Introduction

I shall argue that the Islamic veil is a symptom of the questions: What is a woman? What is a man? Working with two articles, "Paradigms of Jouissance" (2000a), and "Notes on Shame" (n.d.), and one Course – On the nature of semblants – by Jacques-Alain Miller, I have come up with a multiform picture of the cause and function of the veil. As a symptom of male phallic castration fears, the veil works as non-delivered meaning – a definition Miller gives of the symptom (Miller, 2000a, p 12). It is also a symptom of why sexuality would be seen as licentious, as well as of why the sexual difference is so mysterious, even traumatic.

At one level, as a signifier of jouissance, the veil hides that which is unspeakable, impossible to say. It is impossible to say the degree to which the fragmented objects a – the voice, the gaze – refer to a jouissance beyond words, a jouissance whose first roots are in the attachment of the infant to the mother's body. The taboo of incest – the Father's Name entering as a third thing, a prohibition of oneness between infant and mother – reappears in the veil. Thus, the traditional veil proscribes the Other's jouissance of woman by covering over her sexuality, her gaze, her lips, sometimes even her voice. In a psychological or a sociological picture, one would merely say that the drive objects of jouissance are covered over, obliterating the woman's sexuality, making her the unique property of one man or one family. But one may already bring up at this point the contraposition between pleasure and jouissance (Miller, 2000a, p 22). Pleasure, since Freud, has been the homeostasis of non-movement, this itself being a good. Jouissance, on the other hand, is the excess of itself. Jouissance or excess has historically been portrayed as dwelling on the side of evil. In this context, the veil marks, paradoxically, the homeostasis of pleasure by its function of covering over, as well as the interdiction of jouissance. Between the signifier that is the veil and the jouissance it hides lies the symptom. On a more global front, Miller says, jouissance is an equivalent of the Symbolic without the object a – cause of desire, aim of the drives (2000a, p 22).

Much like the art that calms jouissance, as portrayed by Lacan in Seminar XI (1981), the veil is meant to calm the effects of the drives. Indeed, in Seminar XI, Lacan starts with the fragmented body of the partial drives, with the erogenous zones. Drive comes and goes with and without transgression, making jouissance akin to the signifier in the mode of alienation (Miller, 2000a, p 25). The drive indicates that "something in the apparatus of the body is structured in the same way as the unconscious" (Miller, 2000a, p 25). The full Islamic veil tells not only of such repressed objects, but, like a death shroud, mimes their loss, the loss of these primordial objects. In another turn of the kaleidoscope, the veil becomes an equivalent of the lamella, a libido incarnating itself, stating its own absence by its existence. Lacan makes of it a kind of organ, a matrix of lost objects. We remember that the lamella, in Seminar XI, is no longer the signified of desire or das Ding. It is the statement that jouissance outside the signifier is reachable only through transgression. And the veil is, indeed, a law prohibiting transgression on the part of the woman, as well as those who look upon her. Lacan takes all this a step further and tells us that the libido is the object as inadequate to be filled (Miller, 2000a, p 25). The veil hides something, but that something cannot be filled. Perhaps that is why the veil cannot be removed once a woman is married, or when she is a young girl who takes it on. The drive objects in question are always circulating, never finally satiated and at rest.

Indeed, what better statement could you make about the Lacanian Woman than to cover a woman, to say implicitly that she exists as a fantasy, that is, as a phallic dream? Yet, the objects that the veil represents as being recuperable are irrecuperable. What this means is that "separation [from the object] is in fact the recuperation of libido as lost object" (Miller, 2000a, p 26). That is, the libido responds to a signifying lack proper to all human beings, except psychotics. This follows on from the earliest articulation of identification to repression (Miller, 2000a, p 26). Miller even goes so far as to call this link between identification and repression a natural loss. Being subjected to the cycle of sexed reproduction – where one must be a man to a woman or a woman to a man, each losing half his or her identity – causes a loss of life (Miller, 2000a, in reference to Lacan, Seminar XI, 1981, p 26).

But in Seminar XI, Lacan recovers his main ambition: significantization by other means. Things are represented by naming. On the side of naming in Lacan's sexuation graph from Seminar XX (1988a), language is portrayed – as first representable in the Symbolic as a word articulated on the Father's side – as being on the side of the Symbolic (). If you think to cover over, represent, present a thing merely by its naming, then you are cornered in the Symbolic. The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symptom are left out. Insofar as the veil's function is to name a woman as prohibited to others, a certain paradox occurs. She is transferred to the side of the Symbolic order. The Real that is each woman's particular jouissance is covered over and the woman is made masculine, "all" alike, all covered in a similar way: . Meanwhile, the feminine side of sexuation points to the "not all" under one umbrella, each one going her own way, one by one: x.

