APPENDIX
What does analytic discourse allow us to formulate concerning the difference between the sexes? What can be put forward concerning men and women that does not come from public opinion or from a person’s own wishes?
What is at stake in these questions is not so much the real relations (relations) between the sexes. These relations, as we know, function very well—or perhaps very badly, but that is their way—without our being able to say anything about them. What is at stake, instead, is the ethics of the treatment. Many questions about this subject have been left hanging, first of all, the following one: What is required, and is there something required, concerning sexed identifications, if an analysis is to be called finished? This is an old debate—the theme of access to genital oblativity once raged around it—but it is still open. One can also wonder whether the analyst operates as someone who is para-sexed (para-sexué), in which case it does not matter whether s/he is a man or a woman; the difference would only lie at the level of the analysand’s representations. Finally, we can ask ourselves whether the treatment has the same effect on a man and a woman.
I am not going to answer these questions in the following remarks, but I am mentioning them in order to make us perceive what, in analytic experience, seems to me to be in play in Lacan’s sexuation formulas: Concerning sexual difference, does analysis, which operates only by speech, allow a certain real to be reached?
Men and women, Lacan remarks, are real. No idealism has gone to the point of arguing that the division between the sexes is only a representation. Nothing, however, can be said of this real—the real of the sexed living body. Nothing can be said of it because of the “wall” of language; the real is outside the symbolic, but we deal with it, nevertheless, in the very precise form of jouissance. I will quote Lacan’s statement that the unconscious is
a knowledge that is articulated from lalangue, the body that speaks there being knotted only by the real from which it gets off on itself (se jouit). Yet the body is to be understood in its natural state (au naturel) as unknotted from this real, which, even if it exists on the basis of having its jouissance, does not remain less opaque. It is the less noted abyss of what lalangue is, the lalangue that civilizes this jouissance, if I dare to say so. By this, I mean that it carries it to its developed effect.1
If, therefore, the real from which a body gets off on itself is inaccessible, the only real that is accessible to the speakingbeing, the real that Lacan defines in terms of the impossible, remains to be delimited. For a “semblance of being,” a being commanded by discourse, what is most real is what discourse forbids in the strong sense: what is impossible in the logic belonging to discourse, what therefore is not transgressed. It will thus be a matter of seeking “what of the real makes a function in the knowledge that is added to it [to the real].”
How, in the experience of analytic speech, can one approach this real, which is grasped at the limits of what can be articulated, through the impasses of formalization, this real as impossible? How is the difference between the sexes involved in it?
Let us start with the obvious: first of all, there is what the analysand says (les dits analysants), which is impulsive, risky, and groping, and which cannot be taken back. It certainly aims at the subject’s singular truth, but in pursuing the latter, it sketches out the movement specific to the treatment, by which speech turns around on itself, reducing all truth to the truth of speech, the truth that Lacan stated but that every analysand demonstrates: the subject is divided. In order for it (ça) to pass into the saying (dire), it is enough for the analysand to speak. The saying is to be distinguished from what is said, for the former is not of the dimension of truth. It is the moment of enunciation and its content is not what is stated in what is said (les dits), but what is inferred from all that is said; it is what is demonstrated by means of what is said. On this point, the analytic method touches the real of speech.
The neurotic devotes himself in his life to avoiding castration, but if he speaks, there are many things that he will not be able to avoid. First of all, the equivocation of the signifier, if the analyst sends it back to him, dispossesses him of the intentionality of what he says (ses dits) and fixes him to what has possibly been said (s’est dit), without him: without his “me-I [moi-je].” The equivocation of signifiers therefore makes him the subject, who is subjected, of an enunciation that could almost be said to be without an enunciator. Furthermore, he is the subject of an enunciation whose meaning—a meaning or meanings—is impossible for him to stop. This meaning thus remains impossible to articulate although it is articulated. Anyone who has dreamed of synthesizing his statements (énoncés), of grasping the final word of what has programmed his history, discovers that he is the subject of the unconscious. This is the failure of any synthesis. One could say that synthesis is forbidden to whoever speaks as such, and this is the division of the subject. In drifting in this way through his speech, could he hope at least to moor himself to the synchrony of his last signifiers? Not even that, for there is primal repression. We can conclude, from his inability to bring together what would be the battery of his fundamental signifiers, that there is a logical impossibility, which Lacan designated as S(Ⱥ). The linguistic notion of synchrony is revealed to be an illusion here, as the analysand discovers, and Lacan gives the reason for this. What cannot be done is to take all the signifiers at the same time. We cannot make a set of them for there is always at least one missing—the signifier of the subject. It is this impossibility, he says, that illustrates best what castration is.
