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[[symbolic]] phallus.
The phallus has no corresponding female signifier; 'the phallus is a symbol to which there is no correspondent, no equivalent. It's a matter of a dissymmetry in the signifier.'<ref>{{S3}} p.176</ref>
Both male and female subjects assume their sex via the [[Symbolic]] phallus.
Unlike the [[Imaginary]] phallus, the [[Symbolic]] phallus cannot be negated, for on the [[Symbolic]] plane an absence is just as much a positive entity as a presence.<ref>see E, 320</ref>
Thus even the [[Woman]], who lacks the [[Symbolic]] phallus in one way, can also be said to possess it, since not having it the [[Symbolic]] is itself a form of having.<ref>S4, 153</ref>
Conversely, the assumption of the [[Symbolic]] phallus by the man is only possible on the basis of the prior assumption of his own castration.
However, Lacan warns his students that the complexity of this symbol might be missed if they simply identify it with the [[Symbolic]] phallus.<ref>S8, 296</ref>
The symbol is more correctly understood as designating 'the phallic function'.<ref>S8, 298</ref>
In the early 1970s Lacan incorporates this symbol of the phallic function in his formulae of sexuation.
Using predicate logic to articulate the problems of sexual difference, Lacan devises two formulae for the masculine position and two formulae for the feminine position.
All four formulae revolve around the phallic function, which is here equivalent with the function of castration.
==Criticisms of Lacan ==
Of all Lacan's ideas, his concept of the phallus is perhaps the one which has given rise to most controversy.
Objections to Lacan's concept fall into two main groups.
Firstly, some feminist writers have argued that the privileged position Lacan accords to the phallus means that he merely repeats the patriarchal gestures of Freud (e.g. Grosz, 1990).
Other feminists have defended Lacan, arguing that his distinction between the phallus and the penis provides a way of accounting for sexual difference which is irreducible to biology (e.g. Mitchell and Rose, 1982).
The second main objection to Lacan's concept of the phallus is that put forward by Jacques Derrida (Derrida, 1975) and echoed by others.
Derrida argues that, despite Lacan's protestations of anti-transcendentalism, the phallus operates as a transcendental element which acts as an ideal guarantee of meaning.
How can there be such a thing as a 'privileged signifier', asks Derrida, given that every signifier is defined only by its differences from other signifiers?
The phallus, in other words, reintroduces the metaphysics of presence which Derrida denominates as logocentrism, and thus Derrida
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Lacan goes on in 1961 to state that the [[Symbolic]] phallus is that which appears in the place of the lack of the signifier in the Other.<ref>S8, 278-8 1</ref>
It is no ordinary signifier but the [[Real]] presence of desire itself.<ref>S8, 290</ref>
In 1973 he states that the [[Symbolic]] phallus is 'the signifier which does not have a signified'.<ref>S20, 75</ref>
The [[Symbolic]] phallus is written PI in Lacanian algebra.
==Dictionary==
The term "phallus" designates the representation of an erect penis, which plays a key role both intra- and inter-subjectively. Freud barely distinguished between the fantasized phallus and the anatomical penis. He called the period between three and five years of age the "phallic stage." At this stage, infants of both sexes are dominated by the question of who possesses a penis and the related issue of its masturbatory jouissance (gratification), which is clitoral in the case of girls. Up to this point, the mother is imagined as having a penis, and the discovery that she lacks a penis, after an initial denial, precipitates the castration complex.
