The Witty Butcher's Wife: Freud, Lacan, and the Conversion of Resistance to Theory

Author(s): Cynthia Chase

Source: MLN , Dec., 1987, Vol. 102, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1987), pp. 989-
1013
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905309

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 The Witty Butcher's Wife:
Freud, Lacan, and the Conversion of
Resistance to Theory

Cynthia Chase

Nothing can overcome the resistance to

theory since theory is itself this resistance.

-Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory"

"Un reve c'est un reveil qui commence."

Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung'

I want to consider in this essay the meaning of the importance of

identification in desire. One of the most fruitful trends in psychoan-
alytic thought of the last decade is a rediscovery of the extraordi-
nary significance of narcissism, or of the specular conditions of any
playing out of desire, any establishing of relations, any symbolizing
activity. This trend can be seen as a critical reaction against Lacan's
privileging of the Symbolic order over the Imaginary as the di-
mension in which negativity of the really productive and inter-
esting kind occurs, in which speech or language in the full sense
goes on. The notion of entry into the Symbolic order via castration
as the condition of full speech went along it seemed with the de-
nunciation of the Imaginary or the mirror-stage, like American
ego-psychology, as the locus of delusion-as the dimension of
mystification which individual subjects should get over and which
psychoanalytic theory should successfully altogether avoid. To the
extent that Lacan's indictment of the Imaginary sounded like a
dismissal of its importance, to the extent that the denunciation of
ego psychology sounded like a discouragement against thinking
about the ego, it was inevitable that the pendulum should eventu-
ally swing the other way, toward a reemphasis on the importance,
persistence, unavoidability, and productiveness of the Imaginary

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 990 CYNTHIA CHASE

or the variously redefined non-Symbolic-Kristeva's "the se-

miotic," for example-and on the powerful negativity not of de-
sire or the Symbolic but of narcissism.
This trend is in fact perhaps a further elaboration of Lacan's
formative concept the mirror stage, and its newness might be mea-
sured as the difference between remembered doctrine, between
remembering Lacan's rhetoric from a distance, and actually
reading it. For Lacan's writing inscribes in many registers the ne-
cessity of a specular moment in the process of signification, and
the necessity of its recurrence. It is Lacan, following Hegel-the
mirror stage is the confrontation of "Master" and "Slave"-who
stressed the stand-off of the mirroring relation to the other as the
point of entry into the dialectic of symbolization. And the way
Lacan's theory of the Imaginary and the Symbolic emerged in the
context of his polemical specular rivalry with a largely imaginary
"American" psychoanalysis performs what it is also possible to see
demonstrated in Freud's advancement of his theoretical argu-
ment: namely that a rivalrous mirroring relation is also the condi-
tion of a genuine theoretical reflection on specularity and narcis-
sism. My work on this paper led me eventually, I must say only
very gradually, to re-reading Lacan, a tack not taken by much of
the best psychoanalytic writing I'm alluding to and drawing on
here (Samuel Weber, Abraham and Torok, recent Kristeva), and
I've found it difficult to sustain the argument I originally thought
I could make: that Lacan's reinterpretation of the dream of the
witty butcher's wife (from chapter four of The Interpretation of
Dreams) is an example of a mirror-stage moment in analytic
thinking, blind to itself as such, escapable error, an instance of
theory becoming the resistance to theory in a way that could in prin-
ciple be avoided. The notion of the possibility of avoiding such a
moment is the recurrence, in my own reflections, of the theoretical
error I had been intending to diagnose in Lacan, as the notion that
the mirror "stage" could be surpassed. It turns out to be extremely
difficult to differentiate reflection on the mirror stage from its re-
currence-or performances of narcissism from its implicit theori-
zation. It's the narcissistic, rhetorical character of Lacan's writing
that makes it difficult to say what he has not said, about the nega-
tivity of the specular moment. I mean to show, nevertheless, that
the importance of identification that Lacan stresses in interpreting
the desire of the witty butcher's wife means nothing other than the
importance and recurrence of the resistance to theory within the

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 M L N 991

theoretical enterprise itself. What de Man's essay of that title ("The

Resistance to Theory") describes is a resistance to language, or to
the rhetorical nature of language or to the necessity of reading,
precisely in theories of language, in "theory" understood as a re-
flection on how language is in the first instance about language
rather than about the world. Lacan's celebration of the witty
butcher's wife as manifesting the desire for desire rather than the
desire for a particular thing-caviar, as it happens-reflects his
theoretical, his structuralist conception of language as first of all
language about language, of speech as a system of signs rather
than a grasping of referents. That conception of language
"theory," for short-necessarily includes, de Man has argued, a
reversion to the very illusion it claims to rise above, a resistance to
its own insight. That, I think, is what the recurrence of the mirror
stage in the Symbolic order or the importance of identification to
desire is "really" "about." I will examine Lacan's articulation of the
role of identification in desire-in particular, his key notion in in-
terpreting the witty butcher's wife, of her identification with the
phallus-to see how far his account exemplifies such blind specular-
ity, or resistance, and how far it theorizes it.
Desire and identification-as well as the concepts of desire and
identification-come into play from the start in Freud's discussion
in chapter four of the Traumdeutung of the witty butcher's wife.
Identification, a specular relation, is the necessary condition of the
theory of desire, it seems, as well as of desire itself. A certain ri-
valrous identification between Freud and his patient is the frame-
work for his reflection on desire and identification. Freud is re-
porting his interpretation of the dream of a clever patient of his
who claims to have disproved his theory that dreams are wish-ful-
fillments. She has had a dream that she wanted to give a dinner
party, but found she had nothing in the house but a piece of
smoked salmon, and recalled that it was Sunday so all the shops
were closed, and discovered that her telephone was out of order so
that she couldn't call a caterer. This dream, Freud first agrees
we can see him nodding weightily-seems the reverse of a wish-
fulfillment. But rather quickly the witty butcher's wife brings up
associations that make her dream interpretable as a fulfillment of
the wish-fulfillment theory. It turns out that her husband the
butcher mentioned the previous day his intention to go on a diet
and accept no more invitations to dinner, making her alert to the
connection between attending dinner parties and gaining weight,

