Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Renata Salecl is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. She is the author of The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism and (Per)versions of Love and Hate.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Many of today's leading Lacanians--practicing psychoanalysts as well as cultural theorists--here puzzle out the new riddles of sexuality. Does Lacan's concept of 'sexuation' really answer to feminist and queer discourses on sex and gender, sexual identity, sexual orientation, performativity? These provocative essays will begin the debate."--John Brenkman, author of "Straight Male Modern: A Cultural Critique of Psychoanalysis"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

sexuation

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction......................................................................................................11 Jacques-Alain Miller, On Semblances in the Relation Between the Sexes.........................................132 Genevive Morel, Psychoanalytical Anatomy.....................................................................283 Colette Soler, The Curse on Sex...............................................................................394 Eric L. Santner, Freud's Moses and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire............................................575 Darian Leader, Beating Fantasies and Sexuality................................................................1066 Paul Verhaeghe, The Collapse of the Function of the Father and Its Effect on Gender Roles.....................1317 Genevive Morel, Feminine Jealousies..........................................................................1578 Elisabeth Bronfen, Noir Wagner................................................................................1709 Slavoj Zizek, The Thing from Inner Space......................................................................21610 Alain Badiou, What Is Love?...................................................................................26311 Alenka Zupancic, The Case of the Perforated Sheet.............................................................28212 Renata Salecl, Love and Sexual Difference: Doubled Partners in Men and Women..................................297Notes on Contributors.............................................................................................317Index.............................................................................................................318

Chapter One

On Semblances in the Relation Between the Sexes

Once again, we are back to semblances, this time their role in the relation between the sexes. Where do men stand on this point? Perhaps they are more captivated by semblances than women are, and perhaps women are closer to the real, so that if we speak of "women and semblances," it is men who are in the role of the semblance.

The Race of Women

It appears that Hesiod was the first to speak of "the race of women" [genos gynaicon] in his Theogony, source of many myths. And after Hesiod, in the literature of Greek antiquity, women are referred to as ikelon, which means "semblance" or "copy"; dolos, which means "ruse"; and pema, which means "calamity." This shows that the calumny against women began a very long time ago.

Semonides, from the aptly named city of Amorgos, had already composed a poem entitled Iambe, in which he speaks not of a genos gynaicon, but rather of the "tribes of women." In this poem, which was recently reprinted in England, he draws up a list of women. This poem is a catalog-written, of course, without prior knowledge of Mozart's Don Giovanni-that lists different types of women, which he calls phyla rather than genos. The first word of his poem is koris, which is translated as "aside," but since Lacan, we realize that it should be understood to connote not unity but diversity. This is the word with which Semonides starts his poem.

Among other things, I want to take the risk of proposing another type of woman for this catalog, a type we shall encounter throughout this essay.

The citations we have mentioned lead us to think that Lacan's statement-Woman does not exist, there are only women-is something that has been known for a while now, at least since the Greeks. Today, Lacan's formula is known well enough for us to use it as our point of departure.

The fact that Woman does not exist does not mean that the place of woman does not exist, but rather that this place remains essentially empty. The fact that this place remains empty does not mean that we cannot find something there. But in it, we find only masks, masks of nothingness, which are sufficient to justify the connection between women and semblances.

Nothingness, Shyness, and Respect

What is a semblance? A semblance is something whose function is to mask nothingness. As such, the veil is the first semblance. As history and anthropology reveal, men have been consistently preoccupied with the veiling or covering of women. We no doubt cover women up because we cannot discover Woman. So, we can only invent her.

In this sense, we call subjects who have an essential relation to nothingness "women." I employ this formulation with some trepidation, because every subject, according to Lacan's definition, has a relation to nothingness; but the relation of female subjects is more essential and more immediate.

Freud theorized women's relation to nothingness on the basis of physical, anatomical nothingness. In a1932 article, he enumerates some psychical consequences of feminine maturation, like shyness, which he explains as being initially the intention to veil the absence of the genital organ.

There is therefore a paradox in shyness. According to Freud, it simultaneously veils absence and constitutes this absence as something. In other words, the act of veiling creates, gives rise to, brings out.

Historical variations in shyness show that it is an invention which, by its localization, attracts the gaze. One could also say that it phallicizes the body. There is no shortage of assertions by men, both in literature and in psychoanalytical cases, in which shyness appears in its phallic value. The veil of shyness can actually impart the value of the phallus, to use Freud's terminology, to any part of the body; here we see that the use of the veil is phallicizing.

There is very little distance between shyness and respect. Respect means that something must not be seen or touched. Like shyness, it is related to castration. Could it be that respect is always respect for castration, that a demand for respect always involves respect for the distance of the father? What is respected in the father, if not what Lacan called the father's former capacity as a warrior? When there is respect, nothingness is always at stake, and, correlatively, offenses-which makes us understand that being offensive can take on an erotic value.

In analytic circles, we sometimes see what Lacan would call a delirious respect, a stringent demand for respect on the part of older people or of people who have positioned themselves as such. This has something to do with the fact that the analyst does not exist. It is because the analyst does not exist that sensitivities around the issue of respect take on a role that might be considered excessive in the functioning of a psychoanalytical milieu, even if it is a school.

Toward a Clinical Understanding of Femininity

It seems that Freud, unlike Lacan, limited himself to an anatomical conception of the feminine difference and considered women indeed to be marked by a lack; in other words, feminine castration was considered complete. But even if we admit the fact of this lack, the question of its subjectivation remains-that is to say, what significance this not-having acquires for the subject. Freud proposed the concept of penis envy [Penisneid], his term for not-having.

This opens the way for what we could call a clinical understanding of femininity, or a "clinic for the feminine." Without claiming to exhaust the subject, we can speak of a clinic for the feminine as a direct...