Britney Spears’ autobiography and Lacan’s seminar XX: Encore

In Britney Spears’ bestselling autobiography, The Woman in Me (2023), she refers to a wordplay, her boyfriend at the time, Justin Timberlake, makes on his name for his new album: Justified. This album comes out, precisely as the couple break up. Justin Timberlake uses the wordplay to suggest that he has really gotten to know himself (Justin) and that he was also “justified” in relations to the fact that they broke up. He presented himself as the victim (as in the song cry me a river). In Britney’s autobiography another story is told. She was pregnant and did not want the abortion, but Justin made her do it. When she was feeling at her lowest, lying in pain in the bathroom afterwards he did not try to understand her, but merely played a bit of guitar for her (that is he was simply “phallizing” the situation the phallic jouissance being one that does not involve the Other). Instead of acknowledging the loss suffered by Britney, he simply played guitar (that is he thought she would be comforted by his great guitar playing).

In Seminar XX, entitled Lacan also makes a wordplay on “justice”. This one with many possible readings, and it takes us to the crux of the matter of the seminar. Lacan describes a kind of satisfaction that is not of the order of phallic jouissance. It is an “other satisfaction”. Yet, with his play on “just” Lacan points out, that this other satisfaction is not a binary, it does not make a two. We have to think of the other satisfaction as “just barely” another one.

“Another satisfaction is the one that answers to the jouissance that was barely (juste) required, just enough (juste) for it to happen between what I will abbreviate by calling them man and woman. In other words, the satisfaction that answers to phallic jouissance. Note here the modification that is introduced by the word barely (juste). This “barely” is a “just barely” (tout juste), a “just barely succesful” that is the flip-side of failure — it just barely succeeds. This already justifies what Aristotle contributes with the notion of justice s the bare mean (le juste milieu).

Perhaps some of you recognised, when I introduced the whole (tout) — found in the expression, “just barely” (tout juste) — that I circumvented the word “prosdiorism”, which designates the whole that is not lacking in any lacking. Well, the fact that it is the prosdiorism, the whole that allows us on the occasion to slide from Aristotle’s justice to the just barely (justesse), to the just barely successful (réussite de justesse), is what legitimates my having brought in Aristotle’s work here. Indeed — right? It cannot be understood immediately like that.” (64–64/61).

Lacan is using psychoanalysis and the notion of enjoyment to complicate a long history on the notion of justice as the perfect equilibrium. The word-plays themselves do not allow for a complete equilibrium, but are themselves “slippery”, they seem not to carry equal weight and they keep the reader off balance.

Britney Spears’ book is entitled The Woman in Me. This is probably meant to suggest that she found the Woman (with capital W), that she found herself. But her book rather suggest something differently. The Woman with capital W does not exist. There is no Woman outside the masquarade of the phrase: the Woman in Me (which suggest revelation).

Lacan’s point is that justice has always been based on the One. For example in the famous blind Goddess with the weight-scales. Each should get what they “deserve”, the weights should be even. Behind this is also a “sexual technique” as Lacan points out: the two sexes that “fuses” into One, the perfect balance. This is the model from Yin and Yang for example, where each pole taken together would make a balance. This is not the situation in Britney’s bathroom. There’s rather a dissymmetry. Lacan’s reflections also invovles the notion of a justice that perhaps would not be based on the One, but rather on “There’s something of One”, a disymmetry. “There is something of One”, does not mean that there are two. Like the word-play on justice and “just barely” it is like the a constant failure of any word to fully fit, leading to the next in a series, that does not form a whole.

This is quite a lot to take in. It is like a maze, that you are trapped in reading Lacan’s text. I feel, playing on the words, that even explaining them, you can “just barely” exit the maze. Perhaps you do not exit. Perhaps it is another part of the maze.

Lacan has spent the seminar leading up to seminar XX in defining sexuation through the psychoanalytical lense. Sexuation does not mean gender. It is not a symbolic construction, but a failure of such constructions. Lacan prefers to use logical functions to explain how this failure comes about. The two sexes do not relate to each other. They refer instead to a split. The male sexuation is based on the exclusion of castration in one position. “There is one that is not castrated.” This is opposed to the pole beneath where “All are castrated”. Men, or phallic jouissance, can form a whole by referring to one position that is not castrated. For example, Spears’ recounts her father and her grandfather as identifying with such a position: they do not represent the law, they directly see no limits to their power:

“…my grandfather June Spears Sr. — was abusive. Jean suffered the loss of a baby when he was only three days old. June sent Jean to Southeast Louisianna Hospital, a by-all-accounts-horrible asylum in Mandeville, where she was put on lithium. In 1966, when she was thirty-one, my grandmother Jean shot herself with a shotgun over her infant son’s grave, just over eight years after his death. I can’t imagine the grief she must have felt.” (6).

The fathers are in other words, not “oedipal” fathers of symbolic authority (themselves submitted to the law’s castration), but much more like the obscene primordial father of the horde, enjoying without limits. “June made my father exercise long past exhaustion. Each day when my father finished basketball practice, no matter how tired or hungry he was, he still had to shoot a hundred more baskets before he could come inside. (…) even in my family, it was said that the Spears men tended to be bad news, especially in how they treated women.” (ibid.).

The male side relies on Exception, either in the case of the oedipal structure of the father of the Law, or the father that tries to position himself as the Exception (like the primordial father). It enables a drawing of a limit, between the position that is not castrated and the rest or whole of castration).

