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

EXISTENCE AND DEATH 63
an eternal return which robs particular women of the power of generation and puts it
in the hands of universal Superman. With his will to power, he alone can know such
an affirmation of the whole. Only Superman can delight in the eternal return, which
says that woman is nothing, finite bodies and births are nothing. But Superman’s
own nothing is something else: he is a creator because he has embraced the fetishes
of procreativity over the abyss of nihilism. The finite, the small, the particular:
woman is loathesome to Nietzsche.
Such a spirit who has become free stands amidst the cosmos with a joyous and
trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all
is redeemed and affirmed in the whole—he does not negate any more (1954,
p. 554).
“He does not negate anymore” should be “he is not negated anymore”, for what
Nietzsche affirms is his triumph over death. Nietzsche’s joyous fatalism before the
“whole” is that he can overcome it by a massive will to power. The eternal
recurrence is his hope for the transcendence of both finitude and the annihilation of
his particularity through its eternal return as masculine time without end.
Lévi-Strauss’s theory of time is similar to that of Nietzsche’s, except that
Nietzsche proclaims an endless synchronicity, and Lévi-Strauss was more nihilistic
in his finitude. The particles of matter may be broken down to the infinitesimally
small, and recombined, but the number of these recombinations is as finite as the
matter it disperses and forms. In contrast, Nietzsche conceives time as infinite, and
recombinations of specific moments and bodies will occur again and again,
endlessly. The eternal return is Nietzsche’s dynamic synchronicity. Unlike Lévi-
Strauss’s final moment of ultimate binary combination, there is no finality in
Nietzsche, no “nothing” at the end, but a continual return to the same. Nevertheless,
the Superman is similar to Lévi-Strauss’s and Sartre’s idea that while man is
nothing, he is also everything. Superman:
who has organized the chaos of his passions and integrated every feature of his
character, redeeming the ugly by giving it a meaning in a beautiful totality…
would also realize how inextricably his own being was involved in the totality
of the cosmos: and in affirming his own being, he would also affirm all that is,
has been, or will be (Kaufmann in Nietzsche: 1974, p. 320).
Superman’s “Yes” is an attempt to absorb eternity in his own being: imitating the
formless chaos of the abyss with his uterus-fetish. But this is a static and not a
dialectical creativity. There is no creation of new beings since matter/mater is
rendered ultimately finite and sterile.
But the abyss is not easily mastered. It is a dangerous labyrinth from which man
may not emerge, a tormented sea on a dark night. Its aspects are creation and
woman. Nietzsche must leap from peak to peak over the abyss, along the teeth of the
vagina dentata, insatiable cavity of death and rebirth. In parable 27 of Twilight of the
Idols, he is humming to himself to mask his fear: “Women are considered deep—
why because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even
shallow” (1969, p. 25). In Nietzsche’s “Women and their action at a distance” in The