woman is one of the names

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Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or How Not to Misread Lacan'sFormulas of Sexuation lacanian ink 10 - 1995

Slavoj Zizek

The usual way of misreading Lacan's formulas of sexuation 1 isto reduce the difference of the masculine and the feminine side to thetwo formulas that define the masculine position, as if masculine is theuniversal phallic function and feminine the exception, the excess, thesurplus that eludes the grasp of the phallic function. Such a readingcompletely misses Lacan's point, which is that this very position ofthe Woman as exception-say, in the guise of the Lady in courtly love-is a masculine fantasy par excellence. As the exemplary case of the

exception constitutive of the phallic function, one usually mentionsthe fantasmatic, obscene figure of the primordial father-jouisseurwhowas not encumbered by any prohibition and was as such able fully toenjoy all women. Does, however, the figure of the Lady in courtly lovenot fully fit these determinations of the primordial father? Is she notalso a capricious Master who wants it all, i.e., who, herself not boundby any Law, charges her knight-servant with arbitrary and outrageousordeals?

In this precise sense, Woman is one of the names-of-the-father. Thecrucial details not to be missed here are the use of plural and the lack

of capital letters: not Name-of-the-Father, but one of the names-of-the-father-one of the nominations of the excess called primordialfather. 2 In the case of Woman-the mythical She, the Queen fromRider Haggard's novel of the same name for example-as well as in thecase of the primordial father, we are dealing with an agency of powerwhich is pre-symbolic, unbridled by the Law of castration; in bothcases, the role of this fantasmatic agency is to fill out the viciouscycle of the symbolic order, the void of its origins: what the notion ofWoman (or of the primordial father) provides is the mythical startingpoint of unbridled fullness whose "primordial repression" constitutes

the symbolic order.
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A second misreading consists in rendering obtuse the sting of theformulas of sexuation by way of introducing a semantic distinctionbetween the two meanings of the quantifier "all": according to thismisreading, in the case of the universal function, "all" (or "not-all")refers to a singular subject (x), and signals whether "all of it" is

caught in the phallic function; whereas the particular exception "thereis one..." refers to the set of subjects and signals, whether within thisset "there is one" who is (or is not) entirely exempted from the phallicfunction. The feminine side of the formulas of sexuation thusallegedly bears witness to a cut that splits each woman from within:no woman is entirely exempted from the phallic function, and for thatvery reason, no woman is entirely submitted to it, i.e., there issomething in each woman that resists the phallic function. In asymmetric way, on the masculine side, the asserted universalityrefers to a singular subject (each male subject is entirely submitted tothe phallic function) and the exemption to the set of male subjects('there is one' who is entirely exempted from the phallic function). Inshort, since one man is entirely exempted from the phallic function,all others are wholly submitted to it, and since no woman is entirelyexempted from the phallic function, none of them is also whollysubmitted to it. In the one case, the splitting is externalized: it standsfor the line of separation that, within the set of "all men",distinguishes those who are caught in the phallic function from the'one' who is exempted from it; in the other case, it is internalized:every singular woman is split from within, part of her is submitted tothe phallic function and part of her exempted from it.

However, if we are to assume fully the true paradox of Lacan'sformulas of sexuation, one has to read them far more literally: womanundermines the universality of the phallic function by the very factthat there is no exception in her, nothing that resists it. In otherwords, the paradox of the phallic function resides in a kind of short-circuit between the function and its meta-function: the phallicfunction coincides with its own self-limitation, with the setting up of anon-phallic exception. Such a reading is prefigured by the somewhatenigmatic mathemes that Lacan wrote under the formulas ofsexuation and where woman (designated by the crossed-out la) is

split between the capitalized (of the phallus) and S(A), the signifierof the crossed-out Other that stands for thenonexistence/inconsistency of the Other, of the symbolic order. Whatone should not fail to notice here is the deep affinity between the and S(A), the signifier of the lack in the Other, i.e., the crucial factthat the Phi, the signifier of the phallic power, phallus in itsfascinating presence, merely gives body to theimpotence/inconsistency of the Other.

