Lost in the Game of Words: The Male Subject s Predicament. Pei-chi Tsai 1. Abstract

Transcription

1 Lost in the Game of Words: The Male Subject s Predicament Pei-chi Tsai 1 Abstract In Encore (Seminar XX) Jacque Lacan s formulas of sexuation illustrate his complex ideas of the sexual subject, which is defined by its subtle relations with the phallus, the objet a, and the jouissance. In this paper, inspired by Renata Salecl s exploration of the concept of doubling, and Alenka Zupancic s argumentation on the doubling in the Oedipus structure, I thus endeavor to argue for a new perspective on Lacan s formulas of sexuation, specifically, an implicit doubling on the male side of the diagram so as to lay out its full complexities. I will look into the Oedipus myth and James Joyce s A Painful Case to analyze how the subtle doubling relation between the barred male subject and the phallus gives rise to the male subject s predicament in maintaining his symbolic identity. Key words: the formulas of sexuation; doubling; the male subject; the Oedipus myth; A Painful Case 1. Pei-chi Tsai. Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University.

2 In Encore (Seminar XX) Jacque Lacan s formulas of sexuation illustrate his complex ideas of the sexual subject, which is defined by its subtle relations with the phallus, the objet a, and the jouissance. In this paper, inspired by Renata Salecl s exploration of the concept of doubling, and Alenka Zupancic s argumentation on the doubling in the Oedipus structure, I thus endeavor to argue for a new perspective on Lacan s formulas of sexuation, specifically, an implicit doubling on the male side of the diagram so as to lay out its full complexities. I will look into the Oedipus myth and James Joyce s A Painful Case to analyze how the subtle doubling relation between the barred male subject and the phallus gives rise to the male subject s predicament in maintaining his symbolic identity. In Love and Sexual Difference: Doubled Partner in Men and Women Renata Salecl introduces the idea of doubling/redoubling, which suggests that men and women often double their loved one into two figures, one a stable partner and the other an inaccessible lover. The subject who tries to incite the love of his or her loved one often presents himself or herself as someone else, that is, s/he redoubles herself/himself in order to attract the attention of the loved one. In addition, Salecl also observes that doubling emerges in the mirror stage and the quartet Oedipal drama as well. stage. She notes that we can trace the doubling of the subject back to the mirror In the mirror stage the mirror image is in effect an alien other who appears to be coherent, unified, and much more perfect than the child who is fragmentary, in a state of body in bits and pieces. This more perfect doubling traumatizes the subject, for where we first saw ourselves it is outside of us it is fundamentally linked to the impotence of the human being. The human being only sees his form materializes, whole, the mirage of himself, outside of himself (Lacan SI 140). In Mladen Dolar s explanation, this specular image promises a future illusionary synthesis and perfection, and it traumatizes the subject as it is always a suture, that part of the subject is always

3 outside itself, and that there is always alien kernel within the subject, or an automatism beyond control (14). Salecl s conception of doubling focuses mainly on the subject, so that she maintains that in the supposed triangular Oedipal drama, in which the child is trapped in his desire for the mother and the father s prohibition, the doubling of the subject renders the Oedipal structure a quartet one; whereas in Alenka Zupancic s observation, in the Oedipus structure the doubling refers both to the father and the mother as well. Zupancic quotes Lacan s Le mythe individuel du nevrose to explain the doubling of the father: The father is always, in some way, a father discordant with his function, a deficient father, a humiliated father There is always an extremely sharp discordance between that which is perceived by the subject on the level of the real, and the symbolic function. It is the gap that gives the Oedipus complex its value. (qtd. Zupancic 192) In the Oedipal structure the actual father can never live up to his symbolic function. In other words, the father who is supposed to embody the law fails in his very person, and there is always chasm between the real/empirical father and the Name of the Father (which also concerns the phallic function on the upper left part of the formulas). In the Oedipus myth, Oedipus encounters his father Laius in the form of a stranger, a rude traveler, thus Zupancic suggests that Oedipus encounters his parents only in their empirical form and that his symbolic parents and his real/empirical parents fail to coincide so that they are not always true or equal to their symbolic function. The something in the father that is more (or less) than the Name-of-the-Father (the simple man, more or less decent, with all his weakness and desires) is embodies, instead, in the figure of the uncle (Zupancic 192).

