Feminine Sexuality

By: Moustafa Safouan

Admittedly feminine sexuality is the stumbling stone of psychoanalytic theory. All talk about it involves the psychoanalysts conception of the Oedipus complex, or more precisely its core - the castration complex. Before the Second World War, between 1923 and 1936, it aroused an intense discussion, in which nearly every name of any importance in the field of psychoanalysis took part: Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Helen Deutch and LauigodGroot, to name just a few. The most instructive and telling positions were, however, those of Freud and Jones, because they stood in stark opposition to each other, as if there were two poles over which one seemingly had to choose.

For Freud, a woman became a woman: Womanhood is the result of a process, going through the imperatives implied by the Oedipus complex. For Jones shes made so; she doesnt become.

Recall that, according to Freud, a girl goes through a first stage, during which she is just as attached to her mother as is a boy. This is whats called, wrongly, her pre-Oedipus complex, in contrast to the so-called properly feminine Oedipus complex, during which the father replaces the mother as the object of her desire. And in the same way, like the boy, the girl goes through a phallic phase, that is, a phase during which there exists only one sexual organ: the penis. In this phase sexual difference is conceived as the difference between those who have a penis and those who havent, those ones who are castrated. Moreover the little girl isnt yet aware of the anatomical reality of her own sex, of her vagina, and in as much as she takes any notice of her clitoris, she will assimilate it to a small penis. Besides the change of object, the resolution of her Oedipus complex implies a change of the locus of her jouissance, from the clitorial to the vaginal.

Ernst Jones admits the existence of Freuds first stage, during which the girl is as deeply

attached to her mother as is the boy. He also admits the existence of a phallic phase, but he gives it such a twist as to completely change its meaning and importance within the frame of Freuds theory. According to Jones, the ultimate source of anxiety, in the boys case as well as in the girls case, isnt the threat of castration but the threat of aphanisis, that is, of the disappearance if not the complete destruction of his or her sexual life altogether, that is, of desire. The boy symbolizes this threat, which he feels as a result of his rivalry with his father, as a threat of castration. The girl, who feels the same threat as a result of her rivalry with her mother, defends herself against it by imagining it as a threat of castration. In this way she refuses an invisible threat in favor of a visible and therefore more manageable one. What Freud calls the phallic phase is in fact, says Jones, a deutero-phallic one, which means that it is a secondary, transient phase, an artifact produced for the purpose of defense. In spite of all his protestations of fidelity to the Master, the difference between their two theories is so great they cant both be true.

But its rather difficult to just take sides.

Indeed, its difficult to subscribe to Freuds denial of all awareness on the part of the girl of her anatomical reality. There is some evidence that she has at least some suspicion of the existence of her vagina, in that she draws some intimate sensations from it. Many women analysts pointed this out to Freud. And as far as the displacement of her jouissance from the clitoris to the vagina as a sign of normality, this isnt borne out by the facts. Indeed the very linking of normality to jouissance as localized in such and such erotic zone seems at the least arbitrary, if not completely strange.

As to Jones, his idea of aphanisis, that is, his idea of the most radical source of anxiety being the possiblility of the disappearance of desire, supposes the instance of a subject who is detached enough from his desire to be able to suppose it could disappear. We may also notice that this disappearance of desire can itself be a desirable object: There can be a desire to have no desire! Many schools of wisdom profess to lead to this apparently desirable end, and by this token Jones entire construction of the so-called deutero-phallic phase as a defense against aphanisis falls

down. In fact clinical experience doesnt point to any fear that lies beyond or behind the castration complex, of anything that can be said to constitute the truth of what it really is. The function of the phallus, not as a defensive imaginary artifact but as a marker, what we now call the signifier of sexual difference, is without doubt. I shall stay with this point a while.

Later well see the real reason we know neither what it is to be a woman nor what it is to be a man, but we must start by saying that it is precisely because of this not knowing that we may talk endlessly about men and women, assigning them attributes, roles and activities that may be different in different societies. We even create oppositions out of the terms man and woman, through which we represent, for example, the strong and the weak, the clear and the obscure, and the odd and the even. In all of this speech man and woman figure as the subjects of our phrases. But there is at least one situation in which they must be used as predicates: the moment of birth - it must be immediately said whether the newborn is a boy or a girl. Societies generally ill-tolerate hermaphrodites. In ancient Greece they were

considered ominous creatures and they were left in the wilderness to feed beasts and birds of prey. Our not-knowing never prevents us from distinguishing immediately between the two sexes, thanks to the conspicuous character of the penis. The penis belongs to the realm of the real: it is the organ of copulation. But its conspicuous character also enables it to work as the signifier of sexual difference, or in other words, as the phallus, which is what makes it possible to imagine the sex to which one belongs, whichever it is.