We can therefore say that analysis puts castration to work in speech. In this sense, it is the experience of the logic specific to speech, a speech which, let us not forget, is incarnated, and which, no matter what dualism says, makes the speaking body. Like logic, therefore, analysis is the “production of a necessity of discourse,” with the paradox that this definition implies. Indeed, if necessity is produced, it must be thought not to have existed before, but as necessitated, it must be supposed already to have been there before it has been produced. Many of the particularities of experience are caught in the same paradox: for example, the castration that Lacan calls symbolic. On the one hand, we recognize it as a fact of structure that is not accidental—in other words, there is no way of cutting it—but on the other hand, we speak of assuming responsibility for castration, for the access to symbolic castration. We therefore speak of it both as something that is, that has always been there, is necessary, and as something that must come into being, must be produced. This is the same nuance that we find in Freud’s sentence, “Where it was, I must come into being.”
What is this coming into being in analysis other than a coming into existence through speech and the saying (dire) borne by it? This is not at all, however, something that one becomes aware of (prise de conscience) as is proved by analysands who go into analysis knowing in advance that, as they sometimes formulate it, they have to undergo symbolic castration. With this term, they find a place for what is the least of their disappointments, when they are not hiding from them through resignation or evasion. Thus they “know,” but this is not true. In order for it to be true, the experience of what is said (des dits) must secrete the saying (le dire), must make it ex-sist. This same splitting between knowledge and truth may also divide the very transmission of psychoanalysis. The latter produces a knowledge—a knowledge about truth—that can be known in advance, repeated, even used in the university; it can sustain whatever infatuation you like. Yet this knowledge about truth is true for the subject only if transferential speech enacts it. It is and not only has been produced because, between truth and knowledge, there is what could be called a sort of hiding game (jeu d’éclipse), in which truth loses its way when it is shown, and is forgotten in knowing it. Thus it is necessary to continue the work of the analysand in whatever form it takes. The experience of the treatment is irreplaceable but this does not imply that it is similar to religious initiations, as some people fear. They can be distinguished if, from all the things that are said (dits)—the meaning of which runs away and gets lost—there emerges a saying (dire) with which what conditions the meaning can be written. The choice between science and religion may not be vital.
I will come back to sexuation: Does the subject who is divided from speech have a sex, or is the difference between the sexes only a matter of either the living real or the ego? The ego itself is very much a synthetic function, but it is an imaginary synthesis. It is certain that it is involved in the question of sex. Lacan even says that it is dominant there, but he adds,
it is enough for the business of the ego, like the business of the phallus, to be articulated in language for it to become the subject’s business and no longer to have the imaginary as its only motive force.
The question can thus be reformulated: Inasmuch as sex would be the subject’s business, what is it saying (dire) in analysis if the saying is what supports existence? According to Lacan, Freud’s saying is a statement that he never formulated, and that Lacan himself “restores”: there is no sexual relation. Such is the formula that can be inferred from everything that is said (tous les dits) about the unconscious that Freud discovered. Yet what founds this inference?
It is not simply that analysands say, “It isn’t working out,” since such an observation does not exclude the possibility that someday it will work out; the hope that it will end up working out is, in fact, the hope that leads many people into analysis.
“There is no sexual relation” implies that people are waiting for this relation; we are not astonished enough about this, for it is already an old song, and it very conveniently allows each of us to shelter there all our experiences of solitude, our failures, and even our lapses. This brings us back to the problem of negation, which, if we follow Freud, supposes a previous Bejahung. In order for it to be expected, there must be two; difference must have been installed in the unconscious.
