Feminine Jouissance does not exist.
‘The unconscious is structured like a language.’
There you have it ladies and gentleman, that’s what Lacan said, right there in his twentieth seminar. I could stop here but I believe there are some items to be clarified. Ill let Lacan go on: ‘On that basis, language is clarified…by being posited as the apparatus of jouissance.’[1]
What I am going to say is a bit provocative, that Lacan’s famous seminar on feminine sexuality has little to with the matter, and there is no such thing as “feminine jouissance”. Instead, there is knowledge; something feminine sexuality has a great deal to say about. Lacan is talking about knowledge in seminar XX, knowledge with a capital “NO”. In many places Lacan shows us that there is a failure in how language installs itself as knowledge, which is to say as jouissance.
Our placement in language is a fundamental trauma; so much so that I will argue it is THE form of castration, overriding the Oedipus Complex itself as the nucleus of psychosexual development. The trauma of language resides in-between the symbolic and the real, and seminar twenty is an audacious attempt to articulate how this trauma is synonymous with the arrival of sexuation that is nothing less than human consciousness itself, that which is predicated on the disjunction with the Other.
Knowledge does not properly satiate us. We need more pleasure still! Modes of jouissance are constructed to establish supplementary epistemophilia; we insist there must be more, out there, somewhere! God only knows where that is! This is why I believe Lacan states ‘The true aims at the real’[2]. This knowledge we so desperately seek in the form of truth guides us with an injunction: “it must exist!” Lacan makes this explicit: ‘Doesn’t this jouissance one experiences and yet knows nothing about put us on the path of ex-sistence?’[3]He demarcates our grandest questions about existence with a single dash – a tiny dash that gives us a great deal of worry, an epistemological gap that continues to cause us great distress.
But Lacan insists that it is only in this failure of knowledge that anything meaningful can ever be expressed, and he will carry this idea with him throughout the whole of Encore to describe what speaking beings produce, namely desire by means of jouissance ‘that shouldn’t be/could never fail. That is the correlate of the fact that there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship, and it is the substantial aspect of the phallic function.’[4] For Lacan, the question of sexuation is a question of knowledge acquisition and its limits to approach truth– for even our first person knowledge, designated as Connaissance, that construction of knowledge par-excellence of the phallus, is always a méconnaissance, a misunderstanding of the foundations of ones own subjectivity that always runs the risk of falling off the precipice of a “no-ledge”.
We don’t want to fall off this ledge, so we make up nifty tricks to overcome it, the niftiest of solutions? It must come from the Other! There must be one who has this Other Jouissance that we know nothing about! You in this room know what I mean when I say the Other, but the miraculous thing is – so does everyone else, and they know where to find it! We see this all the time with religion, with science, you name it! As analysts, we most evidently see it in the clinic, albeit cloaked by repression and anxiety.
For Marie Cardinal, in her testimony of her analysis, The Words to Say It, she thought this knowledge was to be found in her mOther. Cardinal takes pains to describe her drawn-out bout with constant vaginal bleeding and the analysis that most miraculously allowed it to cease, and gives an example of the knowledge, that is to say the jouissance, that is specific to the feminine and it must be said, could fundamentally never have been written by a man. In analysis, she re-discovers the torturous relationship she had to her mother, whose abusive words left an impression so traumatic that it had to be painfully repressed. How was it repressed? Into the body, and it is predominantly out of the body that it would manifest itself again and again as a visible, unending conflict between the knowledge she holds within her, and that which can not be put to words. In fact, it is only upon putting it into words, transfiguring her jouissance into signifiers that aim at the Real, that the bleeding stops. This case is quite suitable to discuss the mechanisms of feminine knowledge, and the crux of the matter, that odd reading assignment we are given as analysts: jouissance itself, the text that lies between a subject’s truth, and their knowledge.
