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

NOTHINGNESS AND DE/GENERATION 37
recognizes women’s specificity—can challenge and resist fascist domination.
Katharine Burdekin’s anti-fascist dystopia, Swastika Night, (1940) treats the
“Reduction of Women” to breeding animals who will not resist rape as central to this
political ideology (Patai: 1984a). Women are allowed to participate in the “Holy
Mystery of Maleness” (1940, p. 9) by bearing children, yet birth is something which
defiles men and is transcended by a second birth into the fascist polity.
Nothing matters to both Lévi-Strauss and Sartre. Nothing is generative in these ex
nihilo epistemologies. What really matters is why these patriarchal thinkers are
searching for matrices of history, transcendence and matrimony, yet they spurn
matter. 9 Matrix, from mater, womb, is something within which something else
originates or develops. Why does it matter If matter is “a subject under
consideration,” “a source especially of feeling or emotion,” and especially, a
“condition affecting a person or thing, usually unfavourably” 10
In contrast to this ad nihilo teleology, recent feminist perspectives on temporality
shift from the masculinist death-determined future to a birth-determined one. This is
the case for Forman (1989), O’Brien (1989a), and Irigaray (1984), although Irigaray
uses the metaphors of procreativity only to introduce an amorous heterosexual
ethical birth. Her ethics of sexual difference remain within the patriarchal chain
which signifies womb as crypt. Frieda Forman’s work on women’s time
consciousness exposes the specific masculinity of Heidegger’s Being-Toward-Death.
She brings to light the ways in which “for us the future as generative is as much a
condition of our lives as is our mortality…. As a collective, women do not only live
in time (from birth to death), they also give time and that act makes a radical
difference to Being-in-the-World” (1989, p. 7, italics in original). In “Periods,” Mary
O’Brien argues that “The birth of a child is the cord which links and breaks and
reconstitutes the integrity of history and nature, of linear time and cyclical time.
These are not two different time modes but the dialectic vitality of human existence”
(1989a, pp. 15–16). I am arguing that what is needed is not “feminist”
postmodernism, but feminist thoughts on energy, matter and relativity that do not
lead to annihilation.
In “Resolute Anticipation: Heidegger and Beckett,” (1989b) Mary O’Brien uses
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as a dramatization of Heidegger’s Being and
Time. Heidegger raised the question of Being as the forgotten issue in philosophy.
O’Brien does not follow the philosopher into his cave of transcendental Being and
everyday being. Rather, she is concerned with the ontological and existential
presuppositions of a male Dasein. She argues “there can be no authenticity for a he-
Dasein who does not recognize that temporality is a continuous species experience
grounded actively and materially in birth processes, and not the passivity of simply
9. A Feminist Dictionary defines mater: “Mother. The root ma plus the suffix -ter yield mater, a very
old linguistic form which is among the earliest words we can reconstruct historically. Its cognates
are found across the Indo-European languages and include in English ‘mother’, ‘mama’, ‘matriarch’,
‘maternal’, ‘material’, ‘matrix’, and ‘matter’. The centrality of these worlds is one kind of evidence
for the view that a matrilineal Indo-European culture and ‘mother-tongue’ antedate the patriarchal
culture of more recent history” (Kramarae: 1985, p. 260).
10. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1979, p. 703.