The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt

From the perspective of psychoanalysis as a theory of sexuality and thought, I will now deal with the question of female sexuality, or rather bisexuality, and in particular the girl’s relationship to the Oedipus, the law, and the phallus. This is of interest, of course, insofar as the question of revolt is also situated in relation to the law. To comment on Freud’s statement in Female Sexuality that “bisexuality . . . comes to the fore much more clearly in women than in men,”¹ which I would like to highlight in this chapter, I will refer to several of Freud’s texts: “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (1925), “Female Sexuality” (1931), “Femininity” (1933), and An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938; published in 1940), particularly chapter 7 (this last does not directly concern female sexuality, but it nevertheless offers the final state of Freud’s thought on the question).

I want to emphasize the copresence of sexuality and thought in order to dissociate myself from two currents of thought that investigate the psyche: cognitivism, on the one hand, which considers the mind solely from the point of view of consciousness, and a pre-Lacanian psychoanalysis, on the other, or at least a psychoanalysis that circumvents the Lacanian contribution and heads off into either a sort of organicism or an analytical approach that accentuates only the fantasmatic aspect of the psychical experience without taking thought into account. Instead of psychoanalysis as a matheme of the signifier, or a theory of “the mind,” or the transaction of organs and drives, I will try to show that the originality of the Freudian discovery resides in this: psychoanalysis is a clinic and a theory of the copresence of the development of thought and of sexuality. This two-sided (thought/sexuality) approach to the speaking being, which I see at the heart of the analytical experience, is an original variant of the age-old notion of dualism, and far from biologizing the essence of man, it centers the study of the psychical apparatus, its deployment, and its obstacles, in the biunivocal dependency of thought-sexuality/sexuality-thought. As language is the domain of this interaction, it is here that Freud found the “other scene,” that of the unconscious, with its components (representatives of the drive) and its logic (primary processes) irreducible to conscious linguistic communication. I will therefore present my reflections on female bisexuality by trying to define it from the angle of women’s specific relationship to the phallus.

To make this difficult question more concrete, I will give a few paroxysmal examples of feminine positions that demonstrate a somewhat dramatic adherence to the phallic, a structural adherence, but at the price of often traumatic suffering.

Armelle had a high-powered position in an international organization. A wife, mother, mistress, and author, she had everything except personal satisfaction (“It’s not sexual,” she insisted, “I’m not frigid”). This was accompanied by the feeling of being a little girl, never taken seriously, never operating at her true capacities. She took on all tasks, chores, and obligations, regardless of their difficulty. Armelle was fixed at the pivotal scene that I situate between her Oedipus¹ and her Oedipus² (remember these terms; I will use them again). She had a bed of nails made and would lie on the spiked surface, pressing her back or stomach into it until she bled. The martyrology of saints, transmitted by familial tradition, was added to the structural jouissance of “A Child Is Being Beaten”:² Armelle is being beaten, Armelle beats Armelle, Armelle punctures Armelle until she bleeds; the entire body is a penis-phallus that takes pleasure in sadomasochism to punish itself for clitoral pleasure and to avoid acknowledging itself as a punctured/castrated body. Armelle achieved her professional excellence, her phallicism in the symbolic order, at the price of the denial of her bisexuality: she wanted to be all phallus. Her perverse jouissance was paid for by the physical and mental exhaustion of the superwoman.

Dominique had a boy’s slender body and an allusive way of speaking. Her computer skills were not enough to explain this reserve. She reluctantly revealed that she had had erotic encounters with women but preferred a man, whose masochistic partner she was. Much later, Dominique revealed to me that this man was her hierarchical superior and, later still, that he was black. Dominique had greatly admired her brother, who was a year older, a sort of twin; a younger sister was born five years later. The idyll of Dominique-as-a-boy ended in adolescence when her brother was hit by a car. “I don’t think women have a sex. After my brother’s death, I noticed I was smooth between my legs, like a plastic doll.” Without a penis, without a clitoris, without a vagina, Dominique lived out the failure of her psychical bisexuality by offering her anus as a hollow penis to her sadistic partner. Another configuration of phallic monism.

