Bruce Fink on Symbolic Castration

From Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1995), p. 99:

"In Seminar XIV, Lacan asks,

'What is castration? It is certainly not like the formulations Little Hans puts forward, that someone unscrews the little faucet, for it nevertheless remains in place. What is at stake is that he cannot take his jouissance inside himself.' (April 12, 1967)

Castration has to do with the fact that, at a certain point, we are required to give up some jouissance. The immediate implication of this is that Lacan's notion of castration focuses essentially on the renunciation of jouissance and not on the penis, and therefore that it applies to both men and women insofar as they 'alienate' (in the Marxist sense of the term) a part of their jouissance."