The Actual Phallic Function: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Two Films by Lars von Trier (a 1998 lecture given in Oslo, Norway)
- Eric Anders
- Dec 14, 2024
- 20 min read
Introduction: A Lecture at the University of Oslo, 1998
In 1998, I gave a lecture titled “The Actual Phallic Function: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Two Films by Lars von Trier” at the University of Oslo for the Nordic Institute for Women’s Studies and Gender Research (NIKK).
This lecture was something of a family affair—my sister, who was working at NIKK at the time, convinced her colleagues that I would be the perfect person to discuss Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories and von Trier’s films with a room full of feminist scholars. I suspect she framed it as a joke—“a bunch of women hearing a lecture on ‘the actual phallic function’ from an American man? What could go wrong?”—but it turned into an earnest opportunity to critique what I saw as the glaringly obvious misogyny embedded in both Lacanian psychoanalysis and von Trier’s aesthetics.
At the time, Lars von Trier was emerging as a celebrated auteur, especially in Scandinavia, where his films such as Breaking the Waves (1996) and Zentropa (1991) had been lauded for their artistic ambition and emotional depth. What I found striking, however, was how so few viewers—even feminist ones, and especially Scandinavian ones—were acknowledging the overt misogyny in his films. The same audiences who were quick to critique male-dominated Hollywood seemed to give von Trier a pass, either because of his reputation as an intellectual filmmaker or because his female characters were presented as martyrs and “strong” in their suffering.
Feminist scholarship since then has exposed how von Trier’s work consistently reinforces patriarchal structures, fetishizing female pain and self-sacrifice while masquerading as critiques of oppression. Scholars such as Rosalind Galt, Linda Badley, and Anna Backman Rogers have extensively analyzed how von Trier’s films center on the suffering female body as an object of male pleasure, ultimately reifying the very misogyny they appear to critique.
Moreover, as feminist scholarship developed in subsequent decades, von Trier’s later films (Antichrist in 2009 and Nymphomaniac in 2013) confirmed what I suspected back in 1998: von Trier was not simply a provocateur but an outright misogynist whose work reveled in the spectacle of violence against women. Critics like Claire Henry and Catherine Wheatley have argued that von Trier’s films operate through a deeply embedded sadism, one that serves to obscure rather than confront the patriarchal systems they purport to critique.
Adding to this, scholars like Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen have situated von Trier within a broader right-wing reactionary context, suggesting that his films align with a cynical, misanthropic worldview that is far removed from progressive or feminist ideals. Rasmussen’s analysis highlights how von Trier’s work, particularly in films like Zentropa, engages with aesthetics and narratives that evoke the ethos of European fascism, presenting a nostalgic, stylized embrace of authoritarian imagery. This ideological undertone, Rasmussen argues, is not merely incidental but reflective of von Trier’s broader disillusionment with collective progressive movements and his alignment with reactionary individualism. Such a worldview underpins many of his films, where themes of suffering, submission, and the grotesque often center on the degradation of women and the dehumanization of vulnerable subjects, framed through a lens that resists moral clarity and instead revels in ambiguity, cruelty, and despair. This alignment with a cynical and misanthropic ethos distances von Trier from any genuine engagement with feminist or progressive critiques, making his films increasingly complicit in perpetuating harmful patriarchal and authoritarian ideologies.
In this lecture, I attempted to draw a connection between von Trier’s misogyny and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, particularly through what I call the “actual phallic function.” Both Lacan and von Trier construct symbolic systems that rely on the erasure of feminine agency. For Lacan, the phallus operates as the master signifier, structuring the symbolic order and rendering woman the “lack” upon which the masculine subject constructs his identity. Similarly, von Trier’s films treat their female protagonists as sacrificial figures whose suffering reestablishes patriarchal coherence, much like Lacan’s phallic function restores symbolic order. My goal was to reveal how both Lacan’s and von Trier’s ostensibly subversive works actually reinscribe phallocentric hierarchies.
