Mortifying Love

Between man and woman there is no instinctual rapport because sexuality is marked by the signifier. Thus an Other sits between them. And there is no reciprocity because the Other - the symbolic order - is asymmetric: there is no signifier for the woman...only one signifier, the phallus, rules over the rapport of the sexes. "The sexual rapport cannot be written."

For Lacan "The most naked rivalry between men and woman is eternal." Love then is the illusion for the absence of harmonic rapport between the sexes. Man does not enjoy the body of the woman, only the body part - sexual drives go solely towards the partial object. With Jacques-Alain Miller, "body parts can certainly be represented, beside with other natural elements, yet they account for signifiers. They are imaginary signifiers whose matter is taken from the image. When we say 'the living body,' we leave aside both the symbolized body and the body image. The body affected by jouissance is neither imaginary nor symbolic, but a living one." Life is a condition of jouissance. "Life overflows the body. What obliges you to attest there isn't jouissance unless life appears under the form of a living body."

There is therefore no sexual rapport between two subjects, but only between two subjects and an object - a partial object. From the side of the man the objet a is in place of the missing partner, and this brings up the matheme of the fantasme (S <> a); in other words woman does not exist, for the man, as a real subject; she only exists as an object in the fantasme - the cause of his desire. "Woman serves a function in the sexual rapport only qua mother." Richard Klein discusses gender, "The fundamental trauma is no longer castration which the phallus includes. Traumatic is the sexual non-rapport in that the sexual relation is a hole in the real. It is troumatique. Nothing like a hole to indicate that something that does not exist can still operate."

J.A.