A—
Lacanian Freedom

"For instance, now," she went on, . . . "there's the King's Messenger. He's in prison now, being punished; and the trial doesn't even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all."

"Suppose he never commits the crime?" said Alice.

"That would be all the better, wouldn't it?" the Queen said. . . .

Alice felt there was no denying that. "Of course it would be all the better," she said: "but it wouldn't be all the better his being punished."

"You're wrong there, at any rate," said the Queen: "were you ever punished?"

"Only for faults," said Alice.

"And you were all the better for it, I know!" the Queen said triumphantly.

"Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for," said Alice: "that makes all the difference."

"But, if you hadn't done them," the Queen said, "that would have been better still; better, and better, and better!" Her voice went higher with each "better," till it got quite to a squeak at last.

Alice was just beginning to say "There's a mistake somewhere—. . . ."^[62]

[61] Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, supra note 1, at 238.

At first blush, the Lacanian universe sounds hopelessly bleak and repressive, bound by prohibitions that make immediate human relationships impossible by definition. But a second look reveals a much different picture. By being castrated, the Lacanian split subject becomes negative (like Hegel's subject explored in The Philosophy of Right ). But this means that subjectivity contains the capacity for freedom.^[63]

This is even more true from the feminine position which is the place of that which is lost in castration. The Woman does not exist. But this means that she is not bound by actuality but is pure potentiality. She does not exist—yet. The law of prohibition is an alchemy that enables humans to imagine and actualize freedom. In other words, woman does not exist, she insists —she denies our limits.^[64]

External reality is brute necessity. One cannot do certain things because they are literally impossible in the brute sense that "man cannot fly." But as conscious subjects, we do not have direct, immediate access to reality. The instant we realize we are experiencing reality, we are interpreting it—this is why jouissance is silent. The order of the real, therefore, is this interpreted concept of that which exists outside of our interpretation.

The psyche can only keep the realms of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic separate through the law of prohibition—"Thou shall not merge with the real." What was impossible (merging with the world and

[62] Id . at 234–35.

[63] In other words, communication is rendered possible by the very feature which may seem to undermine most radically its possibility: I can communicate with the Other, I am "open" to him (or it) precisely and only insofar as I am already in myself split, branded by "repression," i.e., insofar as (to put it in a somewhat naive pathetic way) I cannot ever truly communicate with myself; the Other is originally the decentered Other Place of my own splitting.

Zizek,^[*] Tarrying with the Negative, supra note 47, at 30–31.

[64] Id . at 188.

the others in immediate relationships) is now prohibited. One does not prohibit what cannot be. Consequently, the impossible is now reimagined as possible but not allowed! The real—"that which we can't speak"—now becomes "that which we mustn't say." "You cannot" becomes "Shut up!" This creates "the ought"—the desire, possibility, and necessity of going beyond a self-imposed limit.

Thereby we have already produced the formula of the mysterious of horror into bliss: by means of it, the impossible limit changes into the forbidden place . In other words, the logic of this reversal is that of the transmutation of Real into Symbolic: the impossible-real changes into an object of symbolic prohibition. The paradox (and perhaps the very function of the prohibition as such) consists of course in the fact that, as soon as it is conceived as prohibited, the real-impossible changes into something possible , i.e., into something that cannot be reached, not because of its inherent impossibility but simply because access to it is hindered by the external barrier of the prohibition.^[65]

The Lacanian Feminine is the negativity of subjectivity, but not in the sense of a simple negation of some masculine positivity. If she were, she would merely be the complement of Masculinity and the two sexes would together constitute a harmonious whole. The Masculine claims to have "it," but the Feminine denies that anyone still has "it," while predicting that we will obtain "it" yet. But such complementarity only exists in our fantasies, in the imaginary.^[66] That is, the Feminine is the "it" which the Masculine claims to have—the paradoxical moment of sublation which is logically impossible. The Feminine is the negative of the Masculine in the sense of a denial of the hegemony of the symbolic order and its limits. She is the "not-all" (pas tout ) in the sense of "not all things are phallic."^[67] This is why she cannot be described in the symbolic or captured in the masculinist fantasies of the imaginary. The Masculine—the speaking subject—is totally captured in the phallic order of the symbolic. The Fem-

[65] Id . at 116.

[66] What defines the imaginary order is the appearance of a complementary relationship between thesis and antithesis, the illusion that they form a harmonious Whole, filling out each other's lack; What the thesis lacks is provided by the antithesis and vice versa (the idea that Man and Woman form a harmonious Whole, for example).

Id . at 123.

[67] Slavoj Zizek,^[*] For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor 122–25 (1991) [hereinafter Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do]; Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, supra note 47, at 56.

inine is not. She is, therefore, the possibility of going beyond. The Feminine stands in the position of the negative subjectivity that is the condition of freedom.

