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

14 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
doubt that we recognized that God is dead, and that is why Freud thinks so
hard about it. But also, since it is the dead Father at the origin that God serves,
he too has been dead all along. The question of the Creator in Freud is then to
know what must be appended to that which continues to exercise this order
today (1986, p. 152).
Both creativity and crisis are being rethought in the space opened up by the death of
the Creator. Lévi-Strauss awards creativity to structure, Nietzsche recreates a
Superman, while Sartre gives creative potential to the struggle of the for-itself with
the in-itself. In this way, the good, the true and the beautiful are redivided and
reorganized.
Nietzsche proclaims “the beautiful,” as the birth of perfection, and Superman as
the progeny/goal of this birth. God is dead, therefore Zarathustra must give birth to
himself and his world. This affirmation attempts to ride the waves of uncertainty,
and exult in delirium and ambiguity as the sources of creation. Nietzsche proclaimed
a postmodern nihilism of action and aesthetic truth. As Megill summarizes, “instead
of drawing back from the void, man dances upon it. Instead of lamenting the absence
of a world suited to our being, man invents one. He becomes the artist of his own
existence, untrammelled by natural constraints and limitations” (1985, p. 34).
Nietzsche established art as the new source and possibility of truth. He saw “the
world as a work of art which gives birth to itself” (1978, p. 419 aphorism 796).
Foucault claims that Nietzsche was the first to understand that “man was dying of
the signs born in him” (Bellour, 1981, p. 142). Nietzsche was the first prophet of the
death of God and man, he was the harbinger of the new law of eros. Yet women
have always recognized the similarity between what we are told is divine authority
and equally pretentious male authority. This new prophetic activity is a frenzy of
possession—of woman, and an acting out of union with the deity: the Original
Phallus.
While Nietzsche danced on God’s grave, Sartre sought to realize immortality
within human time. In spite of the death of God, transcendence is still possible.
Physical man becomes metaphysical man through the totalizing process of history.
And grace is reincarnated in the existentialist project as praxis and being-for-itself.
Sartre, then, is the inheritor of “the good”, of value, which comes when one avoids
the pitfalls of bad faith. Sartre’s search for value is as ideological and patriarchal as
Lévi-Strauss’ reification of truth.
Lévi-Strauss claimed “truth”: God is dead, but his Word is alive and universal.
Truth is structure, and it is without value. The ten commandments, the laws of
human consciousness, are absolute truths: self-creating, self-validating, and
15. cont. from previous page modern culture, far from mirroring historical reality, were a figment of
the humanist imagination” (1989, p. 47). In other words, Lyotard, Foucault, et al. use
postmodernism to hide the atrocities of their humanism and they are imagining themselves in crisis
in order to remain in the theory-academic business. Most critically, Modleski points out: “we need to
consider the extent to which male power is actually consolidated through cycles of crisis and
revolution, whereby men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it” (1991,
p. 7).