The female side is different. It does not allow for an exception. The upper line reads: “there is no one who is not castrated.” And the lower line reads: “Not-all are castrated”. The female side, hence, does not allow for exceptions to castrations. But this means precisely that no limit can be drawn. Instead of simply including “all women” in a whole, it makes a hole in the whole.

Lacan also opposes these two in the sense of satisfaction. On the male side the satisfaction is “phallic”. It is organ-based and needs an object. On the female side, there is a relation to the Other.

Nevertheless, let me try to simplify Lacan’s points and exemplify it with Britney Spear’s autobiography and the way she talks of her singing as “the other satisfaction”, a satisfaction that she claims brings her closer to God. Surprisingly, Lacan also brings in God vis-a-vis this “other satisfaction”. In this other satisfaction something like God is present. While this other satisfaction is called “jouissance feminine” as opposed to phallic jouissance, it is not reserved for biological women. Lacan claims we also find it in mystics.

To be sure, Britney Spears description are quite simplistic compared with great mystics like Hildegaard von Bingen. Nevertheless, this does not rule out, that it might be the same kind of other satisfaction, that they talk about. The prologue of Britney’s book says, how she feels God’s presence, for example in the warmth of the rocks and in her singing and dancing:

“As a little girl I walked for hours alone in the silent woods behind my house in Louisiana, singing songs. Being outside gave me a sense of aliveness and danger. When I was growing up, my mother and father fought constantly. He was an alcoholic. I was usually scared in my home. Outside wasn’t necessarily heaven, either, but it was my world. Call it heaven or hell, it was mine.

Before going home, I would follow a path to our neighbors’ house, through a landscaped yard and past a swimming pool. They had a rock garden full of small, soft pebbles that would trap the heat and stay warm in a way that felt so good against my skin. I would lie down on those rocks and look up at the sky, feeling the warmth from below and above, thinking: I can make my own way in life. I can make my dreams come true.

Lying quietly on those rocks, I felt God.” (1)

Here we have a clear opposition. On the one hand there is the everyday life with misery (domestic abuse, alcoholism…), not being able to stay at home. But then there is another connection. This world itself not all (pas tout). There is another dimension that shines through in small glimpses, like a satisfaction on the skin, “feeling God”. This other dimension is not another one (it is not like she escapes this world completely). It is more like flip-side, a kind of otherness within this world. We can see this in how she uses the possessive pronoun “mine”. It is not about a possession one can actually have, it is more like being penetrated and exposed in a world (like the way she is lying on the rocks and feeling warmth going through the body). It is also significant that it is not in her own house, but the neighbors. This underlines her exposure, that she does not have her own property. The passage makes us think of a sort of possession that does not involve property, but rather something like receiving a gift, being open to receive. If we compare it to the male side based on an exception, God is not an exception to the world. There is no clear limit between God and this world. But this makes this world non-all, it is impossible to locate God precisely. If Britney had written that she felt the warmth of the rocks simply we would have a world consistent with itself. By introducing “I felt God”, God emerges rather as something that makes limits to this world harder to maintain, it makes the world, otherwise perceived whole “non-whole” (pas-toute).

God is not a force of the beyond. The experience of God is rather something like a surprise, something that ‘waits’, like the warmth in the rocks and small pebbles, and that gives a certain sensation (“felt so good against my skin”). This is important because it shows the importance of the body. Lacan’s seminar is entitled encore, which he relates to feminine jouissance. Encore can mean: “more”, it can mean “still” and it can play on en corps, meaning in the body. Britney experiences such an “encore”. It is something “more” than the world as it is merely perceived and more than the structural relations that constitute it (father, mother, neighbors, her). It is also something still (like the heat that is still in the pebbles and rocks). Third, it is something that is “in the body” (it felt so good against my skin). The feminine jouissance is especially related to the body. It cannot be limited to a specific organ, for example.

The otherness is not a binary. There is not One and then the Other. This would in fact eliminate the Other (because it would make them simply One). This is why Lacan uses the phrase: “There is something of the One”. The “something” describes a kind of otherness, that makes the One inconsistent. The pebbles in Britney’s description end up being “something” of the One, that prevents the world from being simply reducible to itself. It also points to something that cannot be simply a whole, but point to a singularity “I can make my own way in life”.

In Lacan’s quote he first discusses the “other satisfaction” (female jouissance) as what answers to phallic jouissance. The word he uses is “répond à”. This can mean answers to, talks back to, corresponds to. This already points to the problem. Is this other jouissance one that corresponds to phallic jouissance, so that taken together they make up a whole?

This would be the same as usual models of binaries that together make a fusion, an all. Traditional ways of thinking about this is in Yin-Yang models. They might be different, but together they constitute a balance. In fact, on this model it is only in so far as they are different, that they make a whole. This is the model that says something like: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, to quote the famous book. True, they might misunderstand each other, not be able to communicate, but nevertheless, each position is whole on to itself. In this sense, they constitute a whole. They don’t know how to talk to one another, but they fit a whole together (even in their strife).

Lacan has something very different in mind from this common wisdom. The whole problem, what makes this other satisfaction other, is that it is not a binary. It cannot be taken in this sense of another pole. We should take “answer to” (répond à) therefore in the sense of talking back to, challenging, but not in the sense of a complement, but instead a supplement.

