I am interested in exploring the relation between Power and Force as a symbolic frame for the male/female dialectic of desire and drive. Force is momentary and thrusting—aligned with the compulsion of drive (pulsion)—while Power is enduring, linked to the structural authority of the signifier. Drive circles its object without resolution; it consumes desire but cannot metabolise it.
The momentary identification of the phallus with the penis—most notably during erection or orgasm—is an illusion, a brief foreclosure of symbolic distance. The phallus is not the penis but the signifier of desire itself—that which causes desire in the Other, and which organises subjectivity. The penis, by contrast, is anatomical, visible, and vulnerable to lack. At times, the phallus may be misrecognised through the penis, but never fully captured by it.
When the penis seems to bear the phallus—at the apex of erotic charge or jouissance—the illusion of unity produces a sublime intensity: a momentary synthesis of symbolic and real, power and force. But this union is always finite; it collapses. Afterward, in the slackening of the penis, the gap reopens. The man is once again just a body. The phallus has withdrawn into the field of signifiers.
And here it becomes evident: one may have the phallus without having a penis—as in the case of a woman who occupies the position of lack in the symbolic, and thus becomes its structuring absence. Equally, a man may have a penis but not the phallus—he is reduced to flesh without authority, anatomy without desire. |
