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

A SPACE ODYSSEY 3
simply descriptive. Derrida and Foucault argued over origin and madness. All of
these authors whose roots lay either in scientific Marxism or functionalist
structuralism had denounced existentialism, yet at a certain point all were secretly
turning to Sartre, and to the Romantic novelist Stendhal, writers who embraced the
humanistic, metaphysical, historicist tradition that structuralism rejected
(Macciocchi: 1983, p. 491).
Macciocchi deliberately describes Althusser’s torments preceding his murder of
his wife and his attempt to absolve his subjectivity. In the year before her death,
Althusser test drove and pretended to purchase a Rolls Royce in London. In Italy, he
spent an evening with an “earthy” woman who confided to a friend, “Yes, nothing
but little kisses…he’s afraid of the body” (1983, p. 530). At a Terni Workers’
Cultural Circle, he spoke for the first time on “The Pleasures of Marxism,”
performing as at a carnival of denunciation and absurdity in the face of orthodoxy
and passivity. After this, he confessed to Macciocchi: “I told the truth, and I saved
my soul” (1983, p. 535). She considers: “For the first time, I heard him speak in the
first person. However, people turned their backs on him, furious that he was showing
the gap between yesterday’s utopias and today’s realities, that he thereby touched the
knot of theoretical reflexion, which was finally the knot of his own despair” (1983,
p. 535). Macciocchi traced the “insolent” acts (1983, p. 538) of the twelve-month
period prior to Althusser’s murder of his wife, Hélène Rythmann, and discovered his
growing despair over communism, Marxism, and his work. But Macciocchi focuses
on Althusser’s epistemological breakdown, and not its patriarchal expression and
force: “These three acts were the sundering…[la rupture]…of three inhibitions, of
three chastity belts, with which marxism had cast subjects into iron statues. Human
passions, the need to imagine, and the liberty of thinking—otherwise known as
heresy” (1983, p. 538). The uxoricide is negated, used as a metaphor for Althusser’s
purported self-destruction, almost in the way Derrida uses the story Pierrot
Murderer of His Wife to focus on subjectivity. 2 According to Macciocchi:
By killing Hélène, in a final grip of love and hate, he sent to the tomb the
Mother, the nurse, the companion, the Jew he had protected from persecution,
and also the only voice that could prolong his own. He really wanted to silence
himself forever (1983, p. 537).
Monique Plaza calls Althusser’s murder of Hélène Rythmann “ideology in action”
(1984a, p. 75). She argues that “the murder of a woman is within the continuum of
the discursive negation of women…ideology against women is not just a matter of
words; it is also a matter of death” (1984a, p. 75). When Plaza presented this paper
to an international symposium on Ideology at the Polytechnic of Central London in
1981, organizers requested that she remove this discussion of Althusser’s murder of
his wife (1984a, p. 82). Geraldine Finn argues that we must attend to the political
and personal:
2. See discussion in Chapter 4.