Reply to Commentary

Iam deeply thankful to Kareen Malone for her attentive and passionate reading of my essay, which allows a dialectical approach to the issues at stake. I discussed elsewhere some of her specific concerns: Lacan's emphasis on the phallus as a structure (Lichtenberg-Ettinger, 1992, 1993a, b; 1996a) and likewise the priority of the matrix as a sense-revealing/producing apparatus (Lichtenberg-Ettinger, 1992, 1995a, 1996a), the possibility of “amicable relations with the Other” (Lichtenberg-Ettinger, 1995a, 1996b), the links of the coemerging I and non-I with phenomenology (Lichtenberg-Ettinger, 1995c, 1996b), and the differences and affinities between Lacan's objet a, and objects in other theories (Lichtenberg-Ettinger, 1995a, b). The difference between Malone's and my Lacanian perspective concerns the place of language: whereas Malone emphasizes its centrality and “the Other as the locus of the signifier,” I accentuate the unconscious beyond the chains of the signifiers. If indeed “the S1 … need not follow the route of the phallic function” we should question why it is still presented as “forming the kernel of the phallus,” thus allowing the phallus to define both its own proper scope and its beyond, whether as before (stage) or beside (structure).

Indeed, the challenge to feminine difference, as Malone so eloquently shows, had been, precisely, not just to exchange an organ (penis) and its image for another (womb), but to conceive of an alternative to the phallus in terms of structure, mechanism, functions, logic. As long as mental objects are treated by the same mechanisms (metaphor and metonymy), structured in a similar way (phallus/castration), and stored by repressions of signifiers in an unconscious “structured as a language” and as long as fusion and rejection linked to presence and absence and affected by either “love” or “hate” are considered the only primary affective moments, and castration as the only passageway to the Symbolic, then Lacan's claims that su