To summarize, Ernst Jones theory does not resist criticism on the theoretical or on the clinical level. As for Freud, even though he didnt use the term phallic signifier, he rightly speaks of the phallus as the signifier of sexual difference. We have seen, however, that some of Freuds ideas about feminine sexuality are far from being corroborated by facts. Another conception or theory is thus required, which brings us to Lacan. Indeed he offers this theory.

Lacans theory is contained in two negative

formulas: the first, The woman does not exist and the second, There is no sexual relation. His second formula requires a preliminary terminological remark. The French language contains a distinction between relation and rapport that has no equivalent in English. This distinction makes it possible to deny one while affirming the other one. For example take the two positive numbers, 2 and 3. These two integers have the relation of succession and of inequality, that is, of more and of less, but they dont have the rapport of denominator, of divider and divided. To have this rapport you have to bring it yourself, by constructing the fractional or relational number 2/3. (Thats why Kroensker says only natural numbers are Gods work; man makes everything else.) Similarly you may say there are sexual relations and at the same time deny there is sexual rapport, which means there is nothing that makes a man and a woman have sexual relations with each other.

We shall come to the second thesis later, but first there is a remark to be made. Lacans two aphorisms are based on a logic of his invention (which differs from Aristotles logic), the aim of which is to eliminate Freuds myth of totem and

taboo, a myth that incites Lacan to consider the Oedipus complex as Freuds dream and to eliminate it in favor of a structural elucidation, inasmuch as structure, says he, is logic.

Strictly speaking the first aphorism cant be spoken, it can only be written, with a bar, it should be noticed, on the definite article and not on woman. This article signifies universality. What is denied, therefore, isnt the existence of the feminine sex (the existence of the two sexes is undeniable, and readable in the two genetic scripts, xx and xy) but of its assumption under a pretended universal concept: there is nothing as all women. In Aristotle the universal is obtained from the particulars, whose existence is postulated. But this passage to the universal constitutes a manifestly gratuitous assumption that is justified by nothing. Even though the sun has thus far risen every morning, we can still doubt, with Russell, that it will rise again tomorrow. This is why, according to Lacan, the universal (for example, man, the horse, the primary numbers, the unicorn, etc.) bears testimony in the first place to the power of fiction, which is a property of language: Only language is able to create the concept

horse as an unmultipliable one, independent of all consideration concerning the existence or non-existence of any individual object that may correspond to it. So, the universal is not constructed through reviewing the particulars, one by one, an operation manifestly impossible, but by postulating the existence of an exception. It is by imagining a horse without a horn that we create the unicorn. It is by postulating some man as being immortal that we decree: all men are mortal. And it is where the judgment of the existence of an exception (which is different from effective existence) fails, that the construction of the universal breaks. But then the question arises: Why does the affirmation of an exception and therefore the construction of the universal function not work in the case of the feminine sex?

Well, it all depends on the way in which this sex is defined, which amounts to saying that the problem must be put, not on the level of the real sex (which well exists outside discourse, although it is discourse that posits its existence), but on the level of what the signifier woman means. Indeed nothing can be perceived except through language, and it is only the fact of the preceived being inscribed

in language that lends it a layer, which is properly imaginary, and without which lack cant be positivized or affirmed. It is in this sense that Lacan can say, although privation is real, the object of lack is symbolic. This passage from lack as a given reality to the position of its object in the symbolic is mediated by the imaginary. And it is from this primary imaginairization that the perceived lends itself to a variety of interpretations or representations, equally imaginary, but which nonetheless determine its form. It is in this way that privation of the phallus is assimilated or interpreted as castration.

But there is more than the simple logic of perception that has its share in this assimilation. The fact is that the mothers privation is only apprehended with regard to another being, one who possesses the object she lacks, nominally the father, which makes of it a perception of properly sexual desire, and which adds to the phallus, with which the subject identifies himself or herself as a signifier of the desire of the Other, a value which may be qualified as juridical, that is, it interdicts this very identification and it excludes the subject from it. The subject is

thus deprived of his own being just where he thinks to find it; he or she is castrated just where he or she thinks he or she is the phallus. Therein lies what Lacan calls the phallic function inasmuch as it is, equally, castration. But, what is the reason for the phallic function?

Desire is a radical lack that no gift can fill, in as much as a gift works merely as a sign of love. Now lack doesnt lack on the pregenital level, since on that level its a matter of an object from which the subject actually separated, according to his evolution as a living being, and according to the modalities of his relation to the Other. But on the genital level this lack is precisely not-inlack: the two sexes, or their representatives, are really there, biologically capable of engaging in sexual intercourse, under the condition of their having the desire to do so. So for sexual intercourse to take place a lack must be introduced, even though there is no lack. What takes charge of this interdiction is precisely the phallic function, which Lacan symbolizes by: (x).

