You Are the Woman of the Other and I Desire You

Eve and Adam, the first “crush” in human history. We actually have data to say that there was a crush on the part of Adam at first sight, but we do not know if there was one with Eve, perhaps she had her first crush with the snake. This introduces a certain asymmetry. I give my version of the story of Adam and Eve, accepting however other possible interpretations. I have no dogmatism on the structure of Adam and Eve. Everyone knows the story of the rib from which God made a woman. It is often said that God made woman. Perhaps God had read Lacan. Besides – quoting the French version of Rachi, the great commentator of sacred texts – he says that God endows man with a woman. It is the time of the gaze. God brings Eve to Adam and Adam talks. It’s remarkable. Adam meets Eve, and talks. And see in what terms he expresses himself. I quote Rashi (a name adopted by the medieval rabbi Salomo ben Isaak of Troyes: “She is the bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. She is called woman because she was taken from man. ” If God had read Lacan, Adam probably had not read Freud, which does not stop him describing the object choice called narcissistic: the first expression is to recognize himself in Eve, in what they have in common, the likeness between him and her. We should notice that Adam has a lead over us, the rest of men: he could not mistake Eve for his own mother.

But this advantage has perhaps one difficulty, namely to consider Eve as God the father, that is to say that He agreed to be led by her. Now, Rashi notes that, if the Bible uses the pronoun “that,” if we read “this time,” it is because Eve is not the first; she, the first woman, had rivals. For Rashi it means that Adam, our common human father, had sexual intercourse with animals, domesticated and wild, but was not satisfied with those relationships. He did not know they were contra natura. There is no reason to believe that the coupling of Adam with the animals was contra natura before the appearance of Eve. He wasn’t satisfied with that, says Rachi, until he met Eva, at which point it is assumed that Adam became satisfied. It may be said then that Eva is something else than a female. Her appearance brings about a kind of transformation of sexuality. The fact, not well known, that Adam had relations with animals gives a new emphasis on the seduction of the serpent. Interestingly, Adam’s sexuality begins with perversion. And where does Adam turn but to the Father? The woman he will have, he gets her from the Father, and it is love at first sight. It’s also interesting that she was detached from the body of man. So, Adam, upon seeing her, did not say: “I prefer the goat”, that is, with the first and so far the only, it is an object-choice. Because there were others, albeit non-human.

I will not continue with everything that is plausible on this first crush. We note that the first thing Adam is concerned with is that she possesses some familiar traits. The familiar resemblance probably conditioned the narcissistic object choice, but also affects the “anaclitic” object choice, that is, when the object choice is directed toward the mother. In this we find the themes developed by Freud in “Contributions to the Psychology of Love.” And we should mention that the nature of love as repetition is also found in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).

The downgrading of love for Freud seems obvious when one reads what for him is the prototype, Vorbild, of any relationship, of all Liebe. The prototype of any romantic or erotic relationship – this word best conveys the meaning – is the child being fed by the mother’s breast. If this were the definition of love, we could say it represents a debasement of love. We define love as the repetition of that primary satisfaction. We can consider what is unsatisfactory in this definition if we take it as a developed definition of love. Love not only means to jouir from an object: it is to short-circuit the definition of love to define it only by the relationship between a subject lacking-in-jouissance and an object that embodies that satisfaction. Developed love needs that this object be found in a person, a person with an imaginary nature, and not only a purely objectal one. This is the ambiguity of the Freudian Liebe: on the one hand, it is love, on the other, it includes jouissance. The breast, it must be said, is not a person. There is a very funny novel by Philip Roth called The Breast, which imagines the loving relationship between a man and a breast. Literary writing allows one to speak of a breast as a person and to depict the love affair between the main character and a personalized breast. We find it also in Gogol, in “The Nose”, which narrates the meeting between a character and a nose that walks down the streets.

To customize the object or to attach more importance to the object in detriment of the person: we may surmise that in this we have found fetishism.