Lacan tells us this is our job, and there is a rare, almost mystifying passage in Freud’s 1924 essay “A supplement to the Theory of Sexuality” where he takes up Lacan’s advice if you will, he investigates knowledge in relation to sexuation: ‘for both sexes in childhood only one kind of genital organ comes into account—the male. The primacy reached is not therefore a primacy of the genital, but of the phallus.’ This is a rare occasion for Freud, for throughout his corpus, even when he used the adjective ‘phallic’, he still implied the genital organ. This sentence is immediately followed by one of Freud’s many disappointments: ‘Unfortunately we can describe this state of things only as it concerns the male child; the corresponding processes in the little girl are not sufficiently known to us.’ Curiously enough, this same paragraph includes Freud’s allusion to an ‘epistemological impulse’[5] on the behalf of the little boy to expect ‘the same thing in other people’. In these passages of Freud’s we find three key elements to the limits of his exposition on the topic of psychosexual development: the inability to conceptualize the abstract function of the phallus, (albeit with the suggestion that it may need to be), an extremely limited grasp on feminine desire, and the aspiration of, but failure to explore the ways in which sexual drives constitute the acquisition of knowledge. Lacan picks up where this paper left Freud on that Dark Continent he thought women inhabited. As to the first failure of Freud’s that he famously left to Princess Marie Bonaparte, ‘Was will das Weib?’[6], a question that suggests men know what they want, and indeed already have what troubles them. In Seminar XX, Lacan shifts this logic with a phenomenological spin, suggesting that sexuation is conferred on the basis of “having” or “being” the phallus. However, by “having” he does not mean “possessing” as Freud did with the literal Penis, and by being he does not mean “is”.
Instead, sexuation for Lacan, in so far as he capitulates to any actual conceptualization of it (which I argue he never really does), gets woven together by means of various philosophical principles in order to formulate an ontological schema that serves to correct Freudian drive theory by examining its epistemological tenets, in particular his views on female sexuality. To be frank, these needed some straightening out. In “Female Sexuality” Freud stated that bisexual dispositions manifest ‘much more plainly in the female than in the male.’[7]And then in 1933, with charming school boy wit, he exclaims to an audience all too keen to hear, that in keeping with their narcissistic investment, women prefer to be passively in the position of “being” loved rather than doing it, pardon my French. Putting aside that this would be followed up by a quaint fabrication of history, that the only thing women had contributed to society was knitting[8] to compensate for their un-decorative pubic hair – it would seem Lacan latched onto Freud’s tacit sexual phenomenology.
The “being” Freud described is a modality of knowledge for Lacan. To be precise, it is a ‘Rapport objectal’[9] to a semblance of the phallus. The phallus, being a ‘pure signifier’[10] in the words of Paola Mieli, is something that no one, not even Freud’s little boy “has” as such. And if woman is indeed a confused and Dark Continent, it is because the conditions that womanliness is predicated on has less to do with a body of land (a piece of property for Freud to own it would seem) and more to do with a “body” of knowledge.
Referring to his 1972 lecture given in Milan, Lacan goes on to tell his audience that ‘the lady analysts’, ‘haven’t contributed one iota to the question of feminine sexuality. There must be an internal reason for that, related to the structure of the apparatus of jouissance.’[11]
What a preposterous statement for Lacan to make, and yes, the Italian ladies certainly took notice! But, let us remember that when a great thinker says something preposterous, there is probably good reason. This is because the only way to say anything about woman is to necessarily invoke phallic logic, which does nothing for feminine jouissance, since their “no-ledge” extends infinitely beyond the phallus. Lacan says you can only write “le femme”, ‘at the level at which woman is truth, why one can only half-speak of her.’[12] The literary provocation Lacan invents on the blackboard for which I have appropriated, “Woman”, is an epistemological exercise to help correct that other idea of Freud’s, that all the ladies are “more” bisexual than the lads.
Lacan says what everybody already knows: that women are better philosophers of desire, so much so that they “make [the Other] desire”[13], to quote Colette Soler, who, in her essay “What does the unconscious say about Women?” states ‘the unconscious does not know everything, but what it knows is sufficient for us to analyze women.’[14] For women, it turns out there’s a great deal the unconscious knows, it knows it is a “body” of knowledge, in fact, the Woman philosophizes with every inch of this flexible “body”!
There is a crude and vulgar joke that a psychoanalytic colleague, a woman mind you, told me: “What bleeds for five days and doesn’t die?”
