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

LACAN AND IRIGARAY: ETHICAL LACK AND ETHICAL PRESENCE 97
work has been ignored, misunderstood, and neglected—or copied and used without
credit. “Americans are still not aware of the degree to which Lacan influenced poststructuralist
thinkers and writers who never credit him” (1989, pp. 38, 39). She
mentions Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze in this context and Lyotard as well. Well before
Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives, Lacan had shown “there is no metalanguage”
(1989, p. 58, italics in original). Loyal to a man she believes is virtuous, rather than
stimulated by one she knows to be a prick (Gallop: 1982, p. 37), Ragland-Sullivan is
more compelling in terms of intellectual honesty. Fortunately, it is not necessary to
choose between these two ways of relating to Lacan.
It is not unusual that someone so phallic-centred as Lacan should be so well
defended. Lacan, Sade, Nietzsche and Derrida speak of nothing but women, and yet
it is said they all speak ironically. Women are told we must be patient, sympathetic,
and amused, we must be humble in our approach to capricious genius. Clément tells
us that Lacan was inspired by the style of paranoid madwomen, the objects of his
earliest studies. Descriptions of Lacan as a “phoenix”, “shaman,” “prophet” and
“witch” appear repeatedly in her book. Was the image in Lacan’s mirror an hysteric
“Transvestite, he found in the fantasies of women a passion for language that
constantly obsessed him. He identified with their tortures, their anguish” (1983,
p. 49). Clément notes Lacan’s “incoherent, disturbed” (1983, p. 56) writing style
derived from his studies of “inspired madwomen” (1983, p. 56). Actually, he made a
calculated use of feminine delirium and panic, which he determined to be
incommunicable and strange: inhuman It was with feminine jouissance that Lacan
sought to identify himself, presenting himself as a mystic (1983, p. 67). Lacan never
stopped talking of women. 8 Clément claims that feminine jouissance is the core of
Lacan’s thought, and she focuses on “God and the Jouissance of the Woman” to
prove, uncritically, that he was a real Ladies’ man. Certainly, Lacan appropriates the
style of a madwoman possessed by desire, and then says that only a man can speak
of it. O magical, detachable, disappearing phallus! What is this hysteria to be a
possessed female body but a male fantasy of possessing female bodies and wombs
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (Lacan: 1985a) are utterly loyal to this deadly
game in their introductions to Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan and the école
freudienne.
When Lacan himself did refer to biology, it was in order to remind us of the
paradox inherent in reproduction itself, which, as Freud pointed out, represents
a victory of the species over the individual. The “fact’ of sexed reproduction
marks the subject as “subject to” death (Rose in Lacan: 1985a, p. 35).
In contrast, Page duBois (1988) criticizes the Lacanian feminists Juliet Mitchell and
Jane Gallop for failing to historicize the concept of gender and thereby perpetuating
the notion of the castrated female as human destiny. In similar reference to Jane
Gallop’s Reading Lacan, duBois charges:
8. See Feminine Sexuality.