Glow in the Nose
It is worth thinking about Freud’s example in his 1927 article, “Fetishism,” where we find the choice of what he called a fetish. He tells us about the accidental circumstances, contingent, which led the subject to that election, which is precisely the nose. That is, what Freud calls the choice of the fetish. It is a curious fetish the one Freud takes as a paradigm. He doesn’t take the shoe nor any material thing, but something rather unsubstantial: a gloss on the nose, the Glanz auf der Nase. This depends on many things, being something infinitely fugitive: it depends on the light or the time it takes women to get some mascara. And this is the paradigmatic example Freud takes. This fetish, our objet a as the cause of desire, is openly illustrated in this example where not only it is an almost pointless thing, or a substance almost immaterial, but it also depends on a “signifier” play. As you know, the fetishist presented by Freud was educated in England, and his opening sentence was “a glance on the nose,” and because of the homophony and the misunderstanding of the translation, happens what Freud called a fetish.

This demonstrates the Lacanian thesis that the signifier structures desire. The fetish is produced by a homophony between two languages. In the example, the fetish is the nose and, according to Freud, also a displacement of the nose under the skirt. Here the Freudian fetish is a screen memory and is what Freud called a penis substitute. Not any penis, however, this nose under the skirt is a displacement, a substitute for a penis that does not exist. This is the paradox: the nose under the skirt is a bat that, in the light of day exists only as displaced; in the light of day, the nose under the skirt does not exist as such. This means that it is something that lurks in the Other, something that cannot stand the light of day, something that exists only in hiding. And when an attempt is made to see it, it is nothing other than a shine.

This is not a symptom, a fetish is not a symptom, in that it does not do any wrong. A shine on the nose is not too hard to find in a woman. The Freudian fetishists should be quite happy because it easies the way for desire. For example, one needs only from a woman that she doesn’t put powder on her nose. I don’t know if Adam wanted Eve with a shiny nose. Besides, the Freudian fetish is produced in-between two signifiers, it is the structure of the misunderstanding which produces it. All that Freud, in “Contributions to the Psychology of Love,” presents as conditions for love is also exhibited in-between two signifiers, as something that emerges in the in-between.

Mother, Whore
In the first of his “Contributions …” (“A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men” – 1910), Freud gives us the conjunction between the signification of the mother and, to say it quickly, the signification of the whore. In his second contribution (“On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” – 1912), he tells us, on the contrary, about the disjunction between the signification of the mother and that of the whore. What matters is that it is a play between two signifiers. This is a standard structure, where what takes the place of the cause, as an object, always occurs between two signifiers.

The thematic of conditioned love appears in Freud’s first text from two articulated conditions: the injured third party, and what Freud calls Dirnenhaftbarkeit, which can be translated as “the status of whore.”

The injury to the third party is the first condition emphasized by Freud in the peculiar case he presents in the first of the “Contributions …” For the subject, the Liebesbedingung, the amorous condition, is that the woman in question belongs to another man. This is articulated with the second condition that, Freud says, is secondary and is not to be found in the former: we deal here with a not very faithful woman, that is to say a woman of ill repute. Freud uses the word Dirne, which translates as “woman of ill repute,” “dissolute woman.” In Carmen, for example, this is represented, in the character of the cigarrera, through the smoke. Promiscuous women smoke and the smoke stands for the very nature of their sex lives. These are the two conditions. Freud gives an Oedipal interpretation that he builds upon the conduct of the subject in question: the overestimation of the object and the subject’s will to save the woman from wantonness. Freud, dramatically, demonstrates in the theme of salvation the equivalent of having a child. I will not comment on this since it has been widely discussed elsewhere.

I think there is another interpretation to the purely Oedipal, a more general interpretation from which the Oedipal seems particularized. This interpretation is linked to the fact that, with Adam, it is God who brings Eva to him. Here we find again the woman who belongs to the Other. And that the other man of whom Freud speaks, the third party, is not a double of the subject; quite the opposite, it is not that the subject is jealous of this man. That man is necessary – and this is capital – because he is the one rightly entitled to the woman. He is the husband who has the law on his side, so it is essential to the subject to be in an illegitimate relationship. The other man, of whom Freud doesn’t speak, is not a double of the subject but the rightful owner of the woman. So, the woman appears as a commodity, an object that belongs to that other who deserves to be called the Other, because he is not a double of the subject but someone who has the law on his side, while the woman is in the position of an asset, a commodity, the man’s property, his possession.

