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

38 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
“waiting’ for Being to visit one’s subjectivity” (1989b, p. 85, italics in original). As
O’Brien notes, the very foundation of being in the world, being born, is absent from
the play. Beckett dramatizes Heidegger’s “throwness” (1989b, p. 86). Vladimir and
Estragon “find themselves” in a world in which they were not born. In this waiting
room of Beckett’s stage, I argue that structuralist he-Dasein attends to his timeless
desire: to receive the Word. Vladimir and Estragon threaten to kill themselves if they
do not receive word from Godot tomorrow.
It is O’Brien’s analysis and not Beckett’s dramatization that illuminates for us the
masculinity of this static leap for authenticity. There are no women: “There is no
dialectic of birth and death, of subject and species, no tension of natural and
historical time, no being and no Being” (1989b, p. 88). Godot is a structure,
immovable, enigmatic and thanatically eternal. Actually, the message has been sent,
and Vladimir and Estragon have heard it. The message is: NOTHING, the last word
of Lévi-Strauss’ Mythologiques and the preoccupation of Sartre’s being. Estragon
and Vladimir, Sartre and Lévi-Strauss do not recognize the sterile masculinity of
nothingness. These theories of masculine subjectivity and substance speak only to
the unborn and the undead, those without past or future. Time can only be
destructive of matter, never generative; time’s potency is death, never potential birth.
In masculine epistemology, time, space and matter are realities external to Pure
Desire and have been theorized in relationship to an original nothingness and a
future destruction. Descartes’ Masculine Birth of Time (Farrington: 1951) portends
the annihilation of matter. Existentialism and structuralism turn the tree of life into a
hanging post: no new embodiments. This preoccupation with empty, timeless space
and the nothing which is everything is the poststructuralist, postmodernist,
postcoitel, postmortem scene. 11
He-Dasein attends to his timeless desire: to receive the Word and master time, by
mating with nothingness/death: Matador. 12 What is at issue, then, is an intimate and
ideological process: the purification of masculine desire and the degeneration of
time.
11. And the excremental cultists recite: “The postmodern scene begins and ends with transgression
as the ‘lightning-flash’ which illuminates the sky for an instant only to reveal the immensity of the
darkness within: absence as the disappearing sign of the limitless of the void within and without;
Nietzche’s ‘throw of the dice’ across the spider’s web of existence” (Kroker and Cook: 1986, pp. 8–
9). The Postmodern Scene, Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics is a prayer to the postmodern
cult of despair, authored by representatives of a Canadian journal which is among the strongest
endorsers of postmodernism internationally. See also the critique of The Canadian Journal of
Political and Social Theory by Gaile McGregor (1989). Indeed, Callinicos points out that
“postmodernism found some of its most extravagant enthusiasts in Canada” (1990, p. 1). A certain
post-colonial mentality
12. “Lover of death” in Spanish, or “killer of bulls”. Of a certain masculinity, Leclerc writes: “Man
is aggrieved, not at the cessation of his pleasure, but at the cessation of desire. Deprived of the only
tangible proof of his virility, he falls back into the anguish of his indeterminacy, an anguish which
never leaves him. His pleasure deprives him of his sense of maleness.
Robbed of his virility, cut off, therefore, from the only kind of humanity he desires, he feels himself
to be totally abandoned, totally alone. Man is the creature for whom pleasure is desolating” (1974/
1987, p. 77, italics in original).