Indeed. For postmodernists, however, all objects have basically the same status, be they gods, vampires, human bodies, or social relations. Therefore, I don't think their ways of conceiving objects help us much. Kant said he "had to deny _knowledge_, in order to make room for _faith_" (_Critique of Pure Reason_). The same must be said about Lacan, whose works may be renamed _Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason_.
It is also not for nothing that one element in the making of postmodern philosophy was a turn to Pascal. Not to knock on the poor Althusser (whose best insight is long forgotten but whose worst momemnts have been brought to excess in postmodern philosophy) too much, but I must say that his "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus" (_Lenin and Philosophy_) is full of mystifications of 'paradoxes' straight out of Pascal:
***** Besides, we are indebted to Pascal's defensive 'dialectic' for the wonderful formula which will enable us to invert the order of the notional schema of ideology. Pascal says more or less: 'Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.' (168) *****
Althusser evidently thought that learning from Pascal would help him banish 'ideas' and make 'practice, etc.' appear, but the trajectory of the Pascalian turn has been the exact opposite of Althusser's intention. It simply helped many post-/anti-Marxist intellectuals to enshrine a neo-Kantian epistemology -- an idealism with vengeance.
Now take a look at the curious ascetic routines of the Lacanian scholasticism:
***** As an analyst, he [Lacan] "expects" from this audience, he says, "nothing more than to be the object thanks to which what I teach is not self-analysis." Otherwise, this theater would be reduced to a hysterization of the actor (assuming a body for the other); this process calls forth a paranoid interpretation by the listeners (a proliferation of signifieds born of the question, "what then does he want from us?").... By stepping back ("I want to know nothing of it"), he _holds_ the difference separating the speaking (symbolic) from an identification (imaginary).
This exercise resembles a prayer to which and for which nothing would answer. A Midrash once said, "Praying is speaking to the wall." Lacan turns speech into a conception close to this rabbinical austerity. The Other is there, but we can expect nothing from it except the desire which is produced by being deprived of it. Perhaps the sharpest expression of speech is to be found in one of those "formulas"...: "I am asking you to refuse what I am giving to you because that's not it." (Michel de Certeau, "Lacan: An Ethic of Speech," _Heterologies_ pp. 50-1) *****
It is the denial of mastery -- self-imposed 'poverty' and gestures of divestiture -- that helps invest Lacan with authority and makes him a Master. It's an old religious (or Socratic) trick, for which we (near the end of the twentieth-century) have no need to fall. But, then again, you may be or want to be religious, after all, without becoming a part of an old-fashioned religion; in that case, you've made a correct choice.
I am, however, disappointed (though not surprised) that you take Kenneth Burke (or rhetoric) lightly. One at least hopes that those who say so much about 'discourse' would be interested in the study of rhetoric. Anyway, the point made by Burke is that an argument against 'authoritarianism' doesn't take an argument against 'authority' per se.
Your appeal to Hume is fitting, given your philosophy:
>Burke(yuck!)? Why not David Hume.
>
>David Hume wrote in "A Treatise of Human Nature"
Idealism and empiricism support each other, in the sense that where knowledge is denied, one relies on faith and/or the fetishization of the cosmic contingency of human experience (as conceived by empiricism), as Roy Bhaskar notes. David Hume said:
***** No matter of fact can be proved but from its cause or its effect. Nothing can be known to be the cause of another but by experience. We can give no reason for extending to the future our experience in the past; but are entirely determined by custom, when we conceive an effect to follow, from its usual cause. But we also believe an effect to follow as well as conceive it. This belief joins no new idea to the conception. It only varies the manner of conceiving, and makes a difference to the feeling or sentiment. Belief, therefore, in all matters of fact arises only from custom, and is an idea conceived in a peculiar _manner_....
...Almost all reasoning is there reduced to experience; and the belief, which attends experience, is explained to be nothing but a peculiar sentiment, or lively conception produced by habit. Nor is this all, when we believe anything of _external_ existence, or suppose an object to exist a moment after it is no longer perceived, this belief is nothing but a sentiment of the same kind. (_A Treatise of Human Nature_). *****
With this conception of nature, philosophy would be entirely Pyrrhonian, as Hume noted. (While some say that postmodernists are 'anti-Enlightenment,' I'd say that, on the contrary, they've been working on a post-/anti-Marxist return to the Enlightenment in their epistemology.) A Humean conception of nature and law makes a space for a Kantian faith; if the existence of every object can be doubted, there is no reason to think of the existence of God and vampires as more doubtful than that of one's fingernails and fellow workers when they are not objects of sense-experience.
It is also on the impossibility of knowledge that Plato rests his mouthpiece Socrates' victory over Thrasymachus in _Republic_:
***** [Socrates] 'Yes, Cleitophon, and he [Thrasymachus] also maintained that right is the advantage of the stronger party. And once he'd affirmed both of these propositions [that 'morality is in the interest of the stronger' and that 'rulers are capable of error in the knowledge of what is in their interest'], he also agreed that sometimes the stronger party tells the weaker party, which is subject to it, to do things which are disadvantageous to it. And from these premises it follows that morality is no more what is advantageous to the stronger party than it is what is disadvantageous to the stronger party. *****
After this rhetorical defeat of the sophist assertion that morality is in the interest of the stronger, hence after the defense of an argument that morality is in the interest of all who possess it, Plato, through Socrates, will argue for the very conception of morality designed to guard the rule of the few over the many. To stage this victory over a democratic criticism of morality and argue for an authoritarian state, Plato employs several tricks: (1) cast a sophist criticism of morality in the form of a defense of the ruling class; (2) reduce the question of class rule and hegemony to that of rulers knowing & acting in their personal self-interest (as opposed to maintaining the system of the exploitation of the many by the few); and (3) transform a fact that it is not always possible to know one's best interest into an assertion that it is no more likely for the ruling class to know or act in their class interest than for them not to know or act in it.
Postmodern scepticism works in a way similar to the Socratic attack on knowledge and democracy (or the masses' ability to acquire knowledge and govern themselves) in _Republic_.
Yoshie