Schroeder, Jeanne L. The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.
The master’s and university’s discourses are masculine while the analyst’s and hysteric’s discourses are feminine. The masculine is the subject who is totally identified with the symbolic order of law, and the feminine is the subject who is not wholly so subject – who is to some extent excluded or alienated from the symbolic order.
“[T]here are no sexual relations.” Sexuality is an impossibility, a fundamental impasse that cannot be bridged in the symbolic order. The two sexes are not complements, like yin and yang, that can fit together to form a perfect whole. When combined, the sexes result not in a single whole, but a melange of fulsome overlaps and obscene gaps. This sounds depressing, but it has its positive side. If two people could really satisfy each other and join as one, they would lose their individuality and subjectivity. The individuation that remains despite our desire to merge allows us occasionally to achieve something much more valuable than any object of desire – love.
The critic, speaking the hysteric’s discourse, does not address the legal economist in his public persona as expert (S2). Rather she addresses the truth hidden below this pretense – power (S1). The legal economist, speaking the university discourse, does not address the subject subjected to law, but rather what he sees as the collective goals of society and the law. The hysteric cries, “Look what your law is doing to me!” The university replies, “The law has a purpose.” The university might be “correct” in his justification of the law in that societies do necessarily have collective purposes, positive laws are adopted instrumentally to achieve these purposes by affecting the behaviour – thereby restricting the freedom – of those subjected to the law, and this might conflict with the subjective desires of any specific subject. Nevertheless, the university’s reply is not an answer to the hysteric’s question arising out of the truth of her pain. It is equivalent to Ring Lardner’s immortal conversation ender, “Shut up,” he explained. It does not help her integrate within the symbolic order of law but further alienates her. 177
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Discourse of the Analyst
The goal of psychoanalysis, like speculative philosophy, is to help the subject actualize her freedom by writing her own ethical law. The analyst’s discourse addresses the barred subject and hystericizes her. It helps the analysand change from a masculine subject who believes he is completely bound by the symbolic order, to a feminine one who understands she partially escapes it. Analysis must then set the analysand free and allow her to speak. This creates the hysteric’s discourse. 106
If the master commands and university lectures, the analyst interrogates. Consequently, the analyst’s address consists largely of silence – through an absence of speech. The analysand speaks to fill in the gap represented by the analyst. When the analyst does speak, it is not in her own voice as master or teacher. She tries to articulate the analysand’s voice, helping him to articulate his desire – to dissolve the traumatic symptom lost in the real by integrating it into the symbolic.
The other addressed by the object of desire is the barred subject himself. The analyst “interrogates the subject in his or her division, precisely at those points where the split between consciousness and unconscious shows through.”
The truth hidden beneath the analyst is knowledge. Lacan calls the analyst “the subject supposed to know.” The analysand goes to the analyst because the analysand is a barred subject – he is traumatized, unhappy, and alienated. The analyst is the expert who is supposed to know what is wrong.
The knowledge that is the truth underlying the little a is neither savoir faire nor expertise. Rather, this hidden knowledge is the analysand’s own unconscious knowledge. The truth of the analysand’s desire is within himself. This is not to deny that the person who is a psychoanalyst also has savoir faire – she knows how to treat patients – and expertise – she is a highly educated professional. Nevertheless, these forms of knowledge are not the truth of analysis.
The result of analysis is the master signifier. But this time, it is not the master signifier imposed upon her by the Big Other (as in the master’s discourse) but his own “new master signifiers (S1), ultimate values, formulations of their identity or being.” 108
To hear the call of the hysteric, one must step out of the university discourse and back into the master’s discourse to which the hysteric discourse leads. To communicate with the hysteric, one must step out of the university’s discourse and forward into the analyst’s discourse. These two discourses [hysteric and university] are opposed to each other, in the way the two sexes are. … Communication between them must be mediated through the other two discourses. The idea that there can be a direct relationship between the two discourses is a fantasy in the technical sense of the term.
The master declares law, telling you what to do. The university justifies law, explaining why you should obey. The analyst interprets law, asking you what you want from it. The hysteric questions the law. “The hysterical subject is the subject whose very existence involves radical doubt and questioning, her entire being is sustained by the uncertainty as to what she is for the Other.” The hysteric’s question for the big Other is “What do you want from me?”
The other addressed in the hysteric’s discourse is the Big Other, what takes on the place of the master signifier. 149
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Discourse of the Hysteric
The hysteric can learn several things through her discourse. First, mundanely, she can learn what the Other wants from her – what she needs to do or say to fit better into the symbolic. It is, however, a fundamental Lacanian point that a perfect fit is never possible – every normal subject remains split and castrated. Consequently, and more critically, the hysteric can learn what is lacking in the symbolic – to identify its flaws and decide whether to cope or seek to change them.
