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

96 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
birth from the thigh of Zeus. No-name women who don’t have a language should not
talk back. “Ah, my students, if they only knew where I was taking them,” mused
Lacan. Did Irigaray see the particular and not “universal” man who was taking
God’s place
Clearly among the angels (who have no sex), Kristeva claims to have transcended
the category of women: “I have never experienced that ‘slave’ mentality, that feeling
of being excluded or repressed…the sulking slave-like position that is still fairly
widespread [in France]: ‘they took this, they stole that, my way is barred, I am not
appreciated…etc.’” (1977/1987, p. 114). Her notion of the semiotic is meant to
supplement Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order. The feminine must be a practice of
the semiotic, eternally provoking the phallic symbolic, but never moving into
signification. Kristeva adheres to Lacan’s notion of the symbolic order as the
exclusive domain/prerogative of the phallus; a place where the feminine/female
cannot be represented. It must vibrate, shock, energize, spark the phallic symbolic,
but the feminine semiotic must never speak a female word/world.
Never strident, never complaining, Kristeva suspects those who are interested in
women as a group, in female collectivity, community, politics, of avoiding their
neuroses: “I am convinced that those who engage in issues concerning women not in
order to examine their own singularity but in order to be reunited with ‘all women’
do so primarily in order to avoid looking at their own particular situation…” (1977/
1987, p. 114). Thus does she misrepresent the intensely personal/political origin of
women’s movements. “These are the same women who today are bitterly or
perversely opposed” (1977/1987, p. 114) to Freud and psychoanalytic theory.
Antagonism to Freudian analysis becomes another neurotic episode. Resistance is
impossible in the Foucauldian universe; for Kristeva it is quite simply perverse. She
accuses feminists of fantasizing that their sex, language and psyche have been
“betrayed by a knowledge that is neutral or masculine” (1977/1987, p. 115). In other
words, they are hysterical and the Fathers of psychoanalysis (and semiotics) are
innocent.
A little has been said about Lacan’s misogyny (Gallop: 1982). Sarah
Kofman defended Nietzsche, and now Catherine Clément enters the field on Lacan’s
behalf. Even in the early 1960s, Clément was among the audience in Lacan’s
seminars. Clément’s Life and Legends of Jacques Lacan is dedicated to Jacques-
Alain Miller, Lacan’s son-in-law, supporter, designated interpreter and posthumous
editor. Given her attachment to the inner circle, it is not surprising that Lacan’s
“problems with women” such as Françoise Dolto and Luce Irigaray receive little
attention from Clément. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan also protects Lacan from feminist
accusations. She argues that he has been misunderstood by Irigaray who, for some
reason, takes his theory of phallic signification as prescriptive rather than descriptive
(1987, p. 273). She charges that the Derridean feminists Jane Gallop, Alice Jardine,
Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous mistakenly find Lacan’s work less relevant to a
concern with sexual difference (1989, p. 63). Ragland-Sullivan argues that “the poststructuralist
American Lacan is not the Lacan known in France or other countries
where Lacan’s texts have been studied for two and three decades” (1989, p. 34). She
finds that his contribution to current cultural critique has been neglected, and that his