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

A SPACE ODYSSEY 17
harbour only dreams of death… Horror and fascination, death haunts them, these
fanatics of desire” (1974/1987, p. 77) The “death fuck” (Millett: 1971, p. 292) is the
core of this ideology; it is a murder mystery like a novel by Robbe-Grillet. And the
target is not the Father, but woman, as nature and mother: mat(t)er.
It is to the heart of mater/matter that phallic consciousness seeks to penetrate. And
in feminine disguise, as we see when Derrida becomes a woman. But this is
unoriginal; as Anne-Marie Dardigna (1981, p. 37) notes with respect to Sade’s
“ejaculating” and “discharging” heroines. In Derrida’s work the ontology of
language is like one of the questions of first philosophy: a religion of the sacred and
the profane where male words are sacred and female flesh is profane. Derrida, of
course, profanes the profane to worship the sacred. This epistemology knows only
the Word, which is not material, although the Word is in man. (Not woman, specifies
Lacan.)
Lacan’s moterialism 19 is both “the death fuck” (Millett: 1971, p. 292) and Gnostic
intercourse as death. By the twentieth century, the theft of any possibility for women
to speak of feminine sexuality in the novel was underway (Dardigna: 1981, p. 37).
For what happened “with the invention of the Sadean heroine was the assimilation of
feminine sexuality” (Dardigna: 1981, p. 37, italics in original). Lacan strives for a
style which would imitate mad, paranoid female ecstasy, as indicated by his
fascination with Aimée, a woman who killed a woman. 20 The style of murdering
women: “Style is the man himself” incants the homme fatal (1966, p. 9). I want to
point to the ways in which the ethical and political formulations within these
writings reflect a masculine appropriation and definition of the feminine, 21
somewhat like Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” 22
This masculinization of womb-madness (hysteria, already a male fantasy) is
similar to the melancholia claimed by the male literary critic and described by Tania
Modleski and Julianna Schiesari as male feminization for female negation. They
argue that the gendered ideology of melancholia recuperates women’s real sense of
loss and muteness as a privileged form of male expression, ironically of male
inexpressivity and suffering; beset manhood (Modleski, 1991, p. 9). Further, “[w]hat
is of course besetting manhood today is feminism, which the melancholy male
‘hero’ responds to by appropriating so that he can make its losses (for which he is
thus partly responsible) his losses” (1991, p. 10) and voilà: “the problem of
19. Lacan uses this as a play on mot (word)/materialism. Jacques Lacan (1989), “Geneva Lecture on
the Symptom,” Analysis 1, 14. Thanks to Maira Januus.
20. Lacan’s 1932 thesis and early articles deal with women’s (a displacement) murders and
attempted murders of other women. His thesis, De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec
la personnalité, studied Aimeé’s unmotivated attempt to murder an actress she had never met, and
his 1933 article, “Le Crime paranoiaque” took up the crime of the von Papin sisters who had
murdered their employer and her daughter. Lacan theorized that these delirious paranoic breaks were
motivated by a desire for self-punishment (Dean: 1986).
21. See also Teresa de Lauretis (1985) and Tania Modleski (1986; 1991).
22. Andreas Huyssen discusses this in his study of masculine identification with the feminine (1986,
p. 189). But see Barry (1989) for an excellent feminist analysis of Tootsie-Lacan, and Modleski
(1991, p. 15) on Tootsie-Culler.