Shanna de La Torre - Sex For Structuralists-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

Sex for Structuralists
Shanna de la Torre
Sex for Structuralists

The Non-Oedipal Logics of Femininity
and Psychosis
Shanna de la Torre
Minneapolis, MN, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-92894-4 ISBN 978-3-319-92895-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92895-1
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Acknowledgements
My first thanks are due to Elaine Fan and Rachel Daniel at Palgrave,
for extending this opportunity and a new reason to write, and to Kyra
Saniewski, the anonymous reviewers, and everyone on the editorial team,
for sustaining that opportunity.
My other first thanks are to Tracy McNulty, teacher, friend, adviser,
and Quebec roomie. After touring me around Ithaca some 14 years ago,
she introduced me to Lacanian psychoanalysis and to the Groupe inter-
disciplinaire freudien de recherche et d’intervention clinique et culturelle
(GIFRIC). Tracy sustains my work in ways she cannot know through her
own work, her teachings, her excellent sense of humor, and her willing-
ness to meet up for a cocktail. As I finish this project, I hear her breezy,
bracing refrain: “On to the next!”
I want to thank too good friends from the days of the Psychoanalysis
Reading Group. Heidi Arsenault and Daniel Wilson were this project’s
readers, as well as two of the first people I met at Cornell, and they have
been, as ever, generous, unflappable, provocative, and kind. Our unoffi-
cial work goes on! Warm thanks, too, to Karen Benezra, Henry Berlin,
Andrew Bielski, Rebecca Colesworthy, Paul Flaig, Diana Hamilton,
Ryan Jackson, Kristine Klement, Fernanda Negrete, Pablo Pérez-Wilson,
Carissa Sims, and Audrey Wasser, friends in psychoanalysis all. And,
thanks too to Christopher Meyer; words I would not have known with-
out his support show up throughout this project.
While at Cornell, I was lucky to be supported by many people, friends
and teachers alike. Among these, I want to send big thanks to Kathleen
v
vi Acknowledgements
Perry Long and Cary Howie, for showing me something of the love of
small spaces and the freedom of floating ones, and for writing many let-
ters; to José María Rodríguez-García, for being a support in the back-
ground these many years; to Anne Berger and Camille Robcis, each of
whom stirred my interest in Lévi-Strauss; and to Masha Raskolnikov,
who can sing a praise like nobody’s business. I also want to thank the
many students I met at both Cornell and the University of Chicago;
their passion, kindness, willingness to laugh, and willingness to take risks
kept me going. Special thanks too to Annelies Deuss and Sergio Pulido,
since become the international hosts of our dreams, and to Emilia
Wilton-Godberfforde, who sends a birthday sapin every year!
To my friends in Minnesota—Katherine Swanson, along with
Torrey, Oliver, and Alma, Letta and Josh Page, KP Powell and Sabrina
Winkleman, Cinto Birkhofer and Alli Shelly, Lucas Schulze, BJ Titus,
Antonia Lortis, and Holly LaRochelle—thank you.
To my family, thank you and I love you.
To my husband, Osvaldo, who used to say, “Why don’t you just write
your theory book?”: thank you for inspiring and accompanying me.
Contents
1 The Criteria of the Future 1

1.1 Structure and the Symbolic 5
1.2 Outline of the Project 11
1.3 Conclusion 13
References 17
2 Primal Scene, Ground Zero: Lévi-Strauss, Lacan,

and the Wolf Man Beyond the Seduction 19
2.1 Lévi-Strauss the Synthesist 21
2.2 The Signifier of the Lack in the Other 26
2.3 From Seduction to the Insoluble 29
2.4 Conclusion 32
References 37
3 Madness and the Sensitive Anthropologist: Lévi-Strauss’s

New Structuralism 39
3.1 No Society Is Wholly Symbolic 41
3.2 The Condition of Symbolic Thinking 51
3.3 Conclusion 54
References 58
4 Two Traumas, Not One: The Feminine in Myth 61

4.1 What Is Myth? 65
vii
viii Contents
4.2 Two Traumas, Not One 66

4.3 The Shaman’s Song 71
4.4 Conclusion 77
References 81
5 The Mythologist’s Aesthetic Task: Amelia 83

5.1 The Babadook 88
5.2 Two Traumas: Generating Mister Babadook 91
5.3 Becoming a Mythologist: First Condition, (Dis)Belief 92
5.4 Second Condition, Free Association 94
5.5 Third Condition, “A Limit to the Drive Where the Law
Was Unable” 97
5.6 Conclusion 99
References 101
6 Sex for Structuralists: From Myth to Fantasy 103

6.1 Lacan’s Formulas of Sexuation 105
6.2 The “Real-of-the-Structure” 109
6.3 The Other Jouissance 111
6.4 An Ethical Exigency 116
6.5 Conclusion 118
References 124
7 How Do We Use Structuralism? 127

References 132
Index 133
CHAPTER 1
The Criteria of the Future
Near the end of his essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,”

written and published in 1967, Gilles Deleuze describes structural-
ism’s future. Having outlined the six formal criteria of any structuralism
(“the simplest ones,”1 he notes), Deleuze has arrived at the final crite-
ria, those concerned with transformation, the transformation specific to
the method that structuralism is: The point where what was a subject—a
subject now broken up—becomes a practice. It’s obscure, he writes:
“these last criteria, from the subject to practice, are the most obscure—
the criteria of the future.”2
Structures, he has explained, “discover on their own account verita-
ble languages”3; they are the things of invention, found, and founding.
And the process of determining a structure unfolds, Deleuze observes,
with “no general rule”—“no general rule at all,” he writes; “structural-
ism implies, from one perspective, a true creation, and from another, an
initiative and a discovery that is not without its risks.”4 Structures dis-
cover, and structuralism creates: In each of these brief notes on struc-
ture and structuralism’s essentials, Deleuze underscores structuralism’s
groundlessness, pointing to the ways in which it is a method without any
guarantee that could authorize either the unfolding of its work or the
languages thereby discovered. What makes such work possible? Deleuze
begins to answer: The criterion of the empty square, which is the space
in structure that makes it play: “It is always as a function of the empty
square,” he writes, “that the differential relations are open to new val-
ues or variations, and the singularities capable of new distributions,
© The Author(s) 2018 1

S. de la Torre, Sex for Structuralists,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92895-1_1
2 S. DE LA TORRE
constitutive of another structure.”5 But, what makes it possible for any

given subject to accompany the “empty or perforated”6 space that makes
a structure play? What makes it possible for a subject neither to “occupy”
nor “desert”7 that space, but accompany it, and “mutate”8 with it, and
create? And, why would any subject want to?
These questions belong to the criteria of the transformation of the
subject, named by Deleuze as the thresholds of structuralism’s future;
and in this chapter and the chapters to follow, I will approach these
questions by way of the teachings and writings of Sigmund Freud,
Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Structures, I contend, open
onto the resources of the symbolic and therefore, potentially, desire.
They thus mark an important point of contact between the method
of structuralism and the ethics of psychoanalysis. And while Deleuze
suggests that “a structuralist hero”9 is located at the site where the
subject, by some obscure maneuver, becomes a practice, I argue that
structuralism is at its most interesting when it voids itself of its heroes
and engages with subjective logics instead. Furthermore, I argue that
sex matters to this evacuation, for it makes a difference where a sub-
ject is logically positioned with respect to the space in structure that
makes it play. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, as Deleuze notes, that
empty space is the “symbolic phallus”; and while the symbolic phal-
lus—to which I will return—is “neither the real organ, nor the series
of associable or associated images,” “it is indeed,” as Deleuze writes,
“sexuality that is in question, a question of nothing else here, contrary
to the pious and ever-renewed attempts in psychoanalysis to renounce
or minimize sexual references.”10 I would say the same about this pro-
ject: It is indeed sexuality that is in question, a question of nothing
else here.
Over the course of the project, I will develop the following claim: It
is at those sites where structuralism engages with the non-Oedipal logics
of psychosis and femininity, or the not-all, that it makes manifest the pos-
sibility and creativity that are unique to its method and, thereby, makes
itself useful.11 Consequently, it is important to determine those sites
within structuralist writings where such logics are operative. For while
structuralism has not necessarily been known for these—has, in fact,
been generally regarded as virtually coterminous with the Oedipal log-
ics for which Freud and Lévi-Strauss, in particular, are famous or infa-
mous—it is nonetheless the case that structuralism offers more by way
of non-Oedipal logics than some of its critics have suggested. I would
1 THE CRITERIA OF THE FUTURE 3
submit that these logics appear, in fact, at key junctures in structuralist

texts. Therefore, I will work with such examples in the chapters to come,
focusing first upon the writings of Lévi-Strauss, wherein he—by way of
myth, trauma, and exploratory thoughts on symbolic thought and social
structure—touches upon and builds out the non-Oedipal logics that I
contend make structuralism’s usefulness manifest. I will work too with
these examples’ links to the writings of Freud and Lacan, who, from the
beginning, have a certain way of tuning into what Lacan will eventually
refer to as “the real-of-the-structure,”12 and whose clinical engagements
make emerge again and again that the “subject of the unconscious …
gears into the body.”13 What the non-Oedipal logics of psychosis and the
not-all also bring relentlessly out into the open, as it were, is that there
are holes—fortuitous in their own way—that no myth or logical operator
can make “good”; and—what can be difficult for some non-Oedipal sub-
jects—neither are they “bad.”
To be sure, Lévi-Strauss may appear to be an unlikely candidate for
such a project, and for good reason. For one, his theoretical interest in
women (who, as I will discuss in Chapter 6, ought not to be confused
with feminine or not-all subjects) appears to be limited to their slightly
curious status as subjects who are also objects—bearers, as it were, of two
kinds of bodies.14 In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, he finds that
they circulate as words do, writing of the link between kinship and lan-
guage that “these results can be achieved only by treating marriage reg-
ulations and kinship systems as a kind of language … That the mediating
factor, in this case, should be the women of the group, who are circulated
between clans, lineages, or families, in place of the words of the group,
which are circulated between individuals, does not at all change the fact
that the essential aspect of the phenomenon is identical in both cases.”15
And while, anticipating protest, he specifies, “words do not speak, while
women do,”16 perhaps his truest love was in fact structural linguistics:
Deleuze calls him “the least romantic”17 of the structuralists, while Gayle
Rubin famously responds to his description of women as subjects who
are also objects by declaring, “This is an extraordinary statement. Why
is he not, at this point, denouncing what kinship systems do to women,
instead of presenting one of the greatest rip-offs of all time as the root of
romance?”18 Indeed, why not?
I do not dispute any of the above. And I share Rubin’s strong oppo-
sition to contemporary versions or residues of the practice of “the
exchange of women” and any attempt to justify it in the name of nature,
4 S. DE LA TORRE
culture, politics, or otherwise. This is not only an issue of human rights;

it is a principle at the heart of psychoanalysis today, which joins Rubin
in affirming that no human can be an object and goes one step further
by engaging the analysand in a process of working-through in which he,
she, they, or ze may discover the same by way of the love of the truth of
the unconscious.19
Thinking logically about Lévi-Strauss, we might say that his writings
on the incest prohibition and the elementary structures of kinship elab-
orate at their base an unambiguously Oedipal logic, which I would like
to define as a logic that installs a certain kind of limit, namely a limit
capable of simultaneously barring a deadly enjoyment and enabling a
smaller “share” of enjoyment. That the limit plays an enabling function
is, I suggest, partly responsible for the fact that Oedipal logics have been
so conducive to the (hetero)normative uses for which Oedipus tends to
be known. In other words, this word “share” is significant: For those
subjects for whom this limit is operational (in the language of Lacanian
psychoanalysis, masculine subjects), the limit is both external to and
internal to the subject; and in its external iterations, it has been given to
acquiring the force of a norm. I will develop further the question of the
limit that operates within the logic of masculinity in Chapter 6, offering
a reading of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. I will also address the logic of
the limit such as Lévi-Strauss conceptualizes it, looking in Chapter 3 to
his notion of the zero symbol, where the limit figures as the condition of
symbolic thought.
Structures, however, are not norms but models, moreover, which are
constructed according to a specific set of criteria. While norms are rules
for social engagement that aim at and are premised upon the repression
of the subject of the unconscious, structures open onto the resources
of the symbolic—the first criterion of any structuralism, according to
Deleuze20—and therefore, potentially, desire. And the symbolic opens
onto creation: Tracy McNulty’s proposal to define the symbolic as “a
creative process of devising ‘compelling fictions’”21 is a key formulation
for this project, as is her argument that “the essence of the symbolic”
is “to create new practices or mechanisms that sustain the subject in
the exercise of its desire or freedom.”22 McNulty argues that to reduce
the symbolic to the normative is to forfeit or to fail to see, sense, and
draw upon the symbolic’s resources and what McNulty calls its “‘exper-
imental’ dimension.”23 It is also to undermine the experience of those
subjects for whom the limit described above is not operational, whose
experience of limitlessness does not tend toward the repair proffered

by societal norms; and undermining that experience is presumably pre-
cisely what antinormative critics want not to do. With that in mind, it is
important to add that structuralism does not aim at modifying norms or
producing new ones, for instance, norms that would be somehow more
amenable to people’s social lives; the structuralism I want to use recog-
nizes norms as such as repressive of unconscious desire and, in that sense,
violent. When Deleuze asserts that structures discover and structuralism
creates, and when McNulty emphasizes that the symbolic can sustain the
subject “in the exercise of its desire,” both authors underline that struc-
tures can bring something radically new to the social link.
In this project, I hope to carry out my own experiment in exploring
the following proposal: While Lévi-Strauss’s writings on kinship could be
said to elaborate an Oedipal logic, whose own workings are conducive to
the perpetuation of norms, the heart of structuralism is not here: Rather,
its heart—as its name suggests—is with structure. And it is structural-
ism’s engagements with the subjective logics of psychosis and femininity
or the not-all that bring this forward, for such engagements bring for-
ward, too, the impossible “knowledge” borne by or within such logics:
that there is a lack in structure, described by analyst Willy Apollon as an
“unfoundedness which makes a hole in the order of the symbol”24—
and an unfoundedness which, according to Apollon, can be the “vor-
tex” into which the psychotic subject can “topple,” for lack of any myth
that comes to cover over or make up for it.25 Or, as Will Greenshields
writes, citing Lacan: the “‘permanent downfall of the Other,’ the reve-
lation that the Other is also barred and castrated—the first ‘great secret’
of psychoanalysis which establishes the second ‘great secret’ (the sexual
relationship’s non-existence)—is, Lacan tells us, ‘not to be considered as
a happening due to [an occasional] defect’ experienced as impotence in
the face of prohibition or circumstance, ‘but as a fact of structure.’”26
1.1 Structure and the Symbolic

First, what is a structure? As I noted briefly above, for Lévi-Strauss, a
structure is a model meeting the following four criteria: First, a structure
is a model which is a system, meaning that change effected in any ele-
ment within the system will bring about change throughout.27 Second,
a structure is a model which demonstrates repeatability: “for any given
model,” he writes, “there should be the possibility of ordering a series
6 S. DE LA TORRE
of transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type.”28

Third, a structure is a model which demonstrates predictability: “the
above properties make it possible to predict how the model will react if
one or more of its elements are submitted to certain modifications.”29
Fourth and finally, a structure is a model which “make[s] immediately
intelligible all the observed facts.”30 To repeat: to qualify as a structure, a
model must, according to Lévi-Strauss, show “the characteristics of a sys-
tem,” demonstrate interdependence of elements and predictability, and
make its own “facts” intelligible.31 According to Lévi-Strauss, the ques-
tion of what structure is “is not an anthropological question, but one
which belongs to the methodology of science in general.”32 With this
remark, he underlines an aspect of structuralism taken up by both Jean
Piaget and Jean-Marie Benoist, when these latter consider the stakes of
structuralism’s status as a method, not a doctrine. Benoist responds to
Piaget on this point: “Piaget emphasizes that structuralism must remain
a method or else it will founder in a reification of structures, in a carica-
ture of positivism.”33 He then cites Piaget: “‘Briefly, the permanent dan-
ger threatening structuralism when one tends to make a philosophy out
of it is that an ontologically privileged status will be accorded to struc-
tures; it is a danger that emerges as soon as one forgets the latter’s con-
nections with the operations of which they are the product.’”34
On the basis of the sparse criteria for a structure listed above, we can
already discern some of the differences between structures and norms,
differences which are critical to identify and uphold in approaching the
uses of structure and the logics of psychosis and femininity. To fill out
these differences, however, we must ask the further question, what is
the symbolic? The symbolic is not only the first criterion of any struc-
turalism, as Deleuze observes, and it is not only a central term shared
by Lévi-Strauss and Lacan, a point on which they did not necessarily
agree but certainly crossed paths. More crucially, the symbolic is that
which enables structure to be operationalized by any given subject.
Operationalized for what, one might ask? Operationalized for subjec-
tive “ends” which cannot be known in advance. If, as I am suggesting,
structures open onto the resources of the symbolic, and if, in a recursive
movement, the symbolic enables structure to be operationalized and the
ends of that operation cannot be known in advance, it matters quite a bit
how we define the symbolic: As I hope to show, it’s a question of ethics.
Perhaps more clearly than any other scholar dealing in the terms
of Lacanian psychoanalysis today, McNulty elucidates the fact that
subjects experience the symbolic differently. In Wrestling with the Angel:

Experiments in Symbolic Life, McNulty proposes defining the symbolic as
“a creative process of devising ‘compelling fictions.’”35 Citing Deleuze’s
affirmation that “the symbolic ‘only has value to the extent that it ani-
mates new works which are those of today,’”36 McNulty first argues for
and then proceeds to produce a more nuanced account of the symbolic
than that forwarded by, in the first place, those who conflate it with nor-
mativity in the service of critiquing the latter and, in the second place,
those who conflate it with normativity in the name of normative aims.
To begin, McNulty notes that it is partly due to Freud’s “own for-
mulations”37 that the concept of the symbolic has been frequently con-
flated with normativity or called upon in support of normative aims. To
be sure, as she remarks, the concept of the symbolic does not appear
in Freud’s writing38; but McNulty identifies what she describes as “a
nascent account of its structure and function”39 in his texts on infan-
tile sexuality, where he theorizes the traversal of the Oedipus complex
as one which marks, as McNulty explains, “the condition of successful
entry into social life”40 and one which “equates ethical comportment
with the internalization of the paternal superego.”41 These are the ori-
gins of Oedipal logics as Freud theorizes them in his early writings on
infantile sexuality, and they effectively collapse moral development with
superegoic injunctions. Such an account, fortunately, is not Freud’s final
word on the matter. Noting this, McNulty proceeds to offer a reread-
ing of both Freud and Lacan by way of Lacan’s work with three of
Freud’s early texts and two of his last ones, a list comprised of Studies
in Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, Dora, Moses and Monotheism,
and “Constructions in Analysis.” McNulty finds in this conjunction the
concepts that led to Lacan’s reinvention of the symbolic, on the basis
of which she argues that his “work can be understood as attempting to
extract the concept of the symbolic from the institutions, norms, and
prohibitions that represent it for the neurotic in order to reveal its struc-
tural dimension.”42 And her own work, together with Lacan’s, is con-
nected to what she describes as “the urgent need to theorize a paternal
function beyond the law, and so distinguish its psychic function from
the patriarchal norms and ideals that structure a social or moral order
defined by the renunciation of enjoyment or the embrace of certain
values.”43
McNulty suggests that Lacan has two aims in reinventing the sym-
bolic: “to reduce the analytic experience to its fundamentals, and to
8 S. DE LA TORRE
make possible the analysis of those subjects that the clinical practices of
[Lacan’s] day failed to address in a satisfying way.”44 For, as McNulty
emphasizes, a “symbolic that only describes the experience of the (mas-
culine) neurotic is not a symbolic at all, but a normative codification of
values and ideals.”45 McNulty’s reading of the aforementioned texts pro-
duces the following claim: “I contend that these works [the texts cited
above] allow us to identify two distinct ‘inventions of the symbolic,’
both of which foreground its experimental character: the inauguration of
the analytic transference in the Freudian clinic, and the founding of the
Mosaic law.”46
Part of what McNulty wants to clarify is the difference between what
she calls “representations” of “the structural fact” of castration and the
structural fact of castration itself.47 What is castration? As we know, cas-
tration implies a cut; in psychoanalytic terms, it names the notion that,
as humans, we are constitutively and primordially cut not by the knife or
cutting instrument at the root of the word (castrum), but by language.
Language is the instrument that cuts humans—from what, we do not
know. Not only are we cut: For the satisfaction of our most basic needs,
we are brought into the field of the Other. McNulty proposes defining
castration as “most simply the loss of full being to language, or the fact
that for the human being it is not possible to return to a purely instinc-
tual existence.”48 She then specifies, “castration denotes the fact that the
quest for satisfaction, in the human being, must necessarily pass through
the locus of the Other (the field of the address, or language itself),
which results in the transmutation of need into a demand that cannot
be fulfilled directly.”49 In the space between a need and a demand, the
drive emerges as that excess of energy which “respond[s] to an absent
Other.”50
Clarifying the difference between what McNulty calls representa-
tions of the structural fact of castration and the structural fact of cas-
tration itself brings us into Lévi-Strauss’s field. For while castration can
be described as a structural fact resulting from that other fact of human
existence (language), the incest prohibition is, by contrast, a representa-
tion of castration—one that is admittedly very well-known and one that
enjoys quite a lot of cultural currency—so much so, in fact, that it was
posited by Lévi-Strauss to be at the very site of culture’s advent: as he
writes, “There only, but there finally culture can and must, under pain
of not existing, firmly declare ‘Me first’, and tell nature, ‘You go no fur-
ther’.”51 But, as McNulty notes, in a remark that connects directly to
the impetus of this project: A representation of castration like that of the

incest prohibition is “addressed to, and pertinent for, half of humanity
at most.”52 Why? Most simply put, because the incest prohibition works
to explain humans’ constitutive cut by way of something that is given up
or lost because impossible, and at the same time, it renders other objects
possible. Clearly, this representation of castration has myriad implica-
tions, but to pull out one that is particularly important for our purposes
here, we can say that the incest prohibition functions as a representa-
tion of castration that metaphorizes loss. McNulty explains it thusly:
the prohibition metaphorizes “the [drive’s] impossibility of obtaining
its object.”53 Indeed, we could attribute part of the appeal of thinking
humans’ constitutive cut via the representation of an actual loss of part
of the body—like the penis—to this aspect of human experience. In
other words, it’s appealing because it is unconsciously “known” to some
subjects.
But what Freud and Lacan quickly discovered in their work with fem-
ininity and psychosis is that some subjects are confronted in castration
with not loss (loss of the penis, loss of an object given up to render other
objects possible) but excess; and in such experiences, precisely nothing
comes to limit the working of the drive. As I suggested in the past, with
reference to feminine subjects: “Not only is incest not prohibited; no one
thing is prohibited.”54 What does this mean? If we accept McNulty’s—
and Lacan’s—view that castration is a structural fact, then such subjects
are no less subject to castration. But, representations of castration that
conjugate loss to prohibition and impossibility have very little to do with
what feminine and psychotic subjects experience in their pass through
the locus of the Other, where what is at stake is less a loss than an excess
which can be “damaging, inexpressible.”55 And perhaps it is also the case
that the attribution of loss to a prohibition, according to which some-
thing is given up, can lend itself to a cascade of acts of giving up: giving
up on one’s desire, in favor of objects deemed acceptable by the norms
and ideals of the social link. At the same time, perhaps it is also the case
that the attribution of not loss but excess to a failed Other can lend itself
to different cascades of failed acts, detours from acts of articulating one’s
desire to the social link that arise out of paralysis, suspicion, or pure
transport. In other words, in this preliminary sketch of what is at stake
in castration for different kinds of subjects, it is important to note that
Oedipal and non-Oedipal subjects also refuse castration with recourse
to different strategies. That is, out of the distinction sketched above,
10 S. DE LA TORRE
concerning what is at stake for different kinds of subjects in their pass

through the locus of the Other, arise further distinctions, concerning the
different ways in which castration can be refused, denied, or disavowed.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
That there is a difference between representations of castration and
the structural fact of castration itself is worth upholding, for the differ-
ence, McNulty suggests, allows space for the invention of “other rep-
resentations, other stagings” of castration.56 Not only that: such space
clarifies that all such stagings are fictions—symbolic fictions. And sym-
bolic fictions, McNulty argues, are all “experimental”:
My focus is on articulations of the symbolic that take a creative form or

enable a creative practice, and that therefore provide a structure in which
the subject can renew or reactivate its encounter with the lack in the
Other—or castration—in a way that allows the subject to exercise its free-
dom and give expression to its desire. I contend that at base all cultural
articulations of the symbolic have an ‘experimental’ dimension, even if they
subsequently take on a normative character. The ‘becoming normative’ of
a symbolic form is not the telos that determine its function or value, how-
ever. ‘Experiment’ implies an experience, something the subject undergoes;
the emphasis is therefore upon the experience or the trajectory itself, and
not the static ‘fact’ of the symbolic or the laws or institutions that might
represent its function.57
As McNulty emphasizes throughout her project, while a symbolic fiction

can transform into a norm and thereby lose what was essentially symbolic
about it, the symbolic itself is a process that produces new fictions.
To circle back to the question of the difference between structures
and norms, then, we can now say that the concept of the symbolic—
such as it is reinvented by Lacan and renewed by McNulty—emphasizes
that there is a lack in structure, hollowed out when the cut of language
brings the human into the field of the Other. Furthermore, the sym-
bolic’s reinvention forefronts what Juliet Flower MacCannell describes
as “the job” that the symbolic “is supposed to do”: that of supporting
the subject in accessing something creative in his/her/hir structurally
inevitable encounter with that lack, or in MacCannell’s words, “the job
of embracing and sustaining the most contradictory and conflicting of
dreams and desires.”58 Norms can perform a somewhat similar function:
that is, norms too can support the subject in the structurally inevitable
encounter with the lack in structure; but psychoanalysis’s critical insight,
present since Freud’s earliest writings, is that they do so at the cost of the
expression of unconscious desire. According to Lacan, it is the “uncon-
scious [which] makes it possible to situate desire,” and this constitutes
“the meaning of the first, already quite complete, step Freud took, which
was not merely implied but in fact fully articulated and developed in
the Traumdeutung.”59 To my mind, this alone—that norms “support”
subjects at the cost of desire while structure may open onto something
new—provides sufficient cause to attend to structuralism and its uses.
1.2 Outline of the Project

The broad strokes of the pages to come are as follows: in the next chap-
ter, “Primal Scene, Ground Zero: Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and the Wolf Man
beyond the Seduction,” I consider Lévi-Strauss’s own discussions of the
foundations of structuralism in Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss.
To begin, I am interested in the Lévi-Strauss we know: Lévi-Strauss the
idealist, Lévi-Strauss the (quasi-)humanist, and, more significantly for my
purposes, the Lévi-Strauss for whom the psychic universe is “a projec-
tion of the social universe.”60 In other words, this is the Lévi-Strauss for
whom there is no decentering relay through the Other inaugurating the
gap that is the condition of desire, the gap underlined by Lacan in “The
Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious,” to which I turn next. In this écrit, Lacan points to the
difference between Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the zero symbol and his
own concept of the signifier of the lack in the Other, a difference which
distills the diverging structuralist paths between Lacan and the Lévi-
Strauss we know, as well as a difference that I propose might be mapped
in terms of Oedipal and non-Oedipal logics. Finally, I consider Freud’s
case study of the Wolf Man, the case Lacan calls on to affirm Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that Freud’s thought is “much more struc-
turalist … than received ideas would have it.”61 Here I am interested in
fleshing out the kinds of queer erotics that are the material of any anal-
ysis, and I argue that the case study of the Wolf Man foregrounds the
“real” that separates Lévi-Strauss from Lacan in the shape of the primal
scene.
There is, however, another tendency in Lévi-Strauss’s work, to which
I turn in Chapters 3 and 4. In Chapter 3, “Madness and the Sensitive
Anthropologist: Lévi-Strauss’s New Structuralism,” I begin to explore
how we might theorize structuralism differently—non-Oedipally—with,
12 S. DE LA TORRE
rather than against, Lévi-Strauss, one of the foremost theorists of the

incest prohibition. I return to the Introduction to the Work of Marcel
Mauss to argue that we find here both Oedipal and non-Oedipal logics
at work in Lévi-Strauss’s treatments of the zero symbol and what he calls
“mental disturbance.” In particular, I am interested in how Lévi-Strauss
develops an account of a symbolic that does not cover everything, as well
as his argument that there are members of the collective who are sensi-
tive to those sites that the symbolic does not cover, a logic I link to those
of femininity and psychosis. Bringing together Lévi-Strauss’s account of
those members of the collective whom he describes as “sensitive” and his
account of the experience of the anthropologist, I point to ways in which
this early account of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism both touches upon and
backs away from the experience of limitlessness that is the hallmark of
non-Oedipal logics.
I proceed in Chapter 4, “Two Traumas, Not One: The Feminine
in Myth,” to consider the links Lévi-Strauss draws between myth and
trauma, as well as the implications of his identification in Mythologiques
of a new condition for symbolic thought, something which he calls “real
contradiction” and which I propose terming a feminine experience about
which there is no freedom to choose. I propose that the link Lévi-Strauss
finds between trauma and “living myth” brings into structuralism the real
unconscious that is ostensibly barred by a system that posits the existence
of a collective unconscious. In Chapter 5, “The Mythologist’s Aesthetic
Task: Amelia,” I turn to Jennifer Kent’s 2014 horror film The Babadook
to pursue the questions with which I conclude Chapter 4, namely what
is a “sick woman”—or a subject who is not-all in the symbolic whose suf-
fering has become, as in Apollon’s formulation, “bad to say”62—to do in
the face of the real unconscious, there where an experience that the social
cannot integrate is inscribed, and what means does structuralism offer for
approaching this problem? Proposing that The Babadook is an allegory in
the form of a horror film about the unleashing of a feminine psychotic
break, and that structuralism approaches the problem outlined above by
way of the figure of the mythologist, I outline conditions under which a
“sick woman” can become mythologist to his/her/hir own pains.
In Chapter 6, “Sex for Structuralists: From Myth to Fantasy,” I shift
from an emphasis on the non-Oedipal logics of Lévi-Strauss’s writings on
myth and trauma to those of Lacan, Apollon, Cantin, and MacCannell,
where femininity, in particular, is elaborated in relation to fantasy and the
Other jouissance. I begin by offering a reading of Lacan’s Seminar XX

formulas of sexuation, arguing that they enable us to think the impossi-
ble real that sex “is,” as well as the logics of masculinity and femininity,
outside the frames of gender identity, gender expression, and biological
sex. I then consider Apollon’s innovations of Lacan’s account of sexual
difference, where femininity and masculinity appear not only as distinct
logics, as for Lacan, but as ethical exigencies at stake for all subjects.
Finally, in Chapter 7, “How Do We Use Structuralism?”, I conclude
by considering a collection of Lacan’s own comments on structure and
structuralism, wherein he specifies, on the one hand, that he owes much
to Lévi-Strauss, and, on the other, “‘This does not prevent me from hav-
ing a very different idea of the concept of structure.’”63
Altogether, I am interested in what becomes of structuralism when
the ground upon which it ostensibly stands—namely that of the zero
symbol (as discussed by Lévi-Strauss in the Introduction to the Work of
Marcel Mauss) or that of the incest prohibition (as discussed by Freud,
Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss in numerous texts)—drops out from under it.
And in this inquiry, I place particular emphasis on Lévi-Strauss’s writ-
ings, proposing that we find here terms according to which structural-
ism (might) function(s) differently for those “others” structuralism has
historically been thought not to address—namely the “mad,” the fem-
inine, the not-all, the non-Oedipal. Ultimately, I am interested in both
the uses of a rehabilitated structuralism and structuralism’s indications of
how we might go about engaging in that labor, and I am heartened in
both aspirations by Piaget’s naming of structuralism as “a method, not
a doctrine.”64 For as a method, structuralism is above all a way across,
and as such, I believe it wants to be used. For these reasons—structur-
alism’s status as a method not a doctrine, and the question of its uses—I
frame this project within the context of both Lévi-Straussian structural-
ism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, for the use of structure brought about
and sustained within the practice of psychoanalysis puts into relief that
such apparent abstractions as these have real effects.
1.3 Conclusion
Why write about femininity and psychosis together, when they are, first
of all, not terms that figure within Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, and when
for Lacanian psychoanalysis there is much that differentiates them? Are
14 S. DE LA TORRE
they really both non-Oedipal logics, and, if so, in what sense? With full
acknowledgment that an entire project could be devoted to attending
to the nuances of the differences between (the logic of) femininity and
(the structure of) psychosis for Lacanian psychoanalysis, and with full
acknowledgement, too, of the fact that there are of course feminine psy-
chotics and that much could be said of what is operative when the two
come together—I would like to offer a provisional proposal: femininity
and psychosis are both non-Oedipal in the minimal sense that, for both,
primary repression fails. McNulty has spoken of primary repression as a
mechanism that “drains off … troubling affect and therefore limits jou-
issance,”65 while Apollon writes of it as a process which opens onto “the
metaphor which would permit the subject self-representation.”66 Linking
the concept of primary repression to the arc of this project, we might say
that, for those for whom primary repression fails, the real unconscious is
very much so there.67 And while, as we will see, the real unconscious is
always there,68 we can also say that there is a difference in the way it
is experienced which itself depends on a subject’s relation to the
symbolic, and, indeed, the symbol. Apollon writes of that difference as it
concerns the experience of feminine psychosis:
If love is the gift of a signifier where the being of the beloved can be sig-
nified for the lover, it is therefore at the origin of the primary processes
which establish for a given subject her capture in the order of the symbol.
This “birth in the symbolic order,” access to the metaphor which would
permit the subject self-representation, as a subject in language and not as
an object in reality, is the effect of the primary processes which found what
Freud calls primary repression and where Lacan sees the primordial symbol-
ization of the subject.69
How do we use structuralism, and what is a structuralism we can use?

