The Lacanian Hysteric’s Essential Question of Lack

But there is the lack of symbol adequate to transcendentally center the structure of language and the unconscious, which therefore makes the hysteric’s question one of the essential lack. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, according to Derrida, "[s]omething is missing from its place, but the lack is never missing from it" (Der81 441): "manque à sa place," which Bass translates as "lack in its place, missing from its place" (Der87 425). "Manque à sa place" is also a homophone of "manque a sa place": "lack has its place." Contrary to leading to any undecidability, indeterminacy, or division between sex and identity, "lack in its place, missing from its place" is the very foundation of "castration-truth" and a "destinational linguistics." According to Derrida, "lack does not have its place in dissemination" (Der87 441).

Lacan’s status as theorist–whether his work is poststructuralist or postmodern (e.g., Cop94) or the products of a potentially reactionary ontotheologist (e.g., Nan92)–is difficult to determine. According to Derrida,

Yet, following Derrida’s reading of Lacan that follows this quotation, I will argue that the Lacanian text is psychoanalytic and not literary– that is, it attempts to ground itself in its own "castration-truth." Its "logic of the signifier" is a logic of lack: a textuality of a "certain linguistics" (Der78 199). This logic may disrupt "naive semanticism," but it does so by securing a transcendental phallic center where the "failure" of language secures the center: the disruption is itself construed as that lack which has its place. The absence of this "naive semanticism," therefore, should not be read as an example of a postmodern celebration of the indeterminacy of meaning and the decentering of Western discursive structures. The question for me becomes: should Lacan’s style be read as an obfuscatory defense against any kind of critical assessment? Along these lines, Barratt argues that

Despite all the turnabouts and twists and contradictions, the orthodox feel of Lacanian "psychoanalysis" comes from the way it consistently conceptualizes the relation of the "subject" (in its most servile sense) to the Other, the ultimate totality and patrocentrism of that Other, and the immutability and oppositionality of the possible sexual identities determined by the Other. Moreover, a cosmology based on Oedipal destiny (Der87 495) is created when the "letter," the "odd" material substrate of the Other and its logic of the signifier, "always arrives at its destination" (Lac88 53), and this destination is the reproduction of the oedipal structure of sexual positionality and the actual phallic function. Though Lacan claims to have subverted the notion of "anatomy is destiny," he has erected a determinism immune even to what might be called the vicissitudes of any "biology" or adestinational postal system and created a sexual transcendentalism where the "male" is "whole" and the "female" is "not-whole," as determined by the phallic function.

Despite what seems to be the consistent and radical determinism of Lacanian "psychoanalysis," Joan Copjec, in her book Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists–in particularly the section, "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason"–writes that deconstruction could learn about undecidability from psychoanalysis (which she erroneously assumes is simply represented by its Lacanian form). This claim stems from her analysis of Lacan’s opening to Television that "saying it all is literally impossible: words fail" (213), and of the relationship of this "failure" to sexual difference, and therefore to hysteria’s essential question. The rest of this opening to his mass seminar is as follows:

It may seem that Lacan, with his conception that "words fail," has backed away from his previous belief in how "a letter always arrives at its destination," and therefore embraced a less deterministic theory of language, but this is not necessarily the case. "Words fail" to speak "the whole truth," but the letter of each word, mysteriously connected to a part of truth, seems to still be determined to "arrive" at the proper destination. We can read "failure" here as "lack": words must fail, properly. They must take a detour in order to return; in order for the "Real" to be held onto, mastered.

