Yesterday the main point of my seminar was, if you consider psychoanalysis as a talking therapy and if instead of going out of the talking to find out what it denotes, you stay within the talking, you situate the subject within the talking act, then you are led to a different conception of otherness than that of the other ego, or what Lacan calls the small other. You are instead led to a conception of otherness as the place of truth, the truth you don’t want to know, and as the place of language, the language whose signifiers betray the truth anyway. What I want to deal with today is the question, What is there in this place of the Other? This is the same question as, What is there that remains outside? Or, What is in my relation to language when I say, for example, “I was wrong to treat John the way I did,” or “Those years were the best years of my life”? The question is, in other words, What is in my relation to language that remains rebellious to mere reflection?
I would like to approach this subject by first examining the meanings of the word symbol in the French school of sociology. Emile Durkheim, the founder of this school, wrote a book entitled The Rules of the Sociological Method, and his first axiom was that social facts are things. Around the same time he wrote another book entitled Elementary Forms of Religion, in which he considered religion to be the fundamental social tie, that is, the tie that makes for our “togetherness,” as members of the same society.
He used the word symbol with two nearly opposite meanings. According to the first one, symbol is used as a term in which society takes consciousness of itself. His second meaning was that the symbol is constitutive of society itself. For example, you can consider the symbol “God” as a term in which society takes consciousness of itself as such, of its own unity, that is, as something different from the members of which it is composed since, after all, individuals die while the group as such remains. But you can also consider the same symbol “God” as a condition for the constitution of society, or the social order. I think both uses are worth retaining because many sociologists continue to use the word symbol as if it were merely synonymous with representation, that is, as something that stands for something else, which would mean that the word symbol covers everything from traffic lights to the rights of man.
Durkheim’s disciple and nephew Marcel Mauss was rather dismissive of his second meaning, even though Mauss shared in his uncle’s preoccupation with the sacred, with religious phenomena. But besides considering social facts as things, Mauss had a keen feeling for what he called the “total social fact,” that is, the fact that constitutes the essence of human society as such. Indeed he grasped this “fact”; he found it in the phenomenon of the gift, inasmuch as it creates the obligation for a return gift.
Then came Claude Levi-Strauss, who took over this idea of gift and countergift, which means exchange. For him exchange was the soul of social existence. The fundamental fact of exchange is, according to him, the exchange of women by men, that is, the laws of marriage. (Here I may say that Levi-Strauss was well aware that laws of marriage may be considered as laws of exchange of men, and that an andocentric view isn’t necessary. He adopted the masculine point of view because men held political power in societies, which brought out so many exceptions and anomalies, it made it easier for him to formulate the laws of marriage the way he did.)
But even though laws of marriage differ widely in different societies, one fact remains common to all: the interdiction of incest between mother and son.1 This means a society may give its king the right to marry his sister, a right that wouldn’t be given to anyone else, but that not even a king may marry his mother. Even so, Levi-Strauss considered the law of prohibition of incest to be only a consequence of the main fact, the social fact of exchange, since there would be no exchange if men kept the women for themselves. Thus, what was to be explained was exchange per se, which for him constituted the point of passage from the animal order, the “wild” population, to the cultural order, which is submitted to law. This means he took the idea of exchange to be the total social fact and he eliminated all preoccupation with religious order.
My thesis is that the problem of the passage from the order of nature to that of culture is exactly the same as that of the sacred, and if Levi-Strauss succeeded in eliminating the problem of the sacred, it was because he failed in explaining the exchange. Indeed, his idea was that society has a dual structure, which means that society is composed of an infinite number of pairs or couples, that is, of you’s and me’s. His point was that this dual relation between two egos makes pacific existence impossible. So, in order to ensure pacific existence, a synthesis must come about, which for him was the exchange. Thus, society proceeded to exchange, in the first place to the exchange of women.
His thesis, however, amounts to saying that it was society that created the condition that makes society. There is a clear circle in this reasoning. Moreover you can realize that, when you examine the example he gives to illustrate his thought, there is something else at stake. He writes two or three very beautiful pages describing what happens in some country restaurant when two strangers find themselves sitting at the same table, face to face. Each feels embarrassed, an embarrassment that has no other reason than the fact of the presence of another. To put an end to the tension, one offers a taste of his wine to the other one. Then they start to talk and everything is fine. Of course the other fellow asks the first one to taste his wine as well, an exchange that entails no profit for either. The incentive, according to Levi-Strauss, was to pacify the relation in order to make coexistence possible. But if you try to imagine this exchange taking place in silence, as a pantomime, you will then realize that the real exchange that was pacifying was not exchanging wine but was exchanging speech. The exchange of wine was only a celebration of the exchange of speech.