Now, what we see is that difference itself is a question. Men’s and women’s speech is certainly different in style, tone, content. We speak as a man or a woman, and we speak about difference because there are signifiers. We do not, however, know what difference is. Freud had already insisted on the fact that there was no representation of the masculine/feminine distinction in the unconscious. What we certainly see functioning is either the refusal to be a man or a woman or, more frequently, the aspiration to be a real man or a woman. There is no doubt, however, that what is aimed at in these cases, beyond what is imagined about men and women, is always only the phallus, in terms of having or being it. Thus we speak about men and women without being able to make any judgment of attribution about them.
How, then, does this difference impose itself?
We say that they are different because of the little anatomical difference. Yet when we say that they are different, we are not only designating a difference in the form of the body, we are also implying that they are different as subjects. We can imply this because the phallus is already a signifier that differentiates them. To grasp this, one only has to compare it with other anatomical differences: for example, having blue or brown eyes. A difference in being cannot be concluded from this difference in having. It is true that this is what racism, particularly Aryan racism, tries to do: to reproduce, on the basis of an anatomical trait, a difference as radical as that between the sexes. Such racists raise another anatomical trait—the Aryan or Mediterranean type—to the function of a signifier, a signifier in relation to which symbolic places could be apportioned.
It is thus because there is already the phallic signifier that we say men and women are different and because we call them different, they are going to relate differently to the question of difference.
I am insisting on this in order to make you perceive Lacan’s effort at formulating a difference that is not a matter of the judgment of attribution, that is, does not operate according to the following form: men are this and women are that. This is the form in which all the ideologies on the question are deployed, and it always supposes, behind the attribution, the reference to a substance.
How then, on the basis of this single term, the phallus, do we obtain the apportionment of individuals into two superimposable halves—the “sex ratio”—an apportionment that “does not become mixed up in their ‘coïteration’ ”?
The distinction between being and having the phallus, which, in “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan used to approach the division of the sexes, can be clarified by the use of propositional functions.
On this subject, I only have a few remarks.
When one writes ∀x.Φx. (for every x, phi of x), the argument x, before being related to the function, is, as Lacan says, totally undetermined. What allows it to be determined, and thus to be differentiated, is the modality inscribed in the quantifier ∀. Therefore, when one says, as Lacan does, that there is a universal for man, one can write “all men.” Man is completely in the phallic function and what must be noted is that it is not because he is man that he is in the phallic function; on the contrary, it is because such-and-such an undetermined x is placed completely in the phallic function that he can be called man. It is thus a conditional imputation. The signifier “man” will be imputed to every x that is completely situated in the phallic function; this leaves entirely open the question of knowing whether even one of them really exists.
Likewise, when one writes ∀x.Φx., there is no universal of woman, woman does not exist, women are not wholly in the phallic function, it is not because they are women that they are “not whole,” but if they are lined up on the side of the “not whole,” then they can be called women.
There is no essence of masculine and feminine and consequently there is no obligation, since anatomy is not destiny. Each of us is free, Lacan says, to line him/herself up on one side or the other; there is a choice for both sexes. If such is the case, it is meaningless to ask why discourse imputes to women the choice of lining themselves up on the side of the “not at all” (pas du tout), a choice that makes them radically Other. We could indeed object that it is not because they are women that they have to situate themselves there, but only because they situate themselves there that they are called women.
It must, however, be remarked that we are not free to be indifferent to anatomy, for the signifier is linked to anatomy. An organ of the body makes manifest what the phallic signifier will represent, and because of this, individuals are called boys or girls before they take any position as subject. If there is a choice, it is one about which, at the very least, we have been given some strong advice. We could not understand in any other way the fact that the two halves of humanity can roughly be superimposed on each other as a sex ratio, so that the reproduction of the species is continuing. This, indeed, was what had already astonished Freud, in a note to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, where he remarks that if there are only, as he has established, partial drives, it must then be explained how heterosexuality remains so general. It is certain, in any case, that since the signifiers “man” and “woman” are not unrelated to anatomy, the subject is going to be represented a priori by one or the other of these signifiers, and that s/he cannot choose not to confront them. The question therefore remains with us.
