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

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will be outside the defined and policed arena of discourse. Now, in the academy, you
cannot just say anything about male theory. You have to proceed with an immanent
critique, that is to say, you have to expertly play the parts against the whole. You
show, for example, how certain assumptions in the work actually defeat its stated
purpose of human liberation, but once remedied, i.e. salvaged, the theory will work
for women. An immanent critique can stay within the masculinist academic circle. In
this position women become the technicians of male theory who have to reprogram
the machine, turning it from a war machine against women into a gentler, kinder war
machine, killing us softly. This is a very involving task and after years of playing
this part it is understandable that there may be little desire to admit that the effort
was virtually futile. An investment has been made, and the conformity is not wholly
outer. What attitudes and feelings does this sexist context produce towards
oppositional women who refuse this male material Does a male-circled woman
have the power and security to be generous Having compromised her freedom, will
she be less willing to compromise ours Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this
arrangement, besides the ways it sets women against one another, is the fact that
although the male academy values owning our freedom, it does not have to pay a lot
for it. Masculine culture already controls gross amounts of female lives. Still, it
seems to want more, but always at the same low price. The exploited are very
affordable.
This book points to the missing, hidden parts of postmodernism which have been
occluded in the rehabilitation processes others have undertaken. In doing so, I am
suggesting that feminist critique cannot ignore the misogyny which is the ideological
practice of this theory. It would not be possible to take a piece of the cloth of
National Socialist or White supremacist “theory” for liberatory goals, even though
status in institutions of higher learning have required this methodology and figures
key to poststructuralism, like Heidegger and de Man, have collaborated. 15 These
masculine theories are not purely theoretical. What I am showing in the discussion of
these texts is that ideological practices are real, and that an essential part of feminist
strategy is to be aware of the masculinist ones. Also, not all thought is male and
knowing this is also a significant feminist activity.
15. Victor Farias’s expose of Heidegger’s Nazism caused tremendous debate in France, a debate
which is traced in Ferry and Renaut (1988). Derrida’s response is worth special attention; a reading
of this and his defense of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism for the Belgium newspaper under Nazi
control is essential in evaluating whether deconstruction is the anti-totalitarian methodology it claims
to be. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity, translated by Franklin Philip,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990; Victor Farias (1989), Heidegger and Nazism,
Temple University Press; and Jacques Derrida (1989b), Of Spirit, Heidegger and the Question,
translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Chicago: University of Chicago Press;
Jacques Derrida, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” in Critical
Inquiry, 14, 3, Spring, 1988 pp. 590–652; David Lehman (1991), Signs of the Times, Deconstruction
and the Fall of Paul de Man, New York: Poseidon; Thomas G.Pavel (1990), The Feud of Language,
A History of Structuralist Thought, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, especially “Post-Scriptum: The
Heidegger Affair”.