Sex on the Table - AK

I am primarily responding to the Lacanian diagrams as aesthetic forms – this may be because I am already very familiar with their intellectual meanings and connotations. That said, here’s my interp of the Table of Sexuation:

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The table is an algebraic rendering of Lacan’s argument put forward in Seminar 20, 'Encore - on Female Sexuality'. In these equations he states that speaking beings can align themselves on either side, on the side of men or women. The top section of the table is an attempt to encapsulate the universal and individual aspects of subjectivity; I would say an attempt to make universal the specifics of the subject due to her or his relationship to language and the symbolic. On the side of the male, the top line translates as: 'There is a being in language who says 'no' to the phallic function' - this is described as the male existential position. The equation directly under this reads: 'All beings in language are subject to the phallic function'. This means that man's pleasures are in relation to the play of signifiers. On the side of the woman, the first line translates as: 'There is not a being in language who is not subject to the phallic function' - the female existential position. And underneath that: 'Not all of the speaking being is subject to the phallic function' - described as the universal position. Which can be summarised as meaning that woman is not wholly bound or limited by the symbolic order or the signifier. (Before moving on to the discussion of what takes place below, I'll quickly discuss what the 'phallic function' is, which is symbolised as the phi).

The phallic function is the castration performed by the symbolic. For Lacan, acting as a psychoanalyst-semiotician, this castration is language based - not based on the threat of the removal of a sexual organ, but the effects that language has on the subject, and the subsequent coded sexual activities of the sexed body. The castration or phallic function is related to Lacan's 'name-of-the-Father', or the 'No!' of the Father, that separates the child from the Mother, or rather, brings the child into phallically dominated or ordered language. The phallic function alienates the subject in language, forces one to loose or give up absolute access to jouissance - where pleasure and pain meet. Lacan argues that every child, whether 'biologically male or female', must accept castration (separation from the mother and the fantasy that he or she is all and fulfils her very need) in order to have different symbolic and sexual relationships around the phallus, as sexual beings. The symbolic phallus in language, therefore, is the signifier. As Lacan state in his paper 'The Signification of the Phallus': 'It is a signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified'. The idea of the symbolic phallic signifier as 'whole' is useful here, as it is wholly empty. The phallus can be thought of as the 'empty universal', the empty sign. As Lacan writes in 1973: 'It is the signifier which does not have a signified'. The castrating aspect of this symbolic phallic function then, is the laying down of the bar that guarantees contingency, over the subject - it bars the subject from absolute access to the life threatening Real, and underlines the impossibility of the subjects Absolute satiety. The phallus is a sham.

A bone of contention still remains within post-Lacanian feminist responses to the phallic function. It is argued for example that the phallus as privileged signifier is really only Freud's theory of the penis and any privileging of the penis continues to guarantee male domination. But, as I have noted, Lacan argues that no sexed subject owns the phallus, both all are symbolically 'castrated', i.e., born into language that separates them from the Whole (even although they may have different sexual organs). Derrida, in the other hand, argues that as a privileged signifier, the phallus acts as a transcendental guarantor of meaning in relation to logocentrism, creating a phallogocentric latent humanist universe. I would argue in a cursory way, that as an empty or quasi universal, or an historically and contingently constructed fallacy, the phallus is the illusory foundation of transcendental justifications. It is neither a positive or negative theology, it is a atopia, chora or tabernacle where meaning is created to be located - not innocently discovered. It must also be said that in his later career Lacan privileges the use of the object 'a' as a replacement or substitute for the term phallus - he could have easily used the letter 'X'.]

Now to the lower section of the table. On the side of the male, Lacan locates the Universal and Univeralising sign for the male barred subject: S (I can't draw a line through the S here, but there should be one). The male subject as a signifier is barred internally because he is barred from the Other, separated, split, as a subject thrust into language and it's inability to give the subject access to the Other. The barred subject represents alienation in language, the split brought about by the first empty master signifier - the 'No!' of the Father - that puts limitations on the child.

The arrow of fantasy that joins this sign to the letter 'a' - which is in Lacanian terminology the 'objet a' (a for 'autre'/other), demonstrates that the subject believes and fantasises fulfilment and the generation of desire via the part object or fetish object that can be found in the desirable partner - who is here, on the side of women. Remember, any subject can occupy any aspect of this equation. Because as Lacan argues, 'the sexual relationship does not exist' - there is no clear cut, unmediated relationship between the subjugated sexes - the male relates to the woman as a collection of desirable signifiers or 'objet a'. An aspect of her (not all of her) finds a certain pleasure in his relation to the phallus - the phallus being a signifier of lack and desire, which he has (as he stands in total relation to the castrating phallic function), and she is (in that she is his object of desire, 'a', that he feels will give him access to the Other). For the male to be in total relation to the phallic function means that his desire is limited by the incest taboo laid down by the father, and that to unanchor this would cause psychosis by foreclosing the 'Name-of-the-Father'.

On the side of the woman - facing this bared subject, is the subject or signifier of the barred Other: S(A) (line through the 'A'). This can be understood to mean that on the side of the woman, as part of the feminine structure, there is an aspect that relates to the barred subject; the fact that subjectivity is based on the barred Other. This means that the female is not entirely in the symbolic or ruled by language, but that that Otherness is barred and split. We can interpret this to mean that the Other, as Mother, as the unattainable Wholeness that is projected by the barred subject, is not as complete as that subject believes, she also desires and has jouissance beyond the signifier - a jouissance that castration and the phallic function forget. This signifier of the barred Other stands in fantastical relation to the conception of Woman as Whole, Universal, satiated and One. This is an impossible fantasy of Goddess-like omnipotence that counters the pathetic God-like position on the opposite side that aims at Universality. The woman, as a definite article of faith, does not exist. The singular definable woman that stands directly in relation to man, as his other, or as the other half that makes him whole is a myth. She is not One, as Irigary would tell us, she is many. The dream of symmetry that haunts masculinist fantasies of obliteration in the arms of the Mother is here fragmented and exposed. This is why Lacan uses the hyperbolic statement: 'The Woman does not exist.' The Woman is related to the phallic function, which appears on the side of the male here, which demonstrates that she cannot be qualified in relation to this function alone, but can desire it on the side of the masculine structure. The feminine structure proves that the phallic function has its limits, and that the signifier is not everything. The 'not all', or the 'not One' of the Woman is excessive - she says yes and no and yes or no to it's dominance. She evades Universal encapsulation due to the constitutive split that the bar over the Other offers her, a gateway if you will over and under the phallic economy of symbolisation. This leads to a supplementary not complementary jouissance, which is a jouissance that is behind, before and beyond - over and under the phallic function.

Hope this helps.