NLS MESSAGER 665
VIII NLS CONGRESS - TOWARDS GENEVA 4
TOWARDS GENEVA 4
Semblants and Sinthome in Freud's 'Three Lines of Development'
Adrian Price
The title for the next NLS Study Days, Daughter, Mother, Woman in the Twenty-first Century, offers a way of reading the theme of the WAP Congress, Semblants and Sinthome – ‘Semblants’ in the plural, ‘Sinthome’ in the singular. The inverse is likewise true. But here it shall be a question of shedding light on the semblants and the sinthome by using some of the material you have been working through already this year to read a small selection of texts from the latest Scilicet volume.
One of the principle references in the preparatory source material for the Congress is Jacques-Alain Miller’s 1991-1992 Course, De la nature des semblants. It features prominently in the texts in the Scilicet volume, and happily it is a Course that, though still unpublished in French in its entirety, we have come to know in some measure in English thanks to the successive editors of the London Society's Psychoanalytic Notebooks. Issues 3[1] carries a lecture on women and the semblant that Miller delivered in Buenos Aires in March 1992, i.e. between the second and third terms of this Course; Issue 15 includes the ‘Commentary on the Inexistent Seminar’ which groups together the second and third lessons[2]; and the recently published Issue 20 carries a translation of the lesson of 20 May.[3] The latter half of the Course dealt at length with the question of sexual difference and the relations between the sexes, with a particular emphasis on the women’s side of the table of sexuation. So I shall also be using these texts as support material.
To take the title of the NLS Study Days, the three terms, mother, daughter, woman, are evidently not to be pitched on the same plane. They are in a sense staggered terms, in the same way that Lacan writes Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety across a staggered line, according to the degrees of difficulty and mobility they represent for the subject. In each of the three terms mother, daughter, woman – when taken as subjective positions – something of this staggering is apparent in the varying degrees of mobility and difficulty they imply. And yet they are not solely subjective positions, they are equally semblants. Mother, daughter and woman are as much semblants for the female subject as the male subject. Thus the interplay of relations suddenly becomes very complex, much more complex than a simple staggered succession. To what extent is the mother a semblant for her child? Does the woman become mother embody a new semblant for her partner? What does the make-believe of childhood present to the parents? What of the semblant that the other woman represents for the hysterical subject? The web of seemingliness is intricate and variable. It weaves a social network, but the real is never far away. How for instance will the event of a newborn child be negotiated by each of the family members? In the case of the female child, a host of semblants may be mobilised to welcome her into the world, as girl, as woman, as daughter, as sister, just as conversely, access to any one of these semblants may be complicated by a ‘primary refusal’.
The gap between daughter and girl – in other words between one term which designates a strict filial relation between subject and parent or parents, a structure of kinship to use Lévi-Straussian vocabulary, and another term which is loosely determined by age – will have to be particularly carefully extracted from the contributions of our French speaking colleagues, where the two notions are carried by the same signifier – fille.
When privilege is given to the age-related signification, we may invoke the entire English imagination on childhood, which Lacan notes in passing in Seminar VII[4], where the romantic vision of the child that emerged at the time of the industrial revolution has little or no equivalent in what preceded it, nor in many of the other cultural currents in Europe. The appearance, one generation after, of a character like Lewis Caroll’s Alice, is unthinkable without this cultural shift in the status of the child. But already Alice marks a distinct modification of this new current, with her markedly post-romantic irony.
The modernist era produced a stunning figure of girlish make-believe, this time with a character that is in many respects the nether side of the child in the romantic imagination, in the form of Nabokov’s Lolita.
The age-old identifications from the “girl next door” to the “girl about town”, from the “girly-girl” to the “tomboy”, have seen a notable massification and codification in the last three decades. The late twentieth century group identifications assumed by late teens and sometimes women well into their twenties, from demographic stereotype ‘valley girl’ to counter-cultural ‘riot grrrl’, have even in our new century undergone web-age mutations into tribal communities such as SuicideGirls and the ‘cosplaying’ shojo and bishojo fans in Japan. Whilst these group identifications obscure as much as indicate the position of the female subject, they do point to a further cultural shift and a new promotion of semblants of girlishness, in contrast to those of motherhood or the womanly masquerade of past generations, and one which cannot be separated from the enormity of the figure introduced in Nabokov’s mid-twentieth century Lolita.
