Officers, maids and chimneysweepers

Mladen Dolar

Søren Kierkegaard, in his astounding book on repetition (1843), a book that everyone
should read, at some point discusses the proposal that the entire humankind can be divided in
just three categories, and only three: officers, maids and chimneysweepers.

One can immediately appreciate the brilliance of this proposal, it possesses the cheek
and the wit, boldness and audacity, nonchalance and imagination. If one makes a quick
opinion poll among one’s friends, philosophers and non-philosophers alike, one can see that
the suggestion immediately produces laughter, enthusiasm, approval and good humor. It is
more difficult to see where precisely lies the brilliance of it.

One can imagine the protestation, or a mock protest: officers, maids and
chimneysweepers, all right, but where am I in this? Which category do I belong to? The first
answer could be: are you an officer? A maid? A chimneysweeper? Sorry, then you are not
part of humankind. Why do you think you qualify as human? On what basis? You should
reconsider your automatic presupposition. And do you believe that one can be part of
humanity without belonging to any of its categories? If you don’t fit in any of these, which
one do you think you fit?

Another strategy could then propose that if one doesn’t fall into the three categories on
offer, one should supplement them by additional ones. E. g.: humankind can be divided into
officers, maids, chimneysweepers and professors of philosophy. One can quickly see that the
extensions will not ameliorate the initial proposal but rather make it worse, or the absurdity of
the first proposal will only be made more apparent. If one continues adding in this way, one
will inevitably end up with the classification of animals proposed by an alleged Chinese
Encyclopedia, that Foucault enthusiastically quotes at the opening of Les mots et les choses,
The Order of Things (1966), taking it from Borges, where one has fourteen different
categories of animals, but with each category belonging to a different classification. 1 – I can

1
“… the animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c)
those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h)
those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j)
innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those
that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.” Jorge Luis
Borges, The Total Library. Non-fiction 1922-1986, London: Penguin 1999, p. 231. This
famous quote stems from the essay “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language”, written in 1942.
 2

only add that psychoanalysts don’t need an additional category. The first psychoanalytic
patient, who became famous under the name of Anna O. (her real name was far less romantic,
Bertha Pappenheim) and who was treated by Josef Breuer in 1880-82, invented two names for
this new treatment, and since one of her symptoms was that she spoke only English with her
doctor, she proposed them in English: “She aptly described this procedure, speaking seriously,
as a ‘talking cure’, while she referred to it jokingly as ‘chimney-sweeping’.” (PFL 3, p. 83) So
psychoanalysts are chimneysweepers, and therefore human. For the rest of us this seems far
less certain. And we must keep in mind this extraordinary and far-reaching description of
psychoanalysis, proposed at its dawn, at the moment of its birth, a description so apt that one
hasn’t ever come up with a better one: talking cure avec chimney-sweeping. We will come
back to this.

There is a third possibility: since one cannot find oneself in any of the proposed
categories, one can easily and eagerly find oneself in the standpoint which enables such a
classification, in the viewpoint which looks on society from outside and from above, and from
where one can shamelessly classify others. So this is the name of the game, and one can
instantly engage in a parlor game, inventing dozens of classifications, one more extravagant
and exotic than the other. Yet one can soon see that this game is quickly over, or that it has
been actually already over with the first move accomplished by Kierkegaard, and that any
nutty proposals one may come up with can hardly surpass his own, they all rather appear as
pale epigones vainly hoping to match the brilliance of the first attempt. No doubt a great deal
of merriment provoked by this proposal stems from placing oneself into the shoes of the
classifier, ultimately the shoes of the Master, for the Master is the one who can classify others
shamelessly and arbitrarily, according to his whim, looking at society from the supposed
bird’s eye view, given the position that he occupies. And what defines the Master is that he
can classify without being thereby classified himself, or at least this is the illusion of his
position. This is part of the charm of Kierkegaard’s example, it exposes and displays this
arbitrariness precisely by classifying in such a grandiosely implausible way, while also
ironically delivering part of the pleasure of this position as an innocuous parlor game.
Anybody can put on the Master’s shoes for a moment, and Kierkegaard was the grand master
of irony (that is, according to Quintilian’s definition, of ‘saying the contrary of what is being
said’. This is a wonderful definition of a basic property of language as such.)

Borges ascribes the quote to Dr. Franz Kuhn, an important German sinologist and translator,
but of course this is a hoax, Borges made it up himself.
 3

If the structural illusion of the Master is that one can classify without being thereby
classified (just as in Bentham’s proposal of Panopticum, and we will come back to Bentham,
the lure is that of seeing without being seen), one can extend the initial proposal: humankind
can be divided into officers, maids, chimneysweepers and the one who has made this
classification and who is invisibly present in it by his point of enunciation, by his bird’s eye.
Classification includes a category which is itself classified, in the American sense of the
word, like a state or a military secret. The classifier is both outside the classification and
inside it as its invisible condition, its secret weapon. His hope may be that he will remain
classified (i. e. kept secret), not realizing that one is always also already classified (i. e. being
on display by the classification one has made).

