of Experience
Introduction
B
efore the child knows sexual difference as the anatomical difference between the sexes, s/he knows or recognises the lack in the mother's desire for something that the father is perceived as having. The anatomical discovery of the difference between the sexes ("Show me yours and I will show you mine") will be placed within this symbolic context. Thus, more than a penis and before it is a penis the phallus is a signifier of a lack within the mother's desire.Within Lacanian theory, the symbolic and imaginary significance of the phallus have ascendancy over its anatomical function.
On the one hand, it behooves the child to occupy the place of the object of the mother's desire. A good-enough mother is one who loves or desires her child in a very personal way. On the other hand, if the mother does not desire anybody else other than the child, the desire for the child also becomes problematic for the child.
Unfortunately the problem does not end when the mother desires the father, because it is precisely this desire that triggers sexual difference and the perception of the mother, and femininity, therefore, as lacking something that the father is perceived as having.
It is the defence against this perceived lack and the struggle to have what the father is perceived as having that contributes to the rejec-tion of femininity by both sexes. Feminine simulacrum and the patriarchal phallic parade both represent hysterical and organised attempts within h u m a n culture to defend against what is perceived
48
as a negative lack within the mother. Within the Imaginary, and particularly in consumer-oriented capitalist societies, the ego does not realise the constructive function of the lack within desire and the being of the subject. Within society people think that the rejection of femininity is solely based upon the low status of women within the culture. In actuality, and according to Freudian and Lacanian theory, the low status is due to both the phallic defence against the lack (which debases women and makes women identify with masculine attributes) and the misapprehension of the lack as having a low and expendable status.
If it is true, as Lacan says, that it is the subjects relationship to the phallus that determines sexual position, then it is also true that within Lacanian theory the significance of the presence and absence of the phallus is a multi-layered dialectic across the three registers of experience. The phallus is the signifier of the desire of the Other, of what the mother desires from the father.
For Lacan, the phallic function is equivalent to the function of castration defined as a symbolic lack of an imaginary object. Thus, the imaginary phallus is the contextual object that in the Oedipal crucible is construed as what the father has which the mother wants.
The imaginary phallus, as such, does not exist and castration, as a symbolic act, bears not on the penis as a real organ but on the imaginary phallus. The symbolic phallus is a signifier (of a lack) of a missing or non-existent imaginary phallus.
For Lacan, symbolic castration refers more to a fact of the structure rather than to a biological fact or to an imaginary or traumatic threat.
From a Lacanian perspective, the old interpretation of castration, psychoanalytic or otherwise, a$ representing the biological or constitutional inferiority of women appears as a dated fiction or imaginary construction. The concept of castration is not the bad thing that in the West we have come to associate with a rejection of femininity. The concept of castration as a biological form of inferiority mimics the view of femininity as the second or "weak sex" that prevails within what Lacan called the masters discourse. Lacan was able to avoid the imaginary interpretation of the complex by theorising the three registers and giving Freud's concept its specific weight and symbolic significance.
Since ultimately the imaginary phallus that precipitates the difference of the sexes is a missing or castrated symbolic phallus, the
5 0 LACANIAN THEORY
difference between the sexes cannot be explained by a simple having of the phallus for masculinity and a not-having the phallus for femininity, as was the case with regards to the penis within Freudian theory. According to Lacan, the only signifier of sex is masculine and the signifier of masculine sex is the signifier of a lack. From this perspective, and as Pickmann (2001) has pointed out, it is men that lack and/or are castrated. Here Lacanian theory results in an exact inversion of the Freudian view. In this regard, Lacanian theory can be interpreted as liberating women from Freudian concepts. For Lacan, castration is on the male side, it is normal and normalising as a male norm. Women instead have more degrees of freedom in their relationship to castration. In seminar XX, Lacan argues that a woman is not-all under the phallic function or the law of castration.
A woman is not all in the phallic function but, on the other hand, woman as the not-all does not constitute a negation of castration either.
Lacan proposes that according to a dissymmetry in the signifier both the boy and the girl identify with the phallus as the signifier of the desire of the mother. But how can the phallus alone generate sexual difference if the imaginary phallus is a construction and does not ultimately exist, and the symbolic phallus is the signifier of a lack and both sexes as speaking beings are lacking beings? I argue that both having and not having the phallus occurs for both sexes, but in a different order and across different registers of experience.
Sexual difference revolves around the imaginary and symbolic phallus and the phallus has no corresponding feminine signifier. In relationship to the father the girl and the boy will experience both the presence and an absence of a signifier for sexual difference. The boy will receive a signifier for masculinity from the father as both an imaginary object and a restrictive symbolic or missing phallus/signifier. The girl in turn will not receive a signifier for femininity and this lack will be experienced as imaginary castration but will also anchor her within the Symbolic and give her several degrees of freedom within the same.