The term nymphet – today common currency but a neologism when Nabokov coined it in 1955 – was chosen to designate a demoniac nature perceived in the pre-teen adolescent by what Nabokov’s specifies as ‘certain travellers, twice or many times older than they’. In her article on Lolita from the Scilicet volume, Dora Pertessi takes up Lacan’s reading of the novel from his lesson of 24 June 1959, the penultimate lesson of Seminar VI. Lacan notes that the novel is ‘marked by the seal of our contemporary epoch.’ There may be better on the theoretical plane says Lacan, but Lolita is ‘all the same a pretty exemplary production.’
Dora Pertessi shows how Lacan brings out the function of the i(a), the imaginary form given to the object cause of desire, which is one of the first precursors in the Lacanian algebra of the semblant that would appear in the seventies. Here, with regard to Lolita, Lacan notes the ‘symbolic function of the image’ in the protagonist’s account. This alludes to the fact that the disjunction is no longer between S and I with the R in brackets, but between the colluding S I in contradistinction to the R.[5] Not only that, but the (a) enveloped by the narcissistic image undergoes a startling metamorphosis when it emerges as ‘a small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger’[6] that awakens the protagonist from his dream, heralding the second half of the novel.
This contrast between the semblant and the real it clothes allows Lacan to proceed to what he sees as the most important lesson to be drawn from the novel, that of the contrast between the two desires dealt with in the two halves of the story: the first, neurotic, ‘the sparkling character of desire such as it is mediated upon, such as it occupies some thirty odd years of the subject’s life’ and the second, perverse, desire’s ‘prodigious degeneration into a boggy reality’. When the protagonist, Humbert, finds himself doubled up, overtaken, and hoodwinked by Clare Quilty, desire emerges as ‘only being able to live in an other, there where it is literally impenetrable and utterly unknown.’ When finally he resolves to kill Quilty, in a painfully clumsy and comical execution, whose overtones Lacan is particularly alert to having recently analysed the fencing duel from Hamlet in this same Seminar, the shots from Humbert’s revolver make his victim shiver, ‘as if I were tickling him.’[7] He continues, ‘in distress, in dismay, I understood that far from killing him I was injecting spurts of energy into the poor fellow, as if the bullets had been capsules wherein a heady elixir danced.’ Even in his death, this other who represents the subject’s double – here it is the semblant as semblable which Lacan will develop much later on in L’étourdit – embodies all the exiled jouissance his neurotic desire has forbidden him.
Lolita meanwhile, in the words of Dora Pertessi, is in essence no more than ‘the fantasy of “capricious nymphet” that Humbert remains fixated upon’, ‘a semblant that unveils moreover his position of jouissance.’
We might be forgiven, therefore, for not expecting to learn anything from this novel on the female subject’s relation to the semblant, her subjective relation. We are even reminded of Miller’s comments in opening his lecture ‘On Semblants in the Relation between the Sexes’, to the effect that men are perhaps more captive to semblants than women, whilst women are perhaps closer to the real, in such a way that in speaking of ‘women and semblants’, it is the men who are at the place of the semblant.[8] This is certainly what is apparent in the relationship between Humbert and Quilty. But might we not apply what Lacan warns us of in 1958 with regard to the imaginary hold of the symbol to the semblant, namely: ‘images and symbols in women cannot be isolated from images and symbols of women.’[9] Is there not something in this figure of Lolita that would be the equivalent of what Lacan perceives in Caroll’s Alice, namely: ‘the scope of the object that the little girl can take on […] because she embodies a negative entity, which bears a name I am not to pronounce here…’ – Lacan was speaking on the radio – ‘…if I don’t want to embark my listeners in the ordinary confusions.’[10] This ‘negative entity’ is, of course, exactly the same as what he had already indicated under the skirts of the ‘Infanta Margarita’ – Margarita Teresa in the Velasquez canvas Las meninas in his lesson of 25 May 1966. Lacan draws attention to this central character on the painting, the young child ‘lit up’ by Velasquez, his favourite model whom he painted on several occasions, but more than the child herself, it is this ‘hidden object’ that he draws our attention to. Lacan labels it with a ‘name is still valid in our structural register, the slit.’ He proceeds to define this object as ‘something that is made of the other, of that blind vision proper to the other, in so far as it supports this other object.’ But more than a mere visual trope, a scopic dynamic, Lacan asks: ‘this central object, the slit, the little girl, the girl as phallus that is this sign […] I designated for you as the slit, what is this object? Is it the object of the painter, or, in this royal couple whose dramatic configuration we are familiar with, the widowed king, who wed his niece, which everyone got so stirred up about – with an age difference of twenty-five years?’
