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Beyond phallic domain: Female otherness as a resource for liberation.

Some notes from Lacanian psychoanalysis and poststructuralist feminism 1.

Marcela González-Barrientos
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
marcela.gonzalez.b@ucv.cl

Stefania Napolitano
stefania.napolitano@icloud.com

Abstract

The article explores the political derivations of psychoanalytical discourse on femininity,

starting from the impact of Lacanian positions on feminist thought. The consideration of a

dimension of absolute otherness of female sexuality, irreducible to masculinity and to a

phallic domain – not-all phallic –, theorized by Lacan in the 70s, opens up many complex

issues for the politics of women’s liberation. It is a matter of living the absolute difference

without either radically excluding it from the speakable or letting it be part of a romantic

imagery of the otherness that perpetuates sexual hierarchy and, consequently, female

subordination. Taking up the proposal of such authors as Julia Kristeva or Silvia Tubert, we

suggest that the Lacanian theory offers the conceptual tools to shift from exclusion to re-volt,

from the place of the Other as a pedestal for the Same to a political function of female

otherness and of the “not-all” that it represents: a part of the Kultur and its difficulties, but not

entangled in it to the point that it cannot bring any innovation.

Keywords: Psychoanalysis – Lacan - Feminism – sexual difference– liberation– enjoyment –

semblance - sexuation

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Paper originally published by: Gonzalez-Barrientos, M. y Napolitano, S. (2015). Beyond phallic domain: Female otherness
as a resource for liberation. Some notes from Lacanian psychoanalysis and poststructuralist feminism. The Psychoanalytic
Review, Vol. 102 (3), pp. 365-388. doi: 10.1521/prev.2015.102.3.365.
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Beyond phallic domain: Female otherness as a resource for liberation.

Some notes from Lacanian psychoanalysis and poststructuralist feminism.

Being female psychoanalysts in our changing world, is an inevitable starting point when

listening to the questions that theoretical and clinical training provoke. By demonstrating our

sexuated position from the beginning, more than aiming the text “towards” female analysts,

we are attempting to make more visible the position “from” which female authors write, think

and livei.

Thus, it is from this femininely “embodied” position where we listen and serve the new

discomforts facing each other, which continuously encompass the relationship problem

between the sexes, or the consequences of the inexistence of that relationship. Therefore, as

perceptions, meanings and expectations between the sexes change, so do the symptoms, the

discontent and the demands. From the lacanian perspective, what does not change is the fact

that the relationship between the sexes does not work, since far from being destined to some

kind of complementarity which would make One, femenine and masculine belong to different

worlds, logic and ways of enjoying, hence their meeting has no guarantee.

In this framework, it is worth considering the consequences of the change in era in social

contemporary ties, the effect of the decline of the father and his traditional authority and the

social changes that alter the sexual and family order. These affect the intimacy of the subjects

and reveala power resistance in the face of these changes, which seems to pose a great threat

to preserving the status quo in the relationship between the sexes.

Feminism and psychoanalysis: the matter of the female “Other”.

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Psychoanalysis, constantly concerned with monitoring suffering and discontent and

attempting to redirect subjects to discover the construction and perpetuation of the dead ends

in which their symptoms reside; has interpreted subjective female discontent in different

ways. These include explanations such as phallic grievance, narcissistic compensation,

masochism, perennial dissatisfaction, etc., problems that can stem from the “rock of

castration” as Freud called penis envy, which has unconsciously afflicted the woman, and her

impossibility to overcome it.

From the specific (and therefore sexuated) position of female psychoanalysts, it is a matter of

urgency to revise the conceptual assumptions that underlie our clinical practices regarding the

sexes, and to critically scrutinize them under the microscope. This would allow us to prove

the bias of these assumptions and avoid a cure that simply repeats or adapts to the customs

and habits of a patriarchal society, which rather implicitly than explicitly still considers

differences such as inequality, namely the subordination of the female sex, as something

natural.

In the history of psychoanalysis, when Freud (1923) establishes that in child sexuality what

occursaround the Oedipus complex is not only genital primacy, but phallic primacy, in both

sexes, this produces the non-trivial consequences of unconscious contempt and horror for

femininity, female psychoanalysts do not stay out of the debate. Indeed, the matter divides

psychoanalysis of the time into the School of Vienna and the English School, provoking for

more than a decade, a large amount of research on female sexuality, including the work of

M.Klein, K.Horney, H.Deutsch, L.Andreas-Salomé, R.Mac Brunswick, J.Lampl-de Groot, as

well as the contributions from Karl Abraham and Ernest Jones.

As Silvia Tubert (2001) has exemplarily synthesized, the central elements of the debate

among theorists on female sexuality are fundamentally: a) phallic supremacy (which leads to

the concept of penis envy in the woman); b) sexual monism, in other words, the existence of a
 4

single libido for both sexes (which destroys the idea of complementarity between the sexes, as

much as the idea of an exclusively female desire); c) the change of the sexual object from the

mother to the father (which hides the importance of the first mother-daughter relationship in

the woman); and d) the change of the main female erogenous zone from the clitoris to the

vagina (which superposes normatively and androcentrically the reproductive function onto the

erotic function).