Suffice to recall a political leader-what is the ultimate support of his

charisma? The domain of politics is by definition incalculable,unpredictable; a person stirs up passionate reactions without knowingwhy; the logic of transference cannot be mastered, so one usually


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refers to the magic touch, to an unfathomable je ne sais quoi whichcannot be reduced to any of the leader's actual features-it seems as ifthe charismatic leader dominates this (x), as if he pulls the stringswhere the Other of the symbolic order is incapacitated. The situationis here homologous to the common notion of God as a person

criticized by Spinoza: in their endeavour to understand the worldaround them by way of formulating the network of causal connectionsbetween events and objects, people sooner or later arrive at the pointat which their understanding fails, encounter a limit, and God(conceived as an old bearded wiseman, etc.) merely gives body tothis limit-we project into the personalized notion of God the hidden,unfathomable cause of all that cannot be understood and explainedvia a clear causal connection.

The first operation of the critique of ideology is therefore to recognizein the fascinating presence of God the filler of the gaps in thestructure of our knowledge, i.e., the element in the guise of which thelack in our positive knowledge acquires positive presence. And ourpoint is that it is somewhat homologous with the feminine "not-all":this not-all does not mean that woman is not entirely submitted to thePhallus; it rather signals that she sees through the fascinatingpresence of the Phallus, that she is able to discern in it the filler of theinconsistency of the Other. Yet another way to put it would be to saythat the passage from S(A) to the is the passage from impossibilityto prohibition: S(A) stands for the impossibility of the signifier of theOther, for the fact that there is no "Other of Other", that the field of

the Other is inherently inconsistent, and the reifies this impossibilityinto the exception, into a sacred, prohibited/unattainable agent whoavoids castration and is thus able really to enjoy (the primordialFather, the Lady in courtly love). 3

One can see now, how the logic of the formulas of sexuationultimately coincides with that of public power and its inherenttransgression: 4 in both cases, the crucial feature is that the subject iseffectively 'in' (caught in the phallic function, in the web of power)only and precisely insofar as he does not fully identify with it butmaintains a kind of distance towards it (posits an exception to the

universal phallic function; indulges in the inherent transgression ofthe public Law), and, on the other side, the system (of public Law, ofphallic economy) is effectively undermined by the very unreservedidentification with it. 5 Stephen King's Rita Hayworth and theShawshank Redemption tackles with all stringency this problemapropos of the paradoxes of prison life. The commonplace aboutprison life is that I am effectively integrated into it, ruined by it, whenmy accommodation to it is so overwhelming that I can no longerstand or even imagine freedom, life outside prison; so that my releasebrings about a total psychic breakdown, or at least gives rise to a

longing for the lost safety of prison life. The actual dialectic of prisonlife, however, is somewhat more refined. Prison effectively destroys
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me, attains a total hold over me, precisely when I do not fully consentto the fact that I am in prison but maintain a kind of inner distancetowards it, stick to the illusion that real life is elsewhere, and all thetime indulge in daydreaming about life outside, about nice things thatare waiting for me after my release or escape. I thereby get caught in

the vicious cycle of fantasy, so that when eventually I am released,the grotesque discord between fantasy and reality breaks me down.The only true solution is therefore fully to accept the rules of prisonlife and then, within the universe governed by these rules, to work ona way to beat them. In short, inner distance and daydreaming aboutlife elsewhere effectively enchains me to prison, whereas fullacceptance of the fact that I am really there, bound by the prisonrules, opens up a space for true hope. 6

The paradox of the phallic function (which symmetrically inverts theparadox of the feminine not-all) is therefore that the phallic functionacts as its own self-limitation, that it posits its own exception. 7 Andinsofar as the phallic function, i.e., the phallic signifier, is the quasi-transcendental signifier, the signifier of the symbolic order as such,one can say that it merely reveals the fundamental feature of thesymbolic order at its purest, a certain short-circuit of different levelsthat pertains to the domain of modal logic. In order to illustrate this apriori possibility of the short-circuit between different levels thatpertains to the symbolic order qua order of symbolic mandates-titles,let us recall the opposition of father/uncle: father qua severe authorityversus uncle qua good fellow who spoils us. The seemingly

