The Abject Phallus as the Locus of the Real

Lacan nominates the phallus as the privileged signifier which secures the other signifiers’ status in the symbolic dimension: “it is the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier” (2006: 579). As the signifier towards which the living subject pushes him/herself forward throughout life, the phallus figures as the sig-nifier which promises to endow the subject with the subject position in the sym-bolic order. However, the signifying chain points to the fact that what the phallic signifier introduces into the signifying system is but absence or difference which sabotages the signifier/signified dyad and disrupts the interrelated signifiers. Ac-cordingly, the phallus signifies the absolute Otherness of the symbolic order. Nat-urally, Lacan portrays it as an “imaginary object” (2006: 693). In this connection, Jacqueline Rose writes, “The Other therefore stands against the phallus – its pre-tence to meaning and false consistency. It is from the Other that the phallus seeks authority and is refused” (1982: 51). Consequently, though enjoined and activated by the phallus, the Lacanian signifier virtually spells ruin to the privileged signifi-er.

In an effort to approach the question of male and female sexual desire, Lacan des-ignates the woman as serving as the man’s phallus, which functions as the

“signi-fier marking gender difference as a position taken toward language and law”

(Ragland-Sullivan 1991: 57). The woman then functions as the privileged signifi-er which subjects man to symbolic castration and, paradoxically, imbues him with phallic power. For example, in The Woman Warrior (1975), Maxine Hong King-ston points out that in traditional Chinese culture, women sacrifice themselves for their husbands and family life:

Marry a rooster, follow a rooster.

Marry a dog, follow a dog.

Married to a cudgel, married to a pestle, Be faithful to it. Follow it. (1989: 193)

In this way, women are totally objectified upon entering into marriage under the domination of patriarchal Chinese culture. In Écrits, Lacan employs the word

“masquerade” to suggest the masochism that the woman has experienced upon entering into culture: “a woman rejects an essential part of femininity, namely, all its attributes, in the masquerade” (2006: 583). In so doing, women actually give up their right to be a speaking subject in the phallocentric symbolic order.

Masquerading to match man’s phallic nature, the Lacanian woman is always “al-ready doubled” (Lacan 1982: 152) and divided from herself, living both inside and outside language. Falling prey to symbolic signifiers, she is deprived of the right to speak. For this reason, it is impossible to essentialize her who is “not all”:

when any speaking being whatever lines up under the banner of women it is by being constituted as not all that they are placed within the phallic func-tion. It is this that defines the . . . the what? – the woman precisely, except that The woman can only be written with The crossed through. There is no such thing as The woman. (Lacan 1982: 144, original italics)

In this light, there is no signifier for the woman in the unconscious: “Any search opens to the search for an absent signifier where the inadequacy of signifiers for sexual difference finally bump [sic] up against a beyond in culture itself which Lacan names Woman” (Ragland-Sullivan 1991: 59). She is the Other sex which suggests the unconscious locus where the man displaces and deposits his lack in the Other.

Julia Kristeva elaborates the woman’s entering into culture and language as mas-ochistic self-mutilation: “If what woman desires is the very opposite of the subli-mating Word and paternal legislation, she neither has nor is that opposite” (1986:

144, original italics). Accordingly, as with Lacan, Kristeva refuses to categorize the woman. She elaborates further:

All that remains for her is to pit herself constantly against that opposite in the very movement by which she desires it, to kill it repeatedly and then suffer endlessly: a radiant perspective on masochism, a masochism that is the price she must pay in order to be Queen. (1986: 144)

Indeed, the woman is caught in a double bind: whether she desires that opposite or expels it, she “has no access to the word” (1986: 142). Put another way, what she desires turns out to be the Lacanian real, which implies her status of lack re-sulting from paternal legislation. Not surprisingly, she has to submit herself to symbolic castration in order to secure power in a patriarchal society.

The woman’s affinity to the real inscribes her beyond the symbolic order. As La-can points out, “Her being not all in the phallic function does not mean that she is not in it at all. She is in it not not at all. She is right in it. But there is something more” (1982: 145, original italics). This does not mean that she exists outside the symbolic, but that she also relates to the Other “where truth⁵² falters” (Lacan 1982:

151). Significantly, it relates the woman to “a point of origin prior to the mark of symbolic difference and the law,” which “gives them access to an archaic form of expressivity outside the circuit of linguistic exchange” (Rose 1982: 54). The woman qua the phallus both registers and invalidates the power of language.

