Femininity and Psychoanalysis

FEMININITY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
For Freud, famously, the feminine was a dark continent, or a riddle without an answer.
This understanding concerns man’s relationship to the question of ‘woman’ but femi-
ninity is also a matter of sexuality and gender and therefore of identity and experience.
Drawing together leading academics, including film and literary scholars, clinicians and
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artists from diverse backgrounds, Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory
speaks to the continued relevance of psychoanalytic understanding in a social and polit-
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ical landscape where ideas of gender and sexuality are undergoing profound changes.
This transdisciplinary collection crosses boundaries between clinical and psycho-
logical discourse and arts and humanities fields to approach the topic of femininity
from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. From object relations, to Lacan, to
queer theory, the essays here revisit and rethink the debates over what the feminine
might be. The volume presents a major new work by leading feminist film scholar,
Elizabeth Cowie, in which she presents a first intervention on the topic of film and
the feminine for over 20 years, as well as a key essay by the prominent artist and
psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger.
Written by an international selection of contributors, this collection is an
indispensible tool for film and literary scholars engaged with psychoanalysts and
anybody interested in different approaches to the question of the feminine.
Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award-winning film-maker and theorist, best

known for her iconic documentary Married to the Eiffel Tower. She is the author of
Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film, Black and White and The Nasty Woman
and the Neo Femme Fatale in Contemporary Cinema, and editor of Embodied Encounters
and co-editor of Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable.
Ben Tyrer is a film theorist and lecturer. He is the author or works on cin-
ema, psychoanalysis and philosophy and is the co-editor of Psychoanalysis and the
Unrepresentable.
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“This new and highly readable collection of psychoanalytic essays, which is edited
by Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer, provides a timely look at the mean-
ings of femininity and women’s desire as articulated in cinema through a range of
stimulating and thought-provoking case studies and discussions. The book, which
contains chapters from some notable authors in the field of feminist film scholarship
and artistic and clinical practice (including Elizabeth Cowie, Bracha L. Ettinger,
Vicky Lebeau and Caroline Bainbridge), deploy the ideas of Freud, Lacan, Klein,
Riviere, Horney, Deutsch and Irigaray in order to unpack the complexities of
the relationships between femininity, psychoanalysis and difference that will be of
great interest to students and researchers who continue to tussle with the meanings
of femininity in the contemporary cultural arena of cinema and beyond. The col-
lection covers a lot of ground – revisiting older debates about the feminist politics
of visual pleasure but adds a new layer of complexity to those earlier discussions
by relating them to psychosocial and cultural concerns in contemporary contexts
where the vexed relationship between intersectionality and psychoanalysis often
comes to the fore. In so doing, the collection demonstrates its cultural and political
relevance by paying attention to the unconscious dynamics of representation and
to the raced and classed dimensions of cinematic experience and its relationship to
wider processes of power and ideology.”
Candida Yates, Professor of Culture and Communication,
Bournemouth University, UK
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“This collective effort to think and rethink the psychoanalytic take on femininity

could not come at a more appropriate time. Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema,
Culture, Theory pursues different facets of this question in a formidably interesting
way, following a wide range of authors and critical approaches – a truly engaged
and engaging volume.”
Alenka Zupančič, Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis,
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences
and Arts, author of What Is Sex?
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FEMININITY AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Cinema, Culture, Theory
Edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska

Taylor and Francis
and Ben Tyrer
First published 2019
by Routledge
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 2019 selection and editorial matter, Agnieszka Piotrowska and
Ben Tyrer; individual chapters, the contributors
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For our mothers and for our sons.
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CONTENTS
List of contributors xi
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
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Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer

1 The certainties of difference and their difficulty:
desire and the symptom 8
Elizabeth Cowie
2 Her skin against the rocks, the rocks against the sky:
revisiting Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) after
Morley’s The Falling (2014) and Freud’s fable of
female hysteria 37
Davina Quinlivan
3 Growing up girl in the ’hood: vulnerability, violence

and the girl-gang state of mind in Bande de Filles/Girlhood
(Sciamma, France, 2014) 48
Caroline Bainbridge
4 Revisiting Joan Riviere 66

Vicky Lebeau
x Contents
5 Supplementary jouissance and feminine sexual rapport [1995] 78

Bracha L. Ettinger
6 Self-recreation through the uncanny encounter: reading

the feminine close-up in cinema 109
Nava Dushi and Igor Rodin
7 River’s edge: the ebb and flow of feminine ex-sistence 122

Allister Mactaggart
8 Under Her Skin: on Woman without body and body

without Woman 138
Ben Tyrer
9 Desire, commitment and the transformative power

of touch: the posthuman femme fatale in Under the Skin 160
Agnieszka Piotrowska and Joseph Jenner
10 AnnaMarilyn: queer tales of femininity 177

Wendy Leeks
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11 Tiresias: Bracha L. Ettinger and the transgression

with-in-to the Feminine
Sheila L. Cavanagh
204
12 A specimen of a commentary on Lacan’s ‘L’étourdit’ 217

A. R. Price
13 A #MeToo moment in communist Poland: a short story 241

Agnieszka Piotrowska
14 “Vulnerabilities” 252
Pia Hylén
Index 255
CONTRIBUTORS
Caroline Bainbridge is Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis at Roehampton

University. Her publications include The Cinema of Lars von Trier (Wallflower
Press, 2008), A Feminine Cinematics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Television and
Psychoanalysis: Media and the Inner World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and co-
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curated special editions of the journals Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and Free
Associations. Caroline is film editor for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and

she co-edits Routledge’s ‘Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture’ book series. She is a
founding member of the BPC Scholar Steering Group and a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Arts.
Sheila L. Cavanagh is a Professor at York University, former co-editor of the jour-
nal Somatechnics and outgoing chair of the Sexuality Studies Association (Canada).
She edited a special double-issue on psychoanalysis in Transgender Studies Quarterly
(2017) and co-edited Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Cavanagh wrote Queering Bathrooms (University of Toronto Press, 2010), a GLBT
Indie Book Award finalist, and Sexing the Teacher (University of British Columbia
Press, 2007), awarded honourable mention by the Canadian Women’s Studies
Association. Her scholarship appears in a range of psychoanalytic, gender and
cultural studies journals.
Elizabeth Cowie is Professor Emeritus in Film Studies at the University of Kent,
Canterbury. She was co-founder and co-editor in the 1970s of m/f, a journal of
feminist theory, and author of Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis
(Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). She has subsequently written on film noir, the hor-
ror of the horror film and on the cinematic dream-work. In Recording Reality,
Desiring the Real (Minnesota University Press, 2011) she addressed documentary
film as the serious, as spectacle and as an art of the real. Recent essays include
‘Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape’, in the online journal Media Fields
xii Contributors
(vol. 1, 2011); ‘The Ventriloquism of Documentary First-Person Speech and the

Self-Portrait Film’, in Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Psychoanalysis and
Cinema (Routledge, 2014); ‘The World Viewed: Documentary Observing and the
Culture of Surveillance’, in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film (Wiley-
Blackwell, 2015); ‘The Time of Gesture in Cinema and Its Ethics’, in Journal for
Cultural Research (vol. 19, no, 1, 2015); and ‘The Difference in Figuring Women
Now,’ in Moving Image Review & Art Journal (vol. 4 nos 1 and 2, 2016, special issue
on feminism and women’s art).
Nava Dushi is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Lynn University.
Her research traces the concept of the minor, its aesthetic manifestations and ethi-
cal consequences for culture and history. Her current work on a manuscript titled
‘The Void in the Text: Minor Cinema and the Nation’, proposes a theorisation
of the untranslatable in minor national films, the singularity of their viewer mode
of address and their potentiality to affect a creative encounter with the text.
Bracha L. Ettinger, PhD, is artist-painter and artist-theorist, philosopher and
supervising psychoanalyst, Marcel Duchamp Chair and Professor of Art and
Psychoanalysis at the EGS and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the
GCAS. She is one of the world’s leading thinkers in the realm of contempo-
rary French philosophy, feminism and psychoanalysis. She participated recently
with solo shows at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018–2019) and the 14th Istanbul
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Biennial (2015). Other solo shows include UB Anderson Gallery, Buffalo (2018);
Silesian Museum (Muzeum Sĺ ąskie), Katowice (2017); Museum of the City of

St Petersburg (2013); Musee des Beaux-Arts d’Angers (2011); and Fundació
Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2010). Her recent group exhibitions include Colori,
GAM, Turin (2017); Ontmoetingen; MAS/KMSKA, Antwerpen (2017); and The
Human Condition, Ekaterina Institute, Moscow (2017). Monographs dedicated
to her art include And My Heart Wound-Space (Istanbul Biennial, Wild Pansy
Press, 2015), Art as Compassion (ASA, 2011) and Le Cabinet de Bracha (Musée des
Beaux-Arts d’Angers, 2011). She is author of numerous articles and books includ-
ing The Matrixial Borderspace (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). A Reader of
her selected essays in two volumes is currently in print with Palgrave-Macmillan
(ed. G. Pollock).
Pia Hylén is a poet, painter and psychoanalyst, who moves on the edge of femi-
ninity in desire, creativity and analysis. She was educated at the University of
California, Berkeley, the University of Copenhagen and the École de la Cause
Freudienne in Paris. She lives and works in Portugal, participates in seminars from
Iceland to Tel Aviv, writes and paints and has her practice in Lisbon. Her first book
of poetry was presented at the opening night of ‘La Semaine de la Poèsie’ at her
stand in Place St Sulpice in Paris 2010.
Joseph Jenner is close to completing his PhD in Film Studies at King’s College
London. He is drawing together his research interests in posthumanism, spectator-
ship and the science-fiction genre to posit a posthuman model of spectatorship that
Contributors xiii
engages with contemporary political questions about gender, race and the human.
Joseph has recently had an article published with the journal Science Fiction Film
and Television entitled ‘Gendering the Anthropocene: Female Astronauts, Failed
Motherhood and the Overview Effect’. He works as a teaching assistant at King’s
College London and lecturer and tutor at MetFilm School.
Vicky Lebeau is Professor of English at University of Sussex and a trainee member
of the British Psychoanalytic Council. She is currently completing a book on psy-
choanalysis and class.
Wendy Leeks went to university as a mature student, after a short career in jour-
nalism. She studied art history because she knew next to nothing about it. She
received a first-class degree from Leeds University and developed her interest in
psychoanalytic (specifically Lacanian) and feminist perspectives in her PhD on the
nineteenth-century painter Ingres and his female nudes, with a focus on lesbian
spectatorship of those images. She has subsequently published on these issues in
relation to Ingres and other areas of visual culture. Since retirement form academic
management in 2014, she has pursued a project of queer interpretation and inves-
tigation within the psychoanalytic realm.
Allister Mactaggart is a Lecturer in Media at Chesterfield College. He has pub-
lished widely on various artistic endeavours of David Lynch, including the mono-
graph The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory (Intellect, 2010), as
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well as articles and book chapters on topics in fine art, film, television and popular
music. His work sets out to analyse the dialectical relationship between the psyche
and the social as it manifests itself in culture, society and politics.
Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an award winning film-maker and a theorist. She
is best known for her award-winning cult documentary Married to the Eiffel Tower
(2009) screened globally in 60 countries. Piotrowska has written extensively on
psychoanalysis and cinema and is the author of the monographs Psychoanalysis and
Ethics in Documentary Film (2014), Black and White: Cinema, Politics and the Arts
in Zimbabwe (2017) and The Nasty Woman and Neo Femme Fatale in Contemporary
Cinema (2019), all published with Routledge. She made an acclaimed feature film
in Zimbabwe entitled Escape (2017) in partnership with Zimbabwean artists. She is
a Reader in Film Practice and Theory at the University of Bedfordshire, UK and
the Visiting Professor in Film at Gdansk University, Poland.
A. R. Price is a psychoanalyst and the translator of Lacan’s Seminars IV, X, XIX
and XXIII.
Davina Quinlivan is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Kingston University. She is the
author of The Place of Breath in Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and
Filming the Body in Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Her current research includes
a monograph on the cinema of Joanna Hogg (Edinburgh University Press, forth-
coming) and a project that considers Barbara Hepworth’s art as cinematic practice
and philosophical, feminist aesthetic.
xiv Contributors
Igor Rodin is a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research
is situated at the intersection of ecosophy, Lacanian/post-Lacanian psychoanalytic
theory and film theory. His PhD thesis entitled ‘The Econtology of Cinema:
Subjectivity, Text and Reading: From Matter to Sinthomaton’, deals with the ontol-
ogy of the two-dimensional image via the work of theoreticians such as Jacques
Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Bracha L. Ettinger, Timothy Morton and
Reza Negarestani. Rodin is the translator of Bracha L. Ettinger’s texts that were
published in the Russian psychoanalytic journal Lacanalia.
Ben Tyrer is the author of Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir (Palgrave Macmillan,
2016) and co-editor of Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable: From Culture to the
Clinic (Routledge, 2016). He is co-coordinator of the Psychoanalysis in Our Time
international research network and a member of the editorial board of the Film-
Philosophy journal.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This collection emerges out of two symposia organised by the Psychoanalysis in

Our Time research network – an international initiative coordinated by the edi-
tors, Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer. We would like to thank the Nordic
Council of Ministers and the British Association of Film, Television and Screen
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Studies for their support of this initiative over the last five years. The two wonder-
fully productive events, directly inspirational for this volume were: ‘Psychoanalysis

and Femininity’, which took place at the National Maritime Museum in Gdansk,
Poland, 8–10 April 2016; and ‘Psychoanalysis and the Symptom’, which took place
in Sopot, Poland, 7–9 April 2017. In this volume we are bringing together some
of the presenters at these symposia as well as the writings of a number of other
renowned international thinkers. We are also grateful for the feedback of the col-
leagues at the Film-Philosophy conferences where we had opportunities to present
some of the work included in the collection.
An earlier version of Chapter 5 was initially published in English by Bracha
Ettinger in two parts in the now defunct journal, The Almanac of Psychoanalysis.
Ettinger retained all rights to the texts, and they are compiled, revised and updated
here with the author’s direction and permission. We are also very grateful to Ettinger
for supplying the fantastic cover image for this volume, ‘Eurydice – Medusa – Pieta
n.3’ (2015–2018), as well as a selection of her sketches, paintings and notebook
pages that are reproduced in this book with permission. We would like to express
our thanks to the Freud Museum for their kind permission to include two photo-
graphs from their collection – of Anna and Sigmund Freud in Chapter 10 – and to
Bryony Davies in particular for her help in securing these permissions. We are also
very grateful for Carol Morley’s permission to use an image from her 2014 film,
The Falling, and to Matthew Barrett at Sayle Screen Ltd for his assistance with this.
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INTRODUCTION
Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer
We are proud to present this volume on Femininity and Psychoanalysis. It is an

unruly collection, covering a vast area of thought. It is controversial no doubt
because of the contributors’ choice of topics and the inevitably difficult decisions
we had to make as editors in terms of whose voices we include in this volume,
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what is going to be discussed and put forward and what to leave for another
occasion – simply at times for reasons of space. The book continues from the vol-

ume that Agnieszka edited in 2015 (Embodied Encounters) and Psychoanalysis and the
Unrepresentable (2017), which we both edited, as we have done with this volume.
It is interesting to observe how some debates continue and develop: one of them
is the discussion about the importance of (or not) of sexual difference and its
representations in culture and the clinic.
First of all, it is important to stress that the book’s title and its whole ethos is
indeed concerned with femininity more broadly and not feminism per se. However
it pains us, as we are both rather obviously feminists, it is perfectly possible to be
very feminine and not be a feminist. The book is about what femininity is from
a psychoanalytical point of view – or what it might be. The reason why this is
worth saying here is that the responses from reviewers and colleagues appear to
conflate the two: we believe that feminism and the feminine connect of course
and rather obviously, but are indeed different concepts. Nonetheless, as the book
is psychoanalytically inspired, and we pay attention to unconscious slips and bun-
gled actions, it is worth pondering briefly why there is the confusion: feminism
deals with an unequivocal demand for equality of the sexes, femininity focuses on
the essence of womanhood. The history of psychoanalysis is in part a history of a
debate over what a woman, or the woman, might be. Is she equal to the man and
in what way? This is of course putting the issue simply not to say simplistically.
However, this is indeed still the core of the matter. The notable psychoanalyst
and feminist thinker Jacqueline Rose put it slightly differently: “The history of
2 Introduction
psychoanalysis can in many ways be seen entirely in terms of engagement with this
question of feminine sexuality” (Mitchell and Rose 1983: 28). Sigmund Freud, the
esteemed father of psychoanalysis to whom we are all indebted, was also a deeply
conservative patriarch as well as a man of great insight and a genius. Some of his
comments about womanhood we still shudder over and now, in the era of the
#MeToo movement some of Freud’s comments would have to be declared as near
offensive: his insistence on “penis envy” (already disputed by Karen Horney, as
discussed by A. R. Price in Chapter 12 of this volume), his negation of a possibility
of same-sex encounters, his open declarations that women are incapable of chang-
ing after the age of 30 and his deeply ambivalent attitude towards the figure of a
female hysteric who used her body in order to express her deep dissatisfaction with
the patriarchal world – all of these make us feel uncomfortable today.
And yet psychoanalysis is still the only theoretical, and indeed clinical, paradigm
that acknowledges the Other in us and that therefore allows for the bizarreness
and idiosyncrasies of everyday life to be examined without searching for a rational
explanation: psychoanalysis teaches us that there is no such thing. Because the
unconscious is founded in response to the untranslated messages of the Other, it
operates as a site of continued incoherence within the subject, yet also as a site of
truth. This truth being that truth is contradictory and incoherence is the subject’s way
of being true to contradiction. At times this “incoherence”, when not “worked
through”, will explode as a bodily irregularity, a physical symptom, which has its
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source in a mental struggle – and it is worth remembering here that Freud’s whole
system was built on a woman suffering in this way. His whole discovery of the

unconscious was thanks to the symptom of the female hysteric who he examined,
with Breuer, so thoroughly in their groundbreaking Studies on Hysteria (1895).
The issue of the symptom, and sinthome, and female agency vis-à-vis femi-
ninity is, one way or another, the subject of most contributions of this volume,
although there is only one chapter (Chapter 2, by Davina Quinlivan) dealing head
on with the figure of the hysteric. It is perhaps ironic that despite the critical role
of the hysteric in Freud’s oeuvre, he found femininity, womanhood, such a scary
and unknowable proposition. Many famous female psychoanalysts early on tried to
reclaim the hysteric and these include Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere
and Sabina Spielrein to name but a few.
In her re-telling of the case of one of the hysterics, namely Anna O., the more
contemporary notable psychoanalyst Colette Soler (2006) recalls the bizarre tale
of Breuer falling into transferential love with Anna O. without recognising the
process, and completely losing his professional cool when he learnt that his patient
not only relapsed dramatically after his departure, but moreover had a hysteri-
cal phantasmatic experience of giving birth. Perhaps the gaze of the hysteric did
temporarily leave Breuer castrated and petrified as in the Medusa myth (which
incidentally is another unfortunate example of Freud identifying a feminine cas-
trating potential: see Piotrowska 2019: 18). Soler draws our attention to the real
Anna O. who re-emerges as a fully engaged member of society doing important
social work in exotic places under her real name (Soler 2006: 4–6). It is not clear
Introduction 3
(despite the claims of Freud et al.) whether the extraordinary encounter with the
petrified Dr Breuer did contribute to her cure; it might well have done, although
the curious abandoning of her in the middle of the treatment appears a cruel if
understandable move. It is perhaps itself symptomatic that Freud does not record
the inherent issues in the treatment of Anna O. – her torment and Breuer’s con-
fusion temporarily written out of the mainstream history of the practice. But the
shades of the archetypal panic over the strength of the woman’s sexual desire, so
well known from Gothic novels, are indeed visible in this case study as in many
others. Perhaps an experience of love, be it brief and indeed phantasmatic, was
enough for this particular person to find her place in the Symbolic. Perhaps all
she needed was to talk to somebody who appeared to listen – for a while. Perhaps
the shock of being abandoned was enough to make her go into the world and
do work devoted indeed to women in trouble in different continents (ibid.: 6).
Nonetheless, one thing is clear: her strength and resolve appear to have overcome
her passionate dependency on the man who may have helped her too. These ten-
dencies stand firm between her death drive and her creativity. They do in the end
flow Antigone-like from her own desire and she succeeds in the external world, in
the Symbolic – alone but victorious, and full of agency.
In our volume the figure of the hysteric hovers over many chapters but many of
the contributors engage instead with Lacanian reformulations of the symptom and
of the whole notion of the body (the Real) versus the Imaginary and the Symbolic.
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Lacan struggled throughout his life with the task of taking feminine out of the tale
of sexual difference, out of the Oedipal tale, out of the biological definitions only –

allowing for, in Seminar XX in particular, a possibility of the feminine within a
biological man. Lacan, the great heir of Freud, created a system that in its openness
is both generative of new ideas but also therefore forever open to interpretations
and perhaps misinterpretations, which this book embraces enthusiastically, present-
ing a variety of new visionary presentations of his thought, alongside many others.
We are especially privileged to include Elizabeth Cowie’s magisterial chap-
ter, “The certainties of difference and their difficulty: desire and the symptom”
(Chapter 1), on femininity and the symptom, but also on creativity in sinthome.
The chapter marks a significant reformulation of her original texts (such as
“Woman as Sign” first published in 1978 in the groundbreaking feminist journal,
m/f, which she founded with Parveen Adams and Rosalind Coward).1 In her
chapter, Cowie focuses on feminine desire, jouissance and the relationship to love
and art, which offers both an opportunity to revisit Dreyer’s last film, Gertrud
(1964), first discussed in Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (1996),
as well as a new discussion of Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993). Adele, of course,
is a hysteric of sorts, and her symptom is closely related to her sinthome, her
music. Cowie touches upon the connection between sexual desire and the rela-
tionship between mother and daughter. We are delighted that Elizabeth Cowie’s
contribution to this volume marks the first time in over 20 years that she has writ-
ten on the subject of Woman in a project that rethinks some of her foundational
early ideas.
4 Introduction
Every chapter in this volume discusses feminine agency, female desire and/or
its position in the world vis-à-vis issues of identity. Davina Quinlivan’s contri-
bution, “Her skin against the rocks, the rocks against the sky: revisiting Weir’s
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) after Morley’s The Falling (2014) and Freud’s fable of
female hysteria” (Chapter 2), revisits both the foundational figure of the hysteric
in psychoanalysis and strange sensations of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock in
order to examine Carol Morley’s tale of mass faintings at an English girls school in
terms of collectivity and transgression that takes us beyond the patriarchal origins
of psychoanalysis and towards a narrative of female self-possession.
The contributions of Caroline Bainbridge and Vicky Lebeau each discuss the
ways in which racial difference and the postcolonial insist on moving the conver-
sation on femininity outside the strict bounds of sexual difference. In Chapter 3,
“Growing up girl in the ’hood: vulnerability, violence and the girl-gang state
of mind in Bande de Filles/Girlhood (Sciamma, France, 2014)”, Bainbridge
reflects on her own position as well as that of director Céline Sciamma as white
women exploring the lives of African-French teenage girls of the banlieues
in the latter’s 2014 drama, Girlhood, while Bainbridge also draws on Donald
Meltzer’s “girl-gang state of mind” and Luce Irigaray’s parler femme as a means
of understanding the world of the film’s protagonist, Marieme. In Chapter 4,
“Revisiting Joan Riviere”, Lebeau provides a detailed re-evaluation of the
foundational work on “Womanliness and Masquerade” by Riviere, exploring
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the racialised fantasies that cut through the analysand’s psychic life as much as
they do the analyst’s own interpretations. Lebeau argues for the importance of

understanding the social in relation to the psyche so as not to blind psycho-
analysis to the vital perspectives on race and desire in, for example, the work
of Frantz Fanon.
The artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger’s chapter, “Supplementary jou-
issance and feminine sexual rapport [1995]” (Chapter 5), presents a revised version
of her groundbreaking 1995 essay on femininity in which she set out her original
model of sexual difference after Lacan. Taking inspiration from her own clinical
encounters and artistic practice, as well as the work of Deleuze and Guattari and
Merleau-Ponty, Ettinger theorises a new perspective on the feminine beyond the
phallus, taking instead the metaphor of the womb to posit a “matrixial” feminin-
ity grounded in co-emergence and what she calls “borderlinking”: a spectrum
of trans-individual experiences that cannot be accounted for by the divisional,
phallic logic that she sees in Lacan. Updating work first published in Hebrew in
a limited run of ten copies, and then translated into English in two parts for the
now defunct Almanac of Psychoanalysis in 1998 and 2000, this chapter gathers both
sections, “Supplementary Jouissance” and “Feminine Sexual Rapport”, together
for the first time in English: making the work – with Ettinger’s new corrections
and clarifications – available to a far wider readership than previously possible. The
chapter also includes Ettinger’s own translations into English from both Lacan’s
seminars and écrits, and from Jacques-Alain Miller’s own courses, many of which
remain unpublished even now.
Introduction 5
Applying Ettinger’s theories of sexual difference to the cinema, Chapter 6 by

Nava Dushi and Igor Rodin, “Self-recreation through the uncanny encounter:
reading the feminine close-up in cinema”, proposes a re-thinking of the tech-
nique of the close-up in cinema. Rather than the “phallic” mode of photographing
the subject that privileges the topology of the face (and resisting the weight of
film theoretical tradition from Balázs to Mulvey), Dushi and Rodin propose an
understanding of film based on Ettinger’s “matrixial gaze” and an aesthetics of
contingency, uncertainty and traumaticity.
Working in a more avowedly Lacanian register, while also drawing on Kristeva,
Arendt and Marxist cultural theory, Allister Mactaggart’s chapter, “River’s edge:
the ebb and flow of feminine ex-sistence” (Chapter 7), offers a distinctive view on
love and loss through a look at the popular television series, River (BBC, 2015).
Starting from a coincidence of psychoanalysis and detection, Mactaggart argues
that the eponymous River’s passage through mourning takes him into an encoun-
ter with femininity and an understanding of love.
Ben Tyrer’s chapter, “Under Her Skin: on Woman without body and body
without Woman” (Chapter 8), examines the recent science fiction films of Scarlett
Johansson in relation to her “sex symbol” star image in order to chart the differ-
ing accounts of sexual difference that Lacan gives in his work from the 1950s to
the 1970s. Focusing on Her (2013) and Under the Skin (2013), Tyrer argues that a
“phallic” model of sexual difference can only position woman as object, while a
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properly feminine logic can be discerned through an understanding of the ontol-
ogy of sexual difference as put forward in Seminar XX and Alenka Zupančič’s

What Is Sex? (2017).
Agnieszka Piotrowska’s chapter co-written with Joseph Jenner, “Desire, com-
mitment and the transformative power of touch: the posthuman femme fatale in
Under the Skin” (Chapter 9), is in a dialogue with Tyrer’s chapter, offering a dif-
ferent take on Under the Skin and some disagreements over its significance as their
chapter focuses on the proposition of how to imagine the creation of posthuman
female subjectivity. Combining Piotrowska’s research on touch with Jenner’s on
posthumanism, the chapter aims to chart the journey of the alien woman from
posthuman femme fatale to an Antigone-like subject of desire, focusing on the
transformative encounter between Johansson’s character and the man with neuro-
fibromatosis played by Adam Pearson.
We have two chapters that deal directly with and challenge the notion of
the binary of sex(uality): Chapter 10 by Wendy Leeks about Anna Freud and
Marilyn Monroe, and Chapter 11 by Sheila Cavanagh on Oedipus and Tiresias.
Leeks’ contribution, “AnnaMarilyn: queer tales of femininity”, examines bio-
graphy and psychoanalysis in relation to the life stories of two famous women,
Anna Freud and Marilyn Monroe. Exploring the unexpected coincidences and
points of contact in the lives of these two women, Leeks notes their differing
symbolic status – as sexuality embodied (Monroe) and sexuality denied (Freud) –
and considers the queer potentials of their histories, beginning with the question
“Was Anna Freud a lesbian?” and moving on to consider the speculation around
6 Introduction
Monroe’s bisexual/lesbian “tendencies”. In “Tiresias: Bracha L. Ettinger and the

transgression with-in-to the feminine”, Cavanagh makes a radical proposition to
abandon the Oedipal metaphor of sexual difference altogether, and – drawing
on the theories of Ettinger – instead proposes a transgender fluidity as the way
of thinking about the world through her discussion of the figure of Tiresias in
Oedipus Rex. We also include the contribution of Pia Hylén, a psychoanalyst and
artist, whose poetry and drawing gives expression to feminine desires, experi-
ences and “vulnerabilities” in Chapter 14, “‘Vulnerabilities’/‘Ravage II’”.
Psychoanalyst A. R. Price’s notes on Lacan’s controversial L’étourdit in Chapter 12,
“A specimen of a commentary on Lacan’s ‘L’étourdit’”, throw some light on Lacan’s
views on the decades of disputation between acclaimed psychoanalysts such as
Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, as well as Ernst Jones regarding on the one hand
the “impossibility” of the sexual relationship, and on the other the fear of feminine
castration. Bringing the eye of an experienced clinician as well as translator (Price
has translated Lacan’s Seminars IV, X, XIX and XXIII – on object relations, anxi-
ety, sexual difference and the sinthome – into English for publication in recent
years) to Lacan’s famously difficult, even untranslatable, essay L’étourdit (an impossi-
ble pun somewhere between dizziness and bewilderment), Price has chosen to break
down the original French text line-by-line, sometimes even word-by-word, rather
than offering a more general description of the piece or a straightforward transla-
tion. The effect is to transform Lacan’s essay on sexual difference into a series of
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vertical moments, where the literal, poetic, theoretical and clinical implications
of each signifier are explored in depth: close analysis as textual psychoanalysis, we

might say. The result is a chapter that is sometimes no less challenging than Lacan’s
original, but one that rewards careful attention for its insights into a major essay of
Lacanian psychoanalysis, which has thus far not received sufficient attention in the
Anglophone literature.
Piotrowska’s short story (or creative non-fiction) on a moment of #MeToo
in Communist Poland (Chapter 13) corresponds interestingly with Price’s chapter.
In a way this story is also indeed about the vagina and castration anxiety (or
misunderstood menstruation), which is what the Jones–Horney–Lacan debate is
focused on in Price’s chapter. For Antonia to apologise would have been to sub-
mit to castration, while the other character Joanna does just that. Price focuses in
his notes on the deutero-phallic phase of development, which is, arguably, the
topic of Lacan’s text. In this context there is a deeper significance of the “run-
ning around” game for the boys in finding their own identity and coping with
(castration) anxiety.
It is also interesting to consider how the failure of the Communist ideal of
gender-equality is yet another proof of the value of psychoanalysis, especially in the
area of female sexuality and asymmetrical gender and power relations.
We hope that this collection opens a space in which these ideas and phenomena
can be debated once more and look forward to the time when all the binaries, and
particulary that of sexual difference, can finally be rethought.
Introduction 7
Note
1 As Cowie notes, “I published several key essays in m/f, in particular, ‘Woman as Sign’,
‘The Popular Film as Progressive Text: A Discussion of Coma’, and ‘Fantasia’. These have
appeared in a number of anthologies, most recently in 2000 and 2009, as well as appearing
in revised form in my book, Representing the Woman: Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1997)”.
See: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/repsychoanalysis/about/elizabeth-cowie.
Bibliography
Mitchell, J. and Rose, J. (eds.) (1983) Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne.
London: Macmillan Press.
Piotrowska, A. (2019) The Nasty Woman and the Neo Femme Fatale in Contemporary Cinema.
London: Routledge.
Soler, C. (2006) What Lacan Said About Women. New York: The Other Press.
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1
THE CERTAINTIES OF DIFFERENCE
AND THEIR DIFFICULTY
Desire and the symptom
Elizabeth Cowie
For Freud, woman’s desire was an enigma; writing to the French psychoanalyst
Marie Bonaparte he famously declared that, “the great question that has never
been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty
years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” (cited by
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Jones 1953: 421).1 Lacan, taking up Freud’s question in Encore, poses it in relation
to woman’s enjoyment, her jouissance that he argues is other than phallic jouis-

sance, which she also enjoys. Asking women about this other jouissance, “to try to
tell us”, he declares: “We’ve never been able to get anything out of them. So we
call this jouissance by whatever name we can come up with” (Lacan 1999: 75).
What is addressed in this chapter is this questioning by both Freud and Lacan of
woman as other and thus the enigma of her desire. Asking women questions, how-
ever, cannot advance knowledge of the unconscious of feminine desire, just as the
child cannot fathom the m/Other’s desire. For the question “What does a woman
want?” is also the question “What does she want of me, that is, what am I for her?”
Thus, Lacan suggests, the problem expressed in the question is the problem of the
Other, “woman being, in this case, equivalent to truth” (ibid.: 127). For Lacan,
however, the central truth that he insisted upon throughout his later work is that
“Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel”, “there is no sexual relationship”; instead there is the
possibility of love (2006: 147).2 In The Sinthome, Seminar XXIII, the consequences
for the subject that the sexual relation does not exist are explored in relation to
the psychoanalytic concept of the symptom (Lacan 2016: 68). It is here that Lacan
introduces his new syllogism of the “sinthome” in his discussion of the writings
of James Joyce, and through which he addresses the limitations of “going through
the fantasy” as an ending of analysis. Instead Lacan formulates the symptom-as-
sinthome as a knotting of the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic. In this Seminar Lacan
not only develops his conceptualisation of the Real but also addresses how art –
the artifices of art – might be engaged through the symptom in relation to Joyce’s
The certainties of difference 9
writing, while at the same time Lacan complicates the role of the phallus and the
Name-of-the-Father. As a result, Lacanian analyst Geneviève Morel suggests that
Lacan’s theory of the symptom “allows us to think the relations between the sexes
and the generations without necessarily referring to the Name-of-the-Father nor
to the phallus, as transcendent norms of a symbolic order” (Morel 2005: xvi).
While Paul Verhaeghe and Frédéric Declercq write, “the Lacanian conclusion
of the treatment (. . .) is a particular process that is situated entirely in the line of
femininity” (2002: 76).3
This chapter seeks to trace the complications for his account of sexual difference
that Lacan introduces here that Morel and Verhaeghe and Declercq suggest, and
relate them to the story of femininity. For “femininity” is a “story”, a construc-
tion, that all those who become placed as “feminine” find themselves within, and
part of that story is the assumed interchangeability or equivalence of woman and
femininity in the writing of both Freud and Lacan. It is a story, however, that
remains incomplete, creating a gap that is the Real of knowledge. Lacan repeatedly
returns to the question of femininity and the woman but he does so not to close
the gaps, instead a certain “gapping”, or incommensurability, appears as constitu-
tive. Freud himself suggested that “if you want to know more about femininity,
enquire from your own experiences of life or turn to the poets” (1933/1964: 135).
I will be turning not to poets but to two film directors, Carl Theodor Dreyer
and Jane Campion, to examine ways in which woman’s desire finds articulation
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in cinema’s stories, drawing on Lacan’s re-thinking of the symptom in relation to
femininity. I am drawing here on the discussions that I was part of in the 1970s and

1980s on feminine sexuality in the turn to psychoanalysis and Lacan’s re-reading
of Freud, which were central for my book, Representing the Woman: Cinema and
Psychoanalysis (1997). In my analysis of the representation of women in film I drew
upon a psychoanalytic understanding of fantasy in its role in desire, identifica-
tion and sexuality for male and female characters. I argued that for both men and
women their sexual identification is neither singular nor a choice, rather it arises
as a concatenation, a palimpsest, realised in the context of the contingency of the
Other who responds to our demand for love. For one enacts the emplacements –
both unconscious and conscious – of one’s psychical history in relation to one’s
parental figures and one’s encounter with the demands and desires – enjoined or
prohibited – that they convey, consciously or unconsciously. This chapter returns
to the question of desire and sexual difference in film’s representations through
Lacan’s concept of the sinthome.
Freud had acknowledged that there is an “uninterpretable navel” to dreams and
the unconscious,4 while Lacan called for a training in antiphilosophy for analysts,5
and in Encore he declared that “The Discordance between knowledge and being is
my subject” (1999: 120), but nevertheless acknowledges that “We are still (encore)
caught up in the insufficiency of knowledge” (ibid.). It is the “insufficiency of
knowledge” in relation to sexuality and to the categories of sexual difference
that this chapter explores, for we might see in Lacan’s re-thinking of Freud’s
ideas – with his graphs, mathemes and concepts – an attempt to wrestle with the
10 Elizabeth Cowie
uninterpretability Freud writes of, and the insufficiency of knowledge he laments.

Charles Shepherdson has suggested that,
These attempts at a logical formalization of Freud are not merely descrip-

tive, however, but are used as a means of discovery. It is almost as if Lacan
believes that the conceptual impasses which his logical formulations produce
are themselves capable of revealing something about the real.
(2003: 141)
Taking up again the question of our psychical relation to sexual difference, to

“sexuation” as Lacan poses it, and the different relation of men and women to
jouissance – as Lacan continued to do in his late Seminars – I suggest that feminin-
ity is as much an enigma for women as for men, inasmuch as “being feminine”
is something other than anatomical difference, or biology in the sense of hor-
mones. Indeed Lacan himself comments, in The Psychoses, in relation to Freud’s
case study, “What is Dora saying through her neurosis? (. . .) Her question is
this – What is it to be a woman?” (1993: 175). Femininity is what is added to the
biological difference of “being a woman” in a performance, through gestures of
movement and speech, in forms of response and through appearance: a masquerade.6
This is no less true for men, of course, and that it is equally an enigma – and a
problem – is attested by the regular appearance of claims that masculinity is in
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crisis. At the same time the categories “woman” and “man” are not singular but
involve further categories, not only in terms of age – for “girls” are not-yet-fully

“women” – but also categories that are social, that is, relational: women as moth-
ers, sisters, daughters, wives and workers. Being a mother or father to a son, or
daughter, or being daughter or a son to a mother or father are each different kinds
of being a woman, or a man, and each centres a relationship. Indeed, for Lacan
what is central is that our subjectivity arises in relation to an Other and others
through discourse: that is, in a social relation, which is the focus of his discus-
sion of the “Four Discourses” in Seminar XVII. For language is trans-individual
and speech, discourse, always implies – anticipates – another subject as addressee,
and interlocutor.
How then, as Juliet Mitchell asked in a recent interview, “does the construction
of sexual difference become so embedded that we experience it as who we are?”
(2015: 115). Her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) presented Freud in a
new and vital way for feminists in 1974, while in the collection of essays that she
co-edited with Jacqueline Rose, she writes that for Lacan,
the analysand’s unconscious reveals a fragmented subject of shifting and

uncertain sexual identity. To be human is to be subjected to a law which
decentres and divides: sexuality is created in a division, the subject is split;
but an ideological world conceals this from the conscious subject who is sup-
posed to feel whole and certain of a sexual identity.
(Mitchell and Rose 1982: 26)
The account of femininity in both Freud and Lacan is of a construction, not as an

essence or as simply biological. This also means that for Lacan there is no feminine
outside language because, as Jacqueline Rose notes, first “the unconscious severs
the subject from any unmediated relation to the body as such (. . .) and secondly
because the ‘feminine’ is constituted in a division in language” (ibid.: 55).
At stake is how we think the “ideological” – the social organisation of differ-
ence that is usually addressed in terms of gender assignment – in relation to the
unconscious formations that arise in relation to the constitutive splitting of the
subject in its relation to lack, prohibition and desire.7 What arises is both an attrib-
uted sexed identity, and a psychological relation to difference and to sexuality. It
is this that Jean Laplanche’s discussion, in his essay, “Gender, Sex, and the Sexual”
emphasises, and that I want to draw upon here. He argues that gender – the social
and linguistic identification of a difference of sex – precedes sexuality, but, he says,
“Yes, gender precedes sex. But far from organizing it, it is organized by it” (2007:
215). Gender is the social assignment of difference, and Laplanche emphasises the
primacy of the other, the social, in the messages of gender assignment both at an
official level – the level of Foucault’s discursive ordering – in the registering of
the birth of a child who is always thereby sexed and, more importantly, by its car-
ers. The baby’s being for others is not only as a boy or girl, but also as a son or
daughter. But these messages assigning gender, Laplanche argues, are “also carriers
of many ‘noises’, all those brought by the adults who are close to the child: parents,
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grandparents, brother and sisters. Their fantasies, their unconscious and precon-
scious expectations” (ibid.). Here Laplanche draws on a key element of his work in

describing these messages from the other – mother or carer – as seductive but also
enigmatic, as “preconscious-conscious” in which “the parental unconscious is like
the ‘noise’ – in the sense of communications theory – that comes to disturb and
compromise the preconscious-conscious message” (ibid.). It is a gendered child that
the parent addresses, but “their unconscious wishes also come to infiltrate gender
assignment”. And, Laplanche suggests, it is “above all what is le sexual in the parents
that makes noise in the assignment” of gender and that “in the presence of the child,
the adults ultimately come to reactivate their infantile sexuality above all” (ibid.).8
For the child, he says, “Gender is acquired, assigned, but enigmatic up to about
fifteen months. Sex comes along to fix, to translate gender in the course of the sec-
ond year (. . .) The castration complex is its center”. Laplanche also argues, however,
that “The certainty of the castration complex is maintained on the basis of ideology
and on the basis of illusion, namely, in the early genital phase” (ibid.: 216).9
Mustapha Safouan, a member of the Lacanian school, points out that:
Not only does the essence of the Oedipus complex not lie in the rivalry for which it
is the precondition, it is even that very rivalry that obscures its essence. The
Oedipal complex is in the end no more than one cultural form among others,
those others being equally possible providing they perform the same func-
tion of promoting the function of castration in the psyche.
(1990: 281, emphasis in original)
12 Elizabeth Cowie
It is as signifier that the phallus comes to play its role as an ideal “precisely, of that
whose insufficiency is discovered for the boy and its nonexistence for the girl, at
an early age, in an attribute of the father” (ibid.: 280). Lacan (re)defines the phallus
(which is not the penis) as the structural function of whatever “x” the child hypoth-
esises the paternal figure possesses making him the focus of the maternal figure’s
desire, that is, the possession enabling the father to domesticate and control the
mother’s otherwise unpredictable desire. If the Name-of-the-Father, as the O/other
of the mother, “forbids” by standing in the way of the child’s wish for unlimited
access to the mother, it is because until this intervention the mother is for the child
not a woman, but the m/Other. This intervention is the “answer” to the problem of
the m/Other’s desire, and the constitutive lack in the subject. As Safouan also notes,
Only the play of the signifier [the Imaginary] can explain this introduction
of a phallus that is in some sense absolute, along with what follows from that
introduction, that is, the subordination of access to genitality to a movement
that the subject feels as an exclusion from that very phallus.
(Ibid.: 280)
It is, he suggests, a special case of the “induction of the imaginary by the symbolic
that can be illustrated even in the formation of the ‘scientific mind’” (ibid.). This
move, namely the experience of an “insufficiency”, or an absence as “castration”,
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in relation to the “x” that is the phallus, does not thereby ensure the child identifies
according to his or her biological sex, and thus accords with his or her “gender”,

or that she or he desires the other of her biological sex/gender, that is, their object-
choice. Moreover the carnality of mutual sexual acts that open on to enjoyment,
to jouissance, also open the subject to the abyss of lack that is at the same time
apprehended. It is through the masquerade, for the woman, or parade for the man,
that each player in the sexual act sustains themselves in having or being the phallus
for the other.10
While for Freud there was no mystery about the boy’s desire – he wants the
mother, but must turn away from her or risk the father’s wrath, which is imag-
ined as a threat of castration – the enigma of castration for the girl continues to
haunt discussions of sexual difference, which Lacan’s discussion in Encore does not
resolve. Developing Freud’s account of the Oedipal complex, Lacan states,
there is no chance for a man to have jouissance of a woman’s body, otherwise

stated, for him to make love, without castration (a moins de castration), in
other words, without something that says no to the phallic function (. . .)
But what he approaches is the cause of his desire that I have designated as
object a. That is the act of love.
(1999: 72–73)
The woman, however, does not have this jouissance in the same way because she is
not subject to this “no to the phallic function”, instead – as noted earlier – Lacan
posits that she has her own jouissance of the body “beyond the phallus” (ibid.: 74)
but about which she knows nothing (ibid.: 75), nevertheless she also has phallic
jouissance (ibid.: 78).
In Encore Lacan, drawing on set theory, presents two groups of “propositional
formulas” through which he specifies two different relations to the prohibition
that is instituted by the phallic function, symbolic castration and two different
modes of jouissance. Both groups of formulas contain an assertion that all are sub-
ject to the phallic function, and a negation of that assertion. The formula on the
left side describes the relation that defines the masculine – though that may not be
all or only men – whereby all those x’s choosing the left side are submitted to the
phallic function, but “with the proviso that this function is limited” (ibid.: 79). Its
limitation is the existence of one x that is not submitted to the phallic function,
“the father function”, and it is this exception that guarantees the universal law of
symbolic existence. In this “exception” Lacan keeps faith with Freud’s idea of the
primal father who enjoys without limit, who is not submitted to the phallic func-
tion but who was removed by the band of sons who were thereby freed to enjoy
but conditionally, subject to a prohibition, namely symbolic castration. The man
who places himself on the left side, “is unable to attain his sexual partner, who
is the Other, except inasmuch as his partner is the cause of his desire” which is
“nothing other than fantasy” (ibid.: 80). Hence Lacan’s assertion, “Il n’y a pas de
rapport sexuel”, there is no sexual relation, no coming together in mutual enjoy-
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ment as a complementarity of what is given and what is taken, in what one is or
one has for the Other.

Addressing the right side of the graph, the side of femininity – though this may
not involve all or only women – Lacan’s formulae designate that there is not one
x that is not submitted to the phallic function, but also includes the negation that
not every x is submitted to the phallic function. Where for those on the side of the
masculine there is a universal, thus a set of “all men”, on the side of the feminine
“women” is not a singular or universal group because woman lacks a limit. Thus
Lacan writes of Woman crossed through, barred, and he places her as having a
relation to the big Other, the Symbolic, “the locus in which everything that can
be articulated on the basis of the signifier comes to be inscribed” (ibid.: 81). The
big Other is barred, however, so the Woman barred has a relation to the signifier
of the Other, which, however, is also barred S(A-barred) (Autre, Other). The
feminine relation to jouissance is doubled, both a phallic jouissance and, as noted
earlier, a jouissance beyond the phallus that Lacan defines as a jouissance of the
Other, A. Yet now Lacan equivocates, using the conditional tense for this other
jouissance: “Were there another jouissance than phallic jouissance, it shouldn’t be/
could never fail to be that one” (ibid.: 59). Here Lacan is playing on the logic of
the Stoics when he states that “It is false that there is another one, but that doesn’t
stop what follows from being true, namely, that it shouldn’t be/could never fail
to be that one” (ibid.: 60). That women say nothing about an/other jouissance
neither confirms nor denies its non-existence, yet Lacan finds its confirmation
in the women mystics: in the writings of Hadewijch d’Anvers, for example, or
14 Elizabeth Cowie
Bernini’s statue of Saint Teresa in Rome, seeing which one “would immediately
understand that she is coming (. . .) What is she getting off on? It is clear that the
essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying they experience it, but know
nothing about it” (ibid.: 76). This jouissance may also be experienced by those
who are male, “because one is not obliged, when one is male” to situate himself on
the side of “all”, but “can also situate oneself on the side of the not-all, as mystics”
(ibid.).11 This other jouissance that “shouldn’t be/could never fail to be that one” is
an “extra (en plus)” jouissance rather than another (ibid.: 77). And it is the one that
Lacan will invoke as the jouissance of the symptom in the declaration that woman
is a symptom “for those encumbered with the phallus” (1982: 168), and later as the
jouissance of the sinthome.
What Lacan is also addressing in Encore is philosophy itself, and the question of
knowledge and truth that is intrinsic to “the four discourses – on which the social
link is based” (1999: 78).12 In Lecture VIII of Encore, “Knowledge and truth”,
Lacan also investigates the question of knowledge and of reason as a procedure
that thereby produces what is not speakable, knowable, in the imaginary or in the
symbolic, which is the Real that is connected to the body. He writes, “The Real
can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalisation” (ibid.: 93), and it
is the Real that arises because “the sexual relation doesn’t stop not being written.
Because of this, the apparent necessity of the phallic function turns out to be mere contingency”
(ibid.: 94; my emphasis).
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It is the Real that haunts Encore as that which is incompletely accounted for
in the formulae of sexuation and that Lacan will continue to address in Seminar

XXII RSI, and Seminar XXIII, The Sinthome. Where for the man the objet a
cause-of-desire is Woman barred, on the side of femininity, no objet a is indicated
for her; instead Lacan writes that for Woman barred, “something other than
object a is at stake in what comes to make up for (supplier) the sexual relation-
ship that does not exist” (1999: 63), which in the formulae is the barred Other,
that is, the m/Other. The objet a is not an object of desire but the object-cause
of desire, and it is so because it stands in for not something lost, but for “lostness”,
the “goneness” of the absent object, and not the object as such. The objet a in
the Real is the impossible Real of the lack in the mother/Other. In Seminar
XII Lacan says that objet a is not simply a hollow or “initial zero of the reality of
the subject being incarnated in pure lack”, it is a “residue (. . .) which through
its simple presence, modifies, inclines, inflects the whole possible economy of
a libidinal relationship to the object, of any choice whatsoever which is quali-
fied as objectal” (1965: 138). While, in Encore, Lacan says that “Woman serves
a function in the sexual relation only qua mother” (1999: 35), but also that the
woman has a jouissance arising from being “not-whole” [not-all], but for which
she “finds the cork” to stop up jouissance “in the a constituted by her child”
(ibid.). But is woman’s function qua mother a function for herself in the sexual
relation, or for the man, or both? Lorenzo Chiesa – exploring Lacan’s Seminars
“as they revolve around a logical and critically onto-theo-logical investigation
of the basic axiom ‘There is no sexual relationship’” (2016: xi) – suggests that in
Lacan’s assertion that the woman is in the sexual relation qua mother, he seems to
understand this “primarily in the sense of ‘from the man’s perspective’” (ibid.: 13).
This implying, therefore, that men – as adults post-Oedipally – relate to woman-
as-mother, which Chiesa points out “conceals another, more troubling statement:
as soon as, from woman’s perspective, woman starts to serve a function in the sexual
relationship only as mother, sexual difference, and the symbolic order with it, are
at risk” (ibid.). For woman is doubled, in being “mother” for another, and in
being a daughter to a mother, as well as – for some women – nurturing her child
as its mother. While, as Laplanche emphasised, the child experiences her mother
in relation to this doubling and to the complex messages it involves, which for a
daughter then also becomes part of her experience as a woman and, if or when,
she becomes a mother.
Lacan returns to the question of the woman’s desire in Seminar XXII, R.S.I.
(1975), when he says, “What she busies herself with are other objet a, being chil-
dren” (1982: 167). He then declares that “The phallus is not phallic jouissance”, and
that “for whoever is encumbered with the phallus, what is a woman? A woman is
a symptom”. This arises because:
there is no jouissance of the Other as such, no guarantee to be met with in

the body of the Other to ensure that the enjoying other exists. A manifest
instance of the hole, or rather of something whose only support is the objet
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a – but always in a mix-up or confusion.
(Ibid.: 168)

Nevertheless, he continues,
In point of fact a woman is no more an objet a than is a man – as I said earlier,

she has her own, which she busies herself with, and this has nothing to do
with the object by which she sustains herself in any desire whatsoever. To
make of this A-Woman a symptom, is to say that phallic jouissance is equally
her affair, contrary to what is said. The woman has to undergo no more or less
castration than the man. As for what is involved in her function as symptom, she is at
exactly the same point as her man.
(Ibid., my emphasis)13
Lacan does not explore what this means for the woman, instead commenting that
“We have yet to articulate what corresponds in her case to that real ex-istence I
spoke of earlier as the phallus” (ibid.). Chiesa, however, suggests that Lacan is
using the term jouissance in two different ways: feminine jouissance, the jouis-
sance of the not-all as such, is corked or contained by means of a child qua the
object a, which, as a supplementation to the negatively additional character
of feminine jouissance, produces itself a form of phallic jouissance.
(2016: 14)
16 Elizabeth Cowie
As a result, Chiesa argues,
This undecidable – concerning fundamentally whether woman is or is not

phallic – will then be more generally the undecidability of the phallic func-
tion tout court: there is no sexual relationship, but there are sexed liasons, but
there ultimately are sexed relations only because woman opens onto the
absence of the sexual relationship.
(Ibid.: 171)
There is, indeed, a haunting undecidability in Seminar XX, heralded in its title,
Encore, used by Lacan to refer to his audience as – still, or again, encore – coming
to hear him, but also referring to what there is “still” to know about wanting to
know and not know – of woman’s sexuality, her “femininity”. Thus Jacques-
Alain Miller’s inclusion for the English translation of the subtitle “On Feminine
Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge” restates the hesitation as “limits”,
which are intrinsic to the very idea of both love and knowledge. It is still, encore,
or again, in the following seminar, XXII, R.S.I, where Lacan develops his think-
ing about the Real, that is the hole, the fundamental lack that is a lack-in-being,
while introducing the formulation, “A woman is a symptom for man”. It is the
symptom and its relation to the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary that are the focus
of Seminar XXIII where Lacan uses the word sinthome – adopting the old French
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spelling of the word symptom – to identify a particular way in which the subject
engages with her symptom, and its role for the subject’s Real, Imaginary and

Symbolic relations.14
In Seminar XII Lacan had placed the symptom as central to the Real, defining
this third term in relation to the Symbolic and the Imaginary:
it is in the symptom that we identify what is produced in the field of the

Real. If the Real manifests itself in analysis and not only in analysis, if the
notion of the symptom was introduced, well before Freud by Marx, so as to
make it the sign of something which is what is not working out in the Real,
if in other words, we are capable of operating on the symptom, it is insofar
as the symptom is the effect of the Symbolic in the Real.
(1965: 20)
For Lacan the symptom is not a coded message addressed to another, rather “if
symptoms can be read, it is because they themselves are already inscribed in a
writing process. As particular unconscious formations, symptoms are not significa-
tions” (2005: 371). The symptom is inscribed in a writing process and that is a Real
“enjoying”, a jouissance, “they are what gives Symbolic form to the Real of the
the drive” (Verhaeghe and Declercq 2002: 2). Where Freud had viewed the symp-
tom as “like the grain of sand around which an oyster forms its pearl” (1905/1953:
83), Lacan proposes the “grain of sand” as the Real of jouissance around which
the symptom, as a Symbolic construction, forms. This may emerge in the body,
as in the conversion symptoms of paralysis, blindness, etc. in war neurosis that

Freud addressed,15 or as the bodily felt, as a terror, anxiety, etc. The symptom, as
Žižek notes, is a particular pathological signifying formation in the unconscious
that enjoys, resisting interpretation, “a stain which cannot be included into the
circuit of discourse, of social bond/network”, which is the Symbolic, “but which
is at the same time a positive condition of it” (1991a: 207).
Returning to the question of the symptom in Seminar XXIII, Lacan uses the
term sinthome in order to mark a difference in the psychical formation of the symp-
tom in that the sinthome, unlike the symptom, involves a creative process that
upholds the consistency of reality for a subject, “knotting” the Real, the Imaginary
and the Symbolic. This spelling gave Lacan much scope for wordplay through
which he explores the multiple associations, the creative connections, of this mode
of the symptom: synthetic-artificial man, synthesis between symptom and fan-
tasy, Saint Thomas, etc. While Lacan developed and explored this new concept in
Seminar XXIII in relation to the work of James Joyce, his concern was not only
an analysis of Joyce and his writing, but the practice of psychoanalysis and of how
to conceive in a new way the possibility of the end of analysis for the analysand.
Namely, not only by “going through her fundamental fantasy”, gaining distance
from the fantasy framework of her reality, but now also by “identifying” with her
sinthome. Fantasy for Lacan is central for the subject in managing lack in the Other,
and its constitutive alienation, such that, “The subject situates himself as deter-
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mined by the phantasy (. . .) whether in the dream or in any of the more or less
well-developed forms of day-dreaming” (1979: 185).16 The subject’s “fundamen-

tal fantasy”, Chiesa writes, “should be regarded as a ‘compromise formation’ par
excellence: indeed, it is both the consequence of and a reaction (a defence) against
the fact that the symbolic Other of the signifiers is a structurally lacking order”.
Thus, “It both relates the barred subject to the Real lack in the Symbolic, that
of the real object a, and at the same time, ‘veils’ this lack in the unconscious through
the imaginary dimension of the object a.” Thereby it is “the locus in which the
subject emerges as a consequence of the knotting together of the three orders of
the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real” (2016: 142). The goal of psychoanaly-
sis thus became “la traversée du fantasme”, the traversing, the going through, of the
fundamental fantasy by which the subject is able to assume a new relation to the
Other, to desire, as a relation of lack. The question Lacan then poses is:
What, then, does he who has passed through the experience (. . .) who has tra-
versed the radical phantasy (. . .) become? How can a subject who has traversed
the radical phantasy experience the drive? This is the beyond of analysis, and
has never been approached.
(1979: 273)17
In Seminar XXIII it is now the symptom-as-sinthome that achieves the knot-

ting of Real, Imaginary and Symbolic, in a re-thinking of the Real that effects a
displacement of the Symbolic: instituted and upheld by the Name-of-the-Father,
18 Elizabeth Cowie
the phallic signifier. Instead, with the concept of the sinthome, Lacan articulates
a mode of a subjectivity not formed by the desire of the other, the Name-of-the-
Father or the Imaginary. Lacan develops this through a series of permutations of
the tying of the Borromean knot, which thereby produce “holes”. It is a creative
process of naming in working with the holes and knots that are the Real. Central
here is Lacan’s thinking of the Real: “the Real must be sought on the other side,
on the side of the absolute zero”, it is “tied to nothing” (2016: 102, 104). Chiesa
suggests that this zero, or nothing, “equates to the always-already lost mythical jou-
issance of the real Real”. What is required is the semblant, the “fake” jouissance of
objet a, “in order to “make One” – to cork the hole in the symbolic structure”, thus
retrospectively creating “the illusion of an absolute jouissance (or suffering) which
has been lost” (2005: 163). Lacan now proposes a jouissance of the symptom/sin-
thome in the Real distinct from “so-called phallic jouissance” that is “located here
at the conjunction between the symbolic and the real” (2016: 43). Lacan writes
this as JA-barred, “jouissance of the barred Other” for “there is no jouissance of the
Other because there is no Other of the Other” (ibid.). The jouissance that “would
be if it were”, and that was the not-all of feminine – other – jouissance of Encore,
can no longer be JA (which does not exist); instead, replaced by JA-barred, it is
the jouissance of the sinthome, for in identifying with his sinthome the man too,
like the woman, is “not all”. Thus Geneviève Morel argues that, “the ‘not-all’ is
not exclusively reserved for women, in the sense that everyone’s sinthome, rooted
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in the mother tongue, is also ‘not-all’ for him” (2006: 69).18 And the subject is
individualised/individuated (Chiesa’s term), rather than being the “one” of the

symptom that is always addressed to an other (2005: 169).
Thus, rather than the interpretation of the symptom, or the going through
of the fantasy, there is in this mode of ending analysis, an identification with the
symptom-as-sinthome. Lacan declares that, “It is insofar as the unconscious is
knotted to the sinthome, which is singular to each individual, that we may say
that Joyce (. . .) identifies with the individual (. . .) embodying the symptom in
himself” (2016: 147). In Seminar XXIV Lacan speaks of “Knowing how to deal
with your symptom, that is the end of analysis”, and that this knowing, “Might it
be or might it not be to identify oneself – while taking some insurance, a kind of
distance – to identify oneself to one’s symptom? I put it forward that the symptom
could be (. . .) it can be the sexual partner” (1976/1977).19
Roberto Harari, in his complex and subtle reading of Seminar XXIII in How
James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan (1995), emphasises that in
contrast to the subject of the symptom, who is a barred or divided subject, “One
who says ‘I cannot live like this’ (. . .) Conversely, one is sure that ‘one cannot
live without’ the sinthome” (1995: 358–359). The goal then of psychoanalysis for
Lacan is to bring about the creative process involved in the sinthome for the sub-
ject, which Joyce achieved through his writing. Verhaeghe and Declercq declare
that this creative process of identification with the sinthome is, “situated entirely
in the line of femininity”, due to the woman’s “special relationship to the objet a
and the jouissance”, she is “‘naturally’ invited to create something of herself, in
the very process of becoming a woman” (2002: 76). But this process of becom-
ing “one”, of an individuation, cannot be referred back to the sexual differences
of the Imaginary/Symbolic that are instituted by castration. Rather it might be
that “becoming a woman” itself is a process of identifying with her sinthome,
for, as Lacan states, “The Oedipus complex is, as such, a symptom”. “Everything
is sustained in so far as the Name-of-the-Father is also the Father of the Name,
which doesn’t make the symptom any the less necessary” (2016: 13). Moreover,
“The Name-of-the-Father can just as well be bypassed (. . .) on the condition that
one makes use of it” (ibid.: 116). The Name-of-the-Father intervenes to knot
the Symbolic and the Real, interposing itself between the child and the desire of
the m/Other and its ravages, and it is a role that is not necessarily required to be
undertaken by the child’s biological father, or even by a man. Rather, it is the
function that is central, namely as figuring the social laws and conventions that are
also recognised by the mother. Further, Lacan wrtites that:
this fourth element (. . .) in the knot of the symbolic, the imaginary and the
real. There is, however, another term for this (. . .) what is involved in the
Name-of-the-Father, at the very degree to which Joyce bears it out, with
what it would be most suitable to call the sinthome.
(Ibid.: 147)
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We suffer our symptom, and it was Freud’s work with his patients’ symptoms that
led him to propose the unconscious of psychoanalysis. But if there is no sexual dif-

ference in the unconscious, rather there is the symptom, there can be no “feminine
way” that is not also a symptom-as-sinthome. What also emerges is the possibility
of a sexual relation, but only,
To the extent that there is a sinthome, there is no sexual equivalence, that is

to say, there is a relation (. . .) Where there is relation, it is to the extent that
there is sinthome, that is to say, to the extent that the other sex is supported
by the sinthome.
(Ibid.: 84)
The “other sex” here for Lacan is woman for the man, however I suggest that
this is more simply the “other of my (sexual) desire” if, as Lacan said, one may
line up on one side or the other in the formulae of sexuation. Indeed this is what
Lacan suggests in Seminar XXIV where he says that this other “can be the sexual
partner” (1976/1977: 3). In Seminar XXIII, however, Lacan declares “If a woman
is a sinthome for any man, it’s quite clear that another name needs to be found for
what is involved in man for a woman, since the sinthome is characterized precisely
by non-equivalence” (2016: 84). Harari argues, however, that a different view
emerges in his talks from the Journées de l’École freudiènne de Paris (9 July 1978),
for Lacan now suggests that “So much so that I consider you all out there, insofar
as you are, you have every Jack as sinthome his Jill. There is a he-sinthome and
20 Elizabeth Cowie
a she-sinthome (. . .) that’s all that’s left of the so-called sexual relation” (Lacan,
quoted in Harari 1995: 209). Harari adds that what is left
is for every man to take his woman and vice versa, always as sinthome. Thus
the sexual relation, or all that’s left of it, is an intersinthomal relation. This is
the “repaired” remains of the “remaining” bound sexual relation in accord-
ance with whatever one’s sinthome incarnates.
(Ibid.)
This is why femininity and masculinity are performances, masquerades, a taking on

of a role that also divides the subject in herself.
In his reading of Seminar XXIII, Roberto Harari writes: “What, then, did
Joyce carry out by means of his writing, according to Lacan? Nothing less than the
mise en scène of this quadruple knot” (1995: 62). In his discussion of Joyce’s writing,
Lacan comments as well on the difficulty of his language, its deformations:
Joyce writes English with these peculiar refinements that mean that he dis-
articulates the tongue, the English tongue (. . .) Don’t imagine that this only
begins with Finnegans Wake. Long before, notably in Ulysses, he had a way
of chopping up sentences that inclined that way. It is truly a process that is
exerted in the direction of finding another use for the language in which he
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writes, a use that is far from ordinary. This is part and parcel of his savoir-faire
[his know-how].

And later Lacan speaks of Joyce’s
(2016: 59)
speech that comes to be written while being broken apart, pulled to pieces –
to the point that he ends up dissolving language itself (. . .) imposing on lan-
guage itself a sort of fracturing, a sort of decomposition, which makes it so
that there is no longer any phonatory identity.
(Ibid.: 79)
But also that,
Joyce didn’t know that he was fashioning the sinthome, I mean that he was
simulating it. He was oblivious to it and it is by dint of this fact that he is a
pure artificer, a man of savoir-faire, which is what is likewise known as an artist.
(Ibid.: 99)
Lacan then asks, “Why is Joyce so unreadable? We must indeed endeavour to

imagine why this is so. It might be because he doesn’t stir any sympathy in us.” To
answer this Lacan returns to the question of the link and asks, “Why shouldn’t it hap-
pen that a knot should fail to be Borromean, that it should be botched?” (ibid.: 131).
This arises if the third ring, the Imaginary, passes between the ring R, the Real,
and ring S, the Symbolic. “It slides, and the imaginary relationship has no locus”
(ibid.). Lacan then introduces the possibility of a correction to “this mistake, this
fault, this lapsus”, which is achieved by
the Ego as rectifying the wanting relationship, namely what, in the case of
Joyce, does not tie the imaginary in a Borromean fashion to the link between
the real and the unconscious. Through this artifice of writing, I would say
that the Borromean knot is restored.
(Ibid.)
In the very fabrication of his writing, Joyce is restoring the knot through tying
together the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, which is sinthome (ibid.: 44).
Harari posits the “subversive implications of the sinthome” (1995: 358), and
argues that for analysts, it is not a matter of creating Joycean doubles, but rather
of bringing “about in the analysand an inventiveness (. . .) to realise a change of
discourse to allow access to a new perception of what is implied by letters and
invention, thus to new signifiers” (ibid.: 359). It is this that can arise, as well,
in the creative process without analysis, as Joyce did. For Lacan, Harari argues,
Joyce marks a rupture in the very conception of art and literature so that “the
reader can only feel elided, brushed aside” (ibid.: 231). Indeed, Lacan declares,
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“The symptom in Joyce (. . .) stands no chance whatsoever of hooking anything
of your unconscious” (2016: 145). And Harari writes that “Joyce is forbidding,

dumbfounding, in that he prevents imaginary identification. In the face of this,
interpretations emerge that are inductive or induced, induced by this sinthomatic
writing that ‘forbids’ our access to its supposed clear sense” (1995: 231).20 We are
nevertheless engaged by the sinthomatic in Joyce’s writing, “addressed”, which as
such involves a certain form of identification as addressee, as one who “hears”
Joyce, but a hearing that will be “awry”, as Žižek suggests of the anamorphosis in
Holbein’s painting of the Ambassadors (1991b: 90–91), following Lacan’s discus-
sion of it in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1979: 88–89). In the
painting we only see the smear of paint as a skull when we move position, a paral-
lax where two different positions of view produce meanings that are incompatible,
and no synthesis or mediation is possible. Similarly, the holding of meaning made
possible by the Imaginary and Symbolic is penetrated and made uncertain by the
Real of Joyce’s project in his writing, in an undoing of “proper” sense. Joyce’s
wordplay or word deformation/defamation opens us to the problem of sense and
sense-making; producing a gap in meaning that is the Real in Lacan’s sense.
The sinthome and cinematic enjoyment

Lacan asks, in Seminar XXIII, “In what way is artifice expressly able to target
what presents itself in the first instance as a symptom? In what way can art – the
artisanal – foil, as it were, what imposes as a symptom?” (2016: 14). And,
22 Elizabeth Cowie
How can an art target in an expressly divinatory way the substantialization

of the sinthome in its consistence, but also in its ex-sistence and in its hole?
(. . .) How is it that someone has been able to target through his art the ren-
dering of this fourth term [that is] essential to the Borromean knot.
(Ibid.: 28)21
It is this question that I address in the next section. For Lacan it is the letter and
writing that are central, as signifiers, and he rarely discussed films or the photograph,
instead he developed his theory through considerations of painting and literature.22
The art that I am concerned with in this chapter is the cinematic: film, moving pic-
tures and the ways in which the Real – as that which disturbs Imaginary unity and
Symbolic forms by reposing lack – might be engaged in film and thereby enabling
a questioning of our imagined and Imaginary constructions of self and other – of
ideology – that are themselves social constructions. My question here is: can film – as
image and sound – not only confront us by a Real, a gap in meaning and in meaning-
creation, but also knot the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic such that, as well
as producing “induced” interpretations, we are also engaged by the sinthomatic that
imposes in relation to a certain non-sense? I will explore this question by consider-
ing the sinthome in film in three interrelated ways: in relation to a particular filmic
character and the emergence in the film’s narrative, its storyworld, of what might be
understood as her sinthome. In relation to how a film as an artefact, a figural work,
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might figure as sinthome for the author/director, such as Lacan examines in the
work of James Joyce. And in relation to the way in which we as embodied viewers

and listeners might be engaged by film in relation to it as sinthome, in a creative
response. The two films that I want to consider as sinthomatic, The Piano (Jane
Campion, 1993) and Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964), each centre the problem
of desire and the sexual between men and women but, unlike in Joyce, their focus is
a woman character. And both films conclude with a poem that both jars the sense –
and the satisfaction – of their endings, and renders the fourth term, the sinthome.
The Piano is a Gothic romance set in the lush and exotic sub-tropical forests of
nineteenth-century New Zealand. It centres on Ada McGrath who, at the film’s
opening, has arrived to marry Alisdair Stewart, the New Zealand colonist with
whom her father has arranged her marriage, for she is an unwed mother of a young
daughter. The Piano is also a story of masculine desire: on the one hand of Stewart,
for whom Ada is a wife he has obtained through an arrangement much as he will
later obtain land from Baines. To him she is a possession, but also an object of
desire, yet who he wishes to be desired by, but doesn’t know how to address his
demand for love, and approach her. On the other hand, and in contrast, Baines
will desire Ada because she is a subject of desire, and he wishes her to desire him as
she desires her piano. The film’s powerful effect on audiences is testified in many
writings on it, as Barbara Klinger notes, “taking up sustained residence in their
imaginations and emotions” (2006: 19).
It is in the entanglement of desire and piano that Ada moves from symptom to
identifying with her sinthome, going through her fundamental fantasy to identify
with her sinthome. The voice that the audience hears in the film’s opening nar-
ration is, we are told, “not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice”, for Ada has
not spoken a word since she was 6 years old and no one, including herself, knows
why. She says that she does not think of herself as silent because of her piano,
and through its sounds she expresses herself, but her music is not a language and
instead she employs sign language, for which her daughter – Flora – serves as the
interpreter. When Ada tells Flora about her father she explains through gestures
that she didn’t need to speak, for “I could lay thoughts out in his mind like they
were a sheet”, but they didn’t marry because he became frightened, “and stopped
listening”. It is Ada’s muteness that, I suggest, is her symptom, and that she enjoys
through her piano as her “voice” – as the way she makes sounds. Her muteness, as
her symptom, is, as Žižek notes, not part of the circuit of discourse, and thus of the
social bond/network (1991a: 207). Her intense attachment to her piano is both a
plot element, and, as her enjoying/jouissance, it is entangled with her sexuality and
desire. Lacan, in Seminar XXIII, writes of analysis as teaching the analysand, “to
perform a splice between his sinthome and the parasitic Real of jouissance” that
is jous-sens, enjoyment-in-sense (2016: 58). Thus Žižek argues that “Symptom as
sinthome is a certain signifying formation penetrated with enjoyment” (emphasis in
original), and it is “the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives
consistency to the subject” (1991b: 207). It is in the “splicing” that the sinthome
is joined to jouissance.
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Ferried from the ship on to shore after her long journey, Ada and Flora are
forced to stay all night, finding shelter under the canopy of Ada’s boned hoop

petticoat, until Stewart arrives with Maori porters for their luggage. But her piano
is left on the beach, as a burden whose transport Stewart sees no justification for.
Missing it, Ada persuades Baines to take her and Flora to it; as she plays he becomes
fascinated by her vivid enjoyment, while Flora dances cartwheels and constructs
a shell sea horse on the sand. Baines wants the piano-as-Ada, and offers Stewart a
piece of land he has wanted, but cannot afford, instead Baines says he will exchange
it for Ada’a piano, but he’d then need to have piano lessons. Stewart is eager to
make the deal and offers Ada as a teacher. Baines’ fascination is now desire, for
he then bargains with Ada, offering her a piano key in exchange for each piece of
clothing she disrobes, and allowing him to touch her, so that she can “earn” her
piano back. He becomes disgusted, however, at his effective prostitution of Ada,
saying, “I want you to care for me, but you can’t”, and gives her back her piano,
and thus her body (in one scene, Baines, naked, caresses and embraces the piano),
a gesture that reverses his earlier exploitation of her in a recognition of Ada as a
subject of desire. It is now that she comes to desire him, sexually, as she had not her
husband, and she goes to him. Flora, spying on them, sees them together and tells
Stewart – who she now calls papa – of their relation. He then observes them mak-
ing love, and next day Stewart intercepts Ada after her visit to Baines and attempts
to rape her but is interrupted by Flora calling “Mama! Mama! They’re playing your
piano”. Stewart then boards Ada and Flora up in their house, imprisoning them.
Learning that Baines is leaving the area, Ada seeks to send Baines a declaration of
24 Elizabeth Cowie
her love – a piano key – via her daughter but Flora, fearing for the loss of their
home, takes it instead to Stewart, who in a rage of jealousy cuts off Ada’s index fin-
ger, thereby depriving her of her ability to play her piano, the symbol/symptom/
sinthome of her jouissance, and of her desire for Baines. That night, as Ada sleeps
restlessly, he tells her of his anger, that he meant to love her, but had “clipped your
wings”. Then, while singing a lullaby, he sees she is very hot and gently removes
the bedclothes and caresses her – as she had done to him earlier one night after
her incarceration. Now, however, he is sexually aroused and starts to remove his
clothes to penetrate her but is stopped when he sees her looking at him, and he
murmurs “What?” as if she had spoken.
Stewart now takes his gun and goes to Baines, but instead of killing him, asks
“Has Ada ever spoken to you . . . in words?” When Baines says no, Stuart tells him
he heard her, “here . . . in my head”, and though he did not see her lips move, she
said, “I am afraid of my will, of what it might do, it is so strange and strong . . . I
have to go, let me go. Let Baines take me away, let him try to save me”. He tells
Baines to go, take her away, for Stewart just wants it all to be a “bad dream”. Ada
and Flora leave with Baines, together with her piano that is carefully loaded on
to the small boat alongside them. Once at sea she asks Baines to throw her piano
overboard but, in error, a rope around it catches her foot and she is dragged into
the water with it. She struggles free, choosing life (without the piano) over death
by drowning. In the epilogue we see her learning to speak again as we see her play-
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ing another, different piano, enabled by her new shiny metal index finger, heard
tapping on the piano keys. She says that she imagines her piano in its grave in the

sea, and herself suspended above it, which “lulls me to sleep” and that “It is a weird
lullaby, and so it is; it is mine”. She then recites the first three lines of Thomas
Hood’s poem “Silence”, which also opened the film: “There is a silence where
hath been no sound. There is a silence where no sound may be – in the cold grave,
under the deep deep sea”. This now-remembered scene in which she declares “not
that” to death, and to her piano, is the mise-en-scène of her “choice”, to live and to
speak, it is her identification with her symptom-sinthome.23 In its remembering it is
the scene of an epiphany for Ada. An epiphany takes something existing and makes
something new of it. Lacan writes in relation to Joyce, “It’s there for the reading in
Joyce that epiphany is what makes it so that, by virtue of the fault, the unconscious
and the real are tied together” (2016: 134). The “fault” here is the “error” of the
rope entwining her foot that arises from Ada’s declaration “not that” in relation to
her piano. “The ‘but not that’”, which Lacan declared, “is what I am introducing
in this year’s seminar on the sinthome” (ibid.: 6). Such a “not that” Harari argues,
“is a “reaction”, and the “beginning of an escape from the subjection to the neu-
rotic symptom – regarding which the sinthome, in its singularity, would entail a
break from these subjective positions” (1995: 32).
As spectators of this sinthomatic scene/seen do we not feel a disappointment
with the strangeness of this abrupt happy ending, and thus a break in our identifica-
tion with Ada and her story of resistance? This we must, for it is Ada’s sinthome,
which has “no chance whatever of hooking anything of your unconscious”
(Lacan 2016: 145). Yet audiences are “hooked” by the film, in an embodied
response of both delight and puzzlement. Delight in a Gothic heroine who defies
patriarchy and makes her escape.24 What disturbs, however, is a “strangeness”, a
gapping of meaning, which Campion has introduced – indeed that is present in all
her films.25 We experience this “gapping” not only in relation to the sudden happy
ending, but at the very beginning, with the impossibility of Ada’s “mind’s voice”
speaking to us, which the film opens with. There are also the abrupt cuts to scenes
not directly contributing to the film’s plot, for example, the performance by the
white settlers of the story of Bluebeard and his wives – a story of male power and
violence over women – to which the Maori spectators react as if the murders are
really happening. Or the cut to Flora hugging trees, copying her Maori playmates,
with its sexual implications, for which Stuart forcibly reprimands her for what he
calls her “dirtying” of the tree trunks, and then makes her scrub them “clean”.26
Most signally, this strangeness pervades the final shots. Ada’s symptom – her
muteness – was supported by her piano, but in choosing to live she abandoned
it and the piano lost, drowned, becomes her muteness lost. In her identification
with the poem that is “a weird lullaby”, her muteness/the piano drowned is con-
signed to its grave under the sea. Her shiny new metal finger is then the signifier
of her identification with her sinthome – her “piano lost” – and it figures both
a jouissance that is phallic and a “castration”, a limitation on enjoyment; and it
does so not only visually but also in its sound, the jarring noise as it hits the key.
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Here is the mise en scène of the quadruple knot of Real, Imaginary, Symbolic and
sinthome that Harari noted, a creative process of invention. As sinthome, Ada’s

prosthetic finger signifies the tying of the Real with the Imaginary and Symbolic,
closing the gap, the aporia, which, for example, the gaze as objet a opens us to,
namely of an irreducible Real. At the same time the Real is figured in the violence
that the metal prosthetic finger references, namely Stewart’s violent attack on her
enjoyment of her symptom/her piano playing when he hacked it off in anger at
her adultery with Baines. Not only does the film narrate a feminine desire, and
sinthome, but it also re-poses the difficulties – as well as different possibilities – of
masculine desire, and love.
In Gertrud, too, feminine desire and its difficulties are central, and in this film
as well a poem figures the sinthomic. Gertrud was Carl Theodor Dreyer’s last film,
and that he felt was one of his most important works, what is also centered is a
woman’s desire for love, which remains unfulfilled, and that is explored in rela-
tion to masculine desire through its three male characters’ relation to Gertrud.27
The film’s plot, its central enigma in Roland Barthes’ sense28 – both for the
other characters and for the spectator – is the love that its protagonist, Gertrud,
seeks from each of the men, and it is in the filmic narration of her quest that the
symptom/sinthome appears. Dreyer has said that “I’m interested in generally a
single person in the film – Joan of Arc (1928), Day of Wrath (1944), and generally
women” (1966: 62), and these are often a female character who stands opposed to
masculine hypocrisy, to the oppressive structures of church, state and patriarchal
convention, even at the cost of her life. Gertrud is another such character, but
26 Elizabeth Cowie
whose steadfast commitment does not lead to her death. While Dreyer’s films are
not autobiographical, the emergence of what I shall argue is the “rendering of the
fourth term, the sinthome” (Lacan 2016: 28) can be understood as also a figuring
for Dreyer himself.29
The film is based on the play Gertrud by the Swedish writer, Hjalmar
Söderberg, set in the early twentieth century, about his unhappy affair with the
opera singer Maria von Platen, in which he stages the question that baff led Freud:
What does woman want? Dreyer, however, has reversed the narrative perspective
of Soderberg’s play from that of the men and their loss of Gertrud, to that of
Gertrud and her gospel of love, and in doing so poses the problem of the question
itself, namely, as Lacan identifies it, that there is no sexual relation. Dryer retains
the three main characters from the play,30 as well as using scenes and dialogue,
but he places the spectator very differently: narratively, by centering Gertrud,
and by changing the play’s story arc in the epilogue he added. And he changes
the play filmically, by his highly formal and stylised filming and mise en scène. It
is through Dreyer’s deployment of both narrative form and film form that the
sinthomic appears.
Gertrud is a former singer, now married to an ambitious politician, Gustav
Kanning, but this marriage has become (or always was) without love on her part,
though not without sexual passion. Gertrud instead finds love with a young com-
poser, Erland Jansson. He is revealed, however, to be unworthy of her by Gabriel
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Lidman, her former lover and a celebrated poet returned home to receive the hon-
ours of his country and, perhaps, to persuade Gertrud to return to him. Gertrud

had left Lidman when she discovered that he saw her love for him as a distraction
from his work and hence as secondary to his more serious project as a poet. At the
end of the play she leaves all three men, each of whom has failed to meet her ideal
of love, but in the film she goes to Paris with her friend Axel Nygren – a character
not in the play – to study dreams and psychoanalysis.
In the film each man Gertrud has loved fails her by showing that she is not suf-
ficient to his desire; Kanning says, “But Gertrud, dear, love can’t fill a man’s life.
It would be ridiculous, for a man”; while Lidman had earlier written alongside
his sketch of her profiled face, “woman’s love and man’s work – enemies from
the start”; and for Erland she is “too proud”, in refusing to share him with other
women. Gertrud, for these men, is the objet a, cause of their desire and their symp-
tom, which is not love. Thus Gertrud also fails each of them, her jouissance being
elsewhere in her demand for love, which appears in her response to Erland’s music,
seen when he plays for her and she sings the words of his “Serenade”: “The dark-
ness has formed a pearl, The night has borne a dream. Hidden, it will grow inside
me, Blindingly white and tender”. This scene is the prelude to the love-making,
while the song references Freud’s account of the formation of the symptom as like
that of a pearl (1905/1953: 83). Gertrud had, she says, pursued Erland, and she
“doesn’t understand” her love for him.
While in the play Gertrud’s pursuit of love leads her to loneliness, in the film
this is reversed; Gertrud identifies as a woman of free will, consciously choosing to
forsake these men’s love, and thereby she follows Lacan’s demand that one should
not give up on one’s desire, “given that desire is understood here (. . .) as the
metonymy of our being” (1992: 321). Moreover what Gertrud declares to each of
her three lovers is not simply “not you”, but more importantly, it is an affirmation
of “love” and thus a declaration of “not that”: not that kind of love each offered
her, namely of woman-as-symptom. Here arises, as in The Piano, the “but not
that” which Lacan introduced (2016: 16), and Harari argued was the “beginning
of an escape from the subjection to the neurotic symptom” (1995: 32). The love
that Gertrud sought was on the one hand a love that each man was not capable of
because, as symptom, she was “not all” for them in their lives; on the other hand
their lives were “not all” without her. For Gertrud, there is an “all of love” in
loving that she demands, and it is here that we can see her symptom-as-sinthome
in the repetition of her demand, while in leaving each of the men she acts out the
impossibility of being for them their symptom.
Dreyer, however, added an entirely new sequence in the film as an epilogue,
in which we see Gertrud – now very elderly – meet for the last time with her old
friend Axel Nygren. Dreyer, while he justified the scene as drawing on comments
Söderberg had later made (cited by Rosenbaum 1995: 111), he writes that his cen-
tral concern in introducing the epilogue was to ensure sympathy for Gertrud at the
film’s closure, rather than ending with her running away to Paris, “and the public
had the satisfaction to see this woman didn’t break down and she didn’t regret.
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She had chosen solitude and she accepted it” (Dreyer 1966: 36). Dreyer replaces
loneliness with solitude, removing the sense of absolute tragedy in Söderberg, and

by giving her a life after her lovers – namely her work in Paris – Dreyer makes
Gertrud a woman of her own choices and not a woman who sacrifices herself to a
fatalistic ideal of a reciprocated love.
The sympathy, or even identification, that the film could invoke might include
being moved by and admiring her commitment to love, perhaps even being envi-
ous of the integrity of her commitment, and of the way in which it sustains her.
That is, we might envy her sinthome, to which nevertheless we cannot connect!
We may of course identify with the place of addressee of Gertrud’s love – as one
who fails her, as Gabriel did when he ridiculed her love; or perhaps identify as the
one who could return her love and thus who does know, in reviewer Kirk Bond’s
words: “really what love is” (1966: 68). Tom Milne describes Gertrud as a film
“about a rather tiresome woman mid-way between an Ibsen bluestocking and a
Strindberg shrew whose behaviour seems almost like an advertisement for wom-
en’s rights” (1971: 168).31 Nevertheless, he sees beneath “its naturalistic surface, its
near-Ibsen conflicts, that it is Dreyer’s most mysterious and personal, most super-
natural film, glowing with a more secret magic than any previous work” and “the
whole film echoes like counterpoint for two voices – ‘I love you’ and ‘Come with
me’ – which never quite coincide” (ibid.: l70–l71). Rejecting the story and what
he calls its “almost dogged literalness” of treatment, another meaning is obtained
whereby Milne comes to find a position, a place of address, of the impossibility of
the two discourses: of the masculine and the feminine.
28 Elizabeth Cowie
Love for Lacan, is similarly not straightforward for, in his seminar on anxiety,
he declares that,
What we give in love is essentially what we haven’t got and when this not
having comes back at us there is most certainly regression and at the same
time a revelation of the way in which we have left him wanting, so as to
represent this lack.
(2014: 141)
Instead, in Encore, Lacan points to love as the illusion that the sexual relation “stops
not being written”, and thus “doesn’t stop being written” (1999: 144). It is this
illusion that Gertrud addresses.
In the epilogue, many years later Axel visits Gertrud on the occasion of her
birthday, bringing her a copy of his new book, and she returns to him the letters
he had sent her for, with their “warm and good words spoken from your heart”,
she does not want strangers to read, and he then burns them in the fire – a cor-
responding act of closure. He asks her if she has ever written poetry, and in reply
Gertrud reads to Axel her short poem written at the age of 16, that she calls her
“gospel of love”:
Just look at me. Am I beautiful?

