Abyssal Feminine Knowledge

Abyssal Feminine Knowledge designates a structural position in which a figure — paradigmatically Jocasta — is attributed a knowledge that reaches into the Real, a knowing that is simultaneously impossible to represent within the symbolic order and devastating to the cultural-symbolic fabric that depends on its concealment. In the theoretical move articulated in the Boothby source, Jocasta does not merely possess information; she embodies das Ding — she is the traumatic locus of the Other's desire that culture cannot confront. Her silence is not ignorance but the sign of a knowledge that has no place within the Symbolic, a knowledge coextensive with the void itself. This is "abyssal" in the strict Lacanian sense: like das Ding, such knowledge is an "excluded interior," an extimate kernel that cannot be assimilated to the chain of signifiers and whose proximity is experienced as annihilating.

The "abyssal" quality is inseparable from the "feminine" qualifier, which must be understood structurally rather than anatomically. Drawing on the logic of feminine sexuality's "not-all," this knowledge belongs to what falls outside phallic signification — it is the supplement, the S(Ⱥ), the unrepresentable excess that the symbolic order cannot domesticate. Jocasta's knowing-in-silence enacts the foreclosure that culture must perform: her knowledge is not repressed (it does not return as neurotic symptom) but structurally disavowed and pushed toward a zone that Greek — and, by Boothby's argument, Western — culture organises around as a paranoid remainder. The "witch-women in league with darker forces" are the cultural precipitate of this structural foreclosure: the recurring fantasy by which culture names and quarantines the unbearable possibility that a feminine figure holds knowledge of the Real.

Within the source diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred, Abyssal Feminine Knowledge functions as a specifying application of das Ding to a cultural-historical and gendered register. Where das Ding names the irreducibly alien, pre-symbolic void at the gravitational centre of desire — the "beyond-of-the-signified" that all representations orbit without reaching — Abyssal Feminine Knowledge localises that void in a specific figure (Jocasta, the witch-woman) and traces its cultural afterlife as paranoid fantasy. The concept is therefore an extension-and-specification of das Ding into the register of gender and cultural history: the feminine figure does not merely evoke das Ding but is structurally identified with it, making her the traumatic locus of the Other's desire.

The concept also draws on the logic of Feminine Sexuality (the "not-all," the jouissance beyond the phallus, S(Ⱥ)) and of Jouissance (the Real satisfaction that escapes symbolisation and that the Law simultaneously prohibits and constitutes). Crucially, the mechanism Boothby diagnoses in Greek culture resembles Foreclosure rather than ordinary repression: the knowledge in question was never admitted into the symbolic order — it erupts from without, as the spectral figure of the witch. The Oedipus Complex provides the dramatic scene, but Boothby's argument implicitly reverses its usual orientation: it is not Oedipus's ignorance that is structurally primary, but Jocasta's unbearable knowing — her proximity to the Real — that the entire mythological and cultural apparatus is organised to silence. The concept thus occupies a singular position at the intersection of das Ding, Feminine Sexuality, and Foreclosure, functioning as a cultural-symptomatological reading of how the abyssal Real gets gendered and expelled.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.109)

Such an ancient suspicion of women's abyssal knowledge appears to have percolated down through the centuries, informing the recurrent paranoid fantasy about witch-women who are in league with the darker forces

The phrase "abyssal knowledge" does precise theoretical work: "abyss" signals the void-structure of das Ding (a locus of pure lack, not a positive content), while "percolated down" and "paranoid fantasy" together indicate that what could not be symbolised — foreclosed rather than repressed — returns in the Real as a culturally institutionalised hallucination, the witch-woman as monstrous figure of unbearable knowing.