Kierkegaard is not the author of this proposal, he invokes an unnamed source: “A

witty head once said that the humankind can be divided into officers, maids and chimney-
sweepers.” (Slov. p. 164). The scholars scrutinizing his work have dug out the source: in 1827
a Danish humorist (also a logician, somewhat like a Lewis Carroll figure) who signed his
pieces only by the initials B. C. (so his identity is unknown), published in one of
Copenhagen’s newspapers a piece called “Om indelinger”, “On divisions”, which starts with
this opening salvo: “Even someone who has never studied logic knows how important it is
that classification be made according to a single fruitful principle. Thus everyone understands
that the division of humankind into officers, maids and chimneysweepers doesn’t obey such
rule.”2 Kierkegaard was 14 years old at the time so either this quip stuck in his mind or it
gained enough popularity with Danish public to be still around 16 years later, in 1843, when
he used it.

B. C.’s proposal is given at the beginning of his piece as a demonstrational device, an

obvious case of how not to go about with classification. The case is so glaring that it doesn’t
even need disproval, it sins so spectacularly against all common sense. B. C., after this
conspicuous opening, then went on to tackle a particularly tough nut to crack, the
classification of women (with all the male-chauvinist innuendos one can imagine, but which
were common at the time).3

2
Kjøbenhavns Hyven de Post no. 40/1827. For this quote and the background of the story cf.
Yves Depelsenaire, Une analyse avec Dieu, Brussels: La lettre volée 2004, p. 110-1, 129-35.
3
There are all the self-evident clichés of the era: women can be e. g. divided into those who
soil the borrowed books before returning them, and those, very rare, who don’t – they
obviously soil the intellectual products by the very femininity; or they can be divided into
those who go to theatre with a hat, and those, very rare, who don’t – for why would a woman
go to a theatre except to display her hat? Etc. Briefly, the problem with the classification of
 4

Kierkegaard had quite a bit to say in his work about the unclassifiable nature of
women, but his purpose, when he brings up this proposal in Repetition, is directly opposite to
that of its author B. C.:

“A witty head once said that humankind can be divided into officers, maids and
chimneysweepers. This remark is in my view not only witty, but also profound and
insightful, and one would need a great speculative talent to propose a better division.
When a classification doesn’t ideally exhaust its object one should by all means give
precedence to the contingent, for it brings fantasy/imagination into motion. A partly
appropriate classification cannot satisfy reason, and even less so imagination, so it has
to be wholly rejected, even though it is greatly honored by daily use, partly because
people are very stupid and partly because they have very little imagination.” (p. 164)

This is Kierkegaard’s point: the proposed division is actually excellent, one would be
very hard put to come up with a better one, it has a speculative depth. More plausible ones
would seem more palatable only because they lack two seemingly opposite things, reason and
imagination. There lies a speculative depth in the contingent which brings forth far more than
a plausible classification. Actually it brings forth far more than a classification which would
‘ideally exhaust its object’, if such a thing ever existed. If classification is the way to divide
the universal genus into particular species, with the most strenuous endeavor to fully exhaust
the universal by the particular, then the contingent classification, in its outrageous
extravagance, points to the fact that this never quite works. Can there be an exhaustive
classification of humankind, and in particular, in the most particular, an exhaustive division
into men and women? For we may see in the officers the caricature embodiment of men, and
in the maids the caricature embodiment of women, but then the question arises: why do we
need the chimneysweepers? This will be our question. Why can’t officers and maids, men and
women, relate to each other without the chimneysweepers?

Kierkegaard only needs three items for the maximum effect. Borges’s classification,
brilliant as it is, seems also a bit too stretchy, so that perhaps the fourteen categories of
animals do the job less well than the three categories of humankind. Three is just enough: if in
officers and maids one can see the beginning of a sound classification, starting with men par
excellence and women par excellence, then the chimneysweepers are the representatives of
pure contingency as such, and thereby, this is the essential part, the representatives of

women, at the bottom, seems to be that they don’t want to comply with the category which is
reserved for them in the first sentence, namely that of maids. They want to read books, go to
theatre etc., but their maid’s nature betrays them.
 5

universality. Human as such is a chimneysweeper. The third and last category brings forth the
unexpected truth of the series which begins with the two first entities.

Let me give some more examples. I guess the most famous and significant one comes
from Marx’s Capital, vol. 1, where Marx proposes the series ‘freedom, equality, property and
Bentham’. The market economy is

“… the very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality,
Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say
of labor power, are constrained only by their own free will. … Equality, because each
enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they
exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is
his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings
them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and
the private interest of each. Each looks to himself only, … and just because they do so,
do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, work for the
common wealth and in the interest of all.”4

To make it brief, ‘freedom, equality, property and Bentham’ presents another case of a
sequence that we are after, a sequence where the last term, which is out-of-series, or its
unexpected surplus, coming from another register, retroactively sheds light on the first three,
with which it is placed on the same level. The beginning of the series gets its significance
from its end, from Bentham, that unsurpassable theoretician of utilitarianism who managed to
reduce all possible diversity of human motivation to the simple calculation of private interests
and thus displayed the ‘subjective economy’ which underlies the elevated slogans of freedom
and equality. There is no freedom and equality without Bentham, this is the bottom-line of
capitalist system. Kierkegaard, I think, would have been thrilled. The first two terms are taken
from the slogans of the French revolution, but already the third and particularly the fourth put
forth its hidden truth, its spring, the underpinnings of the system where those great slogans
have served as political guidelines. Their emancipatory potential took support in a hidden
clause which conditioned their impact throughout. The genus of human and political rights
encounters in Bentham its particular species, even an individual instance, which changes
everything with a single stroke.

Marx’s famous series may well have taken its support from a predecessor whom Marx
knew well and whom he perhaps took as the model in this case. It is well known that he has
struck a close friendship with Heinrich Heine in the 1840s in Paris. Heine, in the second part
of his Reisebilder, Das Buch Le Grand (Images from travels, The Le Grand Book, 1827)

4
Capital, Volume One, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co. 1909, p. 195.
 6

states that he has a particular passion for “love, truth, freedom and shrimp soup”. 5 The series
begins in the same manner with high ideals and then, on the same level with them, finishes
with shrimp soup which sheds a questionable light on those ideals. It would have been too
easy to take this quip as a commonsensical reminder that the high ideals don’t go very far
unless one takes care of one’s stomach (although Heine himself says things which go in that
direction: “My stomach has no taste for immortality, I have thought it over, I want to be half
immortal and wholly full.”) It would have been too easy because the entire booklet is
constructed of three parts, following the slogans of love, truth and freedom, where the shrimp
soup represents the unstoppable appendix which inherently overturns these slogans,
displaying their reversal, showing that none of these can be taken on its own without the
comical addition which endows it with its sting. Shrimp soup is not just the indication of our
bodily needs and their discrepancy with the high ideals, but the necessary and the contingent
not merely bodily appendage which provides the viewpoint from which one can consider
these ideals in the first place and adopt them. One should beware of people who love freedom,
love and truth without the shrimp soup.

Heine loved classifications like this one. In Harzreise he says, e. g.: “The inhabitants
of Göttingen are divided into students, professors, philisters and asses; these four categories
are by no means separate.” In school, he said, he was submitted to so much “Latin, beatings
and geography”. The technique of classifying is the same. Freud loved Heine and it comes as
no surprise that he enthusiastically took so many examples from Heine in his book on jokes
(Jokes and their relation to the unconscious, 1905). And so did Marx – what Freud and Marx
definitely had in common was their enthusiasm for Heine – could one say particularly for the
type of odd classifications with the appendix?

There are several more instances in Marx. Slavoj Žižek never tires of using the
example from Marx’s Class struggles in France (1851), where Marx says that the two
fractions of French royalists, i. e. the legitimists and the orleanists, could only find their
common denominator in republicanism. Should they promote royalism, then the question
would immediately arise as to which king they actually support, and there could be no
agreement, so the only way to be a royalist as such was to be a republican, i. e. antiroyalist. So
the genus of royalism is divided into three species, legitimists, orleanists and republicans.
Marx’s greatest example comes from the first version of the first chapter of Capital where he
speaks about money as the commodity as such:

5
Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand, Stuttgart: Reclam 1972, p. 19.
 7

“It is as if, apart from lions, tigers, rabbits and all other actual animals which by their
groups form the various genuses, species, subspecies, families etc. of the animal
kingdom, there would exist the Animal, the individual incarnation of all animal
kingdom. Such a particular which in itself comprises all actually existing species of
the same kind, is a universal, like an Animal, a God etc.”

This example seems to be like the opposite of the previous Bentham one: there we had
the universal notions (freedom, equality …) that were supplemented with a singular name
which was put on the same level. Here we have a set of particular commodities (particular
animals as lions, tigers and rabbits) supplemented by a universal commodity as such,
appearing in the same series with all particular commodities (the Animal as such). But the two
logics are actually one and the same: what is at stake is the short-circuit between the singular-
contingent and the universal. The seeming universality of money as the general equivalent
hides its particular nature of being a particular commodity, while the seeming singularity of
Bentham conceals its being the hidden condition which strikes all universals with
particularity. The metaphysics of genus and species is our everyday metaphysics in the world
of commodities and money.

