Feminism

The Political Conscience of Postmodernism

Bibliographic Data

ID2928126
AuthorsLaura Kipnis (corresponding author)
Year1989
Issue21
Pages149
Publication date1989-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Text (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0164-2472 • E-ISSN: 1527-1951
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/827813
OpenAlexW2317819444
LanguageEN
Citations received18

In these, the twilight years of (so it seems in the industrialized West), a phrase still echoes through the shabby halls of left theory, halls now bustling with better-dressed post-Marxists scratching out a story of crisis, decline, and aftermath. Here is the phrase: Marxism lacks a theory of the subject. Psychoanalysis, the preeminent theory of the subject, was offered as a provisional remedy: although initially and officially rejected by a stalwart orthodoxy wielding such epithets as bourgeois practice, it was periodically taken up as a prosthetic device for this politically disabling missing limb (as feminism has, in its turn, been called upon to supplement Marxism's missing theory of gender). The unlikely alliance of the theory of praxis and the talking cure was initially forged in the Frankfurt School, and later came, with Althusser's Lacan connection, to offer the crucial missing link, a theretofore unwritten theory of ideology. This theoretical renovation would propel the next decade of Marxist culturalists, while breakaway factions abandoned class altogether for the uncharted waters of sexuality, language, and other signifying practices, the political implications to which psychoanalytic theory appears to offer access. The similarly fraught relations between feminism and psychoanalysis can be organized into a comparable narrative. The early repudiation of the psychoanalytic as a prescription for patriarchy (and Freud as patriarch personified) yielded to what might be called a homeopathic approach--poison in small doses as a temporary remedy, one whose curative powers, however, run the risk of producing in the healthy the symptoms of the disease. That this latex

Conscience · Epistemology · Feminism · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Sociology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics