ABSTRACT
I had gotten to the question of knowing where phallic jouissance comes from. The question is one of knowing if it is subordinate to the father as Lacan said of the imaginary signification of the phallus. The answer is no, although we repeat thinking that we are drawing from Lacan, that the phallic function is missing when the function of the father is missing, and specifically in psychosis. This thesis comes from the time of the paternal metaphor and of the R schema. But Lacan spoke then, with the term phallic function that he was already using, about the phallus as signifier of desire’s lack. Next, he included in this function the uppercase phallus of jouissance. He introduces it in “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire”, the same text where he already dissociates castration and paternal function, as I have said, a theme that he will take up again in Anxiety . I am not going to follow all of the ins and outs of this development but I will skip to the end of them where the thesis is explicit in Le sinthome . We can see incidentally that in “L’étourdit” the phallic function is introduced before the father function and independently of it – but this is no more than a clue. In Le sinthome , Lacan redefines this jouissance, distinguishes it from that of the penis, but above all he explains the origin of it, and it is not the father, it is … speech. The function of speech must then be rewritten.