Kristeva designates “feminine,” far from being a primeval essence, as an “other”

without a name which subjective experience confronts when it does not stop at the appearance of its identity. The subject’s reluctance to stop suggests the other as reminiscent of maternal plenitude. Yet at another level, in so doing, he risks being swamped by the maternal body and then “the loss not of a part (castration) but of the totality of his living being” (Kristeva 1982: 64). Morrison highlights the lethal effects of regression into the maternal body in her novels. For example, after Beloved’s reinsertion into her family, mother and daughters cluster together in the all-female household, falling into oblivion of the outside world; they are in effect buried alive in the house of 124, which figures as the abject maternal body.⁵³ On the other hand, Kristeva inclines to eroticize the experience of encoun-tering the maternal body:

How, if not by incorporating a devouring mother, for want of having been able to introject her and joy in what manifests her, for want of being able to

52 In Lacan’s diagram, truth points to the lack ingrained to the symbolic system. It refers to “lan-guage as a system of rules [which] is indeed a prototype of a closed circuit whose self-sustaining raison d'être is not only to negotiate desire, but also to exclude disunities, incon-sistencies, doubts, fadings, anxiety, jouissance” (Ragland-Sullivan 1991: 63).

53 124 qua an abject place will be further discussed in chapter 7.

signify her: urine, blood, sperm, excrement. [. . .] the advent of one’s own identity demands a law that mutilates. (1982: 54)

What Kristeva expresses here is a law founded on the sacrifice of the maternal figure who is feared for her “generative power” (1982: 77). Accordingly, Kristeva highlights “a coming face to face with an unnamable otherness – the solid rock of jouissance and writing as well.” By so doing, she “set aside [. . .] a different ver-sion of the confrontation with the feminine, one that, going beyond abjection and fright, is enunciated as ecstatic” (1982: 59). This moment serves to suggest the subject’s escaping symbolic castration by way of straying on to the “excluded ground” of the maternal body: “And the more he strays, the more he is saved”

(1982: 8). The more he strays, the more he escapes the castrating, confining pa-ternal law. Eventually, the loss and repression of the mapa-ternal is eroticized and projected onto the woman, who is simultaneously rejected and sought after in the phallocentric symbolic order.

In Kristeva’s system, abjection is at some point synonymous with castration, which is integral to the formation of symbolic identity: “To preserve himself from severance, he is ready for more – flow, discharge, hemorrhage. All Mortal” (Kris-teva 1982: 55). For instance, to protect her double Nel as a gesture of protesting her own marginalized position in the symbolic, Sula slashes the tip of her finger to scare away the Irish hoodlums; similarly, by having her leg cut off by a train in order to collect insurance money to raise her children, Eva achieves her status as a matriarch in the Peace family. Similarly, in Beloved, Sethe commits infanticide, which constitutes symbolic suicide at the same time, and is thus interpretable as a moment of abjection of slavery-inflicted shame; she obtains ownership of her children by sacrificing them firstly to the symbolic. To view the three female characters’ violent acts collectively in the light of Kristeva’s statement and query,

“The eroticization of abjection, and perhaps any abjection to the extent that it is already eroticized, is an attempt at stopping the hemorrhage: a threshold before death, a halt or a respite?” (1982: 55. Question mark in the original). In this light, subjected to the castrating effect of the symbolic, they figure as Lacanian subjects who take on the power possessed by the phallus by succumbing to the letter of the Other (the symbolic order) in the first place.

Fusing the opposing other and Other, woman remains remarkably unconscious to man: she insinuates the non-existence of sexuality and the un-relation between the two sexes in the symbolic. Yet alternatively, sexuality arises when taking into

account the limits of meaning.⁵⁴ It may be argued that Lacan’s inclination to read sexuality side by side with the unseen and interstitial presence of the woman cor-responds to his tendency to decipher the subject in relation to the split inflicted on him/her by the symbolic. Inevitably, men as well as women are driven by desire marked by the Other. Defining both sexes with their desire for the lost objet a in the symbolic order, Lacan has effectively dissolved the demarcating line between male and female sexuality.

