S(A)
Fig. 4. The Graph of Desire (partial) (Safouan 132)34
By reaching this point, the scopic drive, so far as it has a relation with the Other, must have a stake in the lack of the Other (A/ ), or Mother, and that, to say the least, this drive is the logical outcome, as well as the eventual stage, of the daughter's Demand leading and responding to what the Other wants. So far as it is the drive, it may not be necessarily scopic, but we have stuck to the scopic level mainly because Sophie's quest,
____________________________________
34 This is Safouan's simplified version of Lacan's completed "Graph of Desire"
("Subversion" 315), where Lacan also comments on the "question-mark" (312). Minor corrections of Safouan's graph have been made by myself.
aided and facilitated by her still camera (we will come back to this), also takes place in the scopic field, which we have been led to consider as simply imaginary. We may therefore overlook the fact that it is her urging demand, or rather Demand, that has turned to phantasy (S/ <>a) in the scopic field for an ad hoc solution to her quest as substantiated in her "detour" to Venice. She has, as a result, discovered nothing, not even with her good eyesight; facing this wall called the phantasy, her scopic drive is instead gravely pacified, encircling the object a without ever meeting it. This makes her demand even more an unsettling matter, subsisting nevertheless in her phantasy.
Now phantasy is not a peaceful event, on the other hand. It is equally unsettling, as in these words by Fink:
Fantasy is the attempt to bring the two elements of choice--the subject of language and jouissance--together [ . . . ]. Fantasy thus attempts to overcome the either/or, the choice responsible for the advent of the subject and for a loss of satisfaction; it stages the attempt to reverse that loss.
("Desire" 50n26)
So far as the subject is barred by language (S/ ), this loss (of jouissance) is filled up by words, words, words. Yet we must also take this scenario as arising from the
"signifying cut"--as being related to Demand. Precisely because Demand has no place in this phantasy scenario that we must throw the nature of scopic drive into question by asking whether another important aspect of the drive has been forgotten, which is its nature as speech. It is in this sense that, as we have said earlier, the drive provides us a way out of the imaginary scenario, particularly of phantasy, in the scopic field.
If we should at this point shove aside Miller's radical deduction of the drive as speech, then the notion of the drive that is left to us--the one that is not "communicative"
but has object a as its sole destiny--would fall short of unfolding to us the whole story about jouissance. Referring again to the graph above, it is clearly defined that the drive in the final trajectory of the question mark succeeds, and in fact originates from, demand.
If there is pure Demand at all in Safouan's sense, it must then survive castration by becoming the drive, yet not the kind of drive as we know it that encircles the object a, with phallic jouissance as its one and only destiny. This soon lays, I think, the logical ground for feminine jouissance as the jouissance of the Other, notated as S(A/ ), to arise, which has its root in pure Demand.35 On the other hand, since "surviving" castration does not mean, in psychoanalysis, that castration is "overcome" or "abolished," but first and foremost that castration is reaffirmed as a necessity, pure Demand would not then become the drive without this castration. It is in this light that Miller approaches this obscure remark of Lacan's on the very last page of "Subversion of the Subject":
"Castration means that it is necessary that jouissance be refused so that it can attain the opposite side of the law of desire" (qtd. in Miller, "Drive" 28).36 Miller's gloss is: "It is necessary that phallic jouissance be refused, it is castration--so that the jouissance of the Other, her, can be attained" ("Drive" 28). I would add: phallic jouissance has to be refused through castration, so that the drive can "communicate" with the Other and retain there its status as pure Demand. Otherwise, without this "communicative" drive, the feminine jouissance qua the jouissance of the Other would be unimaginable.
However, there can be several "different modes of renunciation of phallic
____________________________________
35 That is to say, S(A/ ) will have to mean here the signifier of the primordial loss in a subject. Fink: "Symbols' meanings often evolve very significantly over time in Lacan's texts, and I would suggest that S(A/ ) shifts between Seminars VI and XX from designating the signifier of the Other's lack or desire to designating the signifier of the 'first' loss" (Lacanian Subject 114).
