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In-Existence: London Society of the New Lacanian School
A new issue of the “ Psychoanalytical Notebooks” of the London Society of the New Lacanian School is out! It is devoted to “ In-existence ”. The term has taken Lacan, and the editors of this issue No 39, in a new and unexpected direction. What makes something inexist? What gives a status of inexistence? In logical terms, what inexists assumes its status solely through a symbol that designates it, an “x”, as not existing. Inexistence however depends on the symbol that designates it as not existing. As Christiane Alberti put it in her opening text, existence depends on inexistence. It depends on the Other that does not exist. And since the symbol marks what does not exist, the latter, the inexistence does not equal nothing. What does not exist is not nothing.
Lacan’s “existentialism” takes him in a completely different direction than the one of existentialist philosophers of 19th and 20th century, including Sartre, Camus, and others. It points him to female sexuality, to what is called “Woman”, and to what is referred to as feminine jouissance . During his visit in Italy in the early 1970s, Lacan pronounced “Woman [ La femme ] does not exist”. This caused an earthquake. Many were already reconciled with the fact that God does not exist. But to say to the Italians “ La Donna non esiste ” rocked the boat of their belief. Lacan did not seek to cause scandal among the Italian male population, he already did that in his practice. We have to ask first what Lacan meant when he said “Woman”.
If he referred to the chromosomal blueprint of the sexual difference his audience’s reaction would have been tepid. But something else was on their minds. Lacan found the logic of the female sexuality more complex than the discourse of science. Nor did he speak about sexual masquerade where the phallic operator cuts out the bespoke clothes, dressing women into men and the other way round irrespective of their true colours. What was at stake for Lacan was not the truth of sexual appearance or the biological sex, but the relationship between sexual jouissance and language. Is all of the body affected by the signifier Lacan called phallic? It’s not all for a woman, he said. He did not say it’s not-all for Woman. It was precisely Woman as the universal category that Lacan found inexistent. Do all women experience jouissance that is not marked by the phallic logic in the same way? Not satisfied with Aristotle’s logical quantifiers “All”, “Some”, “Any”, Lacan invented a new quantifier “not-all” to respond to the question. Since the universal, and its derivative particular, “Woman” was inadequate to name the feminine, the not-all would come to name singular women by virtue of what is felt in what cannot be said for each one.
Lacan existentialism therefore differs from ontology. The latter relies on the totality, on the “all”. Philosophers for whom totality is real never doubted that. But an existence in the Lacanian sense can only be found as embedded in the signifier all alone, the One that is outside meaning and that functions as the One of existence. In analysis, the universal, ontological Woman of all women, which presents itself as a belief in what does not exist, comes to grind itself to exhaustion and to an almost nothing, the remainder that drives the repetition. And repetition forms the basis of the symptom. Lacan said the woman is man’s symptom. She orients his life as a symptom as long as he believes in the universal Woman!
The feminine enigma reveals the enigma of the body animated by the jouissance that is singular to a woman on account of not being conditioned by the body affected by the phallic signifier. Whereas phallic jouissance makes all those who submit to the limit called castration “men”, the other jouissance , the one that arises not through submission to the phallic limit, makes “a woman”. How to account in analysis for these impasses of the speaking body?
Lacan’s “existentialism” takes him in a completely different direction than the one of existentialist philosophers of 19th and 20th century, including Sartre, Camus, and others. It points him to female sexuality, to what is called “Woman”, and to what is referred to as feminine jouissance . During his visit in Italy in the early 1970s, Lacan pronounced “Woman [ La femme ] does not exist”. This caused an earthquake. Many were already reconciled with the fact that God does not exist. But to say to the Italians “ La Donna non esiste ” rocked the boat of their belief. Lacan did not seek to cause scandal among the Italian male population, he already did that in his practice. We have to ask first what Lacan meant when he said “Woman”.
If he referred to the chromosomal blueprint of the sexual difference his audience’s reaction would have been tepid. But something else was on their minds. Lacan found the logic of the female sexuality more complex than the discourse of science. Nor did he speak about sexual masquerade where the phallic operator cuts out the bespoke clothes, dressing women into men and the other way round irrespective of their true colours. What was at stake for Lacan was not the truth of sexual appearance or the biological sex, but the relationship between sexual jouissance and language. Is all of the body affected by the signifier Lacan called phallic? It’s not all for a woman, he said. He did not say it’s not-all for Woman. It was precisely Woman as the universal category that Lacan found inexistent. Do all women experience jouissance that is not marked by the phallic logic in the same way? Not satisfied with Aristotle’s logical quantifiers “All”, “Some”, “Any”, Lacan invented a new quantifier “not-all” to respond to the question. Since the universal, and its derivative particular, “Woman” was inadequate to name the feminine, the not-all would come to name singular women by virtue of what is felt in what cannot be said for each one.
Lacan existentialism therefore differs from ontology. The latter relies on the totality, on the “all”. Philosophers for whom totality is real never doubted that. But an existence in the Lacanian sense can only be found as embedded in the signifier all alone, the One that is outside meaning and that functions as the One of existence. In analysis, the universal, ontological Woman of all women, which presents itself as a belief in what does not exist, comes to grind itself to exhaustion and to an almost nothing, the remainder that drives the repetition. And repetition forms the basis of the symptom. Lacan said the woman is man’s symptom. She orients his life as a symptom as long as he believes in the universal Woman!
The feminine enigma reveals the enigma of the body animated by the jouissance that is singular to a woman on account of not being conditioned by the body affected by the phallic signifier. Whereas phallic jouissance makes all those who submit to the limit called castration “men”, the other jouissance , the one that arises not through submission to the phallic limit, makes “a woman”. How to account in analysis for these impasses of the speaking body?
172 pages, Paperback
Published June 17, 2022
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