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992 CYNTHIA CHASE

and on the same day, when she visited a friend of hers-a thin
friend, whom her husband, peculiarly, constantly praises, though
he ordinarily likes women who are plump-this friend "inquired
... 'When are you going to ask us to another meal? You always
feed one so well.' "2 So Freud is able to write, "I was able to say to
my patient: 'It is just as though when she made this suggestion you
said to yourself: 'A likely thing! I'm to ask you to come and eat in
my house so that you may get plump and attract my husband still
more! I'd rather never give another dinner party.' What the dream
was saying to you was that you were unable to give any dinner-
parties, and it was thus fulfilling your wish not to help your friend
to grow plumper" (182/148 trans. mod.).
The interpretation thereby confirms Freud's thesis about what
he terms "counter-wish dreams": "namely that the non-fulfillment
of one wish meant the fulfillment of another." (184/15 1). A dream
is the fulfillment of a desire. But the dream's wish-fulfillment can
be the fulfillment of the wish precisely not tofulfill a wish-the wish
of the butcher's wife's thin friend to be invited to dinner, for ex-
ample, or the wish of her analyst, Freud, to confirm his theory that
all dreams fulfill wishes. And also, of course, in fact, the witty
butcher's wife's own wish (to give a dinner). This aspect of the
dream-fulfillment through non-fulfillment-reappears in the
dreamer's waking life. The witty butcher's wife reveals what Freud
calls her "need for an unfulfilled wish," when she mentions that
she is very much in love with her husband lately, and that she has
begged him not to give her any caviar-in order, so she says, that
she can go on teasing him about it. The witty butcher's wife, "la
belle bouchere," though her husband the butcher is "a genital
character" (Lacan spells this out) and satisfies his wife's sexual
needs, "wants other, gratuitous needs, and to be sure they are gra-
tuitous they must not be satisfied."3 Dreaming and waking, la belle
bouchere displays desire as distinct from the need for satisfaction.
And she's not the only one. Why does a piece of smoked salmon
appear in the dream? Because her friend, her thin friend,
"grudges herself smoked salmon as much as [the witty butcher's
wife] grudges herself caviar" (182/148).
This leads Freud to, as he says, a further and "subtler" interpre-
tation of the dream. In the dream the witty butcher's wife identifies
herself with her friend. Instead of dreaming that one of her
friend's, she dreams that one of her own wishes was not fulfilled.
It's significant that this identification coincides precisely with a

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 M L N 993

wish-fulfillment at a higher level, as it were, through a wish's not

being fulfilled. What we are seeing Freud point out is that wish-
fulfillment is a dialectical process accompanied and made possible
by identification, by the construal of an other of the self.
Freud digresses at this point into a discussion of hysterical iden-
tification. His point is that a hysteric's imitation of another person's
symptoms is not simply a matter of seeing and copying, but a more
complicated mental act: the expression of an Unconscious process
of comparison, in which a hysteric produces the same symptom as
the other person after inferring its cause and judging that the
same cause is present in her own situation as well. "Hysterical
identification" so defined is not merely a mirror-stage phenom-
enon, but a symbolizing process played out at the level of the Sym-
bolic order, involving not just a dual relation but a third term. The
witty butcher's wife identifies with her friend on the basis of their
common desire for the desire of her husband, in a pattern that
conforms to the model of the child's post-Oedipal identification
with the parent of the same sex, on the basis of a renounced, or
cancelled and preserved, desire for the opposite parent. Freud's
concluding account of the dream describes it as such an Oedipal
structure. "My patient put herself in her friend's place in the
dream because her friend was taking my patient's place with her
husband and because she (my patient) wanted to take her friend's
place in her husband's high opinion" (184/150-1).
The witty butcher's wife's dream involves in the first place, then,
a type of identification associated with an achieved Oedipal iden-
tity. But it proves also to involve an identification distinguishable
from this, and associated by Lacan with two "regressive" or earlier
types of identification: the regressive identification with the lost
object in mourning or melancholia, and the infant's "primary
identification" with the image of the mother. These identifications
have different and less harmonious relations with the dialectical
progression of the Oedipus complex, and much of the suggestive-
ness and power of the texts on the witty butcher's wife comes from
the way the Oedipal, dialectical mode of identification begins to
look like the other two modes, raising questions about the condi-
tions of possibility of dialectical logic.
The dialectical logic of desire is plainly manifest in the desire of
the hysteric, which is exemplary of the nature of desire as the de-
sire of desire, Lacan will argue, precisely because of the way the
hysteric's desire depends on identification, on identification with

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994 CYNTHIA CHASE

another's desire, rather than being fixed on a particular object or

trait. Those terms, "desire" and "identification," derive from an
argument in The Interpretation of Dreams which is a theory of signi-
fication, a theory of language. It is an argument that powerfully
recalls Hegel's opening chapter of the Phenomenology, his account
of how in indicating a particular object, a particular "this," one
inevitably instead indicates the universal "this"-anything what-
ever that can be indicated or pointed out. Hegel's chapter one is in
fact about the deictic function of language, though it does not an-
nounce that it is about language but rather about "sinnliche Ge-
wissheit," "sense-certainty." This first and recurrent mode of cer-
tainty is the conviction that the validity of consciousness lies in
one's consciousness of sensory particulars. Hence consciousness
will consist in indication, in pointing out-in language in its referen-
tial function, or deixis. "Sense-certainty" is the mode of certainty
characteristic of dreaming, too. And the dialectical logic that Hegel
discovers in' consciousness as indication or deixis-the deter-
minate negation of a particular "this" and its Aufhebung into a uni-
versal-Freud discovers in the dream as wish-fulfillment. Thus
Freud's first and central attempt to argue, not merely affirm, his
thesis that dreams fulfill wishes, his crucial fourth chapter, turns
on the notion of "counter-wish dreams." "Counter-wish dream" is
the classification Freud invents for the dream of the witty butcher's
wife. After a triumphant analysis of her dream, Freud reports how
"A contradiction to my theory of dreams produced by ... the clev-
erest of all my dreamers ... was resolved [even] more simply ...
upon the same pattern." The dream of the cleverest dreamer-
briefly, a dream that she "had undone the solution she had wished
for"-fulfills, quite simply, the wish "that I" -that Freud-"was
wrong," in his theory that dreams are wish-fulfillments. With this
report Freud redefines the dream that otherwise fails to fulfill a
wish as the cleverest dream of all: one that fulfills the wish to re-
fute the theory of wish-fulfillment, and thereby confirms it. A sort
of contest between dreamer and theorist, a specular rivalry be-
tween Freud and his patients, marks the very emergence of
Freud's theory of dreams. These interpretations of so-called
counter-wish dreams are not just a flagrantly ingenious ploy of
Freud's in that close combat. They indispensably disclose what the
concept of wish, or wish-fulfillment, must be understood to mean:
quintessentially, a wish having to do with wishing. Each of these
dreams involves a wish not to fulfill a wish: a wish, one could say
then, to have a wish. Here the self-referential nature of desire is

