The Mediation of Lack: The Feminine Position and the Structure of the Subject in Lacan

Psychoanalysis has met, since its inception, a structural obstacle at the question of the feminine. Taking Lacan's assertion that the woman does not exist as its point of departure, this paper reconstructs the generative mechanism of the feminine position within his theory of the symbolic order, and argues that the defining character of that position is captured precisely by the term the mediation of lack. The argument falls into two parts of equal weight. The first proceeds within Lacanian theory. The self-referential structure of the symbolic system, which can never exhaust the real, makes lack something that must be mediated rather than confronted or abolished, and the objet petit a is on this account a structural necessity. Against this background the masculine position secures a closable location through the having and not-having distinction organized by a central signifier, while the feminine position stands in an unclosed zone between the symbolic and the real, its stability resting instead on the persistence of a relational dynamics. There arises from this a mechanism by which the subject internalizes the persistence of lack as a function of itself, becoming the site at which lack is kept relatable, accessible, and open to continued questioning. The second part does not rest in exposition. It passes first through the feminist and post-structuralist critique, which discloses that what is confining in this position issues from the historical construction of a particular symbolic order rather than from structural necessity, and then reframes the position within the framework of Generative Relational Being, under which the mediation of lack is not a defect but the site at which relational value is generated. On this basis the ethics of the position is set out through five ordered principles, which specify the conditions under which the mediation of lack is just rather than exploited. The account issues in an ethic and closes, in the manner it requires of itself, on the questions that ethic opens.