In the first instance, a structuralism we can use does not shy away from
the fact that not all subjects have “access to the metaphor which would
permit the subject self-representation.” A structuralism we can use might
theorize the conditions of symbolic thought itself beyond the Oedipal
logic of the zero symbol. It might enable the construction of generative
limits—singular ones—for those subjects in the symbolic without limit.
Above all, it might open rather than close the resources of the symbolic.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” in Desert
Islands, and Other Texts (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 171.
2. Ibid., p. 192.
3. Ibid., p. 189.
4. Ibid., p. 183.
5. Ibid., p. 191.
6. Ibid., p. 188.
7. Ibid., p. 191.
8. Ibid.
9. Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” p. 191.
10. Ibid., p. 187.
11. My thanks to Daisy Delogu for the formulation “a structuralism we can
use.”
12. Jacques Lacan, Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment,
trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Annette
Michelson (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 37.
13. Ibid.
14. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James
Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1969), p. 61.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
18. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’
of Sex,” in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p. 201.
19. See Juliet Flower MacCannell, “Jouissance between the Clinic and the
Academy: The Analyst and Woman,” Qui Parle 9, no. 2 (Spring/Summer
1996), p. 108. I will return to this topic to engage with it more fully in
Chapter 6, wherein I will draw on MacCannell’s explication of analytic
work with unconscious fantasies, fantasies wherein “the subject sees itself
as always ‘something of’ an object. An abused object./But also ‘some-
thing of’ a subject” (ibid., p. 108).
21. Tracy McNulty, Wresting with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 265.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 15.
16 S. DE LA TORRE
24. Willy Apollon, Psychoses: l’offre de l’analyste (Quebec: Collection le Savoir

analytique GIFRIC, 1999), p. 160, my translation here and after unless
otherwise specified.
25. Ibid.
26. Will Greenshields, Writing the Structures of the Subject: Lacan and
Topology, eds. Calum Neill and Derek Hook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017),
p. 157.
27. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and
Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Basic Books, 1963), p. 279.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 280.
31. Ibid., pp. 279–280.
32. Ibid., p. 279.
33. Jean-Marie Benoist, The Structural Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1978), p. 109.
34. Ibid.
35. McNulty, Wresting with the Angel, p. 265.
36. Ibid., p. 10.
37. Ibid., p. 52.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 55.
43. Ibid., p. 59.
44. Ibid., p. 52.
45. Ibid., p. 53.
46. Ibid., pp. 53–54.
47. Ibid., p. 56.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., p. 70.
51. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, p. 31.
53. Ibid., p. 58.
54. Shanna Carlson, “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual
Difference,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21, no. 2
(2010), p. 62.
55. MacCannell, “Jouissance between the Clinic and the Academy: The
Analyst and Woman,” p. 107.
57. Ibid., p. 15.
58. Juliet Flower MacCannell, “Death Drive in Venice,” (A): The Journal of
Culture and the Unconscious 11, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2002), p. 71.
59. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis: Book XVII, trans. Russell Grill (New York: Norton, 2007),
p. 45.
60. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 182.
61. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p.
321.
62. Willy Apollon, “The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture,”
trans. Steven Miller and John Mowitt, in The Dreams of Interpretation:
A Century Down the Royal Road, eds. Catherine Liu, John Mowitt,
Thomas Pepper, and Jakki Spicer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2007), p. 34. Apollon writes of the “mal à dire” as a “‘difficulty in
saying’” that “the subject encounters in its confrontation with the real”
(ibid., p. 34).
63. Lacan, quoted in Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Lacan’s Dora Against Lévi-
Strauss,” Yale French Studies, no. 123 (2013), p. 130.
64. Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler (Hoboken:
Psychology Press, 2015), p. 142.
65. Tracy McNulty, “The Signifier and Jouissance in Freud’s Rat Man Case”
(lecture, the annual Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis,
GIFRIC, La Bordée, Quebec City, QC, June 3, 2015).
66. Apollon, Psychoses: l’offre de l’analyste, pp. 173–174.
67. I will offer an account of the real unconscious in Chapter 4. My thanks
to Daniel Wilson for bringing my attention to this concept as it could
be linked to Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of the signifier and the signified in
Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss: This insight proved formative
for the project!
68. Lucie Cantin, “Practices of the Letter: Writing a Space for the Real,”
Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious (2010), p. 15.
69. Apollon, Psychoses: l’offre de l’analyste, pp. 173–174.
References
Apollon, Willy. Psychoses: l’offre de l’analyste. Quebec: Collection le Savoir analyt-
ique GIFRIC, 1999.
Apollon, Willy. “The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture.” Translated
by Steven Miller and John Mowitt. In The Dreams of Interpretation: A
Century Down the Royal Road, edited by Catherine Liu, John Mowitt,
Thomas Pepper, and Jakki Spicer, pp. 23–38. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007.
18 S. DE LA TORRE
Cantin, Lucie. “Practices of the Letter: Writing a Space for the Real.” Umbr(a):
A Journal of the Unconscious (2010), pp. 11–33.
Carlson, Shanna. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference.”
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2010), pp.
46–72.
Deleuze, Gilles. “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” In Desert Islands, and
Other Texts, pp. 170–192. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.
Greenshields, Will. Writing the Structures of the Subject: Lacan and Topology.
Edited by Calum Neill and Derek Hook. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2017.
Lacan, Jacques. Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment.
Translated by Dennis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New
York: Norton, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by
Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2007.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Edited by Rodney
Needham. Translated by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
CHAPTER 2
Primal Scene, Ground Zero: Lévi-Strauss,

Lacan, and the Wolf Man Beyond the
Seduction
In Rome in 1953, Lacan shares that one of his fundamental formulations

was a gift. For the time being, he leaves the gift’s provenance in mystery.
Gift, of course, is a dangerous word—call it a loan, or even a theft. Lacan
reports:
Hence the paradox that one of my most acute auditors believed to be an

objection to my position when I first began to make my views known on
analysis as dialectic; he formulated it as follows: ‘Human language would
then constitute a kind of communication in which the sender receivers his
own message back from the receiver in inverted form’.1
The sender receives his or her own message back from the receiver in inverted
form, or, as Lacan states more concisely, “I maintain that speech always
subjectively includes its own reply.”2 But, of course, how could this be?
Lacan’s auditor thinks he has isolated the paradox in Lacan’s thinking; he
underlines its absurdity by describing just what Lacan’s thinking would
mean for human language. In response, Lacan plays with him, going on
to note that he recognized in his objector’s formulation the stamp of his
own thinking.3 Finding his own thinking in the Other’s message, Lacan
demonstrates the formulation’s ostensibly absurd logic. Effectively, he
brings logic to life.
If it’s a gift, then, it’s a gift Lacan gave himself, and he needed the
Other to get it. In fact, as will become clear 21 years later, he needed
two. In Rome once more in 1974, Lacan divulges the names of the

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92895-1_2
20 S. DE LA TORRE
“others” in question: Claude and Monique Lévi-Strauss.4 As the story

goes, Claude whispered the above words to Monique, who proceeded to
share them with her good friend the psychoanalyst.
Lacan’s debts to Lévi-Strauss are not news, but Marcos Zafiropoulos
argues that they have been undervalued. In Lacan and Lévi-Strauss or
The Return to Freud (1951–1957), Zafiropoulos argues that it is neces-
sary to think through Lacan’s debts to Lévi-Strauss if we are to under-
stand the former’s return to Freud.5 According to Zafiropoulos, it is
Lévi-Strauss’s research, more than that of Ferdinand de Saussure, that
“lays bare the essential structures of the Freudian unconscious.”6 As
Zafiropoulos powerfully summarizes: “What [Lacan] owes to Lévi-
Strauss is nothing less than the ability to see the effects of everything that
he includes in the notion of the Other.”7
Part of what is at stake for Zafiropoulos is to reveal and remedy the
“epistemological repression”8 of the social sciences in readings of Lacan’s
work; these, Zafiropoulos contends, have been dominated by explora-
tions of Lacan’s philosophical references. Zafiropoulos suggests that this
idealization of philosophy is out of step with Lacan’s own sympathies.9
Moreover, the idealization of philosophy at the expense of the social
sciences has forestalled the development of what Zafiropoulos terms an
anthropological psychoanalysis—one that will attend to the intersections
of the social and the psyche in order to elaborate a knowledge about
social symptoms.
In the course of his book, Zafiropoulos beautifully analyzes Lacan’s
readings of a set of Freudian cases, analyses that were, he contends,
“carried out in the light of Lévi-Strauss’s research.”10 The engage-
ments in question—including readings of the cases of Dora, the Rat
Man, Schreber, and little Hans—span from 1953 to 1957. Intriguingly
absent from this list, however—comprised as it is of Freud’s paradigmatic
cases—is that of the Wolf Man. Where does the Wolf Man fit in the con-
stellation of Freud, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss? Lacan himself calls on the
Wolf Man case in 1954 in order to reiterate and affirm Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s assertion that Freud’s thought is “much more structuralist
… than received ideas would have it.”11 Is there something about the
Wolf Man case that nonetheless renders its truths inassimilable to Lévi-
Strauss’s structuralism? Could the Wolf Man offer up terms according to
which we might understand Lacan the structuralist differently? In short,
what kind of structuralist does the Wolf Man make Lacan?
2 PRIMAL SCENE, GROUND ZERO: LÉVI-STRAUSS, LACAN … 21
In the pages to follow, I will argue that the case study of the Wolf
Man forefronts the “real” that separates Lévi-Strauss from Lacan,
the real that Lacan variously identifies as an effect of structure12 and
in structure.13 In other words, the case of the Wolf Man does not fit
in Zafiropoulos’s reconstruction of Lacan’s early debts to Lévi-Strauss
because this case brings out a significant sense in which Lacan and Lévi-
Strauss are, in the main, different kinds of structuralists.14 Bringing
together a limited set of Freud’s, Lacan’s, Lévi-Strauss’s, and the Wolf
Man’s terms, I hope to show what Lacan’s innovations add to the field
of structuralist thought, something that is frequently missed in accounts
of structures, by structuralisms’ critics and adherents alike, and that is
that a real lack inhabits structure. For while Lévi-Strauss uncovers what
he calls zero-value institutions, enabling phenomena that “have no
intrinsic property other than that of establishing the necessary precon-
ditions for the existence of the social system to which they belong,”15
the case of the Wolf Man recalls that beyond these zero-value institu-
tions lies a wholly different sort of ground zero, that of the primal scene.
The ground zero of the primal scene is not the “real world” ostensibly
neglected by structuralism—a “world behind the structuralist grid”16—
but the (real) absence that de-completes the world.
2.1 Lévi-Strauss the Synthesist17

Lévi-Strauss outlines the terms of his structural anthropology in 1950 in
the Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, a text that was, according
to Maurice Godelier, “at the time rightly regarded as the manifesto of
the new ‘structuralism.’”18 Lévi-Strauss hones in on Mauss’s The Gift in
order to offer a critique of it which will at the same time allow him to
articulate the broad strokes of his own new thinking.
In The Gift, Mauss analyzes a variety of societies that practice gift
exchange in order to ask: “In primitive or archaic types of society what is
the principle whereby the gift received has to be repaid? What force is there
in the thing given which compels to the recipient to make a return?”19
Mauss finds his answer in the Maori notion of hau. Drawing on con-
versations between Elsdon Best, an ethnographer from New Zealand,
and Tamati Ranapiri, a sage of the Ngati-Raukawa people, also of New
Zealand, Mauss declares that hau is that force in the given thing which
strives to ensure that exchange functions properly.20
22 S. DE LA TORRE
Lévi-Strauss critiques Mauss’s understanding of gift exchange, how-

ever, suggesting that Mauss fails to recognize the centrality of exchange
in focusing on hau. Mauss, Lévi-Strauss charges, relies on Maori the-
ory to construct a notion of exchange out of seemingly disparate phe-
nomena, the three obligations of giving, receiving, and returning.21
Hau functions in this model as an “additional quantity”22 that ena-
bles exchange; for this reason, it takes precedence in Mauss’s thinking
over exchange. Here, Lévi-Strauss levels, Mauss goes astray: Mauss has
attempted “to reconstruct a whole out of parts.”23 Instead, he ought to
have followed his own axiom that “‘The unity of the whole is even more
real than each of the parts.’”24 When the parts predominate instead of
the whole, according to Lévi-Strauss, there is a mystification25:
… instead of applying his principles consistently from start to finish, Mauss

discards them in favour of a New Zealand theory … The fact that Maori
sages were the first people to pose certain problems and to resolve them
in an infinitely interesting but strikingly unsatisfactory manner does not
oblige us to bow to their interpretation. Hau is not the ultimate expla-
nation for exchange; it is the conscious form whereby men of a given
society … apprehended an unconscious necessity whose explanation lies
elsewhere.26
Hau is a construction, consciously developed by Maori people to answer

a question about the operations of social life. It is only a fragment of a
much larger picture, however, and a conscious fragment at that.
In his critique of Mauss, Lévi-Strauss sketches out ideas that will
become fundamental tenets of structural anthropology.27 In his text by
the same name, Lévi-Strauss expresses his wish to explore the possibil-
ity that “all forms of social life are substantially of the same nature”28:
that all forms of social life might “consist of systems of behavior that rep-
resent the projection, on the level of conscious and socialized thought,
of universal laws which regulate the unconscious activities of the mind
…”29 Lévi-Strauss hopes to arrive at an understanding of the “basic
similarities between forms of social life”30: He cites language, art, law,
and religion, fundamental systems of any human society. These systems
may appear heterogeneous “on the surface,”31 but on the unconscious
level, those differences recede, for each system references and attempts to
resolve an “underlying reality.”32 Disparate conscious phenomena—the
“parts,” we might say—are a projection of a whole that is, to cite Mauss,
“more real,” but unconscious. Moreover, that underlying reality is best

accessed through language: “We have very little chance of finding that
reality in conscious formulations; a better chance, in unconscious mental
structures to which institutions give us access, but a better chance yet, in
language.”33 Lévi-Strauss takes us on a tour that ends in language itself:
Language will provide access to those unconscious mental structures that
constitute universal laws.
Had Mauss himself paid more attention to language, he would have
reached the same conclusions: He would have recognized that hau is
supplementary, not central—a conscious attempt at resolving the under-
lying reality of exchange. Lévi-Strauss cites Mauss’s own citation of
another scholar, John Henry Holmes, who points out that Papuan and
Melanesian peoples use the same word for buying, selling, lending, and
borrowing. According to Lévi-Strauss, “That is ample proof that the
operations in question are far from ‘antithetical’; that they are just two
modes of a selfsame reality.”34 The underlying reality in this instance:
exchange, an unconscious necessity whose explanation lies elsewhere.
Mauss’s mistake, however, is illustrative, for it provides an example
of the kind of work done by words like hau. This kind of work finds
a significant analogue in myth, whose purpose Lévi-Strauss defines as
to “provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”35
Myths and words like hau, according to Lévi-Strauss, create syntheses
where human thought encounters contradiction.36 But where the con-
cept of hau is concerned, Lévi-Strauss does not see an actual contradic-
tion at work: “We do not need hau to make the synthesis, because the
antithesis does not exist.”37 With hau, we find what we might call an
imagined contradiction, one that creates the illusion of discord where
language and the unconscious see the homogeneous plane of exchange.38
***
Toward the end of the Introduction, Lévi-Strauss picks up another of
Mauss’s key terms, mana, which Mauss indicates as designating an
idea which “we … experience difficulty in grasping”—a “troublesome
notion[],” “obscure and vague … abstract and general, yet quite con-
crete …”39 Demurring the task of delineating the complex status of the
word and its “local differences,”40 Lévi-Strauss seeks instead “to con-
struct the type.”41 From this starting point, he concludes that the role
of mana (and words like it) “is to enable symbolic thinking to operate
despite the contradiction inherent in it.”42
24 S. DE LA TORRE
Mana for Lévi-Strauss is the paradigmatic whatchamacallit, “in itself

devoid of meaning and thus susceptible of receiving any meaning at
all.”43 Such words “always and everywhere… occur to represent an inde-
terminate value of signification.”44 They exist because of the particular
way in which human language itself arose: “Whatever may have been the
moment and the circumstance of its appearance in the ascent of animal
life, language can only have arisen all at once. Things cannot have begun
to signify gradually.”45 Lévi-Strauss identifies the signifier/signified rela-
tion in language as one of “complementary units”: They “came to be
constituted simultaneously and interdependently.”46 This complemen-
tarity, however, falls apart as soon as humans search for signifiers that
would be in a relationship of mutual satisfaction with the world’s sig-
nifieds. Knowledge entails a painstaking process of trial and error, sig-
nifier and signified locked and falling apart in search of satisfaction.47
Language’s sudden emergence thus represents a “radical change” that
“has no counterpart in the field of knowledge, which develops slowly
and progressively.”48
Mana enters here: Its “sole function is to fill a gap between the sig-
nifier and the signified, or, more exactly, to signal the fact that… a rela-
tionship of non-equivalence becomes established between signifier and
signified, to the detriment of the prior complementary relationship.”49
Mana, thus, recalls the failures of knowledge and the origin of lan-
guage; susceptible of receiving any meaning at all, mana is a sign in lan-
guage of an imperfect ratio that it recalibrates. Mana is a solution—in
Lévi-Strauss’s estimation, a universal and necessary one, marking those
inadequations that cannot be balanced without it, but in its function as
solution effacing them as well.
***
In each of these examples, the form of Lévi-Strauss’s thinking is the
same: At each turn, he moves, like magic,50 toward reconciliation, local-
izing real and unreal dissonances and reshaping them into more perfect
ratios, effacing the contradictions he has tracked. In the last example
that I will consider, taken from the essay “The Sorcerer and His Magic,”
Lévi-Strauss brings that tendency out of the abstract. Here, Lévi-Strauss
recounts the story of a shaman named Quesalid. As the story goes,
Quesalid is so skeptical of shamanism that he elects to become a sha-
man himself, in hopes of uncovering the truth of their practices. As an
apprentice, he is trained in the ways of one of the schools of the region.
One technique—that of the tuft of down—will both bring renown to

Quesalid and complicate his skeptical stance. Quesalid is taught to hide
a tuft of down in his mouth so that he might, in a session with a patient,
spit it out as proof that he has extracted a sickness-giving foreign body.51
When Quesalid discovers that shamans of a different school produce no
such object—that they “merely spit a little saliva into their hands, and
they dare to claim that this is ‘the sickness,’”52 he tries the technique he
has been taught on a patient for whom the other method has failed. He
succeeds in curing this patient and, according to Lévi-Strauss, “vacillates
for the first time. Though he had few illusions about his own technique,
he has now found one which is more false, more mystifying, and more
dishonest than his own.”53 Following this, Quesalid seems to become a
skeptic not of shamanism itself but of other shamans. When other sha-
mans beseech Quesalid to share his secrets or to answer questions as to
his authenticity, he remains silent. Lévi-Strauss reports that one shaman,
in the absence of response from Quesalid, “disappears with his entire
family, heartsick and feared by the community … He returned a year
later, but both he and his daughter had gone mad.”54
As Lévi-Strauss notes, “the psychology of the sorcerer is not sim-
ple.”55 Ultimately, however, the success of the system depends not on
the psychology of the sorcerer, which must vary, but on the relations
between the shaman and the group: “Quesalid did not become a great
shaman because he cured his patients; he cured his patients because he
had become a great shaman.”56 Even more fundamentally, the relations
between the shaman and the group depend upon the relations between
“normal” and “pathological” thought:
… pathological and normal thought processes are complementary rather

than opposed. In a universe which it strives to understand but whose
dynamics it cannot fully control, normal thought continually seeks the
meaning of things which refuse to reveal their significance. So-called
pathological thought, on the other hand, overflows with emotional inter-
pretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise deficient
reality … so-called normal thought always suffers from a deficit of mean-
ing, whereas so-called pathological thought … disposes of a plethora of
meaning. Through collective participation in shamanistic curing, a balance
is established between these two complementary situations … sorcerer,
patient, and audience, as well as representations and procedures, all play
their parts.57
26 S. DE LA TORRE
Lévi-Strauss points out that “normal thought” cannot “fully control”

the dynamics of the universe. Things remain elusive, stubborn, and
resistant, making for a reality that Lévi-Strauss calls deficient because
made up of “things which refuse to reveal their significance.” Normal
thought falls short before this deficient reality. By contrast, pathologi-
cal thought enjoys abundance and is rich in “emotional interpretations
and overtones.” Lévi-Strauss judges here that the two modes of thought
necessarily work in tandem, reconciling the deficient with the abundant
in pursuit of balance, parts squared to ensure the unity of the whole.
While Lévi-Strauss also cites reality’s deficiency and acknowledges the
existence of “things which refuse to reveal their significance,” he points
to these gaps in order to foreground their balancing by way of the func-
tioning of structure. This effacement of things which might remain out-
side signification—just the kind of things that interest a psychoanalysis
tuned to the real unconscious—is all the more interesting in that Lévi-
Strauss also compares the shaman to the psychoanalyst in this essay.58 I
will return to the question of the shared features of the practices of psy-
choanalysis and shamanism in Chapter 4; in Quesalid’s story, however, it
is above all Quesalid’s silence in the face of fellow practitioners’ demands
for answers that strikes me as psychoanalytic in character, for here, he
could be read as withdrawing in such a way as to create the space of the
lacking Other.
2.2 The Signifier of the Lack in the Other

In “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?”, Deleuze maps the criteria
he deems essential to any structuralism worthy of the name, forging a
schema out of diverse authors’ ideas. Among these, the criterion of the
empty square may distil the entire project: In Deleuze’s words, “No
structuralism is possible without this degree zero.”59
One of the many virtues of Deleuze’s essay is that it defines struc-
ture itself: “Structure is defined,” Deleuze writes, “by the nature of
certain atomic elements which claim to account both for the formation
of wholes and for the variation of their parts.”60 Deleuze notices that
structure can only function, however, if it “envelops a wholly paradox-
ical object or element … it is in relation to the object that the variety
of terms and the variation of differential relations are determined in
each case.”61 Each structuralism proffers such an object, which Deleuze
writes as the object = x: an empty square characterized by its unceasing

displacements:
Lacan evokes the dummy-hand [in] bridge, and in the admirable opening
pages of The Order of Things, where he describes a painting by Velasquez,
Foucault invokes the place of the king, in relation to which everything
is displaced and slides, God, then man, without ever filling it … Phillipe
Sollers and Jean-Pierre Gaye like to invoke the blind spot [tache aveugle],
so designating this always mobile point which entails a certain blindness,
but in relation to which writing becomes possible … In his effort to elab-
orate a concept of structural or metonymic causality, J.-A. Miller borrows
from Frege the position of a zero, defined as lacking its own identity, and
which conditions the serial constitution of numbers. And even Lévi-
Strauss, who in certain respects is the most positivist among the structur-
alists, the least romantic, the least inclined to welcome an elusive element,
recognizes in the ‘mana’ or its equivalents the existence of a ‘floating signi-
fier,’ with a symbolic zero value circulating in the structure.62
Bits of “nonsense”63—the dummy hand, the place of the king, the blind
spot, the zero, and mana—constitute a series of terms for the space in
the structure that makes it play: “Games need the empty square, without
which nothing would move forward or function.”64 In Deleuze’s sum-
mation, “this is how nonsense is not the absence of signification but, on
the contrary, the excess of sense, or that which provides the signifier and
signified with sense. Sense here emerges as the effect of the structure’s
functioning.”65
When Deleuze cites Foucault, however, he brings out an under-
standing of structure that I believe is quite different from that which
is at stake for Lacan. While Foucault points to a relation between indi-
vidual experience and the systems of society wherein, “‘at any given
instant, the structure proper to individual experience finds a certain
number of possible choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the sys-
tems of the society,’”66 for Lacan, by contrast, structure is only in part
about what’s possible, impossible, and over-determined in the systems
of the society. For Lacan, beyond the notion of a circulating space that
gives every society just enough wiggle room to elaborate wildly varying
modes of being-together, there is one more absence, real and unmov-
ing, and the fact of this absence changes structure. It’s a difference he
underlines in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire
in the Freudian Unconscious,” writing there explicitly of the difference
28 S. DE LA TORRE
between Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the zero symbol—the logical operator

that is the name Lévi-Strauss gives to words like mana—and Lacan’s
notion of the signifier of the lack in the Other, which Lacan writes as
S( ).
Let us observe carefully … what it is that objects to conferring on my sig-

nifier S( ) the meaning of mana or of any such term. It is the fact that we
cannot be satisfied to explain it on the basis of the poverty of the social
fact, even if the latter were traced back to some supposedly total fact.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, commenting on Mauss’s work, no doubt wished to
see in mana the effect of a zero symbol. But it seems that what we are deal-
ing with in our case is the signifier of the lack of this zero symbol.67
We cannot explain S( ) on the basis of the poverty of the social fact:

What does this mean? For Lévi-Strauss, the poverty of the social fact may
be the deficit that opens up the moment language comes into existence,
with knowledge and the signifieds of the world always already fallen far
behind language’s excesses: In Lévi-Strauss’s words, “in man’s effort to
understand the world, he always disposes of a surplus of signification.”68
In a sense, signification itself for Lévi-Strauss is like pathological think-
ing, excessive in its meaning, needing to be shared out by some sorcerers
or zero symbol. The signifier of the lack in the Other, by contrast, plays
an entirely different function, for it comes into being as a “product of the
subject’s desire, and not a substitute for or effacement of it,”69 thereby
underlining that there is a gap: “the gap that all thought has avoided,
skipped over, circumvented, or stopped up whenever thought apparently
succeeds in sustaining itself circularly, whether the thought be dialectical
or mathematical.”70 Indeed, the signifier of the lack in the Other under-
lines, as Lacan notes here, the lack of the zero symbol itself.
While it may therefore be thanks to Lévi-Strauss that Lacan can rec-
ognize the Other, as Zafiropoulos suggests, Lévi-Strauss himself does
not conceptualize the unconscious as the site of the discourse of the
Other, and with this difference, we return to the anecdote with which we
opened, to the absurdity Lévi-Strauss highlights in Lacan’s theory of lan-
guage. For Lévi-Strauss, there is no decentering relay through the Other
inaugurating the gap that is the condition of desire. Instead, for Lévi-
Strauss, the psychic universe is “a projection of the social universe”71—
no Other scene here, short-circuiting the unity of the whole.72
2.3 From Seduction to the Insoluble

