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Gregg Lambert "What does woman ß«*·«* *'«*»'* want?": John Guillory and that obscure object of desire The question "What do graduate students want?" is the subtitle of an article by John Guillory that appeared in The Profession 1996. As my title indicates, this question bears an implicit allusion to the one which Freud addressed in a letter to Princess Marie Bonaparte: Was will das Weib"? ("What does Woman Want?"). Of course, the response that Freud offers to the question is that "Woman, simply put, desires the phallus," and with this statement he assigns to the subject of "Woman" (i.e., All-Women) the object of desire which she constitutionally lacks. That is, Freud's reply specifically addresses thesubject of "Woman" from the position of the hysteric, and around a particular interpretation of desire that belongs to the unconscious formation of the hysteric subject. Namely, in as much as her desire is structurally constrained around the position of an object which cannot satisfy her desire for the phallus, the discourse of the hysteric creates a series of partial objects to replace or to cover-over this missing object; this, in turn, produces the subjective condition that is taken up and expressed by the neurosis in the forms of profound dissatisfaction, sadness, illness, frigidity, and, finally, suicidal depression . The implicit analogy between the desire of the hysteric and that of the graduate student of English in Guillory's analysis can be readily established by summarizing the main points of his initial argument. "The question of my subtitle—what graduate students want—is simply answered at the present time: they want a job" (91). That the job functions in Guillory's commentary in the position of phallus, the site of castration in the Freudian schema, can be illustrated by the following passage: One of the consequences of our current crisis has been that the very uncertainty of this object of desire, the job, permits the object to stand infor many other objects as well, some of which are reasonable and attainable, others, as I hope to demonstrate, largely phantasmatic. (91, emphasis mine) As Guillory goes on to describe, in as much as this object of their desire is found to be missing, and structurally appears to be more and more impossible, there appears within the field constituted by graduate student desire an ever widening "gap between objective chances and subjective aspirations" (94). In as much as the graduate student must occupy a position that is structured by this funda- 250 the minnesota review mental contradiction (or impossibility), she must defend herself against the lethal factor of that moment when the news of lost object finally reaches her—when, for example, she must fatally encounter herself in the moment of symbolic recognition (i.e., the moment of castration), when she must finally acknowledge that she has no job\ This moment is lethal in the sense that the subject cannot any longer defer the recognition of her lack and, in the moment when she fully encounters it, must incarnate this lack in her being. This might address the status of those graduate students who, after several unsuccessful years on the market, finally accept the job's loss and simply "vanish." However, there is an alternative presented in those who choose to defer this encounter indefinitely by arranging their whole lives around the perpetual (in)completion of their dissertation project, and who "haunt" the department by suddenly appearing in intervals of several years to announce their intention to complete their degree, only to suddenly vanish again. "When a student cannot find a job," Guillory writes, "it is not only the desirefor a job that isfrustrated but also every desire whose gratification is thought to be contingent on the job" (91, emphasis mine). In an effort to forestall this moment, the widening gap between the position of her desire and its impossible object is filled with a series of partial-objects which Guillory finds to be "largely phantasmatic" (e.g., teaching, publishing, delivering conference papers, serving on department committees, performing countless other professional activities, etc.). Of course, in the final analysis all these partial objects ultimately fail to conceal or to cover-up the irremediable lack-in-being caused...

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