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Outrageous Hagsand a new Atlantis
QUINTESSENCE: REALIZING THE
ARCHAIC FUTURE By Mary Daly Beacon Press, 288 pages, $24. To
order: 1-617-742-2110 By GARY MacEOIN
In this, the final work of a
trilogy, the matriarch of radical feminism calls for Meta-subversion and
meta-dissolution of the entire patriarchal order. The project, she
believes, requires what some may consider a desperate remedy: the geographic
separation of the sexes.
To accomplish this objective, Daly hypothesizes a rediscovered
Atlantis, in which by the year 2048 close to 50,000 Outrageous Hags of
every ethnic origin are living.
Although they have not eliminated the reality of death, they do
not fear extinction. We probably will decide to achieve this by
parthenogenesis, they tell Daly on one of her many trips between harsh
reality 1998 and the blissful future in 2048. Besides, they have a backup plan.
Back in what is left of the Old World after the catastrophe of 2012, there
still are many women and also some men who have repented of their macho ways.
Thanks to them, the race will survive until parthenogenesis is attained.
Such is the rather bizarre framework for a very serious analysis
of the state to which, as Daly sees it, boundary-violation
necrotechnologists have today reduced our planet. Attempting to
second-guess God, they are invading and destroying the genetic wilderness and
the space wilderness. Forests are dead or dying. The oceans are dying. They
plan to strip-mine the moon. Add to all this the rise in religious
fundamentalism, including the misogynist rhetoric of the Promise Keepers and
the intellectual oppression found in academentia.
Daly denounces pornography, which she sees as causally connect to
the rape and torture of women. Pornographic computer software,
pornography in the print media, movies and television, and increasing
objectification of female bodies by fashion and advertising industries produce
a climate in which rape, torture and murder of women and girls become
commonplace and even acceptable. The result is that women now live in an
escalating state of terror.
Horrified but not overcome, Daly points the way to freedom.
Dreadful/Dreadless Women willfully join with the whole crowd of
everys -- the mountains, the minerals, the atoms, the
protons, the critters of all kind -- Naming ourSelves not simply as targets but
especially as choosing to win the war that is waged against all life by
necrophiliacs/nothing-lovers We will succeed in our Quest for
Quintessence.
Although she has formally repudiated her Catholic past, Daly has
not exorcized it. The Aristotelian philosophy and medieval philosophy,
specifically that of Thomas Aquinas ... nourished my soul and was deeply
satisfying. And even in the Utopia of Atlantis, she speaks of her desire
to revisit Fribourg, where she had earned doctorates in philosophy and
theology.
However radically changed the content, that intellectual
discipline undergirds everything she writes.
Gary MacEoin lives in San Antonio.
National Catholic Reporter, February 5,
1999
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