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

14 NOTHING MAT(T)ERSdoubt that we recognized that God is dead, and that is why Freud thinks sohard about it. But also, since it is the dead Father at the origin that God serves,he too has been dead all along. The question of the Creator in Freud is then toknow what must be appended to that which continues to exercise this ordertoday (1986, p. 152).Both creativity and crisis are being rethought in the space opened up by the death ofthe Creator. Lévi-Strauss awards creativity to structure, Nietzsche recreates aSuperman, while Sartre gives creative potential to the struggle of the for-itself withthe in-itself. In this way, the good, the true and the beautiful are redivided andreorganized.Nietzsche proclaims “the beautiful,” as the birth of perfection, and Superman asthe progeny/goal of this birth. God is dead, therefore Zarathustra must give birth tohimself and his world. This affirmation attempts to ride the waves of uncertainty,and exult in delirium and ambiguity as the sources of creation. Nietzsche proclaimeda postmodern nihilism of action and aesthetic truth. As Megill summarizes, “insteadof drawing back from the void, man dances upon it. Instead of lamenting the absenceof a world suited to our being, man invents one. He becomes the artist of his ownexistence, untrammelled by natural constraints and limitations” (1985, p. 34).Nietzsche established art as the new source and possibility of truth. He saw “theworld as a work of art which gives birth to itself” (1978, p. 419 aphorism 796).Foucault claims that Nietzsche was the first to understand that “man was dying ofthe signs born in him” (Bellour, 1981, p. 142). Nietzsche was the first prophet of thedeath of God and man, he was the harbinger of the new law of eros. Yet womenhave always recognized the similarity between what we are told is divine authorityand equally pretentious male authority. This new prophetic activity is a frenzy ofpossession—of woman, and an acting out of union with the deity: the OriginalPhallus.While Nietzsche danced on God’s grave, Sartre sought to realize immortalitywithin human time. In spite of the death of God, transcendence is still possible.Physical man becomes metaphysical man through the totalizing process of history.And grace is reincarnated in the existentialist project as praxis and being-for-itself.Sartre, then, is the inheritor of “the good”, of value, which comes when one avoidsthe pitfalls of bad faith. Sartre’s search for value is as ideological and patriarchal asLévi-Strauss’ reification of truth.Lévi-Strauss claimed “truth”: God is dead, but his Word is alive and universal.Truth is structure, and it is without value. The ten commandments, the laws ofhuman consciousness, are absolute truths: self-creating, self-validating, and15. cont. from previous page modern culture, far from mirroring historical reality, were a figment ofthe humanist imagination?” (1989, p. 47). In other words, Lyotard, Foucault, et al. usepostmodernism to hide the atrocities of their humanism and they are imagining themselves in crisisin order to remain in the theory-academic business. Most critically, Modleski points out: “we need toconsider the extent to which male power is actually consolidated through cycles of crisis andrevolution, whereby men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it” (1991,p. 7).