Within symbolic castration and the symbolic logic of sexuation, femininity is not lacking in the same way as masculinity because the All in the logic of sexuation represents castration and not its absence, and women are not-all within castration. In my opinion, the entire problem depends on how the object of having or not having is
conceived (a penis or an imaginary and symbolic phallus) and according to what logic and register are having and not having articulated. Having and not having can be articulated according to both binary/formal and dialectical logic. Within imaginary formal logic, masculinity has the phallus and femininity does not, but according to dialectical logic and within the symbolic, the phallus cannot be negated because although having can represent not having not having is also a form of having. Thus I argue that, strictly speaking, the logic of castration is dialectical, not binary or formal.
According to dialectical logic, both sexes experience having and not having in a different mode. Within femininity, not having represents the lack of a fixed signifier for what they have or not have of the phallus; within masculinity, not having represents having the signifier of a lack. In this way, not having is not the whole story for a woman because she does not not have an Other puissance that escapes signification. As I will later argue, feminine jouissance, which Lacan distinguished from phallic jouissance, is one of the manifesta-tions of the third jouissance that I call the Other jouissance which is also differentiated from the jouissance of the Other in relationship to the mother. Having a lack of h. signifier is also a presence although this does not mean that she has the phallus in the Real.
In this sense, neither having nor not having according to formal logic may apply to the logic of femininity. In addition, in my opinion, only a negative dialectic of emptiness can account for a not having which is also having and for a having that does not produce a fixed positive or affirmative synthetic idea/ideal/signifier for femininity.
On the feminine side of sexuation, women in general do not have the phallus but a particular woman is not only about not-having.
However, language does not have a single or fixed signifier for what a woman has of the phallus. Women do not have it but a woman does not not have it either. This, I argue, is the negative dialectic of the not-all.
On the masculine side of Lacan's (1972) graph of sexuation (shown later on in this chapter), the primal father has it, and men do not.
Although all men are castrated, the primal father is not. Therefore, according to the logic of sexuation, it can be argued that men are not without a relationship to the primal father and the imaginary phallus as the imaginary and phantasised object of a symbolic lack of the mother. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that at least in phantasy
52 LA.CANIAN THEORY
men may have something more of the phallus than simply the signifier of a lack of a phallus.
Another way of putting it is that the phallus is a signifier of two different things: 1. a lack in.the Other or in the symbolic subject of the enunciation and; 2. of the mastery, lordship, and sufficiency of the imaginary enunciating ego. The symbolic function of castration also has. effects on sexual difference within the dimension of the Imaginary. Within the Imaginary men will defend against castration by affirming and parading their ownership of the imaginary phallus and women will experience themselves deprived of a privileged imaginary object that does not exist. Symbolic or logical sexual difference as the actual bedrock of castration is only revealed within an analytical/theoretical function. For most human beings who are not analytical subjects, sexual difference is an experience that takes place at the level of the Imaginary. The meaning of having or not having the phallus is produced by dialectic between the Imaginary and the Symbolic.
The symbolic phallus as the signifier of a lack appears within the imaginary register as a dialectic between having and not having the imaginary phallus. To realise this structural fact all one has to do is go to a policemen or masculine sports team locker room to discover the different signifiers that men use to represent masculine sex within the Imaginary. In some ways, the common sign for masculine sex (cT) could be a sufficient example of imaginary masculinity as a form of identification with the erect penis. Following Lacan's (1962-1963) lead in the seminar on anxiety, where he speaks of 9 in relationship to - 9 , 1 use the 9 as a symbol of imaginary masculinity.
Similarly, the locker room jokes about the phallus always address not only who has it, or who has a definite big one in the Imaginary, but also who does not and/or has a small one in the Symbolic.
Moreover, it is often women who may feel most sexually attracted to the imaginary presentations of masculinity. Even a feminist such as Germaine Greer has been reported to prefer sex with truck drivers despite her ideological and political rejection of masculine versions of sexism. In contrast to the symbolic phallus, the imaginary phallus is the unbarred phallus that the pre-Oedipal mother is presumed to have rather than lack. Moreover, if the mother lacks the imaginary phallus then it is the unbarred masculine represented by the living v primal imaginary father who has the phallus, and all women for that
matter, rather than the castrated and dead symbolic father. Thus, the mother herself may be placed within the position of the living mythical primal father. The mother has the imaginary phallus via her own father or son and instead of her husband or the father of her son. In the case of an educated woman having sex with a truck driver, despite the appearance of equality it becomes acceptable for the working class man to have the imaginary phallus because she, the woman, is in the place of the mother who has the phallus represented by her education or intelligence. Only with the death and castration of the omnipotent primal father can the father begin to appear within its proper symbolic dimension.
I argue that it is in the Imaginary and not within anatomical reality that women do not have the phallus, but also that within the Symbolic the not having the phallus in the Imaginary signifies that they are not all within symbolic castration. Conversely, masculinity has the phallus in the Imaginary and not within anatomical reality.
Within the Symbolic, masculinity only has a missing phallus or the signifier of a lack. Femininity does not have the phallus in the Imaginary and masculinity does not have it in the Symbolic.
Having and not having the phallus is dialectically articulated between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, masculinity and femininity.
