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

42 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
It is humanism which is abstract! All these cries from the heart, all these
claims for the human person, for existence, are abstract: that is to say, cut off
from the scientific and technical world which alone is our real world…. Now,
the effort currently made by the people of our generation is not to lay claim to
man against knowledge and against technology, but it is precisely to show
that our thought, our life, our way of being, right up to our most daily way of
being, are part of the same systematic organisation and thus raise the same
categories as the scientific and technical world (in Chapsal: 1966, p. 15, italics
in original).
Foucault’s work was similar to contemporary structuralist tendencies in its
elimination of the subject and rejection of phenomenology and existentialism. He
makes this clear in an interview with Paolo Caruso published in 1969:
We re-examined the Husserlian idea that there is meaning everywhere, a
meaning that surrounds us and permeates us even before we open our eyes and
are able to speak. For those of my generation, meaning does not appear alone,
it’s not “already there”, or rather, “it is already there” but under a certain
number of conditions that are formal conditions. And from 1955 we dedicated
ourselves mainly to the analyses of the formal conditions of the appearance of
meaning (in Caruso: 1969, pp. 94–95).
Foucault acknowledged Sartre’s passion for politics, but insisted that his own
generation had instead discovered a passion for concepts and systems. In this
interview for La Quinzaine littéraire, Foucault takes his distance from Merleau-
Ponty, Sartre, and the generation surrounding Les Temps Modernes. 1 The generation
of those who were under twenty years of age during the war applauded the courage
of the existentialists who reacted to the absurdity of life and the bourgeois tradition
by finding meaning everywhere. “But we, we found something else, another passion:
the passion of the concept and what I will call the ‘system’, (in Chapsal: 1966,
p. 14). System is defined as an “ensemble of relations which maintain and
transform themselves independently of the things which they link” (in Chapsal:
1966, p. 14). Foucault himself stopped believing in “meaning” when he discovered
the work of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. Meaning is self-sufficient in structure, which is
an absolute object of intelligibility.
The point of rupture came the day when Lévi-Strauss for societies and Lacan
for the unconscious showed us that meaning was probably no more than a sort
of surface effect, a reflection of light, a surface, a foam, and that which crosses
us profoundly, that which is before us, that which has supported us in time and
space, was the system (in Chapsal: 1966, p. 14, italics in original).
1. Foucault became associated with the journal Critique and the newspaper, Libération, which as it
happens, was founded by Sartre.