These problematics are also addressed in Lacan’s remarks in Seminar Five, where he contrasts the mark a shepherd leaves on his flock of sheep with the mark of circumcision:
It’s indeed true that, in a certain way, circumcision presents itself as constituting a particular flock, the flock of God’s chosen ones. Are we not merely rediscovering this? Certainly not. What analytic experience, and Freud, brought us at the beginning is that there is a close, even intimate relationship between desire and the mark. The mark is not simply there as a sign of recognition for the shepherd. . . . Where man is concerned, the marked living being has a desire which does not fail to have a certain intimate relationship with the mark.4
Unlike a simple identifying badge, circumcision, both Lacan’s and Derrida’s comments suggest, marks simultaneously one’s communal identity and the individual desire that emerges out of the process of inscribing oneself into a community; both of these circulate around the subjection to a wound, at once singular and universal. As Reinhard Lupton writes, ‘Circumcision separates the individual from the nation in the very act of joining him to it, naming his strangeness to the symbolic in the moment of estranging him within it.’5 The cut traverses the imaginary, symbolic, and real: it imaginarily represents symbolic castration (referencing the penis as the imaginary origin of the symbolic phallus, as well as generating an identitarian mark that serves as the imaginary signified of a symbolic community) and in the process circumscribes the ‘hole’ of the real. It both offers us the captivating image of the introduction of lack into the subject and repudiates this moment through the establishment of law and the invocation of the desired qualities of the Other sex – the attempt to eliminate the threat of difference.