Accordingly, this chapter will examine sexual difference and the permutations of having and not having the phallus across the three registers according to the logic of the following grid:
Femininity Masculinity Imaginary 3 x O x (plural) 3 x O x (singular)
Absence of Phallus -cp
Presence of . Phallus S(<p) Symbolic Vx<S>X (singular) Vx<S>x (plural)
Not Having is Having ©
Having is Not Having S(<£>) Real Lack of a Signifier Signifier of a Lack
Not Without Not Having
$ ( 0 ) (plural)
Not Without Having S ( 0 ) (singular)
Sexual Differences in the Imaginary and Symbolic
Lacan has been criticised for an ambiguous going back and forth between the anatomical reference to the penis and the supposedly
5 4 LACANIAN THEORY
symbolic perspective on the phallus that he theorises (Macey; Grosz).
In other words, it is said that despite assertions to the contrary (Mitchell and Rose), Lacan never fully divests himself of Freud's biological and anatomical references with regard to sexual difference, It is my contention that the ambiguity associated with the concept of the phallus needs to be understood as a dynamic interaction not between the biological and the cultural, but between the Imaginary and Symbolic dimensions of sexual difference. Anglo-American gender theory distinguishes between biological sex and cultural gender, but does not recognise how sexual orientation and sexual/
gender identity within psychoanalysis are constructed according to the psychical dimensions of the Imaginary and the Symbolic.
The psychical proper, as the symbolic field of the unconscious, does not fall entirely either on the side of biology or on the side of the cultural environment; rather it interacts with both. The psychical dimension illustrates not only the mind as a cultural construction but culture itself as a psychical construction. Biological laws do not organise culture, but neither is culture identical to our conscious ideological beliefs and predilections regarding the nature of gender.
Sex is organised according to unconscious symbolic laws that determine the nature and experience of the sexual environment as perceived through our senses. The biology of the libido and of the organism appears within the visual field (i.e. anatomical forms) as organised by symbolic laws. As aforementioned, the empirical reference to the anatomical distinction is interpreted according to the presence or absence of an imaginary object (i.e. the imaginary phallus as the signifier of the mother's desire).
Biological reality for Lacan is mediated by both Imaginary and Symbolic registers. Real objects are not "objective objects" but rather real images organised by naming in language. For Lacan, reality has a fictional or illusory quality. Here, he differs from Freud, who, in classical Western fashion, clearly distinguished between fantasy and reality. Visual perception and the Imaginary lead us to misrecognise what is given by the symbolic structure for something that exists out there as a reality object.
The meanings of the penis/testicles and the vagina/clitoris (vulva) as objects of perception, and not of the senses, are dialectically con-structed between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. In the imaginary visual field, the anatomical penis of the boy represents the potential
presence of the paternal imaginary phallus as the imaginary object of the mother's desire. On the other hand, the small detumescent penis of a boy, or of any man for that matter, can also represent the absence of an erect full-size penis as the prototype for the imaginary phallus. Conversely, in the case of a girl, the anatomical vagina represents the absence of the phallus or the lack in the mother's desire. In these examples, imaginary masculinity and the imaginary father appear as a deceiving semblance of having something that femininity and the mother do not.
However, since even in heterosexuality the psychical construction of sex (as subject or object) is an independent variable with respect to biological/anatomical distinctions between the sexes, this sets the stage for increasing degrees of separation and independence between psychical (Imaginary/Symbolic) and biological sex. In this regard, like in Lacan's graph of sexuation, either male or female as biological specimens can enter the masculine or feminine side of the graph/grid. Thus when psychoanalysis speaks of sex, the reference is to psychically constructed sex rather than biological sex, and the former may or may not accord with the latter. Because of this, psychical sexuality, or the sexuation paradigm, can never be reduced to a latent form of heterosexism (a concern raised by Penney).
In addition, because psychical sexuality is independent from biological sex, it has important consequences for the psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality and transsexuality as distinguished from the perverse structure. In the case of heterosexuality, the biological male would enter psychical masculinity and the female psychical femininity. In the example of homosexuality, the biological male would enter psychical femininity and the female, psychical mascu-linity. Moreover, a biological male could also enter psychical masculinity but then in sex desire femininity in a biological male rather than a female. In the same way, a biological female can enter psychical femininity but then in sex prefer psychical masculinity in a female rather than a male. Homosexuality shows how sexual rela-tions between the psychical dimensions of the sexes can occur independently of the sexual characteristics given by biology. Finally, the permutations of biological and psychical sex can reach increasing levels of complexity as seen in cases of transsexuality. For example, a biological male could want to change his anatomical sex to that of a biological female either to occupy a feminine psychical position
5 6 LACANIAN THEORY
vis-a-vis another biological and psychical male or to occupy a feminine psychical position vis-a-vis a biological female who is a psychical man or to occupy himself a masculine psychical position but as a biological female rather than as a biological male.
But if it is not only biology or social rules that compel male or
But if it is not only biology or social rules that compel male or