If the veil were only its naming in the Symbolic and a certain masculinization of women, it would not be very interesting. To return to the complexity of the veil in the sexual non-rapport, one returns to Miller. He says that, to introduce separation and an object a as an answer to the lack of a fundamental signifier for sexual difference, you have to substitute the subject for a living body, a sexed body. The a links das Ding to the Other by mediating, performing a significantization of jouissance. This significantization of jouissance has as one of its names the veil. The veil states implicitly that there both is and is not a sexed body. But, there is The Woman. On Lacan's sexuation graph, the phallic division between the sexes appears as a bar between the masculine and the feminine. In the lower right-hand corner of this graph, Lacan says there is The Woman, who in effect is only a myth, who does not exist as an essence. She is Woman whom one supposes to exist, confused with some Ur-repressed idea of a primordial mother. This problem of what woman is plagues all people and all cultures. And the veil is the complex Islamic solution to this problem: She exists by not being there, by signaling her invisibility. There is no "The Woman" who would be equivalent to the (Name of the Father signifier). But even this signifier is attached to the Real of The Woman who does not exist by the arrow linking it to S(O). This linkage is the phallic dream of eradicating loss, aiming at a homeostasis that is, instead, the death drive of the pleasure principle, itself a symptom of phallic distress.

Instead of a signifier of jouissance – for example, the – Lacan gives us the object a. It is an element that materializes its inscription to the Symbolic order (Miller, 2000a, p 28). Miller clarifies that this is separation, as opposed to alienation. The a has the elementary structure of the signifier and is, together with it, substantial. There is, then, a signifying materiality that is also a substance of jouissance. This makes for the difference between the object a and the signifier (Miller, 2000a, p 28). In a global sense, one could say that the Islamic veil is not about the signifier. That question remains within the realms of anthropology, sociology, history, psychology. Rather, the veil is about the object a and jouissance.

Miller goes on in "Paradigms of Jouissance" (p 28) to say that Lacan's four discourses belong to the paradigm of discursive jouissance (Lacan, 1970; S. XVI (2006a; orig. 1968–69)) and S. XVIII (2007; orig. 1968–69). Discourse, for Lacan, is alienation and separation unified. In Seminar XVII (in press; orig. 1969–70), Lacan says, "There is a primal relation from knowledge to jouissance" (see Miller, 2000a, p 28). And repetition is repetition of jouissance, that is, of something of the death drive that remains "beyond the pleasure principle" (Ragland, 1995). While we know from the Écrits (Lacan, 2006b; orig. 1960: The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious; see Miller, 2000a, p 29) that "the signifier represents the subject for another signifier, equaling symbolic alienation," we know that the discourses show that the signifier represents a jouissance for another signifier (Miller, 2000a, p 29). What is so mysterious about the Islamic veil is that it is not simply a signifier, although it can play this role. It is a part of woman on the side of jouissance, evoking the object a beyond the Symbolic and the signifier.

But what is jouissance? It is emotion, affect in the body. In "The Subversion of the Subject..." (Miller, 2000a, pp 32–33; Lacan, 2006b), Lacan says jouissance is a lack in the Other. In another turn of his teaching, jouissance is the leftover of dead desire. As such, it is impossible, outside the signifier, the signifier rendered absolute. The death shroud appearance of some veils, with their accompanying robes, resembles dead desire, jouissance as lacking. Yet a message is carried by the veil. It says that the Symbolic is autonomous and the signifying chain conveys jouissance (Miller, 2000a, p 33). The effect of the signifier is to have two outcomes: entropy or loss of jouissance, or jouissance as a supplement to the loss of jouissance (Miller, 2000a, p 34). The veil "speaks," saying that woman is bereft of jouissance and at the same time that jouissance is repetitive, "beyond the pleasure principle." Yet the excess jouissance can only be retrieved because jouissance has already been lost – lost in infancy each time the baby tries for a totalized unity and fails (Miller, 2000a, p 34). From Seminar XVII on, this is the way Lacan shows jouissance: loss brought about by the signifier. So the woman under the veil seems strange to us from other cultures. She "states" one of Lacan's latest and most radical axioms: The Woman qua Woman does not exist. And, under the veil, she shows that one needs no sexual masquerade – a masquerade where the men pretend to be real men and the women real women. Knowledge, taken as a means of jouissance, surrenders the autonomy of the Symbolic, possessing the effect of loss and producing a supplement (Miller, 2000a, p 35). The Islamic veil becomes a supplement, a veil of sorrow at The Woman's inexistence. Even more powerfully, truth is the little sister of jouissance, Lacan argues in Seminar XVII. Truth is inseparable from the effects of language and is bound to barred jouissance, jouissance as forbidden, Miller says (Miller, 2000a, p 35). That is, it is not that the Islamic man is going to have a feast of sexuality when he removes his woman's veil in privacy. It is that he is going to show that there is a beyond the signifier where a strange truth reigns – there is no sexual rapport, each partner being a partner to their own Other – his or her unconscious – not to the other.

But what jouissance is forbidden this couple with the veil removed? It is phallic jouissance as exemplary, perfect, and paradigmatic. It is forbidden insofar as what supersedes it is the accretion of entropic loss. The difference between imaginary castration (the -) and the lack it supposes, and the object a, between lack and its supplement, is what conditions and encourages repetition, which is the basis of encore, of repeated jouissance as the essential form of the signifier (Miller, 2000a, p 35). Metonymy is redefined as the loss of jouissance. The veil takes us on a trip toward that which is not subject, but which is a return to the body. Between fantasy ($ <> a) and repetition ($ <> R), one finds the search for lost jouissance, S <> J. The veil links fantasy to jouissance via the repetition of its own appearance as a constant. The symptom in play is that of phallic loss, lack, and impotence.

But on its supplemental side, not its side of entropy and symptom, jouissance is posited as the object a of the drives, where one finds the oral, anal, scopic, and invocatory objects, even nothingness. Indeed, all the objects of sublimation are included (Miller, 2000a, p 37). The veil is exemplary of the sublimation of the objects of the drive, showing that there is a division between the body and jouissance (Miller, 2000a, p 37). The veil becomes the signifier of the cause of jouissance, the goal of the signifier (Miller, 2000a, p 37). In Encore, Seminar XX (1988a), Lacan takes up language as lalangue, as the primordial dits maternels, as evocative of jouissance – not as communication (Miller, 2000a, p 38). This function is grounded not only on the non-rapport between man and woman, but also on the disjunction of signifier and signified, of jouissance and the Other. The veil, here, becomes a connector between orders that do not automatically join, for example, a signifier for the Father's Name that makes a join between the Symbolic and the Real. The veil, in this guise, says there is jouissance and it is in the body (en-corps) (Miller, 2000a, p 42). While jouissance One is the totalizing jouissance of the unary phallic, on the side of the "all," supplemental jouissance is the opposite: it is a jouissance of the whole body as intimated by what the veil hides. In this way, the veil is a symbol of the talking body. The question of what woman's place is in the Symbolic order becomes the question of what is woman? The veil, then, excludes the social Other at the same time that it makes its wearer masquerade as the bearer of jouissance.

In another turn of the kaleidoscope, the veil is deeply reminiscent of the problem of shame as it concerns us. In "Notes on Shame," Miller argues that shame is prior to guilt and is related to jouissance and to that which is most intimate within a subject (Miller, pp 2–3). The veil, in another guise, is a symptom of shame over sexuality. The emergence of shame, Miller says, shows a collapse of the subject (Notes, p 5). But woman under a veil is not a subject as such. She is a semblant that we will talk about later. The woman under the veil is extracted from the spectrum of the gaze and shows the subject as evanescent, fading, $. In this, the woman under the veil is not in the Other because the gaze implies the Other. She is only there as a masculine "all" – all wearing one uniform, all trying to resemble each other as members of a group. Indeed, the masculine logic of the "all" attempts to hide man as a man of jouissance.

The woman is also under the veil as the refuse of the object a: the nothing (to be seen, heard, etc.). The object has fallen. Sartre's view of shame is that one says that one recognizes oneself as the object the Other regards and judges, as that being-in-itself. Lacan adopts the opposite point of view in Seminar XVII. We are no longer subjects of shame, he says, we are at the time [in the late 1960s] of an ellipse of the Other's gaze as the bearer of shame (Miller, "Notes," p 6). And, indeed, it is the gaze, not the voice, that is the prime agent in evoking shame (Miller, "Notes," p 7). The gaze enjoys. Indeed, the death of the gaze parallels the death of God (Miller, "Notes," p 8). Thus traditional Islamic culture of the veil is the opposite of the Western culture Lacan has just described. That Islamic culture lives under the gaze of shame and guilt makes the Abu Ghraib incident all the more shameful for the Americans and the English who participated. As an articulation of the shame that goes along with sexuality, the veil is a response of the Real. It represents Woman as a collection of small a's. Indeed, the veil proves that the Other is barred, is not complete within itself. It needs objects to supplement it. It belies a complete Other who would wish to have nothing to hide. This all gives morality a meaning and vice versa. There is something beyond life, pure, and simple (Miller, "Notes," p 10). Insofar as the veil represents the woman as not a subject, but as an object a, the signifier "Woman" represents her for the Other as absent. The veil says the woman has no place in the Symbolic order. She sacrifices herself to the signifier she was destined by the Other to incarnate (Miller, "Notes," p 12).