I would like to turn now to the case of the Wolf Man, in order to explore
what it is that de-completes his world. The primal scene, I contend,
proffers a real contradiction, that is, the kind of contradiction that Lévi-
Strauss is on the track of in his discussions of such “primal” phenomena
as hau, mana, and the zero symbol. As we have seen, each of these phe-
nomena functions as a construction which solves some sort of primordial
problem. And for the Wolf Man too, the fantasy of the primal scene is a
construction, but it is not a solution. To borrow the words of Jacques
Derrida, writing of the Wolf Man’s case, “This is not a solution, rather
the opposite of one.”73 The fantasy of the primal scene is a narration of
the insoluble that leaves the insoluble in place; it gives representation to
a trauma that is outside language, and that representation bears the bru-
tal residue of the real contradiction it both constructs and recalls.
A dream sits at the center of Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man. It is
nighttime in the dream, and the dreamer is lying in his bed near a win-
dow looking out onto a row of walnut trees. The window opens sud-
denly, exposing to the dreamer’s view the terrifying image of six or seven
very white wolves, with tails like foxes and ears like dogs, sitting in the
walnut tree nearest the window. The Wolf Man tells Freud, “In great ter-
ror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves I screamed and woke up.”74
Freud reports that the dream furnishes two impressions which deeply
preoccupy the Wolf Man: “the perfect stillness and immobility” of the
wolves and “the strained attention with which they all looked at him.”75
Freud hypothesizes that these two impressions signal the key elements of
a scene predating the first experience of the dream.76 From here, Freud
proposes that the Wolf Man’s dream delivers an example of a primal
scene, which Freud identifies as “the earliest experiences of childhood
that are brought to light in analysis.”77 The content of the present case:
“sexual intercourse between the boy’s parents in an attitude especially
favourable for certain observations.”78 Less coyly, “What sprang into
activity that night out of the chaos of the dreamer’s unconscious mem-
ory-traces was the picture of a coitus between his parents… he was able
to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s member; and he under-
stood the process as well as its significance.”79
But why are there wolves? When he was little, the Wolf Man tells
Freud, he was very afraid of a particular picture-book showing the
30 S. DE LA TORRE
figure of an upright wolf.80 There was also a story told to him by his
grandfather, in which a tailor maims a wolf who has leapt into the tai-
lor’s workroom, causing the wolf to run off. When the tailor encounters
the now-tailless wolf again in the forest, the tailor scrambles up a tree to
escape. The wolf conspires with his pack: They climb atop each other’s
shoulders, forming a tower of wolves. The tailor cries out, however, “as
he had before: ‘Catch the grey one by his tail!’”81 The memory of the
words and the maiming terrifies the tailless wolf. He flees and the wolf
tower tumbles.82
Slowly but surely, Freud and the Wolf Man are led to certain con-
clusions: sexual inquiries, a fear of death, and the theme of castration.83
Freud asserts: “The wolf that he was afraid of was undoubtedly his
father; but his fear of the wolf was conditional upon the creature being in
an upright attitude.”84 And the wolves are mother-surrogates too: One
wolf upright climbs upon another, two become several,85 and in that
form in the dream a scene is activated, the witnessing of which—a win-
dow ripping open—leaves the Wolf Man in a state of terror.
Freud suggests that the Wolf Man finds in the reconstructed primal
scene simultaneously the “reality of castration”86 and the necessary con-
dition of enjoyment of the father: “now he saw with his own eyes the
wound of which his Nanya [his nurse] has spoken, and understood that
its presence was a necessary condition of intercourse with his father.”87
Whether or not the Wolf Man understood the bodies in question in
exactly these terms, it is clear that everyone is castrated here: Others
(literally) upon Others, both expressing an enjoyment so threatening—
an enjoyment surely signifying of the horrifying truth that something
is missing, for something is desired—that its witness replaces the entire
tableau with a wolf phobia.88 Wolves cover the thing, stopping it up. In
Freud’s summary:
At the age of one and a half the child receives an impression to which he
is unable to react adequately; he is only able to understand it and to be
moved by it when the impression is revived in him at the age of four; and
only twenty years later, during the analysis, is he able to grasp with his con-
scious mental processes what was then going on in him.89
Primal scenes come to light, or come into narrated being in the primal
scene fantasy, because of “the real problems of life.”90 In Cantin’s words,
the fantasy of the primal scene is “a representation constructed by a child

about what is a central traumatic experience”91—a central traumatic
experience in which the Other enjoys, threatening the life of the sub-
ject. The fantasy of the primal scene speaks to how a person has “lived
that experience,”92 giving mental representation to a universal experience
that is outside language.93 Most of the time, however, the fantasy of the
primal scene is covered over by the seduction fantasy, which is meant
to protect the subject from the primal scene and the threatening Other
within it. Within the seduction fantasy, the subject constructs an ideal
ego—what the subject thinks she needs to be in order to be loved.94 The
seduction fantasy has nothing to say, however, about the drives, or the
energy at work within the body as a result of the subject’s encounter
with the (lacking) Other.95 Instead, the seduction fantasy speaks to how
the subject rescripts the Other’s lack as the Other’s demand, making the
Other responsible for the subject’s suffering. Thus, the seduction fantasy
is also the means by which the subject can “refuse responsibility for the
drives.”96
Linking the above to terms I have been working with up until this
point: The analysand constructs the primal scene fantasy not in order
that it might—like mana or some myths—resolve a contradiction, but
to bring contradiction into view. In the fantasy of the primal scene, the
irreducible, insoluble desire of the Other is so present it’s deadly. Here,
the Other’s lack is real; Lévi-Strauss is the one who points out that a
myth will fail in its purpose if the contradiction it wishes to overcome is
a real one.97 Neither the seduction fantasy nor the fantasy of the primal
scene can overcome the real contradiction that the primal scene repre-
sents. Instead, what is left for the analysand to do—and this is a lot—is
to operate the
‘fall’ of the imaginary Other by dismantling the seduction fantasy that

allows the subject to refuse responsibility for the drives, and so to con-
front him with the castration implied in the passage through the symbolic
locus of the Other that alone will allow him to construct his unconscious
desire.98
In this process, the primal scene fantasy will be transformed into a funda-
mental fantasy: one that has something to say about what is going on in
the body of the analysand.99
32 S. DE LA TORRE
2.4 Conclusion
By way of conclusion: The primal scene is only ever constructed but,
for that, no less real. Constructing the fantasy of the primal scene is a
means of traversing anew the relay through the (lack in the) Other that
inaugurates desire. It bodies forth a structure inhabited by an absence
that cannot be overcome but only traversed, and this necessity of
traversal implies an ethical practice. The Wolf Man, sadly, did not feel
he got there. In his 80s, after a lifetime spent in and out of analysis, he
laments in conversations with journalist Karin Obholzer, “‘the whole
thing looks like a catastrophe. I am in the same state as when I first came
to Freud, and Freud is no more.’ O: ‘Do you believe that Freud could
help you today?’ W: ‘No, I don’t believe that.’”100 Freud cannot help me;
the catastrophe is that Freud is no more and I am the same as ever. We
can wonder at the factors behind these many disappointments: the sad
reality that Freud and others failed to acknowledge that the Wolf Man
and his sister were most probably sexually abused; the strange situation
of the money the psychoanalysts sent the Wolf Man to support himself
after the fall of the Russian aristocracy101; or perhaps something as sim-
ple as the great wall of resistance, as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok
suggest: “A few innocent words, and all of a sudden the whole family is
destroyed.”102
For Zafiropoulos, the repression of the significance of Lévi-Strauss’s
thought to Lacan’s own has hindered the development of “a true psy-
choanalytic anthropology” whose goal “would be to throw light on
both the clinic of the individual case and on societies.”103 With the
help of psychoanalytic anthropology, we will be able to analyze social
symptoms,104 by which I understand Zafiropoulos to mean that we
will be able to analyze collectively held solutions—shared “mythi-
cal formations.”105 What happens to the idea of the symptom when it
gets imported into the social, however? Does this simply reverse Lévi-
Strauss’s claim that the psychic is a projection of the social, making of the
social now a projection of the psychic, and thereby once again skipping
over or stopping up the gap that the signifier of the lack in the Other
aims at underlining? Perhaps Zafiropoulos’s qualifier provides another
avenue to follow: For what would make a psychoanalytic anthropology
true? Perhaps a true psychoanalytic anthropology would be one devoted
not so much to the social but to the “real-of-the-structure,”106 thus, one
that might look not to construct structures that double the social, but
to construct those that represent the real contradictions the social moves
to cover over. In other words, a true psychoanalytic anthropology might
attempt to do for the logics of femininity and psychosis what Freud’s
Totem and Taboo attempts to do for that of masculinity, which was, as
Freud writes, “to deduce the original meaning of totemism from the ves-
tiges remaining of it in childhood—from the hints of it which emerge
in the course of the growth of our own children”107; a true psychoan-
alytic anthropology interested in the logics of femininity and psychosis,
in other words, might deduce the “original meaning[s]” of there where
there is neither totem nor taboo.
Notes
1. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 246.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Jacques Lacan, “La Troisième,” Lettres de l’Ecole freudienne 16 (1975),
pp. 177–203.
5. I owe the debt of the knowledge of the above story to Zafiropoulos’s
book, among many other things. See Marcos Zafiropoulos, Lacan and
Lévi-Strauss or The Return to Freud (1951–1957) (London: Karnac
Books, 2010).
6. Zafiropoulos, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss or The Return to Freud (1951–
1957), p. 150.
7. Ibid., p. 154.
8. Ibid., p. 15.
9. Ibid., p. 204.
10. Ibid., p. 174.
11. Ibid., p. 321.
12. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis: Book XVII, trans. Russell Grill (New York: Norton,
2007), p. 45.
14. While Zafiropoulos does not attend to the case of the Wolf Man, he does
point to the difference between Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, writing in his
Postlude of Lacan’s critique of Lévi-Strauss by way of the S( ) and sug-
gesting that “[t]he critical rereading of Lévi-Strauss’ texts can begin.
A new period opens up in the less complete universe that contains the
S( )” (Lacan and Lévi-Strauss or The Return to Freud [1951–1957],
34 S. DE LA TORRE
p. 215). Two substantial endnotes in Zafiropoulos’s Postlude delve

deeply into this difference and were key inspirations for this chapter.
16. Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism Volume 2: The Sign Sets,
1967-Present, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis, 1998), p. xx.
17. I borrow the descriptor from Christopher Johnson, Claude Lévi-Strauss:
The Formative Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
p. 180.
18. Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 18.
19. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic
Socities, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970),
p. 1.
20. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
21. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans.
Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 46.
22. Ibid., p. 47.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 48.
27. Johnson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 69.
28. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, pp. 58–59.
29. Ibid., p. 59.
30. Ibid., p. 65.
31. Ibid.
32. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, p. 49.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
38. Some contradictions, however, are real, a point to which I will return
in Chapter 4. Lévi-Strauss notes this detail parenthetically immediately
after defining the purpose of myth. To paraphrase Lévi-Strauss: Myth
will fail in its purpose if the contradiction it wishes to overcome is real
(Structural Anthropology, p. 229).
39. Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (New
York: Routledge, 2001), p. 134.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 63.
43. Ibid., p. 55.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., p. 59.
46. Ibid., p. 60.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid. I return to Lévi-Strauss’s account of the origins of language and
knowledge in Chapter 3.
50. In comparing the function of mana to a magical operation involving
clouds and smoke, Lévi-Strauss suggests that the efficacy of the magic
relies on a prior unity between clouds and smoke: “Magical reasoning,
implied in the action of producing smoke to elicit clouds and rain, is not
grounded in a primordial distinction between smoke and cloud, with
an appeal to mana to weld the one to the other, but in the fact that
a deeper level of thinking identifies smoke with cloud; that the one is,
at least in a certain respect, the same thing as the other: that identifica-
tion is what justifies the subsequent association, and not the other way
round. All magical operations rest on the restoring of a unity; not a lost
unity (for nothing is ever lost) but an unconscious one, or one which
lies less completely conscious than those operations themselves” (ibid.,
pp. 58–59).
52. Ibid., p. 176
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., p. 178.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., p. 180.
57. Ibid., pp. 181–182.
58. Ibid., p. 180.
59. Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” in Desert
Islands, and Other Texts (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 186.
60. Ibid., p. 173.
61. Ibid., p. 184.
62. Ibid., p. 186.
63. Ibid., p. 175.
64. Ibid., p. 186.
65. Ibid., p. 187.
66. Ibid., p. 189.
67. Lacan, Ecrits, p. 695.
36 S. DE LA TORRE

70. Lacan, Ecrits, p. 695.
72. As Zafiropoulos explains, in Lacan’s 1970 seminar on anxiety, he sug-
gests that Lévi-Strauss makes of structure only the “‘doublet’” and
“‘not even [the] lining [doublure]’” of the world (Lacan, quoted in
Lacan and Lévi-Strauss or The Return to Freud [1951–1957], p. 215).
73. Jacques Derrida, “Foreword,” in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A
Cryptonymy, trans. Barbara Johnson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xvi.
74. Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories: The ‘Wolf Man,’ The ‘Rat Man,’ and
The Psychotic Doctor Schreber (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 213.
75. Ibid., p. 218.
76. Ibid., pp. 218–219.
77. Ibid., p. 243.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., pp. 221–223.
80. Ibid., p. 198.
81. Ibid., p. 215.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid., p. 219.
84. Ibid., p. 226.
85. Ibid., p. 228.
86. Ibid., p. 231.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., p. 233.
89. Ibid., p. 232.
90. Ibid., p. 242.
91. Lucie Cantin, “The Limits of the Receivable” (lecture, the annual Yearly
Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La Bordée,
Quebec City, QC, June 5, 2014).
92. Danielle Bergeron and Lucie Cantin, “The Quest” (lecture, the annual
Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La
Bordée, Quebec City, QC, June 3, 2014).
93. Willy Apollon, “The Unconscious, the Censored, and the Social Link”
94. Bergeron and Cantin, “The Quest” (lecture, the annual Yearly Training
Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La Bordée, Quebec City,
QC, June 3, 2014).
95. Ibid.
96. McNulty, Wrestling with the Angel, p. 72.

98. McNulty, Wrestling with the Angel, pp. 71–72.
99. Bergeron and Cantin, “The Quest” (lecture, the annual Yearly Training
Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La Bordée, Quebec City,
QC, June 3, 2014).
100. Karin Obholzer and Sergei Pankejeff, The Wolf-Man: Conversations with
Freud’s Patient Sixty Years Later (New York, 1982), pp. 171–172.
101. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A
Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 25.
102. Ibid., p. 24.
103. Zafiropoulos, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss or The Return to Freud (1951–
1957), p. 209.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid., p. 188.
106. Lacan, Television, p. 37.
107. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the
Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. and ed. James Strachey
(New York: Norton, 1989), pp. xxviii–xxix. Thanks to Heidi Arsenault
for the insight connecting the interests of this project to those of
Freud’s Totem and Taboo.
References
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy.
Translated by Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986.
Apollon, Willy. “The Unconscious, the Censored, and the Social Link.” Lecture
presented at the annual Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis,
GIFRIC, La Bordée, Quebec City, June 2, 2014.
Bergeron, Danielle, and Lucie Cantin. “The Quest.” Lecture presented at the
annual Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La
Bordée, Quebec City, June 3, 2014.
Cantin, Lucie. “The Limits of the Receivable.” Lecture presented at the annual
Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La Bordée,
Quebec City, June 5, 2014.
Deleuze, Gilles. “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” In Desert Islands, and
Other Texts, pp. 170–192. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. “Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok.” Translated by Barbara Johnson. In The Wolf Man’s Magic
Word: A Cryptonomy, pp. xi–xlviii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986.
38 S. DE LA TORRE
Dosse, Francoise. History of Structuralism Volume 2: The Sign Sets, 1967–Present.

Translated by Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Case Histories: The ‘Wolf Man,’ The ‘Rat Man,’ and The
Psychotic Doctor Schreber. New York: Collier Books, 1963.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental
Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Translated and Edited by James Strachey. New
York: Norton, 1989.
Godelier, Maurice. The Enigma of the Gift. Translated by Nora Scott. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Johnson, Christopher. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative Years. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Lacan, Jacques. “La Troisième.” Lettres de l’Ecole freudienne 16 (1975), pp.
177–203.
York: Norton, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of
Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2007.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and
Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Basic Books, 1963.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Translated by
Felicity Baker. London: Routledge, 1978.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.
Translated by Ian Cunnison. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Mauss, Mauss. A General Theory of Magic. Translated by Robert Brain. New
York: Routledge, 2001.
McNulty, Tracy. Wresting with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014.
Obholzer, Karin, and Sergej Pankejeff. The Wolf-Man: Conversations with
Freud’s Patient Sixty Years Later. Translated by Michael Shaw. New York:
Continuum, 1982.
Zafiropoulos, Marcos. Lacan and Lévi-Strauss or The Return to Freud (1951–
1957). London: Karnac Books, 2010.
CHAPTER 3
Madness and the Sensitive Anthropologist:

Lévi-Strauss’s New Structuralism
Lévi-Strauss is interested in what makes things possible. Not a particular

set of things for a particular type of creature, but things as such.1 It’s a
primitive interest. He chases its earliest lines to childhood walks along a
limestone plateau, and it chases him.
Describing in Tristes tropiques the restless intelligence that led him to
anthropology, Lévi-Strauss explains: Philosophy was not enough; law was
not enough. In these fields, “[t]he signifier did not relate to any signi-
fied; there was no referent”2; what, therefore, was beautiful? What was
true? Only in anthropology could he—like anthropologist Robert H.
Lowie before him—describe an experience and “the significance of that
experience through his involvement.”3 The discovery was profound.
Anthropology freed his mind. He writes: “refreshed and renewed … I
became drunk with space, while my dazzled eyes measured the wealth
and variety of the objects surrounding me.”4
Lévi-Strauss finds in anthropology a vocation made for open spaces
in relation to which the anthropologist “acquires a kind of chronic
rootlessness,” wherein he, she, they or ze is “at home nowhere,” and,
interestingly, “psychologically maimed.”5 These effects of the work
of anthropology upon the anthropologist—uprooting, exiling, maim-
ing—are important to bear in mind as we begin to explore anew Lévi-
Strauss’s structuralism, seeking now what I referred to in Chapter 1 of
this project as the other tendency in his work, the tendency which drives
toward another logic than that of the incest prohibition. For while struc-
turalism can be regarded as a doctrine of self-sufficiency, such that what

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92895-1_3
40 S. DE LA TORRE
could be said to matter for the discourse is the coherence the structures
map within—Benoist refers to this as “monster structuralism,” or that
structuralism seen as “coldly determined to choke human creativity in
the coils of its systems and structures”6—such a structuralism would
seem also to invite practices worryingly akin to those within philoso-
phy refused by Lévi-Strauss. These practices, he asserts, replace thought
with exercise, truth with consistency, and discovery with repetition. In
short, the world closes up. As far as Lévi-Strauss is concerned, philoso-
phy can go ahead and tell its self-sufficient stories, tricks of language he
might describe as “extremely disappointing”7—words he uses to indict
one of his early teachers—but Lévi-Strauss is avowedly not interested in
tricks of language, nor expertise, nor provisional responses. Above all—
or beneath it—he wants to know what makes both society and symbolic
thinking as such possible: What provides for that?8
As we will see, the answers given in Introduction to the Work of Marcel
Mauss are numerous: a certain kind of surfeit or supplementarity (sig-
nifiers to signifieds); a certain kind of logical necessity constructed to
name (and contain) that surfeit (the zero symbol, or “a symbol in its
pure state”9); and various instances of complementarity (between the sig-
nifier and the signified, between individual psychical processes and the
group, between the mad and the sane). With so many elements in play,
are we not dealing with a delicate system, one whose sites for possible
breakdown are numerous as well? Yes, we are. Not only that: Subjective
or psychical breakdown—or, more precisely, the theoretically limitless
experience of fragmentation—is itself an integral part of what makes
things as such possible. For part of what Lévi-Strauss proposes through
the course of his engagement with the work of Marcel Mauss—on the
path to developing his own new invention—is that there are sites that the
symbolic does not cover, and that the members of the collective who are
located here prevent the total system from disintegrating. At the same
time that Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss plays a critical role
in establishing Lévi-Strauss’s “new ‘structuralism,’”10 then, it also intro-
duces moments for what I am referring to in this project as non-Oedipal
logics.
In this chapter, I return to Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss
in order to attend to two narratives which bookend the text and which
represent departures from Mauss’s teachings: First, I consider again Lévi-
Strauss’s origin story about language and knowledge, discerning in his
concept of the zero symbol an Oedipal logic at work; second, I consider
3 MADNESS AND THE SENSITIVE ANTHROPOLOGIST: LÉVI-STRAUSS’S … 41
his account of the function and experience of madness, discerning in

his description of the experience of those who are located within the
gaps and contradictions of the social structure the workings of a non-
Oedipal logic. One narrative, I propose, contains the core premise of
Lévi-Strauss’s new structuralism, while the other suggests that madness
itself may found or figure the unfounded foundation of Levi-Strauss’s
symbolic. It is important to mark from the outset, however, that I am
introducing the term “madness” into this discussion; Lévi-Strauss’s own
terms include “abnormality,” “special,” “psychopathology,” and “mental
disturbance.” I introduce madness both to organize under one general
term those who are “off-system” for Lévi-Strauss and to begin to make
the link between the experience with which Lévi-Strauss affiliates them
and the non-Oedipal logics of femininity and psychosis. To be clear: This
project considers none of these madnesses pathological; instead, I begin
from the premise that any subject may encounter the “mal à dire”11 to
the point of malady. In other words, in this project, the mad are not any
more or less likely to find themselves malades.
3.1 No Society Is Wholly Symbolic

Death, madness, and the child’s body inaugurate structuralism. That is,
they fill the first pages of Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Lévi-
Strauss reminds readers here that Mauss was ahead of his time, that the
latter’s L’Idée de mort (from 1926) went “to the heart of matters which
psychosomatic medicine, as it is called, has only made topical in recent
years.”12 He was ahead of his time in taking an interest in the ethnolog-
ical study of children and child-rearing as well, thinking it necessary—as
Freud did before him—to consider the body of the child, conceptualiz-
ing fears, postures, and reflexes as the body’s deep indexes of society’s
“imprints” on the individual.13 Lévi-Strauss expresses his regret at eth-
nology’s failure to take up Mauss’s innovations, and particularly its fail-
ure to attend to the body as expansively as Mauss “insisted was urgently
necessary”: “as for the very numerous and varied possibilities of that
instrument which is the human body,” Lévi-Strauss writes, “we are as
ignorant as ever, even though the body is universal and is at everyone’s
disposition …”14
And madness, are we ignorant of madness? Levi-Strauss does not say
so, but if we are, it’s a willful ignorance. For madness, I will argue, may
provide the key to Lévi-Strauss’s symbolism. Over the course of this
42 S. DE LA TORRE
project, I hope to show how very logical it is that death, madness, and
the child’s body should inaugurate Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and why
(and, in some cases, how) such seeds bear remembering. In this chapter,
I will focus on the second of these. In Introduction to the Work of Marcel
Mauss, madness serves as the privileged example for delineating the rela-
tion between the psychological and the sociological and that between
the individual and the group. This epistemological labor, however, pales
in comparison with what madness does for social structure as such: For
Lévi-Strauss, madness serves to elucidate a central detail about societies,
which is that they are never wholly or completely symbolic.
***
A question preoccupies Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, and the American
“psycho-sociological school,” according to Lévi-Strauss: What are the

relations between psychology and sociology and between the individual
and the group? In its engagement with these questions, the American
school was, Lévi-Strauss remarks, “in danger of trapping itself in circular
thinking,” wishing to establish which came first.15 Lévi-Strauss judges the
debate “insoluble”16; the question must be displaced, something which
Mauss manages, in Lévi-Strauss’s terms, by discovering that “the psycho-
logical formulation is only a translation, on to the level of individual psy-
chical structure, of what is strictly speaking a sociological structure.”17 In
other words, for Lévi-Strauss (as for Mauss before him), it’s all social.
But “social” for Lévi-Strauss comprises a very particular sense—
indeed, several; moreover, these senses may or may not be the same as
Mauss’s, for in this text, Lévi-Strauss is not only introducing Mauss, he
is also driving toward something, an “edge of immense possibilities”
before which Mauss “halt[ed].”18 Given that, it’s worth taking a detour
through two of Lévi-Strauss’s later pieces to help clarify what he may
have in mind when he speaks of the social.
Both “Social Structures” (a paper first published a few years after
the appearance of Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss and repub-
lished in Structural Anthropology) and the postscript to “Social
Structure” (written specifically for Structural Anthropology) aim at clar-
ifying Lévi-Strauss’s key terms and methods. In the first of these, “Social
Structures,” Lévi-Strauss defines structure. He does so because it is “dev-
astating” that critics have been unable to discern the proper qualities of
a structure.19 By way of example, he cites anthropologist A.L. Kroeber,
who has concluded that the notion of structure has deteriorated to
meaninglessness: “‘‘Structure’ appears to be just a yielding to a word

that has a perfectly good meaning but suddenly becomes fashionably
attractive for a decade or so… and during its vogue tends to be applied
indiscriminately… in fact everything that is not wholly amorphous has a
structure.’”20
But Lévi-Strauss objects: It is not everything “that is not wholly
amorphous” that can be said to have a structure. To merit the name
structure, a thing must meet certain criteria, and Lévi-Strauss outlines
these with expressive rigor:
First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system. It is made up of

several elements, none of which can undergo a change without effecting
changes in all the other elements.
Second, for any given model there should be a possibility of ordering a
series of transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type.
Third, the above properties make it possible to predict how the
model will react if one or more of its elements are submitted to certain
modifications.
Finally, the model should be constituted so as to make immediately
intelligible all the observed facts.21
Clearly, we are not dealing with just anything. Rather, a structure is a

model meeting the criteria listed above: It shows “the characteristics of
a system.” The interdependence of its elements is key: One change will
register and reverberate throughout the system, within “all the other
elements.” Additionally, a structure demonstrates repeatability. Further,
the model’s interdependent responsiveness can in time be predictable,
even manipulable. Finally, it’s useful: It’s constituted in such a way as to
expose its own facts. By these criteria, not just anything can be a struc-
ture. And in fact, structures take work—first the work of locating a site
for a possible structure and then the work of constituting said structure.
Lévi-Strauss explains elsewhere, “we do not begin with an a priori defi-
nition of what can be structured and what cannot. We are too much
aware that it is impossible to know in advance where, and at what level
of observation, structural analysis can be applied.”22 In a very real sense,
then, structures according to Lévi-Strauss do not exist—one will never
be discovered in “reality.” Instead, they have to be constituted, or, to use
a Freudian term, they have to be constructed.
44 S. DE LA TORRE
Social structure is something else again, and like structure itself, it has
been misunderstood. Where structures have appeared ubiquitous—just
anything that’s not amorphous—social structures have been confused
with social relations. Lévi-Strauss allows that the concepts are closely
related23—indeed, they share a common foundation—but they differ in
both sense and use, for while social relations can be described, a social
structure gives a method.24
Social relations and social structure share the foundation of concrete
or empirical reality, here identified as raw materials: “social relations,”
Lévi-Strauss writes, “consist of the raw materials out of which the mod-
els making up the social structure are built …”25 Raw materials make up
social relations, and these same raw materials can be brought together
to build models—the model defined in the paragraphs above—which
themselves make up a social structure. In a sense, then, it may be that
the important distinction to be drawn is not that between social rela-
tions and social structure, but that between concrete reality and social
structure. Lévi-Strauss brings out this distinction by way of disciplinary
domains: Ethnography, he points out, is concerned with the gathering
of the raw materials of empirical reality, while social anthropology works
with the models built from these materials.26 Later, he revisits this dis-
tinction in order to offer a passionate defense of anthropology: “None
of us,” he insists, “would ever think of substituting a frozen abstract type
or structure for that living reality. The search for structures comes at a
later stage, when, after observing what exists, we try to isolate those sta-
ble—yet always partial—elements that will make possible comparison and
classification.”27 In other words, indicating that a social structure is irre-
ducible to social relations does not signal that the concrete realities that
comprise social relations are a matter of indifference to the anthropolo-
gist. Likewise, “we know that a concrete society can never be reduced to
its structure, or, rather, structures …”28
To summarize: A concrete society cannot—and in a sense ought
not—be reduced to its structures, but those structures are valuable
because of the uses to which they can be put, and this is the site at which
Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism makes its intervention:
… what makes social-structure studies valuable is that structures are mod-

els, the formal properties of which can be compared independently of their
elements. The structuralist’s task is thus to recognize and isolate levels of
reality which have strategic value from his point of view, namely, which
admit of representation as models, whatever their type.29
And Lévi-Strauss finds the origins for this approach, as well as for the dis-
tinction described above between concrete reality and social structure, in
Mauss’s Essai sur le don:
What happened in that essay, for the first time in the history of ethnolog-
ical thinking, was that an effort was made to transcend empirical obser-
vation and to reach deeper realities. For the first time, the social ceases to
belong to the domain of pure quality—anecdote, curiosity, material for
moralising description or for scholarly comparison—and becomes a system,
among whose parts connections, equivalences and interdependent aspects
can be discovered.30
***
Circling back, then, to the question of structure in relation to normal
and abnormal modes of behavior: Lévi-Strauss has just explained that
society naturally expresses itself symbolically in its customs and institu-
tions, but “normal” modes of individual behavior are never symbolic in
themselves31:
It is natural for society to express itself symbolically in its customs and its
institutions; normal modes of individual behaviour are, on the contrary,
never symbolic in themselves: they are the elements out of which a sym-
bolic system, which can only be collective, builds itself. It is only abnormal
modes of behaviour which, because desocialised and in some way left to
their own devices, realise the illusion of an autonomous symbolism on the
level of the individual. To put it differently, abnormal modes of individ-
ual behaviour, in a given social group, do achieve symbolic status, but on
a plane which is inferior to that on which the group expresses itself; and
within a different order of magnitude, if I can put it that way: an order
really incommensurable to that of the group’s self expression.32
Symbolic expression is given here as given: natural, decided, and self-

evident. Also given: that a symbolic system can only be collective, a claim
linked to structuralism’s understanding that meaning emerges differen-
tially, through interactions among a structure’s elements.
Why are “normal” modes of individual behavior never symbolic in
themselves? Because normal modes of individual behavior—it will surprise
no one to hear—are at one with the collective. That is, they are the ele-
ments which constitute the symbolic system, here identified with the col-
lective. It may also be unsurprising to hear that Lévi-Strauss articulates the
notion that “the normal” depend on “the abnormal,” that “‘abnormality’
46 S. DE LA TORRE
… alone can supply a definition of ‘the normal’ …”33 But, as discussed in

the first chapter of this project, norms are not structures—at a maximum
they are “very poor ones”34—and we here are dealing with structuralism.
How then does abnormality—which Lévi-Strauss also calls mental distur-
bance, and which I am calling madness—fit in a structuralist framework?
Moreover, what does it show—or know—about structure itself?
Mauss had said it before Lévi-Strauss: What’s real is real for the social.
The social is reality, or “the social is only real when integrated in a system
…”35 A symbolic system, meanwhile, is any system in which the group
expresses itself. It takes those elements which can make a collective, and
it renders them real in the taking. “Any culture,” Lévi-Strauss writes,
“can be considered as a combination of symbolic systems headed by lan-
guage, the matrimonial rules, the economic relations, art, science and
religion.”36 Furthermore, “All the systems seek to express certain aspects
of physical reality and social reality, and even more, to express the links
that those two types of reality have with each other and those that occur
among the symbolic systems themselves.”37
But what Lévi-Strauss goes on to elucidate about symbolic expres-
sion is, to my mind, where we find a sort of alternative key—a coun-
ter-key, we might say—to his symbolic. In these passages, Lévi-Strauss
offers three formulations which suggest that structuralism’s own foun-
dation may itself be an experience of groundlessness. They are as follows:
First, no society is ever wholly or completely symbolic. Second, no society can
manage to give all its members, to the same degree, the means whereby they
could give their services fully to the building of a symbolic structure. And
third, there are people who are sensitive to those sites where symbolic systems
break off, and they prevent the total system from disintegrating. Here are
his words:
The fact that the systems can never achieve that expression in a fully sat-
isfying and (above all) equivalent form, is, first, a result of the conditions
of functioning proper to each system, in that the systems always remain
incommensurable; second, it is a result of the way that history introduces
into those systems elements from different systems, determines shifting of
one society towards another, and uneven intervals in the relative evolu-
tionary rhythm of each particular system. So no society is ever wholly and
completely symbolic; that is because a society is always a spatial-temporal
given, and therefore subject to the impact of other societies and of earlier
states of its own development; it is also because, even in some hypothetical
society which we might imagine as having no links with any other and
no dependence on its own past, the different systems of symbols which
all combine to constitute the culture or civilisation would never become
reducible to one another … Instead of saying that a society is never com-
pletely symbolic, it would be more accurate to say that it can never man-
age to give all its members, to the same degree, the means whereby they
could give their services fully to the building of a symbolic structure which
is only realisable (in the context of normal thinking) in the dimension of
social life.38
In the first formulation, Lévi-Strauss underlines that, from one sys-

tem to the next, there is a difference: Systems are neither identical nor
commensurate; nor can one eclipse another. There are gaps, seams, or
cuts, unseen ledges where symbolic systems fall off, sites the symbolic
does not cover. In the second formulation, Lévi-Strauss suggests that
there are people for whom the symbolic is insufficient, who are not fully
supported by its resources and who, correspondingly, do not fully give
their services to its building. Importantly, such people are still counted
by Lévi-Strauss as members of the society, “integral parts of the total
system.”
And in the third formulation, Lévi-Strauss links the first two, pro-
posing that there are those who are sensitive to the symbolic’s gaps and
contradictions:
Any society at all is therefore comparable to a universe in which only dis-

crete masses are highly structured. So, in any society, it would be inevita-
ble that a percentage (itself variable) of individuals find themselves placed
‘off system’, so to speak, or between two or more irreducible systems. The
group seeks and even requires of those individuals that they figuratively
represent certain forms of compromise which are not realisable on the
collective plane; that they simulate imaginary transitions, embody incom-
patible syntheses. So, in all their apparently aberrant modes of behaviour,
individuals who are ‘ill’ are just transcribing a state of the group, and mak-
ing one or another of its constants manifest. Their peripheral position
relative to a local system does not mean that they are not integral parts
of the total system; they are, and just as much as the local system is. To
be more precise, if they were not docile witnesses of this sort, the total
system would be in danger of disintegrating into its local systems. It can
therefore be said that for every society, the relation between normal and
special modes of behaviour is one of complementarity. That is obvious in
the case of shamanism and spirit-possession; but it would be no less true
48 S. DE LA TORRE
of modes of behaviour which our own society refuses to group and legit-
imise as vocations. For there are individuals who, for social, historical or
physiological reasons (it does not much matter which), are sensitive to the
contradictions and gaps in the social structure; and our society hands over
to those individuals the task of realising a statistical equivalent (by consti-
tuting that complement, ‘abnormality’, which alone can supply a definition
of ‘the normal’).39
Lévi-Strauss’s descriptions underscore such individuals’ experience, giv-

ing the image of a sensitivity that is spatially oriented, based in move-
ment and the body: To be sensitive to a gap or contradiction is to
“simulate imaginary transitions” and to “embody incompatible synthe-
ses.” It’s a thing lived in the body and it’s a logic—a logic of incom-
patibility. It’s also a movement or a stillness, a recreation or something
crossed over by other or others’ movements. With respect to the group,
it’s a transcription of something society can’t integrate, a compromise
the collective can’t manage. “Our society”—France in 1950—does not
group or legitimize its “off system” members, having built no vocational
holding places for them. But, were there not individuals sensitive to the
gaps and contradictions in the social structure, the “total system” would
disintegrate. This is why I suggested at the beginning of the chapter that
subjective or psychical breakdown is for Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism an
integral part of what makes things as such possible. To be fair, however,
naming that experience breakdown is not entirely accurate. For one
thing, Lévi-Strauss does not do so, describing it instead as an experience
located within sites of breakage; presumably, individuals manage or fail
to manage embodying what the group cannot realize in infinite ways,
and not all of these entail breakdown or crisis. But, in the section to fol-
low, I will explore the possibility that all of them entail the experience of
both actual limitlessness and theoretically limitless self-fragmentation—
much like, according to Lévi-Strauss, the ethnographer does.
***
For Lévi-Strauss, individual psychical processes “complement” the
social structure without ever “completing” it. That there is a relation
of complementarity between “individual psychical structure and social
structure”40 does not, however, suggest that there is anything dyadic,
binaristic, or two-dimensional about this relation. Why not?
To explain the non-binary nature of this complementarity between
individual psychical structure and social structure, Levi-Strauss turns to
Mauss’s notion of the “total social fact,” where once again, experience
matters. By my read, experience creates the hole that makes of “comple-
mentarity” a three-dimensional concept for Lévi-Strauss. But, is it expe-
rience as such, or the experience of the sensitive, that creates this hole? I
raise the question because, as Lévi-Strauss arrives at his final comments
in the Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, the unique experience of
“sensitivity” or “mental disturbance” drops out of the picture.41 And just
when madness drops out of Lévi-Strauss’s argument, the ethnographer
or anthropologist shows up—more, he shows up as the kind of person
given to the theoretically limitless experience, or practice, of fragmenta-
tion, suggesting to me that there may be an important linchpin between
the knowledge of the mad and the work of the ethnographer or anthro-
pologist—a connection worth remembering as we continue to reflect
on the question of the transformation that is specific to the method that
structuralism is.
What is a total social fact? In Lévi-Strauss’s summary, a total fact
includes “different modes of the social,” such as the juridical and the
aesthetic; “different moments of an individual history,” such as birth
and education; and “different forms of expression,” which encompass
unconscious categories, the physiological, and conscious representations
both individual and collective.42 “One might be tempted,” Lévi-Strauss
remarks, “to apprehend the total fact through any one aspect of soci-
ety exclusively: the familial aspect, the technical, economic, juridical or
religious aspect.”43 A total fact cannot be apprehended through any one
aspect of society, however, because then—if I may be glib—it wouldn’t
be total.
A total fact requires the full spectrum of individual experience. We see
this already in the list above, which includes both individual history and
individual representations. But the role of individual experience in the
making of a total fact extends still further: For there is only one way to
verify that a total fact “corresponds to reality,”44 and that is by way of
the individual: “the only guarantee we can have that a total fact corre-
sponds to reality, rather than being an arbitrary accumulation of more
or less true details, is that it can be grasped in a concrete experience:
first, in that of a society localised in space or time, ‘Rome, Athens’; but
also, in that of any individual at all in any one at all of the societies thus
localised, ‘the Melanesian of this or that island.’”45 On the basis of this,
Lévi-Strauss announces, “So it really is true that, in one sense, any psy-
chological phenomenon is a sociological phenomenon, that the mental
50 S. DE LA TORRE
is identified with the social. But on the other hand, in a different sense,
it is all quite the reverse: the proof of the social cannot be other than
mental.”46 This is why “any valid interpretation must bring together the
objectivity of historical or comparative analysis and the subjectivity of
lived experience.”47
And, crucially, the path to that valid interpretation proceeds on the
basis of the individual’s ability to grasp an object both objectively and
subjectively, ad infinitum, in an experience of objectification of the self
or fragmentation which is “[t]heoretically … limitless, except for the
persistent implication of the existence of the two extremes as the con-
dition of its possibility.”48 In other words, it is by way of the theoreti-
cally limitless process or practice of self-fragmentation that a total social
fact can be verified, a total social fact itself being, among other things, a
means of verifying that individual psychical processes complement social
structure. Also or actually limitless: that “series of objects” which “con-
stitute[] in ethnography, the Object.”49 Facing that infinity, Lévi-Strauss
writes—beautifully—that the ethnographer might be compelled to “pull
away painfully” had he not experienced “a prior fragmenting.”50 In other
words, what grounds a new experience of fragmenting in the face of
infinity—what bastions the ethnographer in the midst of that pain—is a
prior experience of fragmenting.51
For the purposes of this project, it is not important whether or
not we find Lévi-Strauss’s account of the function of the total social
fact persuasive. What I find interesting is that Lévi-Strauss extracts
from Mauss’s framework of the total social fact a reading of comple-
mentarity that includes an experience of fragmentation, wherein each
fragmentation builds toward confirmation of something that Lévi-
Strauss wants to call real or reality; recall how important it was for
him to encounter in anthropology a field of study that cared about
what was true.
But, some of the truths Lévi-Strauss is finding exceed that which can
be integrated by the collective. By his own account, while what’s real is
real for the social, the mad are “desocialized.”52 Could we say by exten-
sion, then, that the mad have an experience of what is not covered by the
symbolic? While Lévi-Strauss does not go into detail about those gaps
and contradictions to which some individuals are sensitive, we can assert
that there where the symbolic cannot cover is without limit—it’s only
logical. Could we then also say that what’s real for the mad, or the sensi-
tive, is an experience of limitlessness? Such an experience would include
a knowledge concerning the existence of holes where nothing is synthe-

sized—a knowledge which would only erupt in the midst of the group
as somehow “unreal.” If we could say that much following from Lévi-
Strauss’s indications, we could say by extension that there is a Lacanian
real at the heart of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism.
3.2 The Condition of Symbolic Thinking