As might be expected, the audience—a group of sharp and skeptical Scandinavian feminists—was not entirely thrilled to have an American man lecture them about how a celebrated Scandinavian filmmaker was a sexist. While I believed my arguments were airtight, I could sense their resistance, partly because von Trier’s misogyny, though apparent, was less explicit in the films available at the time. Breaking the Waves, for example, could be read as a story of female martyrdom rather than a critique of the patriarchal structures that require such martyrdom.
After concluding my lecture and fielding a few pointed questions from the audience, I turned to my sister, who was seated across the auditorium. I asked if we could grab a pølse og lompe—a Norwegian hot dog wrapped in a potato flatbread. Unfortunately, in my eagerness to escape the tense atmosphere, I misspoke. Instead of asking for a pølse og lompe, I loudly to get a "pølse i rompe.” For the uninitiated, this translates to “sausage in my butt.” My sister turned bright red, her colleagues shook their heads and laughed, and I was left standing there, trying to understand what was going on.
In retrospect, the combination of my polemical critique of von Trier and my linguistic blunder might have softened the audience’s reception of my ideas. The experience left me with an appreciation for the complexities of cross-cultural critique and the challenges of male scholars presenting feminist arguments in a context where cultural loyalty and intellectual critique are in tension. But even if I didn’t fully convince the audience that day, the trajectory of von Trier’s career—and the growing body of scholarship on his misogyny—has only reinforced the importance of this conversation. As both Lacan and von Trier demonstrate, the phallic function is alive and well, and it demands a critical feminist interrogation. Here is my 1998 presentation:
"[T]he cinema has become a gigantic machine to model the social libido, while psychoanalysis has never been more than a small artisanal enterprise reserved for selected elites.... [The] famialist, Oedipal and reactionary [cinema] ... conducts a mass psychoanalysis, seeking to adapt men not to the out-moded, archaisms of Freudianism, but to those that are implicated in capitalistic (or bureaucratic socialist) production.” Félix Guattari, “Le divan du pauvre”
“By their very function, those who deny [the fact of adestination] most energetically are the people charged with the carrying of the mail, the guardians of the letter, the archivist, the professors as well as the journalists, today the psychoanalysts ... But it is psychoanalysis that, apart from philosophy, is singled out as the institution that, though situated at a turn in the postal era, too readily reinforces its restrictive power and that, having uncovered the unconscious and the work of censorship in human psychic activity, itself acts as a policing agency over this activity.” Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory
The Actual Phallic Function:
Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Two Films by Lars von Trier
by Eric Anders
Félix Guattari’s observation that cinema operates as a “gigantic machine to model the social libido,” while psychoanalysis remains a niche practice reserved for “selected elites,” encapsulates the tension between mass cultural productions and psychoanalytic theory. This essay explores this dynamic through an analysis of two films by Danish director Lars von Trier—Breaking the Waves and Zentropa. These films are situated within Guattari’s “gigantic machine,” but are interpreted here through Lacanian psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on its tropological structure: the “actual phallic function.” This concept critiques Lacan’s theoretical obfuscations and their complicity in preserving a patriarchal order. My aim is to show how Lacanian theory, despite its claims to deconstruct patriarchal authority, paradoxically reinscribes phallocentrism through its linguistic and symbolic structures.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, tropology plays a central role because Lacan sees the unconscious as structured like a language, relying on metaphor and metonymy to explain how meaning and subjectivity are produced. Within this framework, the phallus emerges as a figurative trope—a master signifier that metaphorically represents lack, authority, and the regulation of desire. The phallic function operates as a metaphoric and metonymic structure: it simultaneously substitutes (metaphor) and displaces (metonymy) signifiers within the symbolic order. Lacan’s use of the phallus as a trope positions it as the key mechanism that limits jouissance while also granting it symbolic representation. However, this symbolic role of the phallus is fraught with contradictions, as it conflates the biological penis with its symbolic counterpart, exposing the underlying complicity of Lacanian theory with patriarchal norms.
