2
A Woman
Thirty years ago now, for the first time since Freud, Lacan introduced something new concerning sex in relation to the analytic experience, “sex” being taken here in the old sense of the term—“the sex”—which designated not the two sexes, but only the one that was first called the weaker, and then more recently, the second. These innovative elaborations were accompanied by a denunciation, one that was discreet and decent, but also explicit and vigorous. Lacan stigmatized the “scandal” of analytic discourse. What is scandalous is the inability to think what is specific to femininity, and still more, the Freudian “forcing,” which measured women by the standard applied to men. This scandal, epistemic in itself in both of its aspects, has been intensified, Lacan said, by being “smothered” in the analytic community. In any case, it is clear that this is not unrelated to sexed prejudices, since no saying (dire) escapes from the partiality of sexed identity.
Obviously, Lacan’s theses did not go unnoticed; they quickly went around the world, especially in the context of the feminist movements of the period. There is nothing astonishing in this: Freud’s phallocentrism was being held so much against him, and his clear reduction of women was being questioned and rethought. Perhaps it should be concluded that the supposed resistance of the English language to the theses of psychoanalysis could itself be a function of the psychoanalysts’ own discourse.
I will therefore take up again a question I have been asking myself for a long time. I formulated it as early as 1992 at the conference of the École de la cause freudienne,1 when I asked our Lacanian movement how far we had pushed the consequences of the theses that Lacan formulated in “L’étourdit,” and the seminar Encore.
Once launched, the theme of women made the rounds of this community, and besides, our age itself has sped up our interest in the question. Where have we gotten today with the scandal of analytic discourse? Has this scandal been reduced or has its face merely changed?
RESPONDING BY MEANS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
Freud resorted to the Oedipus complex as both a response and a solution, but we must ask to which question and which problem.
Sex is a matter of differentiations that are not only subjective but also biological, and that are supposed to be natural: those of living sexed organisms. These differentiations had been visible in anatomical differences, long before science showed us the genetic and hormonal determinants that give rise to the sexed body. Life, God knows why—which means that no one knows why—maintains the sex ratio among living beings: there are more or less as many males as females. We can see that humans, who are all speakingbeings (parlêtres), never become too muddled in their “coïterations,” as Lacan said, and that they are not reluctant to reproduce themselves by the paths of “nature.” It is true that the new techniques conditioned by science could change this fact, but we have not reached that point yet, although the birth rate—whether too high or too low—has begun to be a problem.
It has been impossible, since the Freudian discovery, to call upon instinct to explain this fundamental given of human experience: the reproduction of bodies. The unconscious knows nothing of biology and, as far as life is concerned, accommodates nothing other than what Freud discovered in it: the divisions (morcellement) of the drives, which are called partial—oral, anal, scopic, and invocatory. What is missing is what would be the genital drive, which would designate a sexed partner for each person. Thus we reach the question that Freud formulates in one of the notes added over the course of the years to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: If there are only partial drives, and if, when it is a matter of love and the “object relation,” the narcissistic choice of the counterpart is primary, how can we account for the attraction between the sexes? If maleness is not enough to make the man, nor femaleness the woman, how, then, was what appears as the heterosexual norm established? The question can be reformulated by means of Lacan: How does language, which produces the subject as a lack in being (manque à être), set him/her up to accomplish the purposes of life? How does it do so in spite of its denaturing of the instincts?
The Freudian Oedipus complex responds to this question. Freud discovers that in the unconscious—and it should be added, in discourse in general, as our legal status of being either a man or a woman shows—anatomical difference is made to pass through the signifier and is reduced to the problematic of having the phallus; this occurs despite the fact that the partial drives, in themselves, know nothing of sexual difference. Thus it is the orientation of sexed desire that needs to be explained. We can already see that for Freud, in terms of this fundamental lack of knowledge, homo- and heterosexuality are equal.
The Freudian unconscious responds to the following question: How can a man love a woman sexually? The Freudian answer, reduced to its essentials, is that this cannot be done without renouncing the primordial object, the mother, and the jouissance to which this object refers. In other words, there must be a castration of jouissance. We know that Freud tried to apply this explanation to the feminine side, but encountered a number of surprises and disavowals. I will note, however, that in the end he recognizes the failure of his attempt. His famous question, “What does a woman want?,” confesses this in the end and can be translated as follows: the Oedipus complex makes the man, but not the woman.