36 The modified translation quoted here is by Kirsten Stolte, the translator of Miller's text, while Alan Sheridan's translation runs as follows: "Castration means that jouissance must be refused, so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (l'échelle renversée) of the Law of desire" (Lacan, "Subversion" 190/324).
jouissance" for the Other's jouissance to exist (Miller, "Drive" 30), and some of them can be wayward in the clinical sense. Miller raises two of them, the perverse and the neurotic. In the first case, as is well known in voyeurism and exhibitionism, the subject makes himself "an instrument of jouissance for the Other" ("Drive" 29), from which the algorithm a<>S/ , the reverse of phantasy, can be derived (Evans 139).37 The neurotic mode, on the other hand, takes the form of the Other demanding the subject's castration (Lacan, "Subversion" 323). The "end of analysis" would be in this situation the
successful "refusal, by the neurotic subject, to sacrifice his castration to the jouissance of the Other," so that, eventually, "only phallic jouissance matters fully" (Miller, "Drive" 29) and the drive, as says Fink earlier, can be "freed to pursue object a" ("Desire" 39). Yet since castration, as noted earlier, also means that this phallic jouissance should be refused in order for pure Demand to arise, the issue now hinges on which mode a subject must adopt to properly renounce the phallic jouissance.
This is apparently the predicament Sophie is facing in her "detour" to Venice. To begin with, she is not without jouissance with herself, only that it might be some very wrong kind. The presence of the peaceful and pacifying phantasy, in which she
discovers nothing with her keen eyesight, is all the more disturbing when what may have been smoothed over is this troubling jouissance currently overpowering her. Again, the issue of demand is at stake, because it has also been smoothed over. Everything seems to fall apart and fall into an enigma; what hangs over her quest is nothing but a big
question mark. So far as her "detour" to Venice is a quest, it is a question, especially the one lingering over her sexual identity, given that her identification with a man, Henri B.,
____________________________________
37 This is Lacan's “formulation of phantasy [turned inversely] to reveal that the subject here makes himself the instrument of the Other’s jouissance” in perversion ("Subversion" 320), conforming to what Freud has noted very early on that “neuroses are the negative of the perversions” (1905d, 165).
is the most salient part of this quest. Nothing, however, has come of it, for what Henri B.
is, remains obscure. At least, her masquerade to hide her "real" identity as a man is still devoid of the castration anxiety she needs in order to feel like him.38 The question,
"What is a woman?", must eventually return to Sophie for an answer, further fueling her
____________________________________
38 To Freud, it is the loss of love, but not castration anxiety, that exerts its effects on a feminine subject (1924d 178), while the theory of "masquerade," proposed by Joan Riviere in 1929, means to counter this view (303-13). Explains Millot, "for girls, fear of a loss of love takes the place of castration anxiety among men. Freud's central thesis is to link the formation of the superego to the dissolution of the Oedipus complex for the girl, in so far as castration anxiety does not affect her. Which implies that she retains her bond with father, that is, her demand on her father survives" (295), the demand which we have termed "incestuous." Yet Freud would rather insist that this demand eventually evaporates through the girl's renunciation of it, due to her "constitutional masculinity" in herself (Millot 303). "It may be asked," however, Millot writes, moving now along the line of Riviere's argument, "whether the renunciation of this demand [ . . . ] might not proceed from love for the father. The girl renounces her demand insofar as she feels that it constitutes a castration threat for the father. Having constituted this paternal ego ideal, she is henceforth endowed with the phallus at the phantasy level," and feels the need to masquerade as not having this phallus, as exemplified in the clinical cases published by Riviere and others (Millot 303-4). The case of Sophie Calle's pursuit in Venice, on the other hand, seems to leave the question of masquerade open for two reasons. First is that, as attested by Millot, not all (∀x.Φx) women have this castration anxiety (304); that is, this proposition, which we will come back to later, suggests a non-inclusiveness of the phallic function on the feminine side. Secondly, the enigma of masculinity remains as it is to Sophie, which may indicate that this castration anxiety has caused little or no
practical impact on her.
urge to "detour" and becoming the very question Dora has persistently asked.
