Feminine Jouissance and the Signifier
Clinical Study Days 18. Brief intervention on feminine jouissance and signification delivered during a panel on LC members’ experiences in cartels.
The work of our cartel has brought each of us—from different starting places, along different lines—to a surprising point: a point that I will designate with the term sublimation. What began as a broad inquiry into feminine jouissance has developed into a set of traits that trace the links between feminine jouissance and that which lies before or beneath its sublime solitude. What leads the unspeakable to make itself heard? How can a jouissance beyond the phallus be encoded in signifiers and forms of writing, in social practices that ground what Laurent called “communities of jouissance,” and even in partnerships, however liable they are to the violence of the ravage?
Perhaps our emphasis on symbolic capture is a spontaneous effort to domesticate this opaque jouissance, to force it into a phallic mode that is more comprehensible. Such an effort tends to reduce feminine jouissance to a negative gesture or a gap—a kind of apophatic femininity. One proclaims, with a false humility: “beyond this point we can say no more.” Already, masculine logic reasserts itself. It’s as if there are two worlds—Mars and Venus, say—that might interact, but that ultimately remain separate. In this cosmology, femininity is in the place of the exception, which serves, according to Lacan’s formulas, to shore up the universe of men. Feminine jouissance is captured by and in its exteriority; it is sealed away.
After many meetings spent working in the dark, suddenly a spark flies and casts its brief light. Another way to understand this jouissance flickers into view: sublimation not as capture, even in the disguised form of radical exteriority, but as inscription. Whereas the former serves the logic of masculinity through its investment in the resolute difference of feminine jouissance, the latter punctures the boundary between the masculine and the feminine. It suggests that feminine jouissance also has a foothold in the phallic domain, appearing in and through certain signifying acts. Our cartel began to speak about the mystics, about the signifiers that appear at the end of an analysis, and about symptoms that use the body and its affects as a signifying surface. To be clear, these are still semblants, and they still subordinate feminine jouissance to phallic signification. However, they do not leave the masculine side unscathed. They are semblants that disorient the signifying field, that expose the semblant to the Real.
If we follow the arrows on Lacan’s formulas, we see that feminine jouissance tends toward particular signifiers: the phallus and the signifier of the barred Other. The signifier of the barred Other is written close to the line between the left-hand side and the right-hand side—close, also, to the object a. Men cross over, as if into a kind of wilderness, looking for this object, but sometimes they find something else entirely. Sometimes their hunt for the object leads them right into the jaws of the barred Other. What happens after this encounter? Are they able to return to the same place from whence they came?
This is one way of articulating the relationship between the jouissance of the barred Other and feminine jouissance. The object that should plug the lack in the Other slips, and a jouissance not regulated by the semblant erupts. The threat of an absolute decoupling between the subject and this Other jouissance emerges: the subject may lose herself in this zone, may never emerge from these depths. But there is another vicissitude of jouissance, of the drive—one to which femininity enjoys privileged access.
To wit, feminine jouissance can sublimate into a signifier: the signifier of the barred Other. Through it, feminine subjects inscribe some shade of their experience of non-phallic jouissance, a jouissance not organized by the object, in the phallic domain, in the sphere of the semblant. They do so by forging a signifier that bears an intimate connection with the inconsistency of the Other, with the Other’s silence where feminine jouissance is concerned. A semblant that shows how the rest dissemble. This new configuration appears not for all women, but for each one who dares to take up the feminine position.
At the same time, the signifier of the barred Other acts as a demand, of sorts. To whom is this demand directed? Well, to men. This demand drives men crazy, and sometimes it even drives them to do something about it, for better or for worse. For some men, this demand may lead to a reactionary reinforcement of the idiotic, phallic mode of jouissance. A hardening of the jouissance position. For others, it may lead, as I suggested, to the brink of madness. Maybe, for a select few—the saints, as Lacan put it—it can even go further, throwing one into the feminine position, making one not-all. The best writing on the feminine position solicits this particular sort of madness. The work of our cartel has sustained it, and has even allowed us to wrest a word or two from the closed lips of the Other jouissance.