Título:

Transsexual surgery: A novel reminder and a navel remainder Por: Gozlan, Oren,
Transsexual surgery: A novel reminder and a navel remainder, 0803706X, January 1,
2011, Vol. 20, Edição 1
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Transsexual surgery: A novel reminder and

Abstract
This paper considers questions of gender integration in transsexuality. While, historically, the
medical/clinical establishment has treated the transsexual's desire for surgery as a hysterical
demand, I develop the view, with the Lacanian theories of Gherovici and Verhaeghe, that
transsexual surgery may signify a means to traverse phantasy and claim one's desire. This
formulation depends on Lacan's notion of “the Act.” Along with presenting clinical material, the
paper asks: is it useful to think about hysteria while trying to think about gender, identity
formation, and sexual difference? Can the demand for surgery be other than a demand for
certitude?
On the cover of Gherovici's Please select your gender (2010), we see a slender figure dressed
in feminine clothes standing in front of a toilet, legs slightly spread, as if ready to urinate.The
woman (or man?) stands facing away from us, with hair tied up in pigtails in the fashion of little
girls, and wearing high-heeled boots. Readers are pressed to articulate what they are seeing. Is
this a man or a woman, a transsexual or a transvestite? We may look at the cover over and over
and over, but we cannot walk away with a sure answer. What then renders this figure so
indeterminant? Does the ambiguity reside in our ideas of what gender should be, or in the
figure's actions? Gherovici's book cover suggests that language and the body do not get along.
Knowledge, all at once, settles and destroys meanings .
Historically, the medical profession has approached the transsexual as a problematic figure who
cannot accept the limits of the body, or who treats the body as a fetish, thus insisting on
becoming a “real” man or woman as the means to become complete or whole. Sex
reassignment surgery (SRS) is often treated in psychoanalytic literature as evidence for such a
conceptualization, and surgery is seen as both a mutilation and an omnipotent attempt to enact
a phantasy of rebirth in order to reach an ideal construction of another sex (Gozlan, 2008). The
request for SRS is often viewed as a hysterical idealization of the Other's completeness, an
urgency to settle the question of identity, and hence foreclose the uncertainty on which
subjectivity depends.
The transsexual presents both an insistence on medicalization of the body and a challenge to it.
As a challenge, transsexual surgery may also signify an “act” that traverses phantasy. In this
view, transsexual surgery is a means to claim one's desire, altering the body for further
elaboration over the course of life. Such transitions can be given meaning through the analytic
endeavor. Via the transference, analysis, after all, repeats the relation with the Other where
patients come to recognize themselves as incomplete and alone. Even as transsexuals rely on
medicalizing their body, they must challenge this medicalization to give meaning to
embodiment. The question of meaning for the transsexual will be illustrated through Freud's
understanding of appearance and disappearance (Fort–Da) as a way to handle lack.
Identification and the body's excess
Paul Verhaeghe (2009) analyzes the problem of the body caught between pleasure and pain.
He considers this conflict as the grounds for which the Oedipal myth was conjured. In its original
helplessness, the body of a newborn infant is subjected to its own sexual tension, both
unbearable and pleasurable. Something within in the gap between ego and body cannot be
grasped or represented, and this lack is projected outward to an external Other. Gender
becomes a container for one's desire to close the gap, yet desire serves to keep the gap open.
These imagined attempts at closing and opening, and satiating and creating, desire take many
forms, although everything depends upon the psyche's ability to tolerate absence.
One way to think about opening and closing desire is to remember how Freud links hysteria to
writing a novel. In 1893, Freud wrote a paper in which he establishes the hysterical symptom in
the domain of the psyche (Freud & Breuer, 1893–1899). He had noticed that his cases read like
novels (Britzman, 2006). This led to a theory of hysteria that conceived the subject's illness as
part of “a story with its own style” (Britzman, 2006, p. 19), what Britzman describes as a
narrative that creates and prevents meaning. Psychic life is created by fiction –“a phantasy of
knowledge” – a “motivating fiction” that keeps the subject desiring, through a search for total
satisfaction. Although this is never achieved, the lack keeps the subject engaged in a search.
The subject, as Britzman observes, “wants to know against all odds” (2006, p. 18).
