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TOWARDS GENEVA 8

VIIIth Congress of the NLS"Daughter, mother, woman in the 21st Century"

26 to 27 June 2010Geneva

Logic and semblants of the feminine position"There is no sexual relationship that can be written". This is the Lacanian point of departure for the text that Marie-Hélène Brousse has kindly sent us a month before the Congress that will reunite us in Geneva on the 26 and 27 June. It declines the logic of the absence of the sexual relation between men and women on the basis of Seminar 18 and isolates three female solutions for "making the sexual link" there where there is no relation: the three Rs: ruse, ravage, ravishing. This working paper will help us to better identify these elements in the texts of the Congress.Lacan indicated this in a slightly different way in a passage from Seminar XX (p 88): “There is, according to analytic discourse, an animal that happens to be endowed with the ability to speak and who, because he inhabits the signifier is thus a subject of it. Henceforth, everything is played out for him at the level of fantasy, but a fantasy that can be perfectly disarticulated in a way that accounts for the following—that he know a lot more about things that he thinks when he acts.”Ruse, ravage and ravishing are thus semblants as Marie-Hélène Brousse indicates. But a question insists : how to maintain a feminine position when the fantasy itself is inconsistent? We will have some elements of a response at the Congress. Between now and the 26 June we will be circulating each week a reference text that will allow us to refine our approach so that the discussion will be fruitful. Don’t forget to register online, as this will facilitate the work of the Organizing Committee.PGG

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FEMININE KNOW-HOW WITH RELATIONSHIP

THE THREE Rs: RUSE, RAVAGE, RAVISHING

Marie Hélène Brousse

I am going to quickly establish the coordinates at the heart of which will be situated the

development that I hope to make concerning some feminine solutions to the sexual rapport

which I will call know-how. Lacan’s affirmation “There is no sexual relation that can be

written”, an affirmation which serves as the foundation of the analytic discourse, had at the

time he enunciated it the effect of a bomb. It was scandalous. Yet, and in conformity with

the logical demonstration that Lacan then made of it, it is verified today in the

contemporary master’s discourse, which again he had anticipated. I will not develop this

point, that the multiplication of the modes of sexual jouissance not correlated to the

difference man/woman and the Oedipal norm are verified in the psychopathology of love

life today. The belief in a sexual relation between men and women required the univocity of

the Name of the Father, even if since Freud, who had already remarked on it, the analytic

clinic of speaking beings pulls in the opposite direction. Thus today the idea that there is

no sexual relation between men and women has almost become evident, not that this means

the formula is better understood.

An opposition, even an alternative, is necessary here between relation and link. If

the relation can be written, then the link, that is to say the discourse, is no longer necessary.

If the relation cannot be written then, quoting Lacan in Seminar 18, D’un discours qui ne serait

pas du semblant, “it is thus within a discourse that male and female beings, natural beings if

one can say such a thing, have to prove themselves [se faire valoir] as such”.[1][1] This

opposition between relation and link is declined according to others: writing and language,

letter and speech. In so far as it cannot be written in the form of a relation in mathematical

or even logical language, the sexual is the object of a saying. It even constitutes, as

impossible signification, the foundation of all meaning, or meaning for all occasions [sens à

tout faire] of the master’s discourse, which is to say also the unconscious that it saturates.

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Because, as Lacan says in the same Seminar[1][2], sexual need is not “measurable”, what

follows from this non-determination is the impossibility of inscribing a relation. On the

other hand, if it is not possible to write it as a function, it is possible to “enunciate” it.[1] [3]

Language does not account for the sexual as a relation and because of this very fact it

produces the sexuated dimension as an ensemble of fictions. It is thus at the level of

statements, of enunciation, of speech and its uses, that the sexuated organises discourse.

The other side of the formula “There is no sexual relation” is thus “there is a link which is

sexuated”. The feminine subjective solutions that we are going to envisage situate

themselves in a discourse and as such pertain to the semblant and fiction. They constitute a

know-how which, deploying itself in the universe of the discourse of the unconscious, aim

at and designate from the social link, an emptiness constituted by the missing relation.

