“Repetition and the Real of Other Jouissance, Encore…”

Cristina Rose Laurita

For Lacan, “Woman cannot be said.”1 Come again?

The paradox: attempts to speak of the feminine will encounter a point of impossibility, a real “dit-mension.” How does the real as the impossible, which repeats via the “doesn’t stop not being written,”2 relate to the Woman that doesn’t exist and Other jouissance?

Subjects on the right-hand side of Lacan’s sexuation table are divided, having access to phallic and Other jouissance. Since feminine jouissance cannot be fully inscribed in the symbolic, her relation to Other jouissance positions her closer to the real.

For Lacan, the real is always traumatic in that it involves a hole, hence his neologism troumatisme. Repetition includes a hole, as that which resists symbolization. What escapes the phallic limit produces an excess which drives repetition.

In “The Third,” Lacan states: “There is no hope of reaching the real through representation”3 and that representation is “completely separate from”4 Other jouissance, which is outside the symbolic. S(Ⱥ) in feminine sexuation indicates that there is no signifier that could adequately describe or create a closed set of women; instead, they must be taken in their singularity, one by one. No knowledge or signifier could fully encapsulate feminine jouissance. There is a hole, a real that cannot be said or represented. Repetition may encircle but will forever miss that which eludes representation.

One of my analysands enjoyed “dirty stories” online (no images or videos, just the written word). It was phallic jouissance—on the side of the signifier, stories, and meaning. Her analysis produced a shift in her jouissance, and they suddenly ceased to turn her on. She instead became fascinated by lesbian pornography, watching the videos over and over again, “as if trying to solve an unsolvable mystery,” she said. What captivated her was something very specific: the faces of the women in the moment of reaching orgasm. She said it was beautiful, like art or poetry. This is the real of orgasm, the mystery of femininity, and the real of the feminine position. Other jouissance, encore... She also paints, through abstract (non-representational) watercolor art, that which she cannot express in words—her relation to her own femininity. Beyond the semblants of mother and wife, a contingent encounter with Woman that doesn’t exist, about which one cannot say much. A real that can best be encircled, as in art or poetry.

References

1 Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore (1972-1973), ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink. (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 81.

2 Ibid, p. 94.

3 Lacan J., “The Third,” The Lacanian Review 7, 2019, p. 90.

4 Ibid, p. 106.