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

116 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
Lacanian category of the symbolic, and because it wants to avoid appeal to third
terms such as law which it suspects of being sexually biased. Therefore, feminism
omits or is missing a third term and lacks a concept of the symbolic. Can’t think
abstractly Or cannot accept the “tyranny of the abstract” (O’Brien: 1989b, p. 45)
Only very recently, they argue, has feminist criticism addressed “theory, philosophy,
history, language and law” (Feldstein and Roof: 1989, p. 3)—apparently not the
purview of de Beauvoir, Greer or Millett, also critiqued in the previous collection
co-edited by Richard Feldstein.
Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (1989) reproach feminist critics for using
familial and harlequin models to frame the “encounter” (their neutral formulation)
with psychoanalysis. Any pointing to the law of the Father over the daughter is
“misleading”, because it puts the drama in “the sexualized, emotionalized,
personalized, privatized, erratic sphere of the home and bedchamber rather than in
the structured, impersonal, public realm” (1989, p. 2). Feldstein and Roof reproduce
the public/private, family/culture dualism, and have no sense of the development or
practices of these forms. In sociology, this is known as the family-as-an-independentsystem
approach. Profoundly conservative, the functional/dysfunctional family is not
related to theory, philosophy, history, language, law! What is central to all of this is
that Lacan is reread as a symbol which feminism must use if it wants to be seriousminded.
According to Feldstein and Roof, feminist psychoanalytic theory is only
now emerging from the haven of the safe, familial metaphor, from the swamp of the
non-political, the simple, and the binary. Only now perhaps emerging from the
“problematic bond” with the mother The purported dyadic mother-child
arrangement must give way to a third term, the phallus, and this trinity is the
pluralism which funds poststructuralism’s appearance of heterogeneity. Jane Flax 20
very briefly raises the concern that in fact, “To a large extent even ‘postmodern’
culture and philosophy are still constituted by bonding of fathers and sons against
the return of the repressed ‘mother-world’” (1986, p. 343).
Feminist critiques of the family, of sexual politics, were not critiques of culture, of
domination It is precisely this discontented editorial voice which has not
understood the feminist critique of the public/private split: the family does not exist
independently from culture or language. 21 It is the foundation of patriarchy and its
expression. And the barrier between public and private life is the foundation of male
supremacy. The “third term” is in fact the male supremacist notion of the necessity
of this split; it is also called “second nature” in political theory. Feminist critiques of
the Law of the Father do not replicate this binary opposition, they unmask it, they do
not use the mask as their third term, their symbolic. In contrast, they make visible the
20. An essay by Isaac D.Balbus attempts to show that the feminist psychoanalytic theories of Jane
Flax, Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein indicate that “the Foucauldian deconstruction of
True Discourse betrays assumptions that can only be characterized as a classically male flight from
maternal foundations” (1987, p. 110).
21. See also Nancy Chodorow’s (1989) critique of Lacanian theory in Feminism and Psychoanalytic
Theory, “Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Psychoanalytic Psychology of Women.”