We are now prepared to tackle Lacans formulas of sexual relation, and we are prepared to see, under the light of what has preceeded, that these formulas dont concern two sexes, the masculine sex and the feminine sex, but their desire. If Lacan avoids the expression formulas of sexuality to speak instead of sexuation, it is because it is a matter of the process through which the formation of masculine desire and feminine desire takes place in such a way that it isnt a priori excluded that a being of the masculine sex may choose a feminine desire, or that a woman may choose a masculine one. Lacan doesnt use the two letters, x and y, to designate the two sexes, because the question is how a subject may come to adopt a position in conformance with his biological sex, or not to.

According to Freud, the masculine position is rooted in two mythical times: A first where the dominating figure is the castrating father, whose existence is perpetuated in a kind of phylogenic memory, and a second where the desire of this dead father takes on the force of law, in the sense that, seized by a feeling of culpability toward this father, as much

loved as hated, the murderer-brothers decide to submit themselves to symbolic castration, in the sense of renouncing the Good for which they had committed the murder, that is, renouncing their mothers, which then frees them to take wives from outside their group. But this conception doesnt explain the passage from a state where sexual reproduction is submitted only to the biological laws of copulation, to another state in which it is submitted to the law of symbolic castration in the sense of the renunciation on which desire finds its ground. Freuds failure to explain this passage leads Lacan to consider Totum and Taboo as just a story, or more precisely, as a myth, which, like every myth, covers an ignorance of structure.

According to Lacan, the structure equally consists of two times: a first in which the existence is affirmed of an exceptional being, not submitted to the law of castration or to the phallic function, which means no doubt the father as a symbol and as a figure of authority in our societies. In a more general way, the authority and the representation of the group to the outside world has always been a masculine function, even among the Na of

China.1 <#_ftn1> This isnt because men are phallofore, but because desire is not constructible in the child without passing through another desire, which is in principle supposed to be directed toward some third being. The law of interdiction of incest simply grounds this thirdness, which mediates desire, and without which the child would be buried in the dyad. The speaking being, as Lacan repeats, cannot but demand to be deprived of something real. The phallic function offers him the privation of a jouissance, whose satisfaction would have sealed his subjugation to the desire of the mOther, and would have meant the end of the world of the demand. With regard to this third being, the exception, we may talk universally about all men, for example, all men are merely small fathers in flesh and blood.

In brief, it is by submitting to castration as a universal law with regard to an exception that a man has access to a desire that can be qualified as heterosexual. And we can conceive a woman positing the existence of the exception in the same way, and from there submiting without restriction to the phallic function, in which case she would be inhabited by a

homosexual desire. This point deserves to be examined more closely on the clinical level: Is the fear of the threat of castration more vivid among homosexual women than among others? Is this the reason feminine homosexuality often takes on chivalrous, if not platonic, aspects?

Let us pass to the construction of feminine desire. This position begins with the negation of all exceptions. Indeed, if x designates a woman, then this woman is by definition aphallic, which consequently withdraws her from the threat of castration without any need to posit an exception. It remains, however, that the negation of the exception forbids the constitution of the universal. The bar of negation, therefore, must be put on the quantifier which negates this function: Axx. But then, what does this not-all mean if not that some exception, as Aristotle affirms, exists? Lacan, whose entire theory is here at stake, energetically denies the validity of this conclusion.2 <#_ftn2> According to him, the proposition it is not the case that all x are castrated, does not imply the existence of some x that isnt castrated (which would amount to repositing the existence of the exception), even though the feminine position subsists

precisely in this denial. According to Lacan, Axx only signifies that a woman is somewhere submitted to castration, but there is nothing that objects to her being not wholly subjected. We touch here a problem that already arises on the level of the theory of the construction of the universal.

In fact we may say with Lacan that the construction of the universal logically necessitates the exception, but that once the universal proposition has been constructed it may then deny the exception on the level of its signification. For example, we may affirm the existence of one prophet who says the truth in order to affirm that all prophets are liars, but this proposition doesnt hinder us from denying retroactively the exception which permitted its construction. Here the meaning of logical necessity is at stake: How can the rules of inference be established without first delimitating their significations?

