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

EXISTENCE AND DEATH 41
“Man is perpetually dephased in relation to structures which condition him because
he is something other than what makes him what he is. Therefore I do not understand
how one can stop at structure! For me, that is a logical scandal” (1971, p. 115).
Epistemologically, the structuralists accept an atemporal formulation of concept
which is autonomous to the development of things; Sartre defines notion as a
synthetic process which is homogeneous. He discovers a Cartesian rejection of time
among the new generation:
They don’t want a dépassement, or at any rate a dépassement made by man.
We return to positivism. But it is no longer a positivism of facts but a
positivism of signs. There are totalities, structural wholes which constitute
themselves through man; and man’s unique function is to decipher them
(1971, p. 114).
Foucault was not dissuaded, and would continue to justify his archaeological
methodology and the study of the discourse of discourses:
on the same plane and according to their isomorphisms, practices, institutions
and theories…. I seek the common knowledge which made them possible, the
historical and constituent layer of knowledge. Rather than seeking to explain
this knowledge from the point of view of the practico-inert, I seek to formulate
an analysis of what one could call the “theorico-active” (in Bellour: 1971,
p. 138).
Sartre compared Foucault to Althusser as rendering invisible the relationship of
things to lived experience. Anthropology has replaced philosophy, system has
negated subject, and language replaces praxis. Foucault, unlike Althusser, does not
try to suggest a means of transforming the structure in dominance. As Jeanne Parain-
Vial notes, “For Foucault, this notion [the structure in dominance] is not even
explicative, it is a positive category of unification. Foucault even avoids posing the
problem of causality, and keeps to pure description” (1969, p. 192). She finds that
Foucault does not specify, in The Order of Things, whether structures of language
are identical to or different from mathematical structures: “Is Foucault promising us
a philosophy of being and language for the future, or is he demanding from linguistic
structure the key category which would dispense with metaphysical reflection and
which henceforth would risk engendering a new scientism” (1969, p. 189). Parain-
Vial argues that Foucault does not use structure in the scientific sense as model, only
as essence in Kantian rather than linguistic terms. Kant’s transcendental cogito is
empty and static, much like Foucault’s epistemes.
Like Althusser, Foucault was convinced that humanism was the unnecessary
baggage left over from problems the seventeenth century was unable to solve,
replete with obsessions which do not merit philosophical reflection, such as “the
problem of the relationship of man to the world, the problem of artistic creation, of
happiness” (in Chapsal: 1966, p. 15). Foucault’s politics is to endorse Althusser’s
attempt to purge the French Communist Party of the humanist-Marxist tendency, as
he asserts in the Chapsal interview (1966, p. 15). He reacts against the charge that
his new system of thought is cold and abstract: