Glossing Jacqueline Rose and 'Feminine Sexuality' PART 3.

Through the 'opposite sex' I may hope to unite my own division, however, the idea of another sex only creates my division.

Meanwhile, the Other is as divided as myself, we are all equally divided at The Mirror Stage and by being brought into language where language is other to us and language operates only by differences.

For men women can become fantastic promises of lost wholeness, a dream of replacing the lost object - which is in fact an inevitable and necessary part of being introduced to the self and to language.

But whether this is right or wrong is not important -Lacan would maintain- what is more important is the fact that the Symbolic Order prioritises the male principle of the Phallus while we recognise that the Phallus is a fantom, only falsely promising meaning and consistency.

Lacan then comes to say things like 'woman is not' or crosses through the word 'THE' when it is placed before the word 'WOMAN'. But this refers to woman not as she is but as she is in the Symbolic Order. It is not a further subjugation, annihilation or denial of women (Lacan and Rose might argue) but a sign of her potential to rule or undermine the Order by inhabiting the Order's inherent negative forms (see 'lack', 'absence', 'castration', 'loss', 'missing' etc..

Can woman break out of the Order, perhaps by returning to a point before Language and Order imposed themselves?
Is there any return, rescue, redemption or refuge?
Is the body after all the answer to Lacan's Symbolic schema?

Rose concludes that despite feminist hostilities to Lacan he is of significant use to Feminism. She sees Lacan's Symbolic Order as convincing, due to the radicalism of his considerations and particularly the imaginative and difficult inversion of Freudian / modern positivism, so that everywhere in his system negative terms do the work of maintaining us in our order.

But the feminine always stands for a potential refusal of that order in a way that the masculine cannot, if only because the masculine term -as positive and no mater how fantasmatic- necessarily orients and grounds the Order.