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

16 NOTHING MAT(T)ERSmurder which inaugurated civilization and creation. (It has a history, then, thismonotonous crisis). It’s a matter of being born into and by the Phallus. So God is notdead: masculine philosophy continues to perform sacrifices to him.Jean Baudrillard blames the failure of the “revolution” on women and change,women’s change. He sees puritanical “hysterics” everywhere whom he accuses ofexaggeration about sexual abuse (1986, p. 42). The radical nostalgia which pervadeshis postmodern scribbling is for Rousseau’s (1979) Sophie and Lasch’s haven in aheartless world. For Baudrillard, a rapist is a violent fetus 17 who longs for ancientprohibitions not sexual liberation (1986, p. 47). Baudrillard’s pessimism is actuallyhis hope for a defeat of feminist initiated change and a return to man and god incontract, the eternal sacrifice of woman. His ramblings in his cups of cool whisky(1986, p. 7) are given the status of thought. He considers himself outré and daring tocriticize feminists but, as anyone who has taken a feminist position knows,misogynous attack is banal and regular. Sorry, Baudrillard: it is outré to support andto be a feminist. But is this in vino veritas, when Baudrillard proposes a Dionysiansacrifice of woman to the image of beauty, purity, eternity? In Amérique, he writes:“One should always bring something to sacrifice in the desert and offer it as avictim. A woman. If something has to disappear there, something equal in beauty tothe desert, why not a woman? (1986, p. 66). When queried about this “gratuitouslyprovocative statement” Baudrillard replied, “Sacrificing a woman in the desert is alogical operation because in the desert one loses one’s identity. It’s a sublime act andpart of the drama of the desert. Making a woman the object of the sacrifice isperhaps the greatest compliment I could give her” (Moore: 1989, p. 54). Acompliment postmodernism will make over and over, like opera. 18 Commenting on asacrificial scene in D.H.Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away, Millett writes:This is a formula for sexual cannibalism: substitute the knife for the penis andpenetration, the cave for a womb, and for a bed, a place of execution—andyou provide a murder whereby one acquires one’s victim’s power. Lawrence’sdemented fantasy has arranged for the male to penetrate the female with theinstrument of death so as to steal her mana…The act here at the centre of the Lawrentian sexual religion is coitus askilling, its central vignette a picture of human sacrifice performed upon thewoman to the greater glory and potency of the male (1971, p. 292).This explicates the psychic structure, power and process of “phallic consciousness”(1971, p. 292). In Parole de Femme, Annie Leclerc describes masculine philosophy:“Death. Death. Death… For if desire is the only thing on their lips, their hearts17. Mary Daly (1978, p. 431) has also pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s identification with fetuses inBeing and Nothingness (1978).18. See Catherine Clémen “Dead Women” in her book Opera, or the Undoing of Women (1988).Again, it is resistance to male domination which is outré: “Carmen, in the moment of her death,represents the one and only freedom to choose, decision, provocation. She is the image, foreseen anddoomed, of a woman who refuses masculine yokes and who must pay for it with her life” (1988,p. 48).