Drive first needs to be understood as a leftover. Something is left out when the subject becomes the subject of the signifier and is incorporated into the symbolic structure. When the subject becomes a speaking being, he or she will no longer be able to have sex in an animal's instinctive way. However, in the place of this loss, we encounter a force that essentially marks the subject by imposing a constant pressure on him or her. This force is what Lacan named variously libido, drive, or lamella.10 Through this naming, Lacan does a rereading of Freud that offers another perspective on and to Freudian theory.

For Freud, libido primarily concerns the subject's ability to find sexual satisfaction in different ways. Aside from having sex, the subject can find this satisfaction through such activities as eating, shitting, looking, speaking, writing, etc. Libido is always linked to a libidinal object, which is not simply a material object and which Lacan names object a.

It is crucial for the subject that only partial drives exist, and no genital drive as such. The subject is determined on the one hand by these partial drives, and on the other hand by the field of the Other, the social symbolic structure. For Freud, love, for example, is to be found not on the side of the drives, but on the side of the Other. And it is in this field of the Other that anything that could resemble some kind of genital drive finds its form.

Drive and desire each have a different relation to the symbolic law. Desire is essentially linked to the law, since it always seeks out something that is prohibited or unavailable. The logic of desire would be: "It is prohibited to do this, but for that very reason, I will do it." Drive, in contrast, does not care about prohibition: it is not concerned with overcoming the law. Drive's logic is: "I do not want to do this, but I am nonetheless doing it." Thus, we have an opposing logic in drive, where the subject does not want to do something but nonetheless enjoys doing just that. Drive paradoxically always finds satisfaction, while desire has to remain unsatisfied, endlessly going from one object to another, positing new limits and prohibitions. Drive is thus a constant pressure, a circulation around the object a, which produces jouissance-a painful satisfaction.11

Drive is in the final instance always the death drive, a destructive force, which endlessly undermines the points of support that the subject has found in the symbolic universe. In regard to drive, desire plays a paradoxical role of protection, since desire, by being subordinated to the law, pacifies the lawless drive and the horrible jouissance that is linked to it. The subject of desire is the subject of identification: this is the subject who constantly searches for points of support in the symbolic universe, the Ego Ideals with which he or she can identify and thus achieve an identity. Such a point of identification can be a teacher, lover, analyst, etc. But on the level of drive, there is no identification anymore; there is only jouissance. Paradoxically, the subject is always happy at the level of drive: although because of drive the subject actually suffers terribly and tries to escape its enormous pressure, in this suffering jouissance is at work, which means precisely that this painful satisfaction is the highest happiness on which the subject can count (Miller, Donc).

The problem of the subject is that he or she is nothing except through the love and desire of others. The subject by him- or herself has no value. Recognizing this fact causes the subject's devastating depressive moods. So, it turns out that the subject is not the phallus that would complement the Other. The Other can function very well without the subject. And to overcome this traumatic truth, the subject endlessly tries to leave a mark on the Other, on the social symbolic structure, on history, etc. However, the subject can find a special form of happiness when he or she is not at all concerned with the Other, i.e., through jouissance which pertains to drive.

One can discern this jouissance in the partial drives related to the voice and gaze. It is in the tonality of the voice, for example, where we encounter jouissance--this is where the surplus enjoyment comes into being as something that eludes signification. This excessive jouissance that pertains to voice is what makes the voice both fascinating and deadly. If we take as an example the diva, it is clear that the very enjoyment of opera resides in her voice. At its peak, her voice assumes the status of the object detached from the body. The singer has to approach "self-annihilation as a subject in order to offer himself or herself as pure voice. The success of this process is the condition for the dissolution of the incongruity between singer and role, a dissolution that . . . is at the foundation of the lyric arts." But if this process does not succeed, the public reacts sometimes with violence. The singer who fails to produce this effect of the object detached from the subject reopens the incongruity between object and subject and thus becomes "a failing subject": "the singer is cast back by the public into the position of object, but now a fallen object, a piece of refuse, to be greeted in kind with rotten egg or ripe tomato-or . . . with the vocal stand-in for refuse: booing and catcalls" (Poizat 35). The public reacts so violently because it is denied its moment of ecstasy; its fantasy of finally possessing the inaccessible object has fallen through. And the same goes for the Sirens: if they do not succeed in seduction, they are punished. Many stories about the Sirens stress their failure to seduce with their voices. Unsuccessful singing contests with the Muses supposedly caused the Sirens to lose their wings. Later they tried to out-charm Orpheus's lyre but failed again and as a result supposedly committed suicide.

