The Politics of Feminism

Abstract

The point, emphasised in the previous chapter, that Lacan’s concept of the phallus marks a shift away from the biological determination of subjectivity and sexuality requires important qualification — has, indeed, received just that, notably from feminists critical of the phallocracy of his practice. One of his seminars was devoted to the question posed by Freud in a letter to Marie Bonaparte (‘The great question that has never been answered and which I have never yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”’). Lacan’s answer to (or gloss on) the Freudian enigma includes the following:

just as with Saint Teresa — you only have to go and look at the Bernini statue in Rome to understand immediately she’s coming, no doubt about it. And what is she enjoying, coming from? It’s clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that of saying they experience it but know nothing about it… I believe in the jouissance of the woman in so far as it is en plus, something more, on condition you block out that more until I’ve thoroughly explained it.¹