The “all” and this “not at all” represent two possibilities for the speaking subject, two sides of structure. In “L’étourdit,” Lacan asks what ∀x.Φx means. It means that every subject as such is inscribed in the phallic function, and this is why he can also say that if women are not wholly (pas toutes) in the phallic function, they are “not not there at all.”2
To define this Φx. and the phallic jouissance that it supports, I will use, among all possible expressions, the following one: the phallic function is the castration function that is due to lalangue. Because the jouissance of the body is organized by lalangue, it becomes something that is “outside the body,” anomalous and identical with the jouissance operating in the symptom. The signifier is the cause of jouissance, but it is also what makes it partial and irremediably exterior. The phallic function therefore designates the way in which the body and the subject are caught in lalangue.
What can be said about the not whole? If the phallic function is as we have just stated and if the subject is as Lacan has described it—that which is supposed in relation to the signifier, in the space between two signifiers—it immediately seems paradoxical to speak of a subject who would not be completely in the phallic function. Lacan relates it explicitly to the S(Ⱥ), which I mentioned above. This is because there is a gap in the Other as place of speech and this place always remains other, which can be formulated by saying that there is no Other of the Other, or no absolute knowledge is possible. Discourse cannot embrace something that would be a totality of knowledge. In other words, in the Other, there is a hole. What is designated here is an internal limit to the symbolic order.
To say that a being comes to represent this limit is to say that nothing can be said about her, or that one can “say everything” (tout dire), in the sense of being able to say anything at all, but nothing that would found a universal definition. The oblique line that comes to bar the Woman who “does not exist” would thus be homologous to the one that bars the Other (as well as the subject). However, as undefined as she may be in the field of the signifier, this being is not completely indeterminate since the speaking subject is not incorporeal, for there is a real body. It must therefore be emphasized that this internal limit to the symbolic, which finds its signifier in the S(Ⱥ), is not to be confused with another one, which it covers over: the limit that separates the real and the symbolic. What, indeed, “escapes from discourse” if not, by definition, the real outside the symbolic, the real that, when it comes to sex, can only be represented by the body?
There are thus two aspects of the absolute Other: the Other which, as the place of the signifier, is barred, is always Other, and the real, inasmuch as it is absolutely other than the symbolic, which ex-sists to it. This double aspect seems implicitly to be present when Lacan speaks in “La troisième” of the jouissance of the Other, the jouissance that he calls impossible, and that is as much “outside language, outside the symbolic” as phallic jouissance is “outside the body.” The Other designates, first of all, the substance of the other body, and as body, it can only be hugged or destroyed, or a piece of it can be caught (ou en attraper un morceau). On the other hand, the partner’s real body symbolizes the Other as the impregnable place of the signifier.
To say that women are “not whole” is therefore to say that the signifier “woman” connotes what escapes discourse and makes present to us whatever is beyond what can be reached by speech. This beyond is certainly due to the symbolic structure and the lack that is inherent in it, but it would remain totally indeterminate if there were no real—here, that of the body—outside the symbolic. For this reason, the disputes about the sex of the angels deserved to be called Byzantine. To claim to be a woman is thus to give body to an aspect of structure: to be, “by relation with what can be said (se dire) of the unconscious, radically Other.” The opacity of the real of the body (of the real by which a body enjoys itself [se jouit] and which is the most foreign to the symbolic as such) comes here at the place of the gap in the symbolic.
Why is it the feminine body that is called, by preference, to take this place and what does this imply for subjects?
Perhaps we should go back to the thing—the aspect of the real that remains foreign, outside the symbolic—the thing encountered, first of all, by every subject as the maternal thing. This is a bad encounter if it is an encounter at all, since it is that of the wall that cuts the speakingbeing from the real. Yet the mother, here, has a double aspect: she is both body and speech, the mystery of the speaking body, to repeat an expression that Lacan applies to the unconscious. The relation with the mother, indeed, is a double one.