From the Other's Desire to the Other's Jouissance

In Homer there is a certain ignorance at work in the Sirens' lure: they would like to get Odysseus into their trap, but they are not at all struck by him, i.e., he is not the object of their desire. Why is desire of the Other such a problem for the subject? For Lacan, this dilemma concerns the subject's very being; it is first formulated as the question of what was the subject's place in the desire of his or her parents. The subject tries to answer this question by way of forming a fundamental fantasy, a story of his or her origins that will provide the grounds for his or her very being.

The desire of the Other incites horror on the side of the subject, i.e., it produces anxiety. This anxiety arises because the Other's desire remains an enigma to the subject, which also means that the subject can never really know what kind of an object he or she is for the Other. Lacan exemplifies this anxiety by asking us to imagine that one day we encounter a giant female praying mantis (Ego). As it happens we are wearing a mask, but we do not know what kind of a mask it is: we do not know if it is a male or female mask. If it is a male mask, we can, of course, expect to be devoured by the female praying mantis. This example returns us to the subject's encounter with deadly feminine creatures, such us the Medusa or the Sirens. In this encounter, the subject's urgent question is: what kind of mask am I wearing? In other words, what kind of an object am I for her? Am I a man or a woman? This would be the question for the male hysteric. He has doubts about his sex and his being, therefore he expects to get an answer from the Other, just as a female hysteric does. And, in order to obtain this answer, he places himself as the ultimate object of the Other's desire, but the object whose allure is linked to the fact that he always vanishes and can never be possessed.

Because most men are not hysterics but obsessionals, the question is: what is the obsessional strategy in regard to the monstrous female? In contrast to the hysteric, who sustains her desire as unsatisfied, the obsessional maintains his desire as impossible. While for the hysteric every object of desire is unsatisfactory, for the obsessional this object appears too satisfactory, that is why the encounter with this object has to be prevented by all means. The hysteric, by always eluding the Other, slipping away as object, maintains the lack in the Other. She wants to be the ultimate object of the desire of the Other; but she nonetheless prevents this from happening and by doing so keeps her desire unsatisfied. But the obsessional maintains his desire as impossible and does so in order to negate the Other's desire (Lacan, Ecrits 321).

The obsessional wants to be in charge of the situation; he plans his activities in detail. An encounter with the woman who is the object of his desire will be thought out well in advance; everything will be programmed and organized, all to prevent something unexpected from happening. The unexpected here concerns desire and jouissance. The obsessional tries to master his desire and the desire of the Other by never giving up thinking or talking. His strategy is to plug up his lack with signifiers and thus to avoid the object of his desire. Lacan also points out that the obsessional does not want to vanish or to fade as a subject, which happens when the subject is eclipsed by the object of his desire and jouissance. The obsessional tries to demonstrate that he is the master of his own desire and that no object is capable of making him vanish (Ecrits 270). Even during sexual intercourse, he will go on planning, thinking, and talking, always in efforts to control his jouissance and the jouissance of the Other.

This obsessional strategy can best be exemplified by the case of a man who waited two nights for a telephone call from the woman who was the object of his love. In the middle of the night he got the idea that the phone might not be working, thus he repeatedly picked up the receiver and listened to check the dial tone. The man, knew, of course, that picking up the receiver would hinder the woman's efforts to call him, so as soon as he was convinced that the phone was working, he quickly put the receiver down. But after a short while he would repeat the test procedure. He continued this ritual throughout the night to the point of utter exhaustion. And after two nights, he fell into a serious crisis, which brought him to analysis (see Indart).

Odysseus's position is obsessional: he resorts to a series of strategies in order to keep at bay the jouissance of the Other and his own desire for the Other. Odysseus thus performs a whole ritual to prevent a genuine encounter with the Sirens. It can even be said that he finds his very jouissance precisely in this ritual of thinking and planning about how to escape the Sirens' lure.

