Old notes

Lacan doesn't say that women don't exist. He does something more degrading: he bars them, as if denying them access to full individuality. Barring woman is done in a very graphic form. Lacan puts a line across their noun. Woman is a barred subject. To paraphrase Lacan, women, like men, are nothing but signifiers, but there is something in women that escapes discourse. Woman is not-whole, and in this sense at least the existence of woman can be put into doubt.

For Freud, children are born out of desire. But for Lacan, this desire is not only sexual (albeit also sexual) desire comes from what we perceive, the imbalance between language and image, and the real thing. It is impossible to satisfy this desire because we don't know what we want. The truth is completely unknown. Desire is replaced—we crave everything else: sex, food, drugs, alcohol, consumer goods—trying to fill the gap in desire. But we are not satisfied with these things, because once the desire is satisfied, it will disappear.