Changes

"The big secret of psychoanalysis is that there is no sexual act," all there is is sexuality, a very different thing. The act has a specific definition: it provokes a signifying doubling that allows for an insertion of the subject in a chain in which he inscribes himself. Or it raises the institution of the signifier. But there is no signifier of sexual difference and none of the feminine sex either. Between man and woman "there is this third object, objet a, whose always sliding function of substitution makes it impossible to keep them opposed in whatever eternal essence. It is impossible then to posit a subject inscribing himself as sexed in the act of conjunction to the subject of what is called the opposite sex." At the symbolic level, "there is no sexual rapport": there is merely (a + 1) and (a - 1), where a term marks the difference as a plus or a a minus. The phallus is "the sex-unity": the 1 symbolizes the incommensurable.

Lacan uses Marx's analyses of use value and exchange value, and starts his theory of "man-he" (l'homme-il). The "man-he" is also the man-standard and the man-stallion (l'homme-étalon), as well as the bull and the poor bearer of the symbol of sex, doomed to symbolic castration. He does not know how to live since there is no Other to guarantee him, not even if he were God, marked as he is by castration. The only safeguard is the construction of a protective society based on masculine homosexuality. The Father of Freud's primal horde, because he supposedly jouis all women, sees "his jouissance killed." Then, if the almighty phallus circulates, it is due to women. "Woman represents the phallus as an exchange value among men; and, if the power of the penis bears the mark of castration, it is because fictitiously she becomes what is enjoyed, ce dont on jouit, and circulates as an object of jouissance: she is the locus of transference of this jouissance value" represented by the phallus. Through her identification to the use value embodied in the phallus, woman transforms herself into an object-good. Yet, she does not lack resouirces, such as masquerade, to act as "man-she," l'homme-elle. "She is inexpugnable as a woman precisely outside the system of the sexual act," or "she has a different use of her own jouissance outside this ideology." Thus, Lacan establishes "the radical heterogeneity" of the jouissance of the two sexes whose rapport could only be problematic. He begins here a reflection that will lead him to Encore, the twentieth seminar.