This is confirmed by Lacan’s quote in the next section. This other satisfaction succeeds “just barely”. It is precisely this other satisfaction that fails to make one. We might say, were it not for this other satisfaction, we would only have phallic satisfaction (and thereby a One). It is this kind of “juste” (just barely) that also interrupts any kind of balanced whole. The most famous is for example Aristotle’s “the right mean” (le juste milieu).

Aristotle’s just means is an ethics that tries to find a balance, to avoid going to extremes. It is not like the word-play on encore that always says “more”. It is perhaps not a surprise that Aristotle also wonders about the “use” of female orgasm. Since Aristotle believes that “life” comes from the semen, there is really no need for the woman to feel any satisfaction. Aristotle even thinks it is dangerous and can disturb reproduction. Without theorizing it properly, Aristotle already sense that this “other satisfaction” is something that can throw the world off balance, that would ruin the equilibrium.

We should keep it in moderation. Freud himself even talks along the same lines when he introduces the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle is about reducing tension. When we reach a minimum of tension we feel pleasure. It is therefore about moderation. We tend to think of justice (following Aristotle) along the same lines. Justice is when everyone is given their due. This does not mean that everyone is given the same amount, there were many slaves in antiquity, it just means that justice is that everyone is given what they deserve. Our view of justice is mostly on the balanced whole (like the traditional icon of justice — the blindfolded Goddess with the scales). But this can be done with goods. Lacan says it is like material, like clothing that can be cut. But satisfaction cannot be cut like a material. We cannot say “everyone should get the satisfaction they deserve”, since satisfaction run contrary to the symbolic order. To put it simply, even if everyone is given the same size of cake, I can fantasize that the others enjoy their cake much more than me, for example. Enjoyment is both impossible to “measure” or “moderate”, but it is also impossible to get rid of. It disturbs the One, and “makes something of the One”. The playwright and comedian Aristophanes makes a word-play that is kind of a ruination of Aristotelean ethics and cosmology when he refers to “cosmetics” of women (that is to masquarade). He says, the cosmetics ruins the cosmos (cosmetic implies etymologically cosmos) and yet, because of “cosmetics” (masquarade) we do not have have a cosmos (that is not w whole).

So the balanced is upset by the other satisfaction and by the truly innovative character of psychoanalysis. Here there is a kind of satisfaction that does not get off, by reducing tension (moderation), but paradoxically by raising it. Phallic satisfaction, modelled on the orgasm is about the highest kind of pleasure when tension is released. But this is not everything. There is another satisfaction. Lacan formulates it as a satisfaction that gets off on not succeeding. If the orgasm is the phallic image of success, this other satisfaction goes beyond such a “success”. It is rather a satisfaction in the very failure to reduce tension.

Let’s try to explain this with Britney again. When Britney gets together with Justin Timberlake she describes this as an attempt of fusion. The two made into One is the image of “perfect love”. With all her love-relationships with men so far this is how she describes it: as a fusion towards the One:

“When he and I were anywhere in the same vicinity — his mom even said this — we were like magnets. We’d just find each other immediately and stick together. You couldn’t explain the way we were together. It was weird, to be honest, how in love we were.” (57)

In this image it is like the two have merged into one. With Britney’s fortuitous metaphor, they were like magnets. This is a very Aristotelian view: the One without cracks. There should be One, and parts should fit together in a greater whole, going back to the Prime Mover. Like in the comparison with magnets, that explains movement and causality, without a gap or interval (the more psychoanalytical notion of a cause, always has something anti-conceptual, on the contrary).

At one point she gets pregnant, but Justin asks her to have an abortion. She does it for him. Looking back she says, she was more “into it” than him. This seems to open the traditional male-chauvinist reading. Justin is thinking of Britney and his career, whereas Britney, as soon as she gets Justin she only thinks of being with him. Put in Lacanian terms: the male side of sexuation has an exception (the Career), whereas the female side, has no “exception”, does not allow for the split between oikos and polis, between “home” and “career”. Yet, what is thought of as home, as in Greece the non-political reproductive activities is as psychoanalysis shown precisely never really “at home”, but always derailed, there is no “biological animal” in contrast to the political animal, a human beings pursuit of pleasure is always excessive, never just “right”.

Precisely because the female side has no exception it renders the entire “whole” inconsistent. It is not that Britney’s sensibility is simply a stupid girl who cares little for “fame” (the public). It rather that her investment if you will renders fame itself no longer that important. Men are hugely invested in the public ideal (the superego), whereas the female side, following Freud’s old remark, is less susceptible to the superego. This does not mean, as Freud seems to suggest that the woman are less “ethical”. It means that the female side renders this very superego morality less important. Put another way, whereas men are more (superegoic) moral, women are more ethical. Britney herself describes this kind of superego in relation to her childhood:

“As a child, I’d always a guilty conscience, a lot of shame, a sense that my family thought I was just plain bad. The sadness and the loneliness that would hit me felt like my fault somehow, like I deserved unhappiness and bad luck. I knew the truth of our relationship was nothing like how it was being portrayed, but I still imagined that if I was suffering, I must have deserved it. Along the line, surely, I’d done bad things. I believe in karma, and so when bad things happen, I imagine that it’s just the law of karma catching up with me.” (89).

