This harmonious difference between the simplicity of the divine being and the complexity of created beings is altogether other than the philosophi- cal conflict between the One and the many, in which the One/the Absolute requires the conquest and destruction or assimilation of otherness. This is why, in Seminar XX, Lacan insists that woman, belonging on the side of the philosophical not-all, reveals the Christian Other of the philosophical One. She never attains to the (illusory) universality of the One that man claims for himself. She is always one plus one plus one, in a series of infinite exceptions to the oneness of being that is the condition for anything else to become. Because of this, it is woman rather than man who reveals what it means to be in the context of Christianity’s understanding of God.
Here, Lacan is at his most provocative from the perspective of his feminist interlocuters, particularly those in the post-Protestant tradition of English-speaking academia, who are tone-deaf to the theological nuances in Lacanian theory. Lacan situates the question of subjectivity and otherness in terms of the philosophical distinction between paternal form and maternal matter, masculine perfection and feminine lack. A woman lacks the definite article, because her otherness derives from the fact that she is on the side of the not-all, matter in relation to form, lack in relation to perfection, as the excluded other of the universal One of the form: “The Woman can only be written with a line through The. There is no Woman with the definite article designating the universal. There is no Woman because . . . of her essence, she is not all.”25 But it is in this “not-all” that Thomas’s God can be purged
of his Aristotelian distortions, and revealed anew as the Other of woman’s jouissance, which expresses an incarnate desire for that which is beyond all knowing, naming and possessing. This is a surplus jouissance, supplemen- tary to anything that can be said of the sexual relationship in terms of desire and otherness.
Lacan detects a double deception in Thomas’s Christian appropriation of Aristotelianism. First, Aristotle defies the logic of his own philosophy when he privileges the soul over the body, because in the Aristotelian/ Thomist order of being there is no a priori knowledge. All that we are is formed by way of our sensory interactions with the material world. So, says
Thomas, “The proper act is produced in its proper potentiality. Therefore since the soul is the proper act of the body, the soul was produced in the body.”26 Second, in Christianity the emphasis is not on Christ’s soul but on
his body—a body that, like every human body, has a beginning but no end in the order of being. So not only does Christianity introduce the obscenity of the flesh into the purity of the Greek philosophical form, it also condemns the human to the unbearable jouissance of eternal bodily life. We come into being from a void but we can never escape from being back into the void. Let’s bear these points in mind, for they haunted Lacan’s Catholic soul.
Christianity’s God as Other must be differentiated from “the idea of a God that is not that of the Christian faith, but that of Aristotle—the unmoved mover, the supreme sphere.”27 Over and against this Aristotelian
concept of God, Lacan posits the Other of woman’s bodily desire:
The whole foundation of the idea of the Good in Aristotle’s eth- ics is that there is a being such that all other beings with less being than him can have no other aim than to be the most being they can be. . . . [I]t is in the opaque place of the jouissance of the Other, this Other as being which might be the woman, if she existed, that the Supreme being, manifestly mythical in Aristo- tle, is situated, the unmoved sphere from which there proceed all movements whatever they may be. . . .
It is insofar as her jouissance is radically Other that woman has more of a relationship to God than all that could have been said in ancient speculation following the pathway of that which manifestly articulates itself only as the good of the man.28
Lacan is both deconstructing the Aristotelian/Thomist order of knowledge, and appropriating it as potentially offering a more truthful ac- count of reality than Platonic and later Cartesian and Kantian accounts of the subject. With Thomas/Aristotle, he is insisting that the soul is empty of content except insofar as this is provided by the experiencing body. Against Thomas/Aristotle, he is refusing to ontologize the reproductive/sexual rela- tionship as fundamental to the order of being.
Referring to Aristotle’s De Anima, Lacan points out that “if there is something that grounds being, it is assuredly the body.”29 But according
to Lacan, Aristotle fails to link this to “his affirmation . . . that man thinks with—instrument—his soul.” This means, says Lacan, that “man thinks with
26. ST I, 90, 4.
27. Lacan, SXX, 104 (82). 28. Ibid., 104–5 (82–83). 29. Ibid., 140 (110).
Aristotle’s thought. In that sense, thought is naturally on the winning side.”30
Through the influence of Aristotle, mediated by way of Thomas, the mind has displaced the body as a source of knowledge, so that man/form/mind is “on the winning side” over woman/matter/body. But this is an illusion, because in saying that the man thinks with his soul, Aristotle denies that the source of thought is the body. So, says Lacan, “He animates nothing, he (mis)takes the other for his soul” (il prend l’autre pour son âme).31
Lacan seeks to expose this inverted order of truth that constitutes intellectual mastery in the Western ordering of knowledge, by bringing into view the excluded other of the body as the locus wherein the God of Christian desire is to be discovered, beyond all the myths and frustrations of the sexual relationship. Language (le langage) constitutes the conceptual- ized and rationalized sphere of the symbolic, but this conceals the body’s mother tongue (la langue), the voice of the unconscious with its visceral and unformed expressions of lack and longing, horror and ecstasy, love and loss. There is an inversion in the order of reality, when Western philosophy privi- leges soul over body and mind over matter, for in fact, without the medium of the body the soul would know nothing.