Sexuality and Violence: Towards Feminine Ethics

Abstract

The general aim of this chapter is to show that collective violence not only seeks the restoration of a social order, but the restoration – or reinforcement – of a masculine law or patriarchal social order. Such a social order entails a particular mode of enjoyment (phallic jouissance), as a specific form of transgressing the law. Thus, violence and exclusion will be regarded here as expressions of a masculine form of enjoying transgression of the symbolic order, and paradoxically, as ways of restoring such an order. In this framework the excluded other, par excellence, is feminine desire, associated in our masculine culture with passivity and disintegration.