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

xix
Postmodernism exults female oblivion and disconnection; it has no model for the
acquisition of knowledge, for making connections, for communication, or for
becoming global, which feminism has done and will continue to do. 6 You have to
remember to be present for another, to be just, to create sense. But “the demon
lover” will not do this. Robin Morgan recognizes why:
If I had to name one quality as the genius of patriarchy, it would be
compartmentalization, the capacity for institutionalizing disconnection.
Intellect severed from emotion. Thought separated from action. Science split
from art. The earth itself divided; national borders. Human beings categorized:
by sex, age, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, height, weight, class, religion,
physical ability, ad nauseam. The personal isolated from the political. Sex
divorced from love. The material ruptured from the spiritual. The past parted
from the present disjoined from the future. Law detached from justice. Vision
dissociated from reality (1989, p. 51).
Feminists like Anne-Marie Dardigna (1981) and Andrea Nye (1988) have disclosed
how psychoanalytic theory refuses to acknowledge the anguish of women’s lives and
stories of brutality which threaten the son’s reconciliation with the Father necessary
to his inheritance of privilege. As Nye argues, “the imaginary male self is threatened
not by fusional maternal animality, but by the always-present possibility of renewed
accusations from abused women, not by the nothingness of the intersubjective, but
by an empathy that will make him vulnerable to others’ experiences” (1988, p. 161).
The refusal to feel for or with women, the rejection of solidarity with women,
assures the son’s access to the Father’s power. In fact, the Master from Vienna
located the voice of the conscience in the Other—in the voice of the murdered father
who becomes, with difficulty, the external internal voice—so that the ego is one’s
own but the conscience is founded only from an external threat of retaliation for
murder (Freud: 1913). Indeed, ego and conscience are not connected here!
According to Dardigna, 7 it is really the fascination for the all-powerful father that
is at the centre of masculine desire (1981, p. 188). To desire a woman is in some
sense to recognize her, and this threatens a loss of control over the divisions he has
made in his life between his mind and his body, his reason and his emotion; between
the women he uses for sex and the women he talks with about postmodernism. And
the women writers he criticizes, not daring to confront the Father. As Wendy
Holloway (1984) has shown, he withholds, withdraws, and does not meet her social,
6. This was the case in Nairobi, 1985. See Charlotte Bunch (1987), Passionate Politics, Section
Five, “Global Feminism”, pp. 269–362.
7. In her interpretation of the myth of Adam and Eve in the garden, Anne-Marie Dardigna recalls
Eve’s gesture of subversion: Eve senses the presence of the Tree of Knowledge, she tastes the fruit,
and introduces new values of pleasure and perception. When she disrupts the pact of Father and Son,
she is punished by male domination of her desire: “Thy desire shall be thy husband, and he shall rule
over thee.” In Genesis, the Father-Son alliance is reasserted: “the Father and the Son are reconciled
by denying the desire of Eve as subject and transforming her into an object of their desire” (1981, p.
179). Men remain fearful of the dangers: knowing women, and knowing a woman threaten the Law
of the Fathers.