This document provides an overview of a paper that will use psychoanalytic theory to analyze issues of gender in organization studies. It summarizes Judith Butler's feminist critique of Jacques Lacan's concept of the phallus as the master signifier. Butler argues that Lacan reinforces a masculine view of sexuality and gender by equating the phallus with the penis. The document then discusses two incidents that prompted the author to examine how Lacan's theories may silence women and reinforce gender hierarchies in academic settings.

1. Paper submitted to the AoM CMS research workshop
Stream: Using psychoanalysis to reconceptualise organisation studies
University of Southern California
7-8 August 2008
LACAN AND THE ‘WOMAN QUESTION’:
IMPLICATIONS FOR ORGANISATION STUDIES
Nancy Harding,
Bradford University School of Management, UK.
n.h.harding@bradford.ac.uk
Overview
This is very much ‘work in progress’. It has been written too quickly, has major
omissions, skates over arguments too lightly, ignores complexity, etc., etc., etc. I
have not yet provided a summary of the expanding literature that uses Lacan in
analysing organisations. However, its arguments have been circulating in my mind
(wherever that is) and emerging to bother me in all sorts of places, all sorts of times,
over the last few years. This is the first attempt to put them on paper.
Introduction: Lacan and the ‘Woman Question’
One particularly troubling aspect of Lacan’s work remains largely ignored in the
newly-flourishing Lacanian management and organisation studies (MOS): the
apparent misogyny of an author who could state that ‘there is no such thing as
woman’. There is, to date, only one reference in Lacanian MOS to Lacan’s
exploration of gender, found in a warning given by Jones and Spicer (2005). They
comment on the need for caution in using Lacan due to the ‘patriarchal stain’ of
Freud’s heritage in his work, and ‘his troubled relationship with questions of gender’
(p.229). They note that ‘Anyone hoping to engage with Lacan must face up to this
stain’ (op cit), although they ‘do not think that a stained carpet is necessarily a useless
one’ (ibid). Their warning has gone largely unheeded and, indeed, untested. There
is, further, a curious absence in MOS of reference to the phallus, defined by Lacan as
the master signifier so of huge importance in his work. An admittedly brief search,
and one I must follow up as I develop this paper, reveals that in Organization Studies
the phallus has been mentioned only four times, once in a non-Lacanian paper and the
remaining three occurrences are in book reviews. There is no mention of the phallus
whatsoever in Organization, and only two in Human Relations, one in a book review
and one in a bibliography. (I count my own work similarly guilty of such ignorance
[Harding, 2007]).
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2. Given the fervour with which Lacan’s position on gender has been debated in other
disciplines, especially gender, cultural and psychoanalytical studies, this coyness, this
absence, is perhaps surprising. Those debates show that the sort of stain in Lacan is
open to contestation: his theories have been not only abhorred but also celebrated by
feminist writers: he can be seen as either phallocrat or feminist (Gallop, 1985, p. 133).
It is this contradiction in interpretations of Lacan that, I suggest, are particularly
important to understanding organisations through a Lacanian lens. To remain in
ignorance of the potential misogyny in a Lacanian interpretation is to perpetuate
misogyny in MOS, whilst to remain in ignorance of Lacan’s arguments regarding
gender are to ignore an extremely important way of understanding organisations, in
which must be included the academy. These two positions are not incompatible, I
will argue, but should be held in tension.
The ‘stain’ arises because dotted throughout Lacan’s works are statements that
announce ‘there is no such thing as woman’ and, furthermore, that sexual
relationships are impossible. This is in a context where the master signifier that
makes all signification possible is called the phallus. Lacan states, very clearly, that
the phallus is not reducible to the penis, so it is ostensibly very different from the
penis that underpinned Freud’s opus. However, his use of the term ‘phallus’ further
opens his work to charges of misogyny. Man, for Lacan, desires the phallus whilst
woman is the phallus. The woman, it would seem, is reduced to the status of nothing
more than a male member, an object denied speech, agency, subjectivity and, indeed,
the possibility of being.
