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

LACAN AND IRIGARAY: ETHICAL LACK AND ETHICAL PRESENCE 117
violence of Lévi-Straussian binary rule and theories of kinship. But Feminism and
Psychoanalysis mistakes Lévi-Strauss for a feminist and feminists for nature. 22
These gender-and-psychoanalysis books also produce the notion that feminism is
a codependent of psychoanalysis. Their use of the addiction to pain model is
apolitical family systems theory where codependency is used as an apologetics for
child sexual abuse. What their analysis depends on is sexism. For example: “As
suitable parables for what is perceived by some feminist psychoanalytic critics to be
a problematic and evasive drama of love, hate and incompatibility, metaphors of
romantic ambivalence reflect the wary absorption of feminism and psychoanalysis
with one another” (Feldstein and Roof: 1989, p. 1). Thus, feminism is in a
codependency relationship with psychoanalysis and Feldstein and Roof suggest a
three-point recovery plan: emerging from the domestic haven in a heartless world,
overcoming binary opposition, and opening to a third term: the Lacanian symbolic.
Leaving behind earlier questions of gendered subjects and sexual difference (which
themselves replace the sexual politics orientation), feminist psychoanalytic critics
can now take up advanced, post-graduate issues (theory, philosophy, history,
language, law)! This speaks to the misreading of and low esteem for “purely”
feminist endeavours, and is revealed in such slips as “Lou Andreas-Salomé,
Nietzsche’s mistress and a friend and student of Freud’s” (1989, p. 6– 7). This is the
arrogant new man defining women and feminism against the standard of
masculinity: same difference.
For a moment, Judith Roof considers the “unintended” moments of rebellion
against masculine psychoanalytic theory by some of the participants at the 1986
conference held in Normal. She concludes that there is simply no escape from the
phallic signifier, “And such is the frustration of feminism in the context of
psychoanalysis” (1989, p. 343). As though psychoanalysis were magic and not
ideology! Feminism is still the castrated woman here, and the “critics” cannot
conceive of a symbolic order that is not patriarchal.
Jane Gallop raises questions about the poststructuralist feminist identification with
the masculine: “In 1978, Elaine Showalter saw feminist critics as Annie Hall,
women in ‘men’s ill-fitting hand-me-downs.’ In 1983, she saw male feminists as
Tootsie, men in women’s clothing. But what about the post-structural feminist who
is wearing the hand-me-downs of men-in-drag, writing a feminine which has become
a male transvestite style…. What is the position of the woman who identifies with
men who identify with women” (Gallop: 1988, p. 100). 23
According to Roof, then, “When Paul Smith asks why no one has questioned the
role of men as presenters at this conference—questions, in effect, the role of men in
feminism—it seems in some way the feminist psychoanalytic critics, male and
female, are almost all men in feminism who simultaneously resist the contradictions
inherent in that role” (1989, p. 348). While I do not wish to interrupt this tentative
22. Kinship is a system for men’s insertion into culture, as Mary O’Brien (1981) and Geraldine Finn
(1989) have argued.
23. See Modleski (1991, pp. 3–6) for an account of Showalter’s recent turn-around.