Thus there was a movement beyond the Oedipus complex, a movement that Lacan formalized by referring to logic. The unconscious, if it adheres to language, also adheres to the latter’s logic. Thus we have the formula that the unconscious is pure logic. Pure logic regulates what is completely different from it: the living jouissance of the body. It is therefore not astonishing that Lacan reformulates the differences between the sexes both by the opposition between two kinds of logic, that of the phallic whole for men and of the phallic not-whole for women, and two types of jouissance, one of which is phallic and the other that is called supplementary.
Does this mean that he refuted the Freudian Oedipus complex? He put it in question, interrogated and criticized it, and, in the end, in “L’étourdit,” reduced it to its logic: the logic of set theory, of the whole. In doing so, he does not, however, properly speaking, refute it, and he himself considers that he maintains it. All of it can be preserved, he says, on the condition of recognizing the logic to which I have referred. It is this logic that makes man, every man, by means of the great law of castration, and which leaves him, in matters of castration, only the jouissance that is called phallic, the jouissance that is as limited and discontinuous as the signifier itself.
As a result, in logicizing the Oedipus complex, Lacan also reduces its range, and this reduction is the decisive step: for whoever is called a woman, something else is in question. Rather than remaining within the phallic whole, this other goes far beyond it, for this other thing is no less connected to “the being of signifiance.” The other, supplementary jouissance, which, far from excluding the reference to the phallus, is added to it, can be situated in another logic, one that is not that of sets, but of the not-whole. On this point, therefore, Lacan diverges explicitly and precisely from Freud, concerning the sexes’ relation to castration. I will quote him:
Unlike him, let me say it again, I do not oblige women to gauge by the shoehorn of castration that charming corset that they do not raise into the signifier.2
Although castration is recommended, for what is called “the foot,” it must be foreseen that one can do without it.
Shouldn’t this entail some consequences at the level of what is required in analysis? The reference to castration is so necessary to analysis—and particularly to a definition of its end—that one can at least deduce from it a question for what Lacan names the “not-whole” (pas-tout), a new noun by which he designates what is not in the phallic whole. And if the clinic of the end of analysis also involves the not-whole, why not ask how the two intersect?
THE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE NOT-WHOLE
Logical construction dispenses neither with collecting the facts nor with constructing a clinic of the not-whole. Lacan himself mentions what he calls its “manifestations.” He qualifies them as sporadic, which contrasts them with the phallic function for every man. Encore begins an inventory of such manifestations. The ecstasies of the mystics—although not all of them—are placed side by side with the specifically feminine jouissance of the genital relation, and with access to the existence of Kierkegaard. We have done little to enrich this series since Lacan formulated it.
However, we cannot be content here, any more than elsewhere in psychoanalysis, with remaining silent about what is impossible to say, in order to place ourselves back within a single logic. First of all, because if Woman, written with a capital letter, is impossible to identify as such, since she “does not exist,” this does not prevent the feminine condition from existing. By this, I am not designating the various miseries that society, according to the period, has inflicted on women, nor, indeed, those that they themselves have inflicted on some of their objects; I am thinking, instead, of the fate of the subjects called upon to bear the weight of the bar placed over women, a bar that Lacan writes for us in its difference from the barred subject, 
. Next, because Lacan’s application of Russell’s logic to the problematic of woman must be stated from a specific position, just as the law of the master is, his saying (dire) of it can be questioned. As Lacan suggests, the memory of half of a chicken, in the book that he read as a child, may have fixed for him the primal intuition that preceded his elaboration of the division of the subject; here, I am concerned with his first idea of the other sex. For this reason, I am interested in all the formulas that, well before his invention of the not-whole, Lacan gave of women. There are many of them, and I have chosen one.
I am intrigued by a remark in the seminar on transference, which came to me as a stroke of good fortune. Coming back to Claudel while reexamining the Oedipus complex, Lacan notes in passing that with his feminine characters, Claudel was clumsy and missed woman! Lacan credits him, however, with one exception, in Break at Noon (Partage de Midi), where, with Ysé, he succeeded in creating a true woman. This gives us the occasion to look for the mark by which Lacan thinks that she can be recognized!