This line of thinking is much more nuanced than the simplicity of the prose might make it appear. It leads us straight to the paradoxical logic of the superego, in contrast to the power-knowledge matrix of Michel Foucault, for example. In Foucault the subject is simply an effect of the discourse. For Freud, the subject is a paradoxical effect, a surplus of the discourse. The superego is not simply “internalized” authority, but is something posited by the subject itself. By taking on an “excessive” sense of guilt, the subject paradoxically make the authority seem to exist. In Britney’s case, it is precisely what makes a One of being (“the law of karma as a sense of equilibrium”). The superego is however a symptom that there is not simply law, but that this law is itself non-whole, but “made whole” by the influx of jouissance from the subject (“as a child, I’d always had a guilty conscience”). As Freud writes, the superego is a paradoxical law because the more you “obey” it, the more it demands. Freud writes in civilisation and its discontents of the superego: “For the more virtuos a man is, the more severe and distrustful is its behaviour, so that ultimately it is precisly those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness” (Freud 1956: 125–126). How to explain this paradox? As Freud says, even if “irrational” they are in a way correct, since by feeding the superego, they posit authority as nonlacking, and hence give way to their own desire. It is precisely by taking the guilt upon herself that the subject can constitute a whole (the cosmology of “karma” in this sense).

In the book, Britney describes several times a near-psychosis like sensitivity: “I’ve always been almost disturbingly empathetic. What people are feeling in Nebraska, I can subconsciously feel even though I’m thousand of miles away. Sometimes women’s periods sync up; I feel like my emotions are always syncing up with those around me.” (90). This can be explained precisely by women not having a point of exception to castration, that can form a “whole”.

It is like Britney becomes precisely who she is with. That a woman is primarily masquerade. The men are on the contrary imposters. This does not mean, compared to men, that women are therefore less subjects. On the contrary, it makes them more subjects, since the basic structure of subjectivity is precisely the void, the pure cogito, not the res cogitans (the thinking-substance). Britney for example describes when she plays a role in movie:

“The first movie I did was Crossroads, written by Shonda Rhimes and directed by Tamra Davis. We had filmed it in March 2001, around the same time I was recording the album Britney. In the film, I was playing a “good girl” named Lucy Wagner. The experience wasn’t easy for me. My problem wasn’t with anyone involved in the production but with what acting did to my mind. I think I started Method acting — only I didn’t know how to break out of my character. I really became this other person. Some people do Method acting, but they’re usually aware of the fact that they’re doing it. But I didn’t have any separation at all. This is embarrassing to say, but it’s like a cloud or something came over me and I just became this girl named Lucy. When the camera came on, I was her, and then I couldn’t tell the difference between when the camera was on and when it wasn’t. I know that seems stupid, but it’s the truth. I took it that seriously. I took it seriously to the point where Justin said, “Why are you walking like that? Who are you?” (66)

Here we find another point of sexual difference: between the male “Exception” and the feminine impossibility of Exception. A man can ‘do’ method acting (aware that they are doing it, can step out of it), whereas Britney, (here taken as the female side of sexuation) does it too much, she becomes too involved, rendering the very ‘normal reality’ inconsistent. The male side would operate with fiction as exception, the female side has no exception, but as such it makes the “whole” inconsistent, makes it not-whole.

It is very important to recall, that to say that women are not wholly in the phallic function, does not mean that they are somehow beyond the symbolic order. The image of the woman as beyond is male fantasy. The Woman with capital W is a male fantasy, and she can operate as the exception. The classical imaginary figure of the exception is the primordial father of the horde, with limitless enjoyment. But also the imaginary figure of woman that enjoys without limits can be positioned there. (as in the porn-industry). Feminine enjoyment is not limitless, in a beyond. It is more like impossible to locate and define its limits. It is like an unorientable, not a limitless enjoyment.

This is not what the other satisfaction means. It is not that women can simply enjoy much more of the same “phallic” satisfaction (the same in higher measure), or in an uncastrated way. As Lacan says, the female side has no exception, but as such it renders castration inconsistent, not-all. It means that no whole can be formed.

It is interesting to compare Britney’s singing and her “link with the fans” in this respect. This link is not described as a whole. It is not an oceanic fusion. Instead it is like a more like a series of particles, like an open set in set-theory. When Britney is locked up under her father’s conservatorship, she one day sees some fans in the “free Britney movement”. It is easy to laugh at this. We can also claim that Britney and her editor put it in to gain more fans (the perfect way to sell the book). Yet, why should we only reduce it to that? Isn’t it much more subversive and productive to read it as pas-toute, the non-whole:

“The same way I believe that I can sense how someone’s feeling in Nebraska, I think my connection to my fans helped them subconsciously know that I was in danger. We have a connection, no matter where we are in space. Even if you’re on the other side of the country or the world, on some level we’re bound up together. Fans of mine — even though I hadn’t said anything online or in the press about being confined — they just seemed to know.

Seeing them marching in the streets, chanting “Free Britney!” — that was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life. I know some people laughed at it. They saw the pink T-shirts with my name on them and said, “What kind of cause is this?”

