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

2 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
the post-1945, postmodern ideology: “appearances are everything, it is forbidden to
go beyond them…the world of enterprises, struggles, need, work, the whole real
world, disappears into thin air” (1968, p. 636). She charges that “with the intention
of saying nothing, they mask the absence of content with formal convolutions…”
(1968, p. 636). De Beauvoir links this “escape into fantasies about the absolute” and
“defeatism” (1968, p. 637) to the degraded situation of France and the rise of fascism
there.
Those who have stood at the door of the Masters’ House of science and subjectivity,
of class and state power, have been struck by what O’Brien calls “an ironic sense in
which the understanding of how hegemony works might well be clarified in an
ethnography of Marxist intellectuals” (1989, p. 233). Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi,
a former student of Louis Althusser, looks back at the men of her generation and
recalls life among the men of science and subjectivity, class and state power. She
chronicles their disappearance as the ending of an era:
Nikos Poulantzas committed suicide on October 3, 1979. Lacan dissolved his
school on March 16, 1980. Sartre died on April 15, 1980. Barthes, victim of an
automobile accident on February 18, 1980, died in the month of April in the
same year. Althusser strangled his wife on November 17, 1980. Lacan died on
September 19, 1981 (1983, p. 487).
Certainly, their works influenced, engaged and denounced one another in many
ways. Althusser reread Marx and Lacan, Lacan reinterpreted Freud, Barthes’
Mythologies was indebted to Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques, Sartre influenced
Foucault, and Poulantzas tried to write the methodological micro-histories called for
by Althusser. Foucault said: “Open Althusser’s books” (Bellour: 1971, p. 192) even
though he disagreed that Marx represented an epistemological break with Classical
thought. Louis Althusser read Lacan 1 as having accomplished for the unconscious
what he, Althusser, had done for the theory of the economic structure. Lévi-Strauss
sought to interpret the universal unconscious with language, while Freud considered
the particular. Their two approaches merge in Lacan’s work. Lacan turned to the
mathematical sciences to reveal the functions of the unconscious just as Lévi-Strauss
described universal codes with the use of mathematics (Ragland-Sullivan: 1987, p.
138). This is not to deny the level of difference and disagreement within that period
of French political and social theory. Althusser may have written of Freud and
Lacan, but in 1980 he violently denounced Lacan as that “magnificent, pathetic
Harlequin” (Clément: 1983, p. 21) at one of Lacan’s private seminars to which he
had gained access. Anti-Oedipus (1983) by Fé1ix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze was a
rebellion against Father Lacan, which had some success among the Lacanian school.
Deleuze was a former pupil and analysand of Lacan; as was Althusser. Some
Lacanians followed the forbidden work of Jacques Derrida, who criticized Lacan’s
phallogocentricism in The Post Card (1987b). In the section “Le facteur de la
verité”, Derrida argued that Lacanian psychoanalysis was prescriptive rather than
1. Louis Althusser, (1984) “Freud and Lacan,” Essays on Ideology, London: Verso, pp. 141–172.