Perversion the Social Relation

6zBruce Finkculture "perceives" differently, as a function of the distinctions its language engenders.ii Consider how Lacan problematizes any attempt to draw clear lines between insideand outside in his use of surfaces such as the Klein bottle and the cross-cap in SeminarIX (L'identification, I$6I-I$6I, unpublished). See also Fink, The Lacanian Subject,end of ch. 8.13 In other words, some repression has occurred. Note that if something is put a out ofmind," it first had to be "in mind"—it first had to be a thought, had to be symbolized.14 Theorists and practitioners who place little emphasis on the importance of language,law, and the symbolic are likely to think Lacan has systematized Freud in an infelicitousway, leaving out the importance of the mother. It should be clear, however, toanyone who reads Freud carefully that throughout his work the father is of capitalimportance. Lacan simply provides Freudians with the wherewithal to refute Freud'scritics who stress the importance of the pre-Oedipal: with the advent of language andthe law, the pre-Oedipal is rewritten or overwritten. "The pregenital stages ... areorganized in the retroactive effect of the Oedipus complex" {Écrits, 554; 197). TheOedipus complex has a retroactive effect on that which preceded it temporally, implyingthat it is a symbolic operation; for in the signifying process, the addition of anew signifier to a series (say, of the term "father's *No!' " to the series "name of thefather," "father's name," and "name given by the father") transforms the meaning ofwhat was said before. Since speech is the only tool at our disposal in psychoanalysis,what we deal with as analysts are the retroactively constituted meanings, not thepre-Oedipal relations that preceded them.15 This is one instance in which Freud's terminology needs to be clarified by usingLacan's categories: the fetishist believes his mother has a penis—that is, a real, biologicalorgan, not a phallus; for a phallus is a symbol—in other words, part and parcelof the symbolic order. Lacan sometimes loosely refers to the organ the child believesin as the imaginary phallus, but that should generally be understood to imply thepenis (the real organ) the child imagines the mother has.16 This expression is used in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice,17 Freud says one thought persists in the id and the other in the ego (SE XXIII, 204), aformulation that leads to further problems in his own metapsychology.iS Freud encourages us to understand this split in the ego in terms of knowledge. Accordingto Freud, the perception of the female genitals is put out of mind because itimplies that the father means business when he threatens to cut off the boy's penis(indeed, the boy believes that the father has already done it to the boy's mother);this newly realized possibility of losing the highly invested organ leads to considerableanxiety. The anxiety is dealt with, not as in neurosis where a symptom forms tobind or alleviate anxiety, but by the formation of a kind of split (Spaltmg). The splitis such that two bits of "knowledge" are maintained side by side in a kind of punctualsuspension of the law of non-contradiction: "Women don't have penises" and"All humans have penises." There may be abstract, rote knowledge where the pervertsimply repeats what those around him say ("Women don't have penises"), and yet