As a matter of fact, one could say that primitive peoples had a keener sense of what is at stake here, because they invented myths of origin that always attributed the creation of the social order, if not existence itself, to the work of some third being that was not a member of their society. Call it the ancestors, the gods, the souls, or whatever it may be; it is this “thirdness” that makes the pair. It is heterogeneous in the sense that, as far as you and I are concerned, we can cheat each other, but the third entity is above all cheating. It is the “witness” and its word is never liable to any falsity.
You may consider Freud’s Totem and Taboo as a myth of origins, although it’s untenable in that it contains the same circle we observed concerning Levi-Strauss’s explanation. According to Freud, the brothers, after the murder of their father, subsumed his law. This means it was the brothers, who were still engulfed in the order of nature, who created the condition that humanized them. That’s why Lacan didn’t accept it, although unlike many anthropologists he didn’t fail to see its significance. Indeed, if the order of law was instituted after the murder of the father, this means that what created law was the very name of the father, since only his name remained after his death. So it was the name that constituted the third.
Here we approach Lacan’s theory of psychosis. In the first year of his teaching Lacan introduced his famous distinctions between the symbolic father (meaning the name of the father), the imaginary father, and the real father. At the same time, he made a distinction between what he called la parole pleine and la parole vide. And with this distinction between two kinds of speech, there was a distinction between two kinds of “you.” He used to ask his students, “Do you find that the you, the one you use in asking someone, “I don’t understand what you said,” or, “Will you explain this point again?” to be the same as the you that you use in saying to someone, “I was dazzled by the light you threw on this point,” which is more or less a mockery? No, of course it isn’t the same you. In the first use I was addressing myself to someone from whom I was actually expecting an answer, an Other as a place of language, while in the second mocking use, I was rather caught in the kind of aggressivity that always underlies all imaginary relations.
According to Lacan, the main characteristic of the psychotic is his incapacity to have the place of the Other in the first meaning of the word, as the place of language. For the psychotic the only other is the small other. It is true that Shreber talked about god, who was the main personage of his delirium, but for him god wasn’t a third term; god was just another image of himself. For Shreber god was a cheating god, which means that god himself was taken up by the play that may go between you and me; there was no third for Shreber. You may say the possibility of thirdness was outside his mental sphere, which is the same as saying that for him the name of the father was foreclosed, the name of the father as the center of a system of names that are the names of parenthood.
You may ask, but what is there, in a system of names? “What is there in a name?” is also Juliet’s question, when she remarks that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Here I will make a small digression to recall a remarkable, short book the title of which is The Language Connection, by Roy Harris. You can find it in a paperback edition (Thoemmes Press, 1996). This book constitutes a remarkable critique of the idea of metalanguage. According to Harris, the Greeks invented grammar and logic and this symbolic invention brought a real interest, that is, for a whole class of grammarians and a whole class of logicians. Defending the idea of metalanguage was a matter of assuring their livelihood. But to prove that there may be another outlook, he mentioned, among other arguments, a Chinese story about a prince who asked Confucius for counsel about what good government should be. Confucius answered, “For good government a ruler must be a ruler, a subject a subject, a father a father, and a son a son.” This kind of answer tells us nothing; it seems just words, tautological. We want an answer of the sort that a ruler must be just, virtuous, and courageous, and a subject obedient, dutiful, and whatever. But our wish is nonsense, because the fact is that it is words that make the order. Words are not just the outcome of our activities; they are the regulators of our activities.
And when you think about it, no person can ensure the regularity and stability of human relations, because any person can be a cheater. Neither can it be ensured by any signification, because there is no end to significations and any signification may be put into question. So, there must be some law that is inscribed in the very name. You may say this law concerns the name of the father, as a name that is never absent in any system of names of parenthood. This doesn’t mean that the father was always represented as the generator. The function of generation can be attributed to other entities, for example spirits, or ancestors, or whatever else. But the name father or fathers in the system or in the collective names of parenthood suggests the existence of the laws of marriage and signifies the prohibition of incest.