Let’s forget that the word “subconscious” was never accepted by Freud. What matters here is that this connection is not a fusion, it is not a ONE (like the fantasy of the couple’s union). It is more like an open-ended series, something that interrupts the flow of everyday life and balance, that does not permit a closure (like a closed set). We can say that it is “just barely” a whole. Let’s go back and compare it the fusion of the couple. When Britney gets pregnant with Justin, he believes it is bad for them to have the child (basically bad for his career). He wants Britney to get an abortion. Here, we have the crack of the union, the crack of the couple. When she is sick in the bathroom he comes to play on his guitar totally “out of sync” (no pun intended) with the situation:

“On the appointed day, with only Felicia and Justin there, I took the little pills. Soon I started having excruciating cramps. I went into the bathroom and stayed there for hours, lying on the floor, sobbing and screaming. They should’ve numbed me with something, I thought. I wanted some kind of anesthesia. I wanted to go to the doctor. I was so scared. I lay there wondering if I was going to die.

When I tell you it was painful — I can’t begin to describe it. The pain was unbelievable. I went down to the ground on my knees, holding the toilet. For a long time, I couldn’t move. To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.

Still, they didn’t take me to the hospital. Justin came into the bathroom and lay on the floor with me. At some point he thought maybe music would help, so he got his guitar and he lay there with me, strumming it.

I kept crying and sobbing until it was all over. It took hours, and I don’t remember how it ended, but I do, twenty years later, remember the pain of it “and the fear.

After that, I was messed up for a while, especially because I still did love Justin so much. It was insane how much I loved him, and for me it was unfortunate.

I should have seen the breakup coming, but I didn’t.” (77)

It is interesting at this point that she still pursues the fantasy of the One, of the couple. To be in this couple would mean, that they would be like One. But as Kierkegaard says, “love believes everything and is never deceived”. What this means is precisely that there is something in love, that renders the pursuit of fame, for example, inconsistent. It is the same kind of logic that is involved in her sensitivity with other people (becoming too much like them, or in her singing for herself). Like when they are broken up and she naively goes to an interview:

“I’d often retreated to my apartment to be alone; now I was being forced to speak to Diane Sawyer there and cry in front of the entire nation.

It was completely humiliating. I wasn’t told what the questions would be ahead of time, and it turned out they were 100 percent embarrassing. I was too vulnerable then, too sensitive, to do this type of interview. She asked things like, “He’s going on television and saying you broke his heart. You did something that caused him so much pain. So much suffering. What did you do?”

Here the sensitivity is a sort of weakness, regarding the public image. Yet, as Kierkegaard says, love believes everything and is never deceived: it is not clear, that this very sensitivity also makes the fame pursued by Justin at this point superficial and fake. Something that is “put on” (like phallic power). It is interesting to note, how when they break up Justin succeeds in the narrative, that Britney betrayed him, and not, as is the case, the other way around.

Let’s sum up, simply going with how Spears’ recount the story: Justin has cheated on Britney many times, and Britney only kissed with one guy once. Britney wants to have the child, Justin wants them go get the abortion, so that their careers will not suffer. She is the one that has to go through the pain, while Justin simply, narcisstically fails to put himself in her shoes, and simply thinks it will help if she hear him play a bit of music. Now, when they break up Justin sells the narrative, that Britney has really hurt him and so on. That he is the victim. The point is not so much here Britney or Justin as individual people, but rather why this story is so believable. Why the symbolic order is as such a “phallic order”. For example Britney recounts several times, how unfair it is, that men can pursue their careers ruthlessly, whereas women, especially if they are mothers, have to de-sexualise themselves (otherwise they are sluts, ‘bad mothers…’):

“What I can see now but couldn’t see then is that every part of normal life had been stripped from me — going out in public without becoming a headline, making normal mistakes as a new mother of two babies, feeling like I could trust the people around me. I had no freedom and yet also no security. At the same time I was also suffering, I now know, from severe postpartum depression. I’ll admit it, I felt that I couldn’t live if things didn’t get better.

All these other people were doing their thing, but I was being watched from every corner. Justin and Kevin were able to have all the sex and smoke all the weed in the world and no one said one word to them. I came home from a night at the clubs and my “own mother tore into me. It made me scared to do anything. My family made me feel paralyzed.”

Now, to take a line from another pop-star Taylor Swift: “If I were a man, I’d be the MAN”. Men are men because they rely on the exception (the Man). Now Swift’s and Britney’s point is here of course that this is unfair. Men are allowed to behave in a completely different way than women. And of course, women should be allowed to do the same. One of the ways, the book precisely undermines this image of sex versus motherhood, is that Britney describes how she likes sex more when she is pregnant: “Two things about being pregnant: I loved sex and I loved food.”. What we see here, is therefore precisely not an exception (like the virgin-mother), but the “impossible” figure of the sexual mother. We can understand feminine jouissance as precisely invoking such “impossibles”, that is what is seen as impossible from the current state of the symbolic order. Certain positions are always “impossible”.

But let us go back to why the phallic or the symbolic order is structured in this way. It is not simply, that we could ‘correct’ it (say provide a signifier for Woman). The logic is the opposite. It is rather that this non-whole can itself have consequences for the symbolic order. If we provide a signifier for woman, make her exist, we make (or have the illusion) that the symbolic order could be full. This would make the non-whole contingent, something to be corrected. This obviously does not mean that women cannot have equal rights or equal pay for the same amount of work and similar rights. But it means that the symbolic cannot offer a signification that would close the symbolic order.

We could be tempted to think, that if Woman does not exist we are making a point about Patriarchy and its elimination of Women. For example women could be forced to wear the veil. Does this not eliminate women? No, the opposite holds: it is precisely by veiling women that Woman come to exist behind the veil. It is not Patriarchy that eliminates woman, it is the symbolic order. But Patriarchy exploits this “primordial repression”. And that is an entirely different matter. We should not forget that while patriarchy is very hard on women, it is so because it wants Woman to exist (for example through the figure of the Mother, or the house-keeper, or the prostitute).