Lacan is thus compelled to look beyond the intricate play of the gaze within the picture, with its multiple mirroring and shimmering, to bring out what Velasquez was sensitive to in this strange milieu, this bizarre famulus that was the royal court in mid-seventeenth century Spain, and by anticipation, the wedding that came a decade after the painting. It was an arranged marriage, but apparently a happy one, at least up until Margarita Teresa’s difficult pregnancies fraught with miscarriages and illness, which she would eventually succumb to at the age of twenty-one. Lacan says that twenty-five years is a fine age difference for a couple, though perhaps not when the groom is only forty.
What I want to highlight here is that this focus on the ‘negative entity’, on the ‘slit’, is indicative of a semblant that will have to be subjectively negotiated by the female subject, and cannot be simply reduced to the gaze she falls under. It falls on the side of being rather than having, and yet paradoxically, having come down on this side, confronts a further either/or where it will lean more to the side of what Lacan calls in his ‘Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Female Sexuality’ a pure absence, rather than a pure sensitivity. Thus opens what Lacan will pin down with the strange formula – a hapax in his teaching – ‘narcissism of desire’.[11]
The female subject, faced with the semblant of the little girl, whether Nabokov’s Lolita, Caroll’s Alice or Velasquez’s Infanta Margarita, will have to find in the caprice of the phallus that this semblant invokes, something from which to construct her position with more or less duplicity.
Lacan raises the question in the ‘Guiding Remarks…’ as to the degree of this duplicity, and whether it permits of being reduced to zero. The question shifts our focus towards the filial link as evoked by the term daughter, thus bringing us concretely to the first of the terms in the English title for the NLS Congress.
Lacan is casting doubt on the supposedly ‘natural’ transition from girl to woman as described in the transition from the daughter’s attachment to her father to a woman’s attachment to a man. There is an English adage that already runs counter to this: ‘a son is a son till he takes him a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all her life.’ The Freudian line would of course point out that the son merely replaces the mother with another woman, and, at least in the first couple he establishes, plays son to his wife[12], but we meet in this proverb a strong echo of the Freudian position on the dissymmetric exit from the castration complex in the two sexes. ‘It would be a solution of ideal simplicity if we could suppose that from a particular age onwards the elementary influence of the mutual attraction between the sexes makes itself felt and impels the small woman towards men […]. But we are not going to find things so easy.’[13] That is Freud in 1933. Two years earlier he had given an outright rejection of the notion of an ‘Electra complex’ for the girl as a mirror to the Oedipus complex which would restore symmetry to the picture[14], and already we have a distinct foreshadowing of Lacan’s doctrine where both sexes have to position themselves in relation to the same givens, most notably the signifier of the phallus.
No, there is no his and hers in this story. No ‘each to their own’ as Lacan mocks Jones’s concession to the British feminists.[15] The grain of truth in the proverb is to be found on the side of the women’s position. In Freudian terms, the female subject, confronted with castration not as a prospect but a fact, sees three ‘possible lines of development’ open before her: 1. turning away from sexuality; 2. a defiant ‘over-emphasis’ of her masculinity; 3. the circuitous path that leads to the father and the feminine form of the Oedipus complex, and ultimately to so-called ‘definitive femininity’.[16] The third path, which Freud asserts to be the least pathological, nevertheless remains ‘exposed to disturbance of residual phenomena of the early masculine period’. In all three lines of development the girl is squarely placed in the position of daughter, in the sense of one who is grappling with what is transmitted to her from one or both of the parents. If a girl is ‘a daughter all her life’, it is as a result of the massive influence of these ‘residual phenomena’. Let’s take these three lines of development in turn:
1. Freud qualifies the first line as the neurotic line. It is marked by the subject’s great disappointment with the phallic mother who turns out to be castrated and who is thus cast aside.[17] Freud adds that in later life, a female subject who has pursued this line may take over the role of the deposed mother, and take as her object a partner who recalls something of the child she was, struggling to overcome her masturbatory urges. This would account for a certain type of object choice where the man’s trait is not the capital phi of castration but a weakness, an infirmity, an addiction or a certain delinquency. Though this line has a wider scope than hysteric neurosis, something of the hysteric’s choice of the ‘straw man’, or the impotent master is clearly evident here, semblants which call rather upon the minus phi of castration. These semblants serve to make-believe that the man is just as stricken, just as compromised, just as deficient, as she perceives herself to be.