One can state in general terms that in the relation between genus and its species there
is always something that doesn’t work, ça cloche, and this mismatch is presented by a species
which appears inside of series of species as its internal outside, a contingent addendum that
sticks out and seemingly contravenes the rule, acts as an exception which incarnates the genus
as such in its universality while at the same time putting into question the nature of this
universality, striking it with contingency. How come that one can never quite classify in such
a way that everything would fall into allotted spaces without a contravention? Why is it that
one can never quite classify by the Aristotelian mold of genus proximum and differentia
specifica? Why does classification never exhaust its object ideally, as Kierkegaard put it, so
that there always appear Benthams and chimneysweepers?

So what I am interested in is the type of classification for which Kierkegaard’s

proposal provides the model: officers, maids and chimneysweepers. A series begins like a
plausible classification, and then the last element spoils its smooth run and puts it into
question while at the same time embodying its secret condition. Minimally three elements are
needed. I have taken my examples haphazardly from Kierkegaard, Heine and Marx, but
already at first glance it is obvious that they all stem from the same period, or rather from the
same historic moment – the moment that one can at the shortest designate as ‘after Hegel’, the
after-Hegelian opening, or a new departure for philosophy. And one can see that this formal
 8

device is actually only possible after Hegel, and that there is a logic in it which came fully to
the fore only with Hegel. Perhaps I stretch Kierkegaard’s proposal too far or make it carry too
much weight, but one can see in it a certain exit from the logic of classification which largely
ruled from Aristotle to Hegel, and which Kierkegaard refers to as ‘exhausting its object
ideally’, i. e. without chimneysweepers. [It was Hegel who brought this logic to its point of
reversal. I can only remind you of the notorious Hegelian equation ‘spirit is a bone’, 6 where
the universality of spirit, the universality par excellence, gets its equivalent in a contingent
dead thing. But I cannot pursue this further.]

Before going back to our initial classification and looking more closely at the
mysterious chimneysweepers, let me give my last and the crown example, stemming from
another period. It comes from Shakespeare, from his rarely produced play Cymbeline, a
convoluted and obscure play, in the middle of which there is suddenly a rather wonderful
poem, the flash of vintage Shakespeare. Let me quote just these two lines: “Golden lads and
girls all must / As chimney-sweepers come to dust.” (IV.2.261-2) There is something
strangely magic in the simplicity of it, the perfect disposition of a few words that only
Shakespeare could manage. The connection which underlies this image is clear: ashes to
ashes, dust to dust, and if there is one profession which has to do with ashes and dust, then
this is the chimney-sweeping. These lines are in strange echo with Kierkegaard’s proposal: we
have a division by sex, into lads and girls, and then the chimneysweepers as the third, which
is here given as the metaphorical addition, a comparison by which both sexes face the same
human destiny, while in Kierkegaard’s example the third term is the metonymical
prolongation, the extension of the series, but which embodies the metaphorical condition of
the series, placed in the last term of the metonymy. In Shakespeare there is the metaphorical
comparison which leads to mortality and death, but in extension equally, in the same breath,
to sexuality. The end of the following stanza runs: “All lovers young, all lovers must / consign
to thee and come to dust.”

Let us now go back to our initial classification. We have seen that this classification
starts off by the sexual difference, bringing forth the caricature embodiments of men and
women, brought to a patriarchal grotesque. Men are by their standing and their calling
supposed to be the officers, this is where their true manly nature is displayed, while the true
feminine nature is to be maids of one kind or another (be it in the sublime form of wives and

6
“… the being of Spirit is a bone.” Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A. V. Miller, Oxford UP
1977, p. 208.
 9

mothers). Some very crude assumptions are tacitly made about the nature of men and women.
But what about the chimneysweepers, which in their very contingency embody the human as
such, the Animal as such apart from the male and female animals, the general equivalent, as it
were, of men and women?

Freud, who spent so much time and effort trying to figure out what does it mean to be
a man or to be a woman, has also actually occasionally written about chimneysweepers. E.g.:

“The amulets that bring luck are altogether to be seen as sexual symbols. Let’s
consider such a collection which is carried around in the guise of small silver
appendages: a four leaf clover, a pig, a mushroom, a horseshoe, a ladder, a
chimneysweeper. … the chimneysweeper, carrying a ladder, belongs to this gathering
because he practices a profession which is vulgarly compared to sexual intercourse.
His ladder was recognized as a sexual symbol in dreams.” (SA 1, p. 173)