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 M L N 995

unmistakable, and it is coincident with the self-"fulfilling," the per-

formative nature of the dream.
The mode of "fulfillment" of dream-wish-fulfillment is deeply
enigmatic. As the occurrence of disagreeable or anxious dreams
makes clear, a dream is by no means the description or representa-
tion of a wish; it is a wish-fulfillment-not a constative or cognitive
process, simply, but a performative one. Freud maintains "that the
dream really has a secret meaning, which results in [ergibt] a wish-
fulfillment"-not, pace Strachey, "represents" a wish-fulfillment
(179/146). A dream is fulfilling not because it does something, or
gets something, but because it means something, but its meaning is
a doing-but a doing of something to meaning. Freud will empha-
size in the chapter on "The Dream-Work" that that distortative
process, the transmuting of the dream-thoughts into the images of
the dream-the process, rather than the dream-thoughts or
dream-wish as a content-is "the essence of dreaming" (545/507).
The dream, the "dream-work," is a doing of something to
meaning: its distortion, its concealment, its . . . secretion.
The dream's doing of something to meaning may in fact be seen
as an enactment of the tension between meaning and indicating, or
meaning and signification, Sinn and Bedeutung, that Hegel's anal-
ysis of deixis or -deutung brings to light. One means, in using a
deictic term such as "this," or "here," or "now," a particular here or
now, expressive of that first and recurrent mode of certainty of
consciousness, "Sense-certainty"; for example (these are Hegel's
examples), "Here is a tree," or a house, or "Now is the night." But
what one says in saying "now," or "here," or "this" is a universal,
the class of particulars, every "this" or "here" or "now." The deictic
function of language, indication, has two simultaneous and contra-
dictory registers, just like the double register of the wishing or
-deutung in dreams. In the dream of the witty butcher's wife, for
instance, the wish in the dream, the wish represented in the
dream-to give a dinner-is the opposite, the negation, of the
wish of the dream, the wish fulfilled by the dream, not to give a
dinner party, not to help her friend gain weight. The counter-wish
dream fulfills the wish to have a wish, in the sense of not to fulfill
one. Freud's sharp opposition of latent to manifest content, in dis-
cussing what he explains as dream-"distortion," tends to assimilate
all dreams to the counter-wish dream, that is to a dream of which
the wish, or the fulfillment, is the determinate negation of a wish-ful-
fillment.
Freud's subsequent chapters, like a complication I'll return to in

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996 CYNTHIA CHASE

the last pages of Hegel's chapter, depart from the claim that deter-
minate negation is the nature of the relationship between sign and
meaning, that the dream-text's meaning and signification are re-
lated by a negation that achieves a sublimation or "fulfillment."
Chapter six, "The Dream-Work," describes the relationship be-
tween latent and manifest dream not as negation or reversal but as
a radical indeterminacy: it can never be known for certain whether
a given element is to be interpreted antithetically, literally, met-
onymically, symbolically, or by word-play. The contradiction of
wish by wish, the negation of meaning by signification, involve a
specular structure, a mirroring, and that, I suggest, is what allows
in fact for the negation's determinate character (on which dialectic
depends) being exceeded, and the radical indeterminability of
texts as they depend on reading coming into play.
Hegel's critique of the rhetoric of sense-certainty I take as the
argument of "theory" par excellence. Freud's interpretation of
dreaming also offers it. To stress that a wish is fulfilled by a dream
is a form of the insight that language reaches not referents, not
sensory particulars, but signifieds. That is what chapter one of the
Phenomenology shows as it demonstrates the dialectical nature of the
deictic function, the dialectical character of the referential nature
of language. Reference takes place not in the apprehension of a
singular entity but in the indication of a particular object, which
signifies its reality or perceptibility precisely as its belonging to the
class of things that can be perceived or pointed out. In de Man's
terms, Hegel's analysis presents reference as a linguistic function
rather than an intuition.4 The familiar current form of this idea
one might call the structuralist insight: the impossibility of having
access to referents, the inevitability of referring to signifieds.
Structural linguistics has restated the basic finding of Hegel's anal-
ysis of the deictic function. It is the fact that deictic terms are
"shifters," like the personal pronouns, which refer precisely not to
tangible things in the world, but to "the instance of discourse," as
Benveniste puts it, to speech itself.5 The referential function is a
self-referential function of language.
The witty butcher's wife, the "spirituelle" hysteric, emblematizes
that insight in her wishfulfilling unfulfillment, her desire not for
caviar but for desire. It is this, I believe, that has determined her
curious itinerary in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud's witty
hysteric becomes Lacan's "la belle bouchere": the beautiful butch-
eress, and the beautiful stopper-upper (from the verb boucher, to

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 M L N 997

stop up something, a figurative mouth). La belle bouchere is my fa-

vorite character-my favorite hieroglyph-in analytic literature.
La b.b.: she shows up again, and heads a chapter, in Catherine
Clement's Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, which includes a vivid
and amused retelling of Lacan's reinterpretation of her dream in
his lecture "The Direction of the treatment and principles of its
power."6 Lacan concludes by interpreting the smoked salmon in
her dream as the phallus. (This is a gesture Neil Hertz calls "the
rape of the lox.") Clement's appropriation of this reading makes a
striking ending to a story that begins with an instance of "resis-
tance," of resistance to a man's theory. What starts out as an inge-
nious dreamer's demurral to Freud's claim that all dreams fulfill
wishes ends up as a celebrated tour de force of psychoanalytic
theory, Lacan's claim that desire as such finds its signifier in the
phallus-and a reading reclaimed by a woman and a feminist
(Clement) as evidence that Lacan draws his model of subjectivity
from feminine desire. The witty butcher's wife, then, I submit, is a
figure for the conversion of resistance to theory.
For the unfixedness of the hysteric's desire, the desire of desire,
reflects-means-the reference of language to language, the ref-
erence of deictics to "the discourse," rather than to sensory partic-
ulars. The conversion of resistance into theory is the itinerary of
consciousness from the notion that the reality, the resistance of ex-
ternal things gives reality to consciousness, to the knowledge that
consciousness, as deixis, is language about language, indicating not
things, but the system of signs. Even in affirming this I'm aware of
the renewal of resistance, resistance as one reaches that conclusion.
We all, perhaps, resist it. We all relive the resistance of Freud's
patients to his insight into language about language, his theory
that dreams fulfill dreams. Revealingly, their resistance took the
form of a refusal to interpret dreams any way but literally, an ig-
noring of the distinction between manifest and latent content-a
refusal to read. Such refusal marks Freud's own first dream-inter-
pretation, too, not only in his capacity to ignore the resemblance of
her case to his patient Emma's (the near-fatal effects of his friend
Fliess's operation on Emma's nose), but in the flat and semanti-
cizing quality of this first construal of the idea of wish-fulfillment.
In contrast, Freud's interpretation of the witty butcher's wife ac-
knowledges the dream's figurative meaning and self-referentiality.
It overcomes not just her resistance, but his own.
The conversion of resistance to theory, though, as emblematized

