1 :: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
at the level of sexual difference. ‘It can be said that the phallic signifier’, comments
Lacan (1977: 287), ‘is chosen because it is the most tangible elements in the role of
sexual copulation ... it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation’.
Masculinity is thus forged through appropriation of the sign of the phallus, a sign that
confers power, mastery and domination. Femininity, by contrast, is constructed
around exclusion from phallic power. Femininity holds a precarious, even fragile,
relation to language, rationality and power. ‘There is no woman’, says Lacan
(1975: 221), ‘but excluded from the value of words’. This viewpoint, as the reader
might have already gathered, is hardly likely to win much support from feminists;
and, in fact, Lacan has been taken to task by many feminist authors for his
perpetuation of patriarchal assumptions within the discourse of psychoanalysis.
However it is perhaps also worth holding in mind that more fluid possibilities for
gender transformation are contained within Lacan’s formulation of sexual difference
and its cultural consequences. Beyond the bleak Oedipal power of the phallus, Lacan
deconstructs sexuality identity as fiction or fraud. Desire, he maintains, lurks beneath
the signifiers upon which identity and sex are fabricated. Gender fixity is always open
to displacement.
Psychoanalysis, from Freud to Lacan and beyond, has exercised an enormous
influence upon debates over identity in social theory, especially in feminist and
gender studies – of which more shortly. Throughout these volumes, the reader will
encounter various psychoanalytically-informed contributions to the critique of identity
- from Cornelius Castoriadis to Julia Kristeva, from David Reisman to Hélène Cixous.
There are also many detailed psychoanalytic mappings of identity presented,
including contributions from Melanie Klein, Thomas Ogden, Jessica Benjamin,
Christopher Bollas, D.W. Winnicott and many others.
THE DISCURSIVE PRODUCTION OF IDENTITY: STRUCTURALISM,
POST-STRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM
The claim that identity and the repressed unconscious are intricately interwoven is
at the heart of psychoanalysis. But there are other ways of approaching the analysis
and critique of identity, and these other approaches tend to view psychoanalytic
approaches with suspicion. The symbolic violence which wrests identity out of the
unconscious might be conceptualized in terms of primordial repression within the
discourse of psychoanalysis, but in other influential European traditions of social
thought this constitution of the subject comes about not as a result of internal or
affective forces, but rather through the imposition of linguistic codes or social
discourses. For the French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault, identity is