4 Two doublings in Lacan s formulas of sexuation Lacan s upper formula for the masculine structure illustrates that the masculine structure is regulated by an exception: indicates that it is through the phallic function that man as whole acquires his inscription, with the proviso that this function is limited due to the existence of an x by which the function is negated:. That is what is known as the father s function. (SXX 79) Here the father s function is supposed to be an exception which defines the boundary of the set (the whole of men), and serves as an exception which proves the rule that men/the whole of a man/every man is altogether determined by the phallic function. Bruce Fink suggests that Lacan associates this father with no ordinary father, but the primal Father presented in Freud s Totem and Taboo, who has not succumbed to castration, and presumably enjoys every single woman in the horde (Fink 110), and thus the primal father ex-sists, standing outside of symbolic castration. We may thus conclude that it is the ex-istence of the primal Father that secures men s submission to phallic function. However, an undermining doubling is embedded in this formula, which cannot be reduced merely to the chasm between the real/empirical father and the symbolic father as is suggested by Zupancic. While Fink proposes that this exception, the ideal of noncastration, points to the imaginary primal Father, nevertheless, it is one s empiric/real father who stands in His stead, who assumes the Name/No of the Father, thus results in the inconsistency between the Name/No of the Father and the empirical father, and so the failure of the father s function. In addition, there is also another doubling in the masculine structure in Lacan s formulas of sexuation. On the lower part of the masculine formula one finds a barred subject and the phallus. There is no direct link between the split subject and

5 the phallus, to which the woman relates and desires. Ironically, the phallus, though situated on the male side, is, according to Lacan, not the fantasy nor is it as such an object still less is it the organ penis or clitoris that it symbolizes For the phallus is a signifier (Lacan 275, italics mine). The phallus is not man s penis, it is not his narcissistic object that is under the threat of castration, nor is it the organ that enjoys for him. It is but a signifier which relentlessly disregards his attempts of mastery, and such futile attempts to pretend the mastery (for it is what the woman sees in him) traumatize men utmost. We may then look into the Oedipus myth, specifically, the Sphinx, to see how the Sphinx, the phallus under the disguise as the maternal Thing, illustrates the doubling relation between the male barred subject and the phallus. The doubling of words: the Sphinx as the phallus Oedipus s confrontation with the Sphinx and his decipherment of the riddle is crucial in the development of Oedipus s tragedy Oedipus outwits the Sphinx and as a reward he is given the throne and the queen of Thebes. The Sphinx is a female monster, a femme fatale, who has a grotesque and terrifying image: she has the face and breasts of a woman, the body of a lion, the wings of a bird, and a snake s tail. As an ambiguous assemblage and the fragmentary whole, the Sphinx points to the fringe of the bestial and the divine. She sings the riddle and devours those who fail to solve it. According to Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus confrontation with the Sphinx demonstrates the hero s failed initiation, and patricide and incest are precisely the consequences of a failed initiation (Zupancic 188). The typical initiation of the non-oedipal hero includes that the hero has to brave an ordeal, which is a confrontation with a female monster. The hero is, as a rule, assisted by gods or sages, and in the end he will kill the Woman-monster and is rewarded with the throne or/and

