and lesbian cultures.As a very partial effort to come to terms with that maternalist discourse, however, Julia Kristeva’s description of the semiotic as a maternal subversion of the Symb
Trang 1and lesbian cultures.As a very partial effort to come to terms with that maternalist discourse, however, Julia Kristeva’s description of the semiotic as a maternal subversion of the Symbolic will be examined in the following chapter
What critical strategies and sources of subversion appear as the consequence of the psychoanalytic accounts considered so far? The recourse to the unconscious as a source of subversion makes sense, it seems, only if the paternal law is understood as a rigid and universal determinism which makes of “identity” a fixed and phantasmatic affair Even if we accept the phantasmatic content of identity, there is no rea-son to assume that the law which fixes the terms of that fantasy is impervious to historical variability and possibility
As opposed to the founding Law of the Symbolic that fixes identity
in advance, we might reconsider the history of constitutive identifica-tions without the presupposition of a fixed and founding Law Although the “universality” of the paternal law may be contested within
anthropo-logical circles, it seems important to consider that the meaning that the
law sustains in any given historical context is less univocal and less deterministically efficacious than the Lacanian account appears to acknowledge It should be possible to offer a schematic of the ways in which a constellation of identifications conforms or fails to conform to culturally imposed standards of gender integrity.The constitutive iden-tifications of an autobiographical narrative are always partially
fabricat-ed in the telling Lacan claims that we can never tell the story of our origins, precisely because language bars the speaking subject from the repressed libidinal origins of its speech; however, the foundational moment in which the paternal law institutes the subject seems to func-tion as a metahistory which we not only can but ought to tell, even though the founding moments of the subject, the institution of the law,
is as equally prior to the speaking subject as the unconscious itself The alternative perspective on identification that emerges from psychoanalytic theory suggests that multiple and coexisting identifica-tions produce conflicts, convergences, and innovative dissonances
Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Heterosexual Matrix
85