If we refer to the psychoanalytic experience, we shall see that the logic of Lacan works. There is no doubt that, on the level of being, a woman is submitted as much as a man to

symbolic castration, which constitutes her as a lack-of-being. As to having, Freud no doubt went too far when he limited her position to penis envy, because the fact is that it is in the measure in which a girl is left to her mother, whether this means to her love or her hate, to her anxiety or her indifference, to her aggressivity or her tenderness, to her care or her neglect; it is in the measure where a certain mediation (of the third, usually the father) fails, that the girl resorts to penis envy, in as much as it constitutes the spontaneous mechanism which permits her to preserve her desire in its primitive form, as a desire for the impossible, or more precisely, as a counterdemand in which she can subsist as a subject in the face of maternal demands. But this does not exclude her from being reconciled somewhere else to a lack that spares her the threat of the castration that weighs so heavily on man. In fact, this threat is in a way knotted to a mans body much more tightly and directly than to the body of the woman, from which we may conclude that womans jouissance is untroubled by such a threat, and so is less perturbable.

To consider it, however, under the angle of

their respective relations to jouissance, the difference between the two sexes doesnt just end here. It isnt simply a difference between plus and minus, as suggested by the question Tireseas answered, not without arousing the fury of the goddess.

Indeed, if it is true that language names things, it nonetheless doesnt give us their essences. To say of a man that he is a man doesnt put him in possession of his sexual reality; on the contrary naming subverts it by bringing the question, what is it to be a man? And its the same with a woman. This unscience, however, doesnt forbid the differentiation between the two sexes by virtue of a mark, that is, the phallus, which has its organic correspondence only in man. This limits the jouissance of the man to phallic jouissance, in as much as his sexuality is submitted to the phallic function from beginning to end, while a whole section of feminine sexuality (and one cant but think of the womans tighter link to sexual reproduction, to life and death) escapes it. Where Freud distinguishes between two modes of feminine jouissance according to anatomical location (clitoral and vaginal), Lacan

distinguishes between a feminine jouissance, which is arrived at along lines drawn by the logic of the phallic function in as much as it works through a first time, which is chronological, and another jouissance that remains outside the reach of the phallic function, which is to say, outside language. It is unsayable, and being unsayable, it engenders the mystical discourse of which Lacan finds the highest expression in Berninis St. Teresas ecstasy and in the Obscure Night of Joan of Arc. Lacan qualifies this other jouissance, not as complementary - which would amount to reestablishing homogeneity where there is none - but as supplementary.

The question is nevertheless raised: doesnt insistence on this unspeakable jouissance amount to reputting into circulation, on the level a return, the question of the black continent evoked by Freud?

The theoretical elaborations of always went in the direction of limitations on the power of the words severe enough to denounce

Jacques Lacan greater gift. He has no the oblativity

some analysts consider to be the mark of genital love, while at the same time considering gifts to be characteristic of the anal phase. Inasmuch as the castration complex deploys its effects in it, the phallic phase rather points to the limit of the gift: The phallus is not given except by metaphor, while at the same time the phallus relates lack to the level of the absence of being wherein desire subsists, and where the obj. a (a lack rebellious to representation if not to refinding) is nothing more than the figure of this absence. This is so true that Lacan considers the phallus to be the signifier of what, on the side of being, cannot be integrally put into speech, that is, the signifier of the part of significations that will always remain distant from The Thing. In this respect the phallus may be considered, according to Lacan, the equivalent of the definite article, since it is out of the impossibility of obtaining Quiddity that the universal quantifier is forged, the lack of being resolved between genders and species in a classification of universals.

Limitation of the power of the gift is consumed by Lacans affirmation that sex whose denial

isnt in question doesnt ground any sexual relation. There is no sexual relation because, regarding sex, speech functions only on the level of the semblance. Sexual positions arent sociological data but logical options, which makes it that what man looks for in a woman, what he loves most in her, is the object cause of his own desire, while she puts herself at the frontier on which his being, marked as it is by the signifier, fails him. There is no complementarity to constitute the One that would authorize us to talk about some kind of mythical fusion. Moreover, the positing of another jouissance, that is, supplementary jouissance, makes of the woman the absolute Other, which puts an end to generalized relativity, that is, to that which is not different by virtue of some attribute that can be predicated on it, but which is just difference, as such.

Some conculsions follow: Supplementary jouissance is a kind of satisfaction that has nothing to do with the jouissance the subject finds in imagining himself the object of the Others jouissance. More generally it has nothing to do with jouissance considered as the place the subject naturally makes for himself

in the field of language, where there is no room for him. Moreover, it cant it be captured in the descriptions women give of their orgasmic feelings, since these are sensations that relate to the getting of the phallus. Dreams of a jouissance other than the one submitted to the phallic function (dreams that aim to install sexual rapport) abound in art and literature, as well as in speech. They mistake supplementary jouissance for some unknown teritority. The truth is that its what assigns a limit to our knowledge.

London, 16/X/04

1 <#_ftnref1> Cai Hua, Une societe sans pere ni mari, PUF, 2003. 2 <#_ftnref2> it is only from not-all that you deduce some are
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