On the other hand, the veil is a huge statement. It is a master signifier that is the emblem of the woman under the veil, as honored to be placed outside the Symbolic and on the side of the Real (Miller, "Notes," p 14). The S₂ as equivalent to the veil says that woman is an ineffaceable singularity (Miller, "Notes," p 15). Indeed, attention to singularity makes the subject a master (Miller, "Notes," p 15). This seems to conflict with the idea of the veiled woman as a unitary "all." But the "all" is the One of jouissance, the supplement, while the singularity in question here is of the Symbolic. Your master signifier is contingent, that which does not cease to not write itself, and however fragile one may be, this signifier places one apart from others (Miller, "Notes," p 16; cf. Lacan's text on Gide, 2006c; orig. 1966). The veiled woman is something different for each one and for the man with whom she has a relationship. "The master signifier is the singular unit of value, which cannot be quantified, then, which will not fit into a calculus in which everything is weighed . . . . 'Making ashamed' is an effort to reinstate the agency of the master signifier" (Miller, "Notes," p 18). In today's capitalist West, one can show it all. This is a radically different cultural order from the Islamic. One could even call the culture of the veil one of honest consciousness "which takes 'each moment as an essence that ensures; everything is in its place and which signs the melody of the good and the true'" (Miller, "Notes," pp 20–21). In this reading of the veil, the woman is not only an object for a patriarchal master, but one whose duty, self-esteem, and honor place her within an aristocracy of heroism. This is, I would say, one repressed meaning of the veil. The honor of being morally pure places the noble over the ignoble and prudence over imprudence. Lacan argued that in the West, we are in a system that produces impudence, not shame (Miller, "Notes," pp 2–3). We only apprehend the function of shame in the form of insecurity. That is, the Western subject is no longer under the domination of a master signifier (Miller, "Notes," p 23). Miller says the result for the West is an artificial authoritarian return of the master signifier. The young women who take up the veil defend an offended Father's Name.

I would touch on the issue of the French educational ruling against the veil in public school as fragile. Every Symbolic order in every culture must work out an answer to the question of the sexual non-rapport: What is a woman? What is a man? For one Symbolic to tell an Other what its solution should be smacks of totalitarianism. Yet, Western feminist and leftist consciousnesses abhor the sight of a woman under a veil. How does one intervene? Does one? Are all such interventions pre-emptive? To "make ashamed" attests to the Real that we cover over at all costs. We cover it as synonymous with covering nakedness. Lacan goes on to say that Christian utilitarianism is the reign of the Christian bourgeoisie. And, he argues, rather than being based on shame and honor, it has no honor code (Miller, "Notes," p 24).

In his last work on knots, Lacan evoked the binary pair of the semblant opposed to the real (Miller, 1991–92, p 38). Lacan (2007; orig. 1968–69) asked in his Seminar, "D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant," Seminar XVIII, what such a discourse would be. He answered that the body is equivalent to a cadaver of a delibidinized speaking being. The body of jouissance means the body significantized: not a semblant. What, then, is a semblant? What Miller says in his Course is that the semblant is a category, a principle of classification, a quality attributable to an object, as well as a class where one organizes objects of the same nature. Lacan particularly used the idea of the semblant after Seminar XVII. He invented it after the discourse (Miller, Nov. 20, 1991). Lacan stressed in Seminar XVIII that the phallus can be read as a semblant, as the Real of the father as denuded in psychosis. But most people are not psychotics. What, then, is the Real of the father? It is the Real veiled by the semblants of the father . . . Archie Bunker, Santa Claus. The semblant is not just a static mask, it is not just illusion, for it operates (Miller, 1991–92, p 38). But the totalizing signifier One makes an all of the all, pushes toward the universal of masculation sexuation where all are castrated – x x – alike in obeying the law of the one exception (x) be it God, Allah, or some other.

Such a likeness evokes a jouissance of the ego, the jouissance of the semblant of all being alike before a mirror as the gaze of the Other darts back and forth. That is, Lacan's first theory of the semblant is organized on the mirror stage. Such a doctrine of the libido is narcissistic. The one involved in the Other sex is reducible to the narcissistic subject (2006d; orig. 1948, p 95). This jouissance of Islamic males who feel themselves alike in hiding their women from public view is Imaginary, Lacan says. Jouissance and the Imaginary are created as barriers to Symbolic opposition as it carries the object a. In the psychoanalytic clinic of deception and semblance, jouissance is in question insofar as analysands are trapped in false identifications. Any lack of the Imaginary also means a lack of jouissance, a lack of narcissistic identity (Miller, Semblants, April 15, 1992). The mirror stage becomes equivalent to the , however, in the same way that jouissance is equivalent to a signifier. But the phallus is primary in the way of the murder of the mythical Ur-Father (May 20, 1992). That is, the veil belongs to the band of brothers who murdered the Ur-Father, in Lacan's rereading of Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1913), where the brothers ground themselves in the law of the group by murdering the one who is the exception to the law of castration (S. XX, 1988a, pp 73–74). That is, the Imaginary third (R.S.I.) normalizes around the question of "am I the phallus" (the desired object) or not? (May 22, 1992). The veiled woman lacks the phallus whose value is Symbolic. But in the Imaginary she incarnates it. Even in incarnating this signifier, she still lacks power in the Symbolic. Yet, the feminine one under the veil has her unconscious structured on the side of the Real where one finds a kind of logic of the same and that is opposed to the masculine logic of difference from the mother (Ragland, 2004).