We can even go further patriarchy has held sway not simply because it was an “ideology”, but also because if offered enjoyment through its particular exploitation of the missing signifier for woman. It is the missing signifier, the primordial repression that “fuels” the other subsequent repressions, repressions in the sense of keeping woman in the house for example.

This is why Lacan says, that the contemporary feminism (of the 70ies) is both on the right path, and if anything psychoanalysis completely undermines the father and the master’s authority, showing him to be a big fraud, a semblance. But the post-patriarchal society risks being even worse. It risks also bringing the father “back” in a worse version, like the father-of-enjoyment that can provide woman with a W, once again. Lacan says therefore provocatively, that in the symbolic, as such, not just patriarchy, a woman is excluded.

A woman can but be excluded by the nature of things, which is the nature of words, and it must be said that if there is something that women themselves complain about enough for the time being, that’s it. It’s just that they don’t know what they are saying — that’s the whole difference between them and me.” (73/68).

It’s way to easy to simply complain about this exclusion as the basis of a historical-contingent system. If this was the case, we only needed a feminist movement and a ‘new symbolic order’, simply providing women with the signifier THE woman. But perhaps we should say that being excluded by “the nature of words” does not prevent her from using these words very eloquently and to the point (which they do when they “complain”).

But this is precisely the problem. There is something missing, primordially repressed in this order, and different patriarchal systems ‘repress’ this repression itself (trying to come up with THE woman, for example in the figure of the house-wife or the prostitute, or the virgin-mother. There is something missing in the symbolic order and the male and female side of sexuation, are precisely to ways, that the sexual relationship is ‘messed up’. The male side is also established through a split, since there a position is exempted from symbolic order and castration.

We must keep this in mind, not to fall into the trap of quick-fix solutions. If Justin can so easily sell his narrative about Britney as a slut, it is clearly something with the structure of the symbolic order as such. As Lacan says, the women has been called woman and has been defamed (either the madonna-like virgin mother, or the slut), (Lacan plays on dit-femme and diffâme which sounds homonymous in French): “She is called woman (on la dit-femme) and defamed (diffâme).” (85/79).

In the phallic, symbolic order a woman can only be a mother or a virgin, or a slut). Britney herself tells about the shock, when Justin reveals that they had sex (which should hardly be surprising…). Now, we come to the other word-play “justified:

“Soon after my return, Justin was preparing to release his solo album Justified. On 20/20 he played an unreleased song for Barbara Walters called “Don’t Go (Horrible Woman)” that seemed to be about me: “I thought our love was so strong. I guess I was dead wrong. But to look at it positively, hey girl, at least you gave me a song about another Horrible Woman.”

Less than a month later, he released the video for his song “Cry Me a River,” in which a woman who looks like me cheats on him and he wanders around sad in the rain. In the news media, I was described as a harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy. The truth: I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.

May I just say that on his explosive album and in all the press that surrounded it, Justin neglected to mention the several times he’d cheated on me?

There’s always been more leeway in Hollywood for men than for women. And I see how men are encouraged to talk trash about women in order to become famous and powerful. But I was shattered.”

This album plays on Justin, justified (like justified in making the song which is a bit of a revenge song). Britney continues:

“The thought of my betraying him gave the album more angst, gave it a purpose: shit-talking an unfaithful woman. The hip-hop world of that era loved a storyline with the theme “Fuck you, bitch!” Getting revenge on women for perceived disrespect was all the rage at the time. Eminem’s violent revenge song “Kim” was huge. The only problem with the narrative was that, in our case, it wasn’t like that.

“Cry Me a River” did very well. Everyone felt very sorry for him. And it shamed me.

I felt there was no way at the time to tell my side of the story. I couldn’t explain, because I knew no one would take my side once Justin had convinced the world of his version.”

Why is it like that? The point is not the ‘woman question’ is as such political. What is a woman or what does woman want, as Freud said, refers to the lack of any “whole”. In fact the “feminine essence” has always been sought by patriarchal systems. This is why Lacan’s point, that the other satisfaction does not make a balance or a whole remains a feminist point. To be sure, Lacan’s personal life might not give us the inclination that he is a great feminist. But that does not mean that his teaching cannot be used by feminists as they see fit. The point is not so much what Lacan thought himself, as what his development of psychoanalysis enables in terms of political questions. There is also the sense, that precisely the other satisfaction enables a different set of ideals, than those related to the phallic order. Talking about her later husband, Kevin, Britney says:

“Kevin was just so enthralled with the fame and the power. Again and again in my life I’ve seen fame and money ruin people, and I saw it happen with Kevin in slow motion. In my experience, when most people — especially men — get that type of attention, it’s all over. They love it too much. And it’s not good for them.”

