Feminicides: “Symptoms” of Anxiety and Discontent in Contemporary Civilization?
Argyris Tsakos
The issue of feminicide is complex and highly charged. Here I shall only focus on just one aspect that may exist about anxiety and discontent in modern culture and civilization. I shall pose some questions about the phenomenon of feminicides keeping in mind that we cannot make generalizations.
Éric Laurent mentions the following about this subject, among other things: “The ongoing violence against women's bodies resonates particularly with Lacan’s saying that men do not know what to do with a woman’s body. [...] Feminicide testifies that in the face of the enigma of sex, a demand for jouissance with a woman's body can be absolutized [s’absolutiser] without limits. [...] In feminicide, we could speak of an ordinary absolutization of jouissance, which veils the hole of the sexual non-relation.”[1]
In Greece, the rates of feminicides have increased. Many other phenomena such as rapes, forcing minors into prostitution and incidents of infanticide have also increased alarmingly. These are very disturbing phenomena that have shocked public opinion.
There is an effort to include the term “feminicide” in legal vocabulary and legal law, as separate from the term “homicide.” The difference lies in motivation: it is not murder of a woman, but murder because the victim is a woman. It seems that with the delegitimization of patriarchal power (since modern patriarchy has suffered continuous defeats) we have the effects of feminicides – often under the regime of passage to the act, characterized by a divorce from symbolic coordinates. At a first level, there seems to be an intensification of patriarchal violence as a “response” to an ongoing deconstruction of masculinity and the anxiety this induces in certain subjects. But we need to take another step so that we shift from the axis of “patriarchy” and, instead, frame the issue in terms of access to jouissance in the modern world (and not in terms of identities). In doing so we have to consider what form the economy of jouissance and anxiety take in the modern world.
We know that women have a privileged relationship with Otherness (ετερότητα). The hated object (which can also be the loved object as well) carries within itself what the envious subject hates in himself or herself. The hated object is equivalent to a sacrificial object aimed for destruction. Hatred expresses a relation of the self to the Otherness that inhabits each one of us. Thus, apart from the humiliating degradation of the sexual partner, I think that misogyny has one more (encore) root, which consists of the envy that a jouissance irreducible to the phallus provokes, the so-called feminine or Other jouissance. A woman who does not conform to the ideals of patriarchy could embody a kind of Agamben’s “bare life.”[2]
Would the discontent and anxiety that are endemic in these cases have anything to do with the body that becomes “a support/surface for what is “symptomatic” in our civilization, in our culture”?[3] Perhaps we can make the hypothesis that with the reduction of the female subject to her body – in the context of the fall of patriarchal ideals – the subject is pushed to exclude from the stage of the world, the “object dirt” in the form of another body.
References
[1] Laurent, É., “Comments on Three Encounters Between Feminism and the Sexual Non-Relation, PsychoanalysisLacan, 5, Online Journal of Lacan Circle Australia, trans. Mia Lalanne, available online: https://lacancircle.com.au/psychoanalysislacan-journal/psychoanalysislacan-volume-5/comments-on-three-encounters-between-feminism-and-the-sexual-non-relation/
[2] Cf. Agamben, G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Redwood City, Stanford University Press, 1998.
[3] Roy D., “Discontent and Anxiety in the Clinic and in Civilization – An Introduction to the NLS Congress 2023,” available online: https://www.amp-nls.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Argument-FINAL-VERSION-DISCONTENT-AND-ANXIETY-IN-THE-CLINIC-AND-IN-CIVILISATION.pdf