Power, Desire, Difference Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Power, Desire, Difference - Essay ExampleThe specific mental concerns of the symbolic whitethorn have been played down in some feminist writing, political issues have been played down (and deeply confused with psychical ones) in new-fashioned critiques of essentialism. The thing is, the challenge to Lacan is often read as, or reduced to, the challenge to patriarchal structures of language and phallogocentrism, which of course in part it is. Lacans theory similarly covers the psychical organization, the argument that the symbolic is the see to it of sanity it is not purely about the patriarchal order of language (Chodorow 1998167). It should become evident that this facet of Lacans theory has also received attention in French difference feminisms, especially from Irigaray. Moreover, it is only when this aspect of Lacans theory is taken into account that the British feminist defence of him makes some(prenominal) sense.The symbolics patriarchal nature relies on the interlocking fun ctions of the symbolic receive, and the notorious phallus. Lacan says the symbolic father intervenes in the imaginary ties between mother and child (Withford 1986). For Lacan the actual father calculates infinitely less than his structural, symbolic position as an intervening third party. In the imagination, the fathers place is similar to the occupied by language, in that language intervenes in the imaginary dyad as the symbolic words that rupture the threads of phantasy that hold lack at bay and the illusion of union in place. To borrow the vocabulary of mainstream psychoanalysis for a moment, this intervention is critical to the process of psychical differentiation, to the subjects differentiating itself from others and this is one reason why sanity relies on the symbolic (Withford1988). How ever-changing the sex of either the intervening third party or the primary care-giver, or the actual fathers social spot, would affect the process of differentiation is another matter but r eal changes in either parenting models or the social position of women and men must have consequences for the symbolic. The phallus is the mark of need, and diversity in worldwide and sexual difference in particular. As the mark of need, it pertains to the fact that the subject is not complete unto itself. It is here that the symbolic father and phallus connect the reason breaks up the illusion of unity, the latter represent that break (Withford 19867). As the mark of difference in general, the phallus is allied with the logos, with the principle that the identification of difference is the condition of logic and language alike. That is to say, thinking as such requires difference. This brings to a critical Lacanian claim that sexual difference is the crucial one in being subject to speak, thus think and, mutatis mutandis, that speaking is critical to sexual difference. The visual recognition of sexual difference is a channel connecting the heterogeneous experience of the feeling , sensing organic structure to something that is strange to it the differential structure of language in turn, that language allows it name the difference.In short, Irigaray, like Mitchell, may have a clinical issue in mind the idea that the phallus is represented by the penis implies, according