Here is an important point concerning the relation between the child and her mother. This relation, as we know, is open to all kinds of perversities. Thus, everything in this relation depends upon the degree to which the mother has herself succeeded in integrating the symbolic order, that is, the degree to which she herself has a certain respect, not so much for the person of the father as to the name of the father inasmuch as it signifies the prohibition of a perverse relation with her child. If this is the case, she may give the child all her love without being tempted to go further, to perversity. Her behavior will have far-reaching effects, because the idea of narcissism as characteristic of the child, and the idea of the toute puissance (omnipotence) as characteristic of the mind of the child, is false. As a matter of fact, the toute puissance is on the side of the mother. She gives her love, and everything. The very life of the child depends on her love. So if a child finds herself in front of this entire toute puissance, in front of some creature who can do anything she likes without any limit to what she can or can’t do, this will have the most devastating effect. Things will take an unfortunate turn for the child if her mother behaves in such a way as to give the impression there is no limit to her caprice.
But instead of a confrontation with all this toute puissance, you can have an order of things in which the very name of the father as a third term produces its own effects, a state in which this name is substituted for her otherwise undefined desire. This substitution is the paternal metaphor, and the effect of this metaphor is to bring about some entity that does not exist in reality, in the same way that Romeo brings to light a new cosmological order when he says, “Juliet is the sun.”
So what Lacan calls the paternal metaphor brings, as its effect, the creation of a new entity, which he calls the phallic image.2 There is a distinction to be made here between the phallus and the penis. From this point of view the phallus isn’t simply an organ of copulation; the phallus means something that can never be real. Nonetheless the possession of it, were it possible, would guarantee the desire of the Other, in the first place the mother’s desire. And such a guarantee is simply impossible, although Othello could never understand this state of things. When he says that the curse of marriage is that it makes us believe we possess these delicate creatures when we don’t possess their appetites, he reveals his blind spot. He was not content with the fact that Desdemona gave him her desire; he wanted it guaranteed. That’s the meaning of aspiring to be the phallus, and the only means to it is to keep on going in the way of idealization. Othello speaks as if his mirror image were composed of all the perfections of the world. Of course this idealizing effort is destined to fail. There can be no other outcome because there will always be a difference between the ideal and the phallic image, which is a lack that can’t be filled.
And if you go back and examine a child’s relation to her mirror image once this phallic image has come into play, what will be the result? The result is that the girl will perceive a lack, and the boy will see his penis. But a boy is in no better position than a girl, since he will perceive that his penis is really pitiful, and he will have the feeling of his insufficiency, as if something were missing that would otherwise make him complete and would guarantee the desire of the Other.
It is at this point that we approach the heart of subjectivity. A subject is not a thing; a subject cannot have all its presence here and at once. And not being a thing, a subject is an absence. You may say with Lacan that this absence that “appears” in the mirror image is the absence where we are. This is castration as an imaginary effect of the symbolic order. The subject, however, who doesn’t know where this “void” came from, will experience it as frustration. The girl will envy the boy for what he apparently possesses, and the boy will try to imagine someone else who has what he hasn’t, so that he can have it in an indirect way, through identification with the one who has it, the father or father substitute, whoever it may be. But this imaginary identification will only perpetuate his frustration. The way out, which is the meaning of symbolic castration, is to stop trying to complete the mother, at any cost. The “rock of castration” is the rock of the mother’s castration, which amounts to admitting that, after all, the mother is not one’s own business, she’s the business of the father.3 From this point of view symbolic castration amounts to assuming a lack that, as long as it is not assumed, will leave the subject a perpetual prey to lack in the form of frustration.
Here I would like to add a point about Lacan’s research, while he was giving his seminar on psychosis, when he first tried to explain the idea of foreclosure of a signifier. What does this mean? He said that if there were a signifier that didn’t exist in language, it would have an incalculable effect. As a matter of fact, there is an agreeable novel by a Spanish writer, entitled The Alphabetical Order, in which the author imagines a society where books begin to fly and words begin to disappear. The result was tremendous, because people couldn’t sit anywhere, as there was no word for chair, couldn’t sleep in beds, because there was no word for bed. In this way Lacan first explained foreclosure. He started with the question, “Is there in language a true signifier that doesn’t figure?” And then he asked, “Where is this hole in the plane of signifiers?” He found it in the fact that there is no signifier that expresses feminine reality as such.