While the hysteric endlessly questions the desire of the Other, the obsessional does not want to know anything about this desire. For the obsessional, it is crucial that he puts himself in the place of the Other, from which point he can then act so that he avoids any risk. Thus he wants to escape from situations that might involve confrontation, or might in any way disturb his equilibrium. While the hysteric deals with the dilemma "Am I a man or a woman?" the obsessional agonizes over the question "Am I dead or alive?" He hopes that with the death of the Other, who continually imposes obligations on him, he will finally be free. Thus the obsessional also questions whether the Other is still alive or dead. And thus the encounter with the Other who is the living dead becomes the most horrible thing for the obsessional. But paradoxically, the obsessional is himself a special kind of living dead, since the rituals and prohibitions that he imposes on himself make him a robot-like creature, apparently drained of desire.

Odysseus also acts in an obsessional way in his passion to narrate his encounter with the Sirens. It is well known that obsessionals find great joy not only in planning the encounter with the object of their desire and at the same time preventing this from happening, but also in narrating this failure, in creating a story about it. Odysseus also has been mandated to recount his meeting with the Sirens, and his jouissance is at work not only in planning how to avoid an actual encounter with the Sirens, but also in telling others about this missed encounter.

In sum: for both the hysteric and the obsessional, it is crucial to understand their dilemmas with desire as defenses against jouissance. The hysteric, for example, wants to be the ever elusive object of the Other's desire, but she does not want to be the object of the Other's jouissance. She does not want to be simply a partial object through which the Other enjoys, but something else-the never attainable object of desire. The hysteric masquerades herself as a phallic woman with the intention to cover the lack in the Other, to make the Other complete. Since this attempt always fails, she needs to repeat her seductive strategy again and again. Through seduction, the hysteric tries to provoke the desire of the Other for her, which will, of course, never be satisfied. Although the hysteric may enjoy this game of seduction and unsatisfaction, she cannot deal with the situation when the Other takes her as his object of jouissance and not simply as the inaccessible object of desire. The hysteric is therefore attracted to the desire of the Other but horrified by his jouissance.

Let us exemplify this aversion to the Other's jouissance with the help of a short story by O. Henry, "The Memento." This story is about a young Broadway dancer, Lynnete, who decides to change her life: she gives up dancing, moves to a small village and falls happily in love with the local priest, from whom she wishes to hide her dishonorable past. Rumor has it that the priest was unhappily in love sometime before and that he keeps a secret memento from his beloved locked in a box. One day, Lynnete finds and opens this box. What she discovers presents an absolute horror for her: in the box is one of the very garters that she, as a Broadway dancer, used to throw into the audience at the end of each performance. After this discovery, Lynnete flees from the village and, disillusioned, returns to the Broadway theater.

The story makes it clear that the priest did not know he fell in love with the same woman twice. When Lynnete questions him about his past love, the priest simply explains that he was infatuated by a woman he did not really know. He admired this woman only from a distance, but now all this has been forgotten, since he is finally happily in love with a woman who is real. Although the priest tries to distinguish fantasy from reality, he actually fell in love with the same object. Both the first and the second time, he loved the woman because of something that was more in her then herself. Since it was always the object a in the woman that attracted the priest, for his love to emerge it did not really matter whether the beloved was a "fantasy" or "reality"--a distant dancer in a Broadway show or an innocent country girl.

But the crucial problem of the story is: why was Lynnete repulsed when she discovered the memento? Why was she not happy that she herself was his great past love? One of the explanations for her horror could be her fear that the priest might stop loving her if he found out about her deception. However, there is another explanation for Lynnete's repulsion: Lynnete's horror is to encounter the very elusive object of love itself--the object a. The garter stands here for the object a. However, this object is for the priest not only the always elusive object of his desire, but also the object through which he enjoyed. And this created a problem for Lynnete: she wanted to be the object that is desired by the priest but not the object through which he had found his particular form of jouissance.

This story can help us to understand the universal dilemma of neurotics, which has to do with the subject's desire to be desired by another subject, while he or she does not want to be the object through which another enjoys.12 Returning to the story of Odysseus and the Sirens: it can be said that Odysseus actually desires the Sirens (and maybe even wants to be desired by them); however, what causes problems for him is the peculiar way the Sirens enjoy.