It is also worth pointing out that while points c) and d) do not currently cause significant

divisions between the schools of psychoanalysis, since the mother-daughter relationship is

transversally considered primordial in the psychosexual development of women, whose

change to the father object in the “positive” Oedipus in no way buries that first

relationship/deception of the maternal. Furthermore, the change of erogenous zone is not

considered a necessary condition for normality, since vaginal pleasure does not exclude the

clitoral and is even generally facilitated by the latter; however, with regard to points a) and b)

the division remains, since the Schools tied to the French Lacanian psychoanalysis have

endorsed both Freudian ideas, while the British analysts have maintained their opposition to

these concepts, considering that there is a primary female identification as well as an

unconscious representation of femininity linked to early vaginal sensations. This would be

equivalent to the phallus, signaling the emergence of two libidinal energies, a masculine and a

feminine, therefore allowing the consideration of complementarity between the sexes.

A second important point in the discussion on female sexuality in psychoanalysis arose in the

1970s, from the inception of the pertinent social revolutions, in which feminism plays a

central role, with the development of two opposing interpretations or proposals for femininity

in terms of emphasis on the notions of “difference” or “equality” between the sexes. This

created a considerable theoretical and political impasse, which took feminism over a decade
 5

to overcome, though its mark still remains engraved in the philosophical and political

postulates of diverse feminist stands today.

On the one hand, there is the group of feminists of equality who mainly include English-

speaking feminists with the old suffragette mark. They adopt the concept of “gender” as a

theoretical tool to conceptualize the social, historical and cultural construction of sexual

difference, opposed to any naturalization or biologization of femininity. Their political

strategy aims to achieve integration and validation in the existing patriarchal order, assuming

equality for women as non-different subjects to men. Two decades later, the demands of the

new gender and “queer” theories would strongly adhere to this group, incorporating the need

to “deconstruct gender” and its stereotypes with the consideration that they imply the

reproduction of inequalities and hierarchies learnt between the sexes. Judith Butler, a feminist

philosopher recognized for her defense of “gender autonomy”, suggests that anatomy is

neither a destiny nor an ontology, since there is no feminine or masculine “nature”. From

there, she questions the sex notion, considering that there is nothing natural in this, that the

sexual body is conditioned by the same practices of discursive subjectivity as “gender”, which

would oblige us to accept just two possibilities of sexuality, as a rigidly dualistic essence:

“(...)a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the

binary options as a variable construction (...) Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex

discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and

social interests? (...) perhaps this construct called "sex" is as culturally constructed as gender”

(Butler, 1990).

On the other hand, from the continental European Riviera comes the group made up of

feminists of difference, who follow the concept of “sexual difference” developed in France by

the philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray along with Helene Cixous and adopted with

great success in Italy by diverse feminine groups such as the group “Rivolta femminile” or the
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philosophical collective “Diotima” of Verona, which was later also adopted in Spain. This

leans towards installing and highlighting an autonomous female subjectivity, thereby

revaluing the feminine side of sexual difference. From this feminist point of view, the

theoretical “naivety” of the feminists of equality is criticized for claiming to be included, on

official approval, in the historical domination and universalization of the masculine. For the

feminists of difference, the practices of female political inclusion, far from being abolished or

overcome, actually allow the patriarchal order to find support in women themselves to

validate the historical invisibleness of women in their specific difference. The strategy of this

group then is to redefine the feminine subjectivity in terms of “sexual difference”,

emphasizing the lack of symmetry between the sexes, i.e. their radical difference, not their

inferiority, and thus to focus on the alternative values women can contribute. It is in this way,

by developing diverse political practices which range from “affidamento” to “self-awareness

groups”, that feminists of difference aim to construct a culture and an ethic of emotion and

sexual difference in all their dimensions. The thesis that underlies this trend fixes it roots in

the body, considering that there are two distinct, differentiated sexes with specific anatomical

characteristics as well as diverse psychic sensitivities and dispositions which would refer to

two different types of ontology. This would on the one hand, center the male sex on the

phallic monarchy, and on the other hand, center the female sex on a nomadic and anarchic

plurality of the body, as a body with no center, a double body (in the sense of the unique

experience of pregnancy and also the experience of the two labia of its sexuality), open,

implacable and rebellious in the face of the hierarchical supremacy of the phallus: “It is a

matter then, for women, of learning to discover and inhabit a different magnetism and the

morphology of a sexuated body especially in its mucous particularities and qualities. But this

flesh (and wouldn’t the mucous largely be the material of the flesh?) has remained ignored,

often imagined as chaos, an abyss or an enigma. (...) The female hasn’t yet used her
 7

morphology. Subjected to the maternal, reduced to being a womb, or the ornament to seduce,

the female has served only to conceive, to raise, to give birth and rebirth to the forms of the

other” (Irigaray, L., 1987, pp. 202).

It is interesting to note that the very enthusiastic but not always fair criticisms against the

Freudian psychoanalysis, which intensified in the 70s from both feminisms, led the British

psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell (1974) to develop a feminist psychoanalytical articulation. Her

fundamental argument is that since psychoanalysis consists of a description of how a subject

comes to acquire, adapt to and yield to a patriarchal law, i.e. the ways in which the subject

internalizes and reproduces oppression and subordination, it would be possible to generate a

descriptive explanation of what women suffer from but never an invalidating prescription for

them. In other words, Mitchell situates psychoanalytical theory in a historic, social and

political context which allows the understanding of the origin of oppression between the sexes

and thereby enables it to be set up as an instrument of liberation, an issue we will come back

to.