On the one hand, it must be said that there is no jouissance of the body of the mother. There is certainly sonorous, olfactory, and tactile contact, but this body remains other, foreign, withdrawn into its internal opacity, which the specular image envelops. The child’s sadism seems to me to have no other meaning than that of designating the encounter with this first limit: one can try to cut, to gobble up, to smash the other body, but it remains other. This is what the child’s real and imaginary aggressions stumble up against, before the interdiction carried by discourse comes and puts an end to them. The inability to catch the maternal thing, the impossibility of incest with the thing, means that the subject can do no better than obtain pieces of it, bits of objects—breast, voice, gaze, and so on. The child sets up the partial drives, if, however, the Other allows him/her to do so.
Yet the mother also speaks. I will leave aside the question of how the child can discover that there is speech, how speech is separated from noise. The mother speaks, and in speaking, she provides the signifiers that organize the drives in the body. She sets up, with the dimension of the demand, those of desire and the phallic signifier: the dimensions of the very enigma of the Other. What must be emphasized, however, is that this enigma of her desire as articulated, at the horizon of which the S(Ⱥ) emerges, intensifies the enigma of the real of her body. Here again, we find the same superimposition as the one that concerns the “not whole.” It is essential to note that I am not saying that the real in itself is enigmatic. It is simply there, devoid of interest, beyond reality, which itself is constructed. The enigma comes from the symbolic. The real constitutes an enigma for the speakingbeing because the symbolic separates him/her from it. It remains therefore only as a limit, which can be imaginarized in the form of the container.
Can it thus be said that the maternal thing is the place of all the metaphors, that it is what is aimed at by all the metaphors? It is perhaps not by chance that each time that women try to say something about themselves, they succeed in doing so only by making sparkling metaphors. There is indeed, as Michèle Montrelay says, an imaginary that she calls feminine; perhaps it would be better to say that it is an imaginary of the feminine, rooted in the imaginary of the maternal, which aims at making the real itself pass into the signifier. This would be the case because the mother is the first Other, the one in relation to whom the child apprehends the gap of the symbolic and with the latter, the real as what is beyond and impregnable, which the feminine body remains for every subject. Whether one is a man or a woman, the feminine body is “heteros.”
An objection could arise here concerning the passage from the maternal to the feminine. When the subject, as infans, encounters the maternal thing, it can only classify the mother as being on the women’s side after it has recognized the difference between the sexes. Previously, primordially, for both sexes, the phallus is attributed to the mother, and moreover, as we know only too well, maternity can function in part for a woman as a recovery of the imaginary phallus of which she has been deprived. It is therefore only retroactively, after the recognition of sexual difference—that is, of the mother’s castration—that the relation to such difference can be connected with woman. Perhaps this distinction should be articulated more precisely, but it must be emphasized that it is present implicitly as soon the enigma of the mother is evoked, since this enigma is only brought to light by the metonymic presence of desire in speech.
How does this relation to the maternal thing, which is identical in the beginning for the boy and the girl, come to be situated differently for them? I will not examine all aspects of this question here. I will only consider two traits.
The first lies in the fact that a woman is related to this other place by her own body, and not only because discourse, and then her partner, put her there. To say that a woman is related to it by her own body is not to misuse the call to the body. Lacan has denounced this abuse in relation to women who, in the analytic movement, “called from the unconscious to the voice of the body, as if precisely, it were not from the unconscious that the body took on its voice.” Let us not doubt, but let us also not forget that, as the cry makes the silence heard, the voice of the body brings about the appearance of whatever, from the body, from the real body, does not pass into the voice. Now, it is precisely this “real from which a body enjoys itself (se jouit)” which, for a woman, comes in the opaque place of the maternal thing. This is not only true of sexual jouissance but of everything that is added to it, particularly during gestation and childbirth. In these cases, it has been said, a woman is always outstripped by the real. (Outstripped implies no pathos.) No anatomical knowledge (connaissance) applies; there is no painless childbirth that succeeds in reducing what is ineffable in the incommensurable encounter. This encounter, moreover, is not reserved to women. A man can be confronted there too, in illness, for example, or even when performing in a sport, beyond the rivalry included in the latter. Quite simply, however, because of the fact that women give birth, it is more difficult for them than for men to be unaware of this real. When Michèle Montrelay argues that in childbirth, a woman encounters the real mother, wouldn’t it be more correct to say that she encounters what the mother encountered: the inexpressible real of the body getting jouissance? Between revelation and perplexity, the experience of the inexpressible comes to fill in the mystery of the thing, oscillating, according to the case, between the attitudes “so that was it” and “was that it?” From here, there appears one of the truthful sides of the hysteric’s masquerade; by its artifices, showing the semblance as a semblance, she designates what is beyond it: the point at which every discourse fails.