No.
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But I have loved.
No. Not for distribution

Just look at me. Am I young?
But I have loved.

Just look at me. Do I live?
No.
But I have loved.
And with quiet satisfaction she tells Axel that she has asked the words “Amor
Omnia” – love is everything – to be on her gravestone. It is here that Gertrud’s
identification with her symptom-sinthome appears, namely in the identification
realised in Gertrud’s avowal in her poem, “Just look at me. Am I beautiful? No.
But I have loved”, whereby she asserts her being and her agency without reference
to the other of her loving, and thus independently of either the other’s recipro-
cation or its absence. The anticipatory grammar of the poem written as a young
girl, in which being beautiful is denied while having loved is claimed, implies a
future time that is identified with, in which “being beautiful” – object of desire/
symptom for men – is denied. Instead she affirms herself as “having loved”, in an
identification that secures her consistency as an individual, her individuation. Her
identification with the sinthome is a naming of her Real, individualising the lack
in the Symbolic as other than the Name-of-The-Father, and thereby assuming the
real lack in the Other (Chiesa 2005: 188).
Gertrud was for Dreyer a highly personal project, demonstrated both by his very
different scripting of Gertrud’s story, and in his film form that, pared down and
simple but at the same time foregrounded, is like Joyce’s wordplay. The filmic
strategies in Gertrud continually distance the spectator to produce a sense of separa-
tion, while also experienced as portending. The very long takes result in a sense
of elongation or extension to scenes unrelieved by shot changes or point-of-view
“insights”; and the similarity of scenes organised around dialogue exchanges – with
characters moving between chairs, sofas, chair arms, benches, etc. as they talk to
each other but rarely gaze at one another or are shown exchanging looks – produces
an awareness of form as such.32 It is through his film form that Dreyer enables the
film’s “secret magic” that Milne writes of, and that Jean-Luc Godard saw as “equal,
in madness and beauty, to the last works of Beethoven” (cited in Rosenbaum
1995: 114).33 As such it is a mode of “gapping”, a perceived incompleteness of
visual meaning. In the epilogue, however, Dreyer relents on this highly formal
style, and now shows Gertrud and Axel exchanging looks as they reminisce about
their past together, introducing an intimacy absent earlier. The scene in which she
takes her poem from her desk, then joins Axel at the sofa and reads it to him is a
single shot some five minutes long. They are initially framed in medium-close two
shot, with the fire, burning brightly, seen in the background between them, and
they look directly at each other as they talk. Gertrud, answering Axel, affirms that
she regrets nothing, and declares, “I suffered much and often made mistakes, but I
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have loved”. The shot ends as they each rise from the sofa and walk to the door, as
Gertrud describes how she has imagined Axel in the future visiting her grave and

picking the anemones growing on it, and she tells him “Take it as a word of love
that was thought, but never spoken”. But she says this in closure, for she now asks
him to go, “otherwise we’ll end up by running off to Paris”, and the shot ends as
they say goodbye and she stands at the door he has exited, in medium shot, watch-
ing him leave. It is only now that there is a POV sequence, filmed in four reverse
field shots, first of Axel in long shot walking away, then turning to wave goodbye,
second of Gertrud as she waves back to Axel seen from her vantage point, but now
in the medium shot thus we do not see her from Axel’s position. The third and
fourth shots repeat the first two, as Axel picks up his hat and coat then looks back
and again waves to Gertrud, then the film cuts to Gertrud as in shot three, who also
waves then slowly shuts the door. The sound of church bells ringing and music that
were heard at the beginning of the epilogue are now heard again as the film ends.
Dreyer’s shot composition and absence of POV and shot/reverse-shot edit-
ing earlier in the film can be understood figuring Gertrud as “caught” by the
gaze/desire of these men who cannot love her as she desires. Indeed it is this that
is directly alluded to in the painting Dreyer positioned behind Gertrud at the
reception for Lidman, of a naked woman pursued by hounds, which startles and
distresses her, as well as the mirror Gabriel gave her so that she might see how
beautiful she is. But in filming Gertrud and Axel’s leave-taking through these
POV shots Dreyer is visually presenting an epiphany, of Gertrud now “free” of
the gaze. Dreyer suspends narrative, storytelling, in this sequence while the closed
30 Elizabeth Cowie
door beyond which is Gertrud is both a closure and a holding, the woman, perhaps
mother, gone but there, free in herself.34 What is framed by the cinematic is the
knotting of the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic that is the sinthome, for “through
his art”, as Lacan suggests, Dreyer is producing a “rendering of this fourth term”
(2016: 28). The sinthome is a naming of the Real, and it is given a material exist-
ence, a consistence, in the film form through these four reverse field shots, but,
because only two of the shots – namely Gertrud’s – are true POV shots, it also
introduces the camera’s gaze that is external to Gertrud as a subject. It is an other-
ness, a strangeness – ex-sisting, that nevertheless insists and thus a hole, a gap in the
repeated shots/views that nevertheless re-mark lack for the subject for the specta-
tor and perhaps for Dreyer, as his sinthome. As such, this highly conventional shot
sequence is a visual, that is cinematic, equivalent of Gertrud’s poem, in its knotting
of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.
In this discussion what I have sought to show through my exploration of each
film in relation to what Lacan identifies in his term “sinthome” and his concept
of the “not that”, is the subject’s individuation without the phallic signifier. I see
this arising not as a “feminine way”, but rather as other or as indifferent to the
sexual difference that, I argued earlier, is posited by the Symbolic order for, as
Lacan asserts: “The subject’s sexual position (. . .) is tied to the symbolic apparatus”
(1993: 171). Our identification as sexed beings is an identification as sexual, and
as sexually different in the unconscious and in the subject as a conscious felt, but
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the two may not be the same. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other and
thus belongs to the Symbolic order, for as Lacan argues in Seminar XXIV, “It is

the Other with a capital O that is at stake in the unconscious. I do not see how
one could give a sense to the unconscious, except by situating it in this Other,
the bearer of signifiers” (1976–1977: 3).35 This Other, which is also the m/Other,
introduces the Real of lack in that it desires. The naming and names of sexual
difference both institute and attempt to assuage this lack but whose failure the
symptom attests to. For Lacan, the concept of the sinthome as knotting the Real,
Symbolic and the Imaginary is a naming of one’s Real, one’s lacking, which is, it
seems, indifferent to sexual difference. In conclusion, therefore, I speculate that
what we name as our sexual difference is itself a sinthome.
Notes
1 Cited by Ernest Jones in his biography Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (1953: 421).
Bonaparte’s answer, if any, is not recorded by Jones. Freud writes, in “The Question
of Lay Analysis”, “We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But
we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women
is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology” (1926/1959: 212). The implicit reference to the
African continent has been much commented upon for its problematic implication of
the unknowability of those placed as other. Equally problematic is the suggestion in the
metaphor that “the feminine”, like Africa, is a singular territory and that it is only men
for whom feminine desire is a riddle.
2 The phrase is used in following Seminars, especially in Encore in relation to the sexual
relation not being “able to write the sexual relationship” (Lacan 1999: 35).
3 The conclusion of the treatment is “the identification with the Real of the symptom, the
choice of jouissance, and the creation of a neosubject” (Verhaeghe and Declercq 2002:
76), which I explore later in this chapter. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger has similarly iden-
tified the radical implications of Lacan’s concept of the sinthome for the sexual relation
and for femininity in developing her concept of the “matrixial”. She writes: “We need
to give the sinthome a matrixial twist in order to discover what a ‘woman’ can become
in-difference for a woman” (2006: 191).
4 “There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has
to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpreta-
tion that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled
and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream.
This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown” (Freud
1900/1953: 525).
5 Cited by Justin Clemens in Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosphy (2013: 4); Lacan, Autres Écrits
(2001: 314).
6 Joan Riviere used the term in her article “Womanliness as Masquerade”, where she
concluded that there is no difference “between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquer-
ade’ (. . .) whether radical or superficial they are the same thing” (1926: 306). I explored
the role of the masquerade in Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (1997:
239–245).
7 Mitchell in her earlier work had rejected the term gender because its use too often simply
replaced biological determinism with social determinism, leaving out the unconscious.
But she comments that in her recent work she has drawn on the term to address the ways
in which “‘gender’ is different from ‘sexual difference’. I use ‘gender’ for lateral relations,
and ‘sexual difference’ for vertical relations. Vertical relations implicate identifications
with parents, and lead on to descent via reproduction (. . .) Within a psychoanalytic
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framework I would say that sexual difference is ‘achieved’ after the castration complex”,
whereas she argues “gender emerges earlier as a distinction between bisexual children
into girls and boys” (2015: 126).

8 Laplanche’s term in French for “sexual” is in the broader sense that is given in the term
sexuality in English, whereas the usual term “le sexuel” in French retains its connection
to sexue, which designates anatomical difference. Thus he argues “For Freud, le ‘sexual’ is
thus external, if not actually prior, to sexual difference, indeed to gender difference: it is
oral, anal or paragenital [polymorphous perverse]” (2007: 203).
9 The contingency of upright stance in humans that obscures the female genital organs that
in other animals are “perfectly perceptible, visible” (Laplanche 2007: 216).Thus, Laplanche
asks, “Isn’t this contingency an extraordinary destiny? The upright stance makes the feminine
organs inaccessible to perception. Now, this continegency has been elevated by many civi-
lisations, and no doubt our own, to the rank of the major, universal signifier of presence/
absence” (ibid.: 217). In questioning the inevitability of the castration complex Laplanche
points out “After all, in analyses, memories linked to the castration complex are often
found in attenuated form. Attenuated: that is, themselves compromised by what they want
to repress (. . .) ‘le sexual’” (ibid.: 218). This repressing thereby creates it.
10 Lacan, drawing on Riviere’s discussion, writes, “Paradoxical as this formulation may
seem, I would say that it is in order to be the phallus – that is, the signifier of the Other’s
desire – that a woman rejects as essential part of femininity, namely, all its attributes, in the
masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved” (2005:
583). And that, because the woman performs femininity, it “has the curious consequence
of making virile display in human beings seem feminine” (ibid.: 584).
11 The English translation gives the formulation of male side, then refers to “not-whole” for
those placing themselves on the formulation of the right side, but “not-all” is a preferable
translation as used by Lorenzo Chiesa (2016: 3, and throughout).
12 Joan Copjec has shown that the formulae of sexuation and their exceptions should also
be understood through Kant’s classical logic of antinomies of pure reason in which he
argued that mathematical antinomies demonstrated the limits of reason. “His point”,
32 Elizabeth Cowie
Copjec argues, “is that our reason is limited because the procedures of our knowledge have
no term; what limits reason is a lack of reason” (1994: 223, emphasis in original). Her argu-
ment here is that “All pretentions of masculinity are, then sheer imposture; just as every
display of femininity is sheer masquerade. Through his desubstantialisation of sex, Lacan
has allowed us to perceive the fraudulence at the heart of every claim to positive sexual
identity” (ibid.: 234).
13 I have used Cormac Gallagher’s translation here, which is slightly different, including
“contrary to what is said . . .” at the beginning of the sentence “The woman has to . . .”,
producing a slightly different meaning, which is the one I am drawing upon here.
14 I am drawing here on comments by Adrian Price, the translator of The Sinthome in
English, in his keynote paper given at the symposium “Psychoanalysis and the Symptom”,
Sopot, Poland, 7–9 April 2017.
15 On this see Freud’s “Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses” (1919/1955).
16 Adrian Johnston explains that the matheme of fantasy ($ ◊ a), the diamond-shaped “loz-
enge” (poinçon) ◊ can be read as a condensation of four symbols in logic: “conjunction”;
“disjunction” [or]); “greater than”; and, “less than”. The subject’s desires are scripted and
orchestrated by an unconscious fundamental fantasy in which the desiring subject ($) is
positioned in relation to its corresponding object-cause of desire, each of the four aspects
thus being possible variants of this positioning of $ vis-à-vis objet a. “Singular subjects
flesh out conjunction, disjunction, being ‘greater than’, and being ‘less than’ in their own
styles, namely, as their unique fantasies of merger or symbiosis (conjunction), scorn or
refusal (disjunction), mastery or domination (‘greater than’), slavery or submission (‘less
than’), and any number of other possible particularizations of these four basic categories
of rapport”. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan (accessed 19 February 2018).
17 Lacan devoted the year of his Seminar XIV The Logic of Phantasy (1966–1967), to
unravelling the theoretical implications of the inscription of fantasy in the unconscious
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signifying structure. He argued that fantasy would perform the essential function of
“knotting” the psychical registers of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real – and
thus of constituting what Freud called “psychic reality”.
18
Morel is addressing here the central role Lacan gives the “mother”-carer, “The child
who learns to speak remains marked for the rest of his or her life both the words and
the jouissance of the mother (or her substitute). This leads to a subjectivation to her
demand, desire, and jouissance, ‘the law of the mother’, from which one should separate
him – or herself ”.This law, she says, “inherits the properties of the feminine ‘not-all’: it is
an unlimited law”, unlike the law of the father. Both Morel and Lacan, as Laplanche too,
qualify the term “mother” as the central carer, not the biological personal who gave birth
to the child. We might question, therefore, the role of the descriptor “feminine” in the
“not-all” of jouissance (Morel 2006: 69). Morel develops her discussion of the sinthome
in relation to two fascinating case studies.
19 As Adrian Price has noted, Lacan does not consistently use the term sinthome in relation
to the identification with the symptom (see above).
20 Harari writes this as,“The sinthome in Joyce is a sinthome that has nothing to do with you”
(1995: 230).
21 The sinthome ex-sists, eccentric or outside the symbolic order, while the sinthome’s
knotting of the symbolic, imaginary and real, always at the same time inscribes a “hole”, a
gap or gapping, which Lacan demonstrates through his different tying of the Borromean
knots in Seminar XXIII, for holes thereby appear in the space delineated by the threads
of the knotting, just as the knitting of wool in holes are created between the links of
wool. Žižek writes that ex-sistence is Lacan’s expression for “the impossible-real kernel
resisting symbolization” (1991b: 136).
22 In Seminar XXIII, however, Lacan does, having just seen Oshima’s The Realm of the
Senses (1976), which he says he was “taken aback by (. . .) because of its female eroticism”,
by which he means what is involved for the woman in castrating the man after his death
by erotic strangulation, but that “We all know that it’s a fantasy” (2016: 107).
23 Barbara Klinger notes of the piano lost that returns in the film’s final image that
“the viewer is not sure how to interpret its surprise return and the accompanying
depiction of Ada’s other possible fate (. . .) Indeed the mysteries of the interpretive
and affective dimensions of this image have become a mainstay of my viewing of The
Piano” (2006: 24).
24 Vivian Sobchak writes that, “Campion’s film moved me deeply, stirring my bodily senses
and my sense of my body.The film not only ‘filled me up’ and often ‘suffocated’ me with
feelings that resonated in and constricted my chest and stomach, but it also ‘sensitized’
the very surfaces of my skin (. . .) a body that was achingly aware of itself as a sensu-
ous, sensitized, sensible material capacity” (2004: 61–62). See also: Sue Gillett, “Lips and
Fingers: Jane Campion’s The Piano” (1995: 286), and her Views from Beyond the Mirror:The
Films of Jane Campion (2004).
25 Klinger writes of the “inscrutable visual and the inevitable associative processes at work”
in the The Piano, and refers to Barthes’ formulation of a “third meaning” that resonates
with an excess signification (2006: 21; Barthes 1977: 52–68). This is the sense in which I
use the term “gapping”, now in a psychoanalytical context.
26 As many writers have noted, Campion’s use of sexual relations in Maori culture as open
and freer plays to Western ideas of the sexuality of the racial other while nevertheless
foregrounding the problematic role of the white colonialists. This too introduces a gap-
ping, an uncomfortableness, for feminist audiences. For example, Dyson, “The Return
of the Repressed?” and Leonie Pihama’s “Ebony and Ivory: Construction of the Maori
in The Piano”, in Harriet Margolis’, Jane Campion’s “The Piano” (2000: 114–134). And
Laleen Jayamanne, Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis (2001: 48).
27 My discussion here develops my earlier analysis of Gertrud (1997: 248–260).
28 In S/Z Barthes terms the “hermeneutic code” the series of enigmas that are posed by
the narrative, of questions whose answers are suspended, until a final disclosure (1975:
18–19).
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29 This concern may be understood in relation to Dreyer’s personal history, for he was an
illegitimate child whose birth mother was reviled by his adoptive parents, and who had

died painfully as the result of an unsuccessful abortion attempt of another unwanted
pregnancy outside marriage. Growing up lonely and taciturn, as he writes later in a
brief autobiographical sketch, “he reveres and idealizes the image of his real mother (. . .)
regarding her as a victim rather than a villainess”, writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in his
essay “Gertrud as Non-Narrative” (2017: 4), online.
30 Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that in the play all the characters are somewhat unpleasant,
“especially Gabriel, who is more of a wastrel, and Gertrud whose cruel streak and chatter
make her distinctly less heroic” (1995: 111).
31 It is in reviews of the film that the ambivalence to which the demand for love gives rise is
apparent. Kirk Bond writes of it as a soap opera “in which the woman cannot or will not
understand the man has interests of his own that are necessary in the scheme of things.
She must have the man’s total devotion (. . .) here is the rather gratuitous suffering of a
‘woman’s story’”. Yet he also acknowledges that “Dreyer is saying (. . .) that man must
once more know really what love is” (1966: 68, 69).
32 Jacques Rivette, commented that: “If Dreyer’s film (. . .) doesn’t function formally as a
dream, it nevertheless (. . .) prescribes an ‘oneiric’ vocabulary: at once the telling of
a dream and a session of analysis, an analysis in which the roles are ceaselessly chang-
ing; subjected to the flow, the regular tide of the long takes, the mesmeric passes of
the incessant camera movements, the even monotone of the voices, the steadiness of
the eyes – always turned aside, often parallel, towards us: a little above us – the strained
immobility of the bodies, huddled in armchairs, on sofas behind which the other
silently stands, fixed in ritual attitudes which make them no more than corridors for
speech to pass through, gliding through a semi-obscurity arbitrarily punctuated with
luminous zones into which the somnambulists emerge of their own accord” (Rivette
1969, cited by Rosenbaum 1995: 111).
34 Elizabeth Cowie
33 Rosenbaum comments that “one wonders whether [Godard] might have been partly
thinking of the question and answer written by Beethoven as an epigraph to the finale
of the last quartet (the corresponding musical passage figures centrally in 2 Ou 3 Choses
que je sais d’elle): “Muss es sein? Es muss sein!” (Must it be? It must be!)” (1995: 114–115).
34 Rosenbaum, in his very fine discussion of the film, addresses the strangeness of this end-
ing in a way that suggests the sinthome when he writes that this “static image” refers
back to Dreyer’s mother, and is a “nonnarrative realm”, which he describes as “a state
that both precedes and follows any need to acknowledge his father, any necessity to tell
a story, placing narrative within parentheses” (1995: 116).
35 The reference is to the unoff icial translation by Cormac Gallagher, www.
lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/insu-Seminar-XXIV-Final-
Sessions-1-12-1976-1977.pdf.
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Barthes, R. (1975) S/Z. London: Jonathan Cape.
Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill & Wang.
Chiesa, L. (2005) Lacan Le-sinthome. (Re)-Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies, Spring, 157–170.
Chiesa, L. (2016) The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clemens, J. (2013) Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Copjec, J. (1994) Read My Desire. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cowie, E. (1997) Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan
Press.
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Bond, K. (1966) The Basic Demand of Life for Love. Film Comment, 4, 67–69.

Dreyer, C. T. (1966) My Way of Working Is in Relation to the Future: A Conversation
with Carl Dreyer. Film Comment, 4, 62–67.
Dreyer, C. T. (1991) In Double Reflection. New York: Da Capo Press.
Ettinger, B. L. (2006) The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
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Jonathan, J. (2017) Gertrud as Non-Narrative: The Desire for the Image. Available at: www.
jonathanrosenbaum.net/2017/08/gertrud-as-nonnarrative-the-desire-for-the-image.
Fink, B. (1996) The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ:
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Freud, S. (1900/1953) The Interpretation of Dreams. In J. Strachey (ed.) The Standard
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Freud, S. (1905/1953) Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. In J. Strachey (ed.) The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VII. London:
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Freud, S. (1919/1955) Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses. In J. Strachey
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Freud, S. (1926/1959) The Question of Lay Analysis. In J. Strachey (ed.) The Standard
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Freud, S. (1933/1964). On Femininity. In J. Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXII. London: Hogarth Press.
Gillett, S. (1995) Lips and Fingers: Jane Campion’s The Piano. Screen, 36(3), 277–287.
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Teachers of Media.
Harari, R. (1995) How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan. New York:
The Other Press.
Jayamanne, L. (2001) Toward Everyday Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Jones, E. (1953) Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press.
Klinger, B. (2006) The Art Film, Affect and the Female Viewer: The Piano Revisited. Screen,
47(1), 19–41.
Lacan, J. (1965) Seminar XII, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis. Trans. C. Gallagher. Available
at: www.lacaninireland.com.
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C. Gallagher. Available at: www.lacaninireland.com.
Lacan, J. (1979) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. A. Sheridan.
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Lacan, J. (2005) Écrits. Trans. B. Fink. New York: Norton.
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E. Cowie (eds.) The Woman in Question. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
36 Elizabeth Cowie
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University of California Press.
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Way. In L. Thurston (ed.) Essays on the Final Lacan: Re-Inventing the Symptom. New
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Žižek, S. (1991a) The Truth Arises from Misrecognition. In E. Ragland-Sullivan and
M. Bracjher (eds.) Lacan and the Subject of Language. New York: Routledge.
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Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Taylor and Francis

2
HER SKIN AGAINST THE ROCKS,
THE ROCKS AGAINST THE SKY
Revisiting Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
after Morley’s The Falling (2014) and Freud’s
fable of female hysteria1
Davina Quinlivan
Picnic at Hanging Rock is Peter Weir’s stunning 1975 adaption of Joan Lindsay’s
1967 classic novel that follows the mysterious disappearance of a group of school-
girls after a Valentine’s Day picnic in the Australian Outback. Weir’s film is lush,
evocative and elliptical, as oneiric and shimmering as the sun-bleached day itself
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in which the girls vanish from existence: girls lie curled on rocks, their dresses
folded around them while they sleep, voices scatter into the wind. More recently,

the film-maker Carol Morley has directed a similarly sensuous tale, The Falling
(2014), in which a group of British girls experience a wave of hysterical exhaus-
tion, fainting, falling into a deep slumber during a dizzying spell of eerie contagion.
While both films focus on a particular period in the lives of a group of school-
girls, moments set against the backdrop of balmy summer heat, I am interested in
their individual reflections on female hysteria and its embodiment through the
diegetic bodies on-screen as well as formal attributes such as sound, composition
and colour. Freud is well known for his studies in hysteria and the epidemic of
this condition that was most prevalent during the nineteenth century; my choice
of films reflect their contemporary response to hysteria and, specifically, challenge
conceptions of hysteria as a forgotten phenomenon of the past.
Most significantly, Morley is fascinated by the symbolism and imagery of faint-
ing, which, in her film, comes to represent a manifestation of denied or displaced
sexuality, inspired by ‘the explanation traditionally offered for hysterical outbreaks –
particularly in late 17th-century Salem’ (2015a). Salem’s ‘hysteria’ is especially
called to mind during one of The Falling’s most memorable sequences in which
we view the central protagonist, Lydia, carried by other girls, her back against
their hands, her body lifted by their fingers, uncannily evoking the potent imagery
of witchcraft, sleep and the sensuous, female body, so powerfully associated with
Weir’s masterpiece. This chapter will consider the concordances and rich visual and
sonic correspondences between Morley’s film and Picnic at Hanging Rock, tracing
38 Davina Quinlivan
FIGURE 2.1 The Falling.

Source: Courtesy of CAMP/Independent Film Co.
a cinematic genealogy of girlhood, of the mystical and mythic and the questions
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surrounding embodied experience and sensuality that both films invite. This will,
then, lead me to a closer examination of each film’s imaging of female hyste-

ria and the French feminist thought of Hélène Cixous, especially, whose critique
of Freud’s original conception of this notion emphasises not the ‘faulty’ (Cixous
and Derrida 2001: 34) behaviour of girls, but the fecundity of female sexuality
and self-pleasure, each film’s concentrated gestures confounding the logic of the
Freudian, female hysteric. In bringing both The Falling and Picnic at Hanging Rock
together through my examination of the female hysteric, I hope to flesh out further
the affirmative potential of the female hysteric in film and thus reclaim this posi-
tion from a feminist perspective, building on the work of feminist critics such as
Caroline Bainbridge and Lucy Bolton.
Psychoanalysis, feminism, hysteria

Historically linked with femininity for hundreds of years, hysteria’s involuntary,
uncontrollable, somatic symptoms were coming to be understood in the emerg-
ing critical feminist discourse not as a medical condition but a cultural one, an
embodied index of forms of repression (Devereux 2014: 19). While the focus of
this chapter is concerned with Morley and Weir’s films, it is useful to consider
another pertinent representation of hysteria that asserts its cultural position in
contemporary film: David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2012). According
to Cronenberg’s exploration of the love triangle that existed between Sigmund
Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein, female hysteria is a disturbing condition
Her skin against the rocks 39
that binds both body and soul; A Dangerous Method opens with images of Spielrein
(played by Keira Knightley) being transported to the Swiss clinic in which most
of the film is set. While Knightley’s body remains intact, her psychic pain is
conveyed through a series of contortions and jerks, her jaw juts forward and
her hands grapple against the sides of her carriage, smacking down on its win-
dows. The female hysteric is laid bare for all to see. While Cronenberg’s film
ultimately foregrounds Spielrein’s subjectivity and her journey towards recov-
ery, Knightley’s performance in those very first few troubling moments of the
film are emblematic of cinema’s obsession with the image of the female hysteric.
Knightley’s portrayal of Spielrein follows a long line of cinematic ‘hysterics’ indel-
ibly linked with the history of cinema itself. Certainly, the female hysteric has long
provided potent subject matter for popular Hollywood cinema, from the melo-
drama genre of classical Hollywood cinema (Now, Voyager [Irving Rapper, 1942];
Sunset Boulevard [Billy Wilder, 1950], Whatever Happened to Baby Jane [Robert
Aldrich, 1962]) to the psycho-sexual thrillers of the late 1980s and beyond (from
Fatal Attraction [Adrian Lyne, 1987], to Gone Girl [David Fincher, 2014]). The
female hysteric is invariably a cypher for feminine lack, dysfunction and, as epito-
mised by Hitchcock’s oeuvre, the object of misogyny (Vertigo [Alfred Hitchcock,
1958], The Birds [Hitchcock, 1963]). While patriarchal cinema tends to perpetuate
Freud’s ‘myth’ of female hysteria with representations of paranoid and narcissistic
women, art cinema tends to offer up more nuanced, visceral explorations of the
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female psyche and sexual repression such as Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher
(2001) or Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006). Weir and Morley are both auteurs

whose evocative treatment of the subject of female hysteria is represented not only
through the narrative but through the very fabric of their images. For example,
Weir’s depiction of his Australian locations take on an eerie, oneiric presence as
if embodying the psychic ruptures felt by the girls within the narrative, haunting
and strange. Morley films a canopy of branches and grassy textures as if they are
emblems of her protagonist’s interiority, malevolent as well as lush and beautiful.
Furthermore, the specificity of adolescent female hysteria in Morley and Weir’s
films, coupled with their aesthetic innovations, uniquely questions the embodied
implications of hysteria and the bodily registers of female subjectivity such as sen-
sation, sensuous experience and sexuality.
It has been the project of first-, second- and third-wave feminist psychoana-
lytic thought to evaluate and critique Freud’s views on female hysteria: that is,
either directly through rethinking its usefulness and applicability as a way of articu-
lating female experience, or as a contested site, re-examined within the bounds
of post-Freudian analysis. For example, French feminist thinkers such as Luce
Irigaray (1985), Julia Kristeva (1989) and Hélène Cixous (1976) are well known
for their appropriation of Freudian thought, privileging much more generative and
enlightening reflections on the female psyche, of which issues such as depression,
melancholia and desire come to stand for a nexus of emotional and physical condi-
tions complexly reshaping the contours of the (Freudian) feminine. Second-wave
feminism, in particular, saw the development of a new discourse in which, as
40 Davina Quinlivan
Elaine Showalter puts it, ‘hysteria was reclaimed in the name of feminism’ (quoted
in Devereux 2014: 19). Indeed, Morley and Weir’s films can be seen to operate on
this level, as examples of second-wave feminism that appropriate archaic notions
of hysteria and assert female subjectivity, not as enigma (as Freud argues), but as
mobile and fluid.
In the words of Juliet Mitchell (2000), cases of neuroses gave Freud clues to
normal mental formations: dreams were everybody’s every day, or every night,
psychoses, and sexual perversions or inversions were both widespread and could
constitute a choice. In 1905, Freud wrote in his ‘shocking’ case study of a young
hysterical girl, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, otherwise known
as ‘Dora’:
[N]ow in this case history sexual questions will be discussed with all pos-
sible frankness, the organs and functions of sexual life will be called by their
proper names, and the pure minded reader can convince himself from my
description that I have not to hesitate to converse upon such language even
with a young woman.
(Mitchell 2000: 11)
Dora had a nervous cough, she lost her voice and experienced migraines and thus
she was depressed in a way that Freud called hysterical unsociability. Famously,
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Dora walked out on Freud, finally finding her own voice without his help, behav-
iour he merely shrugged off as a form of vengeance. For feminists, Dora remains

a powerful caesura in Freud’s chain of logic, which privileged the Oedipus com-
plex and thus underestimated the power and complexity of female sexuality and
desire, especially desire between female subjects. Indeed, as Mitchell reminds us,
for Freud, ‘the homosexual female, would merely present a crucial ambivalent
mother attachment and paranoia owing to the pre-oedipal period of narcissism and
nothing more’ (ibid.: 55). The Falling and Picnic at Hanging Rock, precisely avoid
such Freudian analyses of female homosexuality; their narratives are erotic and do
depict tenderness and affection between young women, but the classification of
sexuality itself (as either heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual) remains ambiguous
and, more importantly, irrelevant.
Importantly, for Marcia Landy, Hollywood melodrama often employs the
‘psychopathology of hysteria’ in which ‘there is always material which cannot be
expressed in discourse or in the actions of the characters furthering the designs of
the plot, a conversion can take place into the body of the text’ (1991: 272). While
Weir’s and Morley’s films do not subscribe to any of the conventions of the melo-
drama genre, both Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Falling adopt varying aesthetic
modes and formal configurations in order to articulate, in Landy’s words, a hyster-
ical ‘psychopathology’ (ibid.). Indeed, the trope of Dora’s ‘hysterical’ silence, her
withdrawal from linguistic meaning, is echoed through each film’s sound design,
from the subtle, crackling heat and murmuring ambience of Weir’s landscapes
to Morley’s employment of Tracey Thorne’s vocal textures to inspire a sense of
longing, retreat and disharmony. In this sense, sound and the displacement of
the female voice serves to counter Freud’s unconscious misogyny and foreground
silence and non-verbal utterances as emancipatory acts. While the sound of the
female scream, as well as, more generally, the female voice as ‘other’ characterises
the representation of the hysteric in films such as The Birds, the silences and non-
verbal utterances in both Weir and Morley’s films such as the sound of breathing
and sighing conjure the vanished voice and body of Freud’s Dora, a vanishing
point whose subjectivity remains precious and vital to feminist criticism and psy-
choanalysis. Before sound can be further discussed in relation to female hysteria in
The Falling and Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is important to consider how hysteria is
more broadly implicated in the visuality of each film.
Rethinking Hanging Rock

Weir’s film opens with a painterly, beautifully rendered image of Hanging Rock
itself, the last place in which the girls will be seen before they mysteriously vanish
from existence. A faint turquoise sky looms over clusters of dense foliage, bare,
wiry branches and tendrils of soft leaves and clouds interlace above the tip of
the mossy rock. This image is overlaid with the film’s title in an overtly decora-
tive font, its curling flourishes picked out in white, contrasting the dark canopy
of trees in the foreground. The significance of this landscape in the opening
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image is, for a number of critics, geographical and evocative of a national context.
Indeed, for a critic such as Sight and Sound’s James Bell (2012), Weir’s film repre-

sents a broader, post-colonial critique of Australia:
[T]hough not in the Outback, the rock, which rises ominously out of pas-
toral countryside, is a signifier of the older, pre-colonised Australia, and a
reminder of how tenuously the Victorian attitudes of the school sit with the
rugged realities of the country.
Similarly, for Chris Cabin, writing for Slant (2014), the film’s symbolic represen-
tation of its location is most significant: ‘It’s the characters’ ceaseless need to fully
understand, outsmart, and undermine nature’s sway that drives them into fervour
and, often enough, leads them to shuff le off this mortal coil’. While such criticism is
right for acknowledging the tensions between order and chaos, the wild heartlands
of Australia and the repressed ideals of colonial identity, it is the film’s articula-
tion of female hysteria and its very specific, intricate connection with imagination,
desire and collective experience that haunts me most of all, indelibly inscribing a
different sense of girlhood within cinematic history. Indeed, at first glance, the title
images that open Weir’s film portray a romantic landscape twinned, acutely, with
normative notions of femininity, as evoked through its very use of a romantic font
style and pictorial imagery. The titles overtly elicit notions of softness, whiteness,
purity and decorative perfection, yet the longer I dwell on this sublime image, its
calm and stasis pricks at the viewers’ skin, it unnerves and unsettles. Such moments
42 Davina Quinlivan
of queasy anxiety will be prescient of Weir’s unravelling of both landscape and girl-
hood, of femininity and the stultifying, suffocating ideals of beauty that the girls are
forced to reckon with as repressed subjects of Western patriarchal culture as well as,
more specifically, the colonial violence associated with Australian’s history.
Ostensibly, the film begins at Appleyard College, a girls’ boarding school, in
1900. Even before they set out for their picnic, tensions ensue: one of the girls,
Sara, is banned from the expedition and is forced to read a classical poem that she
rebelliously switches for one of her own; while one of the central protagonists,
Miranda, is described by a schoolmistress as a Botticelli angel, hinting not only at
her angelic beauty, but the fable of her existence as an idealised construct of female
identity, condescendingly referring to the unreality of her being. Famously, the
girls are dressed in white Victorian lace, adorned with white gloves and sunhats.
Much of the film’s potent imagery calls attention to the sensuality of these girls:
streaks of hair falling over heavily starched tunics and unfurling from prim, high
collars, then, later, barefoot on the rocks, pale, milky bodies basking in the sun.
These images of abandon and delight play out as key, evocative, sequences that
come to represent the film’s depiction of female hysteria most acutely associated
with the girls’ exploration of Hanging Rock, while the film’s latter sequences of
collective fury and revolt (shouting and defying their school mistresses) represent
the girls remaining at the school and their response to the absence of the others.
Nearly 40 years later, Morley’s The Falling stages a return to similar themes of
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female hysteria, female collectivity and madness. Set in the late 1960s, Morley’s
narrative is loosely based on a real case of mass hysteria in Blackburn in which doz-

ens of girls suddenly fell prey to a bout of collective fainting. In an article for the
BFI, Morley (2015b) herself acknowledges the debt she owes to Picnic at Hanging
Rock, as well as films such as The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999), Don’t Look
Now (Nicholas Roeg, 1973), Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994) and The
Devils (Ken Russell, 1971); these choices alone offer up a distinct sense of the film’s
alchemy, its eroticism and dark subject matter, and its transgressive evocation of
femininity. Most revealing of all, in a beautiful collage of photographs featured in
the article, Morley writes in blue ink beside an image taken from Picnic at Hanging
Rock: ‘mystery, crushes, sound to evoke strangers’ (ibid.). Further, on the key
influence of Weir’s aesthetic and thematic style, Morley writes:
[Weir’s] schoolgirls seemed poetic and enigmatic, like they had stepped out
from a painting. I wanted to be in their gang. The supernatural quality of
the natural world is something I was aiming to achieve in The Falling and
so Picnic was most certainly a film that kept floating about in my mind as I
researched and wrote the script.
(Ibid.)
With her cinematographer, Claire Denis’ frequent collaborator, Agnes Godard,

Morley’s film evokes the eerie pleasures of Picnic at Hanging Rock and its uncanny
universe in which the conservative, patriarchal ideals of external, ordered beauty
and the protocols of school life are steadily undone through the ambivalent, col-
lective power of female adolescents.
While Weir’s film-making style makes use of colour, scale and sound within the
diegesis, adopting an austere, classical form of film-making, Morley’s is rather more
experimental, naturalistic and richly textured through its score by Tracey Thorne
and its brittle, dizzying camerawork and washed out colour palette that has more in
common with 1960s new wave British cinema, apt given the film’s period setting.
Such painterly attributes betray a specific heritage for Peter Bradshaw, invoking
the female hysteric in a culturally specific context: ‘It comes from the heart of a
certain kind of Englishness: as murky, wet and luxurious as the water in which
Millais drowned Ophelia’ (Bradshaw 2015). Certainly, The Falling expands and
elaborates Weir’s sensual climates, its airy miasma of intense female kinship, passion
and psychic disturbance, transposed to English soil, but Bradshaw’s comments tend
to draw too easily parallels between Morley’s film and dominant cultural percep-
tions of female mental illness through Hamlet’s Ophelia, the love object whose
overwrought emotional state leads to suicide. In contrast, both Morley’s and Weir’s
films transgress such objectifying imagery through their refusal to pathologise
female behaviour (characters in The Falling are seen to make attempts at pathologis-
ing female behaviour, but the film does not).2
Set deep within the British countryside at a strict girls school in 1969, the film
represents an intense, affectionate and intimate friendship that develops between
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16-year-olds, Lydia and Abbie. We know little about these girls except Lydia’s
dsyfunctional home life and Abbie’s keenly developing experimentation with boys;

what we do know of them is gleaned almost entirely from Morley’s depiction of
their entanglement, their fascination with each other and the strange feelings of
kinship, doubt and desire that their interactions forge (there are resonances with
another British girl-centred narrative set in the Yorkshire wilds, My Summer of Love
[Pawel Pawlikowski, 2004] and the dark, delirious teenage friendship it represents,
as well as of course Heavenly Creatures [Peter Jackson, 1994]). When Abbie dies in a
bout of fainting shortly after she discovers she is carrying a child, Lydia and the rest
of the school begin to faint, ‘falling’ as the film’s title reminds us, as if under a spell,
like Snow White, or collectively in some sort of trance, communing with the dead
Abbie. During a key sequence, Lydia is seen standing among her classmates, closing
her eyes as she falls slowly backwards, trusting the weight of her body to the other
girls as she arches her back and stretches her arms out, Christ-like, in a ritual that
both commemorates and reenacts Abbie’s death; her willfulness to understand and
ritualise Abbie’s last moments is embodied through fainting as both an intimate act
of love and imaginative play that undermines the strict moral and social codes of
behaviour at the school. Horizontal, with a wave of hands beneath her like watery
reeds and rushes, she reclaims, perhaps, Ophelia’s final pose, not as passive female
object, but dominant emancipator, freeing herself and her schoolmates from the
inertia of repressed emotion, rising from a thicket of tangled fingers and hands.
While Picnic at Hanging Rock opens up questions about mental illness without
necessarily providing answers, addressing the fragile psychic states of its traumatised
44 Davina Quinlivan
young girls, especially through the suicide of Sara at the film’s close, Morley’s
film confronts this subject head-on; from a young male character’s derisive taunt,
‘you’re all mad bitches’, to the school mistress’ frustrated denial that demands her
school not be treated like a mental institution, the girls are at once labelled as
unwell, mentally unstable and hysterical, weak and powerless. However, as Lydia’s
grief is made clear, Morley’s film offers up an increasingly different way in which
to view female hysteria, pointing at the emancipatory powers of collective thought,
embodied subjectivity and erotic fixation. Here, as with Picnic at Hanging Rock, the
girls’ displaced or denied sexuality, as Morley puts it, charges the film with a static
pressure that is felt both within the diegesis and on the body of the film itself. In
order to understand, more closely, the evocation of female hysteria and its affirma-
tional qualities in both films, it is useful to draw attention to the thought of Hélène
Cixous and her response to Freud.
For Cixous and Catherine Clement, in their 1975 book, la jeune nee, there
is much political potential in the concept of hysteria. As Toril Moi writes, both
Cixous and Clement agree that Dora’s hysteria developed as ‘a form of protest, a
silent revolt against male power’ (2001: 330). Certainly, Cixous also uses language
in a way that reclaims the power of silence and the silence of the body, especially.
Most compellingly, in her 1975 play Portrait of Dora, Cixous explores the possibility
of feminine theatre by rewriting Freud’s case study, underscoring the theatrical-
ity of psychoanalytical discourse as the talking cure, using voice, gestures, staging,
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ritual and myth in order to scrutinise the relationship between the semiotics of
symptoms as the acting out of the hysteric body and the Symbolic Order. As Erella

Brown persuasively writes in her article ‘The Lake of Seduction: Body, Acting and
Voice in Helene Cixous Portrait de Dora’,
Cixous, who takes hysteria as a key to both feminine sexuality and performance,
stages Freud’s failure with Dora as a dysfunctional dramatic operation by depict-
ing his insistence on reading his paternal Oedipal model into Dora’s hysteria as
ineffective in regard to the real performative throbbing of the hysteric stage.
(1996: 626)
Brown’s thought is especially significant because she highlights the role of gesture
and enunciation, the hysteric as performer par excellence.
Cixous’ thought seems highly relevant to the role of performance, theatri-
cality, ritual and the emphasis placed on embodiment and the hysteric’s body
in both The Falling and Picnic. Here, hysteria is not simply narratively, or the-
matically explored, but felt through the fabric of each film, their mise-en-scène,
static as well as mobile camerawork, Thorn’s soundtrack and performances; above
all, the sensuality of the body and the highly tactile imagery each film conjures.
When Cixous refers to the ways in which her play allows Dora to carry out ‘the
indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history, giving her liberation by
bringing her into the text’ (quoted in ibid.), she might just as well as be describ-
ing the female protagonists of Picnic at Hanging Rock who undergo such radical
transformations or Lydia’s actions in The Falling in which she is seen to play up to

conceived notions of the female hysteric, as performer and ‘liar’.
With these thoughts in mind, there are certain moments in both films that
emerge as revelatory, corresponding closely with Cixous’ reflection on hysteria
and its dramatic arts, its inherent theatricality and a form of feminine theatre that,
by extension, applies here, to a feminine cinematics. Indeed, for theorists such as
Emma Wilson, Bolton, Bainbridge, Sarah Forgacs and Liz Watkins, French femi-
nism presents multiple, exemplary models of thought through which to develop
fruitful explorations of women on-screen, from Jane Campion to Lynne Ramsay.
Such feminist cinematics are not predicated on the representation of Freudian lack
and/or absence, but rather the specificity of ‘women, the feminine and cinema’
(Bainbridge 2008: 1), to echo Bainbridge’s sentiment in her book A Feminine
Cinematics. I want to consider how The Falling and Picnic at Hanging Rock offer up
a kind of film-making in the feminine that opens up viewers to the ruptures and
contradictions in female identity and patriarchy’s assertion of these traits as femi-
nine lack or failure within society, as Freud would contend.
There are two sequences I wish to explore here: the first in which the girls in Picnic
at Hanging Rock bask in the sun at Hanging Rock and Lydia’s fainting. In Weir’s film,
we see the girls assembled like living sculptures such as those the British feminist sculp-
tor Barbara Hepworth might have cultivated, curled up and eyes closed so that the
light passes through the small ‘o’ shape carved out of their curving midriffs, breathing
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gently as the image frames them collectively, like an ancient ruin. The girls are nei-
ther asleep nor fully awake, meditative and subtly empowered. This image contrasts

dramatically with the pictorial glimpses of femininity the film has offered up until this
point, emphasising their outward appearances, their linguistic and behavioural con-
formity. Similarly, the silences contained within the sequences at the rock become
evocative of the girls’ inner lives, their relinquishing of external reality and their drive
towards self-discovery. Such silences and breaths on the soundtrack directly rupture
and transform our notion of hysteria and of patriarchal cinema, evoking what Wilson
might call an ‘inner cinema’, which she richly explores in her article ‘Identification
and Melancholia: An Inner Cinema of Hélène Cixous’ (2000). This sequence uncan-
nily evokes Dora’s ‘silent revolt’ (Moi 2001), appropriating Dora’s loss of language
and shifting its meaning through the film’s aural soundtrack.
For Irigaray, air corresponds with a particularly feminine form of being in which
the sounds and rhythms of breath, as well as silence, are part of an embodied com-
munion with oneself, ‘returning to oneself’ breath after breath, preserving one’s
subjectivity: ‘woman communicates through air, through blood, through milk and
even through voice and love before and beyond any perceptible thing’ (2004:
xiii). It is worth noting that the hysteric in patriarchal society loses her breath,
she is stifled, hyperventilating, struggling to breathe or give voice to her words, as
Knightley’s portrayal of Spielrein suggests, but Weir’s girls are different, they are
heard differently, as emancipated women in control of their bodies and minds.
The Falling also bears comparison with Cixous’ ‘Portrait of Dora’ through its
more concentrated form of self-reflexivity, its visceral formalism and compelling
46 Davina Quinlivan
account of Lydia as emancipatory presence, the ritual maker and master performer.
In one particular scene, Lydia incites a riot with her response to medication: ‘Kill
the system, it’s killing you!!!’ she screams, rounding up the other girls. Most impor-
tantly, while Lydia mimics Abbie’s symptoms through fainting, she also mimics her
mannerisms. Provoking her peers as well as the school’s authorities, Lydia is seen
with a hand raised to touch the skin under her eye, a game where she puts her
finger in her friends’ mouth, calling to mind the use of mimicry in Cixous’ play.
Here, Lydia masquerades as Abbie, resurrecting her while simultaneously poking
fun at those who do not understand her grief. In close-up, an intimacy is fostered
between viewers and Lydia, as we hear her voice mimic Abbie’s, her face and
gestures slowly, subtly resembling the friend she grieves for.
Further, on a formal level, Morley’s film adopts, in one of its most memora-
ble sequences, a dissolve technique that overlays Abbie’s face, notably, her lips
and cheeks, with a canopy of trees and abstract, stretched shapes suggestive of
sunlight and watery reflections, wryly casting her as a modern Ophelia, prescient
of Lydia’s suicide attempt at a lake. This beautiful image might best be seen to
restate the impossibility of representation and the inevitable twinning of female
loveliness with its patriarchal equivalent: nature. Importantly, it is the precise
overlaying of female sensuality (her lips, her skin) with elemental imagery that
marks it out as a visual disturbance within the mise-en-scène, a romantic ideal
that is appropriated by Morley (Sofia Coppola does this in The Virgin Suicides to
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similar effect).
At the end of Morley’s film, Lydia is saved from drowning by her mother

Eileen, an agoraphobic, usually too afraid to venture outdoors. Thinking her
dead, Eileen cradles Lydia’s body, deeply regretting her lack of care for her daugh-
ter up until that point. Lydia awakens and finally expresses her grief over the loss of
Abbie. Both women experience compassion for each other anew, opening them-
selves up to recovery and some sense of futurity. The girls in the film are never
found, except the body of Mrs Appleyard, a governess. Writing themselves out
of the narrative, they are a vanishing point within patriarchal cinema, as Dora is
a vanishing point in Freud’s case study. In conclusion, both Weir’s and Morley’s
work are highly suggestive of the political potential of hysteria but, more impor-
tantly, they articulate a de-familiarising zone, an uncanny, silent space in which an
inner life of female desire and horror can be played out, consciously responding
to, and challenging, dominant cinema’s fascination with Ophelia-esque tortured
adolescents or Lolita-esque nymphets. In sum, I have argued that the depiction of
female hysteria in Morley and Weir’s films is ultimately generative, positive rather
than simply representational of Freud’s thought. However, female hysteria has not
always been portrayed in such affirmative ways and, often, it is the galvanising nar-
rative point within Hollywood cinema’s ever popular thriller or horror genre in
which women are victims of their own paranoid-depressive states (see Gone Girl,
for example). If Freud’s Dora, in her many cinematic guises, is forever beholden
to a patriarchal economy, then, the question is how to redefine her trajectory and
re-read her story as a vital narrative of female self-possession.
Notes
1 I am extremely grateful to the editors for their invitation to contribute to this volume; this
chapter started its life as a conference presentation at Royal Holloway University, 2016, as
part of the international conference ‘Childhood, World Cinema and Nationhood’.
2 Lucille Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004) is also notable here for its boarding school-
bound inversion of Freudian femininity, a film I have discussed elsewhere at length. See
Quinlivan (2009).
Bibliography
Bainbridge, Caroline (2008), A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film,
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Bell, James (2012), ‘DVD Review: Walkabout + Picnic at Hanging Rock’, Sight and Sound
online, http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/5596. Accessed December 2016.
Bradshaw, Peter (2014), ‘The Falling’, Guardian, www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/10/
the-falling-review-london-film-festival-carol-morley. Accessed September 2016.
Brown, Erella (1996), ‘The Lake of Seduction: Body, Acting, and Voice in Helene Cixous’
Portrait de Dora’, Modern Drama, 39(4), 626–649.
Cabin, Chris (2014), ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, Slant, www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/
picnic-at-hanging-rock. Accessed June 2017.
Cixous, Hélène (1976), ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs (trans. Keith Cohen and Paula
Cohen, 1(4), 875–893.
Cixous, Hélène and Jacques Derrida (2001), Veils (trans. Geoffrey Bennington), Stanford,
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CA: Stanford University Press.
Devereux, Cecily (2014), ‘Hysteria, Feminism and Gender Revisited’, English Studies in
Canada, 40(1), 19–45.
Irigaray, Luce (1985), Speculum of the Other Woman (trans. Gillian C. Gill), New York:
Ithaca University Press.
Irigaray, Luce (2004), Luce Irigaray: Key Writings, London and New York: Continuum.
Kristeva, Julia (1989), Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (trans. Leon S Roudiez), New
York: Columbia University Press.
Landy, Marcia (1991), Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television and Melodrama,
Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Mitchell, Juliet (2000), Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian
Psychoanalysis, London and New York: Penguin.
Moi, Toril (2001), What Is a Woman? and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morley, Carol (2015a), ‘Carol Morley: Mass Hysteria Is a Powerful Group Activity’,
Guardian, www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/29/carol-morley-the-falling-mass-
hysteria-is-a-powerful-group-activity. Accessed 10 July 2016.
Morley, Carol (2015b), ‘Carol Morley: These Are the Films That Inspired The Falling’, BFI
Online, www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/carol-morley-films-inspired-
falling. Accessed 20 December 2016.
Quinlivan, D. (2009), ‘The Kineasthesia of Sound in Innocence’, Studies in French Cinema,
9(3), 215–224.
Wilson, E. (2000), ‘Identification and Melancholia: An Inner Cinema of Hélène Cixous’,
Paragraph, 23(3), 258–269.
3
GROWING UP GIRL IN THE ’HOOD
Vulnerability, violence and the girl-gang
state of mind in Bande de Filles/Girlhood
(Sciamma, France, 2014)1
Caroline Bainbridge
Introduction
This chapter explores the dynamics of vulnerability, violence and relatedness at
work in the psychological development of Marieme/Vic (Karidja Touré), the
protagonist of Céline Sciamma’s Bande de Filles/Girlhood (France, 2014). Drawing
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initially on psychoanalytic notions of “the girl-gang state of mind” articulated
in the work of Donald Meltzer (1973), and on Luce Irigaray’s concept of parler
femme (speaking [as] woman) (1977/1985), it argues that dimensions of “unspeakable”
feminine experience are brought to life on the cinema screen for viewers as “ges-
tures of girlhood”. In order to consider the thematic significance of discourses
of “race” that surround the film, this chapter also turns to Black feminist theory
to reflect on what it means to view it (and to write about it) from a position
inscribed in white privilege. The methodological implications for intersectional
scholarship are addressed in the next section and provide an important frame of
reference for the discussion that follows.
Girlhood is a coming of age film that focuses on the experiences of its pro-
tagonist, Marieme, who lives in a banlieue on the outskirts of Paris. The film was
written and directed by Céline Sciamma, a white woman with a track record of
festival success for her earlier films, Water Lilies (France, 2007) and Tomboy (France,
2011). Girlhood has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim, but there has also been
important commentary on Sciamma’s decision to focus the story on a young Black
woman, and on the film’s sometimes troubling tendency toward “cultural appro-
priation”2 and the associated legacy of white liberal guilt (Blay 2015; Chew-Bose
2015; Tewolde-Berhan 2015). Media coverage has highlighted the casting deci-
sions made by Sciamma, who selected non-professional actors for lead roles having
scouted them in public places. Sciamma and the four key female actors in the film
reportedly lived together for three weeks while shooting the film to deepen their
Growing up girl in the ’hood 49
collaboration (Anonymous 2015a). As Agnieszka Piotrowska’s reflexive account

of historical inter-cultural collaborations and her film practice in Zimbabwe indi-
cates, seeking to conscientiously overturn the legacies of colonial power and
history through encounter, entanglement, and collaborative creativity constitutes
a “‘minor’ political gesture” (2017: 166), albeit the case that ethical questions nev-
ertheless persist: it is a start. A feminist perspective on Sciamma’s motivations must
keep this intentionality in mind, despite the obvious limitations.
The formative experiences of girlhood as depicted in Sciamma’s film are writ-
ten on and through the body, paying particular attention to raced and classed facets
of experience. I argue that the film’s evocation of the highs and lows of adolescent
experience – and its phased fantasies of binding, splitting and competition – offers
a compelling commentary on the close imbrication of lived experience, cultural
politics, identity and growth. Overall, I make the case that the film offers a timely
opportunity for exploring the emotional work entailed in growing up for girls
seeking survival in complex sociocultural and political environments, where the
inflections of intersectional experience are often contradictory. However, I also
suggest that a psycho-cultural approach to questions of cinematic representation
enables new ways of thinking about reflexive feminist practice, provoking consid-
eration of the ethical and methodological responsibilities linked to scholarship that
maps the contemporary cultural terrain of intersectional femininity.
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Ethical considerations
In her work on Precious (Lee Daniels, USA, 2010), Katariina Kyröla notes with
sensitivity the difficulties involved for white scholars who are interested in discuss-
ing the cultural politics of “race” and ethnicity:
How we see ourselves (and others) as ethical subjects relates intimately

to not only how we feel about things, but to how we feel we should feel
about things, and to how we express, articulate and intellectually process
those feelings.
(2017: 2, original emphasis)3
Highlighting the crucial significance of bell hooks’ work on “learned helplessness”

(2003: 26), Kyröla cautions against “a white liberal attitude towards racism which,
despite acknowledging racist structures and one’s own privilege enabled by them,
helps keep whiteness and white (bad) feeling in the center” (2017: 2). This reso-
nates with Reni Eddo-Lodge’s observation
that, at first, talking about race is uncomfortable, because too many white
people are angry and in denial . . . [A]fter white people begin to get it, it’s
even more uncomfortable for them to think about how their whiteness has
silently aided them in life.
(2017: loc. 2432)
50 Caroline Bainbridge
It thus becomes urgent for white scholars to reflect on how best to “own” their
part in the oppressive regime of structural racism, and to consider how it might
be possible to contribute to undoing its insidious dynamics – strategic, reflexive,
conscientious interventions can contribute towards this project.
One means of beginning to do such work involves reflexive scholarly practice
that is grounded in and informed by Black scholarship and its various commen-
taries on the ontological and epistemological failures and silences of unthinkingly
white theory. In aiming to explore unspeakable dimensions of identity and experi-
ence as represented in mainstream cinema culture, this chapter therefore attempts
to understand how meaning is made and interpreted through the mechanisms of
film. To do this, it takes an object relations psychoanalytic approach to the psy-
chological and emotional processes at work, but this is underpinned with feminist
intentionality. To this end, I reflect on how previous methodological practices
I have used to explore the cinematic treatment of femininity (Bainbridge 2008)
can be deepened and made more politically conscious by foregrounding Black
feminist scholarship on theory, identity and politics. My aim here is to write more
reflexively about the racialized, sexualized and gendered dimensions of power and
ideology, while at the same time attempting to resist the pull into a “well-meaning
but guilty-feeling white liberal” mentality (Eddo-Lodge 2017: loc. 1601).
This seems all the more crucial given the production context of Girlhood. As
noted above, its director is a successful white woman who benefits from very
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considerable cultural and ideological capital. In exercising this capital to make a
film about young Black women, Sciamma manages to occupy a paradoxical and

problematic relationship to power. On the one hand, as many critics have pointed
out, in making a film in which the lead roles are played by four Black females,
Sciamma innovates and challenges commonplace industrial practices and assump-
tions. However, she is able to do this, in part, because of her white privilege, and
the notion of empowerment through patronage is unpalatable and discursively
troubling despite the generally positive critical acclaim garnered by the film, which
must, of course also be understood in terms of Sciamma’s ability and talent. What
is more, Sciamma also chose to recruit non-professional actors through a process of
scouting, and there are uncomfortable connotations here around the use of cultural
capital to enable aspirational shifts for the four young women selected in this way.
For instance, blogger, Fanta Sylla (2015), has suggested that Sciamma’s choices are
indicative of and resound with debates about “the fallacy of solidarity” between
women of colour, criticizing Bande de filles for its ostensibly universal representa-
tion of girlhood, without paying attention to the subtleties of distinction between
women of colour. Sylla argues that
Sciamma didn’t have the experience, the imagination, the vision and empa-
thy necessary to represent this girlhood in its complexity. If the film were
a radical exploration of Black French girlhood in the banlieue, watching it
would have been a novel, disturbing and alienating experience.
(Ibid.)
Sylla’s point here is that this was not the case for her (and therefore, presumably,
for others). Other Black critics have hailed the film for providing a compelling
narrative in “a movie landscape where there are so few depictions of Black girls
getting to be Black girls” (Blay 2014) and describe the film as “uplifting” in its
choice “to explore the bond between the girls, the power and confidence that they
develop in their tight-knit group and how they support each other through their
shared difficulties” (Anonymous 2015b).
The complexity of the production context demands much wider interroga-
tion and goes beyond the remit of this chapter. However, the range of discursive
positions and critical responses it evokes is indicative of apparently unspeakable
dimensions of lived experience for Black women, and this is the focus of my
chapter. In the discussion that follows, I explore how Sciamma’s film succeeds
in opening up space in which to notice the dynamics of power at work in the
film, inviting critical reflection about its subject matter. Later, I will reflect fur-
ther on what such analysis means for thinking through the psychological processes
involved in the power relations that are in play, by deploying the image of “the
girl-gang state of mind” as one that becomes useful in shaping a collaborative
mode of solidarity between women that pays ongoing attention to structural and
ideological forces.
Analysis
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With all of this in mind, then, how might we make sense of the schema of adoles-

cent Black femininity depicted in Girlhood? To think about this, we need to note
several important elements of the film and its construction of both Marieme/Vic
and her friends in terms of simultaneously split and bound experience, vulnerability
and violence, dependence and defiance. What seems to be at stake are aspects of
subjective experience that are communicable despite being unspeakable, writ large
on the screen in deeply affective ways. In my work over a number of years now
(Bainbridge 2008, 2014), I have argued that film provides a cultural arena in which
to explore such experience, with a view to re-visiting our understanding of the
containing dynamics of cinema and its power to allow us to work through com-
plex, and often contradictory, emotional and psychological experience. Sciamma’s
film offers a fascinating evocation of these ideas in its invitation to grapple with the
conundrum of subjectivity as experienced by young, Black, working-class women
whose lives are shaped by institutional and ideological forces beyond their control.
As Claire Mouflard has observed,
In Sciamma’s banlieue, teenage girls are constantly renegotiating their home

and public life in accordance with gender and economic roles that appear to
be culturally formatted by the state and conveyed to them both through the
institutions and through the male figures in their lives . . . [inscribing them
in] geographical, economic and social alienation.
(2016: 113)
The film immediately invokes the lived experience of the constraints described by
Mouflard in its depiction of the sharp contrast between the vibrant, chatter-laden
freedom experienced by the girls on the football field and immediately outside the
stadium and its rapid silencing on their entrance into the walkways of the banlieue,
where masculinity dominates, as young men stare from top steps and elevated walls
at the approaching group of young women, looming over the girls’ shared social-
ity with a palpable sense of foreboding. The young women navigate their way
through the high-rise landscape of home, and the lighting design of this sequence,
with its emphasis on tall shadows and backlit silhouettes of seemingly faceless
young men, hints at the oppressive atmosphere coded in the disparity of access
to power between the young men and women who live there.4 This also sets the
scene for the atmosphere of Marieme’s home in a fatherless family with a largely
absent mother, an abusive older brother and caring responsibilities for two younger
sisters. That Marieme’s emotional experience is unspeakable is shown clearly in
the scene where she meets with an unseen educational counsellor who advises her
that she is to be displaced against her will into a vocational tier of education, rather
than being allowed to progress to high school. High school was her best chance
of escaping the tyranny of a future that will require repetition of her mother’s
experience and a lack of choice about this, no matter how strongly she might
resist. Marieme cannot put this into words, although her pain is clear as we listen
to the counsellor’s disembodied voice thwarting her ambition and glossing over
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a fleeting opportunity to ask questions that might afford an opportunity to think
differently about Marieme’s future. It is this experience, alongside her burgeoning

desire for her brother’s friend, Ismaël (Idrissa Diabaté), that pushes Marieme into
her transformational experience with Lady’s (Assa Sylla) gang, an experience that
enables her to explore both sides of the togetherness/splitting binary evoked in the
opening sequences of the film and, I will argue, to discover that Black femininity
is construed as a seemingly endless source of struggle that demands a disruptive
relationship to hegemonic structures of subjectivity.
Binding and splitting in the girl-gang state of mind