Ruse and silenceA few years ago I came to work on a passage in Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in which he

compared a feminine and masculine way of dealing with the law and prohibition. I will not

take this example again but will develop another which comes from observation. Two

children of the same age, between three and four, a girl and a boy, are spending the holidays

with other children. There are a lot of toys in the house where they live. Constant disputes

and rivalries which are causing fights over these objects led the adults in charge of them to

lay down a rule: “The toys in the house are for all the children.” You notice the structure of

the type “for all” situating the sentence on the side of the universal. The little boy is in a

room absorbed in playing with a toy. The little girl arrives, looks, takes the toy away from

him and responds to his cries with “The toys are for all the children!” Then she leaves with

her loot. What has she done? Underneath the sentence that she repeats, a universal law, she

brings out another dimension, one that is not enunciated. She short circuits the “for all”

which does not exist, with an act that is the sign of “a child”, existence of the singular, here

the singularity of a desire marked with the competition for the object that Lacan analyses in

such a limpid way in the Seminar L’angoisse.

I will call this solution “ruse” because the act in no way challenges universal law as

such, rather it leans on the formulation of this very law, and yet it unveils it as fiction while

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re-introducing into it a dimension that this law ignores. In the example taken from the

Emile text, it is by introducing a blank into the chain of oral demand in the guise of silence

that the subject displaces onto the Other the charge of explicating the demand, a demand

he had himself forbidden the subject from formulating. Thus the ruse implies first a

knowledge of lack and its acceptance, second, a use of speech erasing the singular position

of the subject which remains unspoken, third a handling of the defect in the Other of law

and language. It supposes a familiarity with the function of castration in the relation with

the object. These solutions are old and bear the mark of the hysterical discourse. To quote

Lacan: “These are the consequences, in the position of the woman, of this: it is only on the

basis of her being a woman that she can institute herself in what is un-writeable about not

being one, that is to say what is a gaping remainder of what is at stake in the sexual

relation. Thus this happens, so legible in the so precious function of hysterics: that they are

the ones who tell the truth about what is at stake in the sexual relation... As for playing the

everyman [touthomme] she is just as capable as the everyman himself, that is, through the

imagination.”[1][4] The problem is that playing the everyman no longer necessarily interests

her much, nor imagination, when what she is looking for is a real that is not a semblant at

the fault of the symbolic.

Let us return to our little girl. At the age of identification with the Princess and the

domination of sweet pink into which she had entered precociously, her belief in phallic

attributes had sometimes led her to put on three dresses one on top of the other. When

she started school her parents, respecting this orientation, had given her a diary with a key

presented as the diary of a princess, her confidant. Some years later it was left abandoned,

disaffected, in a cupboard. I was curious and had a look at it. It had long lost its key. Not

much was written in it but one sentence returned page after page, a sentence written in

different, jubilant lettering styles: “Prince Charming is a cretin”. I must say that it struck

me! Certainly it is a secret, it is not meant to be shouted from the rooftops, as I am doing

before you. But I am tempted to see it as a modification of the hysterical position. Reading

the little text that Jacques-Alain Miller wrote recently on Sarah Palin, I see here the same

movement of lifting the veil on castration and a challenging of the “at least one”, in brief, a

relation to the phallic function without the belief in the exception to that function.

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Two clinical references will allow me to go a bit further with this solution by the

ruse. A patient comes to see me because the relation with her husband has been

deteriorating for some time, which makes her suffer a lot because she loves this man. I will

keep to the essentials: as they were moving house some old letters of hers were found in a

trunk which had been, for years, at the head of the conjugal bed. Among these letters some

were from a former, short-term lover, from before their marriage. She had forgotten they

existed, just as she had forgotten the name of the man. But the husband took it badly,

reproaching her in particular for having made him sleep for years with, he said not without

exaggeration, these letters under his bed. What does she say? She understands neither his

anger, whose effects she is suffering from on their relationship, nor her own act, an act that

she is beginning to perceive as a formation of the unconscious. She had forgotten them,

certainly. They did not mean much to her, these fairly insipid letters, but why keep them

then? And in this place, where after all they weren’t really hidden? A trophy, this was the

first signifier that came to her. A revenge would be the second, evoking the fact that at the

beginning of their relationship her husband was far from faithful to her. Finally, if this

forgotten lover had one characteristic, it was his anonymity at the time of their first sexual

encounter, an anonymity she associated with the unprecedented pleasure she had

experienced.

