Desire Machine
dog muzzle, iron, glass, mirror, anal plug and led display / 68 x 20 x 54 cm / 2019
“for Lacan's recovery of
Freud has also been suggested as a basis for understanding
patriarchy and the structures of male dominance. It is a key to
grasping the ·ways in which the animal child enters the social
world as a boy or a girl, the unconscious ways in which psychological "masculinity" and "femininity", and male dominance,
are accepted as necessary parts of becoming social beings. Such
an understanding is essential for a feminist politics. A sketch of
Lacan's theory will clarify this process, and also partly explain
some of the terms used by Hocquenghem.
The human infant is seen as being concerned at first with the
exploration of sensory perceptions, and its main characteristic is
its autoerotism. It has no sense of its physical separateness, nor of
its physical unity. This is the moment which retrospectively is
referred to as the phantasy of the "body in pieces". The mirrorstage is the moment when the infant realises the distinction
between its own body and the outside, the "other". It is expressed
metaphorically in terms of the child seeing itself in the mirror
and identifying with its reflection. But the image is ever external
to the child, so that this mirror-stage announces the permanent
alienation at the heart of identification. The process of identification inaugurates the imaginary relation, where the individual
misrecognises himself as the perfect image which appears in the
mirror and with which the individual identifies, as being everything he imagines himself to be. As interpreted by Althusser this
becomes a key term in the understanding of ideology, as an
"imaginary" (but not "false") misrecognition of the world.
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Following the mirror-stage, the first form of identification with
an object outside the infant is with the mother, a relationship
which determines the attitude of the child to the zones of its own
body, according to the significance given to them within the
relationship. The fact that the genital aspect of the infant's
relationship to the mother cannot be developed brings this preOedipal phase to an end. The Oedipus complex is the stage when
the intervention of the Father necessitates the child's abandonment of its exclusive relationship with the mother and its entry
into the structures of human sexuality. The child is assigned a
position in language and the family, in structures of "masculinity" or "femininity". The repression of those elements of the
psychic life of the child which do not conform to this positioning
constitutes the unconscious.
It is in the unconscious that the child carries the very structures of a patriarchal society. The child's attempt to include
genital functions amongst those expressive of the identification of
mother and child are unsuccessful because the child has a rival
in the Father, against whom it is powerless. This is not necessarily
a real male parent but rather the symbolic representation of all
Fathers: the Father is the authority which dominates the motherchild relation. Confronted with this authority the child now sees
the mother, formerly the repository of all identity, as a testimony
only to the authority of the Father. The opening of this fundamental "absence" in identity inspires the fear of castration, in
both boy and girl, though the specific forms vary. This is what
forces the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, when the child enters
the social world, which Lacan calls the Symbolic, the order of
language; the child identifies with certain terms-boy, girl, son,
daughter - which receive their significance as ideas through
their relation to a central "signifier" (in Lacan's usage a duster
of words, images, ideas) the Phallus, the symbolic expression and
representative of the authority of the Father. This is intimately
connected with the notion of desire ; indeed, as Juliet Mitchell
has put it, the phallus is the very mark of human desire. It is the
expression of a fundamental absence which can never be
fulfilled, the desire to be the other, the Father, which is both
alienated and insatiable : alienated because the child can only
express its desire by means of language which itself constitutes
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its submission to the Father; and insatiable because it is desire
for a symbolic position which is itself arbiter of the possibilities
for the expression of desire. The Phallus and Desire are thus key
elements, and represent and express the individual's submission
to the laws of society. Just as "desire" cannot be equated with
organic or biological need, so the "phallus" is not coterminous
with the physical penis : it is the representation, the signifier of
the laws of the social order, the law of the Father, through which
obedience to the social (and patriarchal) order is instilled.”
Hocquenghem - Homosexual Desire