A second difference comes from the relation that a mother has with her child according to its sex: she gets jouissance differently from a daughter than from a son.
That the child plays the part of an “erotic thing” for a mother is what Freud located precisely from the beginning. Yet the child is evoked here as a signifier, caught in the “equation” of the little separable objects. This is the most obvious and the most general aspect of the mother’s feeling, but it does nothing other than emphasize how much the child is placed in a woman’s relation to the phallic function. I think that there is more, however, and that it is not emphasized often enough. Here, again, the signifier is incarnated, takes on a body, is knotted to the real, and because of this, the child—who is certainly the most integrated into the economy of the signifier—also makes present what most escapes this economy: the incommensurable real. S/he represents it all the more since s/he is a being who is still marked only to a minimal degree by the signifier and is quite close to “the organic night”3; the child is still reduced to the mystery of the life of the body, between cry and sleep. In this, s/he can be,4 for a mother, for a period of time, the persisting encounter with what concerns her most particularly as a woman: beyond the symbolic and the limits of all knowledge (tout savoir). In this case, the child, as a bit of the real, comes to symbolize for her mother the S(Ⱥ) itself. Precisely in this sense, s/he participates in her/his own division; for the mother, s/he is the Other that woman is for every subject. Perhaps it is also from the child’s status as Other that the mother gets jouissance.
In this respect, the situation is not equivalent for the boy and the girl. For the latter, there is an effect of intensification. To the extent that anatomy and the signifier, which is grafted onto it, place her on the feminine side, she becomes the external place, for the mother, of her own otherness (autreté) as a woman. Recent texts insist, once again and quite correctly, on what is interminable in the narcissistic struggle with the mother, on how one gets bogged down in an imaginary—or real—duel whose maddening effects (effets d’égarement) are obvious. Yet the identity of specular images would not be enough to account for this duel, which, indeed, also occurs in the father/son relation; it could not account for it if the feminine did not represent the Other, perhaps for reasons that I have tried to say. Here again, therefore, the imaginary is sustained by the symbolic, and, indeed, is sustained very precisely by the fact that the Other is always other and that thus, nothing can be said about it. Nothing can be said, except what Hadewijch of Antwerp says about God: everything that he is not, for he is beyond everything that can pass into language.
For women, to whom discourse imputes the task of representing this limit, there remains then, in the relation to the other, what I will call the fundamental “we” of the communication between women: the “we” of effusions and affinities, of the confided maternal secret that always calls for losing some phallic hope, which is what would distance the daughter from the intimacy of their silent jouissance and which would leave the mother to her solitude. Yet this is also the reverse side of the situation of being trapped and stuck in relation to the maternal figure; it is the enthusiastic “we,” the “we” of the confidence of being carried by what, for lack of another word, we call life. In other words, it is what carries the discourses along. Perhaps it is this faith that, in Agnès Varda’s film One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, makes all the women who have just had abortions sing together.
I come now to the question of this specific effect that is the “other jouissance.” First of all, is there another? On what conditions can we put it forward?
There is phallic, partial jouissance, which arouses the protest, “That’s not it,” and which secretes the mirage of what would be it: the absolute jouissance that could also be attributed to the primal father, because this enjoyment has not encountered castration. Yet the other jouissance, if we follow Lacan, is distinguished from the latter:
“That isn’t it”: this is the cry by which the jouissance that is obtained is distinguished from what has been expected…. Structure…has marked how far it is missing, the one that would be in question if that were it; it does not only suppose the one that would be it, it supports another of them.