Lacan analyzed ethics in terms of Kant's dictate "You can, because you must."^[68] By this he seems to have meant that impossibility does not excuse one from one's ethical duty. But Lacan, like Hegel, went beyond Kant by recognizing that, paradoxically, impossibility creates the duty. The limit not only defines the ought, but the ought is itself the limit (i.e., the real to the symbolic).^[69]

"Man cannot fly" in the real becomes "man shalt not fly" in the symbolic. Mere physical impossibility becomes in the imaginary the Icarus myth whereby man is punished for daring to fly, as well as innumerable inspirational fantasy images of angels and other winged beings that haunt the art and legends of so many cultures. Man must not fly becomes man must fly. As a result, today we have in fact gone beyond this limit and do fly—but notably not in the actually impossible (real) way of flapping our arms and flying like birds, but in a uniquely human way of using the imaginary and symbolic to invent flying machines. That is, flying is artificial—in the literal sense of "made by art"—and is, therefore, authentic to human nature.

Consequently, Lacan must rewrite the Freudian concept of the superego. The superego, as every undergraduate thinks she knows, is supposed

[68] Lacan, Seminar VII, supra note 38, at 315–17. Lacan's tour de force of the Seventh Seminar is to show that the Kantian imperative is equivalent to the obscene philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, and the superego's paradoxical dictate "Enjoy!" (Lacan republished these ideas from the Seventh Seminar in an essay, Lacan avec Sade , which was contained in the French version of Écrits but was not included in the English edition.) All are radical apathological ethical dictates in the Kantian sense of being completely beyond "every element of sentiment." Id . at 79.

I showed you how one can easily substitute for Kant's "Thou shalt" the Sadean fantasm of jouissance elevated to the level of an imperative—it is, of course, a pure and almost derisory fantasm, but it doesn't exclude the possibility of its being elevated to a universal law.

Id . at 316. See , Zizek,^[*] The Metastases of Enjoyment, supra note 38, at 67–70, 99–100.

[69] "You can, because you ought"—this expression which is supposed to mean a great deal is implied in the notion of ought. For the ought implies that one is superior to the limitation; in it the limit is sublated and the in-itself of the ought is thus an identical self-relation, and hence the abstraction of "can." But conversely, it is equally correct that: "you cannot, just because you ought." For in the ought, the limitation as limitation is equally implied; the said formalism of possibility has, in the limitation, a reality, a qualitative otherness opposed to it, and the relation of each to the other is a contradiction, and thus a "cannot," or rather an impossibility.

Hegel, The Greater Logic, supra note 7, at 133.

to be the part of our psyche that internalizes the law of prohibition. But paradoxically, it is the superego, not the id, that constantly tells us "Enjoy!"^[70] It is our guilty conscience that constantly harps on us to obey.^[71] The law of the Father castrates us by forbidding our enjoyment. The symbolic—law and language—cannot exist without an order outside of the symbolic that serves as its limit. This is the real and jouissance . It is necessary, therefore, for the law to establish its own transgression. The only way for the superego to internalize the law is to force us to transgress the law.^[72]

We give up this enjoyment to assuage our guilt and expect to be compensated for this loss with the lesser pleasures allowed by the law—sexual maturity. But we continue to desire enjoyment which requires transgression of the law. The paradox is, of course, that it is only through the prohibition that we become subjects capable of desire, enjoyment and sin. Lacanian thought is retrospective. We conclude that the enjoyment of wholeness is forever lost because of our sin, when, in reality, it is the dream of the not yet.^[73]

Hegel makes this precise point in The Philosophy of Right when he argues that wrong is not merely implicit in, but required by, the notion of right.^[74]

[70] Zizek,^[*] For They Know Not What They Do, supra note 67, at 237.

On this view, according to which we are simultaneously guilty and obligated to act by law, enjoyment is crime, and crime is lawful, because law is the source of enjoyment. Law is contradictory when it outlaws crime. Or, more generally, the concept of law has within it its negative. It therefore defines and is the source of crime.

Jeanne L. Schroeder & David Gray Carlson, The Subject Is Nothing , 5 Law & Critique 94, 100 (1993) (reviewing Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do, supra note 67).

[71] The child creates his own guilt by retroactively writing and applying a law that is always already broken. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do, supra note 67, at 105; Schroeder & Carlson, supra note 70, at 98–100; and Jeanne L. Schroeder, Virgin Territory: Margaret Radin's Theory of Property as the Inviolate Feminine Body , 79 Minn. L. Rev. 55, 159–60, n.395 (1994) [hereinafter Schroeder, Virgin Territory ].

This retroactive logic is what the White Queen would have called "the effect of living backwards." Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, supra note 1, at 233.

[72] We try to justify our castration in terms of just punishment for our violation of the law even though the law did not exist, and could not be violated, prior to castration. We, therefore, need to establish our own guilt. That is, we are not punished because we are guilty, but we are guilty because we are punished. See Schroeder & Carlson, supra note 70, at 100.

[73] Id .

[74] Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, supra note 41, at 115–30.