This association exists in many languages [and Freud references Anthropophytea, the
annual publication with many volumes, edited by Friedrich Krauss, which still presents the
biggest collection of anthropological material concerning sexuality from all quarters of the
world.7] Chimneysweepers are there as the very necessary contingency, a contingency
inherently pertaining to sexuality, and the contingency that spells this out, the sexual
addendum, the necessary appendix, is the question of phallus. So Anna O. hit the mark very
well when she qualified psychoanalysis by this double definition: talking cure with chimney-
sweeping. If officers are archetypal men and maids are archetypal women, then the
chimneysweepers are precisely the phallic element – sexuality as the third which is added to
the first two genders. How many sexes are there? Why do we need three to have two? What is
the sex of chimneysweepers? (By the way, are there any female chimneysweepers anywhere
in the world?) On the one hand the phallic element is what enables the relation between men
and women, on the other hand it is what troubles this relation and impedes it. If there was a
sexual relation, if it existed in a straightforward manner, then officers and maids could do
without chimneysweepers, but since – according to Lacan’s notorious dictum – there is none,
we cannot manage without chimneysweepers in sexual matters. One of the most famous
slogans of Lacan maintains precisely that ‘there is no sexual relationship’, Il n’y a pas de
rapport sexuel.8
7
It was published 1904-1933, with a vast number of contributors (including Franz Boas). A
reprint was published by University of Michigan Library in 2011.
8
Lacan, by the way, knew Kierkegaard’s quip and loved it. He used it in one of his lesser
writings, “Hommage à Ernest Jones” (1959), where he says: “These lines [of Jones] reminded
me, with a feeling of returning to the light of day, of the immortal division of human functions
that Kierkegaard promulgated for all posterity, a division that is, as we know, tripartite,
including only officers, maids, and chimney-sweeps.” (Écrits, transl. Bruce Fink, NY: Norton
 10

What, if anything, is phallus? How do we get to the point of this equation:

chimneysweepers equals contingency equals universality equals the phallic element? What is
the basis of this short-circuit? And how do we equate this point with the signifier? This is
what Lacan maintains in one of his most famous essays, “The signification of phallus” (1958),
where one should read the title precisely as a thesis, positing a strong link, or even a mutual
implication, between the two terms, phallus and signification, which also means a close link
between the contingency of a bodily appendage and the universality of meaning. There is
something in phallus which is tightly connected to signification as such. Lacan says that
much:

“In the Freudian doctrine, the phallus is not a fantasy, if we are to view fantasy as an
imaginary effect. Nor is it as such an object (partial, internal, good, bad etc.) inasmuch
as ‘object’ tends to gauge the reality involved in a relationship. Still less is it the organ
– penis or clitoris – that it symbolizes. And it is no accident that Freud adopted as a
reference the simulacrum it represented to the Ancients. For the phallus is a signifier, a
signifier whose function, in the intrasubjective economy of analysis, may lift the veil
from the function it served in the mysteries. For it is the signifier that is destined to
designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its
presence as signifier.” (English, p. 579; French p. 690)9

There is something baffling and counterintuitive in this Lacan’s very notorious

statement. Phallus is thus not an imaginary entity playing its role in fantasy (e. g. as the bearer
of potency and might) nor is it an object (such as breast or feces or other embodiments of
object a, partial objects) nor is it the organ to which it is nevertheless necessarily tied.
Maintaining that phallus is a signifier – what does it mean?

What is a signifier? It is a creature of pure difference, this was the profound lesson of
Saussure. It is an entity composed only of difference and nothing else, with no substantial
hold, features or qualities and with no identity. What singles out the signifier, as opposed to
all other modes of being, is that it is an entity which rests on difference alone. ‘In language,
2006, p. 600) What is particularly remarkable in this is Lacan’s passing aside hinting to the
tripartite division, referring to the famous tripartition of humankind proposed by Georges
Dumézil as the matrix of all Indo-European culture, that into priests, warriors and laborers.
Lacan’s hint is that Kierkegaard’s proposal matches the Indo-European tripartition as its post
scriptum and ironic transcription. If officers are obviously warriors, and maids are obviously
workers providing for survival, then the chimneysweeps can only be the priests, the
unnecessary addition whose function is nevertheless crucial: they establish a relation, a
relation between the one and the other, between the visible and the invisible – a relation
between what has no relation. This fleeting reference is no coincidence, since Dumézil’s
famous book, L’Idéologie tripartite des Indo-Européens, was published in 1958.
9
Écrits, transl. Bruce Fink, New York: Norton 2006; Écrits, Paris: Seuil 1966.
 11

