Pluth, Ed. “On Sexual Difference and Sexuality “As Such”: Lacan the and the case of lilttle hans.” Angelaki 12:2 (2007): 69-79.
Sexual difference is traumatic. No doubt, but what is so traumatic about it? Lacanians have had to dance around this forever because of a strong feminist current of critique whose vigilance with regards to spotting forms of essentialism and male bias in Lacanian theory, particularly any time a Lacanian talks about ‘sexual difference.’
Ed Pluth, a Lacanian, is doing more to shed some sort of repectable coherence and understanding to this freakin can of worms:
… what makes sexual difference “real” is the function it plays in the symbolic as a place-holder for something else. … The impasse or “trauma” that sexual difference marks in Lacanian theory is not really a trauma about sexual difference at all. … It is a trauma that, more originally, is about sexuality as such … In other words, if sexual difference is a symbolic impasse, and thus real, it is because it is the repetition of another impasse, one that Lacan describes as sexuality “as such.” 70
Here Pluth is saying that before sexual difference, there is the trauma of sexuality. Sexual difference is a way of taming sexuality as such
It [sexual difference] is less a way of making sense of sexuality than a way of doing something with sexuality, just by putting the enigma of sexual difference in the place of the enigma of sexuality itself (72).
Sexual difference is not a way of representing sexuality as such. A better way to put it is to say that the impossibility introduced by sexuality as such — an impossibility in the sense that its emergence defies symbolization — is replaced by another impossibility in signifiers: what Lacan ends up calling the impossibility of the sexual relationship. (76)
Sexual difference … is a translation or repetition of the impasse of sexuality as such in the symbolic. … a displacing or transferring of an impasse between the real as such and the symbolic as such into purely symbolic terms. (77)