Woman’s ‘Not-All’ and the Paradox of Passive Aggression

Abstract

Having clarified Žižek’s view of the exclusionary logic that sustains the ‘all’ of the masculine field in Lacan, let us now have a look at his controversial interpretation of Lacan’s definition of femininity. The main argument, regularly rehearsed by Žižek, is that in femininity the exclusionary logic is absent. Femininity undermines the masculine logic of the ‘exception to the rule’ by fully identifying with the rule qua symbolic law, i.e. by abolishing the fracture between the Symbolic and the Real, thus depriving the Symbolic of its founding excess. In the feminine position of ‘not-all’ there is simply no exception to the phallic economy, but total identification with it — no part of woman is free from the phallic function: … totalization takes place through its constitutive exception, and since, in the feminine libidinal economy, there is no Outside, no Exception to the phallic function, for that very reason a woman is immersed in the symbolic order more wholly than a man — without restraint, without exception (Žižek, 2003b, 68).1 This topic can also be tackled by referring to the status of what Lacan calls jouissance feminine which Žižek considers at various points in his work.