This makes sense, precisely because men believe in the symbolic order and its exception. (To be the MAN, the primordial father, the exception…). The feminine side has no exception, but as such it renders the symbolic order pas-toute, not-whole. Somehow it is both more serious AND at the same time more playful, more light. To make a comparison to another mystic, we might compare Britney’s autobiography to Augustine’s Confessions. Also Augustine’s writing has a ‘passion’ that pertains to the other satisfaction. If someone like the mystic Angelius Silesius is a male mystic, Augustine is rather like female mystic. Silesius is a male mystic, because he turns himself into the object, through which God sees himself. This is putting it loosely, but anyone who has read Silesius can simply sense it is different. The male mystic turns himself into an instrument for God’s jouissance. In contrast how Britney describes singing is feeling God, not being an object or instrument for his jouissance, not the eye through which God sees himself. As Britney says:

“Raising kids in the South used to be more about respecting your parents and keeping your mouth shut. (Today, the rules have reversed — it’s more about respecting the kids.) Disagreeing with a parent was never permitted in my house. No matter how bad it got, there was an understanding to stay mute, and if I didn’t, there were consequences.

In the Bible it says your tongue is your sword.

My tongue and my sword were me singing.

My whole childhood, I sang. I sang along with the car radio on the way to dance class. I sang when I was sad. To me, singing was spiritual.” (3)

It’s all too easy to dismiss this as simply conservative Christian values or popcultural-kitch writing. Here the singing is precisely an other satisfaction (termed spiritual). But while Britney’s singing is “spiritual” there is never the sense of being an object merely for God. They are clearly distinct, even if her singing is “oriented” towards God. It is also not unbounded, but very much “enabled” or structured through the signifier (“In the Bible it says your tongue is your sword”). Her spiritual singing is interpreted through the metaphor, a metaphor that does the work also of “signifierness”. This limit does not mean it is “constrained” or “fixed”. It is clear that it involves a subjective response (“My tongue and my sword were me singing”). It is how she inteprets it, and this interpretation itself means something that cannot be calculated, or confined to the limits of the symbolic in advance. Furthermore, the line says, in contrast to a male mystic: “My tongue and my sword were me singing”, whereas a male mystic might have said: “When I sing it is God that sings through me”.

The other satisfaction is precisely not a binary to the phallic enjoyment. As Lacan says of the feminine jouissance, it is not a complement, but a supplement. “You will notice that I said ‘supplementary’. if I had said ‘complementary’ what a mess we’d be in! We would fall right back into the whole’. (73).

From various gender theorist, we always hear the claim that Lacan is making a binary (the other satisfaction can only be other to the One?), Lacan also know that people will level this critique against him. These are precisely people that think that the symbolic order could be complete, that it does not have a crack, or fault-line within.

Yet, this notion of the other satisfaction as complementary, is precisely NOT the case, the other is truly other only in so far as it is not a binary. The gender theorist knocks on an open door and fail to see precisely that Lacan’s undermining of the binary is much more radical than the gender theorist (who claims simply that the symbolic order is ‘open’). The point is rather, as Lacan says, that symbolic order and its ‘genderisation’ make up for the failure of the sexual relationship (rapport). It means that it misfires in so many ways and continues to misfire in so many ways. This is what Britney’s autobiography is a great testament to — and to the inconsistency of the phallic order. Let’s recall what Lacan says about this other jouissance and mysticism. It is sometimes claim, that Lacan ‘silences’ women, because he says, that women have not explained this other jouissance:

“The plausibility of what I am claiming here — namely, that woman knows nothing of this jouissance — is underscored by the fact that in all the time people have been begging them, begging them on their hands and knees — I’ve spoken last time of women psychoanalyst — to try and tell us, not a word.” (75).

But does this mean, that this is a jouissance that cannot be put into words, but only experienced. “There is a jouissance that is hers (à elle),at that belongs to that “she” (elle) that doesn’t exist and doesn’t signify anything. There is a jouissance that is hers about which she perhaps knows nothing if not that she experiences it — that much she knows” (74). So it would seem that this cannot be spoken about. But it cannot be spoken about, not because it is beyond, but rather because it iself sticks to the signifier. It runs along with the signifiers as their obverse. I earlier said that enjoyment cannot be distributed like clothing. Perhaps more precisely would be to use Lacan’s wordplay from seminar 17, l’envers, usually translated as the “other side”. But l’envers is also used to wear a shirt inside-out, or inner lining of a shirt. The inside-out is not another shirt, nor is it floating in the air, but precisely what constantly lies beneath it, but “stitched to it”. Enjoyment cannot be distributed a material, like cloth, precisely because it is too much part of the clothing itself (and not another material).

On the front cover of the French edition of Seminar XX, we can see the sculpture of Bernini: “the Ecstacy of St. Theresa”. Clearly here, she is having an orgasm, and she speaks not (in fact, we look fascinated at her). Yet, to say, that we cannot speak of this jouissance is clearly not what Lacan is saying. He is, namely also saying, that contrary to the phallic jouissance, the other satisfaction is the “one of speech”. This means, that we have to think it a bit more nuanced. We get this satisfaction, when we speak or write poetry (like the mystic’s writings), but the poetry in itself does not EXPLAIN it.

It is rather evoked there, but it is not drained into the symbolic. Rather it points, to what the symbolic can’t say. Yet, we only get to this through the act of saying (le dire). Lacan gets the same kind of jouissance in his endless wordplays (like the one on justice, tout juste…). In other words, we have to read for example Hildengaard von Bingen, or in this case, I would even include Britney Spears descriptions (even if not on the same level of sophistication). But Lacan does not say that only female mystics experience it, but each woman, even if they cannot form a whole. Lacan says:

“There is, nevertheless, a little connection when you read certain serious authors, like women, as if by chance. I will give you a reference here to an author, a reference I owe to a very nice person, who had read the author’s work and brought it to me. I read it immediately. I’d better write her name on the board, because otherwise you won’t buy it. It is Hadewijich d’Anvers, a beguine — she is what I quaintly refer to as a mystic.

