GENDER TROUBLE 105

Gender Trouble
later date is a discursive production that claims to be prior to all discourse, effected through the compulsory and generative exclusionary
practices of normative heterosexuality.
Lacanian discourse centers on the notion of “a divide,” a primary
or fundamental split that renders the subject internally divided and
that establishes the duality of the sexes. But why this exclusive focus on
the fall into twoness? Within Lacanian terms, it appears that division is
always the effect of the law, and not a preexisting condition on which
the law acts. Jacqueline Rose writes that “for both sexes, sexuality will
necessarily touch on the duplicity which undermines its fundamental
divide,”27 suggesting that sexual division, effected through repression,
is invariably undermined by the very ruse of identity. But is it not a
prediscursive doubleness that comes to undermine the univocal posturing of each position within the field of sexual difference? Rose
writes compellingly that “for Lacan, as we have seen, there is no prediscursive reality (‘How return, other than by means of a special discourse, to a prediscursive reality?’, SXX, p. 33), no place prior to the
law which is available and can be retrieved.” As an indirect critique of
Irigaray’s efforts to mark a place for feminine writing outside the phallic economy, Rose then adds, “And there is no feminine outside language.”28 If prohibition creates the “fundamental divide” of sexuality,
and if this “divide” is shown to be duplicitous precisely because of the
artificiality of its division, then there must be a division that resists division, a psychic doubleness or inherent bisexuality that comes to undermine every effort of severing. To consider this psychic doubleness as
the effect of the Law is Lacan’s stated purpose, but the point of resistance within his theory as well.
Rose is no doubt right to claim that every identification, precisely
because it has a phantasm as its ideal, is bound to fail.Any psychoanalytic theory that prescribes a developmental process that presupposes the
accomplishment of a given father-son or mother-daughter identification mistakenly conflates the Symbolic with the real and misses the critical point of incommensurability that exposes “identification” and the
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