Certainly, for the creator of psychoanalysis, the man/woman differentiation is explained by

the different position of the sexes in the face of “castration” (in the phallic-oedipal stage)

whether it is due to the anxiety/fear that this actually might occur (men) or due to the

resignation/grievance in the face of what is already so (women). It is interesting to insist on

the fact that in both cases it is a matter of the particular ways of assuming the consequence of

“castration”, in other words the relationship with the phallus itself, whether it is the fear of

losing their representative (the penis) as in the case of men, or the need of having the

possibility of receiving it, as in the case of women. The latter would be fundamentally

guaranteed in becoming a mother (ideally of a son). It is here, for Freud, that “penis envy” or

penisneid is posited as a key element which would mark the boundary of the analyzable in a

woman (Freud, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1931, 1933).

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Between the first and second important moments of the discussion on female sexuality, the

school of thought of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was developed in France. Without refuting

the Freudian thesis it offered a structural interpretation of femininity that avoided the problem

of female identity, to concentrate on its enjoyment (jouissance)ii. In this way, it allowed new

questions regarding the possibility of femininity to arise, thus going beyond the insuperable

rock of castration, and the resulting “penis envy” stated by Freud. Such a possibility is

welcomed among feminist groups interested in psychoanalysis as a possibility of overcoming

and becoming free of the impasses of conservative Freudianism.

To form this movement, Lacan, following the Freudian line linked to the unconscious

primacy of the phallus, transfers the conception of the Other from the place of the Signifier

and Culture, to finally incarnate the place of the Woman, who from this perspective becomes

the Other even for herself; in other words, the fundamental otherness. Indeed, if the

unconscious does not have a symbol for the female sex, on the subject of the unconscious the

Other sex is missing as much for the man as for the woman. In other words, from

phallocentric logic, the female sex is the absolute Other for both sexes, which is the place

that, historically and in all the disciplines of knowledge and power, the woman has always

held.

The complexity of the subject is apparent from at least two perspectives. Firstly, if the phallus

is the signifier of desire (for something lacking) for both sexes, it is neither innocuous nor

banal that its imaginary representative par excellence is the activated penis and that it is from

the moment when the organ is perceived that sexual difference is established in early

childhood. Despite this, in distinct moments of his work Lacan attempts to explicitly

differentiate it from the anatomical reference: “emphasizing the organ, the phallus does not

describe in anyway the organ called penis with neither its physiology nor the function that

could indeed be attributed to it with some credibility, that of copulation. If we refer to the
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analytical texts, it indicates in the least ambiguous way its relationship to enjoyment

(jouissance)” (Lacan, 1971, p. 62).

However, even if, for Lacan, the phallus refers to an “instrument of enjoyment (jouissance)”,

which works for both sexes, which “absolutely must not be confused with the penis” (Lacan,

1971, p.65), psychoanalysis still considers the impact of bodily semblances in the sexuation or

subjectivation of sex. This impact can also be described as the perceived presence/absence of

the penis as a bodily detail, the influence of which is not indifferentat the start of sexuation, in

the same way that the discourse of the Other, which receives this body, has importance. This

“not indifferent” influence refers to the need to historicize the concept of the “phallus”, in the

sense of “remembering that the signifier without the signified is necessarily included in social

signification, which, for the case of our cultural context, is an androcentric signification in

which the +1 of possession of the anatomical organ on behalf of the man and the -1 of its lack

for the woman are linked to a hierarchical valuation of the sexes (...)” (Santos Velásquez,

2009, p. 116).

Secondly, and very much related to the first point, if in the unconscious there is only one sex,

the male, and its alternative is the castrated, the woman is positioned as the Other castrated,

for herself as well as for men. According to Irigaray, this designation of the woman as the

lacking Other, belittled and devalued, has not only affected what the male world from its

position of knowledge/power says about women, but also what women themselves come to

consider their own and the direction of their searches (Irigaray, 1974, 1977, 1987).

As already mentioned, it is this circumstance, the consideration of the female as the castrated

and passive Other, where Freud deduces the generalized disdain and horror in the face of

femininity as a particular unconscious consequence.

If this is so, what transformations between the sexes can feminism expect? Is female

“liberation” and the resulting “revolution between sexes” a utopia with no destiny?
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Women’s liberty and liberation in Lacan’s teaching.

The fact that women’s liberation is not given through emancipation has already been pointed

out by the Italian feminist movement in the 1970s when, after passing through consciousness

raising groups as a necessary step, emancipationism (which assumes gender equality as a

precondition) was recognized as a way to eliminate differences that prevented women from

accessing an autonomous female subjectivity. Emancipation, as a demand for equality with

men, would have meant for women giving up the search for their own, different, “meaning of

existence”(Lonzi, 1970).Psychoanalysis can perhaps provide the feminist project ‘on

difference’, concerning the achievement of an independent female subjectivity, with a

theoretical framework. In lacanian terms, emancipation may be interpreted as women’s

subjugation to what Lacan calls the semblance, i.e. the collective consciousness and the

system of values linked to the phallocentrism expressed through it, and from which the

feminine position, understood as a form of enjoyment (jouissance) that differs from phallic

enjoyment (jouissance), ensures a greater freedom.