It is this other that Lacan superimposes on the not whole. We see, he says, “the logical power [puissance] of the ‘not whole’ lives in the recess of the jouissance that femininity conceals.”
Now, it is attested well enough that the two sexes deploy jouissance differently in their bodies, but that does not imply that woman’s is other. For us to be authorized to say that it is other, it must be determined, produced differently by the being of signifiance. This is what Lacan puts forward. He not only says that the S(Ⱥ) symbolizes the opacity of feminine jouissance, but also adds that women, thereby, have more of a relation with the S(Ⱥ), and what’s more, that they get their jouissance from it.
Does this postulate that jouissance is only produced by the being of signifiance, that it is always knotted to the symbolic? It is certain that the being of signifiance organizes jouissance in analytic experience, but this does not prove that it organizes everything. After all, in the case of animals, for example, we do not rule out the idea that the real of the living body can be enjoyed (se jouir) alone, without the signifier. It also does not prove that, where it is lalangue that organizes jouissance, all the differences in jouissance can be imputed to it. To hypothesize, for example, that some of these differences derive only from the real of the sexed living being would be to understand that none of them pass into knowledge and that, as Lacan remarks, women cannot say anything about them. To conclude that feminine jouissance is different, that women as subjects have more of a relation with the S(Ⱥ) is not sufficient to prove that they get off on it.
Lacan puts this idea forward, however, and finds support for this in the mystics. Indeed, in them, there is very much the idea of an other jouissance, from which one can—without any guarantee—try to throw light on feminine jouissance. These mystics point to a jouissance that would be produced by evoking what is beyond the Word, by evoking a God who would not be God the Father. God the Father says no to the phallic function and incarnates the paradox of producing the Word without being subject to it, without being caught up in it. On the other hand, the identity of the mystics’ God would be beyond any differentiation by the signifier; in the jouissance of the mystics, presence and absence would merge together and the opacity of the body that is getting jouissance would come to fill in the rift in the system of signifiers.
A possible homology with what happens in the partial drives presents itself here. For the latter, Lacan, seeking to articulate a relation between the registers of the signifier and of jouissance, has emphasized the topological unity of “the gaps that the arrangement of libidinal investments by signifiers establishes in the subject” and of the apparatus of the body inasmuch as there are orifices. The erotogenic zone is thus defined by the superimposition of these two gaps, which a single object comes to close up. One could mention an analogous, although different superimposition here, one that would define the very contrary of a zone. This would be the night of the body, where our perception of sensations is no longer fixed on an edge, but exceeds any localization, thus placing any support by the image or the signifier outside the circuit; this would be the body as what cannot be delimited, which would come to be superimposed on the gap of the Other. Thus, without ruling out the possibility that differences may lie in the real of the sexed body, one could speak of the jouissance of the S(Ⱥ) in which what cannot be delimited in the body would come to represent, to symbolize the very division of the subject. We would then have a basis for saying that the other voluptuousness (volupté), beyond any object, is also the product of signifiance.
It can be conceived then that such a jouissance can be mobilized in analysis. But if it is called feminine, shouldn’t it then be said that analysis is capable of feminizing analysands, and not only women, because the logic of the not-whole is a part of the being of signifiance? This would not be to refer, in the case of men, to some sort of homosexuality, at least not to that of Schreber, who aims at being the wife of God-the-Father; it would be, instead, to evoke the relation to what Lacan names the other face of God, which is supported by feminine jouissance; it is not, therefore, on the slope of the Name-of-the-Father, but rather on that of the absence of the Name.
What, then, of the question that has remained unanswered: Is there a saying (dire) of the difference between the sexes in analysis? I will leave this question in reserve. There is something of the saying that says (dit) that there is something of the Other, whether of solitude or division, and there are also encounters—and thus a contingency—of which it remains to us to clarify what is specific in them to each sex. If for men, they are presented as those of the women who “count” for them, can women be said to count in the same way?