Rob Schaap wrote: >(1) The symbolic value of the penis seems to rest on some hegemonic idea >that its presence implies wholeness and its absence some sort of >incompleteness. Or as Freud charmingly said somewhere, "the difference between the sexes, the lack of a penis...." >(2) As signifier of desire, the phallus would tend to a rather one-sided >notion of desire, no? Well yes. There are some hardcore Freudian/Lacanians who say this is pretty essential, almost hardwired stuff, while there are other, softer sorts who historicize it (i.e., The Phallus acquires this signifying power in patriarchal society, and will fade as patriarchy does - kind of like gold in the days of the classical gold standard, as Goux argues). >(3) And one reason for all those antiquities highlighting penises as >symbols of (we can but guess what from syntagmatic context) is that a symbol >must lend itself to stylisation without risk of confusing meaning - penises >are better for that than vaginas. That's easy for you (and me) to say. But you could argue, as I think Jane Gallop did (someone lost my copy of The Daughter's Seduction) that the very absence of vaginal symbols, and the plenitude of phallic ones, is a sign that something's amiss - something is being repressed in the former case and something being overvalued - hysterically so? - in the latter. A friend of mine who graduated from Bryn Mawr in the early 1990s said that she & her friends used to join their opposing index fingers and thumbs in a kind of elongated parenthetical shape [()] and run around campus screaming "pussy power!" So the relative plenitude of symbols may itself be historical, eh? >Dicks are yesterday's news. What's left of the phallus might be just enough >to wrap around some fish'n'chips. Hmmm, now we can begin? Doug
