Tiresias the Transgender

It is a pleasure for me to follow the path opened by Fabienne Guillen, whom I warmly thank for allowing me to speak before you today, as well as by Christine Larroque and Pascale Macary. I retain three points in particular from their intervention: first, the question of detumescence from which the phallus truly comes into play; second, a certain rapprochement between the phallus and the object small a to be questioned; and finally, the idea that the reality of sex (which tends toward an imaginary formalization of male and female positions) only partially covers the impossible as the real of jouissance. Today I will add another point: jouissance correlated with sex as a calling into question, indeed a putting to the test, of transcendental reality.

To address these questions, it seems wholly fitting to return to the lesson given by Lacan on March 20, 1963 in his seminar on Anxiety. In addition to elevating him to the rank of “patron saint of psychoanalysts”, Lacan mentions three times the mythical figure of Tiresias, or more precisely evokes three very different figures of the seer: as depicted by Ovid, struck blind and made an oracle by capricious gods; under the figure of Thérèse-Tiresias in Guillaume Apollinaire’s scandalous play; and finally as the narrator of a scene of modern life set forth in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land”. Three approaches to Tiresias that I propose to visit.

Part 1: The Lesson of March 20, 1963

In this lesson, Lacan seeks to situate anxiety—to indicate its site or zone, returning to what he calls “the central field, already outlined in the seminar on Ethics, as being that of jouissance”, conceived as profoundly independent of the articulation of desire, because desire is constituted on this side of the zone that separates jouissance and desire—which is the fault line where anxiety occurs. From there, Lacan formalizes a schema structured by a movement initiated by the question of the meaning of being (“what am I?”), comprising three levels: the principle of jouissance (as Christian Fierens names it), the fault line of anxiety, and dialectical desire—undergoing an inversion where the division of the subject by the questioning Other becomes the division of the big Other ($S(not{A})$) by the subversive question of a subject in becoming. […]