What I term the “actual phallic function” extends Derrida’s critique of Lacan by interrogating how these tropological structures function within Lacan’s framework and within cultural texts, such as von Trier’s films. Derrida famously critiques Lacan’s reading of “The Purloined Letter,” identifying the phallus as emblematic of phallogocentric logic—a system privileging patriarchal authority, unity of meaning, and transcendental origins. This critique reveals how the phallus, even as a symbolic construct, assumes a transcendental status that undermines Lacan’s claim to escape biological determinism. Similarly, the “actual phallic function” highlights how Lacan’s reliance on tropes like the phallus, as well as his linguistic and psychoanalytic frameworks, reaffirms patriarchal structures rather than dismantling them.
Through an analysis of von Trier’s films, this essay shows how the “actual phallic function” operates as a narrative mechanism that negates femininity to uphold patriarchal authority. In Breaking the Waves, for instance, the female protagonist’s complete submission to phallic logic culminates in her death, which serves to restore the male protagonist’s physical and symbolic potency. This narrative mirrors Lacan’s theoretical maneuvers, where the phallus emerges as the central organizing principle of both meaning and desire. Tropologically, the feminine is consistently displaced, serving as a conduit for masculine transcendence.
Drawing on Derrida’s concept of “adestination,” which challenges Lacan’s claim that “a letter always arrives at its destination,” I critique the epistemological foundations of Lacanian theory. Derrida’s deconstruction of Lacan reveals how the latter’s reliance on transcendental structures undermines the differential logic central to contemporary theories of language. By situating Lacan’s tropological framework within von Trier’s cinematic narratives, this essay seeks to uncover how the “actual phallic function” operates not only as a trope within psychoanalytic theory but also as a mechanism that structures cultural representations of gender and authority.
This argument unfolds in three key sections. The first examines Lacan’s conception of the phallic function and its implications for subjectivity and language. The second explores Derrida’s critique of Lacan, focusing on the intersections of deconstruction and psychoanalysis. The final section applies these theoretical insights to von Trier’s films, demonstrating how their narratives reflect and critique the mechanisms of phallocentric desire. By interrogating the tropological underpinnings of both Lacanian theory and von Trier’s cinematic narratives, this essay seeks to uncover the persistent influence of the actual phallic function in both psychoanalytic and cultural texts.
Revised Section: Suture, Castration, and Coherence in Breaking the Waves
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, suture theory addresses the process by which the subject is inserted into the symbolic order, providing the illusion of coherence to a fundamentally fractured being. The subject’s constitution depends on an alienation that structures their relationship to the Other, both as a linguistic network and as a locus of meaning. This alienation is directly tied to castration, which signifies the subject’s fundamental loss or lack—the gap around which subjectivity forms. Castration, therefore, is not merely a biological or symbolic concept but a structural necessity within the Lacanian framework, designating the impossibility of wholeness.
Suture functions by masking this absence at the heart of subjectivity, stitching the subject into the symbolic order and granting the appearance of unity. However, this coherence is always illusory, as the subject remains marked by division and incompleteness. Lacan’s theory suggests that the symbolic order is sustained by this disavowed lack, making castration both a condition of subjectivity and a central concept in psychoanalytic theory.
Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves provides a rich terrain for examining these concepts of suture, castration, and coherence. The film’s protagonist, Bess, offers a compelling figure through which the phallic function operates, not just as a symbolic structure but as a narrative mechanism. Bess’s story revolves around her sacrificial love for her husband, Jan, whose paralysis becomes the central crisis of the narrative. Her actions, motivated by her belief in her divine connection to God and Jan, exemplify her submission to the demands of the phallic function. However, her ultimate death raises critical questions about the coherence of her subjectivity and the ethical implications of her sacrificial role.