6 a woman (usually a princess). This initiation process suggests that the hero must resolve his relation to the Thing/Mother/Jouissance. Not until he has kill[ed] the Thing does he gain access to his proper, lawful place in the symbolic (Zupancic 188). In this sense, Oedipus becomes a failure because he responds to the maternal Thing/ the Sphinx only with the words instead of its eradication, and the Sphinx avenges herself for not having been killed (Zupancic 188) and that is why she has to return as his wife/mother Jocasta. Goux s interpretation is problematic. To begin with, Goux s interpretation of the Thing is misleading for it implies, as Zupancic points out, an evolutionary perspective: first the Thing, then the signifier and what is left of the Thing (190). Zupancic argues that the remainder (or the objet petit a) is: not simply the remainder of the Thing, but the remainder of the signifier itself which retroactively establishes the dimension of the Thing; it is not the remainder of some matter that the signifier was incapable of transforming into the symbolic, it is the remainder, the outcast, the spittle of the self-referential dynamics of signifier. It is in this sense that we should understand the thesis according to which the operation of the symbolic (of symbolization) never comes out right, that it always produces a remainder. (191) Thus Oedipus tragedy is not about his failure to eradicate the maternal Thing, nor is it about his failure to accomplish the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic as is proposed by Goux; instead, Zupancic argues, it is a tragedy of the entry into the symbolic itself and the consequences of this entry. Zupancic contends that Oedipus confrontation with the Sphinx is the drama within the symbolic and that the Sphinx, as left over, is not what is unsymbolizable or something that escapes symbolization, but it is that symbolization, in its very perfection and completeness, produces a surplus

7 which undermines it from within by engendering impasses (191). We may hence argue that the Sphinx is what the subject strives but fails to quilt in the signification; it is the signifier, the phallus, the doubling produced by the signification. What haunts Oedipus is thus his phallus on the lower part of Lacan s formulas of sexuation; and this very signifier/phallus which he fails to conquer and unify is veiled and fantasized as the maternal monster (the stand-in/doubling for the phallus) which he reacts with mere/more words. As Oedipus demonstrates the male subject s failure and fantasy concerning his doubling, the phallus, we may further delve into James Joyce s A Painful Case for clues as its male protagonist Duffy illustrates the male subject s traumatizing doubling, which displays the feeling of indulgence in the splitting game of signifiers. Duffy s doubling: the predicament of the male subject: What is the phallus? Joyce s A Painful Case, on the surface, is about a middle-aged cashier, James Duffy, who leads a self-imposed meticulously organized life, and who has a brief fling with a married woman, Emily Sinico. What Duffy demonstrates is the predicament of the male subject. This relationship between the male barred subject and his objet a, or, the barred woman with the phallus exposes Duffy s fundamental crisis his difficulty in maintaining his symbolic identity, or, to put it in another way, his difficulty in unifying the phallus. As a result, Duffy displays the male subject s indulgence in the splitting game of the signifiers. Lacan proposes that there is no Woman, that the female subject lacks a signifier in the symbolic order, which traumatizes her relentlessly whereas the male subject, we may argue, though granted and privileged with a master signifier, the phallus, is also traumatized with this seeming having. What haunts the male subject is what is the phallus? and the difficulty in maintaining their unification, which drives the male subject to react to the

8 signifier/phallus with more/mere signifiers, and that may account for why Duffy is endlessly trapped in the game of the signifiers, and still feels lost in finding out what he is and what he desires. Duffy strives to maintain his symbolic identity, which leads to his obsession with words/thinking and his rejection of what might disrupt his imaginary whole of his symbolic world, of what might remind him of the Real. which betokened physical or mental disorder (108). Duffy abhors anything He constructs and organizes his own world by carefully selecting his dwelling, cleansed of any possible contamination. Thus he prefers Chapelizod, away from the mean, modern and pretentious Dublin (D 107). The house where he lives in is an old somber house with simple furniture. His room is uncarpeted and free from pictures and ornaments, thus it is ironically bare and naked. 2 His monotonous life is meticulously ordered. Everyday of his life he haunts the same carefully chosen places: the bank where he works in Baggot Street, lunch at Dan Burke s, and dinner at an eating-house in George s Street, and he even eats the same food ( a bottle of larger beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits ) (D 108). Fink explains that man s pleasure is limited to those allowed by the play of the signifier itself to what Lacan calls phallic jouissance (106). As a male subject, Duffy is obsessive with words/signifier/thoughts, for it is jouissance-laden. His life is a rhapsody of words. There are books carefully arranged according to their bulk, and there are always writing materials on the desk. Moreover, Duffy has an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in 2 Duffy s over-ripe apple which he cherishes and keeps secretly also betokens the lurking erotic desire within his purified dwelling place. The apple s seductive fragrance is kept secretly so that it reveals its presence only when one lifts the lid of a desk. Its sensual fragrance permeates the air, touches Duffy s body and infiltrates his thoughts.