Florence alternated between anorexia and bulimia, trying to vomit up an abandoned and abandoning mother, whom she protected and suffered for with her entire body. Too early Florence had taken the place of her divorced father for her loved-hated mother. This maternal score-settling led to Russian roulette. A dream: “I’m playing Russian roulette, which is actually Belgian roulette: you lose every time, meaning you win death. There is no empty slot in the cartridge. You won’t believe this, but I pulled the trigger, and I won a sort of big phallus, only it meant that I was dead. It was an absurd dream. Gambling doesn’t interest me. My brother is the one who gambles; it’s disastrous, he’s pathological, he’s destroying his family.” Florence swallows-vomits the penis (the brother’s, the father’s) and wins her big phallus, but these creative performances that signal her gain are paid for by a putting-to-death of the entire body, which has become an imaginary phallus that she prefers to erect as well as abolish in anorexia rather than pay the price of the lack through the recognition of bisexuality.

I will come back to this unbearable phallicism in women. For now, I would like to emphasize once again the universality of the phallic reference, which is manifested in both sexes, although in different ways, well before the phallic phase and the oedipal phase it announces and thus before the child locates the importance of the “third.” This, as I have already mentioned, is what psychoanalysis calls “phallic monism,” which emerged with the clinic and refers to the universality of the phallic reference in the girl as well as the boy, although again in different ways. It appears because of language, because of the paternal function, and because of the maternal desire for the father (her own and the child’s). What we call phallic is the conjunction, encounter, intersection between the importance of the symbol—of thought—on the one hand, and genital excitation, on the other. Lacan points out this “trace of the phallus” and speaks of “a phallus without incarnation”³ that always already organizes the subject’s psychosexuality. Primary identification, narcissism, sublimation, idealization, the imposition of the ego ideal and the superego are only a few of the well-known stages of the positioning of the future subject vis-à-vis this phallic reference, in other words, this unity of sense and law.

Let us return to what Freud calls the phallic stage, which he situates between ages three and six and which, structurally, is the central organizer of what I have called the sexuality-thought copresence in both sexes. This is the age at which the child discovers his/her sexual organs and their excitability, invests them at the same time as thought, which is related to both language and the third and placed, so to speak, above the sensorial mother-child relationship. Numerous authors have pointed out the particularities that destine the penis to be invested by both sexes and to become the phallus, that is, the signifier of privation, of lack of being, but also of desire, the desire to signify, which consequently makes it the signifier of symbolic law. Remember what I said earlier: the penis, visible and narcissistically recognized, erectile and invested with erogenous sensibility, detachable and thus cuttable, susceptible to loss, is suited to becoming the basis of difference, the favored actor in the 0–1 binarism that founds all (marked/unmarked) systems of meaning, the organic factor (real and imaginary) of our psychosexual network.

Here, I want to examine briefly the kairos,⁴ this subtle and in a sense miraculous encounter between desire and meaning during the phallic phase that henceforth seals the fate of the human being as desiring and speaking being. Whether anatomically male or female, the subject who desires and speaks is formed by this phallic kairos. This is what psychoanalysis reveals to us, after the mysteries; the essence of our psychical destiny bears this mystery’s (admittedly dramatic) consequences.

In effect, the phallicism of both sexes thus structured and under the threat of castration (it may be encountered as well as cut) will succumb to latency and repression. The primacy of the phallic remains only an infantile genital organization for this phallic primacy is precisely what differentiates infantile genitality from adult genitality, which in principle recognizes both sexes and does not remain under the primacy of the phallus.⁵ A single sex (the penis), a single libido (male), a single symbol for the activity of thought (the phallus): this phallic experience common to both sexes will remain a basic given of the unconscious for both sexes. Adult sexuality, however, will dissociate itself from it by acceding to the discovery of the second sex (in the optimal hypothesis). Phallic monism is thus an infantile illusion that nevertheless remains an unconscious organizing reality of the psyche. An illusion that has become unconscious reality: isn’t this an illusion promised a certain future? This is the foundation of what Freud would call “the future of an illusion,” because all religion may be traced back to the phallic cult.

