Ricoeur locates the problem with ideology, beyond its being a falsified relation between men and their world, in its "Freudian-Althusserian" function as overdetermining, distanced and somehow innocent, transcendent in relation to man as subject. Ricoeur's alternative "would be a motivational framework; [which] would allow us to understand that it is in fact in terms of motives and motivation that we speak of the overdetermination of meaning" (128). Within the frame of psychoanalytic theory, Lacan gives a rather clear description of this overdetermination and motivation, this maintenance of authority and power, in his lecture "The Signification of the Phallus." Lacan's first question in "Signification" is that "there is an antinomy [in the castration complex], that is internal to the assumption by man of sex: why must he assume the attributes of that sex only through a threat . . . of their privation?" In Freud, he explains, there is an "essential" "disturbance" of masculine sexuality "resulting from the castration complex in the masculine unconscious and from penisnied in the unconscious of women" (Écrits 281). (To clarify the German, penisneid is untranslated German for penis envy.) Lacan continues that this "aporia," this gap, is "insoluble to any reduction to biological givens," even if (as in Freud and in "The Mirror Stage") the whole situation is predicated on the visibility of bodies and their organs, framed as an antagonistic contest for organs. The related question is: "What is the link between the murder of the father and the pact of the primordial law, if it is included in that law that castration should be the punishment for incest?" (282). Lacan proceeds to explain that link via the problematic of the woman's/the feminine's, Lacan's Other's, relation to the Phallus, using that problematic (penis envy) as the predication for the subject's relation to the phallus (guarding it), which Lacan argues is a symbolic (linguistic and cultural) signifier and not related to the body. The move here, in terms of ethics, is again to recuperate the feminine as patriarchally defined to the establishment of the masculine subject in language and culture/ideology, as authority:

Man is both determining of and determined by discourse through which the relation of men to their world is established and to which that world submits. The signifier with its signifying passion is the phallus:

This translates to the phallus being the determining signifier of analysis, which lifts the veil of the mysteries. The mysteries are that "other scene," the unconscious and the "chain of materially unstable elements that constitutes language" which operates in terms of metonymy and metaphor, and has determining effects for the institution or establishment of the subject. Meanwhile, the subject's discourse, its speaking of itself, which is tied to its unconscious, is determined by that subject's relation to the phallus, which for the male is fear of castration and for the female is penis envy. The phallus, in other words, is the signifier par excellence. The real hitch here for the subject and its relation to the phallus is that "it speaks in the Other, I say, designating by the Other the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes." And beyond this, "If it [the phallus] speaks in the Other, . . . its is because it is there that the subject, . . . finds its signifying place" (285). And the place is the unconscious, by analogical binary logic the Other, the feminine; she serves as the ground or predicate on which the subject establishes itself. The subject finds its signifying place, its status as subject, in the Other simply because it is in relation to that Other that the subject finds speaking necessary, to express anything; to express anything is always already to desire something from or in relation to the Other--this is the basis of all speech and has been established by many theorists, Lacan included. So, the subject's existence as such is always predicated on the existence of an Other (as determined by the signification of the phallus) since it is the presence of an Other that elicits the desire to speak, establish authority and power in the subject. This agon (castration-penis envy) is of course only taking place in the symbolic and discursive realms, without affect, in Lacan.

Although Lacan does not argue it here, it is the assigned condition of being unknowable the unelectable, the in-visible, of being the Other, her fluidity and relations to the unconscious (only partly established in this lecture) that constantly "intervenes" and makes the subject speak or act, which keep the subject in the state of desire and leads it to address the Other because it/she is defined as unknowable and outside/eccentric, it/she must constantly be defined and located in order for the subject to know itself. The problem for the subject in this discursive and ethical system is that it "constitutes the Other as already possessing the 'privilege' of satisfying needs, . . . the power of depriving [needs] of that alone by which they are satisfied. This privilege of the Other thus outlines the radical form of the gift of that which the Other does not have, namely, its love" (286). Because of her lack, the subject says to her, "Do you love me?" and "You are mine, " and "Hold still you." That subject says, "That which is my Other is my haven and my death, I must control it, define it, describe and limit it so that it does not move, speak or threaten me."

Since this whole theory is about the subject and its/his formation, the only recourse the Other has is to either give over, to submit as the signifiable, to the demanded (not requested) love (sex, labor, approval, etc.) or to withhold it (to say no, to offer respectful critique, to suggest (her) own view). In the first case, the Other/she simply reenforces the subject's always already split and partial nature (since he got it from her, he can never be sure that is his--love, idea, desirability, sense of worth), and in the second case the Other/she annihilates the subject's/his status in a refusal equated with castration/punishment. In this transaction in an ethic of appropriation, "the phallus is the privileged signifier of the mark (the visible penis) in which the role of the logos (language/discourse/ideology) is joined with the advent of desire" (287). In other words, if you have the phallus, you have privileged access to culture, authority, power and to the Other. Lacan goes on to explicate this "exchange" between subject and Other in which the "desire of the Other" (to possess the phallus--this is her danger, her desire to be the same) is predicated entirely on the Phallus, discourse, which is predicated on the masculine model, on the male body and its see-able parts--an exchange/economy in which the Other has no desire, love, the gift she does not possess, (and therefore no signifying system) proper to itself. The subject is seeking in the Other that gift which the Other does not have, because the Other has been defined only by her lack of something (a penis/phallus, which she should envy since if he didn't have one he would want one), and not by any attribute which belongs to her--the subject is looking into an empty space--"woman does not exist"--what some philosophers call the abyss, or death.

On the ideological levels of inter-subjectivity and gender it is this signification of the phallus and the masculine subject it supports which subtends the function of ideology and estrangement Ricoeur explicates from Althusser and Marx. This phallus as overdetermining signifier has behind it all the force and weight of history, governs discourse and determines a motivated ethic which, as Irigaray effectively argues in This Sex Which Is Not One, excludes or precludes, rather, the Other or the feminine from its own subjectivity and relation to (phallogocentric) discourse, ideology and power. In this phallethic the Other submits to its marks, functions as the historical/ideological, slippery ground on which the historical/ideological masculine subject predicates itself, linguistically and psychologically as authority. The motive is simply to insure and to shore up the masculine subject and its attendant ideology, to maintain a patriarchal and sexist power relation; a relation which if we follow Ricoeur's understanding that "all these concepts overlap" is the model for (Occidental) man's domination and appropriation of other others: the natural world, the Orient, communists, Africans of all nationalities, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, gays, Iraqis, Serbians, speakers of various dialects of any standard language, workers, artists--who also operate in this same "phallethic" in relation to their others.