Dyess, Cynthia and Tim Dean, “Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10:5 (2000): 735 – 56. Web. Oct 5, 2009.
So when Lacan points out that “the signifier can’t signify itself,” he is drawing our attention not only to what has yet to be signified, but more fundamentally to the negative effects of the real, to what is outside the symbolic. Furthermore, once we agree with Lacan that the formal properties of discourse are determined by factors outside our grasp, we can consider a dimension of subjectivity that cannot be placed in the harness of language, that is not manipulable in rhetorical terms. … Lacan’s concept of the real is intended to designate just this impossibility, the internal fissure or constraint that we are constitutively unable to grasp. (743).
Like Butler, Copjec is also aware of gender’s radical contingency, but whereas for Butler this is an effect of its social construction, for Copjec it is an effect of its location in the real. Although Butler leaves herself open to the charge of voluntarism, the idea that gender can be performed at will, Copjec emphasizes that, by virtue of its position in the Lacanian real, gender is no more subject to our manipulation than is the unconscious itself.
Another way of putting this is to say that, at the most basic level, Butler’s account of gender doesn’t leave room for the unconscious. Butler’s theory encourages us to rethink gender in terms of its possibilities; Copjec responds by pointing to a fundamental impossibility that inheres to gender. This doesn’t mean that Copjec is defeatist, but rather that she is familiar with the limit conditions imposed upon us by the unconscious and believes that a psychoanalytic theory of gender should account for these (745-6).
However, by locating gender in the real, Copjec is insisting that sexual difference resists meaning, rather than gives rise to competing meanings. …
For Butler … there is no viable distinction between the concept or discourse of gender and gender itself. On this point, Copjec lays bare the core difficulty in Butler’s argument. Referring to Butler’s conflation of concept and thing, Copjec (1994) wrote, “To speak of the deconstruction of sex makes about as much sense as speaking about foreclosing a door; action and object do not belong to the same discursive space”(p. 210). And this is precisely the position Butler occupies when, after noting that signification is always in process, she assumes that there is no stability of gender.
Deconstruction applies only to discourse, or in this case to the concept of gender. Although agreeing with Butler that the conceptual dimension of gender (i.e., its meaning) is always unstable, Copjec aims to argue further. Indeed, Copjec allows us to take the desubstantialization of gender one radical step further by describing how gender’s meaning is necessarily incomplete, not because of its unstable linguistic properties, but rather because it involves an inherent impossibility that arises as a consequence of its nonlinguistic dimension (746).
Copjec’s interpretation of the impossibility that Lacan presents us with nonetheless encourages us to think about the nonsymbolic, nonimaginary aspect of gender—in other words, she helps us to think gender in the real. Copjec’s use of Lacan’s sexuation graphs has some intuitive appeal. In talking about the limits of reason and about the real as a limit internal to language, Copjec shifts our attention away from what is imposed from the outside, whether it be the effects of an oppressive social regime, on one hand, or of brute materiality, on the other. Copjec is interested less in the external limits proffered by social constructivism or biological determinism than in a limit internal to language itself — the Lacanian real and the impasse in meaning that it creates. Being situated in the real, which is itself a negative instance, gender has no positive content. In this schema, gender is not an incomplete entity, but a totally empty one. Facing off with Butler, who by joining gender and signification makes gender something which communicates itself to others, Copjec (1994) argued:
When, on the contrary, sex is disjoined from the signifier, it becomes that which does not communicate itself, that which marks the subject as unknowable. To say that the subject is sexed is to say that it is no longer possible to have any knowledge of him or her. Sex serves no other function than to limit reason, to remove the subject from the realm of possible experience or pure understanding. This is the meaning, when all is said and done, of Lacan’s notorious assertion that “there is no sexual relation”: sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation, to communication [p. 207].
Copjec is taking us much further than perhaps Lacan himself intended. It’s not merely that “there is no relation” (i.e., no symmetrical or complementary relation between men and women), but that sexual difference itself has no signifier, that it is not fully representable. Imaginary constructions of the difference between the sexes are fantasies—ways in which we provide ourselves with answers to impossible questions. In aligning sexual difference with the structural incompleteness of language—the impossibility of articulating this difference — Copjec puts her finger on its traumatic dimension, and this component of experience is something for which deconstruction has no vocabulary. According to Copjec, this is fundamentally what sexual difference is—a difference that cannot be determined. From this perspective, essentialism and social constructivism are efforts to negate this impossibility, this impasse of reason.