The Feminine
By Marie-Hélène Brousse
And introducing the new
WAP Libretto Series
As women assert themselves on the world stage and sexual categories multiply,
psychoanalysis reveals that the feminine cannot be reduced to biological or cultural data. This book explores the feminine outside of gender and beyond fantasy. From the words of
analysands, it extracts some experiences of jouissance.
Female sexuality – the “dark continent” of Freudian psychoanalysis – is a mystery.
Marie-Hélène Brousse makes effects of knowledge emerge from this black hole. The void situates an eroticism proper to the feminine, and the author pinpoints Lacan’s move to isolate a jouissance other than phallic: non-localized, unspeakable, infinitely refined.
The feminine is a mode of jouissance that always surprises speaking beings when they experience it, a jouissance out of meaning, out of law, but not outside of body.
Translation from the French by Janet Rachel.
Established by Pamela King, Ève Miller-Rose, Cyrus St. A. Poliakoff, Alan Rowan, and Florencia Shanahan of the WAP Libretto Series Team.
Search: ‘The Feminine: A Mode of Jouissance’ on Amazon in your country to order now.
Copyright Year 2022
ISBN 979-8411660906
Published March 8, 2022 Independently published
99 Pages
Libretto Series
Libretto is the book series of the World Association of Psychoanalysis created in 2021 with the Lacanian Press:
the first of its kind in English.
It aims at introducing a new presence of what Jacques-Alain Miller has named the “Lacanian Orientation” in the English-speaking world, inviting readers to encounter or re-encounter Lacan’s teaching in a lively and serious way. This teaching, continuously derived from his praxis, offers key concepts for clinicians and practitioners.
The Libretto book series will be a central reference point for anybody wishing to engage with Lacanian
psychoanalysis which privileges a constantly renewed interpretation of the world we inhabit.
Summary
Introduction to the English Edition
INTRODUCTION
- The Feminine: A Mode of Jouissance
- Epistemic Encounter
I. VOIDING THE MOTHER
A Childhood Memory in Anamorphosis
Lacanian Advances
- Structure
- Topology
- Logic
The Family in the Time of the Ones-All-Alone
- Indifferenciation
- An Unintended Consequence: Exit the Mother
- From Chain to Knotting: The Three’d of the Iron Order
Three Clinical Lessons
The Void That There Is
II. THE FEMININE: THE VOID AS A MODE
OF JOUISSANCE
Concerning a Feminine Position of Speaking Bodies
The Feminine Outside Gender
- The Feminine Beyond Fantasy
- Encore, Again
The Heteros in the Speech of Analysands
- Scattered Signifiers
- Hiding
- Disobedi-sense
- Anonymous, Outside the Name
- Silence, Outside Speech
- Disappearing
Heterotism or the Erotism of the Void
- Drawing
- Of the Void
- Erasures of the Image, the Name and the One
- Disobedi-sense and Silence
- Solitude and Disappearance
Jouissance of Disappearance: Being Barred
CONCLUSION