Table Of ContentLacan and Critical Feminism
This book takes a critical feminist approach to Lacan’s fundamental concepts,
merging discourse and sexuation theories in a novel way for both psycho-
analysis and feminism, and exploring the possibility of a feminist subject within
a non- masculine logic.
In Lacan and Critical Feminism, Carusi merges Lacan’s theories of discourse
and sexuation, not only from a gender/s exuality angle, but also from a literary,
feminist, and women’s studies framework. By drawing examples from literature,
film, art, and socio-p olitical movements to focus on discourse and sexuation,
the text examines how tropes impact the subject’s positionality within any dis-
course mode. The book also uses women’s collective experience and action to
illustrate ways that women have repositioned dominant narratives discursively.
This text represents essential reading for researchers interested in the rela-
tionship between Lacan and feminist theory.
Rahna McKey Carusi, educational developer in the College of Humanities
and Social Sciences and Digital Innovation at Massey University, New Zealand.
The Lines of the Symbolic in Psychoanalysis Series
Series editor: Ian Parker, Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix
Psychoanalytic clinical and theoretical work is always embedded in specific
linguistic and cultural contexts and carries their traces, traces that this series
attends to in its focus on multiple contradictory and antagonistic “lines of
the symbolic.” This series takes its cue from Lacan’s psychoanalytic work on
three registers of human experience, the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the
Real, and employs this distinctive understanding of cultural, communication,
and embodiment to link with other traditions of cultural, clinical, and theor-
etical practice beyond the Lacanian symbolic universe. Lines of the Symbolic
in Psychoanalysis provides a reflexive reworking of theoretical and practical
issues, translating psychoanalytic writing from different contexts, grounding
that work in the specific histories and politics which provide the conditions of
possibility for its descriptions and interventions to function. The series makes
connections between different the cultural and disciplinary sites in which psy-
choanalysis operates, questioning the idea that there could be one single correct
reading and application of Lacan. Its authors trace their own path, their own
line through the Symbolic, situating psychoanalysis in relation to debates which
intersect with Lacanian work, explicating it, extending it, and challenging it.
Pink Herrings
Fantasy, Object Choice, and Sexuation
Damien W. Riggs
Sexual Difference, Abjection and Liminal Spaces
A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Abhorrence of the Feminine
Bethany Morris
Dolls, Photography and the Late Lacan
Doubles Beyond the Uncanny
Rosalinda Quintieri
Lacan and Critical Feminism
Subjectivity, Sexuation, and Discourse
Rahna McKey Carusi
Lacan and Critical Feminism
Subjectivity, Sexuation, and Discourse
Rahna McKey Carusi
First published 2021
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Rahna McKey Carusi
The right of Rahna McKey Carusi to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 19702- 5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 19709- 4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978- 0- 429- 24273- 1 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction 1
A literary and critical approach to psychoanalysis 6
The book’s trajectory 9
2 A (re)turn to Lacan 13
Discourse, psychoanalytically speaking (or, discourse and the
directionality of the subject) 13
The four discourses 17
The hysteric’s discourse 18
The hysteric and the feminine 19
Discourse and sexuation 22
QUILTING POINT
A literary discussion on metaphor and metonymy 31
3 The troped body 37
The hysterical symptom and its inscription on the body 38
Metaphor, always behind the throne of metonymy 41
Metonymy, the articulation of desire 44
The gaze and the L schema 48
4 The materiality of the letter 57
The materiality of the letter 57
Affect: shame and guilt 59
Shame, the “feminine” position, and the letter 65
The paradigmatic queen 67
The letter conflated with Woman 68
Woman does not exist, but neither, perhaps, does the phallus 71
vi Contents
QUILTING POINT
I AM A MAN and the essence of Woman 75
Woman as metaphor (and the conundrum of the wisdom to
pick one’s battles wisely) 76
Schlafly v. Johnson: the problematic of Woman as essence 77
5 Woman as metonymy: Or, I am not your manqué l’être 81
Woman as metonymy 81
Contiguity and refiguration: Irigaray and her critics 84
Speaking as Woman: the discursive limitations of enjoyment and
the discursive enjoyment of limitations 88
A metonymic disfiguration of masculinist syntax 90
QUILTING POINT
The masculine symptom in Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men 99
6 Jouissance and ethical extimacy 109
The monstrous Woman: symbolic failure in Antichrist 109
Woman and extimacy 114