Bess’s narrative arc illustrates the tensions inherent in the suture process. On one level, her self-sacrifice appears to restore Jan’s symbolic and physical potency, positioning her as a redemptive figure within the film’s patriarchal logic. Yet, this restoration comes at the cost of her own annihilation, highlighting the impossibility of fully suturing the lack that defines her subjectivity. Von Trier’s portrayal of Bess challenges the viewer to confront the fragility of coherence, exposing the symbolic order’s dependence on acts of erasure and exclusion.
The film’s conclusion complicates this dynamic further. The final scene, in which church bells ring from the heavens following Bess’s death, ostensibly suggests divine approval of her sacrifice. However, this gesture is profoundly ambiguous. Does it signify her ultimate redemption, or does it underscore the oppressive structures that demand her self-destruction? Von Trier refuses to resolve this ambiguity, leaving the audience to grapple with the implications of Bess’s role within the symbolic economy of the film.
Through its exploration of suture, castration, and coherence, Breaking the Waves critiques the mechanisms of the phallic function and their ethical ramifications. Bess’s character serves as a site of tension between the symbolic order’s demand for coherence and the subjective fragmentation that defines her existence. Her story, far from affirming the symbolic order, exposes its reliance on violence and sacrifice, calling into question the patriarchal structures that sustain it.
This analysis situates Breaking the Waves as both a reflection of Lacanian psychoanalytic principles and a critique of their cultural manifestations. By foregrounding the violence inherent in suture and the contradictions of the phallic function, von Trier’s film invites a deeper interrogation of the ethical stakes of coherence and the symbolic order.
Lacan, Copjec, and the Undecidability of the (Actual) Phallic Function
What misleads many readers into identifying Lacan as a postmodern theorist, rather than as a reactionary medieval ontotheologist, is the ostensibly fragmented and decentered nature of his discourse. This stylistic complexity is often misinterpreted as a celebration of postmodern indeterminacy. However, Derrida critiques Lacan's style as intentionally obfuscatory, designed to obscure the content of his ideas and shield them from systematic critique:
Lacan’s “style” was constructed so as to check almost permanently any access to an isolatable content, to an unequivocal, determinable meaning beyond writing. (Derrida, 420)
Similarly, Barratt notes that Lacan’s style hinders any coherent engagement with his theses:
Assessment of any “thesis” of Lacan’s … is notoriously difficult. For, eschewing systematization, Lacan deftly, even roguishly, defies systematic critique. Moreover, as is well known, his style almost wholly obliterates considerations of the content of his thought. For Lacan, style is everything, and the content of whatever thesis he might happen to be presenting becomes quite unnecessarily adumbrated. (Barratt, 214)
Despite this resistance to clarity, Lacanian psychoanalysis reveals a medieval framework through its conceptualization of the subject’s servile relationship to the Other. This framework reifies a patriarchal cosmology rooted in the Oedipal structure. Here, Lacan constructs a deterministic model of sexual difference, where "male" is equated with "whole" and "female" with "not-whole," both defined by the phallic function.
Lacan claims to subvert the notion of "anatomy as destiny," but his theories establish a transcendental determinism even more rigid than biological essentialism. For example, Lacan’s conception of the "letter"—the material substrate of the Other and the signifier—"always arrives at its destination" (Derrida, Purloined Letter, 53). This ensures the reproduction of Oedipal destiny, reasserting the immutability of the phallic function.
Joan Copjec, in her essay "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason," provocatively suggests that psychoanalysis, as represented by Lacan, offers lessons in undecidability that deconstruction could learn from. This claim relies on Lacan’s assertion in Television:
I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real. (Lacan, 3)
While Copjec interprets this as evidence of Lacanian psychoanalysis' embrace of undecidability, she misreads the implications of Lacan's phallocentric framework. Instead of fostering genuine undecidability, Lacan’s reliance on the actual phallic function operates as a means of securing patriarchal authority, veiling it under the guise of an impossibility that paradoxically guarantees its coherence.
