Vicki Kirby. JB: Live Theory. Continuum 2006.
But why should libidinal transfer be described in terms of paternity? Through a sliding metonymy of references that presumes the identities it is trying to explain, Freud conflates the generative power of the phallus with the male organ. As we have seen, the phallus is more accurately understood as a productive process of delineation through which entities/body parts emerge into identifiable significance. When this transformative dynamism is arrested and likened to a thing-like property however, man appears to have the phallus, just as woman appears to be this erotic and valued object; a commodity possessed or exchanged between men. This sexualized matrix of oppositional functions and subject positions organizes other divisions, whereby woman becomes a being of passivity to man’s activity, a vacuous instrument for his agency and pleasure, a vulnerable body that requires protection from his invulnerable one, a dumb body that depends on the superiority of his more evolved reasoning capacities. Because the phallus (woman) is figured as an attachment, a tool to be used and manipulated, this heterosexual economy of signification understands man as an incorporated being: He may have a body and certainly desires it, yet he is not himself, body. Despite its cartoon logic, these ‘natural’ associations exert an insidious gravitational pull on the way we conceptualize sexual identity as well as what constitutes a legitimate mode of attachment and exchange/sexual intercourse (53-4).
However Butler finds something disturbing in the way Lacan’s argument seems to have it both ways. He explains the organizational logic of the Symbolic order, those cultural and linguistic structures into with the child is interpellated, as a given system of binary identifications whose positions are determined by a transcendental signifier —the phallus. And yet he also insists (and we are reminded here of Lévi-Strauss and the more general cliams of structuralism) that the Symbolic order exceeds specific cultural or social ascriptions for its is the universal principle of differentiation that motors all languages. For this reason, Lacan will echo Freud by insisting that the phallus should not be confused with the penis, or indeed with any organ or particualr imaginary effect. But what can be done if we accept this thesis? As Butler’s critical energies are focused on the need to contest political inequities, her concern is that Lacan’s ‘explanation’ has the performative consequence of investing the penis (and masculinity) with the symbolic privilege accorded the phallus, and in a way that places the male organ’s political significance beyond question (58).