Indeed, in the 1970s, Lacan posited the distinction between two logics of enjoyment

(jouissance), two different ways of organizing the libidinal economy, that is a ‘feminine’ and

a ‘masculine’ form of sexuation. Masculine libidinal economy is entirely governed by the

castration complex and by the reference to the phallic signifier. This is what Lacan calls the

logic of being completely (tout) in the phallic function. On the contrary, as Freud had already

pointed out (1925), women’s libidinal economy does not entirely revolve around the

castration complex: in addition to phallic enjoyment (jouissance), which women share with

men, as it were, there is a form of enjoyment (jouissance) that Lacan calls supplementary. As

Lacan says, women are ‘not-all’ (pas-tout) in the phallic function: their libidinal economy
 11

goes partially beyond the phallocentrism that Lacan attributes to the unconscious. This extra-

enjoyment (jouissance), supplementary to the phallic one, defines an area in which female

sexuality is independent from phallocentrism and a greater freedom from it is therefore

possible.

Let us now analyze a few passages in which Lacan mentions this peculiar feminine freedom.

Initially, Lacan’s theory assigned to women the role of objects for the exchanges ordered by

the elementary structures of kinship, thus repeating Levi Strauss’s insight: the institution of

marriage, which is at the basis of the social order, is a trade of women and of their

reproductive abilities, wanted by men (Levi-Strauss 1949). From this perspective, there is no

creature with less freedom than a woman, since she is subject to a symbolic order that

‘literally transcends her’ (Lacan, 1954-55, p.333) and that gives her an economic function

ensuring a universal bond among men. This theory can also be found in Irigaray’s critical

feminism, according to which women lose themselves in their attempt to please men’s desire,

thus becoming a consumer product or object of desire in the interests of the male subject:

“In our social order, women are “produced”, used and exchanged by men. Their status is that

of “merchandise”. How can this object for use and transaction demand a right to speak and,

more generally, a participation in the exchanges?” (Irigaray,1977, p.62).

On the other hand, psychoanalysis has situated the woman-mother at the central place of what

Lacan calls das Ding, the Thing, following in Freud’s footsteps, which means she is the first

object of a mythic fulfillment, which has never been experienced in reality but can only be

retroactively perceived as the lost and missing object, or rather enjoyment (jouissance), and

pushes the subject to find it in potential replacements, whose value will be defined by the

phallic referenceiii.Again, the woman is defined not in herself, but as an object of desire

(Lacan 1959-60 p.253).

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In other words, the position of the woman as subject remains controversial and Lacan starts

discussing this topic more extensively in his 10th Seminar (Anxiety),stating that women do

not completely participate in the fundamental alienation of their subjectivity on which the

Kultur is based. ‘Completely’ means that the relationship with the Other is not immediate but

takes place by means of the male subject, which leads to a ‘second degree’ relationship with

the Other (Lacan1954-55 p.333), providing the woman with a larger scope of action as far as

enjoyment (jouissance)is concerned:

“It is because, in her relationship to the Other, she does not hold to it as essentially as the

man, that she has this greater freedom essentially, Wesentlich”(Lacan, 1962-63 p.198).

Indeed, according to Lacan, the woman is interested in the object as the object of male desire,

which means that her liaison to “phallic” objects is mediated by the interest men have in

them:“[…] it is indeed with the desire of the Other as such that she is in a way affronted,

confronted. It is a great simplification that, as regards this confrontation, this phallic object

only comes second for her and in so far as it plays a role in the desire of the Other”(ib. p.198).

If on the one hand, in a symbolic order, the feminine position is the one of an object, on the

other one, in the same symbolic order, the woman as a subject could have a greater

independence, since her enjoyment (jouissance), which Lacan had not yet posited as

supplementary enjoyment (jouissance), is already considered as partially independent from

phallicism.

“This lack, this "minus" sign, with which the phallic function is marked for man, which

means that for him his liaison to the object must pass by this negativing of the phallus by the

castration complex, this necessity which is the status of the (-φ), at the centre at man's desire,

is something which for the woman is not a necessary knot”(ib. p.197-98).

This leads Lacan to an interpretation which is wholly contrary to the Freudian theory of

Penisneid: “the woman does not lack anything” (Lacan 1962-63 p.196), since her liaison to
 13

the object is not entirely governed by castration and, consequently, by the function of the lost

object that assumes a phallic value. Therefore, considering the creation myth as representative

of the structure of masculine desire and of its liaison to the lost object, we might state that

women have no ribs to re-incorporate, which leads her to a greater degree of freedom in her

liaison to the object of desire.

The idea of women’s greater independence from the object (or from the castration complex) is

explained by Lacan through a specific case study, concerning a woman whose excitement is

caused, “inexplicably” (ib. p.203), from any moving objects entering her field of vision, “in

appearance is quite foreign to sexual images or space” (ib. p.204). The object is insignificant

in itself, but what is noteworthy is that, following the associations subsequently produced by

the patient, the analyst is evoked as a witness of its presence:“Any object whatsoever obliges

me to evoke you as a witness, not even to have the approval of what I see. No, simply the

look. In saying that, I am even going a little too far. Let us say that this look helps me to get

its meaning from everything" (ib.).

In this case, it is not the nature of the object that determines excitement, nor its function of

cause of desire, replacement of the lost object. What seems to be important is that the gaze of

the Other, and consequently the desire of the Other, is evoked on the stage, thus letting any

object whatsoever assume enjoyment (jouissance) value. Any object whatsoever can be a lure

to entice the Other: indeed, Lacan states that the woman is mainly interested in the desire of

the Other and that she basically tempts herself in tempting the Other (ib. p.205).

The greater degree of freedom that Lacan attributes to women in their liaison to the object can

be detected on the analyst’s side as well, in the countertransference formulations to which

female psychoanalysts, in Lacan’s opinion, have made the most significant contribution.

