Couched in feminine terms

By Dalia Karpel

An interview¹ with Marco Mauas² about Lacan’s Seminar XX in Hebrew.

mauas@netvision.il

[…]
Lacanian philosophy has become fashionable in Israeli academic circles in recent years, in spite of the fact that until now his writings were not available in Hebrew. This month, an important and comprehensive text by Lacan was published in Hebrew for the first time. The English title of the book is “On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore.” It is taken from the 20th seminar, which took place in Paris in 1972-73. Lacan, who died in 1981 at the age of 80, proposed a revolutionary formula (as opposed to what was generally believed in biology and sexology): There is no sexual relationship between people; there are sexual relations between them.
“Encore” was published in Hebrew with very few footnotes, as in the original French, as opposed to the English-language version, in which the footnotes take up more room than the text itself. The difficulty of deciphering the text - one reason being Lacan’s attempt to provide a mathematical basis for psychoanalysis - required special work on the translation. Five people worked for five years on the Hebrew translation: the translator from French, Dr. Yoram Mayron, a physician by profession; and alongside him the Lacanian psychoanalysts Perla Miglin (who initiated the translation) and Mabel Rosen; and Lior Loew, who is specializing in psychoanalysis. The scientific editor was Dr. Marco Mauas, who is also a Lacanian psychoanalyst (and Miglin’s husband).
“We added few footnotes because we wanted to expose the readers to Lacan himself,” says Mauas, whose book “Freud with Lacan” will soon be published. “The work on the book is the product of a local psychoanalytic community, which works according to Lacan’s orientation. Five people working together managed to keep going for five years, because they loved working with one another.” The use of the world “loved” is not coincidental: Mauas cites Freud, who states that true love is tested “in its productivity and in its ability to fulfill the goal of the love.”

And what does Lacan say about love?

“How does it happen, that people love? This question has been familiar since Freud’s time, when he defined the goals of psychoanalytic therapy as ‘the ability to love and to work.’ Lacan says that there is a limit to love. We cannot love whomever we wish; we are restricted by language: I will not be able to have a love encounter with someone with whom I cannot speak. What remains then? A perverted encounter: Perverted is the place where there is no love. The pervert enters the bathroom and looks for someone in order to do something with him, without words.
Ferdinand de Saussure (who laid the foundations for modern linguistics and structuralism) was the first to write it: Human beings are born into language and receive it as a package. The poets teach us that anyone can acquire the package and use it in a creative manner, and reinvent language.”
According to Lacan, says Mauas, speech is not only a means of communication for transmitting knowledge. Lacan spoke of a “wall of language”: There is a gap between the signifier and the signified, the intention of the speaker is not always absorbed as-is by the listener, “and when we speak,” adds Mauas, “there is also something within us that enjoys the very fact that I am opening my mouth and chatting.”

In that case, what is love according to Lacan?

“The love encounter takes place when each one examines in the other the ‘exile’ from the sexual relationship, in other words, the weak point. I’ll give you an example from Freud: a hysterical woman who falls in love with an impotent man. She falls in love with him the moment she identifies, with her hysterical sense - in other words, in her unconscious - this characteristic of impotence. Whereas he identifies in her a woman who has difficulties with her femininity, and because of these difficulties, she identifies with this particular man, who is impotent. This is a love encounter between human beings, when each examines in the other the ‘Achilles heel’ relating to love, in the language of Greek mythology.”
She who has “Encore” deals, among other things, with female sexuality. Mauas mentions Freud’s immortal question: “What does a woman want?” and remarks that at one of his seminars, Lacan directed the question to the female analysts there, in order to elicit some kind of answer from them. “There was absolute silence,” says Mauas. “As opposed to the common male belief that ‘a woman wants a phallus’ - or to put it bluntly, ‘what a woman wants is a good fuck’ - when Freud asked the question, he was hinting that this isn’t everything, that there is something beyond the phallus.”
Lacan relates differently to men and women. Men, he claims, define themselves as a group, and constitute a group. Women, on the other hand, cannot be defined as a group. This, says Mauas, is the source of Lacan’s famous statement, that “Woman with a capital ‘W’ does not exist in terms of being the definer of a group. Each and every woman exists in her own right, and each and every one has a character of her own.”

But there are also women who define themselves as a group - for example, feminists. Does Lacan deny their right of self-definition?

“Feminists try to define women as a group and do not succeed; that’s a fact. Feminists define women’s rights in legal terms in society. Femininity is something else. Does belonging to a feminist movement guarantee that a woman will be more feminine? No. Sometimes the opposite even happens, and there are feminists who are very unfeminine.”

What is unique about men as a group, as opposed to women?

“All men are in one group because of the phallus. Freud offers the case of the boy Hans who was afraid of horses. Hans said that every living thing had a penis, and his great surprise came when he discovered that his little sister didn’t have one. The universal rule didn’t work there. That was the start of his problem. Man defines himself by the fact that he has a phallus. In that sense, a woman has more freedom. Lacan says in the 20th seminar that everyone is interested in women - both men and women. According to this, we are all heterosexuals, because we are all interested in the other, the hetero - in other words, in the woman. This interest is not necessarily sexual, except in the sense that a woman arouses curiosity in everyone.”
Mauas emphasizes that a woman - and not “woman” - is an unknown entity who arouses curiosity: “Freud said that she is a ‘continent,’ and my interpretation is that he meant something like the other side of the moon. And the fact is that Freud’s question, ‘What does a woman want?’ is still relevant. In ‘Encore,’ Lacan gives an answer that is not of the type from which one can derive a direct return. But I will illustrate this by means of an interesting complication that is preoccupying the country - the affair of Judy Shalom Nir-Mozes, which has led to a situation where Israel is about to dismiss an ambassador because of a soap opera between women.
“I read an article about that in the IHT (International Herald Tribune), and I am analyzing it here as though it were a one-act play with three or four characters. In the text, Shalom Nir-Mozes appeared in the role of she-who-has, in other words, a person of means, who wants to appear in a photo with a woman who is identified with mysticism. The person who wrote the article, using literary talent, understood that the entire mess concerned Madonna (which means “woman” in Italian), and the definition of the concept of femininity. The woman described in the text as a wealthy woman did not succeed in being photographed with Madonna. The ‘hitch’ was created because Madonna, in this case, hadn’t come to Israel in order to promote herself or her music, but in order to study kabbala, i.e. mysticism, and even wanted to downplay the more familiar aspect of her personality.”

Does “she has” or “she doesn’t have” also relate to a woman’s intellectual abilities?

“Anything that is part of the definition of property, including intellect, talent, et al., is not sufficient for a woman to define herself as a woman. I want to mention the president of Harvard University [Lawrence H. Summers], who implied a few months ago that women have less scientific talent than men. This led to a scandal, because by doing so he defined woman as ‘she who does not have scientific talent.’ Lacan said that the woman par excellence is the poor woman, a metaphorical statement in which he claimed that a woman is not restricted by her property. At the 20th seminar, Lacan defined a woman as ‘she who can go far beyond the place to which a man goes,’ who is defined as a man of property. The man, as we have already said, is limited by the concept of being defined as the owner of a phallus. Therefore, when a man is in a situation of not having, it’s just not a matter of physical property.”
Lacan claims in “Encore” that mystics experience another kind of pleasure, not based on the phallus, and he believes that a woman experiences another kind of pleasure.
“He brings as an example ‘Holy Teresa,’ Bernini’s statue in Rome, which appears on the cover of ‘Encore,’ and about which Lacan wrote that one has to look closely at the statue in order to understand immediately that she is experiencing pleasure. In the English translation they translated ‘jouissance,’ experiencing pleasure, as ‘she is coming,’ i.e., having an orgasm, which is phallic pleasure. But Lacan is speaking of something ecstatic, outside the body.”

How is all this related to the affair of Judy Shalom and Madonna?

“Shalom Nir-Mozes caused a scandal because she didn’t succeed in having her picture taken with the woman who came for mystical reasons. In the newspaper article, she was described as a wealthy person who was angry that Madonna, who came to a kabbala conference, didn’t meet with her. That’s the gap between kabbala and mysticism on the one hand, and power struggles and property on the other.”

So what, according to Lacan, differentiates me as a woman from you as a man?

“It’s not our anatomy that defines us. It has not yet been proven that I am in fact a man and you are a woman. Napoleon said, ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ Lacan says that this is not the case, and it’s enough to see a film by Almodovar in order to understand that this is not the case. If I were a mystic, according to Lacan I would have a little more of the feminine side, in other words, I would be less limited by the phallic definition and more willing to accept another kind of pleasure in this world. And if you were to define yourself as she-who-has, you wouldn’t be as much a woman according to his definition, you would tend somewhat to the masculine side.”

The advantage of failure

Failure, says Mauas, is at the center of Lacan’s philosophy, which is discussed in “Encore.” Advertisements and the elements of capitalism point to the road to success, guarantee success, and when they use sexual symbolism, they are implying that the sexual encounter will be successful as well. Lacan claimed that there is no chance of this, Mauas points out. People try to conceal their shortcomings, their failures, in the hope that this will lead to a successful love encounter, but “the most correct thing to do is for each to adhere to his shortcomings, to his failure, and his failure will lead him to something, mainly when it comes to the love encounter and the sexual encounter. One has to manage with it, because everyone has a different failure.”

We are familiar with advertisements that have feminine and masculine images and codes of success in the sexual arena, and you are talking about adhering to failure.

