Jacques Lacan:Sexual Difference

Introduction

The most controversial and contested area of Lacanian psychoanalysis involves the conceptualization of feminine sexuality.

Lacan's thinking on feminine sexuality is distinguished by two main phases.

First, he was concerned to distinguish sexual difference on the basis of the phallus and here Lacan makes a significant innovation regarding Freudian thinking. For Freud the question of sexual differences revolved around the 'castration complex', that is, around whether or not someone 'has' or 'does not have' a penis.

For Lacan, on the other hand, castration is a symbolic process that invovles the cutting off, not of one's penis, but of one's jouissance and the recognition of lack. In order to represent this lack the subject has two possible alternatives - that of 'having' or 'being' the phallus.

According to Lacan, masculinity involves the posture or pretence of having the phallus, while femininity involve the masquerade of being the phallus.

The second phase of Lacan's thinking on sexual difference comes from a late seminar, seminar XX - Encoure: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-1973 - and concerns the 'structures of sexuation'. In this late phase Lacan continutes to develop masculinity and femininity as structures that are available to both men and women and not related to one's biologi, but what now determines a masculine and feminine structure si the type of jouissance one is able to attain - what LAcan called phallic jouissance and Other jouissance.

We will explore thesehighly controversial ideas below.

The Woman Does Not Exist

The idea that "Woman does not exist" or that she is "not-whole" has often been seen as the most offensive of Lacan's formulations about feminine sexuality but, as with the notion of the phallus, this reading is based on a fundamental misreading of Lacan.

Just as the phallus is an 'empty' signifier - it is a signifier of lack and has no positive content - the sign 'woman' has no positive or empirical signified.

There is no universal category of women to which the sign "Woman" refers.

To appeal to the notion of women therefore as a homogeneous group is to appeal to an imaginary, and therefore illusory, identity.

Furthermore, when Lacan talks about existence, he is reerring to something at the level of the symbolic.

If the woman was to exist she would have to exist at the level of the symbolic and this has a number of implications.

First, as the symbolic is phallic by definition, it would subordiante feminity to the phallus in the same way that Freud saw femininity as defined by not having the penis.

Second, it would mean that femininity is wholly a discursive construct and that sexual identity is completely socially - symbolically - constructed.

Lacan, however, "leaves open the possibility of there being something - a feminine jouissance - that is unlocatable in experience, that cannot, then, be said to exist in the symbolic order."

TO say that the woman is "not-whole" is not to say that she is in some way incomplete and lacking something that the man has, but rather that she is "defined as not wholly hemmed in. A woman is not split in the same way as a man; though alienated, she is not altogether subject to the symbolic order."

Lacan puts this in a rather convoluted double negative, which has given rise to much of the misunderstanding about woman as "not-all":

"[A]nd this is the whole point, she has different ways of approachign that phallus and of keepign it for herself. It's not because she is notwholly in the phallic function that she is not there at all. She is not not at all there. She is there in full. BUt there is something more.

It is precisely because the woman does not exist and that she is "not-whole" that she has access to somehting more (encore) than men.

Courtly Love

We will present an example of what Lacan means by the terms phallic jouissance and Other jouissance in the form of the poetic tradition of courtly love.