These Lacanian reflections on circumcision bring us to my key argument regarding the moebius-like nature of the practice with respect to sexual difference. I propose we view acts of circumcision as fundamentally ambivalent, involving both a ‘masculine’ attempt to secure the phallus and a ‘feminine’ undermining of this pursuit or showing up of its fraudulence. In the former, circumcision mobilizes the logic of the phallus in an attempt to master the trauma of castration. The rite is inserted into a system of meaning that reassures the subject that something can be done with the trauma of the cut; it can be harnessed toward membership of a social order regulated by paternal law. (This corresponds to Eilberg- Schwartz’s formulation, ‘One must have a [circumcised] member to be a member.’6) Additionally, at the imaginary level, circumcision appears to appropriate and master enigmatic and threatening aspects of femininity. Circumcision thus transforms the penis into the phallus, an instrument of signification and social order, enabling members of the male sex to negotiate difference through the phallic pursuit of representing and mastering the unrepresentable. Yet, circumcision does this only by disavowing the phallus’s emptiness. Thus, at another level, circumcision restages (and even valorizes) the very moment when the splitting of the subject takes place. The removal of the foreskin confronts men with the fundamental lack imposed by the symbolic order and the fraudulence of any subsequent claims to phallic wholeness (the same dilemma that faces women). In the final analysis, circumcision and its attendant significations can be seen as giving form to the originary signifying cut, and an attempt to respond to the problems it raises. This is not to negate specificity or context; for, in each case, circumcision (and the stances and controversies surrounding it) are, as the chapters of this book show, extremely particular. In any given moment in the history of circumcision, the problem of phallic (dis)possession plays itself out differently; yet, this irresolvable problem is always at play. Moreover, as is the case with signification as such, for any one meaning that circumcision accrues in a particular context, its inverse always threatens to emerge.
