ABSTRACT
The failures of sexual difference and MAS theory, drawn as they are from two sometimes antagonistic positions in psychoanalytic thought, demand another attempt at a metaphorical description of the relationship between the inner realm of the psyche and the outer realm of the social. The irresoluble interiority/exteriority tension is the condition of any social practice: necessity only exists as a partial limitation of the field of contingency. While they insist upon the impossibility of fixing meaning and identity, they are also opposed to their absolute non-fixity. The place of identity and meaning in the speaking subject, is on this threshold between inner and outer. It is a place which is overdeter-mined, an articulation of different elements into a subject identity. The use of a word or expression is determined by a rule and this rule is itself determined by a culture’s collective use of it; they are not imposed by some transcendental signified or a coercive standard from outside.