Such statements led to a radical challenge by feminists, notably Kristeva who
established a body of theory in direct opposition to Lacan’s interpretations. For the
purpose of this paper, however I am drawing upon Judith Butler as an example of a
feminist critique of Lacan. Butler is somewhat ambivalent in her relationship to
Lacan, drawing upon his ideas to assist her interpretation in some parts of her work,
preferring to return to Freud in other parts (for example, in The Psychic Life of Power,
1997), and developing powerful critiques of Lacan in other aspects, such as in the
chapter entitled ‘The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary’ in Bodies
that Matter (1993), an argument I am drawing upon in this paper. I am using Butler’s
critique of Lacan’s theory of the phallus because, firstly, to understand Lacan’s
theories regarding women it is necessary to explore the role of the phallus in his work,
and Butler’s interpretation is a powerful interrogation of that role. Secondly two
incidents inspired the writing of this paper, and Butler provides a theoretical lens
through which to start reading them.
The first of these occurred at the Baltic Gallery in Gateshead, England in January
2008, when I was gripped by a particular exhibit. The sculpture that fascinated me
looked like a shop window full of a miscellany of white objects. There were
statuettes of Jesus Christ, a garden gnome, ET, the Starship Enterprise, a knight on
horseback; there was a model of a virus and numerous other white objects on white
shelves. Peering short-sightedly at them, I found myself in a game of recognising
what each object might represent until, that is, an object out of place in each little
exhibit filtered through the myopia. Each object had attached to it a phallus – erect
and not really shaped like a penis, but undoubtedly a phallic attachment. Goodness, I
thought, this is Lacan in three-dimensional form: everything is phallicised, nothing
can be signified outside a phallicised language. There was no information about the
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3. sculpture so I asked about it at the information desk on the ground floor. I described
the exhibit in the detail I have given above. The two young women took to searching
the computer – failure. They phoned the (male) curator on the second floor and
described the exhibit but without using the words ‘phallus’ or ‘penis’. But – success.
They printed some details for me. When I checked the details later I found that the
two very efficient assistants had given me details of the wrong exhibit 1. They had, it
seemed, been unable to repeat the word ‘phallus’ when they’d been describing the
exhibit to the curator and their tongue-tiedness led to them accepting a title that had
no mention of the words ‘phallus’ or ‘penis’ in it.
That incident seemed to me to capture powerfully the notion that everything is
phallicised and that the phallicisation of all objects serves to silence the women who
cannot possess even the metaphor that is the spoken word ‘phallus’. It led to the
questions: is it possible for female MOS theorists to write or speak about Lacan?
Does not the position of the phallus in Lacan’s work silence us? Indeed, why is there
so much focus on lack and desire in Lacanian MOS that the phallus is present only
through its absence? An earlier incident, and one I will return to below, confirmed
the necessity of asking these questions. This occurred in the psychoanalytical stream
at the Critical Management Conference in 2007. Because of stream organiser duties I
could attend only one session, in which Lacanian ideas featured prominently. In that
session women sat silently while men debated passionately, angrily, testily each
other’s interpretation of Lacanian terms. The Lacanian phallus seemed to hover in the
air. My immediate thought was that the Lacanian turn signified a continuing silencing
of women in MOS. In this paper I will suggest that that thought was too simplistic.
Rather, I will argue that the very name ‘Lacan’ is phallicised and has thus become
performative of the masculine and feminine within the academy. This has
implications for how we theorise organisations and teach our students.
To reach such a conclusion I am drawing firstly on Judith Butler’s (1993) ‘Lesbian
Phallus and Morphological Imaginary’ as an example of a feminist critique of Lacan.
I will then contrast this with the celebratory feminist interpretation of Seminar XX
offered by Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell (1982). Teresa Brennan’s (1993)
interpretation offers a way of reconciling these two conflicting approaches, so in the
fourth part of the paper I turn to her work. In the conclusion I bring all four authors’
work together, to explore how the name, Lacan, has become phallicised in MOS. I
suggest the need to keep the critical and celebratory interpretations of Lacan in
tension if those of us in the academy who see an emancipatory potential in our work
are not to pollute our ideas with an anti-emancipatory inflection.