Ultimately however, if the position of the daughter is prolonged indefinitely on this line of development, she is less the daughter of the father than the daughter of the mother, in the sense that it is the mother who constitutes the partner. Freud, echoing the vocabulary of the female analysts in his circle, alludes to a pre-Oedipal relationship with the mother that has strong overtones of hate and resentment.[18] Under the influence of Ruth Mack Brunswick, Freud was led to interpret the rage and anxiety that is equally present in this mother-daughter relationship at the anal-sadistic level.[19] It’s one of the least convincing parts of Freud’s paper. The Lacanian term of ‘ravage’ seems to be much more adequate here: as Lacan puts it, ‘In this respect, the Freudian flight of fancy of the Oedipus complex, which the woman would take to like a fish to water, due to castration being with her from the start (Freud dixit), contrasts painfully with the fact of the ravage which, in her, for the most part, the relation to her mother is; a relation from which she seems to expect, as a woman, much more substance than from her father, – which does not go with him being second, in this ravage.’ The mother thus provides the template for the ravaging partner, i.e., a partner with whom the semblants are not easily mobilised to temper the real.
2. Where the first position is characterised by a turning away from sexuality, the second is a particular assertion of masculinity. Freud introduces this line of development to account for female homosexuality, citing identification with the phallic mother or the father. This is the line that Freud spends least time developing, but from the Lacanian perspective this can be accounted for in a sense by the fact that what Freud failed to include in this line, supposing it to lie on the path to ‘definitive femininity’, is the chapter on maternity. Indeed, it is a chapter that is surprisingly absent from the 1931 paper. But once again under the influence of his female colleagues, Freud in 1933 promotes the transition from the hope of getting a penis to the desire for a child from the father as being a feminine wish par excellence. Freud does however concede that ‘the ancient masculine wish for the possession of a penis is still visible through the femininity now achieved.’[20] It is true that Freud, in these Introductory Lectures to a wide public, is introducing lines of demarcation between the pathological and the normal. Distinctions that elsewhere he shuns. He has no reason to include maternity in a category that would be a-normal. A Lacanian distinction however, having abandoned the categories of normal and pathological in favour of a logic of sexuation, struggles to include the maternal position on the woman’s side of the dividing line.
Maternity, from the Lacanian perspective, in no way figures the so-called ‘definitive femininity’. Giovanna di Giovanni, in the Scilicet volume, looks in some detail at the maternal position in a paper that carries the title ‘Hysteria’. In the end she doesn’t deal at length with the question of hysteria, but she opens her paper by raising the question of this accomplishment of femininity through maternity as it is championed in some analytic circles. She notes how the figure of the mother constituted for Dora a point of mystery, as evidenced in Raphael’s Dresden Madonna that so fascinated her. An image that supported an identification at a moment when she was opening up to a love relation. In this case we have the mother as semblant, coming to answer to an aporia with regard to sexuation by covering it over. Giovanna di Giovanni goes on to recall Lacan’s observation that a woman, faced with jouissance that makes her absent to herself, absent as subject, ‘finds the cork for this jouissance […] in the a constituted by her child.’[21] This corking up of jouissance is a solution on the side of having. Indeed, as Giovanna di Giovanni writes in her conclusion, ‘the hysteric problematic faced with maternity exemplifies how the identification does not go without presenting a certain difficulty for the woman in search of her being, i.e., of knowing who she is.’ In other words, having presents a difficulty for her position of Being.