We can’t but think of the purloined letter, which Lacan returned to once more in this

same passage in the Seminar 18.[1][5] I quote: “it is not nothing to foreground the letter in

a certain relation of the woman with that which, of the written law, is inscribed in the

context where the thing is placed, because she is, as Queen, the image of the woman joined

to the King. Something is improperly symbolised here, and typically around the relationship

as sexual. It is in this context that the fact that a letter be addressed to her acquires the

value that I give it, that of a sign.” Lacan quotes himself: “For this sign – the letter – is

clearly that of the woman, because she brings out her very being therein by founding it

outside the law, which ever contains her – due to the effect of origins – in a position as

signifier, nay, as fetish.”(Ecrits: 2006, p.22). The letter thus arises out of an act of revolt, a

revolt against her status as signifier or as fetish in the context of the law. But here there is

more than the letter, sign of her revolt and of her being beyond the law. There is the fact

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that it is she, and not a third party, who hides the letter by putting it in this particular place.

It is thus she who underlines the deficiency in the sexual relation, yet promoted by

marriage. Through the letter she placed there, she grounds the “instated”, legalised sexual

relation on a sign that undermines it, that shows its value as fiction and in this way

disengages her being from it. Who is in the shadow that the letter casts on her marriage?

Her husband of course, who thereby took on a supplementary value for her because he was

feminised, but also herself since she had forgotten it: a recuperation of femininity for

herself as well as a consequence.

Here is another clinical element: In her analysis this woman, highly respectful of the

patrilinear transmission of the name to children, this woman for whom, she said, it was

unthinkable that her children not carry the patronymic name of their father, of the father

she had chosen for them, realised that in the choice of first names negotiated with the

father, one letter of her own first name was transmitted. The symbolic order, the

nomination of the father, is respected but curiously, another filiation comes in, parallel,

silent, unclaimed. How can we not relate this invisible nomination to the refusal to take

part in the means of production, or of reproduction, without this refusal amounting in the

least to a challenge to the cornerstone that the name of the father is. This is not a desire

outside the law, but a desire in spite of the law.

A last clinical example will allow me to go from the clinic of the ruse to that of

ravage. The characteristic of the ruse is that it holds the sexuated together as discourse of

the unconscious and as its point of verification, which, as Lacan says “is devoted to

grasping where the fiction ends, and what stops it.”[1][6] It brings this verification,

forgetting, the secret, the silence, the letter and writing into play. It implies a certain irony

applied to the discourse of the unconscious, ie to the master-signifier, which it is careful not

to contest or to manhandle.

Ravage and abuse This woman is in a tormented, painful relationship with a man who was to remain the

central man of her life. She would wait many years before telling him that this child who is

theirs and whom he cherishes more than anything is not his: a soft version of Medea

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combining ruse – here the child is the silent objection – and ravage, the ravage of her

choice of this particular man. It concludes with a clear attack on the symbolic link through

which transmission and reproduction are regulated. Unlike the ‘ruse solution’, the choice of

ravage attacks the phallic value of the object for the subject, and functions by dissociating

objects a from their phallic value. So it is a mortification of the phallus, in which the super-

egoic imperative of jouissance wins over desire and its cause. In a way, this imperative

comes to occupy the place of the ego Ideal. This is why ravage brings the subject back to a

fault in the narcissistic investment of the image of the body, a fault in the ideal ego

connected not to the ego Ideal and the Name of the Father, but directly to the superego, in

short circuit. Ravage is in this sense a sort of push to the woman, injurious of the symbolic

order and thus of desire, which can no longer circulate there. It is the massacre of the

living body by the word without recourse to the phallic cut effected by nomination. We

know that Lacan made of ravage a feminine solution to what is not saturated by discourse

of the real of sex. But the link to a man then takes on the colour of this real. Ravage is the

relation a woman produces with a man through the consummated sacrifice of the phallic

third, herself sometimes. But, being the object to be sacrificed makes it all the more

necessary: this method of making the feminine ex-sist eternalises the sacrifice of the

phallus. I will not say any more today on this subject, which has often been treated by

different colleagues and of which I have already given some clinical elements elsewhere.

