[1 Ironically, not so much by "MLF feminists" (Lacan ]Encore[ 54) but primarily by Lacanians themselves. Witness Ragland-Sullivan's rebuttal of Alice Jardine's reading (]Gynesis[ 164 et passim) as literal (65). According to Jardine, there are no women if there is no sexual relation. Meaning that women are the effect of this relation. Meaning that if there actually is no sexual relation, then because there are ]only[ women in the patriarchal world.

2 Cf.: "Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary schema, they become remodelled in the imagination ... The contradictions between experience and the schema seem to supply the conflicts of childhood with an abundance of material" (Freud ]Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose[ 123).

3Cf.: "... the original fantasy ... is characterized by the absence of subjectivization" (Laplanche and Pontalis 22); "So long as there is some idea of the subject, even if playing a passive role, are we sure to reach the structure of deepest fantasy?" (23)

4 Which explains why the masochistic fantasies are clearly conscious in male patients whereas the female analysands repress them (cf. Freud "Ein kind wird geschlagen" 217). The reason is the latter simply have no use for them. Which suggests the necessity to regard repression and not masochism as an] economic problem[.

5 Cf. Irigaray's idea of "strategic mimicry".

6 Contrary to the notion of patri/matricide, the taboo of virginity is an historical fact. Therefore to assign it the suggested role means at long last to provide a firm materialistic basis for a cultural extension of psychoanalysis.

7 I wish to express my thanks to the Dutch colleague of mine, Jack van der Weide who had alerted me to the existence of this text and thereby prompted me to straighten my ideas on the subject.

8 Cf.: "One should never criticize that which one is not complicitous with" (Braidotti 110); "... one cannot deconstruct a subjectivity one has never controlled" (117).

9 Witness the most recent feminist reading of ]Lolita[ in Blum's ]Hide and Seek[. If the author avoids spelling out these conclusions, then only because she does not bother to pursue to the end the logic of her own argument. On the one hand, to subsume the novel under the rubric of the narcissistic impasse, i.e. to foreground the rivalry between Humbert and Quilty means to subscribe to the moral view, for if Humbert is the imaginary double of Quilty, then he is unambiguously guilty - especially in the critical context that pays so much attention to word-play regarded as a privileged discursive manifestation of Lacan's Imaginary (202-203). On the other hand, to view Lolita as a go-between child/woman means to structurally equate Nabokov's novel with Dickens' ]Bleak House[. The artistic failure of the latter has been always already said to stem from the bleakness of the child-figure which is unconvincing (156). The irony is that if this is really so then the poetics of the "go-between" propounded by Blum is the poetics of pornographic stereotype, for it is precisely hackneyed personages which make of conventional pornography an artistic failure.

10 By matter of fact, poststructuralism still begs us the answer to the question how "woman-as-spectacle" paradigm has to be reconciled with veiling/repressing the woman in/by patriarchal discursivity.

11 Put crudely and bluntly, it is simply untrue that "it is by negation of this privileged 'other'/woman that the male subject can construct himself as the universal standard of normality and normativity" (Braidotti 261). Which does not make logocentrism less threatening, to be sure, only the task of its subversion more difficult - and urgent.

12 Cf. Blum's reference to J.P.Shue who "holds that, ]paradoxically[, the parodic features inNabokov's work suggest an 'hors-texte' that necessarily 'undermine[s]' the Nabokovian text's professed 'independence' (649)" (239; italics added). Our analysis proves that the alleged paradoxicality has nothing paradoxical about it. The paradox is not Nabokov's but of his poststructuralist readers. A full-scope examination of this issue provides Linetski's ]Anti-Bakhtin, Being the Very Best Book on Nabokov[.

13 Thus, Derrida's attempt to deconstruct the master narrative by trying to show that "nothing happens" ("The Law of Genre" 218 et passim) in it is, in fact, the reconfirmation of the narrative's virginity.

14 This point is meticulously argued in Linetski's "The Promise of Expression".

15 Narratologically, Cleland's novel is a sequence of scenes qua sequence of phalluses whereas every new sample is "more unwieldly, inordinate siz'd" (149) than the previous "monstrous machine" (95). Logically, it is precisely this escalation which allows Fanny to claim that every new triumph over her is a triumph over "a second maidenhead" (92) ]in order[ to be able to assert that she had remained true to her Charles: the escalation reaches its pick with the appearance of "a young savage" (195), "a perfect changeling, or idiot ... ]Good-natured Dick"[ (190) for whom "the nature has made amends, in her best bodily gifts" (191) furnishing him with "a May-pole ... of so tremendous a size that, prepared as we were to see something extraordinary, it still, out of measure, surpass'd our expectation, and astonish'd even me" (193). The function of this "furious engine" (92) is to ultimately virginilize Fanny: the only phallus which can surpass Dick's is that of Charles whose return is made thereby structurally necessary and convincing. Which explains why, on the one hand, the encounter with Dick should lack any financial motives, whereas, on the other, the ultimate deflower/purificator is enjoyed au-pair with Loiusa - just as Lolita and Barbara "were doing it by turns" with another young savage, "silent, coarse and surly but indefatigable Charlie" (144): it is only the presence of the third party which transforming the primal scene into a masochistic scenario makes of it a resolution of Oedipus. This effect is over-emphasized by the fact that Dick's display follows immediately upon Fanny's witnessing the homosexual act and her violent phillipic against non-reproductive sexuality (188-190).

