24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
Chapter 8
The Signification of the Phallus
LACAN AND LANGUAGE
cannot measure up to the idealized phallus precisely in the moment of detumescence in the woman's body. Grammatically speaking libido is always feminine for Freud (die libido). His ascription to it of a masculine character occurs in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905c, p. 219).
==MORE==
The significance of the phallus (1958)
It is in this paper that Lacan uses the term 'masquerade'. The term is not in Freud but it appears in a famous paper by Joan Riviere, 'Womanliness as a masquerade' (1929).12 Her paper is important because of the debate around the construction and representation
92 Jacques Lacan
of sexual identity. Riviere's paper is concerned with 'women who wish for masculinity' and who may then put on 'a mask of womanliness' as a defence, to avert anxiety and retribution feared from men.
The particular case Riviere discusses involves a successful intellectu<d woman who seeks reassurance from men after her public engagements.
Analysis of her behaviour after her performances showed that she was attempting to obtain sexual advances from the particular type of men by means of flirting and coquetting with them in a more or less veiled manner. % extraordinary incongruity of this attitude with her ha~tYimpersonal and objective attitude during her intellectual performance, which it succeeded so rapidly, was a problem. 13
Riviere suggests that the problem can be solved by reference to Oedipal rivalry: in her successful professional career the woman rivals and takes the place of the father; in her acknowledgement nevertheless of womanliness, the flirting and coquetting, she placates him: ' ... it was an unconscious attempt to ward off the anxiety which would ensue on account of the reprisals she anticipated from the father-figures after her intellectual performance'.14
A woman identifies as a man - takes on masculine identity - and then identifies herself after all as a wom'an - takes up a feminine identity. Masquerade, 'the mask of womanliness' seems quite simple but there are some puzzling questions: where does Riviere draw the line between genuine womanliness and 'masquerade'? If there is a mask, then there is a behind-the-mask - and we need to know what is behind. In Stephen Heath's view, by collapsing genuine womanliness and the masquerade together, Riviere undermines the integrity of the former with the artifice of the latter. IS
What is the Lacanian interpretation of the patient described in Riviere's paper? In 'The signification of the phallus' Lacan writes:
Paradoxical as this formulation may seem, I would say that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved.16
Lacan's Ecrits: A review 93
In other words, the game being played is that of being the phallus. With the mother as initial object, the child seeks to be the phallus she wants. Now, according to Lacan, no one has the phallus, it is a signifier, the initial signifier of the lack-in-being that determines the subject's relation to the signifier. The subject is constituted in lack and the woman represents lack.
Lacan credits Riviere with pinpointing in the masquerade 'the feminine sexual attitude'. The masquerade serves to show what she does not have, a penis, by showing - the adornment, the putting on - something else, the phallus she becomes, as woman to man, sustaining his identity and an order of exchange of which she is the object. Lacan remarks: 'Such is the woman concealed behind her veil: it is the absence of the penis that turns her into the phallus, object of desire.'17 Adornment is the woman, she exists veiled; only thus can she represent lack, be what is wanted: lack is never presented other than as a reflection on a veil.
I think I should mention that at the time Lacan gave his paper on the meaning of the phallus (1958), he wanted to emphasise the place of the Symbolic order in the determination of human subjectivity. (He argued that the contemporary science oflinguistics was unavailable to Freud.) In the paper Lacan returns to some of the debates of the 1920s and 1930s and criticises what he sees as a reduction of the phallus to an object of primitive oral aggression, belonging in the realm of the instinct. Instead he places the phallus within the Symbolic order and argues that it can be understood as a signifier only in the linguistic sense of the term.
Lacan has often been accused of phallocentrism. And it is true that he, has asserted that 'the phallus is the privileged signifier'. The meaning of the term phallus, however, has often been misunderstood. The term phallus must be distinguished from the term penis. The penis is an organ of the body; the phallus is signifier, function or metaphor. Lacan says explicitly that the phallus is not a fantasy, not an object, but least of all an organ, a penis. The phallus symbolises the penis and the clitoris. It is a signifier. In short, Lacan's distinction between the penis and the phallus enables Freud's biologistic account of male superiority and women's penis-envy to be explained in linguistic and symbolic, and thus historical terms.
Lacan's paper contains a discussion about desire and the difficulties of the sexual relation, especially for the woman, whose
\
94 Jacques Lacan
relationship to the phallic term is described in terms of masquerI ade. Let me recapitulate some of the key points: the drama of the subject in language is the experience of its lack in being, and that experience is a movement of desire. Desire is a relation of being to lack. Nothing can make up division, no object can satisfy desire what is wanting is always wanting, division is the condition of subjectivity.
The phallus, with its status as potentially absent, comes to stand in for the necessarily missing object of desire at the level of sexual division. That no one has the phallus is an expression of its reality as signifier of lack: if division cannot be made up, desire satisfied, then the phallus is not an end, not some final truth but, paradoxically, the su~me signifier of an impossible identity.
Pre-Oedjpally, both sexes have a masculine relation to the mother seeking to be the phallus she wants. The prohibition of the mother under the law of the father, the recognition of castration, inaugurates the Oedipus complex for the girl, she now shifting her object love to the father who seems to have the phallus and identifying with the mother who, to her fury, does not: henceforth the girl will desire to have the phallus.
The phallus is the signifier of lack marking castration. It signifies what men (think they) have and what women (are considered to) lack. The woman does not have the phallus, the object of desire for another. The phallus is the signifier of signifiers, the representative of signification and language. The phallus is the crucial signifier in the distribution of authority and power. It also designates the object of desire.
Lacan writes about the castration complex in the masculine unconscious and penisneid in the woman's unconscious. Man is threatened with loss, woman is deprived. Because she feels deprived, her (structural) attitude is one of envy. In an interesting paragraph, Lacan does not use the more usual word deprivation or envy, he uses the word nostalgia.18 The dictionary definitions of 'nostalgie' - homesickness and regret. for something past - are useful in understanding Lacan's text. But there is a third definition which is also helpful in understanding Lacanian theory: unsatisfied desire. The Lacanian subject is castrated, that is to say, deprived of the phallus, and therefore can never satisfy desire.
Now, one might say that desire does not know its object, has no (conscious) idea of its object, because of repression. Of course, the
Lacan's Ecrits: A review 95
repressed was once conscious and so the desire is £Or a return to an object whose knowledge is only contingently unavailable to the subject. But what if the object of desire was an indefinable something, the result of primary repression? The primary repressed was never present to consciousness; it is primordially and structurally excluded. There is no past state that was once present to which one could return, even in phantasy. The returned cannot be imagined because one does not know the object. (Saint-Exupery defines nostalgia as the desire for what cannot be defined.) What Lacan calls desire is precisely the result of this primary repression and yields up a nostalgia beyond the drive to return, a desire constitutively unsatisfied and unsatisfiable because its 'object' simply cannot ev~r be defined. In short, primary repression is that part of needs which is left out in the articulation of a demand, and which we experience as desire.