Von Trier’s Fort-Da
In keeping with my strategy of using psychoanalysis to critique psychoanalysis, the concept of the "actual phallic function" builds upon Freud’s fort-da game. Derrida, in “Freud’s Legacy,” critiques Beyond the Pleasure Principle for failing to truly subvert the authority of the pleasure principle. He contends that Freud’s grandson’s game does not signify the death instinct but rather demonstrates what Freud describes as a "Bemächtigungstrieb" or “drive for mastery” (qtd. in Derrida, 325; Beyond, 16). Derrida argues that this drive does not transcend the pleasure principle but instead reflects an illusory mastery over presence and absence. For the child, the game enacts a symbolic attempt to overcome the dissimulated difference, absence, dependency, and passivity associated with the mother’s presence and absence.
Lars von Trier serves as a cinematic “guardian of the letter,” akin to Lacan in psychoanalytic theory. However, von Trier’s medium—the “gigantic machine” of cinema, what Guattari calls “mass psychoanalysis”—extends his postal route far beyond the confines of traditional psychoanalytic practice. While my primary focus is on Breaking the Waves, von Trier’s earlier film, Zentropa, also warrants discussion as it illustrates the interplay of similar tropes, albeit polarized in their execution.
Critics like Roy Grundmann mistakenly assumed that Breaking the Waves and Zentropa were “markedly different” due to their distinct aesthetics and narratives. However, the two films share significant thematic and structural similarities, often presented in a polarized manner, with von Trier assigning opposing values to similar elements. For instance, both films culminate in the protagonist’s death in the ocean and reveal the true nature of a voice from beyond. In Zentropa, the male protagonist dies as a consequence of the femme fatale’s terroristic desires, reinforcing a “negative” reading of the narrative. Conversely, in Breaking the Waves, the female protagonist sacrifices herself to restore her husband’s physical and emotional castration, positioning her death as “positive” through an idealized notion of love.
The voice from beyond in Zentropa belongs to a diabolical hypnotist, who traps the viewer in a phantasmagoric trance of castration and chaos. In contrast, the voice in Breaking the Waves appears to emanate from a restorative God, whose love is channeled through the female protagonist to heal castration across physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. This dichotomy between the two films mirrors the fort-da dynamic, with Zentropa signifying the fort (absence) and Breaking the Waves embodying the da (presence). The tagline for Breaking the Waves—“Love is a powerful thing”—underscores its thematic alignment with a patriarchal phallogocentrism masked as redemption.
In both films, von Trier dramatizes the actual phallic function by constructing narratives that hinge on the restoration or destabilization of patriarchal structures. The female protagonist in Breaking the Waves, through her complete self-sacrifice, becomes a vessel for reestablishing phallic authority. This stands in stark contrast to Zentropa, where the male protagonist’s death marks the failure of the phallic system. These films serve as cinematic enactments of fort-da, with von Trier using their polarized resolutions to explore the phallic function’s implications in cultural narratives.
Von Trier’s Fort-Da and the Actual Phallic Function
Following my strategy of using psychoanalysis to critique psychoanalysis, the actual phallic function extends from my interpretation of Freud’s fort-da game. As Derrida argues in "Freud’s Legacy," the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle never fully subverts the authority of the pleasure principle. If Freud’s grandson’s game does not illustrate the speculative death drive, it must instead represent what Freud terms a “Bemächtigungstrieb,” or drive for mastery. Derrida suggests that such a drive would fail to transcend the pleasure principle. Within this framework, the fort-da game serves as a symbolic illusion of mastery, masking the child’s dependence, passivity, and the dissimulated absence of the mother.
Lars von Trier, whom I regard as a "guardian of the letter" akin to Lacan, utilizes cinema’s “gigantic machine” as described by Guattari—what might be called mass psychoanalysis. While my primary focus is Breaking the Waves, I also briefly consider its predecessor, Zentropa. Contrary to Roy Grundmann’s claim that the films are markedly different, I argue they are conceptually linked, though polarized. For instance, both end with the protagonist dead in the ocean, accompanied by revelations regarding a “voice from beyond.” These endings, while formally similar, diverge in their treatment of castration and redemption.
