philosophical ontological implications of psychoanalytic notions of sexuality and unconscious. Something happened to philosophy when this thing started to get articulated. One needs to think through this consequences of this unprecedented articulation. The concept of unconscious in its intrinsic link with sexuality is not simply concept of some newly discovered entity, of being. No.
It is not exactly an entity, it is not simply being nor non-being. Sexuality is constitutively unconscious. Fundamental negativity, non-being or gap implied in sexuality.
When Freud discovered sexuality what did this imply? He insisted against Jung, there is NO natural or pre-established place for human sexuality, it is constitutively out of its place. It is fragmented, dispersed.
3 Essays on Sexuality: Sexuality is nothing other than this out-of-placeness of its satisfaction. The sexual for Freud was not a substance to be properly described and circumscribed but rather the impossibility of its own circumscription and the limitation.
Sexual is NOT a separate domain of human activity or human life. Sexuality is something that exists in-itself only as something other. Sexuality is the very out-of-itselfness of being.
6:20 What was most disturbing of Freudian discovery is not emphasis on sexuality, emphasis on dirty matters, but more disturbing was ontologically uncertain character of sexuality itself. Sex is dirty! No it’s not dirty it’s only natural NO! Freud didn’t say this. What is this sex that you are talking about, in its ontological texture?
Constitutively Unconscious. It refers to some fundamental negativity implied in sexuality. Yet giving as such a structured to the unconscious.
8:15 JOKE: COFFEE exhibits this PARADOXICAL STRUCTURE perfectly
If it seems that psychoanalysis cannot serve us anything without sexuality. It is because there is NO sexual substance proper that it could serve us.
And still following the logic of the same joke: sexuality is that singular cream whose non-being does not reduce it to a mere nothing. It is a nothing that walks around makes trouble and leaves traces.
9:15 If ontology is the discourse of the Master, what is at stake in this thesis, I think what is usually lost to thought in ontological question, is not some being which is left out but a singular kind of nothing or negativity, namely the dimension on account in which coffee w/o cream is not the same as coffee w/o milk.
A Negativity in which coffee without cream is not same as coffee without milk
In other words besides a simple negativity that refers to absence or non-being, there is also negativity that curves or magnetizes the very space of being and in this way dictates its topology or structure.
10:50 John Houston movie: Freud the Secret Passion. “Gentlemen we are not in a political meeting.” Coincidence of Politics and Freudian theory of sexuality. When one opens up sexuality one enters also the order of political.
What is at stake is battle of ontological status of sexuality.
13:40 Sexuality is structured around a missing link in the ontological chain of its own reality. It is neither simply is nor isn’t.
14:15 The question for Freud is not whether sexuality should be considered important or not, sexuality is important because it never simply is. This is why it is determinant of what we are becoming and being.
We talk of sexuality openly, nothing to be ashamed of, it’s good for our mental and physical health, Freud’s discovery of the determinant role of psycho-sexual in our development has largely been integrated in psychoanalytic practices even in somewhat diluted form … But this is far from being the case.
15:35 2009 study concerning status of sexuality with contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Therapists tended to believe sexuality serves as a defence against deeper issues such as intimacy and self-identity. Sexual issues were viewed as impediment to the goals of helping patient adjust to their surrounding and everyday encounters. Focused on sexual encounters rather than psycho-sexual aspects of development. Amazingly two therapists claimed that sexual issues should be treated by sexologists and not by psychotherapists. One therapist concluded that his patients rarely talk about sexual issues and that their discussion of romantic relationships never have sexual intimations.
Therapists tendency to avoid sexual issues, several therapists experienced discussion of sexual matters as hostility and abuse directed at them. One therapists described one of her patients, “It was as if he was thinking this is therapy so I can talk about everything.”
18:30 Reduction of Freudian notion of sexuality, to different sexual identities, different sexual practices as constituting whatever, as sexual intercourse … Naughty things that one does or does not and used to harass one’s therapist with. Understood in this way one can almost agree with the claim that sexuality serves as a defence against deeper and more difficult issues if expressed in this way.
Irony is that for Freud sexuality was deeper and difficult issue behind different sexual practices, something inherently problematic and precisely disruptive of identity. There is no sexual identity, it is the very thing that disrupts all identity.