In De la nature des semblants, Miller asserts that ‘the true in a woman, in Lacan’s sense, is to be measured by her subjective distance from the position of the mother.’[22] The child is to be placed in the series of objects that the female subject may employ as supplements ‘encountered or invented’ to deal with the minus she feels herself to be marked by.[23]
These ‘corks’ of jouissance foreground the register of ‘obtention and giving’, more usually associated with male pathology. Miller even adds money to this series of objects, evoking the figure of La bourgeoise that Lacan considers in L’étourdit and Encore.[24] Fink doesn’t translate La bourgeoise. My dictionary gives ‘the missus’ which captures the tone though perhaps not the connotation. There is an aspect of ‘her indoors’, the woman who, extracted from the regular labour that might previously have been characteristic of this lower echelon of society which Lacan refers to disparagingly as ‘the commoners’, is left to rule the roost, the house, the kids, and family possessions. And consequently, in so far as she rules the roost, ‘he is the one who obeys orders, not her’. She runs the show. And in running the show, she ‘has different ways of approaching the phallus and keeping it for herself.’ Lacan uses la bourgeoise as an example of the female subject fully at home on the man’s side of the table of sexuation, fully within the phallic function. She rules the roost, she runs the show, we have only to add, she wears the trousers.
Ana Lydia Santiago, in her text ‘Postiche’ also cites Miller’s ‘On Semblants in the Relation Between the Sexes’ to examine the woman with postiche.[25] The woman with postiche is another version of a female subject who procures for herself, ‘artificially’, what she lacks, on the condition that she get it from a man. In his text, Miller is attempting to clarify the ambiguous term ‘phallic woman’. We are not dealing with the woman who is the phallus, she ‘who operates with her have not’, but once again the subject who ‘conceals her want-of-having’ by ‘prancing around’ as proprietor of the phallus, to the detriment of the man who is exposed as castrated. This partner is not to be confused with the male subject we met in Freud’s first line of development whose compromised nature fuels an identification. Here ‘it is not uncommon for her to complete herself with a man in whose shadow she remains’, with her ultimate goal being to command respect.
In his text from the Scilicet volume, ‘Répartitoire sexuel’, Ernesto Sinatra paints us the portrait of a contemporary bourgeoise, or a variant of the woman with postiche, in the guise of la patronne, the boss, in feminine declension. He describes La patronne as a kind of wife-mother chosen by certain men who tend to spend their evenings away from home in bars and cabaret clubs, leaving her to organise their lives. He notes that when these women move into the public sphere of professional responsibility, they are often led to complain that men are easily intimidated when they so much as jangle their car keys or house keys. The woman as she who possesses is finding a new counterpart, according to Ernesto Sinatra, in the timid, unsociable man, who lends himself to a certain objectification. He is more apt to work out than work, his hair shines more than his wit.
Nevertheless, Sinatra concludes that the modern patronne brandishing her keys is merely the other face of la bourgeoise brandishing her rolling pin, and that despite ‘the plasticity of the semblants’ at the level of the sinthome, ‘the fetishistic form of love continues to govern the jouissance of the male position, just as the erotomaniac position governs female jouissance.’ This is a timely reminder that these positions which we have considered here, the maternal position, ‘her indoors’, the ‘woman with postiche’ and ‘the boss’, do not condemn the female subject to circulate solely on the man’s side of the table of sexuation. What Freud calls lines of development are not developmental stages, but semblants into which the female subject may advance and retreat, depending on her relation to sexuation, and the particular partner-symptom she will construct.
3. Whilst the route into the Oedipus complex, via the castration complex, was in Freud’s view circuitous, back in 1924 he sees her exit from the Oedipus complex as being ‘much simpler than that of the small bearer of the penis.’[26] This is the fish to water version that Lacan puts into question. There are two objections to what Freud describes here. We have seen them both already. The first was that, quite simply, the girl does not take to her father like a fish to water because she still expects something substantial from the mother, and this thwarted expectation has ravaging effects. The second was that, as Freud himself noted, the more the father does emerge as an object, the more she remains in the position of daughter, and not woman to a man: ‘you must know that the number of women who remain till a late age tenderly dependent on a paternal object, or indeed their real father, is very great.’ To employ another English language maxim, not only does she not take to the father like a fish to water, she takes to a man like a fish to a bicycle.
