ABSTRACT
Key Concepts: sexuation, the Universal, the Particular, and the Singular, is the rejection of the feminine body by both sexes, as Freud believed, a defense against Imaginary castration or a legitimate defense against oppressive definitions of gender? The Third jouissance beyond the phallus has three forms: feminine jouissance, the jouissance of the mystic, and the jouissance of meaning. The Third, as the name indicates, requires the prior intervention of the phallic function of castration. The missing symbolic phallus itself helps in the transition to the Third jouissance.
Lacan is speaking about the universe in terms of the whole and the ‘not whole’ or ‘not All’ and their applications to the two sexes. “The universe is the place where, due to the fact of speaking, everything succeeds”. The universe he’s referring to is the logical category of the universal in relationship to the particular in Aristotelian logic. The universal is that “All women” or “All men” are under castration. Then there is the alternative logic, which is that “not all of a woman” is under the phallic function. And then there is the question of the interaction between the two sexes – what a man is looking for in a woman and what a woman is looking for in a man.