16 Obviously, this is the ultimate and ]real[ reason why it was confession which became a "scheme for transforming sex into discourse" (Foucault 20). No wonder that Foucault and postructuralism in general prefer not to spell it out (cf. Williams 91-92).

17 Thus, contrary to Rose (4, 10-11), Barrie's narrative is not ignorant of contemporaneous psychoanalytic developments: it intervenes into the debate offering a solution to the problem which, as Laplanche's discussion of ]Castration/Symbolistions[ shows (119-148), remains one of the theoretical quandaries.

18 Which the Derridaean pharmakon is not due to its supplementarity (cf. ]Dissemination [157-171).

19 The same resolution into post-oedipal linearity subverts the subversiveness of de Sade's work. Witness ] 100 Days of Sodom[ where the brute sexual symmetry is counteracted by overt masochism which is fundamentally a dissymetrical affair (J.-A.Miller "A Discussion" 231-232).

20 Which explains why Fanny's precious gift should be supplemented by another one, shared with other members of her profession, namely the "emotion of natural modesty" (144; cf.136-143, 204). The mysogynic underpinnings of this good-enough quasi-modesty are bared in Hardy's patriarchal idyll: "'Ay, good; she's ]good enough[. When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand she's as good as any other; they be all alike in the groundwork" (76; italics added). ]Under the Greenwood Tree[ merits attention also in that it exposes the interdependence of quasi-virginity and quasi-modesty (the "good enough"):

"'Then there are three dresses ]good enough[ for ma eyes, but neither is ]good enough[ for the youths of Longpuddle,' he said .... Here he meditated and meditated, and the more he meditated ... the more positive was he that his time had been scandalously trifled by Miss Fancy Day - that, so far from being the simple girl ]who had never had a sweetheart before[, as she had solemnly assured him time after time, she was, if not a flirt, a woman who had no end of admirers" (103; italics mine). These passages prompt us to recognize in the notion of the "good enough" a safety-valve against the transformation of the phallic exaggeration into the non-phallic one. Since it is the former which, as we have seen, resolves the Oedipus, it is not surprising that the psychoanalytic post-Lacanian practice would lay particular stress on the notion of ]tact[ as a ]distancing gift[ (Kristeva 90) which allows to achieve practically what theory fails to do, i.e. to tame the non-phallic exaggeration subversive of Oedipal machinery. Little wonder, then, that "Feminism in the 1990s has stood increasingly ]for and with the normal[ ... in two senses. It is identified with the norm as a prescription of correct, conventional, or moralizing behavior or identity, and with ]the normal as it is commonly misapprehended as the familiar[" (Russo XII; italics mine). The very least of which could be justly said about the value of our contribution to the ongoing debate is that it at long last traces down the this normalizing logic and thereby defamiliarizes the logocentric normalcy - the task which Russo's study unfortunately avoids albeit it is the sine qua non of any feminist inquiry.

21 Cf. the role of dissymetry (i.e. discrepancy of sizes) in a pastoral which celebrates patriarchal values: the symbolic sublimation of the bride's virginity is her marriage provision which "is a repetition upon inanimate objects of the old principle introduced by Noah ... The duplicate system of furnishing owed its existence to the forethought of Fancy's mother ... The arrangement spoke for itself: nobody who knew the tone of the household could look at the goods without being aware that the second set was a provision for Fancy, when she would marry and have a house of her own" (Hardy 65). And yet the duplicates are not symmetrical: "The most noticeable instance was a pair of green-faced eight-day clocks, ]ticking alternately[" (65; italics added) and thereby "]emphatically[ /i.e. exaggeratively/ perpetuating" "the desperate rivalry"(66; italics added) of their makers: "That Ezekiel Saunders o'thine is tearing on afore Thomas Wood" (67).

22 Cf. 14-15. From a different perspective, the role of the primal scene in ]Lolita[ is addressed in Linetski's essay "The Mechanism of Ambiguity Production".

23 Cf. an astute remark by one of Defoe's readers that "Since respectable women were brought up to believe that chastity was all-important, it is to be expected that she /Roxana/ would feel more guilt for committing adultery with the jeweler than for abandoning her children" (Rogers 289).

24 Witness the ironical constancy with which the utilizations of Lacan's unnamable desire wind up with giving it a name, and quite an unambiguous one at that (cf. Silverman 213, 215, 219).

25 Whence the failure of the "ecriture feminine"-project which is the poetics of gaps/silences, i.e. the reconfirmation of the logocentric discrepancy of seizes (for a fuller discussion consult our paper "The Promise of Expression").

26 Obviously, mother's concealing from Cedric that his grandfather is an old tyrant has no bearing on his attitude towards the latter since he has already learned from his American friend Mr.Hobbs to regard aristocracy as a class of tyrants (10-13).

27 It is this issue which is decisive for the narrative's ability to maintain its subversive promise. Thus, the question whether Mary Norton's ]The Borrowers[ does indeed represent the conservative "escapist fantasy" (Hunt 125) boils down to the problem of narrative's ability to sustain Arrietty's claim that the Boy is the only one "human bean" (78), i.e. to subvert the patriarchal Symbolic grounded in the discrepancy of sizes by freezing its agent. Since the answer implies a meticulous textual analysis the scope of the paper allows only to voice our contention that it does, whereas the dismissal of Norton's novels as promoting the patriarchal world-view and moral stems precisely from reluctance to examine the textual strategy (cf. Kuznets, Pace, Hunt).