Lacan asks in the first of the questions that close his ‘Guiding Remarks…’: ‘Why does the analytic myth come up short concerning the prohibition of incest between father and daughter?’ Once again, our contemporary epoch is vouching for a particular response to this question, in the figures of what Robert Polhemus terms Lot’s Daughters.[27] Polhemus is taking his lead from the biblical patriarch, who having fled his city with his two female offspring, is seduced by them each in turn after having been plied with wine.[28] Down the centuries this tale has been the cause of great perplexity, not least for Luther who dedicated a considerable amount of ink to it. Polhemus’s book is entertaining and provocative, he leaps from example to example and is not adverse to conjecture, allusion and wild juxtaposition. Whilst it is difficult to see in what way the ‘Lot complex’ he puts forward has anything complex about it, the study has the merit of turning the spotlight on a contemporary bemusement faced with the question of the incest prohibition between father and daughter. Taking the twists and turns of the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow saga and Allen’s marriage to his adopted daughter Soon-Yi as a means of measuring the pulse of the question in contemporary society, the myriad reactions that this very public couple have drawn from commentators and authorities over recent years are presented unflinchingly, with little moralising.
The first prejudice to dispel in pursuing this line of enquiry, is that the paternal object to which the female subject may be attached is in some way connoted by a ‘cynical’ choice on her part. In the absence of any clear trait that would make the link between this paternal object and her own father – in the way that her shift from father as elected love object to a man would isolate one – commentators are frequently keen to point out any number of lures: power, money, experience. But for every example of a steady hand of authority, there are countless examples of milquetoasts to contradict the rule; to every example of the lavish wealthy sugar-daddy, there are a host of hard-up penny-pinchers who prefer to split the bill; to every paragon of world-wizened urbanity, a troupe of naïve buffoons. In all evidence, the trait as such takes second place to the simple fact that the parental object is, quite simply, a male with offspring, whether he is birth father, surprise father, non-parental father, regardless in fact of the quality of the parental bond he maintains with his own child or children.
The second issue, again a potential prejudice, and perhaps Freud’s own, is whether the parental object is not just as legitimate a partner for the female subject as the childless man of her own generation. After all, the tender attachment to the parental object seems to be built on a semblant that is largely successful in fending off the ravage that a man can be for a woman. Recall that Lacan insists in Seminar XXIII that whereas a woman is a sinthome for a man, another name has to be found for what the man is for the woman, because sinthome implies non-equivalence: he terms it an affliction worse than a sinthome, a ravage even.[29] Thus, when a female subject does succeed in forging a partner-symptom, we need not always expect that partner to be a man in the sense that Freud proposes him as something automatic. Might the parental object be a partner-symptom that offers what Maria Cecília Galletti Feretti in her Scilicet paper qualifies as ‘the partner as means of jouissance’? After all, ‘the object a occupies its place here of cause of desire, at a distance from the ravage of jouissance.’ The question remains open, just as it remained open for Lacan in 1971 with regard to the hysteric who provides the most classical illustration of the subject in a tender, long-lasting attachment to a paternal object or father: ‘The hysteric is not a woman’, says Lacan, ‘it’s a matter of knowing whether psychoanalysis such as I define it gives access to a woman. Or whether, if a woman comes about, it’s an affair of doxa (doksa) as virtue was, in the words of those who dialogue in the Meno, […] something that can’t be taught.’[30]
Maria Cecília Galletti Feretti’s paper contains a number of elements that enable us to deepen our understanding of the partner-symptom and its relation to the semblant. Take for example the quote she extracts from Encore: ‘jouissance is questioned, evoked, tracked, and elaborated only on the basis of a semblance.’[31] This implies discourse, the four discourses, and the analyst’s discourse especially, as means of questioning, evoking, tracking and elaborating the jouissance of the partner-symptom. The manifold reactions to the Woody-Soon Yi story, where Allen plays Leopold I to Soon-Yi’s Infanta Margarita, show that meaning is powerless to interpret the jouissance at stake. In such a case, the analytic discourse would serve not to decipher, but as Lacan puts it, cited by Galletti Feretti, to allow for jouissance to ‘be avowed, precisely in so far as it may be unavowable.’