Yet, paternity is a sham, is an Imaginary function, even a function of the semblant. Between the poles of existence and sex, the veiled woman poses the question of what is "more" under the veil – the object a – or a mortified woman? What is woman's object, the veil asks? While the woman is man's object, Freud said the woman's objects are her own father and later a child. Lacan says, instead, she wants the man's desire. One of the powerful components of feminine sexuality is that it introduces the lack of an object, thus pointing to the primacy of the phallus. Lacan called this phallus an ancient simulacrum. Freud called it an image. Both views are based on jouissance. Miller says, rather, that it serves its function – to endow one with power. But the phallus qua phallus does not exist, only the subject's perception of something lacking or lost, to be regained by the pathways of sexual difference. All of this introduces the subject as lack-in-being, a lack of something: $ (Miller, May 20, 1992).

Still, the phallus as semblant does not touch the essential thing. The paternal function of naming and stabilizing in the Symbolic has a primordial meaning. But it is the mother who gives the phallus – the term of difference – by her desire. She symbolizes the question about what lacks in being. Woman's object, however, is never separate from its concern with the place of her desire in reference to the Father's Name. As early as "The Instance of the Letter" (2006e; orig. 1957), Lacan argued that the nature of the phallus is a point of lack indicated in the subject. For Lacan, Imaginary castration (-) became the barred subject ($), difference constructing lack. But why would a woman want to wear a veil? Want to symbolize lack-in-being? Only insofar as lack itself is created around the primordial point of difference as itself being a third thing, an abstraction, a signifier without a signified. The answers a culture evolves in how to treat this difference become institutionalized and then rigidified. How do you undo something as complex as castration, the phallus, the man in the Symbolic, the woman in the Real, and so on, by just saying "no more veil."

Miller says that one of the desires of the mother is that men be feminized. The veil itself denies this right to the man at the same time that it affirms his absence among the mothers. But Lacan's innovation here is to say that the true nature of the phallus is veiled. It is approachable in psychosis and in male homosexuality. While the male homosexual renounces his identification to the mother or the father (Miller, May 27, 1992), the female homosexual identifies with the woman as Other. In heterosexual relations, the question of the complexity of woman as man's symptom resonates. The veil, I would say, is a desperate attempt to make The Woman exist. If one looks at the phallic mask of the veil in terms of the structures of desire as elaborated by Lacan – the psychoses, perversion, the masquerade, the neuroses – the mask can be removed in psychosis. The psychotic is One with the woman who was his mother. He is the mask, the semblant of being as woman. In perversion, the goal is to remove the mask and make sex an equivalent of all other jouissances. Here it is also a link between image and signifier, the phallus as a semblant to be articulated in the Symbolic order. In the masquerade of normativity, the veil is whatever is in fashion, whatever fills up the lack-in-being. Indeed, the veil covers up in the masquerade and seems, rather, to be a denial of the père-version of sexuality. Yet, there is the phallus and its jouissance. In the neuroses, hysteria, and obsession, the veil oscillates. For the hysteric it hides the question, "am I a woman or a man?" For the obsessional, it locks onto the question of "am I dead or alive?" Can I enjoy? If one loves in the other what one lacks in the Other, the veil is a sign of love, the feminine phallus if you will. But this is a psychoanalytic structural view of the veil. It enunciates the logic of how separable times interlink places and orders of elements that seem not to join in any way. Insofar as linking places up to other places concerns topology, we can say with Pierre Skriabine that there is a fault in the universe. It is not whole within itself, but contains an empty set. He writes it as the O barred: Ø. It is this hole in the Other that the veil addresses (Skriabine, 2004). The veil is an answer as to how you pass from the Imaginary jouissance of the man who has covered his woman to the Symbolic institution of the veil as a semblant that organizes the relations between the sexes. On the other hand, once the veil is in the Symbolic, its effect is perverse, from one point of view. In perversion there is a prevalence of the image, the scene, a projection of the Symbolic onto the Imaginary. The image takes on the value of a semblant – that is a signifying articulation. While the woman remains a sublime object, the one who is loved for what she does not have, the Symbolic term of castration functions in an Imaginary way in response to the issue of castration (Miller, June 3, 1992). The veil implicitly says she lacks the phallus, she has nothing. But this nothing is made into something, a semblant on the side of the drive where lack is in play.

