5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
excluded is the feminine: woman is denied a voice of her own. Lacan thus claims, in
what is regarded by many as a clear indication of his anti-feminism, that The Woman
does not exist.’ Linking the unconscious with the essentially patriarchal organization
of language and culture, Lacan defines the feminine in the negative. Woman as the
Other, as something which is outside the symbolic order: this is what gives the
masculine unconscious its self-presence as power and authority.
At this point, it is necessary to briefly consider some central features of the Lacanian
theory of gender-differentiated subjectivity. For Lacan, as for Freud, the phallus is the
marker of sexual difference par excellence. The father and his phallus smash the
incestuous unity of the mother—infant bond, and thereby refer the infant to the wider
cultural, social network. In contrast to Freud, however, Lacan claims to conceptually
disconnect the phallus from any linkage with the penis. The phallus, says Lacan, is
illusory, fictitious, imaginary. It exists less in the sense of biology than in a kind of
fantasy realm which merges desire with power, omnipotence, wholeness. In Lacanian
theory, the power that the phallus promises is directly tied to maternal, imaginary
space. According to Lacan, the infant wishes to be loved exclusively by the mother.
The infant painfully learns, however, that the mother’s desire is invested elsewhere:
in the phallus. Significantly, this discovery occurs at the same time that the infant is
discovering itself in language, as a separate subject. In this connection, it is important
to note that Lacan says that both sexes enter the symbolic order of language as
castrated. The infant’s separation from maternal space is experienced as a
devastating loss. The pain of this loss is castration, from which sexual subjectivity
becomes deeply interwoven with absence and lack.
Lack, therefore, cuts across gender: both boys and girls undergo castration. Yet to
enter the symbolic, says Lacan, is to enter the masculine world. For Lacan, sexual
identity is established through a privileging of the visible, of having or not having the
phallus. As Lacan puts this: ‘It can be said that the [phallic] signifier is chosen
because it is the most tangible element in the role of sexual copulation... it is the
image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation’ (1977:287). Lacan thus
underwrites the constitution of masculinity as phallic and femininity as non- phallic.
In this scenario, the feminine is on the outside of language, culture, reason and
power. Yet, since meaning arises only out of difference, Lacan infuses this argument
with a subtle twist as concerns gender. Man’s self-presence as phallic authority, says
Lacan, is secured only through the exclusion of the feminine. The displaced feminine
makes the masculine as phallic power exist, yet it also threatens its disruption. At the
limit of the symbolic order, the feminine at once maintains and subverts existing
forms of gender power.