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

EXISTENCE AND DEATH 55
way for when, in the interior space of his language, he killed man and God
both at the same time, and thereby promised with the Return the multiple and
re-illumined light of the gods (1973b, p. 306).
The specular and spectacular mirror stage 7 In Lacan’s theory, (1936/1977) the child
recognizes absence, lack and realizing it is not merged with the mother/world,
emerges into a break from the Real and seeks images of the original (the imagery)
and language (the symbolic). Here the child in the mirror phase is Foucauldian
structure, grasping the lightning chain of signifiers in his Apocalyptic birth.
Nietzsche’s return is used as a Frankensteinian moment of self-illumination by the
demiurge of knowledge: a static Being of Discourse recognizes itself when modern
thought’s question “Who is speaking” flashes across both Renaissance resemblance
and Classical representation, symbol and sign, and the Science of Being is known.
From a position of stasis, man re-apprehends being in a flash of lightning. Yet, since
there is no memory, no aletheia in Foucault’s epistemology, there can be no new
futures.
There is no intentional, subjective time in Foucault’s Darwinian science of
history. His discursive practices are governed by a spatializing logic as universal as
Hegel’s. There is no work in Foucault’s time, no labour. Space is not perceived, and
time is not experienced. Temporality is absent in Foucault’s writing because he
rejects lived experience as a foundation for knowledge, and time is experienced.
Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge and genealogy of power are natural
“sciences”, marked by a Nietzschean theory of evolution: the struggle for life and
the will to power. The key works of Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle
for Life and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex were also
preoccupied with the forms, variations and origins of life. Foucault’s structural
Darwinism studies the descent of competitive, Malthusian formations.
“Man” is a creature of some not entirely omniscient deity: “Before the end of the
eighteenth century, man did not exist—any more than the potency of life, the
fecundity of labour, or the historical density of language. He is a quite recent
creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than
two hundred years ago” (Foucault: 1973b, p. 308). 8 Who are these demiurges, these
splendid, flawless unities of knowledge which gave birth to “man” but topple into
the yawning chasms which border each episteme Epistemes are the spaces for the
deployment of new modes of being of the empiricities Life, Labour and Language.
Yet these two dimensional tables have no depth. The modern episteme, for example,
has a length of about 1795–1950, and is wide enough to sustain the inscription of
those positivities which support all our forms of empirical knowledge. Successive
7. Jacques Lacan (1936), Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, Écrits, Paris:
Seuil: 1966, pp. 93–100; Écrits: a Selection (1977) translated by Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock,
pp. 1–7.
8. If one points out that need, memory and desire were subjects of Classical thought, Foucault
counters that nevertheless, “there was no epistemological consciousness of man as such” (1973b,
p. 309).