ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the question posed at the end of the previous one: Is the phallic signifier, mediator of all the identifications inscribed in the graph of desire, subordinated to the signifier of the father, NdP, or does Lacan change his thesis?
It begins with the developments made in “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”, specifically the R-schema. The schema designates the phallus as the mediator of the subject’s primordial identification with the Other, knotting real and symbolic registers, only depending on the signification it receives from the NdP in the Paternal metaphor. It shows how the hole in the imaginary produced by its foreclosure gives rise to the clinical phenomena of psychosis.
The chapter continues to demonstrate the subversion of the thesis in “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire” and the graph, where Lacan states there is no Other of the Other. This rectification is due to his use of the logic of sets, according to which a set cannot be both consistent and complete, requiring an element outside it, a minus one, to form the set of signifiers. This element is made clear by the writing on the graph of S(Ⱥ), a missing signifier in the place of jouissance, which is the quilting point of all significations.
The chapter then reviews the two aspects of phallic signification, that of lack and of jouissance, implying the phallic dialectic of castration and sexual power. It explains that this dialectic stems from its definition, as designating the power of the signifier on the signifiable, transforming it to signified, but making it also the signifier of division, and therefore, of castration.
It ends, following this discussion, with this signifier’s copulatory function, not only between the subject and the Other but between the sexes, via the dialectic of having or being the phallus. This thesis will be elaborated on in the next chapter.