there are only differences, without any positive terms’, as Saussure maintained against all
odds in the single most famous sentence of his Course. If signifiers are nothing but the
bundles of differences, with no other hold, sustaining each other in their difference, then the
condition of their possibility is pure difference as such, not a difference between any two
existing entities. And here is the crux of the matter: in the contingent appendix this difference
must appear as such, within the order it conditions, it has to get an embodiment, and its
incarnation can only be a purely contingent element whose function is that it presents the pure
difference which drives the structure. It is like a reflected form of the universal transcendental
condition, appearing as its opposite, the appendix. Differentiality, which enables signification,
is embodied in a contingent surplus, an addition, which doesn’t signify anything. This is the
function of the phallic element, this is what conditions the necessity of chimneysweepers. It
seems that everything makes sense except for this point which appears senseless, but which
incarnates meaning. This is why Lacan says that this signifier is ‘destined to designate the
meaning effects as a whole’. One doesn’t find this in Saussure, chimneysweepers are an
addition to his theory, and the first simple criticism of Saussure could be that he didn’t see the
structural necessity of chimneysweepers, i. e. that in the universal necessity of differential
structural determinations he didn’t see the necessity of a contingent appendage. This
appendage is by itself not yet something psychoanalytic, we could see it functioning in
Kierkegaard, Heine, Marx, and we could maintain that its necessity stems from Hegel, the
Hegelian speculative insight which surfaces time and again at various points in his system,
where the highest spiritual universal has to find its counterpart in a contingent thing, a bone,
or where the universal nature of political reason in a State has to find its embodiment in the
contingent and trivial person of the monarch. The universality of genus has to find its
counterpart and embodiment in a particular contingent species.

As far as Saussure and structuralism are concerned, one could say that the structural
revolution properly started only at the moment when Claude Lévi-Strauss came up with the
lucid and far-reaching insight that there is no differential structure without chimneysweepers.
His name for it was mana, a signifier without meaning added to the infinite list of signifiers
endowed with meaning, embodying the very condition for all others to make sense, while
mana itself, as the ubiquitous mysterious magic property, means ‘everything and nothing’. It
means only that it means, it means meaning as such.

The properly psychoanalytic step is made with Lacan’s bold thesis that this element is
phallic by its nature, so that the chimneysweepers’ appendage has to be brought together with
 12

the contingent bodily appendage. This brings us ultimately to the question of how to match
two kinds of difference: the signifying difference, the pure difference that all signification is
based on, and on the other hand the sexual difference, which seems to be the most obvious
natural difference, providing a model for all others.

The first simple and obvious answer would be this. How does language treat sexual
difference? It treats it as just another signifying difference. Sexual difference is only available
in language as a difference which is reducible to a presence or an absence of a mark, a
distinctive trait. This is what makes a signifying difference: the difference just between the
presence and an absence of a distinctive mark. And what makes possible to reduce the sexual
difference to a signifying difference is precisely the bodily contingency of phallus as a
distinctive mark of gender, thus the model for all distinctive marks. What could be more
glaringly obvious? A child is born, and the first question is ‘is it a boy or a girl?’, and the
question is easily decided by the presence or the absence of an anatomical marker. This is
where the signifier, a disembodied entity composed of differences alone, meets the body in its
materiality and physiology, and among the myriad bodily differences this is the one which
behaves most conspicuously as the signifying difference, the difference between a plus and a
minus. Differential necessity of a disembodied structure here crosses its path with the
anatomic contingency. Sex pertains to linguistic structure by the bodily mark of sexual
difference, which provides the first model for establishing a signifying difference. It is the
paradigm of difference: witness the basic classification of nouns in practically all languages,
which is the division into the masculine and the feminine gender, the grammatical gender
taking its cue from the supposedly natural gender difference. This opposition is used as the
most elementary guideline to sort out our vocabulary. But its spectacular proliferation in all
directions testifies to the impossibility of the task – everything can be grammatically sexed,
posited on either masculine or feminine side of the divide, but when anything can be sexed,
then nothing can be, and the very instrument of such classification is ruined by its own
success. – In Truffaut’s Jules et Jim there is a famous line where Oskar Werner, as a German,
tells Jeanne Moreau (this French woman par excellence): ‘What a strange language is French
where l’amour is masculine and la guerre is feminine.’ In German, with die Liebe and der
Krieg, it’s the opposite, supposedly how it should be if we are to follow ‘a natural pattern’. In
Germany love is the domain of women and war is the domain of men, while in France,
reputed for its hang for perversion, it seems to be the other way round. ‘Make love not war’
would have a completely different meaning and impact in Germany or in France. So taking
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the sexual difference as the pattern of grammatical gender makes for the infinite possibilities
of extension in any direction, while the guiding principle becomes completely useless.
Everything can be accounted for in terms of gender and squeezed into its mold, except for the
sexual difference itself which served as the model. The difference on which everything may
be modeled persists as a real which cannot itself be seized as a difference.