meaningless, contradictory title of father-uncle can be nonethelessjustified as the designation of a father who is not fully ready to exerthis paternal authority, but instead spoils his offspring. (To avoidmisunderstanding: far from being a kind of eccentric exception,father-uncle is simply the normal everyday father who maintains adistance towards his symbolic mandate, i.e., who, while fully takingadvantage of his authority, at the same time affects camaraderie andgives an occasional wink to his son, letting him know that, after all, heis also merely human ...) We are dealing here with the same short-circuit as that found in The History of VKP(B), the holy text ofStalinism, where-among other numerous flashes of the logic of the

signifier-one can read that, at a Party congress, "... the resolution wasunanimously adopted by a large majority". If the resolution wasadopted unanimously, where is the(however tiny) minority opposed tothe large majority?

The way to solve the riddle of this 'something that counts as nothing'is, perhaps, to read the quoted statement as the condensation of twolevels: the delegates resolved by a large majority that their resolutionis to count as unanimous... The link with the Lacanian logic of thesignifier is here unmistakable-the minority which mysteriously

disappears in this enigmatic/absurd overlapping between majorityand unanimity is none other than the exception which constitutes the


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universal order of unanimity. 8 The feminine position, on the contrary,is defined by the rejection of this short-circuit-how? Let us take as ourstarting point the properly Hegelian paradox of coincidentiaoppositorum that characterizes the standard notion of women:woman is simultaneously a representation, a spectacle par

excellence, an image intended to fascinate, to attract the gaze, whilestill an enigma, the unrepresentable, that which a priori eludes thegaze. She is all surface, lacking any depth, and the unfathomableabyss.

In order to elucidate this paradox, suffice it to reflect on theimplications of a discontent that pertains to a certain kind of feministcritique which persistently denounces every description of femininityas male clich, as something violently imposed onto women. Thequestion that instantly pops up is: what is, then, the feminine "initself", obfuscated by male clichs? The problem is that all answers(from the traditional eternally feminine, to Kristeva and Irigaray) canagain be discredited as male clichs. Carol Gilligan, forexample, 9 opposes to the male values of autonomy, competitiveness,etc., the feminine values of intimacy, attachment, interdependence,care and concern, responsibility and self-sacrifice, etc. Are theseauthentic feminine features or male clichs about women, featuresimposed on women in the patriarchal society? The matter isundecidable, so that the only possible answer is, both at the sametime. 10 The issue thus has to be reformulated in purely topologicalterms: with regard to the positive content, the male representation of

woman is the same as woman in herself; the difference concerns onlythe place, the purely formal modality of the comprehension of thesame content (in the first case this content is conceived as it is 'forthe other', in the second case, as it is "in itself"). This purely formalshift in modality, however, is crucial. In other words, the fact thatevery positive determination of what woman is "in herself" brings usback to what she is "for the other" (for man), in no way compels us tothe male-chauvinist conclusion that woman is what she is only for theother, for man: what remains is the topological cut, the purely formaldifference between the "for the other" and "for herself".

Here, one should recall the passage from consciousness to self-consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: what oneencounters in the suprasensible Beyond is, as to its positive content,the same as our terrestrial everyday world; this same content ismerely transposed to a different modality. Hegel's point, however, isthat it would be false to conclude from this identity of content thatthere is no difference between the terrestrial reality and its Beyond:in its original dimension, Beyond is not some positive content but anempty place, a kind of screen onto which one can project any positivecontent whatsoever-and this empty p ace is the subject. Once we

become aware of it, we pass from Substance to Subject, i.e., fromconsciousness to self-consciousness. 11 In this precise sense, woman
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is the subject par excellence. The same point could be made also inSchelling's terms, i.e., in terms of the difference between the subjectqua original void, deprived of any further positive qualifications (inLacan's mathemes:, $), and the features that this subject assumes,puts on, and which are ultimately always artificial, contingent. 12 It is

precisely insofar as woman is characterized by an originalmasquerade, insofar as all her features are artificially put on, that sheis more subject than man-since according to Schelling, whatultimately characterizes the subject is this very radical contingencyand artificiality of her ever positive feature, i.e., the fact that she inherself is a pure void that cannot be identified with any of thesefeatures.