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998 CYNTHIA CHASE

in the "witty hysteric," asks to be read as well in another sense: as

conversion in the sense of hysterical conversion. Like Dora's cough
identifying her with her father, such a conversion transposes psy-
chical conflict into the somatic register. Hysterical paralysis involves
the literalization of a figure: "a slap in the face," such as (to Dora)
Freud's appointment to a professorship, is experienced as a facial
neuralgia. That defiguration is a striking form of a common and
irresistible error: "to confuse the materiality of the signifier with
the materiality of what it signifies," to confuse "linguistic with nat-
ural reality," in de Man's words (11). Far from being theory, the
hysteric's desire takes the form precisely of resistance to desire, to
desire understood as a function of language, a psychical condition,
rather than a somatic mechanism. Hysterical conversion is the resis-
tance to theory, as it is the resistance to language. Can we combine
this reading with reading the witty butcher's wife as an emblem of
the conversion of resistance to theory? Perhaps like this: theory that
takes the form of a conversion, or an overcoming, of resistance, is
necessarily the mirror image or symmetrical inverse of resistance.
I would suggest that in fact that is so: the theoretical insight par
excellence, into the nature of language as about language, reverts
to or mirrors the illusion that language grasps things. It does so in
the course of describing language as a system of signs or a set of
conventions, insofar as this reduces language to a code. The struc-
turalist insight-that language is not reference but signification-
is an essential one; the progression from reference to signification
is built into the deictic function itself; and it must always be re-
peated, for the illusion of reference tends inevitably to reassert
itself. But the assertion of the self-referentiality of language-the
structuralist imagination of language as a sign system or code-it-
self repeats or mirrors the illusion of reference. A code is like a
thing, and not like language, in that it is unambiguous, ultimately
determinable, as language is not to the extent that it is rhetorical or
figural. In taking as its object language-as-about-language, lan-
guage as signification, structuralism takes as its object language as
code, and this is to take as its object an object, or take some thing as
its object in the way that the illusion of reference does, like "nat-
ural consciousness" invoking a particular "this." Freud's text, like
Lacan's, and Hegel's, both enacts, and exceeds, this structuralist
"moment," which is not really a moment, but a dimension of a
permanent dilemma.
Freud's argument exceeds this structuralist dimension of his

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 M L N 999

thought with a remarkable supplement to his theory of wish-ful-

fillment, intimated in chapter five, under the heading of "somatic
sources" of dreams, and reaffirmed late in chapter seven.7 There,
Freud, "without appearing to be aware of the slightest contradic-
tion," Lacan comments, writes that the dream "serves above all the
desire to sleep" (260/624). The bathos of this conclusion is
haunting. We dream to sleep, to go on sleeping. All that dream-
work, all that trope-production, all that condensation and displace-
ment, presented and performed over six chapters, serves the pre-
conscious' wish to sleep, the wish to go on being unconscious. The
crucial import of this statement is to bring out an instability in the
term "wish": "wish," in this context, indicates a determination not
of the order of intention (even unconscious intention) but rather
of tendency. Whereas in fulfilling an unconscious wish discover-
able through interpretation, the dream participates in the order of
intention and meaning, in fulfilling the wish to sleep, it serves not
so much a desire as a necessity, or a desire not subject to interpre-
tation. The dream-text has now been construed both as interpret-
able and significative and as essentially non-significative. The no-
tion of the wish to sleep thus implies the indeterminacy of the status
of the dream-text. It implies the indeterminably significative status
of the text; and that is something quite other than the determinate
negation of meaning implied by the counter-wish dream, a nega-
tion that ensures its meaningfulness. Freud's reconsideration of
the conditions of the dream puts its status as signification-rather
than an effect of mere necessity or probability-in doubt. This is
the moment in which the mirror wavers, in which the specular
symmetry of the structuralist conception of language-about-lan-
guage breaks down, as language (here, the dream-text's produc-
tion) seems to mean also that which does not certainly signify.
The wish to sleep marks a curious moment in Lacan's lecture, a
wavering in which his discourse swerves from assertions about the
semantic status of the dream into a question about the "failing" of
his own voice. "Why does my voice fail to finish," he asks, the
phrase "the desire for recognition," which he had been saying was
the wish behind the dream (260/624). In this passage Lacan turns
from an interpretation of the dream oriented by the notion of the
"desire for recognition" stressed in the influential commentary on
Hegel's master-slave dialectic by Alexandre Kojeve, to an interpre-
tation of the dream alert to Freud's notion of the desire for sleep.
This shift of focus from the "desire for recognition" to the "desire

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for sleep" goes along with a shift of focus from la belle bouchere's
heterosexual desire and Oedipal identification with her friend, to
her homosexual desire and "pre-Oedipal" identification with her
husband, which Lacan reads as a replay of the baby's identification
with the mother. In thinking how so-called "primary" and "regres-
sive" identifications go together with desire, Lacan comes to indi-
cate the specular conditions of the dialectic and the figural and
material conditions of language-the dimensions overlooked, that
is, by the structuralist aspect of Freud's and Lacan's theory.
Let us come back to la belle bouchere's unsatisfied desire for
caviar. The relation to caviar is not one of need but of the "need
for an unfulfilled wish"; it signifies the desire for a desire, and it is
replaced in the dream by another signifier, the smoked salmon,
which signifies as well as the dreamer's identification with her
friend, and with her friend's unsatisfied desire. Her identification
with her thin friend is a wish-fulfillment induced by her husband's
desire for her friend; it is a query into the nature of her husband's
desire. This is Lacan's reading, which leads up to the concept of
desire as the "desire of the other"-implying la b.b's identification
not only with the desire of the other, her friend, but with the desire
of the otherfor the other, with her husband's desire for her friend.
Catherine Clement sums up: "The question, 'How can another
woman be loved?' . . . becomes the butcher's wife's question, and
... she in turn 'becomes' the question. In order to answer it, she
places herself in the masculine position and desires the other
woman as her husband does" (130). "Thin as she is"-I quote
Lacan-"she is hardly built to attract him, with his taste for
curves." "Has he too, perhaps, not got a desire that is somewhat
thwarted, when everything in him is satisfied?" (262/626). Here
Lacan blends his questioning with that of the witty butcher's wife's,
just at the point where, in the next moment, he will associate her
identification with the question of the desire of the other-of her
husband-with the baby's identification with the question of the
desire of the mother. Whatever else that so-called "primary identi-
fication" between mother and infant means, I suggest, its signifi-
cance surely has to do with the way it arises as a topic where the
difference between writing and its referent wavers, where the dif-
ference between the desire one is questioning and the questioning
one is doing, threatens to become elided, as when la bouchere's
identificatory questioning voices Lacan's own.
Lacan associates, then, la bouchere's demand for love from her

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 M L N toot

husband (the significance of her asking and asking not to be given

caviar) with "the demand of a presence or an absence" in "the pri-
mordial relation to the mother." Allusion to "the primordial rela-
tion" raises the question of how relation as such is established as a
possibility. It evokes the crucial ambiguity of the term "identifica-
tion": either it may mean the identification of one thing with an-
other by means of their comparison with a third term in an already
functioning system of substitutions-that is what's involved in la
bouchere's identification with her friend-or it may mean an arbi-
trary initial act of identification that sets up the possibility of such
comparisons and substitutions-which is what's at stake in la bou-
chere's desire for her friends through her identification as Lacan
says with the question of her husband's desire, with the question of
the possibility of desire (such as her husband's desire for her thin
friend although his taste is for plump women). That would be a
recurrence of the "primary identification" which, Freud will af-
firm in his enigmatic and disruptive concept of "primary narcis-
sism," is an "immediate identification" prior to any object relation.
Identification in this sense, that is to say, makes up the very possi-
bility of the institution of the system of substitutions that constitutes
language as a signifying system.
Lacan's discussion of la bouchere's demand thus succeeds in
posing the question of the conditions of signification, and what he
describes is how those conditions are evaded or resisted. For la belle
bouchere's posing of the question of her husband's desire will take
the form of her identifying with it. This is to refuse its status as
mere signifier, signifying something else. Such resistance is the na-
ture of identification with, as Lacan puts it, the phallus. La belle
bouchere identifies with the signifier of her husband's desire, the
phallus, and this is like the baby's identifying with the signifier of
the mother's desire. As a story of the baby merges in with Lacan's
story of la belle bouchere, it becomes a story of la b.b.: of a subject
constituting itself by identifying itself with a signifier. The phallus,
the signifier of desire, whether of the mother's desire, or the hus-
band's, can only appear veiled or masked. Masked, for instance, as
a piece of smoked salmon. (Remember the logic of Lacan's final
flamboyant interpretation: the smoked salmon is the friend's fa-
vorite food, the friend is desired by the husband, the smoked
salmon is the signifier of desire. The phallus is the signifier of de-
sire. The smoked salmon is the phallus.) This is the ending of
Lacan's story of la belle bouchere: her identification with the phallus,

