On Reading Lacan Without Interpretation: The Dogma of Female Enjoyment

The absence of interpretation in certain readings of Lacan is baffling. This pertains particularly to Lacanians. Take for example Luce Irigaray's influential misreading in Speculum of the Other Woman on the infamous passages on female enjoyment and mysticism in Lacan's Encore. It is as Lacan really ever said more of what he eventually only uttered and not enounced. Due to a non-interpretation of his readers or hearers, Lacan's every utterance is treated dogmatically, by Lacanians and Lacan's critics as well. What is missing in Irigaray's reading or hearing of Lacan is the very interpretation, of the context of his utterances on female enjoyment and knowledge, and moreover, that nothing is said of which, preciselly because of that, a discourse of an "extra" or "plus" followed, to compensate for the absent fact, namely that Lacan, when each one of his audience was eager to hear Lacan speak about the woman, did not hear him properly. Perhaps, his "cravat was an obstacle"... It is more likely that Lacan never bothered to enounce anything about female enjoyment in Encore since he already in the thirties, in his treatment of Aimée and the case of the Papin sisters, was perhaps the first to dare to challenge the psychology's and Freud's notion of "female enjoyment". Not only because Lacan recognizes that the notion of female enjoyment leaves the male instrument of enjoyment, his sexual organ, in the hands of the idiot but nonetheless because there is nothing of the knowledge of the enjoyment the male has the access to, as little or none at all as the female. Because this knowledge, equally unknown to the male and the female, is the enjoyment itself, of the subject of the unconscious. There is nothing male or female about it. And this is a subject whose being - of the order of the real - does not seem to fit in the binary logic of gender ideology....