Note in passing that this Freudian theory that the clinic confirms brings with it two consequences that have not been sufficiently considered. First, the phallic kairos is proper to infantile genitality, which means that phallic monism is a vestige of this infantile phallocentrism that conditions the Oedipus phase. Second, because this phallicism is repressed and becomes unconscious, the unconscious is phallic. In other words, the unconscious lacks genitality in the sense of a recognition of sexual difference, or, to put it more bluntly, there is no unconscious psychical genitality (there is the biological instinct of procreation and the pubescent desire for the opposite sex, but nothing in Freudian theory suggests that there is an unconscious psychical representative of the opposite sex as such).

Keep in mind as well that man undergoes a crisis of the Oedipus complex, which is conditioned by the phallic kairos: this crisis is the abandonment of incest and murder and the institution of the conscience and morality that Freud interprets as a “victory of the race over the individual.”⁶ The agencies of the psychical apparatus (id, ego, and superego) replace the libidinal investments through desexualization and sublimation, and only neurosis—in trying continually to return to the infantile and oedipal or preoedipal pleasures—betrays a rebellion of the ego against the pretensions of the sexual function. What are we to think of this other form of rebellion, which for the subject is no longer represented by neurosis but by the creation of thought and language, the aesthetic creation often parallel to neurosis and even to psychosis but irreducible to it? This inquiry into (female) bisexuality will perhaps make it possible to sketch out an answer to this question that Freud did not raise.

The fate that Freud accords the primacy of the phallic can be summed up this way: it is the central organizer (as is the Oedipus); it is illusory (peculiar to infantile phallic organization); and it shatters under the threat of castration and when the individual is effaced in favor of the race.

We know the revenge and the overinvestment of the phallic to which Lacan devoted himself in order to restore the function of the father and language in the speaking being: a lacking, evanescent phallic, common place of anxiety and, for this very reason, the first symbol that determines sexuation. I emphasize the fact that this is not simply a matter of the erected organ; the penis becomes a symbol susceptible to lacking, to not being. “[Man] is not without having it . . ., woman is without having it.”⁷ I would like to compare this statement with Winnicott’s proposition of a driveless maternal that quite simply is (the self is the breast, the breast is the self) and does not “do.”⁸

To be, to have, to do: are the differences so clear? I propose the following as an extension and counterpoint to these two propositions by Lacan and Winnicott.

In the little girl, too, a decisive encounter fuses her being as thinking and desiring subject: the encounter (kairos) between the mastery of signs (cold abstractions and evanescent frustrations but so many sources of new benefits and powers) and genital sexual excitation (no longer oral or anal). Whether the vagina is or is not perceived, it is essentially the clitoris that concentrates this phallic assumption, at once felt (real), imaginary (fantasized in power/powerlessness), and symbolic (investment and efflorescence of thought). Masturbation, incestuous desire for the mother: here is the first aspect of the Oedipus complex (I will call it Oedipus¹) that structurally defines the girl, as well as the boy, before she arrives at Oedipus², which causes her to change objects (the father instead of the mother). Yet, starting with this structuring (Oedipus¹), there are differences between the girl’s phallicism and the boy’s, which perhaps have not been sufficiently underscored.

