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

OUT OF OBLIVION 141
lover, Ariadne, die in childbirth. According to her Cyprian cult, Ariadne died in
childbirth, killed by Artemis at the order of Dionysus. It is the murder of the mother
and the death of her sacredness that is the central message of the play. The triumph
of Dionysian masculine philosophy is the erasure of women’s memory of birth and
maternity: the death of the mother and the annihilation of her consciousness. Semele,
the name of Dionysus’s mother, is a cognate of Selene, the horned aspect of the
Moon Goddess and an incarnation of the Great Mother of the Gods, Cybele. Hecate,
another aspect of the triadic Moon Goddess, had hair of live snakes and symbolized
the natural processes of death for life. Both aspects were usurped and distorted by
Greece’s new lady Di. Semele was “made into a woman by the Thebans and called
the daughter of Kadmos, though her original character as an earth goddess is
transparently evident” (Guthrie, 1955, p. 56). Demeter is another earth goddess who
figures prominently in the play, and who Dionysus wears for legitimacy, as we must
now touch the phallus in our work in order to speak.
The alchemists of postmodernism seek what they perceive as the magic of
maternity. They speak of the death of God the father in order to prepare for his
resurrection as Father the god. This will be their first miracle of divine creation and
mastery over the secrets of generation after dissecting women’s bodies (Corea,
1985a). Philosophically and materially, woman is the prima materia for this
alchemical transmutation of the male word into flesh and female flesh into word.
And that which astounds male ideology is woman’s centrality to the procreative
process. These theorists repudiate totality, even comprehensibility, but they are
understandable as male ideology of ex nihilo, of fear of woman and of man’s
materialization via the body of woman: the transmutation of the sperm into seed, the
entry into the womb/ova to become seed, to become mortal. Postmodernism is the
philosophy appropriate to the new reproductive technologies 36 and for the disarticulation
of feminist politics. Derrida’s message for women is: you can’t produce
original knowledge, I am the origin, you have to imitate me! Lacan is telling us: men
won’t change and there’s nothing you can say about it anyway! Foucault says: don’t
bother to resist, à quoi bon All of this is an unoriginal revamping of patriarchal
power.
The Master’s science finds the Master’s truths and untruths. As Audre Lorde has
said:
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may
allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable
us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those
women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support
(1981, p. 99, italics in original).
36. For a discussion of how Jacques Testart, the “father” of reproductive technologies in France,
viewed the in vitro fertilization and birth of “his creation”, the girl Amandine, see Brodribb (1988b,
pp. 33– 34). He says he fantasizes being her lover: “Because what immediately comes to mind is a
meeting, a meeting when this girl will enter puberty. And I’m a little afraid that she won’t recognize
the weight of what I did” (Breen: 1984, pp. 102–103).