Freud said, “Only a very small portion of unsatisfied sexual tendencies can find an outlet in coitus or other sexual acts.”
20:10 The point is: IMPOSSIBILITY of full sexual satisfaction in the absence of all external obstacles is precisely a constitutive part of unconscious sexuality as such, it is not something to be filled in by something else.
21:00 The obstacle is BUILT IN, a CONSTITUTIVE NON-SATISFACTION that is part of its DRIVE. It is not something to be healed and one can get over it.
Defence against something involved in the Freudian theory of sexuality. What is this SOMETHING? Resist temptation of taking defence against sexuality as self-explanatory. It is not sex that can explain the defence, it is the DEFENCE that can shed some light on the nature of sexuality.
It puts on the track some deeply metaphysical issues.
22:15 How can we think about this claim that there is something about sexuality that is constitutively unconscious. Unconscious even when it first occurs, it is not simply due to a subsequent repression.
It only appears in reality as repressed What is it about sexuality that only registers in reality in the form as repression and not something that is as fully constituted and then subsequently repressed?
23:10 Sexuality and Knowledge Paradoxical link or short-circuit Uniting them in shared negativity, shared lack, shared missing link
Unconscious is not opposite of knowledge, it is a knowledge that does not know itself. exists only in displaced forms formations of the unconscious. Singular curving of ontological space that occurs here.
Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity a missing link which unites them precisely at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious is the concept of where they come together, overlapping in this negativity.
24:30 Paradoxical short-circuit of knowledge and sexuality. Tree of Knowledge introduces sexuality into the world, it is shameful something to be hidden. Knowledge in biblical sense means sex.
25:40 There is something concerning signifying knowledge that is constitutively involved in the becoming sexual of sexuality. This brings us to Freud. Infantile sexuality becomes sexual when precisely traversed by a quest for knowledge: where do babies come from? Knowledge and sexuality, infantile sexuality is the realm where desire for knowledge takes off.
There is no original drive for knowledge in people it takes place at points of existential difficulty, For example when children face the fact of getting a brother/sister. Procreative sexuality become a question of the being there of oneself and others.
How do we come to be? It enters it as negativity, as unsatisfactory character of all possible positive answers. Although it is involved in the becoming of being sexuality provides no point of attachment no anchoring point in the explication of being as being.
28:30 The embarrassment and covering up of sexuality by adults should not be explained by recourse to traditional cultural ban on sexuality but the other way around …
The cause of embarrassment in sexuality is not simply something which is there, on display, in it. But on the contrary something that precisely is not there.
Fairytales we explain sexuality to children, not there so much to distort the realistic explanation, but to mask the fact that there is no completely realistic explanation.
Even most exhaustive scientific explanation lacks the signifier that would account for the sexual as sexual.
29:50 The short circuit between the epistemological and the ontological takes place. FOR THIS EPISTEMOLOGICAL LAPSE IS AT THE SAME TIME ONTOLOGICAL.
The question of something missing does not concern a missing piece of knowledge about the sexual as a full entity in-itself. It relates to the sexual as not fully constituted in-itself. And hence for this reason constitutively unconscious.
Unconscious sexuality is this short-circuit between epistemological and ontological levels, it is nothing else but the form of existence of negativity in which they overlap.
Culture is not simply a mask of the sexual, it is a mask for this ontological lapse involving sexuation, a standing for something in the sexual which is NOT. not fully constituted, not there.
IT is in this precise sense that culture is the classical Freudian stance goes, sexually drive, it is not driven not by that which is, but is driven by that which is NOT or NOT FULLY.
Whenever social culture religious covering up of sexuality, we can be sure it never just covers up only what is there (sexual organs) but also the mental ambiguity as something that is not, brings in a metaphysical order and its questions. In other words the more we try to think the sexual as sexual, as only that what it is, the quicker we find ourselves in the element of pure and profound metaphysics.
Should the portray Adam and Eve with or without navels. They were not born of woman so could they have a navel. … if as men they were created in God’s image, God would also have to have a navel. Artists dodged question by extending fig leafs to cover not only sexual organs, but the lower belly as well. This extending of fig leafs to cover more than sexual organs, a perfect illustration of my argument by covering up the sexual, one covers up a deep ambiguity something that is NOT and also inseparable from it (the sexual) and opens up in the direction of metaphysics.
