Julia Kristeva (1986). What should
we respond to these new Gods Wittig has a solution. She could be discussing Lacan
and Lévi-Strauss, and the exchange of words on women. Her escape from Foucault’s
spiral is Antigone’s death.
They say, Vile, vile creature for whom possession is equated with happiness, a
sacred cow on the same footing as riches, power, leisure. Has he not indeed
written, power and the possession of women, leisure and the enjoyment of
women He writes that you are currency, an item of exchange. He writes,
barter, barter, possession and acquisition of women and merchandise. Better
for you to see your guts in the sun and utter the death-rattle than to live a life
29. As Elaine Marks concludes in her study of de Beauvoir’s death-centred writings, a new
relationship to death would be a new relationship to others (1973). It is also important to note that de
Beauvoir is anxious about her own death, and does not use the annihilation of women to affirm
herself, as de Sade does.
30. Stabat mater, “the mother was standing at the foot of the cross”, opening words of a medieval
Latin hymn which describes the suffering of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross of Jesus. See
Spivak’s critique (1987, pp. 134–153; pp. 308–309; 1989, p. 145).