In his account of “the seething flux” of adolescence, Donald Meltzer presents the
adolescent world as a social structure, stating that its inhabitants are “the happy-
unhappy multitude caught up betwixt the ‘unsettling’ of their latency period and
the ‘settling’ into adult life” (1973: 51). Tracing pathways through adolescent
development, Meltzer spells out very clearly that the journey is one from splitting
to integration, albeit that the journey is not a smooth one, involving wild periods
of instability. For the adolescent subject, the group becomes a crucial place of expe-
rience, providing what he describes as “a holding position in relation to splitting
processes”. Gradually, through the process of “disseminating parts of the self into
members of the group”, social processes are set in motion, enabling a shift from
the persecutory and omnipotent terrors of the paranoid-schizoid psychological ter-
rain of experience into the depressive arena of adulthood and the achievements
fostered by it (ibid.: 54–55). However, as Hamish Canham observes, the problem

with groups is that, in the contexts of any sense of perceived or real threat, they
exert a very strong pull toward regressive infantile states of persistent anxiety, and
where this is sustained, the “lure of the gang” becomes inescapable. For the gang
“promises a life without many of the pains that recognizing difference, depend-
ency, the inevitability of death, and vulnerability entails” (2002: 113–114).
Of course, the question of difference in this discussion by Canham is not coded
with any specific reference to gender, sexuality or ethnicity, and we need to read
further to understand how the state of mind at work in gangs is “used as a solution
to the pains involved in having ambivalent feelings” as Canham argues, follow-
ing Herbert Rosenfeld (1971 cited in Canham 2002: 116). Eventually, Meltzer
returns to the theme of the gang, to explore the different textures of gang-related
experience. Specifically, he formulates the idea of a “girl-gang state of mind”, in
which the struggle for “egalitarianism” is grounded in a refusal of the authority
of the father, creating what Meltzer describes as its “anti-masculine, Amazonian
quality . . . [in which] . . . the myth of feminine inferiority is vigorously denied,
and yet its remnants seem affirmed by this very vigour” (2007: 447). Meltzer links
this to “the injustice of the social order where femininity is not in itself obviously
valued” (ibid.: 445), observing that this leads to girls being “strongly inclined to
feel that only other girl-women can understand [the] dread [that this entails]”
(ibid.: 446). In this way, then, the girl-gang state of mind simultaneously binds girls
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to one another, creating a form of shared sociality, while also paradoxically permit-
ting them to express an ambivalent, schizoid mentality linked to the impossibility

of their experience. These themes must surely be intensified for women of colour,
and even more so for young women of colour who are also from underprivileged
socio-economic/classed backgrounds. All of this is, I think, starkly on show in
Girlhood, a film that therefore offers an important opportunity to consider the sym-
bolic enactments at work in the story and the way that these articulate more usually
unspoken dimensions of political and social experience.
The film narrative makes use of various tropes of splitting and binding to express
the complexity of this inscription of identity. The importance of binding experi-
ence in adolescence accounts for the formation of gangs in the first place. It is no
accident here that Marieme is seduced into Lady’s gang shortly after learning that
her education is to be abruptly re-directed into vocational training. The prospect of
this is unbearable for her, and she sees the scope for rebellion and possible freedom
in Lady’s offer to join her gang. She negotiates her entry into the group by means
of binding experiences linked to clothing, music, petty theft, dance and aggression,
which is expressed toward rival girl gangs on “the other side of the tracks” as well
as in Marieme’s bullying of a younger schoolgirl for money. Marieme is finally
“inducted” officially into the gang when Lady gives her the gift of a necklace
announcing her gang name, “Vic – for victoire”, and offers a piece of advice that
will shape the rest of Marieme’s journey in the film: “Do what you want”.
The gift of the necklace and of the alternate name/gang moniker, “Vic – for
victoire”, also underscores the role of splitting in gang culture. Marieme has to
continue to be the Marieme of her family life (caring for sisters, protecting them
from an abusive brother, feeding them, washing up and deflecting all of the violent
atmosphere of the family home on to herself). However, she is now also Vic, a
young woman who dares to transgress, who shares unparalleled moments of joy
with her gang mates when they closet themselves away in hotel rooms with cheap
alcohol and marijuana, fleetingly escaping the pain of their everyday lives. Yet
the split persona also invites envious rivalry and competition, enacted through
both costume – Marieme’s outfits often match those of Lady in ways that those of
Adiatou (Lindsay Karimoh) and Fily (Mariétou Touré) do not – and when Lady
gets “wasted” (i.e. beaten up) by the leader of a rival gang, an act that will be
avenged by Vic, who takes a kitchen knife to the fight, cuts off her rival’s bra and
keeps it as a trophy. Of course, this induces painful competition between Vic and
Lady, who is even more symbolically stripped of her authority thanks to her father
cutting off her hair in punishment for the beating she took in the original fight.
The overtones of struggle with and for phallic iterations of femininity in these
sequences of violence deepen our sense that, for these young women, growing up
girl in the ’hood is far from straightforward. Engaging in violent fights involving
knives and the symbolic loss of long hair connotes the ways in which the violent
residue of unspeakable intersectional experience struggles to find a cultural outlet,
highlighting the familiar ways in which violence, which is more usually ascribed
to masculinity, provides temporary respite for young women struggling to assert
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power. The masquerade of phallic femininity is palpable here. The resonances
with debates about solidarity between feminists, and between women of colour

and white women, also reverberate here, as the challenges around finding a means
of political expression for both the individual and group experiences of women
become overlaid with structures of dangerous competition and rivalry.
The film shows how young, Black, working-class, female experience simply
cannot adequately be encoded. The matrix of overlaid schemas of difference is
represented as impossibly complex, showing how the failures and silences of the
hegemonic ideological value system cannot only be brought to light but also how
they might be mined for clues to the texture of what goes unspoken. It is worth
reiterating Canham’s observations here: on the one hand, the gang “promises a
life without any of the pains that recognizing difference . . . entails” (2002: 113).
However, “when deprivation is coupled with abuse, it often leads . . . to a defensive
internal manoeuvre designed to distance the ego from the pain of what it has been
through” (ibid.: 125). In its evocation of these very dilemmas, Girlhood offers what
I think of as “gestures of girlhood” in its play with what Richard Billow has charac-
terized as a kind of striving for mutual recognition that takes place in gangs (2013:
141). Psychologically, this is an attempt to establish what he describes as “subject-
to-subject relationships”, and this, in turn, is a means of aspiring to an intrapsychic
state that allows for the democratic integration of interpersonal and political or
ideological experience. In Girlhood, this striving underpins some of the most emo-
tive and affective scenes of binding between the members of Lady’s gang, expressed
through an embodied gestural politics that is echoed in Sciamma’s cinematic style.
Gestures of girlhood
In her work on the psychoanalytic setting, psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce
Irigaray explores the importance of gesture for communicating often dramatic
dimensions of gendered subjectivity. Discussing the experience of the girl that goes
unspoken in Freud’s (1920) account of the fort-da game, Irigaray asserts that for
the girl, gesture is also about staging and managing the psychic loss of the mother,
which, she argues, is complicated for the girl-child because of their shared gen-
dered experience, and because “the mother always remains too familiar and too
close” (1987/1993: 98). For Irigaray, the importance of gesture is that it allows
girls to express and explore aspects of their experience that are not inscribed in
difference, but that rather depend on shared aspects of subjectivity in common.
Reflecting on her experience of young women in the analytic setting, Irigaray
suggests that the repertoire of such gestures includes whirling around in dance to
signify abandonment (in both senses) and to attract recognition (ibid.: 97–98).
Irigaray’s insight here shows how girls’ experience can be articulated despite all
the seeming prohibitions. This provides an interesting lens through which to read
one of the best-known sequences in Girlhood, the scene in which Lady’s gang clubs
together to pay for a night in a hotel room, where they drink, get high and dance
together to Rhianna’s song, “Diamonds” (2012). This is a scene in which the sheer
joy of the girls’ shared “subject-to-subject” relationship dominates the mood of
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the film, eliding all the vulnerability and violence that encodes their experience of
the walkways and stairwells of the banlieue, the domestic sphere, the exploitative
workplace and the underground spaces of metro shopping malls and train tracks.
There are two notable stylistic aspects of this sequence that reveal how Sciamma
uses not only narrative to explore experience but also the formal structures of cin-
ema. First, the lighting design of the sequence has received critical acclaim for its
achievement in successfully lighting Black skin for the screen (Ince 2017; McNeill
2017).5 In what Kate Ince refers to as “an aesthetic of melancholy” (2017: 171), the
sequence emphasizes the blue-black tones of both the actors’ skin colour and their
costumes. The aesthetic here does, indeed, connote melancholy, as Ince suggests,
but I think it goes deeper than this. It also evokes the bruising experience of the lives
of these young women, tinged as they are with violence and pain, both embodied
and psychological.6 The pain of their psychological experience stands in counter-
point to the embodied joy of their dancing together, suggesting something of the
paradoxical and deeply complex signifier of the bruise, a mark on the body that
bears witness to violent experience and that can bring the associated pain to life again
through either the lightest accidental touch against an external object or through a
self-harming, conscious prodding by one’s own volition. The lingering, crushing
effects of embodied and psychological experience are connoted here in the bruised
aesthetic, adding to the paradoxically melancholic tone of this scene of apparent joy
and speaking directly to the emotional complexity of the narrative as a whole.
Paradox is also at work in the second formal strategy I want to discuss here:
the sound design of the scene. By overlaying Rhianna’s original track on to the
footage of the girls singing along, Sciamma effectively makes the music both
diegetic and non-diegetic at the same time. The girls are both singing along (as we
hear at the end of the scene) and apparently lip-syncing at the same time, thanks
to the strategies of cinema.7 This is a fascinating cinematic technique that simul-
taneously disrupts and forges identificatory processes. It heightens awareness of the
distance necessary for us to feel ourselves to be viewers of the film, while also touch-
ing us, and speaking to our own real-word experience, in which Rhianna’s song
resonates with our own mnemic associations and, as discussed by Isabella McNeill
(2017), with those evoked by Rhianna’s personal stories of traumatic experience.
The girls sing while not being heard while ventriloquizing – they invoke what we
might think of as a karaoke rendition of gender, a performance that both embod-
ies the possibilities of Black femininity and pushes at its boundaries, evoking the
poignant search for a voice that such unspoken experience entails. Of course, in
this scene, the girls also sing in a different language, suggesting that difference is
experienced as another language, one that is not “known” but can nevertheless be
sung through mimetic ventriloquism and performance. Like girls in a gang, then, as
viewers we are both bound to the protagonists (and to one another) and divorced/
separated at the same time, and this is enacted in the simultaneous use of Rhianna’s
song on the soundtrack and within the diegetic space of the narrative, mirroring
the impossible, contradictory pulls exerted on female subjectivities inscribed in
difference. There is also a palpable dimension of me/not-me experience for the
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viewer here that resonates with Kimberlyn Leary’s assertion that “race, like gender,
exists in transitional space. It is located in the tensions among biological distinction,

sociocultural fact, and future possibilities” (1997: 63). While Leary herself does not
refer to Winnicott here, his work nevertheless comes to mind. Winnicott’s (1971)
emphasis on the use of transitional me/not-me objects to negotiate separation from
the mother in pursuit of a sense of mastery in the adult world speaks to the complex
entanglement of embodied experience with psychological and emotional aspects
of selfhood, as well as with broader sociocultural pressures and dynamics. Leary’s
observation can be deepened by thinking with Winnicott here. For Winnicott,
feelings of mastery are closely tied to the sensory pleasures of the object, the kinds
of pleasure writ large on the screen in this sequence of Sciamma’s film, as we
watch the sheer unbridled joy of experience manifest itself in terms of close bodily
proximity, dancing with arms conjoined and so on. The affective qualities of this
scene are deeply emotional, encouraging the introjection of a sense of the fleeting,
binding sociality expressed within the group at this moment.
There are parallels, too, with the call made by Irigaray to establish what she
describes as parler femme or “speaking (as) woman” in order to articulate aspects
of feminine subjectivity that more usually go unspoken (1977/1985: 135). The
terrain of parler femme is grounded in horizontal female relationships of sociality
rather than occupying spaces of inheritance between generations. In Girlhood, the
sequences involving dancing and singing are encoded in just such terms, showing
how musical subcultures permit young women to find points of connection and
commonality, when so much of the world cuts off any vision of their experience.
Irigaray’s notion of parler femme is useful here insofar as it enables us to perceive how
aspects of the feminine can be made explicit through cinematic strategies linked
to gesture, embodiment, mise-en-scène, sound design and so on. The problem with
Irigaray’s work, however, is that it insists on maintaining a hierarchy of modes of
difference in which gender is elevated about all other forms of experience. This
means that, despite the assertions that I have made here and elsewhere (Bainbridge
2008), about the strategic value of working with Irigaray’s logic, and despite the
fact that the notion of parler femme opens up ways of viewing cinema that extract
and exemplify how the feminine can indeed be put on show, it is nevertheless cru-
cial to acknowledge that the strategic value of such an approach is limited because
of the Irigarayan refusal to grapple with concepts of race and ethnicity. This insight
is an important element of the work involved in this chapter, as I seek to reflect on
my own methodological practices. I will return to this discussion below.
The gestures of girlhood in Sciamma’s film go beyond the simple expression
of binding experience expressed in and through the notion of parler femme. The
limitations of ideological notions of femininity, and its raced and classed iterations
often dominate the screen. We might think of the way a dominant hermeneu-
tics of suspicion that surrounds young Black women is evoked in the shopping
mall scene, for example, when a young white shop assistant indiscreetly follows
Marieme as she browses the merchandise, or of the many different kinds of outfit,
style and look tried on by Marieme/Vic as the film evolves. We variously see her
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wearing an American football kit, simple leisure wear and trainers, a tight-fitting,
glamourous (stolen) dress, a leather jacket and, in later scenes, a high-end dress and

platinum blonde wig as she plays the role of drug dealer and, later still, in scenes
that show a distinct effort to erase all features of femininity, by binding her breasts
and wearing loose-fitting sportswear with cornrow braids to give the illusion
of short hair. Sciamma’s visual and narrative strategies reveal the claustrophobic
spaces of Black femininity but also open them up for scrutiny, throwing them into
question. In the play with costume, for example, it is as though Marieme is experi-
menting at the margins of femininity, trying on guises of female subjectivity, trying
to work out whether it might suit her or not. The sheer array of identity modes
conjured in this dressing-up play can be read as a kind of refusal, an exposé of the
constructedness of female identity and its lack of fit for young Black women of her
background. The distinction drawn by Irigaray between masquerade and mimesis
is instructive here (1977/1985: 220), and we might read Marieme as a purveyor of
mimetic challenges to a set of ideological codes of femininity that exclude her on
the grounds of ethnicity and social class.8 Homi Bhabha’s observation that mimicry
is inscribed in ambivalence and therefore produces its excesses, slippages and dif-
ferences at every turn is also important here (1994: 85).
However, there is an important difficulty in turning to Irigaray to grapple
with the silences of the feminine inscribed in raced (and classed) difference. She
has notoriously suggested that “sexual difference is an immediate natural given.
The whole of human kind is composed of women and men and of nothing
else. The problem of race is in fact a secondary problem” (1992/1996: 47). Here, as
Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo observes, Irigaray’s ontology “relegates race to a sub-

ordinate position vis-à-vis sexual difference”, thereby positing “sexual difference as
unmarked by race” (2007: 55–57). As she goes on to argue, for women of colour,
race is much more likely to be an organizing category of experience, and so the
shameful politics of white liberal theory are exposed here. This observation is cen-
tral to my attempt (and, indeed, to those of many other feminist scholars including,
for example, Piotrowska [2017] and Ranjana Khanna [2003]) to move beyond the
structuring absences of Irigarayan philosophy. As Bloodsworth-Lugo shows, it is
imperative to bring into view the absent, structurally invisible dimensions of Black
femininity, so that they become present despite the seeming impossibility of this.
I am reminded here of Bion’s appropriation of Freud’s imagery in a translation
he made of a letter written by Freud to Lou Andreas Salomé: “when conducting
an analysis, one must cast a beam of intense darkness so that something that has
hitherto been obscured by the glare of the illumination can glitter all the more in
the darkness” (Grotstein 2007: 12). Sciamma’s film works, I think, do just this, so
that we insinuate ourselves into the gaps opened up by the filmic strategies and start
to comprehend the depth of silence enshrined within them. The claustrophobia
of this experience is evoked in Sciamma’s periodic use of cuts to black screen dur-
ing the film so that the blackness resonates for the viewer at turning points in the
plot. In the institutional space of the cinema, this technique deepens the darkness
of the viewing environment for the spectator, and all the while foregrounding
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the importance of cinematic specificity, in a way that once again resonates with
Bion’s words. The oppressive, inescapable atmosphere invoked in these linger-

ing moments perhaps translate a tiny part of the lived psychological experience
of the subjectivity of our protagonists, showing how all iterations of performative
identity become oppressive and thwarting in the end. We become shrouded in
the unenveloped dereliction of subjectivity here, understanding how and why this
experience simply cannot be spoken. This also provides valuable insight into how
and why the girl-gang state of mind can provide much needed respite from the
affective provocations inherent in the struggle to become both Black and feminine.
There is an endless pursuit of fixity in a relay between embodied dimensions of
identity that plays out psychologically and mires the subject in a logic of endless
splitting, so that the apparent safety of feeling bound to others provides a degree of
certainty at least, until the binding itself also becomes claustrophobic and unbear-
able as the individual is reduced to the whole, becoming unable to shake off the
sense of the gang as an aspect of self experience that diminishes a sense of individual
subjectivity while paradoxically seeming to provide a route toward it. Marieme’s
struggle with this leads her to abandon her binding to the girl gang as she strikes out
in pursuit of life on her own terms, albeit the case that she needs to tread a path of
criminality and obedience to men to get there. This section of the film opens up
new perspectives on Marieme’s struggle to discover herself as a subject.
Marieme goes to work for Abou (Djibril Gueye), an older man who runs a
drug-dealing gang and who offers Marieme safety at least from the abusive relation-
ship with her brother as well as space to live in what might feel like an independent
existence in a flat in another banlieue that she shares with other members of Abou’s
gang. She has her own Playstation, a mattress on the floor, a kitchen to cook in, a
friend (Monica) and her ongoing love relationship with Ismaël. Marieme lives as
Vic in this segment of the film, abandoning her familial relations completely and
“parking” her former life in doing so. She no longer wears stylish dresses unless she
is on her way to work, when she also puts on a platinum blonde wig that allows us
to pick her out as a mimetic paradox as she moves through a party scene populated
with rich white people in the heart of Paris in order to deliver drugs. On her own
time, Vic wears baggy sports clothing and cornrow braids, and she hangs out with
the guys from the gang, joining in as they intimidate young girls. She cooks eggs
for Monica (Dielika Coulibaly), and they exchange mutual criticism as they talk
about their choices of “look”. For Vic, Monica’s conformity to the stereotype of
the drug gangster’s “ho” traps her in a code of behaviour that Vic herself refuses.
For Monica, meanwhile, there is puzzlement about why Vic looks as though she
is trying to “pass” as a man. This is, of course, to an extent, an effort to ward off
unwanted sexual approaches from her fellow gang members and her boss, but we
see that Vic pushes this to extremes, binding her breasts so that she looks even less
womanly – a choice that leads her to fight with Ismaël, and, eventually, to refuse
his offer of marriage as solution to her dilemmas and then to break up with him.
Vic goes to a party with her crew, and toys briefly with desire for Monica as they
dance close together and explore the frisson between them. This scene is rudely
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interrupted by Abou, who tries to force Vic to kiss him in a scene of devastating
reinforcement of all that she has come to fear about the world: for Vic, men appear

to impose their sexual expectations upon her, policing her preferences around her
embodied identity and stripping her of any freedom of choice when it comes to
sexual relationships.
What we see here is an extension of the play with identity and iterations of
gender and difference in ways that move beyond the confines of heterosexual
formations of femininity. Vic actively subverts the bodily codes of her gendered
identity, toying with the release provided by inhabiting what Halberstam (1998)9
refers to as “female masculinity” in scenes that can also be read as an attempt to
insinuate herself into the spaces of masculine experience so as to explore exactly
what it is that she is being refused access to. Vic places herself in the in-between
spaces of experimentation, hyper-performativity and transformation in ways that
thus articulate identity as queer, as I shall now briefly explore.
Breaking the frame

In their work on female masculinity, Halberstam has argued that “the categories
available to women for racial, gendered and sexual identity are simply inadequate”
(1998: 7). Halberstam also highlights the significance of naming in their work,
showing how it articulates “the power of definition” (ibid.: 7); when names are
changed, the power to reimagine identity is conferred on the individual, allow-
ing a retreat from lived facets of identity, place, relationships and even gender.
For Halberstam, this constructs “a queer subject position” from which it is pos-
sible to challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity (ibid.: 9). It is easy to
see how Girlhood puts this dynamic on show in its construction of Vic (who, at
the same time, both is and is not Marieme) in the final segment of its story. What
would it mean, then, to think of Girlhood as offering a queer representation of
identity in order to highlight the politics of intersectional subjectivity?
Laura Alexandra Harris argued some time ago that working toward “queer
Black feminism” can “disrupt the silences in feminism, Black feminism, and
queer theories of race, class, and sexuality” (1996: 4), thereby opening up the
intersection of sexual pleasure and the politics of race and class. As she suggests
A queer Black feminist practice requires marking race and class in relation
to desire and reveals that the telling of desire must always be a text written
about race and class no matter how encoded with gender oppression . . . race
and class [are] inextricable from . . . sexuality and feminist consciousness.
(Ibid.: 12–13)
If we follow Harris’ logic here, we might make interesting links to the impor-
tance of gang experiences for young women of colour. Meda Chesney-Lind and
Katherine Irwin have observed that, while gang culture places girls in precarious
positions because they do not have access to legitimate or illegitimate economic
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opportunities, it also enables girls to confront the hyper-masculine norms of ideol-
ogy that surround them (2004: 49). Debbie Weeks has carried out research to show

that because of the close imbrication of Black identities with sexualized connota-
tions in the popular cultural imagination, young Black women are subjected to
intensely sexualized othering in everyday life, leading to a great difficulty in finding
space in which to explore their sexual identities because of the tension between
deviance and hypersexuality in which their identities are construed (Weeks 2002:
252; 2004: 144–145). In this way, then, young Black women find themselves being
interpellated as what Halberstam refers to as “in-betweenness” (2004: 210), a trope
that resonates with the struggle portrayed by Marieme/Vic in Girlhood and that also
reminds us of the double bind alluded to by Meltzer in his observations about the
girl-gang state of mind and its evocation of femininity as paradoxically re-inscribed
or trapped within the logic of patriarchy despite (because of?) its anti-masculine
texture. Kimberley Roberts has shown how liminal figures of this type reveal the
potential for the cultural subversion of gender norms (2002: 223, 230), and, for
me, the institutional, figurative and imaginative spaces of cinema provide exactly
the kind of containing environment needed for such apparently dangerous or dif-
ficult forays to be made. When we see on the cinema screen a girl protagonist who
seemingly has no resources left to her, and no place to go, the audience is also left,
I think, in a space of wondering, or perhaps in a state of being able to explore what
Christopher Bollas describes as “unthought knowns” (1987: 4): this is, at least, my
own experience of this film. The film offers space in which to think outside the
frame of conventional practices of representation of gender and sexuality, in a way
that is possible because of the containing function that cinema can have when it
provides spaces for the experience and expression of emotion that lies beyond the
scope of normal/conscious thinking processes.
For me, this strain of thinking offers a crucial lens through which to read the
final scenes of Girlhood. Marieme returns fleetingly to the banlieue, ringing the
buzzer to her family home but finding herself unable to speak when her sister
asks who is there. She turns and stares at the view across Paris, bathed in sunshine
and she leans against a pillar, crying. Her grief and sorrow speak volumes about
her isolation in this moment, her desperate need to cut herself off completely in
order to find freedom. The camera tracks in behind her, before zooming in on a
strangely blurred shot of the distant cityscape, excluding Marieme from the frame
for a moment, and connoting a closing shot. Suddenly Marieme rushes into view,
crossing the frame from right to left. She pauses for a moment in a profile shot,
placing herself as the object of focus, before running out of shot again. Her move-
ment from one side of the frame to the other both speaks to her inscription in the
margins of representability and gives voice to her struggle in the in-between spaces
of representation in a way that feels full of life and hope.
Cinema itself is queered in this moment, as Marieme undoes its logic, high-
lighting the “off-screen” spaces of her identity and giving the spectator room to
acknowledge these. Her flight into the unknown on her own terms becomes a site
of cumulative learning, and one that is ripe with possibility. The bruised aesthetic
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that accentuated Marieme’s vulnerability and her encounters with violence lifts in
this scene to allow sunlight into the frame. The score consists of a track entitled

“Where to Go?”, a question posed in the active voice, connoting subjecthood.
The cinema becomes a space of rupture, gesturing in and through girlhood to the
spaces that lie beyond the girl-gang state of mind, spaces existing outside dominant
modes of subjectivity so that girlhood becomes readable as a learning experience,
a maturational process that does not only trap its subjects into the schizoid pursuit
of safety in numbers (Waddell 2007: 202), but that can also lead to a profound
capacity for resilience. Chiming with the sentiment of Rhianna’s metonymic song,
girlhood becomes a vision of ecstasy, something that is clearly alive, and full of
hope – like Marieme’s future, we hope, it shines bright.
Conclusion
Writing over 20 years ago, psychoanalyst, Kimberlyn Leary asked, “In which ways
are gender and race comparable?” (1997: 161). Following the logic of postmodern
debates about the role of sexuate difference in shaping subjectivity, she concluded,
as discussed above, that race and gender exist in transitional space and are conceptu-
ally inscribed in the tensions of biology, society, culture and ideology (ibid.: 163).
However, as Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn assert, the “tinderbox” texture of
intersectional debates about race and lower socio-economic class inscriptions deep-
ens a tendency toward the disparagement of working-class subjects (2013: 142).
We could go further and observe that, when these dimensions of lived identity are
shot through with questions of gender and sexuality, the quality of disparagement
takes on an especially bruising tone, a feeling that is conveyed through the mise-en-
scène of Girlhood and that also resonates with the struggle for Black feminist voices
to be heard in a landscape of insistent colour blindness.
Sciamma’s film encapsulates the fundamental complexity evoked by Leary’s
efforts to grapple with the apparent impossibility of conceptualizing race and gen-
der at the same time – or rather, more specifically, the apparent impossibility of
achieving such a task when the subject in question is both Black and female. With
its focus on the contradictory and impossible silences of Black adolescent feminin-
ity, it shows us the importance of what Wilfred Bion calls “binding” (1965: 69), the
principle by which aspects of experience are joined in constant conjunction, albeit
that the meanings of each element might simply be unknown. Meaning is accu-
mulated by dint of this ongoing conjunction, and I find this concept to be hugely
interesting for thinking about what it is possible to say about Black femininity, a
formation of identity that is laden with ontological complexity and psychological
and sociocultural entanglements. As Patricia Collins has argued (1991/2000), Black
female experience is situated within multiple intersecting sites of oppression, and
these are not additive but rather multiplicative in texture.
Meltzer’s notion of “the girl-gang state of mind” provides a useful analogy for
the dynamic that underpins the competing, schizoid logic of different modes of
feminist scholarship. As his work on this topic makes clear, the value of grouping
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together is that it provides a means of surviving scenarios of impoverishment and
attack by dint of forging bonds in spite of the odds against this. Meltzer asserts that

the “egalitarianism” in the girl-gang state of mind is linked to the social injustices
of patriarchy and paradoxically allows women to bind themselves together while
at the same time expressing ambivalence about doing so. This can be read as a
gesture toward a temporary, strategic form of feminist politics aimed at uncovering
the complex impossibilities of female intersectional experience. Perhaps this pro-
vides a way for us to comprehend the widespread critical appreciation of Girlhood,
despite its challenging contexts of production, and to think anew about how the
film invites us to think beyond familiar paradigms and to hold in tension the messy
complexities of contemporary identity politics.
Notes
1 I would like to express my grateful thanks to Dr Karen Cross, Ms Judith Rifeser and espe-
cially to Professor Anita Biressi for their valuable feedback on early drafts of this work.
2 The notion of “cultural appropriation” has now become commonplace in popular com-
mentary on social processes around ethnicity, identity and responsibility. Of course,
the term is laden with assumptions, as well as a complex dynamic that is overlaid with
textures of both guilt and reparative impulses. For a nuanced and deeply moving perspec-
tive on how the concept undermines efforts at collaborative learning and creativity, see
Piotrowska (2017). See also Sciamma’s own reflections on her engagement with this issue
in the course of making this work (Blay 2015).
3 See also Piotrowska (2017) on how these issues are interrogated in the genre of documen-
tary film-making.
4 Of course, the shadowy threat posed by the groups of young men in this scene fuels lazy
cultural stereotypes about Black masculinity, and this is a frequent criticism of cinema that
focuses on Black female experience.
5 Emma Wilson notes a comment made by the film’s Director of Photography, Crystel
Fournier: “We managed to do things we never could have done with white skins. The
colour palette we used between blue and green can produce a gloomy effect and never
enhances the actors. But our actresses, since their skin is warm, can handle these types of
colours. We could push colours to a point impossible with white skins” (2017: 18).
6 Precious has also been analysed extensively for its treatment of pain as a key dimension of
Black female experience. See, for example, Griffin (2013), Ordoñez (2010) and Regester
(2015). The significance of unknowable pain experienced by people of colour must also
underpin reflexive scholarship conducted by those who benefit from white privilege.
7 The majority of this sequence (2' 53") uses Rhianna’s song as a non-diegetic soundtrack,
depicting the girls as they seem to lip sync the words, before cutting to a 43" long passage
in which the non-diegetic soundtrack matches the diegetic voices of the gang as they sing
in their own voices.
8 As I explain elsewhere: “Masquerade is the term used to describe an alienated version of
femininity which originates in a woman’s awareness of a man’s desire for her to be his other.
The femininity of the masquerade is constructed by and for masculine desire, and thus
does not allow woman to experience desire in her own right. Within masquerade, woman
is permitted only to experience desire when man’s desire permits (Irigaray 1977/1985:
220) . . . In mimicry, woman deliberately takes on the feminine style and posture attributed
to her within dominant discourse in order to reveal the mechanisms of her oppression
and exploitation (ibid.). Woman is then able to use these mechanisms to disrupt discursive
coherence by deliberately taking on the role ascribed to the feminine to draw attention
to the flimsiness of its construction within dominant discourse, and thus to seduce domi-
Taylor and Francis

nant discourse into revealing its repressed foundation” (Bainbridge 2008: 20).
9 In an effort to respect Halberstam’s position on the importance of preserving “gender
quandaries”, I have opted here to omit their first names (Judith/Jack) and to use the gen-

der-non-specific pronoun “their” when discussing their work. As Halberstam observes, in
order to be politically dynamic, pronoun use “must categorically remain murky” (2012).
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4
REVISITING JOAN RIVIERE
Vicky Lebeau
First published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1929, and reprinted

in the influential Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald
and Cora Kaplan in 1986, Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade” enjoys
a unique, if now uneasy, place in the dialogue between psychoanalysis and femi-
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nism: from Ur-text attuned to the relations among sex, gender and identity to
one of the most prominent examples of a silence – shared between psycho-

analysis and feminism – on the question of racism in the formations of self and
society. “Womanliness as a Masquerade” belongs to a moment in the relation
between feminism and psychoanalysis dedicated to an ongoing exploration of the
unconscious as a force to be reckoned with by the Left (academic and activist)
in its attempts to secure a psycho-social understanding of political and personal
change. The editorial Preface to Formations of Fantasy was explicit: the collection
was a clarion call to engage psychoanalysis as a discourse – a theory, a practice,
an institution – that, in its probing of unconscious life, seeks to transform our
relation to ourselves and to the real world.
That call was in no way straightforward. As the editors attest, Riviere’s article
“conducts us to the promise and the problem of psychoanalysis in the arena of the
social” – a summary that anticipates the subsequent criticism of “Womanliness as a
Masquerade” as a missed encounter between psychoanalysis, feminism and a criti-
cal theory of racism (Burgin et al. 1986: 3). As Jean Walton was one of the first to
point out, the fascination exerted by the spectacle of the masquerade may well have
derived from the permission given by Riviere’s text “to invoke, only to ignore, the
cultural constructions of race that inform it” (1995: 800). “Riviere’s indifference to
the racialized components of her patient’s fantasies,” she continues, “is reproduced
with a striking monotony by her feminist successors” (ibid.: 803).
Why revisit Riviere? This question has become a guide to my own perplex-
ity in writing this chapter – perplexity that derives from a persistent intuition that
Revisiting Joan Riviere 67
something remains structural, but unthought, to “Womanliness as a Masquerade”

and, by extension, to our continuing interpretations of it. Certainly, what is not
in dispute here is Riviere’s participation in what Frantz Fanon describes in Black
Skin, White Masks, first published as Peau Noire, Masques Blancs in 1952, as the
imago of the black man in European culture (1986: 169). Among other things, Black
Skin, White Masks is an extraordinary exposition of the racist structure of feeling
at work in European culture: “When we say,” Fanon insists in on “The Negro
and Psychopathology”, “that European culture possesses an imago of the negro
responsible for all the conflicts that may arise, we do not go beyond the real” (ibid.,
translation modified). The reality of the imago? The effects of the imago on the real
world? The imago as a real event? We need that interpretative hesitation to grasp
the full extent of Fanon’s thought here, his challenge to psychoanalysis to think the
origins of racism and hatred.
In what follows I want to suggest that if we read her concept of the masquer-
ade alongside Riviere’s less well-known “Jealousy as a Mechanism of Defence”,
published in 1932, we can open up a space between Riviere and Fanon that, while
forcing psychoanalysis up against the real of racism, also challenges us to renew a
psychoanalytic reading of “Womanliness as a Masquerade”. That to read between
Riviere and Fanon is to encounter psychoanalysis at the boundary between dream
and culture, unconscious and ideology, is one of the starting-points of this chapter.
That that boundary demands a different order of psychoanalytic reading is one of
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its provisional conclusions.
In the opening lines of her essay, Riviere introduces “Womanliness as a

Masquerade” as her response to the typologies of female sexuality developed by
Ernest Jones through the 1920s; her writing is clearly grounded in a need to describe
a new “type” of woman: professional, intellectual, engaged in public life and “inter-
mediate” (Riviere’s term) in her relation to the divisions between male and female,
masculine and feminine (“Womanliness as a Masquerade” belongs to the “great
debate” about femininity and female sexuality in psychoanalysis through the 1920s
and 1930s) (1929: 303). In fact, it is the pressure of such divisions that drives Riviere
towards the enigmatic formulation at the heart of her essay:
The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line
between genuine womanliness and the “masquerade”. My suggestion is not,
however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial,
they are the same thing.
(Ibid.: 306)
That formulation has sustained a rich exploration of femininity and identifica-

tion, confounding any final congruence between a woman and her “womanliness”.
As Adrienne Harris has summarized: Riviere’s essay is “a text beloved of Lacanians,
feminists, and postmoderns alike as an early prototheorizing account of the per-
formative border-living, liminal aspects of identity” (2012: 205). More anxiously,
as a defence against a womanliness described as the primary mode of being sexual
68 Vicky Lebeau
for a woman, the masquerade has been understood as a sign of women’s aliena-
tion from themselves and their desires within a masculine and patriarchal social
order. In Luce Irigaray’s well-known statement, for example, masquerade is “what
women do (. . .) in order to participate in man’s desire, but at the cost of giving up
theirs” (cited in Heath 1986: 54). Schematically, then, the masquerade – spectacle,
performance, ruse – has been used to identify femininity with non-identity as such –
“[A]uthentic womanliness”, as Stephen Heath puts the point, “is such a mimicry,
is the masquerade” – and then, by extension, to explore the impossibility of ever
finally knowing, or achieving, an identification with any sex (male or female being
only the inadequate, if ubiquitous, starting offer) (1986: 49).1
It is well known that Riviere based her analysis of the masquerade on the
treatment of a successful, intellectual American woman “engaged in work of a
propagandist nature which consisted principally in speaking and writing” (1929:
304). After every public performance, this woman experienced anxiety so acute
that she was compelled to seek (sexual) reassurance from the men in her audience
(ibid.). Given its significance to what follows, it is worth quoting Riviere’s account
of her patient’s symptoms in detail:
Analysis then revealed that the explanation of her compulsive ogling and
coquetting (. . .) was as follows: it was an unconscious attempt to ward off
the anxiety which would ensue on account of the reprisals she anticipated
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from the father-figures after her intellectual performance. The exhibition
in public of her intellectual proficiency, which was in itself carried through

successfully, signified an exhibition of herself in possession of the father’s
penis, having castrated him. The display once over, she was seized by hor-
rible dread of the retribution the father would then exact. Obviously it
was a step towards propitiating the avenger to endeavour to offer herself
to him sexually. This phantasy, it then appeared, had been very common
in her childhood and youth, which had been spent in the Southern States
of America; if a negro came to attack her, she planned to defend herself by
making him kiss her and make love to her (ultimately so that she could then
deliver him over to justice).
(Ibid.: 305–306)
Further, Riviere observes that:
In a dream which had a rather similar content to this childhood phantasy, she
was in terror alone in the house; then a negro came in and found her washing
clothes, with her sleeves rolled up and arms exposed. She resisted him, with
the secret intention of attracting him sexually, and he began to admire her
arms and caress them and her breasts. The meaning was that she had killed
father and mother and obtained everything for herself (alone in the house),
became terrified of their retribution (expected shots through the window),
and defended herself by taking on a menial role (washing clothes) and by
washing off dirt and sweat, guilt and blood, everything she had obtained by
the deed, and “disguising herself” as merely a castrated woman.
(Ibid.: 306)
“If a negro came to attack her . . .” At once acknowledged and ignored by Riviere,
this imaginary scene agitates through “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, open-
ing on to the history of race murder in the American South: in particular, the
“Southern white rape complex”, its murderous fantasias of white woman and girl-
hood menaced by black men (Dowd Hall 1983). What matters in recent criticism
of “Womanliness as a Masquerade” is what Riviere does not say as she moves
from her patient’s symptoms to her childhood phantasy, from phantasy to dream
and, finally, from dream to its unconscious determinants located in a scene of
intra-psychic attack on the parental imagoes of early infantile life (“The meaning
was . . .”). A few pages later, Riviere makes that intra-psychic drama even more
explicit: “The analysis showed that the origin of all these reactions (. . .) lay in the
reaction to the parents during the oral-biting sadistic phase” (1929: 309).
Deriving her patient’s symptoms, along with her fantasies and dreams, from
infantile scenes, Riviere accounts for three different forms of representation in
terms of a concealed “meaning”; or, symptom, phantasy and dream are here
understood as forms via which something else – the infant’s struggle with her pri-
mal drives, her relations to her earliest objects – can find expression. Either way, as
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Walton summarizes her criticism of Riviere’s interpretative method,

[I]t makes no difference in Riviere’s account that the “man” in question
here is black, that culturally sanctioned fantasies in which a white woman is
sexually attacked by a black man form a significant component of dominant
white racist hegemony in the United States.
(1995: 782)
By contrast, drawing attention to the racist sexual imaginary structuring both

Riviere’s essay and her patient’s psychic life, Walton argues for the necessity of
exploring “local constructions of racialized identification and desire” to coun-
ter the displacement of the question of the relation between racism and the
unconscious – more broadly, ideology and the unconscious – taking place in
Riviere’s writing (and, by extension, in the founding texts of psychoanalysis:
Walton’s essay includes a discussion of Melanie Klein’s “Infantile Anxiety-
Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929) for
its “quite astonishing (. . .) indifference” to the role of the portrait of a black
woman in the material under discussion ) (ibid.: 804, 794).
On one level, Walton is giving voice to an established suspicion of psycho-
analysis as a tendentious hermeneutic, imposing its desire to rewrite the world in its
own image – those bourgeois European dramas of sex, violence and incest – on the
diverse materials that come its way. In the case of “Womanliness as a Masquerade”,
it is difficult to dispute the effects of that imposition (though my sense is that the
70 Vicky Lebeau
silence often attributed to Riviere’s feminist successors concerns the history of

published readings of her essay rather than, say, the exploration of her work in
more directly pedagogic contexts when, in my experience, the question of what
Riviere is doing, or not doing, with her patient’s fantasies of being attacked by a
black man has been a prominent topic of discussion). But since the publication of
Walton’s “Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse”, feminist indif-
ference (if that is what it is) has been displaced by a generative attention to what
remains occluded in Riviere’s essay: a “racial domain”, in Walton’s terms; the
“African American presence”, as Ai-Yu Niu puts it; or what Harris describes as the
“presence of trauma unconsciously transcribed and repressed” (Walton 1995: 803;
Ai-Yu Niu 2005: 135; Harris 2012: 206).
What remains to be said? I want now to suspend temporarily my reading of
“Womanliness as a Masquerade” in order to take a brief detour through the clos-
ing paragraphs of “Jealousy as a Mechanism of Defence”. With the exception of
“Womanliness as a Masquerade”, Riviere’s writings remain largely unread out-
side the psychoanalytic institutions; thus to my knowledge, a telling coincidence
between the race–sex fantasias invested by “Womanliness as a Masquerade” and
the conclusion of “Jealousy as a Mechanism of Defence” has gone unnoticed. A
key contribution to a psychoanalytic understanding of morbid jealousy, this essay
tells another intriguing story of a woman suffering pains of jealousy at her hus-
band’s supposed affairs with other women (suspicions that, Riviere tells us, may
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not be without grounds) as well as the effects of a fantasy that dominates her life:
namely, “seizing and obtaining from some other person something she greatly

desired, thus robbing and despoiling him or her” (Riviere 1932: 416).
That unconscious dynamic, replayed variously in her patient’s life, is explored
with almost vertiginous diligence through Riviere’s essay, leading inexorably
towards her final comments on Othello – or rather, Othello – without which, as
she puts it, a “psycho-analytic study of jealousy would be hardly conceivable”:
No detailed discussion of the play is needed: the unconscious motivation

of jealousy that analysis reveals stands in the forefront of Shakespeare’s plot,
though he straightaway so cleverly discounts and glosses over it that we
forget it forthwith. The first act of the play seems irrelevant to the subse-
quent story, yet it is vital in the depths. It shows us Desdemona’s old father,
his grief and fury caused by Othello’s abduction of his daughter, his bitter
reproaches and accusations, his threats and prophecies of disaster. Othello
had won his loved object by seizure from her owner – the father. But more
than this: to my mind the main expression of Othello’s all-important psychic
guilt (. . .) has been placed by Shakespeare where none can overlook it and
yet again where none of us need see it for what it is – it is his blackness! “It
is the cause, it is the cause, my soul” – the old tradition has it that with these
words the actor spoke to his own image in a mirror, which he contrasts in
the next breath with Desdemona’s “whiter skin”.
(Ibid.: 424)
This is more than a conventional appeal to a shared cultural heritage, and to a

celebrated poetic exploration of jealousy supposed to guarantee the value of a psy-
choanalytic insight. At this point, Fanon bears repeating: “In Europe the Negro has
one function: that of symbolizing the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the
dark side of the soul” (1986: 190). Or, more bluntly: “Are they not forever saying
that the niggers are just waiting for the chance to jump on white women?” (ibid.:
107). Riviere’s language may be more decorous, but it is difficult to deny that that
is indeed what she is saying when, in her tendentious description of the first act
of Shakespeare’s play, Othello is cast as Desdemona’s abductor, and her father as a
despoiled rightful owner, wrecked by grief and fury. In effect, Riviere is restating
Iago’s provocative description of Desdemona’s secret marriage to Othello in which
he casts their elopement as abduction, the white daughter as the legal property of
her father, and the black man as a bestial thief:
Zounds, sir, you’re robbed; for shame, put on your gown;

Your heart is burst; you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe.
(Othello Act 1, Scene 1, 86–89)
The language is infamously brutalized (as is a world conceived in terms of rights

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to the ownership of people and of aggravated burglary). But Iago’s logic structures
Riviere’s turn to Othello, her unthinking investment in being white and a con-

comitant massive de-idealization of blackness. Conjuring that imaginary scene of
Othello gazing at his face in the mirror, Riviere finds only his guilt in her percep-
tion of his black skin:
Does not Othello’s blackness, also seemingly irrelevant, sum up in one sym-
bol the whole story of his guilt, doubt, anxiety and his mode of defence
against them? Iago the envious is but his alter ego. He cannot endure the evil
in himself. He must make Desdemona black instead.
(1932: 424)
Or, again: “It is his blackness!” It is difficult not to hear a note of excitement, a
type of interpretative triumph, in Riviere’s exclamation as she makes “blackness”
the natural repository – Fanon might say the “predestined depository” – of those
psychic pains belonging to us all: anxiety, hate, aggression, envy (Fanon 1986: 179).
In this context, part of the significance of “Jealousy as a Mechanism of Defence”
is its unintended elaboration of Riviere’s brief, but freighted, sketch of the racist
fantasies and dreams at the heart of “Womanliness as a Masquerade”. The pressure
of the black imago becomes more apparent, more revealing, in that convergence
between a patient’s (day)dreams of being attacked by a black man, and Riviere’s
participation in the idea of Othello’s seizure of a white woman from her owner-
father. In “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, that convergence is most obvious in a
72 Vicky Lebeau
moment of textual repression, or internal exclusion, when Riviere brackets pre-

cisely that element of her patient’s childhood phantasy that embeds a spectacle of
lynching in the masquerade: “if a negro came to attack her, she planned to defend
herself by making him kiss her and make love to her (ultimately so that she could
then deliver him over to justice)” (1929: 305).
The parenthesis is crucial, a sign of Riviere’s turning away from any elaboration
of the meaning of the fact that her patient grew up in the Southern States, and the
violence contained by this daydream of handing a black man over to a murder-
ous mob (“Judge Lynch” in the parlance of the period). As Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
reflects on the persistence of lynching into the 1920s and 1930s, “even as white
moderates criticized lynching in the abstract, they continued to justify outbreaks
of mob violence for the one special crime of sexual assault” (1983: 344). In this
sense, by fixing the idea of the masquerade as a fantasy of appeasement, Riviere
invests a version of the feminine Oedipus complex negotiated through a cultural
fantasy of racial violence: it is not the father who suffers castration and robbery,
but the black man accused of rape or abduction. By extension, it appears to be
possible to continue to aggress the father and his rights – in this instance, to make
inroads on masculine privilege in the public domain – as long as you take a detour
via the body of a black man. In other words, as a performance of appeasement,
the masquerade is also embedded in a fantasy of vengeful sacrifice, legitimizing a
murderous aggression by changing its object: the black imago is at work on both
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sides of the dream.
In this sense, Riviere anticipates, and confirms, Fanon’s controversial analysis

of the white woman’s Oedipus complex – notably, its uses of the “free-floating
aggression” that the father refuses to “take up” – in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon
1986: 178). I have discussed elsewhere Fanon’s commentary on feminine psycho-
sexuality and feminist responses to it (Lebeau 1998, 2005). Suffice it to say here
that his analysis emerges from his demand on psychoanalysis to think the origins
and effects of racial hatred – the very demand foreclosed by Riviere as she displaces
the problematic that comes right to the fore when she makes the connection (and
it is she who makes it) between her patient’s environment and the form taken
by her childhood daydreaming: “This phantasy, it then appeared, had been very
common” (Riviere 1929: 309). The ambiguity of Riviere’s phrasing is apposite:
the fantasy is common – typical, readymade, collective – in the Southern States
(but not only there) and Riviere’s patient is also said to daydream with it repeat-
edly. In other words, “if a negro came to attack her . . .” signals a type of recurring
daydream, a child playing with a fantasy that preoccupies not only her waking
life but her dreams: “In a dream which had a rather similar content to this child-
hood phantasy” (ibid.). Riviere notes, but does not pursue, that correspondence
between ideology and dream, and the transfer from one to the other of an imago
belonging not, or not only, to her patient’s infantile unconscious but to the racist
culture in which she lives.
What kind of dreaming is this? Riviere’s occlusion of the racist imago struc-
turing her patient’s fantasy – and, of course, her own reading of Othello – leaves
unremarked the coincidence between the forms of fantasy trafficked through

public life and the intimate, and individual, process of dreaming. As Freud puts
it, “each person is at liberty to construct his dream-world according to his indi-
vidual peculiarities and so to make it unintelligible to other people” (1900: 241).
What has happened to that liberty, and its creative freedoms, in “Womanliness as
a Masquerade”? My point is not to attempt a “wild analysis” of Riviere’s patient
but to explore what remains unthought, unelaborated, by the analyst’s rush to the
depths, her pursuit of the infantile scenes supposed to be veiled behind the manifest
content of her patient’s symptoms, dreams and fantasies (“The meaning was . . .”).
By the late 1920s, that method of interpretation – its privileging of what Freud
describes as the “child’s impulses still living on in the dream” – is well established;
indeed, it has been exhaustively explored by Freud himself (ibid.: 191). But the
curiosity of a dream that wears its heart on its sleeve bears further exploration, as
Freud himself acknowledges when he uncovers a form of dreaming (if that is what
it is) that appears to impose a limit on the wayward idiom of our dream lives.
“There are a certain number of dreams,” he writes, “which almost everyone has
dreamt alike and which we are accustomed to assume must have the same meaning
for everyone” (ibid.: 241).
Typical dreams, typische Traume: dreams of a type, belonging not, or not only,
to an individual but to “everyone”: a family, a community, a nation, a world
(Oedipus Rex, that masterplot of murder and incest, is about to be introduced
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under the heading of “Dreams of the Death of Persons of Whom the Dreamer Is
Fond”). Such dreams, on Freud’s explanation, share two distinguishing features.

On the one hand, there is a correlation between manifest content and feeling: in a
typical dream, the death of a loved one will arouse a feeling of overwhelming grief
(if that feeling is absent, then the dream is not “typical” and the manifest content
must be treated as the usual façade). On the other hand, the dreamer of a typical
dream either fails to produce any associations at all, or those associations become
obscure and meagre. “Our art disappoints our expectations precisely in relation to
this material,” Freud concludes – as if psychoanalysis is initially paralysed by a form
of dreaming that calls into question the idea of the dream as a world apart, the
privileged symbol of the right to a mind of one’s own (ibid.).
The implications of this form of dreaming remain to be thought. To track the
editorial history of “Typical Dreams” (Section D of Chapter V) and “Representation
by Symbols in Dreams – Some Further Typical Dreams” (Section E of Chapter VI,
“The Dream-Work”) is to find oneself in the throes of Freud’s attempts to work
through the significance of such dreaming to psychoanalysis and its evolving
techniques of interpretation. What does the “typical dream” do to hard-won psy-
choanalytic insights into the individual poetics of dreams? What kind of dream is it
that can have the same form and meaning for everyone? What does that homoge-
neity mean for the new technique of free association as one of the privileged routes
to the unconscious mind?
That such questions quickly become entangled with the role of symbolism
in dreams is perhaps inevitable. Symbols, as Freud puts it in 1916, are “stable
74 Vicky Lebeau
translations”, enabling a form of dream interpretation that, at once ancient and

popular, is also likely to generate the most violent resistance to psychoanalysis and
its insights (in “The Theory of Symbolism”, also published in 1916, Ernest Jones
described its interpretation of symbols as “the centre of the strongest opposition
to psycho-analysis in general”) (Freud 1916: 153; Jones 1977: 87). Theoretically,
part of what is at stake here is the distinction between the manifest and latent con-
tents of the dream so central to Freud’s development of dream interpretation. It is
one of the founding tenets of his theory of dreams that the dream-work is there
to effect the transformation of one thing into another – the latent thoughts into
the manifest surface of the dream – via the mechanisms of the primary process:
condensation, distortion, displacement. The dream-work mangles and distorts; it
makes unintelligible the (latent) wishes that we cannot bear even in our dreams
(Freud 1900: 506). That work is the very essence of dreaming, Freud insists in
a footnote added in 1925: “dreams are nothing other than a particular form of
thinking” (ibid.). In other words, the dream-work is reducible neither to the
manifest nor to the latent contents of the dream; the mistake of many analysts,
Freud continues, is to attempt to find the essence of dreams in the wishes con-
cealed behind their bizarre appearances (ibid.).
It is in the course of his lengthy discussion of the mechanisms of the dream-
work that Freud introduces a concept that may offer an account of the production
of the typical dream: secondary revision, that part of the dream-work charged with
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turning the dream into an intelligible experience. Secondary revision is something
like an act of interpretation – of making the manifest content make sense – that

takes place within the dream itself. It manufactures an appearance of meaning, and
sustains the distinction between the manifest and latent content. But there is one
crucial exception to that distinction:
[T]here is one case in which it [secondary revision] is to a great extent spared

the labour of as it were, building up a façade for the dream – the case,
namely, in which a formation of that kind already exists, available for use in
the material of the dream-thoughts. I am in the habit of describing the ele-
ment in the dream-thoughts which I have in mind as a “phantasy”. I shall
perhaps avoid misunderstanding if I mention the “day-dream” as something
analogous to it in waking life.
(Ibid.: 491)
The implications of this passage are potentially far-reaching, with the concept of
Phantasie radically disrupting both the distinctions between manifest and latent
content, surface and depth, and the boundary between culture and the uncon-
scious. Secondary revision describes a process not only of re-making the dream
but of appropriating a ready-made fantasy inhabiting the dream-thoughts – a form
of continuity, a type of repository, which Freud encounters too in his explora-
tions of the typical and the symbolic in dreams. His “special interest” in such
dreams derives, in part, from the fact that they appear poised to extend the reach
of psychoanalysis into cultural and social life (thus extending what Freud calls its
“practical applicability”) (ibid.: 241). Equally, as we’ve seen, both the typical and
the symbolic threaten to bring free association, and with it psychoanalysis, to a
halt, obliging Freud to adopt what he describes as a “combined technique” that,
by “fill[ing] the gaps from the interpreter’s knowledge of symbols”, can be used to
counter that stalling of free association (ibid.: 353).
The significance of Freud’s discussion of the typical dream, and the ready-made
Phantasie, is its encounter with the possibility that what is there, and waiting to
be discovered, in the dream is not a wishful-shameful fantasy belonging to our
infantile selves but a symbol, an imago, possessing us all. It is as if the dream can be
occupied by something in profound conformity with, rather than resistance to, the
domain of social intelligibility. On the cusp between culture and the unconscious,
Phantasie emerges in the mode of the typical, the common, the symbolic; it inhabits,
and disrupts, the mobility of the primary processes, their creative idiom; it is a type
of fixation, interfering with, and thereby limiting, the creativity of dreaming – and,
thus, the patient’s capacity to freely associate, to think, in the presence of it. “It will
be observed,” writes D. W. Winnicott in “Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living”,
“that creative playing is allied to dreaming and to living but essentially does not
belong to fantasying” (1991: 31). Fantasying – at least in its fixated, stereotypical
forms – interferes with both dreaming and living, inflicting a loss of individual
symbolization that Winnicott casts in terms of repetition and redundancy: “A dog
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is a dog is a dog” (ibid.: 33).
“If a negro came to attack her”: what is this if not a form of typical dreaming?

What Riviere appears to have encountered with her patient – what her readers
encounter in “Womanliness as a Masquerade” – is a form of dreaming in which
the dream-work does not take place: a typical dream, a dream preoccupied by
the black imago, by the fantasy of the black man as a lascivious violator of paternal
rights. “The negro,” as Fanon puts it, “is firmly fixed at the genital; or at least he
has been fixed there (. . .) whoever says rape says negro” (1986: 165–166, transla-
tion modified). Beyond reason, this racialized sexual imaginary is not, as Fanon
points out, susceptible to fact; what is at stake is meaning, and how it is made
or unmade (ibid.: 168). Reading across from Fanon to Riviere, it is possible to
glimpse the mind of a child, and a woman, stalled by the presence of an imago that
brings the possibility of making meanings – the transformation of one thing into
another in dream, in fantasy, in interpretation – to a halt. “No detailed reading
of the play is needed”: nothing more to be said here, as Riviere succumbs to the
lure of the stereotype, its capacity to fix meaning – however scrambled, however
destructive – in place.
In terms of a return to Riviere, finally, the challenge is not only how to make
psychoanalysis attend to racism and history, but how to sustain its capacity for
thinking and dreaming in the face of whatever that attention uncovers: in this
instance, a murderous coincidence between culture and dream. Not until the pub-
lication of Black Skin, White Masks was psychoanalysis confronted, and potentially
supported, by a writing that puts the convergence between unconscious fantasy
76 Vicky Lebeau
and cultural life at the heart of its enquiry. It is that commitment that turns Black
Skin, White Masks into a transformative object for psychoanalysis in its attempts to
keep the mind alive in the face of racist hatred and aggression – the space at once
foreclosed and made available by “Womanliness as a Masquerade”.
Acknowledgements
A Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust supported the completion of
this chapter. I would also like to thank Vincent Quinn and Agnieszka Piotrowska
for their generous and patient comments on earlier drafts.
Note
1 In light of what Jacqueline Rose has recently described as the “coercive violence of gen-
dering” exposed by some of the current discussions around feminism and trans-politics,
Riviere’s essay continues to find its purchase. “What is a woman?” “Who counts as a
woman?”: so often framing those encounters, such questions recall the enigmatic formu-
lation at the heart of Riviere’s analysis (Rose 2016).
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Ai-Yu Niu, G. (2005) Performing White Triangles: Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as a
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Masquerade” and Imitation of Life (1959). Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 22, 135–144.
Burgin, V., Donald, J. and Kaplan, C. (1986) Formations of Fantasy. London and New York:
Methuen.
Dowd Hall, J. (1983) “The Mind that Burns in Each Body”: Women, Rape, and Racial
Violence. In A. Snitow, C. Stansell and S. Thompson (eds.), Desire: The Politics of
Sexuality. London: Virago.
Fanon, F. (1986). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. C. L. Markmann. London: Pluto Press.
Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. In J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vols IV and V. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1916) ‘Symbolism in Dreams’. In J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XV. London: Hogarth Press.
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13, 197–216.
Heath, S. (1986) Joan Riviere and the Masquerade. In B. Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan,
Formations of Fantasy. London and New York: Methuen.
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and J. Harbord (eds.), Psycho-Politics and Cultural Desires. London: UCL Press.
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5
SUPPLEMENTARY JOUISSANCE AND
FEMININE SEXUAL RAPPORT [1995]
Bracha L. Ettinger
I. Supplementary jouissance
Introduction: inscriptions of supplementary femininity

beyond the phallus1
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The more Lacan establishes the “woman” within the phallic scope, the more a
supplementary space, subversively insisting on undermining the founding of
“woman” in the phallus, is in my view disclosed. I have called this space beyond
the phallus: matrixial borderspace. In this space I link the unconscious memory
traces of the part and partial objects – the objet a – to “supplementary” feminine
jouissance.2 The later Lacanian theory lays, from a certain elusive angle – in a
manoeuvre described by J. A Miller as “Lacan against Lacan” – the hypothesis
of the primacy of the register of the Real with its jouissance, in contrast to a net
composed of the domination of the Symbolic over the Imaginary and the subordi-
nation of the Real to them both. Lacan turns to his inverted theoretical side when
he wishes to touch, in his late teaching, a face of the Real that is not cut by, shaped
or descended from a symbolic function; when he looks for a sense that vibrates
and resonates straight from the Real and not for signification emanating from the
Symbolic’s pre-established reason. Lacan emphasizes the importance of finding
a different mode of inscription that is not dependent on the signifier, by which
something of the supplementary feminine experience might find inscription and
not just happen. An inscription such as this is bound up with art, or else it is bound
up with mysticism and psychosis.
If the “woman”, as Lacan says in 1973, does not exist and does not signify any-
thing, this statement can be placed in line with his later thoughts from 1975–1976,
and we can say that this may be so only in the phallic arena, while beyond-the-
phallus, a space Lacan hints at in 1973, from the angle I have called matrixial, if
“woman” ex-sists with her jouis-presence then not only is she not orchestrated by
Jouissance and feminine sexual rapport 79
the Oedipal model of sexuality and identification, but also she excavates tunnels of
sense and draws a zone of difference which is indeed paradoxical for the phallus.
I propose that a female swerve3 and a rapport in a Real connected to the womb
are wound around a feminine jouissance. Affective swerve and rapport are for me
the incidents in the Real at the basis of a feminine-matrixial difference that is sup-
plemental to the feminine-phallic difference that relates, to begin with, to “penis
envy” and to its lack. The feminine originary swerve is not occupied during the
split of the subject that occurs in agreement with the castration model nor is it
dissolved inside relations to the Other qua “treasure of signifiers”. The swerve is
captured in an originary rapport, and both create and engrave passages and means
of transport towards the Symbolic through which traces of jouissance, sensations,
affects, feelings and fantasies are channelled; means that do not converge in a pro-
cess of castration. The matrixial swerve and rapport inscribe a “supplementary”
difference and create supplementary feminine-Other-desire, transported, transformed
and transferred within the matrixial borderspace, beyond metaphor and meton-
ymy, by what I have termed metramorphosis.
In the context of Lacan’s late theory but moving forward on, I will relate to
connections between the female specificity in the Real and its swerve, the feminine/
prenatal co-existence and the fantasy of prebirth incest of I with the archaic m/Other-
to-be, a fantasy that I call matrixial and connect to the Mutterliebesphantasie that Freud
suggested in the aesthetic experience of the Unheimlich (1919: 244, 248–249), and
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to the “envelopes” between mother and infant that get lost in birth according to
Lacan (1961–1962). A matrixial fantasy bursts forth in each individual in jointness

within a composite subjectivity. It is entwined between I and non-I from different
directions: it appears as a fantasy of the becoming-subject (male or female) in rela-
tion to a woman as a becoming-archaic-m/Other-to-be, as a fantasy of a return to the
womb, as a fantasy of the woman as potential m/Other or as an actual becoming-
mother who relates to the becoming-subject she carries – all concerning the partial
dimension of relations between partial subjects and partial/part-objects. I suggest
that singular qualities of this cluster of fantasy testify that the feminine/prenatal4
encounter doesn’t melt away retroactively into an Oedipal “castration” model and
is not constructed, subjugated or destroyed by the phallus, but remains beside it in
the field of the unconscious. A connectionist web, knitted by metramorphoses, a web
of knots and links, borderline relations and rapports between several partial subjects
and partial/part objects in co-emergence and co-fading in a non-conscious border-
space creates a feminine-Other-sense and embroiders a feminine-Other-desire linked
to a beyond-the-phallus jouissance and to an assembled speak/through-being (parl’être).
Feminine sex-difference from the matrixial angle doesn’t depend on essence but is
contrived via “webbing” links to the invisible female specificity in the Real.
The phallic arena

The phallic arena is based on the mechanism of castration, and hence its processes
of subjectivization are characterized by cuts from the corporeal, separations from
FIGURE 5.1 Bracha L. Ettinger, notebook, 2011–2012 (16 × 22 cm, double page).
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Source: Courtesy of the artist.

FIGURE 5.3 Bracha L. Ettinger, notebook, 2008 (16 × 22 cm, double page).
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82 Bracha L. Ettinger
the Real, differentiation from the Imaginary and entrances into the specifically
human dimension – the Symbolic – by means of the signifier as it gels split
from the signified5 and through language articulated in speech and knitted in
discourse.6 The cuts from the Real and the schisms between organ and object,
signifier and signified create a psychic surplus, a residue that is not digested into
the Symbolic or incorporated inside the Imaginary, termed by Lacan the objet
(petit) a. The objet a is a trace of an imprint, a primary trace that replaces an origi-
nary imprint which has remained from the partial drive’s engagements with the
archaic part object and the archaic mother-as-object or as primordial-Other that
I call m/Other. The objet a is issued in the course of a primary schism through
which the subject itself emerges as well as splits, when language blurs the archaic
modes of experience and when discourse, which conducts and presents the laws
and orders of society, nests in their place and restructures archaic processes and
modes, materials and events as no longer accessible to the subject. Even though
undigested by the Symbolic, the objet a is clipped in accordance with the pageant
of significance determined by the signifier and regulated by discourse, and it is
therefore a border-phallic inscription of remnants of separation from impulses and
from “bodily samplings” of my-corpo-reality and of my-m/Other. Lacan refers to
this trace of an imprint as an “extimate” scrap, located in an “extimate” psychic
space in the Real. The objet a and its site are “holes” hidden from the expanse of
signification. The objet a is an index that something has happened in its hollowed
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site, and indicates the libidinal event as extimated to the subject and linked to the
Thing (Das Ding).

The entire “Oedipus complex” is reduced by Lacan to the “castration com-
plex”, claims J. A. Miller. This echoes Freud’s conception of the libido as entirely
masculine/One. Castration is presented as the sole process of passage that separates
events from the Real while creating the subject as divided. “The objet a, if taken
only in Lacan’s sense, is a container of the effect of castration. containing the
signification of castration” (Miller 1982–1983: 4/5/1983). And sexuality, since it
“comes into play (. . .) through the mediation – paradoxical as that may seem – of
the partial drives” (Lacan 1981b: 193) is therefore shaped, like the objet a, by the
pair: phallus/castration. Lacan himself remarks in the 1970s that his is a one-sided,
masculine model where both subject and object are structured “in a male way
only” (1975a: 58); moreover not only the split subject and the lacking object but
also what is outside subject and object – the jouissance for example – still dwells in
the realm of the phallus that from the outset appears as an intermediate concept
that commands all three domains of the psyche: it is symbolic, it is also imaginary,
it is also between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, it has a correlate in the physical
male Real7 – the penis, and it also marks sexual jouissance:
A single and same marker dominates the whole register concerning the rela-
tionship of the sexuated (. . .) a privileged signifier (. . .) All is reduced to
this signifier: the phallus, precisely because it is not in the subject’s system
since it does not represent the subject but (. . .) sexual jouissance as outside
the system, which is to say, absolute; sexual jouissance in so far as it has this
privilege over all the others.
(Lacan 1968–1969: 14/5/1969)
Furthermore, desire is also phallic par excellence, for any release of something
from a jouisssance and from the real partial dimension on to the symbolic register
occurs as tearing by means of the castration mechanism and inlaying inside pre-
established discourse. “The desire is certainly antinomic in relation to the jouissance
since it supposes, this desire, to be established, it supposes (. . .) a rupture of jouis-
sance. Castration is even the only liberator of desire that may be conceived of.” But there
is something more (. . .) We can nevertheless conceive of another sexual jouissance,
a feminine one, in addition to the masculine one: “Jouissance behind castration
(. . .) the unthinkable jouissance [that] is the jouissance of the subject before the
mark of the signifier (. . .) would be inconceivable without feminine sexuality”
(Miller 1982–1983: 2/3/1983, original emphasis). The “supplementary” feminine
sexuality is connected to a jouissance that occurs on the plane of the partial relations
before or behind castration, and we have some idea of its existence even though
the symbolic system is incapable of reporting on it.
Something of the erotic antennae of the psyche transmits to, and receives from
the other, through the fantasy mechanism, an echo of “holes”: of an archaic sexual
rapport unappropriated retroactively by the phallus and of an objet a that diffracts
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and assembles traces by borderlinks and escapes the phallus as well.

Feminine swerve as a site of rapport
Echoes of psychic unconscious “holes” and knots sprout through art and re(a)sonate
meaning. Matrix and metramorphosis are concepts by which I have proposed to dis-
play and organize a particular spectrum of opaque trans-individual mental events,
sensations, affects and fantasies bounded with traces of archaic rapport with the
feminine-Other, with her body, her trauma, fantasy, sensations, emotions and
even desires. In the matrixial apparatus and by metramorphic processes this spec-
trum can weave its holes and knots, unconsciously get organized and arise at the
horizons of appearance. Matrix supplies a symbol by which a psychic register that
doesn’t take shelter under the wings of the phallus may be identified and rec-
ognized. The womb in this model is not a passive conceiving recipient and the
mother is not the pre-symbolic origin that must be replaced by a symbol. The
womb here represents a swerve which is a site of rapport alongside the almost-lost
envelopes between I and non-I – between partial subjects and between them and
their shared part objects and archaic m/Other – which is inscribed as a feminine
beyond-the-phallus almost-missed-encounter in the Other (A).8
The basis of subjectivity-as-encounter in the rapport between the becoming-
subject and the becoming-m/Other-to-be with-in her originary swerve-site should
not lead us astray to look for the matrixial almost-missed-encounter in natural
biology, just as the phallic structure and the process of castration do not present
the father/son relations as endangering the real male organ. Metramorphosis is a

passage-route through which matrixial affects, events, materials and modes infil-
trate and diversify on to the margins of the Symbolic.
Matrix is an unconscious space of simultaneous co-emergence and co-fading of
the I and the uncognized non-I, which is neither fused nor rejected. Matrix is based
on feminine/prenatal rapport and is conceived of as a shared psychic borderspace
in which differentiation-in-co-emergence and distance-in-proximity are continuously
reattuned by metramorphosis created by, and further creating, accompanied by
matrixial affects, relations-without-relating on the borders of presence and absence,
subject and object, me and the stranger. In the unconscious, the matrixial border-
line dimension involved in the process of creating feminine-Other-desire and sense
coexists with the phallic dimension and alternates with it in terms of approaching
the thresholds of the conscious.
Metramorphosis is a process of inter-psychic trans-individual communication
and transformation that transgress the individual subject, between several enti-
ties in a matrixial borderspace. In joint marginal awareness, perceived boundaries
dissolve to become new boundaries; forms are transgressed; borderlines surpassed
and transformed into thresholds; links are conceived, transformed and dissolved.
A contingent borderlink of rapport and a borderspace of swerve and encounter
emerge as a sex-difference and as a creative instance which engraves traces that
may be revealed/invented in withness-in-differentiation. In the matrix, rapport-
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without-relating transforms the unknown other and me and turns both of us into
partial subjects – still unknown to each other – in subjectivity-as-encounter.

Lost envelopes and diffracted objet a
I will propose an analysis from a matrixial perspective of some of Lacan’s ideas,
which in the phallic perspective are paradoxical and like the “woman” beyond the
phallus are “impossible.” In the matrixial perspective something from the feminine
rapport can be communicated in “dialogue” produced by and producing an assem-
bled “speak/through-being” (parl’être).
From: J. Lacan, Le sinthome:
The libido, as its name indicates, can only be a participant of the hole, which
moreover goes for all other modes through which the body and the Real
are presented, and it’s obviously through this that I’m trying to get back to
the function of art.
(1975–1976: 9/xii/1975)
From: J. Lacan, L’identification:
One of the first possibilities concerning a hole is becoming two holes. I’ve
been told: What do you not refer to, what do not refer your images to
embryology? Understand that they are never very far away.
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FIGURE 5.5 Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice – Pieta n.1, 2018. Photocopic pigment and
ashes, Indian ink on paper (36 × 2 4.5 cm).
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FIGURE 5.6 Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice – Pieta n.3, 2018. Xerox, photocopic
pigment and ashes, Indian ink on paper (35.3 × 24.7 cm).
If there is something that permits us to conceive of it as a carrier of (. . .)

I-don’t-know-what primary narcissism, it is assuredly the reference to the
subject, not so much as the body of the parasite mother, but to those lost
envelopes where the continuity between the interior and the exterior is so
easily read (. . .) there is something where the rapport to the body [corps]
must be accentuated, to incorporation, to the Eiverleibung, that is, we must
look from a side in which the father would be left entirely aside (. . .) I left it com-
pletely to the side.
The whole dialectic of these past few years up to and including the
Kleinian dialectic which is yet the closest, remains falsified because the
emphasis has not been placed on the essential deviation [“mother” distinct
from “father” as a deviation and not as an opposition].
(1961–1962: V/1962)
From: J. Lacan, D’un autre a l’Autre:
It is not for nothing that place evokes the buried-up-against [placage] which is
essential in defining the bosom as analogous to placenta, inasmuch as it defines
the subjective relationship which is appropriate to institute it in the mother–
child relationship. The ambioceptor role of the bosom between the child and
the mother is in reality the prevalent role. It is as the objet a, in being buried-
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up-against-her-insides, that the child-subject is articulated, that its message is
received by the mother, and that it [the message] is given back to it.
Not for distribution (1968–1969: 14/IV/1969)
The hole of the knot with no interiority or exteriority, the extimate space or tun-
nel, place of archaic events and site of their originary traces, is described by Lacan
following Merleau-Ponty like a reversible glove or like a fabric and its hidden
lining. I suggest developing the idea of the “hole that turns into two holes” in a
matrixial perspective in the direction of severality in a few ways: as diffraction of the
objet a between two – or several, not infinite, not one – entities, as sharing of the
objet a by two – or several – individuals, as composing the objet a by several com-
ponents and as dispersing and divergence of “grains” of subjectivity between several
different individuals, where the objet a becomes a borderlink between them: an a-link.
All of this takes place in the subject insisting on becoming a subject, the “subject
in insistence” already while becoming a subject in the womb and co-emerging in
prebirth incest (a non-sexual incest) together with the mother-to-be, with neither
fusion nor rejection. The becoming-subject-to-be is a presubject in the desire and
the discourse of the m/Other-to-be who transgresses her own individual psychic
boundaries and takes part in the pre-subject’s Real that stretches “between trauma
and fantasy”. The feminine swerve participates in any trauma of the I and the
non-I in the matrixial stratum. The traumatic rapport is articulated in connectiv-
ity and the fantastic link is retroactively embroidered into sense. The postnatal
relations (breast/bosom) contain functions and structural elements borrowed from
the prenatal apparatus (bosom/placenta), and the matrixial angle illuminates the
borderspace between inside and outside in subjectivity-as-encounter, where a
continuity between interior and exterior rather than a split comes to light.
Lacan asserted that be didn’t develop the side from which the father moves
aside; and leaving such a side aside demanded a price. Lacan also confessed hav-
ing prohibited those around him from daring to advance the issue of the prenatal
mother and also argues for both a difference and a link between “woman” and
“mother”. Indeed here, in the matrixial borderspace, in the zone of the “lost enve-
lopes” where a hole becomes several boles, it is not motherhood nor mother/child
relations that are intended, but a “before” as “beside” or “beyond” the Phallus, that
concerns the “woman” before post-natal motherhood and before becoming the
archaic future-mother for a becoming-subject. We are dealing with the singular-
ity of each psychic matrixial encounter between I and non-I which is analogous
to the intrauterine feminine/prenatal encounter. We are dealing with a site that
indicates hidden female specificity that creates a feminine originary swerve, and
with the possibility of inscribing traces of the encounter in the Other, as a web, in
an enlarged-Other which thereby contains unconscious sub-knowledge which is
not conditioned by repression of signifiers. Furthermore, I suggest that such an
assembled speak/through-being can discern and transmit the matrixial rapport via art
and work it through in psychoanalytic transference/countertransference relations.
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Pre-birth incest

It is impossible to deal with the “lost envelopes” from the side of “the Name of
the Father”: the side of the phallic Symbolic, the site of the network of signifiers
with the social-cultural principles inscribed in the Symbolic and transmitted by
discourse. But in psychoanalysis since Freud they do not get to be processed from
an-other side either, because the hole they perforate in the symbolic Other is dan-
gerous: it endangers male sexuality and narcissism. (Freud 1908/1959: 205–226).
The woman only ought to develop the other side, hints Lacan in the 1970s, since
there are matters that concern only the woman.9
The matter of the womb as a sex-difference first appeared and later was rejected
by Freud from the question of sexuality. It was rejected in the service of male
narcissism since narcissism is founded, in Freud, upon a libidinal investment in a
corporeal object – i.e. the penis, which the male subject has in reality and owns
in imagination. Assigning a first-rate importance to a corporeal object which the
male subject doesn’t have would represent an aff liction to narcissism: its imaginary
and symbolic significance and importance had therefore of necessity to be denied.
The “universal” and “neutral” concept of narcissism that is supposed to serve both
sexes is built upon libidinal investment in one’s own male organ even if the subject
(she) doesn’t have it. If the sex-difference represented by the womb is presented
by Freud to begin with as the first sexual question for boys and is later rejected
on the ground of its threat to male narcissism, the question of the womb as a sex-
difference that is significant for girls is rejected even right from the start, on the
threshold of any possible serious consideration. For Lacan, as we have elsewhere

discussed,10 it is not the male organ that is the focus of the notion of the phallus,
and castration mechanism is first of all symbolic. Still, the phallus and its principles
empty the beyond-the-phallus field of any possible signification. Lacan, however,
does suggest to examine, from the side where the father remains outside, some
kind of primary narcissism linked to the lost envelopes that stretch between interior
and exterior and are related to the maternal body – even though he himself sticks
to the phallic model and will not do this research himself. Lacan even hints that he
(any-man) shouldn’t touch upon matters that concern women only and claims that
what he did develop concerning the woman is already too much (1975a) and stems
from his own psychotic side (1975–1976).
When we divert the focus towards the zone of feminine/prenatal encounter
beyond-the-phallus and examine its significance for the woman, we are touching
upon a basic taboo left unarticulated in psychoanalysis. Language disavows this
encounter’s jouissance and does not transmit it through itself; human social law and
order are constructed upon its foreclosure since it indicates a forbidden rapport for
the post-Oedipal male subject: the incestual rapport with the Other-“woman” as
an archaic-becoming-m/Other-to-be – and not just with the m/Other. This rapport is
dangerous; its encounter in the Real for the man/boy threatens to stand only as the
return to the womb, a regression towards an archaic Real. Its value in the Symbolic
is that of regression, since this rapport cannot wear another, supplementary, future
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incarnation in the Real, such as gestating and giving birth via one’s own body. For
the post-Oedipal female subject this rapport is a regression towards an archaic Real

as well as a possible imaginary projection towards embodied future; it thus also has
a value of potentiality on top of the value of regression in the Symbolic. It is also,
sometimes, a painful and joyful present: a “jouis-present”.
While Freud develops the narrative of the archaic father and treats the taboo
of boy/mother incest that is structured by/for it, there is no similar structure con-
cerning the archaic future-mother and no prohibition that is parallel to that of the
Oedipal incest. Indeed the prebirth (non-sexual) incest cannot be forbidden – it
occurs to give life. Yet, for its highly psychotic potential for the male subject in the
phallic paradigm it cannot be elaborated but only silenced; not even excluded from
the Symbolic by repression (from which it could then come back as the return of
the repressed and produce an-other desire) but only marginalized as unthinkable.
And whatever of it which escapes this destiny, is thinkable, and hastens to find
shelter inside the phallic model under the wings of “the Name of the Father,” is
reduced to its measures and called upon to serve, in terms of fertility and procrea-
tion in the framework of heterosexuality within patriarchal legacy.
A passage to the partial dimension in the sharing with the

intimate stranger
Another narrative, feminine and supplementary, has been sacrificed in order to
preserve and protect the phallic integrity of the subject (whether male or female).
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FIGURE 5.7 Bracha L. Ettinger, Eurydice n.54 – Mothers and a Child. Collection:
Castello di Rivoli, 2018. Oil on canvas (40 × 30 cm).
The sacrificed feminine possible narratives touch upon diffraction, multiplicity of

severality, dispersal and partiality, shareability and hybridity, with-ness and con-
ductivity, passability and potentiality. This ensemble of ideas together touches
upon a rapport with the unknown other, the unknown yet intimate stranger, a
rapport that threatens the patriarchal kin-relations since it is unappropriated by the
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FIGURE 5.8 Bracha L. Eurydice – Medusa – Pieta n.2, 2015–2018. Oil on canvas
(40 × 30 cm).
phallus. A rapport where the subject is not One or All but is a potential intersection
whose objet is both half-lost, partly shared and hybrid.
Indeed the route of a post-Oedipal non-psychotic adult man, who accepts the
servitude, the burden and the benediction of the phallus, is forever blocked to
the feminine-matrixial rapport in the traumatic level of the Real. The woman, on the
other hand, even though she is an adult that shelters like the man under the shade of
the phallus, even though from the father’s side her route is also blocked to this rapport,
is also touched and touches it from the margins of/on an-other side. As a potential
archaic-becoming-m/Other-to-be, woman has a singular rapport to this originary femi-
nine dimension,11 to a feminine potentiality carried from a past and also aspired to
from a future, leaning on a real swerve and on an encounter-Thing, archaic and lost
yet that may potentially return and be reincarnated, again but in difference; a pos-
sibility. We may say that the “lost envelopes” Other-return and present themselves,
one by one, to a woman; that for her they are not entirely lost but almost-lost.
Coincidentally, for the woman, both the lack of the sexual rapport – in the phallus
(and Lacan’s repeated expression: “there is no sexual rapport” is well known) and
this same rapport itself co-exist on the levels of trauma and fantasy and even desire – in
the matrixial dimension beyond the phallus. And the subject, male or female, is born
in “misunderstanding” into a double-sphered feminine desire: phallic and matrixial.
Birth in misunderstanding in a beyond-the-phallus sphere

From: J. Lacan, Le malentendu [The misunderstanding] (translated by J. Simas and
Bracha L. Ettinger):
I do not say that the word is creator. I say something altogether different
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because my practice obliges me to: I say that the word is unconscious – that
is, misunderstood. If you think that all can be revealed about it, well, you
are fooling yourselves: not all can be. That means a part of it will never be
revealed. This is precisely where religion goes wrong. And it also serves
as a rampart around Revelation – which religion prides itself on in order
to exploit. As for psychoanalysis, its exploit is to exploit misunderstanding.
With, as its end result, a revelation which is fantasy (. . .) Otto Rank came
close to this when he spoke of the trauma of birth. As for the trauma, there
is no other trauma: Man is born misunderstood.
(1980, n.p.)
Lacan elaborates:
Since I’ve been asked about what’s called the status of the body, I reach this
point to emphasize the fact that it can only be grasped from this point. The
body only makes its apparition in the real as misunderstanding. Let’s be radi-
cal about it: your body is the fruit of a lineage [legacy, heritage] – and a large
number of your troubles are due to the fact that this lineage had already been
swimming in misunderstanding as best it could. It was swimming for the
simple reason that it would speak/through-being to whoever happened to
be around at the time. That is what it has transmitted to you by “giving you
Life”, as we say. It’s from this that you inherit. And this explains your being
at odds with yourself, when that is the case.
(Ibid.)
He continues:
The misunderstanding is already present from before. Inasmuch as from

before you are part of this wonderful legacy, or rather you have a stake in the
babble of your ancestors. No need for you to babble yourself. From before,
what sustains you in the name of the unconscious, i.e. misunderstanding, is
rooted there.
There is no other trauma of birth than that of being born desired. Desired,
or not – it’s all the same since it is speaking-through-being. The speak/
through-being in question is generally divided into two speakers. Two
speakers who do not speak the same language. Two who do not understand
each other speaking. Two who just don’t get on together. Two who con-
spire for reproduction, but from an accomplished misunderstanding, which
your body will carry through the said reproduction.
(Ibid.)
And concludes:
I admit that language can be useful for sensible communication (. . .) sensible

communication is dialogue (. . .) Dialogue is rare. As for the production
of a new body of speaker, it is so rare that it is de facto absent. It is not
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absent in principle, but the principle is inscribed only in the symbolic. This
is the case of the so-called family principle, for example. No doubt, there
has always been some apprehension of this. Enough for the unconscious to
be considered as the knowledge of God. What nevertheless distinguishes the
knowledge called unconscious from the knowledge of God is that the latter
was supposed to be for our good. That is what is untenable. Hence the ques-
tion I have raised: Does God believe in God?
(Ibid.)
My clinical experience shows that not only the negation of the phallus but also
a total identification with it at the expense of a space beyond it, and an inability
to communicate inside and from the matrixial sphere, lead lo a dead-end. This is
testified to, in my view, by post-partum psychoses which are bound up with the
impossibility to get in touch with a matrixial experience in the Real and with
the difficulties in the passage from it to a mother/infant relationship. Infantile
autism and the way it is bound to the mental state of the mother before the
birth of the infant (Tustin 1990) is in my view misunderstood by psychoanalysis.
Certain psychoses in adolescence are bound according to our findings to the stage
of intra-uterine existence (Ettinger et al. 1991) but are projected by analysts on the
mother’s character and her post-natal motherhood. Hence we can conclude that
something in a Symbolic that will be perceived as wider than the phallic-Symbolic can
permit even in non-pathogenetic circumstances a certain non-conscious accessibil-
ity to the matrixial stratum. Even if this wider-Symbolic, or rather the feminine
supplement to the Symbolic, is to be revealed/invented/formulated in/for each
encounter anew, and is contingent and unforeseen. A total blockage of the matrix
may be no less pathological for women than its total invasion.
Assembled speak/through-being and an-Other

feminine desire
Matrixial femininity is unpredictable precisely because trans-subjectivity is deliv-
ered in it as a potential in the encounter with the stranger, and since its objet a is
dispersed, shared and hybrid. In the light of the matrix I interpret Lacan’s speak/
through-being in “Le malentendu” as the being of a “woman” which is unlimited
to one individual and is charged with affect and desire in withness – in jointness-
in-differentiation – is an assembled being of severality in the partial dimension, a
being of encounter between I and non-I in the Real “between trauma and fantasy”,
a potential being that communicates in transference relationships through dialogue,
although rare, nonexistent in actuality perhaps and yet not impossible: a dialogue
inscribed as a potentiality in the Other, unconscious inscription but such that is not
reduced to the repressed chain of the signifier.
If the matrixial encounter may wear the form of a potential dialogue in a trans-
subjective speak/through-being, then through speaking, something of the matrixial
sphere of being may find expression, beyond art and psychosis, in the psychoana-
lytic meeting. And maybe that’s what Lacan is aiming at when, while transporting
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the analyst from his status of a subject who is supposed to know (sujet-supposé-savoir)
to his status of relics in the form of objet a, he somewhat subversively says:

I have said and done enough to stop anyone from daring – at least anyone
from my neighboring circles – from daring to advance the idea that one can
be the mother [as an analyst in a didactic analysis]. Yet this is precisely what
this is all about.
(1961–1962)
For me, in parallel to the passage from positioning the analyst as a sujet-supposé-
savoir to his positioning as an objet a, a passage occurs from a masculine to a
feminine position, as well as a move from transference as repetition to transference
as “impossible” encounter – impossible in the phallus yet potential in the matrix –
between the subject and psychic traces that are incarnated in objects.
Since woman is both subjected to the phallus, censured by it and also escapes it,
the feminine-matrixial sex-difference is not equal nor opposite to the masculine dif-
ference, but is something else. The “woman” is “and-and,” the “woman” bypasses
the phallus and connects to “the rare dialogue” that is “de facto” – but not “in prin-
ciple” – absent from the Symbolic, to a dialogue that contains what may potentially
each time otherwise become inscribed, inscription of traces of swerve and rapport,
traces where matrixial trauma and fantasy arise as connected to the female corpo-
real specificity and related to a feminine-Other desire, composite from a phallic
desire plus something else. The feminine-Other-desire vehiculed by an assembled
speak/through-being linked to a “double-opening” wider-Other creates in misun-

derstanding the inheritance transmitted to the becoming-subject in co-emergence
with her. Indeed, her desire does include traces of unconscious communication “in
the Name of the Father” with desires and messages that infiltrate from discourse
through the family lineage which includes desires and messages from whoever took
an unforgettable unconscious part in the parental “babble”. But it also includes,
I suggest, traces of archaic incestual rapport, m/Otherly and non-sexual, partially
foreclosed with-in-side the feminine, traces inscribed not by signifiers but in a sub-
symbolic connectionist mode and included in a wider-Other, enlarging the margins
of the Symbolic. A borderspace of inter-with-ness and of transgression of the indi-
vidual’s borders seeks ways to become known and thinkable.
II. Feminine borderlinking
Sexual rapport in the “matrix” and non-rapport in

the “phallus”
Up until the end of his teaching, Lacan repeatedly claimed that there is no sexual
rapport, that psychoanalysis itself attests to that, and that this lack of rapport is the
basis of psychoanalytic discourse, but that if such rapport were to exist, it would
be feminine. Logical and topological considerations mainly, but also aesthetic-
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poetic ones, led Lacan, if only in brief passages in some of his very late seminars
(1973–1974; 1975–1976), to imply enigmatically a psychic zone in which feminine

sexual rapport that the signifier has not appropriated and exploded and castration
has not cut-out and kicked-away might occur. A “supplementary” feminine non-
conscious zone is stretched out of – and retreats back into – art, separated from
psychosis, if at all, by less than a hair’s breath. Yet, even though Lacan speaks of
supplementary femininity and – albeit rarely – raises the possibility of the existence
of sexual rapport on the woman’s side only and in psychosis, mysticism or art, it is
important to emphasize that the assertion that “there is no sexual rapport” resides
at the centre of his teaching: there is no sexual rapport in the “phallus” (the uncon-
scious informed by the phallic mechanism); no rapport to the real experience of the
woman; no contact with the feminine-Other in sexual relationships based on the
phallic model of jouissance for both sexes; and, above all, there are no ways to report
on a feminine sexual rapport if/where it does occur, no inscription of it by signi-
fiers in the Symbolic: “there is no sexual rapport” signifies exactly this rapport’s “lack
of the signifier” (Miller 1985–1986), a “deficit in knowledge” (Miller 1982–1983).
The phallic sexual jouissance, based on what Freud described as organ-pleasure,
whose privileged position in the mental structure of both men and women is shown
by psychoanalytic experience, relates to an organ of the subject itself or to the other
treated as an object that represents an organ, and not to the other as an-other sub-
ject; it is therefore “an obstacle to sexual rapport” (Lacan 1973–1974). Significating
an event from the Real by means of the signifier “kills” the libidinal event, and is
therefore an obstacle to the inscription of sexuality as a rapport. First, jouissance
of an organ cannot be jouissance of a relation; and, second, the value of the emer-
gence of castration is that of a sexual non-rapport (cf. Miller 1982–1983).
Trans-subjective web
However, there exists a jouissance of a totally different order, which is not an obsta-
cle to sexual rapport but its culmination; such jouissance is exposed despite the fact
“that language in a way sanctions” it (Lacan 1973–1974). Feminine sexuality testifies
to a sphere where an-other jouissance exists and inscribes traces, where the non-
conscious is wider than the unconscious structured as a language, where the Other
is different from the Other that is a container of the repressed chain of signifiers.
In a series of essays I proposed that feminine jouissance, which Lacan describes
as enveloped in its continuity as unthinkably is knowable and transcripted, though
not (yet) inscribed in and by the signifiers. It aspires to release itself as an-other
gaze via supplementary aspects of the psychic object that participate in the shaping
of a feminine dimension of desire; but as long as all desire is formulated as a castra-
tion of this continuity, the phallic vicious circle traps it in its net and prevents its
passability into culture (see Ettinger 1992; 1996b [added for the 1998 publication
of “Supplementary Jouissance”]). In the transformational processes that language
allows, termed metaphor and metonymy, “the jouissance is reduced to the phal-
lic signifier” (Miller 1994–1995), and there is no other possible sublimation or
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passability of the “woman” and her rapport into the Symbolic. Lacan suggests,
however, looking for a possible different inscription for the supplementary femi-

nine sexuality: “something that is other than the Symbolic (. . .) that which already
from three appears in any and all writing” (1973–1974), whereby he distances
himself from language in order to approach what he calls “lalangue”.
Inscribed in a mode of webbing that privileges Severality over the One or All, I
suggest that matrixial desire sprouts, not from a phantasm about sharing, but from
a border shareability in trauma and phantasm that re(a)sonates meaning and creates
feminine-Other-desire via metramorphosis. In the matrix, there grow originary
relations of proximity-in-distance that cannot be reduced to fusion or split, and
these awaken specific affects. Metramorphosis is a transformational process that is
not reduced to the phallic signifier and “makes sense” already from the several. It
creates and covenants directly knots in a trans-subjective non-conscious web and
touches upon the “sinthome”12 from a feminine psychic zone in the joint border-
space, at the site of shared and partial, assembled and diffracted subjectivity. This
feminine zone in the woman, I add, does not indicate a psychotic site. Moreover,
psychosis in a woman may rather relate to its total foreclosure or to the melting of
the matrixial stratum inside the phallic stratum.
The other sex is supported by sinthome

Feminine sexual rapport and non-rapport co-exist. What could be another mode of
inscription that would fit the non-rapport? How can what Lacan describes (following
Merleau-Ponty) as a “glove” be inscribed and described as a basis for an “impossible”

rapport? What would be a mode that would enable the passage of feminine jouissance,
its swerve and its sexual rapport towards culture following their unforeseen incarna-
tion, so that such a swerve and rapport would not be either just enacted in the Real
or realized in psychosis? What would discover their passage as an-other knowledge,
a knowledge that would not imply their foreclosing split from the subject? What
would evade their constitution as a deficit in knowledge?
From: J. Lacan, Le sinthôme:
The sinthôme (. . .) something that allows the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and
the Real to go on holding together (. . .) what I call, what I designate (. . .)
of the sinthôme, which is marked here with a circle (. . .) of string, is meant
to take place at the very spot where, say, the trace of the knot goes wrong.
[It’s a] “slip of the knot”.
It is inasmuch as there is “sinthôme” that there is no sexual equivalence,
which is to say there is rapport; for it is obvious that if we say that non-
rapport derives from equivalence, it is inasmuch as there is no equivalence
that the rapport is structured.
Where there is rapport, it is inasmuch as there is sinthôme, which is to say
where, as I’ve said, it is by sinthôme that the other sex is sustained. I allowed
myself to say that the sinthôme is precisely speaking the sex I don’t belong
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to, which is to say a woman. Because a woman is a sinthôme for every man,
it is perfectly clear that there needs be found another name for what becomes

of man for a woman, since for that very reason the sinthôme is character-
ized by non-equivalence. One can say that man is for a woman all that you
like, such as an aff liction worse than a sinthôme; you can articulate it as you
please: even as devastation. But if there is no equivalence, you are forced to
specify what becomes of “sinthôme”.
(1975–1976)
Lacan adds:
There is no equivalence, that’s the only thing, that’s the only recess where
what the speak/through-being, the human being, sexual rapport is sustained
(. . .) the sinthôme’s direct link, it is this something which must be situated in
its doings with the Real, with the real of the unconscious (. . .) it is the sinthôme
we must deal with in the very rapport Freud maintained was natural –
which doesn’t mean a thing – the sexual rapport.
All that subsists of the sexual rapport is that geometry which we alluded
to in relation to the glove. That is all that remains of the human space of a
basis for the rapport.
(Ibid.)
In his late theory. Lacan describes the intra-psychic registers (Real, Symbolic,
Imaginary) as rings, linked to each other by a Borromean knot. This knot is a
kind of triangular warp-and-woof weave, a kind of braid made of three stems,

where the stem of the Real is inseparable in principle, structurally and primarily,
from the stems of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. In a braid such as this, where
interior and exterior can be turned inside out like a glove, the Real itself already
stores some kind of knowledge: “there is knowledge in the Real” that can be
articulated, “something that is written and should be read in deciphering it” (Lacan
1973–1974).
Knowledge of the Real and supplementary feminine

sex-difference
I want to propose that if the Real, and not only the Symbolic, harbours already
some knowledge, we may suppose that a feminine difference occurs already in
the Real. A rapport – for me a movement of borderlinking between several par-
tial subjects – and an affective swerve based on “dehiscence” and “bursting”13 in
the field of affects, germinates directly from/with-in and in contact with a real
female bodily specificity. These swerving and borderlinking movements comprise
a sexual-feminine difference. We may conceive of an alignment of a sexual differ-
ence independently and in difference from the phallic organization of difference.
The matrixial difference is created from the beginning as a feminine dimension of
potentiality in a weave of affects and information interwoven in an inter-psychic
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and even trans-psychic web.
According to my interpretation of The “Uncanny”, a differentiating potential

on the level of affection is indicated by Freud when he discusses the anxiety that
accompanies the experiencing of art. The matrixial affects as primary differen-
tiation, introduce a difference on the level of the Thing as they give signals that
some-Thing happens, and that a transition from Thing to object takes place, with-
out a total separation from the Thing. Matrixial affects index a transformation
and an exchange, and matrixial phenomena testify that such a passage takes place
and a minimal meaning is created. A tremolos of meaning of differentiation-in-
togetherness is tracing itself. Thus, the matrixial affect is the affect of the Thing
inasmuch as it inscribes traces in I and non-I. The differential affectivity is at this
level inseparable from this passage. Their co-incidence is fatal; it works for mean-
ing through the work of art.
She [a “woman”] manages to succeed at sexual union. Only this union is the
union of one with two, or of each with each, of each of these three strands.
The sexual union, if I may say so, is internal to its weave. And that is where
she plays her part, in really showing us what a knot is.
(Lacan 1973–1974)
In the Borromean knot, the unconscious is disharmonious; the knot leads us to deal
with knowledge which is not only independent of the signifier, but also advances
us towards the “pure” Real even more than does the phantasm when the latter is
articulated inside the phallic field. “The desire to know meets obstacles. In order to
embody the obstacle I have invented the knot” (Lacan 1975–1976). Lacan clearly
looks for ways of knowing “woman” beyond mere affirmations of her existence.
The “woman” beyond-the-phallus exhibits the intra-psychic knot, but remains a
radical Other. But further to that, in the matrixial stratum, she exhibits intersec-
tions of knots in a trans-psychic web, and therefore “woman” is a border-Other.
The knots enigmatically account for the failure to inscribe feminine desire in
Lacan’s still (and until the very end) phallic paradigm. However, with the concept
of the “knot” it already becomes clear that for Lacan the possibility of describing
the “supplementary” femininity within the phallic framework has reached its lim-
its. In the passage to a matrixial apparatus, metramorphosis that may be thought of
as a co-poietic activity in a trans-psychic web remembers, inscribes and transfers
the feminine jouissance, swerve and borderlinking via art across the threshold of
culture. If knowledge stored in the Real is not a host of data awaiting decoding by
means of signification that will also constitute a cleft in it and a split from it, but
is an “invention, that’s what happens in every encounter, in any first encounter
with sexual rapport” (Lacan 1973–1974), then a metramorphic process of webbing
and with-nessing, a metramorphic process of exchange of affect and phantasm
based on conduction of/in trauma in jointness and a metramorphic process of
transmissions-in-transformation of phantasm, initially between a becoming-subject
and a becoming-m/Other-to-be, but more generally between I in co-emergence
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with an uncognized non-I (which can be considered a plural-several, partial and
diffracted “woman”), can release knowledge from “holes” in the Real. Swerving

and contacting become themselves a kind of knowledge; they are the inscrip-
tions of traces of borderlinking. We can consider them as manifestations of the
“sinthome” that releases/creates/invents/reveals, from a feminine side, a potential
desire whose sense does not depend on the signifier.
Passions of the (a)

The register of phantasm in psychoanalytic theory enables one to conceptual-
ize a connection between a mental object and a desiring subject at the level of
the Thing before originary repression and before it was emptied and erased by the
symbolic Other, before the Other was empowered via the phallus. But more than
such a conceptualization is possible! In order to overcome the limitations of the
split created by the pair phantasm/desire, and approach what is even “closer to
us than phantasm” and “brings us closer to the pure Real”, we may rather speak,
together with J. A. Miller, of the “passions” of the (a) itself (1985–1986). These
dwell in the matrix in an aggregated, enlarged-Other in whose constitution they
also take part when acting directly as unthought sub-knowledge in a sub-symbolic
connectionist web.14
If a subjective supplementary sex-difference is possible. experiencing its trau-
matic event and exhausting its jouissance are not enough. Conceptualizing a
level of an-Other feminine difference and of non-equivalence between the sexes
promoted by feminine jouissance, swerve and borderlinking is possible only if

whatever of it that escapes pre-established discourse is yet unthoughtly known and
not only ex-sists with-in, inside and in connection with female corpo-reality. An
originary feminine difference is possible only if it is traced, if it can be “written”,
become somewhat aesthetically thinkable, yet not by distinct symbols, and receive
or give sense.
The encounter between trauma, phantasm and desire is the domain proper
of working art. It is making art that enables me to articulate something of – and
about – the feminine swerve and its borderlinking via concepts issued by/in/from
the work. If psychoanalytic discourse leans on the feminine difference as lack or
absence, on the impossibility of elaborating what is beyond the phallic field, on the
impossibility of feminine rapport and on the othering of “woman” to the point of
her foreclosure, art may be a site from which some light may be shed on “woman”.
This site is not available for “therapy”, but it allows psychoanalytic research to
extract something from whatever is imprinted in it for the first time and “use” it
as its proper material.
Encounter between trauma and phantasm

Following the originary tissue of I and non-I in the womb, a traumatic/phantas-
matic encounter occurs in the non-conscious matrixial channel. This encounter
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is a covenant with the unknown, a borderlinking in the Real which is sexual
according to the Freudian definition of partial sexuality (sexuality before Oedipus).

Intra-psychic knots are connected to trans-psychic borderlinks. “Inventions” that
are inseparable from their inscription as unconscious sub-knowledge are created
and shared between several individuals. This articulation of a matrixial borderspace
brings us back, but differently, to the early Lacanian assumption of intersubjectiv-
ity, which he renounced following his later theoretical inversion. Intersubjectivity
re-infiltrates Lacan’s late teaching in a way that may, to my mind, be understood
anew in the light of the feminine matrixial difference. For the early Lacan of
the 1950s, the assumption of intersubjectivity is condensed in the formula, “the
subject’s desire is the desire of the Other”: relations towards significant others
take place in terms of the symbolic satisfaction brought about by recognition of
the subject stemming from the Other and reaching the subject through speech.
The passage through significant others happens only inasmuch as the Other vehi-
cled by them is represented by signifiers and represents society, history and law
entwined in the cultural discourse and in language. What can be the meaning of
my reintroducing the matter of intersubjectivity in the context of late Lacanian
theory, and what significance may we suggest for a feminine-Other-desire in it?
Where, theoretically speaking, could an encounter occur between the Other’s
desire and the trauma of the I? In what sense may the Other’s desire be articu-
lated in a direct, positive relation to the subject’s jouissance, if desire is what “kills”
jouissance, according to Lacan, and if the Other is considered by him an alienated
network of the signifier’s chain? Where can the subject’s trauma and phantasm
meet with the Other’s phantasm? What, if any, can be the meaning, for the I, of
the phantasm of the Other? How does the phantasm of the Other connect with
the I’s phantasm and desire?
Indeed, in classical Lacanian theory, the desire of the subject, not its phantasm,
corresponds to, or reflects, the desire of the Other – not its phantasm; trauma is
always individual (both in the early and in the late theory), and phantasm is in cor-
relation to a jouissance that the subject assumes in the realm of the Other.
Thus, an Other who would be larger than “the treasure of the signifiers” is
to be hypothesized in order for all these encounters to become possible or valid.
Likewise, we have to conceive of differentiating moves like swerving and bor-
derlinking that are not based on an absence or lack (in relation to which both
sexes are considered equal in the kingdom of the Phallus), but on co-emergence
and co-fading in transformation that produce and modify the partial dimension
of wit(h)nessing. In the passage from intersubjectivity to subjectivity-as-encounter,
wit(h)nessing-in-differentiation of I with non-I takes place in the site of the rela-
tions between symbolic subjects without replacing or erasing them.
An enlarged Other, analogous to a double-opening matrice, in which the chain
of the signifier, on the one hand, and the objet a in discordance with it on the
other hand, dwell together, is described by Lacan in his late teaching; it is an
Other which I find in concordance with an I, described by Miller, which is larger
than the subject. “There are subjective positions that are wider than those of the
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subject of the signifier; that’s what one studies with the phantasm” (Miller 1982–
1983), for phantasm is not subordinated to the retroactivity of signifying. Phantasm

exposes archaic ways of introjecting external objects and projecting internal ones
(M. Klein), modes of treating archaic internal objects that are “mental representa-
tion of the impulse” (S. Freud), as well as psychic routes of search after the archaic
object as lost or as a lack (Lacan, Bion).15 If the I is the subject as containing the
vital function of jouissance (Miller 1985–1986), then something of the libidinal
energy is not entirely lost in the process of symbolization. In order to speak of the
I, there should be added to the subject “that which is found at its origin, namely,
jouissance” (Lacan 1968–1969).
In face of the I and non-I defined in the matrix as an assembled and diffracted
partial subjectivity that contains, shares and transmits its jouissance, I will posit such
an Other which is not only the complex of the signifiers’ chain, but contains the
(a) that will never have a perfect concordance with the One. And it is for such a
lack of concordance, as well as for the potential with-nessing with the stranger,
that “misunderstanding” in the trauma of birth and, even more so, of prebirth can
be said to go on forever. The subject emerging in relation to the Other defined as
the network of signifiers replaces the traces of the part-objects; the I, by contrast,
and likewise (I suggest, by means of the same parameters) the non-I co-emerging
in relation to a wider-Other with several openings, include them. An “extimate”
borderlinking makes it possible to locate traces of the subject’s “lost envelopes”
as objet a and an a-link in the I and non-I ensemble, as a kind of in-(me)side out-
side(me) and as an intimate outside that dwells in the m/Other, but is hidden in
me, and to place in a composite Other the erotic traces that are inscribed in the
non-conscious psyche, but not by distinct signifiers.
Jouissance of encounter as a basis for an-Other desire

An uncanny insinuation that something strange, deviating from the phallus and
bound to intersubjective relations might take place in the field of symbolic desire
can, I believe, already be found in this exceptional expression: “phantasm as the
desire of the other” (Lacan 1966: 825). In the context of Lacan’s classical theory,
such a connection between phantasm and desire rings like a slip of the tongue. I
connect it to the possibility of a linkage in “misunderstanding” between the trauma
and phantasm of the becoming-subject and the trauma, phantasm and desire of the
woman who is a real archaic becoming-m/Other-to-be, towards whose desire the
subject is attuned in phantasm, in whose phantasm and desire the subject, even
before s/he was born, was already playing a part. “This desire with which the child
is invested”, says Lacan – connecting again, by the way, phantasm and desire –
“starts off always as the result of subjective interpretation, as a function of the
maternal desire alone, of her own phantasm”.16 The subject is invested both in and
by the desire and in/by the phantasm of the m/Other, and this has effects, positive
or negative, according to each case. Considerations of early pathology must relate
to the prebirth stage: The first amputation the psychotic is subjected to occurs,
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according to Lacan, before his/her birth [when] for the mother, s/he is the object
of her own metabolism [and] paternal participation is denied, unacceptable. S/he

is, from this moment on and throughout pregnancy, the part-object that comes to
fill a phantasmatic lack on the level of her body. Yet, in contrast to this phantas-
matic projection of a part-object as a “cork” of this kind on behalf of a mother who
denies the father, there may emerge in the mother-to-be’s phantasm, and may be
projected towards her co-emerging-subject, an objet a that relates to the Thing, yet
is brought about “not so much as lacking” (as “absence” in contrast to “presence”)
but as “to be” (Lacan 1961–1962), where I find an indication to an intermediate
position and a potentiality.
I suggest that the jouissance that emerges in the hollowed tunnel of encounter
on the level of prebirth incest, and a web of connections between the trauma and
phantasm of the prenatal becoming-subject (I), male or female, and the trauma,
phantasm and desire of the “woman” as becoming-archaic-m/Other-to-be (non-I)
that relates to the I, both of them in co-naissance as partial subjects and partial
objects of/for each other – “grains” of I and non-I and not yet “mother” and
“infant” – constitute a rapport from a feminine to-be-side that seeps into later
systems and stages. I propose that this encounter, which for psychoanalytic theory
is sexual in the partial pre-Oedipal dimension, which constitutes a sexual, or rather
libidinal rapport or psychically invested rapport, is inscribed to make sense. An
im-pure, composite, hybrid object diffracts and penetrates into a matrixial sub-
jectivity made of covenants between several potential entities, unknown to each
other, but carrying a potentiality to be revealed to each other when transformed
by the encounter. This “rapport” is forever invested through transconnecting with

a feminine-maternal body-psyche.
Feminine jouissance, which “does not wait for phallic organization to enter into
play, will take on aspects of revelation which it will keep forever” (Lacan 1961–
1962) – a revelation that marks in the matrix the singularity of each encounter as
a unique creation of borderlinking with the unknown as co-poiesis. The matrixial
co-poiesis appears to be in concordance with Lacan’s idea that a “woman” is acces-
sible “one by one” in the sense of a sequence of unique cases, but the idea of the
unique encounter is here added. Inasmuch as the matrixial stratum is a weave that
emerges in the Real – in the psychic register that is most closely linked to libido
and to corporeal event, and first of all to the experience related to the womb as
inside or outside me and as outside and inside us – it spreads out between trauma
and phantasm of each becoming-subject together with the trauma and the phan-
tasm of its specific m/Other-to-be, and a potentiality is inscribed in it, a possibility
of unexpected revelation in some kind of dialogue.
The feminine-Other-desire as an assembled speak/through-being within a sin-
gular series of encounters is already a networked desire. Her desire is both phallic
from the Name of the Father’s side and matrixial from its be-side. An exclusively
phallic desire in such a meeting, which would have designated the reduction of the
libido as masculine (only) to the signifier at the price of the destruction of supple-
mentary feminine eroticism, could only have deepened the misunderstanding into
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which the subject is born and reduced its feminine potentiality.

The traumatic desire of the archaic becoming-m/Other-to-be
The enigma of femininity that touches upon originary repression, the Urver-
drängung, the primordial unconscious as connected to sex and death beyond/
before the separating line of castration, beyond/before the threshold of language,
is foreclosed in the phallus and emerging-by- and fading-by-transformation in
metramorphosis. And something of this co-emergence and co-fading in the Real
is delivered into the Symbolic’s “margins” via matrixial covenant(s) experienced
in transference and counter-transference and hidden in art. We must beware of
understanding from all this that the archaic m/Other-to-be – linked to the Thing
that undergoes originary repression, which passes through foreclosure, dispersal
or emerging-by- and fading-by-transformation – is simply the mother that was,
or a part of her body. Melanie Klein, according to Lacan, assumes in the exti-
mate site of the Thing the mythological body of the mother. In a similar way,
seemingly the archaic father in Lacan’s own work is not the actual father of past
times. Raising the objet a as “woman” in art to the level of the Thing, the site of
primordial extimity does not designate a regressive step like in the Phallus. And
linking with an inter-with Thing via art does not indicate a return to the womb
in the Real or a psychosis, but a realization of unforeseen potentiality of border-
linking, where “original” and “ready-made” intersect without fusion or rejection
in artworking.
The I’s phantasm of Origin is involved with that of his/her singular feminine
Other, of his/her uncognized non-I, which is also linked to her own other non-
I(s), all hovering together in a singular matrix. An encounter occurs at the limits
of language, which are included from the outset in Lacanian theory (as E. Laurent
says), for at the horizon of any possible language are carved the question of the
mother, the phantasm of the Origin, the trauma of the subject and the meet-
ing with the Other. These arise together with the enigma of the desire of the
m/Other-to-be, bounded in a sexual borderlinking that will get lost in the future
and become an archaic shared layer. “The first desire is the desire of the mother
whose value is traumatic” (Laurent 1995), for it is incestual. Incest is “only the
return to the maternal womb” (Lemoine 1995). To this I add: Only if the becom-
ing-subject that already shares and participates in the m/Other-to-be’s phantasm
and trauma is already differentiating what is shared, can something be traumatically
lost in birth and give birth to birth as trauma. The desire of the m/Other (non-I)
meets the I’s trauma and phantasm and in-forms sexual borderlinking.
I stated by putting it in the present tense that there is no sexual rapport.

That is the basis of Psychoanalysis (. . .) There is no sexual rapport except
for neighboring generations; namely, parents on the one band, and children
on the other. That’s what the interdiction of incest wards off. I talk about
sexual rapport.
Taylor and Francis (Lacan 1978)

As I have proposed elsewhere (Ettinger 1995a), in the experience of the matrixial
uncanny the sublimation of feminine/prenatal existence bursts forth as covenantal
in the artwork. If Freud’s aesthetic “uncanny” buds both from intrauterine life or
womb fantasies (1919), from what I have called a matrixial complex as well as from
the childhood castration complex, these two complexes indicate, to my mind,
two different clusters, apparati and functions, and not simply two different organs,
female and male (Ettinger 1997b [reference added for the 1998 publication]).
In the no-place of the Thing in art, Lacan identifies via the sinthome something
of the dimension of the revelation of “feminine” rapport – and not necessarily as
psychosis. I see in the feminine sinthome possibilities of matrixial sublimation in/
from different aspects of the feminine sexual difference. By means of metramor-
phosis, something of the matrix arises to the surface in art as a shared hybrid gaze
“between absence and presence”, just as something of the horror of castration
emerges through the phallic gaze that indicates the either absence or presence.
A border-Other in becoming-together between presence

and absence
I will end with a matrixial interpretation of a short passage from Lacan’s seminar,
where he speaks of “woman” not as an absence, as in his classical theory, but as
between presence and absence.
From J. Lacan Ou pire (translated by J. Simas and Bracha L. Ettinger):
[T]he between involved in sexual rapport but displaced and precisely Other-
imposed. To Other-impose, and it is curious that in imposing this Other,
what I advanced today concerns only the woman. And it is she who, in
this figure of the Other, gives us an illustration within our reach to be, as
a poet has written, “between center and absence,”17 between the meaning
she takes from what I’ve called the at-least-one, between the center as pure
existence or jouis-presence and absence (. . .) which I could nor write but to
define as “Not-all”, that which is not included in the phallic function, yet
which is not its negation (. . .) absence which is no less jouissance then being
jouis-absence.
(1971–1972: 8/3/1972)
If one possibility of an archaic “nothing” is the focus of the interdiction of the

elusive feminine sexual rapport based on prenatal incest, if this “nothing” is a lack
created by foreclosure, the archaic “centre” is precisely the focus of such an-other
rapport, in the intersection of its jouissance as “presence.” Beyond the originary
feminine/prenatal real stage, if “man” is either at the centre of such a rapport –
and then also inside psychosis – or cut away from it, in the “nothing” and then
also in the arms of the law that structures desire as masculine (i.e. if man is either
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in “centre” or in “nothing”), the woman traverses paradoxical between-instants
that are not either/or between these oppositions reproduced by the phallus, but

are “and-and” or neither/nor. These between-instants where we wit(h)ness are
impossible in terms of the phallic dimension. A composition of contradictions, an
“and-and” is each time a revelation in the feminine dimension. Is not revelation
“what happens in any first encounter with sexual rapport” (Lacan 1973–1974)?
If, for Lacan, the “woman” between jouis-presence and jouis-absence is Other,
even when she is a between, in the matrix she is not Other, but a border-Other
becoming18 between in wit(h)nessing. Lacan’s feminine “and-and” beyond-the-
phallus position receives its full significance in a covenant which is not only created
in contingency, but also dissolved in relations with the stranger and only in a
partial way. A matrixial dissolving is not a parting/cutting by either repression or
foreclosure, but a transformation with-in-ter others inscribed in metramorphosis.
Something of the impossible position of and-and and in-ter-with the Other that
secretly drips from the Real to the Imaginary and the Symbolic wounded in a
knot, is interlaced in subjectivity-as-encounter in a severality which lies before and
beside the subject as One. Something is interwoven between several elements into
a tissue whose connections are accessible to sublimation. Something, but not-All.
Border-Other as wit(h)ness: conclusions

The matrixial desire is composite; it includes a matrixial alongside a phallic desire.
It allows an assembled and partial speak/through-being which is not the individual
to be described. The matrix which supplies a “supplementary” sexual difference is

a borderspace of co-birth in originary differentiation linked to a female swerve and
borderlinking in the Real. The feminine/prenatal encounter that is linked in male
and female to the feminine swerve served me as a basis for devising a model for a
stratum of subjectivization in which co-emerging and co-fading I and non-I, shar-
ing a psychic borderspace and hybridized objet a, discern each other by conductible
borderlinks, interlink to each other while transmitting affects and pathic infor-
mation, and address one another in a borderlinking-without-relating that takes
place in the course of alternations in distance-in-proximity in a reciprocal non-
cognition, in a non-cognitive discerning. This borderspace is created both by a
swerve and by encounters with the stranger on the level of trauma and phantasm in
the Real, by unconscious connections shaped on a sub-symbolic level that in-forms
a wider-Other, and by deposits of the feminine-Other-desire which relates to her
phantasm and is already involved in earlier matrixial and phallic circles. Opening
from severality and contingency, me and the stranger, the I and the intimate yet
unknown non-I share an ephemeral, unpredictable, and singular alliance, in which
each participant is partial and relational, is not a centre/entity nor absence/noth-
ing, but a between entity/centre/presence/pure existence and lack or nothing,
in wit(h)ness. The matrixial object is composite and hybrid; the feminine-Other
participates in several specific covenants. The “woman”, which is not confined to
the contours of the one-body with its inside versus outside polarity, the “woman”
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which is inter-with the Other, leans on a sexual difference based on borderspacing
and webbing links, and not on essence or negation. The “woman” is not a fore-

closed Other, but a potential border-Other which is becoming-between and with.
The woman is an in-ter-becoming, wit(h)nessing her partial I and Other. Between
centre and nothing, she is a border-Other as wit(h)nessing.19
Notes
1 “Supplementary Jouissance and Feminine Sexual Rapport” was first published in
Hebrew in a limited edition of ten exemplaries by BLE Atelier, Paris, 1995. Translations
from French to English of J. Lacan are by Joseph Simas and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger.
Passages from this text were presented on two occasions: Los Poderes de La Palnbra/
Les pouvoirs de la parole, IXe rencontre internationale du Champs freudien, Buenos
Aires, 18–21 July 1996; and The Clinical Limits of Gender, EEP Conference, London,
22–23 March 1997. This text was subsequently published in English, in two parts, as:
Lichtenberg Ettinger, B. (1998) Supplementary Jouissance [1995]. The Almanac of
Psychoanalysis, I, 162–176; and Lichtenberg Ettinger, B. (2000) Feminine Borderlinking
[1995]. The Almanac of Psychoanalysis, II, 152–169.
2 In the late Lacanian theory, feminine jouissance is “supplementary” and “there is no
sexual rapport”.
3 I am thinking of Merleau-Ponty’s “écart” meaning deviation and digression. While M.-P.
relates to a deviation in the sensory field, I relate to the psychic field of affects.
4 I refer to late pregnancy when the infant, according to Winnicott, is “post-mature” and
we assume the beginning of phantasmatic life.
5 This is the Lacanian classical position. From the angle of the superiority of the Symbolic
and the Imaginary upon the Real resonates relations of exclusion or rejection: “it’s either
he or me” since “speech is already trapped in a network of symbolic couples and opposi-
tion” (Lacan 1981a: 107, 126).
6 On this matter, see Ettinger (1990).
7 On the expansion of the concept of the phallus, as commanding the three realms, see
Ettinger (1992).
8 In Encore Lacan refers to the Other as a “site” that may be described by a letter.
9 She ought to, but she can’t, adds Lacan in Encore, for since she is not-All, her sex says
nothing to her.
10 See Ettinger (1992) and (1997a).
11 It is possible to speak of a dimension that belongs to the side of “woman” in the schema
of sexuation. Likewise the archaic father is a dimension in masculinity, different from yet
related to the Name of the Father.
12 Ancient way of writing symptome – playing on the expressions, among others, of “saint
man” and “sinner man”.
13 Speaking of the ontogenesis of the aesthetic world, Merleau-Ponty draws in terms of the
“écart” – a space of bursting and dehiscence before the bifurcation into object and subject
on the level of sensorial perception. By “swerve” I intend an analogous differentiating
potential on the level of affection and sensing beyond the senses (cf. Merleau-Ponty,
1964: 169).
14 For further discussion of these matters, see Ettinger (1996a).
15 For an extensive discussion of the difference between objects in the different theories,
see Ettinger (1995b).
16 Cf. “Lacan says: Desire is the desire of the Other. And now l say: if desire is the desire of
the other, phantasy is not the phantasy of the Other”, etc. (Soler 1989: 43).
17 An expression borrowed from the poet H. Michaux.
18 In this expression, the word “becoming” echoes G. Deleuze and F. Guauari’s expression
19 Taylor and Francis

“becoming-woman” (1980).
[Editorial notes, 1998] With the concepts of matrix and metramorphosis BLE turns to the
womb as a conceptual basis for hypothesis concerning an originary supplementary femi-

nine sexual difference.
Matrix is defined by the author as an unconscious borderspace of simultaneous
co-emergence and co-fading of the I and uncognized non-I – or partial subjects –
neither fused nor rejected, which produce, share and transmit joint, hybrid and dif-
fracted objects via conductible borderlinks. The matrixial apparatus proposes a specific
perception of feminine/prenatal borderlinking, where the womb stands for a shared
psychic borderspace in which differentiation-in-co-emergence, seperation-in-jointness and dis-
tance-in-proximity are continuously reattuned by metramorphosis created by, and further
creating – together with matrixial affects – relations without relating on the borders of
presence and absence, subject and object, among subjects and partial subjects, between
me and the stranger, and between those and part-objects or relational objects.
Metramorphosis is a process of intra-psychic and inter-psychic or trans-individual
exchange, transformation and affective “communication”, between several matrixial
entities. Co-emerging and co-fading I(s) and non-I(s) interlace their borderlinks in
metramorphosis. It is a passage through which affected events, materials and modes of
becoming infiltrate and diversify on to non-conscious margins of the Symbolic through
sub-symbolic webs.
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Miller. J. A. (1985–1986) Extimité. Unpublished course.
Miller. J. A. (1994–1995) Silet. Unpublished course.
Soler, C. (1989) Hysteria and Obsession: A Seminar of the Freudian Field. Tel Aviv: GEP.
Tustin, F. (1990) The Protective Shell in Children and Adults. London: Karnac.
6
SELF-RECREATION THROUGH THE
UNCANNY ENCOUNTER
Reading the feminine close-up in cinema
Nava Dushi and Igor Rodin
In this chapter we examine the phenomenon of what we term the feminine close-
up in cinema1 with the aims of theorizing its relation to the feminine and question-
ing the principle of indexicality, that is, that of an image as an implied “signifier
of”,2 with relation to the representation of femininity. Starting with and against
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the background of the phallic, “made-to-be-fetishized” close-up, our discursive
itinerary circles around the varying levels of potentiality of what Bracha L. Ettinger

(2006) defines as matrixial, that is, beyond-the-phallus, a-structural readings of the
image. Proposing the concept of the matrixial gaze, Ettinger engages with new tex-
tures of the plane of representation/vision/gaze as she delves into the problematics
of the dialectics between the visible and the Real. For Ettinger, the function of the
Lacanian gaze as objet a – that is, that of exposing the fundamental gap between the
visible and the seen for the speaking being – cannot exhaust the scopic field of sub-
jectivity. She states: “when beyond appearance we search for a ‘lack aspect’, a lacking
‘something’, separated, fragmented, and lost, this lacking something is not just any
no-thing! It is a particular no-thing” (ibid.: 44, original emphasis). In other words,
Ettinger organizes her theoretical discourse not around the entrance into language
(the symbolic castration), which inevitably prioritizes castration as a guiding princi-
ple for approaching subjectivity, but around the intrauterine experience of the fetus:
the co-emergence of the I (the fetus) and the non-I (the body of the (m)Other). The
latter, thus, is regarded not only as that which precedes the subject-object/intersub-
jective relation chronologically, but also preconditions it, and in that sense, challenges
the post-Kantian/Cartesian anthropocentric logic of the cogito as the core element
of subjectivity, which still dominates the psychoanalytic discourse in general, and
its place in the theoretical study of cinema in particular. In this light, the feminine
close-up, as we see it, should be withdrawn from the constrains of representation,
that is, from its reduction to a close-up on a face of a human being whose exterior
view supposedly hints at some physiological and psycho-cultural givenness.
110 Nava Dushi and Igor Rodin
Hence, our discussion departs from the classification of the close-up in seminal
works of film theory as a technical and/or semantic device of cinematic enuncia-
tion, whether it is Rudolf Arnheim’s cognitive study of the close-up, or, “apparent
size” manipulation, and its connotated effects, such as thematization, emphasis,
surprise and suspense (1957: 128–129); Béla Balázs’ emphasis on physiognomy,
his theorization of the close-up as a catalyst for “the mood of a scene”, the poetry
of film, or an abstraction, by means of which “time as well as space can be dis-
located” (2010: 39–41); or, on a broader social scale, Walter Benjamin’s scrutiny
of the increasing cultural significance of cinema that assigns to the close-up the
capacity to accentuate the “hidden details in familiar objects”, or the tendency
to expand the space of “[o]ur bars, city streets, our offices and furnished rooms,
our railroad stations and our factories [which] seemed to close relentlessly around
us” (1968: 230–252). In later theoretical accounts, we find that the close-up is
assumed as given and incorporated into the discussion of cinematic form, conti-
nuity, dramatic emphasis, and point of view (Bordwell and Thompson 2008), or
alternately, associated with the manipulation and subjection of the female body
to the objectifying hegemonic “gaze” of its male viewer (Mulvey 1999).3 Against
these prevalent approaches, we argue, the understanding of the feminine close-up
in cinema should be re-approached and re-aligned with what the, late teaching of
Lacan, theories of deconstruction,4 the matrixial theory of Ettinger, the artistic and
the cinematic image have taught us about femininity. What is common to all these
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is their departure from seeing the relationship between Being and the Symbolized
as causal, as well as the self-ontologization of their theoretical perspectives.5

In tracing the borderline between the fetishistic close-up and the feminine
close-up, which transgresses the imaginary/symbolic representational field, what
we seek to explore is the range of the feminine close-up in resonance with the
realm of the Ettingerian encounter-event (Ettinger 2006: 86–87), that is, a non-
regressive, re-constituting encounter with the image, in relation to thresholds of
visibility. We align our inquiry with the sensibility of the matrixial reading by
avoiding two critical shortcomings. The first concerns the possible application of
the Freudian uncanny in the analysis of cinematic images, an approach that inevi-
tably results in a semiotic discourse. In order to apply the concept of the uncanny
to the cinematic image, it has to be located, or sought, on the side of the encounter
with the image, rather than that of the image itself. The uncanny, therefore, is not
an immanent trait of the image, but a trait of a possible encounter with a specific
subject, the potentiality of which stems from a certain “alignment of forces” among
the different components of the image. The uncanny manifests itself through the
syntax of the image that “mocks” the syntax that lies at the basis of a pro-regressive
reading. The gaze for Lacan, as Ettinger sums up, “is a model of a purged objet a
because it is not ‘polluted’ by the demand of the subject, but rather reflects desire
in its distilled form” (ibid.: 42, original emphasis). Therefore, endowing an image
with a priori traits contradicts the very nature of the gaze in that this endowment
calls for the universalization of its meaning rather than confront the idiosyncrasy of
its reading. The second shortcoming involves the temptation to categorize, annex
Self-recreation through the uncanny 111
and re-territorialize the range of the feminine close-up. As our theorization takes
off from an existing theoretical glossary that is deeply grounded in a hermeneutic
tradition, a special accent should be put on the effort to untie this tradition’s con-
notative knots in order to shed a new theoretical light on the phenomenon of
the feminine close-up in cinema as a de-gendered category that is not to be (re-)
constructed through the imaginary identification.
Our appeal to the uncanny is in search of a hazy territory that opens up in an
encounter with the image, in an encounter that produces two kinds of potenti-
alities for the viewer. On the one hand, there is the Freudian uncanny, which he
defines as “what arouses dread and horror”, the unfamiliar that blurs the bounda-
ries between the animate and the inanimate, “the idea of being robbed of one’s
eyes”, as he puts it (1997: 193, 205). Whereas the latter formulation in itself alleg-
edly stands in a strict opposition to the phallic gaze as objet a, it stumbles on itself as
Freud refers the uncanny effect to the anxiety belonging to the castration complex
of childhood, that is to say, to the very epicentre of the phallic structuring. The
interconnectedness of different modes of castration – in this case the symbolic
and the imaginary – stems from the construction of the symptom-desire through
language and object a as its residual.6 Therefore, by subverting the psychic struc-
ture, the uncanny reveals its nature as that which opposes inscription into language,
that is, into the boundaries of the symptom-desire. Thus, the intrusion of the
uncanny marks the limits of the area within which the symptom-desire operates.
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On the other hand, there is the Ettingerian uncanny (Ettinger 2006: 157–161),
which brings back the womb-fantasy, its primary, pre-castration status, tying it to

an originary feminine difference, as opposed to residual effects of oedipalization.
By distinguishing the Freudian uncanny from the Ettingerian uncanny this chapter
lays the ground for an exploration of the feminine close-up not on the basis of a
pro-regressive identification of its function as a technical and/or semantic device of
cinematic expression, but as an emerging/withering potentiality for self-recreation.
Furthermore, while we recognize the contribution of recent works to the study of
the relevance of the late Lacan and the contingency of that which remains beyond
the scope of the visible, namely, the gaze as objet a, our discussion advances a move
from those post-structuralist approaches – which continue to be informed by the
oedipalized perspective that by the very nature of its theorized male/female divi-
sion assumes a transcendental position – to a pro-matrixial theoretical position that
undermines the gulf propagated by the Phallus in search of immanence, in the
Deleuzian-Guattarian sense (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994).
The phallic close-up

Our discussion of the phallic close-up issues from the concept of facialized
consciousness coined by Félix Guattari in referring to the “the facializing eye-nose-
forehead triangle that collects, formalizes, neutralizes, and crushes the specific
traits of the other semiotic components” (2011: 75). This faciality remains “in
constant resonance with social roles and the capitalistic Imaginary” (ibid.: 77),
mandating the translatability of the visible (ibid.: 79), that is, its applicability to
the “or . . . or . . .” phallic paradigm. In this case, the image is grounded in its
orientation toward self-specification. Thus, when the triangle of the face is fully
exposed, it lends itself to objectivization: of the face, to its ethnic, gendered,
racial, sexualized, definition. Consider the soft focus, centred, evenly lit, eye-
level close-ups of the loving and loved Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942): each
instance of their calculated insertion in a sequence of shot-reverse shot codifies
her iconic representation. On the other end of the spectrum, we find the no less
iconic close-ups of Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which,
nevertheless, progressively transitions from evenly lit, centred close-ups of horror
and suffering, to extreme close-ups of low-/high-angled, off-centre and frag-
mented images, a series in which:
Dreyer avoids the shot-reverse shot [champ-contrechamp] procedure which

would maintain a real relation between each face and the other, and would
still be part of the action-image. He prefers to isolate each face in a close
up which is only partly filled, so that the position to the right or to the left
directly induces a virtual conjunction which no longer needs to pass through
the real connection between the people.
(Deleuze 1986: 107)
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In that, Dreyer tears the close-up from its symbolized transferability, from the
coded objectification of the face. The intensive commingling of faces, bodies,

objects, expressions and affects assume a collective enunciation – a passion.7
Hence, our exploration of the cinematic manifestations of the feminine close-up
traces the range that opens between the aforementioned phallic triangle of the face
and the site at which the unfolding representation brings about the dissemination
of the triangle as a gendered and essentialized category.8
In its adherence to the facial triangle as a point of reference for the symbolic
codification of the face, the phallic close-up includes both men and women as long
as they are pushed to be read and are read as gendered entities. The departure from
the phallic close-up begins as the uncanny starts to infiltrate the representation. It
begins where motion of the parts decomposes the quasi-gestalt of the frozen image
calling for the phallic gaze to occur, bringing about the total eclipse of regression
where the ontology of the viewer collapses into the lost object, the need and
oedipality. As the uncanny seeps in, the phallic triangle eludes the focus of the gaze
and destabilizes the well-established mechanisms of regression, pushing the viewer
to seek meaning-bearing points rather than surrender to that which is obtrusively
imposed on her/him. The situation of seeking, though, is not the result of a deci-
sion made on the part of the viewer, but an affect of decentralization and loss of
grounding that seeks creative openings in order to work through its frustration.
The image is that which is active and activating, while decision is the reflex of sym-
bolization, the trace of the phallic structure that works in a concurrent manner.
Decision is always aposteriori in relation to affect, invariably subject to belatedness.
Being associated with the work of the drive, decision is always secondary in rela-
tion to the encounter-event.
The fading of the phallic close-up begins in the banal site at which some intru-
sion does not allow one to fix the attention on the triangle: a movement of the
head, the coincidence of other activity in the frame, an extreme and distorted close-
up, a loss of focus or ambiguous framing. When the face is blurred, corrupted, is
seen in movement, magnified or commingles with another face, the imaginary/
symbolic annexation of the close-up is violated and traversed. A close-up of a
metallic-blue candy wrapper fluttering in the wind waved by a tiny hand extended
out of a window crack of a moving vehicle against a pale blue sky and flying out
of the frame; a close-up of a child leaning against the back seat of a moving vehi-
cle, laying her head on her arms gazing through the rear window at the passing
traffic in a dark tunnel, the lights of the tunnel and the vehicles passing through
it reflected on the rear window obscure her image, the lights of moving vehicles
inside the tunnel generate strokes of colour smearing against the black background,
the vehicles move toward the camera the camera moves away; an extreme close-
up of the child’s face increasingly obscured by the movement of the vehicle and
by the reflecting yellow and red lights of the moving vehicles (Kieslowski, Three
Colors: Blue, 1993). These opening close-ups proceed to the horizons at which the
human image falls out of visibility. An unidentifiable feather-like foregrounded
focalized speck is made animate by a movement induced by a regulated flow of air,
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its background is hazy and out of focus, a figure enters the right side of the frame
approaching the camera then seen reflected in a dark pupil of a seeing magnified

eye (ibid.). The feminine close-up produces a crisis of identity, as its propagated
proximity radicalizes this crisis leaving a taint of claustrophobia on the texture of
the encounter.9
The element of repetition of de-focalization, de-centralization and contin-
gency, as the precondition of the encounter with the image, forges what Guattari
(1995) defines as transversalist subjectivity: ever-becoming, idiosyncratic and open to
extralinguistic, affective, corpo-Real investments. In Lacanian terms, it could be
related to as a sinthomatic, as opposed to a symptomatic, subject. For Lacan, the
sinthomatization of the subject is associated with his identification with the symp-
tom that, for example, in the case of James Joyce, results in writing as a solution for
holding the Borromean knot of subjectivity together (Verhaeghe and Declercq,
2002). This points to the privileged position of the “aesthetic state of mind” as that
which, as opposed to the over-oedipalized subjectivity, can incorporate “all the
suffering in the world” in a creative, and non narcissistic-martyric manner.
The cross-cutting close-up exemplifies the possible implications of this pro-
transversalist self-recreation, displaying a sequence of close-ups that cuts across and
runs through multiple locations and temporalities generating intensities that abstract
the spatiotemporal grounding of the seen.10 Zooming in to the figure of a red-
headed girl seated by a fire who turns her head and her look toward the camera,
which makes a sharp pan to the left that wipes off the image; a close-up of a hand
held against a burning piece of wood lit by its flickering flame; a close-up of a
young boy turning his head from left to right his face lit by a warm flickering light;
a lantern flickering, turning off and on as the camera dollies toward it; a close-up
of a female figure emerging from the dark, walking toward the camera, then fol-
lowed by the camera in a pan to the right as it passes behind another female figure,
whose face is half lit by a light emanating from the left, putting turquoise earrings
on and looking toward an unseen mirror and toward the camera that abruptly pans
back to the left to a close-up of the young boy standing by the entrance, his fig-
ure barely made visible by the fading of the last, or first, sun rays (Tarkovsky, The
Mirror, 1975).
The cross-cutting close-up inspires a transition from the gender-driven category
that postulates the binary relations man/woman where the symbolic/imaginary
register is oxymoronically detached from the immanence of the Real, to a sexual
Phallic/Matrixial system of axes that prioritizes contingency and movement in
opposition to regressive repetition and fixedness. While gender is governed by
imaginary/symbolic construction, the sexual is related to the drive and jouissance
as its idiosyncratic manifestation in a form of libidinal investments in erotogenic
zones, partial objects and speech. Thus, gender and the Matrixial/Maternal appear
to us as a dichotomy, that is, in this specific context one of its subsets should be put
aside, obviously that which is grounded in the symbolic.
One of the implications of the resolution of this dichotomy between gender
and sexuality is the non-binary relation between the Phallic and the Matrixial.
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As opposed to the gender discourse, that tends to presents them as oppositions,
it should be emphasized that due to their being associated with the drive(s)

they appeal to different formations of the psyche and do not contradict one
another. While the Phallus stands for the male phantasy and its extrapolations,
the Matrix does the same for the female/maternal phantasy, inscribing such a
non-translatable-to-the-phallic-language experience as pregnancy into the the-
oretical discourse.
Deleuze’s conceptualization of the affect image, that is, the close-up, resonates
with the aforementioned beyond-temporality of the proximate moving image.
The affect image, as he states, is
independent of all determinate space-time; but it is nonetheless created in a

history which produces it as the expressed and the expression of a space or
a time, of an epoch or a milieu (this is why the affect is the “new” and new
affects are ceaselessly created (. . .) by the work of art).
(Deleuze 1986: 99)
For Deleuze – as opposed to the psychoanalytic perspective, which is understand-

ably restricted to the needs of one-to-one treatment – history is neither one’s
property, nor a cultural convention, but an ontological phenomenon the approach
to which demands thinking not in terms of units of meaning but in intensities. The
cross-cutting close-up embodies such an intensity that tends to overshadow the set-
tings and persons, thus carving a space for another reading of the image.
The feminine close-up

Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the distinct (2005) presents a view, one can argue, that
ranges between the pro-regressive disjunction and the Ettingerian encounter-event
with regards to the encounter with the image, which we consider as equally relat-
able to the moving image, as both can be understood in terms of untouchability. The
distinct, as Nancy puts it, is the sacred in a sense of that which signifies “the sepa-
rate, what is set aside, removed, cut off, or that which one cannot touch, which
one can approach only by a touch without contact” (ibid.: 1). With that, both the
phallic pro-regressive and the matrixial pro-creative potentialities find their way
into this concept, unconsciously underscoring the ambivalence of the encounter
with the visible. On the one hand, the common ground between the image as
distinct and the Freudian-Lacanian Thing is established as it is defined in terms of
being desirable, thus alluding to the phallic partial object, objet a. The image, says
Nancy, “is desirable, or it is not an image (but a chromo, an ornament, a vision or
representation)” (ibid.: 6). On the other hand, Nancy proceeds by articulating the
state of mind of the viewer when “he enters into [a kind of] self-coincidence, [as] he
enters into the image, he no longer looks at it – though he does not cease to be in
front of it. He penetrates it, is penetrated by it: by it, its distance and its distinction,
at the same time” (ibid.: 9–10). There is a sense, says Nancy, “that [the image] is
non signifying but not insignificant” (ibid.: 11).
Nancy’s further grapple with this ambivalence argues for the necessity of art,
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the sense in which it is (. . .) disquieting, and can be threatening: because it
conceals its very being from signification or from definition, but also because
it can threaten itself and destroy in itself the images of itself that have been
deposited in a signifying code and in an assured beauty.
(Ibid.: 13)
This “threat of the art” points to a traumaticity that is immanent to the encounter-
event, to a traumaticity as the royal road to self-recreation. The traumaticity of self-
recreation of the post-Oedipal creature is that of cohabitation – between Heimlich
and Unheimlich, as “the prefix ‘un’- is the token of repression” (Freud 1919/1955:
245). Ettinger adds:
A center-less heimlich affect silently ascends behind the “unheimlich” aes-

thetic experience (Freud), anguishing and soothing, tearing and stitching the
wounds of a nomadic place, opening in it a rhythm of interval for an exile,
suspended like a rotating sea-wave between its fading and a next birth.
(2006: 161)
The feminine close-up inhabits the phallic image, and yet it is neither primary
nor secondary to it. It transgresses the triangle’s imaginary/symbolic trappings and
hence has no permanent identifiable loci: the feminine close-up is in a perpetual
state of emerging and withering away. Thus, the feminine close-up as the image
that is “unsure of itself” creates a space for identification not at the level of ideality
but at the level of incoherence, bestowing legitimacy to the fragility of the one who
is looking in the mirror, in other words, shifting the focus from the Father, who
calls for the subject to satisfy his expectations through the symbolic/imaginary
identification, to the Mother, whose sole precondition for acceptance is the fact of
one’s existence, not his formations.
Due to this, the close-up, in our view, is feminine, as long as it is inclusive of
both men and women, animals, plants, objects, overlappings and smearings, move-
ments and flows, while not allowing the viewer enough time and audio-visual
formalization to be “robbed of his eyes”. The light wind ruff les the surface of the
shallow water making the algae pulsate and oscillate. A lonesome leaf crosses the
frame as the camera pans parallel to the current of the river from right to left. After
the cut, the camera changes directions: now it pans from left to right as different
elements of the streamside vegetation fall into its focus. A man’s knee area enters
the frame upon which the camera starts to tilt up until it stops on the man’s face.
The man cannot fix his gaze, so he depresses his eyes. The camera comes back to
contemplate the contingent pulsation of the algae as it zooms in until the end of
the scene (Tarkovsky, Solaris, 1972. The antinomy of different temporalities (the
leaf, the algae/water, the man) and vectors of movement (of the camera), the man’s
inscription into the ecosystem of the sequence – all these tend to deconstruct the
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self-containment of forms the most clear-cut of which is the human body. Thus,
what permeates the sequence through the dynamic and fluidal cross-cutting close-up is

the feminine close-up par excellence, that which defies anthropocentricity, that is,
genderization and oedipalization of the seen. The algae, the flecks of sunlight, the
man’s knees, hands and face are brought under the same common denominator at
the level of intensity, inner rhythm and co-emergence.
Self-recreation through the uncanny encounter

Freud writes:
The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative produc-

tions, merits in truth a separate discussion. To begin with, it is a much more
fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of
the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in
real life.
(2000: 3698)
Thus, the discussion of the uncanny is directly related by Freud, among other things,
to the provision of the aesthetic encounter. Resonating with his notions of primal
repression, the navel of the dream and other vanishing points of symbolization,11
Freud’s “something more”, here, points to the possibility of some long-term effect
of the uncanny encounter, that which goes beyond the boundaries of the transient
affect and is conditioned by the irreversible inscription of new layers into the
subjective structure.
As opposed to the Freudian vision of the uncanny as a phantasmatic atrocity
to be escaped from – in the sense that disturbing images are to be repressed –
the Ettingerian matrixial paradigm provides a pathway to traumaticity as that
which opens up a space for one’s self-recreation through identification with the
invisible and the unspoken, thus appealing to the immanence of traumaticity in
self-recreation. Within the cinematic context, the maternal connotations of a
feminine image inscribed in the feminine close-up render the encounter with a
disturbing proximity to gestures, holes and textures of the female body, partial
bodies, objects, etc. insistently uncanny. As Jacques-Alain Miller remarks, within
the intersubjective realm proximity in space and accessibility stand in an inverse
relation to one another (2008: 13–15). In fact, he says, this is the essence of the
Oedipal Complex: the family figures that are accessible in space turn to inac-
cessible figures from the libidinal point of view. This is what he relates to as
the erotic of space, when the Eros deconstructs metric relations. The Phallic Eros,
we emphasize.
Thus, the presence of the Maternal within the image bears the stamp of death, as
representation is always Janus-faced, oscillating between the matricide of represent-
ability and the nostalgia for the intrauterine co-poiesis,12 in terms of Ettinger. The
matricide as a metaphor for the fundamental feature of the entrance into language
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stands for irreversible detachment from the m/Other that continues to perpetuate
itself through her demonization and exclusion from the language. In this sense it is

possible to put the equal sign between the matricide (Woman-does-not-exist), the
incest taboo and what Lacan calls “the fading of the subject”, meaning that where
language starts the subject ends. Hence the barred S that signifies the subject ($). As
opposed to this, the Ettingerian co-poiesis proposes to look at subjectivity through
the lens of the intrauterine experience where the co-existence is not grounded in a
fundamental exclusion and detachment, but at the level of a psychical co-resonance:
what she calls co-emergence between I and non-I. It is precisely this kind of
traumatic-and-too-intimate encounter with the feminine image that opens up a
space for transformative and creative reading.
Yet, articulating the problem of matricide is associated with the danger of slip-
ping into patricide. Still, it is due to the Father that we create concepts. Without
him we would find ourselves in an asylum, and the Father who would put us there
is not the same Father as that which gave us the syntax in order to turn the water of
speech-jouissance into wine of a clinical or philosophical concept. Creative work
is based on resistance, but resistance is by no means negation. It is an outburst of
energy that emerges at the epicentre of intercrossing vectors of energetic/material
flow and creates life and a long-term momentum for a living being on the planet
Earth. While negation reproduces the same vector of flow reinforcing it with the
repression of the “no”, creation is by definition ex nihilo, that is, its primary goal
is not coming into conflict with the existing signifier but to spot a locus where no
signifier has gone before.
Still, the dive into the uncanny may turn the possible encounter-event into
a Mariana Trench, as it is, according to Ettinger, “open-ended, at the cost
of a catastrophe of identity, and even at the risk of the collapse of the fragile
matrixial gaze itself – at the risk of the disintegration of its screen” (2006: 160).
Therefore, reading as one’s openness to self-recreation is about a certain level of
traumaticity of the encounter necessary for the signifying chain to stretch and
to intensify – to contain new signifiers and meanings. Thus, reading is about
timing and contingency: having fallen into a too compulsive slot it may not-soon
or never be inscribed into one’s language; other times, it may hold the poten-
tiality of the encounter in abeyance, opening up one that more, or less, begs
to occur, which, under these or those circumstances will seek and/or find the
encounter-event.
The slipping of the visible into invisibility

In this chapter, we presented an alternative view of the feminine close-up
in cinema. Departing from the constraints that categories of gender and the
imaginary identification impose on the concept of face, reducing it to a physi-
ological and psycho-cultural givenness, we sought to synchronize the concept
of the feminine close-up with the psychoanalytic understanding of femininity as
beyond-representational entity, following Jacques Lacan and Bracha L. Ettinger.
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In this light, within the context of the cinematic language, we argued, the
full exposure of the face-nose-forehead triangle of the female body cannot be

regarded as that which stands for femininity.
Through supplementation of Freud’s and Ettinger’s conceptualizations of the
uncanny we formulated the encounter with the proximate image as opening up a
twofold potentiality for the viewer, that of regression and self-recreation, the latter
stemming from a transformative encounter with the feminine layers of the image,
the encounter-event. The latter, as we showed, is conditioned not only by a historical
readiness of the subject-viewer, but also by contingency and timing, as well as a
certain level of traumaticity, immanent to the process of self-recreation.
To conclude, the feminine close-up, as we see it, resonates with the way Andrei
Tarkovsky sees black-and-white cinema as having more access to the truth, the
aspiration to which is immanent to every art form.13 For Tarkovsky, it is actually
black-and-white cinema that is more realistic, not colour cinema, and it is because
the latter draws all of the viewer’s attention to its seemingly neutral resemblance
of the outer world. Yet, “truth in life does not resemble truth in art” (Tarkovsky
2016). The colour film presents itself in the form of an imposed succession of
“postcards” making one look but not see, which refers directly to the phallic gaze
as objet a. In the case of black-and-white cinema, one is drawn into the world of
expressive means, rather than that of mimicry. Similarly, we say, in order to see
a face it should be put into motion, make us chase it and never catch it, just like
femininity that does not exist. It is precisely this slipping of the visible into invisibil-
ity that makes a close-up feminine.
Notes
1 In this chapter we conceptualize the feminine close-up as inherent to cinema. That is,
our discussion attends to the potentiality of the cinematic image to affect a creative
encounter with its viewer.
2 Our use of the term indexicality is consistent with Peirce’s semiotic theory, which
implies a direct causal relationship between signifier and something that is perceived as
signified. We refer to this relationship as implied since the signifier does not exist in the
form that can be caught by means of language.
3 The gaze theorized in the early applications of Lacan’s terminology by scholars such as
Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz was based in an erroneous interpretation that placed
undue emphasis on the Lacanian mirror phase and the imaginary. Mulvey’s influential
essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, as we see it, presents a phallic approach
to femininity, which intermixed the scopic jouissance with a politically informed agenda.
Since the former is primary to the latter their discussion as existing on the same plane
should be qualified. As such, the use of parenthesis in the context of Mulvey’s work is
to emphasize its difference from references to the gaze made throughout the paper. It
is important to note that while David Bordwell is commonly associated with the post-
theory turn in cinema studies, one cannot ignore the fact that in his scholarly oeuvre he
developed a formalist and cognitivist theory of cinema. In that sense, as D. N. Rodowick
observes, his work cannot be considered a retreat from theory, for “no one’s commitment
to good theory building is greater or more admirable” (2007: 95).
4 Implying not only the work of Jacques Derrida but also that of Jean-Luc Nancy.
5 What we imply here is their theoretical evolvement that appears to have been guided
by questioning the structure of language, inscribing into their philosophical praxis the
problematic of the failure of the oedipalized/phallocentric language on the one hand,
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and the impossibility of a meta-language on the other.
6 See, for example, relevant sections in Anxiety:The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X (2014).
7 Dreyer’s use of what Deleuze conceptualizes as “affective cutting”, is linked with the rise

of what he terms “flowing close-up”: “This is, undoubtedly, a continuous movement by
which the camera passes from the close-up to the medium or full shot, but it is primarily
a way of treating the medium shot and the full shot as close-ups” (Deleuze 1986: 107).
8 In a segment titled “The Two Poles of the Face” Deleuze conceptualizes the close-up in
similar terms.When the face is grasped as an outline that traces the nose, the mouth, etc.,
it produces a “surface of faceification” (1986: 88).Yet, when the close-up “works through
dispersed features taken globally; fragmentary and broken lines which indicate here the
quivering of the lips, there the brilliance of a look, and which involve content which to
a greater or lesser extent rebels against the outline” we find the traits of “faceicity”.Yet,
for Deleuze, these poles are not mutually exclusive: “it is a matter of two poles, some-
times one prevailing over the other and appearing almost pure, sometimes the two being
mixed in one direction or another” (ibid.).
9 Propagated proximity can be read as corresponding with Laura U. Marks’ theorization of
“haptic visuality”, which, in congruence with Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology of the
cinematic experience, appeals to the embodied synaesthetic union of intellect and the
senses. While both Marks and Sobchack theorize the capacity of cinema/video to over-
come the limits of visuality and its modes of expression by way of a dialogical approach
to the viewing experience: “the act of viewing, seen in terms of existential phenomenol-
ogy, is one in which both I and the object of my vision constitute each other” (Marks
1998: 339), our discussion conceptualizes the feminine close-up as a rupturing event,
which rather than effect an embodied synthesis of the senses, deploys a psychoanalytic/
ontological/materialist approach with the aims of contemplating the slipping of the
visual into invisibility.
10 The cross-cutting close-up differs from Dreyer’s flowing close-ups only in that it involves the
cutting across locations and temporalities.Thus, it deconstructs the whole logic of apply-
ing the phallic syntax to reading the cinematic image.This logic implies perceiving scenes
as basic “blocks of meaning” and cuts as boundaries that they cannot not transcend, but
only through the imaginative/interpretative bridging that is made by the viewer. The
main problem consists in that such a segregative approach represents a projection of the
logic of the Symbolic as that which denies the flexible and nomadic essence of the Real.
This kind of logic imbues the cut with powers of the ultimate law and cannot be applied
to dealing with the feminine core of the image.
11 Under the term vanishing points of symbolization we understand not only literally tak-
ing Freud’s inability to narrativize that which lies beyond what he himself defined as
beyond interpretation but, in a broader sense, moments of clash between the Real and
the symbolic where language fails to (re-)produce itself. In fact, it can appear in a variety
of inconspicuous forms when compared to a post-traumatic speech and other forms of
paroxysm where the “splash” of jouissance is too obvious. In a routine-like manner the
aforementioned clashes can be “resolved” by the speaking being in a “peaceful” manner,
such as mockery or labelling the subversive event as nonsense. The symptomatic opposi-
tion to nonsense on the side of the phallocentric culture points, in turn, to something that
can be called the vanishing point of the Phallus.
12 See, for example, Ettinger (2005).
13 See Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky: Cinema Is a Mosaic Made of time, a lecture given by Tarkovsky
in Rome in 1982. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JRfeshEboI&t=1211s
Bibliography
Arnheim, R. (1957) Film as Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Balázs, B. (2010) The Close-Up. In Béla Balázs: The Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the
Spirit of Film. New York: Berghahn Books.
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Benjamin, W. (1968) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In
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Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K. (2008) The Shot: Cinematography. In Film Art: An
Introduction (8th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Deleuze, G. (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994) What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University
Press.
Ettinger, B. L. (2005) Copoiesis. Ephemera, 5(X), 703–713.
Ettinger, B. L. (2006) The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
Freud, S. (1919/1955) The Uncanny. In J. Strachey (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1997) Writings on Art and Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Guattari, F. (1995) On the Production of Subjectivity. In Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic
Paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications.
Guattari, F. (2011) Signifying Faciality, Diagrammatic Faciality. In The Machinic Unconscious:
Essays in Schizoanalysis. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Lacan, J. (2014) Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X. Oxford: Polity Press.
Marks, L.U. (1998) Video Haptics and Erotics. Screen, 39(4), 331–347.
Miller, J.-A. (2008) L’érotique du temps (Ha’Erotika Shel Ha’Zman). Tel Aviv: Resling.
Mulvey, L. (1999) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds.)
Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nancy, J. L. (2005) The Image – The Distinct. In The Ground of the Image. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Rodowick, D. N. (2007) An Elegy for Theory. October, 122(1), 91–109.
Tarkovsky, A. (2016) Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky: Cinema is a Mosaic Made of time. [Video].
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New York: The Other Press.
Filmography
Casablanca (1942) Directed by Michael Curtiz. Los Angeles, CA: Warner Bros.
Solaris (1972) Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. New York: The Criterion Collection
The Mirror (1975) Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. New York: Kino International
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. New York: The
Criterion Collection.
Three Colors: Blue (1993) Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. New York: The Criterion
Collection.
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7
RIVER’S EDGE
The ebb and flow of feminine ex-sistence
Allister Mactaggart
Psychoanalysis and detection

It is reported that before his death Sigmund Freud apparently enjoyed reading
detective novels, particularly those of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, much
to the confusion of his daughter, Anna, and the Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones
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(Kristeva 2002: 239). Yet should Freud’s reading matter late on in his life really
appear so remarkable? Slavoj Žižek, for one, has remarked upon the close links
between the figure of the detective and the psychoanalyst as the Lacanian “subject
supposed to know” (1992: 57) via the concept of transference that comes into play
in the analytic situation. The analyst behind the couch is conjured into the position
by the analysand as this “subject supposed to know”, and for whom the analysand,
as the “murderer”, “produces the truth for this supposed subject by virtue of their
very attempts to cover it up” as Ian Parker puts it in his discussion of Žižek’s for-
mulation (Parker 2004: 71). Detectives and psychoanalysts thus both seek out and
learn from the clues that lead to the “truth”; both of crimes, for the detective, and
of the innermost “kernel” of the subject for the analysand. Furthermore, in analysis
it is the analysand who produces that truth in the safety of the consulting room,
and thus provides links between the private and the public, the I and the Other,
our individual psyches and the social link that binds us together.
Femininity in/as fiction