Feminine Jouissance

A man falls in love with a woman because he perceives in her something that she actually does not have, the object a, object cause of desire. He will therefore fall in love with a woman because of some particularity-her smile, some gesture, her hair, or the tone of her voice, whatever will fill the place of the object a for him. And around this object a man will form the fantasy scenario that will enable him to stay in love. The problem for a woman is that she knows very well that a man will fall in love with her because of some particularity that distinguishes her from other women and, as a result, she will desperately try to enhance what she thinks is special about herself. However, a woman can never predict just what particularity will make a man fall in love with her. Thus one woman might nurture her beautiful lips, thinking that men are attracted by her sensual smile, meanwhile a man does fall in love with her, but mainly because of her fairly unattractive voice. It is needless to point out how the whole cosmetic and fashion industry relies on women's search for the object in themselves that makes them the object of love. And since women can never guess what is more in them than themselves, the fashion industry encourages them to always look for another product that would make them unique.13

In Lacan's formulations of sexual difference, a man is totally determined by the phallic function; however, there is one man, the Freudian primordial father, who is the exception. As the possessor of all the women, he is also the one who prohibits other men's access to women. This father of the primal horde is the only one that has direct access to sexual jouissance and for whom there is no prohibition of incest. The sexuality of other men is essentially linked to prohibition; they have undergone symbolic castration, after which they are not able to enjoy the body of the woman as a whole.

It is wrong to understand castration as something that prevents the subject's rapport with the opposite sex. After the subject has undergone symbolic castration, he or she will not be able to engage in simple animal copulation, i.e., heterosexual intercourse will cease to be an instinctual activity linked to the preservation of the species. However, with humans, castration should be understood not as the basis for denying the possibility of the sexual relation, but as the founding condition for the possibility of any sexual relation at all. It can even be said that it is only because subjects are castrated that human relations as such can exist. Castration enables the subject to take others as other and not as the same, since it is only after undergoing symbolic castration that the subject becomes preoccupied with questions such as "What does the Other want?" and "What am I for the Other?"14

Why is symbolic castration on the side of men crucial to their love-liaisons with women? The fact that a man is totally submitted to the phallic function means that he is marked by a lack. After being barred by language, a man will endlessly deal with two questions. First, what is my symbolic identity (i.e., who am I in the symbolic network)?15 And second, which is the object that can complement me? The subject deals with this second question in his love life when he searches for the object on the side of the woman that would enable him to form the fantasy of an always provisional wholeness. When encountering his love-object, a man will want to know in what kind of symbolic role the woman sees him. In contrast to the woman's dilemma of wondering what kind of object she is for the other, a man's concern is whether the woman recognizes his symbolic role. Here a man's obsessions with social status, wealth, public importance all play an important part. For example, a millionaire in a film by Claude Chabrol complains that he is tired of women insisting that they love him for what he is; he would like to meet a woman who would finally love him for his millions. This man's complaint has to be understood as a confirmation that the man wants to be loved for what is in him more than himself-his symbolic status. Although a man has access only to phallic jouissance, he nonetheless has aspirations to the Other jouissance, i.e., to the jouissance that is beyond the limits of the phallus.

This aspiration is paradoxically caused by the superego's command to enjoy, which arouses the man's thirst for the infinity of the Other, while at the same time prohibiting access to it. The paradox of the superego is that, on the one hand, it is linked to the law of castration (because of which man's jouissance can only be phallic); but, on the other hand, the superego is also a command that goes beyond any law. In sum: the superego is analogous to castration in its prohibitive function, while at the same time it is not submitted to the phallic order (Morel 102). As a result, the superego is a demonic agency that commands the subject to go beyond the phallic order and to experience a non-phallic jouissance, but this agency also prohibits the subject access to this jouissance. That is why the superego is like the laughing voice of the primordial father, who appears to be saying to the son: "Now that you have killed me, go and finally enjoy women, but you will see that you are actually unable to do so; thus, it is better that you not even try."

When Lacan speaks about feminine jouissance he primarily emphasizes the impossibility of defining what it is. Since women are also determined by the phallic function, feminine jouissance is something that women get not instead of phallic jouissance, but on top of it. It is a supplement to phallic jouissance: while the man has access to only one form of jouissance, the woman has possible access to another, additional jouissance. Lacan points out that feminine jouissance is for women only a potentiality, since women do not expect it. And about this jouissance the woman knows nothing more than the simple fact that she enjoys it. She does not talk about it, since it is something that cannot be spoken of in language.

