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

2 NOTHING MAT(T)ERSthe post-1945, postmodern ideology: “appearances are everything, it is forbidden togo beyond them…the world of enterprises, struggles, need, work, the whole realworld, disappears into thin air” (1968, p. 636). She charges that “with the intentionof 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 fascismthere.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 inwhich the understanding of how hegemony works might well be clarified in anethnography of Marxist intellectuals” (1989, p. 233). Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi,a former student of Louis Althusser, looks back at the men of her generation andrecalls life among the men of science and subjectivity, class and state power. Shechronicles their disappearance as the ending of an era:Nikos Poulantzas committed suicide on October 3, 1979. Lacan dissolved hisschool on March 16, 1980. Sartre died on April 15, 1980. Barthes, victim of anautomobile accident on February 18, 1980, died in the month of April in thesame year. Althusser strangled his wife on November 17, 1980. Lacan died onSeptember 19, 1981 (1983, p. 487).Certainly, their works influenced, engaged and denounced one another in manyways. Althusser reread Marx and Lacan, Lacan reinterpreted Freud, Barthes’Mythologies was indebted to Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques, Sartre influencedFoucault, and Poulantzas tried to write the methodological micro-histories called forby Althusser. Foucault said: “Open Althusser’s books” (Bellour: 1971, p. 192) eventhough he disagreed that Marx represented an epistemological break with Classicalthought. Louis Althusser read Lacan 1 as having accomplished for the unconsciouswhat he, Althusser, had done for the theory of the economic structure. Lévi-Strausssought to interpret the universal unconscious with language, while Freud consideredthe particular. Their two approaches merge in Lacan’s work. Lacan turned to themathematical sciences to reveal the functions of the unconscious just as Lévi-Straussdescribed 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 periodof French political and social theory. Althusser may have written of Freud andLacan, but in 1980 he violently denounced Lacan as that “magnificent, patheticHarlequin” (Clément: 1983, p. 21) at one of Lacan’s private seminars to which hehad gained access. Anti-Oedipus (1983) by Fé1ix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze was arebellion against Father Lacan, which had some success among the Lacanian school.Deleuze was a former pupil and analysand of Lacan; as was Althusser. SomeLacanians followed the forbidden work of Jacques Derrida, who criticized Lacan’sphallogocentricism in The Post Card (1987b). In the section “Le facteur de laverité”, Derrida argued that Lacanian psychoanalysis was prescriptive rather than1. Louis Althusser, (1984) “Freud and Lacan,” Essays on Ideology, London: Verso, pp. 141–172.