The emphasis placed on language as the organizer of psychical life, though judicious, has too often prevented us from fully appreciating the sensory (prelinguistic or translinguistic) experience. Now, sensoriality, strongly stimulated in the little girl in the preoedipal phases by the symbiotic link to the mother (through primary homosexuality), allows her to appreciate the difference of the boy’s organic sexual performances as well as the narcissistic overinvestment of which he is the object. Of course, individual variations in excitation or clitoral pleasure, on the one hand, and the singular variants in the girl’s valorization by the father, on the other, considerably influence the modulations of feminine phallicism: a little girl may be as satisfied or valorized as a little boy in the phallic phase, if not more so. Nevertheless, a dissociation is structurally inscribed between the sensory and the signifying in the phallicism of the girl.⁹ The phallus as signifier of the lack as well as of the law, supported in the imaginary by the penis, is immediately perceived/thought of by the girl as extraneous, radically other. Invisible and almost impossible to locate, the real and imaginary basis of phallic pleasure in the girl (the clitoris) immediately dissociates the female subject from the phallus in the sense of a privileged signifier in the logos/desire conjunction that I have called a phallic kairos, to which the girl nevertheless accedes with as much ease as the boy, if not more. This symbolic ease (of thought), however, is not accompanied by sensorial experience (distinct from the phallic drive), in light of the disappointment of the perception of being less visible and less remarkable: less appreciated, although pleasure is not necessarily less intensely felt. Lesser valorization of the girl by her father and mother, in comparison to the boy, traditionally played out in families or as a result of specific psychosocial configurations, contributes to consolidating this disappointment with regard to the symbolic link. From then on, with the sensory/signifying dissociation, the belief is established that the phallic-symbolic order is illusory.

The perception (contemporaneous with the phallic phase), unfavorable to the girl (she does not have a “remarkable” penis, she is not the phallus), reactivates the hallucination of earlier sensorial experiences (satisfaction and/ or frustration in the daughter-mother reduplication and Minoan-Mycenean sameness) preceding or concealed from the appearance of language.¹⁰ From then on, with this gap between the current perception dominated by the phallic kairos and the earlier perception/hallucination, phallic monism, referred to the other (the man) that “I am not,” immediately strikes the female subject with a negation (“I am not what is,” “I am, nevertheless, because of not”). The extraneous or illusory nature of the phallus may be another name for this doubled negativity of “nevertheless” and “not.”

It is not a delirium that heals the perception/hallucination gap in the woman but precisely the belief that the phallus, as well as language and the symbolic order, are illusory yet indispensable. On the other hand, one may interpret as a form of delirium the refusal to accept the difference and the illusory aspect of the phallus that this entails, as well as the female subject’s desperate attempts to maintain equality with the boy’s phallicism through sadomasochism (recall the three examples cited above).

By “belief” I mean conscious and unconscious adherence, without proof, to an obvious fact: here, the obvious fact that the phallus, because of the perception/signification dissociation, always already appears to the woman as illusory. “Illusory”¹¹ basically means that this law, this pleasure, this phallic power and, simultaneously, their lack, to which I accede through the phallus—that of the stranger—is a game. It is not that it is nothing, but it is not everything either or even a veiled everything, as in the phallic mysteries. The phallus that “I” invest is what makes me a subject of language and of law; there “I” am. There is something else, however, a je ne sais quoi. Nonetheless, “I” enter the game, “I” want some, too, “I” play along. It’s only a game (jeu), it’s only an “I” (je), “I” am pretending, and this, for the female subject, is indeed the so-called truth of the signifier or the speaking being. I am not saying that women are necessarily mocking or ludic, though some may be. But when they are not under an illusion, they are disillusioned. Women’s apparent realism is based on this illusion: women continue to do everything because they do not believe in it; they believe that it is an illusion.

This belief in the illusoriness of the phallus may have some benefits. For example, I cultivate a secret sensoriality, which may be furtive but spares me the boy’s difficult experience of making my erotic pleasure coincide with my symbolic performance. Such a dissociation may present the advantage of easing and facilitating the girl’s logical abilities, extraneous to eroticism, thereby favoring the well-known intellectual successes of little girls, precocious geniuses who excel at everything. Still, this experience of the extraneousness of the phallus entails its opposite, which is the opposite of facility and may push the girl into a paroxysmal phallic ambition bordering on martyrology, as the clinical examples cited above show. In women, the extraneousness of the phallus may sustain an aspect of what we too summarily call female masochism, namely, the sadomasochistic phallic competition not compensated by Oedipus² or by reconciliation with preoedipal femininity. In struggling against the extraneousness of the phallus, the phallic girl—who wants to “have one,” like the boy—makes herself more Catholic than the pope, becoming saint, martyr, and militant of a signifier whose illusory aspect all her erogenous zones are mobilized to deny and that she would like to persuade herself she believes in, with rock-hard certainty.