We are us dealing with a kind of convoluted, curved space, as in thestory about Achilles and the tortoise: the male representations (whicharticulate what woman is "for the other") endlessly approach thewoman-tortoise, yet the moment the man leaps over, overtakes thewoman-tortoise, he finds himself again where he already was, withinthe male representations about what woman is "in herself"-woman's"in itself" is always already "for the other". Woman an never becaught, one can never come up with her, one can either endlesslyapproach her or overtake her, for the very reason that "woman inherself" designates no substantial content but just a purely formalcut, a limit that is always missed-this purely formal cut is the subjectqua $. One is thus tempted to paraphrase Hegel again: everythinghinges on our conceiving woman not merely as Substance but also as

Subject, i.e., on accomplishing a shift from the notion of woman as asubstantial content beyond male representations to the notion ofwoman qua pure topological cut that forever separates the "for theother" from the "in itself".

The asymmetry of the sexual difference resides in the fact that in thecase of man we are not dealing with the same cut, we do notdistinguish in the same way between what he is "in himself" and whathe is 'for the other' qua masquerade. True, the so-called modern manis also caught in the split between what (it seems to him that) theother (woman or social environment in general) expects from him (to

be a strong macho type, etc.), and between what he effectively is inhimself (weak, uncertain of himself, etc.). This split, however, is of afundamentally different nature: the macho-image is not experiencedas a delusive masquerade but as the ideal-ego one is striving tobecome. Behind the macho-image of a man there is no secret, just aweak ordinary person that can never live up to his ideal; whereas thetrick of the feminine masquerade is to present itself as a mask thatconceals the feminine secret. In other words, in opposition to man,who simply tries to live up to his image, i.e., to give the impressionthat he really is what he pretends to be, woman deceives by means of

deception itself; she offers the mask as mask, as false pretence, inorder to give rise to the search for the secret behind the mask. 13


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This problematic of femininity qua masquerade also enables us toapproach in a new way Lacan's earlier attempt (from the late '50s in"The signification of the phallus") to conceptualize sexual differenceas internal to the phallic economy, as the difference between

"having" and "being" (man has the phallus, woman is the phallus). Areproach that immediately arises here concerns the reliance of thisdifference on Freud's nave anthropologist evolutionism whosepremise is that the primitive savage doesn't have an unconscioussince he is (our, civilized man's) unconscious. Does the attempt toconceptualize sexual difference by means of the opposition of beingand having not imply woman's subordination to man, i.e., the notionof woman as a lower, less reflected, more immediate stage,somewhat in the sense of Schelling's notion of progression as thepassage from being to having? That is to say, in Schelling'sphilosophy, (what previously was) a Being becomes a predicate of ahigher Being; (what previously was) a Subject becomes an object of ahigher Subject: an animal, for example, is immediately its ownSubject, it is its living body, whereas man cannot be said to be hisbody, he merely has a body which is thus degraded to his predicate...

As a close reading of Lacan's text instantly attests however, theopposition we are dealing with is not that of being versus having, butrather the opposition of to have/to appear: woman is not the phallus,she merely appears to be to be phallus, and this appearing (which ofcourse is identical with femininity qua masquerade) points towards a

logic of lure and deception. Phallus can perform its function only asveiled-the moment it is unveiled, it is no longer phallus; what themask of femininity conceals is therefore not directly the phallus butrather the fact that there is nothing behind the mask. In a word,phallus is a pure semblance, a mystery which resides in the mask assuch. On that account, Lacan can claim that a woman wants to beloved for what she is not, not for what she truly is: she offers herselfto man not as herself, but in the guise of a mask. 14 Or, to put it inHegelian terms: phallus does not stand for an immediate Being butfor a Being which is only insofar as it is "for the other", i.e., for a pureappearing. On that account, the Freudian primitive is not immediately

the unconscious, he is merely unconscious for us, for our externalgaze: the spectacle of his unconscious (primitive passions, exoticrituals) is his masquerade by means of which like the woman with hermasquerade, he fascinates the other's (our) desire.

