Of all the colors in the visible spectrum of light, blue does not reach us. This blue is the light that gets lost, scattered, giving the sky and the ocean its characteristic hue. Any true search for identity, of knowing and being who one is, starts with getting lost. To truly know oneself, one has to shake off the shackles that binds one to the structure, to one’s family, friends and get a taste of the unknown — to meet strangers, wander through alleys, change one’s name, fall, cry and walk back to where one started from.
In other words, any emancipatory politics begins with the loss of identity because it lays bare the veil of positive and stable identity of a conscious rational being with its pretense of sovereignty, self knowledge and self mastery. Psychoanalytic thought tries to understand ideological and psychological aspects of oppression by taking desire as the prime point of politics, by conceiving the subject as always split, divided, in relation to the world of objects. In the contemporary world rife with identity politics, where the term ‘woman’ has been conflated with all kinds of myths of female identity, whatever content to fill it up with to promote her as an empowered whole being, Lacan makes a rather provocative statement — ‘(the) Woman does not exist’.
For whatever the construction of woman is, her being is always enmeshed in relations of power structured by political economy, family and kinship systems. In the current capitalist system of production, sex/gender system can be said to exist within the relations of commodities exchange. A corollary can be drawn between oppression of women through various kinds of power-domination, discrimination by exploiting the sexual non- relation, and the fantasy of relation between use value and exchange value of commodity that gives rise to commodity fetishism.
The system exploits the non-relation in social ties and makes it profitable. The bourgeois nuclear family being the smallest viable economic unit, reproduction is tied to economics and female sexuality is controlled and regulated. Gayle Rubin, however, argues that oppression of women goes beyond the economic system, that it lies in the linguistic and kinship structures itself. Levi Strauss, a structuralist anthropologist, analysed kinship systems as a system of production based on exchange and circulation of women among men. The linguistic structure that undergirds this kinship structure makes meaning in the relation of signifiers itself, puts certain values on relations like mother, daughter, sister and so on. Therefore, subordination of women is a consequence of relationships by which sex and gender are organized and produced through language, economic oppression comes secondary.
Psychoanalysis in its Freudian — Lacanian vein deals with what happens after birth, how separation from the mother creates a duality of subject and object realized in presence and absence of mother and then through language. The child then realizes a lack, gap and splitting causing a rift with nature into the world of language and law. Sexuality then begins in infancy, as a way of encountering the self and the world. It is a concept that formulates a persisting contradiction of reality — its inherent twist. It is disruptive — constructive of identities, causes radical disorientation, operator of inhuman and essentially linked to the unconscious. As Freud says, human sexuality, even though covered in erasure and silencing is problematic because it is characterized by impossibility of full sexual satisfaction, even if all the barriers and restrictions are removed. So, there must be something else which is missing that completes it, and that point is the point of knowledge. Lacan said that the unconscious is structured like a language made of signifiers. This signifying structure has a gap, the point at which language fails, revealing its inadequacy and limit. This place of the missing signifier is where sexuality lies. Hence, sexuality is directly linked to knowledge, and as Alenka Zupancic puts it, is the point of a short circuit between ontology and epistemology. Subject is produced at the inherent limit of language and relates to the Other with ‘Objet a’ — the impossible object of enjoyment that is the missing link in the ontological signifying chain of reality and that is the objective counterpart of non-relation. He/she keeps repeating the desire for ‘Objet a’ because of the inherent deadlock of language that produces the experience of the inexperience able — that which can not be remembered or spoken.
When talking about what makes a man or a woman, Lacan doesn’t talk about any specific biological or anatomical essence that differentiates the sexes but he uses the term ‘sexual division’ to understand how the subject experiences sexuality on the level of the psyche, defining the cut in the symbolic order — two possible responses to castration. Therefore, male and female are symbolic positions as speaking beings that are castrated by the phallic function that includes language and speech. Sexuation is choosing our modes of being — getting a place in the social as sexed subjects.
This logic is very clearly stated in the diagram below -
The left side is male and the right side is female. Both sides have to go through phallic function. The difference is the way in which they take that castration that makes them take the position of male or female.
While on the male side, all men have to go through the phallic function, and only one is exempted from it. On the female side, not all have to go through the phallic function, and there is no one who is not exempted from the phallic function. So masculinity and femininity are not positive or negative attributes but ways of being in the world with regard to language and speech. While the set of men is closed, and there is one man who escapes castration who is usually the primal father who is the source of law of castration that bears on desires of all others and not lets anyone enjoy. The set of woman on the other hand is not closed, there is no ideal of woman that gives the law of the land. Yet, there is a part of feminine jouissance that lies beyond phallic jouissance. While man’s ($) surplus jouissance is trapped by ‘Object a’ which is usually projected in the fantasy of the woman, woman (who does not exist) has two ways of desiring, either the phallic function on the male side or the signifier of the barred Other or the lack in the Other. The latter part is the supplementary jouissance that is only available on the female side. Therefore, the phrase ‘woman does not exist’ means that ‘woman’ is not an essence because a signifier for woman in the unconscious does not exist. ‘Women’ do not constitute a closure, a collective, a class. A biological female can take left side and a biological male can take the right side. Therefore, any positive identity of femininity or masculinity is fraudulent. While masculinity is a matter a of belief, an imposture, femininity a matter of pretense — masquerade. Joan Riviere describes masquerade as a play, as an attempt by a female to negotiate her subjectivity within the constraints of symbolic system, as a response to male fantasy — veiling of a lack, hiding of its nothingness, a failed attempt to match the Symbolic with the Real.
In the signifying structure of the Symbolic then, the subject of politics is always the subject of the unconscious. Any change in the symbolic system therefore has to come from the proletariat that is at the point of exploited structural negativity in touch with the Real that holds the possibility of both holding a system in place and also changing it. Any desire which seeks transformation must liberate itself from the confines of desire as structured by the market and must change alienated work to creative work. True feminist politics must then be to go beyond identity politics and create value by transforming mechanisms of production and existing social relations.
References
Goel, Rohit & Ali, Nadia, 2019. Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics. Bloomsbury Academic Press.
Zupancic, Alenka, 2017. What IS Sex?. MIT Press.
Copjec, J., 2015. Read my desire. Cambridge: MIT Press.
