¹Department of English, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA

Correspondence: Ellie Ragland, 502 West Rockcreek Drive, Columbia, MO 65203, USA. E-mail: raglande@missouri.edu

Abstract

I shall argue that the Islamic veil is a symptom of the question, "What is Woman?" As a symptom of male phallic castration, the veil works as "non-delivered meaning," one definition Jacques-Alain Miller gives of the symptom. As a signifier of jouissance, the veil hides that which is impossible to say and leads to the object a, which refers to a jouissance beyond words, a jouissance whose first roots are in the attachment of an infant to the mother's body. The Father's Name signifier reappears in the veil as a third thing, a prohibition against a supposed Oneness between the infant and the mother. Thus, the veil proscribes the jouissance of woman, covering over her sexuality, her gaze, her lips, sometimes even her voice. Insofar as the veil is meant to calm the effects of the drives, it is a semblant, an emblem of the woman's being placed outside the symbolic, on the side of the real. What is woman's object, the veil asks, she herself being man's object? I would argue that the veil is the semblant that organizes the paternal metaphor (Oedipal structure) in Islamic culture around the Father's Name signifier while making the woman the coordinate of that signifier. Indeed, the veil is the semblant of the truth in jouissance and of the reality in the phallic function.