Freud came to view the story embroidered in the analytic process as a novel that links the
symptom with the patient's place of suffering. The work of analysis becomes a “theory of
distance” (Britzman, 2006, p. 17), For Freud, hysteria involves two interrelated concepts:
conversion and identity. In hysteria, an instinctual drive is represented by a symptom – that is, in
hysteria the symptom remains close to the “effects of the unconscious” (Adams, 1996, p. 7).
Hysteria is much like a dream where the symptom draws us into the vortex of the unconscious
phantasy.
Whereas Freud situated hysteria as a problem of identification with both man and woman, the
universality of the hysterical symptom may be more accurately expressed through Adams's
(1996) framing of the hysterical dilemma: there is identification with one, and also identification
with the other. We are reminded by Green (quoted in Perelberg, 2008, p. xvi) that identification,
in contrast to identity, is “a mode of thinking in the unconscious,” and as such is linked with the
phantasy of the primal scene where masculinity and femininity oscillate and there is fluidity
between positions and ideas. Identity, in contrast, is a defensive illusion of unity that is opposed
to the fluidity of masculinity and femininity. It is defined in terms of one's image of one's body
and conscious ideas about the self. The fluidity of identificatory processes, however, may
overwhelm the hysteric, who confuses reality and phantasy (e.g., phallus and penis), and lead
to a search for certainty. In the hysterical solution, feminine and masculine styles of loving are
dissociated (Kristeva, 1988).
If hysteria comes close to the expression of the unconscious, the symptomatic form it may take
will elaborate the struggle between the foreignness of the unconscious verses the embodied
self. Estrangement comes to be expressed though gender – a mark that is applied to the object
– that, like a name, is given before birth and will become a bearer of a string of meanings, and
then a metaphor for difference itself. And if the unconscious is something that surpasses the
embodied self and is the Other, it will be “a stumbling block” (Pluth, 2007, p. 17) to the self's
attempts for signification, processes that, through language, regulate what is in excess of the
self's symbolic capacity.
Gherovici considers both the hysterical and the sinthomic solution to the problem of desire and
its excess. Both positions are attempts to regulate jouissance. However, the hysterical stance
believes in satisfaction and is involved in an endless search for a guarantor. That stance is
based on a belief in the phallus. Indeed, most literature grounds transsexuality in a hysterical
race toward the creation of a body that will offer complete satisfaction to the Other, or as a way
to evade desire altogether by transgressing the limits of the body.
Gherovici draws on Lacan's concept of the “sinthome” – a position situated in doubt – as a way
out of the certitude of pathology. In the sinthomic position, alienation with phallic signifiers is
accompanied by something else – a lack, or an absence that leaves room for meaning. And
signifiers may then be used autonomously, in “profound indifference to the Other” (Pluth, 2007,
p. 104). But this involves giving up the “complacent,” comfortable relation to the other
(Fink, 1995, p. 72) in a way that permits signifiers (e.g., of masculinity/femininity) to be used in a
way that is not bound up with predetermined meaning. Transsexuality as a position in relation to
jouissance can be only considered when castration is not taken literally, when the Oedipal story
does not lose its phantasmic qualities, and when its psychic author remains the subject.
Transsexuality as sinthome
Lacan's captivating concept of sinthome points to a different route out of endless suffering. In
contrast to the hysterical position, which takes its symptom as truth (a true filler for the Other's
lack), we create a sinthome when we identify with our symptom, that is, when we no longer
believe in the truth of the symptom but see it as a creative product of the self, and hence take
ownership of it. We may enjoy our fantasy of the Other but doubt its authority. We suture
phantasy and doubt together, willing to make do with the scar that at the same time divides and
unites us. The unconscious gives shape to lack through metaphor. In the imaginary world, there
is no lack. The lack is a remainder that is left at the door of the symbolic world of language, the
sensations, “things’ language fails to signify (Efrati & Israeli, 2007). The symptom comes to hide
the lack, but it also hides desire, an aspect of demand that cannot be satisfied (Lacan defining
desire as demand minus need). The sinthome expresses the coming to terms with the fact that
partial happiness is possible only in the face of lack.
