James Jouissance

We certainly shouldn’t mystify the uterus or the womb as if they escape the play of language, and we really ought to think hard about what it means to privilege the maternal or the matrixial as the originary site for the emergence of subjectivity.

Instead of relying on Lacan, who repeats a patriarchal assumption found in Freud and as old as Aristotle, you should think through Derrida's deconstruction of it, more relevant than ever:

A gynecologist friend of mine in Ljubljana once told me (and I think about this constantly) “Slavoj, the uterus has no opinion.” I think this is perhaps the most Lacanian sentence ever spoken by a man who has never read Lacan. Because what does it mean for the uterus to have no opinion? It means that at the level of the Real; at the level of the body, of tissue, of biological process; there is no recognition. The body does not ask, “Who are you?” This is what Lacan is getting at with the formula, il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel--there is no sexual relationship. People think this means something pessimistic, like “love is impossible” or some such nonsense. No. It means that at the level of the Real, the sexual encounter does not produce meaning. The meaning comes from elsewhere. The meaning comes from the Symbolic. From names, from promises, from law. Now. This woman in Australia sleeps with one twin on, let's say, Monday. She sleeps with the other on Thursday. She gets pregnant. And the court says: we cannot determine the father. And everyone treats this as an amusing anomaly, a quirk of genetics. But I want to say something that may sound strange: this is not an anomaly at all. This is the normal situation, finally made visible. Because (and this is where you have to read Lacan very carefully) paternity was never a biological fact. There is this old Latin phrase the jurists knew perfectly well: pater semper incertus est. The father is always uncertain. The mother, you can see: she is there, the child comes out of her body, this is, you know, hard to argue with. But the father? The father is always, in a sense, a hypothesis. And this is precisely why Lacan says that the Name-of-the-Father, the Nom-du-Père, is a signifier. Not a gene. Not a body. A signifier. Which means: a position in a structure. The father is whoever the Symbolic order says is the father. And what this twin case does (without knowing it, without intending it) is they short-circuit this entire apparatus. Because the Symbolic says: “Fine, give me a DNA test, I’ll determine the name.” And the Real replies: “There is no difference to find.” The signifier reaches down into the biological substrate, looking for something to grip onto, and it finds... nothing.