This play, like the rest of Claudel’s work, is very much neglected today. Is he too much of a poet, too fervent a Christian, or too subtle? I don’t know. Concerning this play, Break at Noon, we know that for Claudel, not everything was fiction, and that he rewrote it three times. It deals with what is impossible in love, which is not an impossible love. Its construction is both very pure and very symbolic: three acts, three settings, three kinds of light, three men, and one woman. Ysé is a wife, the mother of two boys, but she announces, “I am the impossible one.”3 De Ciz is the husband. Let’s say that he is occupied: he is leaving to seek his fortune. Amalric, the man of the first missed encounter, is the realist and atheist, the one who takes, rather than being taken. When Ysé, in Act I, bantering seriously, asks, “She gives herself to you, and what does she receive in exchange?,” he answers:
All of this is too fine for me. Hell, if a man has to spend all his time
Worrying preciously about his wife, to know whether he has really measured
The affection that Germaine or Pétronille deserves, checking the state of his heart, things get tricky! [p. 1008]
In short, he says it: “I am Man” (p. 995). Then there is Mesa, who has already retired from the world of men, who seeks God and encounters woman. As for herself, the beautiful Ysé—for, of course, she is beautiful—will allow us to answer a question: What does she want, if she is truly a woman?
WHAT DOES THIS WOMAN WANT?
We already know what she has—a husband and children—and she says enough about them to show us that they make her happy, and that from the moment she comes on stage, she is inscribed in the dialectic of phallic exchange. We also learn very quickly that this kind of happiness is not what she wants:
Ah? Well, if I hold to this happiness, whatever you may call it,
How other I would be! May a blame fall upon me if I am not ready to shake it from my head
Like an arrangement of my hair that can be undone! [p. 998]
And then we hear her very pressing demand, which she addresses to her husband at the beginning of Act II. Having just landed in China, he is getting ready to leave again for some unspecified location, on uncertain and shady business; this, he believes, is the price of fortune.
Ysé—Don’t leave.
De Ciz—But I am telling you that it is absolutely necessary!…
Ysé—Friend, don’t leave….
I am abridging the situation a bit, but she insists, then begs, and pretends to be afraid:
A second time, I beg you not to go away and leave me alone.
You reproach me with being proud, with never wanting to say and ask anything. Then be satisfied. You see me humiliated.
Never leave me. Never leave me alone.
Nicely stupid, he understands nothing and believes that she is confessing his triumph:
It must be confessed in the end that a woman needs her husband.
Then she expresses a doubt: “Don’t be too sure of me.” He does not believe this, and she has to say more clearly what she means:
I don’t know; I feel a temptation in myself….
And I pray that this temptation does not come to me, for it must not. [pp. 1017–1018]
Here is the fatal word. It is not because of the dangers of China that she is appealing to him, but because of the thing that is closest to her. What she asks him to do is to protect her from herself. A passage that was suppressed in the stage version and put back in the new version of 1948 says, in an even rawer way, what a husband is for, at least for Ysé:
After all, I am a woman, and it is not so complicated.
What does a woman need
Other than security, like the honey bee active in a hive
That is clean and enclosed?
And not this horrible freedom! Haven’t I given myself?
And I wanted to think that now I would be quite calm,
That I was guaranteed, that there would always be someone with me
A man to lead me…. [p. 1184, new version]
This does not say what Ysé’s temptation is. What the evidence shows is that she is tempted by another love, and perhaps by a love that is other. This is what we could believe if we questioned not her demand but her conduct. Ysé betrays three times: she betrays each of the three men. In Act II, she betrays De Ciz, the obtuse husband who understands nothing, for Mesa, the man of the absolute, whom she tears away from God. In Act II, she is with Amalric, who has swept her away from Mesa, and whom she will betray in turn: leaving him to sleep through his life, she returns, in an ultimate epithalamium, to Mesa and death. The latter, which is always present, as a counterpoint to love—whether betrayed or chosen—forbids us from reading Claudel, as people have been tempted to do, as a Marivaux—who, for that matter, is misread—in terms of feminine cunning, terms that are always very convenient.
Was Ysé’s temptation that of mad love: a love so total that, annihilating everything, it is akin to death? Perhaps. Ysé explains this to De Ciz so that he will keep her from it, to Amalric, in order for him to measure what is missing in him, and to Mesa, so that he will know.
Ysé to Mesa:
You know that I am a poor woman and that if you call me in a certain way…by my name,
By your name, by a name that you know and that I, listening, don’t
There is a woman in me who will not be able to stop herself from answering you.” [p. 1005]
And again in the admirable duet in Act II:
…Everything, everything and me!
It is true, Mesa, that I exist alone and here is the world
Repudiated, and what use is our love to others?
And here are the past and the future renounced
At the same time. I no longer have family and children and husband and friends,
And the whole universe around us
Emptied of us…
But what we desire is not at all to create but to destroy, and ah!
