Category: sexual difference

fink

Lack or Loss of something is required to set the symbolic in motion.

The Phallus is the signifier of lack

A woman’s sexual identity can, in fact, involve many different possible combinations, for unlike masculine and feminine structure, which in Lacan’s view constitute an either/or, there being no middle ground between them, ego identification can include elements from many different persons, both male and female. In other words, the imaginary level of sexual identity can, in and of itself, be extremely self-contradictory.

The very existence of sexual identity (sexuation, to use Lacan’s term) at a level other than that of the ego, at the level of subjectivity, should dispel the mistaken notion so prevalent in the English-speaking world that a woman is not considered to be a subject at all in Lacanian theory.  Feminine structure means feminine subjectivity. Insofar as a woman forms a relationship with a man, she is likely to be reduced to an object —object (a)— in his fantasy; and insofar as she is viewed from the perspective of masculine culture, she is likely to be reduced to nothing more than a collection of male fantasy object dressed up in culturally stereotypical clothes: i(a), that is, an image contains yet disguises object (a).  That may very well imply a loss of subjectivity in the common, everyday sense of the word —”being in control of one’s life,” “being an agent to be reckoned with,” and so on— but it in no way implies a loss of subjectivity in the Lacanian sense of the term.  The very adoption of a position or stance with respect to (an experience of) jouissance involves and implies subjectivity.  Once adopted, a feminine subject will have come into being. The extent to which that particular subject subjectivizes her or his world is another question.

wright sexuation

Wright, Elizabeth. Lacan and Postfeminism. Cambridge: Totem Books, 2000.

The logic of the sexualtion formulae produces two sets of speaking beings not in a complementary relation to each other. Crucially, the formulae do not plot which sexual position a subject may take up — they are not hetero-sexuation formulae.

What they reveal are the historical limits of the possibility of change. They are nothing to do with a particular subject’s object-choice, which can go across biology. But however variable object-choice may be, society will still demand a binary of some kind, whatever the biology of human beings might become in the far-flung future. There will still have to be the equivalent of a ‘castration’, without which the entry into language would be foreclosed.

For Lacan, these formulae are concerned with how a speaking being experiences sexuality on the level of the psyche. They have nothing to do with biological sex, neither with the love of a man for a woman, nor that of a man for a man, nor that of a woman for a woman. This implies that a biological male can inscribe himself on the female side and biological female on the male side. Each speaking being can choose to inscribe itself on either side, although this will be a ‘forced’ choice, imposed by the parameters of the history of the subject’s unconscious (31-32).

sexuation female existential

Female Existential:
‘there is no entity x that says “no” to the phallic function’.

notxphallic

There is not any that is not phallic jouissance, the emphasis going on the first “is.” All the jouissances that do exist are phallic (in order to exist, according to Lacan, something must be articulable within our signifying system determined by the phallic signifier); but that does not mean there cannot be some jouissances that are not phallic. It is just that they do no exist; instead, they ex-sist. The Other jouissance can only ex-sist, it cannot exist, for to exist it would have to be spoken, articulated, symbolized.

(Fink, 2004, 161)

sexuation male existential

——Male Existential:
‘There is an entity x that says “no” to the phallic function.’

onexnot

Nevertheless, there is the belief in another jouissance, in a jouissance that could never come up short.

(Fink, Lacan to the Letter. 2004, 160)

Does the primal father exist in the usual sense? No, he ex-sists: the phallic function is not simply negated in some mild sense in his case; it is foreclosed (Lacan indicates that the bar of negation over the quantifer stands for discordance, whereas the bar of negation over the phallic function stands for foreclosure), and forclosure implies the utter and complete exclusion of something form the symbolic register. As it is only that which is not foreclosed from the symbolic order that can be said to exist, existence going hand in hand with language.

The primal father —implying such a foreclosure— must ex-sist, standing outside of symbolic castration.  He can be said to ex-sist, because, like object (a), the primal father can be written: ∃x Φx

Now the mythical father of the primal horde is said NOT to have succumbed to castration, and what is symbolic castration but a limit or limitation? He thus knows no limits. The primal father lumps all women into the same category: accessible.  The set of ALL women exists for him and for him alone.  His mother and sisters are just as much fair game as are his neighbors and second cousins.

