Abstract

LEON, Patricia. A false not-all. Estud. psicanal. [online]. 2012, n.37, pp.109-126. ISSN 0100-3437.

This paper gives a new impetus to the debate on feminine sexuality, which opened in 1925 around the primacy of the phallus as set out by Freud, and which Lacan takes to an area that is beyond the phallus-with the elaboration of another space, the phallic not-all. This debate has become stuck in two errors: the first, a logical error, sets out a false structural equivalence between the pre-oedipal and the phallic not-all; the other, a “topological” error, situates the mother/daughter ravage erroneously and thereby, conceptualizes a dominance of woman as mother and a splitting between mother and woman that proceeds from a “false not-all”, which is equivalent to incompleteness. The first part of the article goes back to the pre-oedipal in Freud, since it gives the girl the conditions for opening the space of the phallic not-all; the pre-oedipal, however, is not to be confused with the not-all. The second part takes its orientation from the dialogues between fourteen-year-old Wendla and her mother in Wedekind’s play Spring’s Awakening. Here, this paper redefines the border between the register of the mother/daughter ravage and that of the not-all; she proposes to read ravage as an enclosure within the illusory demand that the essence of femininity be transmitted (without the phallus) whereas the not-all is based on the premise that it is impossible for such a transmission to open up a way to the feminine; it relies on the limited function of the phallus. Yet if ravage is postulated, on the contrary, as a test that must be gone through, in order to get beyond this illusion, “one ends up by making the whole consist by isolating the access to the feminine in the closed circuit of the mother-daughter relation”; this covers over the real of the failure and leads to a conception of love that covers up the impossibility of the sexual relation, and proceeds from another ravage: the one that closes the door through which a woman could encounter a man.

Keywords : Ravage; Phallic not-all; Feminine sexuality.

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