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

EXISTENCE AND DEATH 61
de Sade. I argue that the reason for the post-war Nietzsche renaissance which
Stephens so ably describes, but does not adequately account for, is precisely this
appeal to and continuity with patriarchy. Nietzsche is held up as a philosopher of
affirmation and transcendence, a hero of annihilation. Yet his affirmation is a denial,
and it is a denial particularly of women. It is also a denial of history, in favour of an
Eternal Return or endlessly repeated synchronicity. Interesting how the philosophers
of desire feel that history and woman must be denied together.
What is Nietzsche’s account of the feminine, of woman and women The question
of Nietzsche’s misogyny, and whether it might have any influence on his
philosophy, is not debatable but is still debated. The tradition of outlawing feminist
complaints about Nietzsche’s misogyny is best represented by Walter Kaufmann:
Nietzsche’s writings contain many all-too-human judgments—especially
about women—but these are philosophically irrelevant; and ad hominem
arguments against any philosopher on the basis of such statements seem trivial
and hardly pertinent (1974, p. 84).
And what of Nietzsche’s metaphysical misogyny, when he attributes the essence of
evil to woman Parable 48 of The Anti-Christ:
… God created woman. And then indeed there was an end to boredom—but
also to something else! Woman was God’s second blunder. —‘Woman is in
her essence serpent, Heva’—every priest knows that; ‘every evil comes into
the world through woman’—every priest knows that likewise (1969, p. 164).
Sarah Kofman in Nietzsche et la scène philosophique finds that the accusation of
misogyny is unfounded. 14 Nietzsche is simply caustic about certain women, the
feminists in particular (1979, p. 288). Kofman refers to the following passage,
parable 5 of “Why I Write Such Excellent Books” in Ecce Homo:
Has my answer been heard to the question how one cures—‘redeems’—a
woman One makes a child for her. The woman has need of children, the man
is always only the means: thus spoke Zarathustra. —‘Emancipation of woman’—
is the instinctive hatred of the woman who has turned out ill, that is to say is
incapable of bearing, for her who has turned out well—the struggle against
‘man’ is always only means, subterfuge, tactic…. At bottom the emancipated
are the anarchists in the world of the ‘eternal-womanly’, the underprivileged
whose deepest instinct is revenge (1986b, p. 76).
For Kofman, this is merely a passage condemning ressentiment in both men and
women. But in spite of the protests of Kaufmann and Kofman, Nietzsche is indeed a
14. One uncritical endorsement of Nietzsche’s “feminine” is Jean Graybeal (1990), Language and
“the Feminine” in Nietzsche and Heidegger, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nietzsche is
“in touch” with “the feminine”, according to Graybeal, who does not pause to consider the
masculinity and oppressiveness of his categorization of “the feminine” in the world and in language;
nor does his misogyny occur to her as full of consequences for “the feminine”.