Taking up a case study reported by Lucia Tower, Lacan shows how the analyst is very able to

deal with the fact of being degraded into a partial object by the patient, and to distance herself,
 14

so that she is not involved in the sadistic search of the analysand. This happens because the

analyst, even more as a woman, “knows very well that he can always search, that there has

never been any question of him finding. This is precisely what is involved: for him to realize

that there is nothing to find. There is nothing to be found there, because that which for the

man, for male desire in this case, is the object of the search only concerns, as I might say,

himself” (ib. p.215).

Analysts, especially women analysts, know that the object of desire is hopelessly lost because

of its infantile origins and that it will not be found again, not even in the partner, who can

only agree to sustain the deceit of recovery with a similar one, the masqueradeiv:

“And to go further in my formulae, I would say that because of this fact in the kingdom of the

man there is always some imposture present. In that of the woman, as we already said at one

time - remember the article by Joan Rivière - if something corresponds to it, it is the

masquerade; but it is something quite different. Woman in general is much more real and

much truer in the fact that she knows what the hell she dealing with in desire is worth, that she

passes through this in a very tranquil manner, that she has, as I might say, a certain contempt

for her misapprehension, a luxury which the man cannot offer himself. He cannot have

contempt for the misapprehension about desire, because it is his quality as a man to prize it”

(ib. p. 207).

Whereas the man, due to his desire which is entirely governed by the phallic signifier, is

forced to believe that the lost object can be found and that castration can be redressed, the

woman can maintain a certain distance or, as Lacan says, “a certain contempt” (cfr. supra) for

a desire which revolves around the phallic value of objects.

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After discussing enjoyment (jouissance) (Lacan 1971, 1972-1973), Lacan will return to the

issue of the feminine “greater freedom” in a way that is more accessible to a political

response, positing for women a disjunction between semblance and enjoyment (jouissance).

In his Seminar of 1971, Lacan gives an inspiring example that, once again, deals with the

relationship between the sexes at a given moment of their “psychopathology of everyday

life”.

Lacan states that, since in men there is a coincidence of semblance and enjoyment

(jouissance), due to phallocentrism, the choice of the partner reveals the truth of a man,

therefore we might argue that to weigh a man there is nothing like weighing his wife(1971

p.29). In other words, a woman lends herself to representing the phallic object that a man is

missing, his “truth” in terms of his relation to castration.

“When the woman is at stake it is not the same thing” (ib.): the choice of a partner goes to

show the disjunction between semblance and enjoyment (jouissance), i.e. the fact that her

enjoyment (jouissance) does not belong to the semblance, because “the woman has very great

freedom with respect to the semblance! She will manage to give weight even to a man who

has none”(ib.).Starting from her enjoyment (jouissance), a woman will be able to give value

even to a man who does not seem to have any, as far as the semblance is concerned. In short,

a woman will be able to ennoble even a man who is devoid of the phallic semblances of

virility, such as power, money, physical appearance, prestige and so onv.

In a political perspective, this statement can lead us far: starting from the uniqueness of

feminine enjoyment (jouissance), it envisages establishing “values” that do not belong to a

system of phallic semblances and understanding or giving value differently –legislating on the

terms set by Nietzsche - evoking Lou Andreas-Salomé’s words on the ethic position of

women: “a woman’s order and legality can be found elsewhere” (Salomé, 1928, p.173).
 16

This also leads to the question of the super-ego, which conveys a quest for enjoyment rather

than a system of prohibitions in Lacan’s teaching and explains the conception of a feminine

super-ego, which in Freud was subject to the masculine one, whereas, in this perspective,it

simply becomes different.

To refer to the feminine super-ego, Lacan uses the neologism “surmoitié”, translated as

overhalf (1972 p.367), which “does not become super-ego as easily as the universal

conscience” (ib.).Indeed in 1924, Freud had already pointed out how the constitution of a

feminine super-ego stemmed from the fear of a “loss of love”, a more contingent and less

universal element than the castration anxiety, which relates to the of phallic signifier. The

feminine super-ego, just as much as enjoyment (jouissance), would be resistant to

universality, thus indicating what lacanian psychoanalysis defines as S(A), which means the

fundamental inadequacy of the symbolic system, the necessary incompleteness of any

knowledge and, consequently, the impossibility of universality. In Lacan, the encounter with

this fundamental lack represents one of the carriers of feminine enjoyment (jouissance).

Let us now get back to the possible political response: the hallmark of feminine
jouissance,that is its independence from the phallocentric order of the semblances, its
openness to contingency through the experience of the incompleteness of the Other, might be
a starting point for the development of different models of existence and of ethical
responsibility, which are useful to women’s policy.
Luisa Muraro, an Italian philosopher and feminist, states something similar when she writes
that feminist political theory must be understood as a “politics of the symbolic” (2009 p.115),
which means a transformation of language and values in order to make them better attuned to
the experience of women. As examples of this somehow political process, the author
mentions artistic creation, with special reference to those female writers who experience the
possibility of expressing something new with language, and mysticism, an existential path
that leads to enjoyment (jouissance), which is not very conventional and where we can find a
commitment to speak something that is unspeakableby definition. One of the best-known
examples in the field of ethics is given by the American psychologist Carol Gilligan, whose
works focus on the ethics of care as a form of relationship which is mainly emphasized by
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women but which, in her opinion, can provide the preconditions for a genuinely human and
democratic approach to the Other (Gilligan, 1982; 2011).

Post structural feminism. Possibilities of a“revolt”.