This can lead to the final stage of knowledge – the knowledge that the Big Other does not exist. The reason the Big Other can never truly answer the hysteric`s questions; “What do you want?” is explained by its alternate version as the accusation, “You are wanting!” The Big Other – the symbolic—is not a pre-existing “thing.” It is a human creation, a work in process.
The subject learns, in effect, that only the subject herself can answer the question of how to follow her own desire and how to change the Big Other better to accomplish this. In this discourse, once again, there is no direct relationship, under the bar, between the subject’s desire as the discourse’s truth and subject’s knowledge that is the discourse’s product. This is because this knowledge is precisely that the Big Other does not hold the truth of the subject’s desire. It is the hysteric’s discourse that allows this indirect relationship to come about. This ultimate knowledge the subject seeks is the answer to the question, what is the ethical law? The answer was given by Kant: every subject must self-legislate her own law. 150
The Other is not merely incomplete, but necessarily so. This knowledge can lead to two results. The first id depression and impotence. The Lacanian feminine is the sadder but wiser sex. Why should the hysteric try, when the task of completing the Other is doomed to failure? How can the hysteric face the fact that she is partially responsible for the imperfection (and resulting violence and injustice) of the social order she cannot cure?
Alternately, this knowledge gives the hysteric the courage to go on. The feminine subject is not just sadder, but wiser. Once one rejects the impossible goal of making the Other perfect, the hysteric’s profession of building the Other becomes possible. The fact that the Other is not natural means that it is a work of art – an artefact. The fact that it is not complete means that it is a work in progress. The hysteric can express her creative freedom by furthering its progress. The hysteric can harbour the hope that she can at least partially expiate her guilt for participating in the injustice of the status quo. She knows that she cannot create perfect justice but she might be able to right specific wrongs. 151
In the hysteric’s discourse, as in “real life,” unrequited desire can in a snap of the fingers change to fury. By asking “What do you want?”, “What do you desire?” the hysteric comes to realize that the Big Other wants and desires. This means it must be wanting. The Big Other (the symbolic, the law) is not complete and totalizing as it, the masculine subject and the power discourses insist. In other words, first the hysteric addresses the Other because she lacks. The feminine hysteric learns that her love, the Big Other, does not exist. And she cannot forgive his betrayal.
Consequently, the hysteric’s question “What do you want? What do I lack?” becomes the accusation “You are wanting!” “How must I change to accommodate you?” is now “You must change to accommodate me!” The hysteric’s discourse is that of the true critique. It opens up, not revolution or the impossible search for perfection, but the possibility of imperfect reform. 154
Once the hysteric realizes not only that the Big Other as it (non)exists is not inevitable and understands her role in creating and sustaining that Big Other, she is in a position of challenging and seeking to change the Big Other … she cannot, of course, destroy the Big Other without destroying herself. Her subjectivity – her very ability to speak – depends on the existence of a symbolic of language, law, and sexuality. … Accordingly, the hysteric is not seeking to do away with the law, but to be let inside.
In Bracher’s words:
It is only with the discourse of the Analyst that the subject is in a position to assume its own alienation and desire and , on the basis of that assumption, separate from the given master signifiers and produce its own, new master signifiers – identity and values less antithetical to its fundamental fantasy and the desires arising from that fantasy. [Bracher, eds. Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject Structure and Society 1994]
Lacan once taunted the Parisian student radicals, who were acting as hysterics, “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.” He is correct.
Although the hysteric challenges the status quo of positive law, by establishing a new rule of law, she establishes a new master’s discourse. Legal practice is always conservative by definition because it cannot be anarchic. By Lacan’s terms, to address an issue within the framework of law is to accept law to some extent. 155
If psychoanalysis hystericizes the analysand, the hysteric must be given the opportunity to speak in her own voice. Consequently, once analysis is complete, it can only be given effect through the hysteric discourse.
Lacan admits that governing, teaching, and psychoanalyzing are impossible professions. The only discourse that Lacan does not identify as impossible is the hysteric’s. Unlike the master’s discourse that seeks pure power, the university’s discourse that seeks pure knowledge, and the analyst’s discourse that seeks pure desire, the hysteric understands that purity is impossible. She claims to be precisely what she is – castrated – or to put this within a feminine metaphor, impure.
The hysteric’s discourse is the discourse of possibility because it embraces imperfection. I stated that the representation of clients speaks the hysteric’s discourse. As such, legal practice is the one possible profession. It is possible precisely because its goals are always necessarily limited, its results always necessarily imperfect compromises. Insofar as it is ever successful, it is because it accepts some degree of failure as inevitable.
The fact that justice is always a work in progress is itself the possibility of freedom. If justice were ever achieved, the world would be inscribed within a perfect legal system with all cases within Hart’s core. All subjects would be “men” perfectly circumscribed within the symbolic order – Kant’s automatons. But Hegel and Lacan take Kant to his logical extreme and insist that freedom requires a moment of pure spontaneity unrestrained by all bounds. This is the radical negativity that Hegel believed constituted the heart and soul of personality. This is the feminine.