The belief in the phallus as illusory seems to me an immediate indication of female psychical bisexuality, insofar as the illusoriness (or the extraneousness) relies on the dehiscence between the sensory and the signifiable resulting from an always-present adherence in the girl to the preoedipal daughter-mother osmosis and to the code in which this osmosis occurs: sensorial exchanges and prelanguage (the “semiotic” modality in my terminology: rhythms, alliterations anterior to signs and syntax). The abandon of this semiotic modality of signifiance in favor of linguistic signs during the depressive position characterizes the boy as well as the girl, though again, there are no doubt differences between the sexes that have barely been explored. Later, the phallic structuring of the subject is added to the acquisition of language and consolidates it. But because of the experience of the extraneousness of the phallus in the little girl, the phallic kairos reactivates the depressive position and thereby accentuates in the woman the belief in the illusory nature of the phallus and of language.

A clarification, which is also a warning, is in order: the particularity that I am bringing to the fore is a manifestation of the woman’s psychical bisexuality and does not necessarily lead to “as-if” personalities or false selves, the etiology of which requires traumatic splittings. I did not mention splittings but games, extraneousness, the illusory, the illusory aspect of the phallic being the trace of two continents: the phallic continent and the Minoan-Mycenean continent in the female psychical experience. I think that the illusory phallic in the woman may lead her to inscribe herself in the social order with an aloof efficiency; Hegel referred to this in speaking of women as the irony in the life of the community. Moreover, this illusory position of the phallus may also favor the woman’s depressive regressions when the attraction to the shadow of the preoedipal object (the Minoan-Mycenean mother) becomes inexorable and the female subject abandons the extraneousness of the symbolic in favor of an unnamable sensoriality, becoming sullen, silent, and suicidal. On the other hand, in the maniacal investment of this illusory phallicism, one can see the logic of ostentation that mobilizes the beautiful seductress: constantly made up, provocative, on parade and just as constantly not fooled and disappointed. This is the well-known case of the female illusionist who knows herself to be such, the “girl-phallus” that Fenichel, and Lacan after him, spoke of.

Inversely, while psychical bisexuality imposes the belief in the illusoriness of the phallus in the woman, the denial of bisexuality presents itself as a denial of the illusory. Such a denial implies identification with the phallus as such, which amounts to an identification with the man’s phallic position and scotomization, the quashing of the primary semiotic link with the mother (which some call primary female homosexuality). The result of this is the female paranoiac: the boss, director, or virile lesbian, partisans of power in all its more or less dictatorial forms. As you can see, these different articulations of the phallus offer privileges but also set traps, like every psychical structuring.

But the illusoriness of the phallus does not exhaust the complexity of the strange configuration that is female bisexuality. It was sufficient for Freud to posit the Oedipus phase to see that the girl does not conform to it. “We have an impression here that what we have said about the Oedipus complex applies with complete strictness to the male child only.”¹² You have already noted that I am not among those who reject phallic monism and thus the phallic structuring of the girl subject based on this remark of Freud’s. I would add however to Oedipus¹ (indispensable for the boy and girl, which phallicism sets in motion) an Oedipus², and therefore I propose the notion of an oedipal dyad in the woman. Let me explain.