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1002 CYNTHIA CHASE

he concludes, is the meaning in the Unconscious of her "pre-con-

scious" "need for an unfilfilled wish," and the significance of the
appearance in the dream of the piece of smoked salmon. The no-
tion of an "identification with the signifier" becomes the signified of
a significant dream. But this arrival at a signified may hardly be
blamed as a reassuring reduction. This is a signified hardly letting
us take for granted this dream's significative status; rather it con-
spicuously demands further inquiry into its signification, all the
more through Lacan's flagrantly unlikely comparison of salmon
under gauze and phalluses behind veils;

. . . sometimes desire is not to be conjured away, but appears as here, at

the centre of the stage, all too visibly, on the festive board, in the form
of a salmon. It is an attractive-looking fish, and if it is presented, as is
the custom in restaurants, under a thin gauze, the raising of this gauze
creates a similar effect to that which occurred at the culmination of the
ancient mysteries.
(262/626-7)

That the phallus is fishy is part of this story that doesn't in fact
quite end, for it ends by suggesting that there is a beginning or a
resistance to beginning that may have to go on indefinitely: a pri-
mordial identification with the signifier that should, precisely, sig-
nify, and signify something else.
Suppose one takes it that la belle bouche're's identification with the
phallus, in her dream, is a recurrence of the baby's identification
with the phallus, in the primordial relation to the mother. The
story on that identification is this. Since the child's relation to the
mother "as it is constituted in analysis," Lacan specifies, is consti-
tuted "not by his vital dependence on her," not by his need for her
care, "but by his dependence on her love"-"that is to say"-here
are the Hegelian terms-"by the desire for her desire," the child
"identifies itself with the imaginary object of this desire insofar as
the mother herself symbolizes it in the phallus" (198/554). Again:
"If the desire of the mother is the phallus, the child wishes to be the
phallus in order to satisfy that desire" (289/693). We have to notice
that Lacan is not exactly, or not simply, saying, this: the mother, a
woman, wants the phallus; the child wants to be what the mother
wants; and so it wants to be the phallus. That would be absolutely to
assume what Lacan's account is indeed for the most part pre-
suming: the prexistence of a system of signs within which the
phallus is what the woman wants, as it is what the woman lacks.

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 M L N 1003

But the equation works the other way as well: what the woman
wants-what the mother wants-counts as the phallus. "The de-
sire of the mother is the phallus"-which also means, the desiring
mother, the woman, is the phallus, which is what the man wants,
and lacks, too, in this system conditioned by the interdiction upon
having the phallus, or the mother, in immediate use. The ambi-
guity in Lacan's wording as to whether the desired mother desires
the phallus, or is it, carries with it a certain ambiguity as to whether
this system is in fact in place or not: if the desired mother is the
phallus, then she doesn't lack it, doesn't desire it, and if "the
phallus" is not what she desires, then what does it mean? I'm trying
to evoke the perils for the system and for meaning implied by the
persistence of the "phallic mother": the persistence of the image of
the desiring mother as the phallus, not simply in an early or re-
gressive moment surpassed when the individual accepts castration
or sexual difference, but in the most scrupulous moments of theo-
retical reflection. The persistence of this image registers an uncer-
tainty as to whether what ought to be the primary signifier in fact
signifies; whether the mother in fact signifies-desires-the
phallus, or does not signify, but is ... something else, something
without signification. The crucial ambiguity as to whether the
system of signification is indeed installed comes through most
clearly in Lacan's conditional phrasings: "if the desire of the
mother is the phallus," "insofar as the mother herself symbolizes it
in the phallus." One is lured by the question: What if she doesn't?
Kristeva's interpretation of "primary narcissism" is in effect an
attempt to pursue that question; it gets answered, at one level:
then you have a psychotic or "borderline" patient, and more gen-
erally: that's why our functioning within the Symbolic order is
continually undercut. Kristeva rethinks the concepts of demand
and the mirror-stage in connection with the primary narcissism
Freud defined as an "immediate identification," and thus as an ac-
count of the originary institution of the system of signification.
Lacan's thinking on identification tends in two different directions.
One is the diagnosis of a delusive moment of identification at spe-
cific points in an unfolding process, an entry into language that
resembles a developmental process, though it consists rather in the
phases of a dialectic. The other direction of Lacan's thinking is the
vision of the mirror-stage as the permanent predicament of beings
that speak. I would like to argue that both these directions are in
some sense indispensable. Without the first, the pinpointing of

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1004 CYNTHIA CHASE

moments of delusive identification, one wouldn't get the precise

analysis of the nature of the illusion involved. But without the
second-if Lacan were only to describe the specular moment of
identification as an error to be surpassed-he would repeat the
error of the delusive identification of language as a code, in pre-
scribing an emergence out of and beyond a distorting specularity. He
would be unable to indicate the permanent possibility of an abu-
sive identification-the figure, or rather the catachresis, opening
the possibility of language.
It is not difficult to read Lacan's diagnosis of the recurrent spec-
ular moments in the dialectical process-moments of blockage,
Neil Hertz might say-as a diagnosis of the resistance to theory, of
the resistance to theory in theory itself. Lacan locates the infant's
identification with the phallus at the moment in which the infant
resists its induction into the chain of signifiers by the father's in-
terdiction of a merely dual relation between the mother and the
infant. The phallus, as the phallus of the father, is the means of
that induction into the signifying chain, and as such is its signifier.
The infant's identification with that signifier represents its fixing
in a specular structure the signifier of the chain and what it sig-
nifies, the chain itself. This fixing is precisely what makes language
a chain-that is, a code, in which the relationship between what
speaks and what is spoken about is the determinate relation of sig-
nifier and signified within a sign, and not that of a trope. To es-
tablish a specular structure between the signifier of language and
language-what the infant does in identifying with the phallus that
is the signifier of the signifying system-is to make theory, the
speaking about language, into a code, and into the description of a
code. It is to make theory into the resistance to reading.
One could interpret in the same way the permanent delusive-
ness of "the sexual relation" as it is described by Lacan. Like the
infant's identificatory relation to language, "the sexual relation"
involves an identification with an abstract value. In a passage that
echoes the opening chapters of the Phenomenology, Lacan writes,
"... demand annuls (aufhebt) the particularity of everything that
can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love . . . It is nec-
essary, then, that the particularity thus abolished should reappear
beyond demand." It does so, he concludes, in desire's "'absolute
condition' ": ". . . namely, to put it in the simplest possible way,
that for both partners in the relation, both the subject and the
Other, it is not enough to be the subjects of need, or objects of

