24,656
edits
Changes
→''Encore'': The Theory of Sexuation
=''Encore'': The Theory of Sexuation=
In his early account of sexual difference Lacan had tried to free psychoanalysis from its essentialism and normative, heterosexual, bias by transposing the Freudian understanding of castration and penis envy on to the phallus as a signifier of lack. While the notion of masquerade has been extraordinarily productive in terms of analysing the representation of women (see 'After Lacan'), it still left completely unanswered the question of feminine desire. In 1972-3 Lacan returned to this issue - what can be said about feminine desire - in the seminar Encore. In this seminar Lacan further developed the idea that masculinity and femininity are not biologically given, but designate two 'sexed' subject positions that are available to both men and women. What is important in this seminar is that masculinity and femininity are defined not simply in relation to the phallus, but through the type of jouissance that is attainable in each position. Sexual difference, therefore, is determined not as a difference between two discrete sexes but as a result of one's position in relation to jouissance.
Encore is usually read as Lacan's final statement on feminine sexuality, but this is only part of the picture. Seminar XX presents a wide-ranging reflection on the nature of love, jouissance and the limits of knowledge. Sexual difference is important here because, from a psychoanalytic perspective, it is the ultimate limit of knowledge. Sexual difference is reducible to neither nature nor culture, but emerges at the point of their intersection. This does not mean that sexual identity is the sum of natural (biological) and cultural (signifying) elements, but rather that it is that which is left out of their unity. What Lacan is driving at here is that all structures, whether of the subject or the symbolic, are necessarily incomplete; there is always some contingent element that is left out, an exception to the rule. Thus, seminar XX should be read as a continuation of the project Lacan set out in seminar XI, when he began to elaborate the objet petit a as the left-over of the real. Encore is also, as we will see, a continuation of seminar VII and the discussion of courtly love that Lacan introduced there. Increasingly, in the late Lacan, the drive is associated with the exception and limit; it is the concept of the drive that means that the subject is not wholly determined by the symbolic and marks the limit of the signifier upon the subject. The drive is also the terrain upon which sex is played out.
==Logic of Sexuation==