In Zentropa, the male protagonist dies a victim of a femme fatale’s terroristic desire, his fate symbolizing castration as a consequence of uncontrolled feminine aggression. By contrast, Breaking the Waves envisions the female protagonist’s death as sacrificial, an act that restores her husband’s castration-induced impotence through a love mediated by phallogocentric logic. The “voice from beyond” in Zentropa represents chaotic malevolence, a hypnotist’s refusal to resolve the castrative anxiety of the viewer. Conversely, in Breaking the Waves, this voice is a simplistic and restorative God whose love supposedly cures both physical and metaphysical wounds. As the film’s promotional materials state: “Love is a powerful thing.”
Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves illustrates the narrative and symbolic reproduction of the actual phallic function. The protagonist Bess embodies the ultimate fetish-object within this phallic economy, sacrificing her subjectivity and autonomy. Her annihilation serves the masculinist phantasy of transcendence, reinforcing the authority of a phallic God and a patriarchal order predicated on the woman’s disappearance into absence. This absence, dissimulated as a transcendent act of love, echoes the economy of the fort-da game: the masterful concealment of dependency and passivity.
Critiquing Lacan and the Undecidability of the Actual Phallic Function
Lacan’s style often leads readers to interpret him as a postmodern theorist, but this impression can be misleading. The fragmented and seemingly decentered style of Lacan’s discourse is less a celebration of postmodern decentering and indeterminacy than it is a calculated defense against critical assessment. Derrida argues that Lacan’s writing resists isolating its content, shielding itself from any unequivocal or determinable meaning beyond the text itself. This performative opacity limits access to Lacan's claims, making systematic critique difficult.
Barratt echoes this sentiment, describing Lacan’s writing as obfuscatory. He asserts that Lacan’s defiance of systematization often undermines the very possibility of engaging with his theoretical content directly. According to Barratt, Lacan’s style serves as a monument both to the Freudian unconscious and to his conception of how the unconscious is revealed. This stylistic strategy, however, also reveals the weaknesses of his method, particularly when it comes to addressing the limits of phallogocentrism.
Despite Lacan’s rhetorical gymnastics, his conception of psychoanalysis retains a distinctly medieval feel. This arises from its conceptualization of the subject’s relationship to the Other, a relationship marked by patriarchy, immutability, and rigid oppositionality in sexual identity. Derrida critiques this framework, showing how the Lacanian notion of the letter—particularly its purported inevitability of "always arriving at its destination"—reproduces the Oedipal structures and phallic determinism that underpin Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan’s claim to have moved beyond “anatomy as destiny” is undercut by his reinforcement of a transcendental phallic economy, which privileges the male as “whole” and relegates the female to “not-whole.”
Joan Copjec, in her essay “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” attempts to frame Lacan’s theory as offering lessons in undecidability, asserting that deconstruction could learn from psychoanalysis. Her argument draws on Lacan’s acknowledgment of language’s inherent failure to say everything—a failure he ties to sexual difference. Yet Copjec’s attempt to portray Lacan as an ally of undecidability overlooks the deeply deterministic and patriarchal foundations of his theory, particularly his reliance on the phallic function to structure sexual identity and desire.
Lacan’s assertion that the truth can never be fully articulated but clings to the real through its impossibility is compelling. However, his invocation of this impossibility does not absolve his framework from the deterministic weight of the actual phallic function. The undecidability that deconstruction foregrounds—a genuine disruption of hierarchical structures—remains at odds with the rigid hierarchies embedded in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
In sum, Lacan’s theories, particularly his reliance on the phallic function, resist the very undecidability that Copjec attributes to them. Instead, his psychoanalysis reproduces the phallocentric logics it claims to critique, relying on the phallic function as a stabilizing mechanism that masks the gaps and fissures within its own edifice.