This is in fact the scenario proposed by Gherovici for the transsexual question. Gherovici
introduces the example of Schreiber and Henry (Lacan's transsexual patient) as a way to
consider how the absence of a paternal function –a third space – creates a phantasy of a
claustrum for which different solutions may be employed as a way out. Transsexuality may also
function as a way out of a claustrum, and in this way can introduce difference but in a way that
circumvents “the name of the father.”
Lacan turned to the Schreiber case when treating a transsexual patient named Henry. He
argued that the madness of the father's discourse in the Shreiber case could not function as a
representation of the law but instead “was” the law . The law and the real became one.
Similarly, in Henry's case, the paternal function had failed, leading his patient to confuse the
phallus with the penis. The penis could not be symbolized, making his whole body feel like “a
foreign body” (Gherovici, 2010). Gherovici posits that Henry's demand for surgery illustrated the
way in which sexual difference needs to be embodied in both the symbolic and the imaginary
realm. For Henry, it was the deferred wish for surgery rather than its granting that protected
against the Other's jouissance. The surgery (which he never underwent and which he never
fully pursued) represented a subtraction of a “privileged piece of flesh from the Other's
jouissance” (Gherovici, 2010, p. 159).
In Gherovici's account, the surgery has a relational quality and paradoxically becomes a way to
peel off the crust of signifiers that enclose the real body, and so “carve out” a lack. Gherovici
demonstrates how unconscious sexual positioning does not depend on the literal organ or on a
performative identification with an image. Within the unconscious, the proclamation “I am a
man” or “I am a woman” exemplifies the inherent alienation in subjectivity that is derived from
the very fact of language. We are split on the choice of “meaning” – that is, the signifier that
comes from the Other or “being” – of the subject (Gherovici, 2010, p. 197). This impossible
position, Gherovici argues, is a terrific conflict, one in which choosing meaning comes at the
cost of disappearance under the Other's signifiers, while choosing “being” risks losing meaning,
which comes from the Other.
In Lacan's theory of anxiety, jouissance is a resistance to symbolization that in phantasy is
made into something the Other wants (Pluth, 2007). Through fantasy, the subject makes himself
or herself what the Other may enjoy. But this also places the subject at an impasse because of
the impossibility of jouissance – “Something of jouissance continues to escape the
phantasmatic situation of jouissance” (Pluth, 2007, p. 87). Anxiety is twofold: of being the object
of the Other's desire, and of being expelled from the Other as a failed object. In both situations,
the subject's status in relation to the Other is put into question, so jouissance can be
phantasized as an encounter with death (Pluth, 2007). It is the anxiety of falling into the
phantasmic hole that touches the reality of the lack of the Other – the uncovered gap between
the subject and his or her Otherness.
Lacan distinguishes between strategies to handle anxiety over the jouissance of the Other. One
is through acting out, which may be akin to the hysterical solution of addressing the Other
directly and believing in a possible reunion, “if only …” A second is what Gherovici attributed to
some forms of transsexuality that create a sinthome, which she views as consistent with
Lacan's “passage to act” (and which Pluth attributes to Lacan's third strategy – an Act). Gerovici
interprets the “passage to Act” not as a direct message to the Other, not “a message addressed
to anyone, but rather as implying a disintegration of the subject who, for a moment, becomes a
pure object, a leftover signification” (Gherovici, 2010, p. 203).
In a clinical example of a bulimic patient, Gherovici argues that, in the act of throwing up, her
patient Linda was “swallowed by jouissance beyond castration” (Gherovici, 2010, p. 206). Eating
and vomiting were a way in which Linda held onto jouissance to ensure her rejection from her
mother. In an ironic way, it was her way of carving out a lack in the Other as a desperate
attempt to feel desired by the Other, as her maternal discourse did not have room for “the name
of the father.” We learn that, in her analysis with Gherovici, Linda was able to take control of her
symptom. She no longer saw the Other's desire as a demand for her to embody “the primal
cause of this desire.” We learn that Linda became a culinary artist and that food became the
medium through which the remainder of jouissance was “cut away from the body’ (p. 208) and
made open to interpretation, a surface that could be written upon.
