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

EXISTENCE AND DEATH 57
p. 278). Life is like Nietzsche’s truth, a woman and one who is fluid, capricious and
threatening to man’s boundaries:
Life is the root of all existence, and the non-living, nature in its inert form, is
merely spent life; mere being is the non-being of life. For life…is at the same
time the nucleus of being and of non-being: there is being only because there
is life, and in that fundamental movement that dooms them to death, the
scattered beings, stable for an instant, are formed, halt, hold life immobile—
and in a sense kill it—but are then in turn destroyed by that inexhaustible
force. The experience of life is thus posited as the most general law of beings,
the revelation of that primitive force on the basis of which they are; it
functions as an untamed ontology, one trying to express the indissociable
being and non-being of all beings. But this ontology discloses not so much
what gives beings their foundation as what bears them for an instant towards a
precarious form and yet is already secretly sapping them from within in order
to destroy them. In relation to life, beings are no more than transitory figures,
and the being that they maintain, during the brief period of their existence, is
no more than their presumption, their will to survive. And so, for knowledge,
the being of things is an illusion, a veil that must be torn aside in order to
reveal the mute and invisible violence that is devouring them in the darkness.
The ontology of the annihilation of beings assumes therefore validity as a
critique of knowledge: but it is not so much a question of giving the
phenomenon a foundation, of expressing both its limit and its law, of relating
it to the fmitude that renders it possible, as of dissipating it and destroying it in
the same way as life destroys beings: for its whole being is mere appearance
(1973b, pp. 278, 279).
For Nietzsche, truth is a woman; for Derrida, life is a woman, for Foucault, death is a
woman, or at least, a mother. Words and things are issued from a matrix of life
which spoils and infects them at the origin. 10 The ontology of the annihilation of
beings is The Order of Things. Destruction is the destination of all existence which is
vanity, discontinuity and decay. The corruption of the flesh is the original cause in
Foucault’s system, and the seed of death in life is central to his epistemology.
Foucault confuses immortality with discourse, and mortality with life. Death is
surely an aspect of life, but Foucault’s Christian conceptualization fixes corruption
as our ontology, and attributes the cause of death to birth.
Actually, Foucault’s epistemology—life destroys beings—may be more medieval
than modern. The Cathars were medieval Christian heretics who practiced an
exceptional asceticism, and held that matter is evil and Being precedes matter. The
Christ of the Cathars was not subject to birth or death. Although the exact details of
10. For more information on Foucault and the origin, see Michel Foucault, “The Retreat and the
Return of the Origin” in The Order of Things, pp. 328–335, New York: Vintage Books, 1973; and
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Paul Rabinow, (Ed.) The Foucault Reader, pp. 76–100, New
York: Pantheon Books, 1984. An interesting counterpart and feminist discussion of O, Origin and
Women is Hélène Cixous’s Vivre l’Orange/To Live the Orange, Paris: des femmes, 1979.