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Popular Culture Review
are reactions against being seen. Again, a reference to the scopic reminiscent of
the secretaries behind the glass.
One way of reading Lacan’s famous denial that there is any sexual rapport
is as an insistence that the two positions are not complementary. That is, they are
not concomitant operations that allow for easy exchange. This relates to why
Lacan can also claim that Woman (as a signifier) doesn’t exist. If the category
Man depends upon an excluded, uncastrated primal father of some sort (the
exception that proves the rule), the feminine category is defined by its non
exclusion:
3xOx marks that there is not one who does not fall under the
phallic function, so that the set of all women is
unbounded and contingent, and
VxOx indicates that therefore all women do not fall wholly
under the phallic function, thus eliding the possibility of a
totalizing signifier for woman; women certainly exist, but
as Don Juan learns, completing the set is impossible as he
is always one-shy.4
Functionally, then, by conflating the Jewish and the feminine, the episode
indicates the fantasy-dimension that forms the common ground for both racism
and sexism. For man. On the feminine side, there are a few more options. A
woman may be the phallus (Betty, the secretaries) or have it (Joan). Here we
find The Good Place, a space of lounge chairs, nicely stocked bars, and
expensive hotel rooms that may have been lost to us today but for which there is
still a vacant spot waiting (we like to watch). And this Good Place is authentic
insofar as it fits nicely into the hole we have prepared for it (nostalgia for lost
excesses, sacrificed jouissance projected into the past). The Good Place offers a
fantasy of completeness that is bolstered by what McGowan sees as the primary
work of cinema. Such a cinema of fantasy “allows the subject to relate to the lost
object as an object that is simply out of reach. In fantasy, a spatial or temporal
barrier, rather than an ontological one, intervenes between the subject and the
lost object” (24). So functions nostalgia as a recollection of an earlier time when
things were simpler, men were real men and women were beautiful and one
knew one’s place in the world.
But the feminine may also indicate a lack in the Other (the Other qua “the
locus in which everything that can be articulated on the basis of the signifier
comes to be ins ܚX