ABSTRACT
While there are a number of ways in which Lacan’s changing views can be charted over the thirty years of his seminars, the meteoric rise and gradual subsidence of the phallus is by no means the least interesting. From over 1500 mentions in the seven years between Seminar III and Seminar X, the phallus as noun drops to a mere forty appearances in the final six years. The two seminars under consideration in this book can be said to represent the heyday of the phallus, held aloft and sustained on Lacan’s part by some brilliant, if questionable, intellectual prosthetics. This chapter will examine the successive moves by which Lacan, over the course of these seminars, establishes the phallus as the single signifier upholding the whole world of meaning. The case he makes is impressive. Both the symbolic order and the Oedipus complex shown to underpin it, are specified as androcentric, permitting him not only to reiterate, but to expand Freud’s phallocentrism, while the introduction of the paternal metaphor appears to operate as a tremendous recentring of the relevance of psychoanalysis to modernity. What Lacan does not sufficiently demonstrate, and what this chapter hopes to explore, is the degree to which the necessity for an androcentric symbolic order is filtered through the prism of androcentrism itself. When Lacan provides a compelling justification for patriarchy he is simply restating its own premisses.
