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

A SPACE ODYSSEY 15
self-perpetuating. Incest is the taboo which is the cornerstone of social relations.
Lacan would go even further: the Oedipal taboo is the origin of the superego, of the
individual as well as the cultural superego of the collectivity. For Lévi-Strauss, truth
is scientific and natural, not historical and dialectical. Like Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss
believed that whatever is universally true must be natural. However, since nothing
remains to be done, this ultimate truth can only be redemonstrated. The universal
absorbs everything, and history is replaced by nature. This is explicit in Lévi-
Strauss’ attack on existentialism: “Structuralism, unlike the kind of philosophy
which restricts the dialectic to human history and bans it from the natural order,
readily admits that the ideas it formulates in psychological terms may be no more
than fumbling approximations to organic or even physical truths” (1966, p. 689). Or
as Descartes wrote in 1641, “the idea of God, which is in us, must have God as its
cause” (1958, p. 173). The father of French philosophy was demonstrating his theory
of the separation between mind and body, and the existence of God: “By the name
God I mean a substance that is infinite, immutable, independent, all-knowing, allpowerful,
and by which I myself and everything else, if any such other things there
be, have been created” (1958, p. 204). Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy,
in which the existence of God and the distinction in man of soul and body are
demonstrated, reformulated but centred on Augustine’s problem of knowledge and
conversation with reason: I desire to know God and the soul. Nothing more
Absolutely nothing. 16 Three centuries later, this idea is modernized: structure is God,
and the binary code is His Word: light/dark, heaven/earth, male/ female. Structure is
the new inhuman objectivity, but it is also a historically masculine understanding of
matter.
A fear of life and a disembodied approach to nature is an important characteristic
of male history and scientific patriarchy. Man’s “paranoid somatophobia” (Scheman:
1982) can be traced to Descartes, who demonstrated the isolation of the male self,
the existence of a detached ego without connectedness to the natural world. Cogito
ergo sum expressed the distrust of the body and the senses felt by a self that would
only know the natural world through science. Science is the attempt at understanding
through separation. Indeed, disengagement and distance are the Nietzschean
preconditions for illumination and greatness. These epistemological and ontological
formulations have remained at the centre of subsequent French philosophy. And so
has god, even when he has been declared dead, for he reincarnates as discarnate
structure, language and nothingness. Structure is the body of this apparition;
language is the mind and nothingness is the soul.
What is the meaning of the declaration of the death of all absolutes, the assertion
of the death of the Father Freud understood the critical importance of the end
of metaphysics for man’s desire and law. According to Lacan, the success of
Freud’s Totem and Taboo is to write the only modern myth possible: “The myth of
the murder of the father is clearly the myth of a time for which God is dead” (1986,
p. 209). The only material in Lacan is murder, in his view, the original Freudian
16. Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus Nihil omnino. From Soliloquiorum, lib. I, cap. II, in
Descartes (1958, p. ix).