Sexual identity, identification and difference: A psychoanalytic contribution to discourse theory

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 26, Issue 6, 2000, Pages 85-108

  Glynos, Jason ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

discourse theory; identification; identity; Lacan; poststructuralism; psychoanalysis; sexual difference; social postmodernism

Indexed keywords

EID: 84937331280     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370002600605     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. A companion piece to this essay, ‘Sex and the Limits of Discourse’, appeared in David Howarth, Aletta Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis (eds) Discourse Theory and Political Analysis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
2. Linda Nicholson, ‘Interpreting Gender’, in Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (eds) Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 39 60 59.
3. Nicholson and Seidman, ‘Introduction’ in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, p. 17 21 18 34 22 26.
4. Nicholson, ‘Interpreting Gender’, p. 59.
5. Joan Copjec, ‘Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason’, in Joan Copjec (ed.) Supposing the Subject (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 20–1.
6. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore (1972–3), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998[1975]), p. 59.
7. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Politics and the Limits of Modernity’, in Andrew Ross (ed.) Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 63 (71); emphasis added.
8. ‘Lacan's conceptualization of sexual difference avoids the trap of the infamous “binary logic”: in it, “masculine” and “feminine” are not opposed in the guise of a series of contrary predicates (active/passive, cause/effect, reason/sentiment; etc.); rather, “masculine” and “feminine” involve a different modality of the very antagonistic relationship between these opposites. “Man” is not a cause of the woman-effect but a specific modality of the relationship between cause and effect (the linear succession of causes and effects with an excepted unique element, the Last Cause), in contrast to “woman”, who implies a different modality (a kind of convoluted “interaction” where the cause functions as an effect of its own effects). Within the domain of sexual pleasures proper, masculine economy tends to be “teleological”, centred on phallic orgasm qua pleasure par excellence, whereas feminine economy involves a dispersed network of particular pleasures that are not organized around some teleological central principle. As a result, “masculine” and “feminine” are not two positive substantial entities but two different modalities of one and the same entity: in order to “feminize” a masculine discourse it is enough to change — sometimes almost imperceptibly — its specific “tonality”.’ Slavoj Zizek, Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 159–60.