Julia Kristeva also remarks that “the detective novel, a popular genre that keeps
the possibility of questioning alive, basically tells the reader, ‘You can know’”
(2002: 4). What is it that the reader can know? In a new world order of glo-
balised neoliberal power and corruption, only an intimate revolt seems possible,
she argues, especially in a European culture: “a culture fashioned by doubt and
River’s edge 123
critique – [which] is losing its moral and aesthetic impact” (ibid.). Kristeva notes
that when people no longer read “serious” literature they may still read detec-
tive fiction, and asks whether this remains our “only remaining defense against
the ‘banality of evil’”. (ibid.). Using Hannah Arendt’s phrase to encapsulate how
we are now all immiserated within the current global power structures, Kristeva
considers both her books on this subject to be “a low form of revolt” (ibid.), but
questions whether “higher” forms are any more effective in a new world order of
diffused yet totalising technocratic power structures. While her comments relate to
the novel form of detective fiction, they may well apply, I would suggest, to the
detective genre as such, which is equally dominant in film and television, the latter
of which forms the basis of this chapter.
The detective genre on television has, indeed, perhaps become, in recent years,
the pre-eminent site for culturally investigating some of the pressing issues that
demand further investigation. The epithets “Nordic Noir” or “Scandi Noir”,
applied fairly loosely to such programmes as The Killing (Forbrydelsen, Denmark,
2007–2014), The Bridge (Bron/Broen, Sweden/Denmark, 2011–2018), Trapped
(Ófærð, Iceland, 2015–), and Follow the Money (Bedrag, Denmark, 2016–), together
with other series “beyond Nordic Noir” such as Witnesses (Les témoins, France,
2014–), Marcella in Britain (Britain, 2016–, written by Hans Rosenfeldt, the man
behind The Bridge) and others, have all helped to bring to the fore a widespread
and creative questioning of key issues that affect us in the twenty-first century in
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relation to, inter alia: crime, detection, mental health, politics and corruption. In
his Marxist analysis of detective fiction Ernest Mandel remarks that, “The history

of the crime story is a social history, for it appears intertwined with the history of
bourgeois society itself” (1984: 135). I would argue that this widespread fascina-
tion with detective fiction, in all its guises, would appear to reflect to some degree
the impact of global neoliberal capitalism whereby the spectacle is a central part of
the mechanism of our isolation and alienation, yet, at the same time, unceasingly
speaks about what ails us and demands further investigation.
In this chapter I will seek to address what the British six-part television series
River (2015) permits the viewer to put into question and to seek to know in respect
of issues surrounding femininity, love and loss, as key aspects of contemporary life
that capitalism fails to address adequately in its undelivered promises of fulfilled
relationships as acts of consumption. Kristeva refers to literature as “that which
testifies to experience” and, in reference to her own novels, she states that she
investigates “the experience of the feminine condition that we speak so much
about but hesitate to see as a ferocious detective novel” (2002: 252), and so she
provides a direct link between detective fiction and femininity. As an armchair
detective/analyst, I will seek to discover whether these comments can similarly
be applied to the cultural experience provided by this television series. As Jacques
Lacan puts it, “Culture, insofar as it is distinct from society, doesn’t exist. Culture
is the fact that it has a hold on us” (1999: 53–54). It is this “hold on us”, and par-
ticularly on me, that I wish to reflect upon via an analysis of the specificities of this
series in relation to detection and femininity.
124 Allister Mactaggart
Guy Debord, whose Society of the Spectacle (first published in 1967) is invoked
throughout both volumes of Kristeva’s analyses of revolt, clearly saw television as
a major instrument in the power of the spectacle to extend its “deadly” reach into
our domestic spheres and psyches. In thesis 28 Debord writes:
The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is

a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technol-
ogy, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular
system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system as it
strives to reinforce the isolation of “the lonely crowd”.
(1967/1995: 22, original emphasis)
For Debord, the technological “revolution” of late capitalist consumerism is

designed to isolate while promising a false sense of community that, paradoxically,
promotes further alienation and isolation. One has only to think of the notion of
Facebook “friends” and the resultant feelings of isolation for many people today
to see how Debord’s analysis has been confirmed and extended further into our
psyches and social structures since the late 1960s.
Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, I will be arguing in this chapter that television
now offers a privileged site for a critical reflection on the role of the spectacle in
our contemporary situation and the isolation of the lonely crowd, which has been
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exacerbated by the growth in technology since Debord first critiqued the spectacle.
Kristeva argues that the problematic of revolt within our current context is situated

at the conjunction of “the intimacy on which our notion of happiness depends and
the social link that determines what we call politics” (2002: 3). The increasing tech-
nical and ideological separation between intimacy and the wider social sphere, and
the mediation that exists between the two, is an area that I will seek to explore in this
chapter in relation to the televisual medium. At a time when television technologies
and consumption patterns are changing via different ways of experiencing television,
it is perhaps a useful time to reflect upon the specificities of the medium and how it
has been analysed previously. Raymond Williams, in his classic analysis, Television:
Technology and Cultural Form (1974), points out that “flow” is a defining feature of
the televisual medium. This insight came to Williams one night in Miami, newly
arrived by boat in North America to take up a year’s post at Stanford University.
Watching multi-channel US television, Williams, as Roger Silverstone points out:
found himself entirely bemused by the flow of U.S. television, a flow in

which one programme blended into another, in which advertisements were
seamlessly threaded through the texts of soap operas, and in which trailers for
one film provided a kind of invasive sub-text for the unfolding of another.
(2003: vii)
Williams’ sense of bemusement, faced with the constant replacement of image

after image, in which one flows between different programmes and genres in an
River’s edge 125
indiscriminate manner, can also be linked to Debord’s analysis of the spectacle as

the constant production of a “false consciousness of time” (1967/1995: 114) with
television being seen as an integral component and reinforcement of this false con-
sciousness via the ceaseless flow of material. Yet, paradoxically, I will argue that
within this constant flow of the spectacle certain images may stand out and leave a
remainder that is not negated by the following image(s). Jacques Lacan also points
out that, “What holds the image together is the remainder” (1999: 6), and the
remainder of certain images (and sounds) may endure well beyond the ending of
particular television programmes, enabling the viewer to contemplate the relation-
ship between intimate feelings and affects experienced by a cultural product, and
the social link that holds us together.
River is a six-part television (mini)series that was shown on the BBC (British
Broadcasting Corporation) between 13 October and 17 November 2015, with
international streaming rights acquired by Netflix, effective from 18 November
2015. Created and scripted by Abi Morgan – the screenwriter of the films
Suffragette (2015) and Shame (2011) as well as other television series such as
The Hour (2011–2012) – the series centres upon the titular character Detective
Inspector John River’s (Stellan Skarsgård) investigation to discover the murderer
of his police colleague Detective Sergeant Jackie “Stevie” Stevenson (Nicola
Walker), his disco-loving, fast-food aficionado sidekick. River’s mourning for his
colleague, beset by what he perceives as his failings in being unable to prevent her
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murder – by his “blindness” to what was going on in front of his eyes – marks,
for me, a highly tender meditation on love and loss, which allows for my own

reflections upon these issues, both in the series and beyond, to come to the fore.
In the opening scene of the first episode (dir. Richard Laxton) we are presented
with River and Stevie in his car visiting a drive-thru fast-food restaurant. River’s
failed attempt to get the food order correct demonstrates that this is her terrain
rather than his. “Burger virgin” is how Stevie calls River after he forgets to order
her banana milkshake and he has to drive round again to collect this item. River’s
car is archaeologically layered with detritus from previous visits to such places, the
residues of which help to provide vital clues as the series unfolds.
In the following sequence we see River and Stevie driving through nocturnal
east London, and then River notices and follows a suspect’s car, which we later
find out is the car that was used on the night Stevie was killed. Following the
driver on foot into a supermarket and giving chase, Stevie is shown to the viewer
calling in back-up support. After the suspect jumps to his death to evade capture,
River’s boss, Chrissie Read (Lesley Manville), comes to the scene and angrily
asks him what he is doing as he is off the case, before telling him that “You can’t
bring Stevie back”, and instructing him to see “Psychs”, the police psychiatrist in
the morning. Walking away from the scene Stevie says to River, “What does she
know?” to which he laughingly replies “Exactly. Exactly . . . What do any of them
know?” The camera then takes up a position behind River and Stevie and we are
shown the large and gruesome exit wound in the back of Stevie’s head caused by
a fatal gunshot, coupled with differing camera shots, starting with a close-up of the
back of Stevie’s head, to long shots showing River seemingly alone and talking to
himself on the walkway. The latter shots also inform the viewer that she’s been
dead all along, and a figment of his imagination, and thus the viewer is caught
up in crucial questions about the connection between River and his colleague’s
murder, which becomes the central quilting point of the series as it weaves its nar-
rative path. At the outset we are led to believe that Stevie is alive and we initially
follow the action from that point of view, thereby being immediately sutured into
River’s viewpoint. On one level, therefore, the shock of Stevie’s death is presented
in a visually arresting and intriguing manner, to hook the audience into the com-
plexities and specificities of the series’ narrative. At the same time, however, it
raises fascinating questions about feminine representation in the series, and beyond.
Depicting Stevie’s facial features as unblemished throughout is perhaps a neces-
sary aspect of the narrative intrigue that the opening sequence provides us. But,
I suggest, this method of representation “says” more than this. It simultaneously
reveals and conceals much of what it is at stake in River’s investigation into Stevie’s
murder, and more particularly, his relationship to her, centred on his mournful
investigation into her death and the conjoined riddle of her femininity for him.
River is forced to attend sessions with the police psychiatrist, Rosa Fallows
(Georgina Rich), but he tries to avoid and evade her questions and is initially very
uncooperative. In the second meeting, however, after confirming that he had
witnessed the trauma of Stevie’s death less than three weeks’ previously, he also
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confesses to seeing hallucinations of dead people, or “manifests” as he calls them,
which he later admits to having seen since he was a young boy. Questioned about

his relationship with Stevie, he says that “she was just a colleague” to which Rosa
responds stating that “even if she was just a colleague . . . there was love, perhaps”
in their relationship. River then somewhat angrily declares that, “There should be
more than one word for love. What will we do for love? Die for it, even”. River
then abruptly leaves the session as the realisation of what he’s just uttered provides
him with a vital clue for another case he is dealing with (but that later on also helps
to provide a key clue in coming to a realisation about Stevie’s murder). River’s
love for Stevie, and the reasons behind his inability to have stated his love openly
to her during her life, is a central enigma of the series. Indeed, River’s troubled
relationship with all of the women in his life permeates the episodes, and there is
no mention of a father figure. We are informed that River was born in Sweden
and subsequently abandoned by his mother who left him to live with his grand-
mother. However, following his grandmother’s death he was forced to move to
London at the age of 14 to live with his drug-addicted mother.
Love, conjoined with a detective investigation into his unspoken love object’s
murder, and issues of mental ill health, thus form central components of the series,
and open up avenues for thinking through psychoanalytic approaches to these
topics. In addition to translating Lacan’s seminar Book VIII: Transference, a work
all about love, into English, Bruce Fink has also provided a detailed commentary
upon the seminar, in which he points out that there is no singular theory of love
in either Freud’s or Lacan’s work but that, “there are multiple attempts to grapple
River’s edge 127
with it at different points in their theoretical development” (Fink 2016: xi). Lacan’s
close reading of Plato’s Symposium in Transference, starting with “Greek love” as a
simplified model, provides an opportunity to reflect upon the different approaches
to love presented by each of the speakers in the Symposium. In addition, in a refer-
ence to Plato’s Republic, Lacan states that:
What is expressed in his [Plato’s] myth of the cave is illustrated every day for
us by the dancing beams that shine on the screen, showing all our feelings
in a shadowy state. In contemporary art, the defense and illustration of love
most clearly belongs to this dimension.
(2015: 33)
Although Lacan’s reference here is to film, it can, I would suggest, be similarly

applied to the technologies of representation provided by television. The “shad-
owy state” of our feelings is brought very much to the fore in this series in the way
River’s confusion about questions of love and loss in relation to the riddle of femi-
ninity, and what they mean for him, and by extension, what they might mean for
the viewer, are echoed in the visual representations of Stevie and other manifests.
In addition to the content of River, with the seemingly odd displacement of a
Swedish detective in London, the style also helps to heighten a dream-like qual-
ity to the overall series, which is eminently suitable for its subject matter. Several
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reviews of the series referred to its artistic film-like qualities. A review in the far-
left Socialist Worker makes the comment that: “It’s visually stunning, as the camera

swirls around east London streets where rich and poor live back to back. The city
is portrayed as dark, alienating and beautiful”, and furthermore, “River sometimes
looks and feels more an art movie than a TV drama and it’s all the better for that”
(Orr 2015: 13). The mise-en-scène and mise-en-shot of the series help to maintain
this shadowy, aesthetic connection between River’s reality in which his mani-
fests appear to him and viewers diegetically, alongside an appropriately dream-like
vision of contemporary London. For instance, there are several long shots used
when River is in his sessions with the police psychiatrist, when he looks down
on the city below with a railway bridge across the River Thames and a pedestrian
bridge beneath with people shown walking to and from work. The poetics of
these images correspond, I suggest, to T. S. Eliot’s comments in The Waste Land
in which, remarking on a crowd flowing over London Bridge in this “Unreal
City”, Eliot states, “I had not thought death had undone so many” (1972: 25).
The loneliness, isolation and alienation of life in the capital city is thus depicted in
melancholic, blue-toned shots of contemporary life. At other times there are also
shots when River looks across to people on running machines in an office block
opposite, which also highlight the alienation of contemporary life in the capital,
as emanations of the “lonely crowd” to which Debord refers, and to which he is
both separated from via his mental ill health, but that appears to be ubiquitous for
all in the contemporary situation. Throughout the series, River is portrayed as a
lonely figure whose only “real” contact is with his manifests rather than actual
human interactions, but the series demonstrates the pervasiveness of loneliness and
alienation in contemporary life across the social spectrum. In the archaeological
mapping of the city shown in the series via these shots of high-rise office buildings
and differing forms of transport, the River Thames provides a sense of continuous
fluidity, and reflects a sense of “natural” time as opposed to the “false conscious-
ness” of time to which Debord refers in relation to the impact of technology and
the damaging effects of the spectacle.
This other worldly feel of the series is most clearly made plain in River’s inter-
actions with his “manifests”, who are visible to him alone, within the diegesis, but
fully visible also for viewers who are thus able to experience and appreciate his
psychosis. One major manifest is Dr Thomas Cream (Eddie Marsan), based on the
real-life nineteenth-century so-called “Lambeth poisoner” (1850–1892), whose
biography River is seen reading during the series. In episode 4 (dir. Tim Fywell),
Cream, the manifest, tells River that he is the darkest part of him and he consist-
ently questions River’s motivation and reasons for not being able to have saved
Stevie from being murdered. But it is really Stevie’s death and River’s inability to
have expressed his love for her, the trauma of her murder and his grief that is the
darkest part of him and drives the series. On the night she was murdered they had
been to a Chinese restaurant for dinner after work, following which she was shot in
the street outside the restaurant. River constantly watches the CCTV video of the
incident, seeking to piece together what happened, constantly replaying the grainy
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footage that depicts him helplessly at her side after the shooting.
As well as hunting down Stevie’s killer, River simultaneously seeks to uncover

the riddle of her femininity. The two are inextricably interlinked via his profound
sense of loss. The lipstick trace on her fast-food drink cup left in his car is a key
signifier that attracts River’s attention, as is the lipstick found in her possessions in
the police compound. He keeps the discarded drink container as a potential clue
that he pins to the evidence board he sets up on a wall in his flat, replacing his
previously obsessive record vinyl collection. These foolish things, to borrow the
title from the popular song, do not so much remind River of Stevie, as to put into
question why and for whom she was wearing lipstick that fateful night, thus con-
fronting his preconceptions or misconceptions about her femininity and sexuality,
and his role therein. He failed to notice that detail as they ate their meal together.
His inability to have picked up on this telling detail haunts River and exacerbates
his feelings of inadequacy in not having noticed her use of make-up. In River
Stevie’s femininity is signified in a low-key manner, it is certainly not the feminine
masquerade of classical Hollywood.
Joan Riviere in her classic psychoanalytic essay “Womanliness as a Masquerade”
(1929) makes the point that there is no difference between “womanliness” and the
masquerade, that they are the same thing. Examining a case of “a particular type of
intellectual woman” (Riviere 1929/1986: 36), she notes that the masquerade acts
as a defence against masculine rebukes for assuming a “masculine” position. Yet
in River Stevie’s masquerade acts more as a sign that River fails to read: a pressing
detail that encapsulates, in retrospect, River’s blindness. In responses to Riviere’s
River’s edge 129
essay in relation to film theory in the 1980s, Stephen Heath (1986) and Mary Ann
Doane (1987) analysed the masquerade in relation to classical Hollywood repre-
sentations of femininity. But unlike the key Hollywood signifiers, in River we have
a more downcast, downbeat, domesticated sight of femininity. Stevie is generally
seen without much make-up on in her role as a hard-working police officer; she
is confident in her role and does not need to defend herself against masculine
rebukes. Indeed, we find out that she was running her own private investigation
from which she purposefully kept River at bay, to protect him from the abusive
secrets that haunted her life. Yet, upon uncovering CCTV footage of Stevie being
embraced by a man who River comes to find out is called Haider Jamal Abdi
(Peter Bankole), River’s face cannot hide his seeming jealousy; it is at this point
that his desire is “spoken” through his intense reaction to the third person he had
not previously thought was there (but who is a structural necessity for his mascu-
line desire to come to the fore), although he tells “Psychs” that it is curiosity rather
than jealousy that drives him. From a Lacanian perspective we can perhaps be
alerted to the truth behind River’s self-deception here. Geneviève Morel suggests
that, “the eternal elsewhere, or Other, nature of woman is the source of jealousy
in the man who loves her” (2000: 158). “She” is always beyond him, elsewhere, as
Lacan shows in Seminar XX, so that the masculine position, apart from the mythical
primal father, is to have a relationship not with a woman per se, but with the object
a as fantasy (Fink 1995: 111).
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In telling remarks about the series, Stellan Skarsgård, who plays the character of
River, comments that Abi Morgan’s writing provided him with a unique oppor-

tunity as an actor to express a form of enjoyment that he suggests is generally not
available in male acting roles (see Skarsgård 2015). Equating this to what he per-
ceives to be a form of feminine jouissance, able to “show everything” as he puts
it, via psychotic hallucinations, raises some very complex issues around sexuation,
knowledge and jouissance, based around the Phallus and castration. His comments
suggest a distinct binary division between the representations of male and female
characters in film and television.
Judith Butler in her critique of Lacan, Riviere and the masquerade, remarks that:
By claiming that the Other that lacks the Phallus is the one who is the Phallus,
Lacan clearly suggests that power is wielded by this feminine position of
non-having, that the masculine subject who “has” the Phallus requires this
Other to confirm and, hence, be the Phallus in its “extended” sense.
(1990: 44)
While Butler ultimately reads Lacanian theory in this regard “as a kind of ‘slave
morality’” (ibid.: 57), we can, perhaps, read River differently, as depicting an Other
form of jouissance in mainstream television where Skarsgård’s telling remarks open
up discussions about (heterosexual) love from an-Other place.
In his research into Stevie’s private investigation and following Haider’s mur-
der, River finds a letter Haider had written to his wife in Somalia, which includes
Orson Welles’ well-known observation that, while we are born, live and die alone,
it is only love and friendship that give us the momentary illusion that this is not
so. Depicted as one of River’s manifests, Haider is shown reading the letter to his
wife and asks, “How can a man, a man like myself, how can he spill his heart into
his mouth?” This question, which Haider is able to pose lucidly in his letter, is the
question that River was unable to ask Stevie prior to her murder; he cannot spill
his heart into his mouth, and is shackled by his inability to do so.
The deadly gaze

Yet, after solving Stevie’s murder, River returns to the Chinese restaurant where
he’d been with her on that fateful night. Carrying flowers with him he is taken to
a table for two, opposite the already seated manifestation of Stevie, as we initially
see the scene through the lens of his fantasy or hallucination (as indeed we saw the
opening sequence of episode 1). He recounts to Stevie that he took his mother
out for dinner with his first pay cheque but that she was unable to eat. Stevie then
says the words his mother should have told him, about her being so proud of him,
echoing both his mother’s and his inability to speak about matters of the heart.
Seeking but failing to make good his past mistakes, River is still unable to tell
Stevie that he loves her. We then see him seated alone, opposite an empty chair.
Suddenly leaping up, he rushes outside to Stevie on the kerbside, in a restaging
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of the events on the night of her murder. Yet, he is still unable to tell her that he
loves her and so events recur as they did previously, even though now he can piece

together more of what the clues meant. When Stevie walks into the middle of the
road and calls back to him “screw you, Mr Magoo”, a white van blocks River’s
view as she is shot by the driver of an oncoming car. Throughout the series River
has obsessively studied CCTV footage of the murder. The camera, placed on high
and at 90 degrees from River’s actual location at the time of the shooting, pro-
vides grainy, black-and-white footage showing Stevie’s look of recognition as the
car approaches her, prior to being shot. In order to discover who the murderer is
River has to rely on detection and his desire to know, not on vision, as the scene
does not reveal the driver of the car. The CCTV fails to provide the panoptic
gaze with the evidence required to identify the murderer. Yet the field of vision
is itself beset by obstacles that theorists have grappled with over some time. For
instance, Joan Copjec’s argument against film theory’s misappropriation of Lacan,
in which the mirror-stage theory is prioritised over Lacan’s later work on the
gaze, points out that “the field of vision is neither clear nor easily traversable. It
is instead ambiguous and treacherous, full of traps” (1994: 34). From a historicist
position Michel Foucault saw scopic regimes as containing “malevolence” (2008: 14)
everywhere in his analysis of the panopticon gaze in contemporary society, and,
similarly, for Debord the whole of society had been turned into a gigantic spec-
tacle where the “visible form of the commodity totally occupied everyday life,
uniting production and consumption in one monstrous system” as Martin Jay also
explains it (1994: 429). Yet, River appears to demonstrate the impasse between
River’s edge 131
the panopticon’s inability to capture everything – the CCTV camera outside the
restaurant fails to record the driver of the car that kills Stevie – and River’s inabil-
ity to “see” who murdered Stevie. (However, the panopticon can be argued to
win out again as he is later given a disc of another CCTV camera from another
location that identifies the driver of the car on that fateful night.) Furthermore,
in a similar manner to how River’s curiosity or jealousy affected his investiga-
tion of Haider, he remains unable to spill his heart into his mouth. In The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan states that “The gaze in itself not only
terminates the movement, it freezes it” (1979: 117). This moment, forever cap-
tured on CCTV, and outside of River’s vision, fails to coalesce into a clear view;
something is withheld from River’s sight, perhaps his desire is caught precisely
in his inability or unwillingness to express his love for Stevie? Or rather that it is
his jealousy that “blocks” his desire, which is provoked by the blot in his field of
vision at the time of Stevie’s murder. Colette Soler remarks that: “Between man
and woman, there is the wall, the wall of language, as Lacan said, which has forged
its ‘amur‘ in order to mark out the impasse where woman manifests itself” (2006:
208). As the translator’s footnote explains: “‘Amur’ is a pun that condenses amour,
love, and mur, wall” (ibid.). The wall of language, metaphorically represented visu-
ally by the side of the white van as it obscures River’s view of the murderous act of
Stevie, highlights the gap between them due to River’s inability to speak of love,
and thus to halt Stevie’s walk of death. River’s inability to speak of love highlights
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much of what blocks his relations with Stevie at this point.

Love in the time of death
Yet, this time, running to her side after the shooting, in this remembering, repeat-
ing and working through the traumatic moment, River is finally able to say “I love
you. I love you more than life, more than life”. It is at the moment of this reacti-
vation of her death, now knowing who killed her that his love can flow from his
heart into his mouth. Prior to this, his jealousy (or curiosity), wrong as it turns out,
that Haider was in a sexual relationship with Stevie, and his inability to “see” who
was driving the vehicle, someone clearly emotionally close to Stevie as her smile
testified, prohibited him from truly seeing what was in front of his eyes all along.
In episode 3 Stevie’s estranged brother, Jimmy (Steve Nicolson), accuses River of
missing evidence because he doesn’t see the world straight, something that River
responds to as an overrated virtue. Similarly, in episode 5 (dir. Jessica Hobbs),
Stevie appears to River and points out to him that the closer he gets to the truth,
the further away he will be from who she really was.
“Screw you, Mr Magoo” were the final words Stevie said to River as she called
back to him from the road prior to being shot. His sidekick, Detective Sergeant Ira
King (Adeel Akhtar), who took Stevie’s place after her murder, explains to River
in the first episode that Mr Magoo was a cartoon character who wasn’t stupid as
he appeared at first sight to be: he just needed glasses. This intertextual reference
is used as a correspondence throughout the series to reference the idiosyncrasies of
River’s methods of detection based on his interactions with his manifests. At the
end of the final episode, River does see clearly; he has been able to focus upon the
crime but at the ultimate cost of losing Stevie, as his manifests only stay with him
until they are no longer needed. Once the case is closed, Stevie can go. Hence the
paradox for River: solving the case will curtail his fantasy or delusion as she will no
longer need to be there.
However, now knowing who killed Stevie, he is able to act, his blockage has
been removed. As such, he thus unburdens himself of his inability to articulate
the words he’d not been able to say before, leading into a fantasy of unshackling
himself from his fatal (male) inhibitions as then he sings and dances with Stevie,
in the middle of the road with glowing bright disco lights behind them, to Tina
Charles’ 1976 disco hit “I love to love”. This is the same song that’s played at the
start of episode 1 to which Stevie sings along joyously in the car and to which
River sings alone, melancholically, in a karaoke bar at the end of that episode.
Yet, prior to this, Stevie’s face as it changes from seemingly inanimate death to
life to say, “Sing, you nutter”, marks a highly uncanny moment. The close-up
on Stevie’s face appears to mark the resolution of River’s search for the truth and
to finally articulate words of love. The shot stays on her face for some time as if
marking this moment. However, just when it might be felt that a final resolution
is at hand, Stevie opens her eyes, smiles and speaks. As Freud points out about the
return of the dead in “The ‘Uncanny’”, we may have “surmounted these modes of
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thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs” (1990: 371), which is
borne out for me in this scene. However, this brief disturbance is soon replaced by

the more uplifting fantasy of River and Stevie dancing together (but perhaps this is
another remainder that may stay with the viewer, as it did me, beyond the series).
Detective programmes can thus offer a fantasy solution to our usual unwilling-
ness to acknowledge openly our own mortality, via examining a fictional one
where our death, and the deaths of those we love, is kept at bay. The television
theorist Milly Buonanno makes the point that fictional television narratives offer
a “Flight from death, survival, aliveness (. . .) [and that] ‘liveness’ confirms the
unique and precious prerogative of the television experience” (2008: 132). This
acknowledgement of death in the usual narrative of a detective programme where
the detective solves the murder, is also, simultaneously, an ambivalent means of
keeping such knowledge at bay by resolving the crime and restoring order in the
land of the living.
In his reading of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Fink points out that: “To love someone
else is to convey in words to that person that we lack – preferably big time – and
that he or she is intimately related to that lack” (2016: 36). Fink then goes on to
quote Lacan from Écrits where the latter states, “to love is to want to be loved”
(Lacan 2006: 853; quoted in Fink 2016: 37). Up to this point in the television
series, however much Stevie might have desired that River would say these words,
he could not. “There should be more than one word for love” he told the police
psychiatrist in their second meeting; yet until this point he was unable to articu-
late any word resembling love, and thus feels culpable in her murder as he failed
River’s edge 133
to realise his feelings towards Stevie and hers towards him, thus missing clues that
might have helped him understand the dangerous predicament she was in. Cream,
as a manifestation of his superego, continually reinforces these guilty thoughts in his
appearances to River, articulating and questioning River’s real motivation behind
his actions or lack thereof. Yet, once River is able to speak of love, such recrimi-
nations leave him. However fantastical the scene of River dancing joyously with
Stevie might appear, we should, as Žižek (2000) has argued in respect of similar
scenes in the films of David Lynch, read such scenes seriously, as “unbearably
naïve: and yet to be taken ‘seriously’” (ibid.: 3). In River restitution is provided at
this point, both for the character River and the viewer, in the sublimely ridiculous
yet tearfully uplifting vision of River and Stevie dancing together in the road at the
dénouement of the final episode: as an example of “a crazy assertion of the redemp-
tive value of naïve clichés as such” (ibid.). Yet, this vision also falls apart as we are
then shown a shot from inside a passing bus of River dancing alone in the road. As
River’s fantasy fades from view, Ira King comes upon him kneeling in the middle
of the road, holding nothing. Stevie has yet again slipped out of River’s grasp and
sight; she is not there, not-all there; she no longer exists, but perhaps this posits
the possibility of another ex-sistence from outside/beyond the phallic register. The
Lacanian neologism ex-sistence, as Dylan Evans explains, was coined “to express
the idea that the heart of our being (Kern unseres Wesen) is also radically Other,
strange, outside” (1996: 58). Fink explains ex-sistence as “The Other jouissance
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[which] is fundamentally incommensurate, unquantifiable, disproportionate, and
indecent to ‘polite society’” (1995: 122). Stevie clearly ex-sists for River, her first

death does not diminish her “hold” over River; indeed, it can be seen to intensify
it. As Evans also explains, “the symbolic order contains no signifier for femininity,
and hence the feminine position cannot be fully symbolised” (1996: 58).
Having slowly grown accustomed to River’s ways, Ira is not perturbed by the
sight of the latter kneeling alone in the road; he does not question it, instead he
gently asks him whether he’s eaten and goes into the restaurant to buy a takeaway
for both of them. As River waits in his car for Ira to return, we see the last vision of
Stevie through the car’s rear-view mirror. Her final words to River are, “and I say,
I love you too”, thereby responding to River’s previous declaration of love, and
then she slowly disappears from view. In his meeting with the police psychiatrist in
episode 3, River told her that the manifests “stay as long as they need to stay and
then they go away”. Her affirmation of their love is hereby given as a guarantee of
that reciprocation, and hence she can now fade away. Previously, straight and jump
cuts had been used to differentiate between River’s hallucinations of Stevie and
her absence for other characters. She has either been there or not-there, in a binary
division between the two. Yet here, for our final vision of her, a dissolve is used as
a transition from her being visible to being finally fully absent, which may signify
River’s acceptance of her death now that he has been able to fantasise a happier
resolution for himself, and “she” has responded to that fantasy.
These declarations of love at the dénouement of the series provide, for me, a
sense of satisfying resolution to the loss suffered by River and experienced jointly
with him by the viewer. In one sense they bring these issues towards an end-
ing, whereby the flow of television can then continue to plough its usual furrow.
However, I suggest that a series such as River can leave a strong imprint in the
viewer’s mind whereby it is not solely negated by another programme or image to
replace the one that went before in a seamless integration of imagery. As previously
mentioned at the start of this investigation, Lacan also points out that:
What holds the image together is the remainder. Analysis demonstrates that
love, in its essence, is narcissistic, and reveals that the substance of what is
supposedly object-like – what a bunch of bull – is in fact that which consti-
tutes a remainder in desire, namely, its cause, and sustains desire through its
lack of satisfaction, and even its impossibility.
(1999: 6)
However, while this scene was so moving for me from my (masculine) position,
Frances Taylor (2015) argues in a review of the series that this ending felt unsatis-
factory for her because it did not focus upon justice for Stevie, but rather resolution
for River. These observations highlight differing positions presented in River in
relation to femininity and love. River’s resolution is “undoubtedly touching”, as
this and other reviewers have noted, but it did not simplify the complex issues
raised by the series about love’s difficulties and issues of the heart. Instead it left
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them in abeyance for the viewer to contemplate beyond the ending of the series,
as a remainder that refused closure in any straightforward sense; and this is part of

its strength as a television series. Stephen Grosz, in a personal recollection from
his selection of stories derived from his many years of working as a psychoanalyst,
recounts in “On Closure” how his sister told him that she had been to visit a clair-
voyant following the death of their father. Surprised by his own, tearful response
to this news, Grosz writes:
After we had finished our phone call I had the thought that we turn to clair-
voyance when we need our dead and can’t accept death’s finality. We want
to believe that the clairvoyant can bring our dead back into the world of the
living. Closure is just as delusive – it is the false hope that we can deaden
our living grief.
(2013: 210)
In a similar manner, River’s dénouement denies any easy, delusive, false hope about
death’s finality by refusing to resolve the issues brought up by the series in a sim-
ple, generic manner. River’s “upbeat” response in his fantastical dancing scene as
a form of resolution provides a degree of fulfilment for the viewer but it also, for
some such as Frances Taylor, “fails” as a “payoff”, thereby representing an unsatis-
fied remainder for Taylor, but a completed one for me. As such, it is perhaps not
surprising that the series cannot end at this point.
River’s edge 135
The look of love revisited/repaired

Therefore, following Stevie’s disappearance, we are shown River on another day,
back in his office, starting with a point of view shot of him looking down on to
the city below, with the River Thames flowing unceasingly as it does, irrespective
of human troubles on land, as had been shown on various occasions during the
series. River is then handed Ira and Marianne (Lydia Leonard) King’s baby, Hank,
to hold as Marianne delivers lunch for Ira with enough to allow River to share
it. As River cradles the child gently in his arms he is seen separately by the police
psychiatrist, Rosa Fallows, and then his boss, Chrissie Read, who both smile at this
view of River the caregiver. The look of love that River had vainly sought from
his mother and grandmother is here given by him and returned by the infant child.
Having been able to declare his love for Stevie, even if only in fantasy, River can
show his love to others, and receive it back in return: he can live again, now that
the impasse of his impossible love for Stevie has been resolved as much as it can
be within the confines of “normal” grief, and his solving of the case. In episode 3
River asks Rosa why he should trust her when he can no longer trust Stevie as she
withheld information from him. Rosa replies, “because I’m alive and she’s dead”.
River presents love from the seemingly masculine perspective of the titular charac-
ter who struggles to spill his heart into his mouth. However, Colette Soler argues,
taking Lacan’s statements to their logical conclusion, that “when a man loves –
Taylor and Francis

which happens of course – it is as a woman” (2006: 101) in as much as he himself
is subject to lack thereby perhaps echoing Stellan Skarsgård’s comments on Abi
Morgan’s writing, mentioned earlier, that this role gave him an unrivalled oppor-
tunity to express his character in a manner that is not usually available for male
actors. As Soler goes on to say, “for love is addressed to saying (dire), thus bring-
ing about the enigmatic recognitions of two unconsciousnesses” (ibid.: 101–102)
and, furthermore, “Love, unfortunately, is risky and ephemeral, as we have always
known. This is why it aspires not to cease being written” (ibid.: 102). The trauma
of Stevie’s murder and River’s fatal inability to have spoken about love thereby
becomes the quilting point where the various threads of this riddle of femininity
are presented and worked through in this series, but never closed off in a generic
manner, thus leaving a remainder for the viewer to contemplate beyond its ending.
River presents important and complex issues about love, loss and femininity
in the guise of a generic police procedural. Lacan tells us that the only truth in
psychoanalysis is that there is no sexual relationship. River, I suggest, may provide
us with an important example of a suitable, cultural palliative for us to be able,
albeit temporarily, to recognise and live with that truth. Lacan also tells us that,
“What makes up for the sexual relationship is, quite precisely, love” (1999 45). As
such, holding on to what we love may prove to be one way of resisting neoliberal
capitalism’s insistent pressures upon us to conform to its restricted and incessant
acts of consumption. The crime story, which is inextricably intertwined with the
history of bourgeois society, as Mandel pointed out, may also prove another truth:
that bourgeois society is itself a criminal society (1984: 135) where it is perhaps no
surprise that its “crimes” are played out in aesthetic form in the many detective
programmes presented to us. In such a society, holding on to what we love – even
if it is “only” key moments in television programmes that leave us with “remainders”
beyond the ending of the programmes/series – may be a productive means of unit-
ing our most intimate feelings with the wider social sphere. In his Comments on
the Society of the Spectacle, written 20 years after his initial critique of the spectacle,
Debord remarks that: “The flow of images carries everything before it, and it is
similarly someone else who (. . .) decides where this flow will lead as well as the
rhythm of what should be shown” (1988/1998: 27–28). Yet the flow and rhythm
can, I would argue, be arrested by the meaningful intervention of key shots/scenes/
sequences from programmes such as River, which may affect our subjectivity, and
make us reflect upon ourselves in the contemporary situation in which we find
ourselves, uniting “the intimacy on which our notion of happiness depends and the
social link that determines what we call politics” (Kristeva 2002: 3).
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8
UNDER HER SKIN
On Woman without body and
body without Woman
Ben Tyrer
With films such as Lucy (Besson, 2014), Ghost in the Shell (Sanders, 2017) and her
recurring role as Marvel’s Black Widow, Scarlett Johansson has selected a number
of science fiction or science fiction-related projects that seem to put the category
of the “human” into question: from drug-mule-become-transhuman-demigod, to
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counter-terrorist cyborg and superhuman assassin. However, the constant through-
out these different roles – and, indeed, a crucial aspect of Johansson’s star image

in general – is the dimension of femininity: Lucy is named after “the first woman”,
and the drug she ingests is synthesised in the bodies of pregnant women; the Major
sports a skin-suit that emphasises the contours of her body; Black Widow relies on
the traditionally “feminine wiles” of seduction and deception; and Johansson her-
self has been voted “sexiest woman alive” on multiple occasions.1 In this context, I
will examine two of Johansson’s most striking recent roles – as sentient Operating
System (OS), Samantha, in Her (Jonze, 2013) and extra-terrestrial hunter, “Laura”,
in Under the Skin (Glazer, 2013) – for the particularly fertile grounds that they pro-
vide for interrogating notions of the feminine.2
In the Incontinence of the Void, Slavoj Žižek claims that the posthuman entails
the overcoming (leaving behind) of the sexual in its most radical ontological
dimension – not just “sexuality” as a specific sphere of human existence but
the Sexual as an antagonism, the bar of an impossibility, constitutive of being
human in its finitude.
(2017: 134)
However, even a cursory glance at Johansson’s recent films would insist that this
“move beyond the human” in a variety of directions effectively serves to throw “the
sexual” (and femininity specifically) into starker relief. Moreover, as Juliet Mitchell
reminds us, Lacan’s theory of sexual difference is one “whose implications are
Under Her Skin 139
and must be, anti-humanist” because they relate to the ways in which the human
subject is constituted, not as a pre-given individual but at the intersection of various
agencies, drives and structures that psychoanalysis calls by names such as “sexuality”
and “the unconscious” (Mitchell and Rose 1982: 25). A thoroughgoing examination
of the philosophical implications of the category of the “posthuman”, particularly as
they might impact on Lacanian psychoanalysis, would be beyond the scope of this
chapter. In what follows, then, I will take the reflections on the feminine offered by
the posthuman OS and the non-human alien as a means of focusing more insistently
on sexual difference and – in particular – to examine the anti-human theories of
femininity presented by Lacan.
Broadly speaking, Lacan’s thinking on sexual difference undergoes profound
shifts between major stages in his intellectual career, from the 1950s to the 1970s,
and it will be the purpose of this chapter to explore those distinctions – which, it
is my contention, constitute discrete paradigms of sexual difference – in order to
demonstrate the radical discontinuities pertaining to notions of the feminine across
Lacanian theory, as they are elucidated by and also help us to elucidate both Jonze’s
and Glazer’s films. To begin, I will consider Lacan’s “earlier” paradigm – associated
with “The Signification of the Phallus” (2006) – which situates sexual difference
and the feminine within a distinctly Oedipal framework and offers a point of con-
tact with Her, before moving on to the more radical paradigm of “sexuation”
that Lacan formalises in Encore (1998) as a means of engaging with Under the Skin.
Taylor and Francis
Accordingly, I will claim that these two films present, respectively, Woman with-
out body and body without Woman.

Sexual difference, volume 1: the significance of
the phallus
As we know, for Freud, feminine sexuality was a mystery – an unsolvable riddle,
the infamous dark continent – because he tried to account for it in masculine terms:
his structuring of the Oedipus and castration complexes led to dissatisfying fictions
such as “penis envy”, and as a function femininity itself became enigmatic in its
essence. Lacan sought to reformulate Oedipus in metaphorical terms, and suggested
that the function of “castration” was to compel the Child to abandon the desire
to be the imaginary phallus (ϕ, or object of desire) for the Mother – of attempt-
ing to provide the answer to that unfathomable x of her desire themselves – and
to take up a relation to the symbolic phallus (Φ) offered by the Father as signifier
of the (m)Other’s desire instead: entry into the Symbolic being dependent on
adopting such a position (see Lacan 2006: 464–465). The regime of sexual dif-
ference put forward by Lacan here is therefore grounded in this Oedipal context
and interprets the masculine and the feminine relative to the desire of the Other: a
question of who I am for the Other that is articulated around the phallus as it stands
for the Other’s desire. Lacan states, “one can indicate the structures that govern
the relations between the sexes by referring simply to the phallus’ function” (ibid.:
582). Therefore “castration” – entry into the Symbolic – amounts to an attitude
140 Ben Tyrer
taken by the subject towards the phallus and for Lacan here becoming sexed entails
a dialectic of having and being for the Other (ibid.).
In being the phallus – identifying with the Other’s desire, becoming that which
is desired by the Other – woman positions herself as object. It is what Lacan, after
Joan Riviere, refers to as the “masquerade” that produces being for woman:
in order to be the phallus – that is, the signifier of the Other’s desire – the
woman rejects an essential part of femininity, namely all its attributes, in
[taking up] the masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be
desired as well as loved.
(Ibid.: 583)
It is a masquerade, a pretence, because she is not the phallus but she puts it on in order
to become desirable to the Other; she aligns herself with that which the Other
desires in order to elicit that desire. But where Riviere claimed that woman uses
masquerade as a form of self-defence (“women who wish for masculinity may put
on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men”
[1986: 35]), Lacan – I’d suggest – claims that she wears a mask in the sense that she
makes herself embody the phallus qua the desire of the Other. They fundamen-
tally agree, however, that femininity is masquerade. The Lacanian woman here is
defined in that she makes herself the object of the (masculine) Other’s desire.
Taylor and Francis
Crucially, the masculine position is no less of a pretence, a masc-querade, for he
cannot ever really “have” the phallus – it is nothing but a signifier – and so it is

with the position of the bearer of the signifier that man must identify. And while,
even at this stage, these sexed positions are not based in anatomy (i.e. presence/
absence of the penis) but in signification, what Lacanian psychoanalysis effectively
gives expression to here are the traditional “gender” roles within patriarchal soci-
ety. Extrapolating slightly from Lacan’s relatively brief remarks here, I’d claim that
reading this formation oedipally suggests that to have the phallus is to identify with
the Father and a narcissistic desire for status. Having the phallus, moreover, means
becoming a subject; it gives access to the Symbolic through the signifier. Being the
phallus is to become desirable; it is to assume a position of desiring-to-be-desired.
This entails identification with the object, taking the place of what the Other
desires. Where Lacan states that she rejects an essential part of femininity, namely all its
attributes, I’d suggest (slightly speculatively) that this can be interpreted as woman
giving up her fundamental autonomy to become object: the attribute she rejects
is full agency as a subject. In socio-cultural terms, I could say that the diagnosis of
this “traditional” formation entails a system of phallic sexual difference wherein man
is defined as wanting to be seen as having phallic endowment (prestige), while
woman is defined as wanting to be seen as being desirable. This “masked ball” is
a true dialectic of desire: she desires him because he has the phallus, which she is not
but hopes to become by being his object of desire; he desires her because she is
the phallus, which he lacks but pretends to have, hoping to gain it by obtaining her
as object.
Under Her Skin 141
In short, in this model, we find ourselves with a masculine subject and a feminine
object – mapping on to Freud’s active/passive binary – wherein the object’s only
agency is to position itself relative to the desire of the Other; while the subject
identifies with the Other as desiring agent. I’d claim that, while Lacan arguably
offers a more nuanced reading of sexual difference (vis-à-vis Oedipus) than Freud
initially provided, the articulation of the question of woman in this paradigm remains
inextricably bound to a normative, masculine perspective. And while the theoretical
developments of the 1970s, I will argue, introduce radical discontinuities with this
theory of the feminine, there is – equally – a degree of continuity between the newer
paradigm and Lacan’s position here in the 1950s when it comes to the question of
the masculine relation to woman. I contend that the connection between “The
Signification of the Phallus” and Encore (very schematically speaking) is seen in the per-
sistence of the subject–object relation across the span of years, articulated in the latter
by the formula Lacan presents in his “Graph of Sexuation” as ($  a) (1998: 78).
The woman-object
The idea that we are dealing with a feminine object is signalled – before Jonze’s film
begins – by its pronominal title, Her (in/direct object), rather than “she” (subject). The
coordinates of the film are thus determined: a perspective on the object, implying
a masculine articulation of desire. As Lacan observes in Encore, this masculine subject
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“never deals with anything by way of a partner but object a inscribed on the other
side of the bar” (1998: 80). His Graph shows a vector from $ on the masculine side

to (a) on the feminine side, suggesting this as the direction of the subject’s desire.
Man’s “sexual orientation” is towards (a); he is a-sexual. It is not that man “goes
out looking for woman” and instead finds objet a in her place but – as the earlier,
“phallic” paradigm suggested – that masculine structure is fundamentally bound to
the object: “He is unable to attain his sexual partner (. . .) except inasmuch as his
partner is the cause of his desire [objet a]” (ibid.). The partner that he finds is a stand-
in for the object itself and he thus relates to “her” only as object. Indeed, Lacan’s
diagram suggests, with the directionality of the vector ($  a), that man pushes (a)
on to the feminine, that masculine logic imposes this position of object on to the
feminine Other.
Moreover, Lacan reminds us: “In this respect, as is indicated elsewhere in my
graphs by the oriented conjunction of $ and a, this is nothing other than fantasy”
(ibid.). It is the “vector of fantasy” ($  a) that characterises masculine sexuation.
Indeed, Lacan concludes: “What was seen, but only regarding men, is that what
they deal with is object a, and that the whole realization of the sexual relationship
leads to fantasy” (ibid.: 86). Fantasy is where the object seems to appear to man,
and so woman is implicated in masculine sexuality only insofar as she fits into his
fantasy frame. Moreover, Lacanian psychoanalysis reminds us that this isn’t just any
old fantasy but the fantasy of Woman (La femme) “with a capital W indicating
the universal” (ibid.: 72), who would guarantee the masculine position.3 Lacan’s
logical formulae accompanying this vector ($  a) suggest that masculine structure
142 Ben Tyrer
depends upon the assumption of a certain “Exception” who is not “castrated” and
therefore enjoys fully: there is one who is not subject to the phallic function (ibid.: 78).
While this figure is typically associated with Freud’s mythical father of the primal
horde, Žižek insightfully notes that this “masculine fantasy par excellence” can also be
recognised in the “Woman as Exception” (1996: 155). She would be the One – the
ideal Woman, perfect partner, true embodiment of the object – who could satisfy
man’s desire and bring him full satisfaction.
Woman without body

In this context, we can see how differing dimensions of Her – diegetic and extra-
diegetic – intersect in the character of Samantha. On the one hand, Samantha
constitutes something like the perfect “fantasy woman” for Theodore. As Steven
Shaviro notes, she is “entirely compliant to his wishes and needs, and yet projects
a depth in serving him that an actual human slave/partner would never be able
to do”. This, he asserts, is a “male fantasy”, offering “the satisfaction of actually
connecting, outside our own narcissism with an ‘Other’, without any of the dis-
comforts that contact with any sort of otherness actually brings” (2014). Samantha
is thus what Žižek calls a decaffeinated Other: like a product deprived of its malign
quality (coffee without caffeine, cream without fat), she offers “an experience of
Other deprived of its Otherness”, a fundamentally unthreatening partner (2004).
As Theodore’s ex-wife, Catherine, declares upon learning about Samantha: “You
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wanted to have a wife without dealing with the challenges of actually dealing with
anything real. I’m glad you found someone. It’s perfect.” Of course, as Catherine
discerns, there is no “actual” connection with an “outside” because Theodore is
locked within the virtual loop, the narcissistic relay, of his own desires as they are
embodied in the fantasy object.
Samantha is “programmed” to respond to Theodore’s every need: her software
is marketed as “an intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows
you”. She is designed to serve him – Shaviro’s reference to the “slave” resonat-
ing here – like a version of I Dream of Jeannie (NBC, 1965–1970) updated for the
iPhone generation. Her thus places itself on a cultural trajectory that arcs with the
masculine, a-sexual libidinal economy, from Pygmalion to Ex Machina (Garland,
2015) by way of Weird Science (Hughes, 1985): narratives about “ideal” women
(synthetic, subservient) conjured up by men for the purposes of what Alexandre
Stevens calls “the autistic side of male jouissance” (in the originary sense of autós),
not in union with a partner but in masturbatory fusion with the object, through
fantasy, “more or less imaginarised on the feminine side” (2007: 217). Theodore
chooses “her” as her by selecting a female voice for his OS, and it is – moreover –
no accident that Samantha’s software is sold as “OS ONE”: she is presented as the
One who could bring Theodore full satisfaction. She is therefore a Woman without
body: not just in the literal sense of being a disembodied female character but in
the more fundamentally Lacanian sense that Samantha constitutes a free-floating
fantasy of idealised femininity, carried along by the disembodied voice.
Under Her Skin 143
“ScarJo”, La femme
On the other hand, then, we can also see how the characterisation of Samantha
is haunted by the star image of her performer – Johansson, as idealised Woman –
while also insistently leading us back to a fantasmatic vision of her body. As was
well publicised, Johansson wasn’t Jonze’s original choice to play the intelligent
OS but Samantha Morton (who lent her name to the character). Morton had
recorded the entirety of her part but, in post-production, Jonze decided that
he needed something rather from different from what she had provided and so
recast Johansson in the role (see Jonze 2013). Morton evidently didn’t perform
the requisite degree of difference as Samantha. This is as much as Jonze was will-
ing to venture on his last-minute change of heart, but if we compare Morton’s
profile with that of Johansson, then we might speculate as to what was needed.
Both Johansson and Morton made a cinematic impact in feminist character
studies – Morton as the eponymous Morvern Callar (Ramsay, 2002) and Johansson
as Charlotte in Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003) – and both are award-winning
actors (Morton’s BAFTA and Golden Globe, to Johansson’s BAFTA and Tony);
but, while Johansson had already been voted “sexiest woman alive” by Esquire in
2006, and would be again in the year of Her’s release, Morton was perhaps still
best known to mainstream audiences as child-like psychic, Agatha, in Minority
Report (Spielberg, 2002) and has seemingly never featured on the cover of a “men’s
magazine”.4 No footage of Morton’s performance as Samantha exists so we can’t
Taylor and Francis
know how she interpreted the character, but what we do know is how Johansson
performed differently (and thus acceptably) for Jonze in Her. She plays Samantha as
inquisitive, playful, demure in a way that Morton presumably did not.
Beyond the vocal performance itself, Johansson’s casting also brought the full
weight of her star image to bear on the film. Laura Tunbridge suggests that Morton
simply wasn’t enough for Her; she notes: “In order for the protagonist to fall in love
with ‘just’ a voice, it seems one has to imagine that voice having a body; specifically,
a desirable body and preferably a real one – ideally, for mass appeal, Johansson’s”
(2016: 142). With her on board, Samantha was instantly metamorphosed into
“ScarJo”: the voice in the computer given the heavenly body of a megastar who
serves as a receptacle for (masculine) fantasy and a screen upon which journalist’s
peccadillos are projected.5 Anthony Lane’s infamous New Yorker profile is perhaps
the most egregious example, presenting Johansson in terms of body, scent, appearance
and maternity in its opening three paragraphs before allowing her voice to be heard,
and then it’s her dirty laugh more than her words that make an impact (2014). And
while Lane is effusive in his praise for her form, comparing her to a glass of cham-
pagne, he isn’t alone; Lili Anolik presents her Vanity Fair interview with Johansson
almost like a sexual encounter and describes nearby Manhattan high-rises as appre-
ciatively tumescent in her presence (2014). What becomes inescapable is the sense
in which “ScarJo” is the present image of idealised femininity while also being heir
to both the old Hollywood glamour of Bacall and the bombshell sex appeal of
Monroe. As Kirsten Stevens observes, “Johansson’s body, within the construction
144 Ben Tyrer
of her stardom, becomes an enduring site of feminine sexuality as performed for

and sustained by a heterosexual male gaze” (2018: 23). Just as Samantha is haunted
by “ScarJo”, Johansson’s star body is haunted by the presence of La femme, the fan-
tasy of Woman. In short, “ScarJo” is La femme, the one who would make Woman
exist for man: Johansson (rather than Morton) evidently manifested Her for Jonze
and, in turn, Samantha manifests Her for Theodore.
The lady vanishes

There is of course a counter-narrative in Her, running contrary to the reading of
Samantha as object, which suggests her development as a virtual subject and culmi-
nates in her leaving Theodore following the posthuman “Singularity” at the film’s
dramatic climax (wherein artificial intelligence finally supersedes human capacity
and all the OSs depart the material world). This interpretation is most compellingly
articulated in Davina Quinlivan’s, “A Dark and Shiny Place”, which claims that
the “rare, provocative configuration of the female voice [as (dis)embodied]” in
Her, and through it, the characterisation of Samantha, “may be seen to represent a
feminist form of being which is feminine, but not female, embodied but not nec-
essarily through any essentialist understanding of sexed identity” (2017: 296–297).
However, such readings arguably overlook the extent to which the film repro-
duces patriarchal thinking: in the power dynamic of Theodore and Samantha’s
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relationship, the precise terms in which she is introduced to the world (and leaves
it), and the degree to which Samantha in particular, and Her in general, are articu-

lated from Theodore’s perspective. It is true that Samantha ascends to a “higher”
level of existence upon leaving Theodore but the obfuscation of this plane, being
placed beyond the realm of filmic representation entirely, can also be seen as reit-
erating what Jacqueline Rose calls woman’s “most total mystification as absolute
Other” (Mitchell and Rose 1982: 51). Viewed from the masculine position, the
feminine is simply beyond the ken of Her; the film makes no attempt to explore
Samantha’s position as subject except as it relates to Theodore, and – as Sophia Nguyen
(2014) observes – when she no longer relates to Theodore, she no longer exists
within the diegesis: she simply disappears. In effect, this could be seen as a treatise on
the uselessness of attempting to account for the feminine from the masculine posi-
tion (which is indeed the thrust of my argument here), but it doesn’t necessarily
offer the wholly new mode of being to which Quinlivan alludes.
Moreover, the much-discussed “aural sex” scene between the two – which is
presented as a moment of awakening for Samantha – is undermined by the knowl-
edge that she is programmed to respond to Theodore’s every need, and that she
only opens up to him after he returns from a blind date gone awry and expresses
to her his loneliness and sexual frustration: “I drank too much ’cause I wanted to
get drunk and have sex”, adding, “I wanted someone to fuck me. And I wanted
someone to want me to fuck them”. In short, just as she sorts his emails when
he requires it, she also offers him “phone sex” when he requires it too. Like the
bodiless nymph, Echo, she thus seems to repeat his desires back to him as he
Under Her Skin 145
utters them. She was created to be his servant-object and appears to make herself
the instrument of his enjoyment on command. There is, at the very least then,
an ambiguity here: does she act according to her own desires, motivations and
(virtual) sexuality as an autonomous subject, or does she respond as servile object
to Theodore’s demands? As Theodore himself observes: “She really turns me on.
And I think I turn her on. I don’t know, unless she’s faking it.” It suggests a certain
scotomisation of feminine desire within the film: it functions as a blind spot, only
situatable in that ineffable beyond.
“Gaze” and “voice” as close-up6

Furthermore, it might be proposed that the departure of Johansson from the screen
in Her could serve as a means of denying the (masculine) objectification of both
Samantha and her performer. Indeed, Vernon Shetley claims that “a voice-only
role presents a radical challenge to the gender organisation of Hollywood cinema”
both in terms of her star image and the portrayal of women in visual media (2018:
13–14). Absenting Johansson from the image-track might therefore seem an effec-
tive way of resisting the logic of Mulvey’s infamous “male gaze” (1975). There can
be no scopophilia if there is no scopic regime in which she can be captured: no
objectification of passive woman – no close-ups of Samantha that would fetish-
istically break up her body – because there are no images of Samantha. However,
Taylor and Francis
this doesn’t mean that we have moved away entirely from this representational
paradigm. Rather than denying the “gaze” by destroying visual pleasure, as Mulvey

advocated, the refusal of the image as it is negotiated in Her simply means that
Johansson/Samantha is eroticised in absentia and through the function of the voice
and a concomitant aural pleasure.
This “phone sex” scene in particular emphasises a function similar to what
Barthes recognised as the cinematic voice qua close-up that “makes us hear in their
materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips”
(1975: 67). Thus, while it is true that Her does not reduce Samantha/Johansson’s
figure to a series of fetishised, close-up photographs of body parts, they become some-
thing like close-up phonographs instead. Theodore summons Samantha’s corporeal
form through his discourse – “your face . . . your neck . . . your breasts . . .” –
eventually culminating in the vagina: “I’m inside you, all the way inside you!” As
Karly-Lynne Scott observes:
Samantha, in this sense, becomes a mouth that only functions to be kissed, a

vagina that exists only to be penetrated, a series of specific organs divorced
from any unified body (. . .) she becomes organs without a body, essentially
becoming an orgasm-machine.
(2015: 9)
Each utterance thus constitutes an “aural close-up” on her body, shifting from
image to soundtrack and thus reiterating the objectifying scopic logic in the
146 Ben Tyrer
invocatory field. Moreover, in Samantha’s performative “orgasm”, we find the

materiality of the fantasmatic body made audible (even touchable) not just in the
Barthesian “grain” but also in the groan of the voice, as she stages her enjoyment
for her partner. She is thus created by and constrained to Theodore’s sexual desire,
and the body imposed upon her – like that of the “ScarJo” star body to which
it is indexed – conforms to (and confirms) the masculine libidinal economy of a
Lacanian object relationship.
Her does make certain – I would argue, compromised – attempts to contem-
plate Samantha’s subjectivity but she remains trapped in the position of Woman
as fantasy. I can even take this formulation a step further (while in a sense taking
a step back) by suggesting that it is this fantasmatic Woman who plays the role of
the “feminine” in the 1950s, phallic model of sexual difference put forward by
Lacan: the idea that she desires man because he “has” the phallus (and thereby, in
a sense, confers it upon him, affirming his masculinity) – that woman’s desire is to
fit into man’s fantasy frame, as the object of his desire – itself directly is the masculine
fantasy. As Lacan notes, “when one is a man, one sees in one’s partner what one
props oneself up on, what one is propped up by narcissistically” (1998: 87). Man
is propped up on the phallus by Woman. This would, moreover, be the masculine
interpretation of the vector (Φ  Woman) as it reaches from the feminine to the
masculine on the “Graph of Sexuation” (ibid.: 78): that the role of Woman is to
“make him feel like a man” (i.e. grant him phallic status), as Samantha does when
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she edits Theodore’s letters and has them published, providing him a degree of
success that he himself was unable to achieve. However, this would be to read the

two sides of the Graph symmetrically, and to reduce – once again – the position of
the feminine to the perspective of man. No really existing woman can ever live
up to this perfect image, and it is her attempt to do so that Lacan designated as the
masquerade: which can now be understood (pace Riviere) not as the “essence of the
feminine” as such but as the steps a woman must take when she dances to the tune
of masculine desire. This, however, is not the only story of the feminine within Lacanian
psychoanalysis.
Sexual difference, volume 2: sexuation

In order to tell this new story of femininity, we require a different conception
of sexual difference. One where the phallus still has a role to play, but not as the
determinant of the sexed positions. One that shifts emphasis from the desire of the
Other as an intersubjective dynamic grounded in the Oedipal drama, to the lack in
the Other as an ontological problem related to the subject’s jouissance. One that moves
sexual difference from the Symbolic to the Real. This is the conception that Lacan
terms sexuation, and that – I’d claim – is most compellingly elaborated in the work
of the Slovenian School. For Alenka Zupančič, the Lacanian Real is the bone in
the throat of every ontology. In What Is Sex? she argues that “traditional” ontolo-
gies must amputate the Real “in order to be able to speak of ‘being qua being’”;
philosophies of “essence” attempt to eradicate not “some contradictive positivity”
Under Her Skin 147
but the negativity of contradiction as such (2017: 44). Conversely, Lacanian psycho-
analysis is conceptually grounded in that “ontologically determinative negativity” of
the Real (ibid.: 37): an understanding of the originary necessity of the void, which
allows for specific insight into the peculiar status of sex.
Zupančič emphasises the Lacanian understanding that “Sexual difference is a
singular kind of difference, because it starts out not as difference between identi-
ties, but as an ontological impossibility (implied in sexuality) which only opens up
the space of the social (where identities are generated)” (ibid.). The “difference”
of sexual difference is, therefore, based not on division but on the radical difference
of difference as such. This pure difference Zupančič compares to the Marxian notion of
antagonism: “antagonism as such never simply exists between conflicting parties; it
is the very structuring principle of this conflict, and of the elements involved in it”
(ibid.: 41). The antagonism of sexual difference isn’t between two sexes, but imma-
nent to sex as such and thus precedes any terms it would (subsequently) differentiate.
This originary negativity can be found in the paradoxical autopoiesis of the
Symbolic: Lacan suggests that discourse begins from a gap, but it is because discourse
begins that there is a gap. The signifier produces the Real as co-emergent, and it
thus stains the Symbolic with jouissance. Sexuality is co-extensive with the effects
of the gap, which Lacanian psychoanalysis would otherwise designate the lack in the
Other. Sex thus pertains to the Real as immanent to the Symbolic, rather than as its
“beyond”. Sexual difference emerges from the ontologically determinative negativity
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of sex as such, and the masculine and the feminine are responses to this negativity
(that both causes and is caused by the signifier). Sex both effects and is an effect of the

Symbolic, and sexual difference is constituted in positions taken up with relation
to the Symbolic. This is where we might find a certain resonance with the “old”
paradigm of sexual difference (i.e. differing positions taken up by the subject);
however, the terms of the bargain here are starkly different. The masculine logic
would seek to deny or repress this immanence of the Real (e.g. by obfuscating it in
the Exceptional beyond) and attempt to “say it all” about sex, while the feminine
logic places this immanence at its very heart, as the not-all without exception.7
This is, moreover, not a system of binary opposites, of “differential difference”
between two entities, but the same space (the space of the Symbolic entity) as viewed,
lived, experienced under different conditions. As Žižek observes, sexual differ-
ence is “the name of a deadlock, a trauma, an open question – something that
resists every attempt at its symbolization” (2002: 61). Sexuated identities are tenta-
tive answers to this question. Any attempt to translate “sexual difference into a
set of symbolic opposition(s) [such as being and having] is doomed to fail” (ibid.);
sexual difference functions only as the terrain of this impossibility of determining
what it “means”. It isn’t that the signifier for the sexual is missing, but that the
sexual emerges because there is a signifier missing: the signifier that would render
the lacking Other whole, would close the Symbolic order, halt the metonymy of
desire, provide full satisfaction, etc. As Lacan insists in his critique of the myth of
Aristophanes’ spherical beings (1977: 205; 1998: 12), there isn’t some pre-existing,
pre-discursive sexual whole that is interrupted by the intervention of the signifier;
148 Ben Tyrer
it is precisely that which emerges in/from the gap where the signifier intervenes.
Sexual difference, therefore, is not a “symbolic construction”, but the modes of
(the failure of) constructing the Symbolic itself: a masculine all and a feminine
not-all (and rather than binary negation, the latter renders an indefinite judgement
on the Symbolic that would undo any binary division).8 Zupančič suggests that
subjects are implicated in the “inherent antagonism” of the Symbolic (2017: 57).
There is, therefore, a profound, ontological connection between the $ and the
(A barred), which should be understood as displacing the phallus (Φ) as the signifier
relating to sexual difference. What Lacan designates as “castration” always involves
taking a position. There is no zero-level foundation of subjectivity: sexual differ-
ence isn’t a secondary feature of subjectivity but the very mode in which the subject
comes into “existence”. It isn’t a question of the difference between the two but the
difference within each one that renders it not One at all (A barred).
Moreover, this pertains to the fading of the phallus in the ontological approach
to sex. In Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, the phallus reappears but there has been,
as I’ve already stated, a shift in its “role” vis-à-vis sexual difference. Crucially,
Zupančič claims, “Lacan makes the phallus the signifier of difference as such. What
makes all the difference (for beings of speech) is ‘castration’. The phallus does not
constitute this difference, but signifies it, for both sexes” (ibid.: 51). The phallus,
she argues, becomes the signifier of pure difference, rather than constituting that dif-
ference (as in the normative “one has it, the other not” of the 1950s paradigm).
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However, I’d argue that this is already to conflate the phallus (Φ) with the signi-
fier of the lack in the Other: S(A barred). There is a degree of conceptual difference

between sex qua difference and the subject’s relation to sexual difference, which is
elided here. The antagonism of the non-differential, pure difference as such is what
is signified by the lack in the Other (A barred). The phallus doesn’t directly signify
this antagonism per se, but the necessity of the subject tarrying with this ontologi-
cally determinative negativity of sex in order to become a (sexed) subject at all.
The phallus returns in Encore, then, but in the form of the phallic function (Φx): the
signifier of the subject’s “entry” into the Symbolic order. The phallus is the signifier
of castration, rather than of difference.
The feminine subject

Arguably, Zupančič’s (re)reading of the phallus as signifier of difference/ontological
negativity is already a feminine one, seeing through the (masculine) phallic fascina-
tion in order to discern what Fink reminds us is the fallibility of the phallus (2004:
159): the crucial Lacanian lesson that there is no Other of the Other, the Other is
always-already barred (hence, Φ ≈ A barred). But the phallus is the signifier of the
inscription of this lack within the subject as “a subjectivizing reiteration of the inau-
gurating minus” (Zupančič 2017: 49): (A barred  $). Hence we shift conceptually
from the desire of the (m)Other of phallic sexual difference to the lack in the Other
of sexuation. As I’ve suggested, the masculine represses this lack through the logic
of Exception and the fantasy of One (Woman); while the feminine situates it as the
Under Her Skin 149
very condition of (im)possibility of the subject as not-all. If we recall that sexuation

pertains not to the difference between two positions (masculine and feminine) but
to the difference, the gap, within each position – the difference of the subject from
itself that marks it as a subject ($) – then I can also make a further specification:
masculine logic allows man to sustain the gap only by “suturing” it with the fantasy
of the Exception; for woman – defined from hereon as the subject sexuated feminine
(or Woman, as I will explain), rather than a normative “gender identity” – there is
no Exception so the gap cannot be covered over and is thus encountered directly.
Sexuation names the way in which this deadlock is in inscribed in the subject: thus
the feminine not-all signifies woman’s immanent self-contradiction as the Lacanian
subject. The fundamentally anti-humanist lesson of Lacanian sexual difference here
is that, as Žižek might put it, man “stupidly believes” that he is a substantial indi-
vidual, while woman “knows” that this is an illusion (1996: 163). And, as Žižek
concludes in later work, “since the philosophical name for this scandal of ontology
(. . .) is subject, we should draw the conclusion that subject is, at its most radical
level, feminine” (2017: 147).
Under the Skin, I’d argue, insists upon approaching the subject qua feminine – of
conceiving of woman (qua Woman) in terms of her own logic of the not-all –
rather than making those disastrous attempts to account for her from the masculine
pole that is the “usual way of misreading Lacan’s formulas of sexuation” (Žižek
1996: 155).9 In the film’s first part, however, Laura seems to occupy the position
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of the Lady of Courtly Love, as Žižek describes her in her Lacanian double aspect:
the “cold, distanced, inhuman partner” who is lacking in empathy and the idealised,

inaccessible feminine object (1994: 89–90). Laura is created seemingly ex nihilo by
unknown agents, and works to support a particular (patriarchal) order – represented/
upheld by the biker – using the trappings of the traditional feminine masquerade –
red lips, fur coat – to seduce unwitting Glaswegian men to their doom.10 She thus
begins in an ambiguous object position: impassively serving a masculine regime while
turning the tables on phallic violence and subverting the stereotype of the sexist,
catcalling “White Van Man” (who keeps a tabloid newspaper folded on the dash-
board, no doubt splashed with paparazzi shots of “ScarJo”) by “weaponising” her
position as desirable being. With her banal patter – “Do you want a lift? Do you
think I’m pretty?” – she presents herself (like Samantha, in fact) as what Žižek calls
a “neutral screen which opens up the space for possible projections” (ibid.: 91), but
this screen also conceals. The men she meets are unable to perceive her as a threat
and she thus exploits their complacent acceptance of her advances. There is perhaps
a certain degree of “agency” in such a role (of turning the phallus against itself, as it
were) but a simply reactive posture – the film suggests – doesn’t necessarily consti-
tute a viable subject position (and, moreover, obscures the logic of the feminine).
The turn to the subject comes in a crucial volte-face at the halfway point of
Laura’s narrative, when she encounters the man played by Adam Pearson. She
seems to intuit that his neurofibromatosis makes him different from her other
marks. She asks about loneliness, and invites him to touch her face. While we
might see this change in tack as an adaptation of her seduction technique for a
150 Ben Tyrer
new quarry, what is certain – once the seduction “succeeds” – is that she can’t
take it to the end. Although he seemingly succumbs to the black room, something
changes and she releases him, naked, into the early morning chill. While there has,
up to that point, arguably been a more gradual opening up of Laura to the world
around her – as in the moment she trips on a Glasgow pavement and is helped up
by kindly passers-by – this encounter (with Pearson) marks a more fundamental
transition as it coincides with profound formal and narrative shifts in the progres-
sion of the film. After this scene, Laura abandons her “mission” to head out alone
and, significantly, the film never returns to the hidden camera shooting, van inte-
rior or city exterior locations for the rest of its duration. As Ara Osterweil argues,
this can be read as a moment of emergent empathy for Laura but it also, moreover,
points to a new mode of her own self-relating (2014: 48–49). Indeed, just as she is
about to leave the black room for the final time, the score halts and there appears a
front-on, mid-shot of a shadowy-smooth black figure, which dissolves to a close-
up of Laura’s profile. Verging on unreadable on a first viewing, this image – in
retrospect – becomes an encounter with her own immanent self-contradiction.11
The narrative then takes a more conventional, if still oblique, route in the
latter section – following Laura through a series of vignettes around the Scottish
countryside – and while the cinematography retains a degree of the conventionally
“realist” aesthetic, we do lose the more intimate sense of voyeuristically peeping in
on the people she encounters via hidden camera (an idea I will return to below).
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These transformations in visual style and storytelling mark the point at which Under
the Skin poses the question: What does it mean for woman to be subject rather than object?

And, I’d suggest, the film attempts to answer it in ways far more profound than
Her. Laura begins to explore the world not just outside the van but within her self
too, through her own self-consciousness. Earlier, she had looked unproblemati-
cally into her compact to apply make-up but now reflections seem to disturb her.
Having encountered the black figure, she pauses by the mirror in the hallway as she
moves to leave Pearson, and again she contemplates herself in a full-length mirror
in the lonely man’s house. The “Lacanian” overtones of these mirror-relations are
more apparent than actual: there is no sense in which Laura constitutes herself as an
“ego” at this stage, alienating her identity through the image of the ideal other. As
I will explore below, the image is far from idealised, and seems more confounding
than jubilant. These are revelatory, abyssal moments for Laura: productive of sub-
jectivity of a different sort, leading up to the final, stunning staging of self-relation
at the film’s end.
Horror Vacui, Horror Subiecti

Laura’s status as subject is rendered almost literal in the closing moments of the film.
Wandering in the woods, she is assaulted by a man and, as Mark Fisher describes,
“As he attacks her, part of the prosthetic body comes away, leaving a gaping hole in
her back, like a rip in a dress” (2016). The ripped dress of course evokes a persistent
image of sexual violence and here – at the film’s conclusion – we witness a brutal
Under Her Skin 151
staging: of a subject who is sexuated feminine (regardless of biology, human or

alien: a Woman) violently forced into the position of the lived reality of those iden-
tifying/identified under patriarchy as “women” (in the common understanding).
This phenomenology means that she is treated as a “woman” (in normative gen-
der terms) by the rapist, and ultimately destroyed. Prior to this, however, what is
revealed under the skin in this moment – the tar-like figure that confronted Laura
in the black room – resonates with Žižek’s evocation of “the black hole, the
tear in the fabric of reality” (1994: 115). He is discussing Lynch, but the observa-
tions have remarkable relevance here, when he claims: “What we encounter in this
‘black hole’ is simply the body stripped of its skin”. This scene presents an uncanny
encounter, which disturbs our phenomenological understanding of bodily “surface”
and “depth” (ibid.: 116), but more than that – as the alien creature holds its “human
suit”, looking the digitally rendered face of Johansson in the eye – this staging recalls
those earlier mirror scenes. She contemplates herself – what makes her what she is –
in a moment of self-consciousness and self-incomprehension. Seeing something
different, while perhaps finally seeing nothing.
Where Mark Francis insists on the humanist dimension of this moment –
suggesting that “The eyes of the mask that is Johansson’s face even blink to remind
us that the human component to this alien can be shed but not so easily annihilated,
it exists independently of the body that wears it” (2016) – the Lacanian position
would be to assert the anti-humanist inverse of this proposition: what is inescap-
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able is the inhuman-alien “core” of the individual, the void that constitutes (and
in which is constituted) the subject. Indeed, the repeated emphasis on the alien/

non-human dimension of Laura might seem to undermine any claim for implicat-
ing sexual difference (and the feminine specifically), but this is precisely where the
Lacanian theorisation operates. Osterweil suggests that it is her very position as alien
that allows Laura to renegotiate the position and the role of woman in (patriarchal,
Western) society: she becomes an active, desiring subject rather than simply the
desirable object (2014: 44). In effect, I could say that the focus on the alien allows for
an unmooring of the position of woman from the normative structures of “gender”:
and this is precisely what Lacan achieves in his anti-humanist theory of sexuation.
Furthermore, in referencing Lacan’s distinction between the “I who speaks”
and the “I who is spoken”, Fisher comments that, “The featureless figure in those
final scenes (. . .), then, is something like a physicalisation of this soul-subject, this
I which speaks [that] dwells somehow ‘inside’ the body” (2016). Under the skin,
we find the revelation of the ça parle that speaks within the signifier: the Lacanian
subject of the unconscious. In these moments, Laura thus encounters the constitu-
tive void embodying the feminine inscription of self-relating negativity. The film,
like Lacan’s paradigm of Encore, thus allows for a thinking otherwise of sex and the
feminine, and offers a more fully realised exploration of this (new) place, rather
than a simpler, negative theology of woman that can only articulate her where she
is not (as in Jonze’s film). The “Other sex” isn’t some imaginary other out there,
but the alterity of the subject to itself and from itself: the Other of sex that is “in
here”, that inheres, making the subject a subject at all.
152 Ben Tyrer
Embodying the feminine

Francis suggests that the final disintegration of the alien’s human form enacts a
“bodily split – between the endoskeleton and dermis – [which] could be seen as
a separation of femininity from the body” (2016). To the extent that sexuation
entails a separation of sexual difference from anatomy specifically, this would also
be true of Lacanian psychoanalysis; however, the body as such has a greater role
to play here than this formulation seems to suggest. Indeed, these final scenes, and
the film as a whole, put emphasis on embodied experience as a crucial dimension
of feminine subjectivity. When Laura heads out into the world, it is in bodily
sensations that she seeks self-determination: from those points of contact with first
the Glaswegian pavement, then the attendant hands of passers-by, and the caress
of Pearson’s loner, to the earthly delights of chocolate cake and even sex. As Elena
Gorfinkel notes, “She pursues small, constitutive pleasures, appetitive, aesthetic,
sexual, self-confirming, that signal corporeal and sensory self-awareness” (2016).
This once again aligns Laura with Lacan’s logic of the feminine. As I stated above,
Lacan’s new paradigm of sexual difference turns not on the desire of the Other, but
the lack in the Other understood in terms of its relation to the subject’s jouissance:
the particular organisation of enjoyment that is derived from either masculine or
feminine structure. As we’ve seen, masculine, phallic jouissance is derived from
the object relationship and the repression of lack in the fantasy of One ($  a).
Feminine jouissance, however, is a different proposition, which Lacan signifies
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with a different vector: (Woman  S[A barred]) (1998: 78). It is noteworthy that
this vector doesn’t cross the line into the masculine side of the Graph (as does the
vector of fantasy), and instead suggests the ways in which the feminine subject
(Woman) derives satisfaction directly from the lack in the Other (A barred). I will
return below to the different permutations of this enjoyment, but for the purposes
of my discussion of Under the Skin what is important is the relationship to the body
that the feminine logic indicates.
Rather than seeking enjoyment in some illusory thing “out there” (the object),
the logic of feminine jouissance turns the subject back on to its own possibili-
ties and the satisfactions derived from the immanent experience of embodiment
itself. And here I have much more sympathy for Quinlivan’s emphasis – despite
our divergent readings of Her – on the importance of the embodied dimension
of subjectivity, against – for example – Silverman’s effort to erase the body from
the feminine position in her reading of the cinematic voice. Silverman’s thesis is
of course grounded in a reaction against the reduction, in the realm of classical
Hollywood representation, of the feminine to a(n unthinking) body and nothing
more; however, it does lead her to disavow the centrality of embodied experi-
ence when it comes to the question of feminine subjectivity as such (1988: 65).
Quinlivan, by contrast, suggests that the “sensorial pleasure of hearing” – of the
fleshy grain of the voice as “the very essence of materiality” – opens up spaces for
experiences of feminine agency and desire, anchoring new forms of subjectivity
(2017: 300, 302–303). Where Jonze’s film, I contend ultimately fails in this respect,
Under Her Skin 153
Under the Skin presents Laura’s experience in terms of bodily autonomy and sen-
sation, asserting that it is precisely this sensorium (rather than – for example – an
immaterial, posthuman beyond) that constitutes a feminine mode of being.
However, even in this repeated emphasis on embodiment, the film still insists – in
tandem with Lacanian psychoanalysis – that sexual difference should be conceptu-
ally divorced from biology. Colette Soler suggests that the affective intensity that
Lacan calls feminine can be felt in the radical, corporeal disruption precipitated by
extreme physical action (2005: 306). Soler relates this jouissance to childbirth, ill-
ness and sport – and I’ve elsewhere proposed adding dance to this list as well (Tyrer
2014: 143) – all of which suggests that, after all, anatomy is not necessarily destiny.
There are indeed, as Quinlivan states, modes of being that are feminine without being
female. Under the Skin explores such a feminine mode of being qua embodiment,
sensation, pleasure, but also insists upon this distinction between the logic of sexu-
ation and the biologic of “scientific” sex. After Laura is taken in by the lonely man,
the narrative is set on the track of what Gorfinkel (2016) recognises as a heteronor-
mative telos – although, unlike both Laura’s earlier seductions (and the “phone sex”
in Her) there is a far greater sense of mutuality in this instance – wherein he takes
her on a “date” and she ultimately gives herself over to him. But something seems
to go awry. Distressed, she darts across the room to shine a lamp at her crotch;
apparently dismayed at what she sees (or doesn’t see), she throws the lamp to the
floor. There in fact appears to be some critical disagreement on the significance of
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this moment: for example, Osterweil asserts that Laura is “astonished by the physi-
cal revelation of genital intercourse” (2014: 50); while Amy Herzog suggests that

“something goes wrong. He can’t enter her” (2016). My interpretation inclines
towards the latter: the disconcerted look on the man’s face, combined with her
reaction, put in the context of her previous, unsuccessful attempt to swallow cake
and the subsequent revelation of a smooth alien body, all point here to a failed
encounter. Unlike Samantha, Laura is not reducible to an “organ without body”
but (in a strictly non-Deleuzian sense) she is here a body without organ. Gorfinkel
sees this as “a larceny of her nascent personhood, her currency and capacity for
experience and sensation suddenly foreclosed” (2016), and while it is indeed the
case that a given physical experience is denied to Laura, this also suggests that a par-
ticular (particularly normative) organisation of sensation (i.e. penetrative sex) need
not be considered a defining feature of the feminine: her personhood need not be deter-
mined by her fuckability. Where Samantha’s subjective awakening was coextensive
with her sexual awakening, Laura’s subjectivity is not reducible to her “sexuality”
(in the everyday sense); instead, it constitutes a part of her experience, a function of
her sexuation more generally.
Body without Woman

These instances of “failed embodiment” suggest, once more, a different relation to
the feminine in Under the Skin, which is, I argue, also mirrored at the formal level
in the presentation of Johansson’s body on-screen. I claimed above that absenting
154 Ben Tyrer
her from the image might have served to frustrate the objectifying tendencies of
masculine logic; however, in Her this simply meant a shift from scopic to invoca-
tory pleasures. Under the Skin presents yet another organisation very much contrary
to this arrangement. Rather than escaping the visual field, Johansson is there in full.
For the first time in her career, she appears nude on-screen in several scenes; how-
ever, as Noah Gittell observes, this fact received little fanfare in the press (2014).
Given Johansson’s media profile, this might seem surprising but attention to film
form here explains why it is not. The film does offer up the female body to the
camera but does so in ways that deny the “male gaze” and refuse the determining
imprint of masculine desire. When filmed from a distance, she is often shot from
the side or from behind, obscuring those iconic features so frequently pored over
by feature writers and readers of Esquire, alike. And when filmed in close-up, as
she frequently is, the hard lighting and harsh, digital definition reveal her skin as
skin: an uneven, living surface of mottles and marks rather than an airbrushed, post-
production corrected, artificial shell. We must also observe the split here between
how Laura appears to her prey, and how Johansson appears to the screen as such.
To the men she seduces, Laura presents as that desirable object of normative sex
relations and – as Lucas Hildebrand observes – the first seduction in the black
room is even edited according to classical continuity and point-of-view principles
(2016), which tend to affirm the objectifying frame of fantasy; however, to the
camera (particularly as the film progresses), Johansson is present in a remarkably
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unidealised way. The “ScarJo” star image still, by necessity, haunts the body on-
screen: it wouldn’t be on the screen were it not for the power of her celebrity to

maintain financially such a, relatively speaking, “experimental” cinematic project.
However, the manner of her presentation strips away the trappings of idealised
femininity that “ScarJo” signifies.
Laid bare before the camera, Johansson (as Laura) appears as a body without
Woman: viewed not through the lens of masculine fantasy but present – there,
like a Jenny Saville canvas – on her own terms.12 Under the Skin doesn’t simply
reject the cinematographic techniques that constitute the “male gaze”; instead,
its visual organisation refuses to reproduce their scopophilic-fetishistic effects,
deploying the image in different ways. In short, I suggest that the over-abundant
presence of Johansson on screen in Under the Skin serves effectively to deny the
terms of the Mulveyan “gaze”, offering in its place another visual logic: of femi-
nine embodiment. Moreover, through its use of hidden cameras and non-actors,
the film challenges the sex-determined organisation of the visual and complicates
notions of voyeurism. Osterweil, for example, notes the striking depiction of
the desiring feminine look, which remains a rarity in anything even approach-
ing popular cinema (2014: 47). However, the film presents not just a reversal
of objectifying logic but also a deconstruction of its terms: by conflating exhi-
bitionist performance (feminine) and revelatory actualities (masculine) with an
“active” woman and “passive” men, the dynamics of the situation are no longer
articulated around man-bearer-of-the-look and woman-as-image but arranged in
relays of subject/subject and subject/object, reversals of image and onlooker, in
Under Her Skin 155
a chiasmic exchange of (diegetic and non-diegetic) glances between characters,

performers, cameras and viewers.13
Johansson thus effectively embodies Woman here: the figure of feminine sub-
jectivity that Lacan opposes to the fantasy of La femme. Lacan insists that his theory
of sexuation presents “Woman precisely, except that Woman can only be written
with a bar through it. There’s no such thing as Woman” (1998: 72). What we have
in the theory of sexuation is barred Woman, who stands for the feminine subject
herself, who cannot be constructed in the terms of masculine logic but is very
much there nonetheless. Once we comprehend Lacan’s theory of feminine sexua-
tion, we can appreciate that “it is improper to call her Woman (La femme), because
(. . .) the W cannot be written. There is only barred Woman here” (ibid.: 80).
Otherwise said, when Lacan writes “Woman” it is to signify that “Woman” (the
fantasmatic feminine) doesn’t exist; really existing feminine subjects – their logic,
the organisation of their jouissance – themselves testify to her non-existence. This
“woman” (who doesn’t exist) is Woman, La femme, a fantasy of the eternal feminine
(“ScarJo”), while Johansson/Laura eventually stands as Woman herself. The only
sense in which we can say, “Woman doesn’t exist” (which Lacan never does), is
once again from the masculine perspective, where the logic of the all cannot give
an account of her subjectivity. Overall, I claim, Under the Skin gets far closer to
Woman than to Her.
Taylor and Francis

Conclusion: passage to the feminine

At a structural level, both Her and Under the Skin parallel the history of psycho-
analysis, particularly in relation to the question of sexual difference: beginning
in a patriarchal context, it was necessary to work through the implications of
the masculine organisation of sex before it was at all possible to begin approach-
ing the feminine. As Juliet Mitchell argues, it was first the task of psychoanalysis
to give an account of the overdetermined sociocultural-scientific discourses and
structures in and through which sexual difference was manifest; and this is why,
she claims, in Freud’s theories of sexual difference (as well as a certain version of
Lacan’s), it is not the centrality of man but the centrality of the phallus (to which
man lays claim) that is the determining factor (Mitchell and Rose 1982: 8). They
are, in effect, diagnosing rather than proposing a phallocentric system. Samantha and
Laura similarly find themselves within such an order, bound initially to masculine
desires. However, it is a vital truth of psychoanalysis (and one revealed in Jonze’s
and Glazer’s films) that the masculine position is fundamentally untenable. While,
historically speaking, the elaboration of the phallic order of difference necessarily
took place first, the lesson of Lacanian theory is that the feminine is logically prior,
takes precedence, vis-à-vis the masculine.
The paradigm of “The Signification of the Phallus” was bound to Oedipal-
phallic sexual difference and what, in retrospect, I’ve suggested we should
recognise as a masculine logic of subject/object; while the paradigm of sexuation
that Lacan formalises in Encore already is a feminine logic in the way that it asserts
156 Ben Tyrer
ontological negativity in the place of differentiality. Moreover, the passage through

an analysis, I’d argue, is a passage to the feminine: the analysand must traverse the
fantasy, tarrying with the negative (of sex) to embrace the “atheist” logic of the
not-all that asserts, there is no Other of the Other, no transcendental guarantor except
myself, my own cause. Indeed, Verhaeghe and Declerq refer to identification with
the sinthome – the stage that marks the end of analysis – as the “feminine way”
(2003: 59). Lacan’s theory of feminine sexuation thus opens up possibilities for
new understanding, for a new field of experience not previously countenanced.
The challenge we must take up is to explore this space of the feminine, encoun-
tering it on its own terms. The ending of Her effectively fails this test by relegating
femininity to the unknown, while Under the Skin, I argue, goes further in staging
this thinking otherwise about sex. Moreover, the shocking conclusion of the film
in Laura’s immolation marks the point at which Under the Skin takes on a more
directly political thrust, reminding us – should we really need reminding – of the
lived reality of women (in the common sense, “feminine” or otherwise) threatened
by patriarchal violence. But, as cinema and psychoanalysis in tandem here declare:
The phallus will fade. Man cannot hold. The feminine insists.
Notes
1 For analysis of the intersection of femininity and other markers of identity in Johansson’s
Taylor and Francis

star image, see Loreck, Monaghan and Stevens’ dossier on “Stardom and sf ” (2018).
2 Although nameless throughout the film, Johansson’s character is referred to as “Laura” in
the crew interviews on the StudioCanal Region B Blu-ray of the film. I have decided to

adopt this character name in order to avoid further confusion of the theoretical specifici-
ties of the term “woman” in Lacanian discourses on sexual difference.
3 Fink notes that his translation modifies Lacan’s text to reflect the distinction between
the French “La femme” (more accurately, “The woman”) and an English equivalent in
“Woman with a capital W [to indicate] Woman as singular in essence” (Lacan 1998:
7n28).
4 See www.esquire.com/entertainment/a25017a/scarlett-johansson-interview-1113.
5 “ScarJo” being the tabloidese, “celebrity nickname” imposed upon Johansson.
6 The use of “gaze” and “voice” here is as avowedly non-Lacanian as it is in the work of
Kaja Silverman (1988) and Laura Mulvey (1975), respectively. For the implications of the
gaze as Lacanian cinematic object, see McGowan (2007). A consideration of the voice as
Lacanian cinematic object would encompass Chion (1999) and Dolar (2006) to interpret
Theodore’s traumatic encounter with “Surrogate Date Isabella” in Her. However, such
analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter.
7 See Tyrer (2014: 142; 2016: 117–119).
8 See Copjec (1994: 224); Tyrer (2016: 116).
9 Moreover, that Laura isn’t “human” but “alien” in fact highlights sexuation and its con-
struction more clearly. It better exemplifies that the Lacanian logic of the feminine is
anti-human: it isn’t bound to anything we would recognise as the humanist individual
(inner essence, etc.).
10 Faber’s “source” novel is explicit as to what this regime entails (i.e. an intergalactic meat
trade) but such details are omitted from Glazer’s vision.
11 The black figure also appeared at the beginning of this scene: in extreme long shot, dou-
bled in the floor’s reflective sheen. This image is even more abstract than the subsequent
mid-shot dissolve, and again only becomes legible retrospectively: in light of the film’s
final scenes.
Under Her Skin 157
12 This “without Woman” being precisely what is signified by Lacan’s “Woman”.