The effect of castration (the incest taboo, in this case) is to divide that mythical set into at least two categories: accessible and inaccessible. Castration brings about an exclusion: mom and sis are off-limits (110).

… a man could only really jouir d’une femme from the position of noncastration … to get off on a woman, to really enjoy her, to take full advantage of her, not from something one imagines that one’s pleasure really comes fro her, not from something one imagines her to be, wants her to be, fools oneself into believing she is or has …

Only the primal father can really get off on women themselves. Ordinary masculine mortals must resign themselves to getting off on their partner object (a). Thus only the mythical primal father can have a true sexual relationship WITH a woman. To him there is such a thing as a sexual relationship. Every other man has a “relationship” with object (a) —to wit, fantasy— not with a woman per se.

The fact that every single man is nevertheless defined by both formulas —one stipulating that is is altogether castrated and the other that some instance negates or refuses castration— shows that incestuous wishes live on indefinitely in the unconscious.  Every man, despite castration (that splitting up of the category of women into two distinct groups), continues to have incestuous dreams in which he grants himself the privileges of the imagined pleasure-finding father who knows no bounds (111).

lacan’s symbolic logic of sexuation

Male ………………. Female

∃x : ‘There is at least one x.’
__
∃x : ‘There is not a single x which …’

Φx : ‘x is subject to the phallic function.’
__
Φx : ‘x is not subject to the phallic function’

∀x : ‘ All x‘s’
__
∀x : ‘Not all x‘s.’

x : jouissance
a : The object (a), Desire’s cause remains beyond signification, unsignifiable. Signifies the Other’s desire insofar as it serves as cause of the subject’s desire; but object (a), considered to play a role “outside of theory,” that is, as REAL, does not signify anything: it IS the Other’s desire, it is desirousness as REAL, not signified.

Φ : The phallic function: the function that institutes lack, that is, the alienating function of language.  The phallic function plays a crucial role in the definition of masculine and feminine structure, for the latter are defined differently in terms of that loss, that lack instituted by alienation, by the splitting brought on by our use of —or rather use by— language (TLS Fink 103).  The phallus is the signifier of lack. The phallus is never anything but a signfier, it is the signifier of desire.  Insofar as desire is always correlated with lack, the phallus is THE signifier of lack.

La: Indicates Woman‘ who does not fall into a set, as she is not completely defined by the phallic function.  “Woman does not exist”: there is no signifier for, or essence of, Woman as such. Woman can thus only be written under erasure: Woman.

-image deleted- signifier of the barred Other, feminine jouissance, Other jouissance (TLS 115).

***********

It is precisely because masculinity and femininity represent two non-complementary structures, defined by different relationships to the Other, that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship. What we do in any relationship is either try to turn the other into what we think we desire or turn ourselves into that which we think the other desires, but this can never exactly map onto the other’s desire. In other words, the ‘major problem of male and female subjects is that they do not relate to what their partners relate to in them’ (citing Salecl 2002:93, in Homer 106). In a sense, we always miss what we aim at in the other and our desire remains unsatisfied. It is this very asymmetry of masculinity and femininity in relation to the phallus and the objet a that means that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship (Homer 106).

copjec ethics of psychoanalysis

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

44:”Do not give way on your desire.”  … In short the ethics of psychoanalysis filiates itself with Kant’s argument that ethical progress has nothing to do with that form of progress promoted by modern industry, or the “service of good,” but is rather a matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself.

GAP BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL AND SPECIES: Freud argues that this gap can never be reabsorbed; moreover, it is the very maintenance of this gap that permits the individual subject from being annihilated by the history she inherits.

46: Creon is driven by his superego, which is that psychic agency which fosters in the subject a distaste for mundane, compromised pleasures and maintains us in a state of dissatisfaction.  Creon’s fixation on the lost object causes him to be relatively indfferent to all others available to him. He remains glued to an ideal he will never attain, since it is derived from his nostalgia for something he never possessed.

47: When she covers the exposed body of her brother, Antigone raises herself out of the conditions of naked existence to which Creon remains bound.

lloyd melancholia

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

Mourning: takes place when an object (such as a loved one, an ideal or a country) is lost. In such cases, the libido (mental energy) that was once invested in that object gradually detaches from it and is cathected onto (invested in) another object. The subject thus comes to terms with its loss and is able to form a new emotional attachment —to fall in love for instance. At this point, ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ and the work of mourning is completed.