To conclude, I should like to take Dominique Laurent’s text ‘Woman’, the only one of the texts I will cite from the Scilicet volume to have been translated into English. Like Giovanna di Giovanni, D. Laurent starts off from a consideration of the maternal position. And like Miller in ‘On Semblants in the Relation Between the Sexes’ she highlights the distance between the ‘woman’ and ‘mother’. The mother is certain. Woman variable. The mother has. The woman has not and makes something of this lack.
The next part of her text builds on this ‘has not’ to give a fresh take on the Freudian penis-envy announced in the opening line of her text. With these considerations, Freud’s circuitous ‘line of development’ becomes Lacan’s ‘chicane’[32]. The path swerves and sheers. But chicane in French also refers to the to and fro of bickering and quibbling. Lacan qualifies the chicane at stake here as a logical one.
There is one particular sentence in this D. Laurent’s that struck me, for having retained its freshness despite my having read it a number of times. It is a sentence whose progress we can trace in a number of texts from D. Laurent over the last decade – I myself have had occasion to translate it in at least three different texts[33] – each time with a slight modification. In the most recent text, it runs as follows: ‘In sexual intercourse [Dans la rélation sexuelle], admittedly she wants the organ, but much more than this she wants the phallus as signifier of desire, desire for the one who speaks, her man, to say something of her Being and cipher her jouissance.’
Unpacking this sentence, we can extract the following five points:
1. ‘…admittedly she wants the organ, but…’. Penisneid is reduced here to its proper place. Yes, it exists. Yes it is consequential. But it is neid, envy. Not Eifersucht, jealousy. It stems from the position of not-having, and not from the position of having. In this sense, the woman’s envy is to be distinguished from the hysteric’s passion of jealousy. The object of envy is ultimately an intangible object, perhaps one of little use, and certainly foreign. Jealousy arises when the subject risks losing what he has to another: the object at stake is familiar, and prized, which leads us back to the logic of the ‘obtention’ that characterises La bourgeoise, the woman with postiche, etc.
2. ‘…much more than this she wants the phallus as signifier of desire…’ The object of envy, being foreign, fundamentally foreign and unobtainable, can transform. D. Laurent shows that it is less a question of penis-envy, than phallus-envy. The object that would denote the very existence of desire as such. This question is also explored in the Scilicet volume by Gerardo Réquiz in his text ‘Phallus’. That the woman is well aware of the distance between penis and phallus is clear in the use she makes of the phallus as a semblant in the masquerade.
3. ‘…the desire for the one who speaks, her man, to say…’ Here the object as such has transformed into speech. Or rather, to render the object present, for it to be recognised as an object, it has to be spoken. Thus, the status of intercourse has changed. Now it is clearly spoken intercourse.
4. ‘…to say something of her Being/to speak her Being [son être].’ Each time I translated this sentence I hesitated over the son être. Does the object, her man, speak of his Being or hers? The following sentence, where D. Laurent cites Lacan’s pun dit-femme, indicates that ‘her Being’ is the correct translation. He says in a sense, not what she is, by means of a label or a description, but what she is for him. The phallus that he possesses has thus become fully detached from the penis. It has become the woman herself, in so far as she is equivalent to what answers to his want-of-Being.
5. ‘…and cipher her jouissance.’ We are no longer in the register of the object a enciphered as children, money, or even the paternal object, but jouissance ciphered as a limit point, a point of certitude, denoted by a signifier that indicates that the Other is incomplete. The rest of D. Laurent’s paper explores the structure of this signifier as a name of jouissance, a semblant, and its effect of jouissance on the body as a sinthome.
Suffice it to say by way of a final remark on this concluding chapter, that we have here, in this chicane, a movement of relay, in the sense that Lacan in the ‘Guiding Remarks…’ writes of the man serving as a relay ‘so that a woman becomes this Other to herself, as she is to him.’ This remark also paves the way for grasping what Lacan says fifteen years later in Television: a woman forbids herself Man (with a capital M), [L’homme], ‘not because he would be Other, but because there is no Other of the Other.’[34] In other words, a woman’s partner, her man (with a lower case m), brings the phallus into play in a particular way: not as the phallus that would satisfy all women, like the father of the primal horde, but as the mark of the castration which seals his particular desire as being caused by a woman such as she is. The Man, capital M, who can up and leave at any moment because the conditions of his jouissance are not particularised, i.e. fetishised vis-à-vis a woman, is the one who incarnates the ravage there where the Other of the Other is not.
