ABSTRACT
Key concepts: phallic jouissance, feminine jouissance, love for Being and Tyche’s ‘surprise,’ “be-ternal-ing”.
This chapter examines why there is phallic jouissance between a man and a woman in the sexual act. The fact that a woman doesn’t have a phallus doesn’t take anything away from her, because it gives her access to phallic jouissance with a man in the sexual act. The function of castration gives her access to phallic jouissance and feminine jouissance. The neurotic tendency for a woman is to think that if she wants it from a man and she doesn’t have it herself, then that somehow she is less than a man. And for a man, on the other side, to have it in the Symbolic, he also must not have it first – not have the Imaginary phallus. The access to the phallic function goes through the Other.
For example, when men go to sex therapists for help with erectile dysfunction, the sex therapist forbids sex. Or a couple goes to couple therapy, and the therapist says, “I don’t want you to have sex” or “you should not have sex for the next two weeks”. Then the couple comes back and says, “Gee, we cheated, we had sex”, when they were having all these problems having sex to begin with! That’s a paradoxical intervention, a different mode of working, but it functions out of the same principle; what the therapist is enacting is the phallic function of castration so that the man can function sexually.
Love has been discussed in philosophy since Plato’s banquet, where Socrates asks everybody to say something about love, which goes to the question of why Alcibiades loved Socrates. This is the same question as, “Why does the analysand love the analyst?” And then he says, “I also said that love aims at being, namely, at what slips away most in language — Being, which a moment later, was going to be, or Being that, due precisely to having been, gave rise to surprise”. ‘Being’ is what ‘slips away’ in language or Being’s language is in language, because Being escapes language or appears as ‘Nonbeing’ within language. Remember that Lacan says that when you are speaking or writing, language has a certain kind of direction as in ‘goal-directed’ speech. But the last word of the sentence, where the sentence closes, may be a successful sentence in language; but where the sentence was really going, for Lacan, was ‘Being’. But since ‘Being’ cannot be said in language, then ‘Being’ is substituted for a word that gives meaning to the sentence and closes the meaning within the Symbolic but fails to access Being. In this mistake appears the unconscious surprise where Being failed. So Being in that sense is [only] within language, and the language of the mistake is the same language of the Freudian unconscious. The Freudian unconscious appears where Being failed to manifest. The language of the unconscious is not the same as preconscious language or the unconscious in a descriptive sense. If one manages to access ‘Being’ or contact Being through language, then that will appear as a surprise – as something fresh and original! It’s like what Heidegger called ‘thinking at the origin of being’ where something fresh and surprising will manifest out of language.
For Lacan, feelings are an interpretant, in that sense of using Peirce’s language. Love is determined by signifiers or representations. Now, within love, there are bodily properties – there is energy and there’s jouissance. What gives the definitions of those energies and jouissance as love is a signifier, like in ‘the lover’ or ‘the beloved’ relationship. And with love, there is Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real love. Imaginary love is the love people have for the other based on their own narcissistic fantasy, and that is why they fall in love – that’s the romance – it is a real romance killer to think about it this way, but when you live in the Imaginary you just must live in the Imaginary. Even analysts live in the Imaginary when they fall in love, but we are not fooled by the fantasy. We are not fooled by the fact that there is a narcissistic object there when you love the other, and when you are ready to sacrifice yourself for the other, that’s a false altruism because the sacrifice for the other is based on a narcissistic fantasy of thinking of the other as love object. The love object is located elsewhere rather than in the interpersonal other.
With respect to a sign of love representing a love for Being, Symbolic love is the commitments that one makes in relationships that may sustain a relationship over time in relationship to Being or where the hope of Being in the relationship is not extinguished. But Real love, what Lacan says is that ultimate love is empty, meaning that what we are looking for in love is the emptiness of the other, which somehow feels the same as our emptiness. Ultimately, if what we are seeking is the lack in the Other, to discover the difference between the lack in the Other and the object of fantasy, and to still love, then this is Real love in emptiness.
Lacan says that Imaginary love is what ‘covers over’ the difference between the sexes. After the romantic phase of Imaginary love, differences appear again among the sexes. And so that illusionary function of love, of bringing two people together, is gone. Then, other factors must come into play to work with the absence of a sexual relation.
Instead of speaking of nonbeing or para-being in this seminar, Lacan invents the neologism “be-ternal-ing” to speak about “Being” as a Christian. Being is confined to the Christian Trinity. And, of course, existentialist Catholics (i.e., Teilhard de Chardin) had no problem in making the terms G-d and Being equivalent.