Truth for Lacan usually refers to the truth about desire; thus when he claims to "always speak the truth," he seems to be saying that he has left his imaginary behind, which purifies speech of the demands of the imaginary: Lacan called this "full speech" (Lac77a 46), which might be equated to Freud’s cure. To "always speak the truth," it seems, would be to become one with the assumption of one’s desire, but not necessarily all of one’s desire, especially when "desire" occasionally overlaps with jouissance. Yet even Lacanians understand, as Dylan Evans argues, that "it is impossible to give a univocal definition of the way Lacan uses [truth] since it functions in multiple contexts simultaneously, in opposition to a wide variety of terms" (Eva96 215-16)–and, I would add, at times in radical contradiction to other uses. For example, Lacan also associates truth with deception, lies, mistakes, and errors. His line could thus be read as "I am deceiving you, therefore I am telling the truth." Moreover, truth is supposed to refer to the truth about desire, and desire is supposedly a product of the Symbolic, but Lacan associates it with the Real above, an order that is supposedly a radical alterity to the Symbolic. It seems that "words fail" only because they cannot say the whole truth about desire-jouissance, not because of any inherent failure within words themselves, such as a necessarily arbitrary relation between signifier and signifieds–which would only be a "failure" if "success" meant some magical correspondence between signifier and signified. Lacan seems to be saying that words fail to represent the whole truth, thus he falls back into, if he ever got beyond, a correspondence theory of language, which is antithetical to a differential or Saussurian theory of language. Moreover, this "failure" suggests a failure of words to correspond to the specific absence of lack: words must "fail" in order for "castration-truth" to be at the center of the structure of language and the Lacanian unconscious.

Before I get ahead of myself, I should put Copjec’s use of the quote above into the context of her argument. Copjec argues that Lacan, in Seminar XX: Encore,

Beyond the unfounded assumption of the identity of words failing and the sexual relationship misfiring, Copjec’s citation of the latter quote by Lacan is disingenuous. Bruce Fink’s translation of the extended selection of Encore Copjec quotes reads as follows:

Contrary to Copjec’s misquote, Lacan never argues here that words or the sexual relationship fail in the female way. He only argues that there is another way besides the "male way" of revolving around the fact that there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship, whatever this might mean. Moreover, his statement "there are two ways to make the sexual relationship fail" seems to be what he imagines his detractors ignorantly accusing him off admitting. Copjec’s quotation is thus misleading in two ways: 1) she quotes "there are two ways to make the sexual relationship fail" as if it were directly and unambiguously argued by Lacan, and 2) she equates the "male manner," which is highly ambiguous with respect to whether it modifies the universe’s success or the sexual relation’s failure, with "the male way of revolving around" the "fact that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship," and opposes it to "the female way" of "elaborating" what Lacan "will not designate otherwise" to the "the male way of revolving around" the "fact that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship." Thus in Copjec’s quotation of Lacan there is a conflation of various actions and the potentially very different objects of these various actions: a way of elaborating, a way of revolving, and a manner of failing-succeeding.

Even if we granted Copjec the equation of the failure of the sexual relationship and the failure of words, and that Lacan argued that they could fail in a "female way," it would be hard to imagine these "failings" that fall into two a priori categories as "undecidability"–but Copjec doesn’t stop there. Following Lacan’s "A Love Letter" in Encore, she defines these two categories or positions as follows:

Copjec justifies "Lacan’s abandonment of some of the terms, and even some of the premises, of classical logic" because of the ubiquity of the phallic function. Yet isn’t this in some ways intended as proof of the phallic function? Why this ubiquity would justify such abandonment, furthermore, is unclear. Perhaps similar to the phallus, which is the magical signifier that determines its signified–and, in the process, all other signs–the phallic function’s magic allows for Lacan’s tables to pass as logic. Furthermore, in a rather obtuse Kantian argument for how this a priori compartmentalization of sexual positions constitutes undecidability, Copjec contradicts Lacan’s (and her) notion that "Woman doesn’t exist" (Television 38) and argues "a judgement of her existence is impossible" (226). She also contradicts the idea that the category of woman is determined by the phallic function (castration) and, following Lacan, reduces "woman" to the "not-all" equation "because she lacks a limit, by which [Lacan] means she is not susceptible to the threat of castration; the ‘no’ embodied by this threat does not function for her" (226)–which is ultimately a repetition of the traditional notion of the underdeveloped super-ego of women, the result of the actual phallic function and their marginalization with respect to the phallic Other. Copjec concludes her discussion of the left side of the table as follows:

This seems to me to be a rationalization of the presence-absence of woman required by "castration-truth": totally inscribed, and yet "not-whole." If woman is the product of an-Other symbolic, the supposedly undecidable of her existence with respect to the symbolic of the Other seems to have been decided, this time in harmony with Lacan’s position that "Woman doesn’t exist." Lacan concludes here a totality of "castration-truth," a transcendental structure centered on a specific absence. One wonders what happened to the idea that "there is no Other to the Other" (Television 40). Moreover, a "symbolic without an Other" (how could this be?!) sounds a lot like castration as God, negative theology (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe).

Any "failure" that reinforces the negation of woman and re-establishes man’s privileged relation to the Other would be a success in terms of reinforcing and re-establishing what is obviously a version of the actual phallic function. And any "failure" of words or "the" sexual relationship–as if there were only one, a heterosexist assumption–that maintains two transcendental categories does not embrace undecidability. The so-called failing of language in Lacan always seems to end up reestablishing the oppositionality of the possible sexual identities, a type of "complementarity" that Rose argues is the foundation of the "ultimate fantasy": "It is when the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ are seen to represent an absolute and complementary division that they fall prey to a mystification in which the difficulty of sexuality instantly disappears?" (Mit83 33)–and the "difficulty" of language when it is the basis of an oedipal destiny and the letter’s inevitable return reestablishes this "proper." That these categories are each populated by two contradictory "arguments" is more a product of Lacan’s need for "odd" conceptualizations to sustain whatever might be considered his theoretical system than the basis for some kind of undecidability. I will argue later that these "odd" conceptualizations, Lacan’s material-ideal letter/phallus/penis, are the proper legatees of what I call Freud’s "trauma"-structure trope of castration, his difference-into-identity trope. Another example of one of Lacan’s "odd" conceptualization would be the "at least one x" of the right side that designates the mythical primal father. Isn’t this supposed to be a materialist theory? Also, no explanation is given for why there would not be symmetry between the use of verbs in the second "argument" of each side. Why isn’t it "All x is" or "Not all x’s are"?

Early in her essay, Copjec argues:

In Lacanian "psychoanalysis," any signifier, not just "sexual" ones–whatever these might be in a system where signifiers are not attached a priori to signifieds–are submitted to a linguistic version of the phallic function. This is the "odd" function where the "parlêtre’s" alienation is conceived of in terms of castration, and, at the same time, castration provides the emptied space–the S1 of Lacan’s Urverdrängung–for the S2 of the phallus, which anchors what would otherwise be the sliding of signifiers to the signifieds in accordance with the proper, the proper destination where the letter always arrives at what Derrida calls the oikos, Das heimlich, the familiar and the familial–which, of course, is Oedipus, the Law-of-the-Father, that which determines the economy of the phallic Other.

What remains consistent through the equivocations, obfuscations, and "odd" concepts of Lacanian "psychoanalysis"–which can be confused as "undecidability"–is the repetition of the actual phallic function: repressed, mostly hidden from direct assessment, but constantly returning and hardly an undecidable. Just as there seems to be only successful language in Lacan’s universe, success being determined by the reproduction of oedipal sexual identities, a "specific" failure, any failing of "the" sexual relationship in Lacanian theory has less to do with some mythical obstructions of a Third, the Other, and more to do with Lacan’s drive to maintain the "singulière" hom(m)osexual basis of his theory, his logic of the same, where one side of his oppositionality falls out after it serves its purpose of acting as oppositional other. Any oppositionality would be devoid of sexuality if this sexuality is conceived of as an otherwise other to the binarisms of identitarian logic (see Bar93). Lacan and Lacanians often conflate sexuality and oedipal sexual identities, just as they do language with a rigid and stiltified Other of the Law-of-the-Father. Lacan’s hysteric, therefore, is not the figure of sexual indeterminacy, the so-called "Real," or undecidability, but the foundation, the "anchoring point" of a "specific" failure, a "specific" absence, whose loss would be mourned. Lacan’s hysteric is like Freud’s, but more in the terms of the so-called "linguistic turn" of mid-century structuralism. Lacan mourned lack not having its place, the lack of lack, when he mourned the loss of the traditional hysteric. Psychoanalysis/hysteria.

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