Beyond Gender by Verhaeghe Paul

Author:Verhaeghe, Paul [Verhaeghe, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

The subject of the body?

Ever since Plato we have been acquainted with the division between psyche and soma , between body and soul. Time and again, this division has insisted in the West. It formed the basis for the split between religion and science, and later on, within science itself, between science and the social sciences. Not only did every attempt to bridge or neutralise this original gap with a holistic approach turn out to be a failure, but these attempts even confirmed the gap as such. Just think of psyche - soma - tics .

A first, widely-accepted reading of Lacan reads the body as a mere effect of the Symbolic. The body is ascribed to us and signified for us by the Other. The body is a signified, which means that it is an imaginarised body whose awareness and “self-”consciousness only come about by means of the mirror stage. This consciousness is always a false, alienated, and unoriginal one, because it is one granted by the Other. The relationship between the Ideal Ego and the Ego Ideal through the gaze of the Other is taken up again through the word of the Other, and installs an ever increasing distance between the subject and itself; that is, it installs an ever present inner division.

If we study Lacan’s entire work, we find a more complex relationship between the subject and the body, one that differs from the classical opposition between psyche and soma. The Lacanian opposition is between the I and the body as an organism, and this leads to an opposition between the divided subject and the sexualised, that is, phallicized body.

(divided) subject versus organism

versus

phallic body

This double opposition contains a mutual determination: the one causes the other, which in its turn determines the first one. The ground of this is the drive, and — in view of its double structure — this ground occurs twice. Lacan repeatedly refers to this double structure when he deals with the topological homology between the unconscious, the drive, and the subject. 93 In each case, there is a topological border structure, along with an opening and closing movement in which something gets lost. The fact that it is “double” means that we have to meet with the three main characters twice: the drive, the unconscious, and the subject … twice. Compared to the classical psyche-soma division, what we have here is an epistemo-somatic gap, 94 since it subverts our thinking about causality and science. 95

I consider drive (1) to be the primal drive, the life and death drive, at the border between eternal life, Zoë , and individual life, Bios . The accompanying primal unconscious is Freud’s kernel or nucleus of our being that can never be represented, but remains isolated through a process of fixation, a staying behind — what he called primal repression. This Freudian kernel is Lacan’s Real of the drive, the object a . The first alienating subjectivation takes place within the mirror stage as a response to this. As

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