Butler on Lacan and the Phallus
For Lacan (2006), the phallus is the privileged signifier, that is, that which originates
or generates significations. It is neither a fantasy, nor an object nor ‘the organ – penis
or clitoris – that it symbolizes’ (2006, p. 579) but is ‘the signifier that is destined to
designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its
presence as signifier’ (op cit). The phallus is therefore that which makes meaning
possible. Always veiled, the phallus is, furthermore, conjoined with desire. Through
a dialectic of demand and desire, man has the phallus, while woman is the phallus.
1
The artist is Terence Koh. I have since found a book that explores his work but unfortunately this
particular sculpture was not included.
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4. Butler’s critique of this position is that Lacan sustains the hegemonic imaginary
which privileges a masculinist and heteronormative regime in his thesis of the
phallus as privileged signifier. Although Lacan specifically states that the phallus
is not the penis, she shows, in ‘The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological
Imaginary, that he slips from this position throughout his work, conflating phallus
and penis. ‘It is not enough’, she writes (p. 90) ‘to claim that the signifier is not
the same as the signified (phallus/penis), if both terms are nevertheless bound to
each other by an essential relation in which that difference is contained’.
However, as would be expected in Butler’s work, this observation is only a minor
part of her account. Rather than allowing the phallus to be Lacan’s master, or
privileged, signifier, Butler shows that the phallus itself has to be subject to ‘a
process of being signified and resignified’ (p. 89). It can therefore be resignified
and its meaning can change. This requires that we contest and interrupt the
reiteration (and reveal the performative structure of its make-up) by which the
phallus as privileged signifier has its power. Butler achieves this through
exploring how anatomy, embodiment, and sexual difference tbecome ‘site[s] of
proliferating resignification’ (p. 89). Through a careful reading of Freud and
Lacan she shows that any body part could have done similar justice in
symbolising the privileged signifier; she thus renders unstable the phallus as
signifier.
Her thesis begins with Freud’s claim “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is
not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (Butler, 1993, p.
59). Tracing Freud’s ideas of embodiment through his essay ‘On Narcissim: An
Introduction’ (1914) and The Ego and the Id (1923), she shows that Freud’s account
of the development of the ego inadvertently establishes the conditions for the
articulation of the body as morphology. Anatomy is not therefore a stable referent but
is dependent on an imaginary schema (Butler, 1993, p. 65). It is psychic projection
which confers boundaries and, hence, unity between the psychic and the material (p.
66). The body is thus not an ontological in-itself that becomes available only through
a psyche that allows the appearancae of the body as an epistemological object (p. 66).
Rather, psyche and morphology are mutually formative, for the body is the
‘constitutive demand that mobilizes psychic action from the start’ and which, in ‘that
very mobilization, and, in its transmuted and projected bodily form, remains that
psyche’ (p. 69).
She finds in Freud a concentration on a ‘singular genital organ’ that does not reside in
one particular place but ‘proliferate(s) in unexpected locations’ (p. 60). The whole
body is originally libidinal and a source of pleasure but eventually that pleasure
becomes concentrated in the genitalia. However, she detects a logical problem in
Freud in that he installs the (male) genitals as both the prototype and the substitution
of other body parts. According to Butler this could be read as “an originating
idealization” of these genitals ‘as the symbolically encoded phallus’ (p. 60). What
later becomes the privileged signifier in Lacan is therefore ‘itself generated by a string
of examples of erotogenic body parts’ (p. 61). The phallus itself therefore becomes
the tool of suppression of this ambivalence. Butler reveals that Freud’s conflation of
the phallus and the penis produces the genitals as on the one hand a symbolic ideal
and on the other an imaginary anatomy. Butler is able to show that Freud’s attempt to
repair this lost phallic property for the penis at the same time establishes the
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5. “fundamental transferability of that property” (p. 62). For Butler this becomes the
grounds for establishing the lesbian phallus because the distinction between “being
and having the phallus” (p. 63) is destabilized.
