This post is about the phallic phase. In Lacan's seminal article, "The Phallic Phase and the Subjective Import of the Castration Complex," the French psychoanalytical thought leader made an important contribution to the understanding of the development of female subjectivity, underscoring the particular peculiaraties of female psycho-ontogenesis with regard to female children's necessarily imperfect relationship to the castration complex, which for male children ushers them into the period of tentatively balanced psychic organization that allows for a self-recognition of identity. Through an analysis a representative celebrity entering an explicitly transitional phase, both biologically and in her career, Carles is concerned to investigate whether Lacan's contentions about the genital organization of infantile sexuality still hold under postmodern, highly mediated conditions in which the production of subjectivity may have escaped from the foundry of the hyperrepressive nuclear family to instead be forged by a society-wide repressive tolerance. Or, as Carles frames the question, "Now that Taylor Swift admits to <3ing peen, does this mean she is a slutwaver?"
The question is not an idle one. The phallic stage as experienced in the individual female psyche, Carles suspects, has become a culture-wide phenomenon led by female pop stars who simulate the throes of somatic dystrophy and the dissimulation of identity. Swift, Carles sagely notes, "is dealing with hornie bros who just want to 'get off' but don't really want much emotional attachments" through an barely controlled experiment in sublimation, producing a record album that ostensibly processes and distantiates her passage through the phallic stage almost a decade after the fact. Not coincidentally, the album is preoccupied with information that Swift must at once keep secret and share ("She tried to be all 'secret' about it being abt John Mayer even though the song is called "Dear John.""). The paradox that proclaims its absence everywhere is precisely the unconscious, omnipresent yet elusive, invisible but overdetermined.
It is not too much of an exaggeration to claim, as Carles seems to, that Swift's work is everywhere haunted by the phallus, and that her own artistic efforts are pantomimes of the castration complex in which she occupies the position of both subject and object. That is, the album is, as Carles explains, "abt how she is 'becoming a woman.'"
But what can this mean? As Lacan himself notes, "The Other is not simply the locus in which truth stammers. It deserves to represent that to which woman is fundamentally related." Can any truth be spoken about female subjectivity, and more important, can the subject identifying as a woman know anything about itself? Lacan claims women serve as the organizing void around which male metaphysical delusions can be structured: "So that the soul may come into being, woman is differentiated from it right from the beginning. She is called woman (on /a dit-femme) and defamed (difdme). The most famous (fameux) things that have come down to us about women in history are, strictly speaking, what one can say that is infamous (infamant)." Swift's destiny was always already to be defamed, and the transgressions committed against her in the public eye by various male aggressors are automatically inverted by the public so that she is recognized as the persecutor of every man's longing for transcendence and peace. She is "just another empty female" as Carles puts it, or to use Lacanian nomenclature she is "Woman barred," for "as soon as Woman is enunciated by way of a not-whole, the W cannot be written."
So it is no surprise to find Carles noting dryly, "Glad I am a bro."
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