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

xviH.D. tried to turn the Lord Freud into a woman, but not even her magic could pullthat off. Pull off the phallus. 1Postmodernism is an addition to the masculinist repertoire of psychotic mind/bodysplitting and the peculiar arrangement of reality as Idea: timeless essence anduniversal form. When women appear in French philosophy as Sartrean holes andslime (Collins and Pierce: 1976) or Deleuzian bodies without organs (Guattari andDeleuze: 1983), the mind—and the matter—is masculine. Plato answered thequestion of Being by awarding true reality to the realm of ideas; the sensible worldpossesses only the appearance of reality. Postmodernism is no less metaphysical:here, too, the idea absorbs and denies all presence in the world. This particular trendin patriarchal thinking is neither new nor original: the Collège de France and theFreud school which created it have respectable traditions in Cartesian politics. JuliaPenelope has uncovered the “patriarchal linguistic agenda” (1990, p. 17) of theAcadémic Française, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 with the purpose ofcreating a grammar that would correct women. The institutions as well as the textswhich were patrons to postmodernism excluded and expelled women, includingSimone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. The rule is that only man may appear aswoman. Derrida creates Veronica—“true image” in medieval Latin—woman asrepresentation of the transparency of meaning. Then he deconstructs her whiledenouncing feminists for defining her: Veronica must be his and must be appearanceonly. She must be his (appearance) only. She may be summoned to appear, but shallnot summon the Collège, to account; to politics, responsibility, justice. In any case,once at court, the jester Lacan rules that the law is the phallus and woman cannotspeak; Lacan will speak in her place, however, since only man may representwoman.Once satisfied to control her body and her movements, once pleased to createimages of her and then order her body to conform, the Master of Discourse nowaspires to the most divine of tasks: to create her in his image, which is ultimately toannihilate her. This is his narcissistic solution to his problem of the Other. But to dothis, to create her in his image, he must be able to take her image, educating her tosameness and deference. Taking her body, taking her mind, and now taking herimage. But the task of taking women’s image is ill-advised. In his narcissisticdreaming, he hallucinates, and even if we are called an illusion, he must ask: Wheredid the illusion of woman come from? What evil genius placed the idea of woman inman? In short, the New Age masculinity of self-deluded alchemists and shapeshiftersis not going to be a successful strategy. There is something irreducible aboutVeronica after all, as they always suspected. She informs herself that women matter.Foucault would have written on hysterical women, Lacan tried to write as anhysteric (Clément: 1983; Derrida: 1978a; and Deleuze and Guattari: 1988), write ofbecoming-woman. In the section, “Memories of a Sorcerer, III” Deleuze andGuattari write “becoming-woman, more than any other becoming, possesses a1. Some of the best H.D. scholarship is represented by the works of Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1979;1986; 1981); Susan Stanford Friedman (1981; 1985; 1990); Deborah Kelly Kloepfer (1984) andFriedman and DuPlessis (1990).