Let me explain this point. Obviously the words man and woman figure as subjects in an infinite number of propositions. Everyone has her own ideas about what a woman is, and each society has its own rules about the activities, the rights, and the duties of one or the other. But there is one situation in which the terms must be used not as subjects but as attributes; that is, the moment of birth. At birth you must say whether the newborn is a girl or a boy. For clear gestaltic reasons, the phallus functions as the signifier of sexual difference. This means that woman is defined not by what she is, but by what she isn’t.
But does this mean that, inasmuch as a woman gets into some contact with the experience of her own femininity, she will in some measure fall victim to some psychotic position? Writers like Serge André claim that this hypothesis shouldn’t be excluded, but in my opinion Lacan didn’t go that far. It’s true that according to Lacan the power of the signifier in ordaining reality is eminent, and to such an extent that for him there is no direct opposition between day and night: the opposition is first between day and absence of day, and it is in the absence of day that night takes its place. But in spite of this eminence accorded to the signifier, he didn’t go to the extent of explaining the foreclosure of the name of the father as an absence of the word. He had to admit to the idea of what I call a system of names of parenthood, which sustains as such the whole human order. “Father” is a word the position of which cannot be denied even to Shreber. But here it is a matter of the use of that signifier. From this point of view everything can go for a subject as if the word father, insofar as it signifies a certain symbolic order, had no existence at all. This is the angle through which one can understand the idea of the foreclosure of that signifier.
I think now you may put forth any questions that may help us go further.
Question: What does Serge André claim?
He wrote a book entitled What Does a Woman Want?4 in a clear allusion to the words attributed to Freud by Ernest Jones. Freud apparently admitted to Jones that after thirty years of work he still had no answer to the question of what a woman wants. André’s opinion is that women want more and more unconscious, which is why the first hysterics were so happy to have interpretations; because feminine reality is named not by what it is but by what it isn’t, because there is no positive name for it, there can be only interpretations. That’s the meaning of the hole or cut in the symbolic tissue. And insofar as a woman may somehow get “in touch” with this unsymbolized and unnamed reality, she will find herself in this state of the foreclosure of a signifier that would say what she is. In that way she may find herself in a somehow psychotic position. This may be an exaggeration but André sees no reason to exclude it as a hypothesis.
He illustrates his point by using Joan Rivière’s paper, “Feminine as a Masquerade.” It’s a clinical presentation of a patient, a woman. Although Rivière was actually delivering something about herself, she presented it as a case of a woman whose behavior was always distributed two ways. First, she is brilliant, active, and splendid, which has the meaning of taking hold of the phallus. Second, she is seized by guilt, which entails the surrendering of the phallus. And this mechanism was her means of expressing her femininity, because she argues that femininity cannot be expressed except through the labyrinth of the unconscious. The woman had to create an unconscious mythology in order to sustain her masquerade status, which was better than coming face to face with her unnamed reality, a greater source of anxiety than castration itself.
Question: Lacan doesn’t go that far?
I don’t think that Lacan went as far as to assimilate the feminine position to the psychotic position. He was rather led to talk about feminine jouissance as different from phallic jouissance.
Question: It seems to me that grammar rules seem to disappear; there are fewer and fewer. Isn’t this an example of something totally foreclosed?
If grammar disappears, there will be no language at all. Recall the sentence invented by Noam Chomsky, “Green ideas sleep furiously,” as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but supposedly has no meaning. As a matter of fact, it does have meaning. Why not say “ideas that sleep furiously” is a metaphor for the unconscious? If you don’t have the referent, you can give a sentence any meaning you like. Where there is grammar there is meaning, because you can give meaning to any grammatical sentence. But if there is no grammar there can be no meaning whatsoever, and then there can be no language. The idea of grammar may have been a Greek invention, but the fact remains that in every utterance there is the distribution of a subject and an attribute, in noun phrases and in verb phrases, and you will find this distribution in all languages, which is why language without grammar means the absence of language.