Turning to the question of how bodies assume ‘the morphe, the shape by which their
material discreteness is marked’ (op cit), Butler now explores Lacan’s account of the
mirror stage. Here, the infant held in front of the mirror suddenly recognises its self
in its image, and in ignoring the hands that hold it upright, imagines its self as whole
and fully formed. Lacan, Butler suggests (p. 71), shows here that the body is
achieved through processes of psychic projection and elaboration. Lacan goes on to
elaborate how this body must now submit to language and to the marking of sexual
difference if it is to sustain is phantasmatic integrity. It is here that the Signification
of the Phallus (Lacan, 2006) must be incorporated into the analysis, for this lecture
follows the differential accession of bodies to sexed positions within the symbolic.
This allows Butler to argue that it is at the mirror stage that the organs are installed as
privileged signifiers (p. 77). In other words, she writes, ‘it is the narcissistically
imbued organ which is then elevated to a structuring principle which forms and gives
access to all knowable objects’ (p. 78). But Lacan’s account implies that all knowable
objects will have an anthropomorphic and androcentric character, and this
androcentric character will be phallic (p. 78). However, Butler’s reading of Freud and
Lacan allow her to argue that the phallus does not require the penis to symbolise
itself, and that it can operate through symbolising other body parts (p. 84).
For Butler, Lacan’s theory is problematic on the one hand because the
morphological scheme is masculine and on the other hand because he equates the
body as an idealized centre of control with the phallus as the controller of
signification. The lesbian phallus challenges the possibility of such a centre. In
challenging the link of the phallus to masculine morphology, it becomes possible
to allow for properties that ‘no longer belong properly to any anatomy (p. 64).
Masculine and feminine are shown to be arbitrary morphologies, the “imaginary
boundaries of sex” (88) are destabilised.
Lacan, in Butler’s reading, uses a symbol to represent the privileged, or master,
signifier that is inescapably linked with the penis. Despite his assertions otherwise,
that connection is retained in Lacan’s own work. From Freud, she is able to show the
possibility of any body part being able to do the work of the phallus in representing
the privileged signifier. Butler’s critique of Lacan is therefore that he sustains the
hegemonic imaginary that allows for nothing but a sharp divide between heterosexual
and homosexual, male and female. I turn now to the work of Juliet Mitchell and
Jacqueline Rose, who argue just the opposite.
Mitchell and Rose and Seminar XX
The first translation into English of Lacan’s important seminar on sex and sexuality,
Seminar XX, was undertaken by Jacqueline Rose. In her introduction to this text,
Juliet Mitchell outlines the history of Freud’s development of the castration complex
as the inaugurator of sex and sexuality. Lacan, she writes, remains true to Freud’s
perspective of the ‘fragmented subject of shifting and uncertain sexual identity’
(1982, p. 26). He follows Freud in understanding that ‘[t]o be human is to be
subjected to a law which decentres and divides: sexuality is created in a division, the
5

6. subject is split; but an ideological world conceals this from the conscious subject who
is supposed to feel whole and certain of a sexual identity’ (ibid). ‘Sexual identity’
here refers to one’s place as male and female, and to one’s object of sexual choice.
The fragility of sexual identity is reinforced a few pages later by Jacqueline Rose,
who writes that for Freud, as for Lacan, ‘sexual difference is constructed at a price …
that .. involves subjection to a law which exceeds any natural or biological division’
(Rose, 2002, p. 28) . The phallus, in Rose’s understanding, becomes a ‘concept’
which ‘stands for that subjection, and for the way in which women are very precisely
implicated in its process’ (ibid).
With Mitchell and Rose’s interpretation of Freud’s, and later Lacan’s, theses on sex
and sexuality we thus see immediately that sexuality, and subjectivity itself, is a
fragile accomplishment rather than a given position, but an accomplishment that is
necessary for recognition of the self as a subject. In Lacan, Rose writes (p. 29) we
see an account of ‘the fictional nature of the sexual category to which every human
subject is … assigned’. Indeed, sexual identity operates as a law in Lacan’s thesis:
subjects are ‘enjoined’ to take up a sexed position, lining up according to whether
they have or do not have the phallus. Thus ‘male’ and ‘female’ are notions emerging
out of fantasy (p. 33).
