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

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H.D. tried to turn the Lord Freud into a woman, but not even her magic could pull
that off. Pull off the phallus. 1
Postmodernism is an addition to the masculinist repertoire of psychotic mind/body
splitting and the peculiar arrangement of reality as Idea: timeless essence and
universal form. When women appear in French philosophy as Sartrean holes and
slime (Collins and Pierce: 1976) or Deleuzian bodies without organs (Guattari and
Deleuze: 1983), the mind—and the matter—is masculine. Plato answered the
question of Being by awarding true reality to the realm of ideas; the sensible world
possesses only the appearance of reality. Postmodernism is no less metaphysical:
here, too, the idea absorbs and denies all presence in the world. This particular trend
in patriarchal thinking is neither new nor original: the Collège de France and the
Freud school which created it have respectable traditions in Cartesian politics. Julia
Penelope has uncovered the “patriarchal linguistic agenda” (1990, p. 17) of the
Académic Française, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 with the purpose of
creating a grammar that would correct women. The institutions as well as the texts
which were patrons to postmodernism excluded and expelled women, including
Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. The rule is that only man may appear as
woman. Derrida creates Veronica—“true image” in medieval Latin—woman as
representation of the transparency of meaning. Then he deconstructs her while
denouncing feminists for defining her: Veronica must be his and must be appearance
only. She must be his (appearance) only. She may be summoned to appear, but shall
not summon the Collège, to account; to politics, responsibility, justice. In any case,
once at court, the jester Lacan rules that the law is the phallus and woman cannot
speak; Lacan will speak in her place, however, since only man may represent
woman.
Once satisfied to control her body and her movements, once pleased to create
images of her and then order her body to conform, the Master of Discourse now
aspires to the most divine of tasks: to create her in his image, which is ultimately to
annihilate her. This is his narcissistic solution to his problem of the Other. But to do
this, to create her in his image, he must be able to take her image, educating her to
sameness and deference. Taking her body, taking her mind, and now taking her
image. But the task of taking women’s image is ill-advised. In his narcissistic
dreaming, he hallucinates, and even if we are called an illusion, he must ask: Where
did the illusion of woman come from What evil genius placed the idea of woman in
man In short, the New Age masculinity of self-deluded alchemists and shapeshifters
is not going to be a successful strategy. There is something irreducible about
Veronica after all, as they always suspected. She informs herself that women matter.
Foucault would have written on hysterical women, Lacan tried to write as an
hysteric (Clément: 1983; Derrida: 1978a; and Deleuze and Guattari: 1988), write of
becoming-woman. In the section, “Memories of a Sorcerer, III” Deleuze and
Guattari write “becoming-woman, more than any other becoming, possesses a
1. Some of the best H.D. scholarship is represented by the works of Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1979;
1986; 1981); Susan Stanford Friedman (1981; 1985; 1990); Deborah Kelly Kloepfer (1984) and
Friedman and DuPlessis (1990).