Joan Copjec (2012): The Sexual Compact, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 17:2, 31-48
The psychoanalytic category of sexual difference was from this date deemed suspect and largely forsaken in favor of the neutered category of gender. Yes, neutered, I insist on this; for it was specifically the sex of sexual difference that dropped out when this term was replaced by gender.
Gender theory not only thrust the term sexual difference out of the limelight but also it removed the sex even from sex. For, while gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex is; no longer the subject of serious theoretical inquiry, sex reverted then to being what it was in common parlance: that which is involved in a highly restricted set of activities or in attachments to certain objects or person.
Although it was acknowledged that sexual difference was conceived by psycho-analysis not as a biological given but as an effect of a specific technique, or apparatus – namely language – the new wave of feminists worried that the structuralist conception of language was ahistorical and produced effects that were invariant. For this reason the apparatus (l’appareil) of language was dislodged from its role as the smithy of sex and replaced by historically variable technologies or dispositifs – that is, the complex machinery of social practices and knowledges, relations of power, norms and ideals – responsible for constructing gendered positions and relations.
The recourse to technologies of gender quickly encountered a problem, however:that of technological determinism. How to insure that what came out of the machine was not simply what was put into it, that the gendered subject was not completely stripped of autonomy? This problem was fixed by a well-recognized and anodyne truth: techniques had to be continually redeployed, repeated, but repetition always fails because nothing can be repeated in the same way twice. Or: there is no such thing as repetition.
It was on this denial of repetition that gender theory staked its hope, for the dooming of repetition meant variation was inevitable and this margin of variation, this slim difference, was seized upon as the site of resistance, the launching pad of thousands of small differences. 35
The elimination of sexual difference in favor of a study of the social technologies of gender construction left biology behind altogether and produced subjects without any vitality, subjects without bodies or, more precisely, subjects without sexual organs 38
Sex can never be put on display because it is nothing other than that teetering, unsettling displacement which permanently throws the subject’s identity off balance. In short, Foucault attributed to Freud a position he never held and then attacked it, arguing that far from demanding release from the shackles of power, sex operates in solidarity with it; sex, the notion of sex, Foucault insisted, is saturated with power through and through.
In truth, Lacan and Foucault wereon the same side in regard to the way sex had – incorrectly – become a political factor during this period and the role it was being made to play in the new paradigm of human domination. Both cautioned the students that the demand for sexual liberation did not oppose power but, on the contrary, played into its hands. What they disagreed on was what sex meant, how it was conceived, in psychoanalysis.
Lacan argued forcefully that sex is not repressed, that the mechanism of repression does not apply to it, and for this very reason it made no sense to say that sex sought to be liberated from repression. Lacan thus enjoined the students not to sacrifice their enjoyment to those in power by parading it, exposing it as if it were a predicate – more: the major one – of their identity.
In Foucault’s view, sex was nothing more than a fictional construct of power that serves to bind subjects to unified, determinate, and normative identities. Political opposition to bio-power must take the form, therefore, not of liberating suppressed sexual identities but of liberating oneself from them, freeing oneself from classification by their categories.
Thus, while Lacan and Foucault were allied in their opposition to the demand for the liberation of sex, on the grounds that this demand was a ruse of power, Lacan put all his energy into showing that sex, or jouissance, was not answerable to the opposition liberation/repression and castigated the jouissance restructured by the demand for liberation as a sham, while Foucault pursued the idea that sex and the demand to be liberated, to be known, to assert one’s identity, were inextricably intertwined. 39