9 the past tense (D 108), and sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice (D 111). He clings fast to the signifier both in his mind and in his voice; he produces and lavishes words, and what Duffy enacts with this indulgence in words is in effect imaginary/mental masturbation by the jouissance-laden words. This indulgence in words produces not only jouissance for the male subject; it is also his drastic attempt to encounter the signifier/phallus with words. He should be the phallus; he should be what the woman desires. For Duffy, he should be the angel for both his and Mrs. Sinico s sake. Thus Garry M. Leonard comments what he held sacred, is his ideal image Mr. Duffy s initial love for Mrs. Sinico is yet another attempt to have a third person verify his ideal image (217). As an angel 3 who exalts himself by words and distances himself from erotic love and physical contact, 4 he is pure and thereby his penis can be exalted to the angelic stature to be the phallus. Hence a sexual relationship with Mrs. Sinico necessarily overwhelms him, for sexual intercourse reduces his imaginary phallus back into a penis. It is this simultaneous exaltation and exposure of the phallus which traumatize the male subject; what privileges him as a male, his biological organ, penis, fails him when he strives to attain satisfaction; we may thus argue that the phallus fails the male subject precisely in this exposure; thus the phallus is also the signifier that may lift the veil from the function it served in the mysteries (Lacan 275, italics mine). 3 Duffy regards himself as the angel for Mrs. Sinico; he thinks that he is the one who had withheld life from her and the one who has the power to sentenced her to death. He thinks that he has caused Mrs. Sinico s fall while in fact Mrs. Sinico becomes an alcoholic about two years after their braking off. 4 This abhorrence of body extends to even his own body: He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances (D 188, italics mine) which is simultaneously a distancing and secret peeping.

10 Conclusion: Lacan s two faces of knowledge The subject is born into the symbolic, but into a symbolic which produces its own failure/impasse, a failure of symbolization that it cannot completely cover. However, we should read this very failure of symbolization with Lacan s idea of knowledge. Lacan in Seminar XVII elucidates two facets of knowledge the knowledge that knows itself (articulated knowledge) and the knowledge that does not know itself (the knowledge that works or does the work): I defy you to prove in any way that descending 500 meters with a weight of 80 kilos on your back and, once you have descended, going back up 500 meters with it is zero, no work Try it, have a go yourself, and you will find that you have proof of the contrary. But if you overlay signifiers, that is, if you enter the path of energetics, it is absolutely certain that there has been no work. (48-49). This passage is enlightening for it exposes how the knowledge that does not know itself actually does the work. The knowledge that does not know itself does not work from the point of view of articulated knowledge (the knowledge that knows itself ) (Zupancic 201) and it remains unknown as if nothing has taken place. Thus there is a gulf between the dynamic equations where =0 and the real experience; analogously, we can argue that there are trenchant difference between the subject and its signifier (as its representation), between the male subject and the phallus, between the subject and its symbolic identity, and above all between thinking (sense/signifier) and being. To begin with, the subject who expresses itself in terms of signifiers is not consistent with the I. Although one can make sense only by adopting signifiers, and this dependence seems to seal the subject s fate, for s/he becomes merely what a signifier represents for another signifier, thus the subject is essentially chained to the

