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

4 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
We cannot afford to continue to separate the intellectual in a man (I choose
my terms carefully) from the emotional: the depression from the ideas; or the
political from the personal: the commitment to class struggle from the stormy
marriage, the dead wife… Neither Althusser, “France”, nor the world’s
intellectuals and revolutionaries will acknowledge patriarchy as the powerful,
pervasive and pernicious ideological state apparatus which it is; at the same
time, none of them escape its effects (Finn: 1981, p. 28, italics in original).
When Althusser died in 1990, many masculine Marxists and philosophers still found
reference to the murder to be in very bad taste. One obituary read:
It is still too early to draw up a balance sheet. The master has left too deep an
impression on us. Above all, the man was so close to us, with his exquisite
gentleness, his tact…
Then came the tragedy, which he himself described, partly out of a sense of
propriety and partly out of derision, as the “non-event”, the killing of his wife,
the committal to hospital (Comte-Sponville: 1990, p. 16). 3
Gregory Elliott is more indignant and feels that Althusser is unjustly attacked and
beset: “doubtless pour décourager les autres, some have not hesitated to identify the
death of Hélène Althusser at her husband’s hands as the inevitable denouement of
[his theoretical endeavour]” (1991, p. 28). Indeed, Hélène victimizes Louis Althusser
by staging a supposed murder, murder rendered now in quotation:
When, in November 1980, defeat came, provoked in part by the political
setbacks of the late ’70s, the pitiless form it took—the “murder” of his
companion of some thirty-five years— condemned him to oblivion thereafter
(1991, p. 29).
Melancholic musings on the Master beset by feminism and the woman he
murdered… A Master is Being Beaten.
No manifesto has been endorsed by structuralism, the nouveau roman, semiotics,
deconstruction, poststructuralism and postmodernism. The Saussurian-dominated
intellectual problematic was inaugurated by Lévi-Strauss in reaction to the Marxism
and existentialism of Sartre and others. Yet the indefinability and shifting
categorization of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault contribute to the confusion
surrounding already abstract, slippery texts. It’s difficult to know who is what,
where, and when. This is also complicated by their search for ancestors. 4 John
Rajchman (1991, p. 120) remarks that “postmodernism is what the French learned
Americans were calling what they were thinking.” What follows is a brief
presentation of definitions and a history of the categories.
3. I am grateful to Angela Miles who brought this reference to my attention.
4. Nietzsche, for example, is understood in conjunction with postmodern anti-narrative critique
(Shapiro: 1989) and as a profound influence on the modernist work of D.H.Lawrence, and Gide
(Foster: 1981).