sponds for the child to his active entry into the symbolic order, then the Oedipus
complex will also entail the fact that “the subject finds his place in a preformed
symbolic apparatus that institutes the law in sexuality.”^122 This Law (in sexuality) co-
incides with the existence of the Name-of-the-Father, which we should here in-
terpret in a literal way as the superindividual surname that allows the constitution
of a lineage. With regard to castration, it is then easy to see that the child’s realiza-
tion that the father has the phallus and that, as agent of the Law—as the one who
prohibits incest—he can either donate it or withdraw it, marks both the child’s
sexuation—through an identification with the father as the bearer of the phallus—
and his assumption of a surname, the fact that “he is called Mr. So-and-so” (which
“has nothing to do with his living existence”).^123
But why is sexuality necessarily related to the Symbolic for human beings? “The
symbolic order has to be conceived as something superimposed, without which
no animal life... [nor] the most natural of relations, that between male and fe-
male... would be possible for... man.”^124 Lacan’s continual claim that the Oedi-
pus complex has a normalizingand normative function with respect to sexuality should
be interpreted within this framework:^125 first and foremost, the Oedipus complex
is needed not to keep man from the “excesses” of animal life, but to find a remedy
for his “natural” deficiencies. To cut a long story short, Lacan believes that the sym-
bolic Law (“in sexuality”) is essential for the survival of the human species: the end
of symbolic sexuation would not confine man to mere animal copulation, but
would lead to the extinction of the species. Commentators usually underline how,
according to Lacan, the Symbolic is responsible for the fact that “there is no sexual
relationship”; as Evans succinctly puts it, this means that “there is no reciprocity
or symmetry between the male and the female positions because the symbolic or-
der is fundamentally asymmetrical,” that is, the phallus is the only signifier that
governs the relations between the sexes.^126 What is, on the contrary, almost unan-
imously overlooked is the fact that the Symbolic constitutes the structural condition of possibil-
ity for any sort of (reproductive)human sexual relationship to occur.
As we saw in Chapter 1 , the “natural” helplessness of man as “disadapted” ani-
mal is logically prior to the emergence of the Symbolic. Lacan believes that, already
at the imaginary level, “there is no sexual relationship,” propagation of the species
is impossible: because of the prematurity of birth and the ensuing narcissistic
alienation in the other’s body image, unlike animal Gestalten,man’s “disordered
imagination” is unable to fulfill the basic sexual/reproductive requirements of the
species. Without a symbolic “superimposition” on the realm of animal sexual
instincts, the human Imaginary and the ego-libido would inevitably reduce us
to aggressive self-destruction: the incestuous relationship mother/child is sterile,
and “doomed to conflict and ruin.”^127 Unlike the humanist leitmotiv of the mis-
leading Lacanian doxa according to which the Imaginary is the domain of (man’s)
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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