The Lacanian Review
#13 | 2022
The Woman
Paper edition
Summary
The fact that bodies encounter two signifiers, man and woman, is problematic for speaking beings. Now the backdrop of inexorable culture wars, feminism turned inside out, and renewed movements that give voice to the experience of women necessitate another look at the infamous words of Jacques Lacan: The Woman Does Not Exist. This saying was built from a logical investigation in psychoanalysis that began with Freud’s observation that there was no inscription of woman in the unconscious. It opened a clinical paradigm oriented by the logic of the “not-all”—a way to work beyond the binary and without reference to universal categories. It is difficult to handle Lacan’s formulation without understanding feminine and masculine as structural positions—modalities of jouissance—that have no essential basis in anatomy or gender. But before jumping to conclusions that do not exist, it is best to listen and to read.
The 13th volume of The Lacanian Review examines the word woman in psychoanalysis today. We started by writing The with a bar through it to indicate the infinite possibilities for invention and contingency when a signifier as universal index fails to capture all of one's experience. In this issue, readers will find a new bilingual translation of Lacan’s writing on Marguerite Duras, Jacques-Alain Miller’s text “Of Women and Semblants,” an interview with curator Lynne Cooke on 20th century women artists working with textiles and abstraction, and a collection of new work from the World Association of Psychoanalysis responding to The Woman Does Not Exist. Non-existence develops an orientation, one useful for working with art, psychoanalysis, politics, and other fields that contend with what Lacan named the real.
CONTENTS
Editorial
- Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff, She
Ravishment<
- Jacques Lacan, Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du ravissement de Lol V. Stein
- Jacques Lacan, Homage Done to Marguerite Duras, for the Ravishment of Lol V. Stein
- Marcus André Vieira, Love and Ravage
Psychoanalysis and the Feminine Position
Jacques-Alain Miller, Des femmes et des semblants
Jacques-Alain Miller, Of Women and Semblants
Masks and Inventions
- Christiane Alberti, Introduction to “The Woman Does Not Exist”
- Dominique Laurent, The Push-to-the-Woman
- Ana Viganó, A Frida Solution: Writing with the Eyes
Third Thread<
- Lynne Cooke and Robert Buck, A Conversation: Of Her Own Making
She?
- Roger Litten, Bodies Captured by Discourse
- Zoe Strimpel, The Word “Woman”
- Raquel Cors, A Hole That Allows Breathing
- Éric Laurent, Laughing at Norms
Untranslatable
- Clémentine Bernard, Courtly Love
- Sarah Birgani, Poetic of the Feminine
- Norbert Leber, Die Unerkennung
- Marie-Hélène Brousse, A Barre Over the Discourse of Psychoanalysis
The Feminist Does Not Exist
- Deborah Gutermann-Jacquet, Body, The Return
- Philip Dravers, The Witches of Macbeth
Covers