Melancholia: The individual in this case is unable to get over its loss in the usual way. Instead it incorporates the lost object into its ego. It identifies with it, taking on certain of its characteristics. As a consequence, ‘a new structure of identity’ is created in which certain qualities of the lost other are permanently internalized in the ego. Diana Fuss captures this process nicely when she notes that ‘by incorporating, the spectral remains of the dearly departed love-object, the subject vampiristically comes to life’. Where mourning is the ‘normal’ reaction to loss, melancholia is a pathological response (since the melancholic subject is unable to accept its loss).

“the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and … it contains the history of those object-choices.” To rephrase, the ego is formed melancholically. It is an effect of its identifications. It is this idea that Butler takes over and applies to the question of gender identity.

When Butler talks about the gender identity being structured melancholically she writes that ‘the process of internalizing and sustaining lost loves is crucial to the formation of the ego “and its object-choice”‘ (Gender T. 74 cited in Lloyd 84). It is not only the ego that is formed melancholically, it is also the subject’s sexual orientation — their object choice. That is, whether they choose an object (person) of the opposite sex to or of the same sex as themselves.

According to Butler, when the child reaches the Oedipal phase, they have already been ‘subjected to prohibitions which “dispose” them in distinct sexual directions’ (GT 82, Lloyd 84). They have already acquired heterosexual desires, albeit incestuous ones.

The fact that at the resolution of the Oedipal phase the boy identifies with his father, following the logic of melancholia, must mean that he has lost his father as an object of desire and has not been able to let go of —or grieve— that loss. Ego formation, after all, requires the internalization of —or identification with— the lost object. Similarly the fact that the girl identifies ultimately with her mother must again mean that she has lost her as a love object and has been unable to grieve that loss.

In both cases the lost desire for the parent of the same sex is installed melancholically in the ego. Heterosexual desire is bought at the price of denying —or, in psychoanalytic language, disavowing or foreclosing (what we might think of as negating or repressing)— prior homosexual desire. Heterosexuality thus has a melancholic structure. (85)

When Freud tells the story of the Oedipus complex he narrates it in terms of the taboo against incest, a taboo which he, like Lévi-Strauss … saw as foundational to culture and society. When Butler re-tells the story, she does so in order to uncover what is hidden in Freud’s narrative: that the Oedipus complex relies upon a prior taboo against homosexuality.

The psychoanalytic story of desire, as told by Freud, is thus incomplete: it does not, perhaps cannot, tell of the loss of same-sex desire that exists prior to the Oedipal scene where the incestuous heterosexual love object is renounced and where the subject is initiated into both their sexual identity and the moral order (85).

lloyd oedipal

Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.

According to Lévi-Strauss there is a universal law that regulates the exchange of women in all kinship systems: this is the incest taboo, which ensures that women are exchanged between clans of men not related by blood. The incest taboo is crucial in two ways

1. it generates a non-incestuous heterosexuality

2. the taboo represents the crucial step in the transition from nature to culture. It inaugurates society. … the taboo leads to compulsory heterosexuality. How?

It divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners and it presupposes a prior less articulate taboo on homosexuality. Incest taboo = invariant transcultural symbolic law

Because Rubin believes all humans are sexually polymorphous, she adheres to an idea of ‘sexuality “before the law”‘ rather than as Butler would have it, sexuality as an effect of the law (81).

… it is clear that much of the conceptual apparatus Butler deploys in her own analysis of Lévi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan is borrowed from Rubin’s earlier text: her assumption of a prior prohibition on homosexuality, an understanding of heterosexuality as compulsory and a concern with the intractability of symbolic law (81).

In Freud’s estimation, all infants experience incestuous desires for their parents. How these desires are resolved determines not only the subject’s future sexual orientation but also how its ego and superego (conscience) develop.

Key to Freud’s account, according to Butler, is the idea of primary bisexuality. Freud assumes, that is, that all babies are born with both feminine and masculine dispositions… A masculine disposition, he suggests, is expressed in the child’s desire for its mother, while a feminine disposition is expressed in the child’s desire for its father. The sex of the child in question is irrelevant.

For Butler this can mean only one thing. Freud understands primary bisexuality heteronormatively: as ‘the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche’ (Butler Gender Trouble 77 cited in Lloyd 83).

