The Paradox of the Phallic Signifier

From The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso), pp. 130-131:

Therein resides the materialist 'wager' of Deleuze and Lacan: the 'desexualization', the miracle of the advent of the neutral-desexualized surface of Sense-Event, does not rely on the intervention of some transcendent, extra-bodily force; it can be derived from the inherent impasse of the sexualized body itself. In this precise sense--shocking as it may sound to vulgar materialists and obscurantists in their unacknowledged solidarity--the phallus, the phallic element as the signifier of 'castration', is the fundamental category of dialectical materialism. The phallus qua signifier of 'castration' mediates the emrgence of the pure surface of Sense-Event; as such, it is the 'transcendental signifier'--non-sense within the field of Sense, which distributes and regulates the series of Sense. Its 'transcendental' status means that there is nothing 'substantial' about it: the phallus is the semblance par excellence. What the phallus 'causes' is the gap that separates the surface event from bodily density: it is the 'pseudo-cause' that sustains the autonomy of the field of Sense with regard to its true, effective, bodily cause. Here on should recall Adorno's observation on how the notion of transcendental constitution results from a kind of perspective inversion: what the subject (mis)perceives as his constitutive power is actually his impotence, his incapacity to reach beyond the imposed limitations of his horizon--the transcendental constitutive power is a pseudo-power that is the obverse of the subject's blindness as to true bodily causes. Phallus qua cause is the pure semblance of a cause.