Campbell, Kirsten.Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 81.
Analytic knowledge/feminist knowledge
In analytic discourse, the analysand as knowing subject takes up the position of the barred subject – the subject of the unconscious. The analysand acknowledges the pain and psychic cost of entering the Symbolic order because he or she articulates the lack that all speaking subjects suffer. To know this truth is to know the lack of castration (S17: 58). The love of truth enables the analysand to know ‘this weakness’, to recognize the failure and limits of its knowledge.
Refusing the comforts of the fantasy of a secure and securing identity, the analysand recognizes its split and contradictory self.
In her description of situated feminist knowledges, Donna Haraway argues that feminist epistemologies should privilege the notion of the knower as ‘split and contradictory self’. Haraway contends that ‘[s]plitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies. . . . The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly’ (1991: 193).
This conception of the knower acknowledges her production. The knower recognizes herself as a speaking subject and so her formation in symbolic and social fields. In this position, the knowing subject critically articulates existing orders of representation, and the cost of entering those symbolic economies. By reinscribing that cost into the order of representation, she refuses the position of Master in her acknowledgement of her temporality, disunity and division.
However, the aim of psychoanalysis is to enable the analysand to accept its lack-in-being. Through analysis, the analysand articulates the truth of subjectivity: ontological lack. The analysand consents to that symbolic debt paid by the speaking subject because it accepts the castration that signifies its division and incompleteness.
The analysand represents that loss as castration, which is rendered symbolically through a relation to the phallic signifier.
In this way, the analysand sutures its fundamental lack-in-being through the signification of ontological lack as the sexual difference of castration. By contrast, the feminist knowing subject articulates that symbolic debt but genders, politicizes and refuses it.
While, pace Zizek, subjects may exchange common lack in the Symbolic order, feminism insists that women bear it in their signification of the ontological loss of all subjects (81).
The ‘Woman’ functions as the sign of phallic lack because she comes symbolically to embody ontological (all) lack.
In this way, the female subject pays the debt of the speaking subject in the Symbolic order. In Lacanian terms, the symbolic price that is paid for becoming a subject is the giving up of the mother, and the lack-of-being of all subjects. In feminist terms, women pay this price.
Ragland-Sullivan argues that ‘female depression, passive aggression, and disturbed children is simply too great a price to pay’, and her list is far from being a complete enumeration of the cost of such a social order (1987: 301). However, a feminist subject refuses that cost for herself, other women and other subjects. Unlike the analysand, the feminist knowing subject does not articulate the truth of the Symbolic order simply in order to come to terms with herself. Her knowing position emerges from a relation not only to herself but also to others. In this way, a political relation to others constitutes her position. With that political relation, the position of the knowing subject shifts from psychoanalysis to feminism.
In psychoanalytic discourse, the analyst stands as the cause of the discourse (in the place of the a). The analyst is the silent partner of the analytic process who functions as the addressee of the analysand’s demand for love and knowledge. This address to another introduces the intersubjective dimension of analytic practice. Without the analyst, the analytic process could not unfold because it is through the transferential operation of demand and identification that the analysand produces a hysterical discourse that introduces his or her desire. In this way, the analysand’s relation to an other – the analyst – as a relation to self structures the analytic process.
Unlike psychoanalytic discourse, a political relation to others structures feminism. The feminist subject addresses her desire to know and to love to others, constituting the intersubjective dimension of that address. Other women provide her discourse with its cause. This political address to others distinguishes her position from that of the analysand. Her relation to others, rather than the analysand’s relation to self, produces her speaking position. In her political relation to her others, the knowing subject addresses her desire for knowledge to other women. This address inflects her knowledge, structuring it as an intersubjective negotiation of political principles.
Feminist knowledge seeks to found its act of knowing in the political. Lacan argues that it is not by accident that women inaugurate the revolutionary discourse of psychoanalysis (S17: 62). The analysand Anna O., the subject of the first psychoanalytic case history, named psychoanalysis the ‘talking cure’ (Freud and Breuer 1895: 83). The case of ‘Anna O.’ can be read as an account of the hysterical analysand, or it can be reread through Anna’s own name, Bertha Pappenheim, who was a historical subject with speech, agency and knowledge. In that subjective position, the analysand Anna O. can be recast as the feminist Bertha Pappenheim. Anna O. undoubtedly suffered as a hysteric; it was the hysterical symptom that drove her to her two doctors, Breuer and Freud (82).
However, she also has a speaking position that is not that of the hysterical analysand. Throughout her life, Bertha Pappenheim ‘was a pioneer in German social work as well as a leader in feminist and Jewish women’s organisations’ (Decker 1992: 136). Hannah Decker points out that, unlike Dora, ‘an avocation-turned-career had been the salvation of “Anna O.” ’ (1992: 108).
Bertha Pappenheim was truly able to love and to work. We can see in her life the movement from hysteria, silence and depression to ethical and political engagement, a shift from passive symptom to feminist practice.
If we consider the feminist position as analogous to that of the analysand, and the Discourse of the Hysteric as leading to the Discourse of the Analyst, then it is possible to see the relation between the ‘protofeminism’ of hysteria and feminist discourse (Forrester and Appignanesi 1993: 68).
However, while both have discursive structures that originate in the question of sexual difference and unsatisfied demand, what distinguishes the two is the shift from symptom to signifying practice. One discourse produces a symptom; the other produces a political knowledge. This shift is evident in Anna O.’s life, shifting her position of hysterical analysand to that of the feminist, and from analytic discourse to feminist discourse (83).