Rose defends Lacan against the charge of phallocentrism. Rather than being an
‘unproblematic assertion of male privilege’ (p. 40), the phallus is a function of a
symbolic order that is androcentric and which requires that the subject relate itself to a
phallus whose status is fraudulent, and a castration complex that is necessary for the
inauguration of sexual identity. (With regard to castration, Barzilai, 1999, p. 37 notes
that Lacan’s use of the term ‘castration’ in 1938 clearly had a less-than-literal
signification. It eventually comes to represent in his work a noncorporeal cut,
absence, or void that marks all human experience.) Sexual difference is, however, a
‘legislative divide which creates and reproduces its categories’ (p. 41). Where sexual
difference appears to be assigned according to whether a subject does or does not
possess the phallus, anatomical difference is only a figure of sexual difference. The
complexity of the polymorphous perversity of the subject’s early life, where sex is
utterly fluid, is reduced to a ‘crude opposition’ (p. 42). But it is an opposition which
fails, because sexuality’s location in the symbolic means that it works in two
directions, towards the fixing of meaning and away from that fixing to a point of
constant slippage.
It follows that, with anatomy shown to be a sham, the claim to male privilege is
unfounded because the male, like the woman, is subjected within the symbolic order.
Woman however is placed within the symbolic order as an object. Further, Rose
argues that Lacan’s statement that ‘The woman does not exist’, with the ‘The’ under
erasure, should not be interpreted literally. Rather, what Lacan does in this statement
is show that woman as ‘an absolute category and guarantor of fantasy’ (p. 48) does
not exist. It is the phallic function that excludes the woman: she is excluded ‘by’ and
not ‘from´ the nature of words – in Rose’s reading of Lacan, therefore, the woman is
necessary for man’s ability to know his own self-knowledge and truth. But the notion
of ‘woman’ is a fantasy, and so it would follow that ‘man’ must be too, for each
subject must line up behind a door marked ‘male’ or ‘female’, and in choosing which
door their biology is not implicated. Lacan refuses the possibility of any pre-
discursive reality and so there can be no feminine outside language. The ‘feminine’,
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7. it follows ‘is constituted as a division in language, a division which produces the
feminine as its negative term. If woman is defined as other it is because the definition
produces her as other’ (Rose, 1982, p. 55/56).
The Lacanian notion of phallic difference is designed, Rose concludes, to expose the
arbitrary and symbolic nature of sexual difference. It is not psychoanalysis that has
produced that difference: its role is to give an account of how that difference is
produced. Lacan’s work is important to a feminist interpretation, in Rose’s view,
because it exposes the ‘fundamental imposture’ used in the subordination of the
female and the homosexual.
Teresa Brennan and Lacan as Historian of the Ego’s Era
I have summarised Butler’s critique of Lacan’s theory of the phallus that is at the
heart of his work, in which she argues that in using a term that is closely related to the
male sexual member he perpetuates masculine, heterosexual hegemony. Mitchell and
Rose’s analysis of Lacan’s Seminar XX, on the other hand, celebrates Lacan’s
development of Freud’s theories of sex as it shows the arbitrary and fictional basis in
which female subordination is accomplished. I turn now to Teresa Brennan, whose
work reconciles somewhat these two conflicting perspectives.
Brennan (1993) is puzzled that few reviewers of Lacan’s work have noticed the
influence of history in the development of his theses, but acknowledges that to
understand history in his work requires identifying in remarks that are apparently
disconnected a common thread of reasoning. Indeed, she argues that Lacan’s claim
that he writes in ‘free association’, as if the unconscious were speaking, permits the
search for underlying connections in the arguments of an author who tried, she argues,
to ‘subvert his ego’ (p. 51). To read Lacan therefore, for Brennan, is ‘to follow the
path of implication’(p. 51) in which the reader’s own ego is implicated.
Her exploration of the references to history in Ecrits leads her to conclude that Lacan
is the historian of an ego’s era. This era began in the seventeenth century, in the
West, with the advent of capitalism. It began, more specifically, with the publication
of Pascal’s Pensées in 1670 (Brennan, 1993, p. 39). This is the era of the monad, of
the Cartesian individual whose mind is located in a body whose purpose is solely that
of housing the mind. It is the era when spatiality shifts, when the world is opened up
for surveying and conquering – spatiality and the imaginary ego each influence the
other. She reads Lacan as saying that the ego in this era is psychotic, for it has an
aggressive imperative that desires to make the other into a slave (a perspective
derived from Hegel) and which leads to spatial expansion and an aggressive territorial
imperative. As capitalism expands, the majority of subjects are subjected to
continuous economic insecurity and anxiety over their survival, rendering them
dependent on ‘the dominant ego’s standpoint’ (Brennan, 1993, p. 44).