Man wants to be loved for what he truly is; which is why thearchetypal male scenario of the trial of woman's love is that of theprince from a fairy tale who first approaches his beloved under theguise of a poor servant, in order to insure that the woman will fall inlove with him for himself, not for his princely title. This, however, is

precisely what a woman doesn't want-and is this not yet anotherconfirmation of the fact that woman is more subject than man? A manstupidly believes that, beyond his symbolic title, there is deep in
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himself some substantial content, some hidden treasure which makeshim worthy of love, whereas a woman knows that there is nothingbeneath the mask-her strategy is precisely to preserve this 'nothing'of her freedom, out of reach of man's possessive love...

A recent English publicity spot for a beer renders perfectly what Lacanaims at with his notion that "... there is no sexual relation". Its firstpart stages the well-known fairy tale anecdote: a girl walks along astream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, and ofcourse, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man.However, the story isn't over yet: the young man casts a covetousglance at the girl, draws her towards himself, kisses her, and sheturns into a bottle of beer the man triumphantly holds in his hand...For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signalled bythe kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence (inLacan's mathemes, Phi); for the man, it is to reduce the woman to apartial object, the cause of his desire (in Lacan's mathemes, the objetpetit a). On account of this asymmetry the relationship is impossible:we have either a woman with the frog or a man with the bottle ofbeer; what we can never obtain is the natural couple of the beautifulwoman and man... To conclude, two clichs are to be avoided aproposof the hysterical nature of feminine subjectivity:

-on the one hand, the dismissive treatment of the (feminine)hysterical subject as a confused babbler unable to confront reality,and therefore taking refuge in impotent theatrical gestures (an

example from the domain of political discourse: from Lenin onwards,Bolsheviks regularly stigmatized their liberal political opponents ashysterics who "do not know what they effectively want");

-on the other hand, the false elevation of hysteria to a protest,through woman's body language, against male domination: by meansof hysterical symptoms, the (feminine) subject signals her refusal toact as the empty screen or medium for the male monologue.

Hysteria has to be comprehended in the complexity of its strategy asa radically ambiguous protest against Master's interpolation which

simultaneously bears witness to the fact that the hysterical subjectneeds a Master, that she cannot do without a Master, so that there isno simple and direct way out. For that reason, one should also avoidthe historicist pitfall of rejecting the notion of hysteria as belonging toa bygone era, i.e., the notion that today borderline disturbances, nothysteria, are the predominant form of "discontent" in our civilization:borderline is the contemporary form of hysteria, i.e., of the subject'srefusal to accept the predominant mode of interpolation whose agentis no longer the traditional Master but the expert-knowledge of thediscourse of Science. In short, the shift from the classic form of

hysteria to borderline disturbances is strictly correlative with the shiftfrom the traditional Master to the form of Power legitimized byKnowledge.


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A more than sufficient reason for maintaining the notion of hysteria isthat the status of the subject as such is ultimately hysterical. That isto say, when Lacan asserts that the most succinct definition of thesubject is 'that which is not an object', the apparent banality of this

claim should not deceive us: the subject-in the precise psychoanalyticsense of the subject of desire-only exists insofar as the questionremains open of how much of an object she is for the Other, i.e., I ama subject insofar as the radical perplexity persists as to the Other'sdesire, as to what the Other sees (and finds worthy of desire) in me.In other words, when Lacan claims that there is no desire without anobject-cause, this does not amount to the banality according to whichevery desire is attached to its objective correlative: the 'lost object'which sets in motion my desire is ultimately the subject herself, andthe lack in question concerns her uncertainty as to her status for theOther's desire. In this precise sense, desire is always desire of theOther: the subject's desire is the desire to ascertain her status as theobject of the Other's desire.

Notes

1 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan XX: On FeminineSexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-73 (Encore), NewYork: W.W. Norton, 1998.

2 In the domain of politics, populist rhetoric offers a case of the

exception which grounds universality: whenever the opinion prevailsthat politics as such is corrupted etc., one can be sure that there isalways one politician to promulgate this universal distrust andthereby offer himself as the one to be trusted, the neutral/apoliticalrepresentative of the people's true interests...

3 The transsexual subject, by way of installing Woman at the place ofthe Name-of-the-Father, disavows castration. If one adopts the usualfeminist-deconstructionist commonplace, according to which thenotion of castration implies that woman, not man, is castrated, onewould expect that when Woman occupies the place of symbolic

authority this place will be branded by castration; if however, we takeinto account that both Woman and the primordial father areuncastratable, the mystery immediately disappears.