In the final section of Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, Lévi-
Strauss provides a minimal account of the origins of language and knowl-
edge, along with a more detailed account of those things that follow
from the nature of their emergence. As we will see, it’s an origin with
a bleed—one which, Lévi-Strauss states, scientific knowledge cannot
staunch, but something else can—that is, it almost can.53 What are these
origins, from whence the bleed, and how and why is it to be staunched?
The beginning of the answer lies in language. Language, Lévi-Strauss
writes, must have arisen all at once, for “[t]hings cannot have begun to
signify gradually.”54 We enter here with Lévi-Strauss a zero-sum game
that seems reasonable enough: Either things as such signify, or nothing
does, and since they surely do, then they must have come to do so in
one transformative instant. Lévi-Strauss indicates that the study of the
transformation itself—from a state in which nothing signified to a state
in which everything did—belongs to the fields of biology and psychol-
ogy. From outside those fields, Lévi-Strauss is willing to posit that “a
shift occurred,” from, as he writes, “a stage when nothing had a meaning
to another stage when everything had meaning.”55 He describes this as
an “apparently banal remark”56 with radical consequences.
And indeed, everything follows from here. Building from his claim
concerning this moment in human history, Lévi-Strauss proceeds from
the question of language to the question of knowledge. He outlines the
differing times of the signifier and the signified, suggesting that a fun-
damental excess is necessary to maintaining the complementarity that is
itself necessary to the operation of symbolic thought, and he names what
repairs that excess the zero symbol.
The notion that language arose all at once is thus arguably the core
premise of Lévi-Strauss’s new structuralism. Consider, for instance, a
tree: While a tree either signifies or does not—we are either with lan-
guage or before it—what might be missing or in some sense incomplete
would be knowledge about the tree. The signifyingness of signifiers is
52 S. DE LA TORRE
instantaneous, but the relationships between signifiers and signifieds par-

take of another time. In fact, they partake of at least two: an abstract
time within which signifier and signified form a closed totality of com-
plementary units; and another, concrete time, within which signifier and
signified affix and fall apart in ever-changing arrangements. Lévi-Strauss
calls these processes knowledge. Knowledge, he writes, is the process of
“correcting and recutting of patterns, regrouping, defining relationships
of belonging and discovering new resources.”57
Lévi-Strauss notices that the differing times of language and knowl-
edge create a problem, however. Again: Signifier and signified are com-
plementary in the abstract inasmuch as they emerge simultaneously, as a
closed unit. But between signifier and signified there’s a contradiction
as well, or a relation of non-equivalence or inadequation—Lévi-Strauss
employs each term to describe the problem at hand. He arrives at the
conclusion that there’s a relation of contradiction (or non-equivalence
or inadequation) between signifier and signified after making another
bold claim: “[F]rom the beginning,” he states, “the universe signified
the totality of what humankind can come to know about it.”58 It’s not
only that language arose all at once, then. It’s that all language arose all
at once: All the signifiers are given from the outset. All that’s lacking is
knowledge to match these signifiers to their signifieds, for, as we know,
a thing is not known simply because it is significant. Therefore, Lévi-
Strauss asserts, there is—and there must be—a surfeit of signifiers:
… man has from the start had at his disposition a signifier-totality which he
is at a loss to know how to allocate to a signified, given as such, but no less
unknown for being given. There is always a non-equivalence or ‘inadequa-
tion’ between the two, a non-fit and overspill which divine understanding
alone can soak up; this generates a signifier-surfeit relative to the signifieds
to which it can be fitted.59
What is the function of the signifier-surfeit? It prevents the unthink-

able, which would be a situation involving a signified without a signi-
fier. Recall the zero-sum game with which he began, according to which
either everything signifies or nothing does. A signified without a signifier
is outside that frame. In Lévi-Strauss’s origin story, there are not some
things that do not signify. Instead, there is the ongoing question which
corresponds to the process of knowledge, namely to which signifieds are
we to allocate which signifiers?
While there can be no signified without a signifier, the rule does not
apply in the inverse. A signifier without a signified is thinkable. And
indeed, there are lots. Lévi-Strauss continues:
… in man’s efforts to understand the world, he always disposes of a sur-

plus of signification … That distribution of a supplementary ration … is
absolutely necessary to ensure that, in total, the available signifier and the
mapped-out signified remain in the relationship of complementarity which
is the very condition of the exercise of symbolic thinking.60
A signifier without a signified is necessary—business as usual. Better still,

it gets us at something beyond business as usual: It gets us to some-
thing extraordinary: “a symbol in its pure state.”61 Inspired by Roman
Jakobson’s notion of the zero phoneme,62 Lévi-Strauss names this highly
functional “simple form”63 the zero symbol. The zero symbol intervenes
to recalibrate the contradiction sketched above that is “inherent” in sym-
bolic thinking,64 and that it does so makes it the condition of symbolic
thinking itself.
I read the zero symbol as an instance of an Oedipal logic and thus as
structurally and functionally akin to the logic of the incest prohibition. I
defined the Oedipal logic of the incest prohibition in Chapter 1 as one
that installs a limit capable of barring a deadly enjoyment and enabling a
smaller share of enjoyment. These, to be sure, are not the terms within
which Lévi-Strauss is working: When writing of the zero symbol, he does
not identify signifiers’ excesses, for instance, as somehow proffering or
coincident with a deadly enjoyment. What is clear about the Oedipal
logic of the zero symbol, however, is that it enables something. Not only
does it enable symbolic thought, but as “a sign marking the necessity of
a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signi-
fied already contains …,”65 it ensures “all art, all poetry, every mythic and
aesthetic invention.”
Lévi-Strauss earmarks the notion of the zero symbol as the point
where he moves decisively beyond Mauss’s work. For while Mauss, Levi-
Strauss explains, had done something unheard of, attempting “to tran-
scend empirical observation and to reach deeper realities,”66 he then
halted: “Why did Mauss halt at the edge of those immense possibil-
ities, like Moses conducting his people all the way to a promised land
whose splendour he would never behold?”67 Leaving behind the ques-
tion of why, Lévi-Strauss dedicates himself instead to the “crucial move,
54 S. DE LA TORRE
somewhere, that Mauss missed out.”68 That crucial move, argues Lévi-
Strauss, is to recognize in mana and words like it the work of an opera-
tor—operators, I would add, that are gifts the collective gives itself.
But, not all members of the collective are in a position to receive this
gift, and these, I would submit, are the subjects Lévi-Strauss has in mind
when he writes of those members of the collective who are sensitive
to the social structures’ gaps and contradictions—who are, in Lacan’s
idiom, not-all in the symbolic. While they are thus written into struc-
turalism at its very origins, both they and the “signified without a signi-
fier” remain more or less unthought here. To follow through with such
non-Oedipal logics as these, Lévi-Strauss will need myth, to which I turn
in Chapter 4. In his engagement with myth, Lévi-Strauss will build out
the experience which Freud calls trauma, alluding to it first in his intro-
duction to the canonical formula and returning to it at least twice, in
his discussion of the effectiveness of symbols and in the conclusion to
Mythologiques. As we will see, by way of Lévi-Strauss’s work with myth,
the experience that Freud calls trauma—rather than the logical operator
of the zero symbol, which is both functionally and structurally akin to
the incest prohibition—becomes the condition for symbolic thought.
In other words, in the next chapter, I hope to show how Lévi-Strauss
comes to suggest that we are borne unto symbolic thought of something
we did not experience as traumatic at the time, of something which acts
in the body, of something we will, Cantin suggests, “re-member.”69 To
bring these two structures together, we could say that we are borne unto
symbolic thought of a kind of signified without a signifier which acts in
the body, a concept which in Chapter 4 I will link to the notion of the
real unconscious. This reorientation is significant inasmuch as symbolic
thinking itself would then be born of a universal “feminine” experience,
rather than of one to which not all members of the collective are privy.
3.3 Conclusion
Perhaps for a person who could trace the forms of his own thinking to
such miracles as an encounter with ammonites in rock—as Lévi-Strauss
does in “The Making of an Anthropologist”—it was easy to nest a fun-
damental complementarity within a three-dimensional topology.70 The
operation of vacillating between closed and open is approached here with
some faith that one will know in time where the ground is: “I seem to be
proceeding in meaningless fashion,” he writes.71 It wasn’t meaningless,
however: “It was a quest, which would have seemed incoherent to some
uninitiated observer.”72
Lacan joins Lévi-Strauss here, remarking that “[f]or those who have
gone in for structural analyses the ideal has always appeared to be to
find what links the two, the closed and the open, to discover circularity
on the side of the open.”73 He adds, “I think that you’re well enough
oriented to understand that the notion of structure is by itself already a
manifestation of the signifier.”74 “To be interested in structure,” Lacan
declares, “is to be unable to neglect the signifier…What satisfies us the
most in a structural analysis is an uncovering, that is as radical as possible,
of the signifier.”75
An uncovering as radical as possible of the signifier: Who is more sen-
sitive to this than the mad? It’s not enough, however, because for those
who are in the symbolic without limit, there is the possibility of being
overwhelmed both by a symbol in its pure state and by the excess that
nothing can staunch. In other words, an uncovering as radical as possi-
ble of the signifier is not (always) enough to engage in “a practice of the
signifier,”76 or what Cantin outlines as a speech which “has structuring
effects in the body, if and only if the signifier comes to evoke the pres-
ence of the desiring body in language.”77 How do the sensitive engage
in a practice of the signifier? To approach this question with Lévi-Strauss,
we might—as with anything with Lévi-Strauss—commit to envisaging
something with a form more spiral, “discover[ing] circularity on the
side of the open,” seeking or extracting structure in order to engage in
a practice of the signifier at the very same time that that practice of the
signifier provides—or crystallizes, or hollows out—structure.
Notes
1. See Jonathon Culler, “Good to Think With,” Yale French Studies, no.
123 (2013), pp. 6–13. I am thinking here of Culler’s remark, reflecting
on Lévi-Strauss’s work: “I am pleased that the Lévi-Strauss who is pre-
served in the Pléiade has not been entirely appropriated as a humanist…
The Lévi-Strauss who insisted that the task of the human sciences is ‘not
to constitute but to dissolve man’ is still here in the Pléiade” (ibid., p.
12). For Culler, “Lévi-Strauss is above all good to think with when he
imagines a non-hermeneutic method for les sciences humaines that does
not kowtow to history but maintains the importance of the lessons he
drew from geology, Freud, and Marx for reconstructing the underlying
56 S. DE LA TORRE
systems that make our experience possible” (ibid., p. 13). Benoist quotes
Lévi-Strauss on the topic of humanism: “‘In a century when man is bent
on the destruction of innumerable forces of life, it is necessary to insist
that a properly equipped humanism cannot begin of its own accord but
most place the world before life, life before man, and the respect of oth-
ers before self-interest’” (Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Benoist, The Structural
Revolution, p. 66).
2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman
(New York: Pocket Books, 1977), p. 44.
3. Ibid., p. 51.
4. Ibid., p. 52.
5. Ibid., p. 47.
6. Benoist, The Structural Revolution, p. 21.
7. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, p. 42.
9. Ibid., p. 64.
10. Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 18.
11. See Willy Apollon, “The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture,”
trans. Steven Miller and John Mowitt, in The Dreams of Interpretation: A
Century Down the Royal Road, eds. Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas
Pepper, and Jakki Spicer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007). Apollon writes that the “‘difficulty in saying’ (mal à dire) the sub-
ject encounters in its confrontation with the real, and which subtends the
navel of the dream, is a metaphor of castration in which the subject is
sent back to the horror of its own death, as well as to the solitude of the
subject’s responsibility” (ibid., p. 34).
13. Ibid., p. 4.
14. Ibid., p. 6.
15. Ibid., p. 11.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., pp. 11–12.
18. Ibid., p. 45.
20. Ibid., p. 278.
21. Ibid., pp. 279–280.
22. Ibid., p. 327.
23. Ibid., p. 279.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 285.
27. Ibid., p. 327.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., p. 284.
31. Ibid., p. 12.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 19.
36. Ibid., p. 16.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., pp. 16–18.
39. Ibid., pp. 18–19.
40. Ibid., p. 22.
41. Specifically, what had previously been described as a relation of comple-
mentarity between “normal and special modes of behaviour” has become
a complementarity between “individual psychical structure and social
structure.” For this reason, it’s not clear to me whether abnormality or
mental disturbance for Lévi-Strauss has become coincident with individ-
ual psychical process, or exited the argument altogether.
43. Ibid., p. 26.
44. Ibid., p. 27.
45. Ibid., pp. 27–28.
46. Ibid., p. 28.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., p. 32.
49. Ibid., p. 33.
50. Ibid.
51. Still, reaching for verification of the total social fact, there is room for
error, even “tragic risk”: the tragic risk of “misunderstanding” (ibid., p.
33). The misunderstanding Lévi-Strauss has in mind is that the ethnogra-
pher might reach a “subjective grasp” of something which has “nothing
in common with that of the indigenous individual, beyond the bald fact
of being subjective” (ibid., p. 33). Happily, “the opposition of self and
other [can be] surmounted on a terrain which is also the meeting place
of the objective and the subjective; I mean the unconscious” (ibid., p.
34). The unconscious is the terrain on which the verification proffered by
concrete experience can and must be secured. I will not wade into Lévi-
Strauss’s account of Mauss’s understanding of the unconscious, except to
note that Lévi-Strauss sees Mauss attempt with the concept of mana to
reach “a sort of ‘fourth dimension’ of the mind, a level where the notions
58 S. DE LA TORRE
of ‘unconscious category’ and ‘category of collective thinking’ would be

synonymous” (ibid., pp. 34–35).
52. Ibid., p. 12.
53. Ibid., p. 63.
54. Ibid., p. 59.
55. Ibid., p. 60.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., p. 61.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., pp. 62–63.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 64.
62. Patrice Maniglier, “Acting out the Structure,” in Concept and Form,
Volume Two, eds. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (New York: Verso,
2012), p. 34.
64. Ibid., p. 63.
65. Ibid., p. 64.
66. Ibid., p. 38.
67. Ibid., p. 45.
68. Ibid.
69. Lucie Cantin, “How Does the Symptom Work and the Maneuver of
the Analyst” (lecture, the annual Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian
Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La Bordée, Quebec City, QC, June 8, 2017).
70. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, pp. 42–53.
71. Ibid., p. 48.
72. Ibid.
73. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III, The Psychoses 1955–
1956, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 183.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., p. 184.
76. Lucie Cantin, “The Borderline or The Impossibility of Producing a
Negotiable Form in the Social Bond for the Return of the Censored,”
Konturen 3 (2010), p. 200.
77. Ibid.
References
Apollon, Willy. “The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture.” Translated
by Steven Miller and John Mowitt. In The Dreams of Interpretation: A
Century Down the Royal Road, edited by Catherine Liu, John Mowitt,
Thomas Pepper, and Jakki Spicer, pp. 23–38. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007.
Benoist, Jean-Marie. The Structural Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1978.
Cantin, Lucie. “The Borderline or The Impossibility of Producing a Negotiable
Form in the Social Bond for the Return of the Censored.” Konturen 3
(2010), pp. 186–201.
Cantin, Lucie. “How Does the Symptom Work and the Maneuver of the
Analyst.” Lecture presented at the annual Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian
Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La Bordée, Quebec City, June 8, 2017.
Culler, Jonathan. “Good to Think With.” Yale French Studies, no. 123 (2013),
pp. 6–13.
Godelier, Maurice. The Enigma of the Gift. Translated by Nora Scott. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses 1955–
1956. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Russell Grigg. London:
Routledge, 1997.
Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John and Doreen
Weightman. New York: Pocket Books, 1977.
Maniglier, Patrice. “Acting out the Structure.” In Concept and Form, Volume
Two, edited by Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, pp. 25–46. New York: Verso,
2012.
CHAPTER 4
Two Traumas, Not One: The Feminine

in Myth
When Lévi-Strauss first writes of the structural study of myth, he is

envisioning already the equipment he will need to carry out such a pro-
ject. To analyze even one average-length variant requires hundreds of
cards, cards which could be patterned upon “special devices,” for which
Lévi-Strauss proposes vertical boards of six by four and a half feet.1 To
compare one variant to another, three-dimensional models become
necessary, for which Lévi-Strauss imagines several of the large vertical
boards, and now a large work space will be in order.2 And when, span-
ning out geographically, the frame of reference becomes multi-dimen-
sional, boards suffice no more: Now he will need “IBM equipment,
etc.”3 It’s “extremely bulky” work for an extremely bulky mass of litera-
ture, requiring “team work and technical help.”4
This is not exactly what came to pass. In his biography of the anthro-
pologist, Patrick Wilcken provides this glimpse of Lévi-Strauss at work:
A decade later, when he started on his famous myth tetralogy, he worked

alone. Footage from the era has him crouched over his writing desk in his
apartment, sitting in darkness, apart from a reading lamp lighting up piles
of heavily annotated typescripts. Beside him, he stored his notes and refer-
ences in a filing cabinet, with dividers marking off a hotchpotch of tribes,
subject matters, animals and places: ‘sloth’, ‘tapir’, ‘Mexico’, ‘California’,
‘moon’, ‘meteors’, ‘weaving’, ‘Kaingang’, ‘Iroquois’. He was now sup-
plementing his anthropological reading with Diderot and d’Alembert’s
Encyclopedia, Alfred Brehm’s zoology, Pliny and Plutarch, using an antique

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92895-1_4
62 S. de la TORRE
globe of the heavens to plot astronomical references … By the mid-1960s,

thoughts of wooden boards, pigeonholes and computing cards had given
way to something far more delicate and conceptual: a mobile of wire and
thin strips of paper, looping and bending back on themselves. Lévi-Strauss
would hang the mobiles from the ceiling in his office, and they turned
gently as he worked through the logical possibilities they represented.5
Lévi-Strauss affirms: “‘Throughout the Mythologiques project I worked

night and day nonstop,’ he told film maker Pierre Beuchot in a docu-
mentary shot soon after publication of the final volume, L’Homme nu.
‘I lost all idea of Saturdays or Sundays, of holidays, not allowing myself
to let go of the thread … so that I could understand the structural prop-
erties of the content’s smallest details.’”6
Why is mythical analysis so complex, so consuming? Because analyz-
ing one myth requires analyzing another. At the outset of Mythologiques,
Lévi-Strauss explains that he shall begin with “one myth, originating
from one community,” and that analyzing it will entail making refer-
ence to “other myths belonging to the same community,” that he shall
then “move on to myths from neighboring societies” and “proceed to
more remote communities,” and, at every step, he shall call upon each
myth’s ethnographic context in order to connect one myth to another.7
Through this process, he observes, his project “spreads out like a neb-
ula, without ever bringing together in any lasting or systematic way the
sum total of the elements from which it blindly derives its substance …”8
Lévi-Strauss does not panic in the face of this abundance of data, how-
ever. On the contrary: He reassures his readers and attempts to unhinge
their desire for closure: “there does not exist, nor ever will exist,” he
states, “any community or group of communities whose mythology and
ethnography … can be known in their entirety … we are dealing with a
shifting reality, perpetually exposed to the attacks of a past that destroys
it and of a future that changes it.”9 “There is no real end to mytholog-
ical analysis,” Lévi-Strauss insists, “no hidden unity to be grasped once
the breaking-down process has been completed.”10 And this is the case
because mythological thought itself, he explains, “has no interest in
definite beginnings or endings. .. [it] never develops any theme to com-
pletion: there is always something left unfinished. Myths, like rites, are
‘in-terminable.’”11 With such a view, we can appreciate why Levi-Strauss
would need three-dimensional supports and, indeed, a formula, to be
able to hold onto the thread of myths’ near-infinite transformations.
4 TWO TRAUMAS, NOT ONE: THE FEMININE IN MYTH 63
Mythical analysis may be without end, but Lévi-Strauss is able to

construct structures on the basis of the law of mythical transforma-
tion: This is his canonical formula for myth. He does so, he writes, by
“establish[ing] the group of transformations for each sequence, either
within the myth itself, or by elucidation of the isomorphic links between
sequences derived from several myths originating in the same commu-
nity.”12 This means that as he proceeds, the nebula “spreads”; but at
the same time, “its nucleus condenses and becomes more organized.”13
While its nucleus may become more organized, any notion of unity here
is ephemeral. Why? Because, on the one hand, constructing the structure
in no way nullifies the “uncertainty and confusion”14 that surround it,
and, on the other, any unity that a myth can be said to possess can only
“become a reality in the mind”15 of a person encountering that myth—
which Lévi-Strauss does, notably, with joy.16
In this chapter, I will be not so much concerned with the nuclei
formed through Lévi-Strauss’s engagement with myth but with the
effects of that engagement upon structuralism itself. In particular, I
will return to the unthought and unthinkable “signified without a sig-
nifier” of Lévi-Strauss’s origin story of language, with which I con-
cluded Chapter 3. As I pointed out there, in the Introduction to the
Work of Marcel Mauss, the signified without a signifier is the unthought
and unthinkable reverse of the signifier without a signified. This latter,
of course, Lévi-Strauss does address: The signifier without a signified
is the fortunate surfeit wherein the zero symbol, as the very condition
for symbolic thought, intervenes. But, interestingly, it is the unthought
signified without a signifier which I would like to suggest comes back
when Lévi-Strauss turns to myth—indeed, I would like to propose that
it returns twice, as “living myth” in “The Effectiveness of Symbols”
and as the (feminine) experience about there is no freedom to choose
in Mythologiques. And now, Lévi-Strauss engages with it. Moreover,
through those engagements, structuralism itself shifts; in particular, I
am interested in the ramifications of Lévi-Strauss’s identification of the
experience about which there is no freedom to choose—which he might
refer to as a real contradiction and which I would like to propose in this
chapter can be correlated to the real unconscious—as a new condition
for symbolic thought.
When Lévi-Strauss turns to myth, he enters a field whose elaboration
brings forth a non-Oedipal logic, and this is the case in spite of the fact
that one of the myths of primary interest to him is, as he notices, quite
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a lot like the Oedipal drama (to be precise, quite a lot like the narra-
tive at the base of Freud’s Totem and Taboo17). In his work with myth,
Lévi-Strauss approaches anew those sites where symbolic ledges break
off—sites signaled in Chapter 3 as the field of the mad or the sensi-
tive. At the same time, he approaches structure at its most reduced—
so reduced, in fact, that its transformations can be written in a formula,
which is the function of Lévi-Strauss’s canonical formula of myth. This
convergence—between the breaking off of the symbolic and the writ-
ing of structure—is significant, as it implies that it is precisely when and
where the symbolic breaks off—where language and the social cannot go
and have not been—that we are the most in need of structure, the most
proximate to structure’s writing, and the most likely to accede to the
kind of creativity that is the hallmark of the symbolic in action.
To develop these claims, I consider the following examples: First, I
pursue the implications of Lévi-Strauss’s suggestion that Freud’s work
on the deferred action of trauma is the key to his own writing of the
canonical formula of myth. I suggest that we find here a (forgotten)
feminine experience at the origins of Lévi-Strauss’s engagement with
myth. Second, I turn to Lévi-Strauss’s account of a cure by way of song.
Lévi-Strauss calls upon the song in question—wherein a shaman heals a
woman in the midst of a difficult childbirth—in order to illustrate the
effectiveness of mythical symbols and thereby demonstrate the existence
of a collective unconscious. I argue, however, that his discussion brings
into his structuralism the real unconscious that, taken at its letter, his
structuralism forecloses. The name Lévi-Strauss gives this real uncon-
scious is “living myth.”18 With Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of a cure through
song, we cycle back to the example of madness discussed in Chapter 3
and open onto the question that will orient Chapter 5, namely: What is
a subject who is not all in the symbolic to do in the face of an expe-
rience that the social cannot integrate? In the third and final example,
I consider Lévi-Strauss’s early definition of myth’s purpose alongside his
concluding remarks in Mythologiques on myth’s origins. I argue that Lévi-
Strauss forefronts here the feminine experience which Freud calls the
first trauma that is merely alluded to in his introduction of the canonical
formula. As noted above, the feminine experience in question is a real
contradiction—one wherein there is no freedom to choose.19 And when
Lévi-Strauss identifies this real contradiction as the condition of symbolic
thought, he adumbrates a structuralism that might unfold beyond the
Oedipal logics of kinship, the incest prohibition, and the zero symbol.
4.1 What Is Myth?
First, what is myth? For Lévi-Strauss, to define myth is also to explain
why one would study myth at all. He explains his choice at the outset of
Mythologiques: Among all of the human systems available for study, myth,
Lévi-Strauss hazards, offers the best access to “the constraining struc-
tures of the mind.”20 Myths are preferable even to kinship systems in this
capacity, because, unlike kinship systems, myths have neither an “obvious
practical function” nor a direct link “with a different kind of reality”—
that is, a reality “endowed with a higher degree of objectivity.”21 Myths
are notable for being both untethered from observable, objective reality,
and resplendent with the kinds of repetitions that make of a representa-
tional system something solidified, worthy of an ethnographer’s atten-
tion. And, if myths cannot be said to obey reality’s objective injunctions,
it follows that their injunctions must come from someplace other. Lévi-
Strauss therefore hypothesizes: Perhaps, in myth, the mind has nothing
but itself to imitate and commune with.22 If such is the case, the study
of myth ought correspondingly to put the mind itself into relief. More
exactly, it ought to put into relief the structures that constrain the mind.
At an absolute minimum, it ought to put into relief that the mind is con-
strained, and Lévi-Strauss identifies this notion as central to his research:
“Throughout, my intention remains unchanged. Starting from eth-
nographic experience, I have always aimed at drawing up an inventory
of mental patterns, to reduce apparently arbitrary data to some kind of
order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomes appar-
ent, underlying the illusions of liberty.”23
It is the job of the ethnographer, Lévi-Strauss suggests, to exacerbate
and thereby to make legible the necessities that underlie humans’ illu-
sions of liberty. To do so, the ethnographer begins by strategically choos-
ing a system as divergent from his own as possible, “in the hope that the
methodological rules he will have to evolve in order to translate these
systems in terms of his own system and vice versa, will reveal a pattern
of basic and universal laws.”24 Lévi-Strauss terms this work “a supreme
form of mental gymnastics, in which the exercise of thought, carried to
its objective limit … emphasizes every muscle and every joint of the skel-
eton, thus revealing a general pattern of anatomical structure.”25 When
the ethnographer engages in the exercise of translating a system into his
own and vice versa, it is the mind that contracts, connects, surfaces, and
is exposed in movement, and its patterns—not the system’s—become
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the object of consideration. Again, myth is the ideal domain in which

to engage in this unique mental gymnastics, for it is the domain most
homologous to the mind itself. Through, in a sense, “showing his
work,” the ethnographer puts into relief that which myths have already
put into relief without knowing anything about it. It’s important for
Lévi-Strauss that myths themselves don’t “know”—hence his clarification
that he is not interested in learning what humans think by way of myth,
nor how humans think, but more precisely, “how myths operate in men’s
minds without their being aware of the fact.”26 For the constraining
structures of the mind are unconscious. Rather, the constraining struc-
tures of the mind are the unconscious—the collective unconscious, which
“corresponds to the aggregate” of the atemporal, structural laws which
are “the same laws among all men.”27
4.2 Two Traumas, Not One