Lacan’s five theses ‘On Aggressivity’ are, Brennan suggests, fundamental to this
argument. An aggression founded in capitalist expansion increases in the Victorian
imperialist decades, where the ego’s need for fixity and control is reflected in an
environment that is constructed so as to be controllable This reinforces paranoia,
because the damage done to nature makes the ego fear for its own survival.
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8. The ego of the modernist era is therefore one that is aggressively expansive and
paranoically defensive. The ‘rudimentary theory’ (Brennan, 1993, p. 50) to be
disinterred from Lacan’s work is that of a paranoia which produces more anxiety than
can be released through further aggression. Psychical space, techno-spatial
domination, physical pressure, competitive rivalry and anxiety form a spiral of
aggression. This ‘totalizing imaginary fixation’ (p. 50) is where the woman, or rather
the psychical fantasy of woman, is located, for the ‘aggression is contained by the
psychic fantasy of woman’ who is ‘the losing side in the ego’s master-slave rivalry,
which Lacan neglects to note’ (Brennan, 1993, p. 49). The spiral of aggression is the
‘cause’ of psychosis, and the fantasy of the woman an apparent way of preventing it.
Lacan’s subject is always sexed. The entry to the paternal symbolic requires that the
subject differentiate between the (m)other and itself and between the sexes, as
subjects must line up behind the doors marked ‘female’ and ‘male’. The
differentiation between the sexes is visual, tied to the absence of the penis in women,
but sexual difference is imaginary. The subject’s assumption of the position of ‘I’
thus requires a positioning in relation to the phallus. This positioning, Brennan
indicates (p. 53) occurs both linguistically and visually, for the mirror stage is both
spatial (standing in front of the mirror) and specular (seeing the reflection that is
jubilantly mis-identified as the self). But this nascent, not yet emergent ‘I’ who can
only appear following resolution of the Oedipal complex, is then objectified and lost
in the aggressive master-slave dialectic of the Oedipal transition that involves a shaper
who has the power to afford recognition, and the shaped, who is always subordinate.
The emergent boy identifies with his father, who is masculine and so is a shaper, a
namer, who possesses the ability to recognise and into whose ‘dominating kingdom’
the boy will one day come (p. 56). The girl child however has little option but to
conform to ‘the passified side of the capitation fix’ (p. 57), a cul-de-sac where she
finds her mother in occupation. She has little option because man requires her there
to secure his self-image and his entry into the symbolic (p. 59).
This is an important part of Brennan’s reading of Lacan: the shaper requires that the
shaped is passified so that the shaper can be recognised as a self. However, the one
fixed in the passifying position is regarded negatively because the shaper projects
anything that threatens its superior position onto the shaped. In being the repository
for this negativity the shaped frees the shaper to act. This is an inherently aggressive
interaction. Brennan writes ‘It is the aggressive projection of the position it does not
want to occupy, and that it fears losing; a positioning founded in its image of itself’
(p. 60). There are several ways of interpreting this. The shaper does not want to
occupy the position of the shaped but also fears losing the possibility of being in that
position; or that the shaper does not want to be in that dominant position yet fears its
loss; or perhaps both, in interaction. This makes clear Lacan’s statement that there
can be no sexual relation, for that would involve two subjects. There is only a relation
between master-subject and slave-object. Her illumination of the multiple positions
held by the master/shaper show how precarious is the position of dominance, and
supports Brennan’s case of the aggressiveness of the dialectic of recognition. This
reading of the master-slave dialectic, Brennan argues, is there in the shadows and
ellipses of Lacan’s earlier work, waiting for ‘an older man with a meaner gaze’ to
develop it more fully in his maturity (p. 60).