There is nothing left except you and me, and in you only me,
And in me only your possession and rage and tenderness both of destroying you and of no longer being hampered…. [p. 1026]
Here it is, people will say: the all too well-known wish to be unique—a wish that must be distinguished from the claims of privilege, which belong to the register of distributive justice—and the exaltation of love into death. This theme is not only not new but is quite classical (see, for example, Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World). Claudel/Ysé only elevates it to the absolute dimension: not to mystical love, but rather to the mystique of love, which appears in the place from which God has stolen away. It is the temptation of a total love, one that is as absolute as it is oppressive, which sweeps away not only the muddlings of compromise, but which also voids even the dearest objects of their substance. It puts all difference to death and affirms itself only in the form of the annihilation—which is to be distinguished, of course, from negation—of all the objects that are correlated to the phallic function, that is, to lack. Ysé evokes this deleterious side when she speaks of her temptation:
Understand what race I come from! Because a thing is bad,
Because it is mad, because it is ruin and death and perdition for me and everything,
Isn’t it a temptation to which I can hardly resist? [p. 1018]
Isn’t this more than a simple appeal for love? Through this appeal, isn’t it the call for something more radical: the temptation par excellence of annihilation?
THE MARK OF WOMAN
What, finally, does Ysé want? It would be a bit too simple to conclude, from her fluctuations, that she does not know what she wants, as is said so often of women. Instead, these fluctuations translate what she does not dare to want—in the sense of a will that she can assume as her own—what she desires in the sense of the unconscious, as the Other. She may not know what it is, except that it is manifested in the form of a temptation against which she appeals to her husband and to more temperate loves. She cannot evoke it except as the power that bars everything that the Other has brought into existence; it is a fascination with the abyss, which is “inhuman and akin to death.”4 Thus, what reigns over the splendid Ysé, with her beautiful laugh and all her childish mischievousness, is the mortal aspiration that breaks every human bond, an aspiration that effaces the men she loves and also the sons who are left offstage, but about whom she says, at several points, how precious they have been to her. They are effaced in the name of a wish for the abyss, a vertigo for the absolute, for which love and death are only the most common names, and for which “jouissance” would not be inappropriate. It is not betrayal that, in Ysé, makes the mark that is specific to woman. She certainly does betray, but not one object for another, one man for another; instead, she betrays all the objects that respond to the lack inscribed by the phallic function, and she does so to the profit of the abyss. This quasi-sacrificial trait of annihilation is the specific mark that designates the threshold, the border, of the portion that is not at all phallic, of the not-all; it is the absolute Other.
I find confirmation for this hypothesis in the fact that Lacan, after having mentioned Ysé on p. 352 of the seminar on transference, refers also to Léon Bloy’s forgotten book, La femme pauvre (The Poor Woman), about which he affirms that it contains numerous touches that should interest psychoanalysts. For example, near the very end of the novel, there is a sentence—which is stupefying for those who have read Lacan—concerning the heroine: “She even understood, and this is not very far from sublime, that Woman really exists only on the condition of having no bread, no shelter, no friends, no husbands, and no children. It is only in this way that she can force her lord to come down.” If we are to believe this author, to assume this renunciation in this way still leaves two paths open: those of the saint and the whore, according to the two modalities that he always supposes, those of beatitude and sensual delight. Such formulations show us that women’s fate owes much to the period and what takes refuge, in our time, in the poor tragedies of the love life—infinity within the grasp of poodles, as Céline said—could have found another field in the ages of ardent faith. In any case, this same trait of renunciation, or more precisely of detachment from the place of objects, can be recognized in Kierkegaard, in his approach to ex-sistence. Perhaps this other jouissance could be shown off to advantage by the opaque prestige of lyricism or the mysteries of poetic writing; I want to emphasize, instead, that this mark of what I have called annihilation indicates a structure at work. Indeed, if the not-whole is related to “a good at one remove (au second degré) that is not caused by a little a,”5 its difference could only be noticed through a procedure that has a subtractive quality; this procedure is properly that of a separation, where an annulling—in the libidinal sense of the term—emancipation is affirmed in regard to any object. This is neither the hysterical evasion nor a negating ambivalence, for in both of these, we discover only the empty parenthesis where all the subject’s objects come; this other aim, on the contrary, also effaces the void from which the object takes its sustenance. The result, as we can glean from Freud’s text “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” is sometimes the appearance—as it is believed to be—of sovereign freedom!
CLINICAL PROGRAM
This perspective allows us to examine and throw new light on many affirmations made by analytic theory concerning those who are called women. While canvassing the field, I will give a few samples.