Since the undeniable impact of feminism on culture in recent years, psychoanalytical research

regarding the female position suggested by Lacan has become more complex and richer.

For Julia Kristeva (1993, 1996, 1998), celebrated semiologist and psychoanalyst who was

trained under the IPA but very closely to Lacan, it is urgent that in the midst of the society of

image and spectacle which currently reigns, marked by the fall of rebellious ideologies as

well as the advance in culture-merchandise; to strengthen a “culture revolt”, illuminating “the

value of experiences-rebelliousness, formal and philosophical ones, which offer perhaps an

opportunity to keep alive our internal life” (Kristeva, 1996, p.21).

In this respect, the author applies experience linked to “the universe of women” to suggest an

alternative to the robotizing society of spectacle that ruins the revolt-culture: “this alternative

is, simply, sensitive intimacy. (...) the revaluing of the sensitive experience as an antidote in

the face of technical reasoning” (Kristeva, 1998, p. 16).

This sensitive experience that underlies the “intimate revolt” to which Kristeva urges us,

which is at the same time the path of rebels, of realists who want the impossible, whose

questioning remains as “the only possible thought, indication of a simply alive life” (Kristeva,

1998, p. 9), has a previous moment to sexual differentiation as a basis in the subjective

constitution and to its resulting positioning as males and/or females. It is a matter of the

semiotic space of the maternal, which will later give way to the incorporation of the subject in

symbolic language, a primary moment that will lay the foundations for the possibility of a

future subjective re-volt and subversion of the strictness of the symbolic order in which both
 18

men and women are inserted in culture. To explain the semiotic, Kristeva invites us to think

about language, besides its relationship of signifier and signified, as having a “density of the

layering”vi, nourished by the sensorial. This would be found latent behind the symbolic order,

being previous to this and being intertwined in the maternal, corresponding in this way to the

drives which would insert the non-significant, a bodily nature of rhythms and interruptions,

the harmonies of which with the Lacanian concept of “lalangue”vii appear to us suggestive as

a consequence.

In emphasizing this previous moment to sexual difference, rather than occupying herself in

creating a theory of femininity, Kristeva focuses on the marginal areas of the dominant

symbolic order, the fringe position, which is implied for women from their complex place in

the Oedipus, inasmuch as her possibilities are either being marginalized from the symbolic

order (in identifying with the mother and intensifying the pre-Oedipal components of the

psyche), or having to deduce her identity from the emblems that the phallocentric culture

determines for her (in identifying with the father or with the object of desire of the latter).

According to Kristeva, from the point of view of psychoanalysis, the re-volt would be a result

of the invitation to re-embrace the unconscious, to attempt a “re-birth” or a psychic re-

structuring, an experience where “(...) the tension towards the unity, towards the being or

towards the authority of the law, even if it is always present in this modern re-volt, goes

accompanied, more than ever, by the centrifugal forces of the dissolution and dispersion”

(Kristeva, 1998, p. 21-22).

From this point of view, it is not the world of action but that of the psychic life and its social

manifestations (writing, thought, art) where this re-volt is carried out, where psychismis

formedin the privileged place where life finds its meaning if, and only if, it is capable of re-

volt (p. 22). Therefore, the re-volt culture (and the psychoanalysis that strengthens it) will
 19

especially explore “the permanence of contradiction, the provisional nature of reconciliation,

the demonstration of everything that puts to the test the possibility itself of the single meaning

(like the impulse, the feminine, the unmentionable, the destruction, the psychosis, etc.)”

(Kristeva, 1998, p. 28).

For Kristeva, “from this conflict originates enjoyment which is not simply a narcissistic or

selfish whim (...). This enjoyment –and there the contribution of Freud radical- is

indispensable for the good maintenance of the psychic life, indispensable for this faculty of

representation and questioning which characterize the human being” (Kristeva, 1998, p.22).

Regarding the possibility of an intimate re-volt linked to female liberation, it is worth

underlining that Kristeva’s position does not simply equip femininity with the triumph of the

semiotic, since the mobile fluidity of the semiotic is associated with the pre-Oedipal phase,

and therefore, a phase where the opposition male-female does not yet exist, the mother being

the omnipotent figure who would bring together all characteristics and powers. Hence, her

idea implies the possibility of the male as well as the female subject to revolutionarily

mobilize the enjoyment included in the semiotic space so that it disrupts, destabilizes,

introduces itself into the symbolic order.

Another psychoanalytical researcher of femininity, whose contributions from post

structuralism have permitted a critical rethink of psychoanalysis as well as feminism, is the

Argentine Silvia Tubert (1996, 2001, 2003). She has researched the role of female sexuality

in culture and especially in the epistemological postulates that defend psychoanalysis as part

of the same culture.

For this critical psychoanalytical perspective, if sexuality includes a multiplicity of partial

impulses, which independently search for their enjoyment (jouissance) (where not even

genitalia guarantee a final sexual unity or identity), the essentialist conception of masculinity

and femininity collapses because of inconsistency. Masculinity and femininity will not then
 20

be starting points, but points of arrival and never sufficiently guaranteed; structured through

the particular modes of experiencing the Oedipus complex, that is, through the vicissitudes of

the castration experience (phallic phase of the childhood genital organization).