Marie Cardinal, after spending most of her life bleeding, both with blood and with repressed desire (no-ledge), went to an analyst who told her in no uncertain terms that he had no interest in her medical problems! She had to express her anguish somehow, and after a bit of psychoanalytic finagling, she finally chose words, after all what else could she choose? However, before she could make this conscious choice, the Real of the body did it for her!
Lacan says, ‘there is nothing more philosophical than materialism.’ [15] And what is the body other than material? In a word, women are the ultimate philosophers of the Real.
If I may, let me add an addendum to this brilliant statement, the best I have come across to explain the Real. The Real is that which we cannot see, hear, know, or speak but we all know it is out there, no matter what the scientists will have you believe, it ex-ists. The so-called “hard sciences” must wax over that which we cannot know with their own discursive, coercive mind you - theory, and in this way they are excellent philosophers, in so far as a philosophical theory (for example if it is poorly thought out), can be more philosophical than it is good. Scientists plaster on philosophy to explain away the Real, to sweep it aside.
If we can say one thing about the feminine and its corollary modes of jouissance, it is that the feminine is that which waxes philosophical over the Real with what? Knowledge. What differs this knowledge from the phallic logic of the “hard” scientists is that the multitudes of feminine jouissance do not have such an exigency for coherence, and take for granted the primacy of the not-all of knowledge. I venture Lacan agrees that we should be grateful for this. For the women ‘make the speaking being speak.’[16] In other words, femininity is the agent provocateur of the Real. If there were a feminine jouissance, which there is not, it would be called the “jouissance of the Real of the ‘body’ of knowledge”. Metaphysics, since the birth of the natural sciences, has tried to be a “science of being”. The best scientist of being it turns out, is woman.
Bibliography:
Cardinal, Marie., The Words to Say It., (1983), Van Vactor & Goodheart, Cambridge, Mass., 1983.
Freud, Sigmund., ‘The Infantile Genital Organization of the Libido: A Supplement to the Theory of Sexuality.’, Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 5.,1924.
Freud, Sigmund., ‘Female Sexuality’. (1931), Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, Touchstone, New York, 1997.
Freud, Sigmund., ‘Femininity,’ (1933), Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXII, Ed. J. Strachey, Vintage, London, 2001.
Jones, Ernest., Sigmund Freud:Life and Work, (1955), Hogarth Press, London, Vol. 2.,1955.
Lacan, Jacques., Book 1. On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, (1972-1973), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore, (Ed. Miller, J.-A.), Norton, London, 1998.
Mieli, Paola., ‘Femininity and the Limits of Theory’., The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists., Eds. K.R. Malone & S. Friedlander, SUNY Press, 2000.
Soler, Colette., ‘What Does The Unconscious Know About Women?’, Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality”, SUNY Press, Albany, 2002.
[1] J. Lacan, Book 1. On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, (1972-1973), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore, (Ed. Miller, J.-A.), Norton, London, 1998, p.55.
[2] ibid. p. 91.
[3] Ibid. p. 77.
[4] ibid. p. 59.
[5] S. Freud, ‘The Infantile Genital Organization of the Libido: A Supplement to the Theory of Sexuality.’, Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 5.,1924, 126-127
[6] E. Jones, Sigmund Freud:Life and Work, (1955), Hogarth Press, London, 1955, Vol. 2 ,p.468.
[7] S. Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’. (1931), Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, Touchstone, New York, 1997, p. 187.
[8] *It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented -- that of plaiting and weaving. If that is so, we should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive for the achievement. Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together
S. Freud, ‘Femininity,’ (1933), Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXII, Ed. J. Strachey, Vintage, London, 2001, p. 132.
[9] J. Lacan, op. cit. p. 92.
[10] P. Mieli, ‘Femininity and the Limits of Theory’., The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists., Eds. K.R. Malone & S. Friedlander, SUNY Press, 2000, p. 269.
[11] J. Lacan, op. cit. pp. 57-58.
[12] ibid. p. 103.
[13] C. Soler, ‘What Does The Unconscious Know About Women?’, Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality”, SUNY Press, Albany, 2002, p. 103.
[14] J. Lacan, op. cit. p. 99.