It is at the point of this negativity that the unconscious produces the metonymical chain of meanings which feeds the usual hermeneutics of the unconscious. It is some other negativity underpinning this which is why by simply translating latent content into manifest we don’t get rid of the repression as such. Repression can persist although we know everything there is to know.
35:00 The extended fig leaf covers not simply the sexual, but also navel as elected figure of the scar left by the lapse of being, the lapse of being involved in sexuation and of course sexual reproduction
35:20 in Freud the Dream’s navel: related not to what we can know, but hole or lack in knowledge that can be laid out in analytic interpretation.
Freud: “There is often a passage which has to be left obscured, this is because we become aware during work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream thoughts which cannot be unravelled … “
We read the term “unknown” here, not as unknown to us, but in a stronger sense of a knowledge that is originally missing in the real, and constitutive of the unconscious as such, of the very structure of the unconscious.
If for Freud the unconscious is by definition sexual this is not because it always has a sexual content but because its properly ontological lapse this break or hole is only transmitted by sexuality. And the term “transmission” should be taken in the sense of the transmission of knowledge, or in this case, the transmission of a constitutive impasse of knowledge.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease, and the mortality rate is 100%
This Lapse in being is a sexually transmitted disease of being itself.
QUESTIONS 39:30
Psychoanalytic treatment of philosophy: not superfluous psychological motivations. There is something much more fundamental at play, the drive psychoanalysis points to, a common source that dictates that psychoanalysis can say something about, it is related to the sexual
41:00 J. Hamilton: Aggressive fantasies easily more available than the sexual. The closer you look the more it seems to disappear.
There is no proper image, these are imaginary renderings the more precisely we try to think what it is the more it disappears. There is no way of pinning it down.
45:30 Negative Theology: Psychoanalysis is about NOT making this negativity, either you take this nothing and turn it into this being qua being, this ontologization of nothing itself., or you go in direction, you think of it as the real, the rift of being, not the true being beyond being, but the impasse obstacle in being itself.
Sexuality only exists in this profane way, but is not simply reducible to the profanity it articulates.
A strange negativity that is not simply absence but has some causal, structuring power in relationship to the reality from which it is lacking but nevertheless which is not made into any transcendental entity.
49:20 Nietzsche: negativity, The most famous and power interpretations of Nietzsche are Deleuze there is always this move to pure affirmation.
Alenka goes precisely in the direction of the shortest shadow, the logic of minimal difference, there is some negativity inevitably at work in whatever affirmation we speak about.
The more God is dead, at the same time makes us all the more in debt. The death of God what does it refer to in Nietzsche? God is dead but this is for Freud the beginning of religion. But Alenka insists Nietzsche is aiming not just at second death of God, but the symbolic pact that follows death of God NO LONGER FUNCTIONS. God is dead in this other sense, this word, concept or structure no longer has any power of life.
Dostoevsky: God is dead so everything is possible, Lacan: God is dead Nothing is possible (Lacan) Superego rises up and prevents us, once the authority dies, not a moment of liberation, but the moment we really become enslaved to the logic we were supposedly liberated from.
Analysis constructs something, an invention of a signifier, as opposed to perspective in which there is this thing is kind of revealed, dug up, at the end there is nothing left to dig up, but this structure of the repression needs to be articulated in some way, to be inscribed in reality, a formal process.
Precisely this is the work that needs to be done, it involves a construction/creation of a signifier where there is none.
58:30 Pornography, whenever you try to show up it show too much or too little. The films of Catherine Breillat. Sexuality as RIFT, IMPASSE, STUMBLING BLOCK. RUPTURE.
There is not simply this space everything can be and cannot be and you try to pin it down and it escapes. The very RIFT that structures this field of sexuality in this way.
1:04 2 levels in which I tackle this problem. One is to try to reintroduce psychoanalytical discussion of sexuality, how the sex is to be treated, not simply as practice, often in the move from sexual difference to gender difference, there is something gets lost. Joan Copjec has a good argument here. There is a certain ontological questioning that gets lost in contemporary discussion.