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9. Further, the subject most likely to enjoy the privileged side of this relationship, in the
ego’s era, is the white, Western male. This is a male who both denigrates and
idealizes the woman, for it is woman who has come to occupy, Lacan argues, the
position once taken up by God. The denigration involves passification, Brennan
argues (p. 62). The result, for man, is that he ‘has secured the position from which he
can think, indeed speculate. He can turn outward’ (p. 63) for he is not trapped in the
‘absolute self-referentiality of the ego’. In other words, the psychic economy of the
modern era’s ego rests upon woman’s being passified. This argument can be located
in Lacan’s exploration of the need by symbolic subjectivity for an imaginary anchor,
the objet petit a, an object that is separable from the subject, engages its desire and is
foundational to the subject. Objet petit a carries the surplus energy of that traumatic
kernel that cannot be symbolised. Not only does Lacan concede that a woman can be
such an object, throughout his work he uses the woman as an example of objet petit a.
As woman has come to take the place in the symbolic once held by God, the big A,
the Other, then man in the ego’s era ‘has made both his objet petit a and his way out,
his symbolic Other, into the same object. Far from being a way out, the symbolic
Other is now something he believes he controls’ (Brennan, 193, p. 67). This feeds into
further aggression, for in passifying the woman man fears retaliation, experiences
anxiety, and hence must continue in his aggression.
In Brennan’s interpretation of Lacan, therefore, the woman is necessary in modernity
for man’s psychic existence. The conquest and passification of woman is an
enactment at the individual level of the conquest and passification of other peoples,
other (non-Western) lands, and of nature and space. The ego of the modern era is one
bent on ever greater control that comes at the expense of the fear of loss of that
control.
Synthesis and Discussion
In Butler’s reading of Lacan I showed an author who lines up to accuse Lacan of
phallocentricism and who shows the flaws in his seeming elevation of the masculine.
In Mitchell and Rose’s readings I discussed two authors who recognise in Lacan a
feminist stance, for he shows that there is nothing inevitable about being the man or
the woman – they are positions required by the symbolic and thus can be changed.
In Brennan’s interpretation of Lacan we see the stances of both Butler and Mitchell
and Rose. There is nothing given about being a woman – the masculine and the
feminine are both shown in Lacan to be required for identity in the symbolic, and so
there is the possibility to work for change to a different identity. However, the woman
in the modern era is of necessity controlled, subordinated, passified – rendered abject,
in Butler’s terms. Brennan draws on Lacan to show the manner by which such
passification takes places, opening the possibility for better understanding of how
women continue to be rendered abject in a paternalistic culture, and thus the
possibility of bringing about change.
Lacan, I suggest, is both phallocentric and a feminist. His notoriously difficult style
means that his choice of the phallus to symbolise the master signifier allows for
slippage (as happens in his own work) so that the penis is seen as the phallus and its
possessor, the man, is rendered powerful. Meanwhile, he also shows that there is no
such thing as woman, for woman is a placeholder territorialised, controlled, passified
9

10. and subordinated by that half of Western humanity born with a penis. To be a man
requires that there can be no such thing as woman, only a passified placeholder. It
follows that there can be no such thing as man, only an aggressive, paranoid
placeholder rent through with anxiety and trauma. But as soon as we begin to grasp
this in Lacanian theory, we are thrown back into the phallus/penis slippage, and the
whole struggle begins again. To get out of this endless dialectic we need to radically
separate the phallus and the penis.
It is remarkably difficult to explore the workings of the psyche using methods of
fieldwork currently available in the social sciences (refs.) Some have used novels
instead (Patient, ref) and there is at least one example of a student’s diary being
analysed through a Lacanian lens (ref). To take this argument forward I therefore will
draw on vignettes I referred to above, and introduce another one.
At the Critical Management Studies conference in July 2007 I witnessed a discussion
about Lacan, as I noted above, in which debate became irritable, if not angry.