Implicating Henri B. in her quest, as her other as well as Other, Sophie plays her stalking game like a Dora.
As has been clear to us, the question "What is a woman?" is linked to the difficulty to symbolize the female sex, indicating that gender hinges on the function of the signifier.
Referring to Dora, Lacan has this follow-up statement:
Becoming a woman and wondering what a woman is are two essentially different things. I would go even further--it's because one doesn't
become one that one wonders and, up to a point, to wonder is the contrary of becoming one. (SIII 178)
Hence, the question "What is a woman?" turns out to mean that woman has been an enigma, and secondly that the current state of womanhood is unacceptable, so the
question must be posed. Why does she still despise his man, in spite of the fact that she cannot help identifying with him, even adoring him? Paradoxical as it may seem, to answer these questions that can boil down to the one as "What is a woman?", any subject in the feminine position would need an organ to symbolize the female sex. That in turn would usher her to the royal road of identification, especially of the one with a masculine prototype, which is the father figure, who has such an organ (Lacan, SIII 178).
In Dora's case (Freud, 1905e), this process of identification has been very intricate and, according to Lacan, has undergone several "dialectical reversals" ("Intervention" 64).
To simplify the matter, we will deal only with his conclusion, where we find an inherent paradox in Dora's identification:
Thus it is the case, as Freud thinks, that the return to a passionate outburst against the father [i.e., jealousy] represents a regression as regards the relationship started up with Herr K [who is Dora's ego].39
____________________________________
39 Herr K. has functioned as Dora's ego (SIII 91, 175). Referring to this
But this homage [i.e., in the form of identification], whose beneficial value for Dora is sensed by Freud, could be received by her as a
manifestation of desire [i.e., as the desire of man whom she identifies with;
one's desire is the desire of the Other] only if she herself could [on the other hand] accept herself as such an object of desire [i.e., as a woman, like Frau K], that is to say, only once she had worked out the meaning of what she was searching for in Frau K [i.e., who, or rather whose femininity, is still a mystery to her].
As is true of all women, and for reasons which are at the very basis of the most elementary forms of social exchange (the very reasons which Dora gives as the ground of her revolt), the problem of her condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as an object of desire for man, and this is for Dora the mystery which motivates her idolatry for Frau K.
("Intervention" 68)
That is, if she is a woman at all, Dora will be unable to accept herself as an object of desire, otherwise a woman will be an enigma to her. Having identified with man,
however, she cannot but take woman (represented by Frau K.) as such an object, and must thereby "revolt" in the face of such an enigma. To be sure, what Lacan means by the object of desire (object a) here is more precisely the object of jouissance; Dora has refused to be the cause of Other's jouissance (Soler 269), especially in the sense of social exchange, which is precisely the exchange of women among men.
As if in a vicious circle, Dora soon sticks to her identification as long as the realization of her identity remains a moot point; the more she does so, the more she is unable to realize herself. There is another reason for this: she has gone so far as to
"imaginary identification" in Dora, Lacan points out that "it is in so far as she is identified with Herr K. that she complains" (SIII 175).
identify with the desire of the Other--in this case, of her father, the first penis bearer in her life--to realize her sexual identity; the more she wishes to do so, the more she
identifies with the father, his impotence, and his subsequent unrealized desire for Frau K.
as an object. Now the status of this object must be sustained, in order to keep father desiring; in that case, Dora, in turn, has to keep Herr K. desiring herself as such an object.
If Frau K. has been an object of exchange in this scenario, so must Dora. Yet this is unbearable, for she has to share the same sex with Frau K., whose function as an object of desire she cannot understand, nor can she accept herself to be. In any case, Frau K., being turned into a mystery in this manner, is born and destined to be loved and desired in this scenario, even by Dora. Striving to understand "What is a woman?" through Frau K., Dora must keep the "exchange" game alive, so that some are desiring in there, some other are loved. To keep it alive also means that she has to secretly monitor it and pilot it. Lacan has called it Dora's "Viennese operetta" (SIII 91), "the game by which she must sustain the man's [i.e., her father's] desire," "which in any case was unsatisfied, subsisting--both the desire of the father whom she favored qua impotent and her desire of being unable to realize herself qua the desire of the Other [i.e., of her father]" (SXI 38).