When Lévi-Strauss writes in a formula the series of transformations that
constitute “every myth,”28 he opens onto a field whose logic is not
Oedipal in structure, for the formula brings to the fore that there is a
lack in structure. The canonical formula of myth, as he calls it, has been
noticed by psychoanalytic theorists, who have heeded the signs that it
might provide an important point of contact between structuralism and
psychoanalysis. First to notice was Lacan himself: Shortly after Lévi-
Strauss introduces the canonical formula, Lacan calls upon it to analyze
the case of the Rat Man, remarking after the fact that he felt that he
achieved some success in doing so. And while Lacan would later distance
psychoanalysis from Lévi-Strauss’s work on myths, Lévi-Strauss’s canon-
ical formula has not disappeared from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.
Yvan Simonis, for instance, locates in the formula “a ground for a pos-
sible discussion between structuralism and psychoanalysis”29—a discus-
sion that might emerge, Simonis suggests, through using the formula to
rewrite the Borromean knots that preoccupied Lacan’s late teachings.30
Patrice Maniglier too maintains that the formula could bear continuing
significance to both psychoanalysis and structuralism, arguing in his con-
tribution to Concept and Form that the split subject is written into struc-
turalism by way of the formula and that the redefinition of the subject of
structuralism is a “future [which] remains our present.”31
To my knowledge, no one has addressed the first point of con-
tact between the formula and psychoanalysis, that linking the formula
to Freud’s writings on trauma; to be precise, no one has addressed the

brush with femininity that such a reference entails. Nor to my knowledge
have the indices of a feminine logic at work in Lévi-Strauss’s engagement
with myth more generally been developed.
In fact, it is Lévi-Strauss who makes the first step toward psychoanaly-
sis with the formula, right after he introduces it. He has walked through
the process entailed in arriving at the law of a given “permutation
group,” written the formula for that law, and explained the formula’s
internal logic; then, he declares, “This formula becomes highly signifi-
cant when we recall that Freud considered that two traumas (and not
one, as is so commonly said) are necessary in order to generate the indi-
vidual myth in which a neurosis consists.”32 The formula, Lévi-Strauss
suggests, can be applied “to the analysis of these traumas,” and the
results would be “a more precise and rigorous formulation of the genetic
law of myth.”33 Indeed, it would open onto the “much desired” possibil-
ity of “developing side by side the anthropological and the psychological
aspects of the theory”34—the theory, that is, of myth.
When Lévi-Strauss cites Freud here, it is likely that he means to sig-
nal the latter’s discussion of the Oedipus complex. Certainly, it is the
Oedipal myth which serves in the same essay as the case study for the
introduction of Lévi-Strauss’s method. But the deferred action of
trauma—two traumas, not one—is a phenomenon Freud first encounters
in his work with hysterical analysands.35 Trauma is every bit as inaugural
a concept for Freud as is hysteria itself, and Freud’s first clinical encoun-
ters with it take place in his work with hysterics.
To approach the relation between trauma and myth’s generation,
then, let us first consider the two traumas themselves. In his unpub-
lished manuscript Project for Scientific Psychology, Freud proposes that
there is a hysterical experience of trauma that can only be experienced
“after the event.”36 He outlines the structure of deferred trauma in the
following terms: There is an original event, not experienced as traumatic
at the time because it has been impossible to comprehend, and a second
event that activates the first. Freud theorizes that the first event has been
impossible to comprehend because it took place before puberty or the
advent of sexual maturity. Only when the second event brings about a
bewildering provocation of the chain of signifiers surrounding the first
does this first event begin to acquire its traumatic significance. Then, it
turns out that the original event’s impressions had slipped into the body,
inscribed in such a way as to escape consciousness’s notice—knotted,
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bundled, and packed away for future use, as it were. Only an event
within the sexual sphere, theorizes Freud, could display such conse-
quences, “consequences which we are accustomed to meet with only in
primary processes.”37
Freud calls upon Emma’s case to illustrate the phenomenon:
Emma is at the present time under a compulsion not to go into shops

alone. She explained this by a memory dating from the age of twelve
(shortly before her puberty). She went into a shop to buy something, saw
the two shop-assistants (one of whom she remembers) laughing together,
and rushed out in some kind of fright. In this connection it was possible to
elicit the idea that the two men had been laughing at her clothes and that
one of them had attracted her sexually.
Both the relation of these fragments to one another and the effect of
the experience are incomprehensible … Further investigation brought
to light a second memory, which she denies having had in mind at the
moment of Scene I. Nor is there any evidence to support its presence
there. On two occasions, when she was a child of eight, she had gone into
a shop to buy some sweets and the shopkeeper had grabbed at her geni-
tals through her clothes. In spite of the first experience she had gone to
the shop a second time, after which she had stopped away. Afterwards she
reproached herself for having gone the second time, as though she had
wanted to provoke the assault. And in fact a ‘bad conscience’ by which she
was oppressed could be traced back to this experience.
We can now understand Scene I (with the shop-assistants) if we take
it in conjunction with Scene II (with the shopkeeper). All we need is an
associative link between them. She herself remarked that a link of this kind
was provided by the laughter. The shop-assistants’ laughter had reminded
her of the grin with which the shopkeeper had accompanied his assault.
The whole process can now be reconstructed thus. The two shop-assistants
laughed in the shop, and this laughter (unconsciously) aroused the mem-
ory of the shopkeeper. The second situation had the further point of
similarity with the first that she was once again in a shop alone. The shop-
keeper’s grabbing through her clothes is remembered; but since then she
had reached puberty. The recollection aroused (what the event when it
occurred could certainly not have done) a sexual release, which turned into
anxiety. In her anxiety, she was afraid the shop-assistants might repeat the
assault, and ran away.38
Let us first acknowledge how disturbing it is that an adult man has

“grabbed at [the] genitals” of an eight-year-old child. That act is a
violation of Emma’s dignity and bodily integrity, and it is no wonder that

at the moment it has not been understood by Emma, for no child has
the means of understanding an adult’s attempt to turn her into an object
of pleasure; nor does any child have a means of understanding what
Lacanians would call the jouissance of the Other—indeed, neither do
adults. The fact that experiences like Emma’s are so common—for they
were common in Freud’s day and they remain common today—does not
diminish the pain that attends such a violation, but sharpens it. Freud,
who is listening to Emma, is attuned to her suffering and listening for
her unconscious desire; that is, he is listening for the unconscious struc-
tures that will permit Emma to engage in a process of working-through
so that the events which have marked her will not leave her paralyzed in
repetition, but support her in her discovery and articulation of uncon-
scious desire—her own desire.
To that end, Freud notices that there is a particular logical relation
between the amalgamation of perceptions recalled from Emma’s expe-
rience at age 12 and the complex of ideas relating to the earlier event.
First: From the original event, only the element “clothes” stays with
Emma: “the remarkable thing is that what entered consciousness was
not the element that aroused interest (the assault) but another which
symbolized it (the clothes).”39 Additionally, the “consciously function-
ing thoughts” have “made two false connections”: “that she had been
laughed at on account of her clothes and that she had been sexually
excited by one of the shop-assistants.”40 Freud suggests that Emma’s
experience can be mapped according to the following structure: There
has been an event consisting of B + A, where A stands for “an excessively
intense idea” which makes one weep for unknown reasons and where B
stands for an idea “which rightly leads to tears.”41 A—the inexplicable—
has been substituted for B. Freud writes: “the hysteric who is reduced to
tears by A is unaware that this is because of the association A—B,” for
“B itself plays no part whatever in his mental life.”42 Instead, what plays
a part in the mental life of the subject—and her body—are the errant
symbol and the excessively intense idea to which it is bound which makes
one weep.
The structure Freud outlines above is strikingly spare. It is the simplic-
ity of this early account that recommends it, however, for in this account,
the mechanism of displacement itself is put into relief.43 And this is
important because, as far as Lévi-Strauss is concerned, myth performs the
same operation: Myths too displace. On this subject, Lévi-Strauss quotes
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Emile Durkheim: Myths, Durkheim wrote, “‘explain nothing and merely

shift the difficulty elsewhere, but at least, in so doing, appear to attenu-
ate its crying illogicality.’”44 Lévi-Strauss regards this as a consummate
working definition for not only totemic myth—as in Durkheim’s exam-
ple—but myth as such. “Every myth,” Lévi-Strauss explains, “confronts
a problem.”45 And myths confront problems, he argues, in a very par-
ticular way: A myth confronts a problem “by showing that it is analogous
to other problems … a myth is a system of logical operations defined
by the ‘it’s when …’ or ‘it’s like …’ method.”46 The shift, according
to Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, is relieving, even though the problem
itself remains unsolved: “A solution that is not a real solution to a spe-
cific problem,” Lévi-Strauss proposes, “is a way of relieving intellectual
uneasiness and even existential anxiety when an anomaly, contradiction,
or scandal is presented as the manifestation of a structure of order that
can be perceived more clearly in aspects of reality that are less disturbing
to the mind and the emotions.”47
With his reference to the two traumas discussed by Freud, however,
Lévi-Strauss brings into the picture the troubling piece of information
that the displacement is not always so relieving, that it may indeed only
“‘appear to attenuate’” the problem’s “‘crying illogicality.’” Sometimes it
may not attenuate any crying at all. In fact, the scandal can be quite pres-
ent, even as the “aspects of reality” emanating from it (or back towards
it) are necessarily—by definition—“less disturbing to the mind and the
emotions” than those of the trauma from before. Think of Emma: Emma
is in no way relieved of anxiety. On the contrary, her unease or her “dis-
ease,” as it were, commences precisely with the second trauma—at that
juncture when myth, according to Lévi-Strauss, intervenes or ought to
intervene, the juncture when myth’s generation becomes possible. Emma
is still crying, without knowing anything about it.
I propose, therefore, the following: Perhaps what Emma’s exam-
ple suggests is that the deferred action of trauma can also put mythical
thought in motion in another form, namely in the form of a question
(call it two questions, not one)—specifically, When is it? and What is it
like?
In that case, Emma’s questions about her experience would be like a
myth in reverse, and we are led to the possibility that two traumas may
not be sufficient for a feminine subject to generate an individual myth.
But, they may suffice to set in motion the logical operations of which
myth consists.
4.3 The Shaman’s Song

The essay in which Lévi-Strauss discusses trauma—“The Effectiveness
of Symbols”—does not purport to be about trauma. Instead, the essay
aims to illustrate the effectiveness of symbols by calling upon their use
in a cure by song. It discusses, too, the wide swath of experiential and
conceptual overlap between shamanism and psychoanalysis. Finally, it
underscores the absolute primacy of the structural laws that make up
the collective unconscious, structural laws to which both shamanism
and psychoanalysis are thus necessarily subordinate. Curiously, however,
just as Lévi-Strauss argues with considerable passion for the existence of
the collective unconscious and its atemporal, structural laws, he touches
upon the unconscious as real.
The song in question, “Mu’igala, or the Way of Muu,” comes from
the people historically known as the Kuna of Panama. It tells of a woman
struggling to give birth and the efforts of the shaman whose help is
requested to liberate the woman from the “force gone awry”48 within
her. Since the incantation forms the basis of Lévi-Strauss’s analysis, I will
quote his summary of the song at length:
The song begins with a picture of the midwife’s confusion and describes
her visit to the shaman, the latter’s departure for the hut of the woman
in labor, his arrival, and his preparations—consisting of fumigations of
burnt cocoa-nibs, invocations, and the making of sacred figures, or nuchu.
These images, carved from prescribed kinds of wood which lend them
their effectiveness, represent tutelary spirits whom the shaman makes his
assistants and whom he leads to the abode of Muu, the power responsi-
ble for the formation of the fetus. A difficult childbirth results when Muu
has exceeded her functions and captured the purba, or ‘soul,’ of the moth-
er-to-be. Thus the song expresses a quest: the quest for the lost purba,
which will be restored after many vicissitudes, such as the overcoming of
obstacles, a victory over wild beasts, and, finally, a great contest waged by
the shaman and his tutelary spirits against Muu and her daughters, with
the help of magical hats whose weight the latter are not able to bear. Muu,
once she has been defeated, allows the purba of the ailing woman to be
discovered and freed. The delivery takes place, and the song ends with a
statement of the precautions taken so that Muu will not escape and pur-
sue her visitors. The fight is not waged against Muu herself, who is indis-
pensable to procreation, but only against her abuses of power. Once these
have been corrected, relations become friendly, and Muu’s parting words
to the shaman almost correspond to an invitation: ‘Friend nele, when do
you think to visit me again?’49
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Lévi-Strauss notes that the song is extraordinary not for its form but
for the reading given it by its editors Nils Magnus Holmer and Henry
Wassén, concerning Muu’s way and abode, which are not “simply a
mythical itinerary and dwelling-place” but which “represent, literally, the
vagina and uterus of the pregnant woman.”50 To Holmer and Wassén’s
reading, Lévi-Strauss adds the following: that the song “constitutes a
purely psychological treatment, for the shaman does not touch the body
of the sick woman and administers no remedy.”51 Levi-Strauss thus elects
to call the song “a psychological manipulation of the sick organ,” arguing
that “it is precisely from this manipulation that a cure is expected.”52
How does the song psychologically manipulate the sick organ? It does
so by first calling the organ into being, through a minute and mythic
use of language, and then by narrating the battle the organ wages with
the spirits sent to liberate it. But before the song can begin the process
of calling the organ into being, the shaman must make it possible for
the woman herself to be present to the process. He accomplishes this
task by extensively describing the setting and that which is about to take
place. As Lévi-Strauss writes, the woman is informed in detail of where
she is (“‘Your body lies in front of you in the hammock’”), of the parties
who will be engaged in her delivery (“‘The nelegan’s hats are shining
white… The nelegan are beginning to become terrifying (?)’”), and of
the cure’s overall itinerary (“‘The nelegan go balancing up on top of the
hammock, they go moving upward like nusupane … The nelegan set out,
the nelegan march in a single file along Muu’s road, as far as the Low
Mountain’”).53 “Everything occurs,” Lévi-Strauss writes, “as though the
shaman were trying to induce the sick woman—whose contact with real-
ity is no doubt impaired and whose sensitivity is exacerbated—to relive
the initial situation through pain, in a very precise and intense way, and
to become psychologically aware of its smallest details.”54
Reliving the situation through pain and becoming aware of its smallest
details “sets off a series of events”55 in the woman’s body: Now, she is
here, we might say, here in the naming. And now that she is here, myth
is being written, written into the internal organs of the pregnant woman
or “enacted”56 within her; her organs sing back. And just as the pain of
the onset of the illness is brought to mythic life, so is the experience of
the cure, for while the cure entails no physical contact, it is surely, Lévi-
Strauss reasons, felt by the woman: “The nelegan enter the natural ori-
fice, and we can imagine that after all this psychological preparation the
sick woman actually feels them entering.”57 Symbolizing and sensitizing

proceed, then, hand in hand, as the words “‘light up’” the body: “Not
only does she feel them,” writes Lévi-Strauss, “but they ‘light up’ the
route they are preparing to follow—for their own sake, no doubt, and to
find the way, but also to make the center of inexpressible and painful sen-
sation ‘clear’ for her and accessible to her consciousness.”58
Symbolizing accompanies sensitizing, and these are not simply any
symbolizations, for the pain here is and must be mythic for the cure to
be effective: Lévi-Strauss writes that the “next ten pages offer, in breath-
less fashion, a more and more rapid oscillation between mythical and
physiological themes, as if to abolish in the mind of the sick woman the
distinction which separates them.”59 Pain becomes cosmic when inex-
pressible sensation acquires a name with meaning. Then, it goes away:
“Once the sick woman understands, … she does more than resign her-
self; she gets well.”60
She gets well, Lévi-Strauss thinks, because she believes. He writes,
The sick woman believes in the myth and belongs to a society which
believes in it. The tutelary spirits and malevolent spirits, the supernat-
ural monsters and magical animals, are all part of a coherent system on
which the native conception of the universe is founded. The sick woman
accepts these mythical beings or, more accurately, she has never questioned
their existence. What she does not accept are the incoherent and arbitrary
pains, which are an alien element in her system but which the shaman,
calling upon myth, will re-integrate within a whole where everything is
meaningful.61
Thus, the heart of the cure coincides with what Lévi-Strauss wishes to
elucidate, namely the effectiveness of symbols: The shaman names for
the sick woman that which has been impossible to say, and he names it
minutely, mythically, exhaustively—songfully:
The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which
unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immedi-
ately expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression—at the
same time making it possible to undergo in an ordered and intelligible
form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible—
which induces the release of the physiological process, that is, the reorgan-
ization, in a favorable direction, of the process to which the sick woman is
subject.62
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In Lévi-Strauss’s reading, the cure is effective in large part because the

woman belongs to a society which believes in the mythology mobilized
to name her pains. In a sense, part of her task, then—if she wants for the
cure to be effective—is precisely to believe. While the shaman’s task is to
provide the language for her pain, the sick woman’s task is to believe in
that language—to experience the dissolution of the difference between
myth and physiology, to reconnect with reality, to allow her body to sing
back; these will enable her to survive. Thus, the sick woman is delivered
of her pains not by way of her own myth, but with one belonging to the
collective.
***
The framework proposed by Lévi-Strauss opens onto certain questions,
however. We may grant that the collective can name and reintegrate
some pains, and those who suffer from those pains, into the collective.
But what of the pain of those who do not believe? What of the pain of
those who believe in a myth not accepted by the collective? Most impor-
tantly, what of those pains the collective cannot even name, much less
integrate? In such cases, “the inexpressible” really would be inexpressi-
ble, and the “force gone awry” might be irremediably so. Could a sha-
man cure such a pain? Could anyone?
Lévi-Strauss touches upon a psychoanalytic answer to this question in
this same essay—at the very moment, in fact, that he identifies trauma
with myth, and I would like to explore now the possibility that the link
Lévi-Strauss finds between trauma and “living myth”63 brings into struc-
turalism something of the real unconscious that is otherwise barred by
a system that posits the existence and absolute primacy of a collective
unconscious.
What is the real unconscious? In her essay, “The Drive, the Untreatable
Quest of Desire,” Lucie Cantin suggests that the unconscious as real takes
shape in Freud’s thinking as he discovers that something persists beyond
the process of bringing analysands to understand the meaning of their
symptoms. What could drive the “repetition and the resistance of the
symptom”64 that extend a treatment and that appear to cause undue suf-
fering and to jeopardize both the transference and the health of the anal-
ysand? Cantin specifies that Freud’s encounters with these manifestations
cause him to rethink the unconscious itself:
From the moment Freud first comes up against repetition and the
resistance of the symptom in his clinical practice, and is thus forced to
acknowledge a beyond of the pleasure principle that acts within the sub-
ject, the unconscious can no longer be conceived as a site of representa-
tions that are repressed because they are forbidden or inadmissible in the
cultural or social sphere. Such a conception supposed that once repression
was lifted, the symptom, as the disguised expression of a repressed desire,
was rendered unnecessary and destined to disappear. More importantly,
repression supposed a Thing that was named and then rejected. It sup-
posed a word representation. With repetition and the symptom, however,
both of which resisted all interpretation, Freud was faced with something
very different … The unconscious becomes the site of what has been
inscribed precisely because it has never been represented in language and
therefore can only be repetitively staged or enacted.65
It is on the basis of this very different thing that Willy Apollon, Cantin
writes, “radicalizes and develops a conception of the unconscious as
essentially the site where what remains outside of language, unrepre-
sented, continues to work upon the body.”66
Could a shaman cure the real unconscious? According to Lévi-
Strauss, both shamanism and psychoanalysis “aim at inducing an expe-
rience, and both succeed by recreating a myth which the patient has to
live or relive.”67 But, “in one case, the patient constructs an individual
myth with elements drawn from his past; in the other case, the patient
receives from the outside a social myth which does not correspond to a
former personal state.”68 As he notes, “the psychoanalyst listens, whereas
the shaman speaks.”69 Lévi-Strauss concludes that “the only difference
between the two methods that would outlive the discovery of a physio-
logical substratum of neurosis concerns the origin of the myth, which in
the one case is recovered as an individual possession and in the other case
is received from collective tradition.”70
And what is the origin of the myth recovered in psychoanalysis? Some
psychoanalysts, Lévi-Strauss observes, believe that the myths constructed
in analysis concern “real events which it is sometimes possible to date
and whose authenticity can be verified by checking with relatives or serv-
ants.”71 Certainly, Freud’s case history of the Wolf Man, discussed in
Chapter 2, could be described as a search for resolution with respect to
this very question, namely do primal scenes “take place,” or are they con-
structed in analysis? Lévi-Strauss takes a remarkable stance on this ques-
tion by leaving it entirely open, stating simply, “We do not question these
facts.”72 By this, I understand him to be saying, on the one hand, that
the “psychic constellations which reappear in the patient’s conscious …
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constitute a myth,” and, on the other, that they can “represent … real
events.”73 In other words, it doesn’t matter. Sorting out the difference
between myth and reality, Lévi-Strauss seems to intuit, does not consti-
tute the heart of the work with which an analysand is confronted. Much
like an analyst, Lévi-Strauss’s deeper concern is not with the reality of the
events evoked within an analysis, but the effect of the cure; even more,
Lévi-Strauss is concerned with the reasons behind the efficacy of the cure.
Unlike Lacanian psychoanalytic thinkers, however, for whom there is
no such thing as a collective unconscious,74 Lévi-Strauss attributes the
efficacy of the cure, as well as the traumatizing power of remembered
situations, to the collective unconscious. He writes,
we should ask ourselves whether the therapeutic value of the cure depends
on the actual character of remembered situations, or whether the trauma-
tizing power of these situations stems from the fact that at the moment
when they appear, the subject experiences them immediately as living
myth. By this we mean that the traumatizing power of any situation cannot
result from its intrinsic features but must, rather, result from the capacity
of certain events, appearing within an appropriate psychological, historical,
and social context, to induce an emotional crystallization which is molded
by pre-existing structure. In relation to the event or anecdote, these struc-
tures—or, more accurately, these structural laws—are truly atemporal.75
What I find striking in this passage is, first, Lévi-Strauss’s assertion that
what is traumatizing in a given situation is not “the actual character of
remembered situations” but what the subject encounters. And what the
subject encounters in a situation that is traumatizing, according to Lévi-
Strauss, is the full force of the aggregate of the atemporal, structural laws
forming the unconscious. When a situation “induce[s] an emotional crys-
tallization which is molded by pre-existing structure,” the subject is living
myth—living through myth. And in Lévi-Strauss’s reading, the fact that
cure by myth is effective demonstrates that there is, first, a fundamental
homology between the myths of psychoanalytic and shamanistic practice,
thus between those constructed within an analysis and those circulating
within the collective; more importantly, it demonstrates that these homol-
ogous myths themselves mirror the structural laws of the unconscious.
What happens if we extract the collective unconscious from Lévi-
Strauss’s account of the “traumatizing power” of living (through) myth?
We are left with the traumatic experience of living myth as something
“truly atemporal.” If it’s traumatic, in other words, this is also because
it is the living through of the outside of time—as though all that had
been and all that would be and could be were now falling atop the sub-
ject in a structured “emotional crystallization,” hyper-clear to the point
of the subject’s pure vanishing; yet psychoanalysis would introduce the
notion that this is where the subject lives. Lévi-Strauss does not enter
here into the specifics of what would constitute “the therapeutic value
of the cure,” but focuses on the conditions under which trauma is pro-
duced. He thereby, in a very Lévi-Straussian way, would appear to equate
the condition with the cure: If this is what it takes for a thing to feel
traumatic, then that is the thing that it takes to cure it. And that thing,
he declares, is the symbolic function—the unconscious as “a function—
the symbolic function, which no doubt is specifically human, and which
is carried out according to the same laws among all men, and actually
corresponds to the aggregate of these laws.”76 Even as he now equates
the symbolic function itself to the collective unconscious, Lévi-Strauss
touches here upon the field of the real unconscious: He does so by step-
ping to the side of the question of whether or not constructions in anal-
ysis concern events that are real (as in, from reality), and by introducing
the idea that what is traumatic about an event is not its “actual charac-
ter” but the subject’s experience of it.
4.4 Conclusion
Is the contradiction that myths are generated to overcome “real” or
not? In “The Structural Study of Myth,” Lévi-Strauss leaves the ques-
tion open. He writes there: “And since the purpose of myth is to provide
a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible
achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically
infinite number of slates77 will be generated, each one slightly different
from the others.”78 Here, it would appear that some myths are able to
overcome contradictions, because those contradictions are not real, while
other myths are not able to overcome the contradictions they are pur-
posed with overcoming, because those contradictions are real.
By the time he concludes Mythologiques, however, he offers a slightly
different reading: All myths are generated by a real contradiction; all
myths are tasked with (overcoming) the impossible. In the meantime, he
has looked at hundreds of myths,79 and he has determined that, once
linked, these many myths cause a startling truth to emerge: “‘being of
the world’ consists of a disparity,” Lévi-Strauss suggests here; “[i]t
78 S. de la TORRE
cannot be said purely and simply of the world that it is,” for after all,
“there might have been nothing.”80 Consequently, it is now this “inher-
ent disparity of the world” which “sets mythic thought in motion …,”81
setting off the cascades of oppositions in which myth consists. And,
Lévi-Strauss now concludes, the inherent disparity of the world is the
condition of not only all mythical thinking but thought as such: “The
conditions which allow the emergence of myth are therefore the same as
those of all thought.”82
In the closing paragraph of Mythologiques, however, he finds an even
more “fundamental opposition,” one which I would like to highlight as
Lévi-Strauss’s most concise formulation of the problem of the generation
of thought yet:
The fundamental opposition, the source of the myriad others with which
the myths abound and which have been tabulated in these four volumes,
is precisely the one stated by Hamlet, although in the form of a still
over-optimistic choice between two alternatives. Man is not free to choose
whether to be or not to be. A mental effort, consubstantial with his history
and which will cease only with his disappearance from the stage of the uni-
verse, compels him to accept the two self-evident and contradictory truths
which, through their clash, set his thought in motion, and, to neutralize
their oppositions, generate an unlimited series of other binary distinctions
which, while never resolving the primary contradiction, echo and perpetu-
ate it on an ever smaller scale: one is the reality of being … and the other is
the reality of non-being…83
By my read, what makes this contradiction real—this the last contradic-

tion cited in the tetralogy—is the fact that beyond it there is something
a little more or something a little less which Lévi-Strauss associates with
the fact of there being no freedom to choose. If Hamlet is “still overly
optimistic” when he thinks he has a choice between the two terms of
the contradiction he encounters, this is because remaining at the level
of contradiction, no matter the terms in play—trying, in a sense, to
choose—is to fail to notice that what really makes the disparity, or what
makes the disparity real, is that there is no freedom to choose about it:
again, it’s two traumas, not one. And that there is no freedom to choose
could, I think, be another way of naming the absence or ungrounded-
ness that lies beyond contradiction, which Lacan names the signifier of
the lack in the Other.
Notes
2. Ibid., p. 229.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Patrick Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology
(New York: Penguin Books, 2012), pp. 276–277.
6. Ibid., p. 277.
7. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1,
trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983), p. 1.
8. Ibid., p. 2.
9. Ibid., p. 3.
10. Ibid., p. 5.
11. Ibid., p. 6.
12. Ibid., p. 2.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 3.
15. Ibid., p. 6.
16. “‘I read myths with joy,’ he told film critic Raymond Bellour, and he
read many—several thousand—folding them into the logical models
that evolved over a period of decades” (Lévi-Strauss quoted in Wilcken,
Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology, p. 278).
17. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Jealous Potter, trans. Bénédicte Chorier
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 185.
19. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man: Mythologiques, Volume 4, trans.
John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990), pp. 694–695.
20. Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 10.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 11.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 12.
28. Ibid., p. 228.
29. Yvan Simonis, “A Way of Comparing Lévi-Strauss and Lacan,” trans.
Fabien Simonis, in Konturen 3 (2010), pp. 158–159.
80 S. de la TORRE
30. Ibid., pp. 158–159. For a thorough account of Lacan’s work with knots,
see Will Greenshields, Writing the Structures of the Subject: Lacan and
Topology, eds. Calum Neill and Derek Hook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
2012), p. 46.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Freud will later develop the notion of the deferred action of trauma into a
keystone of psychoanalytic practice with the fantasy of the primal scene. I
address the fantasy of the primal scene in this project in Chapter 2.
36. Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” trans. Eric
Mosbacher and James Strachey, in The Origins of Psycho-Analysis, Letters
to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887–1902, ed. Marie Bonaparte et al.
(New York: Basic Books, 1954), p. 413.
37. Ibid., p. 410.
38. Ibid., pp. 410–411.
39. Ibid., p. 413.
40. Ibid., p. 412.
41. Ibid., p. 406.
42. Ibid., p. 407.
43. Ibid.
44. Emile Durkheim, quoted in Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 5.
45. Lévi-Strauss, The Jealous Potter, p. 171.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 190.
49. Ibid., p. 187.
50. Ibid., p. 188.
51. Ibid., p. 191.
52. Ibid., p. 192.
53. Ibid., pp. 194–196.
54. Ibid., p. 193.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., p. 194.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., p. 193.
60. Ibid., p. 197.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., p. 198.
63. Ibid., p. 202.
64. Lucie Cantin, “The Drive, the Untreatable Quest of Desire,” trans. Tracy
McNulty, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 28, no. 2
(2017), p. 27.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., pp. 27–28.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., p. 202.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Jacques Lacan, Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire Livre XXIII: Le sinth-
ome (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005), p. 133. Lacan indicates here that,
because language is living and therefore created by its users, there is no
collective unconscious, only particular unconsciouses (ibid., p. 133).
76. Ibid., p. 203.
77. The slates refer to the special devices needed for mythical analysis noted at
the opening of this chapter.
79. Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 602.
80. Ibid., p. 603.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid., p. 694.
References
Cantin, Lucie. “The Drive, the Untreatable Quest of Desire.” Translated by
Tracy McNulty. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 28, no. 2
(2017), pp. 24–45.
Freud, Sigmund. “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” Translated by Eric
Mosbacher and James Strachey. In The Origins of Psycho-analysis, Letters to
Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887–1902, edited by Marie Bonaparte et al.,
pp. 347–445. New York: Basic Books, 1954.
Greenshields, Will. Writing the Structures of the Subject: Lacan and Topology.
Edited by Calum Neill and Derek Hook. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Lacan, Jacques. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire livre XXIII: Le sinthome. Edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005.
82 S. de la TORRE

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1.
Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Jealous Potter. Translated by Bénédicte Chorier.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Naked Man: Mythologiques, Volume 4. Translated by
John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
2012.
Simonis, Yvan. “A Way of Comparing Lévi-Strauss and Lacan.” Translated by
Fabien Simonis. Konturen 3 (2010), pp. 149–161.
Wilcken, Patrick. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology. New
York: Penguin Books, 2010.
CHAPTER 5
The Mythologist’s Aesthetic Task: Amelia
The song “Mu’igala, or the Way of Muu”—the subject of study of

Lévi-Strauss’s essay “The Effectiveness of Symbols”—incants the
story of a difficult childbirth. In the song, a battle is waged between
Muu and her daughters and a shaman called upon to assist the preg-
nant woman besieged by Muu’s capture of her “purba, or ‘soul.’”1 As
Lévi-Strauss summarizes, Muu, “the power responsible for the for-
mation of the fetus,” would appear to represent the woman’s uterus,
while Muu’s way represents the vagina2; so argue ethnographers
Henry Wassén and Nik Magnus Holmer, with whom Guillermo Haya
shared the song.3 To Wassén and Holmer’s reading, Lévi-Strauss adds
the notion that the song itself can cure, a point he develops in sup-
port of his claim that psychoanalysis constitutes a form of shaman-
ism and that both succeed in their cures, when they do so, on the
basis of what he refers to as “the effectiveness of symbols.”4 We can
see the effectiveness of symbols in both psychoanalytic and shaman-
istic cures, according to Lévi-Strauss, in that the use of symbols in
each induces transformation at both unconscious and organic levels.
Symbols are effective, Lévi-Strauss suggests, when they hit the right
marks, marks which circumscribe “formally homologous structures,
built out of different materials at different levels of life—organic pro-
cesses, unconscious mind, rational thought—[which] are related to
one another.”5
I offered my own reading of Lévi-Strauss’s reading of the song in
the preceding chapter, proposing that his treatment of the questions

