2—
The Physicality of Property

As we have seen, Waldron first defines property as the regime for the allocation of material resources. That is, he reduces property to the single masculine element of possession—the identification of an object to a subject—and represses the elements of enjoyment and alienation. In turn, he defines the term material resources as those things that are possible objects of human wants and needs. In the following passage, however, he limits material objects to physical things, which he contrasts with noncorporeal things:

I have defined property in terms of material resources, that is, resources like minerals, forests, water, land, as well as manufactured objects of all sorts. But sometimes we talk about objects of property which are not corporeal: intellectual property in ideas and inventions, reputations, stocks and shares, choses in action, even positions of employment. . . . This proliferation of different kinds of property object is one of the main reasons why jurists have despaired of giving a precise definition of ownership. I think there are good reasons for discussing property in material resources first before grappling with the complexities of incorporeal property.^[21]

Note that Waldron has already taken an unacknowledged step toward the identification of property with physicality that will color the rest of his argument. He defines human wants and needs, and therefore property, in terms of purely animal satisfaction of physical limitations. This is an odd choice from a philosopher like Waldron who wishes to explore justifications of property from a Lockean and a Hegelian perspective. Neither Locke nor Hegel justifies property in terms of the satisfaction of animalistic physical needs. Rather, both justify property by reference to the most sublime and abstract notions of what makes humans truly human—liberty and freedom, respectively.

Waldron locates property in the uninterpreted, preimaginary, prelinguistic realm of the real in which humans experience "need." But, as we

[21] Id . at 33.

have seen, property does not belong in the animalistic, physical realm we identify with the real, or the imagistic realm of the imaginary, in which Waldron immures it. Property is the object of human desire . Waldron, however, presumes that property relates to physical want—what Lacan calls "needs." He wants to find an object in the imaginary to take the place of the objet petit a that he can identify with some physical object to stand in for the symbolically prohibited real object of desire and function as the cause of desire. Consequently, Waldron wants to presume that property is originally a physical relationship.

This may explain why Waldron cannot—as he refreshingly admits^[22] —follow Hegel's argument as to the necessary role of property in the development of human personhood. Hegelian property has nothing to do with physical requirements.^[23] As I have discussed, property is the means by which the abstract person as self-consciousness attains subjectivity. This purely logical construct does not yet even have a body, let alone physical needs.

In other words, Waldron makes precisely the phallic metaphoric conflation that Lacan locates as the identification of gender roles—or sexuated positions—with anatomy. Waldron conflates the Phallic with the phallic and desire with need in an imaginary attempt to collapse the symbolic and the real.