Here, I think, we may read a disjunction between the law and jouissance. In this configuration, the condition of access to jouissance is the lack of entitlement, to be entitled to a woman kills jouissance. The Third Book of Pantagruel deals entirely with the question of Panurge’s marriage: “I want to marry but if I marry, I will be a cuckold.” The three hundred pages of the book are devoted to this issue, which is central: to have the legal right to a woman ensures that jouissance, the jouissance of her, will be in another place. So that we can only have access to jouissance by means of the violation of the law. This has a positive side: the subject needs the interdiction of the Other, the subject needs the Other in order that the Other can show him the way to jouissance.

Already in the injured third party condition we have a ternary: the subject, the Other – barred or not – as considered from the angle of property or deception, and the object, present in the person who must have a relationship with the certain Other. To be interesting, it should be the object of the Other, it should be taken from the Other: this is what makes it worthy. And apropos of erotic life, there is a term that we find repeatedly in Freud: Wert, “value”. We must always know the value of the object, that is what the Other is willing to pay for it. In the past it was easier to know, for example, by the estimate in a certain number of camels, etc., which sanctioned the right attitude in erotic matters.

It is clear that in Freud we are not just dealing with denial, Verneinung, the question of existence, and the question of attribution; in erotic life, instead, we deal with the issue of value. Lacan developed the question of value judgments apropos of jouissance through the opposition between use value and exchange value. When Lacan develops these two categories, he finds support on the Freudian Wert. Freud himself speaks of Sexualwert, sexual prowess. And we always find in Freud the term “lessening”, which is a value term, or “overstatement”. The Freudian libido is the psychic value, from where you may think what makes for valuable.

I did a little research on the word Dirne (prostitute), used by Freud; actually it was someone working with me who did it, Franz Kaltenbeck. I assumed that this word would be found in Goethe’s Faust, and in fact I found it at a very prominent stage. This is the moment when Faust first speaks to Margaret, and says Meine schönes Fräulein (“Beautiful lady”), to which Margaret replies, “I’m not a Fraülein nor beautiful.” Later, when Mephistopheles visits her at Martha’s home, he also calls her Fräulein, and Martha says, “The gentleman takes you for a lady.” And she answers: “I’m just a poor girl…”. Those are the terms: Fräulein (lady), Blutjung (young woman). But when Margarita is absent, Faust says to Mephistopheles in a most imperative tone: “Listen, you must procure me that Dirne.” This is the use of Dirne: he calls the girl Fräulein, and to the Other he says, “You must procure me that Dirne.” There are several other examples. What is interesting about the term is that the word is used since the 16th century, and formerly it meant “public woman”, “whore”, “prostitute”.

Freud tackles the issue of Dirne as a displaced repetition of the mother, because the mother is unfaithful to the child by having an affair with the father, with the sexual partner. But this can be read differently. That alleged Dirne is being defamed – I follow Lacan – she is suffering the defamation of woman. When we say Dirne we deal with the following condition of love: the woman in question is not all for the subject; it is a version of the requirement that woman must not be all if she is to be recognized as woman.

The separation between ownership and jouissance is a separation between the order of the signifier, necessary to establish the law, and that which escapes, as jouissance, the capture by the symbolic.

It is a way of saying that, at the level of jouissance, woman escapes, she runs away. Thus, women are unfaithful, even if they are faithful. They are essentially unfaithful.

Maybe it’s an idiocy, a joke, a naiveté needed when we tell a woman: “You are my wife.” The only thing serious that you can say, and this is a generalization of what Freud introduced with the terms of the injured third party and Dirnenhaftbarkeit, is: “You are the woman of the Other, always, and I desire you because you are the woman of the Other.” Everything Freud says about love life comes together on the thematic that woman, to be acknowledged, must belong to the Other.

translated by Jorge Jauregui