A man tries to find out what feminine jouissance is: he may even hope to experience it himself, but he always fails in these attempts. For Lacan, such failure is analogous to Achilles's failure to match the speed of the turtle: she is either ahead of him or already overtaken (see Encore 13; Andre). In the psychoanalytic clinic, this failure is incarnated in the two most common male sexual problems: ejaculation that is too quick or too late.

In this context, how can we read the story of Odysseus's encounter with the Sirens and his silence about the Sirens' song? In the Odyssey, we have, on the one hand, a promise of a limitless jouissance in the form of the Sirens' song, and, on the other hand, a prohibition against hearing it. This promise of the Sirens' song can be understood as something that is linked to Odysseus's superego: whatever voice Odysseus hears might be nothing but the voice of his superego, which commands him to experience feminine jouissance. But this voice also warns Odysseus of the deadliness of such jouissance and thus prohibits his access to it.

However, this explanation does not address the question of whether the Sirens actually did sing. Even if Odysseus heard nothing but his superego voice, the Sirens might still have been singing. But the question remains: did the Sirens want to be heard by Odysseus, i.e., did they need him as an audience? Since the Sirens' song embodies the ultimate myth of feminine jouissance, the question is also whether women need men in order to experience this jouissance. The Lacan of the sixties hinted at a positive answer to this question when he said that a man acts as the relay whereby the woman becomes the Other to herself, as she is the Other for the man ("Guiding" 93). But in later years, Lacan complicates the matter when in the seminar Encore, he claims that the woman does not necessarily need a man to experience feminine jouissance, since she is in a specific way self-sufficient in her jouissance. A woman might experience feminine jouissance simply by herself, or in a mystical experience, by relating to God.

How can we understand this self-sufficiency of women? Let us take the case of a femme fatale, usually perceived as a woman who desperately tries to impress men, who masquerades herself in order to be admired by men. But a femme fatale also has a certain ignorance about men, and it is this very ignorance that actually makes her so attractive. Freud pointed out that with this type of woman, as well as with young children, the ignorance is related to the fact that they have not given up on some part of their libido: since other people have lost this libido, they become so attracted to the ones who still retain some of it ("On Narcissism"). The paradox of a femme fatale, therefore, is that she wants to be admired for her beauty, but she is perceived as beautiful precisely because she is also ignorant about the reaction of others towards her. A femme fatale enjoys her own self-sufficiency, which is why we cannot simply say that she needs men as relays to her jouissance. Of course, she wants to catch and hold the gaze of men, but her attraction is linked to the fact that she quickly turns around and shows very little interest in her admirers.

The Silence of the Sirens, or, Kafka with Homer

In short, Odysseus was so absorbed in himself that he did not notice that the Sirens did not sing. Kafka's guess is that for a fleeting moment Odysseus saw them and from the movements of their throats, their lips half-parted and their eyes filled with tears, he concluded that they were actually singing: "Soon however, all this faded from his sight as he fixed his gaze on the distance, the Sirens literally vanished before his resolution, and at the very moment when they were nearest to him he knew of them no longer" (98). Kafka goes on to speculate that they--lovelier than ever--stretched their necks and turned, let their cold hair flutter free in the wind, and forgetting everything clung with their claws to the rocks. They no longer had any desire to allure; all they wanted was to hold as long as they could the radiance that fell from [Odysseus's] great eyes. (99)

Kafka thus reinterprets the encounter between the Sirens and Odysseus by claiming that the Sirens themselves became fascinated by Odysseus and not vice versa. Two misperceptions were at work in the encounter; the first concerns Odysseus not noticing that the Sirens were actually silent. This misperception helped him to become over-confident in his strength, which also made him ignorant about the Sirens, and his ignorance sparked the Sirens to become enchanted by Odysseus's gaze. Here, we have the second misperception at work: the Sirens did not notice that the gaze of Odysseus was not directed toward them at all. The failed encounter between the Sirens and Odysseus can thus be summarized like this: the fact that Odysseus did not notice that the Sirens were silent, but thought that he had mastered their voice, made his gaze so alluring in its self-confidence that the Sirens fell desperately in love with him.