I don’t use the word “mystic” as Péguy did. Mysticism isn’t everything that isn’t politics. It is something serious, about which several people inform us — most often women, or bright people like Saint John of the Cross, because one is not obliged, when one is male, to situate oneself on the side of ∀xΦx. One can also situate oneself on the side of the not-whole. There are men who are just as good as women. It happens. And who also feel just fine about it. Despite — I won’t say their phallus — despite what encumbers them that goes by that name, they get the idea or sense that there must be a jouissance is beyond. Those are the ones we call mystics.” (76).

The mystic here, is not opposed to politics. It is political precisely because it cracks open the phallic-symbolic order. It is itself a kind of stumbling block of politics. If it was ‘outside’ the political, it would merely be like the famous “dark continent” of women’s jouissance (simply outside the political space). It is rather directly there, in the middle of speech, only it shows that there is a jouissance that is, so say, the other of speech in speech: “It is not because she is not-wholly in the phallic function that she is not there at all. She is not not there at all. She is there in full (à plein). Only there is something more (en plus).” (74).

The other satisfaction is therefore not something we simply have to be silent about. If women (or men situated on the female side of sexuation) don’t know anything about this jouissance, this is not simply because of a personal default. It is because this jouissance is situated where the Other, the symbolic order is failing. Knowledge, signifiers, are there where the Other is full, where the Other can know. In other words, it is for this reason, that “they can’t know about it”, because there ‘is’ nothing to know. This is paradoxically what links it up with God. Not God as the symbolic order, but a God which is “Other” than the One reduced to itself, to the symbolic order. Remember, here, how Britney’s descriptions of God, are precisely such an Otherness, of which one cannot ‘know’ anything, but which is very much present through a sensation in the body.

“Doesn’t this jouissance one experiences and yet knows nothing about put us on the path of ex-istence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance.” (77/71).

Much more than phallic jouissance, which is essentially about the One, and a masturbatory jouissance, which relies on exceptions from speech, this jouissance is directly ‘em-bodied’ in speech. It is not reducible to speech, or signifiers, but follows it, or is evoked through it. It is like Möbius-band, where there is only one surface, and yet there is a split, that prevents the One. Perhaps like singing is never simply speech, but speech that is also enjoyment. That speech is not-whole, makes it inconsistent. This is what we read in much poetry and mystic writings for example.

We can distinguish this kind of jouissance precisely with the male fantasy of exception. Britney gives a perfect description of this fantasy, related to the female hair:

“As performers, we girls have our hair. That’s the real thing guys want to see. They love to see the long hair move. They want you to thrash it. If your hair’s moving, they can believe you’re having a good time.”

What the long hair that moves indicates is precisely a kind of satisfaction that is exempt from castration. It promises noncastrated enjoyment and it is linked to a particular and isolatable object. It works like a fetish that the pervert-male can use to disavow the castration of the Other.

This is one way to understand that men can form a whole by the exception to castration. This exception can be the primordial father, possessing all the women, or it can be the myth of a feminine enjoyment exempted from castration (“they want you to thrash it”). This seem to promise a kind of non-bounded enjoyment, an enjoyment, that would not be subject to castration. The reader might say: but is not all of Britney Spears’ music video and lyrics in the end very much about the “objectification” of women. In many music video she has very tight clothing, you can see a lot of body, it oozes sex as they say. For example, in Baby One More Time, her biggest hit, she sings:

“Oh Baby, Baby,

The Reason I breathe is you Boy, you got me blinded Oh, pretty baby There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do It’s not the way I planned it.”

Here, it seems she has no purpose in life but to be with the lover, who is a boy (man). In the music video she is only 17 years old, and dressed up like a school-girl. Combined with the lyrics “hit me, baby, one more time”, it seems to suggest a school-girl that has already lost her innocence and now wants to be “hit” again. In short, what is there to find as “subversive” in all this? Is it not precisely that she embodies the object for the man, “masturbation with a real partner” as Zizek puts it. She is merely the “prop” here for man’s phallic jouissance.

True, but the first point is still that she sings. For all that she is never merely a prop, it is impossible for a subject to be reduced to a prop as long as it speaks or sings, even if the lyrics are very simple. Plus, things are always more complex: while the lyrics suggest submission without restraint, the lover is referred to as “baby” and “boy”, which suggest that she is not merely the object. Furthermore, she is posing for the camera, the Other, and not this or that empirical man.

That being said the point is that a woman relates to both. As Lacan says, a woman encounters castration primarilly through a man (and she has a relation to Phallus positioned on the male side, even if never coincidental with any actual empirical men). But that is not all. She also has a relation to the signifier for the Other as barred. We do not, I believe, not have to choose between Britney as an object for the phallic jouissance and her “other satisfaction”. The point is precisely that both are present. To make the point more simply, even if all the music videos and the lyrics are there for phallic jouissance, that tells nothing about how she experience actually singing or performing it. It might be her ex-isting. The other satisfaction, as I have repeated, is not exempt from castration, rather it makes castration non-whole.

Bibliography:

Lacan, Jacques. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (Encore). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

Britney Spears: The Woman in Me. Gallery Books, UK. 2023.