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92895-1_5
84 S. de la TORRE
of trauma and “living myth” brings the real unconscious into structur-
alism, and that it does so, counterintuitively, at the very moment that
he is arguing for the existence of the atemporal laws of the collective
unconscious, which the experience of the unconscious as real belies. In
Chapter 4, I drew on the writings of Freud, Willy Apollon, and Lucie
Cantin in order to define the real unconscious as that which is outside
language acting in the body. And I proposed there that the real uncon-
scious emerges in Lévi-Strauss’s writings at key moments in his argumen-
tation; first, as structuralism’s unthinkable in the Introduction to the Work
of Marcel Mauss, as the signified without a signifier which acts; then as
“living myth” in “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” as noted above; and
finally in Mythologiques as the real of the trauma about which there is
no freedom to choose. Furthermore, in the final example, it returns as
structuralism’s other condition of symbolic thought, thereby reorienting
symbolic thought beyond the zero symbol and, correspondingly, I sug-
gest, forming a non-Oedipal “foundation” for structuralism itself. Each
instance represents, I argue, a key moment in structuralism for non-
Oedipal logics, those logics which grapple with an excess which can have
ravaging effects.
I return to the song of Muu now to open onto the questions with
which I concluded Chapter 4: namely what is a “sick woman” to do
in the face of the real unconscious, there where an experience that the
social cannot integrate is inscribed; and what if any means does structur-
alism offer for approaching this problem?
Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism approaches this problem, I suggest,
through the figure of the mythologist, whose experience, as it turns out,
evidences some overlap with that of the woman of “Mu’igala.” In the
song, material obstacles abound in the “hell”6 of the sick woman’s uter-
ine world; the first of these obstacles—threads—are encountered upon
entering Muu’s way. And Lévi-Strauss’s description of the threads gives
a glimpse of the kind of word art he appears to be drawn to; certainly it
is the kind that he generates in turn: he catalogs. “[F]ibers,” he writes,
“loose threads, fastened threads, successive curtains—rainbow-colored,
golden, silvery, red, black, maroon, blue, white, wormlike, ‘like neck-
ties,’ yellow, twisted, thick …”7 This description also gives a glimpse of
the kind of word art entailed in what I would like to refer to, follow-
ing Cantin, as a “practice of the signifier,” which Cantin states makes
possible “a way out for the censored.”8 I will return to these points in
the pages to come. For now, it is important to underline that in the
5 THE MYTHOLOGIST’S AESTHETIC TASK: AMELIA 85
confrontation between those who would deliver the sick woman from
her pains and the source of that pain itself—a source which, Lévi-Strauss
specifies, is not “evil” but in fact “indispensable to procreation”9—
threads are elemental—beautiful—and, simultaneously, the disorgan-
ization that opens onto the pain: “[F]or this purpose,” Lévi-Strauss
explains, “the shaman calls reinforcements: Lords of the wood-boring
insects, who are to ‘cut, gather, wind and reduce’ the threads, which
Holmer and Wassén identify as the tissues of the uterus.”10
Are these not apt metaphors for the work of the mythologist? Like the
shaman and the Lords of the wood-boring insects, the mythologist also
must wrestle with the material obstacle of the thread. But the unique
position of the mythologist is that he must wrestle too with a thread of
his own; and in this capacity, he is concerned not so much to cut, gather,
wind, and reduce it (although this too perhaps): he is concerned above
all not to lose it. This, at any rate, is how I read the depiction of the
mythologist embedded within Lévi-Strauss’s argument on behalf of the
fruits of the study of myth, found in his introduction to Mythologiques:
I believe that mythology, more than anything else, makes it possible to

illustrate such objectified thought and to provide empirical proof of its
reality. Although the possibility cannot be excluded that the speakers who
create and transmit myths may become aware of their structure and mode
of operation, this cannot occur as a normal thing, but only partially and
intermittently. It is the same with myths as with language: the individual
who conscientiously applied phonological and grammatical laws in his
speech, supposing he possessed the necessary knowledge and virtuosity to
do so, would nevertheless lose the thread of his ideas almost immediately.
In the same way the practice and the use of mythological thought demand
that its properties remain hidden: otherwise the subject would find himself
in the position of the mythologist, who cannot believe in myths because it
is his task to take them to pieces.11
Lévi-Strauss sets up a slightly precarious structure here: hypothetically,

he suggests, one could apply the laws of language to one’s speech, but in
so doing, one would lose the thread of one’s ideas. Similarly, one could
hypothetically apply the laws of mythological thought to one’s own use
of myth, but one would lose the thread of one’s mythical thought. The
mythologist, then, is that person who manages not to “lose the thread
of his ideas almost immediately” on account of two characteristics: First,
like everyone else, he does not possess complete knowledge of myth’s
86 S. de la TORRE
structure and mode of operation; he comes to myth, therefore, bear-

ing an attitude of not-knowing. And second, he does not believe in the
myths he takes to pieces. Were he to believe, he would be unable to take
the distance necessary to carry out his task.
And if the mythologist is a myth-maker? Can a mythologist both cre-
ate and transmit a myth and take it to pieces? Lévi-Strauss must think
that he can, for at this point in the text, he has already specified that
Mythologiques itself “is a kind of myth”12: the study of myth offered in
its pages is an instance of mythical creation and transmission. Here, in
other words, Lévi-Strauss acknowledges himself as both mythologist and
myth-maker. As a myth-maker, the mythologist too can become “par-
tially and intermittently” aware of mythological thought’s properties;
and as a mythologist, he can take that same myth to pieces. And in these
conjoined processes, it is the grace of disbelief that permits mythological
thought’s properties not necessarily to be “known” (at least, Lévi-Strauss
eschews as “meaningless” the “ambition” to know the entirety of any
mythology) but, perhaps, constructed.13
The curious meeting of Lévi-Strauss’s mythologist and the sick
woman of “Mu’igala” is interesting to me because, in their separate
encounters with threads, be they mental or uterine, the mythologist and
the woman must, Lévi-Strauss judges, adopt opposing attitudes. That
is, they must adopt opposing attitudes with respect to their belief in the
myth being constructed—or suffer the consequences. In Lévi-Strauss’s
reading, the sick woman proceeds in her task—the task of getting well—
only on the condition that she believe in the myth that the shaman sings
to her:
The sick woman believes in the myth and belongs to a society which
believes in it. The tutelary spirits and malevolent spirits, the supernat-
ural monsters and magical animals, are all part of a coherent system on
which the native conception of the universe is founded. The sick woman
accepts these mythical beings or, more accurately, she has never questioned
their existence. What she does not accept are the incoherent and arbitrary
pains, which are an alien element in her system but which the shaman,
calling upon myth, will re-integrate within a whole where everything is
meaningful.14
If she believes, her threads—rainbow-colored, silvery, like neckties—can

open onto the pain and she can be cured by the song the shaman sings.
By contrast, the mythologist proceeds in his task only on the condi-

tion that he not believe: He thereby manages not to lose his thread (at
least, not immediately!). Of course the mythologist has made no claim
to seek a cure: He takes myths to pieces neither to access a cure nor to
illuminate the truth of a myth’s contents: As Lévi-Strauss writes, “The
truth of the myth does not lie in any special content. It consists in logical
relations which are devoid of content or, more precisely, whose invari-
ant properties exhaust their operative value, since comparable relations
can be established among the elements of a large number of different
contents.”15 Seeking neither cure nor truth in content, the mythologist
works to access the truth in the logical relations in which a myth consists.
By Lévi-Strauss’s account, it is through this labor that the mythologist
uncovers the “underlying reality”16 that makes a sick woman’s cure pos-
sible: This is the effectiveness of symbols for Lévi-Strauss, their atemporal
force, and it is unconscious.
The point that I want to develop in this chapter is that it is by way of “a
practice of the signifier”17 which accompanies—and thereby in a sense actu-
alizes—structure that the work of “uncovering” described by Lévi-Strauss
effects change. Such a practice represents a different kind of engagement
with the signifier than that outlined by Lévi-Strauss in “The Effectiveness
of Symbols,” for it requires the creating of words that no shaman, and no
analyst, can supply for another human being, because they do not know
them. For no underlying reality whose words are given in a collectively
shared myth will succeed in curing a person suffering from an experience
that the social cannot integrate; it’s logically impossible. What, then, is the
task of a mythologist whose myths are not, as it were, already contained
within the collective, one who, in Lévi-Straussian terms, is sensitive to the
symbolic structure’s gaps and contradictions and not fully supported by its
resources—one who, in Lacanian terms, is not-all in the symbolic?
Jennifer Kent’s 2014 horror film The Babadook provides a harrow-
ing example of what can happen for a person who finds no cure in collec-
tive myths. Connecting the questions outlined above to the arguments of
Chapter 4, I will call upon The Babadook in exploring the following set of
formulations: First, that two traumas are sufficient for a subject to begin to
generate his/her/hir own myth; second, that a “sick woman”—or a subject
who is not all in the symbolic whose suffering has become “bad to say”—
can under certain conditions become mythologist to his/her/hir own pains,
conditions which I will explore here; and finally, that such a stance makes
the analysis of those pains terminable, against Lévi-Strauss’s expectations.
88 S. de la TORRE
5.1 The Babadook

The Babadook’s central figures, Amelia and her son Samuel, have been
struggling since Samuel’s birth, for this was also the day that Amelia’s
husband—also Samuel’s father—died in a car accident. They were on
their way to the hospital for Amelia to give birth when it happened. The
film’s opening sequence provides glimpses of that traumatic experience
as it appears in Amelia’s dreams, a scene to which I will return. Amelia
does not speak of this experience elsewhere, and the film underlines that
silence in scenes where she shushes her son, rebukes her neighbor, and
insists to her unsympathetic sister (who declares, “God, Amelia, as soon
as anyone mentions Oskar, you can’t cope”), “I have moved on. I don’t
mention him. I don’t talk about him.” Nor do Amelia and Samuel speak
of Samuel’s father in general: In fact, we hear Oskar’s name only twice in
the film, first in the scene cited above, and again when Grace Roach, the
neighbor, remarks to Amelia’s evident irritation, “[Samuel] sees things
as they are, that one. Oskar was the same. He always spoke his mind.”
All signs of Oskar are kept locked in the basement, but with the help of
a kitchen chair, Samuel is able to retrieve the key to the basement door,
which gives him access to his father. In the basement, Samuel performs
magic shows for his father, promising him that he will protect his mother
when the monster comes. While Samuel is portrayed as bright, loving,
stressed, and creative, Amelia is portrayed as soft-voiced, mild-man-
nered, gentle, and reserved. It is Samuel who, early in the film, hints at
his mother’s hidden power, when he retorts to a bully, “The Babadook
would eat your mum for breakfast!” Samuel, meanwhile, keeps finding
himself in trouble at school—“significant behavioral problems,” as the
school representatives report. He is deeply interested in magic tricks and
monsters, and one of his loosely forbidden projects entails the making of
elaborate weaponry. Amelia, we eventually learn, used to write children’s
books.
With the perspicacity of a six year old, Samuel fully recognizes that
his father’s death and his mother’s distance from him are linked. As he
shouts to Amelia’s bewildered coworker at a moment of stress, “She
won’t let me have a birthday party and she won’t let me have a dad!”
Samuel is also, however—perhaps uncommonly—prepared to fight
for their lives, and we see him piecing together strange objects when
his mother is not looking. Good thing, too, for the only supports out-
side their family unit of two are the clueless coworker, who may have
some romantic interest in Amelia, and the neighbor Mrs. Roach, who
is attuned to Amelia’s crisis despite the fact that it is taking place behind
closed doors. In fact, it is from beyond the closed front door that Mrs.
Roach attests to Amelia, at the very center of Amelia’s crisis, “I just
wanted you to know that I’d do anything for you and Sam. I love you
both.”
I read the film as an allegory in the form of a horror film about the
unleashing of a feminine psychotic break. Sensorially, its gray-painted
walls and intermittent screeches evoke the horror that a crisis within such
a structure can entail, while the mausoleum-like quality of the house
contributes to the sense of the characters’ unutterable solitude going
through such an experience. The plot unfolds over a two-week period
leading up to Samuel’s birthday, which Samuel has never been allowed to
celebrate on its actual date. And on a first view, the film is excruciating to
watch.
The action revolves around the appearance among Samuel’s things
of a children’s book called Mister Babadook. Neither Samuel nor
Amelia knows where the book has come from, and its story of a Mister
Babadook, who comes into a boy’s room at night, is disturbing, to say
the least. The book, however, issues a plain warning to its intended
reader, Amelia, stating on pages that Amelia chooses not to read out
loud to her already terrified son, “I’ll soon take off my funny disguise
(take heed of what you’ve read…) And once you see what’s underneath,
YOU’RE GOING TO WISH YOU WERE DEAD.” The book both
sharpens and intensifies the stress that Samuel and Amelia are already liv-
ing in and brings a new dimension to their trouble. Namely it introduces
the fantasy that there is something malevolent that wants to be let into
the house. It also brings some unconscious knowledge to the fore, for
while Amelia has no memory of writing this book, it addresses itself to
her, demanding her attention: “take heed of what you’ve read …” When
Amelia rips the book’s pages to pieces one night, frustrated that Samuel
believes in the monster, the book comes back, taped back together. And
now it has added lines—“The more you deny, the stronger I get”—and
added images, of a woman standing in front of the Babadook’s shadow,
then doing violence to a dog, a boy, and, finally, herself.
What is Amelia’s position with respect to the Babadook? At first, she
does not believe in it; she does not believe that the book has power. She
sees that it terrifies Samuel and she herself is troubled, but she believes
that peace can be restored through the twin weights of reason and reality:
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It’s just a children’s book, it’s not real, and if she gets rid of the book,
its power and menace disappear too. Samuel, by contrast, believes in an
instant. For him, there is no question: There is a monster and it wants in,
and he is prepared to fight it. Moreover, he quickly makes the connec-
tion between his mother and the monster, seeking reassurance from her
that she will protect him like he plans to protect her and fighting her off
when she tries to wrest his weapon from him, yelling, “Do you want to
die?” and “Don’t let it in! Don’t let it in! Don’t let it in! Don’t let it in!”
Without knowing the specifics of the trauma that the book circumscribes,
Samuel nonetheless believes in the real that the book is addressing, and
he is rightly afraid, without, however, being paralyzed. He continues to
make his preparations. For most of the film, Amelia moves in the oppo-
site direction, expressing her act through her failures to act.
As signs accumulate and Amelia begins to believe that the book is
indeed the work of some malevolence directed at her and her son, she
theorizes that someone is stalking them. This theory is difficult to rec-
oncile with the other stressors manifesting at the same time, such as her
hallucinations of cockroaches crawling on her body and out of a hole in
the wall (a hole she later discovers is not there); but a stalker is a rational
explanation, one that the social could integrate, and one that is easier for
Amelia to fathom as well.
But no one is stalking Amelia and her son. When she goes to the
police—trying to speak her fantasy to reality—things take a turn. She
has burned the book, so she has no proof that it exists, thus no proof
that anything at all has taken place. And as she explains what is going
on to the officer at the counter, she reads skepticism in his face. She also
notices him noticing her strangely black hands, covered, it would appear,
in either soot or ink or both, from the book’s writing, drawing, or burn-
ing. Snatching her hands from the officer’s view, Amelia begins to dis-
cern signs of menace at the police station itself, in a coat that takes the
Babadook’s shape and in the gazes of two other officers fixed upon her.
Perhaps it’s that moment of contact, between the gaze and the hands
that created the book, that prompts what happens next, for that night
at home, Amelia beholds an inky black figure crawling on her bedroom
ceiling, and, for the first time, contorts, arching her back, opening her
mouth, and letting the Babadook in. This moment initiates Amelia’s
change: We see her stay up that night watching TV, and as she watches
the oddly shifting images, we watch her face shift as well, a hard, haggard
hate replacing her sadness, fear, and exhaustion.
5.2 Two Traumas: Generating Mister Babadook

What has caused Amelia to write Mister Babadook? In fact, we don’t
know. That is, the film presents neither Amelia’s act of writing or the
specific events leading up to its writing. To be sure, it is therefore not
certain that she wrote the book at all; but, proceeding on the basis of
the hypothesis that she did, I would like to explore the following: What
if we categorized these unknown events as a “second trauma” and Mister
Babadook as a myth?
In Chapter 4, I discussed Freud’s notion of the deferred action of
trauma in relation to Lévi-Strauss’s introduction of the canonical formula
of myth, wherein the latter proposes that two traumas, not one, are nec-
essary to generate a myth. As I pointed out, Lévi-Strauss makes reference
to Freud to elucidate his formula without addressing that Freud discov-
ered the deferred action of trauma by way of his work with hysteria. For
me, the omission is striking, for it would appear to index the presence of
a (forgotten) “feminine” experience at the heart of Lévi-Strauss’s struc-
turalist engagement with myth. As I outlined in Chapter 4, Freud calls
upon the experience of his analysand Emma to clarify the structure and
workings of deferred trauma, explaining that an odd concatenation of
conditions—the second trauma—troubles Emma because they activate a
“first trauma” which, Freud proposes, was not experienced by Emma as
traumatic at the time. The first trauma emerges by way of the second in
the form of a displacement; recall that Lacan identifies displacement “as
the unconscious’s best means by which to foil censorship.”18
Since the film does not depict Amelia’s writing of the book nor the
moments leading up to its writing, the events that might constitute
a sort of second trauma—the trauma which incites the generation of a
myth intended to manage the suffering of the first trauma—are left out-
side of the film’s narrative. Of the second trauma, we have only the prod-
uct or the residue: Mister Babadook.19
I propose that the example of The Babadook allows us to think some-
thing of the deferred action of trauma and the crisis that can be pro-
voked when suffering can’t be said; it also allows us to think something
of the work entailed in making the transition from “living (through)
myth”—Amelia’s crisis in full effect—to the work of taking a myth to
pieces, which Amelia, I suggest, begins to do near the end of the film.
For even within the obviousness of the suffering of her loss, nothing has
allowed Amelia to connect to a collective myth which would name her
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experience. Her experience remains bad to say, and generating the myth
of Mister Babadook is the way she has found to bring that real to her
own attention.
5.3 Becoming a Mythologist: First Condition,

(Dis)Belief
The Babadook provides a view, too, upon the difference between the
operation of generating a myth and that of becoming a mythologist to
one’s own pains. I’d like to turn, therefore, to the following: Under
what conditions can a “sick woman” become mythologist to his/her/
hir own pains? I would like to propose that there are at least three con-
ditions: First, that she approaches the myth in question with a delicately
calibrated disbelief, one that is oriented toward the real of an experience;
second, that she adheres to “the simplistic method”20 of free associa-
tion; and finally, that there be space and support for some limit on the
drive there where the prohibition did not operate. These conditions are
not met in The Babadook, but I would submit that we see Amelia take
preliminary steps in that direction in the film’s closing sequences: If for
most of the film, Amelia is in a sense paralyzed within the experience
of the “traumatizing power” of living (through) myth, in the closing
sequences, she comes to (dis)believe in the myth in a certain kind of way,
and this stance allows her to begin to take it to pieces.
To my mind, any doubt that Amelia is the Babadook’s creator, and
that that creation is linked to something having to do with the trauma of
Oskar’s death, can be dispelled once Amelia “sees” her (dead) husband
in the basement—not simply because she sees him there, but because the
words uttered by him in that scene are words which represent “a frag-
ment of historical truth”21 and mobilize specific changes within Amelia.
The scene takes place shortly after the scene in which Amelia first lets
the Babadook in. Waking to the sight of her son sleepwalking, or so she
believes, Amelia gets up to follow him, commenting weakly, “Don’t go
down there. It’s not safe.” As if in a dream herself, she proceeds to the
basement, and, with Samuel no longer in sight, she beholds her husband,
aglow with a bright light. It’s one of the film’s rare scenes of tender-
ness, as Amelia relaxes into Oskar’s hug, relieved for a moment of her
strain and heaviness. But as Oskar speaks to Amelia, telling her, “We
can be together. You just need to bring me the boy,” she pulls away and
sees him now obscured in Babadook-shaped shadows, and eyeless, as in
her nightmare of the car accident; and his voice distorts as he repeats,
“You can bring me the boy. You can bring me the boy. You can bring me
the boy. You can bring me the boy.” Amelia objects: “Stop calling him
‘the boy,’” just as she had with the officials at Sam’s school. And then,
inanely, Oskar remarks, “I think it’s going to rain.” This inane remark is
significant, for this is the point at which Amelia screams no, flees to her
bedroom, and locks the door behind her, and the moment at which, I
would argue, her terror is now complete. And what is it, really, that is
“not real” as Amelia crawls, sobbing, on her bedroom floor, hearing the
monster all around her—screeching, growling, and panting—and as we
hear her, repeating over and over again, “It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t
real, it isn’t real”?
The inane remark cited above adds to something otherwise seen
only in a dream, the dream which opens the film. In the film’s open-
ing scenes, we had seen Amelia practicing her Lamaze breathing for a
short moment, then, impact, signaled by shards of glass breaking into
the frame and hitting one side of Amelia’s face. While in our view she
remains upright throughout the scene, the movement of her hair in a
slow flying circle and the knocking of her arms flung akimbo show how
she is set loose in what appears to be a rollover in slow motion. Bending
metal, distorted screams of “no,” and a young boy’s voice plaintively
calling, “Mom! Mommy!,” punctuate the otherwise strangely liquid feel
to this rollover which is at the same time, for Amelia, a free fall—a free
fall back into her bed, as we discover. Because it’s a dream—a nightmare,
really—and in the penultimate instant of it, we see with Amelia half of
a man’s face. This man is sitting across from her in the driver’s seat of a
car; he is eerily still and, because of the angle of the light, appears to be
without eyes. We don’t see his face again until the scene in the basement
mentioned above, at which time the stray sentence cited above is added
to Amelia’s nightmare—a sentence that, by my read, initiates the series of
events by way of which Amelia undergoes one final transition, from, first,
coinciding with her monster—“believing” herself subject to its power—
to beginning to take some measure of responsibility for it, by beginning
to “believe” in the real of the experience it is at terrible pains to express.
For it is also an experience whose denial carries a terrible cost. This
cost is at its height in this time of transition, for before she begins to
confront the Babadook, Amelia tries to kill her son. Recognizing her
deception, he has stabbed her in the leg, knocked her out, and tied her
to the basement floor. Despite her immobility, she gets hold of him
94 S. de la TORRE
and, in a horrifying act of violence, appears prepared to choke him to

death. This moment, however, also contains a beautiful gesture, which is
Samuel’s, who strokes his mother’s face as she chokes him. Samuel’s ges-
ture saves their lives, for following upon it, in a rapid succession of events
that constitute the climax of the film, Amelia releases her son; attempts
to exorcize the Babadook from her body; recognizes, as it were, that
she “can’t get rid of the Babadook”; and confronts it with the question,
“What do you want?” The consequence of her question is the return of
the memory of the night of her husband’s death: “Keep breathing,” a
voice says, “Put your seat back, sweetheart. Ten more minutes and we’re
there. I think it’s going to rain.”
5.4 Second Condition, Free Association

In “Constructions in Analysis,” Freud opens by citing a critique of psy-
choanalysis offered by a scientist who had otherwise “treated psychoa-
nalysis fairly at a time when most other people felt themselves under no
such obligation.”22 The critique was this: “He said that in giving inter-
pretations to a patient we treat him upon the famous principle of ‘Heads
I win, tails you lose’. That is to say, if the patient agrees with us, then
the interpretation is right; but if he contradicts us, this is only a sign of
his resistance, which again shows that we are right.”23 Freud identifies
the critique as both “derogatory” and “unjust,”24 and to its unjustness,
Freud responds first by outlining the “raw material” on the basis of
which constructions are made—fragments of memories in dreams; ideas
in free association; repetitions in affects25—and, then, points out that
neither a “yes” nor a “no” from an analysand is taken at face value, for
neither is “unambiguous.”26 In fact, “indirect forms of confirmation”27
of a construction are more reliable: Freud mentions such examples as
indirect verbal responses like “‘I didn’t ever think’ (or ‘I shouldn’t ever
have thought’) ‘that’ (or ‘of that’)”28; to these we might add dreams,
symptoms, fresh memories, acting out, acting in, failed acts, or, even, an
ethical act. For what matters in an analysis is not the discourse which the
analysand can summon, but speech, which is an effect, something pro-
voked, and something which itself has effects.
What’s the connection? In objecting to the criticism that psycho-
analysts position themselves as infallible in the face of the analysand’s
unconscious, Freud is led to compare the analytic work of construction
to delusion, which is commonly associated with—although not exclusive
to—the structure of psychosis. Both constructions and delusions, accord-

ing to Freud, make an “attempt[ ] at … cure” and include an “element
of historical truth,” and this latter is what makes the construction or the
delusion in question effective:
The delusions of patients appear to me to be the equivalents of the con-

structions which we build up in the course of an analytic treatment—
attempts at explanation and cure, though it is true that these, under the
conditions of a psychosis, can do no more than replace the fragment of
reality that is being disavowed in the present by another fragment that had
already been disavowed in the remote past. It will be the task of each indi-
vidual investigation to reveal the intimate connections between the mate-
rial of the present disavowal and that of the original repression. Just as our
construction is only effective because it recovers a fragment of lost experi-
ence, so the delusion owes its convincing power to the element of histor-
ical truth which it inserts in the place of the rejected reality. In this way a
proposition which I originally asserted only of hysteria would apply also to
delusions—namely, that those who are subject to them are suffering from
their own reminiscences. I never intended by this short formula to dispute
the complexity of the causation of the illness or to exclude the operation of
many other factors.29
In the same formulation, Freud complicates the truth status of construc-

tions in analysis and thereby the historical accuracy of that which is pro-
duced in any analysis, and underlines what we might refer to as a kind of
dignity in delusion. He once again greets madness with respect, arguing
that recognizing the “method in madness” along with its “fragment of
historical truth” permits analysts to abandon the “vain effort … of con-
vincing the patient of the error of his delusion and of its contradiction
in reality.”30 Taking leave of that vain effort, the analyst can recognize
in a delusion “its kernel of truth,” and such a stance can, Freud pro-
poses, “afford common ground upon which the therapeutic work could
develop.”31 And, as he goes on to explain, “The transposing of material
from a forgotten past on to the present or on to an expectation of the
future is indeed a habitual occurrence in neurotics no less than in psy-
chotics.”32 In other words, it is not the act of transposing material from a
forgotten past onto the present and anticipated future that differentiates
the structures of neurosis and psychosis.
What enables an analysand, be he, she, they, or ze neurotic or psy-
chotic, to join the analyst in the labor of constructing the real of an
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experience? First—on the part of the analyst—the common ground upon

which the work can develop which is made possible when the analyst
desires to know; and second—on the part of the analysand—the contin-
ual renewal of the act of giving oneself up to free association,33 or the
rule of saying anything and everything that comes to mind, without cen-
sorship. In The Babadook, of course, there is no such frame: Lacking both
the support of an analyst’s desire to know and that of a space for free
association, the censored comes out for Amelia in the form of her hallu-
cinations and the children’s book that she writes for herself. And perhaps
it is because of this lack of a frame that Amelia, in essence, maintains
what is real about her experience in its delusional form, that is, as a mon-
ster in the basement.
Lévi-Strauss comments upon free association as well, without defin-
ing what it would entail; he recognizes it, however, as a method which
itself recognizes that symbols are relative, or that a symbol does not have
“one and only one signification” but “draws its signification from the
context, from the way it relates to other symbols, which themselves, in
turn, find their meaning only in relation to it.”34 Free association, then,
to Lévi-Strauss’s mind, is a “simplistic method” that expresses the fact
that symbols are relative, and it has “its due place within a global attempt
at understanding the individual by reconstructing his personal history
and the history of his family[,] his social environment, his culture, and
so on.”35 He further suggests that the method of free association may
be analogous to that of ethnography—at least, the goals are the same:
With free association, Lévi-Strauss remarks, “[o]ne would thus seek to
understand an individual in the way an ethnographer seeks to understand
a society.”36
Lévi-Strauss recognizes free association, in other words, as one of the
ways in which the working mythologist can actualize structure. But, free
association does a lot more than Lévi-Strauss indicates, because free asso-
ciation also drives toward what Lacan calls “the real-of-the-structure,”37
to that place where there is an impossible to say. In free association, the
signifier abuts a real, which is why Colette Soler describes it as “a tanta-
lising structure. On the one hand, it supports the transferential suppo-
sition through the recurrence of the emergence of truth; on the other
hand, it contests this supposition through its equally recurrent power-
lessness to find the other half of half-said truth.”38 Free association, in
other words, inevitably introduces into the analytic scenario the impos-
sibility to tell the whole truth that Lacan writes as the signifier of the
lack in the Other, an inevitability which we might restate in the following

way: No matter the number of words produced—no matter the creativity
of language put to work—the other half of half-said truth will never be
said.
And, what takes more work still, there is a logic to what cannot be
said—a method to the madness—which over the course of an analysis
can be deduced. This at least is what I understand Cantin to be saying
when she writes of Freud’s case of the Wolf Man that he
… outlines admirably for us in this text … the status of the unconscious as

it concerns the real, which … is outside of the signifier. It is impossible to
access this real, or the rationality at work therein, without passing through
writing and decoding that portion of real jouissance that ceaselessly writes
itself for lack of being able to represent itself in the signifier. This is what
we call the ‘writings of the real’ …39
In the next chapter, I’ll return to the question of the rationality at work
in the real, shifting from a focus on Lévi-Strauss’s writings to engage
now with those of Lacan, Apollon, Cantin, and MacCannell, a shift that
will mean as well stepping away from myth and into fantasy. For now,
let us say that we might be able to point to signs of the real at work in
The Babadook (i.e., signs of an allegorical real, for after all, the Babadook
really doesn’t exist!), but we cannot in any way decode it. While we
cannot decode anything of the real at work in The Babadook’s Amelia,
we can discern, in the first place, something of the difference between
the act of generating a myth and the task of taking a myth to pieces,
the latter of which, I have suggested, requires approaching the myth in
question with the kind of delicately calibrated (dis)belief that can begin
to grapple with the real of an experience; and we can discern too both
the workings of the deferred action of trauma and the form crisis can
take when there is no frame within which it is possible to say something
about what cannot be said.
5.5 Third Condition, “A Limit to the Drive Where the

Law Was Unable”40
One can appreciate the risks of the undertaking. As I noted at the con-
clusion of Chapter 1, for feminine and psychotic subjects, primary
repression fails, meaning, in part, that the real unconscious can be
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experienced in a way not tempered by the primordial symbolization

that would constitute the subject as “a subject in language and not as
an object in reality.”41 This is precisely why, in the face of the experience
of the real unconscious, space and support for some limit on the drive
are called for. In the face of that experience, such subjects can engage
in a practice of the signifier to provide “a way out for the censored,”42
creating words that no collective myth could proffer already organized,
ready-made, and digestible. In the analytic scenario, as McNulty writes,
it is the transference created by the desire of the analyst that provides
the space and support for some limit on the drive, and it is the analyst
who finds a way to make possible the address to an absent Other, thereby
upholding the hole that sustains the analysand in the work of construct-
ing the knowledge that can be deduced and, with the end of an analysis,
the object cause as truth. And, while the correlations between the scene
of an analysis and the plot of The Babadook are of course faulty and frag-
mentary at best, perhaps we could tentatively liken Samuel’s gestures—
stabbing his mother’s leg and stroking her face—to analytic maneuvers.
He maims her, he touches her, to say, This is you; take responsibility.
The Babadook is not a collective myth. I read it as a myth of Amelia’s
making, a myth she has written for herself in order to deliver herself and
her son from some of the monstrous pain eating away at her since the
death of her husband. And Oskar’s death, in my reading, constitutes a
traumatic event which activated something of Amelia’s “primal scene”;
otherwise the event would not have provoked in Amelia such horrifying
effects. I would hazard the guess that the collective cannot integrate the
real of that experience. “Reality” would indicate either that someone is
indeed coming from the outside to torment Amelia and her son, or that
she has been launched by loss, stress, and some sort of biological vulner-
ability into experiencing things that are not real. The collective would
not like to grapple with the fact that Amelia’s Babadook is real, and it is
her own, and there is something within it that she cannot live without.
That there is something within it that she cannot live without is, how-
ever, something Lévi-Strauss let us know too when, in his commentary
on the song of Muu, he wrote that the “force gone awry” in the preg-
nant woman’s body was not “evil” but in fact “indispensable” to crea-
tion.43 And it is something the character Amelia seems to know, since
after she sets a hard limit with it—“If you touch my son again, I’ll fuck-
ing kill you!”—she keeps it.
5.6 Conclusion
Lévi-Strauss argues that the mythologist who believes in the myth he
must take to pieces will lose the thread almost immediately, and he is
probably right. Analysands do lose the thread, whether they believe in
their myths or not. They lose it because the threads cut off. And while
Lévi-Strauss also argues that free association is a simplistic method, the
simplistic method that free association is enables the analysand to work
like a mythologist, in a working-through that entails losing the thread
and finding it—by creating it—again. For the grace is that the threads
break off around a “locus of pain”44 that progressively takes form, and
which returns, in the writings of the real which tell of an Other scene
“where the being of the subject finds itself brought into play,”45 a scene
where there is no freedom to choose, but there is freedom to create.
Notes
2. Ibid., pp. 186–188.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 201.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 195.
7. Ibid., pp. 195–196.
8. Lucie Cantin, “The Borderline or The Impossibility of Producing a
Negotiable Form in the Social Bond for the Return of the Censored,”
Konturen 3 (2010), p. 200.
10. Ibid., p. 196.
11. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1,
trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983), pp. 11–12.
12. Ibid., p. 6.
13. Ibid., p. 3.
15. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 240.
17. Cantin, “The Borderline or The Impossibility of Producing a Negotiable
Form in the Social Bond for the Return of the Censored,” p. 200.
100 S. de la TORRE
425.
19. It’s important to note, too, that the mapping I am proposing here does not
quite work out: For example, Amelia’s loss of her husband was certainly
experienced as traumatic at the time; moreover, the first trauma toward
which I am driving here is not one which can be located in reality in any
way, and that is a fact from which Amelia and her husband’s car accident
might distract by virtue of the very obviousness of the suffering it entails.
20. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Jealous Potter, trans. Bénédicte Chorier
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 188.
21. Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” trans. James Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 23, ed.
James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 2001), p. 267.
22. Ibid., p. 257.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p. 258.
26. Ibid., p. 262.
27. Ibid., p. 263.
28. Ibid.
29. Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” p. 268.
30. Ibid., pp. 267–268.
31. Ibid., p. 268.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 258.
34. Lévi-Strauss, The Jealous Potter, p. 188.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., pp. 188–189.
38. Colette Soler, Lacan—The Unconscious Reinvited, trans. Esther Faye and
Susan Schwartz (London: Karnac, 2014), p. 42.
41. Willy Apollon, Psychoses: l’offre de l’analyste (Quebec: Collection le Savoir
analytique GIFRIC, 1999), p. 174, my translation here and after unless
otherwise specified.
42. Cantin, “The Borderline or The Impossibility of Producing a Negotiable
Form in the Social Bond for the Return of the Censored,” p. 200.

44. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Dennis Porter
(New York: Norton, 1992), p. 140.
45. Willy Apollon, “Féminité dites-vous?” Savoir: Revue de psychanalyse et
d’analyse culturelle 2, no. 1 (May 1995), p. 35.
References
Apollon, Willy. “Féminité dites-vous?” Savoir: Revue de psychanalyse et d’analyse
culturelle 2, no. 1 (May 1995), pp. 15–45.
Apollon, Willy. Psychoses: l’offre de l’analyste. Quebec: Collection le Savoir analyt-
ique GIFRIC, 1999.
Cantin, Lucie. “The Borderline or The Impossibility of Producing a Negotiable
Form in the Social Bond for the Return of the Censored.” Konturen 3
(2010), pp. 186–201.
Freud, Sigmund. “Constructions in Analysis.” Translated by James Strachey. In
The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 23,
edited by James Strachey et al., pp. 257–269. London: The Hogarth Press
and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2001.
York: Norton, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of
Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1.
Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Jealous Potter. Translated by Bénédicte Chorier.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Soler, Colette. Lacan—The Unconscious Reinvented. Translated by Esther Faye
and Susan Schwartz. London: Karnac Books, 2014.
CHAPTER 6
Sex for Structuralists: From Myth to Fantasy
To assert that sex matters to structuralism may seem risky, since a ques-
tion with a heady history would appear logically to precede it, namely
the question as to whether or not there is any subject in structuralism at
all. At times, this registered less as a question than as a given. So notes
Patrice Maniglier in his contribution to Concept and Form, a two-vol-
ume project devoted to translating and engaging with the texts and prin-
cipal authors of the structuralist French journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse.
Maniglier writes, “Structuralism is commonly understood to have dis-
missed subjectivity as a relevant dimension of the human experience and
as a source of meaning in general …”1 He then asks, “If indeed meaning
only emerges from oppositional relations within a system, how could the
subject be at the origin or even have any particular authority over what
he or she says?”2 As Maniglier points out, “[i]f structuralism is under-
stood in this way, then the re-emergence of subjectivity as a central theo-
retical concern in the mid 1960s might likewise have been understood as
a symptom of the fading of structuralism as a dominant intellectual ori-
entation.”3 According to Maniglier, the editors of the Cahiers pour l’An-
alyse, “young students of Althusser and Lacan,”4 did indeed see matters
thusly and responded by laying out a research program affirming that,
as Maniglier writes, “structuralism actually needs a theory of subjectiv-
ity, and that this theory requires a reworking of the concept of structure
which will have to go beyond the conceptuality inherited from structural
semiotics.”5 In his article, Maniglier “take[s] this attempt seriously,”
while “assess[ing] its rather mixed results.”6

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92895-1_6
104 S. de la TORRE
If there has been no subject in structuralism, how can there have been
sex in it? Then again, what’s a subject, what’s a structure, and what’s sex?
I will clarify my own working definitions for these terms; I take as a point
of departure, however, Maniglier’s compelling case for the subject in
structuralism, a case he makes in part by way of conclusions Lacan draws
from Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth. Maniglier cites Lacan: “‘structuralism
[…] allowed us to elaborate logically […] the subject caught up in a con-
stituting division.’”7 Maniglier argues that the subject as split is written
into structuralism by way of Lévi-Strauss’s canonical formula for myth;
that Lacan uses the formula to analyze the case of the Rat Man precisely
because he recognizes this; and that the redefinition of the (split) subjec-
tivity of structuralism is a “future [which] remains our present.”8
I would like to build from the affirmation of the split subject of struc-
turalism and find the sex in it as well by turning to Lacan’s Seminar XX
formulas of sexuation. Sex matters to structuralism, I propose, at least as
early as the moment that Lacan signals that there is not only one way to
desire, which is also to say that there is not only one way to apprehend
the lack in the Other. He arrives at this formulation not on the basis of
a will to grant the subject authority over what he, she, they, or ze says,
however, but on the basis of the idea that “due to the fact of speaking,
everything succeeds … in making the sexual relationship fail …”9—or, as
Joan Copjec writes, “‘words fail’” and “they fail in two different ways.”10
The reorientation is important: That is, it is important to the concepts of
sex, subject, and structure at work in this project to shift away from a will
to grant the subject authority over what she says and to begin instead
from the unsettling problematic described by Lacan as the failures that
follow from the fact of speaking. Indeed, we might say that sex is the key
name Lacan gives to this problematic—that sex is exactly what is at stake
for “the subject caught up in a constituting division”; or, in other words,
we are sexed because of the constituting division introduced into human
existence by language, and sexed differently by virtue of the different
positions we take with respect to that division.
How so? In Seminar XX, Lacan makes use of the language of logic
and mathematical formalization to plot out the positions subjects take
with respect to the cut of language. He is attempting thereby to write
the distinct logic of each of these two failures, and he elects to do so by
way of logic and mathematical formalization because these supply what
he identifies as the support of “signifierness that runs counter to mean-
ing.”11 I’ll return to each of these points, outlining the ways in which
6 SEX FOR STRUCTURALISTS: FROM MYTH TO FANTASY 105
Lacan articulates the vocabulary of classical logic to the phallic func-

tion, the jouissance that is Other, and the failure of the sexual relation.
From the outset, however, let us note how difficult it is to reconcile the
account of sexual difference given by Lacan’s formulas of sexuation with
pathologizing attitudes about transgender or transsexual people, a diffi-
culty that I have commented upon elsewhere.12 At a very fundamental
level, we might ask: If “[s]ex is,” as Copjec writes, “the stumbling-block
of sense,”13 to which sense, then, might we turn in establishing one—
man, woman, transman, transwoman, and so on—as a more extreme
symptom than any other?14
6.1 Lacan’s Formulas of Sexuation

As noted above, Lacan draws on the language of logic and mathemati-
cal formalization to write his formulas of sexuation, taking from classical
logic the universal quantifier, ∀, which stands for every, all, and none, and
the existential quantifier, ∃, which stands for some, one, and at least one,15
and writing these with the letter he has previously proffered for the phal-
lus, Φ. But, as Copjec clarifies, Lacan also quickly modifies classical logic,
replacing the terms of subject and predicate with those of argument and
function,16 modifications which transform the formulas. Copjec writes:
This substitution marks a conceptual difference: the two classes, male and
female, are no longer formed by gathering together subjects with similar
attributes as was the case with the older terms. The principle of sorting
is no longer descriptive, i.e. it is not a matter of shared characteristics or
a common substance. Whether one falls into the class of males or females
depends, rather, on where one places oneself as argument in relation to the
function, that is, which enunciative position one assumes.17
What is famously in question, of course, is which enunciative position

one assumes with respect to the phallic function: For Lacan posits in his
formulas that all subjects are positioned with respect to one term.
Why place the phallus here, at the center of sexuation, as it were,
as the one term with respect to which all subjects are unconsciously
positioned? The phallus for Lacan is “nothing but the site of lack it
indicates in the subject”18; as an “empty signifier,”19 it signifies the
very possibility of desire, and its logical placement in the formu-
las brings out already that there is not only one way to desire. When
106 S. de la TORRE
Lacan writes the phallic function in the form of a letter, however, the
phallus also changes. Lacan explains his choice: “I used the letter Φχ,
to be distinguished from the merely signifying function that had been
promoted in analytic theory up until then with the term ‘phallus.’
It is something original whose true import I am specifying today as
being indicated by its very writing.”20 How is the phallus as the letter
Φχ “to be distinguished” from the phallus in its “merely signifying
function,” and what is the effect of this original writing? According
to Lacan, the letter Φχ—as a letter rather than a signifier—introduces
what he refers to later in the Seminar as “signifierness,” or a writing
whose “value lies in centering the symbolic, on the condition of know-
ing how to use it … [to] retain … not the truth that claims to be
whole, but that of the half-telling …”21 In other words, Φχ as let-
ter references the phallus as signifier of nothing but the site of lack
it indicates in the subject, or the very possibility of desire; and Φχ as
letter is displaced from its signifying function to introduce something
of another order, which Lacan describes as a writing which centers
the symbolic as that which can be used to tell the truth of the half-
telling. To go further than the truth of the half-telling—to go “as far
as avowal”—would be “the worst.”22 And since telling the whole truth
is also impossible (this is Lacan’s definition of the signifier of the lack
in the Other, or S( ): “what is S( ) but the impossibility of telling the
whole truth … ?”23), we might think of the value of this other use of
the symbolic—a use of the symbolic which does not aspire to tell the
whole truth—as one which brings to light the impossibility of telling
the whole truth while still “requir[ing]” that “the subject produce a
savoir in the field of the signifier.”24 It is a use of the symbolic that
Lacan could be said to demonstrate in his writing of the formulas, and
it is also, I would conjecture, a use of the symbolic toward which any
analysis tends.
Looking, then, to the formulas themselves (Graph 6.1):
The right side of the formulas can be read to state that there is not
one x that is not subject to the phallic function and not every x is subject
to the phallic function: ∃χ �χ and ∀χ �χ.25 Lacan points out that he is
doing something new with logic: Specifically, by placing a negation on
the quantifier (∀), he introduces a “never-before-seen function,”26 some-
thing that does not belong to “the normal practice of symbolic logic”27
from which he draws the symbols. Lacan expands upon the effects of his
writing:
Graph 6.1 Jacques
Lacan’s Graph of
Sexuation from Seminar
XX: Encore
The question … arises whether, given a not-whole, an objection to the

universal, something can result that would be enunciated as a particular
that contradicts the universal—you can see that I am remaining here at the
level of Aristotelian logic.
In that logic, on the basis of the fact that one can write ‘not-every (pas-
tout) x is inscribed in �χ,’ one deduces by way of implication that there
is an x that contradicts it. But that is true on one sole condition, which is
that, in the whole or the not-whole in question, we are dealing with the
finite … But we could, on the contrary, be dealing with the infinite.28
As he indicates, it’s a proposal: “we could … be dealing with the

infinite,” Lacan suggests. If we are dealing with the infinite, the femi-
nine subject who is thereby written forms part of an open set: “she” is
both in the set without limit and, as grammar would have it, limitlessly
within it as well. In Lacan’s words, “She is not not at all there. She is
there in full (à plein).”29 And this is where the logic of sexual difference
gives us to think something of logic’s effects: For being not-all under
the phallic function such as we can conceive of it within a logic of the
infinite comes, Lacan suggests, with a certain knowledge. She is there
in full, Lacan remarks, and then, “But there is something more”30: That
something more is of the order of a jouissance that goes “beyond the
108 S. de la TORRE
phallus.”31 In Suzanne Barnard’s words, “she ‘knows’ that neither she nor
it knows—in other words, she ‘knows’ that the signifier of phallic power
merely lends a mysterious presence to the Law that veils its real impo-
tence.”32 What is “its real impotence”? That there is a lack-in-being—a
lack in the Other—and that nothing finally comes to limit that—nothing,
that is, outside of the fictions we create. How does “she” know? Because,
after all, things might be infinite—that is, there might be “a jouissance
that, with respect to everything that can be used in the function of χ, is
in the realm of the infinite.”33
Turning to the left side of the formulas: The left side can be trans-
lated to state that there is at least one x which is not subject to the phal-
lic function, and all x are subject to the phallic function: ∃χ �χ and
∀χ �χ. Lacan writes: “On the left, the lower line—∀χ �χ—indicates
that it is through the phallic function that man as whole acquires his
inscription … with the proviso that this function is limited due to the
existence of an x by which the function Φχ is negated …. ∃χ �χ .”34 We
have already seen how it could be that there is a “whole” here: This set
is finite and closed: “The whole here is thus based on the exception pos-
ited as the end-point (terme), that is, on that which altogether negates
�χ.”35 While “his” logic is thus characterized by a “ground[ing]”36 that
is founded on the existence of an x that escapes the set, the point raised
above—concerning the lack-in-being about which the feminine subject
has a certain knowledge—has repercussions for the subject who is all
under the phallic function as well. For the phallic function itself does
not enjoy the same grounding that the masculine subject does. Rather,
the phallic function in its “apparent necessity,” writes Lacan, “turns
out to be mere contingency,”37 and masculine subjects—like feminine
ones—grapple with this.
In sum, the four propositions of the formulas represent Lacan’s
attempt to write the real that sex “is” on the basis of two understand-
ings: First, that “[t]he real can only be inscribed on the basis of an
impasse of formalization,”38 and second, that subjects’ positions with
respect to the phallic function—all or not-all under it—require the writ-
ing of two different impasses. And while his narrations of the formulas—
as well as those of some Lacanian commentators—can be interpreted as
alternately shoring up or chipping away at biologically sexed or gendered
understandings of sexual difference, I maintain that the formulas them-
selves support the “divorcing”39 of both gender and biological sex from
unconscious sexuation in a radical way. ∃χ �χ and ∀χ �χ: We are hard
put to locate biological sex or gender here. I want therefore to empha-

size again that such a divorce constitutes a logical consequence of not
only claims wherein Lacan speaks explicitly to the fact that there need
be no accord between what we might commonly refer to as a person’s
gender and his/her/hir unconscious sexuation, as in his claim that “[a]
ny speaking being whatsoever, as is expressly formulated in Freudian
theory, whether provided with the attributes of masculinity—attributes
that remain to be determined—or not, is allowed to inscribe itself in [the
woman portion of speaking beings].”40 Above all, the divorcing of bio-
logical sex and gender from unconscious sexuation is the logical conse-
quence of the writings of the formulas themselves.
6.2 The “Real-of-the-Structure”41
It is important to underline that the formulas’ irreducibility to the
vocabularies of biological sex and gender is but one way in which they
“run[] counter to meaning.” Along these lines, let us not forget that
Lacan is attempting to inscribe a real; to hold this in mind, we might
consider the “image of this” that he proposes, an image, that is, of the
“writing” that “show[s] the real acceding to the symbolic”:
The real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization.

That is why I thought I could provide a model of it using mathematical
formalization, inasmuch as it is the most advanced elaboration we have by
which to produce signifierness. The mathematical formalization of signi-
fierness runs counter to meaning … can’t the formalization of mathemat-
ical logic, which is based only on writing (l’écrit), serve us in the analytic
process, in that what invisibly holds (retient) bodies is designated therein?
If I were allowed to give an image of this, I would easily take that
which, in nature, seems to most closely approximate the reduction of the
dimensions to the surface writing (l’écrit) requires, at which Spinoza him-
self marveled—the textual work that comes out of the spider’s belly, its
web. It is a truly miraculous function to see, on the very surface emerging
from an opaque point of this strange being, the trace of these writings tak-
ing form, in which one can grasp the limits, impasses, and dead ends that
show the real acceding to the symbolic.42
I signal this moment in the Seminar to underline some of the beauty

of Lacan’s accounts of both sexual difference and “the analytic pro-
cess.” The beauty he discerns—for instance, on the surfaces of strange
110 S. de la TORRE
beings’ bodies—runs counter to meaning, but it does not fail to produce

signifierness. For if it is such an impasse, then we know that we are in
the environs of the real—the real acceding to the symbolic by way of a
writing.
But what is the real? In an essay addressing what she calls “writings
of the real,”43 Cantin writes of the real that it is “what escapes the sym-
bolic, forming its excluded, rejected, and unrepresented remainder”; it
is “also that which is irreducible to the signifier” and “what escapes
representation.”44 The real in Cantin’s formulation is thus outside
of language. And “[t]he subject of the unconscious,” Cantin writes,
“is a real.”45 The subject of the unconscious itself is “rejected by the
symbolic,” and the subject’s truth “located in the gap opened up by
representation.”46 The subject’s truth is a truth that shares no com-
mon cause with the logic of the narrative with which the ego engages
with others in the social link. Or, if there is any common cause here,
it would be that the logic of the ego narrative aims at repressing the
subject of the unconscious’s cause as truth. Therefore, that which is
fundamentally of interest to an analysis is this real that Lacan writes
can only accede to the symbolic by way of writing, and which Cantin
figures somewhat differently by way of a reading of Freud’s case of the
Wolf Man.47
How to access a real that is simultaneously irreducible to the signifier
and the singular truth of the subject? Indeed, can we get anywhere near
it? According to Cantin, it can be approximated by way of writings of the
real, which are writings which “no longer refer[] to a signification, but
… become[] rather, the means of approximating an inaccessible real.”48
For, while the real subject of the unconscious is irreducible to the sig-
nifier and, in a certain sense, inaccessible, it is also always there! This,
according to Cantin, is the Freudian unconscious: “constituted by that
which is unable to be represented or symbolized but nonetheless remains
there, stranded, inscribed in the body—and, as a result, it is constantly at
work, ready to be remobilized and reactivated by the chance encounters
of life.”49
As Cantin explains, because the real unconscious is outside lan-
guage—because, in short, the unconscious of interest here is real—“the
analysand can only experience the unconscious through experiences of
the real.”50 And how does one experience the real? By way of symptoms,
failed acts, acting out, stagings, and crisis:
what has been excluded, rejected from the symbolic and inscribed in the
letter of the body, is still at work in the symptom, the failed act, the act-
ing out, the staging, and the crisis—each of which returns it to the space
from which it is excluded. Quietly and independently of all volition, the
drive is in quest of a jouissance that—for lack of being able to be said—will
find in the act, symptom, and staging a pathway and form where the fan-
tasy that subtends this jouissance is written in its own encoded, encrypted,
and self-contained language. Any access to the unconscious, therefore, must
necessarily pass through the writings inscribed in these manifestations of the
real, which are deployed according to a rationality that needs to be decrypted.
The logic inscribed by these writings, however, is altogether different from
the one that the analysand organizes—namely, the neurotic’s narrative, the
psychotic’s delusion, or the pervert’s scenario—in order to sustain his dis-
course and interpretations. This other logic can only be deduced, calcu-
lated, or inferred.51
Cantin cites Apollon in pointing to the stakes of the analytic cure: “that
the real finds it rationality,”52 in a process of decryption, not one of
interpretation. Why must the rationality of the real be decrypted, not
interpreted? Because, while it may appear that we have wandered far
afield of structure here, we are well within it: Logic “comes from the
structure”—so noted Apollon in a lecture, before going on to remark
that analysts are always dealing in structure.53 “There is not something
that is existing and that is language,” he added. “Pay attention to what
exists.”54 What exists? According to Apollon, something that is “out of
language”: the real.55 This—that which is outside language, acting in the
body, which manifests—is the sense of the real unconscious I have been
working toward in this project, what Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantin
also refer to as the censored56—and it is this real unconscious that I have
argued is at select moments circumnavigated in Lévi-Strauss’s writings as
well.
6.3 The Other Jouissance

In the discussion above, I attempted to write of femininity and masculin-
ity as logics, the logics of not-all and all, building from my understand-
ing that feminine and masculine signal for Lacan “two different modes of
ex-sistence in the symbolic, two different approaches to the Other, two
different stances with respect to desire, and (at least) two different types
of jouissance.”57 I would like to add now to the logics of femininity and
112 S. de la TORRE
masculinity by addressing the question of what is at stake when Apollon

calls on femininity and masculinity as phenomena with which all subjects
wrestle, and by turning to MacCannell’s writings on femininity as well,
wherein she centers the prospect of a future feminine clinic and its req-
uisite confrontations with the Other jouissance, which, as she notes, “has
gone almost without comment from serious investigators, despite its
importance in Lacan’s Encore: Seminar XX.”58 While Apollon’s under-
standing of femininity and masculinity could be thought to represent a
turn from Lacan’s proposal that subjects are either all or not-all under
the phallic function—a proposition signaled by Ellie Ragland as “the
heart of Lacanianism” (as she writes, “either/or … One is not both”59),
I would argue that it instead represents a development of a critical
dimension of sexuation, one which elaborates further upon the ethics of
sexuation specifically in relation to jouissance. It is also an innovation:
For by Apollon’s account, a subject may be either all or not-all under
the phallic function—“not both”60—and encounter the distinct ethical
exigencies of both masculinity and femininity. Perhaps, then, we can say
that unconscious sexuation—in addition to having or being discernible
by way of the effects noted above, concerning desire, jouissance, and the
approach to the Other—will have the further effect of modulating the
way in which subjects encounter the ethical exigencies of masculinity and
femininity.
To approach the question of the ethics specific to femininity, Apollon
points to Lacan’s words on the Other jouissance in the seminar devoted
to the subject, the jouissance that Lacan teaches in Seminar XX is “in
the realm of the infinite,” a jouissance beyond the phallus. In this sem-
inar, Lacan’s exemplar of the Other jouissance is that of the mystic
Teresa of Avila. Lacan explains: “it’s like for Saint Teresa—you need but
go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand
that she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it. What is she getting off
on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in say-
ing that they experience it, but know nothing about it.”61 While Lacan
emphasizes about this experience that “[t]hey know nothing. .. nothing
that they could tell us,”62 Apollon approaches the experience in ques-
tion from a different angle in order to draw out the links between this
untellable experience of a jouissance that is “too-much”63 and the related
experience of the lack in language, underlining that the two are, in a
sense, concomitant; that they accordingly—even necessarily—prompt a
profound questioning of the signifier on the part of the feminine subject;

and that they form the basis of a feminine ethics.
What is this jouissance that is too much? In his essay “Four Seasons
in Femininity or Four Men in a Woman’s Life,” Apollon writes of a sea-
son in which feminine subjects discover jouissance, the Other jouissance.
Drawing on case material from his analytic work with women, Apollon
proposes that “[t]here comes a time where man, including the father, in
some instances, represents something of a danger for the girl,” a dan-
ger which “concerns her being’s integrity.”64 By signaling that the very
being of the subject is in question here, Apollon underlines the traumatic
character of the discovery of jouissance: As he specifies, in this experi-
ence, the “subject seems overwhelmed by a fear that even she herself
finds strange.”65 To illustrate this moment—one which, Apollon pro-
poses, effectively ends childhood—Apollon provides excerpts of anal-
ysands’ recollections: In the first, a woman speaks of encountering an
adult stranger who shows her his penis when she is nine years old. She
recalls: “My whole body was shaking. It was as though I was suffocating.
I didn’t understand what had happened to me. I wondered how I would
be able to get home.”66 In the second recollection, a woman speaks of
encountering a love scene in a novel when she is eleven years old67; later,
she relates that reading experience to a “look” her uncle had been giv-
ing her around that time too, “‘undressing’ and ‘penetrating’ her.”68 She
says, “I was fascinated by the trouble that I experienced. Even now, I am
25 years old and I don’t understand what happened in my body.”69
While the recollections which Apollon cites represent the singular
experiences of the subjects in question, the further implication seems to
be that the encounter itself—whatever event may provoke it, whatever
form it may take—is structurally inevitable for feminine subjects. Apollon
writes:
What happens to them … is not only censored. It is not only something

which has never been said… Beyond all this, what they do not know, and
the minimum they must learn from a treatment, is that for each, language
is lacking (lacks) in its representation of what is happening to them. At
most, the signifier can only outline the lack of what is happening to them.
Whence their feelings of solitude in the face of the void which accompanies
this vertigo that propels them beyond themselves when this other jouis-
sance comes.70
114 S. de la TORRE
Apollon proposes that discovering jouissance—the Other jouissance—

ends the girl’s childhood. But he also asks, “has she ever had a child-
hood? Is she not always prematurely an adolescent?”71 If childhood can
be characterized as a time wherein there is the maintenance of the pos-
sibility of a discourse of love that protects the child from a real excess,72
the ending of childhood is brought about by the encounter with a jou-
issance with which the subject is overwhelmed and left alone and for
which there are no words. And if “the girl” is always prematurely an ado-
lescent, the implication is that such a protection has never really func-
tioned for her that well. Perhaps this is why, as MacCannell remarks, “[t]
hough they are the ‘silent ones,’ girls possess nevertheless an outstanding
and crucial savoir, a savoir faire about how to deal with the ever expand-
ing obscenity in our lives.”73
Encounters like those excerpted above are widely known outside of
analytic contexts and within them as well. What psychoanalysis brings
into view about such encounters is the idea that, by way of the expe-
rience that ends childhood, the young person will invent—uncon-
sciously—in an attempt to repair “what has happened.” That is, this
structurally inevitable encounter with an excess in the body, which is
without words, will prompt the production of an unconscious solution,
wherein the senseless takes on a kind of sense. While “for each, language
is lacking … in its representation of what is happening to them,” in the
sense given by the fantasy to “what is happening,” the subject is figured
as an object—the object of the Other’s jouissance, and the object of the
Other’s desire. In other words, in the solution, some quotient of the
Other jouissance—which is upon its discovery dangerous, terrifying, and
excessive—is syphoned off by becoming in the fantasy the jouissance of
the Other, that of the Other who makes of the subject its object, while
some other quotient is syphoned off by becoming in the fantasy the
desire of the Other for whom the subject “is” or aspires to be an ade-
quate object.74
Unconscious fantasies are therefore also an important part of
the material of an analysis, a point MacCannell makes in her essay
“Jouissance Between the Clinic and the Academy: The Analyst and
Woman.” Here, MacCannell counters views of analysis that aim for “a
return from symptom to the signifier”: If, as MacCannell notes, a “com-
mon Anglo-American reading of Lacan”75 has conceived of the clinic as
the site in which to “control” or “destroy” the jouissance that is both
excessive and lost, “by bringing it under the dominion of language,”76

the Lacanian clinic that MacCannell wishes to promote is one which
does not aim at extinguishing jouissance. Therefore, it is also one which
reckons with fantasy. For while analysis can provide “a new or different
signifier for containing the damaging, inexpressible excess,”77 it matters
how one arrives at that new signifier. MacCannell writes that the “treat-
ment must work its way toward the point where such a signifier can be
found” and that “[s]uch work can only go forward by way of the sub-
ject’s unconscious fantasies.”78 That is, the signifiers that can contain—
without destroying—jouissance are those found through the work on the
unconscious fantasies, fantasies which were, in part, solutions, and fanta-
sies within which the subject who enters analysis is captured.
MacCannell outlines the functions and origins of unconscious fantasy:
Unconscious fantasies are already modes of containment; they are the

result of the subject’s having been, at one moment, dominated by an over-
powering excess—traumatized by it—and fantasies are a means to repair
the damage. The subject’s fantasies are ways of re-organizing his or her
position relative to the imaginary Other (‘parental,’ ‘social’ or ‘cultural’),
the one to whom, for whom, or for whose sake jouissance seems to have
been lost. The imaginary Other of fantasy represents the subject’s inva-
sion by the excess or unbearable jouissance of this Other; it represents the
subject’s intolerable helplessness before Its (the Other’s) jouissance. The
subject unconsciously attributes this unbearability to an abusive theft by
this imaginary Other of the subject’s own means to—or even right to—
jouissance. In the unconscious fantasy scene, then, the subject sees itself as
always ‘something of’ an object. An abused object.
But also ‘something of’ a subject. A subject struggling to find at least
partial relief from this abuse. The subject must battle to move itself toward
the side of fuller freedom by passing through these liberatory fantasies.
The liberating work of fantasy is partial at best.79
MacCannell’s definition of unconscious fantasy calls to mind the

kinds of encounters cited by Apollon above. For the woman speaking
in the first example, for instance, it is clear that the man who invited
her to his car and exposed his erect penis to her view was treating her
as an object, attempting to take her as an object. But, what does he
want? And, what does she want? Into scenarios like this, psychoanal-
ysis introduces at least two difficult maneuvers: First, it introduces
116 S. de la TORRE
the idea that—exposed erect penis or not—this girl could not know
what that man wanted, and neither can the woman she became: it’s
structurally impossible. “Could she have been responsible for the
lack in the Other?,”80 for the desire of the Other? This “question and
its lack of an answer,” Apollon writes, “locate once again the void
they face alone.”81 It is only by way of fantasy that she can furnish
any answer to that question and thereby, on the one hand, “repair”
to some extent the traumatic excess that was experienced in the body
and, on the other, divert or turn her back on the void that accord-
ing to Apollon she faces alone. But, again, “the minimum they must
learn from a treatment, is that for each, language is lacking (lacks) in
its representation of what is happening to them. At most, the signi-
fier can only outline the lack of what is happening to them.” Linking
Apollon and MacCannell, we might say that it is by way of working
with unconscious fantasy that a subject can find the signifiers that bor-
der those edges, which may be one of the key reasons why MacCannell
suggests that the “Lacanian clinic … will always demand as absolutely
essential an unflagging creativeness in the use of language by both
subject and analyst.”82
The second maneuver introduced by psychoanalysis into scenarios
like those cited above is the following: Trauma, as Apollon defines it, is
“the action in our body of what cannot be named.”83 By this definition,
what is traumatizing about an experience is “not something [one] can
say about it”; that is, an experience is traumatizing not so much because
of the action of some other but because of the way in which the subject
“encounters jouissance in herself.”84 The displacement here is important,
for it puts into relief, first, that it is not “reality” that is traumatizing,
but the real of an experience.85 It also puts into relief that that which
“causes” the subject is to be located in the relation of the subject to an
Other who is absent.
6.4 An Ethical Exigency