As a result of the threat of castration, to which the experience of the extraneousness of the phallus can be added, the little girl renounces clitoral masturbation, is disgusted by it, rejects it, and turns away from her phallicism, which is as real (the belief that “I have the organ”) as it is imaginary (the belief that “I am male power/powerlessness”). While cultivating her place as subject of the phallic signifier, subject of the symbolic (with the extraneousness and illusoriness she accords it), the girl changes objects in Oedipus². She starts by hating the mother who was the object of her phallic desire, becoming hostile to this mother responsible for castration and illusion, as illusion entails disappointment. The girl, however, still identifies with the same mother who was the object of her phallic desire during Oedipus¹ and moreover identifies with the preoedipal mother of Minoan-Mycenean perfumed paradises. It is from this place of identification beyond hate that she changes objects and from now on no longer desires the mother but what the mother desires: the love of the father. More precisely, the girl wants the father to give her his own penis/phallus, in the form of children that the girl would have as if she were . . . the mother. The renewal of phallic aspiration therefore continues in this Oedipus²—which we could say is interminable—and we see how Freud postulates that, unlike the boy whose Oedipus complex dissolves as a result of the castration complex, the Oedipus of the girl—which I call Oedipus²—not only does not dissolve but is only beginning, specifically speaking, as female Oedipus. It is introduced by the castration complex.¹³

The integration of this feminine position vis-à-vis the father is not free of ambiguity. Indeed, it results from an identification with the castrating/castrated mother, at first abhorred and then accepted, and is accompanied by “a lowering of the active sexual impulses,” and a repression of masculinity; “a considerable portion of her sexual trends in general is permanently injured too.”¹⁴ Does passivation follow the illusory? Whatever the answer, parallel to this passivation, or depression, penis envy persists as a variant of phallicism—which would suggest that the active sexual trends are far from abolished—as either a behavioral or a professional masculine claim or, more “naturally,” in the desire for a child and maternity. This is perhaps where the world as illusory stops for the woman and where that of real presence begins.

A child, as the real presence of the phallus, is invested by its mother quite differently from any sign or symbol, even a phallic one. This is what the last religion, Christianity, clearly understood, in making its god a child and thereby definitively endearing itself to women, so given to disillusion,¹⁵ so incredulous when presented with an ideal or disembodied superego, that Freud himself was struck by it and severely criticized women’s incapacity for morality. Rather than incapacity, I would say “estrangement,” a critical and ironic capacity.

If it is true that the desire for a child incarnates the permanent feminine Oedipus, the last and therefore interminable phallic revolt in the woman’s Oedipus² (“I want a penis = real presence”), it is no less true that the woman finds another variant of her bisexuality here. Why? Because the child is her penis, she does not renounce masculinity. But at the same time, and still through the child, she accedes to the quality of being the other of the man, that is, a woman who has given her child, emptied herself of it, separated from it. Yet, maternity is most often perceived or experienced not as a disequilibrium of identity and even less as an open structure but as fulfillment, to which the term “androgyny” would be better suited than “bisexuality.” When the symbolic order is incarnated in real presence (the child-phallus), the woman finds in it the conjunction of her symbolic essence (phallic thinking subject) and her carnal essence (preoedipal sensuality, mother-daughter sensual duality, reduplication of female parents). As a result, achieving her bisexuality in androgyny in an Oedipus phase that is never completed and always renewed, the woman-mother may appear to be the guarantor of both the social order and the continuation of the species.

Freud’s observation of women as social beings culminates in maternal omnipotence,¹⁶ which, following directly from the mother as guarantor of the social and the biological, strives today with the aid of the gynecologist and the geneticist to restore real presence. The maternal woman, served by science and technology, has the fantasy of being able to do everything and often does do everything to bring the real presence of the phallus into existence, and to improve it, through her child.

Yet this tableau of a hypersocial, ultrabiological, and ferociously restorative femininity, though not entirely false, seems to me not to take into account two weaknesses. The first is the permanence of illusion/disillusion with regard to all signifiers, law or desire. The other is the vulnerability of the woman who delegates her real presence to that of her child (i.e., to another) and who, at each attack on her child’s integrity, relives the throes of castration, if not a brutal identity crisis. What we call female sadomasochism is perhaps the experience of this structural extraneousness of the phallus in these two forms: disillusion (based on Oedipus¹) or an attack on the real presence relayed by the other of the self, the child (based on Oedipus²).

