355
PARTISAN REVIEW
ogy....Philosophers are intellectuals, therefore they are petit-bour–
geois men subjected as a group to bourgeois and petit-bourgeois
ideology." Thus, what a philosopher tries to say does not matter,
and it is useless to listen to him, since it is only bourgeois ideol–
ogy speaking through him. He is condemned in advance since,
whatever he might say in his defense, he remains a petit-bour–
geois philosopher-intellectual. He should just shut up. Althusser,
moving from theory to practice, then borrows Lenin's formula
for philosophy's future: "May a good wind take the bastards!
May the Party rid us of this petit-bourgeois garbage!" What rem–
nant of intellectual debate-and, more generally, of human
rights-remains when one reduces a man to a thing, to his mere
social function? And, given the logic of genealogy, how does
Althusser himself (a petit-bourgeois philosopher-intellectual)
manage to achieve an autonomy of thought that he denies to ev–
eryone else? In this studied incapacity to apply to oneself the
logic of one's own position, we see a stupefYing absence of self–
reflection. Quite beyond its potential for intellectual terror, this
incapacity also reveals the profound weakness of the case against
"the subject."
A second example reveals perhaps more strikingly the aber–
rations induced by the genealogical destruction of subjectivity. In
L 'economie libidinale,
Lyotard devotes a few pages to an analysis of
the masturbatory writer, for the doubtlessly subtle reason that if
all writing is sublimation, and writing gives oneself pleasure,
writing must just be symbolic masturbation. "What was Marx
doing with his left hand while he was writing
Capital?"
Lyotard
asks. What is really unacceptable here is not the timidly auda–
cious desanctification of intellectual labor, nor the boring notion
of intellectual masturbation. What is really striking is the level to
which the systematic practice of genealogy was able to reduce
French philosophy, to the point that it became blind to what can
be called only its own idiocy.
We are not out to condemn
a
priori
every form of genealogy.
It is perfectly clear that, just as certain acts can be interpreted as
the products of unconscious mechanism, so certain ideological
discourses can be ascribed to their social or psychological
"conditions of production." But must one extend this practice to
the point that the assertion of liberty of opinion as an inalienable
human right, for example, comes to have the same status as a
