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

4 NOTHING MAT(T)ERSWe cannot afford to continue to separate the intellectual in a man (I choosemy terms carefully) from the emotional: the depression from the ideas; or thepolitical from the personal: the commitment to class struggle from the stormymarriage, the dead wife… Neither Althusser, “France”, nor the world’sintellectuals and revolutionaries will acknowledge patriarchy as the powerful,pervasive and pernicious ideological state apparatus which it is; at the sametime, none of them escape its effects (Finn: 1981, p. 28, italics in original).When Althusser died in 1990, many masculine Marxists and philosophers still foundreference 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 animpression on us. Above all, the man was so close to us, with his exquisitegentleness, his tact…Then came the tragedy, which he himself described, partly out of a sense ofpropriety and partly out of derision, as the “non-event”, the killing of his wife,the committal to hospital (Comte-Sponville: 1990, p. 16). 3Gregory Elliott is more indignant and feels that Althusser is unjustly attacked andbeset: “doubtless pour décourager les autres, some have not hesitated to identify thedeath of Hélène Althusser at her husband’s hands as the inevitable denouement of[his theoretical endeavour]” (1991, p. 28). Indeed, Hélène victimizes Louis Althusserby staging a supposed murder, murder rendered now in quotation:When, in November 1980, defeat came, provoked in part by the politicalsetbacks of the late ’70s, the pitiless form it took—the “murder” of hiscompanion of some thirty-five years— condemned him to oblivion thereafter(1991, p. 29).Melancholic musings on the Master beset by feminism and the woman hemurdered… A Master is Being Beaten.No manifesto has been endorsed by structuralism, the nouveau roman, semiotics,deconstruction, poststructuralism and postmodernism. The Saussurian-dominatedintellectual problematic was inaugurated by Lévi-Strauss in reaction to the Marxismand existentialism of Sartre and others. Yet the indefinability and shiftingcategorization of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault contribute to the confusionsurrounding 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 JohnRajchman (1991, p. 120) remarks that “postmodernism is what the French learnedAmericans were calling what they were thinking.” What follows is a briefpresentation 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).