“Jokes hit the mark on the subject of failure. A joke contains the knowledge of failure. In Argentina, they say the Spanish are stupid, just as in Israel they tell jokes about Persians who are supposedly miserly. In an ad for Marlboro, we see a cowboy smoking, with his horse alongside. In the ad, they promise that if you smoke this cigarette, you will not fail; you will represent genuine masculinity. Ask me why Marlboro did not succeed in Spain. According to the joke, the Spaniards went out and bought horses, instead of cigarettes”.
“What the ads are looking for is a connection between the signifier and the signified: Buy this and you will have a sign of masculinity, or of sex appeal. Whereas the jokes point out the fact that there is failure there. Jokes that do a good job of pointing this out are those that deal with matchmaking, which appear in Freud. The matchmaker claims that the designated bride is good, and the bridegroom is not convinced, and for every complaint of his, the matchmaker has an answer. The mother-in-law is ugly? - ‘You’re not marrying her.’ The bride is not young and not pretty? - ‘She will certainly be faithful.’ She doesn’t have a lot of money? - “Who’s talking about money? What you want is a wife.’ When the bridegroom complains that she’s a hunchback, the matchmaker says ‘What do you want, someone without any defects?’
“The joke points out the failure, because it recognizes the fact that failure exists. There is failure, there is missing the mark, and therefore the joke is suitable for inviting everyone to learn a little more about knowledge of the unconscious. The joke invites us to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge about the unconscious.”

The world of images that surrounds us from every screen presents a “beautiful” and desirable feminine model.

“That is the model of the woman in the eyes of the man. The model of the beautiful and successful woman, which I saw on [the satirical TV program] ‘A Wonderful Country’ in the guise of Pnina Rosenblum. That is what Lacan is talking about: The image of femininity as a social success, and the capitalistic image of femininity, is a masculine image. And I claim that the feminists fall into this trap as well, when they say that women have to succeed like men. I don’t say that a woman has to fail. I claim there is failure that is characteristic of everyone, and that the urge to succeed limits the woman to a certain image, and does not provide an answer to (Freud’s) question, ‘What does a woman want?’”
“The feminists say, we want equality, like the men. I accept the feminists’ justified criticis of the social structure, and I’m in favor of them. I only say that they do not answer the main question, which is, ‘What does a woman want’ - and that is something beyond rights equal to those of men. We still don’t know what she wants. Lacan hints at a possible answer in his words about the pleasure of the mystic, when he says that the woman has pleasure beyond that of a man.”

What is incurable

Dr. Mauas’ clinic is located in a small ground-floor apartment in Ramat Hasharon. A spacious waiting room leads to a kitchenette and a bathroom, but the room where the therapy sessions take place is narrow and rectangular. The windows are open and the greenery reaches inside. You can hear the birds when the honking of car horns is not deafening. In the library on the wall there are contemporary literary periodicals as well. The room contains a low, narrow coach, and next to it a desk and two chairs. It’s crowded in the clinic.
Marco Mauas was born in 1945 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His father, a factory owner, taught him how to read at an early age, and his mother, born in Lebanon when it was a French colony, spoke French to him and taught him poems by La Fontaine and Baudelaire. When he was 13, his bar mitzvah ceremony in an Orthodox synagogue was a decisive moment: He says that his “chaotic” childhood became well-ordered. He also fell in love with Hebrew.
He completed his medical studies at Buenos Aires University in 1970. He came to psychoanalysis because of problems, “which I experienced personally. I had difficult symptoms during my life. I encountered difficult problems, whether in couple relationships, at work, or in pleasure. When I was a student I began analysis with a psychoanalyst, which continued for 12 years. At the same time, I studied with her husband and we read writings by Freud. In 1974 he brought a book in French, and began to explain life and analysis to me in a language closer to life. Concepts such as desire, problems with one’s father and one’s mother, but in precise language. I asked who had written it, and he said Lacan. I told myself that I hadn’t experienced that in analysis with his wife.”
In 1983 Mauas came to Israel with his wife and three children. “When I came to Israel, some serious symptoms returned. I experienced culture shock, and the exile confronted me, in the broad sense of the word exile, i.e. to be strange and different. The inner exile that took hold of me here caused me to choose Lacanian analysis, and I did it in Paris. There was something of a paradox in this change, because I arrived here, I arrived at the right place, and immediately I began to travel to Paris. I didn’t flee. I traveled. I would call it movement in order to be both here and in another place.”
He went to Paris for the first time in 1986, and since then he has been traveling there, at first very frequently, and lately a little less - for a week, once every few months - for a meeting with his analyst. His symptoms haven’t disappeared, says Mauas. “They have made themselves at home, in other words, they have entered a more useful - and therefore more tolerable - place for me. The Lacanian definition says that a symptom is a certain truth that my knowledge cannot decipher and solve. It is preferable for the symptoms not to disappear, because a symptom is what causes someone to go into analysis; in other words, it’s the thing that enables him to know that he wants to know something more. If the symptom disappears completely, the reason for the wish to know will disappear along with it.”
A year ago, philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy formulated the seven principles of “Lacan’s orientation,” which were adopted by the Lacanians. According to Mauas, when one speaks of the Lacanian school, one is referring to a group of analysts who believe - as opposed to what is common in medicine - that it is not the analyst or another expert who will determine the results of any analysis, but the people who have undergone analysis and testify as to what they have experienced. Therefore, the Lacanians do not speak of the “patient,” but rather of “the analysand.”
Mauas mentions that in the “Encore” seminar, Lacan said that he was speaking as a person in analysis, in other words, not as an “expert” with “known knowledge,” but from the place of someone who does not know.
According to Levy’s first principle, analysands are not consumers of medications and treatments, but are ‘at the heart of a strange practice - which is an exchange of words, a cure by means of the word,’ and interpreting the symptom “is not the business of the analyst alone, but at least half is the concern of the analysand himself.”
[…]
“Woody Allen knew something about Lacanism,” says Mauas, “and through humor he says significant things. He even understood the Lacanian concept of the incurable, and it’s worthwhile to achieve this insight, in order to reduce that which is incurable.” Mauas points out that Lacan listened to “the difficult cases that nobody wanted to hear,” such as people who were suicidal, whereas now there is pressure on doctors to give antidepressants such as Prozac and Sarafem, as an solution for depressive tendencies that in effect exist in all of us.
“The use of these drugs turns the encounter between the psychiatrist and the patient into something secondary, and when the doctor is under pressure because of lack of time or the need to make a living, as well as because of his reputation, if he doesn’t prescribe this drug for you it will look like as though he’s not keeping up with the latest. In order to be ‘responsible’ in the eyes of the system, the doctor is expected to do what the drug company recommends. I’m not saying that all doctors do that, but I claim that modern pressure is leading to that, and the job of the psychoanalyst is not to remain silent.”