One can add that not merely the grammatical gender, but also all the basic ontological
oppositions follow the same model: matter/form, nature/culture, subject/object, body/spirit,
intuition/understanding, sensuality/reason – all of them tacitly presuppose or display a
sexualized basis, they are never sexually neutral, the opposition is always seen as male vs.
female, and perhaps the psychoanalytic addendum is that one should, in this bipartition,
always consider the chimneysweepers. The supposition that there is a complementarity of two
principles, that there is a relation, and ultimately a sexual relation between the male and the
female conceptual side, this supposition has largely underpinned traditional ontological
assumptions. There is perhaps the best known figure of an image of the two, which is the
image of yin-yang and its disposition in the Tao sign. It is an image which has massively
served as support for an entire cosmology, ontology, social theory, astronomy. It gives figure
precisely to the two poles of masculine and feminine, and the image is formed in such a way
that they complement and complete each other, in perfect symmetry. There is a circle, and the
circle itself is divided by two half-circle lines. The masculine and the feminine principle, their
conflictual complementarity, are taken as the clue which informs every entity, indeed the
entire universe. What does this image convey? There is a strong thesis presented in it which
one could spell out like this: there is a relation. There is a sexual relation. Every relation is
sexual. The relation exists emphatically, conspicuously, in a demonstrative manner, in the
complementarity of the masculine and the feminine, in their perfect balance, the perfect
match, and can serve as a paradigm for everything else. Everything can be interpreted in the
light of this image. The thesis implies and manifests even more: there is sense, this is the
visual embodiment of sense that can endow everything else with sense. If there is relation
there is sense, and only relation ‘makes sense’. The paradigm that regulates sense also
regulates the sexual relation. It has the power to bestow sense, which emerges from the
complementarity of the two. – For Lacan the Aristotelian ontology is like our western version
of yin-yang, it makes analogous assumptions about hyle and morphe, matter and form, the
feminine and the masculine, the passive and the active. And this goes for the bulk of
traditional dichotomies: matter and form, body and spirit, nature and culture, intuition and
 14

intellect, active and passive – all of them are secretly sexualized, premised on the assumption
about the relation. There is a theme to ponder: ontology and sexuality. To what extent were
ontological assumptions always underpinned by sexual assumptions, the assumptions about
the sexual relation, its existence as a guiding principle, the hidden assumption about the
relation? What psychoanalysis adds to this is the necessity of chimneysweepers which put the
complementarity out of balance. Not only this is not a complementary relation, but one has to
get out of its relationality, and the symptom of this is the innocuous and conspicuous addition
of chimneysweepers, falling on neither side of the divide. So the proper division would be
into yin, yang and chimneysweepers, and the site of the emergence of meaning, signification
as such, is not the balanced match between the two sides, but the quirky phallic addition.

But if one equates this element with phallus, how to avoid the massive objection of
phallocentrism?

This is where the massive debate about phallocentrism takes its hold, or even more,
phallogocentrism, the term invented by Derrida and which combines two previously proposed
terms: logocentrism was invented by Ludwig Klages, a German Lebensphilosoph in the 1920s
– it was the contention of his philosophy of life that logocentrism was the major sin of all
western philosophical tradition; and phallocentrism was invented by none other than Ernest
Jones in the late 1920s, actually as a part of his critique of Freud’s take on sexuality which
seemed to him to be male-biased. Both were meant as the terms of denigration. Derrida’s
invention of this term was underpinned by the contention that the two go hand in hand, that
logocentrism always takes its support in phallocentrism, albeit a hidden one, so they form a
pattern which has ruled what is massively referred to as ‘metaphysics’. Metaphysics is logos
avec phallus, one didn’t have to wait for Freud. The objection to psychoanalysis would thus
be that it has indeed transformed phallus into a signifier, a meaningless element, this is the
novelty in relation to tradition, but it has thus, in a negative form, nevertheless maintained its
central and determining role. It sustained, in a more sublimated and roundabout form, the
connection between logos and phallus, which was the basis of the metaphysical tradition all
along. Center may well be empty, meaningless, but it is still a center, with its negative mode
one hasn’t done away the centrism. Psychoanalysis perpetuates its centrality. One may well
talk about phallus as Aufhebung in the signifier (as Lacan does),10 but one hasn’t thereby lost

“[Phallus] can only play its role when veiled, that is, as itself a sign of the latency with
10

which any signifiable is struck, once it is raise (afgehoben) to the function of signifier. The
 15

the reference to the more trivial privilege of the male organ and its fantasmatic sway. This is
the objection massively present in a great deal of feminist literature, which largely sees in
Freud and Lacan the promoters of phallus. – One can answer in three steps.

