From a discussion on the impossibility to translate the French term jouissance into English, which uses the sentence 'sexual pleasure' instead, Gallop presents the difference established by Roland Barthes between plaisir and jouissance, tamer the first, wilder the later. She goes on to argue the difference between phallus and penis in the work of Jacques Lacan and of the Lacanian psychoanalyst Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, to conclude that the Lacanian position according to which the phallus is strictly a signifier, not to be interpreted as referring to the male's sexual organ, is not entirely tenable.
Jouissance; Sexual Pleasure; Phallus; Penis; Signifier; Psychoanalysis