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 M L N 1005

love, but that they must stand for the cause of desire" (286-7/690-
691). To require that one stand as the cause of desire is the de-
mand elucidated by Kojeve as the conflict between Master and
Slave, the demand to be the value of the other. It is endemic in
human desire as the desire for a desire. Kojeve writes, "To desire a
Desire is to want to substitute oneself for the value desired by this
Desire. [It is] to desire that the value that I am or that I 'represent'
be the value desired by the other: I want him to 'recognize' my
value as his value."8 Identifying with abstract value means identi-
fying one's consciousness or language with a system of abstract
values like a code, or like a system of exchange ruled by an abso-
lute form of value (a money form), such as capitalism. And here if
not before the problem with this sort of critique-of the specular
delusion involved in the relation to language, the sexual relation,
and the relation to exchange-becomes evident: how is it possible
to imagine another possible relation, to envisage change? Or, better
-those queries lapse too easily into the specular illusion that one
might pass beyond this specular relation-how is language, pre-
cisely, possible, if all we have described is the reinstallment of
code?
Here we meet with the necessity of describing the origin of lan-
guage as figure, as trope not merely sign, rhetoric not merely
grammar or code. The rhetorical problems in locating such an or-
igin have gotten no simpler between the age of Rousseau and the
age of Derrida. Kristeva's description of a "pre-mirror stage" I'm
going to argue is a way of imagining the material and figural con-
ditions of language, the status of language as figure and inscrip-
tion prior to its existence as a phenomenal reality, as form and
meaning. Kristeva's interpretation of primary narcissism, in Powers
of Horror and Histories d'amour, attempts like much recent feminist
theory to rethink the pre-Oedipal phase. Kristeva attempts to
think of it both as triadic, as not merely a dual relation between
mother and infant, and as non-dialectical. She starts off from
Freud's definitions of primary narcissism in "On Narcissism" and
chapter 3 of The Ego and the Id as a triadic structure composed
when "a new psychical action" (Freud's words) impinges on the
autoerotism of the mother-infant dyad, an action consisting in
(Freud's words again) "an individual's first and most important
identification," an "immediate identification" prior to any object-
cathexis, "his identification with the father in his own personal
prehistory."9 These are also Lacan's references, and Kristeva is

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1006 CYNTHIA CHASE

consistent with Lacan in describing the instance she terms the

Imaginary father, and in maintaining that it is the infant's identifi-
cation with this instance that establishes and sustains the gap con-
stitutive of the structure of the sign, the difference between signi-
fied and signifier. What is new in Kristeva's account-or rather,
what is made newly legible-is the crucial significance of the des-
tiny of the mother's desire. Kristeva writes of the "abjection" of the
mother that accompanies the identification with the Imaginary fa-
ther or the phallus. She is describing what is involved in the hypo-
thetical interpretation by the infant of the gestures of maternal care,
which are at once, and indeterminably, the fulfillment of the in-
fant's and the mother's needs, and the indication of the mother's
desire or love. The infant interprets these marks of care as signi-
fying love and desire, her desire in the strict sense, desire for
something other than need-fulfillment, other than merely re-
sponding to the demand of her offspring. In a gesture that inau-
gurates the possibility of meaning, the infant rejects taking the
marks of maternal care as fulfillment of the need that indistin-
guishably merges mother and infant, and interprets them-inter-
prets them as significative, as signifying, indicating, something
other than that mergedness. The first identity is the infant's iden-
tification with this other-this absence set apart from the conglom-
eration of fulfilling mother and fulfilling infant, of marking and
marked.
Here Kristeva has succeeded in further specifying the nature of
that uncertainty we noted in Lacan's formulations, as well as in
Kristeva's rephrasing: "insofar as the mother signifies herself to her
infant as having a desire."'0 The condition of that signifying taking
place is an act of reading: an interpretive act that not only de-
ciphers the meaning of given signs, but decides which signs are to
be taken as such-which marks are to be considered significative,
and which merely as marks. The "abjection," the abjecting, of the
mother-whose forms Kristeva traces in modes of misogyny that
in Freud's words reflect "the repudiation of femininity," which he
called "the bedrock" of resistance to psychoanalysis-the abjection
of the mother is the rejection of the uncertainty about those marks
that may or may not be significative, that are significative, mean-
ingful, only insofar as they are read.
The forms of abjection and repudiation that Kristeva can diag-
nose and document in abundance in several cultures are the best
evidence that such an identification with the Imaginary father and

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 M L N 1007

abjection of the mother actually occur. But there is something du-

bious or credulous about this localization of the moment of rejec-
tion in the infant's act of identification. It repeats, in a sense, the
repudiation of the irreducible uncertainty as to the significative
status of signs. For this is an uncertainty about the meaningfulness
of one's own text, which exists as more than marks on paper, or
noise, only as it comes to be read. The allusion to the origin of
language in the "primary relation" to the mother, as I suggested
earlier, thus occurs at points where the intelligibility of one's own
text, the separability of the matter of one's language and the
matter it is about, comes to seem doubtful. It is this rhetorical logic
of the diagnosis of a delusive "identification with the phallus"-
always what someone else is doing, or did: the infant, the woman
-that Lacan, and not Kristeva, is able to suggest through the rhe-
torical flamboyance of his own speech. Here is the passage leading
up to the claim that the piece of smoked salmon in the dream sig-
nifies la belle bouchere's identification with the signifier:

It's that question [how can another be loved] that the subject be-
comes, just at this point. In which the woman identifies with the man,
and the piece of smoked salmon takes the place of the desire for the
Other.
Since this desire is totally inadequate [Ce desir ne suffisant 'a rien]
(how can one receive all these people with only one slice of smoked
salmon?) [(comment avec cette seule tranche de saumon fume recevoir
tout ce monde?), I really must when all (or the dream) is said and done
give up my desire to give a dinner (that is, my search for the desire of
the Other, which is the secret of my desire). Everything has gone
wrong, and you say that the dream is a wish-fulfillment. [Comment ar-
rangez-vous cela, professeur?] How do you work that one out, pro-
fessor?

(262/626)

Qui parle, la? ...

