Lacan-likbez: S8E5 "Male subject and his anxiety" 

One of the major consequences of sexuelle Revolution is a deep and all-pervading psychologization of everything related to sexual difference. At first, intellectual discussions of that period were devoted to a painstaking elaboration of the definitions of the feminine and the masculine, only to end up with a demand to renounce them as stereotypical and limited as soon as the interest was exhausted. Wherein neither the emphasis on these terms, nor their dismissal addresses the question on the level of Freud’s discovery of phenomena, generalized under the so-called ‘castration’, which according to Freud is uniquely shaping the logic and meaning of sexual difference. Giving a ground for the long-term misunderstandings this concept has finally begun to be clarified only in the light of a refusal to approach it in sexual connotations alone. This marks a turn, when a question of what a subject lacks, is reactivated in psychoanalytical thought; a subject for whose emergence, as Freud insisted, castration has a decisive significance.
Lecture major themes:
- The question: “What does a woman want?” has its asymmetrical equivalent for the other gender and it sounds “What is a man?”. An impossibility to answer this question with the help of psychological ploys is supplemented by the weakness of social theories, where gender is viewed in terms of ‘gender identities’ and structures of power relations, whereas the question of sexuation is omitted.
- From the psychoanalytical point of view, a man is a subject, who is imputed a renouncement of part of jouissance, which he concedes to a subject of other types of sexuation. This definition renders the question of identity and psychological traits of gender superfluous.
- From the viewpoint of traditional general public, a male subject is in ‘crisis’ - a state which humanitarian activists generally disavow. From the analytical position we have to keep in mind at least three major shifts in contemporary male sexuation, coincided with the period of domination of the university discourse: a marginalization of genitality, an increase in censoring jouissance shared between male subjects, and finally a loss of the institution of marriage of an element, which was earlier addressed to the male lack.
Literature:
Jacques Lacan, Seminar V, “Formations of the Unconscious”, chapter IX ‘Father metaphor’.