Similarly, Gherovici posits that, in some instances, a transsexual body is a self-created fiction
that allows a subject to live. She particularly focuses on the transsexual's drive to write, which
she studies in numerous memoirs of transitioning, as well as in the process of transitioning
itself. Both entail a particular narrative that becomes a story of origin, such as is required by
health authorities as a prerequisite for the initiation of hormone treatment. For Gherovici, this
process of writing is a transformative rewriting of a story of origin that inscribes difference. It
involves a reinterpretation of the subject's stance in relation to the Other. Finally, the process
puts subjects in the role of authors of their own destiny.
Indeed, transitioning can be conceptualized in this way as a rebirthing of oneself; however, this
rebirthing not only is in a sense imaginary or real, but also holds threads of the real, symbolic,
and imaginary. The new narrative holds the possibility of changing the structure of the subject in
that the Other no longer plays an important part in it, and this very gap between the self and the
Other is mourned. It is a transition that accepts failure as inevitable and is willing to live
creatively with the “between zone,” as if in the place of a “suture” created by bridging the
phantasy of complementarity or satisfaction, and the lack, joining meaning and
meaninglessness.
In the transsexual sinthomatic position, the body and its narrative are held together by “sutures”
whose visible scars reveal its precarious composition. The “lost object” is recovered through
writing but is not believed. It merely functions as a placeholder for desire (Gozlan, 2008).
Signification and endless pleasure, language and sexuality, can be as if “sutured” together and
contained by what Lacan calls an “Act” – a transgressive move away from complete
identification with the Other's desire, to identification with lack. An “Act” does not describe
movement or a physical action. It refers to a signifying act that captures both certainty and
doubt. It allows for desire but anchors it in a fleeting imaginary – an “as if.” It is both concrete
and symbolic – a “thing” (e.g., a body) – and its representation that does not completely let go of
the unreachable and unintelligible kernel. I argue that, within the Lacanian framework,
transsexuality can function as this “Act”, a way by which the subject inscribes difference to
bridge the gap between lack and satisfaction, where the phantasy of the body's imagined
“wholeness” (its imaginary unity through gender) is linked with absence of the Other (e.g., there
is no preordained meaning to femininity or masculinity) – “a realization that there is no Other of
the Other, as it were, acting as a ground” (Pluth, 2007, p. 148).
Identification with the Act: A clinical fragment
If the symptom is a way to fictively hide the basic truth of lack, the purpose of the analytic act is
to come to terms with lack by creating a narrative, embroidering a personal myth where
enjoyment is shaped by a plot that is written by the subject rather than by a phantasy that is
believed in. Each symptom contains a hidden wish, a sinthomatic solution or “act,” and hence
the analytic act functions as a way to turn this wish from a complaint into desire, keeping the
subject in movement.
Can transsexuality, we may ask, which involves corporal intervention, be considered
sinthomatic? If gender is a way to symbolize sexual difference within the self, a sinthomatic
creation of Otherness through one's own jouissance, this difference does not lie exclusively in
the body or in conscious identity. For Gherovici, the sinthome is where surgery and writing
intersect. Transsexual writing is a way in which transsexual subjects embody “sexual difference”
by rewriting a story of origin that invents themselves, and thus releases the phantasized hold of
the Other's determinations. This rewriting – in literal form and as a historical account of one's
becoming – is a way in which the paradoxical concreteness that Gherovici observes in some
transsexual desire to close the gap between the body and its lack becomes loosened.
I illustrate transsexual desire with a clinical fragment of one of my patients, whom I will call Aron.
His early recollection may be analyzed as a means of elaborating the move from hysterical
solution to traversal of phantasy. Aron is a female-to-male patient in his late 30s who recalls at
the age of three being held by his father but feeling uncomfortable (as if he was suffocating or
absent). He recalls crying and wanting to be handed back to his mother, but then finding this
intolerable and crying again, wanting to shift back to his father. This switching from mother to
father, father to mother, occurred several times, accompanied by uncontained anxiety, anger,
and feelings of being suffocated by both parents.
Aron's depiction of his parents portrayed an extremely self-absorbed pair. He described his
mother as a passive martyr who turned her attention and investment to her husband at the
expense of her children, and portrayed his father as a volatile man, sadistic and envious of him.
