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

58 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
their faith were suppressed by the Inquisition, the Cathars are believed to have
rejected intercourse and any act that would perpetuate matter, the essence of evil in
the world. Giving birth would be the greatest sin and impurity. Without birth, there
would be no decay of precarious forms. Cathars sought to attain perfection and reenter
the light of the good Creator, leaving behind a world soiled by the Demiurge’s
introduction of generation and therefore putrefaction. Sheila Ruth formulates the
masculinist ego in “Bodies and Souls/Sex, Sin and the Senses in Patriarchy: A Study
in Applied Dualism:”
[E]ternal life, godhood, goodness and salvation stand in strict opposition to
physical existence, sense, sensuality, death and ultimately woman, who for
men incorporates them all. The question of woman and death is the key to
understanding this mindset, since dualism is a strategy in patriarchy for
avoiding death. It begins in a primary terror: Death is bad, the worst thing
conceivable; nothing is more awful. At all costs, it must be conquered,
negated. It proceeds: bodies are the things that die, visibly, right before our
eyes, displaying to us in painfully vivid terms our own mortality. Our bodies,
which betray us to death, are therefore bad. In that case, if we wish not to die,
we must separate from our bodies (1987, p. 157).
Woman represents carnality, sin and death, and she defies God and eternal life. De
Beauvoir is more sombre and pessimistic on this point, but she also notes man’s
equation of woman and death. The degradation and vilification of woman and nature
is related by de Beauvoir to the fact that woman, as the source of biological
continuity, embodies the natural process of birth and death. In a 1979 interview she
argued that men resent women, since they are of women born. Consequently men
associate women with nature, and mortality. De Beauvoir believed that feminist
politics could not deal with man’s hatred of woman as the representative of death
since, “It is above all an individual matter. I do not believe that feminism will
prevent men from hating women because women are their mothers, consequently
their death, in a manner of speaking” (Simons and Benjamin: 1979, p. 340).
Gad Horowitz (1987) takes up the Foucauldian question of prediscursive bodily
matter and its conjugation with and necessary but negative relationship to discursive
power. Horowitz (1987, p. 62) notes that for Foucault, “Human material, although it
requires discursive formation in order to be, always contains resistance to any
specific discursive formation.” Horowitz recognizes that in Foucault’s ethical
system, primal matter contains resistance, but Horowitz does not link this to the
extraterrestrial discursive system of power and domination which is the other half of
the codependency relationship. For Foucault, matter contains resistance; it is
passivity and inertia. In his mechanics of sado-masochism, only the power of
domination is given energy, movement, formative force. Horowitz misses this
Aristotelian heritage which is the bedrock of Foucault’s “excessive antiessentialism”
(1987, p. 65). Horowitz is probably correct when he says that the “bodies and
pleasure” section is simply Foucault’s way of specifying for the sexual sphere, the
nature of the resistance to power that is always and everywhere the concomitant of
power: “If there were no ‘deployment of sexuality’ (power) there would be no