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→The Woman Does Not Exist
=The Woman Does Not Exist=
The idea that "Woman does not exist"<ref>Lacan 1998(1975): 7</ref> 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."<ref>Copjec 1994a: 224</ref>
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."<ref>Fink 1995: 107</ref>
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.<ref>1998(1975):74</ref>
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.
=''Encore'': The Theory of Sexuation=