4 Slavoj Zizek, Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman andCausality, New York: Verso, 1994.

5 Since, in patriarchal societies, male predominance is inscribed intothe symbolic order itself, does the assertion that women areintegrated into it without exception-in a sense more fully than men-

not run counter to their subordinate position within this order? Is itnot more logical to ascribe the subordinate position to those who are
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not fully integrated into the symbolic order? What one must challengehere is the underlying premise according to which Power belongs tothose who are more fully within the symbolic order. The exercise ofPower, on the contrary, always involves a residue of the non-symbolized real (in the guise of the unfathomable je ne sais quoi

which is supposed to account for the Master's charisma, for example).It is not accidental that both our examples of the constitutiveexception, of the element non-integrated into the symbolic order(primordial father, Lady in courtly love), involve the figure of anextremely cruel Master not bound by any Law.

6 This paradox points towards the delusion which is the proper objectof psychoanalysis-the delusion more refined than a simple mistakingof a false appearance for the thing itself. When, for example, Idaydream about sexual prowess and conquests, I am, of course, allthe time aware of the illusory character of my fantasizing-I know verywell that, in reality, I'll never effectively do it, that I am 'not really likethat'. The delusion resides elsewhere: this daydreaming is a screenwhich provides a misleading image of myself, not only of mycapacities but also of my true desires-if, in reality, I were to findmyself in a position to realize my daydreaming, I would surely retreatfrom it in panic. At an even more complex level (in the case ofindulging in sadistic fantasies, for example), the very soothingawareness of how I merely daydream, of how "I am not really likethat", can well conceal the extent to which my desire is determinedby these fantasies...

7 Insofar as the symbolic constitutes itself by way of positing someelement as the traumatic non-symbolizable Thing, as its constitutiveexception, then the symbolic gesture par excellence is the drawing ofa line of separation between symbolic and real; the real on thecontrary, is not external to the symbolic as some kind of substanceresisting symbolization-the real is the symbolic itself qua "not-all",i.e., insofar as it lacks the constitutive exception.

8 It would be productive to elaborate the link between the totalitarianleader and the art of the comic absurd, in which figures of the

capricious Master, la Jarry's roi Ubu, abound: i.e., to read LewisCarroll with Samuel Goldwyn, Marx Brothers with Stalin, etc.

9 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory andWomen's Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.Such a feminine substantialism (this word is probably moreappropriate than the usual essentialism) often serves as the hiddenpresupposition of feminist argumentation. Suffice it to recall thestandard claim that a woman who actively participates in patriarchalrepression (by way of following the male ideals of feminine beauty,

focusing her life on raising the children, etc.) is eo ipso a victim ofmale manipulation and plays a role imposed on her. This logic is
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homologous to the old orthodox Marxist claim: the working class is, asto its objective social position, progressive. So that when workersengage in the anti-Semitic, right-wing populism, they are beingmanipulated by the ruling class and its ideology: in both cases, onehas to assert that there is no substantial guarantee of the progressive

nature of women or of the working class-the situation is irreduciblyantagonistic and open, the terrain of an undecidable ideological andpolitical struggle.

10 This ambiguity pertains already to the commonplace notion offemininity, which, in line with Gilligan, associates women withintimacy, identification, spontaneity, as opposed to male distance,reflectivity, calculation; but at the same time, also with masquerade,affected feigning, as opposed to male authentic inwardness-woman issimultaneously more spontaneous and more artificial than man.

11 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: OUP, 1977.

12 F.W.J. von Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy,Cambridge: CUP, 1994.

13 We can see now how the notion of femininity qua masquerade isstrictly co-dependent with the position of woman as "not-all":supposed to conceal something beneath itself, the mask is not all; so,since there is nothing-no hidden truth beneath the mask-there is alsono positive, substantial element exempted from the masquerade,

which is not a mask. The name for this void which is in itself nothing,but nonetheless makes the domain of masks not-all, of course, is thesubject qua void (_).

14 "It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well asloved". Jacques Lacan, ...crits: A Selection, New York: W.W. Norton,2002.
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