Calliope’s Sc(D)ream: Feminine Jouissance in Aristotle’s Works on Language

This essay offers a reading of three major Aristotelian works on language – the Rhetoric, the Poetics, and the Sophistical Refutations – with the theorisations of sexual difference in Freud’s essays on the castration and Oedipus complexes and Lacan’s teaching from On a Discourse that might not be a Semblance to Encore. Nuancing Lacan’s criticism in 1978 of Aristotle in Aristotle’s Dream as believing in representation to the exclusion of the o-object, the essay shows that Aristotle’s treatments of language are intricated with treatments of sexual difference and feminine jouissance.…