Law and Gynesis

The postmodern condition, as I shall take it, is one marked by a certain disinheritance, the collapse of patriarchy as an effect of a series of defamilizing strategies which simultaneously expand statism, consumerism, globalism and, of course, postmodernism itself. ¹ As an aesthetic, an architecture and a ‘paralogic’ of fairies and women released by the collapse of the major ideologies, ² postmodern theorizing is part of the social hysteria it affects to analyse and consequently at best a weak point of view. Alice Jardine ³ has nicely observed that the male reaction to the ‘loss’ of meaning has produced among them an ambivalent gynesis. What we have to respond to in this is a sea-change in modernity that all parties – however reluctant or however celebrant – seem to identify as the event of woman’s-becoming-woman. Lyotard ⁴ has also addressed this movement of gynesis in terms of the myth of an Orpheus who must now learn to look woman in the face if ‘we-men’ are not to lose for ever the chance of civilization.