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

LACAN AND IRIGARAY: ETHICAL LACK AND ETHICAL PRESENCE 113
die. Not and die. Or: die. The everything now of the feminine is not the equivalent
of to die” (1984, p. 67, italics in original). Woman can be induced to the economy of
desire of God the Father, but not of love for God the Father, for that is not possible
without a place of self-love, says Irigaray, and new gods can create such a place. Is
that what is lacking
“‘God’ is necessary, or at least a love so attentive it is divine” (Irigaray: 1984,
p. 25). Do women need Gods and men Will they give her back her body (Irigaray:
1986, p. 233) He will not, and indeed, he cannot. Imagine what life and desire are
like, with dates who are melancholy and fascinated, who claim to have had a great
many illusions and to have lost them all, and say to women, like Mr. Rochester to
Antoinette “I’ll trust you if you’ll trust me. Is that a bargain” (Rhys: 1985, p, 504).
What presides in this masculine desire is the fascination for the omnipotence of God
the Father. Irigaray should beware the sacrificial nature of divine love. Now they
claim He is dead, but it is themselves they set before us in his place. Which is not the
place of our desire. I argue that we must reinterpret Psyche’s search, to see that she
seeks reconciliation with Aphrodite, not Eros; she desires her own self and
creativity. Then the phallus falls away as the signifier of and in our writing, the
reference point of our self-realization, that which must be touched for legitimation.
Otherwise, the restriction of/to our sexuality is complicit with the diminishment of
women’s thought and political originality, the constriction of our creativity and male
direction of our desire. Psyche, as primordial outcast, anarchist, “nobody’s darling”
(Alice Walker: 1983, p. 39) must disrupt and disintegrate all repressive, restraining
patriarchal categories and forms, uproot and burn the Laws of the Father. She must
continue in search of her mother’s garden, redefine the relationships of individual
and community, self and other, and find Sophia. It is this desire, this sense, which is
at (the) stake: psycho-sophia.
Now let’s be patient/s! some insist. And a number of recent American collections
point to the entry of women into the empty space between feminism and
psychoanalysis, a place of feminine invisibility where the dominant look remains
masculine. What these new texts chart is not their stated “wary absorption of
feminism and psychoanalysis with one another” (Feldstein and Roof: 1989, p. 1), but
a movement away from sexual politics, past a more acceptable focus on gendered
subjects to the creation of a psychoanalytic theory called feminist and the
membership of the female psychoanalytic critic in the profession. It is this
standardization which is being negotiated in these collections: a very political
process.
“The antagonism between feminism and psychoanalysis is well known,”
according to the collection edited by Marleen Barr and Richard Feldstein (1989,
p. 1). And it is the antagonism that is problematized as requiring resolution,
intercession, mediation— compromise. The position claimed in the editorial is one
of “mediation” because “the disruptive relationship between the two disciplines”
(1989, p. 1) poses a problem for the feminist psychoanalytic critic. The book is
modelled in admiration and response to Jane Gallop’s (1982) The Daughter’s
Seduction: “Gallop, a mediator between French feminism and French
psychoanalysis, sets up textual interventions to create ‘exchanges’ between these