Ravishing and what cannot be said.

This term was also clarified some time ago by Jacques-Alain Miller and E. Laurent during a

conversation with the Clinical Sections as well as in an article by D. Laurent. It seems to me

justified to make of it a third feminine solution at the level of the sexuated link, that is to

say, of discourse. “What cannot be said is what is mystical”, says Lacan in Seminar 18.[1][7] The

‘ravishing solution’ responds to the point of impossibility in what is said. Lacan’s reference

is to the work of Marguerite Duras, but we can bring his developments on mysticism in

Encore into the same register. In 2006 in Rome Jacques-Alain Miller gave a conference on

one of Lacan’s analysands, Sister Marie of the Trinity. LNA published an unknown letter

from Lacan to Marie of the Trinity and Kristell Jeannot is carrying out research work on

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some of her available writings. In his letter, Lacan evokes this “link” and underlines that

the aim of analytic work is not to free her from it but to discover what made it, at a given

time, “so pathogenic”, in order to allow her to “be completely free to satisfy herself from

then on”. The analysis only intervenes to elucidate what disturbed the functioning of “this

link”, disturbed the solution through ravishing. This disturbance was located by Lacan in

the vow of obedience, which raised the “themes of dependency”. It is not certain that the

solution through ravishing pertains entirely to the order of the unconscious since it touches

the not-all and does not therefore pertain to the universalising pourtouthomme. At the same

time it does not necessarily lean on the phallic value of the objet a, a materialisation of the

failure of the relation that makes the link work. Following Lacan in Encore, we can therefore

have a differential clinic of ravishing, a feminine modality declined in neurosis, psychosis or

perversion. To speak of ravishing in general is insufficient because there are ravishings, and

that of Lol is not the same as that of Saint Theresa. The common core of the different

modalities of ravishing is no doubt that, while ruse and ravage are situated in the field of

speech, ravishing is orientated towards what cannot be said of the Woman, towards the

limits encountered by discourse itself at this point.

Writing seems to be an associated element which is essential to this solution, but that

which seeks to write itself is the unspeakable encounter and its traces, not the relation.

Ruse and ravage: what cannot be written can be spoken in the form of a discourse

that makes the sexuated link. Ravishing: what of the feminine cannot be spoken in terms

of a pourtout, an emptiness of the body, seeks to write itself. The emptiness that inscribes

itself is not of the order of relation, arising rather out of an attempt at soldering.[1] [8] Of

what order is this writing then? A love letter [lettre d’âmour] replies Lacan in Encore. He says

there: “It is indubitable that the symbolic is the basis of what was made into God.”[1][9]

Would ravishing then be the choice of making a body for oneself with the symbolic,

disappearing by soldering oneself to it? In this case, this elucidates the fact that any

principle of authority, in raising the question of dependency or obedience, brings the law

back where there can only be love. To conclude with a more contemporary reference, and

because I think the ravishing solution can function in diverse structures, I will mention a

short episode in the last Tarantino film, Death Proof. This is the episode of the game which

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two of the characters call “ship’s mast”. This game consists in one of the feminine

characters throwing herself onto the bonnet of a car driven at full speed. Not any old car:

the mythical car of a cult film whose title allows an interpretation of the experience that the

character of Tarantino’s film seeks to reproduce. The title is Vanishing Point. In relation to

Hitchcock’s title A Lady Vanishes, it is not about the disappearance of a woman as in a magic

trick, the disappearance of a cumbersome object. It is the search for the point where the

subject vanishes in the ecstasy of the body. It is a contemporary version of ravishing, not

without the phallic function but outside the law.

Ruse and silence, ravage and destruction with abuse, ravishing and corporal

emptiness of the order of the unsayable; these three solutions try to bring into the field of

discourse, despite the sexual law, what is heterogeneous with it.

Translated by Heather Chamberlain

[1][1] J. Lacan, Seminar 18, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, p.146.[1][2] Idem, p.131.[1][3] Idem, p.132.[1][4] Idem, p.143.[1][5] Idem, pp.132 and 133.[1][6] Idem, p.133.[1][7] Idem, p.27.[1][8] J. Lacan, Autres écrits, p.191.[1][9] J. Lacan, Seminar 20, Encore, p.83.