Ragland-Sullivan observes that feminine sexuality is “not necessarily correlated with gender”; rather, it is a “masquerade not only because s/he can disguise her desire, can fake it, can cover her body with cosmetics and jewels and make of it a phallus, but also because her masquerade hides a fact – that masculine sexuality is a tenuous matter” (1991: 71, original italics). Accordingly, the equal, parallel de-velopment of the sexes belongs in the realm of fantasy, since the unconscious divides subjects from themselves and each other. In this view, “Lacan’s phallic signifier would not be read imaginarily – i.e. essentialized – as a privileging of the masculine. It would be seen, rather, as a dividing effect created by learning differ-ence as gender differdiffer-ence” (1991: 71). From this aspect, the phallus is improvised as a result of the lack of a signifier to represent the non-existent sexual difference in the unconscious. As a result, the genital drive based on a prescribed sexual di-vision (“which ensures the survival of a species”) (Lacan 1977: 150) is not listed by Lacan as one of the partial drives. The expulsion of the genital drive from the realm of the drive amounts to questioning its very existence or addressing its sub-sistence only in the realm of fantasy.⁵⁵ Lacan in effect suggests the failure of sex-uality to “represent in the subject the mode of what is male or female in his be-ing” (2006: 720), which in turn dismantles the two sexual poles presumed to be integral to the formation of sexuality in Freud’s paradigm. In consequence, dis-solving the prescribed divisions of sexual reality, Lacan’s conception of sexuality eludes language and transcends cultural limitations.

The phallus signifies sexuality insofar as the subject searches after it unconscious-ly in the symbolic,

something is lacking to define how two sexes [. . .] might find a “natural”

rapport or Oneness within the actual otherness or twoness out of which cul-tural mythologies and ideologies spring, essentializing an anatomical divide

54 This point has been elaborated earlier in this chapter in section 1.

55 It is interesting that, in studying the nature of “phallic jouissance,” Lacan identifies genital drive as “the jouissance of the idiot” (1982: 152).

at the level of psychology, sociology and economics. (Ragland-Sullivan 1991: 53)

In this view, the unconscious functions as the locus where the barred/eclipsed subject deposits his repressed drives/desires engendered by the primacy of the phallus in the symbolic dimension. Alternatively, however, it is the non-existence of sexual divide that puts the phallus in a position of primacy in the symbolic reg-ister. As Ragland-Sullivan suggests, “Although the signifier ‘phallus’ does not exist as a positive object, it signifies this fact: that the effects of sexual difference constitute the axis of the symbolic order” (1991: 61). Accordingly, both man and woman have to sacrifice themselves to the phallus to be able to speak in the sym-bolic register.

As a signifier of the lack, the phallus sexualizes the asexual object of male desire;

it introduces sexuality into man insofar as he is driven unconsciously by the con-stitutive lack towards the lost objet a, that is, the woman. The woman’s lack of and capacity to reflect the power of this privileged signifier finally inspires Lacan to formulate her as the objet a in response to male fantasy: “What was seen, but only from the side of the man, was that what he relates to is the objet a” (Lacan 1982: 157). Seeking after a sexual object marked with the radical lack of the Oth-er, the man is in effect reduced to an obsessional neurotic.

Inspired by Lacan’s designation of woman as the object of man, Rose comments,

“As the place onto which lack is projected, and through which it is simultaneously disavowed, woman is a ‘symptom’ for the man” (1982: 48). The word ‘symptom’

certainly reminds us of the life and power denied to the woman: “Defined as such, reduced to being nothing other than this fantasmatic place, the woman does not exist” (1982: 48). Woman is in effect effaced by what she represents for man. On the second level, proving unrelenting and hence haunting, the symptom refers further back to the real, which functions as the cause of desire and thus weighs on language. Accordingly, incarnating the real, the pulsative, unconscious assaults of the symptom have effectively undermined the phallus. Put differently, the phallus is in effect eclipsed and eviscerated by the very symbolic signifiers it gives rise to.

