GENDER TROUBLE 121

Gender Trouble
within gender configurations which contest the fixity of masculine and
feminine placements with respect to the paternal law. In effect, the
possibility of multiple identifications (which are not finally reducible
to primary or founding identifications that are fixed within masculine
and feminine positions) suggests that the Law is not deterministic and
that “the” law may not even be singular.
The debate over the meaning or subversive possibilities of identifications so far has left unclear exactly where those identifications are to
be found.The interior psychic space in which identifications are said to
be preserved makes sense only if we can understand that interior space
as a phantasized locale that serves yet another psychic function. In
agreement with Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok it seems, psychoanalyst Roy Schafer argues that “incorporation” is a fantasy and not a
process; the interior space into which an object is taken is imagined,
and imagined within a language that can conjure and reify such
spaces.38 If the identifications sustained through melancholy are
“incorporated,” then the question remains: Where is this incorporated
space? If it is not literally within the body, perhaps it is on the body as
its surface signification such that the body must itself be understood as
an incorporated space.
Abraham and Torok have argued that introjection is a process that
serves the work of mourning (where the object is not only lost, but
acknowledged as lost).39 Incorporation, on the other hand, belongs
more properly to melancholy, the state of disavowed or suspended
grief in which the object is magically sustained “in the body” in some
way. Abraham and Torok suggest that introjection of the loss characteristic of mourning establishes an empty space, literalized by the empty
mouth which becomes the condition of speech and signification. The
successful displacement of the libido from the lost object is achieved
through the formation of words which both signify and displace that
object; this displacement from the original object is an essentially
metaphorical activity in which words “figure” the absence and surpass
it. Introjection is understood to be the work of mourning, but incor86