EDITH KURZWEIL
23
cal advances), while feminism presumes that women will prevail and, ul–
timately, will reach true equality with men. Evelyn Fox Keller, for in–
stance, maintains that feminist theory "provided us with an instrument of
immense subversive power. And along with this provision comes a
commitment: nothing less than the reconstruction and deconstruction of
knowledge" (1993).
I do not question the commitment to feminism. On the contrary, I
share it. But I am arguing that the extent to which recent feminist the–
ory (knowingly or unknowingly) is based on Jacques Lacan's, Michel
Foucault's, Louis Althusser's and Jacques Derrida's deconstructions, it is
built on the shifting sands their theories rest on. Moreover, their
metaphoric rhetoric was embraced piecemeal, and sometimes was trans–
lated loosely or even wrongly. Thereby, a succession of disparate psycho–
analytic concepts were inserted into our feminist debates. When they
furthered women's autonomy they helped further the movement. But at
times they fueled a backlash. This happened when literary feminists in
universities who were more and more divorced from psychoanalytic
practice took the lead . They tended to concentrate on such abstract
Lacanian notions as "desire" and to forget that Lacan, even in his semi–
nars, kept referring to what he had learned from interactions with
analysands; their own free associations increasingly were extracted from
literature alone. Consequently, political outcomes are bound to remain
elusive.
As we know, American feminism had proceeded in step with the
other liberation movements that began in the late 1960s, particularly
with the civil rights movement and with the anti-Vietnam and radical
student activities. Although all activists then pursued parallel as well as
particular ends, they were predisposed to model themselves more or less
on the type of struggle Marx had envisioned for the working classes. But
the assumptions of the Second Wave were based on the premises of
Lacan's rereading of Freud, which is more attuned to his public seminars
on the language of psychoanalysis than to his clinical work. This ex–
plains, at least in part, why in America Lacan's thought has come to be
at home in universities rather than on couches, and why it so frequently
is misread and misunderstood.
Of course, misunderstanding itself is one of Lacan's principles. Since
he purports to unravel the unconscious via language, he maintains that
once an unconscious thought is made conscious it
ipso facto
must be mis–
understood. This is just one of many of Lacan's clever and purposeful
obfuscations . These cannot be comprehended without placing them in
their intellectual and cultural context. Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Althusser,
and Roland Barthes also championed radical causes, including feminism,