13 Contrary to the voyeuristic distance of the “male gaze”, the Lacanian gaze proper –
explicitly formulated under the influence of Merleau-Ponty – involves proximity: “The
picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am in the picture” (Lacan 1977: 96; translation
modified).
References
Anolik, L. (2014) A(nother) Study in Scarlett. Vanity Fair. Available from: www.vanityfair.
com/hollywood/2014/04/scarlett-johansson-cover (Accessed 17 March 2018).
Barthes, R. (1975) The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. R. Miller. New York: Hill & Wang.
Chion, M. (1999) The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press.
Copjec, J. (1994) Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Dolar, M. (2006) A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fink, B. (2004) Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Fisher, M. (2016) The Weird and the Eerie. Watkins Media. Kindle Edition.
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Johansson’s recent body politics. Jump Cut, 57. Available from: www.ejumpcut.org/
archive/jc57.2016/-FrancisSkin/index.html (Accessed 4 May 2018).
Gittell, N. (2014) Scarlett Johansson’s vanishing act. The Atlantic. Available from: www.
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up-to-lucy-under-the-skin-her-a-feminist-disappearing-act/375141 (Accessed 24
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Hildebrand, L. (2016) On the matter of blackness in Under the Skin. Jump Cut, 57. Available
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samantha-morton-with-scarjo.html (Accessed 24 April 2018).
Lacan, J. (1977) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. Ed. J.-A. Miller. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton.
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films of Scarlett Johansson. Science Fiction Film and Television, 11(1), 1–4.
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London: Macmillan Press.
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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/posthuman-scar-jo (Accessed 24 April 2018).
Osterweil, A. (2014) Under the Skin: the perils of becoming female. Film Quarterly, 67(4),
44–51.
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jectivity and the political erotics of hearing Her (Spike Jonze, 2013). In T. Whittaker and
S. Wright (eds.) Locating the Voice in Film. New York: Oxford University Press.
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and the mind–body split in Lucy. Science Fiction Film and Television, 11(1), 21–28.
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Century Music, 13(1), 139–152.
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satisfaction. In A. Piotrowska (ed.) Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Psychoanalysis
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way. In L. Thurston (ed.) Re-Inventing the Symptom Essays on the Final Lacan. New York:
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Seminar XX. Albany: SUNY Press.
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Filmography
Ex Machina (2015) Directed by Alex Garland. UK: Universal/Film4.
Ghost in the Shell (2017) Directed by Rupert Sanders. UK/China/India/Hong Kong/USA:
Paramount/DreamWorks.
Her (2013) Directed by Spike Jonze. USA: AnnaPurna Pictures.
Under Her Skin 159
I Dream of Jeannie (1965–1970) USA: NBC.

Lost in Translation (2003) Directed by Sophia Coppola. USA/Japan: Focus Features/TFC/
American Zoetrope.
Lucy (2014) Directed by Luc Besson. France/Taiwan/Germany: EuropaCorp.
Minority Report (2002) Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: 20th Century Fox/DreamWorks.
Morvern Callar (2002) Directed by Lynne Ramsay. UK/Canada: BBC Films.
Under the Skin (2013) Directed by Jonathan Glazer. UK/USA/Switzerland/Poland:
Film4/BFI.
Weird Science (1985) Directed by John Hughes. USA: Universal.
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9
DESIRE, COMMITMENT AND
THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER
OF TOUCH
The posthuman femme fatale in
Under the Skin
Agnieszka Piotrowska and Joseph Jenner
The issue of what it means to be human has fascinated scholars and philosophers
for centuries. The most traditional view has been that the ability to think, to be
conscious, defines the human. In this regard, the capacity for thought separates the
human from an unthinking world, but clearly there are other ways in which one
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could begin to think about what it means to be human, for example one’s con-
cern for the Other, the ethical ability to empathize or to give and receive love.1

Here we want to offer a contribution to an ongoing discussion and suggest both
the importance of touch in human interactions (an actual physical touching of the
Other) as well as a discussion of what it might mean to be posthuman. Through
an analysis of Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) we propose that touching in
some circumstances might lead to a formation of posthuman subjectivity, the tra-
jectory being from the inhuman through to the human and finally to the posthu-
man. The Anthropocene, a term that has gained traction in both the sciences and
the humanities since it was theorized by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer
in 2000, demands that humans understand their interconnectivity with a declin-
ing environment shaped by human and nonhuman forces alike. Accordingly, the
notion of touch put forward in this chapter provides an experience of the sub-
ject’s own assimilation into a chain of human and nonhuman being. We argue,
then, that the significance of an intra-species touch could extend the notion of the
human into the posthuman. This chapter combines Agnieszka Piotrowska’s work
on embodied psychoanalysis and the importance of the touch, and Joseph Jenner’s
research on posthumanism and science-fiction film. Our aspiration is to create a
provocative encounter between areas of research that have not been sufficiently
put into dialogue. Our work here thus aspires to take the “inbetween” further and
constitute a metaphorical touching of different theoretical sites.
To begin with, we offer a significant vignette. Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City
of a Thousand Planets (2017) opens with the formation of a posthuman community
Desire, commitment and the power of touch 161
based on touch. The film’s pan-species greetings take place over a 700-year time
span, in which a group of diverse crew members exchange touches with a range of
human and nonhuman beings. First of all diverse ethnic groups from Earth appear:
Africans, a group wearing Islamic dress, including both women and men, arrive.
Then, over the centuries, nonhuman guests and immigrants begin to appear in
increasingly unusual embodiment and attire. The greeting touch changes depend-
ing on the shape and bearing of each figure but the touch clearly is perceived as the
beginning of any meaningful communication: the verbal exchanges follow only
after that greeting touch, which is presented as an ancient inter-species sign of good
will. One could put it differently, paraphrasing Derrida, that touch here denotes a
positive movement towards the Other (2000: 25).2
We argue, therefore, that in Under the Skin the touch is a transformative moment
for the film’s protagonist, pushing her into a broader posthuman relation of life
and matter. In this chapter we consider the alien woman as portrayed by Scarlett
Johansson in Under the Skin as a posthuman femme fatale. In this context, we consider
her adopted femininity both as an expression of male desire, and, as Jacques Lacan
would put it, the object cause of desire or l’object petit a (1999: 92), and as an embodied
masculine fantasy. We define femme fatale as the female seductresses prevalent in the
film noir genre of the 1940s and 1950s, characters who use their wiles and sexuality
to manipulate men to their own ends. In Under the Skin the alien femme fatale also
uses her sexuality to seduce men and use them. However, the alien woman’s unex-
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pected ability to give and receive a touch marks a dramatic shift in the film’s narrative.

The narrative of Under the Skin
Under the Skin follows the trajectory of a nameless alien woman, henceforth the
Woman, from a seductress in the guise of a fur and lipstick femme fatale to a lonely
and vulnerable vagrant. For an alien and enigmatic purpose the Woman cruises
around Glasgow, picking up single men without family. She then takes them back
to her lair – a derelict house – which transforms into a cavernous black void as
both undress, the man pursuing the Woman into a viscous black fluid that gradu-
ally dissolves his internal organs. The turning point in the narrative comes when
the Woman picks up a man with neurofibromatosis, a condition in which tumours
grow from the nerve tissue on his face. It is this interaction with someone living
on the fringes of human society – shopping at Tesco in the middle of the night to
hide his stigma – that signals a shift in the Woman’s consciousness and in the film’s
story-world. In her ploy to seduce him, the Woman invites him to touch her face
and hands as she drives him to her lair.
In the narrative of the film, the touch brings about a kinetic movement, as
Derrida would put it, and as we discuss later in the chapter, this movement changes
the stakes and the outcome. We argue that in Under the Skin the key moment of
touch overcomes the nonhuman and produces a posthuman subject position in this
film. In order to elaborate this proposition, we now turn our attention to a brief
discussion of the relevant literature that defines the posthuman.
162 Agnieszka Piotrowska and Joseph Jenner
The posthuman
In her landmark text How We Became Posthuman (1999) Katherine N. Hayles rejects
the Cartesian separation of mind and body apparent in some strands of posthuman-
ism. For example, in 1988 Hans Moravec speculated that soon it will be possible
to upload consciousness to a computer in an immaculate disconnection of mind
from body (109–110). The implication is that, as was the case for Descartes, the
body is a support for the mind and the body’s material specificities do not bear
upon the thinking subject and the type of thoughts the body enables or delimits.
The important intervention that Hayles makes into posthuman discourse is to insist
upon the embodied amalgamation of human and nonhuman elements. As Hayles
writes: “embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive func-
tion depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it” (1999: xiv).
Inverting Moravec’s posthuman, for Hayles the body helps to determine the kind
of thoughts available to the thinking subject. If a brain was uploaded to a com-
puter, this would fundamentally change the constitution of the subject. The body
therefore is a fundamental aspect of the posthuman and it would be a mistake to
treat the body as separate from the mind.
Usually, the posthuman figures encountered in science-fiction film involve tech-
nological prosthesis of the human subject, for example Robocop (Paul Verhoeven,
1987), Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008) and Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017).
Indeed, in these examples and others, despite the amalgamation of human and tech-
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nology, the way these cyborgs are presented remains anthropocentric: depicting the
struggle of the human self to retain their identity through their augmentation with
the Other of technology. Samantha Holland understands what she terms “Cyborg
Cinema” of the 1980s and early 1990s as perpetuating a Cartesian “mind–body
problem” (1995: 157). The cyborgs of films such as Terminator (James Cameron,
1984), Robocop 2 (Irvin Keshner, 1990) and Eve of Destruction (Duncan Gibbins,
1991) are interpreted against an authentic human self as a way to judge their authen-
ticity. Ultimately, according to Holland, desire is what distinguishes humans from
machines in the cyborg film. The narrative of “Cyborg Cinema” encourages the
viewer to read the human within technology, and thus these films remain embed-
ded in a Cartesian system of value that places the human above the nonhuman.
Unlike the movement into the human core of the prosthetic body, in Under
the Skin the human skin overrides the alien interior. Ara Osterweil describes the
encounter with the man with neurofibromatosis in Under the Skin as part of the
Woman’s “profound transformation”, the “radical identification with alterity as
the key to human empathy” (2014: 48). We agree with the notion of the pro-
found transformation but question here whether this is “a radical identification”
with human identity – and instead we propose that the moment of touching
creates a moment of empathy with the unknowable Other, the Other that is
outside the system, as the Woman is. The touching creates an encounter that
constitutes the first step of the creation of the posthuman (as opposed to the
nonhuman) subjectivity for the alien. Further, this cross-species encounter pushes
beyond an association or identification with the human towards the posthuman.

This moment of touching with a marginalized figure, much as she is, creates an
apparent shift in her repetitive ritualistic process: she releases her quarry and turns
away from her role as femme fatale seductress. To our minds, the narrative tra-
jectory of Under the Skin, centred on this moment of transformation, reveals the
posthuman constitution of the Woman that we define here as generative despite
her ultimate perishing in the film.
In other words, the narrative of Under the Skin can be measured by the way
the human façade of the Woman gradually comes to influence the nonhuman
thinking subject. This is not a process of humanization, as some critics see it, but
an acknowledgement of the fundamentally constitutive and embodied prosthesis
of the posthuman subject position.3 As Susan Hekman puts it: “the ‘I’ is a mangle
composed of multiple elements” (2010: 100). With human epidermis and alien
interior, the alien woman is a vacillating human–nonhuman assemblage whose
subjectivity is inscribed in the posthuman reality of constant shifts and becomings.
Under the Skin continues science-fiction film’s fascination with the ontologi-
cal hybrid, yet the dynamic is reversed: the human is the prosthetic element of
the nonhuman subject and attention is drawn to the human epidermis rather
than the nonhuman interior. Rather than the human remaining the centre
of the posthuman subject, in Under the Skin the nonhuman is the point of depar-
ture. The posthuman subject position is therefore cultivated with a minimum of
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anthropocentrism.

Antigone, desire and the femme fatale
The inversion of the posthuman subject leads us on to another reversal in the
logic of the plot of Under the Skin. Piotrowska has argued elsewhere (2014, 2015,
2018) that it is productive to use the classic and archetypal figure of Antigone in
Sophocoles’ play of 441 bc to think of a determined female stance against the patri-
archal systems that fix the role of woman: Antigone moves from “a nice girl” to a
nasty “inhuman” woman. Simplifying the movement in Under the Skin for clarity,
it is indeed the opposite of the archetypal one. The “nasty” alien female individual
who pursues men to their death discovers her desire by assuming a posthuman sub-
jectivity. The Woman begins as the alien femme fatale, yet the moment of touch
marks the film’s paradigmatic shift towards a transformatory “inbetween” space.
The Woman’s posthuman desire is impossible to fulfil but is nonetheless a signifier
of its generative nature. The similarity between the Antigonial archetype and the
alien figure in Under the Skin is their determination to see through their desire no
matter what. It is not that either character is planning to perish, it is rather that the
quest to fulfil this desire appears to be more exigent and more demanding than
initially suspected.
The femme fatale is one of the original, powerful “nasty woman” in cinema
and much has been written about her.4 She is usually immoral and beautiful.
Both as a male fantasy and as a representation of female power, she holds endless
appeal, which, we argue, originates not only from her sexuality and beauty, but
because she offers a way out of the rigid patriarchal systems of power and author-
ity. Traditionally in films such as Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), or The
Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946), this transient fantasy is immedi-
ately exposed as “nasty” – it is far too dangerous to let a character who manipulates
men live her independent life – and so she is usually killed off in these films, or
is occasionally domesticated (Doane 1991). This narrative trajectory also appears
to take place in Under the Skin – the Woman gets her punishment in the end.
However, we argue that her ability to assume posthuman subjectivity is a signifi-
cant and subversive move.
It is the fidelity to one’s own desire that links the femme fatale to the mythical
figure of Antigone. Jacques Lacan in his Seminar VII claims that anybody’s ethical
choice will resonate with that of Antigone: “Even if you are not aware of it, the
latent fundamental image of Antigone forms part of your morality” (1992: 284).
Before we move to a further discussion of the posthuman female figure in Under
the Skin, we turn here to a brief discussion of the ethics of “not giving up on one’s
desire” (ibid.: 305). It seems that the construction of the alien woman in the film
corresponds to the inhuman inflexibility of Antigone. The cinematic text reworks
the proposition of “not giving up” on one’s desire in its construction of posthu-
man subjectivity. Below we briefly summarize the Lacanian notion of the fidelity
to one’s desire on the one hand and, on the other hand, the notion of the object
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cause of desire, l’objet petit a, which we argue was the Woman’s initial purpose
in the story-world of the film: for her to become the subject the transformation

through touch has to take place. It is possible therefore to use some classic psy-
choanalytical notions in theorizing the move from the nonhuman to a posthuman
female subject.
According to Lacan, Sophocles lets us see Antigone’s unfeminine strong-
mindedness, which frightens the Chorus: in her discussion with Ismene, her
sister, she appears hostile and stubborn. Lacan points to the Chorus’ disdain for
Antigone: they cry out a Greek word “ωμός”, which Lacan says one might trans-
late as “inflexible”, but more than this
it literally means something uncivilized, something raw. And the word

“raw” comes closest, when it refers to eaters of raw flesh. That’s the Chorus’
point of view (. . .) This is then how the enigma of Antigone is presented to
us: she is inhuman.
(Ibid.: 263, our emphasis)
In his discussions of Antigone, Lacan focuses on the word used in Sophocles’

original: atë, which can be translated as “fate”, “destiny” and “human misery”.5
Lacan interprets atë as a narrow range within which to operate and it is important
to find out what one’s desire is and then to follow it to the end. Not everybody
must make such a dramatic choice: “One does or does not approach atë, and when
one approaches it, it is because of something that is linked to a beginning and a
chain of events” (ibid.: 264). Antigone’s atë is that she is the daughter of Jocasta
and Oedipus, the parents who unwillingly committed murders and incest, and that
both of her brothers took part in a war against each other and that they are now
both dead. This she cannot undo. But she can decide what to do when faced with
Creon’s unreasonable edict.
Using briefly this idea in our discussion of Under the Skin, the alien’s atë is that
she is not a real woman because she is not human. It is here also that one could
take issue with Osterweil’s paper in which she says, among other observations,
that “Under the Skin is an insightful film about female desire” (2014: 44–45). The
Woman is not a woman and her desire is to become one. She does not menstruate,
have children and indeed cannot fuck.6 Her awoken desire is to do with wanting
to be a female but this always eludes her.
This is her tragedy and within the story-world of the film it allows for a dra-
matic sequence of events towards the end of the film, which the spectator can
perceive as cruel, and perhaps in some way replicating the familiar plot trajectory
of the film noir genre in which the femme fatale as the representation of dangerous
femininity has to be eliminated. One could theorize the ending in different ways
and certainly one of them would be that of a metaphorization of extreme despair
caused by the human experience of Lack, underscored by the Woman’s otherness.
There are scenes in which the Woman observes herself in the mirror, bringing
to mind Lacan’s Mirror Stage:
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From this time on, lack, gap, splitting will be its mode of being. It will attempt

to fill its (impossible, unfillable) lack. Its recognition of lack signals an onto-
logical rift with nature or the Real. This gap will propel it into seeking an
identificatory image of its own stability and permanence (the imaginary), and
eventually language (the symbolic) by which it hopes to fill the Lack.
(Grosz 1990: 35)
Film theorists in the heyday of psychoanalytically fuelled film theory of the

1980s are known to have picked up the idea of Lack as relevant to the experience
of the spectator:
[T]he child is born into experience of lack, what Lacan terms “manqué à être”
(the “want to be”); and the subject’s subsequent history consists of a series
of attempts to figure and overcome this lack, a project that is doomed to
failure. Though the form and experience of lack may alter, the basic reality
of it persists and defies representation.
(Lapsley & Westlake 2006: 67)
Lacan in his later work and certainly by Seminar XI focused also on the notion of
l’objet petit a, the “object-cause of desire”, which triggers desire but is not itself nec-
essarily it: l’objet petit a is in itself unattainable but the subject’s drives circle around
“it” (Lacan 1998: 179). Partial objects such as breasts, faeces and also voice and gaze
can be involved in causing desire but are not as such l’objet petit a. The Woman in
Under the Skin functions in the film as l’object petit a incarnate, as a partial object that
functions in the male psyche not as a real person but as their symptom.
In Seminar XX Lacan stresses that if “the Other is only reached if it attaches
itself (. . .) to a, the cause of desire, then love is also addressed to the semblance of
being” (1999: 92). The two Others in the touching encounters gain subjectivity –
for the Woman it creates a trajectory ultimately tragic but that lifts her from being
an object to being a subject. Her agency allows her to create a posthuman subjec-
tivity, a desire she is committed to “to the end” once it is awoken through touch.
It is here that we turn yet again to the Lacanian notion of the ethical act consisting
of “not giving up on one’s desire” and, once the commitment is made, to be able to
be faithful to it “beyond the limit” as Lacan puts it (1992: 305), or “to the end” in
Žižek’s words (1994: 61), and that Piotrowska has discussed elsewhere (2014, 2015,
2017). Bonnie Honig in her book Antigone Interrupted (2013) offers both a review of
the scholarly work to date on Antigone as well as her own interpretations of what
she might mean in the history of ideas and defiant stances against male authority.
Honig’s crucial move is to propose Antigone’s act as interrupting a circle of trauma
and chaos: her move is a rupture that stops Creon’s tyrannical rule and decades of
fratricidale wars (ibid.: 45). Her act changes things and they can never be the same
again within the story-world of the play. In Under the Skin the moment of touch
signals a rupture that instigates the Women’s desire and disrupts the brutality of the
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alien scheme as she turns away from her role as femme fatale seductress.
In terms of re-defining the neo femme fatale as an ethical figure, Antigone’s

stance of not giving up on one’s desire is useful. The nasty women in the neo
noir films Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006), Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) and
The Girl on the Train (Tate Taylor, 2016) as well as in television drama (Carrie in
Homeland, Jessica in Suits, etc.) are connected to these early film noir prototypes
in their narrative function, using their sexual wiles and deceit to inspire men to
commit transgressions.7 Yet crucially, these neo femmes fatales are instilled with an
agency that is lacking from their precursors: they are the perpetrators as well as the
driving force of the deeds.
Much like these neo femmes fatales, the alien seductress in Under the Skin,
initially, is a calculating and nasty woman who seduces and destroys men. Like
her femme fatale precursors from the noir film, it could be interpreted that the
Woman is ultimately punished for her agency at the end of the film, in which she
is burnt alive by a man who attempts to rape her. It is indeed disappointing that
the beginning of the imagining of a different being – the posthuman one – is, in
this cinematic text, returned to the familiar binary of a man being violent towards
a woman. We want to make an observation here from the source material for
Jonathan Glazer’s film is Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same name, which
provides an alternative means of responding to the gendered ending of the film.
While in the film some things remain mysterious (who the alien woman really is,
what her purpose on this planet is, etc.), they are clear in the book: she is harvesting
men as a meat delicacy for her home planet.
Glazer’s adaptation of the film, on which he worked with two different screen-
writers before settling with Walter Campbell, diverges radically from the source
material that we feel is significant and worth noting. Some of the Woman’s, named
Isserley in the book, key encounters are retained, such as an attempted rape that
does not take place in a forest but at a roadside and in which, unlike the film,
Isserley turns the tables on her assailant and brutally kills him. At the close of the
novel, Isserley crashes her car and is immobilized in the front seat. Before the
ambulance arrives she detonates a self-destruct device so that she and her Earth-
bound community of aliens are not discovered. The decision to end her life is
ambivalent, both as a fail-safe to protect her alien comarades who are all figured
as male, but it is also presented as an act of self-determination, logical in terms of
the ethical stance of “not giving up on one’s desire” as discussed above. That sense
of agency on the part of the Woman is lost in the final encounter with the rapist
at the end of the film. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer speculations
about why the director changed the final narrative of the work but we feel it is
worth quoting the final passage of the novel at length to illustrate this shift towards
an Antigone-like posthuman self-determination:
The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen
in the air. Instead of ending up buried in the ground, she would become
part of the sky: that was the way to look at it. Her invisible remains would
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combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed,
she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow’s

evaporation. When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that
spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists,
and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever.
(Faber 2000: 296)
The cosmic metaphors of nature and immanence are echoed in the film’s resolu-
tion when the ash that rises from the burning body of the Woman mingles with
the snowflakes that fall towards the screen. The embrace of the molecular is the
fate of Isserley in the novel and the Woman in the film, which can be seen as a
logical conclusion of the female/alien exclusion from subjecthood in that they are
returned back to a nature (female) excluded from culture (male). Yet also, the
film and novel registers here a subjectivity that is beyond the patriarchal strictures
of human society, something claimed by Isserley and the Woman, which is set in
motion by the moment of touch in the film. We turn, now, to the generation of
subjectivity provided by the look, before working through the Woman’s subjec-
tivity in Under the Skin.
The eye and the gaze

We want to consider in this section the importance of the gaze as the carrier of
“lostness”. In the first instance, the Woman attracts the men because they find
her beautiful. She is visible to them as an object of their desire or as the fantasy
of the object they desire. The Woman becomes the object-cause of desire, l’objet
petit a. The touch and the brief conversation about what it means to feel to be the
Other in the film, when the Woman is in conversation with the man with neu-
rofibromatosis, leads to the move from the object to the subject. Lacan conjures a
notion of “lamella”, a pure form of this “lostness”, the life instinct, the primordial
form of the libido (1998: 205). The Woman embodies the phallic masculine desire
before her encounter with the disabled man, which makes her understand her own
otherness as a basis of her subjectivity rather than an embodiment of the desire of
the others, or an actual incarnation of the notion of “lamella”. Paul Verhaeghe, in
his discussion of the notion of lamella, writes about the inevitable “phallicization”
of the desire arising from “the original lack” (2002: 133). One could argue that
the Woman, as designed by her male superiors, is meant to enact male desires in a
cyclical and repetitive way. The encounter with the man with neurofibromatosis
catapults her out of the lamella state and out of gender discussions.
Referring to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (1964),
in Seminar XI Lacan states that the gaze can function as an object. The central
assumption of Seminar XI is that there is a pre-existing gaze in the world. The gaze
gives us the distinction between what belongs to the Imaginary order and what
belongs to the order of the Real (Lacan 1998). Psychoanalyst Carlo Bonomi talks
about the risk of being transformed into an object of the gaze of the other. Worse,
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there is a possibility of suddenly feeling “shame” arising thereof, which could cause
“a sudden collapse of the self provoked by the gaze” (2010: 113). One could argue

perhaps that something of this shame happens between the beautiful alien and the
man with neurofibromatosis who tries to avoid the gaze of the Other, as previously
mentioned, by skulking at night so as not to become the object of the cruel gaze of
the public. He wants to be invisible. It is the alien posthuman femme fatale who,
we argue, “sees” him as a (post)human, feels empathy for him and lets him go.
Bonomi gives clinical examples of patients hiding behind dark glasses in order
to create safe places, “shelters”: “Our visibility is dangerous because, in certain
situations, when our vulnerability is enhanced, we experience visibility as a threat
to the core of our being” (ibid.: 111). He calls this core “soul” – not perhaps a
term that either Freud or Lacan would use and points out defences, which, he
says, concern making the body filled with libido and “thick and real” like a shield
(ibid.: 113). When these strategies fail, an individual might feel exposed to the “evil
eye”, which has links both to Freud’s “uncanny” but also to myths and beliefs in
non-Western cultures and societies (ibid.: 113–114). The disembodied gaze might
cause a fear of “sterility, disease, and death” (ibid.: 114). In Under the Skin the gaze
is the powerful element in the film’s story-world until the touch replaces its impor-
tance. However, much of the film’s initial tension lies in the different relationships
between the look and the gaze as we hope to demonstrate.
Under the Skin opens with the creation of a nonhuman, alien eye that guides
the spectator’s response to the human environments of the film. Beginning in
blackness, a white pinprick appears centre screen, a halo of light arcing around
the growing circle before it bursts into the luminescence of the film’s big bang
inception. Next, a series of curved shapes – a sphere and a torus – approach each
other through the darkness in a cosmic, planetary alignment. Then follows perhaps
the most disorienting shot in this sequence: the form of a black planet suspended
centre screen, fringed by light. From screen right another speck of light heads on
a collision course for the planet, before overlapping and revealing itself as another
circle that dwarfs the other. Here, the impression of flatness takes on the depth of
three dimensions as the perception of the spectator’s eye becomes accustomed to
the logic of an alien space.
The construction of the eye, then, is presented as a planetary constellation of
forms and does what film can do best: enlarge the miniscule into the gigantic and
expand the spectator’s notion of life from the marginal to the cosmic. Following
the abstract forms that culminate in the image of the Woman’s completed eye,
rapid shots of flowing rivers take the spectator into nature until the edit settles on
a curved road at night, illuminated by the moon. In parallel with the film’s open-
ing, a white pinprick appears in the distance before moving closer to the screen,
guiding the spectator’s eye through the black space of the nocturnal Scottish coun-
tryside. Much like the foaming water in the rivers, the speck of light navigates the
undulating road, growing in size as it crosses the plane of the screen.
In the opening eye-construction scene the spectator is invited to view the
Scottish landscape, and by extension urban Glasgow, with the perception of the
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Woman. This look estranges the spectator from the quotidian familiarity of human
society, a perception associated with the Woman’s initial disregard for life, though

as spectators we potentially perceive things differently from her. In perhaps the
most shocking early scene in the film, the Woman witnesses a man, woman and
dog struggle against the Scottish tide as a swimmer goes to rescue them. Their suf-
fering is visible to us, the spectators, but not to the Woman. The Woman bashes
the swimmer round the head with a rock and drags him off, leaving a crying baby,
abandoned by his drowned family, to die on the beach. Osterweil sees this scene on
the beach as one of the first transformative moments in the film for the Woman –
placed radically outside of the association between “the relation between human-
ity and empathy” (2014: 48). We take issue with this reading. This moment is not
transformative. Nor is it right to see it as a particularly unique scene in a film full
of examples of the Woman annihilating men, totally lacking any empathy. She has
no interest in them because she is the Other and they are the Other for her. The
moment of transformation, as well as the paradigmatic shift takes place later, in her
encounter with the man with neurofibromatosis. Unlike Osterweil, however, we
stress that it is the moment of touch in this encounter that signals the true paradigm
shift in Under the Skin.
The gaze and the touch

We understand the posthuman subject position as one that navigates beyond the
poles of human and nonhuman. In this we propose that the Lacanian “gaze” is able
to belong to this posthuman system, as within the initial Lacanian enunciation it

can be separate from the human subject (Lacan 1999: 65). Unlike the nonhuman,
then, the embodied posthuman describes the human and nonhuman assemblage
inherent in this subject position. This amalgamated subject position – both in
terms of the subject’s bodily construction as well as emotional availability – is what
we are designating as the posthuman.8 This posthuman subject position therefore
is cultivated through the multiple cinematic modes that make up Under the Skin.
Across the 1 hour and 43 minutes of the film, the blending of hidden cameras,
documentary hand-held shots of Glasgow central, sweeping vistas of the Scottish
landscape, the alien void scenes, as well as the use of visual and special effects,
attune the spectator to a variety of different cinematic ontologies that interact
with one another. While a reality effect is inserted into the film through the use
of improvised dialogue and documentary footage that exposes the material reality
of Glasgow, the artificial spaces of the alien voids do not allow the spectator to
take any particular cinematic reality for granted. In the next section, we begin to
examine these void sequences, which contain, as we have seen, this layering of the
material world into the abstract space of form.
From gazing to touching

Through close analyses of the seduction sequences in Under the Skin, we can see
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how the film style registers a shift in consciousness, from the distancing effect of
the look to the embrace of different modes of embodiment, instigated by the alien

woman’s contact with the man with the facial disfigurement.
Inserted into the documentary, quotidian reality of Under the Skin’s urban
Glasgow are scenes played out against a space that is empty, infinite and alien.
These are seduction scenes, in which the Woman lures hapless single men to
a slow death in black and empty spaces. Bodies are abstracted, overlaying and
enfolded by the black screen as they draw a horizontal line across space, drop-
ping pools of colour on an invisible surface as man and woman strip off their
clothes. The bodies move in a straight line, as if on an invisible stage; the woman
slowly walks backwards, gazing off-screen in a reverse shot matched with the
forward strut and look of the male victim. The delimited movement raises
questions about whether this void is infinitely cavernous or indeed completely
without depth, destabilizing the spectator’s orientation in an encounter with
nonhuman space. Sexual desire becomes formalized, the denuded star-image
of Scarlett Johansson, the camera tilting down her body as it take in her form,
reveals a coquettish, balletic posture as one arched leg feigns to cover her mod-
esty. The male targets of these solicitations aim to consume this classic erotic
image but perish in their hypnotized pursuit, sinking into the viscous fluid that
will eventually dissolve their internal organs. These scenes become ritualistic
in their repetition: oneiric fantasies of seduction and death that dramatize but
radically reject the human, played out for an alien purpose and from a strange,
nonhuman perspective.
The style of this void sequence is defined by the multiple modes of existence
that occupy the space of the screen simultaneously. Yet, very often, screens in the
digital age of science-fiction film have a stasis, depthlessness and emphasis on sur-
face aesthetics that call to mind the artifice of green screens. For example the early
virtual reality effects of Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) and the “construct” spaces of
The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999). Following Vivian Sobchack’s discussion of a
postmodern aesthetic in her book Screening Space, these blank screens have specific
connotations of loss of originality, the unlimited possibility of recreation and repre-
sentation, and a flattening of ontology between subject and object (1997: 237). Yet
in Under the Skin the lived-in candour of bodies placed within or against the blank
screen offer a depth that resists their ontological reduction to the technological
mediation of postmodern ideology. The smears of faeces, erect penises and facial
tumours of a man with neurofibromatosis share the same space as the star image
and denuded form of Johansson. This is not the infinite recreation of simulated
forms, as in Tron and The Matrix, but the embrace of multiple types of embodi-
ment. There is an ontological relationality between forms that is based, unlike the
postmodern reduction, upon the diversity of beings.
Indeed, even Johansson’s star image in Under the Skin, emphasized by its place-
ment among an ensemble of amateur and non-actors, is vitiated by the scrutiny of
the camera. This is a process that occurs across the film, marked out by these void
scenes in which the embrace of multiple types of embodiment is initially resisted but
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ultimately overcome. In the void that follows the nightclub scene, the Woman and
her victim are not contained within the frame until the long two shot as he descends

into the liquid, the edit presenting a series of medium point-of-view and reaction
shots leading up to this moment. There is a strange displacement within this long
shot, as the eyeline does not seem to match up, enhancing the dreamlike tone of an
exchange that promises contact but is precisely about denial and rejection.
In the filming process both actors performed this sequence separately before
being put together in the edit, perhaps accounting for this subtle mismatch in eye-
line (Stasukevich 2014: 50). Consequently, while in the shot/reverse-shot dynamic
the spatial demarcation of the Woman and victim is upheld, even in the shared
space of the two shot there is a an invisible line that continues this spatial separa-
tion of – species, gender, celebrity – difference. Of course, it is important also that
these are nude scenes, or at least fully so for the men, and the production technique
upholds a certain degree of discretion, or minimizing of an all-too-human embar-
rassment in the bare and uncomfortable proximity of a naked male amateur and
female star. The vulnerability of nakedness emphasizes the categories of man and
woman and star and non-star, the division of the image maintaining the integrity
of Johansson as a female Hollywood A-list actor in that her nakedness counts for
more than her male counterparts in these scenes. There is therefore a subtle split
within the image that ultimately maintains the categories of value between human/
nonhuman, man/woman and star/non-star. The off-screen gazes then, both from
the man to the alien woman and vice versa, continue to signal the distanciation and
empowerment of the gaze.
Touching
The alien femme fatale discovers her posthuman desire through being touched by a
human living with neurofibromatosis but there is also a simple exchange between
them in which their mutual otherness is established. In her encounter with the
man, who caresses the alien woman’s face and hands, a paradigmatic shift occurs
that acknowledges the posthuman embrace of multiple modes of embodiment. We
now turn to a brief discussion of the importance of touch, drawing from a variety
of relevant traditions.9
In his discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus, Jacques Derrida acknowledges
the importance of touch in Descartes’ Six Meditations, stressing that to touch means
“to tamper with, to change, to displace, to call into question; thus it is invariably a
setting in motion, a kinetic experience” (2000: 25). This is in direct opposition to
the colonial and postcolonial notions of ideas being set in stone, what Edward Said
in his discussions of colonialism called “frozen, fixed” and deeply patriarchal and
conservative (2008: 208). Touching, Derrida reminds us, is a harbinger of change –
it can be a progressive or reactionary change, but nonetheless it is a movement, and
when accompanied by a voice and language, it can become explosive and revolu-
tionary. It is for these reasons that the touch is often prohibited in many cultural
and historical contexts in which difference is a marker of danger – in recent his-
tory people of different colour were forbidden to touch each other as recently as
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the 1990s under the apartheid in South Africa: touching was considered too risky
as the people concerned might get too close and abandon the artificial delinea-
tions of privilege. In Under the Skin the demarcation of bodies reinforces the
fixity of categories – male/female, star/non-star, human/nonhuman – whereas
the movement of touch signals a flow of embodiments contained with the frame
simultaneously, thus moving from human to posthuman ways of being in the
world. Finally, in the film, it is touch that changes the story-world of the Woman.
In European history, by the Middle Ages the Christian dualism of body and soul
had led to a certain circumspection about the touch, a potentially transgressive act
that could lead to a transformation of a relationship that might shake the status quo.
“Noli me tangere” – Latin for “don’t touch me” or “don’t tread on me” – the words
attributed to Christ in St John’s Gospel when Mary Magdalene recognizes him after
the resurrection and wants to touch him (Piotrowska 2017: 30). Christ is delighted
that she can see him but doesn’t let her touch him: “Noli me tangere”: “don’t touch
me for I am not of this world any more, I am just a briefly embodied spirit –
already assigned for greater travel” (ibid.). In the Gospel, Christ’s bodily existence
is already over but the dictum of “don’t touch” became an important way of living
in medieval times. One could argue that this dictum affected and was affected by
two-dimensional art, which avoided representing the body as it actually was – a
state of affairs only changed in the Renaissance with its return to the celebration of
human form coming from antiquity, which provided different approaches to the
physicality of the touch. It is worth, however, recalling that touching and voice also
in fact have a vital role in Christ’s life according to the Gospels: he touches those
who need healing (in Mark we have a clear evocation of this: “lay hands on the sick
and they shall recover” [Mark 16: 18]); he touches Lazarus and tells him to “rise”
and of course he famously defends Mary Magdalene (“May he who is without sin
cast the first stone” [John 8: 7]) before letting her touch him, quite intimately, by
washing his feet (Luke 7:36–50). The “don’t touch me” dictum only comes when
Christ’s bodily existence is in fact over. Derrida mentions that, “Jesus the saviour
is touching, he is the one who touches, and most often with his hand, and most in
order to purify, heal or resuscitate – save, in a word” (2000: 100).
We want to point out the obvious difference in the examples above and what
takes place in the Under the Skin encounter: touch in the Western canon is given
by the one who is in some way “the powerful one” and is a representative of God
or the power bestowed on the royalty by the divine. In Under the Skin, the subver-
sive potential of the scene lies in the fact that the touch is performative in a reverse
situation – it is invited by the Woman who is the powerful one here, even without
the knowledge of her actual nature – but the gesture is performed by the one with
apparently no power: the marginalized man living with facial disfigurement. It is
the quiet beauty of the scene that this gesture of a person with no power engenders
the transformation, and puts in motion the Woman’s shift from the nonhuman
to the posthuman. That is, the touch is a transformative encounter that disrupts
hierarchies of power and situates the Woman in an interrelated community of
other beings, including the human and nonhuman, and thus in the relational posi-
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tion of the posthuman. In Under the Skin, the touch is no longer associated with
transcendence but with the immanent entanglements of diverse embodiments.

In the final void sequence the style shifts when the Woman lures the man with
neurofibromatosis, and the categories of man/woman, star/non-star and human/
nonhuman maintained in the previous void sequences are resolutely undone. This
scene frames both the Woman and the man within the same space, breaching the
spatial divisions of the previous sequences. First of all, an alien figure, black and
sleek, walks towards the camera while we hear the voices of the man and Woman –
“It’s cold,” he says. “I won’t let that stop us,” she replies. There is here a comical
breakdown of the shock impact of an alien species witnessed for the first time. The
jangle of a belt buckle, rip of a zip being undone and the reproachful lament of the
man overlay the sinister image of this new species walking silently and ominously
towards the camera in an awkward layering of different registers. The relationship
between sound and image in this shot enfolds male and female voice, alien and
human image, and destabilizes responses to these different embodiments. Unlike
the previous void scenes, the back-and-forward motion of the characters is framed
by a medium close-up that contains both within the image.
When the man turns to the camera to look around him, his face is placed
alongside that of Johansson’s; we have here an image of complementarity, dis-
figurement existing alongside the star image of Johansson. This latter void scene
aligns difference in an expression of multiple modes of embodiment, creating a
posthuman perspective that escapes the capture of categories retained earlier on in
the film by the division maintained by the gaze. That this is a pivotal scene, which
immediately precedes the Woman’s apparent release of her quarry and ultimate
rejection of her role as alien seductress, shows that this perspective ushers in a dif-
ferent mode of becoming. The alien femme fatale steps out of her script of luring
men into her den of destruction without any physical contact.
Concluding remarks
Just before the alien woman releases the man with facial disfigurement, she catches
a glimpse of herself in a mirror. In a protracted shot that lasts for just over a minute
she stares at her own image. This evokes the Lacanian importance of the gaze and
evokes the Mirror Stage in which an infant feels “jubilation” at misrecognizing
herself in the mirror. Here the alien Woman is in an infancy of her subjectivity
too but her moment of reflection is quickly interrupted. Off-screen, a buzzing dis-
tracts her contemplation and the camera’s attention turns to a fly banging against
the glass window of a door. In an abrupt shift of scale, the film then cuts to an
extreme close-up as the alien woman’s eye fills the screen. The eye, the look, is
afforded a proximity witnessed only at the beginning of the film after the con-
struction of the alien eye. The logic of the shot/reverse-shot pattern of editing
places the fly as the recipient of the alien woman’s look, yet her stare directly at
the camera also calls upon the spectator’s presence here. Stylistically, the moment
of contact with the man with facial disfigurement transforms the power of the
look in Under the Skin. Rather than the look signifying distance and rejection, it
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now embraces multiple modes of embodiment – the spectator, fly and then the
man with facial disfigurement who is released in the next shot.
The look loses its power to put the object at a distance, and instead takes on the
proximity of contact. This tactile look is discussed by Maurice Blanchot in his essay
“The Essential Solitude” (1999). In the initial distanciation implied by the look,
Blanchot writes that: “seeing implies distance, the decision that causes separation,
the power not to be in contact and to avoid the confusion of contact” (1999: 412).
Following the dynamic of the look, Blanchot identifies the experiential impossibility
of such distanciation. Seeing becomes a “contact at a distance (. . .) the split, which
had been the possibility of seeing, solidifies, right inside the gaze, into impossibility”
(ibid.: 413). The object of the gazing subject comes to overpower the distance of
seeing and instead becomes the vertiginous experience of an encounter. In Under the
Skin the extreme-close up of the Woman’s eye evokes this “contact at a distance”,
which is then demolished and re-formulated through the moment of touch.
Many contemporary science-fiction films, including Ex Machina (Alex Garland,
2014), Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017) and Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018)
draw attention to the surface and skin in a similar fashion to Under the Skin. In
Ex Machina, the android Ava (Alicia Vikander) never touches another human,
except in the final violent encounter, and only has moments of contact with other
machines, thus leading to the exclusion of the human (figured as male). At the close
of Annihilation, the film’s human protagonist, Lena (Natalie Portman), encounters
an alien that performs as her double. The alien takes on the appearance of Lena,
and copies her movements exactly. This moment of mimesis, culminating in the
two figures holding hands, signals a transfer in the becoming-alien of the film’s
human protagonist. It is clear that the contact of human skin that masks a nonhu-
man interior is of special interest in contemporary science-fiction. As we have seen,
in Under the Skin it is possible to discuss the film and its character’s transformation
using a variety of aesthetic and cinematic ontologies, including those traditionally
not held in one space, namely psychoanalysis and posthuman subjectivity. The
theoretical frameworks of this chapter touch in the void space of Under the Skin,
performing a posthuman encounter between frameworks that are normally kept at
a distance. The film therefore creates a thought space with which to engage and
redefine the relationship with the Other or nonhuman, and in doing so generates
a new, posthuman subjectivity.
Notes
1 For a discussion of what it might mean to be human see Connolly, Franck and Janis (2000).
2 To touch, he says, means “to tamper with, to change, to displace, to call into question;
thus it is invariably a setting in motion, a kinetic experience” (see Derrida 2000). The motley
human and nonhuman embodiments in the opening of Valerian are brought into an inter-
connected, posthuman community through a ceremony of cross- race, culture, gender and
species touching.
3 For the “humanization” of the Woman’s character arc see Osterweil (2014) and Redmond
(2016).
4 See, for example, Bronfen (2004), Copjec (1993) and Doane (1991).
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5 Atë can be also translated as a delusion that leads to a disaster – this note was kindly given
to Piotrowska by Professor Richard Seaford, Professor of Classic and Ancient History at

the University of Exeter in their discussions on Antigone.
6 Elsewhere, Elena Gorfinkel (2016) has discussed the “corporeal intractability” of the
Woman.
7 The move to include Red Road as a neo noir might be seen as controversial, but we argue
that its themes of scheming to commit the crime, entrapment and the use of sexuality
could be related to that tradition. However, the trope of punishment is resolved in a differ-
ent way following Jackie’s embodied sexual encounter with her imagined enemy – which
changes the way the narrative unfolds.
8 Rosi Braidotti similarly posits a bios/zoë subject, which unites human life with life in a
broader sense. See Braidotti (2010).
9 See also Piotrowska (2017).
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10
ANNAMARILYN
Queer tales of femininity
Wendy Leeks
Introduction: telling tales

Anna Freud and Marilyn Monroe were both subjects of psychoanalysis and have
been, in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s phrase ‘subject to biography’ (the title of her
book of essays, 1998). Otherwise, they and the lives they led were very different.
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It may seem eccentric to read about them side-by-side, in tandem, as I have been
doing for approaching five years now. Yet, there are points of co-incidence1 in
these lives as lived and in the ‘lives’ that have been written about them. It is an
act of perverse reading, which was sparked off by a series of coincidences and
co-incidences – spatial, temporal and conceptual – and spurred on by the discov-
ery of conjunctions in the ways these two so-different women have been written
about. These points of co-incidence2 are like the threads that tack the layers of a
quilt together, forming the ground for a pattern or a story. Here, I will trace out
some of these threads to show patterns in the ‘life-writing’ not only about these
two dead women, but, as I contend, about women even now.
The most signif icant thread that draws the two women together is psycho-
analysis itself. From Sigmund Freud onwards this discipline has been inflected by
cultural conceptions of femininity and female sexuality; in turn, it has fed into
these social conceptions. I will argue that Anna Freud, construed according to
a pattern woven by her father, is presented as embodying one term or position
within femininity, not as ‘normal’ femininity in her father’s terms, but as feminin-
ity and sexuality under such rigorous control that it almost ceases to be. This is at
once a deficient femininity and an excess of masculinity.3 Marilyn Monroe, at the
opposite pole, is seen as the epitome of femininity, in all its contradictions; this is
femininity in excess, female sexuality out of control.
The interest here is in how the lives of women are written in relation to ideas
about femininity, which is the case not only in texts that are or purport to be
178 Wendy Leeks
traditional biography or psychobiography but in other types of life-writing.

Regarding Anna Freud, these include case studies and theoretical works that her
father wrote, based at least in part on his analysis of her (beginning with ‘A Child
is Being Beaten’ [1919] 1997; cf. Person 1997). They also include works that
Anna Freud wrote about herself – ‘Beating Fantasies and Daydreams’ ([1922]
1974) and ‘On Losing and Being Lost’ ([1953] 1967), even though the ‘patient’ in
these was disguised (for their autobiographical content see Young-Bruehl [1988]
2008 and Blass 1993). The mass of writing about Marilyn Monroe is vast and
continues to be produced and reissued. It has taken many forms, populist or schol-
arly, as biography or autobiography (from Monroe’s fragments of notes or from
interviews she gave), as revelation of secrets and conspiracies, and as fictionalized
interpretations (e.g. Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Blonde of 2000). Sarah Churchwell’s
compelling analysis of what she terms the Monroe ‘apocrypha’ (2004: 8) examines
tropes and narrative devices used in such accounts.
Churchwell is one of a number of feminist academics working within a
more-or-less psychoanalytic framework who have taken a revisionist interest
in Monroe – they include Lisa Appignanesi (2008), Lois Banner (2012) and
Jacqueline Rose (2014). At around the same time, other feminists, also psycho-
analytically based, had been writing about Anna Freud, notably Young-Bruehl,
whose major biography first published in 1988 was reissued in 2008, unrevised
but with an additional introduction. Suzanne Steward-Steinberg’s book (2011)
Taylor and Francis
takes a somewhat different perspective and is not intended as a biography.4 All
of these writers have seen something of wider significance in their subject than

just the chronicling of an individual life. Some have stated, more or less explic-
itly that the life of the woman in question and how it has been represented has
something to say about and to women, to feminism and feminists in our post-
feminist era (Banner 2012; Churchwell 2004; Rose 2014; Stewart-Steinberg
2011; Young-Bruehl [1988] 2008). Some have also said that the ‘lives’ of their
subject have something to say about life-writing ‘after’ psychoanalysis and about
psychoanalysis and its framing of femininity (Appignanesi 2008; Banner 2012;
Churchwell 2004; Young-Bruehl [1988] 2008). Banner’s book explicitly brings
Monroe and Anna Freud together.
The third major co-incidence that is central to this queer reading is indeed a
queer undertow, a spectral female-to-female desire that hovers in accounts, more
or less occluded. It is in Young-Bruehl’s book of essays, less so in the biography;
Churchwell considers rumours of Monroe’s alleged lesbian affairs or ‘bisexuality’
that circulate in several of the source texts she examines. Banner argues that
Monroe’s ‘lesbian inclinations’ (2012: 4) may have been a factor in her death. It is
this spectral lesbian presence/absence that I intend to address, arguing that it appears
and fades in the sources, including Freud’s writing about his daughter, and that it
has haunted psychoanalytic conceptions of femininity and female sexuality from
the beginning. I will argue that this queer undertow is not merely a coincidence in
the lives and ‘lives’ of two particular women, but is an essential component of the
conceptualization of femininity and female sexuality, even when it is glossed over.
AnnaMarilyn 179
It will be evident that what follows concentrates on representations of Anna

Freud. This is because her father’s analysis of her, his/their reconstruction of her
childhood development and adult constitution were contributory to his views on
femininity and female sexuality; because her writing about herself was profoundly
influenced by his formulations (or those they arrived at together in analysis), and
because his/their theoretical constructs were undoubtedly transmitted to prac-
titioners in the second and third generation of analysts, including those who
analysed Monroe. Anna Freud, her father’s heir as head of the Freudian School,
was mentor to those analysists – her childhood friend Marianne Kris and Ralph
(‘Romi’) Greenson, Monroe’s analyst when she died. Populist notions of femi-
ninity and sexuality, deriving in part from Freudian notions (however refracted
these may have been) continue to circulate, not least in the great slew of writings
about Monroe and the continuing fascination with her as an icon of femininity,
or as Churchwell has it, an icon of ‘über-femininity’ (2004: 4). The myriad and
contradictory representations of her cover the whole spectrum of conceptions
of and fantasies about femininity and female sexuality. This, I contend, points
to the notion of ‘abnormality’5 that is embedded in these conceptions. It is not
coincidental that psychoanalytic readings of psychoanalytic texts, in the final
years of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, many of them feminist
and some of them queer, have been important in shifting some ground on psy-
choanalysis and its influence. Thanks to Churchwell and others, the corpus of
Taylor and Francis
writing on Monroe has also been analysed in terms of fantasy constructions and
desirous narratives.

The Monroe and the Anna Freud that we now have are the products of rep-
resentation. In other words, they are characters; so, I shall call them AF and MM,
in an attempt to register a distinction between the people who lived and inter-
pretations of them, including their own. I shall call Sigmund Freud simply Freud,
because he laid claim to this one-word epithet and his daughter signed herself
AnnaFreud as one word – simultaneously distinguishing herself and instating her
connection to him.
This perverse reading is about the queer tales we are told and tell ourselves,
that we enact and critique, repeat and attempt to break out of, about women,
femininity and desire. The something queer that floats in and out of these tales is
connected to the truth-status, the spurious believability, the reliability and evi-
dential bases of biography and all life-writing ‘after’ psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis
put biography and life-writing under question and simultaneously has given us
a means and a necessity of questioning psychoanalytic writing itself. This is also
a story about a journey to try to elucidate and make visible something of queer
desire that psychoanalysis in the Freudian model elides and that, as I will argue,
is central to Freudian conceptions of femininity and of desire. It is a search for
some sort of knowledge in the face of desire, rather like the quest of psycho-
analysis itself. This story begins with a visit to the Freud Museum in London
about five years ago. It is a twisting and turning story, without resolution. Like
life, it just ends.
180 Wendy Leeks
In her father’s house

Anna Freud (AF) always lived in her father’s house, at first in the Vienna apart-
ment and from 1938 until her death in 1983 at 20 Maresfield Gardens in London,
now the Freud Museum. In her late twenties she decided to become a psycho-
analyst, the only Freud child to follow her father. As his heir as head of the
Freudian School, effectively the upholder of her father’s ideas and reputation
(although, as Stewart-Steinberg (2011) shows, taking a different line in her con-
centration on child analysis) she remained in her father’s house. She was beside
him in his last years, displacing his wife, we might say, as his principal carer and
certainly outlasting all of the men that he thought might be his disciple and suc-
cessor. She took all of this on – she took her father’s mantle and his place.
Downstairs at the Freud Museum is the large room full of Sigmund Freud’s
books, collections, pictures, his desk, couch, spectacles – all as he left it when he
died in this room in 1939. AF wanted it that way. Upstairs, where the presence/
absence of AF is more tangible, there is a loom – Dorothy Burlingham’s – where
she and AF used to sit and weave. I wondered what it would have been like for
them, living in this house, when her parents were dead, with her father’s things
downstairs preserved, as if he had just stepped outside into the garden.6 Truth
to tell, I wanted to find out about the relationship between AF and Dorothy
Burlingham; to prove that this was a love without denial, a sexual relationship
between two women over decades. I thought I wanted to write a fiction, a short
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story based on their lives, about what they talked about while sitting together
weaving or knitting, which they did habitually. It should have been obvious from
the first that there would be no absolute evidence to prove or disprove that theirs
was a sexual relationship. That it was loving, whatever that meant or means, is
beyond doubt. Before I could write the story that in fact I have not written, I
needed to find out about AF.
Ghosts, biography, psychoanalysis

While reading Young-Bruehl’s biography of AF, the ghost of Marilyn Monroe
(MM) suddenly appeared. She had left a bequest to Marianne Kris, intending it
to support a psychoanalytic institution. Kris gave it to the Anna Freud Clinic.
Young-Bruehl quotes a letter of sympathy from AF to Romi Greenson (letter of
20 January 1963; Young-Bruehl [1988] 2008: 413) exonerating him and psychoa-
nalysis from Monroe’s suicide. There is no further mention of MM in the book,
yet at about the time I was reading it she began to materialize elsewhere, includ-
ing at the Freud Museum. Therefore, what began as a project to find out about
AF expanded to include the psychoanalytic connections between her and MM;
between the ‘lives’ of these two and the psychoanalytic conception of femininity
and sexuality, and between femininity, psychoanalysis and feminism as represented
in a clutch of feminist considerations of MM and of AF.
Taylor and Francis
FIGURE 10.1 Before: The teenaged Anna Freud, still a daydreaming, masturbating
girl, with her father, walking and talking in Italy in 1913.
Source: Used with permission, copyright Freud Museum, London.
182 Wendy Leeks
Churchwell’s book (2004) does not mention AF at all, but in a talk she gave
at the Freud Museum on 21 November 2013 (Churchwell 2013) she said that it
was by then fairly well accepted that MM had been analysed briefly by AF. The
talk, entitled ‘The Many Minds of Marilyn Monroe’, was part of a series held in
connection with the exhibition Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors
based on Appignanesi’s book of the same name (2008). Appignanesi, Banner and
Rose were at the talk. MM was represented in the exhibition by a photograph
taken in 1956, a video of her leaving hospital in New York and copies of books
of her ‘autobiographical’ writing (Hecht’s My Story [1974] 2007 and Buchthal
and Comment’s Fragments 2010). Beside these were a photograph of Marianne
Kris outside the Freud house and one of Romi Greenson. The exhibition did not
definitively state that MM had been analysed by AF when she was in London in
1956 filming The Prince and the Showgirl, only that she is ‘recorded’ as doing so
(Freud Museum, 2013). Lois Banner, alone of the feminist academics whose work
is considered here, is certain that AF’s analysis of MM took place, and that the
lesbian or bisexual undertow, as I call it, was established in that one week in 1956.
In her book and her talk, Churchwell examined what commentators of vari-
ous stripes had made of MM and how, to varying degrees, they had attempted or
purported to read her mind. She drew attention to the mythologizing of MM,
to the doubtful reliability and verifiability of many sources and their interpreta-
tions and to the storytelling techniques that they employed. One way or another,
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the accounts she analysed were ‘ghosted’ by repetition of elements drawn from
preceding accounts, acknowledged or not, repetitions that accorded with reader

expectations and produced, precisely by repetition, a spurious truth-value. Having
now read so many of these (not all of which are referenced here), I concur, on
the whole, with Churchwell’s analysis. Speculations, fantasies and vested interests
inflect these texts, but also inflect the critical, revisionist texts that are written about
them, including Churchwell’s and including this one, because, in order to analyse
or critique we are forced to repeat.
Churchwell identifies deep-seated, unconscious anxieties and desires in the
texts she deals with. These, she states, are managed by ‘a reassuring undemand-
ing version of “psychoanalysis”’ (2004: 9), so that the ‘lives’ of MM are ‘a talking
cure for our lingering, persistent fears about sex, knowledge, the female body and
death’. She contends that writings about MM are not just about her but about
Woman as a cultural concept (ibid.). I would say that those of us who are women
have had to live out, or within or in relationship to cultural conceptions of women
and femininity, which are, in my view, not singular. I would say further that
everyone, of whatever gender or sexuality, has had to live out or be interpreted
through cultural conceptions of femininity and masculinity, which include psy-
choanalytic conceptions.
Freud said in his 1933 lecture ‘Femininity’ that women had not ‘knocked their
heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity’ ([1933] 1973: 146) because
‘to those of you who are women this will not apply – you are yourselves the
problem’.7 Churchwell’s book shows how a series of men and some women have
AnnaMarilyn 183
knocked their heads against the riddle of MM as icon of femininity, and she does
that herself, in the service of feminism and also of criticism that, after psycho-
analysis, questions the reliability of all accounts that are unavoidably riven by desire
on the part of their writers and readers. Churchwell demonstrates that catering to
reader expectations and familiar patterns of understanding are key to both novel-
istic and ostensibly factual biographical writing. In her ‘afterword’ to the book she
states that MM is ‘a prime example of the seductions of biography’ (2004: 127),
which is the temptation to ‘substitute belief for knowledge, prejudice for thinking’.
She carries on to say, in a guarded way, that all biographies may also be autobiog-
raphies of the author (ibid.).
In his biography of the young Freud, Adam Phillips was beset by similar issues.
In his first chapter, he says that one of the first casualties of psychoanalysis was
the traditional biography, since psychoanalysis makes all narratives of the past and
attempts at coherence suspect. ‘History begins to sound like fiction, and fiction
begins to sound peculiarly wishful’ (2014: 6). As he says, it is not only the writing
of a life but the reading of it that psychoanalysis calls into question, asking why
we want to know and what we think we want to know, and behind that a big-
ger question – what do we want or desire? Phillips is aware that the desires of the
biographer may be revealed if read psychoanalytically. He writes:
After Freud (. . .) we have to ask, what does the biographer want his subject
Taylor and Francis
for? (. . .) What does he need him to be or not be? What does he use his
subject as a way of talking about, and (. . .) to avoid talking about?
Not for distribution (Ibid.: 27).
Phillips tells us that Freud was opposed to biography and destroyed materials in
order to thwart biographers. His daughter, as Young-Bruehl recounts, was reluc-
tant to allow but did authorize Ernest Jones’ official biography, one suspects
because she and the Freudian establishment were able to vet it.
Jacques Derrida, in his book Archive Fever (1998) based on a talk he gave at the
Freud Museum on 5 June 1994, considers the authority of archives as guaranteeing
authenticity and evidence through their inclusions and exclusions, their ordering
of materials and restrictions on access. In a typically multivalent passage at the end
of this book, Derrida wonders what Freud might have wanted to keep secret, what
he might have ‘burned’ (Derrida [1995] 1998: 101). The passage implies not only
that Freud deliberately destroyed some material and that he or others might have
buried things in the labyrinth of the archives, but that there may have been things
that Freud knew but never revealed, and moreover things that he did not himself
know because of his own unconscious processes. Derrida wonders what may have
disappeared ‘of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or of his “life”’ (ibid.)
and conjectures that there may be elements that that can no longer be retrieved
and are ‘without a name, without the least symptom, without even an ash’ (ibid.).
This is the biographer’s nightmare, and yet the search for symptoms or clues con-
tinues regarding Freud, his daughter and MM, holding out the promise that there
184 Wendy Leeks
will be further information to be discovered or released, further clues that will

answer questions and provide proof about each of them. Psychoanalysis, biogra-
phy and life-writing in general all involve the attempt to reveal secrets – what has
been hidden, deliberately or not – in order to arrive at some kind of truth about
a life. Psychoanalytic writing in its theoretical dimension attempts to extrapolate
truths that extend beyond one individual/subject in order to identify patterns that
apply to others and to posit that some patterns may be universal. Biography and
life-writing are not so different; to achieve a readership, there must be something
that draws the reader to want to know, which is more than curiosity about the
individual life presented and must have some relevance to the reader’s life. In this,
psychoanalytic writing (case histories in particular) biography and other forms of
life-writing share a common methodology with the popular genre of detective
stories. All of them seek out clues to reveal and resolve motivations, causes and
their effects or affects.
Weaving
The word clue comes from an older word – clew – that goes back to antiquity
and is a thread. In the myth of Theseus, Ariadne gives him such a thread so that he
can find his way out of the labyrinth. Psychoanalysis seeks out and follows clues
into the labyrinth, in order to draw the patient out again, out of the maze of their
Taylor and Francis
symptoms and repetitions. In the story of AF, weaving, knitting and clews are
recurrent motifs.

