Jacques Lacan:Sexual Difference

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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 biology, 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.


More

Let us finally consider what is surely the most controversial and contested area of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the conceptualization of feminine sexuality. Lacan's provocative slogans, such as 'the woman does not exist' and 'there is no such thing as a sexual relationship', have been greeted with indignation and outrage as well as prolonged and passionate defence. 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 difference 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 involves 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 (Adams 1966b). According to Lacan, masculinity involves the posture or pretence of having the phallus, while femininity involves the masquerade of being the phallus. The second phase of Lacan's thinking on sexual difference comes from a late seminar, seminar XX - Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-1973 - and concerns the 'structures of sexuation'. In this late phase Lacan continues to develop masculinity and femininity as structures that are available to both men and women and not related to one's biology, but what now determines a masculine and feminine structure is the type of jouissance one is able to attain - what Lacan called phallic jouissance and Other jouissance. We will explore these highly controversial ideas below before presenting an example of what Lacan means by them in the form of the poetic tradition of courtly love.

Freud and the Enigma of Feminine Sexuality

To Have or to Be the Phallus?

Femininity as Masquerade

The Woman Does Not Exist

The idea that "Woman does not exist"[1] 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."[2]

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."[3]

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.[4]

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

Logic of Sexuation

In the seminar Encore, Lacan proposed what he called "formulas of sexuation" to set down the basic structures of male and female sexuality.

Sigmund Freud

In his book Totem and Taboo, Freud had argued that at the mythic origin of society lay a primal horde, in which a jealous and greedy father enjoyed all the women.

His sons were deprived of all intercourse with them. And so they rebelled and murdered their father to gain acess to the women. But then, in remorse, the sons forbade themselves the very women they had murdered for.

According to Freud, the first law of society was thus imposed by the sons on themselves as a result of their love and remorse for their murdered father.

If this law is understood as a prohibition of jouissance, it is based, at its origin, on a jouissance which is obscene, perverse and unregulated - that of the primal father.

Jacques Lacan

Lacan argues that the law of prohibition always supposes at its horizon an exception, someone who escapes the law. If all men are subject to a law, one man escapes.

This structure of constitutive of male sexuality. If all males are subject to prohibition, there is at least one who escapes.

If Freud's story in Totem and Taboo was a myth, Lacan tries to extract a logical structure from it and he gives notation for the sexuality.

Supplementary Jouissance

As Lacan pointed out there is no myth in the anlytic literature like that contained in Totem and Taboo about female sexuality.

According to Lacan, women participate in a logic very different from that of the man.

Not all subjects are subject to castration, even if there does not exist a subject who is not subject to castration.

THe jouissance of a speaking being may be phallic or it may be "supplementary", an enjoyment born out of the castration complex but not linked to the organ and its limits.

The idea is that once the castration complex has established a lack in one's life, this lack itself can take on a libidinal value.

The subject does not try to fill this lack - which would be phallic jouissance - but to give it a new value as lack, to produce jouissance through this absence.

Not all

Men and women are both subject to the imposition of the symbolic order and the networks of signifiers.

We aimto immerse ourselves fullyin this symbolic order, to accept and absorb the signifier as much as possible. Women instead not only know there sis more to the world than the signifier, but they try, often with the gfreatest determination, to make this something a part of their lives.


Hence Lacan can say that women are "not-all" in the field of the symbolic castration, even if the whole dynamic in question only exists owing to the initial presence of this symbolic dimension.


Masculinity

Femininity

There is No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

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.

Summary

  1. Lacan 1998(1975): 7
  2. Copjec 1994a: 224
  3. Fink 1995: 107
  4. 1998(1975):74