For Tubert (2003), femininity and masculinity are relational terms, which only have meaning

in reference to the difference between the sexes: “The sexuation inscribes itself in the body of

each subject fundamentally as a difference and not as an absolute term linked to particular

sexual organs or the immediate identification with the mother” (p.35). In this sense, rather

than placing the enigma of difference in the body of the woman, ontologising and

essentialising difference, untying it from its historicity, the accent should shift from the study

of women to the problem of difference itself, in which both men and women confirm

themselves as sexuated subjects, that is, produced by a division. Thus, it would then be a

matter of starting to think in terms of sexual difference, understood as a symbolic operation

that takes shape in the distinct anatomical organisms, producing imaginary effects (essentialist

a historical representations of femininity) (Tubert, 2001) and rejecting the definition of

feminine with representations which inevitably would perceive it (as the old “black continent

of femininity”), creating stereotypes that would generate the classic regressive effects for the

theoretical construction of the feminine as well as for the social perception and its effects on

the living conditions of women.

In reality, for Tubert, if femininity seems enigmatic it is because it develops the function of

representing in the symbolic order the biological enigma of the difference between the sexes;

an interesting matter for if the authentic enigma is the existence of the difference between the

sexes and is defined only from the dominant side, clearly it will be represented by a series of

imaginary meanings (the “feminine mystery”, the “black continent”) introduced by a culture

whose hegemonic system of gender is inevitably androcentric. And as a consequence, in

carrying out this inscription in the symbolic order “under the form of negativity”, or the
 21

“lesser” feminine, it produces “(...) conditions a malaise which generates symptoms” (Tubert,

2001, p. 130-131).

On the other hand, in comparing the male phallic enjoymentto the infinity of female

enjoyment (jouissance), it is also indicated that in the female her “not-all” phallic position

would leave her open to what from the unconscious cannot be said, thus assigning her the

dimension of the “mystical” experience (Tubert, 1996), a controversial idea in relation to the

historical idealization and perception of femininity, which feminism has fought for decades

(Freidan, 1963).

Nevertheless, in accordance with the above, we can understand how the woman becomes the

Other of psychism and culture, for the very fact of being a woman contains an intrinsic

impossibility, linked to corporeality. As the Columbian psychoanalyst Santos Velásquez

(2009) has synthesized: She has no way of signifying her sex by what it reveals to sight, that

is, in its specular image (imaginary order), which leads her to a lack of a signifier (symbolic

order), which produces a loss in the real order.

Thus, one of the central questions that are drawn from post structuralist research is how and

why does the penis come to have this function of representing the phallus in our androcentric

culture, and more importantly still, whether or not this determination is structural, and

therefore unalterable, or historical.

From her Lacanian conception of the psychic conformation of subjects, Tubert recognizes the

importance of the metaphorizing function, -the Name-of-the-Father-. However, from her

feminist and historical viewpoint, she tries to operate a twist that permits us to consider

another possibility for female subjects other than the submission to the dominant male order:

“If we recognize that the metaphorizing function that introduces us into the symbolic order is

necessary for our constitution as subject, but the metaphors that drive it are contingent, we
 22

will have to accept that the fixing of meaning of the male and female categories is of an

ideological nature” (Tubert, 2001, p.142).

In the complex relationship that underlies psychoanalysis and feminism, it is worth pointing

out to female psychoanalysts that a deconstructive interpretation of Lacan would have to

concentrate on elucidating the phallocentric keys to understanding the subject (both female

and male). This should be done keeping in mind that feminism aims to achieve political

equality between the sexes and consequently an autonomous position for each.

Psychoanalysis, on the other hand deals with the centrality of the dimension of Otherness

-in which the Woman unconsciously resides for both sexes-contains the impossibility of

subjective self-determination, the need of passing through the desire of the Other, which

destroys the pretension of universal subjective autonomy, since no subject can signifyby and

for itself, but it incarnates the tracks of desire for the Other in the “voices” of the body.

Silvia Tubert (2001) proposes an interesting conclusion in postulating that rather than

occupying the place of the Other, it is a matter of women occupying the function of the Other

as a possibility of reconstruction of the feminine from a place of shared exile with other

nomadic and changing groups, which will avoid falling into identity essentialisms contrary to

the subjective mobility of women and their desires for “liberation”.

Finally, from this proposal to occupy, as women, a moving and changing position, which

nonetheless has made itself heard in the culture, infiltrating the symbolic order of specific

femenine sayings, we find it interesting to consider and incorporate to the clinical listening –

which is from where we position ourselves- the proposed feminism of difference (Irigaray,

Lonzi, Muraro, etc.) and its contemporary derivatives with regard to proposals of “situated”

knowledge, to “nomadic subjectivity” and to feminine “incardination”viii (Braidotti, 2004),

personal and political processes that are particularly pertinent for uniting the two aspects,

while understanding that no matter how complex it is, it is imperative to explore this path.
 23

From our clinical position of allowing and promoting the emergence of specific feminine

speech that infiltrates and permeates the symbolic order, it is a conceptually complex and

perhaps utopic proposal, as it is through the use of the same material that comprises the

symbolic -words- that we aim to remove it. We find one way out of this predicament: if we

think that it is not about getting rid of the symbolic order, which is so essential to human

structuring, but rather about using it to destabilize it, to deconstruct it. It is about forcing

meaning and categories that are assumed to be perfectly understood, to generate questions and

eventually the possibility of developing and visualizing thoughts, languages and desires

infiltrated with a highly necessary otherness.

Conclusions.

The article covers some key concepts for understanding the complex relationship between

feminism and psychoanalysis, in an attempt to shed light on whether it is possible to think of

the latter as an instrument of “women’s liberation” and if so, what kind of liberation would

that be.

