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

98 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
To continue to consider the phallus as the transcendent signifier, to accept the
inevitability of the “idea” of transcendence, to accept the fantasy of the subject
who is supposed to know, to believe that the phallus, and language, control us
but that somehow our escape lies in knowing that male privilege is an
imposture, even though based on an acceptance of the centrality of the phallus
—all this seems to me only to perpetuate a metaphysics of wholeness,
presence, deism, and worship of the symbolic father (1988, p. 188).
According to Lacan, women stubbornly jeopardize their access to phallic jouissance
by foolishly celebrating an anti-phallic nature even after he has told us there is only a
phallic unconscious. 9 Male narcissism is outraged by otherness and female
autonomy. Written on the dissolution (ultimate structuralist achievement) of his
school in the winter of 1980, a querelle des femmes closed his work:
It is only on condition of not losing themselves in an anti-phallic nature, of
which there is no trace in the unconscious, that they can hear that of this
unconscious which does not tend to speak itself, but reaches what is being
elaborated from it, as though procuring for them truly phallic jouissance
[orgasm] (Lacan: 1980, p. 12).
We are warned that women will only achieve phallic jouissance if we remain silent.
Thus did Lacan close the circle of his phallogocentricism: there is only a phallic
unconscious, the phallus is the most significant of all signifiers. The Master’s
success is to make this convincing and to render the female uncertain, aphasiac and
amnesiac, to disqualify all woman-centred views of the imago, the symbolic and the
real. Phallocracy is always in place: we can imagine with nothing else. There is only
penetration, or lack of penetration, says the Master. Macciocchi remembers Lacan’s
dissolution of his School, and his words “Le pére sevère persévere” 10 (1983, p. 487).
Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s son-in-law, wrote of the school: “Elle lui résistait, il
l’a étrangleé” 11 (Macciocchi: 1983, p. 487). Thus does the phallus insist on being the
original, seeking to silence the querelle des femmes when women participate.
Sheila Jeffreys (1985) (1990) and Margaret Jackson (1984a) (1984b) have both
argued that certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of sexuality were
elaborated in the face of feminist gains, and served to organize hostility to women
who were autonomous socially and sexually. The work of Havelock Ellis in
particular can be seen as a response to growing feminist campaigns against male
sexual violence. Sexology was elaborated to reinforce and restabilize masculine
supremacy. Flight from the masculine paradigm was labelled sick and deviant, now
it is simply called essentialist. Margaret Jackson argues:
9. Jacques Lacan, “L’Autre manque,” pp. 11–12 in “Dissolution”, pp. 9–20, Ornicar 1980,
no. 20–21.
10. The severe father perseveres.
11. She resisted him, he strangled her.