Love permits one to insert the function of the nothing. It modifies the demand between need and desire. The projection of the Symbolic nothing onto the veil where it is realized as image gives it the quality of the fetish that keeps the gaze present as long as it is hidden behind the veil (Miller, June 3, 1992). The woman concerns the objects – the gaze, the nothing, the imaginary phallus – and in this the veil takes us back to the primordially repressed Ur-objects cause of desire that Lacan (2006b, p 693) named the voice, the gaze, the (imaginary) phallus, the urinary flow, the phoneme, the breast, the feces, the nothing. In this way, the woman under the veil takes us away from any holistic equivalence between the O and the S(O) with the Imaginary body and confronts us with the fragmented body. Now the $ is equivalent with the O. This also takes us back to the mother as the first primordial object.

But what does all this talk about the veil as taking us back to the primordial function of loss have to do with man? Lacan argued that man can only assure his own sex in relation to the term of privation – the threat of losing the imaginary phallus (-). Insofar as this feeling of privation is touched upon, he strikes back at woman as its cause. In Seminar IV, The object relation (1994; orig. 1956–57), Lacan tells us in one of his graphs that the Imaginary father evokes real privation insofar as the object is concerned when the object in question is the phallus (p 269). In other words, the assumption of sex goes by the way of being, not biology. And the veil is a metaphor for this. Indeed, anatomical sex is Imaginary, based on the body's form. As surprising as it may seem, Lacan argues that one arrives at the primacy of the phallus as the path to sexuation, the path that goes by way of castration (or not, as in psychosis). The attempt made by humans is to link this trajectory to the Symbolic by words, conventions, and rituals (The "You are my wife."). But, in fact, the sexual grounds nothing. There is no the woman or the man. Indeed, the repetition of the sexual act is the proof that nothing is grounded from it.

Freud tried to make the man and woman exist by the path of bisexuality derived from the penis. In Lacan's mirror stage, the signifier of the father enters to intervene between the ego ideal of the mother and the ideal ego of the infant. The phallic enters as an image, while the signifier enters as the Symbolic. The signification in question is that the signifier for difference per se makes a third term, an abstraction. The desire of the mother is to be beloved by the phallic object in her world, and the Name of the Father is that of the phallic object. While the Father's Name is Imaginary, as is the mother's narcissistic jouissance, the father is everywhere as a semblant and this is not a vain illusion, for it operates (Miller, Dec. 18, 1991). With the semblant of the father, the clinic passes into politics. The father is everywhere as One. The One who has authority, even if his name is that of a woman. Lacan says we are made sick by the One (Miller, Dec. 11, 1991).

Lacan's psychoanalytic logic, the logic of the veil, is that of the one minus, the one more (a), the lack, the supplement: 1 + a. And these all arise from Oedipal logic. The hole, the loss, castration, only make sense in light of the mythical One (Miller, Dec. 11, 1991). But the veil fills a concrete lack, not just an emblem for the various things I have mentioned. It allows the object a to find its place where there is castration. People try to fill this lack with the proper name, to close the gap by enunciations. It does not work. Just as there are semblants that have logic and order and exist on the side of the signifier, not the object a, there are false semblants. The hysteric, for example, is a false woman. She identifies as a man pretending to be a woman. But on the other hand, the woman in the masquerade is a false woman too, a postiche woman, Miller says (2000b, p 22), one wearing a wig.

When the Name of the Father is not present, as in psychosis, is foreclosed there, one can see that signification is what we try to make as normal, a filling up lacks and losses with meaning, with ideologies, and beliefs. So phallic means to be under the laws of the Symbolic and Imaginary. That is its symptom. When this name ceases to function, one confronts the father of psychosis – the One father – who makes of the veil an oppression, the father of authoritarianism, totalitarianism. Under the veil is nothing, an enigmatic emptiness (Miller, Dec., 1991). That place of emptiness mimes the void in the Other that occurs with castration. In the beginning is the lack . . . Lacan (1969) said the subject supposed to know is of this vein, while the name of the father is of artifice. The Name of the Father places itself over signifiers and signifieds – the supposed material of knowledge – which places itself over the signifier alongside the void place in the Other. One can make an idol of the Father's Name if one makes oneself, for example, the semblant of the one who takes himself as knowing. What surprises people in such a scenario is the mistrust that is brought forth by signifiers that come from the lack of preceding knowing. The veil is one such semblant. But the father is the principal semblant.