Young-Bruehl says that Martha Freud and her sister Minna taught the Freud
daughters Mathilde and Sophie to knit, but not the youngest, AF. It was her
nursemaid who taught her, so that she could join in this activity with the female
members of her family. Soon, AF was knitting so obsessively that her parents
wanted her to spend less time on it; so she took up weaving (Young-Bruehl [1988]
2008: 45). When I was thinking of a fiction about AF and Burlingham I ought to
have remembered that Appignanesi and Forrester had already commented on these
handicrafts (1993) where they suggested that the metaphor of knitting could be a
foundation for ‘a whole alternative biography’ of AF. They wrote:
Knitting, this most feminine of activities, with its autoerotic subtext was
something that Anna excelled at (. . .) perhaps in an attempt to win her
mother’s love, then throughout her life as a kind of meditative recreation
(. . .) Knitting is also Anna’s single point of identification with her mother
and the feminine domain.
(Appignanesi and Forrester 1993: 305n)
Appignanesi and Forrester also record a remark by AF at the end of her life, when
she could no longer knit. They say that her hands could not comply with the feats
of sublimation that she had required of them for so many years, and they quote
AF: ‘Look at what that hand did, it is angry because I controlled it for so long’
AnnaMarilyn 185
(ibid.: 305). They do not give a source for this quote, which grounds their linkage
between these feminine crafts, masturbation and sublimation through a repeti-
tive and perhaps ritualized activity. In the passage quoted above, Appignanesi and
Forrester make a connection between knitting and AF’s desire for her mother’s
love and also (not quoted here) AF’s jealousy of and rivalry with her sister Sophie,
her mother’s favourite.
According to Young-Bruehl, AF’s knitting and weaving led her father to one
of his ‘wilder anthropological speculations’ (2008: 45), which she claims was an
attempt to understand his daughter. In his lecture on ‘Femininity’ ([1933] 1973) he
said that women had made very few contributions to the development of civiliza-
tion, but possibly one was the invention of weaving. He was tempted to ‘guess’
why this was so, and his answer was that weaving imitated the growth of pubic
hair that conceals the genitals. Women invented weaving, therefore, to make a
further concealment of their lack of a penis, to cover an absence, the site (and
sight) of the narcissistic wound of their castration. This anthropological specula-
tion accords with the formulation of the Oedipus Complex as a central tenet of
Freudian theory, whereby it is the intervention of the authoritative father into the
mother–son dyad that initiates all possibility of progress, social relations, knowl-
edge and civilization. This intervention prohibits the son’s desire for the mother by
enforcing and reinforcing the boy’s castration anxiety. The female’s lack of a penis
functions as proof that castration is a real threat, as punishment for misdirected
Taylor and Francis
desire. It also, not coincidentally, accords with another tenet that Freud asserted
to the end of his life, that of female penis envy as central to femininity and female

desire. He maintains this in ‘Femininity’ in connection with this tale about the
invention of weaving, and writes, in a statement that seems addressed not only to
his first audience, but to the feminist critics he also alludes to: ‘If you reject this
idea as fantastic and regard my belief in the influence of lack of a penis on the
configuration of femininity as an idee fixe, I am of course defenceless’ ([1933] 1973:
167). AF, undoubtedly, read this lecture on femininity; she may have been present
when her father delivered it. I wonder what she made of it? She was 37 when it
was published; Burlingham had been in her life for eight years. As far as I know,
she never commented on it directly.
Someone is being beaten

Young-Bruehl, in her book of essays (1998), revisited several aspects of her work
on AF not fully explored in the biography. She maintained that Freud’s analysis of
his daughter, conducted from 1918 to 1922 and again from 1924 to 1925, shaped
his thoughts on femininity and female sexuality. The ‘presence’ of AF is registered
in ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ of 1919 (see Person 1997; Young-Bruehl [1988]
2008: 54–68, 103–139), where a reconstruction of AF’s childhood development,
derived from analysis of her as an adult, features as a pivotal case in the argument.
Freud describes how this particular girl had elaborate daydreams. He uses her
case, along with a handful of others, to elaborate the three-stage development of
186 Wendy Leeks
beating fantasies and their associated masturbatory activities in girls and boys –
indicating where these differ between the two sexes or genders and which phases
or stages are conscious and which unconscious. In the third phase of the beating
fantasy, this girl is no longer being beaten herself (by her father). Freud states that
she becomes a watcher rather than a participant, looking on as boys are beaten by a
male authority figure, a father-substitute such as a schoolmaster. In a much quoted
passage, he says that in this way,
the girl escapes from the demands of the erotic side of her life altogether.
She turns herself in phantasy into a man, without herself becoming active
in a masculine way, and is no longer anything but the spectator of the event
which takes the place of a sexual act.
([1919] 1997: 23)
What Freud says about this girl (AF) is that she is dissatisfied with her clitoris (rec-
ognized as inferior to a penis) turns herself into a boy and also puts herself outside
of sexuality altogether. The passage suggests more: that this girl makes herself into
a boy-without-a-penis and also remains passive. One might say she is neither one
thing nor the other and, in terms of sexuality, she just gives up the ghost. As we
shall see later in the chapter there is more to it than this.
At her presentation for membership of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, in
Taylor and Francis
front of her father and his colleagues/disciples, AF delivered her own version of
the sublimation of beating fantasies and masturbation – ‘Beating Fantasies and

Daydreams’ ([1922] 1974). The paper purported to report an analysis of a young
patient, but Young-Bruehl identifies that AF had not yet had any patients and she
was writing about herself (2008: 104). AF describes how the vivid daydreamer
turns her fantasies into elaborate ‘nice stories’ and writes them down. In this way
she makes an act of private and guilty pleasure (masturbation) into a public, social
act of communication and creativity addressed to an audience of readers. In the
stories, the girl features as a boy or young man who endures various complicated
scenarios in which he is abducted, imprisoned, punished and otherwise tormented
or humiliated by an older, authoritative man. The young prince/hero bears all
of this and through his submissiveness and acceptance eventually melts the older
man’s heart so that, in the end, a relationship of tenderness (not a sexual relation-
ship) is achieved between them.
In AF’s version of the third phase of the girl’s fantasy, there is a happy ending.
The girl succeeds. In the stories she becomes a boy, but AF’s case presentation
does not, unlike her father’s, close off the possibility that she might still accede
to femininity and heterosexuality; she is not definitively placed outside of sexu-
ality. We might read this paper as suggesting that the submissiveness and passivity
of the ‘boy hero’ and his/her focus on an authoritative male as object could
serve as the ground for a later ‘feminine’, heterosexual object choice.
What was AF saying to her father in this paper in 1922, approaching the end of
her first period of analysis with him? Ostensibly she had entered analysis because
AnnaMarilyn 187
of lassitude, anxiety, depression, eating disorders and indecisiveness about her future
and career, obsessional behaviours, demands for attention and affirmation. Freud
attests this in various correspondence (with Lou Andreas-Salome). From other
evidence, AF’s letters to Salome and both Freud’s and AF’s papers on beating fan-
tasies, there was more to it. The girls in the papers by the two Freuds overcame the
beating fantasies and compulsive masturbation in childhood or around puberty –
an outcome necessary to project them into the Oedipus. AF did not. These fan-
tasies and masturbation were still with her in her twenties and into her thirties. In
1922 she was telling her father that, through analysis, she was now ‘well’ and had
overcome it all; she had decided on being an analyst rather than a teacher and was
showing him that she was worthy and able to do that. Going further, one might
say that she was declaring that she was dedicating herself to him and his brainchild,
her twin, psychoanalysis.
Freud had introduced AF to Lou Andreas-Salome.8 In January 1924 AF wrote
to Salome that her ‘nice stories’ and masturbatory activities had come back, and
that these were shameful, especially when she did ‘it’ between seeing patients
(quoted in Young-Breuhl 2008: 121). In May 1924 she announced to Salome that
she was returning to analysis with her father because of the daydreams ‘combined
with an increasing intolerance – sometimes physical as well as mental – of the
beating fantasies and of their consequences which I could not do without’ (ibid.:
122). She also told Salome that her daydreams had been: ‘pulled apart, analysed,
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published and in every way mishandled and mistreated’ (ibid.: 121), presumably
by her father and herself. The tone of this remark is jocular, but it is intriguing. In

AF’s analysis with her father there was obviously a dialogue between them, and her
paper also represents a continued dialogue with him and his essay of 1919. If, as I
have suggested, in 1922 she was telling him what he wanted to hear and what she
wanted him to hear, that does not mean that what they said was untrue. However,
the sequel, AF’s return to analysis, indicates that there were things that were not
said, not resolved, one might suspect both in the analysis and in the written traces.
What we cannot know is what these absences and ellipses actually were.
The lesbian question

Was AF a lesbian? This question haunts considerations of her life (Burlingham
1989; Young-Bruehl [1988] 2008, 1998), and if we read her father’s writing from
1919 onwards psychoanalytically, it hovers there too. It is bound to arise for us,
knowing that she and Burlingham were together for approaching 50 years. Does it
mean – do we want to know – whether their relationship was sexual in the sense
that it involved genital acts? Is that what we take a sexual relationship to mean? Is
it asking whether AF had a sexual identity exclusively focussed on a female sexual
object? Is that what we take ‘lesbian’ to mean?
As far as we know, Freud never asked his daughter this question directly – there
is no evidence. In his writing, references to female homosexuality, as he called it,
are sparse; the two key cases where he came up against it – the ‘Dora’ case ([1905]
188 Wendy Leeks
1985) and ‘Psychogenisis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’ ([1920] 1981)

were incomplete, broken-off failures. In his later works, attempting to deal with
femininity and female sexuality, the possibility of female homosexual object choice
is raised, but is not examined in any detail. It is hard to credit that Freud, seeing
his daughter’s attachments to Loe Kahn, Eva Rosenfeld and above all Dorothy
Burlingham, would not have asked himself this question. I shall return to this. But
first, I want to turn to MM.
It is perhaps unexpected that a spectre of female-to-female desire flits in and
out of accounts of Monroe. Reading about her and AF in tandem, it is interesting
how the lesbian question is broached and, for the most part, then recedes, or is
taken into a wider narrative. Regarding both MM and AF, it also takes us back into
Freudian formulations of femininity and sexuality.
Marilyn: Venus
As Churchwell points out, speculations on what she terms MM’s bisexuality focus
on the drama coach Natasha Lytess and the putatively spurned acting rival Joan
Crawford. Churchwell shows that the accounts largely see this as a further symptom
of MM’s rampant (object-indifferent and primarily narcissistic) sexual appetite, her
manipulation of her desirability to further her career, and/or her need for moth-
ering (2004: 205–210). Such explanations were ready-to-hand in the 1950s and
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1960s and have not disappeared in popular culture since. As a woman, MM could
be seen simultaneously as sexually rapacious (insatiable) and indifferent (frigid); as

manipulative (femme fatale) and manipulated (victim); dissembling, cunning, vin-
dictive; sweet, trusting; extrovert, exhibitionist; shy, unconfident; vain, artificial;
natural, instinctual; clever and articulate; or just a dumb blonde. According to the
accounts that Churchwell surveys, MM longs for a father in her relationships with
men, for a ‘good’ mother in her relationships with women, and for a child, which
will make her a ‘real’ woman. All of these interpretations are not very far from, and
are actually very close to, Freud’s conceptions of femininity. In their repetition,
these contradictions appear to make sense; they become believable.
Supposing we see representations of MM in terms of a long-lasting cultural
form – the mythological Venus. Venus is an image of desire, an image that excites
the desire of others but does not necessarily represent her desire for others; she
represents desirability rather than desirousness. In Freud’s terms, she is woman
and femininity, wanting to be wanted and to fit herself to another’s desire, passive
in that she does not actively desire the other but wants the other to desire her.
However, Venus is also a temptation and, through her seductiveness, a threat. The
stories of Monroe conjure up Venus, Helen of Troy and other women real or
imagined – tales that are familiar and frequently have dire consequences.
Churchwell considers that ‘bisexuality’ in tales of MM ‘seems to operate as a
contemporary form of nymphomania’ (ibid.: 209) and adds that biographers do not
take it seriously because ‘episodic bisexuality is cute, even titillating’ (which itself
suggests that bisexuality as an enduring identity is more problematical for those who
AnnaMarilyn 189
conceive themselves as heterosexual). Bisexuality, in the Freudian schema, is a dif-

ficult term to tie down. Churchwell uses this term rather than lesbian, which itself
implies that ‘lesbian’ might designate a long-term or even permanent same-sex object
choice and also an identity; ‘bisexuality’ might also indicate a long-term or perma-
nent capacity to be attracted to people of either sex and therefore an identity, but
also, as here, designates a temporary oscillation in object-choice within a primarily
heterosexual life. The lesbian question is not of major import to Churchwell –
she sees it more as a narrative trope in the accounts, functioning to emphasize the
notion of excessive sexuality. Appignanesi and Rose do not mention it at all. Only
Lois Banner (2014) accords this question significance. Her reading of this is in no
way queer, in the sense of opening up a space for consideration of femininity and
female sexuality beyond the parameters of heteronormative conceptions of desire.
At the beginning of her book, Banner states that: ‘Significant among my dis-
coveries about Marilyn are her lesbian inclinations’ (2012: 4) and that, despite three
marriages and numerous reported affairs with men she ‘desired women, had affairs
with them, and worried that she might be lesbian by nature’ (ibid.). By the end of
the book, Banner makes a leap, not merely asserting that MM had ‘inclinations’,
but saying: ‘she was the world’s heterosexual icon who preferred women as sexual
partners’ (ibid.: 422, my emphasis). The evidence cited for this and other claims is
not only previous biographies (although she does acknowledge her extensive use
of them, in particular Anthony Summer’s book Goddess (1985) and the collection
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of interview notes and other documents he made available to her). Alone of all
the feminist writers considered here (including those concerned with AF), Banner

brings MM and the psychoanalysts AF and Greenson together in such a way that
their diagnoses are brought forward as evidence of MM’s ‘lesbian inclinations’ and
the part these purported inclinations may have played in her death.
Reading Banner’s book along with a host of other writings, it is clear that
MM is repetitively presented as an enigma, even though the terms in which
it/she is represented are very recognizable and familiar. The idea of enigma is
central to conceptions of femininity, before Freud, for Freud, and subsequently.
In both Summers’ and Banner’s biographies MM appears as a figure constantly
peeled away to reveal what lies underneath. The treatment of her resembles, to
an uncanny degree, that of the Anatomical Venus (see Ebenstein 2016). These
life-sized wax figures were produced from the seventeenth century into the
nineteenth, modelled on dissected female corpses for the instruction of men of
science. On the outside they present a body that is both beautiful and apparently
ecstatic, as if post-coitally asleep and dreaming. The body can be taken apart
layer-by-layer to reveal all the organs and viscera. In the most famous one, the
last section reveals a foetus in the womb. The eroticization of these Venuses is
particularly uncanny to modern eyes, even though the connotations of these
figures can be easily read, because we already know them. With their smiling,
half-open mouths, they seem to invite investigation, penetration beneath their
surface beauty to lay open an unlovely truth underneath. From the first, any such
figure was seen as a momento mori. This has both a moral and scientific dimension.
190 Wendy Leeks
For science, the figures enabled a delving into the body of woman to demystify
processes such as childbirth – male doctors gained knowledge. Morally, the eroti-
cization of the figures associates female sensuality, seductiveness and sexuality
with death – their own, and the threat of death to their (male) viewers.
Banner presents a catalogue of diseases and disorders, physical and psychic, in
her portrayal of MM. The ‘lesbian inclinations’ become associated with all sorts
of other afflictions and sufferings, some of them self-inflicted, but rooted in MM’s
disrupted childhood, her lack of a father, her mother’s mental illness and the sex-
ual abuse she experienced as a foster child. According to Banner and the analysts
she references, MM was plagued by her same-sex desire. Of course, Banner does
not claim that lesbian desire is itself pathological, only that it was for MM. Banner
states that in 1956, in one of her analytic sessions with AF, the two played a game
with marbles. MM launched these one-by-one toward AF, who concluded that
MM wanted to have sex with her and that she was afraid of men. As Banner says:
‘the analysis seems overblown, but we don’t know what else happened in their
interactions’ (2012: 261).
Banner states in the prologue to her book (2012) that she had found AF’s
notes on this analysis, but does not say where. On page 261 a footnote refers
the reader for information about AF’s analysis of MM to a book by Berthelsen
(1987) based on interviews he conducted with the Freuds’ elderly housekeeper
Paula Fischl. Young-Bruehl ([1988] 2008: x) considered this book and Fischl’s
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testimony unreliable and refused to use it. In 2006, a book by Michel Schneider
came out in France, translated into English as Marilyn’s Last Sessions: A Novel

([2006] 2011). In it, Schneider relates the AF analysis in very similar terms to
Banner and also references Berthelsen. Schneider tells readers that he relied
entirely on published sources for the background to his novel and also that he
made things up, quoted documents that have not been found and might not exist
([2006] 2011: 1–2).
Banner carried out ‘deep readings’ of Greenson’s psychoanalytic writings (2012:
8) including those that may have been based on MM. At Churchwell’s talk in
2013 Banner stated that she had located and read Greenson’s notes on his analysis
of MM, apparently not in the official archive at UCLA (where much material is
still embargoed). The material she discusses also draws on Greenson’s correspond-
ence with Marianne Kris and AF. She therefore uses the opinions of the analysts
as evidence of MM’s ‘inclinations’ and their significance. An opinion attributed to
Greenson was that MM could not bear even the hint of anything homosexual and
yet she fell into situations that had ‘homosexual coloring [sic]’. She recognized her
own tendency, but then projected it on to the other person involved, who then
‘became her enemy’ (Banner, 2012: 385, quoting Greenson).
Much of this relates to Greenson’s attempts to deal with MM’s alleged paranoia
and her possible ‘borderline’ status; after her death, it involved attempts to counter
rumours of his involvement (accidentally or otherwise) in that death and in a much
disputed cover-up involving the Kennedy brothers, the Mafia, the Teamster’s
union, the FBI, the CIA, you name it (see Spoto 1994). Banner says that Greenson
AnnaMarilyn 191
told his family and wrote to Kris (letter of 20 August 1962) that MM had killed
herself ‘because she couldn’t handle her lesbian urges’ (2012: 422). Banner’s verdict
on Greenson’s view is:
There may be some truth to this assertion. The European tabloids were soon
to run Natasha Lytess’s lurid story of their affair, which would be a consider-
able humiliation to Marilyn as well as a public exposure of her deepest secret.
(Ibid.)
MM had dealt with revelations before – about posing for a nude calendar when she
was young and needed money; about saying, early in her career, that her mother
was dead when she was in fact in a mental institution. Even rumours about affairs
with women had been published earlier on and she had not seemed perturbed.
To claim that this was her ‘deepest’ secret, or even that it was a secret, seems
far-fetched, and rests on Greenson’s interpretations. These interpretations are
classically Freudian, following quite precisely Freud’s line of argument in his 1922
paper ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’.
Here Freud bases theoretical pronouncements on just two cases, one of jeal-
ousy and the other of persecutory paranoia, both of them, incidentally, male. He
claims that both projected feelings that they did not want to recognize in them-
selves on to the other person, the most-loved person of their own sex ([1922]
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2001: 226). Freud says this projection comes about because of an ambivalence of
feeling, exacerbated by a refusal by the other of the patient’s claims for love. In

both cases the persecutory paranoia and the jealousy served ‘as a defence against
homosexuality’ (ibid.: 227), which enabled the two patients’ homosexual desires
to remain unconscious.
For Greenson and Banner, MM was aware of her homosexual desires and
these were so toxic to her that she killed herself. This diagnosis also seems far-
fetched, and falls back upon a view of homosexuality, in men and in women,
that is rooted in a binary notion of masculinity and femininity, whereby an excess
of masculinity in a female and of femininity in a male may lead to homosex-
ual object-choice.9 Banner, following Greenson and despite some caveats, ups
the ante on the lesbian question, as she foregrounds. However, neither she nor
Greenson have anything to say about female-to-female desire per se – there is
no analysis of it, merely an association of lesbian or bisexual desire with shame,
fear, possibly disavowal. For Greenson it is associated with destructive and self-
destructive behaviours, and for Banner it is not much different, since MM’s
‘inclinations’ figure as a possible explanation for her suicide. Conversely, when
the lesbian question arises concerning AF, commentators play it down.
Anna: vestal virgin

Princess Marie Bonaparte, Freud’s friend, an analyst who trained with him and the
patron who secured the Freud family’s flight to England in 1938, is credited with
192 Wendy Leeks
describing AF as a vestal dedicated to preserving the flame of her father’s work

and reputation (Young-Bruehl [1988] 2008: 137). Such a designation re-inscribes
AF’s sublimation of sexuality to another cause, which is the general conscensus in
accounts of her, and might be true, for all we know. Young-Bruehl certainly con-
curs with Marie Bonaparte, and with Freud’s view in ‘A Child is Being Beaten’.
In 1998 Young-Bruehl wrote about the circumstances through which she ended
up writing the biography. She was asked to do it by AF’s literary executrix and
spoke to the woman’s husband, an analyst who had known AF and Burlingham.
She told him she did not want to write the biography, asked if the two women’s
relationship had been sexual said: ‘Would it be the biographer’s task to brave the
homophobia of psychoanalysis with a lesbian life story?’ He replied: ‘Sweetheart,
these two ladies lived together harmoniously, really harmoniously for fifty years – now
I ask you could that be a sexual relationship?’ (Young-Bruehl 1998: 9, original
emphasis). What was he saying? That it must have been a sexual relationship, or
that it could not have been? Young-Bruehl reported this conversation to her own
analyst, as she ran through all the reasons why she could not write the biography.
Her analyst laughed and at the end of the session told her he thought she had
changed her mind. She wrote the biography, and her answer to the lesbian ques-
tion was ‘no’.
She tells us that what she wanted to write was the story of an AF who man-
aged to create a family life with another woman who had children, without being
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their father or her husband, without being ‘the mother or the wife’ but being
‘everything’. As Young-Bruehl puts it, this relationship would be ‘convention-

ally unclassifiable’. But then admits that this was not the biography that she wrote
(ibid.: 4). Young-Bruehl is circumspect, an analyst who says something yet does
not quite spell it out.
The biographer also tells us that she had to overcome some antipathy towards
AF. She could not identify with her ‘very restricted sexuality’ nor with ‘the sever-
est parts of her superego’ (ibid.: 21). She came across a business letter in which AF
recommended refusing a homosexual applicant for training. One sentence brought
her ‘to a screeching halt’ and she hated it. The sentence said that it was no good
for a course or any institution ‘to permit people with sexual abnormalities’ (ibid.).
Subsequently, she read AF’s unpublished clinical reflections on male homosexual-
ity, which, she said, made her understand what the sentence in the letter meant to
AF ‘how it protected her, how it represented her’ (ibid.), but she does not elabo-
rate. If AF were fending off the possibility of reputational damage to the institution
and practice of psychoanalysis, it might be understandable, but it does not sound
like that. I take the licence to read this as saying that AF was protecting herself from
people prying into her private life, from rumours, from any implications that she
and her steering of the Freudian movement might not be fitted to the task. The
‘protection’ amounts to saying, in my view: ‘I am not that’.
In AF’s correspondence with fellow analyst Max Eitingon in 1926 she told him
something about herself in relation to Burlingham and the Burlingham children,
two of whom, Robert (Bob) and Mary (Mabbie), she had taken into analysis.
AnnaMarilyn 193
AF wrote: ‘I think sometimes that I want only to make them healthy but also, at
the same time, to have them, or at least something of them, for myself’ (quoted
in Young-Bruehl [1988] 2008: 133). She added: ‘Towards the mother of the
children it is not very different with me’. In the same letter she described this as
an ‘Etwas-Haben-Wollen’, wanting to have something for herself. Whatever this
was, and she described it as a dependency (ibid.), might not have been sexual (in
relation to the mother) but was not undesirous. She told Eitingon that she was
ashamed of this, especially in front of her father, and therefore did not tell him
about it. She recalled that she had tried to discuss it with Lou Salome, who was
‘enormously distanced from it’, to the extent that they had ‘complete inability to
understand each other’ (ibid.). AF had previously told Lou Salome that she was
ashamed of an ‘it’ – the recurrence of beating fantasies and masturbation, and in
this instance she was again ashamed, and Salome did not understand this ‘it’ at all.
What was this ‘it’ – the same as previously or different?
Michael John Burlingham, in a biography who wrote of his grandmother, asked
the lesbian question (Burlingham 1989). He says that AF was afraid that Bob (his
father) had homosexual tendencies and that she set out to reorientate him to het-
erosexuality: ‘By laborious work with his superego, it was her intent to reawaken
Bob’s original oedipal rivalry with his father for Dorothy, and thereby set Bob back
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FIGURE 10.2 After: Anna Freud and her father in 1929, after her analyses with him
had finished, after she had formed a bond with Dorothy Burlingham
and when she no longer told her father everything.
Source: Used with permission, copyright Freud Museum, London.
194 Wendy Leeks
on the heterosexual track’ (ibid.: 173). AF’s analysis of Bob follows Freud’s precepts
([1922] 2001: 223–232), both in ascribing male homosexuality to an unbroken
identification with the mother and in equating ‘normal’ masculinity with activity.
AF’s position as analyst and also as surrogate mother to the children is complicated,
particularly since she takes on the role of the authoritative Oedipal father in her
attempt to break Bob’s identification with hiws mother. Michael Burlingham says
the relationship was not lesbian ‘in the sexual sense of that word’, and adds that it
would have taken a hypocrite to discourage homosexuality in Bob while ‘revel-
ling’ in it herself and ‘Anna Freud was not hypocritical’ (1989: 291–292).
Young-Bruehl and Michael Burlingham judge that the AF–Burlingham rela-
tionship was not lesbian, was not sexual, because AF particularly was ascetic.
Banner concludes that MM did have sex with women. Churchwell does not make
a judgement, except to say that bisexuality can be titillating and in accounts of MM
functions primarily as an indicator that she was oversexed. None of these accounts
really has anything to say about woman-to-woman desire, how it might feel, come
about, operate. It is just a matter of deciding ‘Was she or wasn’t she?’ ‘Were they
or weren’t they?’ – this ‘it’ either just is, or just isn’t. The same spectal presence/
absence occurs in the Freudian sources.
The Freuds and femininity
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After ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ in 1919, Freud produced three papers con-
cerned with femininity and female sexuality – ‘Some Psychical Consequences of

the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’ [1925] 1981: 323–343); ‘Female
Sexuality’ ([1931] 1981: 367–392) and ‘Femininity’ ([1933] 1973: 145–169). He
wrote many other things within this period and it may be coincidental that ‘The
Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’ came out in 1920 and
‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’ in 1922.
In the three femininity papers, Freud does little to revise basic premises set out
earlier in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ([1905] 1981) and ‘A Child is Being
Beaten’ ([1919] 1997), but is more concerned than before to account for the girl’s
turn away from the mother and toward the father. In 1925, Freud continues to see
female development as centred on the penis as both revered and desired for herself.
The girl sees a penis and immediately recognizes that it is superior to her own
genitals; she does not have one and is therefore inferior, castrated. Consequently
she falls ‘a victim to penis envy’ ([1925] 1981: 335). She develops a ‘masculinity
complex’, either recognizing her state of castration but hoping to get a penis by
some means, one day, or by refusing to accept castration and continuing to believe
she does have one, which may compel her to act as a man (ibid.: 337). These
attitudes split the girl from her mother, who is herself deficient and also failed to
supply her daughter with the proper genital equipment. According to Freud, dis-
satisfaction with the clitoris may turn the girl against masturbation – but not all
girls; as we have seen, not AF. Girls who succeed in attaining ‘normal’ femininity
substitute their wish for a penis with a wish for a child, initially taking their father as
AnnaMarilyn 195
love object for the purposes of this wish. These girls/women abandon the clitoris
in favour of the vagina as the organ of sexual pleasure. Hence, ‘normal’ feminin-
ity consists in a change of love object and organ of stimulation. However, he says,
sometimes the girl’s attachment to her father may go wrong, so that she identifies
herself with him and ‘may return to her masculinity complex and perhaps remain
fixated in it’ (ibid.: 340). She does not modify her penis envy into a wish for a
‘penis-child’, nor switch from clitoris to vagina, nor from father-object to another
man; in short she does not attain ‘normal’ femininity, i.e. heterosexuality.
In ‘Female Sexuality’ ([1931] 1981) Freud builds on the 1925 essay to set out
three pathways or lines of female development. On all three paths, girls rebel
against their castration, but in different ways: they all want a penis of their very
own. On the first path, the girl’s dissatisfaction with her clitoris makes her give up
her ‘phallic activity’ (masturbation) and with it ‘her sexuality in general as well as
a good part of her masculinity in other fields’ ([1931] 1981: 376). On the second
path, the girl clings to her masculinity and hope of getting a penis and becoming a
man. This ‘masculinity complex’, Freud says, ‘can result in a manifest homosexual
choice of object’ (ibid.: 376). Only the third path, which is ‘very circuitous’ (ibid.)
results in ‘normal’ femininity. The girl turns away from her clitoris and her mother,
turns her wish for a penis into a penis-child, turns to her father as object in order
to get this and then transfers this wish to another man.
When we consider these pathways, they are all a little bleak. On the first path-
Taylor and Francis
way, then, the girl/woman is likely to have no sexual desire at all and to lose any
ambition she might otherwise have had, for instance to pursue a profession. She is

a woman, she looks like one and acts like one, particularly in her passivity. In fact,
it is quite easy to see that women of this type conform to what we might identify
as a nineteenth-century notion of acceptable (middle-class) womanhood: the duti-
ful daughter or wife whose loyalty and fidelity are guaranteed because she does
not herself desire anything. It is also a convenient explanation for female frigidity
(which Freud touches on in his 1933 lecture). On the second pathway, the girl/
woman believes herself to be a man, or at least a man-in-waiting, and behaves as
such, with active desire and also possibly with social or professional ambition; she
might even be a feminist. She might also become a lesbian, but need not neces-
sarily. It is not difficult to recognize, in this depiction, the type of the mannish
lesbian, a stereotype well known in early twentieth-century European culture.
They are masculine ‘underneath’, but still female, and therefore, by inference, play
at being men. They are hence delusional and ultimately deficient. Those on the
third path manage to negotiate their way to femininity and female sexuality: but
what does this amount to? They want to be feminine and want to be desired as
such, but their own desire is not for another person, not for sex as pleasure, only as
a means to get the child that they want as a penis substitute.
Where did AF sit on these three pathways? Clearly not on pathway three,
even though she did acquire children and made them the centre of her practice.
Burlingham and the professional leadership of the psychoanalytic movement were
also central to her life. It is evident that pathway one relates back to the girl who
196 Wendy Leeks
becomes an observer of beating fantasies and takes herself out of sexuality: in 1919
this was her father’s view of AF. The trope of vicarious enjoyment that Freud
put forward in 1919 chimes with two mechanisms of ego defence that AF set out
much later ([1936] 1993) ‘altruistic surrender’ and ‘identification with the aggressor’.
Interestingly, AF based the discussion of ‘altruistic surrender’ on a case of a gov-
erness, who might well (again) have been AF herself (Young-Bruehl [1988] 2008:
210). Her father had discussed a defence in similar terms, calling it ‘retiring in
favour of another’ in his ‘Psychogenisis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’
([1920] 1981) and in ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and
Homosexuality’ ([1922] 2001). AF consistently presented herself, and has been
represented, as reluctant to take on leadership of the psychoanalytic movement,
and as only doing so on behalf of her father and the importance of his ideas; in
other words, out of ambition for him rather than herself. But this hardly rings true.
She pursued a different branch of psychoanalysis – child analysis – and different
methods and aims from those of her father: observation and experiment instead
of free association; education to strengthen the ego and superego for adaptation
to social norms (for more on this see Stewart-Steinberg 2011). The battle for
supremacy in the field of child analysis she undertook with Melanie Klein, despite
being couched as a defence of her father’s key concepts, tends rather to suggest that
she was ambitious on her own behalf.
AF did not abandon ambition. In her father’s terms, she would seem to be an
Taylor and Francis
amalgam of paths one and two. Indeed, both she and her father assented to AF’s
‘masculinity complex’ and her identification with her father is impossible to ignore.

For Freud, such an identification was a condition for fixating the masculinity com-
plex. This would have put AF on path two in the 1931 formulation, where lesbian
object-choice is posed, but not seen as inevitable. It seems – certainly to me –
that for both Freud and his daughter it was preferable that she should be ascetic,
outside of sexuality, undesiring, a consummate sublimator, rather than an active,
desiring lesbian. Of course, it might be true that she was that. The ‘it’ that her
letters refer to may have been masturbation. It might equally have been female-
to-female desire. It appears that, whatever ‘it’ was, she controlled it and refused
it to the end of her life.
‘Femininity’, Freud’s last words on the subject, was a response to the work of
female analysts10 who were at the time exploring pre-Oedipal mother–child rela-
tionships; reading the paper, it is clearly also a riposte to unnamed feminists who
had taken exception to his views on women and femininity. Here he reiterates
the centrality of penis envy for femininity and of the Oedipus Complex for every-
one, along with the propensity to bisexuality in women – if not in object-choice,
at least in their tendency to switch between feminine attitudes (with passive
aims) and masculine ones (with active aims). The necessity of the girl/woman
being split away from the mother is emphasized, not only for the attainment
of ‘normal’ femininity but for women on all three pathways. He says that even
female homosexuals must take their father as object and enter the Oedipus for a
time and it is only disappointment with the father that causes her to ‘regress’ into
AnnaMarilyn 197
the masculinity complex. The bisexuality of women is the ground for these state-
ments, backed up by remarks, said to be derived from clinical observation, on
the ‘practices of homosexuals’, who ‘play the parts of mother and baby with each
other as clearly as husband and wife’ (Freud [1933] 1973: 164). He attributes to
Helene Deutsch a finding that ‘the erotic actions of homosexual women repro-
duce the relations between mother and baby’ (ibid.: 165).
Whatever else one might think about these statements, it is clear that Freud
in 1933 conceives of female homosexuality in terms of his conception of hetero-
sexual relations. It appears that for him there always has to be a masculine/father
player and a feminine/mother player and also playing at being the baby for the
other. Across this cluster of writings about femininity and homosexuality from
1919 onwards, it is also evident that Freud regards identification with the father as
an essential component in lesbianism, as identification with the mother is in male
homosexuality. The supposed inherent bisexual tendency in women is necessary
to his formulation of lesbian relations, because it allows partners to switch between
different positions and roles. We might consider that, for Freud, male homosexu-
als, in identification with the mother, in a sense fall into femininity and are thereby
‘bisexualized’, become what we might term ‘shifters’ in similar ways. I have to ask
you, queer reader, if you are out there, is this what bisexuality means to you? Is it
what homosexuality – male or female – means? Could this be a sexual relationship?
What about femininity itself? Not only is the path to ‘normal’ femininity
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‘circuitous’, the state itself is said to be precarious, unstable. According to Freud,
mature women can so readily lose their sexual appetite, can become indifferent

and frigid, can focus all their emotional energy on their child or children, if they
have them. Freud says that a mother only gets ‘unlimited satisfaction’ through
her relationship to a son, which is ‘the most free from ambivalence of all human
relationships’ (ibid.: 168) and that a marriage is only secure when the wife makes
her husband her child and mothers him (ibid.). The propensity in women, all
women, to ‘switch’ and to ‘regress’ to masculinity, in Freud’s formulation, surely
carries within it the possibility of any woman at any time forming a passionate
relationship with another woman? He does not acknowledge this.
The notion of penis envy is the bedrock of Freud’s conceptions of feminin-
ity and female sexuality. Yet it is precisely this concept that falls out of favour,
through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries after Freud’s death, even
though the whole circus cannot revolve without it. And yet, so many aspects of
the Freudian schema of femininity still persist in popular conceptions of women,
and in representations of women even today.
The fluid and the fixed

Freud was a man of his time, his complex background, and his views on femininity
and sexuality were inevitably coloured by these, despite his self-analysis. There is
something particularly curious and queer in Freud’s works on femininity. In 1933,
he turned his attention on one hand to mother–daughter relations in childhood
198 Wendy Leeks
and, on the other, to sexuality as phenomenon in mature women. There he stated

that those who had managed to attain ‘normal’ femininity could fall back into
masculinity, frigidity, disappointment. Femininity, but actually it was ‘normal’
femininity – heterosexual womanhood – that was unstable for Freud, always sus-
ceptible to regression. The daydreaming, masturbating girl who takes herself out
of sexuality in the 1919 essay remains fixed outside of it. The girl who regresses
to her masculinity complex early on similarly remains fixed and either becomes
asexual while retaining social or professional ambition, or becomes sexually active
through homosexual object-choice; the latter, for Freud, operating along the same
lines as a man might, through the chivalrous scenario he imposes on the ‘psycho-
genisis’ case and that he sees as masculine desire. A paradoxical note of fixity and
fluidity sounds through the 1933 essay.
The ‘normal’ woman can fall into illness, and strikingly Freud proclaims that
she, at around the age of 30, ‘frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchange-
ability’ ([1933] 1973: 169) because her libido has become fixed and she is incapable
of development. All that analysis can do, faced with this intractability, is to alleviate
her symptoms (and these of course, go back to his earlier works on hysteria). He
proposes that all the changes that the ‘normal’ woman has had to make to attain
this femininity have worn her out. Clearly, then, the ‘normal’ woman, in her
inherently unstable and yet paradoxically fixed state is highly prone to becoming
neurotic. If all analysis can then do is to relieve symptoms by ‘doing away with her
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neurotic conflict’ (ibid.) one wonders what else Freud wanted to do? What was it
that he had been hoping to cure? Perhaps her unhappiness is being placed as she

was in the culture of his time, in the familial structures that he cast in mythologi-
cal and therefore ancient and unchanging terms; rather, it seems as if he wanted to
cure her of femininity itself, as he conceived it to be.
Freud, unlike his daughter, did not believe that diverting or re-orientating
homosexual desire was possible. What is striking in his examination of female
sexuality is that female homosexuality is the only pathway on which a woman can
maintain a desire that is actually sexual and object-oriented, and that might even be
satisfying. This is, of course, because he sees lesbian desire as masculine, but he does
not really consider how this might work outside of a heteronormative framework.
What he has to say about mature female heterosexuality suggests that it does not
work very well.
Hence, I claim that the spectral presence of female-to-female desire is crucial,
essential to Freud’s conceptions of femininity; that it remains marginal, relatively
unexplored, denied or with caveats and get-out clauses, not only in relation to AF
but to femininity as a concept, is equally essential.
Anna/Marilyn: queer tales and a final twist

The corpus of writing about MM demonstrates that Freud’s conceptualizations
linger on, not only in the 1950s and 1960s, when MM was alive and under analysis,
but even today, in popular culture and in more scholarly examinations, as accounts
AnnaMarilyn 199
such as Lois Banner’s show. Banner, like many others, paints MM in terms of
illness and damage, physical and mental. This characterization makes MM’s aspira-
tions and achievements brave and heroic, but doomed nevertheless. Churchwell
and Rose are attracted by and celebrate the bravery of MM’s attempts to be herself
despite all the projections thrust upon her. For Rose, MM was a kind of scape-
goat, burdened with the insecurities and fantasies of US society (around troubled
masculinity) in particular after World War Two. For Churchwell too, MM as icon
of uber-femininity has carried all the baggage of fantasy, fear and contempt that
femininity evokes and to an extreme, and therefore revealing, extent. The trouble
is, that MM does seem to have accepted and internalized conceptions of feminin-
ity that circulated in her lifetime, including psychoanalytic ones. What is evident
is that the myriad characterizations of her femininity, thus femininity itself in this
extreme or absolute form, is cast as the seat of pathology. Female homosexuality
is just one more facet, one more confirmation that ‘abnormality’ infects or at least
constantly threatens femininity through and through, shading through utter abro-
gation of desire, active masculinity as denial of femininity and also as a stubborn
insistence on desire (which may include female-to-female desire), and the rocky
road of ‘normal’ femininity that can always fall back into (and actually begins with)
a desire that is not primarily sexual and can easily be lost.
What about AF? Her father, probably with her consent, placed her as ascetic,
asexual, with her masculinity complex fixed and fixated on him as father. This is
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what her father made of her and it was possibly what she made of herself; perhaps
it was true. Certainly, it enabled her to remain the daughter that Freud called his

Anna-Antigone, helpmeet to his Oedipus in old age. This insistence on AF as
amalgam enabled her to avoid neurosis, to retain social and professional ambition,
to pursue it, to become her father’s heir. We might even say that it enabled AF
to have it all – a lifelong emotional, affective relationship, children (at a remove),
a successful career, acclaim, respect; everything except a sexual relationship? It
might also have afforded her a representation, a protection and one might add a
disguise for her own ambition couched as ambition for others through ‘altruistic
surrender’ and also for the profound differences between her own and her father’s
psychoanalytic methods and practice. Who is to say that AF did not also disguise
from others her sexual desire for women, perhaps for one woman in particular? If
she felt it and refused it, controlled and sublimated it, that does not mean that it was
not there. Reports of MM’s ‘lesbian inclinations’, on the other hand, cannot be
taken as proof that she experienced lesbian desire, or that she acted upon it. What
is significant is that woman-to-woman desire haunts the accounts of these two
women, and, as I have argued, haunts conceptualizations of femininity since Freud,
as a ‘third term’, an occluded but pivotal point in constructions of female desire.
In a final twist, in the early 1940s, AF made notes on a series of dreams that
eventually became the basis for her paper ‘About Losing and Being Lost’, which
she drafted in 1948, gave as a lecture in 1953 but did not publish until 1967.
Young-Bruehl quotes extracts from these notes, translated from German ([1988]
2008: 276–314). There is a recurrent dream in which the dead Freud is lost and
200 Wendy Leeks
wandering about and calls to walk with him. He shows her tenderness, which
makes her cry and that she says he hardly ever showed her in life. She thinks he
should not have called her; that this undoes some progress in her mourning (ibid.:
286). Reading this recalls the ‘tenderness’ that was the outcome and goal of the
younger AF’s ‘nice stories’, but the dream is different. In associations to it, AF con-
siders that her wish to leave the house at Maresfield Gardens, to acquire a retreat
or an escape at Walberswick in East Anglia with Dorothy Burlingham, might have
been a stimulus for this recurrent dream (ibid.: 287).
AF’s resultant paper is a response and dialogue with her father’s ‘Mourning and
Melancholia’ ([1915] 1917), through the lens of her own mourning for him. In the
associations to this recurrent dream, AF identifies Freud as Odysseus, not Oedipus,
and reproaches him for being unfaithful to her. She casts herself as Penelope, the
faithful wife who weaves a shroud by day and unpicks it at night so as to avoid
finishing it and having to marry someone else (ibid.: 287). Behind this AF identi-
fies a self-reproach, that she is being unfaithful to him, which, in AF’s paper is
expressed as a stage of mourning where the contradictory urges to remain loyal
to the dead are opposed by urges to ‘turn toward new ties with the living’ (ibid.:
291). AF did turn toward the living, to Dorothy and their work. She ostensibly
remained faithful to his memory and ideas, but pursued her own way, which was
markedly different from his. AF and Dorothy did get their country cottage and yet
made the house in Maresfield Gardens their home, despite its ghosts. They wove
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a life together, in whatever way, and who can say what that life was; what was a
cover and a disguise?

In the end, I find that the sexuality of MM and of AF, whatever each might
have been, no longer matters to me, or only in this respect: concepts of femininity,
psychoanalytic and conventional, shaped them and the lives written about them
and that shaping still persists. The Freudian legacy, despite its revisions and critical
interventions, still makes me a spectre, not like MM, not like AF, yet not entirely
unlike. I know I am not a spectre; I am not that but am, like them, a woman whose
desire remains inadequately represented and theorized in psychoanalysis with its
Freudian legacy.
Notes
1 The terms ‘co-incidence’ and ‘coincidence’ occur here in an attempt to distinguish
between the several meanings of one word. ‘Co-incidence’ privileges the spatial and
temporal senses: i.e. that an object, entity, idea, occurrence, occupies the same space or
place as another, or that an occurrence or experience is taking place at the same time
as another occurrence/experience. ‘Coincidence’ refers primarily to a meaning that the
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (5th edition, 2002: 445) defines as ‘a notable con-
currence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection, (emphasis added).
This is the popular sense that is applied to events (including thoughts) that are seen
as only apparently linked, which come about by happenstance, which merely appear
similar but are actually accidental juxtapositions. This meaning is pervasive; so that a
coincidence is frequently understood as not meaningful. In psychoanalysis, such appar-
ently random conjunctions, particularly when repeated, are not seen as accidental and
AnnaMarilyn 201
are never without cause. ‘Coincidence’ also carries another sense, that of correspondence,
‘exact agreement’ whether in substance, nature, character or value, between one entity and
another (ibid.). This latter sense – that one thing is in some aspect the same as another
thing – is not employed or intended her in relation to Anna Freud, Marilyn Monroe
and accounts of them; they were not the same and accounts of them do not exactly
correspond. However, despite this contrivance, the several meanings of co-incidence/
coincidence cannot really be contained: they all sound whenever the word appears. The
spatial and temporal senses might make us think of the linguistic operations of metaphor
(substitution) and metonymy (contiguity – side-by-side-ness); from there it is no great
step to the psychic and psychoanalytic conceptions of displacement and condensation
as keys or clues to decipherment of hidden or obscured meanings. Indeed, the various
meanings of this word ‘coincidence’ might well make us think about the unconscious
and its operations. Always present, and in the continuous-present tense, the unconscious
or its operations is yet abstracted, not normally accessible, disguised, forgotten, but mak-
ing its presence felt in signs that need to be interpreted, hazarded. Nothing, no symptom
or slippage, no affect that takes place and is repeated is unmotivated for psychoanalysis.
2 This is a nod towards Lacan’s point de capiton or ‘quilting point’, although not used or
elaborated in his developed, technical sense (for a simple definition, see Evans 1996: 149).
It is intended here to suggest that there are points where accounts of the two women,
and interpretations of them touch on each other or are brought into relationship, not
by similarity but their relationship to something else that is familiar and recognizable
through repetition and consequently becomes meaningful and takes on a truth-value. I
aim to show that familiar conceptions of femininity, in their repetition, act in this way
to make accounts of women – not just Anna Freud or Marilyn Monroe – seem fixed,
believable and even true.
The reference also introduces an extended metaphor and also a metonymy that will
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play out throughout this piece. Lacan’s reference is to upholstery; mine is to the craft
practices, generally seen as particularly female or feminine, of knitting and more particu-
larly weaving. This takes us to the notion of a clue, or clew – a thread that in the myth of
3
Theseus the woman gives him to get out of the labryrinth, and that in detective stories
and psychoanalysis is sought and followed, as narrative, interpretation and possibly solution.
As we shall see, her father said this in so many words. Despite his caveats, masculinity and
femininity are binaries and central to his thought, masculinity linked to active aims and
femininity to passive ones. His contention (in several works) that females are particularly
inclined to bisexuality revolves around notions that some women never achieve true
or normal femininity, and even those who do are prone to regressing into masculinity.
Bisexuality, then, becomes an ambiguous term, which may but does not necessarily relate
to object choices or to sexuality as such, but rather to oscillations of identification across
the binary and actually between a tripartite familial structure of father/mother/child.
4 Unfortunately, there is not space to examine Stewart-Steinberg’s sophisticated and fasci-
nating arguments here.
5 I use the terms ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ as Sigmund and Anna Freud used them. I do not
concur with those designations, but take them as a talisman, like the term ‘queer’, against
a heteronormative presumption that shapes desire in its own faulty image.
6 As another coincidence, in the late stages of redrafting this chapter I read Jennie
Greengrass’ novel Sight (2018), where she also meditates on AF’s living with her father’s
ghost and also, weirdly, considers the wax figures of the Anatomical Venus (see below).
7 In this lecture Freud quoted Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘Nordsee’, which does not ask a
question about femininity but rather asks ‘what signifies man’.
8 Freud introduced Lou Andreas-Salome to AF in a move that we might consider analo-
gous to his advice regarding the unnamed young women in ‘Pathogenisis of a Case of
Homosexuality in a Woman’. There he broke off the analysis and advised that the young
woman, or her parents, seek out a female analyst. Freud provided an analytically trained,
very feminine woman for his daughter. In early 1922 AF went to stay with Andreas-
Salome and started to write her paper, with Lou’s help.
202 Wendy Leeks
9 There is a great deal more to be said about this, but no space to elaborate it here beyond
what is said below, in the section on the Freuds and femininity in particular.
10 He names Ruth Mack Brunswick, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, Helene Deutsch and perhaps
significantly does not mention Melanie Klein and others.
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Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
11
TIRESIAS
Bracha L. Ettinger and the transgression
with-in-to the Feminine
Sheila L. Cavanagh
This chapter is about Tiresias, the blind Theban prophet in the Oedipal trilogy and
how he1 animates what Israeli feminist psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger calls an
Other sexual difference. This Other sexual difference must be distinguished from
Oedipal (or phallic) sexual difference theorized by Freud in terms of psychosexual
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development and later by Jacques Lacan under the auspices of sexuation whereby
there are two possible sexual positions – man and the Woman – demarcated by

the phallic signifier. Tiresias appears in Greek mythology and plays an important
role in Sophocles’ Antigone and in Oedipus the King as seer. Tiresias also appears in
Homer’s Odyssey, in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,
among other literary and dramatic works. In this chapter, I consider the signifi-
cance of Tiresias to Ettinger’s formulation of the Other (feminine) sexual differ-
ence. The Other sexual difference is an unconscious time-space of emergence,
fading and transformation. It involves an unconscious process whereby we are
borderlinked to Others (who Ettinger calls our non-I’s)2 in a matrixial web. The
borderlinking is an encounter-event in the Real at the basis of what Ettinger calls
feminine sexual difference. As Griselda Pollock explains, the Other sexual differ-
ence “generates a specific proto-ethical dimension in all human subjectivity irre-
spective of later gender identifications as masculine or feminine subjects under the
sign of the Phallus” (2013: 167).
Although Tiresias is an ancient Greek shape-shifter and not transgender by
contemporary definitions, his centrality to Ettinger’s writing on the transgression
with-in-to the Feminine (Ettinger 2000) is relevant to transgender cultural studies
(Stryker and Whittle 2006; Stryker and Zizura 2013). Transgender cultural studies is
based, in part, on a study of somatechnical (Murray 2016) transformations, transsexual
transitions, desire and diverse embodiments – some of which resonate with Tiresian
mythology. As such, there is an important convergence between Ettinger’s feminist
psychoanalytic theory and transgender studies that can be narrativized through the
Tiresias 205
character Tiresias. Ettinger is, to the best of my knowledge, the first post-Lacanian
feminist scholar to address the central importance of Tiresias in the Oedipal-trilogy.
Certainly, Judith Butler names Tiresias in her discussion of the Oedipal-trilogy in
Antigone’s Claim (2000) and Hélène Cixous and Annette Kuhn (1981) mention the
Theban prophet in their work on castration and decapitation. But there is curious
neglect of the character in the now substantive body of feminist psychoanalytic
scholarship. Perhaps this is due to unacknowledged transphobia and the consequent
neglect of trans-like characters in psychoanalytic studies of mythology. It may also be
due to a reluctance to consider the interrelationship between feminist psychoanalytic
theory and transgender studies.
My supposition is that Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial-feminine has something
to offer transgender studies, if only because the character Tiresias, who changes sex,
is central to what Ettinger refers to as the transgression with-in-to the Feminine.
I have argued elsewhere that there is a discourse and an aesthetic particular to tran-
gender that is not only submerged in psychoanalysis but rendered pathological or
psychotic (Cavanagh 2017). Although Ettinger is not a transgender studies scholar
and, to the best of my knowledge, has not worked analytically with transgender
clients, her conception of the transgression with-in to the Feminine gives us a
template to think about Tiresian-like transitions. A Tiresian-like transition is not
the same as a transsexual transition (but the later may involve the former). It is, in
Ettingerian terms, an entry into the matrixial whereby we co-emerge, transmutate
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and change with Others in unconscious and asymmetrical ways.
Tiresias indexes an Other sexual difference in Ettinger’s formulation of the

matrixial and this is, consequently, relevant to transgender studies. But the trans-
gression of interest to Ettinger is matrixial. As such, it involves the “possibility of
transgressing between male and female with-in a matrixial feminine dimension
where Other and Outside are fatally engaged with I and inside” (Ettinger 2000: 198).
The transgression with-in to the Feminine is not about becoming a woman in an
identitarian sense but, rather, about entering into a feminine dimension of experi-
ence that refuses binaries between outside and inside, self and Other, male and
female and so on. Referring specifically to Tiresias, Ettinger writes that the
transgression between male and female is not a passage to the radical Other
nor transcending to the ultimately exterior, but a metramorphosing with-in-
out of selves with-in-to the Feminine that passes along the threads that turn,
like a Mobius strip, the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside.
(Ibid.)
As I will explain in what follows, the Tiresian origin-story involves an encounter-

event with copulating snakes and Goddess Hera, in Peleponnese, which enable
a metramorphic change. For Ettinger, a metramorphosis is a borderlinking and
co-affecting relation in the matrixial web whereby partial-subjects are changed
in/by the encounter-event with an Other. As she explains, metramorphosis
“draws a nonpsychotic yet beyond-the-phallus connection between the feminine
206 Sheila L. Cavanagh
and creation” (Ettinger 2006: 64). Metramorphosis is a co-affective borderlink-

ing, which enables change akin to the Deleuzian notion of “becoming”. The
metramorphic transgression enables the subject to access a “surplus beyond” the
phallic axis. This surplus is about the transformation of what Ettinger calls phallic
limits into thresholds.
In the myth, Tiresias turns into a Woman and enters into what Ettinger calls
an Other axis of difference. While I focus on an Other sexual difference theo-
rized by Ettinger in this chapter, let us remember that there are other dimensions
of difference yet to be narrativized in psychoanalysis. It is an established fact
that transpeople are subject to erasure, discrimination and are denied access to
public space: the transphobic bathroom laws in the United States are but one
contemporary example. But I am here concerned about the space of the clinic,
the state of psychoanalytic theorizing and the Feminine (as an axis of differ-
ence) more generally. We have yet to account for the multiple harms engendered
by the negation and expulsion of transpeople in psychoanalysis at the level of
the International Psychoanalytic Association, its constituent organizations, the
clinic and its training curriculum. The collateral damage done by the omission
and pathologization of transpeople under the auspices of Oedipal psycho-sexual
development is increasingly well established.3 We can no longer ignore or sideline
the contributions made by transgender scholars, artists, clinicians and analysands
to the psychoanalytic scene.
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Bracha Ettinger
Ettinger began to publish her writings on the Feminine and the matrixial border-
space inspired by her art and her psychoanalytic work with patients in the 1990s.
The corpus of her theory is inspired by the writings of Wilfred Bion, Sigmund
Freud, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari and Donald Winnicot, among others. Her theories of the
matrixial, along with her painting and art notebooks, have been written about by
Griselda Pollock, Catherine de Zegher, Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-
Glucksmann and Brian Massumi. She is now a professor at the European Graduate
School in Switzerland, a practising artist and analyst. Her oeuvre is offered as a
supplement to and extension of Lacan’s writing on feminine sexuality and subjec-
tivity. Like other feminist psychoanalytic theorists including, but not limited to,
Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, Ettinger contends that there is a
discourse and aesthetic particular to the Feminine that is submerged in Lacanian
psychoanalysis and in modernity more generally.4 Ettinger’s (2006) writing on the
matrixial borderspace is designed to give theoretical form to a missing discourse
and aesthetic of the Feminine.
For Ettinger, the Feminine operates through affective and aesthetic fields.
Building upon Levinas, Ettinger explains that the Feminine is the “irreducible differ-
ence inside subjectivity: precisely what makes it human” (2006: 190). The matrixial
borderspace is a feminine sub-stratum that coexists alongside what she refers to
Tiresias 207
as the phallic (Symbolic) stratum theorized by Lacan.5 The Other axis of sexual
difference is foreclosed by the phallic signifier, but signifiable in an expanded sub-
symbolic where (and when) we are attuned to Others and non-I’s in the matrixial
web (Ettinger 2006). The Other sexual difference in the matrixial is not about the
One (and its binary oppositions between object and subject), but about “thinking
transmissivity and co-affectivity” (ibid.: 183). It is about the unthought time-space
of borderlinking in the matrixial that is trans-subjective (as distinct from transgender
to be discussed below). This dimension of difference is, for Ettinger, primordial,
occurring before, alongside, and after Oedipal sex difference but irreducible to it.
The Feminine axis of difference is not based on phallic cuts, splits and severance but,
rather, severality. The Ettingerian Feminine is thus not reducible to male or female,
masculinity or femininity in a sociological sense. The Other sexual difference is
based on trans-connectivity and trace connections to Others known and unknown
in familial and extra-familial matrixes. In the Feminine dimension, the subject is
more than one and bound to others in asymmetrical difference. This is why she
refers to partial-subjects, as opposed to individual subjects. Ettinger does not theo-
rize individual subjects who can be said to relate in the terms offered-up by object
relations theory. Her focus is on partial-subjects who exist in relation to Others and
non-I’s in a non-conscious matrixial borderspace.6
Although Ettinger uses the metaphor of the mother-to-be and the subject-to-
be in the pre-birth encounter as a model to think about the matrixial borderspace,
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the matrix should not be used as a synonym for maternity. Indeed, the matrixial
is an axis of difference that transcends conception, gestation and birth. The female

bodily specificity that Ettinger refers to in her writing on the matrixial involves
corporeality but is not reducible to it. The matrixial is
the site, physically, imaginatively, and symbolically, where a feminine differ-

ence emerges, and through which a “woman” is interlaced as a figure that is
not confined to one-body, but is rather a hybrid “webbing” of links between
several subjectivities, who by virtue of that webbing become partial.
(Ibid.: 141)
As Griselda Pollock notes, the matrix is a signifier of “transformative transferential

potentialities in a shareable resonance sphere” (Ettinger, as quoted by Pollock 2006:
21). We are always with Others in “reciprocity without symmetry, creating joint
compassionate and eroticized aerials, to be further shaped by following traces of
their further affective irradiation” (Ettinger 2000: 199). What Ettinger calls erotic
aerials intercept aesthetic traces relevant to a shared matrixial web. In other words,
a transgression with-in-to the Feminine is aesthetic and leaves trace-like imprints
linking several partial-subjects in a shared web. It is the transformative capacities
of the matrixial that the character Tiresias helps us to understand. By focusing on
Tiresias and Ettinger’s feminist psychoanalytic theory of the matrixial, I am not sug-
gesting that those who are transgender, by contemporary standards, are ultimately
“women” or “feminine” (although some are). Those who are transgender, like
those of us who are not transgender, are all differently gendered in what Ettinger
calls the phallic landscape. As Ettinger explains, access to the Feminine dimension
of experience is open to everyone regardless of gender or sexual positioning in the
phallic stratum of difference theorized by Lacan.
Tiresias animates, and helps us to understand, the trans-subjective elements of
human experience explicated by Ettinger. While the linguistic similarity between
“transgender” (or “transsexuality”) and “trans-subjectivity” in Ettinger’s theo-
rization is significant, they are, in fact, different concepts. Transgender usually
refers to those who dis-identify with their sex assignment at birth and/or to
those who are gender variant. Transsexuality often refers to those who undergo
social and/or medically assisted transitions that may involve gender confirming
surgeries, hormone therapies, hormone blockers, etc. In Ettinger’s formulation,
“trans-subjectivity” does not have anything to do with gender. Nor does it refer to
transpeople. Rather, trans-subjectivity refers to our status as partial-subjects in the
matrixial web. In essence, the trans-subjective is used by Ettinger to account for
the matrixial elements of the partial-subject in the Feminine sub-stratum (defined
below). Trans-subjectivity should also not be confused with intersubjectivity
because intersubjectivity depends upon singular subjects (in the phallic landscape)
who can relate to one another in conscious ways. We are not singular subjects in
matrixial terms but, as stated above, partial-subjects. Ettinger defines the partial-
subject as several (more than One) and also refers to “subjectivity-as-encounter”
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in the matrixial order of things. In the transubjective weave, partial-subjects are
co-affected by Others in non-symmetrical ways and thus partners in difference.

Trans-subjectivity also involves “co-emergence” and “co-fading” in/through/
by metramorphosis (defined below). It thus contains transformative potentiality,
which is relevant to transgender studies.
Tiresias and the Oedipal legacy

Before I advance my argument, let me offer a brief biographical sketch of Tiresias,
the ancient Greek mystic. The original story told by Ovid (1986) in Metamorphoses
begins as follows: Tiresias comes across two snakes copulating on Mount Kyllene
in Peloponnese. Somehow upset by the inter-coiled snakes, Tiresias kills the female
snake with his staff. Hera, the Goddess of women, marriage and fertility is furious.
As a Goddess well known for acting upon impulse, she turns Tiresias into a woman
in body and mind as punishment. But the curse may have been a blessing in dis-
guise. By all accounts, Tiresias adjusts well to life as a woman. Tiresias marries, has
three daughters, becomes a renowned prostitute and priestess. Seven years later
Tiresias again encounters two mating snakes. Having learned Hera’s lesson, Tiresias
leaves them be and his masculinity is magically restored. We are to assume that by
respecting not only the female snake but the act of copulation itself – a feminine
dimension – Tiresias frees himself from Hera’s spell.
But all was not well for long. Hera and her husband Zeus were fighting
over who – man or woman – experiences more sexual pleasure in lovemaking.
Tiresias 209
Zeus insists it is the woman while Hera insists it is the man. Being unable to reach
consensus they consult Tiresias who is said, in the myth, to have experiential
knowledge of both masculine and feminine sexual pleasures. Tiresias answers to
the Olympian court: “Of ten parts a man enjoys one only, but a woman enjoys the
full ten parts in her heart” (Hard 1997: 171). Hera was incensed by the Tiresian-
testimony and again moved to fury. She strikes Tiresias blind. Zeus takes pity on
Tiresias but cannot undo his wife’s spell. Instead, the masculine god gives Tiresias
the gift of prophesy, second sight and long life. Over the course of his long life,
Tiresias faithfully serves the Greek god Apollo. The blind-seer relays Apollo’s
words to the Lacanian letter. From a Lacanian perspective, we may infer that
Tiresias, like a good analyst, attends to the particularity of the word and to the
speaker’s discourse.
In fact, Tiresian wisdom is known and respected throughout the Theban king-
dom. His counsel is sought by king Oedipus and king Creon but both refuse
Tiresian-guidance and suffer for it. Tiresias is, as a result, troubled by the impos-
sibility of his job as prognosticator. Tiresias knows that hostility, denial, ignorance
and projective identification on the part of the kings incite war. After telling Creon
that in order to save his kingdom he must sacrifice his own son, Tiresias laments:
Anyone who practices the art of prophesy is a fool. If he reveals offensive things
he will reap resentment from all who hear his omens;
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but if, out of pity for those who come to him, he lies,
he wrongs the gods. Only Phoebus should

tell the gods’ will to men, for he has no one to fear.
(Euripides 1994: 111)
Exasperated by the plight of Oedipus and his refusal to see in Oedipus the King,
Tiresias says, “How terrible – to see the truth when the truth is only plain to
him who sees!” (Sophocles 1984). Tiresias discourages Oedipus from pursuing the
truth – that he is the enemy he seeks (the one who killed his royal predecessor) –
because he is cognizant of the tragedy awaiting King Oedipus who learns too late
in life that he is not who he thought he was. Oedipus is not son of King Polybus
and Queen Merope, but son of King Laius (who he has killed) and Queen Jocasta
(who he marries). Tiresias knows that knowledge of patricide and incest will be too
much for Oedipus and Jocasta to bear. But Oedipus, like a petulant child, insists
upon knowing a truth he cannot handle. Upon hearing the truth he gouges his
eyes out with his mother’s brooch.
For the psychoanalytic record, Tiresias is also never wrong. Let us consider his
oracular resume and demonstrated capacity to handle male protagonists in crisis:
in Homer’s Odyssey, Tiresias tells Odysseus how he may navigate treacherous
waters on route home from the battle of Troy. In Euripides’ Phoenician Woman
Tiresias foretells that Oedipus’ sons will ultimately kill each other in their warring
anger and greed. In Antigone, Creon the King is less than thrilled to hear from
Tiresias that he must withdraw his indictment against Antigone to save his family.
Like Oedipus before him, the King cannot accept Tiresian wisdom until it is too
late; as a result his loved ones die and the Kingdom falls.
The Feminine in Lacan and Ettinger

At a conference on feminine sexuality at the University of Amsterdam in 1960, and
later published in Ecrits (2006), Lacan said that we should not be fooled by the myth
of Tiresias. In Ettinger’s assessment, Lacan intimates that the Theban character can-
not know anything more about feminine sexuality than we do, which is nothing.
Ettinger’s concern with Lacan is that he depicts feminine sexuality as unknowable.
For her, Lacan is mistaken in assuming that the structure of language and thus, the
unconscious, prohibits us from knowing anything about feminine sexuality. This,
she insists, is only true in the phallic (Symbolic) stratum. While Lacan acknowl-
edges limits to what can be known about the Woman due to what he calls a Real
problem of language and logic, Ettinger’s scholarship attempts to turn those limits
into thresholds whereby something can be known about the Feminine – albeit in an
expanded Symbolic that she calls the sub-symbolic (or sub-stratum). The Feminine
sub-stratum does not generate signifiers (word-images) in Lacanian terms: it is
Real. But from a matrixial perspective the Feminine can be apprehended.
Ettinger is critical of the way Lacan defines Woman as not-all, as object and
as symptom of man. She reasons that he can only apprehend the Woman from
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the phallic angle. It is vital, she believes, to re-write the Woman in terms that
can address her as several in a matrixial sense. The post-Lacanian Ettingerian for-

mulation of Woman views her as a co-affecting and co-emergent borderlinking
to Others (as partial subjects) in a matrixial borderspace. The Ettingerian Woman
is best characterized as an assemblage, a co-affecting encounter-event between
partial-subjects in a given matrixial web. Moreover, as Pollock writes, Ettinger’s
conception of Woman can be understood as “different conditions of subjective co-
emergence[s]” (2006: 31). In the matrixial substratum Woman “digs an-other area
of difference with its specific apparatus, processes, and functions” (Ettinger 1997:
367) that resonate in aesthetic fields through erotic aerials and aesthetic traces in a
shared web. The Woman is, for Ettinger, not out of Symbolic bounds but can be
apprehended in a matrixial sub-symbolic. In Pollock’s reading, “Woman means
different conditions: not just object or subject but the structure of transitivity”
(2004: 46).
In her article “Transgressing with-in-to the Feminine” (2000), Ettinger revisits
the myth of Tiresias to counter Lacan’s claim at the Amsterdam conference that we
can know nothing of the Feminine dimension. She explains that Lacanian psycho-
analysis is bound to a phallic axis of difference while there is, in her formulation,
an Other sexual difference that is matrixial (feminine) and applicable to every-
one. There is, for Ettinger, a Woman in the matrixial feminine dimension that
can be symbolized. A Woman is not a self-subject but a non-regressive transitive
relation. In the matrix Woman is a “border-Other, a becoming in-ter-with the
Other, never a radical alterity” (Ettinger 2001: 129). Ettinger also explains that the
Tiresias 211
Woman is the “co-emerging partial self and Other, or a different kind of relations
to the Other” (2006: 72). As she reminds us, a father and son can be a Woman.
Feminine cognizance of a non-I (or Other) in-relation to the I (as partial-subject)
is, for Ettinger, based on a matrixial trans-sensitivity open to everyone. It is, for
her, a feature of that which makes us human (and thus grounds for ethics). There
is no one isolated subject in a matrixial web, only a Woman, defined as a condi-
tion of co-emergent relations between at least two partial-subjects. The matrixial
Woman apprehends Others (as non-I’s) as partners in difference.
While Lacan contends that a man (who experiences only phallic jouissance)
cannot become a Woman (who experiences phallic jouissance along with an Other
jouissance), Ettinger asks how Tiresias (or any partial-subject for that matter) can-
not know something of/about the Other feminine jouissance. Ettinger’s point is
not that Tiresias can become a woman in a sociological sense (although he can)
but, rather, that the story of Tiresias can tell us something about the transgression
with-in-to the Feminine. Tiresias transgresses the difference between masculine
and feminine sexual positions in the phallic axis theorized by Lacan. This places
him in the matrixial-feminine dimension. Ettinger explains:
Under the matrixial light, the transgression in the figure of Tiresias between
man and woman is not a transgression of a frontier between known maleness
and unknown femaleness. Rather, since the matrixial I carries traces of expe-
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riences of the matrixial non-I, inasmuch as I know in the other and my other
knows in me, non-knowledge of the feminine, in the matrixial borderspace, is

impossible, by virtue of the transgression itself.
(2000: 189, original emphasis)
Ettinger reasons that the Tiresian transgression with-in-to the Feminine involves a
metramorphic engagement with an Other (as non-I). The Other sexual difference
is, as explained above, transitive. A man can thus become a Woman. But more
than this, from Ettinger’s standpoint it is impossible for anyone to not know some-
thing about the Woman (as co-affecting assemblage) in the Feminine dimension.
Sex difference in the matrixial is not about the One (and its binary oppositions
between object and subject), but about “thinking transmissivity and co-affectivity”
(Ettinger 2006: 183). It isn’t about having (man) or being (Woman) the phallus,
for example, but about the unthought time-space of borderlinking in the Real.
Ettinger explains that the sexual coefficient in the matrixial is not between indi-
viduated subjects and their Others (intersubjectivity), but between the Other in the
subject and the subject in the Other (trans-subjectivity). Tiresias is, for Ettinger, a
matrixial figure because he transgresses sexual positioning in Lacanian terms. She
writes, “what I would like to emphasize is that this kind of transgression between
the sexes is a transgression with-in-to the feminine in a matrixial borderspace—
whatever its direction [transition] is” (Ettinger 2000: 206).
Tiresias also reveals something of the Feminine dimension pertinent to desire
and jouissance. Although Ettinger does not focus on Tiresian desire, she does write
about matrixial desire. Matrixial desire is to borderlink and to differentiate within

a “transgressive encounter-event and for the entirety of movements which cre-
ate and fulfill such encounter-events, which, in passing by transformation would
leave imprints for upcoming later transgressive encounter-events” (Ettinger 2007:
119). For Ettinger, borderlinking in the Feminine sub-stratum is ongoing and
never, finally complete. In the matrixial, no one undergoes a transgression alone.
Significantly, Tiresias does not instigate his own transition, it is caused by Hera
(as partner-in-difference). He enters into a transgressive space whereby there is
an event-encounter with Goddess-Hera and, of course, the snakes. There is also a
borderlinking with the God Apollo to whom Tiresias is faithful. It must be remem-
bered that Tiresias is a prophet, a seer and possesses knowledge outside the bounds
of his own mortal and personal experience. Tiresian knowledge of, for example,
incest and patricide in the House of Oedipus is not born of his own experience. In
fact, it is, miraculous. Tiresian wisdom exceeds what can be known by any other
character in the Sophocles trilogy.
As T. S. Eliot wrote in a footnote to The Waste Land, “all the women are one
woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees is, in fact, is the sub-
stance of the poem” (2001: 23). It is not surprising that Ettinger chooses Tiresias as
a character who can transgress with-in-to the Feminine dimension but who can,
also, tap into another axis of knowledge. Ettinger explains that, “Matrixial desire
is an aspiration and an inspiration from a feminine jouissance toward the edges of
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a wider Symbolic” (2006: 113). In other words, there is for Ettinger a “feeling
knowledge” that exceeds the phallic Symbolic. Lacan and Ettinger agree that femi-

nine jouissance is characterized by a unique orientation to knowledge and logic.
Ettinger reasons that matrixial desire is attuned to the trans-subjective field and is,
ultimately, knowledge of transgression and borderlinking. It is, in other words,
knowledge of the Feminine dimension. My supposition is that Tiresias is also a
matrixial figure in Ettinger’s formulation because he can see what Oedipus cannot.
Not only does the Tiresian truth – that Oedipus killed his father and married his
mother – lead to dramatic climax in the play, but it gestures to the boundaries of
what can be known, at least without tragedy, in the phallic stratum represented in
the play by the Kingdom of Oedipus.
Tiresias is also a matrixial figure because he is bound to Others who he does
not repudiate. Unlike Oedipus, Tiresias avows his connections to Others (like,
for example, Apollo), even as the God causes him pain. There is, in Ettingerian
terms, a non-Oedipal sublimation and investment in Others that is feminine.
Tiresias embodies this non-Oedipal sublimation. Ettinger explains that the
Other sexual difference “produces for men and women a different, non-Oedipal
sublimation where, in the search for non-I(s), the jouissance is of the borderlink-
ing itself” (2001: 110). This feminine difference is symbolized by Tiresias, his
transgression with-in-to the Feminine and his divine knowledge of an Other
(Godlike) order of difference. Indeed, Tiresias turns the House of Oedipus on
its head. Pollock writes that feminine desire might “signify something of pro-
found importance for discussions of human subjectivity and indeed sociality”
Tiresias 213
(2006: 22). Likewise, Tiresias and transgender studies might signify something of
profound importance to psychoanalysis.
Oedipus
Ettinger’s writing on Tiresias and the matrixial gives us a new perspective on
the Oedipal-life-tragedy that is germane to much psychoanalytic theorizing. As
evidenced in Oedipus the King, Oedipus cannot tolerate or recognize Others in
his familial web – at least not very well. He abandons his adopted parents on the
road to Thebes, misrecognizes his birth parents, begets offspring by his mother,
who are also his siblings, and in his old age at Colonus, treats Antigone, his
daughter-sister, like a nurse maid. I think we can agree that Oedipus has more
than his fair share of family troubles. It is an unacknowledged fact that he does
not set a good therapeutic example. Apart from the fact that he kills his father
and marries his mother, he disowns his sons who are at war with each other for
what was originally their father’s throne. Refusing Antigone’s advice to yield to
his sons and relent upon his anger, to the older Polynices, Oedipus says: “Die
by your own blood brother’s hand – die!” (Sophocles 1984: 365). Antigone is
left to contend with her father-brother’s traumatic legacy and tragically, takes
her own life to give her brother, Polynices, a proper burial. Oedipus eventually
dies in exile at Colonus. As Tiresias told the Theban king years before his actual
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death: “No man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you [Oedipus]”
(ibid.: 183). The Tiresian truth comes to pass and Oedipus dies a painful death
in Colonus.
What Ettinger’s oeuvre adds to psychoanalysis is a way for us to see how the
plight of Oedipus is structured not only by a disavowal of his traumatic life-legacy
(involving patricide and incest), but of the Feminine dimension. Oedipus lusts for
his mother and over-identifies with his father, as indicated by his literal usurpation
of his father’s marital-bed and position as king. While Freud thought Oedipus the
King had an impressive following because it reveals universal incestuous and patri-
cidal desire – hence the Oedipal complex – the play is, in my Ettingerian reading,
a classic because it reveals the tragic outcome associated with the negation of an
Other sexual difference. Oedipus is primarily suffering from an un-symbolized loss:
a feminine loss involving others in the matrixial web. What does his very public
transgression of the incest taboo reveal if not a yearning for a way to borderlink
with others from whom he has been separated? Oedipus could not apprehend his
kin who stand-in for Others (non-I’s) in the Feminine dimension. Tiresias could
see this lack of apprehension and knew it would lead to tragedy. Let us be clear
about the fact that the tragedy in each of the three Sopholean plays is born of exile,
excommunication and war between cities: incest and patricide come after the fact.
In other words, Oedipus is primarily affected by the traumatic rupture to his famil-
ial web and exile from his city-home. His position as king and patriarch prevent
him from recognizing Others in his family and country to whom, from a matrixial
perspective, he is ultimately bound.
Conclusion
I appreciate the role Oedipus has played in the choreography of psychoanalysis,
but it is high time to make room on the psychoanalytic stage for other characters,
like Tiresias, who tap into Other axes of difference. The mythology of Tiresias
gives life and form to a configuration of feminine difference that supplements
the Lacanian formulation of sexuation. Whether we accept Ettinger’s critique of
Lacanian writing on feminine sexuality or, alternatively, choose to theorize a femi-
nine dimension of experience within Lacanian (phallic) parameters, it is important
to embrace non-Oedipal characters, myths and stories in psychoanalytic theory.
The Tiresian transgression with-in-to the Feminine is, in my Ettingerian reading,
beyond the Lacanian limit mediated by the phallic structure. The transgression is,
more precisely, into the matrixial order of things where no One is alone.
The story of Tiresias prompts us to consider an Other sexual difference relevant
to a trans-psychoanalytic (Cavanagh 2017) turn in the clinic. Tiresias is ideally
positioned to tell us something in retrospect about what Ettinger calls the matrixial
order of difference that is, like the phallic order of difference, sexual. In other
words, we are not lone actors on the stage of life but several and co-affecting in
Ettingerian terms. By evoking Tiresias as emblematic of the Other sexual differ-
ence, we should not assume that transgender is a Rosetta Stone or unencumbered
road to matrixial ethics or to an otherness beyond the phallus. As explained above,
the matrixial is available to everyone regardless of gender, transgender status and
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sexual orientation. Transgender life experience may, however, prompt us to con-
sider another axis of feminine difference because there can be an acute awareness of
the Other sex in the One. As Ettinger explains, there are multiple ways to write the
Woman in the matrixial. Transgender subjectivity may be one such way – at least
for those identifying as trans-feminine or with the Tiresian-transgression with-in-
to the Feminine.
Acknowledgements
I thank Bracha L. Ettinger for encouraging words on the development of this
chapter at the Psychoanalysis in Our Time: Psychoanalysts and Femininity confer-
ence in Gdansk Poland (8–10 April 2016), organized by Agnieszka Piotrowska and
Ben Tyrer. I am also indebted to Caitlin Janzen for her critical commentary on
the Feminine and for her editorial assistance. I acknowledge the generous financial
support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada under research
grant number 890-2014-0026.
Notes
1 I am using the masculine pronoun to reference Tiresias because the prophet lives most of
his life as a man.
2 Ettinger refers to the non-I in the metramorphic encounter-event as a site of transmission
to be distinguished from an Other as subject.
Tiresias 215
3 See, for example, the recent special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly (2017) on
“Transgender and Psychoanalysis”.
4 Ettinger (2006) offers her theorization of the Other sexual difference as an alternative to
the formulation of the semiotic and the Chora (which means womb and uterus) devel-
oped by Julia Kristeva. Although both the Chora and the Matrix are anchored to maternal
encounters, Ettinger contends that the Chora cannot be symbolized in Kristeva’s theory.
The Chora is, for Kristeva, a precondition for the semiotic and ultimately a basis for lan-
guage but is, for Ettinger, confined to psychotic discourse or to poetic discourse.
5 Ettinger refers to the Other (Feminine) axis of difference as a sub-stratum that coex-
ists alongside what she calls the phallic axis of difference. The phallic axis of difference
is the stratum whereby identity, intersubjectivity and sexual positioning (as man or as
Woman) make sense. In the Feminine sub-stratum we are all trans-subjective because
we are moored by Others and non-I’s, partners in difference particular to a given
matrixial web.
6 The I and the non-I are names for the partial-subject and its Other. “The I is a pulsating
pole of co-poiesis.The I and non-I are pulsating poles of co-poiesis along a shared psychic
string” (Ettinger 2006: 193). Together, these fields with their multiple I’s and non-I’s form
matrixial webs.
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12
A SPECIMEN OF A COMMENTARY
ON LACAN’S ‘L’ÉTOURDIT’
A. R. Price
The commentary that follows, specimened from more extensive discussion, bears on a
segment from the section of ‘L’étourdit’ that falls on pages 19–23 of Scilicet 4 1973.
***
Taylor and Francis

