Recently I read a peculiar internet-post written by a young transgender person (that is, on a transgender message board), sharing a troubling experience, in hope of support. They recounted how they’ve just—for the first time—requested that their close friend started using their new, chosen name (and pronouns) instead of the old, given one(s). Being their friend, they regarded them with respect, wishing to assist them in their process of (social) transition, but, when they met physically and the friend actually did the right thing, and addressed them with the new name, the reaction wasn’t the anticipated “gender euphoria” but straight out anxiety.
How do we approach this problem? That is, without falling into the trap and simply call into question the authenticity of the request. This troubled person should first of all be regarded as brave for making such a vulnerable account of themselves. I can only imagine the kind of “advice” they would have received, had they expressed their concerns on a more mainstream platform.
Before going any further with this predicament, let us examine another peculiar example.
In an episode of the cartoon show Bob’s Burgers, the autistic preteen Tina is briefly addressed, by some peripheral character, in a wrong name. “no, my name is… ”, she quietly rebukes, but she barely finishes her sentence before her world stops and we see a short, bombastic vision in which the name Tina is written with huge letters on a stage; the girl then comes down from above, riding a huge flashing D, that crashes down on the T so that it spells the new name, Dina. The vision, of course, illustrates how this name transforms her subjectivity from the bottom, and for the rest of the episode this otherwise subdued child is like born-again, with a much more outgoing, lively and sassy personality.
At this point, let us venture and ask: what is a name and what does a name signify? Here is a preliminary quote from Slavoj Žižek (2019):
Every name is … the signifying representative of that dimension in the designated object which eludes representation, i.e., which cannot be covered by our ideas-representations of the positive properties of this object. There is “something in you more than yourself” … (p. 231)
This virtual dimension “which eludes representation” isn’t simply filled up “alongside” some objective characteristics: Tina, along with such “objective characteristics”, spontaneously got “tinted” very differently by this new name, and it made her actualize precisely something more than her in herself; – something otherwise repressed, we might say. The name was awesome precisely because it enlightened her vis-a-vis her own repressed desire. Contrary to this, the unhappy trans person got momentarily frozen in anxiety, in the face of their new name. Unlike Tina, who could be interpreted as a victim of name-calling, this was a name they chose for themselves. Haunted by this incident, they found the internet forum – they wanted to know why they had this reaction – like Tina-becoming-Dina, such a desired name change was supposed to be a positive and validating experience.
At this point we should reckon the absolutely basic proposition: that when we name anything in this world, we grant it some form of identity. As an example, many people feel a certain relief when getting a psychiatric diagnosis like ADHD, because something arbitrary and virtually unspeakable (years and years of academic struggles; “brain-fog”; forgetfulness etc.) gets a name, and thus a sort of cultural “handle” that works as a “fixed” representation in the “chaotic” social field.
What we see clearly, with these examples, is that a name is a master signifier. Absolutely empty, but at the same time absolutely decisive. Not just “scientifically authorised” abbreviations like ADHD, but names in general seems to function as a shortcut to designate a “sum of empirical features” that underlies the thing-in-itself, but this is not truly the case, since this sum of empirical features itself is unspeakable, ever more complex and extensive, the more we try to unfold it. The more accurate we want to be when we approach any object, empirically, the more we also have to say about it, and finally, of course, saying everything isn’t possible. A name as a master signifier excels in it’s authorizing, quilting feature, because “it bestows on its bearer’s features or properties the illusion of completeness” (p. 241). One might have heard of the poetic fragment “A rose, is a rose, is a rose.” Nothing that we want to name can ever be reduced to any (correct or incorrect) sum of empirical features; a “rose” is never spelled out, say, “a stalk with thorns, a couple of leaves and an arrangement of red petals on top” – it must be accepted that no matter how (scientifically, etc.) “accurate” I am in my descriptive approach, the thing-itself still eludes the singular, (representative) identity that can be captured in precisely the name itself, with its singular symbolic status of being, say, “a rose”.