Aron felt that both parents were actively invested in stifling his attempts to separate by
restricting his exposure to outside circles (e.g., not allowing him to go to or invite friends round)
and becoming overly dependent on him. Aron's early recollection of moving from one parent to
the other, unlike the Fort–Da game, was directed at his parents and was infused with a wish to
receive the containment he craved for. But perhaps it also held a grain of what would become
his ongoing struggle to dis-identify with them both.
Aron wondered whether his own transsexuality might have functioned to avoid him becoming
engulfed by his parents, perhaps being a way to free himself from the claustrum of their
projections. He felt that his new genitals were “finite,” “symbolic” representations of organs, that
were “functionless and cannot reproduce,” a cut into a phantasy of “generational transmission.”
He described his new genitals as “a closure of a cavity and at the same time useless organs,
leading nowhere.” I had an image of a navel: a useless organ, a cavity, finite, leading
somewhere and nowhere. Yet Aron expressed feeling good enough about his new penis, stating
that analysis had somehow allowed him to think in a novel way about gender. He came to speak
of his transitioning as helping to maintain a fantasy of cohesion and as a novelty – the beginning
of a process to embody masculinity, however tenuous this work might be.
I told Aron of my association with the concept of the navel as he spoke of novelty. He
associated to the scars on his body following surgery and how they marked “a closure to
continuity,” by which he meant “organs that cannot procreate or connect.” Aron felt that he had
“disconnected” a link to his parents that threatened his ability to separate and become his own
person. He also felt that he had somehow linked phantasy to reality in the analytic process in
that he no longer believed in the possibility of cohesive or complete embodiment (e.g.,
becoming a “real” man), yet he created a comfortable coherence for himself through a
semblance of psychic “procedures” that began after his surgery, once he was forced to contend
with his scars. For Aron, surgery may have begun as a phantasized release from the Other's
entrapment. However, the analytic “act” became a creative way of instilling meaning in a place
once saturated with the phantasy of parental authorship. He felt that, through the analysis, he
was “pushed beyond [his] body,” yet made his body into a better container that was able to “hold
a sense of coherence.”
Transsexuality may be considered as one route to inscribe difference in the same way that there
is, in any creative construction, also inherent destruction that creates the external world. For
Aron, surgery perhaps began as an unconscious way to close the possibility of being sucked
into the Other's grip. In a phantastical sense, the transsexual body can no longer merge with the
parental image. Aron was aware, at some level, of the phantasy that he could not be usurped by
his parents’ needs in his transsexual body. He would not be an object of desire for his parents in
the sense that, at the level of phantasy, his body could no longer be reduced to the phallic
desire of the Other.
SRS makes organs into symbolic “stains” in the same way that cutting the umbilical cord leaves
a mark. Like a navel, an imaginary point of origin, the genitals also represent a phantasy of a
lost unity. Both spaces mark an imaginary point of separation and union, linking and unlinking ,
creating and destroying, birth and death. Sex reassignment surgery becomes a way to rupture
the imaginary link to the Other at the same time as leaving a mark (stitch) on the body that
becomes a renewed way of linking two spaces that are forever marked by a gap/scar, a sort of
link that is borne of the impossibility of unity. Surgery then becomes an act – it traverses a
phantasy of union, giving up the phantasized Other, but having to live with a scar.
For Aron, the scar is a remainder of incompleteness and the pain of integration, as if it were a
primal pictographic image representing a yearning for potential cohesion. Through surgery, this
fantasy was brought to an end at the same time as it created a marking on the body, in Aron's
words, “like a gravestone one has to leave behind” for a new beginning. But through analysis,
this final mark was also linked with a psychic reminder of responsibility. The scar is a carving
made by the self, a creation of the body that is made to “suit” a phantasy in order to make space
for desire. Aron came to accept his body as “good enough” and accepted the multiple
representations of masculinity that enabled him to feel “one of many sorts of men.” Analysis
helped Aron to move away from the literality of the body in answering the question “Who am I?,”
and toward the ability to represent his “I” through his body.