Question: Why can’t a specific grammar be constructed or invented to prevent the possible foreclosure of the name of the father?
Since there is no language without grammar, to invent a grammar means to invent a language. But language is never invented; it is always transmitted. If it is invented, it’s a failure. The example is Esperanto, which could never be a universal tongue.
Question: I understand you to be saying that when the name of the father is foreclosed you have psychosis and that the signifier for woman is absent from language, which can be seen as a form of foreclosure. Therefore, there may be a relation between femininity and psychosis. Lacan’s third seminar on psychosis seems to suggest this. But you seem to be saying that Lacan pulled away from this idea.
For the moment at least I am keen to distinguish between the two cases. In one case it is a matter of the absence in language of a signifier for femininity. Femininity is always equal in the unconscious to passivity or to some other term, but it has no signifier as such. In the other case, there is a signifier, father, but it’s a name whose impact never received its weight in someone’s life. Everything goes for the psychotic as if this name did not exist at all. This may be the outcome or the result of her relation to her mother, inasmuch as a mother may behave as if her desire were unbridled, as not subject to any law whatsoever. But there are also cases where this devastating effect comes from the father. There are cases where the father behaves toward his son not as a model who can overcome the anxieties of the castration complex, but as someone who is himself the author of the law.
Question: You are speaking about Schreber’s father?
Yes, as a matter of fact Schreber’s father was something of a monster. His son remained imprisoned in a relation with some other person, who had nothing of the father and everything of the tyrant or elder and stronger brother. All meaning of fatherhood is bound to disappear in such a constellation.
Question: You can define evil as the absence of good, not as a positive thing. Similarly, the feminine is defined as the absence of the male. But on the other hand, the mother is this omnipotent being. So how is it that the feminine signifier is different from other words in the language? Why isn’t the signifier “woman” positive?
The signifier “woman” is surely positive. The question is why there is no signifier for femininity or for sexual difference. In the unconscious, woman is represented negatively, as not marked by the signifier of the phallus. In the unconscious the difference between femininity and masculinity is always assimilated to the difference between passivity and activity, to what is penetrated and to what penetrates, and so on. In short there is no name in the unconscious that symbolizes the reality of the feminine. Thus woman is defined not by what she is but by what she isn’t.
As to the reference to evil as the absence of good, this makes me think of theological matters in general, and in particular to what is called negative theology. We touch here an important point, which we may deal with at some other moment. I think of the object insofar as it was always considered, as an object of knowledge, as such defined or determined by its qualities and virtues. The fact, however, is that a child is loved not for her perfections but for her lack. Love enhances any trait that the object may carry and will turn it into a virtue, whatever it is. Desire is never determined by the objective qualities of the object, or by its gifts. You need only read a novel like Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. That’s why there is nothing more antagonistic to the theology of perfection than psychoanalysis according to Lacan’s conception of desire.
Question: Why do they say in Semitic languages that when a man sleeps with a woman the man gets to “know” his wife? Why isn’t it said that when a woman sleeps with a man she gets to “know” her husband?
As a matter of fact, the relation to the object as an object of knowledge or of contemplation is ambiguous. It is often expressed by metaphors borrowed from the sexual field. That’s why the use of mathematics from Galileo on was a big step in the direction toward getting rid of the grasp of this imagery. Why don’t we say that woman knows man? Because of what I have just said, that femininity and masculinity are translated in the unconscious in terms of passivity and activity, the male being the active one. He is the knower; she is the known.
Question: When there are two human beings, regardless of gender, the active one is male?
In daily life a woman may be very active or even dominating. But this is always perceived as a masculine trait. Gender comes back.
Question: Isn’t that the challenge of modern times, to define the roles for men and for women?
Social institutions vary between societies, and here there are merely points of view about what should be there, which roles should be taken by men and which by women, say in French society, or American society, or Semitic society, which is to say that the question is dealt with from the point of view of the ideal: what the ideal role is. For me the ideal role is the one that helps most in developing one’s own talents.
At present there is too much talk about roles, which may be considered as a measure of the degree of embarrassment, if not anxiety, that actually characterizes the relations between the sexes. The latest law promulgated in France stipulates that every political party must present the same number of female candidates as male candidates. But trying to regulate relations between the sexes through the force of law is not only condemned to failure, it is also a declaration of fiasco.