This is another of these moments in which Lacan merges la b.b.'s
question with his own. But something slightly different is hap-
pening this time. Lacan's second paragraph is at once a parabasis
and a prosopopoeia. Prosopopoeia is defined as the giving of voice
to an absent or deceased entity-a speaking in the voice of
someone, as Lacan here suddenly speaks in the voice of Freud's
witty hysteric. A parabasis is when an actor in a play, for example,
turns away from the scene in which he is playing to address the
audience. It breaks and calls attention to the formal conditions of

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1008 CYNTHIA CHASE

the performance. Catherine Clement picks up on this dimension

of Lacan's story of la belle bouchere: she reads Lacan's identification
with the beautiful butcher's wife and her refusal to satisfy her de-
sire as an anticipation of Lacan's unfounding of his school, of the
Ecole Freudienne. More generally, this passage is a dramatization
of the conditions of Lacan's teaching anything. Lacan puts himself
in the position of Freud's patient, his listeners in the position of
professor Freud. The sudden interpellation of his audience, or his
addressee-with a word with which they might address him, "pro-
fessor"- puts stress on the reversibility of the gesture of address
involved in the act of teaching or interpretation: the intelligibility
of Lacan's utterance depends on its being heard as such by his
audience; they are, in that sense, "the professor" to whom the
question is posed and from whom the meaning must come. And
the question he is asking is how meaning can ever come to pass,
considering its entire insufficiency as sheer intentional structure or
image of a bit of- not even flesh, but smoked fish. How, with a
single signifier, receive this whole world?
There is a peculiar tension between the kind of speech this pas-
sage is, heard as it were without quotation marks, as if it were
spoken by the witty butcher's wife addressing Freud, for example,
and the kind of speech it is as framed, in Lacan's prosopopoeia
and parabasis. Heard in the first way, this utterance is demand
with all the elements Lacan includes in that concept: specular con-
frontation with the other; the negation that points toward meaning;
and finally, "the primordial relation," that is to say, the gesture of
address. The concept of demand brings out a crucial dimension of
the referential function or of language as indication or pointing:
that it is a speech act implying an address. Even the referential
function, even mere indication -especially mere indication -is
rhetorical. The address can never be simply to that which one is
indicating; it is necessarily to an other. Another way of saying this
would be that the address is an apostrophe, a gesture of address
which is a turning aside to address someone else. To that extent, it
is a parabasis, and with this another kind of speech act comes into
play. We encounter it in Lacan's sudden parabasis here: the calling
into question of the very conditions of the production of his lec-
ture's meaning, which makes for a gesture that is peculiarly direc-
tionless, pointing, if it is at all, only to itself. Indication bottoms out
here into just the act of giving voice. Heard as framed in Lacan's
prosopopoeia, la belle bouchere's questions and assertions of

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 M L N 1009

meaning do not signify-even as she speaks of the enigma of ad-

dress: "my search for the desire of the Other, which is the secret of
my desire"-but they give a face to the uncertainty of whether
gestures can signify: the uncertainty as to whether the materials of
meaning-gestures of invitation, consumable marks-are capable
of producing it.
If the fact is that one cannot be certain of the signifying function
of the merest indications, la belle bouchere puts a good face on this
unacceptable matter. Just that is what the baby does, in Kristeva's
interpretation of primary narcissism. What la b.b. does, Lacan im-
plies, in identifying with the question of her husband's desire, is
what the baby does in identifying with the question of the desire of
the mother. Kristeva's account lets us more exactly describe the
nature of the second type of identification that comes into question
in the case of the butcher's wife. If the first type involved is
analogy or metaphor-identification based on a comparison, like
her identification with her desired friend-the second type, the
arbitary "immediate identification," is a prosopopoeia or a ca-
tachresis-the giving of a face or a name to that which has none.
Kristeva's account of primary narcissism is a displaced analysis of
this gesture: a description of the figural and material conditions of
the production of meaning, including that of her own text. The
marks of maternal care, in this account, are a figure for the inde-
terminably significative marks that are the material of any text,
and the infant's interpreting them as a sign of love is the giving of
a face, the prosopon poiein, that posits a structure of signification
and reads the marks as a meaningful pattern.
Nothing else than the occurrence of such a prosopopoeia would
make possible language: a system of the production of effects of
meaning that is not reducible to a code. The institution of the
system of signs by a giving of face or figure is what entails that the
linguistic sign is of the nature not only of an element in a code but
of a trope or figure, the effect of imposing a figure-that of the
difference between a signifier and a signified: the face of the sign
-on a possibly non-meaningful, merely need-fulfilling, function.
In thus describing the prosopopoeia that gives meaning to other-
wise meaningless marks, one is describing language as something
other than the signification achieved by the determinate negation
of reference-that negation or "conversion" bound to install the
mirror image of the illusion it negated. Language involves another
more complex persistence of the function of reference. What we

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 1010 CYNTHIA CHASE

were seeing in the interplay of demand and apostrophe in Lacan's

giving of voice to la belle bouchere was how the referential function
entails parabasis and prosopopoeia-was how these occur in a text
with a referential dimension. They-such occurrences in the text,
the occurrence of the giving of face and of the exposure of the
conditions of production of meaning-can be referred to. They
will be referred to figuratively, described as taking place in an-
other order of materiality, as Kristeva and Lacan refer, for ex-
ample, to the "identifications" performed by the baby and la belle
bouchere. To the extent that they take themselves or are taken only
literally, references such as these are just the sort of "conversion"
we described earlier, the would-be conversion of resistance to
theory that installs a symmetrical inverse of the initial resistance
confusing the materiality of the signified with the materiality of
the signifier.
But the possibility of that confusion remains the basis of the ref-
erential function of language. It cannot be distinguished defini-
tively from the possibility of positing the significative status of the
mere material of signification, indeterminably significative ges-
tures or marks. The decisive function of such a positing of form
and meaning-the decisive function of prosopopoeia-is finally
what is said by the opening chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology. Its
final pages confront us with a no doubt predictable parabasis:
along with all the other "this" 's and "here" 's and "now" 's, Hegel
writes of "this piece of paper on which I am writing." But this
"this," as de Man points out (in a prosopopoeia of his own I wish I
could reproduce here), is unlike those others, in that it is pointing,
if it is at all, only to itself. Writing and referent, marking and
marked, merge, and this coagulation, which indicates nothing, and
signifies nothing, is the matrix of all future acts of reference,
which take it as the guarantee of their possibility. The linguistic
function of reference, which occurs with prosopopoeia, provides
the basis of the intuition of reference, of the illusion that reference
occurs as an intuition.
Thus what resists, and what must ensure the validity of con-
sciousness, is not the fictive hard reality of things. What resists is
what resists reading: indeterminably significative marks, opaque
inscriptions such as Hegel's "this piece of paper on which I am
writing," which we can in no real sense read; but also, what resists
is the avoidance of reading, the tendency to forget about it, which
such marking or repetition carries out. For the validity of con-
sciousness, this is not so great a guarantee.