First. Where does this notion of phallocentrism come from, as a diagnosis of an entire
epoch? It is obvious that it could only appear on the basis of psychoanalysis, that such a
vocabulary was only made available by psychoanalysis, and was only made possible by the
psychoanalytic intervention. In the period which was indeed heavily phallocentric nobody
would ever speak of phallocentrism, and it was this silence that made this structure persist in
its place. It had to be veiled, reserved for Mysteries, as Lacan says, in order to function. So
there is a supreme irony to the objection that psychoanalysis is a continuation of
phallocentrism with other means.

Second. The fact that phallus was named, and pointed out, as it were, has massive
consequences, and naming it was actually tightly linked to the advent of psychoanalysis. What
was veiled as a Mystery turned out to be the banal overlapping of the signifier and the bodily
contingency.11 Phallocentrism could rule only veiled by mystery. With its naming this
tradition stops, its naming isolates it and relegates it to contingency. What seemed to be the
hidden necessity turned out to be based on a contingent coupling between the signifying
difference and the anatomic contingency of a bodily appendage. The transcendental condition
was secretly linked with the triviality of anatomy, but when this is unveiled it loses its
transcendental hold. Let me give a simple parallel: it is just as the notion of geocentrism could
only lose its sway when Copernicus named it and pinned it down. The geocentric era never
considered itself to be geocentric, its geocentrism was concealed and self-evident (the analogy
is not entirely true, but nevertheless instructive), and this is what made it geocentric. Once this
was named, then geocentrism lost the status of the obvious framework, it turned out to be
based on the triviality of our particular placement on this contingent planet. Naming it
dethroned the earth, and naming phallus is setting the limit to phallocentrism.

Third. It was only with this dethronization of phallus, not with its promotion, that the
problem of sexual difference could appear as such. It was only now that it became properly

phallus is the signifier of this very Aufhebung, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its
disappearance.” (“Signification of phallus”, p. 581, French 692)
11
“Phallus […] – the analytic experience ceases its not being written. This to cease not being
written implies the point of what I have called contingency. […] Phallus which was in ancient
times reserved for Mystery, has through psychoanalysis ceased not to be written precisely as a
contingency. Not any more.” (Encore, p. 86-7) Cf. Alenka Zupančič, The odd one in,
Cambridge (Mass.), MIT 2008, p. 205ff.
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insistent, once it was no longer covered by the phallic function. What insists as not being
written, symbolized, seized by the signifier, is precisely the sexual difference in so far as it is
irreducible to phallic difference, irreducible to a difference between a presence and an
absence, a plus and a minus. It is not a signifying difference, and this impossibility of turning
into a binary opposition is the source of its problem and its drama, and this only became fully
apparent with the advent of psychoanalysis. It can never be pinned down by the simple
operation of presence or absence of a marker. It insists through all differences that try to pin it
down to some differential traits or properties, it insists as a difference irreducible to any usual
difference. So there is nothing that would be more opposed to the phallocentric logic than ‘the
signification of phallus’.

Psychoanalysis ultimately discovered two objects which hitherto haven’t been

conceived as autonomous objects, the unconscious and sexuality. If we divide this monster of
phallogocentrism into its two constitutive halves, then one could say, simply and minimally,
that the invention of the unconscious presents what inherently contradicts logocentrism, it is
the rift of logos, its slip. If phallus is posited in line with signification, as the transcendental
signifier of meaning, then one should say that psychoanalysis is precisely not a pursuit of
meaning, it is not after unearthing hidden meanings, buried deep in the unconscious, but the
exposure of a cleft, a rupture of meaning – the name of this rupture is the unconscious. 12 On
the other hand the invention of sexuality presents precisely what contradicts phallocentrism, it
is perhaps the best way to get out of its horizon. The unconscious and sexuality are worthy of
theoretical elaboration precisely by what sets them in opposition to the basic assets of
phallogocentrism.

Anna O. hit the core right at the birth of psychoanalysis in two simple qualifications,
talking cure and chimney-sweeping. Talking cure is the way how to enlist the forces of the
unconscious to work against the logocentric focus on meaning, while chimney-sweeping aims
at an elaboration of sexuality that would escape the phallocentric logic. If we return to the
initial Kierkegaard’s proposal for the division of mankind, then it is clear that
chimneysweepers expose the contingency of the series which started off by the exemplary
embodiments of Men and Women and they at the same time undermine the validity of
12
The unconscious always appears as an enigmatic message, it seems that it is trying to tell us
something in a roundabout way, so that the task of the analytic interpretation would be to
unravel the enigma, to state directly, in plain words, what has been hinted to indirectly by the
unconscious; to call the spade a spade. But this is lure: the unconscious exists only in this
roundabout, in the surplus of distortion, not in some message that could be conveyed in
positive terms.
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presuppositions which conditioned their roles as officers and maids. In chimneysweepers the
signifying logic joins hands with the logic of sexuality, they present the contingent appendix
from where it is possible to disentangle both.