Kafka's rereading of the Odyssey can easily be understood as a myth that endeavors to restore men to their dominant position: a man does not perish when encountering a seductive, monstrous female if he reverses the situation and incites the female to fall in love with him. If some stories say that the Sirens committed suicide when they failed to enchant Odysseus, Kafka offers an even more devastating account of the Sirens' power: it was because they fell in love with Odysseus that they were unable to even sing. We meet a similar situation in Kafka's "Before the Law," where the peasant learns at the end of the story that the doors of the law were there all the time only for him. He is thus not a nobody in front of the law: the whole legal spectacle was put on just for him. The same goes for Kafka's Odysseus: he is not just one of the many sailors who come by the Sirens' island; he is the one that the Sirens were interested in, and he is the only one.

Kafka's reinterpretation of Odysseus's story enacts Lacan's notion of the magic moment of the reversal of the loved one into the loving subject. Lacan analyzes the deadlocks of the reciprocity of love in his seminar on transference, when he introduces the myth of the two hands: one hand (the hand of the desiring subject) extends itself and tries to attract the beautiful object on the tree (the loved object immersed in the self-sufficiency of drive), while suddenly another hand emerges from the site of the object on the tree and touches the first one, i.e., the object of love returns love, turns into a loving subject (Le transfert 67). That a second hand emerges in the place of the object is for Lacan a miracle, not a sign of reciprocity or symmetry. The touching of the two hands does not mark a moment of unification or the formation of a pair. So why does such unification fail to take place? The answer is very simple in its compelling necessity and is beautifully enacted in Kafka's version: because, at that very moment, the first subject no longer notices the hand stretched back, since he himself now turns into a self-sufficient being of drive. Kafka's Sirens lose their self-sufficiency when they subjectivize themselves by falling in love with Odysseus, and, as a result of this subjectivization, the Sirens become mute.

The crucial question here is: do the Sirens give up on their jouissance when they subjectivize themselves? If in Kafka this subjectivization results in muteness, in other post-Homeric interpreters the subjectivization of the Sirens is linked to their recognition that they failed to seduce Odysseus; as a result, they commit suicide. It would be wrong to take the muteness of the Sirens or their suicide as a proof that, as the result of their subjectivization, the Sirens gave up on their jouissance. On the contrary, the fact that the Sirens either became mute or died proves that they did not compromise their jouissance. Was it not Freud himself who associated drives with a fundamental silence, claiming that they pursue their work silently, outside the resonating space of the public word? Had the Sirens compromised their jouissance, they would have become "ordinary" women who would have tried to pursue Odysseus. But in that case, they would never have gained the status of such mythical figures.

The reversal of roles between the Sirens and Odysseus in Kafka is thus not quite symmetrical, since there is a crucial difference between the way the Sirens are subjectivized and the way Odysseus is subjectivized in his fascination with the enigma of the Sirens' song (in the standard version of the story). Odysseus did give up on his jouissance (which is why he was able to talk, to memorize his experience, to enter the domain of intersubjective community), while the Sirens' silence bears witness to the fact that, precisely, they refused to do this. What the Sirens' silence offers is an exemplary case of subjectivization without accepting symbolic castration (the Lacanian name for the gesture of giving up on one's jouissance). Perhaps this paradox of a subjectivity that nonetheless rejects the phallic economy of symbolic castration defines the central feature of the feminine subject. And my point is not that Kafka merely gives a modernist twist to the standard version of the encounter between Odysseus and the Sirens. In a much more radical way, Kafka's reversal provides the truth of the standard version: the reversal described by Kafka always-already was operative in the standard version of the myth as its disavowed background. Odysseus fascinated with the presubjectivized lethal song of the Sirens, intent on probing its secret--is this not the myth of the male desire, sustained by the reality of the male subject enamored in his own fantasmatic formation and, for that reason, ignorant of the invisible, but persistent feminine subjectivity?

A philosopher and sociologist, RENATA SALECL works as a researcher at the Institute of Criminology at University of Ljubljana and is currently a fellow at the Wissenchaftskolleg in Berlin. She is the author of The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism (Routledge, 1994) and co-editor (with Slavoj Zizek) of Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Duke UP, 1996). Her book progress is entitled Objects of Love and Hate.

Notes