In the face of the experience of the Other jouissance, the subject might
ask, what is the word for this experience that is too much, encore and
en corps, in the body, and why can language not account for it? Herein
resides some part of (feminine) mistrust of the signifier, a mistrust which
engenders questioning: “she questions it,” Apollon writes; “she ques-
tions it in a very fundamental way.”86 On the basis of this point, which
represents a reorientation with respect to Lacan’s remarks about what

women experience without knowing anything about it, Apollon cri-
tiques the “theoretical machismo”87 that can be found in some analytic
contexts:
To underestimate this attitude of femininity concerning the signifier leads

to theoretical machismo or clinical resistance with precipitous judgments
about woman’s ‘psychical and intellectual immaturity’ or her ‘lack of
morality,’ in addition to accusations of fabulation, of being a mythoma-
niac—as if these operations should be considered as necessarily condemn-
able, whereas it is a question of the feminine in its relation to the social
link.88
Fabulation and mythomania: What could be more logical than such

articulations as these for those for whom the signifier is not to be trusted
in the first place? Like Lévi-Strauss, they may be led to ask, what is beau-
tiful? And what is true? In “her” inquiry into such problems, the femi-
nine subject will undoubtedly innovate.
But Apollon’s crucial point, as I understand it, is that there is an eth-
ics to be elaborated on the basis of such questioning, an ethics to which
theoretical machismo would be quite deaf. Citing mystics, the possessed,
the “hysterics of yesterday,” and the “borderlines of today,” Apollon
discerns among their ranks a common question, one with which they
address the priests, doctors, and ideologues of their day, namely: “How
does the subject of the drive deal with the fact that language cannot
account for jouissance?”89 Femininity, according to Apollon—which, he
notes, need not be reduced to “the condition of being a woman”—“is
the ethical refusal to give up on this question, no matter the consequences of
such a refusal for social coexistence.”90
And even though the examples provided by Apollon in “Four
Seasons” concern the girl’s discovery of Other jouissance, it is impor-
tant to underline that Apollon also considers that all subjects confront
an experience wherein they are overwhelmed, alone, and without words,
an experience that strikes them in the body: “We claim that everybody
passes through such an experience.”91 Moreover, according to Apollon,
this is the femininity that is repressed in boys and girls alike,92 the “too-
much” that cultural constructions at large are aimed at extinguishing.
The distinct ethical exigency of femininity, then, for Apollon, is that of
“hav[ing] to resolve a fundamental defect in the signifier in relation to a
118 S. de la TORRE
‘too-much’ jouissance where the being of the subject finds itself brought
into play.”93 And the distinct ethical exigency of masculinity, according
to Apollon, is that of “taking responsibility for the defect in language.”94
“Each one of us,” Apollon states, “has a specific way to deal with the
masculine.”95
6.5 Conclusion
Why must an analysis work with unconscious fantasies? In part,
MacCannell answers, because analytic work on unconscious fan-
tasy drastically interrupts that other fantasy circulating in society,
that there may be some kind of “good” achieved when the subject
“returns to language from the symptom.” Within and beyond the
fantasy, things are not, per se, good. MacCannell specifies that “lan-
guage is liberating,” but the process—“[g]etting there,” MacCannell
remarks—“is harder, and less good, than it appears. And what there is
there, finally?”96 Why is it “harder”? Because, for one thing, the real
at which analysis aims is outside of language. Why is it “less good”?
Among other reasons, there is this one: Fantasies do not answer to
the “rules, norms, ideals, and models”97 which functionally repress
the subject of the unconscious. Why is “what there is there” in ques-
tion? “What there is there” is in question because the subject who has
broached the work of the fantasy cannot go back; there is no going
back to the social link conceived within imaginary terms. MacCannell
writes: “a (if not the) central task confronting the analyst [is] that of
helping the analysand to distinguish between the imaginary form of
the ‘social’ from which they suffer, and the symbolic ‘social’ to which
the analyst would hope the patient might gain or regain access.”98 Or,
with a slightly different valence, the “there that is there” has to be
invented. All of the above, as I understand it, is why Apollon writes of
psychoanalytic treatment that it
… calls for a rethinking of the very foundation of a being’s existence and

his relation to others … its particularity must reside in the analyst’s desire
to constrain the subject to assume an ethical position with respect to the
knowledge derived from the experience. The problematic of treatment
implies that the objective is to assume the consequences of such a knowl-
edge and thus to take ethical responsibility toward oneself and toward
others.99
And, in taking ethical responsibility toward oneself and toward others, an

analysand might become “something of ” a subject of desire.
Notes
2012), p. 25.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., pp. 25–26.
8. Ibid., p. 46.
9. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, 1972–
1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton,
1998), p. 56.
10. Joan Copec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” in Supposing the
Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1996), p. 26.
11. Lacan, Encore: Seminar XX, p. 93.
12. Carlson, “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference,”
pp. 46–72.
13. Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” p. 18.
14. There has been unprecedented engagement between transgender the-
ory and psychoanalytic theory in recent years. For an exciting over-
view of that work, see Sheila L. Cavanagh, “Transpsychoanalytics,”
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 3–4 (2017), pp. 326–357.
See also the many essays in that Special Issue, featuring recent and
innovative examples of what Cavanagh calls “transpsychoanalytics”
(ibid., p. 326). For groundbreaking texts in this field, see Patricia
Elliot, “A Psychoanalytic Reading of Transsexual Embodiment,”
Studies in Gender and Sexuality 2, no. 4 (2001), pp. 295–325; Patricia
Elliot, Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested
Sites (New York: Routledge, 2010); Patricia Gherovici, Please Select
Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing
of Transgenderism (New York: Routledge, 2010); Gayle Salamon,
Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010); Oren Gozlan, Transsexuality and
the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian Approach (New York: Routledge,
2015); Sheila Cavanagh, “Transsexuality as Sinthome: Bracha L.
Ettinger and the Other (Feminine) Sexual Difference,” Studies in
120 S. de la TORRE
Gender and Sexuality 17, no. 1 (2016), pp. 27–44; and Patricia
Gherovici, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual
Difference (New York: Routledge, 2017).
15. Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” p. 26.
16. Ibid., pp. 26–27.
17. Ibid., p. 27.
18. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006),
p. 745.
19. Suzanne Barnard, “Introduction,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s
Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, eds. Suzanne
Barnard and Bruce Fink (New York: State University of New York Press,
2002), p. 10.
20. Lacan, Encore: Seminar XX, pp. 28–29.
21. Ibid., p. 93.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 95.
24. Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin, “The Treatment of
Psychosis,” trans. Tracy McNulty, in The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian
Reader for Psychologists, eds. Stephen R. Friedlander and Kareen
R. Malone (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), p. 223.
26. Ibid., p. 72.
27. Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan: Society, Politics, Ideology (London:
Routledge, 2003), p. 125.
28. Lacan, Encore: Seminar XX, pp. 102–103.
29. Ibid., p. 74.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Suzanne Barnard, “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other
Jouissance,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love,
Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, eds. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce
Fink (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 178.
34. Ibid., p. 79.
35. Ibid., pp. 79–80.
36. Ibid., p. 79.
37. Ibid., p. 94.
38. Ibid., p. 93.
39. Shanna Carlson, “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual
Difference,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21,
no. 2 (2010), p. 60.

44. Ibid., p. 15.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. These two formulations raise a question which is outside the scope of
this project, namely the real as that which can only be inscribed on the
basis of an impasse of formalization, and the real as that which is outside
language, acting in the body, which manifests: Are these reals different,
and if so, how?
48. Ibid., p. 12.
49. Ibid., p. 15.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., my emphasis.
52. Ibid., p. 17.
53. Willy Apollon, “The Unconscious, the Censored, and the Social Link”
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Cantin, “Practices of the Letter: Writing a Space for the Real,” p. 17.
57. Carlson, “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference,”
p. 64.
58. Juliet Flower MacCannell, “Jouissance between the Clinic and the
Academy: The Analyst and Woman,” Qui Parle 9, no. 2 (Spring/
Summer 1996), p. 122.
59. Ellie Ragland, “The Hysteric’s Truth,” in Reflections on Seminar XVII:
Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, eds. Justin Clemens
and Russell Griggs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 85.
60. Ibid., p. 85.
62. Willy Apollon, “Four Seasons in Femininity or Four Men in a Woman’s
Life,” Topoi 12 (1993), p. 106.
63. Willy Apollon, “Féminité dites-vous?” Savoir: Revue de psychanalyse et
d’analyse culturelle 2, no. 1 (May 1995), p. 35.
64. Apollon, “Four Seasons,” p. 105.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
122 S. de la TORRE
67. Here are the excerpts in full:

Judith tells her story.
I was 9. We lived just near the edge of the village, 15 minutes
from the church. During the Christmas season that year, I sang
in the choir. One night, while returning after practice, I was walk-
ing alone on the main street. At one point a car pulled up beside
me. It was a red sports car. The guy driving was wearing a leather
jacket. It was not someone from the village. He opened his door
and called to me proposing to drive me home. I refused. Then he
undid his zipper and took out a large penis, it was immense and
all hard. I began to run. Then instead of running home, I just
stopped on the sidewalk. My whole body was shaking. It was as
though I was suffocating. I didn’t understand what had happened
to me. I wondered how I would be able to get home. When I
walked in, I went straight to my room and I told my mother that
I was sick. The next day, I was feverish. And then nothing has
ever been the same as before.
Jocelyne reports …
The summer of 1975, I became a woman. I was eleven years old.
I had gone with my parents to Old Orchard. It was the first time
that I went there. Afterwards, we would return often. That sum-
mer we had gone to join my two aunts, their children and their
husbands. One day, all of us children were alone on the beach.
My cousin, was who 17, was reading a love story. I was watch-
ing her. My older brother was tearing her about the book, she
blushed and seemed to wish to hide the book from the boys and
her parents. The next day, the bigger children went to swim and
take a walk. I stayed alone with my aunt to watch our belong-
ings. I took cousin Berthe’s book. I must have just opened it to
any page to read a bit. After several minutes, I quickly closed it. I
had fallen on a love scene. I had never imagined that anything like
that could happen. But above all, I often took the book on the sly
afterwards during the summer to look for interesting pages. Even
now, I am 25 years old and I don’t understand what happened
in my body. My boyfriend hasn’t changed anything. Anyway, he
doesn’t provoke that anymore in my body. Some time that wor-
ries me more than I dare to express it to myself. (ibid., p. 105)
68. Ibid., p. 106.
69. Ibid., p. 105.
70. Ibid., p. 106.
71. Ibid., p. 105.
72. Ibid.
73. Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future
Female Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000),
pp. xv–xvi.
74. The central fantasy in which the subject figures itself as the object of the
Other’s desire is the fantasy of seduction, which is a fantasy for subjects of
neurotic structures. However, Cantin writes of those neurotic subjects who
might be qualified as borderline that the borderline “lives the impossibil-
ity of constructing a fantasy of seduction” (Cantin, “Borderline,” p. 196);
and, Cantin points out, the solution of seduction is also “doomed to fail
for everyone” (ibid., p. 192). Cantin writes of this fantasy:
[T]he construction of the fantasy of seduction [is] a mode of
treatment, … a way of managing the demands of the Superego.
The fantasy of the seduction, which Freud identifies in the solu-
tion proposed by Oedipus, produces the Ego as an ideal object
in response to parental demands and exigencies, in the imaginary
hope of thus freeing up the energy of the drive from the response
to the Other in which it is locked. But this solution, however nec-
essary to the child, nevertheless remains that which will redouble
the initial repression imposed by language. ... The seduction fan-
tasy, by producing the Ego as object, represses the Subject and
its quest by introducing and nourishing the illusion of an object
possible in reality for the drive of desire. (ibid., p. 191)
The fantasy of seduction is also non-operative for psychotic subjects, for
whom some other solution than being the object of the Other’s desire
must come to manage the workings of the drive and the demands of the
superego, such as a sinthome or a delusion.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., pp. 107–108.
81. Ibid.
83. Willy Apollon, “The Function of the Dream” (lecture, the annual Yearly
Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La Bordée,
Quebec City, QC, June 6, 2016).
124 S. de la TORRE
84. Lucie Cantin (remarks, the annual Clinical Days conference, GIFRIC,

New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, CA, March 10, 2017).
85. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Apollon, “Feminité dites-vous?,” p. 25. My thanks to Heidi Arsenault
and Daniel Wilson for providing this translation.
90. Ibid., p. 25, my translation here and below unless otherwise specified.
91. Willy Apollon, “Sex in Psychoanalysis—Masculine, Feminine” (lec-
ture, the annual Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis,
92. Ibid.
93. Apollon, “Feminité dites-vous?,” p. 35.
94. Apollon, “Sex in Psychoanalysis—Masculine, Feminine” (lecture, the
95. Willy Apollon, “The Body and the Unconscious” (lecture, the annual
Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La
98. Ibid.
99. Willy Apollon, “The Untreatable,” Umbr(a): A Journal of the
Unconscious (2006), p. 26.
References
Apollon, Willy. “Four Seasons in Femininity or Four Men in a Woman’s Life.”
Topoi 12 (1993), pp. 101–115.
Apollon, Willy. “Féminité dites-vous?” Savoir: Revue de psychanalyse et d’analyse
culturelle 2, no. 1 (May 1995), pp. 15–45.
Apollon, Willy, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin. “The Treatment of
Psychosis.” Translated by Tracy McNulty. In The Subject of Lacan: A
Lacanian Reader for Psychologists, edited by Stephen R. Friedlander and
Kareen R. Malone, pp. 209–227. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000.
Apollon, Willy. “The Untreatable.” Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious
(2006), pp. 23–39.
Apollon, Willy. “The Unconscious, the Censored, and the Social Link.” Lecture
presented at the annual Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis,
GIFRIC, La Bordée, Quebec City, June 2, 2014.
Apollon, Willy. “The Body and the Unconscious.” Lecture presented at the
Bordée, Quebec City, QC, June 9, 2016.
Apollon, Willy. “The Function of the Dream.” Lecture presented at the annual
Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, GIFRIC, La Bordée,
Quebec City, QC, June 6, 2016.
Apollon, Willy. “Sex in Psychoanalysis—Masculine, Feminine.” Lecture pre-
sented at the annual Yearly Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis,
GIFRIC, La Bordée, Quebec City, QC, June 10, 2016.
Barnard, Suzanne. “Introduction.” In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work
on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, edited by Suzanne Barnard and
Bruce Fink, pp. 1–20. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002.
Barnard, Suzanne. “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other
Jouissance.” In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love,
Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, edited by Suzanne Barnard and Bruce
Fink, pp. 171–185. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002.
Cantin, Lucie. Remarks presented at the annual Clinical Days conference,
GIFRIC, New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, March 10, 2017.
Carlson, Shanna. “Transgender Subjectivity and the Logic of Sexual Difference.”
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2010), pp.
46–72.
Cavanagh, Sheila. “Transsexuality as Sinthome: Bracha L. Ettinger and the Other
(Feminine) Sexual Difference.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 17, no. 1
(2016), pp. 27–44.
Cavanagh, Sheila. “Transpsychoanalytics.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4,
no. 3–4 (2017), pp. 326–357.
Copec, Joan. “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason.” Supposing the Subject. Edited
by Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1996.
Elliot, Patricia. “A Psychoanalytic Reading of Transsexual Embodiment.” Studies
in Gender and Sexuality 2, no. 4 (2001), pp. 295–325.
Elliot, Patricia. Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested
Sites. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Gherovici, Patricia. Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to
the Democratizing of Transgenderism. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Gherovici, Patricia. Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual
Difference. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Gozlan, Oren. Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian
Approach. New York: Routledge, 2015.
126 S. de la TORRE

York: Norton, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973.
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton,
1998.
MacCannell, Juliet Flower. “Jouissance between the Clinic and the Academy:
The Analyst and Woman.” Qui Parle 9, no. 2 (1996), pp. 105–125.
MacCannell, Juliet Flower. The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject.
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2012.
Ragland, Ellie. “The Hysteric’s Truth.” In Reflections on Seminar XVII: Jacques
Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, edited by Justin Clemens and
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Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Žižek, Slavoj. Jacques Lacan: Society, Politics, Ideology. London: Routledge, 2003.
CHAPTER 7
How Do We Use Structuralism?
Was Lacan a structuralist? In Lacan—The Unconscious Reinvented,

a text that explores Lacan’s formulation of the unconscious as real,
Colette Soler suggests that he was not. She writes: “I do not believe that
Lacan was ever a structuralist, even at the time of metaphor and meton-
ymy. The subject of psychoanalysis is not structural man, if I may use this
expression, and has never really been so at any moment in Lacan’s elabo-
ration.”1 Why not? She explains:
Psychoanalysis certainly knows no other subject than this non-incarnated

subject, the subject that is only ‘the navel’ in the pure combinatory of
the mathematics of the signifier, a navel that even logic cannot manage
to eliminate. But this subject is not the object of psychoanalysis. The sub-
ject that psychoanalysis receives and deals with is the one who suffers. And
not from just anything, but from a suffering tied to truth, the truth that
involves the object of his phantasy and even a bit more: the living being
marked by language.2
What I appreciate about Soler’s description is her focus on suffering: in

suggesting that the object of psychoanalysis is not the subject of struc-
turalism but a subject whose suffering is tied to truth, Soler brings out
into the open something that theoretical engagements with psychoa-
nalysis like mine run the risk of obscuring, which is that real problems
bring people to analysis. If there weren’t a real problem, they wouldn’t
be there; and if by some odd chance there weren’t a real problem before

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92895-1_7
128 S. de la TORRE
they got there, there will be one now. At least, this is how I think about
something Lacan reportedly said to Gérard Miller, quoted by Miller in
his documentary Rendez-vous chez Lacan (2011). Miller recalls:
One day when I wanted to interrupt my own analysis, I asked Lacan, ‘Why
is it so difficult to bring one’s unconscious to light?’ I can summarize what
I remember of his answer as follows: ‘The truth is always uncomfortable to
bear and occasionally psychoanalysis ultimately teaches us much about our-
selves we would rather ignore. The closer we get to the truth of our story,
the more eager we are to turn our back to it.’ He explained that it was for
this reason that he always discouraged people who came to him simply to
know themselves better. It is not enough. To stay in the course of psychoa-
nalysis, the patient must have a problem, a handicap, an intrigue; he or she
must aspire to change something crucial about his or her life.3
But is the object of psychoanalysis any subject at all? The distinction may
be a fine one, but Tracy McNulty takes a different stance than Soler with
respect to the question of the object of psychoanalysis, proposing that the
object of analysis is speech—true speech or unconscious speech as that
which interrupts communication in the form of jokes, slips of the tongue,
and lapses, speech that “interrupt[s] what the speaker ‘meant’ to say”4 and
thereby “attests to a different reality altogether: the intersubjective relation
of the subject to the locus of the Other.”5 And while Soler’s and McNulty’s
understandings of what is entailed in the work of an analysis may or may
not be so different in practice, it’s worth underlining that McNulty con-
nects the unconscious structured as a language to speech, suggesting that
the unconscious is structured as a language “because it responds to and
attempts to construct the effects of speech on the living being.”6
When he is asked in 1974 to speak to the “characteristics of
Lacanianism,” Lacan speaks first of structuralism. That is, first he quib-
bles a bit (“It’s a little early to say, since Lacanianism does not yet exist.
We can just about get a whiff of it, a premonition”).7 Then he states, “I
believe in structuralism and the science of language.”8 Then, in a kind
of demonstration of this ongoing belief, he cites his own 1957 écrit,
“Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching.” I will cite slightly more than he does
from the passage in question:
what the discovery of Freud drives us back to is the enormity of the order
into which we have entered—into which we are, as it were, born a second
7 HOW DO WE USE STRUCTURALISM? 129
time, in leaving behind the state which is rightly known as the infans state,
for it is without speech—namely, the symbolic order constituted by lan-
guage, and the moment of the concrete universal discourse and of all the
furrows opened up by it at this time, in which we had to find lodging.9
What are we to make of this passage and what it is charged with demon-
strating about this emerging “Lacanianism’s” links to structuralism? And
what are we to make of in relation to remarks Lacan delivered not one
year prior to the interview cited above, wherein he speaks of a wish to
distinguish himself from structuralism, stating, “What I put forward, by
writing lalangue [llanguage] as one word, is that by which I distinguish
myself from structuralism, insofar as the latter would like to integrate
language into semiology”? Lalangue, or llanguage, Lacan explains in
1973, “serves purposes that are altogether different from that of com-
munication.” Moreover, “That is what the experience of the unconscious
has shown us, insofar as it is made up of [lalangue] … ” Thus, Lacan
reasons, “If I have said that language is what the unconscious is struc-
tured like, that is because language, first of all, doesn’t exist. Language
is what we try to know concerning the function of [lalangue].” Linking
Lacan’s remarks from 1957, 1973, and 1974, we find anew the real
unconscious: That is, when Lacan notes that if he has said that “language
is what the unconscious is structured like, that is because language, first
of all, doesn’t exist,” perhaps this “first of all” is both logical and tem-
poral. First of all, language doesn’t exist, for the infant;10 first, we are
infans, without speech, living real experiences which will never enter
language if for no other reason than because we were without language
when we lived them. Then, we enter the symbolic order constituted by
language and must “find lodging.” Yet the experience of the unconscious
shows that something persists, something which, in Lévi-Strauss’s terms,
the social cannot integrate, a pain it cannot name, something which, in
Freud’s terms, we cannot remember, and something which the shaman
(and priest and doctor) cannot cure and which psychoanalysis does not
want to, taking it instead as the basis of its practice.11 Because, according
to Lacan:
The unconscious evinces knowledge that, for the most part, escapes the
speaking being … Language is, no doubt, made up of [lalangue]. It
is knowledge’s hare-brained lucubration … about [lalangue]. But the
unconscious is knowledge, a knowing how to do things (savoir-faire)
130 S. de la TORRE
with [lalangue]. And what we know how to do with [lalangue] goes well
beyond what we can account for under the heading of language … If
we can say that the unconscious is structured like a language, it is in the
sense that the effects of [lalangue], already there qua knowledge, go well
beyond anything the being who speaks is capable of enunciating.
It is in that regard that the unconscious, insofar as I base it on its deci-
phering, can only be structured like a language, a language that is always
hypothetical with respect to what supports it, namely, [lalangue] …
Stated otherwise, it has become clear, thanks to analytic discourse, that
language is not simply communication.12
If Lacan’s psychoanalysis is structuralist, in other words, it is not a struc-

turalism according to which the unconscious is a language which need
only be interpreted: The language of the unconscious is not semiology.
Rather, the unconscious here is for Lacan a specific kind of knowledge,
“a knowing how to do things (savoir-faire) with [lalangue].” It is an
unconscious constructed in its deciphering which nonetheless is always
there, the real-of-the-structure on the basis of which Lacan may have
thought that he and Lévi-Strauss parted ways. Jean-Michel Rabaté cites
Lacan’s own remarks on the question of Lacan’s relation to Lévi-Strauss,
remarks delivered in December of 1975 at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology on Lacan’s tour of US universities: “Yes, Lacan said, he
owed a great deal to Lévi-Strauss, perhaps even everything. But he fol-
lowed this remark with a qualification: ‘This does not prevent me from
having a very different idea of the concept of structure.’”13
Was Lévi-Strauss Lacanian? No, certainly not. Still, reflecting in “The
Making of an Anthropologist” on the main influences of his thought—
Freud, Marx, and geology—Lévi-Strauss summarizes what he has learned
from them and how they aided him in becoming an anthropologist: “In
all these instances,” he declares, “the arousing of aesthetic curiosity leads
directly to an acquisition of knowledge.”14 Intriguingly, if sadly, the same
essay opens with a disquieting story of a philosophy teacher Lévi-Strauss
had when he was young: Lévi-Strauss writes of this teacher that “[h]e
expounded his dry dogmatic views with great fervour and gesticulated
passionately throughout his lessons. I have never known such naïve con-
viction allied to greater intellectual poverty. He committed suicide in
1940 when the Germans entered Paris.”15 If the assessment of the man’s
views and lessons is harsh, the conclusion of the story—a completed sui-
cide—is devastating, so much so, in fact, that I think we can say that
the story transmits nothing about Gustave Rodrigue, Lévi-Strauss’s
7 HOW DO WE USE STRUCTURALISM? 131
teacher, but may suggest rather a lot about Lévi-Strauss’s thoughts on

survival: Survival itself may require the arousing of aesthetic curios-
ity. And the arousing of aesthetic curiosity is, for Lévi-Strauss, linked to
the body. Still within the same essay, he remembers the walks he took in
Languedoc as a boy:
when, on one side and the other of the hidden crack, there are suddenly
to be found cheek-by-jowl two green plants of different species, each of
which has chosen the most favourable soil; and when at the same time,
two ammonites with unevenly intricate involutions can be glimpsed in
the rock, thus testifying in their own way to a gap of several tens of thou-
sands of years suddenly space and time become one: the living diversity of
the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages. Thought and emotion
move into a new dimension where every drop of sweat, every muscular
movement, every gasp of breath becomes symbolic of a past history, the
development of which is reproduced in my body, at the same time as my
thought embraces its significance. I feel myself to be steeped in a more
dense intelligibility, within which centuries and distances answer each other
and speak at last with one and the same voice.16
Lévi-Strauss attests here to a miraculous act of witnessing, wherein

centuries and distances speak as one in the rocks and in his body, one
wherein the theoretical precept he has just detailed—concerning the
notion that knowledge “consists … in selecting true aspects, that is,
those coinciding with the properties of my thought”17—transforms into
a truth emerging out of lived experience, one wherein Lévi-Strauss him-
self is of this world, in a new dimension.
In the end, there may be little to no common ground between Lévi-
Strauss’s structuralism and the practice of psychoanalysis such as it was
initiated by Freud and renewed by Lacan and the analysts, practitioners,
theorists, and writers of the Lacanian clinic today. Or perhaps that which
is common here is a drive and a willingness to go on without ground, for
the risk of an experience—an arousing experience—and the singular mode
of not just surviving but living that such an arousal can allow to break free.
Notes
1. Colette Soler, Lacan—The Unconscious Reinvited, trans. Esther Faye and
Susan Schwartz (London: Karnac, 2014), p. 5.
2. Ibid.
132 S. de la TORRE
3. Rendez-vous chez Lacan, directed by Gérard Miller (Paris: Editions

Montparnasse, 2012), DVD.
5. Ibid., p. 68.
6. Ibid., emphasis added.
7. “‘There can be no crisis of psychoanalysis’: Jacques Lacan interviewed
in 1974,” an interview by Emilio Granzotto, https://www.versobooks.
com/blogs/1668-there-can-be-no-crisis-of-psychoanalysis-jacques-lacan-
interviewed-in-1974.
8. Ibid.
371.
10. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, 1972–
1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton,
1998), p. 138.
11. Ibid., p. 101.
12. Ibid., pp. 138–139.
13. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Lacan’s Dora Against Lévi-Strauss,” Yale French
Studies, no. 123 (2013), pp. 129–130.
14. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman
(New York: Pocket Books, 1977), p. 49.
15. Ibid., p. 42.
16. Ibid., pp. 48–49.
17. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, p. 48.
References
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973.
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton,
1998.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John and Doreen
Weightman. New York: Pocket Books, 1977.
Miller, Gérard. Rendez-vous chez Lacan. Paris: Editions Montparnasse, 2012,
DVD.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. “Lacan’s Dora Against Lévi-Strauss.” Yale French Studies,
no. 123 (2013), pp. 129–144.
Soler, Colette. Lacan—The Unconscious Reinvented. Translated by Esther Faye
and Susan Schwartz. London: Karnac Books, 2014.
Index
C I
Canonical formula for myth, 63, 104 Incest prohibition, 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 39,
Castration, 8–10, 30, 31 53, 54, 64
D L
Deferred action of trauma, 64, 67, 70, Lalangue, 130
91, 97
M
E Mana, 23, 24, 27–29, 31, 54
Emma, 68–70, 91 Masculinity, 4, 13, 33, 109, 111, 112,
118
F
Femininity, 2, 5, 6, 9, 12–14, 33, 41, N
67, 111–113, 117 Not-all, 2, 3, 5, 12, 13, 54, 87, 107,
Formulas of sexuation, 4, 13, 104, 108, 111, 112
105
Free association, 92, 94, 96, 99
O
Other jouissance, 13, 112–114, 116,
H 117
hau, 21–23, 29
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 133

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92895-1
134 Index
P Structure, 1–6, 10, 13, 14, 20, 21, 23,

Phallus, 2, 105, 106, 108, 112 26, 27, 32, 40–48, 50, 54, 55,
Primal scene, 11, 80 63–67, 69, 76, 83, 85, 87, 91,
Primary repression, 14, 97 95, 96, 104, 111
Psychosis, 2, 5, 6, 9, 12–14, 33, 41, Symbolic, 2–7, 10, 12, 14, 23, 31,
95 40–42, 45–47, 50, 51, 53, 54,
64, 77, 84, 87, 106, 109–111,
129, 131
R Symbolic thinking, 53
Real unconscious, 12, 14, 26, 54, 63,
64, 74, 75, 77, 84, 98, 110, 111
W
The Wolf Man, 11, 33, 36, 37
S
Seduction fantasy, 31
Sexual difference, 13, 105, 107–109 Z
Shamanism, 24–26, 47, 71, 75, 83 Zero symbol, 4, 11–14, 28, 29, 40,
Signifier of the lack in the Other, or 51, 53, 54, 64, 84
S( ), 11, 26, 28, 32, 106

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Sex for Structuralists

Sex for Structuralists

ISBN 978-3-319-92894-4 ISBN 978-3-319-92895-1 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943854

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover design by Tjaša Krivec

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

1 The Criteria of the Future 1

2 Primal Scene, Ground Zero: Lévi-Strauss, Lacan,

3 Madness and the Sensitive Anthropologist: Lévi-Strauss’s

4 Two Traumas, Not One: The Feminine in Myth 61

4.2 Two Traumas, Not One 66

5 The Mythologist’s Aesthetic Task: Amelia 83

6 Sex for Structuralists: From Myth to Fantasy 103

7 How Do We Use Structuralism? 127

The Criteria of the Future

Near the end of his essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,”

© The Author(s) 2018 1

constitutive of another structure.”5 But, what makes it possible for any

submit that these logics appear, in fact, at key junctures in structuralist

culture, politics, or otherwise. This is not only an issue of human rights;

experience of limitlessness does not tend toward the repair proffered

1.1 Structure and the Symbolic

of transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type.”28

subjects experience the symbolic differently. In Wrestling with the Angel:

the impetus of this project: A representation of castration like that of the

concerning what is at stake for different kinds of subjects in their pass

My focus is on articulations of the symbolic that take a creative form or

As McNulty emphasizes throughout her project, while a symbolic fiction

1.2 Outline of the Project

rather than against, Lévi-Strauss, one of the foremost theorists of the

Other jouissance. I begin by offering a reading of Lacan’s Seminar XX

How do we use structuralism, and what is a structuralism we can use?

24. Willy Apollon, Psychoses: l’offre de l’analyste (Quebec: Collection le Savoir

Primal Scene, Ground Zero: Lévi-Strauss,

In Rome in 1953, Lacan shares that one of his fundamental formulations

Hence the paradox that one of my most acute auditors believed to be an

© The Author(s) 2018 19

“others” in question: Claude and Monique Lévi-Strauss.4 As the story

2.1 Lévi-Strauss the Synthesist17

Lévi-Strauss critiques Mauss’s understanding of gift exchange, how-

… instead of applying his principles consistently from start to finish, Mauss

Hau is a construction, consciously developed by Maori people to answer

“more real,” but unconscious. Moreover, that underlying reality is best

Mana for Lévi-Strauss is the paradigmatic whatchamacallit, “in itself

One technique—that of the tuft of down—will both bring renown to

… pathological and normal thought processes are complementary rather

Lévi-Strauss points out that “normal thought” cannot “fully control”

2.2 The Signifier of the Lack in the Other

writes as the object = x: an empty square characterized by its unceasing

between Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the zero symbol—the logical operator

Let us observe carefully … what it is that objects to conferring on my sig-

We cannot explain S( ) on the basis of the poverty of the social fact:

2.3 From Seduction to the Insoluble

the fantasy of the primal scene is “a representation constructed by a child

‘fall’ of the imaginary Other by dismantling the seduction fantasy that

p. 215). Two substantial endnotes in Zafiropoulos’s Postlude delve

69. Tracy McNulty, Wresting with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life

96. McNulty, Wrestling with the Angel, p. 72.

Dosse, Francoise. History of Structuralism Volume 2: The Sign Sets, 1967–Present.

Madness and the Sensitive Anthropologist:

Lévi-Strauss is interested in what makes things possible. Not a particular

The Criteria of the Future

1.1 Structure and the Symbolic

1.2 Outline of the Project

24. Willy Apollon, Psychoses: l’offre de l’analyste (Quebec: Collection le Savoir

2.2 The Signifier of the Lack in the Other

writes as the object = x: an empty square characterized by its unceasing

2.3 From Seduction to the Insoluble

69. Tracy McNulty, Wresting with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life

96. McNulty, Wrestling with the Angel, p. 72.

Madness and the Sensitive Anthropologist:

Symbolic expression is given here as given: natural, decided, and self-

3.2 The Condition of Symbolic Thinking

5.5 Third Condition, “A Limit to the Drive Where the

43. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, pp. 187–190.

Sex for Structuralists: From Myth to Fantasy

6.1 Lacan’s Formulas of Sexuation