In psychosis, the father in the Real functions without being a semblant. Miller (Dec. 4, 1991) says psychosis is the failure of the semblant. There can be a rapport where no Father's Name intervenes, no lack is created. It is a mistake, then, to believe you are your proper name. It is merely a signifier of the barred Other. Miller (Dec. 4, 1991) says that "the Lacanian semblant [which contains appearance and reality] is not an artifact, in the sense where artifact means to make art." He does not use it in the sense people generally do when they say they have introduced something artificial into nature. Lacan's point is, rather, that the semblant is in nature, that nature is brimming with semblants . . . meteors, rainbows, and shadows. What Lacan opposes to the semblant is the real. Indeed, the real is its antonym. Thus, it is not surprising that he puts the phallus in the category of a semblant. The real penis is a reproductive organ, while the phallus is a mask having to do with sexual difference, with power. But there is no real in nature. It enters the Symbolic as a semblant, as ordered, as arranged in such a way as to prescribe the impossible. "Of the nature of semblants" means, Miller says, that there is structure and no longer merely chaotic nature. Nature is ordered. This is even a step, he says, towards Lacan's later work on the Borromean knot.

What is interesting about the veil as a semblant is to ask whether it is on the side of nature or the side of being; for being, for Lacan, is on the side of the Real. The veil, I would say, is on the side of the semblant. It is a masquerade-like solution to the question of what man is to woman and woman is to man. "The eternal feminine" is a semblant, Miller says. Indeed, the Symbolic itself is on the side of the semblant. One goes from Symbolic to signifier to semblant. When one conflates mother with woman, she exists as a semblant. When truth is on the side of the semblant, being joins it to the Real. Poetry is a semblant, as are God and the jouissance of The Woman (Lacan, 1989, p 865). The semblant is what appears of what is. The semblant as equivalent to the Symbolic and Imaginary plus jouissance is another formation (Miller, Feb. 5, 1992, p 9). As a semblant, the veil is a part of the Symbolic – a semblance of being sexual by not being so. The veil speaks as a message that is not a discourse, but is of the semblant. Lacan concluded that all that is discourse can only give itself as semblant. The early relation to the mirror passed by the rapport to the semblant. The word "semblant" comes from "similes," that which is not declined. No less than the phallus, the a is also a semblant that stands over - (a/-) (Miller, Nov. 20, 1991). What fills the lack in being, then, is a semblant. The proper name stands over the barred Other FN/S(O). Knowledge stands over lack-in-being (S₂/$). The operation of the Name of the Father is universalizing, naming everything, while the body (a) falls from it, resists it. The body, then, is not the Real. While the a is the philosophical rapport of the being of the order of essence and, thus, has affinities with the Symbolic (Miller, Jan. 22, 1992, p 4), the Real is in a sense that the subject repeats itself. There is jouissance in the Real. The repetition of wearing the veil is that something recognizable makes itself felt as nature, as semblant. But there is also Real in knowledge. In this sense, Miller says, knowledge is not a signifier, asking for true or false, but the signifier when one knows it is a semblant (Jan. 15, 1992, p 8).

In Encore, Lacan gives us a new scripting of the semblant. In his triangular graph of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, with jouissance in the center, between the Imaginary and Symbolic, he places the true, the place of S(O), the "not all," Woman as inessential. Between the Symbolic and the Real, he places the semblant standing over the object a. Between the Real and the Imaginary, he places reality, the , "the all," man. In this graph, the a is both Symbolic and Real. In the middle of this triangle one locates jouissance. Indeed, jouissance becomes the goal of all discourse. While the Symbolic directs itself towards the Real, not towards the true, the Real prevails over the true. When one says semblant, one says "nature." One says this when one can no longer say structure or substance (Miller, Jan. 22, 1992, p 3). What Miller calls "nature" or semblance is what we have always called being that makes itself be taken for the original version. This is, however, unsustainable at the edge of the Real (Jan. 22, 1992). What is always taken for the original version is a copy. The body is Imaginary, the a reflecting the fragmented body, the void leading to anxiety where semblance no longer obtains. But the important thing about semblance over reality is that the semblant always results from an effort to apprehend the Real, the impossibility of saying the truth about the truth (Jan. 15, 1992, p 4).

We cannot say that the veil is an object a, however, for the a is averse to the semblant (Lacan, 2006f; orig. 1953, p 197). But why does Lacan link the a to the semblant in Seminar XX? Only jouissance is substance. The a is not substance for Lacan. It is as Miller explains it later. Lacan's point is that the a is empty. And knowledge is a semblant. We know when Bush must admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq and no links with Al-Qaeda that the war is a semblant. It is a semblant about another semblant – terrorism. The truth about terrorism falls between the Imaginary and Symbolic while its reality is between the Imaginary and Real. But as a daily weapon of propaganda whose effects can be measured by colored lights, it is between the Symbolic and the Real, a semblant. The scientific product of knowledge, of the semblant, is to make oneself a subject with weight and gravitas (Jan. 8, 1992, p 3). While jouissance is organized around the phallus, an unveiled semblance as an ancient simulacrum (Lacan, 2006g; orig. 1958), the veil substitutes for what cannot be written: the phallus as symbolic of the sexual non-rapport.