It is in this manner that this "game," as well as the identification with the father, has a stake in answering the question, "What is a woman?" Namely, as long as she is interested in the Other's lack, she is also in the hysteric position, questioning what precisely the Other's object, the woman, is. In other words, "the hysteric," says Colette Soler, wants "to investigate the being of a woman by questioning the Other's object, that is, the man's" (272-73). In this case, Soler adds,
An hysterical subject is a subject who has a special link with the Other's desire [A/ ]. [ . . . ] An hysteric is a subject who wonders what the Other desires or if the Other desires, a subject who questions the Other's desire.
Hysterization involves making a subject sensitive to the Other's desire.
(253)
"Hysterization brings out A/ ," in other words (Soler 275), and in so doing, the hysteric subject also brings the question "What does the Other want?" into the picture, a question which lies beneath the earlier one as "What is a woman?", the link between them being the question: "If the Other wants a woman, what then is a woman?" Yet in order to
"bring out A/ ," "the hysteric sustains her own desire as unsatisfied" and "slips away as an object," so that the Other, whom she has identified with, is also not satisfied. By doing so, the question as "What does the Other want?" means also "What do I, a woman, want?" Soler therefore adds, "'What does a woman want?' That is the hysterical question" (273) and the hysteric further "presents herself as a question to the analyst"
(264). "By keeping her desire unsatisfied, the hysterical subject refuses to be the cause of the Other's jouissance" (Soler 269), namely, to be a sexual object to satisfy the Other, or, as Sophie would have it, to be involved in any "amorous feelings" (Calle, SV 20).
Once the hysteric "slips away," she becomes intentionally "an incarnated mystery" to her analyst, and in particular, "tries to constitute herself in the transference as what is lacking in the analyst [A/ ]" (Soler 277), to further "put transference into action in the sense of [positing the analyst as] the subject-supposed-to-know (sujet-supposé-savoir)" (275).40 What the hysteric would then mean to express is this:
"Please tell me something about myself. Please give me an
interpretation." The subject [S/ ], divided by her symptom [a], addresses someone else, a supposed master (an S1), a master from whom the subject can demand knowledge [S2]. "What do I have? What am I?" The hysteric has a demanding position [. . .]. (Soler 276)
____________________________________
40 Soler: "in French, this expression can mean either: the subject who is supposed to know (verb) or the subject presupposed by knowledge, by unconscious knowledge. In English, subject-supposed-to-know renders only the first meaning" (275).
This position has been notated by Lacan as the hysteric's discourse (SXX 16),41 in which the hysteric, being in "a demanding position," maneuvers,42 in order to become the master of knowledge by assuming the right to say the last word (Soler 276):
S
It is in this manner that Freud has been ushered into Dora's "Viennese operetta," and later kicked out of it by her when he does not know when to shut up (Soler 276). Freud, by acting "a little too early, a little too late" (Lacan, SXI 38), has caused Dora to break off from the analysis, an instance of her acting out as a hysterical symptom, a jouissance, that can nevertheless be traced back to the question, "What is a woman?"
Sophie's "Venetian operetta," though in a less grandiose scale, also wants to put an end to this question. Soon Henri B., in addition to being her alter-ego to be identified with, is turned more importantly into this subject-supposed-to-know for her to manipulate, and is pressed by her for an answer. She now plays the role of, as in Deborah Irmas' words quoted earlier, a "secret woman" (7), while he a Lacanian analyst par excellence for Sophie to reach what she cannot have reached otherwise, as indicated by the analyst's discourse below:
S
1a S S
2The algebra means: "the subject [S/ ] is in the position of being interrogated by object a (the analyst as desire) and must produce something [S1] herself" (Soler 282n8). In terms
____________________________________
41 Evans: "It is not simply 'that which is uttered by a hysteric,' but a certain kind of
41 Evans: "It is not simply 'that which is uttered by a hysteric,' but a certain kind of