The first is that of the poor woman. In Léon Bloy’s approach, she allows us to say something new about the famous couple of the rich and the poor woman, which haunted the Rat Man, and which, thanks to Freud, was immortalized in analytic theory. It is not the same to show, as Freud did, that the trait of having or not having the phallus adapts a woman to man’s fantasy, and to realize, on the other hand, that the one who is poor—poor in terms of all the objects in the phallic series—can nevertheless be rich in another good, as Lacan says, one that demands nothing from man’s fantasy. It could turn out, without any excess of subtlety, that the poor woman is rich in another sensual delight or beatitude. This would go along with the fact that Lacan, in the pages in which he mentions Bloy’s poor woman, notes that the saint, who renounces everything, is rich, of course, in jouissance.
Second, there is the abstinent woman. I could take up again Freud’s text of 1931 on feminine sexuality. Of the three orientations prescribed to the little girl by the fate of the notorious penis envy, special attention has been paid to the last two: the masculinity complex and what he calls the normal feminine attitude. The first of these involves the phallicism of having and its metonymy. The second, which leads to her heterosexual choice of the man as a substitute for the father, is deployed, instead, as a phallicism of being—“being the phallus”—which appropriates woman to respond as object to the man’s phallic lack. The first orientation on Freud’s list consists, in his terms, of a complete renunciation of all sexuality. Freud, of course, gives us no examples of this choice, but the fate of privation that is mentioned here, the ascetic renunciation as a supposed effect of the first vexation is ambiguous; it clearly indicates that sexual desire has been elided, not only in act but in fantasy as well, but it leaves the relation to the other jouissance perfectly indeterminate.
This leads me to reexamine the place of fantasy for the subject who is located on the feminine side, and who, let us not forget, if we stay with Lacan’s thesis, can be anatomically male or female. If the fantasy uses an object of surplus jouissance in order to absorb castration, the subject can have a fantasy only inasmuch as he is inscribed in the phallic function, in the logic of castration. In this sense, the not-whole, as such, cannot be thought as subject to a fantasy. Isn’t this what Lacan is saying when he emphasizes, in Encore, that it is only on the man’s side that the object a is the partner that makes up for the failure of the sexual relation? (That the fantasy, like the partial drives, was discovered by Freud through the words of hysterical women is not an objection, for the hysteric as such is not in the register of the not-whole. She identifies, rather, with what is subject to castration: that which, as Lacan says, is “hommosexual or beyondsex.”6) The question of the child as object and of its place in the barred Woman’s division in her relation between the phallus and the silence of the S(Ⱥ) could be introduced in this context.
From another angle, its full weight must be given to Lacan’s affirmation that a woman has an unconscious only “from the place from which man sees her”7; this situation leaves her own unconscious in a strange suspense, if no knowledge responds to it and if it ex-sists to an Other that “works in such a way that she knows nothing.”8
Yet more essentially, can we ask such a subject to want what she desires, to consent to what the thing in her wants: to an unknown that is barren of any object, whereas the consent to the final destitution of analysis is conditioned by the glimpse of the object? I believe that, in reality—I mean in practice—analysts tend, instead, to take the recourse of suggesting that she hook up to the phallic whole, under its various forms—there are several of them. This, at least, is how I explain their too obvious and benevolent partiality for the conjugo and maternity. I even have some reasons for thinking that Lacan operated in the same way. This does not, however, exclude the question of the differential traits that mark the end of analysis. The disidentification and dephallization of the end of analysis do not ordinarily leave the subject unsecured: whatever her vacillation in the moments of the pass, she quickly finds her equilibrium, for she remains ballasted by the object—the object in its consistency as jouissance. The same thing could be formulated in terms of the fundamental symptom, but it is not necessarily so for the barred Woman, beyond the purchase that she has in the phallic function. We must come back to this question later.
1. It was devoted to “Beyond the Oedipus Complex.”
2. Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” Scilicet 4 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), p. 21.
3. Paul Claudel, Partage de Midi. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1967, p. 1000. Unless otherwise indicated, I am citing the first version, from 1906. References for all further quotations will appear in the text.
4. These are the terms that Lacan applies to truth itself.
5. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar: On Feminine Sexuality; The Limits of Love and Knowledge; Book XX, Encore 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), p. 77.
6. Jacques Lacan, Encore, p. 85. (Lacan’s pun combines the word “homme” [man] with “homosexual.” [Translator’s note.])
7. Encore, p. 99. It is amusing, as Lacan notes on p. 87 of Encore, that Freud had first attributed the object a as cause of desire to woman. “That is truly a confirmation that, when one is a man, one sees in one’s partner what one props oneself up on.”
8. Ibid., p. 90.