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

100 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
Good French philosophy proceeds in the manner of the immanent critique, playing
off sections of the text to reveal internal contradictions, demonstrating the hidden
reliance on repudiated beliefs, and the consequences of a text’s actions. 12 If this were
good French philosophy, then, or the time of the sophists, we would now proceed
through a close examination of how the Lacanian text contradicts its psycho-ethical
suppositions, and perhaps argue that Lacan’s universe entre-deux-morts still depends
on a bourgeois sense of happiness. The partiality of the immanent critique is that
rationality is seen as culminating in the most recent immanent critique: the unreason
of reason, the reason of unreason. Yet there is a critical position that is not that of the
discipline or the disciples: a critique by those who do not learn from the Master to
what they may object. We might try something else then, and show how Lacan
complicates Freud’s question “What do women want” with his own argument that
men want death. Our ironic reversal might not be acceptable no matter how
immanent.
The feminist and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray, was expelled from the Lacanian
school in 1974, because as the back cover says, Speculum of the Other Woman
(Irigaray: 1974/1985c) “provoked the wrath of the Lacanian faction, leading to her
expulsion from the Freudian School and from her teaching position at Vincennes.”
Her originality and resistance certainly indicate courage. Speculum of the Other
Woman (1974/1985c) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1977/1985d) review Western
philosophy from the position of female morphology and difference. 13 Her reversal
of Nietzsche supposes: what if women were a language, what then Irigaray’s
Parler n’est jamais neutre (1985b) shows how all language is sexed, how discourse
is not neutral. “L’ordre sexuel du discours” (1987d) is a close grammatical
cataloguing of texts, deciphered according to hysterical or obsessive compulsive
characteristics. Such attention to grammar and psychology, and belief in the primacy
of language and sexuality in culture is post-Lacanian.
Irigaray’s ethical premises and approaches to Desire and the Law were, like
Lacan’s L’éthique de la psychanalyse, produced as a series of university seminars.
Hers were delivered in 1982 in Rotterdam. In Éthique Irigaray takes up Plato’s
Symposium, Aristotle’s Physics #V, Descartes on the passions of the soul, Spinoza’s
lecture on ethics, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Merleau-Ponty on the visible
12. A witty critique of critique appears in Vincent Descombes’ (1986) “Introduction: Analytical
versus Continental Philosophy” in Objects of All Sorts, A Philosophical Grammar, (pp. 1–14),
Lorna Scott-Fox and Jeremy Harding, Trans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
13. For a clear presentation of Irigaray’s representation of difference and how it has been
misunderstood as anatomical determinism, see Margaret Whitford (1988) (1989). Diana Fuss’s
Essentially Speaking, Feminism, Nature and Difference (1989) contains summaries of antiessentialist
positions and chronicles the essentialist/constructionist opposition which she
characterizes as central to contemporary feminist debates. As an “anti-essentialist who wants to
preserve…the category of essence” (1989 p. xiv), she attempts to show that essentialism is not
necessarily reactionary. This work contrasts with Judith Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble which
argues that the foundational categories of nonpoststructuralist feminism are oppressive and
exclusionary. An excellent discussion is Angela Miles’s chapter “Anti-essentialist reductionisms:
Equality versus specificity” in Transformative Feminisms: Integrative Global Perspectives, New
York: Routledge, forthcoming 1993.