International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
I remember my own castration quite clearly. It did involve a ‘cut’, but the castration of which I speak had nothing to do with real genitalia, something to do with speaking, and everything to do with a severed relationship to—everything itself. Four years old, unselfconsciously at play in a small backyard, I suddenly withdrew from myself in my own perception, looked down at myself as if from above, and heard myself being put into words, thinking: ‘No, you’re not all that—you’re only that.’
As psychoanalysis would parse this sentence: no (my own little echo of the prohibitory ‘no of the father’), you’re not all that (‘that’ being ‘everything’, the mythical plenitude of primary narcissism’s nostalgia), you’re only that (image of small boy’s body translated into even smaller pronoun, signifier constitutively exiled from its signified).
In short, in other words, I remember being shortened, diminished to a word, to ‘that’ shrunken residue of an T that must be spoken but cannot complete itself by designating itself in any statement, that comes into linguistic being only at the cost of losing ‘everything’, being cut off from the oceanic ‘all that’. Identifying myself in language, I lost myself in it like an object—and it hurt like hell, I have to tell you.
But why regard this abrupt recognition of being not all, this small sacrifice of being to meaning, as a sexual dismemberment? Why call this memory/event castration? There are splendid reasons not to; however, for psychoanalysis, castration is the correct word because of the way this alienating sense of losing/ being lost (from) ‘everything’ gets mapped on to an interpretation of the female body as castrated (‘not alT), the mother’s ‘lack’ allegorising the ‘incomplete’ condition of the word as the presence of the absence of the thing. For psychoanalysis, literal castration is so rare as to be relatively unimportant. Castration anxiety, however, is for Freud the necessary condition for the normative resolution of the Oedipus complex for boys, while symbolic castration is for Lacan the universal condition of anyone who speaks. Subject of/to language/desire, I am castrated because I say so, because language, desire and subjectivity are all ‘not all’, all ‘no-thing’, so that…
But here I break off, consenting to castration, leaving that sentence as incomplete as any T must be.
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