D. Laurent’s paper is precious in being the most fully developed consideration of what it means for the female subject to consent to be a woman, namely, the symptom of another body. It is surely no coincidence that it is also to D. Laurent that we owe some of the most developed work on the ravage, which figures in its own way what Freud indicated with the term ‘residual phenomena’.
*
[1] Miller, J.-A., ‘Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes’, in Psychoanalytic Notebooks, Issue 3, pp. 9-25.
[2] Miller, J.-A., ‘Commentary on the Inexistent Seminar’ in Psychoanalytic Notebooks, Issue 15, pp. 25-39.
[3] Miller, J.-A., ‘Lacanian Clinic’ in Psychoanalytic Notebooks, Issue 20, pp. 9-40.
[4] Lacan, J., The Seminar Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 1992, pp. 24-5.
[5] Cf. Miller, J.-A., ‘Lacanian Clinic’, op cit., p. 25.
[6] Nabokov, V., Lolita, p. 109.
[7] Ibid., p. 303.
[8] Miller, J.-A., ‘Of Semblants in the Relation Between the Sexes’, op. cit., p. 9.
[9] Lacan, J., ‘Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality’, in Écrits, Norton, 2006, p. 613.
[10] Lacan, J., ‘Hommage rendu à Lewis Caroll’ in Ornicar ?, Issue 50, 2002, p. 9.
[11] For an elucidation of this term, where it is linked to privation, see Laurent, É., ‘Womanly Positions of Being’, in Hurly-Burly Issue 3, forthcoming.
[12] Freud, S., ‘Femininity’ (1933), Lecture 33 from the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Penguin, 1991, p. 168.
[13] Ibid., p. 152.
[14] Freud, S., ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), in On Sexuality, Penguin, 1991, p. 375.
[15] Lacan, J., ‘On a Question Prior…’ in Écrits, op. cit., p. 463.
[16] Cf., Freud, S., ‘Femininity’, op cit., p. 160 & ‘Female Sexuality’, op. cit., p. 376, p. 379.
[17] Freud, S., ‘Femininity’, op cit., p. 160 & ‘Female Sexuality’, op cit., p. 377-8.
[18] Freud, S., ‘Female Sexuality’, op cit., pp. 379-80, 381.
[19] Ibid., p. 386.
[20] Freud, S., ‘Femininity’, op cit., p. 162.
[21] Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, Encore, Norton & Co., 1998, p. 35.
[22] Miller, J.-A., ‘Of Semblants in the Relation…’ op. cit., p. 14.
[23] Ibid., p. 12.
[24] Lacan, J., ‘L’étourdit’, in Autres écrits, Seuil, 2001, p. 469; The Seminar Book XX, op. cit., pp. 73-4.
[25] Miller, J.-A., ‘Of Semblants in the Relation…’, op. cit., pp. 18-19.
[26] Freud, S., ‘Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, in On Sexuality, op. cit., p. 321.
[27] Polhemus, R. M., Lot’s Daughter: sex, redemption and women’s quest for authority, Stanford Uni Press, 2005.
[28] Genesis 19.
[29] Lacan, J., Le séminaire livre XXIII, Le sinthome, Seuil, 2005, p. 101.
[30] Lacan, J., Le séminaire livre XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, Seuil, 2007, p. 155.
[31] Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, op. cit., p. 92.
[32] Lacan, J., ‘L’étourdit’, op. cit., p. 468-9.
[33] Laurent, D., ‘The Partner’s Response’ in Almanac Issue 3; ‘The Subject and Its Libidinal Partners: From the Fantasy to the Sinthome’ in Psychoanalytic Notebooks, Issue 11, p. 185; ‘Woman’ in Hurly-Burly Issue 2, p. 36.
[34] Lacan, J., ‘Television’ in Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, Norton & Co., 1990, p. 40.
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