Desire & the Symbolic (3)

From Slavoj Žižek's How to Read Lacan (First published in the UK by Granta Publications; page numbers here refer to the edition published in New York by W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), p. 34:

This gap between my direct psychological identity and my symbolic identity (the symbolic mask or title I wear, defining what I am for and in the big Other) is what Lacan (for complex reasons that we can here ignore) calls 'symbolic castration', with the phallus as its signifier. Why is phallus for Lacan a signifier and not simply the organ of insemination? In the traditional rituals of investiture, the objects that symbolize power also put the subject who acquires them into the position of exercising power--if a king holds the sceptre in his hands, and wears the crown, his words will be taken as royal. Such insignia are external, not part of my nature: I don them; I wear them to exercise power. As such, they 'castrate' me, by introducing a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise (I am never complete at the level of my function). This is what the infamous 'symbolic castration' means: the castration that occurs by the very fact of me being caught in the symbolic order, assuming a mask or title. Castration is the gap between what I immediately am and the symbolic title that confers on me a certain status and authority. In this precise sense, far from being the opposite of power, it is synonymous with power; it is what gives power to me. So one has to think of the phallus not as the organ that immediately expresses the vital force of my being, but as a kind of insignia, a mask that I put on in the same way that a king or judge puts on his insignia--phallus is a kind of organ without a body which I put on, which gets attached to my body, but never becomes an organic part, forever sticking out as its incoherent, excessive prosthesis.