As such there’s a decisively fragile moment in naming, because the name has to supplement that ominous lack in the subject/object: being potentially “improper,” a name in itself also potentially reflects the very abyss of everything that the thing could have been:
A name at first hand seems to point towards the depth of its bearer, it seems to capture its innermost essence, its je ne sais quoi, the elusive and mysterious X that makes him or her what he or she is, but the effect of completeness is here only to cover a certain void, to quilt the impossibility of ever adequately filling this void (pp. 240-241)
The accidental mix-up of names that turned Tina into Dina did not, of course, capture any pre-subjective, “innermost essence”, but isn’t this precisely what the pompous vision is there to cover up? The vision is there to underpin not an essence but the Real of subjective emptiness as precisely the reality of the virtual, the transcendentally empirical (Žižek, 2015, p. 4); to link it “back” to the positive logic of necessity, implied in the contingent matter-of-fact, that it responded to the girl’s (unconscious) desire.
Again, the name is as such, if it works as a name, a form of master signifier: it functions to create a unified mode of representation in the place of an arbitrary, neverending, virtual chain of possible signification (description). In order to be a proper name, it therefore also has to be supplemented or accentuated by desire; something that marks or “positivizes” precisely this Realness of the thing: “the name, far from referring to the collection of your properties, ultimately refers to that elusive X baptized by … objet a” (p. 231). In the case of Tina-becoming-Dina, the new name included both moments.
The opposite of naming oneself would therefore be, not surprisingly, name-calling. In name-calling we have the pure master signifier without this other moment of desire proper. Name-calling, that is, if it “works”, does not grant identity but jeopardizes it; breaks it. Any anxiety sparked from such an incident reveals the central void in the subject; a violent encroaching of the Other’s desire. Objet petit a is not just an object to guide desire, but reflexively also an object to alert and spark anxiety in the face of deprivation of subjectivity. It is a purely reflexive reaction in the face of a Real in which the subject is jeopardized beyond the level of flesh and bones, it involves the subject’s “eternal” status, dignity. As such we can understand the predicament like this: the momentary, anxious confusion experienced when the desired name doesn’t “work” reveals the split in the name as such: the split between S1 and a. Do we not have in a desired albeit new name precisely just, only the objet a, without the authorizing, “filling” element of the master signifier? Isn’t this supplementary moment of authority precisely what is already included in a name, when we’re so lucky to have it given us by our parents, and thus (officially) registered by the Other?
A name rarely unveils its contingent nature, but when a person is, say, amidst the deep and fragile turmoil of transition, such a change of name, even when it is deeply desired, nonetheless opens up this abyss of potential (names) and thus potential symbolic statuses: a nauseating multiplicity of identities or precisely the traumatic-Real, underlying, pre-subjective lack of identity altogether. Without the element of the master signifier, nothing covers this abyss. Viewed in this light, it is quite easy to imagine that the person’s deadname will appear much more “real”, Natural, a predicament that could reflect a mode of name-calling that one has given up trying to resist, a model that reflects Lacan’s strong observation that guilt is something we experience when we give ground relative to our desire. In order for this abyss of the Real to be covered up, the name has to become such a master signifier, and since the master signifier is nothing but pure, phallic authority in the symbolic, “a signifier without the signified” (p. 241), the desired name must simply be asserted as such and allowed time to become, for-itself, a Real name.
Having a name given is a privilege rarely bestowed upon trans people, but in the process of becoming, such a development of a proper name can be a crucial step in subjectivation, precisely because it marks and positivizes the radical void in the subject, wiz. “that dimension in the designated object which eludes representation” (p. 231). It can potentially colour the subject in another tone, one that aligns with its “eternal” desire. What we learn from the present case is that a name becomes a name by transcendental means, through a dialectic of desire with the master signifier, virtually, as product.
Marie Boesgaard Bendtsen is a psychology student from Aalborg, Denmark. Self-taught in theoretical psychoanalysis through primarily Žižek and Zupančič.
References:
Žižek, Slavoj. (2015). Organs without bodies: on Deleuze and consequences (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Žižek, Slavoj. (2019). Sex and the Failed Absolute. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Žižekian Analysis 