How does Lacanian therapy differ from other therapeutic approaches?

“The hard cases are what help us to understand the difficulties of the milder cases. Do you understand that we are all hard cases? I learned that from Lacan. There is criticism about the therapeutic method, in which the therapist can suggest that the therapeutic session end after a few minutes, and the patient pays the full price and goes home, a method that caused Lacan to be expelled in his time from the International Psychoanalytic Association.
“The psychoanalyst can suggest that the session end when you have reached a significant point; when you have reached your conclusion as the analysand. That can even happen five minutes after the start of the session. Time is a subjective matter; it depends what happens in it, as Einstein demonstrated in an article he wrote in the 1930s: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”
“Lacan suggested not pushing people into coming to analysis, but working only with those who are determined. A determined person continues to come.”

You said that we are all hard cases. Does that mean that we will remain so, even after years of therapy?

“It’s better to remain hard cases. If we dilute the difficulty, we are liable to dilute everything. Difficulty is the source of man’s uniqueness, and everyone is different. Our goal is to focus and concentrate the difficulty. Diffuse suffering is an entirely different thing from suffering that is focused in a well-defined symptom that you learn to live with, and it alleviates the pain. For example, the State of Israel is a hard case, but the moment it has borders, that will make things much easier, although it will continue to be a hard case.”

What else can Israelis learn from Lacan?

“What Lacan can contribute to Israeli society is to be curious, involved with the place where we live, including its symptoms. To be a Lacanian is a way of life. In other words, to believe in your symptom and to stick to it. “At the start, even before the establishment of the state, it was possible to believe that this society was a kind of utopian society, and that in the kibbutzim they had overcome the Oedipus complex, because the parents were separated from the children, and so on. What I propose to our society today, with Lacan’s tools, it to look at the social utopia from which we have severed ourselves, without cynicism and without despair, with the understanding that the ideals of the past don’t work.
“In 1938, Lacan spoke of the decline of the father’s role in the family, and cited Freud. One of the facts that we live with here is that Israel was the land of our forefathers, and this fact should not be treatedwith cynicism, because that leads to an utter lack of faith. For me, for example, living here is one of my symptoms. I’m an Argentinian; what am I doing here? I’m not a Zionist and I’m not an anti-Zionist, but I have respect for Zionism. It’s part of my symptoms to be here, and I don’t like this symptom, and it’s not a partner for love. But it’s waiting for love.”

¹Originally published in the "Haaretz", a very important newspaper in Israel, on the 3rd of June 2005.
²Member of the New Lacanian School and scientific editor of Lacan’s Seminar “Encore” in a recent Hebrew version.