A psychoanalytic feminism does not need a penis- phallus relation 116
7 Myth, truth, and non- phallic sexuation 123
Lacan’s sexuation graph 124
The sexuation graph’s lower quadrants 130
The first revolution: towards a discursive signification of
desire’s metonymy 136
QUILTING POINT
Tapping into excess, or the feminist trilogies 141
Inland Empire 146
Inland Empire’s men 147
Critique of the trafficking of women 148
The symptom that drives the hysterical film and the hysterical viewer 151
The fading of masculinist logic: aphanisis and metonymic identifications 153
8 The dethroning of the father 157
An ethics of the hysteric’s discourse and the labor of desire 161
S1 replaces ɸ in the sexuation graph 166
Beyond masculinist logic 168
Works cited 173
Index 177
Preface
Lacan returned to Sigmund Freud through Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural
linguistics, opening the way to a radical rethinking of the relationship between
the human subject and underlying enduring symbolic material that grounds
our existence as speaking beings. In place of the reductive stories of biologic-
ally wired- in ages and stages of development in psychoanalysis, we then also
had an opening to questions of discourse, the structuring of language as part
of contradictory historical processes. Then it was possible to return to Freud
again and again, making something new of psychoanalysis in such a way as to
envisage change and, retroactively, to re- shape our possibilities for the future,
to ground those possibilities anew in analyses of the past. Perhaps, some would
claim, Lacan made a second return to Freud through Marx, but the political
imperative driving the interest of many activists outside the clinic was feminist.
This book pursues that re- reading of Freud, and, of course, of Lacan, returning
to psychoanalysis through a critical feminist excavation and reconstruction of
what we know of sexuality, and how we know it through what Lacan called
“sexuation.”
Woman figures at the heart of this re- reading, metaphorized and then
erased by Lacan, as Rahna Carusi points out, but metaphorized and erased
in such a way as to problematize the very masculine logic that essentializes,
idealizes, and denigrates woman. To say that The Woman does not exist – and
we should always remember that Lacan strikes through that positive definite
article “The” – means that fantasies of what Woman is are placed in question.
If, as Saussure argued, in language there are only differences, no positive terms,
then Lacanian psychoanalysis, in feminist hands, is now able to shift emphasis
to difference, historically culturally inscribed difference, and to what is pro-
ductively negative about that; negativity as motor of resistance. Sexuality is
now conceptualized as fixed in place through a discursive grid that determines
what will be said about Woman – that her resistance is only to be understood
as hysterical revolt, for example – and who will say it, what privilege and power
will be accorded to men. What is said about sexuality is structured in the sym-
bolic, what we sense we know about that symbolic grid is experienced in the
imaginary, and something always resists, something of the real. This innovative
book, Lacan and Critical Feminism: Subjectivity, Sexuation, and Discourse, makes
viii Preface
it clear how and why we can grasp the shape of this grid through Lacanian
discourse theory and through Lacan’s account of sexuation.
Psychoanalytic clinical and theoretical work circulates through multiple
intersecting antagonistic symbolic universes. This series opens connections
between different cultural sites in which Lacanian work has developed in dis-
tinctive ways, in forms of work that question the idea that there could be single
correct reading and application. The Lines of the Symbolic in Psychoanalysis
series provides a reflexive reworking of psychoanalysis that transmits Lacanian
writing from around the world, steering a course between the temptations
of a metalanguage and imaginary reduction, between the claim to provide a
god’s eye view of psychoanalysis and the idea that psychoanalysis must be the
same everywhere. And the elaboration of psychoanalysis in the symbolic here
grounds its theory and practice in the history and politics of the work in a
variety of interventions that touch the real.
Ian Parker
Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix
newgenprepdf
Acknowledgments
I would first like to thank Tony and Umberto for your support while I was
absent, and thank you for taking care of each other, too. Thank you to Ema and
Richard for the use of your house and Ruby’s company during the process. And
thank you to Lara and Elsa for always being available when I needed a break.
I would also like to thank the Routledge editors Kate Hawes, George Russell,
and Elliott Morsia, Alec Selwyn and the peer reviewers for seeing promise in
the proposal. Finally, I am grateful to Sally Hales for her keen eye to detail, as
well as her patience and instruction during the copyediting stage.
