New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY 139
complicated, for the subject of the enunciation is, in fact, stating the truth
as well: I am deceiving you (that is my wish). In deceiving, the subject of
enunciation is being true to [his] desire. This contradictory shift and play
of meanings is evidence of the unconscious at work. Stephen Heath
demonstrates that the connection between signification, the unconscious
and subject-formation is central to Lacan’s thinking:
The unconscious is the fact of the constitution-division of the subject
in language; an emphasis which can even lead Lacan to propose
replacing the notion of the unconscious with that of the subject in
language: “It is a vicious circle to say that we are speaking beings; we
are ‘speakings’, a word that can be advantageously substituted for the
unconscious.”
(Heath 1981:79)
Finally, because it refuses to posit a pre-existent and specifically feminine
(or masculine) essence, but rather describes and analyzes the processes by
which SEXUAL DIFFERENCE is produced in human society,
psychoanalysis has been taken up by feminists interested in understanding
the cultural construction of sexuality and the implications of that for
FEMININE DISCOURSE—the articulation and expression of women’s
language, desire and subjectivity. In psychoanalysis, FEMININITY is seen
as a category, produced psychologically and socially, rather than as a set of
biological or anatomical features, and for this reason feminists (both men
and women) find psychoanalysis useful in formulating alternative aesthetic
and social practices.
In this light, Freud’s familar characterization of the female sex as the
“dark continent” is taken not as a restatement of the enduring myth of
women’s enigmatic and seductive essence, but as the posing of a question
to be considered in analysis, and Freud himself is very clear on this: “In
conformity with its peculiar nature, psychoanalysis does not try to describe
what a woman is—that would be a task it could scarcely perform—but sets
about inquiring how she comes into being” (Freud 1965:116). Equally
misunderstood is Lacan’s famous phrase, “The woman does not exist,”
because rather than denying the existence of actual women, it refers to the
fact that there is no universal feminine essence, only a fantasy of
femininity. As Jacqueline Rose explains,
As the place onto which lack is projected, and through which it is
simultaneously disavowed, woman is a “symptom” for the man.
Defined as such, reduced to being nothing other than this fantasmatic
place, the woman does not exist. Lacan’s statement…means, not that
women do not exist, but that her status as an absolute category and
guarantor of fantasy (exactly The woman) is false (The).