COME ON, HUMANS, ONE MORE EFFORT!in which the least that can be said is that the patriarchate has done pretty well for itself,
Christianity has done its utmost either to deny the Father’s powerlessness or to convert it
into supreme glory. But the worm has been in the fruit of the patriarchate from the
outset. Once the father is reduced to nothing more than a metaphor, power is no longer
his inevitable attribute. If, for Lacan (who I cannot help thinking has achieved the Chris-
tian translation of Freud’s Judaism), the name of the father is synonymous with the law,
it is a law that fathers must obey, not a law that they decree. The father is merely the
agent of the law of the signifier when he hands down his name, when he transmits the
phallus.
I sometimes catch myself dreaming of a post-Lacanian utopia that makes the phallus
not just the signifier of castration but rather the signifier of the uncertainty of paternity.
It amounts to the same thing, but why does Lacan acknowledge it only with the greatest
reservation? Didn’t Lacan, who was something of a patriarch himself, stop halfway along
the path in his Christian translation of Freud? I think he did, to the extent of imagining
that the point where it is a matter of being post-Christian merges with the point where it
is a matter of being post-Lacanian. (I don’t think I am alone in thinking so; if I have
understood correctly, Alain Badiou is on the same track.) If one wonders why the signifier
of sexual difference (which applies to both genders) is on the masculine side and why, in
addition, on the side of paternity rather than the side of masculinity in general, the answer
is, obviously, because maternity doesn’t need a signifier. The mother doesn’t need her
mother’s status to be approved by a sign, acknowledged by a symbol. She knows in her
flesh that she is mother. Man needs his paternity to be recorded in a symbolic act because
he doesn’t enjoy any physical signal of paternity. This is whyphallusandname of the
fatherare synonymous andphallusandpenisare not. And why the phallus is a signifier
and not a sign. It is not the father for which it substitutes, like a name for the thing it
names, but the uncertainty of paternity. The phallus is a sign without any signified, or
rather, referent. If a utopia at any price were needed for us to entertain hope, my post-
Christian utopia would be simply this: when it has been understood that paternity consists
in acquiescing in a basic uncertainty through an act of faith, and faith in the faith of the
other—which is to say, that the man who gives his name to a child relies blindly on the
trust he puts in the faithfulness of his woman—the power of the fathers evaporates. Obvi-
ously, this has been understood from the outset, but one doesn’t wish to admit it because
it calls for too much love. Foolish are those who think that a DNA test can be a substitute.
Let us be realistic and get back to the translation exercise under way: hope and equal-
ity. Now that the issue of sexual difference is on the table, equality between men and
women is involved as much as equality between ‘‘undifferentiated’’ human beings. As I
said earlier, hope is the endurance of faith, and Christian hope is buttressed by a quite
specific faith—faith in the resurrection of the Son of God. Faith in his incarnation would
seem to be merely its condition. In order to rise from the dead Christ had to die, and in
order to die he had to have been born. Resurrection is the event, not incarnation. In a
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