Carlson, Shanna T. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference” Volume 21, Number 2, 2010 d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
What do gender studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis have to offer one another? Is it possible to integrate the two domains, or do they, as Copjec charges and as Butler herself seems to worry in Antigone’s Claim, represent fundamentally incompatible approaches?
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Footnote 3: quoting Butler from AC:
It is why, for instance, it would be difficult to find a fruitful engagement at the present time between the new Lacanian formalisms and the radical queer politics of, for example, Michael Warner and friends. The former insists on fundamental notions of sexual difference, which are based on rules that prohibit and regulate sexual exchange, rules we can break only to find ourselves ordered by them anew. The latter calls into question forms of sexual foundationalism that cast viable forms of queer sexual alliance as illegitimate or, indeed, impossible and unlivable. At its extreme, the radical sexual politics turns against psychoanalysis or, rather, its implicit normativity, and the neoformalists turn against queer studies as a “tragically” utopian enterprise. (Antigone’s 75)
Objet a
Lacan tells us that object a is introduced from the fact that nothing, no thing—no food, no breast, no person—will ever satisfy the drive. Object a as “cause of desire” (Encore 92) is not the object that the subject seizes, nor is it the aim of desire, but rather, “It is either pre-subjective, or the foundation of an identification of the subject, or the foundation of an identification disavowed by the subject” (Four 186). It is, indeed, the foundation of a subject, but a contingent foundation: as Dean explains, “[T]his object counterintuitively (ungrammatically?) appears to precede the subject, to found the subject [. . .]. Yet the apparent foundationalism of object a betokens a radically contingent foundation, since as Ellie Ragland points out, ‘[w]e humans are grounded in objects that are not themselves grounded’” (Beyond 194). In insisting that “any object” can stand in as a representative for object a and that object a is only a further representative of “the eternally lacking object,” Lacan distances himself from a reading of Freud that would see a sexual developmental progression or “maturation” from the oral to the anal to the genital drives. Instead, Lacan emphasizes the essential groundlessness of object a and its voidlike role in the circuitous motion of the drive (Four 181).
There are two sexual positions available to human subjects because, as Lacan asserts in Encore using the language of logic and mathematical formalization, subjects are positioned differently with respect to one term: the phallic function. There are two sexual positions insofar as every subject is either “all” or “not-all” under the phallic function. Before falling too quickly into the abyss that can follow from the explication of the phallic function, a few preliminary words are in order on sexual difference as it relates to signification itself: Copjec notes that “[s]ex is the stumbling block of sense” (204), citing Lacan’s own comment that
“[e]verything implied by the analytic engagement with human behavior indicates not that meaning reflects the sexual, but that it makes up for it” (qtd. on 204).
Lacan’s account of object a seems to pose no threat to any range of queer theories of sexuality insofar as it does not presuppose, for
example, that a particular type of object should or in fact ever could satisfy the drive. Indeed, Lacan repeatedly mocks the institution of so-called genital primacy (Ethics 88).
And yet none of this talk of objects, lamellas, and libido speaks directly to Lacan’s assertion that there are two possible subject positions, masculine or feminine. Left only with a story of a-sexual asexuality, we might be halfway to a Lacanian narration of transgender ontology—not such a radical thought when we recall that Freud was the one who pointed out the constitutive bisexual perversion of the human unconscious. From whence, then, the feminine and masculine subject positions?
Sexuation
Similarly, Renata Salecl writes in her introduction to Sexuation that sexual difference “is first and above all the name for a certain fundamental deadlock inherent in the symbolic order” (2).
In fact, it is impossible to signify sex, and the phallus serves as “an empty signifier that stands for” that impossibility (Barnard, Introduction 10).
Feminine and masculine subjects, then, relate to that failure, or are that failure, differently,
As Lacan recounts, the formulas consist of the following: the right side of the formula, is the Feminine side which reads
There is not one x that is not subject to the phallic function
*
*
Not every x is subject to the phallic function
figures the “feminine” side and can be translated to state that there is not one x that is not subject to the phallic function and that not every x is subject to the phallic function.
The feminine subject finds “herself” “not-all” by way of negation insofar as “she” forms part of an open set, open and thereby infinite because it is not constituted by an exceptional figure. No shared trait—aside from the absence of any such shared trait—serves to define the set; no constitutive outside functions close her set. Exceptionally lacking exception, though, and being only loosely linked by virtue of an absence offers/burdens the feminine subject (with) a particular perspective on the phallic function and thus on what grounds the masculine subject, which Barnard describes as “a view to the contingency of the signifier of the Other in its anchoring function [. . .] [S]he ‘knows’ that the signifier of phallic power merely lends a certain mysterious presence to the Law that veils its real impotence” (“Tongues” 178). One of the logical consequences of such a position, of “being in the symbolic ‘without exception’” (178), is that she has a different relation than the masculine subject, not only to the symbolic but also to the lack in the Other.
The “anchoring function” lacking to the feminine subject is located on the “masculine” side of Lacan’s formula:
It is through the phallic function that man as whole acquires his inscription
* All x’s are (every x is) submitted to the phallic function
*
* There is at least one x which is not submitted to the phallic function.
*
This exception also immediately takes on a truly exceptional status, from the standpoint of the masculine subject who is established by it, for the exception proffers the outside that closes “his” set and the limit that grounds “his” being; it thereby proffers a sort of support not afforded the feminine subject.
One figure of this exception would be at of the mythical primal father, he who evades castration and thereby enjoys unlimited jouissance. In other words, the masculine subject is only “whole” or “all” as a result of the fact that he is permitted (permits himself?) the fantasy of one who escapes the very same set that grounds his being
… castration/sexual difference is something that fundamentally, if incompletely, makes up for the absence of the sexual relationship.
By this logic, the sexual positions borne of sexual difference figure as solutions, no doubt principally unsatisfying ones, for the loss of a sort of relation that was in fact never possible, a relation of One-ness or complementarity, or for the loss of that missing half that Plato tells us, somewhat cruelly, we once had.
Importantly, though, nothing in this account specifies that the lost/nonexistent sexual relation was a heterosexual one. As Tracy McNulty has noted, “If the ‘relation’ that is lost is really the relation to the One, to unity or wholeness, then this would be true regardless of sex or sexual ‘orientation’”