Following the argument from Lacan with regard to the greater degree of “freedom” that

women would enjoy and the reasons behind this, the text analyses sexual difference in terms

of the ways desire and enjoyment are experienced, positing that it is possible, thanks to the

singularity of feminine enjoyment, to think of establishing “values” that are not phallic. This

means the possibility of a different way of understanding and conferring value, based on

opening up to the originality of a feminine speech with a more direct relationship with reality.

From this, the article aims to show the benefits of the infiltration of specific feminine speech

into social discourse, without having this feminine speech reabsorbed into equalitarian and
 24

uniformising masculine language, and especially not into an ecstatic silence that only serves

to insinuate some form of mysticism. This is about how, based on absence and without

forgetting the impossible in the structure, the structural change of the feminine, to restore the

paradoxical presence of the feminine in discourse, which though it cannot be translated into a

universal concept, can have real effects.

In order to analyze this subject, the work of psychoanalysts Julia Kristeva and Silvia Tubert

was used to imagine some ways that feminine speech may approach and infiltrate cultural

discourse. Kristeva proposes a cultural reevaluation of the sensitive experience arising in the

maternal semiotic space nestled in the unconscious, a sensitive experience that allows us to

keep the internal life alive in the face of the technical rationalization of “spectacle culture”,

poured out into the external world. This is therefore a subjective flip, from the personal to the

political, subverting the strictness of symbolic order. On the other hand, Tubert discusses the

essentialist concept of masculinity and femininity, warning of the need to reconstruct the

feminine from a place of exile shared with other nomadic and changing groups, while

avoiding falling into identity essentialisms that are contrary to the subjective mobility of

women and their desires for “liberation”.

Based on this, the authors keep open the question of the possibility of thinking of establishing

a politics for men and women that considers strategies and actions aimed at resolving the

problems of the cohabitation of the two sexes, undoubtedly considering sexual difference and

the unequal distribution of power/value between the two and focusing on the

creation/construction of a political space that inhabits difference, where the latter is

considered a central component of subjective formation that cannot be suppressed into an all-

encompassing One.
 25

Politically, this implies resistance and subversion of the idea of equality between the sexes,

focusing on the idea of multiplicity and diversity in the differences, and it therefore seems to

us that the feminism of difference in contemporary thoughts on “situated knowledge”,

“nomadic subjectivity” and “incardination” of the feminine would represent a possible way of

approaching this difference and inhabiting it.

Finally, based on the structural impossibility of apprehending or capturing the Other, this

article urges a stop to insisting on the illusion of complementariness between the sexes,

accepting the structural hole in existence in order to live together and recognize the other as

other, going beyond a simple complementary covering of the gap.

 26

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 29

Notes

i
This is a feminine sexuated position that influences and “causes” our theoretical, philosophical and political
interests, a giving specific outline to the issues that bring us together in the article. This is without forgetting that
the Lacanian theory used as our basis states that anatomy is insufficient to define a sexuated position, as such as
position is more related to the particular ways that a being/speaker, more than the discourse of the Other
(familiar or cultural ideals or prescriptions) and/or the body received at birth, identifies their own sexual
satisfaction, either as male enjoyment (phallic) or female enjoyment (not-all phallic).
ii
The concept of jouissance, widely developed by Lacan, as well as its irrefutable sexual connotation, refers to
more than just the pleasure or enjoyment. As a matter of fact, it has been said that pleasure operates in opposition
to jouissance. As it serves as a boundary that when transgressed draws the subject to pain and suffering closer to
jouissance. It is due to this complexity that the original French concept tends to beretained.
iii
Castration is seen by Lacan, in the first instance, as the necessary separation from the maternal jouissance. This
separation triggers desire, whose signifier is the phallus, as already stated, and it gives a phallic value to the
object of desire.
iv
The masquerade Lacan writes about, with reference to the well-known article by Joan Rivière (Womanliness as
Masquerade, 1929), is understood as the woman’s participation in the masculine phantasm, fitting into the
stereotypical mold of femininity (through make-up, clothes, gestures etc.).
v
Of course, what Lacan points out is a possible resource in women’s jouissance economy, which is not
necessarily translated into action. Indeed, more and more women today adhere to masculine semblances without
any apparent difficulty or contradiction.
vi
By “density of the layering” of the semiotic is understood as the intersection of the multiple layers of
sensorial/material experience of the initial relationship with the mother. It is a density comprised of corporal and
sensual rhythms (voices, touch, tastes, looks, first meaningless vocalizations) where the maternal collects, united
and gives a mark of connection subsequent to the symbolic.
vii
The concept of “lalangue”, central in the last Lacanian teaching, mentions the indivisible work of enjoyment
knotting body and words of the infant, leading to the concept of “parletre” or speaking being, rather than subject.
viii
The “incardination” of the female subject (Braidotti, 2004) is a philosophical and political movement about
appropriating the body in the fight to redefine subjectivity. Thus, the concept of body, based on the theory of
sexual difference, refers to a surface of meanings intermeshed with anatomy and the symbolic dimension of
language, the focus is placed on the sexually differentiated structure of the speaker subject. Thus, the concept of
“incardination” also follows that of “location politics” (Rich, 1976, 1985, cited by Braidotti, 2004) which
indicates the necessary reevaluation by feminist female subjects of the corporal roots of their subjectivity,
rejecting the traditional view of the neutral individual cognoscente, devoid of gender. The subject is understood
in a situated or localized manner, where the first and principal location in reality if incardination itself.