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

Feminists have begun to think through the effects for female sexuality of the
wounding of the mother/daughter relationship. The mothers were also daughters, and
this question has to be considered in generational as well as psychical time, as Luce
Irigaray (1981, p. 65) shows:
But have I ever known you otherwise than gone And the home of your
disappearance was not in me… I received from you only your obliviousness of
self, while my presence allowed you to forget this oblivion. So that with my
tangible appearance I redoubled the lack of your presence.
But forgetfulness remembers itself when its memorial disappears. And
here you are, this very evening, facing a mourning with no remembrance.
Invested with an emptiness that evokes no memories. That screams at
its own rebounding echo. A materiality occupying a void that escapes its
grasp.
Irigaray also argues that sameness and differences among women must be named.
But we have to overcome our aphasia and our amnesia to speak our minds and live
our time. Temporally, sex is momentous, while procreation is duration. Remedying
aphasia, Irigaray (1985d) wrote “When our lips speak together.” Remembering birth,
Mary O’Brien (1981) showed how biological reproduction is the substructure of
human history, the unity of natural and cyclical time. Identifying blackness and
whiteness, bell hooks recharges circuits of community, “homeplace” (1990,
pp. 33–50), spaces of resistance.
But such critiques of the misogyny of masculinist theory have been interrupted,
arrested. Julia Kristeva, the self-styled “father of semiotics” has brought us the
phallic mother: the phallus becomes the mother of us all in Kristeva’s magical
replacement of male supremacy. Her work is tied to the Lacanian formula of desire
and/for female aphasia:
On a deeper level, however, a woman cannot “be”; it is something which does
not even belong in the order of being. It follows that a feminist practice can
only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say “that’s
not it” and “that’s still not it”. In “woman” I see something that cannot be
represented, something that is not said, something above and beyond
nomenclatures and ideologies. There are certain “men” who are familiar with
this phenomenon; it is what some modern texts never stop signifying: testing
the limits of language and sociality—the law and its transgression, mastery
and (sexual) pleasure—without reserving one for males and the other for
females, on the condition that it is never mentioned. (Kristeva: 1974/1981,
p. 137, 138)
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