Definitions about how to interpret the real were thrown about. The women in the
room sat quietly, as woman often do at conferences (Ford and Harding, 2008; Ford
and Harding, forthcoming). A few months later, as noted above, I saw an art exhibit
that brought Lacan’s ideas to life, for it attached a phallus to all sorts of cultural
objects. Insserting that second vignette into the first suggests that the name of Lacan
is now a phallicised object that, in its uttering or writing, allows the author to claim
that he possesses the phallus. This phallus is movable and transferable, as Butler
shows is possible, so it becomes an object whose possession is sought. The woman
has great difficulty in participating in this battle, for the specular logic revealed in
Lacanian and Freudian theory casts her as castrated and not therefore equipped
(literally) for such a battle. Women are however publishing papers that draw on Lacan
in MOS. This may be because the author remains invisible, her name denied to peer
reviewers, and so outside the specular realm she can masquerade as if she were a man
and endowed with a penis. When in company, however, woman is not allowed to
speak Lacan’s name, to possess its phallic resonance, but she can write it. (Indeed, it
will be interesting to see how reviewers respond to this statement).
This has resonance for how we analyse organisations and teach our students. If the
phallocentric Lacan dominates in academia, with women passified and subordinated,
is it not possible that we pollute our research and our teaching with this ego’s struggle
for recognition?
The second vignette dates from a long time ago. I got married a week after my
eighteenth birthday. At the time I was working on the machines in a factory in a
small town in South Wales making condensers for transistor radios (which shows how
long ago this was.) Apart from the more senior managers, the workers in this factory
were all women. The last working day before I was to get married I was given two
wedding presents, the first the set of saucepans I had asked for. The second was a
shoebox stuffed with straw, and nestling in the straw was a turgid penis, somewhat
larger than usual in size but otherwise very realistic. It looked as if its arrival in the
box had been somewhat violent, as if it had been wrenched from its moorings with a
mighty tug. All women were given such a wedding present, to much giggles and
ribald jokes. Recalling this incident as I write this paper I am reminded of Taussig’s
(1993) observation that the women of an aboriginal Australian tribe concurred in the
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11. men of the tribe having rendered taboo any woman’s seeing the totems of the tribe.
The totem was for male eyes only: any woman who saw it would bring disaster on
herself and the tribe. The women were not concerned with this seeming denial of
privilege, a lack of concern that arose, Taussig ponders, because they knew the secret
of the totem: that there was no secret.
The gift of the phallus made to brides by the women of the factory in South Wales
seems to me to say something similar (and I draw also on Henrietta Moore’s recent
[2007] psychoanalytic analysis of originary stories in other cultures to suggest this].
This is that: women have seen through the power of the phallus. They see that it is
nothing but a somewhat delicate organ whose importance has been elevated out of all
proportion. The laughter of the women in the factory signified this: what a hoot that
this organ, even when larger than life and hard as nails, such a ridiculous object, could
be regarded as of such significance. Indeed, is this not an aspect of the feared
retaliation from the slave/woman that Brennan speaks of?
Which renders it vital that rather than critiquing Lacan’s statement that ‘there is no
such thing as woman’ we use it as a rallying call. There is no such thing as woman,
and there is no such thing as man. What there is are psychic pressures to construct and
sustain a mirage. As the era of the ego fades into another era, these pressures are
moving from the unconscious to the conscious, where they can be identified and
tackled. By bringing the woman into our Lacanian interpretations of organisations, by
getting to grips with those aspects of Lacan that may betray our desires, agendered
Lacanian theorists may be able to draw on the emancipatory potential of his work
rather than perpetuate a patriarchal pessimism that informs much current Lacanian
interpretation.
References
Barzilai, Shuli (1999) Lacan and the Matter of Origins. Stanford:Stanford
University Press.
Brennan, Teresa. (1993) History after Lacan. London: Routledge.
Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that Matter: on the discursive limits of “sex", New York:
Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jones, C. and A. Spicer (2005). "The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship."
Organization 12(2): 223-246.
Lacan, Jacques. (2002). The Signification of the Phallus. In Lacan, Jacques. Écrits.
New York: Norton. Trans. Bruce Fink.
Mitchell, Juliet. (1982). Introduction – l. In Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose
(Eds.) Feminine Sexuality. Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. London:
Norton. Pp. 1-26.
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12. Moore, Henrietta (2007). Subject of Anthropology: Gender, Symbolism and
Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rose, Jacqueline. (1982). Introduction – ll. In Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose
(Eds.) Feminine Sexuality. Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. London:
Norton. Pp. 27–58..
Taussig, Michael. (1993) Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses.
New York: Routledge
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