When one unveils the semblants, there is nothing behind. One can only demystify, find oneself a dupe. Analysis is on the side of the veil as "not all," the side of the Real in knowledge. When knowledge is in the place of truth, one has the analyst's discourse (the a/S₂) with jouissance as its limit. And jouissance can only be tracked from the semblant. Thus, jouissance addresses itself to the semblant. Am I a real man? A real woman? While the Real inscribes itself from an impasse of formalization, knowledge ensues from the Other, while truth follows on from jouissance, aiming towards the Woman as half-spoken. One cannot oppose the true and the semblant, however, because true and false are both a matter of semblance (Miller, Jan. 15, 1992). The place of science in all this is the semblant of being master of the signifier, of making oneself a subject that way. What the true is for the semblant is that one cannot say the true about the true; one can only say the semblant. And at that point is the impasse of the Real. Perhaps the analytic pass is to say the true about the Real.

In sexual relations, the Real lies to the partner (Lacan, 1990). When Lacan says "I, the truth, I speak" (2006h; orig. 1955), he gives a version of the veil. You cannot track the semblant from a meta-language, because it is the signifier itself – but not in the sense of making itself the subject of another signifier (Miller, Jan. 15, 1992). It says the truth about the Real as a subject that returns to the same place, repeating itself. To change the veil would be to try to change the semblant that aims for the Real insofar as the two inertias of jouissance are the and the a. Meanwhile, Miller says there is a special relation between women and the semblant. Not that woman is more of a semblant than a man, it is simply that she has a different relationship to castration than he does (1988b; orig. 1966, p 32). In the phallocentric dialectic, she represents the absolute Other, the Mother qua Woman. The sexuation graph depicts this relationship of the phallic signifier to Woman, but it also demystifies it, calling it who is a signifier, a semblant, but not an absolute Other. Her relationship to castration is to be on the side of the logic of the same. The little girl is like the mother, speaking anatomically. She never has to disidentify with her first identification as a little boy does. In this sense, the phallus is a veil because it transforms an object into a signifier (Miller, Feb. 5, 1992). The nature of the phallus is to be a semblant because the non-rapport between the sexes demands it. In sexuation – subjectivization of one's sex – identification is with "to have" or "to be." The phallus is whatever is desirable. Men make the error of identifying with the "to have" while women have the supplemental jouissance of identifying with the "to be." While the man protects his "avoir," woman knows that it is pure semblant (Feb. 12, 1992). The fake woman (femme à postiche) acts with the "avoir pas." She constitutes herself on the slope of the "avoir."

The Islamic veil becomes a statement of the man's castration, his "avoir pas." But the statement is "I have hidden you because I lack something and I will not admit it." In "The Signification of the Phallus" (2006; orig. 1958), Lacan says the function of the mask dominates identifications from the $ to the mask of nothing. At the place of the empty mask, Lacan writes The Woman as the Father's mask, the mask behind which he hides his desire to have them all (Miller, Feb. 12, 1992). While male jouissance is situated in the penis, one is less sure of the place of feminine jouissance. Of course, it is situated in the clitoris, but it is also no place and every place. The woman herself becomes the object that replaces what is lacking in the identificatory castration trauma. Female surgical supplements do not add, Lacan argues. The veil only hides what is not under it. The truth it speaks is that the sexual divide is under it. Indeed, the question about sex is at the heart of the neuroses. The hysteric converts the avoir into a question about être. Lacan speaks about a denaturalization of the alterity of the sexes. Its truth is sought in the Other whose answer is the masquerade: mask of nothing. What is the final good, then? God, says Lacan, is jouissance (Miller, Feb. 19, 1992, p 11). The Imaginary mediates between the Symbolic and the Real that the semblant seeks. In this, the semblant is an anchoring point. It perforates the Imaginary and the Real, presenting their lie. Thus, the Real cannot be reducible to the semblant, which is a signifier that exsists. The phallus becomes the support of the semblant of the père-version. While the object a designates a name for jouissance, society is organized around the semblant of the father, around consistency, order, law (Feb. 26, 1992, p 6). Indeed, the is the remainder of jouissance insofar as jouissance is castrated. Oedipus, then, is a myth about the loss of jouissance, Oedipal law is itself a semblant that tries to realize the rapport of the subject with the Real. It becomes the right of the semblant to be the master signifier insofar as all Names of the Father are myths about the loss of jouissance: masquerade, veil, and phallic mask, alike.

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About the Author

Ellie Ragland is Frederick A. Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She is the author of The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan and the coeditor of Lacan: Topologically Speaking. She has published and edited seven other books and more than 100 articles. She lectures both nationally and internationally and is currently finishing Demystifying Language: Uncovering Structure in Lacan. She is the editor of (Re)-Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies, former editor of Newsletter of the Freudian Field, and also a member of the European School of Psychoanalysis.