THE PHANTASY OF DON JUAN

RAJLIN Beatriz

Jacques Lacan has taught us we should consider the characters of a play as many other incarnations of inner characters—this is the way we tackle literature. Poets have been the first ones to perceive the subject of the unconscious just as Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud have.

When it comes to the constitution of the feminine subject in its way to femininity, Don Juan’s character is an epitome of a fundamental phantasy.

The myth of Don Juan was born in the Spanish Golden Age. Tirso de Molina entitled it El burlador de Sevilla y el convidado de piedra. It is one of the finest plays in the history of literature and as time went by, the ending kept changing due to the fact that in each period desires are given a distinct value which in turn establish what are the conditions of love.

Don Juan’s Moliere (18th century) is depicted as a shameless, hasty, cold, cynical, debauchee and blasphemous character. This "wedding man" is able to handle words but is not able to assume any responsibility about the words he utters. Assuming this responsibility would imply accepting its effects as a symbolic agreement, and breaking the rules implies suffering from the consequences. Women’s faithfulness reaches all men just as men’s faithfulness reaches all women. Figures have nothing to do with this statement— it is a universal function that has been symbolically written in the subject.

In the 18th century, Da Ponte suggested Mozart to take this character, wrote a beautiful text: "Don Giovanni ossia il Dissoluto punito" and gave it to Mozart at a time when he was mourning his father, who had recently died. As regards the alleged sensuality of the phantasy, this text might be considered the best achieved one. It explores the senses of taste, touch and smell. The "odor di femina", or "the perfume of women" used to call his attention, no matter who was wearing it.

According to psychoanalysis, the myth of Don Juan is a feminine phantasy and it depicts a man who has got everything. It recalls the image of a father insomuch as he has not been castrated. Don Juan is subject to an imposition, namely that he is the absolute object, always placed where the Other is, and is always ready, conveying the phallus as meaning of the power encompassing the generation.

Femininity makes women feel she is truly the object in the centre of a desire, thus with the phantasy of Don Juan, women with hysteria escape from desires.

The phantasy of Don Juan is the women’s craving of an image that plays the phantasy role, i.e. there is a man who has got the phallus and even much more than that. He always has it; he can not miss it. Don Juan takes a place within the phantasy implying that no woman can take it, no woman can make him miss it.

According to the myth underlying the pleasure of all women, there is no such thing as "all women". There is no such thing as the universal of women.

The sexed individual of these women who are "not all women" does not lie in the body but in the result of a logic demand of the word. The big Other that is portrayed as a sexed individual requires that is there, one by one.

Don Juan is the other sex, the masculine sex for women. Since there are men, women can be counted and a list can be written. If there is Mille e tre, then it is because they can be considered one by one.

In "Totem and Taboo", the Freudian myth, the father is the possessor of all women. After the father is killed, brotherhood springs and an agreement with his fundamental consciousness is signed; in other words, they all agree on prohibiting the incest that is the basis of culture and the structures of kinship. From then on, the father is going to be the object of love and the object of identification as well. As the father used to be the one who had them all for himself, his daughter is going to be included in the sequence. Her phantasy is related to a man who is always powerful, who lacks nothing, who loses nothing. The idea of a man who possesses all women is only possible in the real of imagination. Women understand that homage paid to the masculine desire as that object belonging to them. This means that the object is not lost. Vindication is the basis of women, and they resort to imagining that they should get this real object.

To have access to femininity, women with hysteria should accept their own bodies as long as they accept themselves as objects of the masculine desires. Women’s mysteries rule because they are not able to have access to femininity. By accepting they are objects of desires they recognize the masculine complex as bearer of the penis. As a consequence, if women take on a place of privation, they take the place of objects in the centre of a desire.

Behind the phantasy of Don Juan, the woman with hysteria keeps herself at a distance from femininity. Psychoanalysis tells us that there is a masculine phantasy, i.e. the one of feminine masochism. The woman, in turn, adapts herself to the phantasy he offers her. Feminine sacrifice is not a gift, but a way to get the other one into the web of a desire.

La Zerlina, by Da Ponte, shows us how she is willingly submitted to punishment in order not to lose her husband, whom she was about to cheat.

This is not about a small erotic acrobatics. The phantasy of the gift springs from the structure described above. As the woman lacks the phallus, her gift is placed in a privileged position as regards the being, that is called ‘love’, and is the gift of what one lacks.

By the 19^th century, in Spain, the romantic Jose Zorrila, dealt with the subject of Don Juan Tenorio once again. For romanticism, love and death go together; by believing in dying for love, love becomes fatality. In the loving relationship women find pleasure. Indeed, what they give as something they do not possess is also the cause of their desire. The woman becomes what she creates in a completely imaginary way and what makes her an object is precisely the cause of her desire. What makes her an object, in such a way that in the erotic illusion she can turn into the phallus; she can be the phallus and not be the phallus at the same time, is what she gives because she lacks. This is the only reason why she sticks to a genital conjunction satisfactorily, although inasmuch as she gives the object what she lacks, she does not disappear in that object.

According to eternal experience, the masquerade plays a crucial role in the feminine sexuality, namely the way she resorts to an equivalent to the phallic object—this is why she always wears jewelry.

Women give pleasure the mask of repetition, they embody the institution of the massacred and she teaches the little one how to show off. The relationship between the man and the object is blurred, and the price he has to pay is the acceptance of his radical position. The prestige of Don Juan is related to that position.

DON JUAN - Paris