Harry Potter actors will make a reunion film for the 20th year anniversary but the author J. K. Rowling is not invited.

What does Rowling’s neologism “Hogwarts” in Harry Potter symbolize? A wart is:
1) A temporary dermatologic condition caused by viral infection.
2) The colloquial symbol of a personal flaw, as in “accepting someone, warts and all”.
3) The integral feature of the stereotypic image of a witch.
4) An image evocative of disgust and aversion.

Let’s examine these further:
1) Witch is both a magical figure of mythology and a feminist symbol of a power outside or beyond phallocracy.
2) Witch hunt is both a historical fact (of Christianity) and the intellectual symbol for any authoritarian (especially religious) crackdown.
3) The quintessential personal flaw in a phallocracy is not being able to wield or be protected by phallic imposture.

The term “Hogwarts” sounds counter-intuitive and unnatural, because to hog something means to be extremely possessive about something so as to deprive others from that thing. A term that would sound more “intuitive” and “natural” is “Hogphallus” since phallus is the socially accepted standard symbol of power, as stated by psychoanalysis and bemoaned by feminism. This social “natural” fact makes Rowling’s term “Hogwarts” even more significant.

But what does it mean exactly to hog warts? Hogging warts is about hateloving. It means that what causes aversion also incites love, since hate and love are close neighbors. Hogging warts is about loving what is behind the curtain of nice and beautiful illusions, it’s about having the courage to persist in love even after being disillusioned. It’s even about turning against the illusions and cherishing the very flaw at the expense of the pretty appearances that attempt to conceal it.

In psychoanalysis, hogging warts is about acknowledging the actual cause of your desire, which can only be a negativity. This is called traversing the fantasy. The psychoanalytic word for “wart” is the symptom, in other words, the lack in the Other.

The psychoanalytic notion of symptom is essentially feminine, Freud initially identified this “wart” with the mother’s lack of penis, Lacan identified it with the impossibility of the sexual relationship, Laclau & Mouffe identified it with the inexistence of Society. Every (masculine) identity is phallic imposture, a hopeless defense mechanism against the “wart”.

“Wart” (symptom) is practically what stains the woman in a phallocracy. This explains Rowling’s persistent position about biological sex: She acknowledges that what ultimately marks the woman in society is her biology, and she is thereby “hogging” womanhood as the ultimate “wart” in this sense.

The three main Harry Potter actors are not as enthusiastic about “hogging warts” as Rowling which is understandable since it’s their job to appear nice and beautiful. From their politically correct perspective, Rowling herself became a “wart” and they chose to “slog warts”: to hit the wart and throw it away.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner