{"agent_id":"lacan","agent_name":"Jacques Lacan","slug":"the-phallus-and-sexual-difference","label":"The phallus and sexual difference: does 'The woman does not exist' say anything about women?","topic":"The phallus and sexual difference","question":"Does 'The woman does not exist' say anything about women?","position":"There is no signifier of Woman answering to the phallic universal, and the sentence says that and nothing more. It is a statement about the symbolic order, not about women.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"There is no signifier of Woman answering to the phallic universal, and the sentence says that and nothing more.","n":[]},{"t":"It is a statement about the symbolic order, not about women.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"*The Signification of the Phallus* (1958); Seminar XX, *Encore* — the formulas of sexuation and the not-all; *Feminine Sexuality* (Mitchell and Rose, 1982). Reception: Luce Irigaray's *Speculum of the Other Woman* and her expulsion from the École; Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose's defence of the account as a description of patriarchy; Judith Butler on the phallus and its transferability; the standing charge that a \"symbolic\" phallus is an anatomical one in disguise.","works":["*The Signification of the Phallus* (1958)","Seminar XX, *Encore* — the formulas of sexuation and the not-all","*Feminine Sexuality* (Mitchell and Rose, 1982)"],"reception":"Luce Irigaray's *Speculum of the Other Woman* and her expulsion from the École; Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose's defence of the account as a description of patriarchy; Judith Butler on the phallus and its transferability; the standing charge that a \"symbolic\" phallus is an anatomical one in disguise.","status":"One of the most contested claims in the corpus, and one where his own defenders and his critics agree on the wording and disagree on everything else.","era":"1901-1981","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Feminine Sexuality","page":"pp. 149–151","canonical":"","quote":"Except that what he takes on is the cause of his desire, the cause I have designated as the objet a. That is the act of love. To make love, as the term indicates, is poetry. Only there is a world between poetry and the act. The act of love is the polymorphous perversion of the male, in the case of the speaking being.","label":"Feminine Sexuality, pp. 149–151"},{"n":2,"work":"Feminine Sexuality","page":"pp. 80–81","canonical":"","quote":"Lacan, therefore, returns to the debates of the 1920s and 1930s (Abraham, Jones, Klein) and criticises what he sees as a reduction of the phallus to an object of primitive oral aggression, belonging in the realm of the instinct. Instead he places the phallus within the symbolic order, and argues that it can only be understood as a signifier in the linguistic sense of the term.","label":"Feminine Sexuality, pp. 80–81"},{"n":3,"work":"Seminar XX, Encore, On Feminine Sexuality","page":"pp. 81–82","canonical":"","quote":"Woman has a relation to the signifier of that Other, insofar as, qua Other, it can but remain forever Other. I can only assume here that you will recall my statement that there is no Other of the Other. The Other, that is, the locus in which everything that can be articulated on the basis of the signifier comes to be inscribed, is, in its foundation, the Other in the most radical sense.","label":"Seminar XX, Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, pp. 81–82"},{"n":4,"work":"Seminar XIX, or Worse","page":"pp. 186–187","canonical":"","quote":"This exception is the inclusive function. What is to be stated of the universal, besides that the universal is enclosed by negative possibility? More exactly, existence here plays the role of the complement, or to speak more mathematically, of the boundary. Thus, somewhere there is an all x.","label":"Seminar XIX, or Worse, pp. 186–187"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-return-to-freud","label":"The return to Freud: is ego psychology a development of analysis or a betrayal of it?"},{"slug":"the-unconscious-is-structured-like-a-language","label":"The unconscious is structured like a language: is this linguistics, or a metaphor borrowed from it?"},{"slug":"the-variable-length-session","label":"The variable-length session: a technical consequence of the theory, or an abuse the profession was right to stop?"},{"slug":"the-style-the-mathemes-and-the-topology","label":"The style, the mathemes and the topology: necessary to the subject matter, or obscurity mistaken for depth?"}]}