On the third level, as Slavoj Žižek observes, “man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: his very ontological consistency depends on, is ‘exter-nalized’ in, his symptom” (qtd. in Hawthorn 2001: 322). Žižek seems to suggest woman as the Other sex onto which man projects his endemic lack. Correspond-ingly, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan claims:

males defend against imaginary castration anxiety by linking identity, dis-course, and sexual apparatus to a fantasy of superiority qua difference. Such a position must then mobilize forces to shut out the feminine, telling the tale

that something lacks in speech and being; i.e., the Other sex that bespeaks the unconscious. (1991: 59)

Woman’s symptomatic, interstitial existence in the symbolic speaks to the lack of the Other. In this connection, Ragland-Sullivan points out that “Lacan saw Wom-an as symptomatic, not only for mWom-an, but of a beyond or excess that niggles in reality and thought” (1991: 62). Put another way, the woman points to the place where symbolic, patriarchal meaning falls apart: “A beyond that returns in lan-guage and logos. She counts by not counting.” Counting by being castrated, she spells ruin for the man, emerging as the desired object marked by the lack of the Other. Yet “it is, paradoxically, no-thing and that on which we count for our grounding. She counts in the same way the real does, as our very cause which is a lost cause” (1991: 62–63, original italics). Evidently, the enigma of woman rests in the fact that her nature of being the Other of man reduces the latter as a hyster-ic.⁵⁶ Or, in Lacan’s words, “the whole of his [man’s] realisation in the sexual rela-tion comes down to fantasy” (1982: 157). Eventually, woman transcends the gen-der difference, appearing as a cultural symptom indicative of the deficiency of the phallocentric order.

Perceptively, Kristeva finds affinity between the abject and the symptom: “The symptom: a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear, for its strayed subject is huddled outside the paths of desire” (1982: 11, original italics). The symptom appears as an ossified real which ruptures the sig-nifying chain. In giving body to the symptom, Kristeva suggests the haunting, unrelenting war that the real wages on the symbolic. It is hence inevitable that the woman’s symptomatic, phallic function deprives man eerily of his self-autonomy;

she encapsulates both man’s desire and fear, impinging eerily and inexorably on the lack of the Other and revealing relentlessly the obsessive nature of a male-oriented culture. Unarguably, as the other marked with the lack of the Other, the woman evokes the return of the repressed. In fact, she figures as the abject, parod-ic phallus of man. In consequence, Lacan’s deciphering of the woman through language renders her presence uncanny in the symbolic register.

The abject status of women is reflected by their degradation into the role of ex-pendable bodies in the patriarchal sexual and social order of modern class-society.

In a similar vein, American people of African origin are reduced to the level of

56 By this, I suggest the fact that the lack inherent in the Other calls into question woman’s role as the objet a of man, and thereby renders man as hysteric and manic, in an constant attempt to pin down woman in order to take on phallic power.

exploitable bodies, absorbing and inscribing the ravages of slavery, reflecting their subjugated position structured by race, nation and class. This is also true of gender issues. Morrison takes a great interest in the abject position as well as the phallic function on the part of black females: the bodies that are mutilated, disfig-ured, brutalized or repressed are, more often than not, black and female, existing as a mosaic composed mainly of past memories. Bennett and Dickerson make a similar claim, pointing out that “in slavery, the black female body served as one of the prime technologies of reproduction and commodification. It, more than any other body, politically belies the American declaration of democracy, equality, and freedom” (2001: 13). The historical status of black people as commodified bodies functions to spatialize, incarnate and commemorate the horror and terror physically and psychologically perpetrated on American people of African origin.

In foregrounding the black “body in pain,” Morrison denounces this eroticization and exploitation, attacking the equivalence of blackness to marketable bodies.

Perhaps most significantly, her gesture of defying this historical reduction of Af-rican AmeAf-ricans manifests itself as her prizing of the body as the prime site of healing for her characters. Her literary gesture firstly emphasizes the degradation

Perhaps most significantly, her gesture of defying this historical reduction of Af-rican AmeAf-ricans manifests itself as her prizing of the body as the prime site of healing for her characters. Her literary gesture firstly emphasizes the degradation