If it is not fixed in omnipotence, female bisexuality tends toward the trials of sadomasochism. Then, still estranged in her latent desire to have the phallus or be it (a desire that nevertheless sustains her being a subject), the woman turns away from the desiring and phallic assumption; she renounces her psychical bisexuality and takes pleasure in a painful sensoriality, which is the carrier wave of hysterical depressivity before it topples into melancholia. Inversely, hysterical indifference may reveal an option for the phallus erected as superego, disgusted by clitoral pleasure, and deprived of any possible recollection of the link to the preoedipal mother. These configurations of female psychical bisexuality (among others) appear, in sum, as variants of the position of the female subject with regard to phallic monism. The structural difficulties of this positioning—more than the historical conditions that must inevitably be added to it—perhaps explain the difficult fate of women throughout history.

Remember the phallic adherence in Armelle, Dominique and Florence, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, whose suffering now appears as a denial of bisexuality in favor of a fantasy of androgynous totality. I gave you these brief sketches of a few dramatic aspects of the difficult female condition to emphasize that by avoiding these (ever-so-frequent) impasses, the mystery of female bisexuality may shine forth. Like all successes, female psychical bisexuality is certainly a fantasy. It supposes the inscription of the female subject in the phallic-signifying order, with the procession of symbolic pleasures and gratifications (Oedipus¹) that this strange and illusory order provides; it also supposes the displacement of castration, depression, and sexual diminishment in a revalorization of the maternal, and consequently feminine, role, which goes through a reconciliation with primary homosexuality; finally it implies the investment of the real presence of the child-phallus, trial of glory and castration, which is finally less illusory, although “always already” somewhat extraneous. In this veritable vortex of adherence and nonadherence to the phallus (to the signifier, to desire), female bisexuality is nothing more or less than an experience of meaning and its gestation, language and its erosion, being and its reserve.

These are the true stakes of the aesthetic experience, this contemporary and lucid variant of the sacred. I am hoping you will meditate on the reason why, in searching for lost time, it is the bisexuality of the Gomorrahan libertine that Proust made the focus of the narrator’s fantasy. Might female bisexuality be the object par excellence of literature and art? This is what many writers seem to suggest to us, caught in the vortex of meaning’s position and deposition.¹⁷

But Albertine dies falling from a horse, unless she committed suicide. And beyond the uncomfortable feminine position that many of us are familiar with, the psychical bisexuality of the woman remains a promised land that we must attain, particularly in psychoanalysis, by curving the pleasure that our professional, clinical, theoretical, and clearly phallic accomplishments give us toward the barely expressible and highly sensitive territory of our silent mothers. Transphallic, and in this sense not less phallic but more-than-phallic, this bisexual jouissance would then be, strictly speaking, mysterious, in the etymological sense that I have already pointed out. Is pain the ultimate mystery? If there is a resolution of female masochism, it perhaps involves the resolution of what I have called Oedipus²: assumption of the phallic and its traverse in the real presence of the child and reconciliation with the unrepresentable antephallic of the preoedipal maternal and prelanguage. The immense psychical work that such a trajectory requires, though never entirely complete, can be measured in the strange, disillusioned, and yet lively and reliable air of certain women.

With bisexuality understood as the resolution of female masochism, I am convinced we are touching on the psychical spring of atheism, were the speaking being able accede to it without militant antireligious counterinvestment. For I see in the psychical bisexuality of the woman not a cult of the phallus or something beyond it, much less beneath it, but a maintenance and an estrangement of illusion as illusion.

The future of an illusion? Necessarily! Freud the rationalist was right: everyone wants an illusion and insists on not knowing that it is one. Structurally, however, a woman is better placed than anyone to explore illusion. I am not sure “atheism” means anything more than taking the other and exploring it. The few guiding lights left to us by eighteenth-century French women may one day lead us in this direction—toward women and atheism—though the current international climate suggests this may be highly perilous.

A discussion of that question must wait. For now, I will conclude by pointing up the incommensurable psychical effort required in acceding to this psychically bisexual being that is woman, a being, one might even say, that never adheres to the illusion of being, any more than to the being of this illusion itself. And I admit that what I have said may only be illusion as well.