The act of analysis is the act of becoming a subject in gender: creating desire out of a place of
meaninglessness, rather than there being an incessant desire for hidden or forbidden meaning
that the phantasy of castration conceals. The transsexual body can function much like free
association, a technique whose aim is not to arrive at a final truth. Surgery in itself becomes
irrelevant to the question of pathology, because what distinguishes an Act from an acting out is
not the activity but its ability to be enjoyed as lacking. Some transsexual subjects may indeed
reside in this suspended place of creativity. They may come to enjoy the incomplete body in a
way that gives expression to its accidental identifications that are an inherent aspect of desire's
polymorphous nature, yet they may lean on these identifications as mythical embroidery or
rather than as the filler for the empty container that these identifications truly are.
Transsexuality, sexual difference, and novel beginning
The body moves from being a biological entity determined by an originary point to a body that
incurs its history through a re-creation that comes to terms with the instability of its own archive.
In this way, the surgery may signify a rebirth that resists an origin. It is a birthing of the self, of
sorts, which is not tied to the phantasy of reproduction. The desire for “new genitals” does not lie
in the aim of achieving unity via procreation or continuity through lineage. Rather,
metaphorically, it may be imagined as creating a point of origin that is closer to the navel – the
scar that signifies separation from the mother, a hole that hints at an endless unknown, but is
also a sign of a wounding impossibility.
Transitioning is not simply the act of surgery itself, but is also the narration that accompanies
one's becoming, the acceptance of the scar that reveals separation and mending of the memory
of the body. The repetition is turned, symbolically, to a place on the body that is lacking and
requires signification. In a sense, the space between the body and its narration is reminiscent of
a dialogue between art and writing, where the two elements function as one entity without
collapsing into each other. Post-surgery scars symbolize primal components of pain and
wounding – what the untrammelled image hides. The narrative and the surgery both hide a
slippery link between origin and meaning that cannot be captured. Transitioning becomes a
creative project that gains meaning retroactively as an attempt to recreate or repeat a
preconscious (pre-difference) primary phantasized origin – an event that cannot be symbolized
but appears to yearn for meaning.
Writing on the body and narrating makes the body into a center of memory that carries
inscriptions of separation and, as such, the formation of a sense of an “I.” We may imagine the
transsexual body as a “creation,” and the genitals, much like the navel, as symbolic markers of
separation and union, functionless organs that cannot link – as if the subject's sense of loss is
inscribed upon them. Indeed, the meaning of the body for some transsexuals is uprooted from
its imaginary essentialist qualities, yet it becomes attached to the image of the body that, like a
peel, holds meaning through its endless links to the Other, although now with the realization that
these links are associative and are placeholders rather than idealized truths. It is the very nature
of the transsexual image, its fragility, its fear of coming apart (of being “read,” “misread,”
exposed), that holds together the enigma of sexual difference, the controlled and stable
alongside the hidden intimate, the organizing element of desire and its polymorphous nature,
the riddle of sexuality and the double meaning that is inherent in every image.
Sex change involves taking a plunge into the unknown. One can never predict how the body will
appear after surgery. The surgery brings the estrangement between the body and the self to the
foreground. As described above, the body moves from being a historical entity determined by an
originary point to a body that incurs its history through a re-creation, that comes to terms with
the instability of its own archive. In this way, the surgery may signify a rebirth that resists an
origin. It is a birthing of the self that is not tied to the phantasy of reproduction, whose aim is not
unity via procreation or continuity through lineage. Rather, metaphorically, it may be
phantasized as creating a point of origin that is closer to the navel – the scar that signifies
separation from the mother, a hole that hints at an endless unknown but is also a sign of a
wounding impossibility – a point of creation that is borne of destruction, a cut that creates an
external reality.
Like the navel, post-surgery genitals are not live organs but scar tissue, representatives of a
novel way of working through impossibility. They become a reminder of impossibility and
meaninglessness, a hole leading to no certain place, but they also become a novel remainder, a
sort of leftover of an impossible wish, carrying the mark of the endless desire concealed in the
wish. The navel is an imaginary “spot of archaic emergence” (Ettinger, 2002) on which life
depends, but it has to be closed. It is a phantasmic spot that may bring us associatively to the
primal scene where incestuous cravings and their prohibition converge. Any being beyond
phallic certainty requires this potential to transgress incest prohibition. Transgression and taboo
coexist in the unconscious (Ettinger, 2002) and represent the way in which timelessness and
meaninglessness turn into meaning that is invented symbolically. We may imagine the navel as
a sinthome, a mark of a cut that makes the incestuous an impossibility, which is inscribed in
every relation.