The End(s) of Analysis: Beyond Castration Coherence
In my critique of Lacan’s theory, I emphasize how the actual phallic function serves as a structuring principle that consolidates the fragmented elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis into a coherent framework. This "castration coherence," as I term it, appears consistently across Lacan’s works, from the early focus on the symbolic order to the later explorations of the Real and feminine jouissance. While these shifts might suggest a developmental trajectory, the phallic function remains an immutable foundation within Lacan’s oeuvre.
Lacanians often claim I conflate the Lacan of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” with the Lacan of Encore. However, I argue that this conflation is warranted, as both phases of Lacan’s work rely on the actual phallic function to stabilize what would otherwise be an incoherent discourse. This stabilization is achieved through what Derrida calls "castration-truth"—a logic that centers the phallus as an absent presence, ensuring the continuity of patriarchal structures.
Jacqueline Rose identifies this dynamic in her analysis of Lacan’s concept of the "ultimate fantasy." She notes that Lacan positions the feminine as the negation of the masculine, elevating Woman to the place of the Other, only to reduce her to a function within the phallic economy. As Rose states, "the place of the Other is also the place of God, [making] this the ultimate form of mystification." This mystification is central to Lacan’s eschatology, where the "ends of analysis" are consistently framed within a hom(m)osexual paradigm. In this framework, the feminine is negated to affirm the male subject’s identity, reducing woman to a mere vehicle for masculine self-realization.
My critique extends to Lacan’s reliance on structuralist principles that "free logic from the constraints of time and history." This atemporal approach allows Lacan to present the phallic function as a universal constant, obscuring the historical and cultural contingencies that shape gender and sexuality. By collapsing temporality into synchronic structures, Lacan’s theory erases the maternal and pre-oedipal dimensions of subject formation, subsuming them into the phallic order.
In conclusion, the actual phallic function operates as both the unconscious foundation of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its ultimate defense mechanism. It veils the patriarchal underpinnings of Lacan’s theory, ensuring its coherence while resisting critical interrogation. My analysis reveals the limitations of this framework, advocating for a psychoanalytic practice that moves beyond the constraints of the phallic economy to engage with the complexities of gender, history, and relationality.
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Review from the Perspective of My Current Work
Reflecting on my lecture at the University of Oslo in 1998, it becomes increasingly clear how the "actual phallic function" remains central to both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Lars von Trier’s films, particularly in their shared dependence on erasure and subjugation of the feminine to stabilize patriarchal coherence. From the vantage of my current work, which seeks to integrate psychoanalysis with broader cultural critiques, I see even more clearly how von Trier’s aesthetics, like Lacan’s theories, rely on a narrative structure that fetishizes absence and sacrifice as the price for symbolic order.
What strikes me now, however, is how prescient that lecture was regarding von Trier’s later trajectory. In the years following Breaking the Waves, films like Antichrist and Nymphomaniac would more blatantly reveal his underlying misogyny, a fact underscored by feminist critics such as Rosalind Galt and Claire Henry. Similarly, as Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen’s work highlights, von Trier’s cinematic alignment with right-wing reactionary aesthetics was already evident in Zentropa, a film whose fascination with authoritarian imagery foreshadowed his growing cynicism and retreat from progressive ideals. The ideological through-line connecting von Trier’s earlier and later works suggests a calculated embrace of patriarchal and fascistic symbolism, themes that resonate strongly with the phallocentric logic I critique in Lacan.
From the perspective of my current book projects, the connection between von Trier’s cinematic narratives and Lacan’s symbolic order becomes even more significant when examined through the lens of the “fevered archive.” Both systems—Lacan’s theoretical constructs and von Trier’s cinematic worlds—operate as repositories of unresolved contradictions, reifying hierarchies under the guise of challenging them. My ongoing exploration of Derrida’s Archive Fever reinforces how both figures perpetuate structures of domination while presenting themselves as subversive or radical. This duality—their simultaneous deconstruction and reinforcement of patriarchal systems—remains central to understanding their enduring cultural influence.
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