Adornments and the Semblant

Natalie Wülfing

For speaking beings, man and woman are but signifiers.[1] In love, they are semblants that are clothed by language and signifying adornments. Clothing signifies and gives to see what cannot be seen. “It is only on the basis of the clothing of the self-image that envelops the object cause of desire that the object relationship is most often sustained”[2] says Lacan. J.-A. Miller develops a “sexual distribution” of the male and female sides that shows how they “slide and invert” if the starting point is the imaginary “having” and “not having.” Both the “poor woman” and the “phallic woman” are emblematic of the phantasy, while on the male side, a fetish object reigns. But for the mode of jouissance a different logic applies: on the feminine side there is no lack, jouissance tends toward the unlimited, whereas on the male side, it is limited by the fetish.[3]

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, this plays out in ciphers of attire.

Rosalind is in love with Orlando and he with her. Alas, she is banished from court and decides with her cousin Celia, equally a Duchess, to live in the woods in disguise. 

Celia: I’ll put myself in poor and mean attire,

And with a kind of umber smirch my face;

The like do you. So shall we pass along

And never stir assailants.

Rosalind: Were it not better,

Because that I am more than common tall,

That I did suit me all points like a man?

A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh,

A boar-spear in my hand, and in my heart,

Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will,

We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside,

As many mannish cowards have

That do outface it with their semblances. (Act I, Scene III)[4]

Celia plays the poor woman, Rosalind the man, naming herself Ganymede, the beautiful boy of Greek mythology. This is not only to hide her fear, but also to mock the “mannish semblances” and by the same token to seduce Orlando. She displays her imaginary minus with the parade of the fetish objects, the axe and the spear, highlighting the homosexual slant of the phantasy. It is what J.-A. Miller calls the “mask-uline” of a woman: the mask she uses to incarnate the phallic object.[5] As a hysteric woman has one foot in the phantasy, another beyond, she plays with the semblant rather than believing in it. She both supports and subverts it.

As, when Orlando and Rosalind, as Ganymede, meet in the woods, she challenges him about the trueness of his love.

Rosalind (as Ganymede to Orlando): […] everything about you should demonstrate a careless desolation. But you are no such man: you are rather point-device in your accoutrements, as loving yourself than seeming the lover of any other. (Act III, Scene II)[6] 

Rosalind has read Freud, where in love the ego is “impoverished” to the benefit of the object invested.[7] Orlando does not have the “look” of a lover, who should be neglecting his attire, whereas his is meticulous.

But her challenge has something of the immoderate. Does she not want “more” (encore)[8] from Orlando than the “accoutrements” that mark his limitation? This goes beyond the phallic masquerade and further than the mockery of male pretense. A true lover would be mad with love, an absolute love. Is this not an appeal to absolute jouissance, a quest for the inaccessible and limitless that shows itself in Rosalind’s little disappointment?[9]

References

[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, London: Norton, 1998, p. 33.

[2] Ibid., p. 92.

[3] Miller, J.-A., “L’orientation lacanienne. Le Partenaire Symptôme,” teaching delivered under the auspices of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University Paris 8, lesson of 25 March 1998, unpublished.

[4] Shakespeare, W., “As You Like It,” in Shakespeare’s Complete Works, Oxford University Press, 1952, Act I, Scene III, p. 222

[5] Miller, J.-A., “Analysis Laid Bare,” WAP, Libretto Series, New York: Lacanian Press, 2023, p. 83.

[6] Shakespeare, W., Op.cit. p. 231.

[7] Freud, S., “On Narcissism” (1914), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, London: Hogarth Press, 1961, p. 100.

[8] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, op. cit.

[9] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI: From an Other to the other, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, London: Polity, 2023, p. 183: “It is precisely because she posits jouissance as an absolute that the hysteric is rejected, not being able to respond to it except by means of an unsatisfied desire with respect to herself.”