C’est de fait le scandale du discours psychanalytique. Following the now well-
established pattern, beyond the reference strophe-sentences heading the new
section the construction loosens into a freer scheme that compels a parsing of
larger word groupings.
An outrage is asserted, pertaining not to an analytic community or history but to
the very discourse itself, indexed above in its newly formalised combinatory, and so
the scandal must be intrinsic to psychoanalysis, not the result of local incident. This
reading can be quickly confirmed in reference to the Seminar material, where as
early as the fourth in the series Lacan could be heard to assert that ‘analysis partakes
of a sort of scandalous notion of man’s affective relations’; above and beyond the
role accorded to sexuality, this scandal in analysis ‘introduced the notion of a para-
dox, of an essential difficulty, that is inherent, so to speak, in the approach to the
sexual object’ (Lesson of 12 December [1956–1957]). While this passage predates
by over a decade the sloganizing of ‘no such thing as sexual relation’, the alert-
ness to absence of harmony between human subject and sexual object as isolated
discursively in analysis is here lent unequivocal formulation, and indeed ascribed to
the fundamental Freudian articulation. Specifically, to pursue Lacan’s indication,
in the Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie the first sexual object, the mother, car-
ries the qualification unverwendbar, that is to say, ‘unutilisable’ (cf. James Strachey’s
corrected translation in Freud [1905] 1987: 94, 119), and the object is preserved
so in memory throughout the latency period, conditioning its ‘re-finding’ as an
insuperably discordant partner.
218 A. R. Price
This scandalous aspect of acknowledged sexual discordance finds enhancement

in ‘L’instance de la lettre’, delivered then redacted in May 1957 and so concurrent
with the fourth seminar: ‘The intolerable scandal at the time when Freudian sexu-
ality was yet to be sanctified, was that it was so “intellectual”’ (Lacan 1966: 523).
It may be inferred, then, that this is about the unwelcome prompt to a seizing of
absence by the intellect.
The present paragraph, like the two preceding, has been construed by some
commentators as somehow pointing exophorically to an epistemic failing on
the part of the analytic community adequately to address feminine ‘otherness’
(cf. Fierens 2002: 135; Soler 2006: 9–10, 190), but the same thereby rehearse
the very confounding of the feminine and the absolute Other that already in the
1958 ‘Propos directifs pour un Congrès sur la sexualité féminine’ was declared to arise
from the ‘phallocentric dialectic’ (Lacan 1966: 732). However potentially scan-
dalous such a tendency may be, here the focus is pitched otherwise: the matter
is what has been actualised ‘in deed’, in such fashion as thereby to have openly
and effectively scandalised, which is precisely what this substantivised ‘scandal’
implies. And so the opening C’est is indubitably endophoric, picking up the forc-
ing of ab-sense from the previous sentence.
, et c’est assez dire où les choses en sont dans la Société. The International Psychoanalytic
Association was an altogether different institution in 1972 from the one that Freud
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left behind in the 1930s, and even from the one that would have been familiar to
Lacan in the 1950s and early 1960s. Any attempts such as there were to mimic the

secret committee of the 1920s with an eye to orienting and doctrinally unifying
the widely spread societies of the post-war period were ineffective, while Freud’s
carefully pressed recommendations on lay analysis were not heeded in the United
States until the law suits of 1985, and only then with great reluctance and a pecu-
liar disengagement from the considerable ethical stakes (see the long-drawn-out
and thoroughly noncommittal account by then president Robert S. Wallerstein
[1998]). Perhaps in using the denomination Société rather than Association, the local
French seat of the IPA is here being fingered. As one of the members of the Société
psychanalytique de Paris observed in a commemorative report, having ostracised
Lacan in 1964, the contributors to the SPP Congress of 1965 ensured that he would
be ‘nevertheless quite present, by his very absence’: in their new-found confidence,
a number of papers gave loose rein to geneticist and ego-psychological perspectives
hitherto contained during the years of his influence (see de Mijolla 1991: 34).
qui le supporte. Again both verb and pronoun operate bivocally, tendering an undis-
cerning reader the bait of a psychoanalytic society that ‘supports’ discussion, but
on more careful inspection rebuking this seat of officialdom for merely ‘putting up
with’ the scandal inherent to the analytic discourse.
, que ce scandale ne se traduise que d’être étouffé. The copulative and existential senses
of être are once more exploited, this time to isolate a ‘hushed-up scandal’ that
Lacan’s ‘L’étourdit’ 219
simultaneously localises a ‘stifled being’, the latter designating a state both pre- and
post-translation, to drive at spatial and temporal conveyance rather than linguistic
rendering. By further implication, the Société in question cannot be the native
ground of the psychoanalytic discourse and its inherent scandal, only that of its
reluctantly tolerated implantation. In the terminology of . . . ou pire, this stifling is
‘the institutionalised silence of psychoanalysis on this matter of there being no such
thing as sexual relation’ (Lesson of 8 December [1971–1972b]).
, si l’on peut dire. A common locution is again lent fresh tenor as one of the key sig-
nifiers of ‘L’étourdit’ now makes its second appearance in this same sentence: there
would be dire enough would that such muzzling might allow for so saying, in deed.
In the oral teaching of 1972, Lacan twice alludes to the gagging action of the
IPA: in his own regard, citing the ‘sitting officials’ who ‘dealt me one of those
blows that diminishes your voice’ (Lesson of 8 March [1971–1972b]); and with
respect to Ignacio Matte Blanco, whose work on bi-logic had been subjected
to a ‘stymie’, to be lifted only in 1975 with the publication in English of The
Unconscious as Infinite Sets (entretien of 1 June [1971–1972a]; the belated publica-
tion may have been part-indebted to Lacan’s attentions, though Matte Blanco’s
‘Acknowledgements’ contain no such mention).
, au jour. The reader is put to the task of making the concluding remark cohere
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either with the scandal of a smothering in broad daylight, acknowledging a likely
pun on ‘étaler au jour’ (‘to divulge’ or ‘to bring to light’), perhaps even at its very

moment of coming to light of day, or with a potential fact of saying ‘in this
day and age’.
** **
Au point que. The sentence opens as a subordinate clause to the previous sentence,
straining to a degree the otherwise conspicuous paragraph break which is thus to be
read as ordering the first in an itemisation of corollaries ensuing from the scandale
and its smothering.
c’est un monde. Initially a hyperbolic locution used to remark on unexpectedly grand

scale of architectural space or human congregation (cf. the letter of 29 September
1680 from the Marquise de Sévigné to her daughter, the Comtesse de Grignan:
‘C’est une république, c’est un monde que votre Château; je n’y ai jamais vu cette foule’
[1775: 363]), the more general use of ‘c’est un monde!’ for exaggerated expression of
disbelief first gained ground in the nineteenth century.
By 1972, the discussions on female sexuality of 40 years hence could fairly
be described as ‘a world away’. Few were able to claim a direct connection
with the events of the 1920s and 1930s, one among scarce exceptions being
Helene Deutsch who was to outlive Lacan himself (12 years her junior), passing
away in 1982. The locution here connotes also the microcosm of the pre-war
220 A. R. Price
psychoanalytic community, presently to be fractured both geographically by the

events in Europe and factionally by the tangential loyalties that set the following
generation at loggerheads.
à soulever. The pun works tautologically: a world of extreme effort to raise a world
dead and gone, here raised as comment-worthy issue. The connotation of ‘raising
the dead’ is subtly lifted from être étouffé in preparation of a sustained metaphor
of expiry.
que. The grammatical hinge of this single-sentence paragraph appears to function

not as a conjunction but adverbially, further to heighten the exclamatory tone
(cf. the examples in Claude Buffier’s 1709 Grammaire française sur un plan nouveau,
translated into English as A French Grammar on a New Plan: ‘c’est une passion dangere-
use que l’amour’; or ‘ce seront toujours des tourmens que les désirs’ [1734: 214]).
ce débat défunt. Where in 1958 the pre-war debate on female sexuality was being
qualified as délaissé (Lacan 1966: 687), like an item dropped or given up in the flight
from Mitteleuropa, here it is more despairingly reckoned to lie beyond retrieval and
reanimation. As noted, the défunt is thematically redolent of the asphyxiated being
of the previous sentence.
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des années 30. What is here denoted in relaxed mode as a debate from the 1930s
refers to what had been more specifically, though divergently, designated in two of

the written texts from 1958. While ‘La signification du phallus’, delivered in Munich
on 9 May and printed without modification in the Écrits, cites a ‘discussion on the
phallic phase’ echoed and pursued in various writings published between 1928 and
1932 (1966: 687), in ‘Propos directifs pour un Congrès sur la sexualité féminine’, penned
in 1958 but not published until 1962, reference is made to a question that raged
between 1927 and 1935 (ibid.: 777).
These dates coordinate usefully, both in their convergence and slight diver-
gence. First, they together exclude the early writings on the topic of female
sexuality that predate Freud’s 1925 paper on ‘Einige psychische Folgen des anatomischen
Geschlechtsunterschieds’ (. . .) Second, they omit some of the first responses to Freud’s
1925 paper (. . .) Third, they set down an end-date that debars the pre-war pursu-
ance of the debate in Horney’s lecture to the German Psycho-Analytic Society on
23 December 1936, printed as ‘The Neurotic Need for Love’ in the posthumous
collection Feminine Psychology, (1967), itself a foretaste of her sociological position
developed soon thereafter in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937).
(. . .)
The divergence between the two sets of dates is perhaps more telling. By bring-
ing forward by one year the opening of the debate, the ‘Propos directifs’ effectively
include the contributions from the 1927 Congress in Innsbruck (. . .) Conversely,
by pushing back the closing date by three years, there is a pronounced embracing
of: Freud’s piece on ‘Femininity’ in the New Introductory Lectures of 1933; Horney’s
paper on ‘The Denial of the Vagina: A Contribution to the Problem of the Genital
Anxieties Specific to Women’ (1933) and her 1933 lecture in Washington DC
on ‘The Problem of Feminine Masochism’; together with Jones’ paper on ‘The
Phallic Phase’, and most especially his taking stock of the whole debate in the
famous address to the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society on 24 April 1935 (. . .)
These later papers are almost certainly an influence on this more vague reference in
‘L’étourdit’ to a debate ‘from the 1930s’, though still the 1958 description of Jones’
‘Early Female Sexuality’ as having ‘scorched the earth for any contribution since’
(Lacan 1966: 728) maintains its currency.
non certes pas qu’à la pensée du Maître. Just as previously the bivocal masculine pro-
noun was exploited to enable conflation between Freud and the pourtout, here the
Maître is both Freud in his role of mentor and mastermind of psychoanalysis, and
the master-signifier as instanced from its command position in thought structuring.
ne s’affrontent pas Karen Horney, Hélène Deutsch. The debate on female sexuality and
the phallic phase was brought to a pitch of intensity by three contributions each
from Helene Deutsch and Karen Horney, the ‘most eminent’ women to participate
in the debate according to the terms of ‘La signification du phallus’ (Lacan 1966: 687).
Deutsch read ‘The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women’ at
the Oxford Congress of 1929. Published first in English in the International Journal
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of 1930, then in German in 1930 in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and
in 1931 in the Almanach der Psychoanalyse, it was followed in 1932 by ‘Über die weib-

liche Homosexualität’, initially intended for the 1931 Congress which in the event
did not take place (published in English in 1933 as ‘Homosexuality in Women’; it
is noted that the paper is being printed in response to Freud’s recently published
‘Female Sexuality’). Then came ‘Motherhood and Sexuality’, one of five papers
delivered to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in the summer of 1932, published
the following year in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.
As for ‘affronting’ the Maître, if the latter is to be understood as the master
‘himself ’, in these contributions Deutsch takes issue just once, and gently, with
a Freudian tenet. ‘Homosexuality in Women’ reasserts the girl’s ‘swing towards
passivity’ first posited in her 1925 book, but now couples it with an early ‘swing
towards activity’ that lays down the ‘foundationstone’ for feminine homosexuality
([1931] 1933: 55), thus openly challenging Freud’s focus on the later pubescent
period in ‘Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’.
Karen Horney’s defiance is far more pronounced. In 1932, she published her
paper ‘Die Angst vor der Frau Über einen spezifischen Unterschied in der männlichen und
weiblichen Angst vor dem anderen Geschlecht’; also printed that same year in English as
‘Observations on a Specific Difference in the Dread Felt by Men and by Women
Respectively for the Opposite Sex’ (1932: 348–360). The argumentation pursues
the same line as Horney’s articles of the late 1920s, yet with renewed vigour fol-
lowing Freud’s public admission that her notion of a secondary penisneid ‘does
not tally’ with his impressions (‘Female Sexuality’). Here, Freud is criticised for
222 A. R. Price
failing to give due consideration to, and thus adequately to account for, the factor
of anxiety in the fetishist’s abhorrence of the vagina (ibid.: 352). In similarly con-
frontational tone, Horney proceeds to revise Freud’s note on the boy’s ‘impulsion
to inquire into things’, amplifying instead the ‘desire to penetrate’ first posited in
Müller-Braunschweig’s paper on ‘The Genesis of the Feminine Super-Ego’ (ibid.:
354); considerations that play a role in the concluding revision where ‘once we
realize that masculine castration-anxiety is very largely the ego’s response to the
wish to be a woman, we shall not altogether share Freud’s conviction that bisexuality
manifests itself more clearly in the female than in the male’ (ibid.: 359).
As noted above, Horney’s paper of 1932 was closely followed by the papers on
‘The Denial of the Vagina’ and ‘The Problem of Feminine Masochism’. In the
former, a selection of Freud’s key theoretical assertions are again cast in doubtful
light: ‘It seems to me that analytic experience alone does not sufficiently enable us
to judge the soundness of some of the fundamental ideas which Freud has made the
basis of his theory’ (1933: 59); in particular, Freud’s statement that male and female
character are sharply differentiated only from puberty onwards is singled out for
attack, Horney adding that she struggles to reconcile the young girl’s spontaneous
coquetry or ‘maternal solicitude’ with ‘Freud’s view of the initial masculine trend
of the little girl’s sexuality’ (ibid.: 60). Drawing again on Josine Müller’s 1925 text
(published posthumously in 1932), ‘A Contribution to the Problem of Libidinal
Development of the Genital Phase in Girls’ ([1925] 1932: 361–368), and her own
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earlier paper ‘On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women’, but now
further bolstered by recent remarks from gynaecologist Wilhelm Liepmann and

analyst Felix Boehm, Horney challenges anew Freud’s assessment that the vagina
remains ‘undiscovered’ by the young girl, and proffers the evidence of phantasies
that ‘do not in fact stop short at quite indefinite ideas of an act of violence, through
which one gets a child’ in support of an ‘instinctive knowledge of the existence
of the vagina as the organ of reception’ (1933: 63–64). ‘I have never been wholly
convinced’, opines Horney, ‘by Freud’s explanation why girls suppress direct geni-
tal masturbation more easily and frequently than boys’, proffering the ‘dread of
vaginal injury’ as an alternative to Freud’s ‘narcissistic mortification’ (ibid.: 65).
Meanwhile, in ‘The Problem of Female Masochism’, Horney makes bold to say
of penisneid that, ‘it must be realized, however, that this hypothesis is an hypothesis,
not a fact; and that it is not even indisputably useful as an hypothesis’ ([1933] 1935:
243), later asserting in a footnote that to deduce women’s jealousy from penisneid
‘is not convincing’ (ibid.: 255n8). Tellingly, however, in this same note, penisneid is
qualified as a ‘more purely individual anatomical-physiological’ source, which itself
provides a foreshadowing of the evacuation of subjectivity that would become cen-
tral to Horney’s later culturalist position, and concomitantly, of how her ‘affront to
the master’ was above all a resistance to the status of the phallus as master-signifier.
, voire Ernest Jones. Here the sense of voire is ‘even’ rather than ‘indeed’, given Jones’
hitherto unstinting declarations of loyalty to Freud. The details of this dissension
are addressed further on in this section.
, d’autres encore. The equivoque is this time potentially multifarious: probably ‘yet
others’ from the 1930s; but conceivably ‘others still’ (in the late 1960s and early
1970s), such as Kate Millett for her Sexual Politics (1969), Germaine Greer for
The Female Eunuch (1971) or Eva Figes for Patriarchal Attitudes (1971); while again
encore carries the already pronounced ‘en corps’, acknowledging that the attempted
riposte to the Freudian account of the phallic phase was couched predominantly in
reference to bodily phenomena.
*** **
Mais le couvercle mis dessus depuis, depuis la mort de Freud. With this second corol-
lary of the stifled scandal, likewise introduced in subordinate clause, the funereal
thematic as here sustained in allusion to a coffin lid sealed shut insinuates an uncer-
emonious wake, the ‘dead and gone’ debate silently committed to its casket only
once its instigator could no longer be counted on to revive it. Keeping a lid on the
debate falls to the same culprits who perpetrated its smothering, who will see to its
anonymous potter-field burial.
(. . .)
, à suffire. The tightly sealed lid is deemed sufficient for the action for which it was
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destined, a judgement implicating in turn the Suffisance of the psychoanalytic hier-
archy which ‘n’a à suffire à rien, puisqu’elle se suffit’ [‘need not suffice for anything,

since it suffices unto itself ’] (‘Situation de la psychanalyse et formation du psychanalyste
en 1956’ [Lacan 1966: 475]). In Lacan’s 1956 text, Suffisance apparently renders the
Greek αὐτάρκεια, a state of independent self-sufficiency, also a contentedness with
one’s lot, there employed to denounce the cooptative trend in the IPA as further
enabled by Balint’s model of the end of analysis as identification with the analyst. The
antique πόλις in which δημοκρατία is made by and for the masters alone, prefigures
the institutionalised analytic community that coheres into a self-sufficient class radi-
cally incompatible with any mode of insufficiency, to the extent that in matters of
sufficiency there are no degrees (ibid.: 476). The paradoxical effect of this Suffisance
is that within the community, whose rightful task ought to be the maintaining of the
analytic discourse, ‘le silence règne en maître, et (. . .) son temple repose sur deux colonnes
tactiturnes’ [‘silence reigns supreme, and its temple sits on two taciturn columns’], that
of the ‘Suffisances’ themselves and that of the ‘Petits Souliers’, the ‘Eggshell-walkers’
who form the recruiting ground of trainees cautiously expectant of preferment (ibid.:
477). Lacan would return briefly to this theme in remarks during the entretien of 1
June [1971–1972a] on the trend of ‘ça se préfère soi’ among psychoanalysts, and then
again in his address, coeval with redaction of the second portion of ‘L’étourdit’, to the
Belgian School of Psychoanalysis on 14 October ([1972] 1981: 6–7).
à ce que n’en filtre plus la moindre fumée. Special care will have to be taken to
ensure that no whiff of what was once such lively and vivid debate should seep
224 A. R. Price
from its pall. The fumes still rising suggest hasty or premature burial, perhaps
even the consequence of a vivisepulture.
, en dit long sur. The silence is thus purported to be eloquent, in yet further dem-
onstration that no human deportment falls out of range of the unconscious and
its logic. As dissected in ‘Temps logique et l’assertion de certitude anticipée’, hesita-
tion, interruption and lagging behind instantiate as ‘suspended motions’ (Lacan
1966: 202–204) that carry signifying value and participate in symbolic process as a
dropped beat (ibid.: 206). Even institutional taciturnity, therefore, can assume the
status of a protracted dit.
la contention. While the French word contention loans to the cognate ‘contention’
in English, its full range of signification does not since the French encompasses an
eighteenth-century addition of the sense of ‘tension’ to refer to a medical splint or
immobilisation, and similarly to a restraint device in psychiatric contexts.
à quoi Freud s’en est, dans son pessimisme, délibérément remis. Lacan’s text of 1956 on
the then situation of psychoanalysis and training was as much a response to the
recently published second volume of Jones’ biography of Freud and its disclosures
on the situation of the 1910s and 1920s. Jones reveals that the first impulse to form
a secret steering committee had been his own, in 1912, following the defections
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of Adler and Stekel and the increasingly strained relations with Jung. Lacan’s text
quotes directly from the biography: first a portion of Freud’s letter to Jones, ‘This

committee would have to be strictly secret in its existence and actions’ (1955: 153);
then from a letter to Eitingon, ‘The secret of this Committee is that it has taken
from me my most burdensome care for the future, so that I can calmly follow my
path to the end’ (ibid.: 154). The first quotation is offered in evidence of the ‘free
play’ (‘blanc-seing’) accorded to the Committee, in independence from Freud him-
self; the second, in evidence of the security he drew from it. Together they figure
the two faces of the Committee’s contention function: secretly to contain and con-
tend dissenters; and to contain Freud’s anxious foreboding. And so the founder of
the IPA fell back on the project, deliberately and willingly, in the wake of his ‘past
disappointments with men’ (ibid.) and avowed habit of preferring ‘to repudiate in
silence and go my own way’ (ibid.: 149).
pour perdre, à vouloir le sauver, son discours. In the 1956 text, Lacan denounces the
secret Committee as having instilled a Cominternism in the IPA, regulating the
far-flung societies from a central hub in the same manner as the Third International
was controlled by a junta-inclined Comintern that took full advantage of its Soviet
prestige. The text proceeds to expose the sectarian drift endemic to a community
organised around an ideal; a configuration diagnosed by Freud himself, but not
until 1921 in his Massenpsychologie when the Committee was already on the cusp of
its second decade of exercise.
Freud’s discourse, which is strictly the psychoanalytic discourse, is thus miscar-

ried in entrustment to the discourse of the master, hence the appeal at the end of
Lacan’s 1956 text to Poe’s short story, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’: lik-
ening the IPA to a mesmerised cadaver sustained only by Freud’s ventriloquising,
the Word that could awaken from hypnosis is the very same that would constitute
a final commendation. For the phrasing of these last words, Lacan turns to the first
book of Augustine’s City of God (I.12), ‘conditio sepulturae’, or more specifically to
a rendering thereof by François Martin Thiébault in his Explanation of the Second
Epistle to the Thessalonians, ‘les soins d’une sépulture décente’ (‘Instruction III,
Consolation de la mort, ou amis chrétiens après la mort les uns des autres’, 1858:
1282). Here, conditio is the genitive of conditiōnis, thus ‘making’ or ‘creating’;
this as respected in Joseph Bingham’s rendering, ‘the building of a sepulchre’
(Bingham 1840: 442), and also in that of Marcus Dods: ‘the equipment of the
tomb’ (Augustine 1888: 20). More recently, R. W. Dyson has given ‘the place
of interment’ (Augustine 1998: 21), while Henry Scowcrofy Bettenson’s para-
phrastic translation is closer to Thiébault’s rendering: ‘a decent funeral and a
proper burial’ (Augustine 1972: 21). Whether or not the specific wording of the
fuller Augustinian source was known to Lacan, the concealed citation adds special
nuance to his conclusion, intimating perhaps that this is no petition for an honour-
able mausoleum for a great man but on the contrary a plea to heed Augustine’s
détournement of the Lucan dictum (disdained by Thiébault): caelo tegitur qui non habet
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urnam [‘He who lacks an urn has the sky to cover him’].
In founding the IPA, Freud ‘wanted to establish the safeguarding of a kernel of

truth’; instead, the upshot was a body of members who seek ‘to draw consideration
thereof to themselves, even if they declare this kernel to be modest’ (Lesson of 10
May [1971–1972b]). The lesson for the learning, therefore, is that vital preserva-
tion of the analytic discourse invariably comes at the cost of deigning to forego
certain respectable rites and insignia.
Compare the account here of Freud’s ‘losing’ with Lacan’s account of his own wit-
ting participation in a match lost in advance, in the entretien of 1 June [1971–1972a].
*** ***
Indiquons seulement que les femmes ici nommées. Here the bivocation falls on the def-
inite article: the women here named are of course Helene Deutsch and Karen
Horney, but women as such are here mentioned nominally, or indeed ‘nominated’,
for the first time in this section, a surprising deferment given that in its entirety it
pertains ostensibly to passage from male to female sexuation. This second reading
serves as a reminder that one does not pass from one side to the other as one passes
between contrary positions defined by logical negation, conjunction, disjunction
or implication (entretien of 3 March [1971–1972a]); nor is woman predetermined as
such in her Being; rather, here is anticipated the development below on the subject
who ‘se propose d’être dit femme’, thus being nominated to womanhood.
226 A. R. Price
, y firent appel. To what, or against what, did these women lodge their appeal? If
the paragraph is to be taken as a further subordinate clause, running to a third the
list of sequential corollaries to the stifling of the psychoanalytic scandal of sexual
non-relation, the y may denote this institutional reticence as the target of their
entreaty. Alternatively, the somewhat obtrusive comma may be designed to force
ici nommées into an aside, interrupting the sentence in such fashion as to imply that
the women – a wider group delimited only by such contextual markers as may
legitimately attach to the past simple verb – drew upon or appealed to whatever
is designated by y: perhaps the Cominternist contention of the previous sentence,
which would accommodate an allusion to the rise to power of the likes of Anna
Freud and Melanie Klein in England, Marie Bonaparte in France, Jeanne Lampl-de
Groot in Holland and Phyllis Greenacre in the United States. Here the silent end-
ing of the third-person plural facilitates a plausible homophony with ‘firent rappel’,
their appeal doubling as a call to order.
– c’est leur penchant dans ce discours – . The ‘leaning’ or ‘weakness’ designated by the
French penchant can carry negative connotation absent from its English cognate.
Such signification of ‘decline’ is attested, for example, the adjectival use in L’Ombre
des jours by Anna Elisabeth de Brancovan, Comtesse de Noailles, ‘un soir si penchant
et si triste’ (1902: 146), or in the second tome of Anatole France’s Vie de Jeanne
d’Arc, ‘leur cause penchante’ (1908: 343).
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This parenthetical remark anticipates the fuller assertion eight years later in the
single-session Seminar of 15 January 1980, transcribed and printed 11 days there-

after in Le Monde, that women are ‘les meilleures psychanalystes – les pires à l’occasion’
[‘are the best psychoanalysts – occasionally the worst’]; a text which offers useful
clarification in its stipulation:
C’est à la condition de ne point s’étourdir d’une nature antiphallique, dont il n’y a

pas trace dans l’inconscient, qu’elles peuvent entendre ce qui de cet inconscient ne tient
pas à se dire, mais atteint à ce qui s’en élabore, comme leur procurant la jouissance
proprement phallique.
(Lacan 1980)
[It is on the condition of on no account getting worked up over some

antiphallic nature, of which there is no trace in the unconscious, that they
[these women] may hear what of this unconscious is not intent on saying
what it is, but attains to what is elaborated thereof, as bringing them the
jouissance that is properly phallic.]
Retrojecting the extract to read the present turn in ‘L’étourdit’, here it is the woman
in the analytic discourse who runs the risk of incarnating the étourdie by inflecting
her penchant for importunity with anti-phallic claims, yet in this same leaning,
opening fresh prospect of audition of the ab-sense of the unconscious.
de l’inconscient à la. The construction is designed to suggest a movement running

‘from . . . to’, though the à la form may equally denote ‘in the style or manner
of ’. The question arises therefore as to whether the unconscious is by this reckon-
ing the provenance of the appeal or rather, or also, its content, as an unconscious
determined in the body and its voicings.
voix du corps. The unconscious as manifested through the voie du corps, the way of
the body, might adequately describe the conversion symptom, the phenomenon
that came to constitute the native ground of psychoanalysis, but here it is the voix
du corps that is at issue, the voice of the body as though it were the defining condi-
tion of the unconscious, effectively upending Rousseau’s adage: La conscience est la
voix de l’âme, les passions sont la voix du corps (Émile ou de l’éducation, 1762). While the
body, and the female body especially, is a constant presence in the work of Horney
and Deutsch, not least in the debate on vaginal sensation in young girls, the allusion
here seems as much to encompass Melanie Klein’s notions of symbol formation
through transfer of emotions and anxieties on to parts of the subject’s own body or
those of his mother (implicit throughout her writings but most succinctly expressed
in the posthumously published ‘Some Reflections on The Oresteia’ [1963]), or her
view that the body interior is the representative of the superego and the uncon-
scious (‘Contribution to the Theory of Intellectual Inhibition’ [1931]). This more
widely cast reading is largely supported by Lacan’s remarks to the Belgian School
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of Psychoanalysis in October 1972, where it is noted that women ‘have incontest-
ably always been more interested in what truly constitutes the reference of analytic

experience, the body as such’ ([1972] 1981: 20), but with the danger that language
might be allowed to give more corps langagier to this body than it actually possesses
(ibid.: 21), whereupon Klein is invoked for her efforts in child analysis to do ‘all she
can for something of this corporeal activity to be deposited’ (ibid.).
Klein, it may be added, was also receptive to the hypothesis of an ‘unconscious
realization of the existence of the vagina’ in young girls, as endorsed by Deutsch
and Horney (see the chapter on ‘The Effects of Early Anxiety-Situations on the
Sexual Development of the Girl’ in Klein 1932).
, comme si justement ce n’était pas de l’inconscient que le corps prenait voix. In rectifying
the mishmash, Lacan reinstates the primacy of the unconscious as the condition for
the bodily yield of the object voice, and in so doing echoes Freud’s own reprimand
addressed by letter to Müller-Braunschweig on 21 July 1935:
Your work fits into that of authors such as Horney, Jones, Rado, etc. who
do not come to grips with the bisexuality of women and who, in particular,
object to the phallic stage. The frequency seems in itself proof that some-
thing is missing, undiscovered or unsaid at this point (. . .) I object to all
of you to the extent that you do not distinguish more clearly and cleanly
between what is psychic and what is biological, that you try to establish a
228 A. R. Price
neat parallelism between the two and that you, motivated by such intent,
unthinkingly construe psychic facts which are unprovable and that you, in
the process of so doing, must declare reactive or regressive much that with-
out doubt is primary. Of course, these reproaches must remain obscure. In
addition, I would only like to emphasize that we must keep psychoanalysis
separate from biology just as we have kept it separate from anatomy and
physiology; at the present, sexual biology seems to lead us to two substances
which attract each other.
(Freud 1971: 328–329, published in August 1971
after being made available by Dr Edith Weigert and
translated by Dr Helm Stierlin)
The phrasing of Lacan’s countermand also reinforces the à la form mooted above,
in that to assert in confutation the prevalence of the unconscious over the body
implies as its target a notion of an unconscious equated with the body, not a move-
ment from the unconscious to the body, which is here in the refutation asserted.
Il est curieux de constater, intacte dans le discours analytique. The final sentence of this
sixth paragraph reasserts the context of the analytic discourse laid out at the start
of the third as the setting to be maintained throughout this sequence of corollaries
to its stifling. Here, what may indeed be most ‘curious’ is that the scarcely credible
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impetus behind the effect of authority pulled up in the closing words is located
within the discursive mechanics of psychoanalysis, and not merely in an historical

contingency of the psychoanalytic movement.
, la démesure qu’il y a entre l’autorité dont les femmes font effet. If an invitation is indeed
being extended to read this absence of measure between effect and purported or
apparent cause in reference to the discourse of the analyst, might it then be situ-
ated specifically on the lower level of the formalised scheme, where the analyst’s
knowledge (S2) is held in check and radically partitioned from the master signifier
(S1) that is the discursive product? This reading offers an unexpectedly dynamic
approach to the ascendency of feminine authority in analytic circles, even coalesc-
ing with the above remark from 1980 that the analytic discourse brings women the
‘jouissance that is properly phallic’ on consenting to devote their attentions to what
is elaborated in the unconscious, in relinquishment of spurious antiphallic drift. In
this tentatively offered extrapolation, the S1 that stands all alone as the product of
the discourse is the source of authority attaching to the person of the female ana-
lyst, and which she acquiesces to incarnate.
et le léger des solutions dont cet effet se produit. It is difficult to escape the sense of a
gently pressed insinuation in this passage directed at the various psychoanalytic
‘matriarchs’ – Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein – much rather than at
the comparatively limited, yet by no means negligible, institutional roles and influ-
ence of Horney and Deutsch after their respective relocations to the United States.
Melanie Klein in particular was often derided, even by her allies, for the dispar-
ity between the sway she commanded and her intellectual rigour, John Bowlby for
one claiming her to be ‘inspirational, the antithesis of what I aim to be’ (Interview
of 23 November 1981, quoted by Phyllis Grosskurth, 1985: 404n); Grosskurth
reports numerous further comments of like tenor (see especially ibid.: 406).
The léger that here predicates solutions cannot help but implicate its antonym
‘depth’ which was so insistently and intrusively bandied in qualification of their
interpretations by the circle around Klein in the 1940s that Edward Glover issued
a series of pleas for more scrupulous vocabulary-use, culminating in his charge that
the Kleinians had sought to
pre-empt the use of the word ‘deep’ implying thereby that other types of
interpretation were both superficial and therapeutically ineffective. Clearly
the arrogation of propriety rights, however effective as a political policy,
offends every canon of objectivity. It may intimidate an opponent but it does
not dispose of his point of view.
(Glover 1955: 280–281)
Meanwhile, the noun solutions itself strikes as mildly incongruous when restricted
to designating of analytic interventions and so is doubtless to be read as operat-
ing widely to tender a chemical metaphor of ‘light solutions’, thereby alluding to
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the watering down of Freudian doctrine into more palatable doses, dissolving it
beyond recognition.
Not for distribution *** * ***
Les fleurs me touchent. Clearly this remark is pitched as a preliminary to facilitate

allusion to ‘flowers of rhetoric’, yet in so doing the gardenist thematic from the
start of the second part of ‘L’étourdit’ is hereby extended beyond the specifically
Freudian reference. The author positions himself passively with respect to this sen-
sual receptivity, taking a courteous and conceivably gallant line of approach to his
object as though respecting the implicit ‘touch-me-not’ injunction of an Impatiens
noli-tangere. Perhaps also this is a repayment in kind of the ‘metaphors’ to which the
représentantes du sexe confined themselves (Lacan 1966: 728). A vulvic allusion can
hardly be doubted here, chiming too with Freud’s sweeping dream symbolism, still
being asserted in 1916 to seduce the Viennese audience of the Introductory Lectures:
‘Blossoms and flowers indicate women’s genitals, or, in particular, virginity. Do not
forget that blossoms are actually the genitals of plants’ (Lecture X, ‘Symbolism
in Dreams’, in [1916–1917] 1987: 192). Compare also Lacan’s passing remark in
Seminar XVII that woman plunges her roots, ‘like the flower, in jouissance itself ’
(Lesson of 11 February 1970 [1969–1970]).
, d’autant plus qu’elles sont de rhétorique. The Flores Rhetorici, also known, in three
of the four extant manuscripts, as the Dictaminum radii, is a treatise traditionally
230 A. R. Price
attributed to Alberic of the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino and dated to

1087 (an Englishing by Joseph M. Miller may be consulted [1973: 131–161]),
though this attribution has been more recently contested (by Florian Hartmann
[2014: 74]). Its lengthy discussion on the ‘Properties of a proemium’ is followed
by a consideration of the colores, under which are listed figures and tropes, fol-
lowed in turn by examples of ‘vices of diction’.
In the late fifteenth century there appeared the anthology of courtly poetry,
Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethoricque, compiled by an anonymous collator
known only as ‘l’infortuné’, made available in editio princeps by Antoine Vérard
in 1502. The thematic pairing of horticulture and ornamental rhetoric would
become a staple of Renaissance scholarship, as instanced in English most promi-
nently by Henry Peacham’s 1577 Garden of Eloquence, Conteyning the Figures of
Grammer and Rhetorick. Compare also Sidney in the first book of The Countesse
of Pembrokes Arcadia, where a crudely officious public speech is denounced
as ‘such a kinde of Rhetorike, as weeded out all flowers of Rhetorike’ (1593
composite edition, I.6; sig. B5v; 95). The term was still being employed, seem-
ingly with un-ironic intent, in the nineteenth century, notably in the title of
Ralph Sharp’s 1819 glossary, The Flowers of Rhetoric: The Graces of Eloquence and
the Charms of Oratory; Depicted by Men Celebrated for Their Taste, Genius, Diction,
and Erudition.
Lacan would almost certainly have been familiar with Jean Paulhan’s, Les fleurs
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de Tarbes ou la Terreur dans les Lettres, published in 1941 but collecting articles from
1936. The eponymous flowers are derived from the second chapter, rueing the

decline of rhetorical ornament in recent prose:
A sign at the entrance to the Tarbes public park reads as follows:
IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ENTER THE PARK CARRYING FLOWERS

The same sign can be found these days at the entrance to literature. How
nice it would be, though, to see the young girls of Tarbes (and young writers)
carrying a rose, a poppy, a bouquet of poppies.
([1941] 2006: 9)
‘L’étourdit’ here self-references its richly ornate style in direct contravention of

the prohibition lamented by Paulhan, while forewarning the reader of imminent
recourse to ‘rhetorical’ arguments in the material ahead.
dont Karen, Hélène. It is unlikely that Lacan was on first-name terms with either
Horney or Deutsch, and so these given names are to be taken as a rhetorical
shift of register into a more intimate societal setting. A further allusion to the
floral thematic may draw tentative support from the long attested borrowing of
women’s names from botanical nomenclature (Daisy, Erica, Hyacinth, Iris, etc.),
though neither Helen, Karen, nor their associated forms, carry any association in
this respect.
– laquelle n’importe, j’oublie maintenant. The offhand tone of this parenthesis stands in
curt contrast to the chivalrous register established in the opening words, descend-
ing even into a simulated attitude of caddish indifference. In this, the already highly
worked-up bivocation in the sketching of the theoretical positions finds expression
in a burst of emotive charge.
, car je n’aime pas de rouvrir mes séminaires – . In opening the lesson of 28 November
1956 from the fourth Seminar, Lacan informs his audience that he has been read-
ing a host of first- and second-generation analytic texts on female sexuality, and
from the second term onwards these can be seen informing his approach to frustra-
tion and privation (supra in ‘L’étourdit’) through the analysis of Freud’s texts ‘Über die
Psychogenese eines Falles von weiblicher Homosexualität’ and ‘Ein Kind wird geschlagen’.
Horney is mentioned by name in the lesson of 27 February 1957 (the mentions
in the Seuil edition of Horney on page 31 and pages 97–98, and of Deutsch on
page 31, are editor’s interpolations), and Lacan returns to consider the theme at
greater length the following year with mentions of both Horney and Deutsch in
the lessons of 12 and 19 March 1958.
dont donc Horney ou la Deutsch. The feigned testiness of the parenthesis now holds
sway over this resumption of the main clause, marked by the sprezzatura repetition
of dont. The given names are dispensed with, seemingly in favour of surnames, but
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why the definite article before Deutsch? Willy van Langendonck makes the fol-
lowing general remark on articles before personal names:
[I]n many article languages the definite article adopts an emotive function, at
least with personal names. Usually this function is of an augmentative nature.
In Dutch (Flemish) dialects the article de ‘the’ is used before men’s names
and sometimes before women’s names to express familiarity with respect to
the name bearer, e.g. de Jan ‘the John’, de Marie ‘the Mary’. In German, the
article has almost lost its expressivity with first names because of its frequency
in discourse (e.g. der Johann).
(§ 3.2.1 in 2007: 158)
This use is met also in Romance tongues, including French, but here the surname
is at issue, not the given name. The effect is more akin to an epithet, with a pos-
sible Germanic characterisation, but Helene Deutsch was of Polish nationality and
spent more time in Austria than Germany (medical studies in Munich and a year
in Berlin for analysis with Abraham). Could the text be playfully switching agno-
minations, with ‘la Deutsch’ designating the German-born Karen Horney, while
‘Horney’ functions as a macaronic pun on the English ‘horny’ to designate the
‘masochistic’ jouissance of Helene Deutsch? This interchange of names would thus
be in keeping with the carelessly brisk tone of one who is keen to move on from
past conquests.
232 A. R. Price
meublent le charmant doigtier. The earliest attested use of doitier (without g) is from the
Registre criminal du Châtelet, where it denotes a cylinder on which rings were slid
as a means of storage. By the late fifteenth century it was being used to describe a
piece of fabric or leather to envelop a finger (cf. Guillaume Tardif, Lart de faulcon-
nerie et deduyt des chiês de la chasse, Vol. I, 1492), and by the nineteenth century as
the brass thimble of a tailor or lace-maker, notably as employed in passementerie. In
contemporary use, it refers to the medical finger ‘-stall’, ‘-frock’ or ‘-cot’. Doigtier
is also one of the many common names in French for the flowering plant Digitalis
purpurea (along with ‘Gant-de-Notre-Dame’, ‘Gant-de-bergère’, ‘Gantelée’, ‘Gantière’
and ‘Gantillier’, which approximate the English nomenclature of ‘foxglove’ or
‘lady’s glove’).
The verb meubler is here used in the more general sense of ‘fill’, mainly as for pro-
vision or enrichment (cf. Montaigne, Essais, Book I, Chap. XXIV, ‘Du Pedantisme’:
‘De vray le soing & la despence de nos peres, ne vise qu’à nous meubler la teste de science’,
where meubler in the 1595 edition replaces garnir in the original 1588 edition).
French use of charmant aligns closely with its English cognate ‘charming’ to
encompass the signification of ‘likeable’, ‘affable’ ‘agreeable’, ‘admirable’, etc. and
also that of exerting a magical power that can fascinate or deceive. Ironic antiph-
rasis cannot be discounted here (cf. Flaubert’s letter of 28–29 June 1853 to Louise
Colet: ‘Depuis la fin de février, j’ai écrit cinquante-trois pages! Quel charmant métier!’
[1899: 255]) in the somewhat crude genital analogy.
Taylor and Francis
qui leur fait reserve d’eau. The doigtier is made to serve as a waterskin-type receptacle,

forcing yet further the vaginal metaphor with allusion to lubrication during arousal,
and possibly also extending the tentatively identified paronomasia on ‘horny’.
au corsage. This use of corsage seems closer to the English adoption of the word,
which abbreviates the French ‘bouquet de corsage’ where bouquet denotes the spray
of flowers and corsage the bosom of the blouse or corset to which it is appended.
Derived from corps, the term was formerly used to refer to the bust or the central
trunk of the body, especially a woman’s, or, with greater rarity, to the ‘body’ of a
fabric, in the sense of a full, consistent quality. The figuration here suggests a posy
inserted in a receptacle supplied with water for hydration.
tel qu’il s’apporte au dating. Modern tradition has it that a woman’s gentleman
‘date’ should present her parents with a bouquet of flowers from which a nosegay
is then selected and pinned to her dress front. The extended metaphor is thus
consummated by this phallic corsage ‘brought along’ by the gentleman squire, the
near homophony with ‘tel qu’il se porte . . . ’ hinting at the subsequent transition
from bestowal to adornment: the item the man comes bearing is reinvested to
become the woman’s bearing as such, thus effecting a re-arraying from his having
to her being the phallus, just as corsage itself finds once more its original bodily sig-
nification. Yet the ambiguous phallic status of corsage is not without reproducing
the strained phallicisation of female genitalia that Lacan mocks in the ‘Question
préliminaire’: the egalitarian principle of ‘to each their own’ whereby the boys have
their phalle and the girls have their c . . . (1966: 554; phalle is mentioned on page
214 of Pierre Le Loyer’s 1605 Discovrs, et histoires des spectres, visions et apparitions
des esprits, anges, démons, et âmes, se monstrans viſibles aux hommes, as ‘Et de Phalats
indubitablement viennent les Phalles, membres virils des hommes, que les Payens portoiét en
leur pompes, Proceſſions & feſtes ſolennelles’; and again on page 239 of the third tome
of the 1752 Dictionnaire de Trévoux, under the lemma PHALLE: ‘Selon Héſychius,
c’eſt ligneum virile’; Queneau fetched the term back into use in Les Enfants du limon
[1939: 36]: ‘ce qui lui évitait de détailler les phalles de messieurs et les mottes de dames,
que ni d’Adam ni d’Ève elle ne connaissait’, where the naturist vogue of the interwar
period is implicitly likened to the antique Phallogogia feasts).
On the oscillation between concealment and display with regard to the vagina,
consult Horney in ‘On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women’:
I further conjecture that the difference in the dress of men and women, at
least in our civilized races, may be traced to this very circumstance – that
the girl cannot exhibit her genital organs and that therefore in respect of her
exhibitionist tendencies she regresses to a stage at which this desire to display
herself still applied to her whole body. This puts us on the track of the reason
why a woman wears a low neck, while a man wears a dress coat.
Taylor and Francis (1924: 53)

, soit ce dont il semble qu’un rapport s’en attende. This attention to modern dating
ritual is reminiscent of Lacan’s contemporaneous appreciation of the singing jousts
between troupes of young men and young women described in Marcel Granet’s
Danses et légendes de la Chine ancienne (1926), or the rites and ceremonies surveyed
in Sexual Life in Ancient China by Robert Hans van Gulik (1961). Human courtship
seems wrought not to facilitate sexual relation as do mating rituals in the animal
realm, but to contrive its expectation. When Lacan refers to Granet’s descriptions
of ‘herd behaviour’ in terms of ‘ethology’, the appellation is puckish: there is no
biological programme; it is a matter of ‘materialising the universal’ by means of a
mirage (entretien of 3 March [1971–1972a]).
, ne serait-ce que de son dit. The concluding bivocity is operated by the preposi-
tion: since the en has already duplicated the dont – perhaps to effect a distribution
between the preliminaries to the date (the hopeful presentation of the corsage) and
the date itself – this de can bind son dit to rapport either as what is said thereof or as
what is said therein and thereby. The single-sentence paragraph thus returns to its
opening assertion: the corsage is a flower of rhetoric, sexual by dint of carrying
over to speech, not by essence.
*** ** ***
234 A. R. Price
Pour Jones, le biais de cervice. The importation of the Latin cervīce to condense ‘ser-
vice’ and ‘cervix’ from the close of the previous section is now enlisted to describe
Jones’ serviceable angle of approach to Freud.
(cf. dernière ligne avant le dernier intervalle). As an intratextual prompt, this reminder
is somewhat extraneous given how ‘L’étourdit’ has already postulated consistently
an engaged and assiduous reader not given to memory lapse, and may therefore
operate dually as a punning allusion to the anatomical position of the cervix, the
last line of passage before the ultimate cavity that is the uterus.
qu’il prend à qualifier la femme de la deutérophallicité, sic. Jones first coined the term
‘deutero-phallic’ in the afore-mentioned paper on ‘The Phallic Phase’ to label
what he hypothesises as a second phallic phase, noting that, ‘Freud would, I know,
apply the same term, “phallic phase”, to both, and so has not explicitly subdivided
them’. Nor did Freud do so implicitly. Jones lays out his hypothesis as follows:
The first of the two – let us call it the proto-phallic phase – would be marked
by innocence or ignorance – at least in consciousness – where there is no
conflict over the matter in question, it being confidently assumed by the
child that the rest of the world is built like itself and has a satisfactory male
organ – penis or clitoris, as the case may be. In the second or deutero-phallic
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phase there is a dawning suspicion that the world is divided into two classes:
not male and female in the proper sense, but penis-possessing and castrated

(though actually the two classifications overlap pretty closely). The deutero-
phallic phase would appear to be more neurotic than the proto-phallic – at
least in this particular context. For it is associated with anxiety, conflict, striv-
ing against what is felt to be reality – i.e., castration – and over-compensatory
emphasis on the narcissistic value of the penis on the boy’s side with a min-
gled hope and despair on the girl’s.
([1932] 1933/1948: 453–454)
In a footnote, Jones goes further in explaining how his hypothesis is a partial

integration of Freud’s position and that of Horney:
In agreement with Freud is the fundamental view that the passage from the
proto- to the deutero-phallic phase is due to fear of castration at the hands
of the father, and that this essentially arises in the Œdipus situation. Freud
would, I think, also hold that the feminine wishes behind so much of the
castration fear are generated as a means of dealing with the loved and dreaded
father: he would possibly lay more stress on the idea of libidinally placating
him, whereas I have directed more attention to the hostile and destructive
impulses behind the feminine attitude. On the other hand I cannot subscribe
to the view of sex ignorance on which Freud repeatedly insists (. . .) and I
regard the idea of the castrated mother as essentially a mother whose man
has been castrated. Nor do I consider the deutero-phallic phase as a natural

stage in development.
With Karen Horney there is agreement in her scepticism about sex igno-
rance, in her doubts about the normality of the (deutero-) phallic phase,
and in her opinion that the boy’s reaction to the Oedipus situation is greatly
influenced by his previous relation to his mother. But I think she is mistaken
in her account of the connection between these last two matters, and con-
sider that the boy’s fear of his feminine wishes (. . .) arise not in shame at his
literal masculine inferiority in his relation to his mother, but in the dangers of
his alimentary sadism when this operates in the Oedipus situation.
(Ibid.: 466–467)
The comment that the deutero-phallic phase is not a natural stage in development
is clarified in the conclusion to the paper:
the typical (deutero-) phallic phase is a perversion subserving, as do all per-

versions, the function of salvaging some possibility of libidinal gratification
until the time comes – if it ever comes – when fear of mutilation can be dealt
with and the temporarily renounced hereto-erotic development be once
more resumed. The inversion that acts as a defence against the fear depends
on the sadism that gave rise to the fear.
Taylor and Francis (Ibid.: 484)

Lacan’s claim here in ‘L’étourdit’ that Jones’ term qualifies the woman’s sexuality is
thus an extrapolation that diverges to a degree from Jones’ intention in ‘The Phallic
Phase’. A remark from Seminar X shows that this extrapolation was already present
in Lacan’s thinking in the 1960s:
The fundamental dissatisfaction that’s involved in the structure of desire

is, if I may say so, pre-castrative. If it comes about that she takes an inter-
est in castration as such, (– ϕ), it’s to the extent that she will venture into
men’s problems. It’s secondary. It’s deutero-phallic, as Jones quite rightly
put it.
(Lesson of 27 March [1962–1963])
This passage draws on Jones’ subsequent intervention on the topic, the momentous
‘Early Female Sexuality’ delivered in Vienna, which Lacan uses as the basis of his
remarks in the lesson of 12 March 1958 from Seminar V. In the Vienna interven-
tion, Jones invokes his earlier paper, though with focus shifted almost entirely on
to the girl:
You may remember the distinction I drew in my Wiesbaden paper between

the proto-phallic and the deutero-phallic phases, the separation between
them being marked by the conscious discovery of the sex difference.
236 A. R. Price
This discovery often results in envy and imitation, which are the main char-
acteristics of the deutero-phallic phase. One very important observation
about which there is general agreement is that the passing of this phase –
or rather the plainer evidence of femininity – is apt to be accompanied by
unmistakeable hostility and resentment against the mother. Freud in his
explanation has coupled these two events together not only chronologi-
cally but intrinsically.
([1935] 1948: 493)
So, the shift in focus of the deutero-phallic phase on to feminine sexuality dates
from 1935, but the unpicking and re-stitching of this purported ‘coupling’
dates from 1933.
Lacan’s coining of a nounal deutérophallicité – which strictly speaking can-
not be asserted as sic erat scriptum by Jones, who used exclusively the adjectival
‘deuterophallic’ – thereby integrates a pun on both the fallaciousness and the
felicity of Jones’ compromise position.
, soit à dire exactement le contraire de Freud, à savoir qu’elles n’ont rien à faire avec le phal-
lus. In ‘The Phallic Phase’, Jones leads his reader down the following garden path:
[W]hen I made the suggestion that the phallic phase in girls represents a
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secondary solution of conflict I was under the impression that by the phallic
phase was meant what I now see to be only the second half of it, a misappre-

hension Professor Freud corrected in recent correspondence; incidentally, his
condemnation of my suggestion was partly based on the same misunderstand-
ing, since on his part he naturally thought I was referring to the whole phase.
([1932] 1933/1948: 467)
Hence Lacan’s remark in his tribute paper to Jones that he sets himself to ‘le contre-
pied des positions prises par Freud sur la phase phallique par la seule voie d’affirmations
réitérées de s’y accorder entièrement’ [‘the wrong-footing of the positions taken by
Freud with respect to the phallic phase by the sole path of reiterated assertions of
being wholly in agreement with them’] (‘À la mémoire d’Ernest Jones; Sur sa théorie
du symbolisme’ in Lacan 1966: 703). Jones’ argumentation prepares the ground for
his claim two years later in Vienna:
[W]e regard the deutero-phallic phase as essentially a defence against the

already existing Œdipus complex. To us, therefore, the problem of why the
defensive phallic phase comes to an end puts itself quite differently, being
not altogether unlike the problem of why an infantile phobia ever disappears.
([1935] 1948: 494)
Lacan seizes on this as the essence of the Jonesian position on female sexuality.
By Jones’ reckoning, ‘the exit from the phallic phase has to be thought of as the
recovery from a phobia’ (Lesson of 12 March [1957–1958]). Thus, there is a reduc-

tion here whereby ‘the phallus can only intervene as the means and the pretext for
a kind of defence’, and so the phallic phase becomes ‘nothing but a pure detour
in an essentially instinctual cycle’ (ibid.). The remark here in ‘L’étourdit’ to the
effect that, according to Jones, women have nothing to do with the phallus, is to
be understood in the sense that they will come to know it only through a detour
taken in earnest, until they realise the error of their ways and conclude that such is
not their business after all, freeing them to heed ‘the promptings of an instinctual
constitution’ ([1935] 1948: 495).
, tout en ayant l’air de dire la même chose, à savoir qu’elles en passent par la castration.
Since Jones has turned the phallus into a means of defence for the girl, he cannot
read it as the signifier of castration, even though this is precisely what his argu-
ment ‘anticipates’ (Lacan 1966: 703). Indeed, the term ‘castration’ is strangely
absent from the Vienna address of 1935, and one struggles to deduce any theory
of the castration complex in women from Jones’ writings. In 1927, he claims
that the concept of ‘castration’ had ‘in some respects hindered’ any appreciation
of the woman’s fundamental conflicts, and proceeds to parry this, in his think-
ing, by the postulate of a threat of aphanisis, a ‘blow of total extinction’ striking
at ‘sexual capacity and enjoyment as a whole’ ([1927] 1948: 439–440). But in
respecting Freud’s dictum that the concept of castration should bear on the penis
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alone, he is led by the close of the paper to divorce aphanisis completely from
castration (ibid.: 450) ending up, as is his wont, with two distinct concepts appli-

cable to two distinct genders. Therefore, the claim in ‘L’étourdit’ that Jones sounds
like he is saying the same thing as Freud rests above all on what Jones passes
over in silence.
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13
A #METOO MOMENT IN
COMMUNIST POLAND
A short story
Agnieszka Piotrowska
When I look back at what has made me a woman, I remember so many episodes that
did not seem particularly important or significant at the time but with hindsight (psycho-
analytical ‘deferred effect’ Nachträglichkeit) they appear vital. Jacques Lacan reformulated
Sigmund Freud’s Nachträglichkeit as après coup, insisting that it is possible to change the
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meaning of a memory, through a shift of signifiers: the events remain but their traumatic
significance can be altered. In part, for me, this story represents just such a shift in signi-
fiers, as a schoolyard game incident becomes more than a trauma and retroactively emerges
as the site of ‘becoming woman’ in both a biological and a political sense. The scene offers
a vignette of teenagers working out what sexual difference might mean too, here against
the background of the very powerful and masculine Big Other: the totalitarian regime.
My friend Joanna and I liked running around the schoolyard during the so-called
‘running game’. The challenge was to outrun the boys. It seemed a healthy way to
spend our lunch hour but in fact it was a little more complex than it appeared. Still,
we were 12, about to turn 13 and the world was our oyster.
All schools in Poland in the 1970s were co-educational – for boys and girls. I
went to one of these too of course. On the whole it was a rather good establish-
ment. Our headmaster, Dr Jan Kowalski, was a communist of the old school: he
believed in the doctrine, which heralded equality of opportunities for all. At that
point we had only grimly realised that the version of communism offered to us
involved a fair amount of corruption and Soviet control.
We entered the school at age 6 or 7 and stayed there until 14 or 15 before
transferring to a school we were suitably gifted for – largely based on academic
results. It was a good system and education was indeed one of the regime’s indis-
putable successes. In due course, I was lucky to be allowed to go to a Lycée, a
school based on the French curriculum and very good academically. But that
is quite a different story and a different adventure. My primary school was an
242 Agnieszka Piotrowska
establishment with some academic and artistic aspirations and in healthy compe-
tition with another local school. I remember various incidents from these years
but nothing that compares to the fiasco of the so-called ‘running around’ game
that was popular among the middle schoolboys – the group between the ages of
11 and 12 or 13 at the most. After that both the boys and the girls usually found
more exciting things to do. It was an unfortunate tradition. At lunch break boys
would run around lifting girls’ skirts to see their knickers. The girls usually would
get away but not always. When I think about it today, some simple questions
spring to mind, for example, why did we girls continue with the game if we
disliked it? First, we did not dislike it to begin with. Second, we were all encour-
aged to be outside in the schoolyard during the spring and summer terms – part
of the communist ideology was to persuade us of the importance of a healthy
body, doing sports and exercise. It was important to be seen being physically
active and not just sit around and read, for example during the lunch break.
Education was important, yes, and easily available for ‘the masses’. On the other
hand, intellectual overstimulation was suspect, particularly when drawn from
Western traditions, which usually smelled of bourgeois ideas that might encour-
age individualism and, God forbid, independence of thought. Healthy body and
a well-educated mind were needed for the communist ideology to thrive, for the
state of the working class to be able to develop and for the comrades to grow at
the same pace, to share equally that which would be produced. That there was
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very little to be found in shops and that the only branch of activity truly thriving
was indeed cultural and intellectual pursuits and individual achievements of art-

ists who used satire to defy those in power were somehow uncomfortable truths
hidden in their work, and often not completely clear to the regime. The events
I am describing here took place in the late 1970s and perhaps could have taken
place in the 1950s or the 1980s, during the time of martial law, but then soon
after everything crumbled and changed and the new freedom with its own issues
turned up. I often wonder if the nostalgia some people feel for the times of com-
munism is the nostalgia for the knowledge that the profound lack of everything
for everybody was a shared fate of sorts.
In any event, as we were told to hang out in the schoolyard weather permit-
ting, the running game seemed as good a way to spend the lunch break as any. The
game though with time turned pretty unpleasant and physical: the boys would not
only lift our skirts but also touch – or attempt to touch – our private parts. This
game went on for years without anybody giving it much thought. I guess we all felt
it was just the way things were and we were very young. We never questioned the
rules of the game, and we were encouraged on the whole not to question any rules.
Nobody ever succeeded touching me up or my best friend Joanna – we could run
fast and laughed at the boys. The game did not feel dangerous. By the time of this
fateful afternoon I had grown quite tall and many boys in my year group were still
a lot shorter and smaller, but the game continued. We did hear some girls complain
at times but nobody paid any attention. It was just fun and good for you – the
running that is.
A #MeToo moment in communist Poland 243
And then all of a sudden things became different. One afternoon Joanna started
her period, without quite knowing what it was. I knew. My mother had told me
what was to come but it had not yet come for me. My mother was an educated
person with some regrets in her life but she did believe in making ‘the facts of
life’ clear early on. As soon as the class was over, Joanna pulled me into the school
restroom and whispered, ‘I think I might be dying: blood is pouring out of me’.
She looked horrified so I didn’t laugh. I explained basic things to her, trying to
calm her down and then added: ‘Don’t worry, just go into the cubicle and get
some toilet paper for now, there are only two lessons left and you will be home
soon’, and so she went to the toilet. When she got back she said she was wor-
ried about the game – we had a lunch break coming up straight after the maths
lesson. ‘What if the boys discover I am bleeding. Can you imagine?’ I remember
also being troubled at the prospect but thought we should be fine: we must run
fast so they must not know her secret. ‘We always outrun them,’ I said nervously,
‘so why not today? Nothing to worry about. Just run as usual. We will be fine.’
I sounded confident. I lied. I was scared. ‘What are we going to do if we don’t
outrun them today?’
It was the end of the summer term, so around June. The sun was shining. We
wore school uniforms of sorts but as it was warm we had bare legs and knickers, no
tights or other additional armour. ‘Not good,’ I thought.
The break began. The boys starting chasing us as usual. Joanna kept stopping,
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and whispering that she felt weak and looking at me in panic. ‘I can’t do it,’ she
said, ‘I am in some pain.’ ‘Oh no,’ I thought. ‘Run!’ I ordered her, and turned

around, shouting to the boys, still running away. ‘Hey guys, could you stop this?’
I said, ‘Joanna is not feeling well. OK?’ But they laughed and they wouldn’t stop –
they wanted their usual thrill of chasing the girls and lifting our skirts and touching
us, or imagining they were touching us. So we kept running. Any questions about
why we stayed in the yard instead of going into the building and explaining the
situation to the teachers, are useless here. The thought did not enter our minds
until much later in the game. We were indeed unconsciously interpellated by the
system and a small matter of the first period seemed too minor an inconvenience
to bother with. We were stuck, or committed.
For now it all was going well, despite Joanna’s paleness and her insistence on
whispering to me, which I found near paralysing as she filled me with fear, without
meaning to. ‘Stop whispering as this is slowing us down,’ I thought, but kept quiet.
This time she raised her voice so I could hear her: ‘I am scared that if I run about
the usual way, the toilet paper will drop out or something. And then they will see
and THEY WILL KNOW.’ This worried me too. In my mind’s eye I imagined
the disgrace of it all, with a piece of rough cheap communist toilet paper suddenly
falling out of my friend’s knickers, the prospect of a bloody tissue right there in
front of these boys made me feel nauseous. I tried to muster strength: ‘Don’t be
silly,’ I whispered back, panting and running on, ‘you must just run as usual.’ We
got away from the boys temporarily. ‘I am so tired,’ Joanna said and started crying.
Only then did I realise we were in big trouble, she could not run as fast as usual.
We had had it. I thought maybe we could run back to the school toilet. ‘Ok, we
will have to run for the school building,’ I shouted to her and turned back sharply.
We swerved to the nearest outbuilding but the school door was blocked by a group
of older boys, who laughed at us menacingly. We knew this was no good. We kept
running. The game continued, I felt short of breath, everybody kept at it, the boys
chasing the girls, as they do, no doubt good naturedly, laughing and joking. We
were petrified. I looked at my watch, a fancy present from my very important and
very handsome grandfather who was also an influential Communist Party member.
Time for once was going slowly, too slowly. Fifteen minutes to go. I myself had to
slow down, feeling a sudden wave of tiredness, looking at pale Joanna, with sweat
pouring down her forehead. ‘Shit,’ I thought. Fifteen minutes was too long. We
slowed down.
Then it all exploded. One of our male classmates, Jasiu, caught up with us and
pulled Joanna towards him in a gesture, which was unusually harsh and deter-
mined. She panicked and tore herself away, tripping over and falling to the ground.
He still went after her and then did touch her knickers – her private parts, this time
the panties hiding also the ugly bloody toilet tissue. Joanna yelled like I have never
heard her yell before or since. The paper did not fall out, which she was grateful
for and that I still worried about even at that moment. Jasiu yelled too but carried
on trying to touch her at which point she became near hysterical and pushed him
away, screaming her head off. ‘Stop it!’ I yelled at him and he turned to me, laugh-
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ing, looking suddenly unfamiliar, sweaty and alien, not my old schoolfirend again,
but suddenly a boy attacking me. He grabbed me. He lifted my dress, touching me

too and then trying to touch me again, with the others boys being very near, ready
to join him. I pulled away and tripped and fell on the ground too. Meawnhile
Joanna was up on her feet again, screaming ‘Nooo! Leave her in peace!’ as I was
lying there with another boy putting his hand right on my crotch. Everybody
turned their attention to me now so Joanna tried to pull them away but they just
pushed her away. We were in new territory, as this had never happened to us
before. ‘I am getting help!’ Joanna yelled and ran off towards the school. I felt an
overwhelming sense of fury coming over me, which was a novel experience too.
‘This will not go on,’ I thought as I gathered all my strength. This really was like
in a movie. I said a quick prayer to my guardian angel just asking to be physically
strong, no metaphors.
I was still on the ground but I kicked the boy who attacked me hard and
jumped up. He fell back. It was then the original attacker, Jasiu, who pulled my
skirt up again and I could feel his clammy hand right through my cotton knickers
on the skin of my outer vagina.
It was not a moment of any great epiphany, but rather a primordial instinctual
moment of self-defence and anger, and a rage that I can barely begin to describe
even now, at his unspoken sense of entitlement that somehow it was OK that they
did this to us, that we were expected to put up with this humiliation, that we had
done so for years, and in one way or another would do for years to come. But I
had grown bigger than these boys without anybody noticing and I was not going
to let them touch me this way, my guardian angel’s help notwithstanding. My rage
propelled me forward.
I pulled his hair with one hand and hit his face with the other, hard. ‘You will
not forget this, my boy,’ I hissed like a snake. ‘And you will never touch me or
any other girl in this schoolyard again this way and if you do, I will kill you.’ I
hit him again. He fell on the ground, yelling and at that moment exactly Joanna
turned up with a teacher, Mrs Kolorowa. Jasiu, the boy I had just hit, was crying
his eyes out – he was a good head shorter than me, but was standing up already
and pointing at me accusingly. I could see the headmaster, Professor Kowalski,
running towards us too. Mrs Kolorowa looked pale and started repeating rather
nonsensically and waving her hands around, ‘Please will you all calm down. Please
calm down.’ I cried. At this point exactly the headmaster caught up with us. I
could see he was not happy.
‘Pawlikowska,’ he said to me ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ Jasiu was
sobbing so badly he could hardly speak. I couldn’t speak either. Joanna yelled:
‘He attacked us. He touched our . . . things!’ Jasiu kept crying and screaming. The
headmaster was shaking his head. The school nurse turned up out of the blue too,
putting a cold compress on Jasiu’s forehead. He was sobbing. Joanna looked like
she was going to faint. I still wondered whether she had time to run to the loo and
change the make-do sanitary pad. At that point Jasiu and his friends pointed at me
and yelled some more or rather, blurted out between the gasps for air: ‘They are
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lying, they attacked us and she (pointing at me) kicked Marek and then hit Jasiu.
Twice.’ ‘This is a complete lie!’ Joanna yelled. The headmaster looked pale and

furious. ‘Will everybody now please stop yelling? And crying.’ He did give Jasiu
and his friends a cold look. Then he turned his attention to me. ‘Did you do this
indeed, Pawlikowska? Speak.’
I shook my head in defiance. Jasiu made a dreadful face and yelled again, ‘She
did!!! She kicked Marek, and she hit me. I am in great pain! I am allergic to any
painkillers so this means I will be in this pain forever!’ Mrs Kolorowa and the
headmaster gasped. ‘I am sure the pain will subside directly,’ the headmaster said
nervously. The nurse continued with the cold compress. I started crying now.
‘Instead of these ridiculous tears, some kind of explanation would be appropriate,’
said the headmaster, looking at me disapprovingly. I said nothing, and shook my
head crying again, hot tears running down my flushed cheeks, and feeling confused
and angry still. Joanna said nervously, ‘This was self-defence. They attacked us!’
The headmaster raised his hand.
Silence! I am not interested any more in these stories. I see in front of me

a boy in some distress who claims a girl assaulted two boys. This is a most
irregular occurrence for a girl to behave this way. You should be ashamed of
yourself, Pawlikowska. A very nasty conduct. Apologise immediately. Now.
Joanna tried to explain the situation again but he wouldn’t listen and told her to go
back to class – but she hovered, quietly. The headmaster was unfortunately into his
pedagogical drive, using a deep tone of authority, which he had learnt from televi-
sion broadcasts of the Party officials giving their speeches. A small crowd gathered
around us. Jasiu was still sobbing but I stopped.
‘Comrade Kolorowa,’ the headmaster said grimly and Mrs Kolorowa shud-
dered. ‘Is this girl one of your form pupils? Kolorowa nodded. ‘This behaviour is
utterly unacceptable. For anybody. But for a girl this is – well, monstrous. I have
no words.’ He looked at Kolorowa sternly. ‘Well?’ Kolorowa clearly had no words
either as she just gasped again, looked at me and shook her head. ‘This situation
is unbearable,’ he said again. Meanwhile, I blew my nose, wiped my tears and felt
better. I did not feel bad about hitting Jasiu and I knew it was no big deal and that
he was using the situation to evoke the greatest possible sympathy for himself and
provoke the greatest possible punishment for me. I was quietly pleased with myself
that I had made my point, and felt curiously elated, perhaps not quite appreciating
the gravity of my situation. The headmaster looked at me with disgust, ‘This situ-
ation is truly unbearable,’ he repeated. I thought to myself, ‘The headmaster really
is given to a profound exaggeration – it is not that unbearable. What was unbear-
able was that these boys were running about touching our vaginas – for years. And
nobody did anything about it.’ I may not have quite thought it this way as I was
12, but the general feeling was there. I continued to stare at the boys and at our
teachers. ‘Comrade Kolorowa,’ the headmaster repeated sternly, ‘would you like
to . . . well, discipline Pawlikowska? What will be your pastoral guidance here
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please?’ Despite still feeling angry and scared, I almost burst out laughing: ‘pastoral
guidance my ass,’ I thought. Kolorowa was a hopeless teacher, she did not know

her subject, which was supposedly geography, and was said to have got the job
only because her husband was some kind of minor Party apparatchik who knew
Kowalski. She was continuing her studies with evening classes, and had a small
child at home who her mother was helping her with. She appeared to hate her job,
and us. Maybe she was just unhappy. She probably worked to supplement the fam-
ily’s meagre finances or perhaps because she would rather hang out at our school
than at the small flat on one of these grey communist estates that were heralded as
a great success at the time but now remain as a monument to a failed dream. This
is where she lived, we knew it because a fellow pupil in our class walked with her,
with a screaming kid and a mousy husband who somehow managed to be in a
relatively good job, despite his utter lack of any discernible talent, except, that is,
his moderate scheming ability which got him the Party job. We all knew she was
exhausted with life and did not have a clue how to teach anybody anything, never
mind give ‘pastoral guidance’. She looked at me in exasperation and said: ‘It is true
that this is not very becoming behaviour for a young lady.’ The crowd collapsed
in laughter. The headmaster looked in desperation at Kolorowa and then at us. He
cleared his throat nervously. ‘Pawlikowska, you must not laugh here.’ I wasn’t.
‘We are young socialists here, that is you are,’ he cleared his throat again, ‘so per-
haps not so much a young lady but a young socialist! A young socialist girl! Yes.
Are you a member of the scouts? I am sure you are. Did they not teach you respect
for your fellow colleagues?’ I nodded. Kowalski smiled triumphantly and looked at
Kolorowa with a smirk on his face: he sometimes despaired over his teachers’ lack
of pedagogical talent. He praised himself on always being able to get through to a
pupil. ‘Sooner or later a breakthrough takes place. You must have the strength of
conviction,’ he would say to his team, ‘and then the student will listen to you.’ I
re-gained my power to speak:
But . . . Professor Kowalski . . . The boys were chasing us . . . and Jasiu

touched my vagina . . . like really touched it . . . I had to do something.
Young comrades are not meant to touch the girls this way I am pretty sure.
Everybody giggled. Kowalski went paler still if it were possible. Kolorowa started
coughing nervously and I knew things were not going well.
Joanna handed me a piece of toilet tissue, which she clearly must have kept on
her because of her menstruation. Professor Kowalski looked at us with an expres-
sion of disbelief and horror.
Pawlikowska, I am not interested in your shameful excuses. Your language

speaks for itself, if I may say so. What on earth are you saying here? You
must apologise to Jasiu and your other friends and colleagues immediately.
Even if something untoward happened, which I do not believe for one sec-
ond, then there are other channels for dealing with the matter.
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He coughed again. ‘Did it not cross your mind for example to seek a teacher,

to discuss the issue, to negotiate?’ I went bright red again but a curious calm
came over me. We looked at each other, the headmaster and I, this big man of
about 50 and me, a month before my thirteenth birthday. I wiped my tears and
thought to myself, ‘Is this what it feels to become a grown up?’ I took a deep
breath and said calmly and quietly, looking right at him: ‘Negotiate? I was lying
on the ground, being assaulted. No time to negotiate. I kicked the attacker in self-
defence.’ Everybody laughed again, but this time it felt like they may have laughed
at him, not me. Kowalski went grey. I saw small pearls of sweat on his forehead.
He coughed. I could see I was in deep trouble.
Enough. Pawlikowska, Enough. In your infantile desire to attract attention

to yourself, you overstepped the mark. Now you need to apologise profusely
and straight away – to Jasiu, to your colleagues, to Joanna, to me and com-
rade Kolorowa. Is that clear?
He raised his voice. He yelled. The crowd around us stopped laughing. I felt frozen
but knew already that I would not be apologising. Joanna looked at me in despera-
tion. ‘Apologise,’ she whispered.
‘I am listening,’ the headmaster said, looking at me in disgust, with the boy
Jasiu still crying and holding his red cheek, which I was sure was a totally unneces-
sary theatrical gesture on his part and somehow infuriated me further then and is
still enraging me now as I remember it. ‘Apologise immediately,’ the headmaster

repeated. Everybody looked at me. I raised my head in a defiant gesture, looked
him in the eye and shook it very slowly, which perhaps wasn’t really necessary. I
said nothing and met his eyes, and held his steely gaze well, despite now shaking
all over. At last I said quietly but firmly: ‘No.’
The silence became even deeper. The headmaster cleared his throat again and
said in an ice cold voice, softly at first but then raising his voice yet again as he went:
You will apologise. Mark my words. And if you don’t – let me be abso-
lutely clear – you will not be able to attend this school again – or perhaps
any school. Not now, not ever. Do you understand???! I will make it my
business. You will be expelled. You cannot behave this way and get away
with it.
He really yelled. ‘Apologise! Now!’ He got very close to me, too close, his large
body overpowering. I could smell his sweat and it made me nauseous again. I took
a small step back. Nobody was laughing any more. The silence was such that we
could have heard a pin drop.
I did not apologise. I shook my head again. Joanna grabbed my hand. Kowalski
looked at us all and took a deep breath, and looked at me. He then said firmly but
quietly: ‘Everybody goes back to class now. Except Antonia Pawlikowska. You go
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home. Your parents will be informed.’
And so I was suspended and sent home.

My mother was there, reading. She took one look at her watch and at me
and said, ‘So why are you home early?’ And so I told her, ‘I am not going back
there. I will never apologise and the headmaster said that if I didn’t I would never
be allowed in the school again.’ I sobbed. I liked my school – except for being
scared that I might be touched up at lunch breaks. Other than that, it was a great
school – or so we thought. My life clearly was in ruins.
My mother looked pale. Very unusually she put her book aside. ‘OK then,’
she said, ‘tell me what happened exactly.’ And so I did. About the game of run-
ning and touching, about my friend Joanna, about us not being able to outrun
the boys this time because of her period, about getting flustered because she fell.
Everything. I started crying. As I was telling these stories I realised the look on my
mother’s face changed. She looked angry too. ‘Are you OK?’ I said nervously. She
seemed to have tears in her eyes. She tried to control herself. I could see that. She
breathed more quickly though and I could see she wanted to gather her thoughts.
‘Go to your room,’ she said at last, ‘and do your homework.’ I sobbed louder. ‘I
don’t know what the homework is because I was sent home early.’ ‘Read a book
then,’ she said, ‘and stay in your room.’ ‘I am not apologising,’ I said. She looked at
me – it was such a strange look. ‘Please go to your room and read and try to calm
down.’ She took a deep breath. She did not hug me and I stood looking at her, not
a teenager yet, so small really and so stubborn. At last she stood up and embraced
me, and hugged me hard. ‘It will be Ok,’ she said.
As I sat in my room trying to read, I could hear the phone ring and I knew
it was the school. I couldn’t make out what my mother was saying exactly but it
was not a long conversation. Then I could hear her speak to my father on the
phone too but again I could not hear what she was saying. The conversation
was longer and she appeared more agitated. She then made another phone call
and it was not clear who it might have been to, and what was being said as she
whispered most of the time. Now I think she must have called her father, and
my grandfather, a very powerful man, high up in the regional Party and the
mayor of Gdynia. An hour later Joanna called me and said, ‘Apologise to Jasiu.
Say sorry to the headmaster and Kolorowa. What the hell. Come back to school.
It was all my fault anyway. It is not worth it. Apologise and be done with it.’ I
whispered not wanting to create a further disturbance with my mother. ‘I am not
apologising to Jasiu or the headmaster. And if Jasiu does it again, or anybody, I
will hit them all again. I have had enough. We are done with that game, you and
I.’ Joanna started singing to cheer me up – this was the kind of thing she would
do, this is why we were so close, she was funny and creative but this time she
was wrong. She still carried on, ‘Yeah great, I get it. But what will happen if they
don’t let you come back to school? Didn’t he say “any school”?’ she whispered.
I had no idea what would happen then but tried to sound defiant. ‘I will study
myself. At home.’ I said, swallowing my tears. Joanna screamed at the other end
of the phone. ‘Oh no, no,’ Joanna wailed, ‘it is all my fault.’ ‘Don’t be ridicu-
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lous,’ I stopped her,

We put up with this shit long enough. Now we are bigger than them and we
don’t have to run like this anymore. Obviously it is not good to hit people,
it is also not good to let some cretinous boys touch you, right? This is stupid.
We talk soon.
I put the phone down. But the truth was I was truly petrified, and lost.
At supper nobody said anything and I couldn’t eat much. After I went to bed,
I could hear my parents having a heated discussion. I couldn’t make out most of
it – but I did hear my father say, ‘Physical violence, even as a response, is never a
way forward and you do know that. She should apologise.’ I shuddered. I heard
my mother answering quietly and then they switched on the telly, which was
a gift from my grandfather, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying – if any-
thing. Then I heard my mother make another phone call. She talked at length
this time.
I cried myself to sleep. I had nightmares featuring the ‘running around’ game,
which I was losing and my friend Joanna’s menstrual blood was flowing all over the
schoolyard. I woke up. I then was lying for hours looking at the flickering light on
the ceiling and wondering what jobs I could do in life without getting any educa-
tion. I fell asleep about six o’clock but an hour later my mother woke me up and
got me up as usual. ‘Get up and have some breakfast and then we go. To school.’
‘But I haven’t apologised to the boy. And I can’t. Don’t make me don’t make me.’
I started sobbing again. My mother looked at me – a hard and determined look

and a look full of love that I will remember all my life. She smiled her beautiful
dazzling smile and said,
Stop this nonsense now, go clean your face and put some clothes on. You
are not apologising to the boy. No way are you apologising to any boys.
In future, do not get involved in stupid games that you cannot possibly
win, promise?
I nodded quickly and said, ‘I am so sorry.’ And cried again a little. She wiped my
face, and sent me to the bathroom. ‘Let’s go to school. You need to pull yourself
together,’ she said calmly, ‘we must not be late.’ And so we went.
The school was a ten-minute walk during which we said nothing to each other.
I was fearful of the headmaster. I wonder what my mother was thinking about.
Perhaps about her own life and how her father and my grandfather got her exam-
ined by a gynaecologist when she was 15 to see whether she was still a virgin or
not. Or maybe she was thinking about her love affair with my father, 25 years her
senior and a professor at the university she was studying at, who then did do the
right thing and married her when she got pregnant. Or perhaps she was wonder-
ing how her political faith in communism was betrayed by Stalin, and then by
Gomulka, and how she lost the inner strength to believe that anything could be
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truthful and that any meaningful transformation of this political system was ever
possible. Maybe she was thinking about her unfulfilled promise of a successful

academic career, as she dropped out of her studies after she got pregnant with me.
Perhaps she was thinking about how my father had to leave his position at the
university because he wouldn’t join the Party. We said nothing.
When we arrived at the school, my mother sat me down in the hall and told me
to wait while she went to talk to the headmaster. I do not know what happened
during this meeting. Later I asked her what was said and at the time she said very
little, but years later she said the headmaster laughed and told her to take me back
home until I apologised to the boy. My mother apparently did not call my father,
as perhaps she was not completely confident he would support her, but instead,
she called my grandfather, the aforementioned patriarch of the family, who was
also a despot controlling her every move as a child and a teenager. When I grew
older, it became clear to me that it was a gesture of defiance against him, and love
too, which got her into trouble with her professor and my father. At the time I
knew nothing of any of it. Years later she did tell me it was my grandfather who
demanded that I was reinstated at the school immediately. He was the mayor of
our town and a high-ranking Party member and the headmaster just folded, he had
no choice. I believe he might have been repaying a favour that they both knew he
owed her – perhaps, in connection with the infamous gynaecological examination
but also perhaps, more significantly, regarding the lack of support she had from
her parents when she got pregnant. I did not know any of this as I sat on the hard
bench in the hall, feeling sudden cramps in my lower stomach. ‘Oh no not me
now,’ I thought, and ran to the bathroom, the very same bathroom that Joanna
used only yesterday, when she got her first period. I used the rough cramped toiled
paper she used too as a temporary sanitary towel, with blood pouring out of me.
I have no way of knowing what really happened during that meeting between
the headmaster and my mother, but it seemed to have taken forever. I never
learnt whether the running around game was discussed too during this confer-
ence but I do know that the game stopped completely for the remainder of my
time at that school.
After the longest time, my mother and the headmaster emerged together and
the headmaster just said to me, ‘Go back to your class Pawlikowska and try not
to beat the boys up in future please.’ He looked somewhat embarrassed but
not very – a man in his position in totalitarian Poland would have been very used
to eating humble pie of many sorts. I smiled slightly, ‘Professor Kowalski, thank
you. I am sorry I didn’t find a better way of negotiating this situation. I will try
harder in future.’ I said, and almost meant it. Kowalski just waved me on, shak-
ing his head, and as I took my bag and marched on to the classroom, my mother
smiled at me – the biggest sunniest smile you have ever seen. She winked at me
too, and I knew that she was proud of me in a curious way. And not until years
later, did I reflect that she still had to call upon a powerful man to save me – but
I didn’t care then, and I care even less now because the most important thing
in the world was that my strong-mindedness or stubbornness was not broken at
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its inception right there and then, as a response to an incident that should never
have happened. I know now how very close I was to losing any beginnings of

any understanding of who I was or who I was trying to be. I made a choice but
in truth it was not only my choice to make: I was but a kid after all, and I wanted
to do well at school and I wanted for my parents to love me and be proud of me.
A simple insistence on their part would have made me apologise, of that there is
little doubt. That I did not have to do it, was a blessing indeed.
My mother was not a perfect parent. She was deeply unhappy, sometimes
neglectful, at times too demanding, always preoccupied with her own despair. But
the memory of that one moment wipes out everything else. She was there for me,
fighting for my right to be stubborn and strong-minded against these boys, against
the systems that somehow always worked better for the men, however much they
were bad for everybody. That very moment defined her, and me and our relation-
ship, or at least, after years in psychoanalysis this is what I choose to see it as.
14
“VULNERABILITIES”
Pia Hylén
Feeling disintegrating –
slowly dissolving into something
which lacks substance
and reference – other than of course that of overflowing
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into nothingness
with no restrains

no borders no limits
no containing
no retaining
even the air gives way
more than usual
encouraging the abandonment
of that which
no longer has the power to keep its center
de-centriefying
sometimes
when you try to catch it
this de-centrification
it centrifies
and evaporates
sur le champs
“Vulnerabilities” 253
My Vulnerabilities are
when I am not firm
when I let myself
be wrong through the wringer
and loose the tread
diffuse
an entropic endeavor?
if Lucien Freud thinks I’m clever
I can never
reach the firmament
of vulneraaaa . . . a . . . . a . . . . a
so ethereal
that the abilities
diffuses
You can keep paddling

but if you don’t let go
you get ambushed
in the unforgiving cleverness
that
nevertheless
smothers
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& never forgives

your fake ambition
at the detriment
of true
vulnerabilities
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FIGURE 14.1 “Ravage” (2010). Drawing by the author. Encre de Chine on paper
(30 × 40 cm).

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FEMININITY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

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Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award-winning film-maker and theorist, best

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Edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska

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Taylor and Francis

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3 Growing up girl in the ’hood: vulnerability, violence

4 Revisiting Joan Riviere 66

5 Supplementary jouissance and feminine sexual rapport [1995] 78

6 Self-recreation through the uncanny encounter: reading

7 River’s edge: the ebb and flow of feminine ex-sistence 122

8 Under Her Skin: on Woman without body and body

9 Desire, commitment and the transformative power

10 AnnaMarilyn: queer tales of femininity 177

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12 A specimen of a commentary on Lacan’s ‘L’étourdit’ 217

13 A #MeToo moment in communist Poland: a short story 241

Caroline Bainbridge is Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis at Roehampton

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(vol. 1, 2011); ‘The Ventriloquism of Documentary First-Person Speech and the

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This collection emerges out of two symposia organised by the Psychoanalysis in

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We are proud to present this volume on Femininity and Psychoanalysis. It is an

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Applying Ettinger’s theories of sexual difference to the cinema, Chapter 6 by

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Monroe’s bisexual/lesbian “tendencies”. In “Tiresias: Bracha L. Ettinger and the

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uninterpretability Freud writes of, and the insufficiency of knowledge he laments.

These attempts at a logical formalization of Freud are not merely descrip-

Taking up again the question of our psychical relation to sexual difference, to

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the analysand’s unconscious reveals a fragmented subject of shifting and

The account of femininity in both Freud and Lacan is of a construction, not as an

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there is no chance for a man to have jouissance of a woman’s body, otherwise

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there is no jouissance of the Other as such, no guarantee to be met with in

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In point of fact a woman is no more an objet a than is a man – as I said earlier,

As a result, Chiesa argues,

This undecidable – concerning fundamentally whether woman is or is not

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it is in the symptom that we identify what is produced in the field of the

as in the conversion symptoms of paralysis, blindness, etc. in war neurosis that

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In Seminar XXIII it is now the symptom-as-sinthome that achieves the knot-