Like a scar (which links two surfaces but is also a revelation of a gap) or the navel (which is both
a “hole-mark” of unity and an absence), transsexuality as sinthome involves bringing together
masculinity and femininity, certainty and death, in a place of constant suspense. Through the
analytic act, the point of joining/unity and absence is carried through in all relations, making
them “trans-subjective,” a swerving/touching/not touching relation without relating (Ettinger,
2002).
Imagining sexual difference as an act of linking that is so bound with affect – anxiety about
contact or absence – swerves it away from the concreteness of the phallus, which is resurrected
defensively as a protection against difference itself. Sexual difference is now changed from
reference to impasse into a mystical canopy, a mystical sense or “perceptive relationship”
(Fachinelli, 1996) that also creates an unconscious flame nurturing an illusion that is borne of
the suspense of surrender, a being that is rooted in “giving oneself to being alone with another
one does not know” (Eigen, 2009, p. 27).
The subject's difference is a sinthome – an irreducible “zone” capable of holding “things coming
from elsewhere,” sensations beyond reach that are linked only loosely – a kind of knowledge
that wove phantasm out of web-like threads and delicate points of contact. Difference in this
sense is always feminine, as it does not rely on phallic opposition between having and not
having. Another path is opened that does not rely on fusion and rejection, having and not
having. Rather, it is the very link between the subject and the other that weaves the two spaces
together, creating this sense of mystical, irreducible space, on which a sense of being depends.
If “knitting the self together” depends on narrating or writing, the Real that cannot be written will
always make subjectivity a creative, never-ending process where impossibility also creates a
space for invention. The transsexual body can potentially become this sort of invention that
knots together primal imprints, inscriptions of joining and absence, that are at the edge of
possibility (because, at the primal level, both can lead to death), that, like the artist's creation, is
not symbolized or signified but is reproduced in the art itself (Ettinger, 2002). Transsexuality as
sinthome empresses the impossibility of sexual rapport, and hence is an expression of
difference.
We can say that what some transsexuals want is to weave a self that is close to the Real of
timelessness and is alive because it is also aware of its death – a temporality that is a function
of its lack . But for this self to be held together, for it to be the “beauty” (Ettinger, 2002) that lies
between phallic pleasure and jouissance, something has to function as protection against
fragmentation – a kind of foreclosure that in the transsexual comes in the shape of surgery.
However, through the analytic process, surgery is not the end but a beginning that, like the
developmental beginnings of the “I,” emerges from a negative (e.g., I am not this, I am that). In
the passage of transitioning, there is a moment of certainty that is always in opposition to how
others recognize one's gendered self. This opposition becomes a resistance to one's
responsibility over one's conceptual and emotional “pictogram.” There is an idea that the self is
dependent on the Other's recognition and that the self can only begin there. Analysis helps to
make space for a more abstract notion of the self, similar to the difference between
representational and abstract painting.
Analysis cannot change one's phantasy but does allow one to think about one's construction of
the self in ways other than an originary moment in external reality, as well as to tolerate the
incompleteness of knowledge. Surgery can become, through the analytic act, a literal knotting
that is also aware of its own literality but that considers it as one enjoys art – for its beauty, not
its phallic truth. Psychoanalysis dislodges saturated meanings and helps one survive moments
of going beyond subjectivity, moments in which one can enjoy the phantasy of cohesion without
believing it. Once the Other's position is mourned as an idealized phantasy, desire turns from an
incessant search for ultimate satisfaction to something fleeting that can be enjoyed only in the
moment, in a space that bridges reality and fantasy, in the tension of life and death. Aron 's
masculinity no longer lies in the future. His surgery no longer aims to phantastically mend a
fractured point of origin where things can connect or lie in harmony, like a resuturing of the
umbilical cord. Through the analytic project, identity is realized as an instant of madness that
can be enjoyed only in art.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge my colleagues Patricia Gherovici and Deborah Britzman
for their thoughtful suggestions.
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