Why is Freud unable to imagine the possibility of pre-oedipal homosexuality? Butler’s supposition (echoing Rubin) is that the reason for this is that the Oedipus complex, and thus Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual development, presumes a prior prohibition on homosexuality.

In order to expose this prior prohibition, Butler set about demonstrating that far from masculinity and femininity being dispositions that naturally inhere in persons, they are, in fact, effects of identification.

Identification refers to the process whereby the individual acquires its identity, or aspects thereof, from someone (or something) else. One of the ways in which this occurs is through … introjection.

Introjection: is when the subject takes into its ego —into him or herself— objects from the outside world in order to preserve them. Introjection is a response to loss.

colebrook on subject

Colebrook, Claire. “Feminism and Autonomy: The Crisis of the Self-Authoring Subject.” Body and Society, 1997. Vol. 3(2): 21-41.

While the failure of autonomy in Romanticism took many forms, the short-circuiting of Enlightenment self-legitimation was always marked by the return of a repressed exteriority; the intrusion of Nature, others, the past, memory, spirit, divinity or embodiment all represented the subject’s inability to exhaustively account for its own being. … Freud’s theory of the death drive, in which all difference is overcome in a return to a state of quiescence, can be read as the epitome of this strain in Romanticism, in whch the desire to overcome all exteriority or otherness results in the self’s extinction. … Against this Romantic desire for self-authorship (and its lamented failure), Shelley’s novel, and the later interventions of Emannuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray, argue that it is separation, belatedness and facticity of one’s being which constitute ethics (23).

Autonomy in Kant

Because the finate self can only experience the phenomenal, or apparent, world there can be no experiencable ground for ethics.

Reason cannot know any foundation which lies outside its phenomenal finitude. The attempt to posit such a foundation (such as the Platonic Idea of the good) can only lead reason astray, for such a foundation could, in essence, never be known by experience. … Reason can only know that which is given to experience, and experience offers not ethical laws. … reson cannot provide any normative or concrete ethical goals … Reason is regulative.

Deleuze and Irigaray

What Irigaray’s reading of the philosophical tradition reveals is that the ideal of rational autonomy is not a general metaphysical premise but the way of being a specifically embodied subject.

thiem desire foreclosure repression

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

[D]esires are formed insofar as they cannot simply take any object; rather object choices take place only in relation to norms (43).

Despite being inevitable, the loss occasioned by foreclosure is never prior to the social but occurs through the horizon of and in relation to social norms. These can and must be interrogated, criticized, and possibly reworked and changed (45). The ego-ideal controls the desires of the ego, demands the repression of certain desires, and becomes the agency of producing and preserving precisely the desires it seeks to regulate.

It is not possible to seek recourse to discovering more original versions of desire that might precede social regulation.  Further, matters become complicated with regard to attempts to rework patterns of social regulation.

Critique cannot mean simply to impart knowledge and give reasons about what is repressive, as if this means that we could then simply get rid of these conditions. Instead, critique comes to be bound to an archaeology of passionate attachments, and such an archaeology means an unbecoming practice of undoing the very subject and its passionate investments in that which it is opposed.  Such an archaeology will constantly run into its own limits, because these attachments are not transparent and hence readily avowable (46).

thiem materiality

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

There is usually not merely one single framework that renders experiences intelligible; instead, there are various frameworks that compete with and among each other. Some are culturally prevalent and dominant; others are relegated to the margins. Yet such frameworks, as ways of making sense of the world, others, and oneself, are not unchangeably closed, fully consistent worldviews in themselves within which one is immersed and to which one is unalterably confined.

Consequently, experiences of pain or pleasure can bring the prevailing modes and frameworks of intelligibility into crisis and open them up for critical questioning and reworking. One runs in many ways up against and thus in a way experiences the limits of one’s hermeneutical framework which is one’s epistemological field. Since one operates from within that field, however, one is not in a position to look upon the field as a whole and so have reflective access to the field’s topography.

🙂 She loses me here: The limits are experienced, but they resist total sublation into reflective knowledge. This resistance depends on the fact that every paradigm works according to a certain foreclosure that occasions the preservation and return of that which cannot be signified within the given order of being. (25) 🙂 We experience the limits but these limits resist “sublation” into something she calls ‘reflective knowledge’