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

50 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
In his view, feminism has responded wrongly to the sexualization and medicalization
of the female body. Rather than learning the history of the “immense ‘gynecology’”
(1977/1988, p. 115) which Foucault planned to write, “the feminist movements
responded defiantly” (1977/1988, p. 115). Foucault characterized feminists as
saying:
Are we sex by nature Well then, let us be so but in its singularity, in its
irreducible specificity. Let us draw the consequences and reinvent our own
type of existence, political, economic, cultural (1977/1988, p. 115).
Condescending and derisive, Foucault considered feminist histories of and writing
on “feelings, behaviour and the body” to be unsophisticated. For, “Soon, they will
understand that the history of the West cannot be dissociated from the way its “truth’
is produced and produces its effects. The spirit likes to descend on young girls”
(1977b, p. 153). By “spirit” he means a “primitive” focus on lived, named
experience rather than anonymous structure. Actually, Foucault is objecting to a
feminist concern with women’s specificity and female embodiment and what he
fears is a refusal of the androcentric universal. Certainly, he is not citing or deferring
to Simone de Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1974,
p. 301) which both named women’s experience and theorized its context. Foucault
does not grant originality or complexity to women’s scholarship, nor did he favour
women scholars. But guess what’s missing from the glossy, 1988 presentation of this
interview, originally published in 1977 “The spirit likes to descend on young girls”
(1977b, p. 153) which appears in the Telos version has been edited out. Is this part of
the production of the true discourse on Foucault When he hired his male lover
instead of the more qualified woman to the department he chaired in Clermont, he
said “We don’t like old maids” (“Nous n’aimons pas les veilles filles)” (Eribon:
1989, p. 168). It seems Foucault does not accept that patriarchy structures the way
“truth” is produced, professors are hired, or “knowledge” marketed.
Foucault’s theories of discourse and his theories of power both originate in a
notion of self-constructing structures and a conception of the social which has no
notion of the individual. Certainly, he has no patience for a feminist individual or a
feminist notion of the social. Foucault is preoccupied with the precarious nature of
being, with the seed of death in life, and he chooses annihilation as the foundation of
his particularly masculinist metaphysics. He poses a system of meaning and nonmeaning,
and asks what is the nature of discourse and how does it practice in this
system where the only certitude is death The Order of Things, as the principal work
of Foucault’s epistemology, provides access to the particular nihilism that pervades
all his work: the ontology of annihilation. When he emphasizes power and discursive
practices, this is still a malevolent power which is capable only of contagion and
destruction. It is especially destructive of resistance, which becomes a co-dependent
of oppression. This is the masculinist mask of Foucault’s fatal discourse, which is
also a mask of power.
In Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and
Paul Rabinow insist that there is an epistemological break between the periods of the
archaeology of knowledge and the genealogy of power. They insist that Foucault