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 M L N 1011

To put this in a simpler way: the condition of language, then, is

not simply figure-that of the sign, as the distance between signi-
fied and signifier; but a non-figure, the mere marking or inscrip-
tion of "this piece of paper on which I am writing"-brought up
also by Lacan's parabasis. And now we can see the beauty of ia belle
bouchere. In identifying herself with the phallus, with the signifier
of desire, la belle bouchere performs the positing of form and
meaning that effaces the uncertain meaningfulness of marking or
writing. She stops up the question posed by the secret that desire is
the search for the desire of the Other-say the question of whether
the Other sleeps to dream, or only dreams to sleep.
That Lacan imagines la belle bouchere as a way of conjuring the
disturbing implications of prosopopoeia-of conjuring them up
and conjuring them away-is suggested, I think, not only by the
logic of his and Freud's text, but by an odd play of the signifier. It
links the lecture on "La direction de la cure et les principes de son
pouvoir" with the seminar on "Le moi dans la theorie...." Lacan
had spoken, in that first seminar, of Freud's first dream-interpre-
tation, the dream of Irma's injection, analysed in the second
chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams. In the dream Freud peers
into his patient Irma's mouth and perceives "extensive whitish-
grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures ... evidently
modelled upon the turbinal bones of the nose" (139-140/107). For
Lacan this is the first climactic moment of the dream; the second,
its fulfilling culmination, is the moment in which there appears in
the dream, in characters "printed in heavy type," the chemical for-
mula for trimethylamin, the "solution" which Freud's friend Otto
has injected into Irma. It is thus the "solution" to the question of
the dream about the nature of Irma's illness, or as Lacan reads
this, of the nature of Unconscious desire. The answer, he suggests,
lies in the formal repetition prominent in the written formula,
which, diagrammed, forms three groups of threes. The Irma
dream thus culminates for Lacan in an apotheosis of language
about language, an oracular theoretical insight. But en route to
this conclusion Lacan's reading includes a moment which, as Neil
Hertz observed, must be described as a moment of abjection.
Evoking the moment in which Freud looks into Irma's mouth-la
bouche d'Irma-Lacan writes that Freud makes "a horrible dis-
covery, that of the flesh that one never sees, the bottom of things,
the reverse side of the face, of the visage, (l'envers de la face, du
visage, les secretats par excellence), secretions ... the flesh inas-
much as it is formless, as its form alone is something that provokes

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 1012 CYNTHIA CHASE

anguish."" La bouche d'Irma is associated with an anguish provoked

by "l'envers du visage"-the back side of the face; non-face, non-
figure: the lack of a face, the taking away of a face, implied by
prosopopoeia as the giving of face, which implies that no face was
there prior to that figurative and disfigurative gesture. La belle
bouchere is beautiful, then, in that she gives a face of a kind to la
bouche d'Irma: she closes up that mouth, that wound, that non-
figure.12 La bouche chere is a dear mouth, then, and an expensive
one; not because, as she tells Freud, her tastes run less to her hus-
band's wholesale meat then to smoked salmon and caviar, for she
also asks her husband not to give her any; but because her dream
absorbs the question of how the theory of signification will be a
theory of desire, and the desire for, and resistance to, theory.
We read this first in The Interpretation of Dreams. If the dream
serves above all the wish to sleep, as Freud writes at the end of his
dream theory, then dreaming can only continue. For the wish to
sleep is the indeterminably significative tendency that is marking
or repetition, and also the wish to forget about it, and to go on with
the hypothesis that one is perceiving a meaningful form. But that
hypothesis brings with it-we have followed this in the logic of
indication-the "hypothesis of dreaming," the hypothesis that
one's signs point not to things, but to other signs. And "the hy-
pothesis of dreaming," as de Man writes, "undoes the certainty of
sleep," just as prosopopoeia, or the hypothesis of hallucination,
undoes sense-certainty.'3 It gives us over to a permanent insomnia,
in the very action of mere repetition or forgetting that should
guarantee our sleep. The repetition may always be read. It is not
possible to end die Traumdeutung. It is not possible to give up resis-
tance.

Cornell University

NOTES

1 Freud is quoting E. Goblot, "Sur le souvenir des reves" (1986). Freud's qualifica-
tion and reversal of this statement, in section D of chapter 7, is a crucial moment
of the metapyschology.
2 Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon, 1965), p. 181. In
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), IV, 148. Further quotations
from The Interpretation of Dreams will be identified in parenthesis in the text, the
page number in the Avon edition first, in the Standard Edition second.
3 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits. A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavis-
tock, 1977), p. 261. The translation omits a negative ("ne pas les satisfaire") from
this sentence. Cf. Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 625. Further references to

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 M L N 1013

Lacan's Ecrits will be given in parenthesis in the text, the page number in the
Sheridan translation first, in the Seuil edition second.
4 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), p. 8.
5 Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), I,
273-4.
6 Freud refers to "a clever patient" ("eine witzige Patientin"), Lacan to "our witty
hysteric" ("notre spirituelle hysterique"); it is Catherine Clement, interpreting
Lacan, who calls this patient "la belle bouchere"-intimating that she functions
in Lacan's theoretical discourse in the ways I suggest here (and see below, p. [23]
ff.) See The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New
York: Columbia UP, 1983), pp. 124-131.
7 The Interpretation of Dreams, ch. 5, pp. 267-8 (Avon), IV, 233-4 (Standard), and
ch. 7, pp. 608-611 (Avon), V, 569-472 (Standard).
8 Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Lectures on the "Phenome-
nology of Spirit," comp. Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H.
Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969), p. 7.
9 Complete Psychological Works, XIV, 77, and XIX, 31.
10 Julia Kristeva, Histoires d'amour (Paris: Denoel, 1983), p. 55.
11 Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre II. Le moi dans la thgorie de Freud et dans la
technique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 186.
12 There is also an allusion to faces and their backsides, strangely, in Freud's text
on the witty butcher's wife. The analysis of her dream begins with her telling
Freud about her husband, how much she is fond of him, and what a good-na-
tured, frank-spoken fellow he is:
... at the place where he regularly lunched, [he] had made the acquaintance
of a painter, who had pressed him to be allowed to paint his portrait, as he
had never seen such expressive features. Her husband however had replied
in his blunt manner that he was much obliged, but he was sure the painter
would prefer a piece of a pretty young girl's behind to the whole of his face.
(180-1/147)
Freud drops a footnote:
1. Cf. the phrase "sitting for one's portrait" and Goethe's lines:

Und wenn er keinen Hintern hat,

wie mag der Edle sitzen?
[And if he hasn't a behind,
How can his Lordship sit?]
No figure without its back side, Freud teaches us-or Goethe. The importance
of the backside makes another story (its richest rendering is Eve Sedgwick's "A
Poem is Being Written," Representations 17 (1987), 110-143) and I will only make
one point about this anecdote. The butcher resists the painter's proposal. This is
ostensibly a resistance (which his wife seems to indulge or find engaging) to the
notion of aesthetic desire, to the wish to give form, to which the butcher gives.
short shrift in favor of the notion of animal desire, or need. But above all we see
here resistance as the denial of the inclination to give a face. It's that resistance
that one could deem characteristic of theory: not simply the reluctance to per-
sonify or characterize, which certainly can mark a commitment to genuinely
critical reflection, but more fundamentally, the exclusion of the implications of
the giving of figure, one of which is the inevitable figurativeness of attempts to
describe the conditions of consciousness or of language.
13 Paul de Man, op. cit., p. 49.

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