11 signifier, while gliding along the signifying chain (Dolar 19). This is Oedipus, Duffy s and also Descartes dilemma. Oedipus regards himself as a mere signifier and he can only passively glide along the signifying chain, the oracle. The above quoted passage, however, connotes that there is something beyond the equation in the articulated knowledge. It does not suggest that the signifier malfunctions, but that it veils as in the game of the signifiers such laborious task (to climb 1000 meters with 80 kg on one s back) can be reduced into nothing and even erased of its trace (it becomes zero in the equation). It indicates that in the process of signification and articulation, a tremendous amount of things disappear beneath the signifiers. One can choose to believe in the articulated knowledge and the simple equation, or one may doubt what is erased behind the seeming zero, the absence, and the non-trace. The subject is not only the signifier but there are other dimensions which remain unknown or disappear without any traces. 5 Thus, when Lacan claims that there is no father within the Oedipus myth, 6 and when Oedipus claims that Laius is but only a strange traveler, they are both indulging in the game of the doubling signifiers that disavows the work. According to such logic, parricide and regicide (to kill Laius as both the father and the king) are horrible crimes, but to kill someone ill-tempered and unknown (Laius as a stranger) is another story. What they are proposing is that what matters is how a signifier is recognized and eradicated, instead of the being that is represented and sutured by such a signifier. What matters, following such logic, is one s symbolic identity, instead of the being. Oedipus ignorance lies in the fact that he only offers an answer as an articulated knowledge, but fails to understand the 5 Those disappeared parts without traces may refer to the alien kernel within subjectivity or an automatism beyond control as are suggested by Dolar (14). 6 in his case there is no father at all. The person who served as father was his adoptive father the father is he who acknowledges us he only becomes the father, as Freud s myth indicates, once he is dead (S7 309).

12 question, the knowledge that does know itself. The Sphinx s riddle 7 has already revealed to him what he should know the many faces of knowledge, the riddle and the oracle; but he keeps his conversation with the Sphinx and his life within the dimension of the articulated knowledge. Oedipus is tragic in the sense that he is never able to go through the game of the riddle and the oracle. Oedipus is tragic in the sense that he never admits his guilt but regards himself as the mere toy of the oracle, the empty vessel of the signifiers. A human being cannot be defined or reduced into a being of legs, whether the variants is four, three or two. Analogously, Oedipus is not merely prince of Corinth, king of Thebes, son and husband of Jocasta, brother and father of Antigone, nor is he a mere outcast or a sublime object. He is but Oedipus, the Oedipus that does not know mercy, pity, and self-control. Analogously, James Duffy is trapped by the question what is the phallus? and gnawed by the anxiety that he can never attain the unification, while what should release him is not how to match himself with the signifier/phallus by engendering more signifiers; instead, only by going through the veil of signification and delving into the dimension that has been erased by the signifiers can he brave what he is with honesty and courage. 7 The Sphinx asks Oedipus what it is that first goes on four feet, then on two feet and finally on three. Oedipus s answer is man as a child one crawls, as an adult one erects on two feet, and as an old man one walks with a cane. The riddle thus suggests the idea of equation; not only the equation between four, two and three, but also that the various distinct symbolic identities may collapse into one another. Oedipus himself demonstrates how the symbolic identities collapse into one another: he is at once foreigner and native, savior from the Sphinx and murderer of the King and cause of the plague; he is both the husband and the son, the father and the brother; his collapse of identities collapses the ordered world, and that is why he becomes an outcast that should be expelled from the ordered structure.

13 Works Cited Dolar, Mladen. Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious. Cogito and the Unconscious. Ed. Zizek, Slavoj. Durham: Duke UP, Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. New Jersey: Princeton UP, Joyce, James. A Painful Case. The Dubliners. Taipei: Bookman, Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud s Papers on Technique New York: Norton, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality. New York: Norton, Leonard, Garry M. Reading Dubliners Again: a Lacanian Perspective. New York: Syracuse UP, Salecl, Renata, Ed. Love and Sexual Difference: Doubled Partners in Men and Women. Sexuation. Durham: Duke UP, Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real. London: Verso, 2000.