Sexual Difference

Lacan’s formalization of sexual difference in his famous "formulas of sexuation," presented by means of an idiosyncratic usage of mathematical symbols derived from symbolic logic and set theory, attempts to distill Freud’s efforts to distinguish the girl’s experience of castration from the boy’s. In the first logical moment of masculine sexuation, an exception to the phallic function—Lacan’s term for the interdiction of castration—is posited, which is then followed by a contradictory assertion of the function’s universality. Though abstracted beyond immediate recognition, it is possible to discern here the logic of the Freudian primal father, who lives in the masculine subject’s fantasy as the exception that proves the universal rule of castration. In the first logical moment of feminine castration, in contrast, it is asserted that there are no exceptions to the phallic function. But there then follows the notion that "not-all" elements of the feminine subject, elements Lacan represents with the symbol designating the negation of the universal quantifier, are subject to the rule of castration. This is the background to Lacan’s controversial assertion that women are "pas-toute." Though numerous feminists, including luce irigaray, have attacked this claim as a rationalization for what they see as women’s secondary status within a patriarchal socio-symbolic order, others have argued that the implication of Lacan’s assertion is simply that women, or more precisely feminine subjects, do not avail themselves to categorization. Whereas masculine subjects routinely abstract themselves in such a way that they constitute a whole paradoxically unified by the exception embodied by the primal father fantasy (a masculine subject, in colloquial terms, can be "just one of the guys"), feminine subjects, so it appears, feature an irreducible element of singularity, one resistant to counting, that renders each of them, one might say, a world unto herself. The implications of Lacan’s suggestive and oft-misunderstood theory of sexual difference for feminism and the theory of sexuality have still to find their full elaboration. One thing, however, remains clear. For Lacan, sex emerges as an impasse resulting from the impossibility of representing sexual difference symbolically and therefore of establishing sexual identities. In contrast to the Anglo-American ideology of "gender," then, which upholds the idea that masculinity and femininity are socially preestablished meanings that may never be fully embodied, sex, in the Lacanian view, refers instead to the impossibility of sexual meanings themselves, of the frustration of every attempt to define sexual difference in positive terms, and therefore of the unforgiving resistance with which sexuality necessarily thwarts the ambitions of our conscious intentions.