Another more, ambitious project which is to think this in more general terms of ontology, the ontological questioning as such, and think philosophical ontology in such a way that is looking for different articulation of what is now being discussed which started with Speculative Realism, Are we just locked into this reality that we constituted in Kantian way, discurisively, How can we break out, and both things again as Absolute without falling into naïve realism.
So it is a clearly the statement I’m making tries to say there is something in being itself, in being in general that dictates or is in play at least the way how being appears
IMPASSE IN BEING
Classical Hegelian with Lacanian twist: Our deficiency is part of the ontological deficiency.
1:11 Human sexuality is sexualized. Sexualization of sexuality.
Freud thought he was scientific man, thought he could get at it, technology of learning of what it is all about … it failed. Another kind of work related to this knowledge, it was all done with this knowledge, but this NEGATIVITY only exists on the outskirts of this knowledge that one is working with in analysis.
Objet a is a TRUE INVENTION
1:15 Discontinuity: there is something in the causal chain, a discontinuity, rift in the chain of reasons. It is precisely , which appears at 2 levels, discontinuity in symbolic chain, but at same time a discontinuity that underscores or drives the symbolic chain as such. It is not simply coming from the outside.
Is it simply situated as a beyond that we cannot reach, or the moment we reach it all symbolic structures will dissolve?
My choice is RIFT, Stumbling Block. IMPASSE.
The good start is the 3 Essays: Sexual Aberrations, we supposedly have something and then all these aberrations, it goes somewhere else, satisfaction is asexual but it is sexual satisfaction, this out of place in the strong sense, is precisely what makes it sexual. It is precisely by not being there in this way it colors this other satisfaction, makes them sexual. There is this idea, the question of satisfaction is question of something that is inherently moveability, it can move around and take place in different configurations and this is what makes it sexual.
1:21 Epistemophilia: emerges out of crisis of knowledge. Adult can’t hear and tries to respond to child with info. The field of Kleinian child analysis, began when analyst can listen to fantasy rather than child wanting knowledge, what is child not saying but conveying. Fairy tale, daddy’s seed go into mommy’s stomach, but Fritz would say I know that. I know that. It’s not what he knows it is what he doesn’t know. Is it useful for us today to begin to take apart the question of sexuality, you Alenka say yes it is.
Alenka: my idea was not let’s go on and dismantle, but I’m circumscribing it, not dismantle it, the whole pt. is that it cannot be further dismantled. Enigmatic signifiers is how he relates child to adult. They are enigmatic for the adults themselves. Unconscious for adult relates to unconscious of children. It is the place precisely when the fantasy takes off, how to integrate this into reality.
Britzman: Their conception of sexuality, only with proper information people will act appropriately. If only we simply had it that knowledge can SAVE us. This was Freud’s position at the beginning. No it is not simply and only the knowledge, but not either Forget Knowledge, but that KNOWLEDGE will bring us to something else, and we should take this seriously and not try to cover it up.
1:30 Late Lacan: Il y’a de l’un
Reusing or reinstalling the One. But some whole determinative of the structure. Freud’s problem was the Father. There is a certain point in Freud that was never analysed.
Oedipal structure: if there is anybody who didn’t have Oedipal complex it is Oedipus himself. Lacan tried to think something, that Freud tried to capture and not simply dismissing it.
Lacan’s formulas of sexuation: the NOT-ALL, the way he opposes the two sides of the formulas, the NOT-ALL, it is the whole that is always constituted by an exception, the NOT ALL get constituted by the very exclusion of the exception, the whole plus something that should have remained outside it. A structure for introducing the RIFT, it relates to this structure.
WHAT DOES THIS STRUCTURE ENTAIL WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
This topology or structure I’m trying to formulate absolutely affects the way we think of ethics. There is a consequence in the way we think of ethics. There is something which is for me very similarly structured in the Kantian ethics. It is not something I developed in Ethics of the Real.
HOW WHAT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, related to CI COMES FROM A SHIFT removed from notion of absolute as GROUND, GOOD, and we are back to question that GOD is dead there is NO Absolute anymore, RELATIVIZATION to everything we do. Kant turns this around that it is precisely there that the ETHICAL ACTION BECOMES absolutely necessary.
Absolute doesn’t point us in right direction, our actions the ABSOLUTE. There is this kind of precisely where this is this introduction of absolute necessity at the very point where this traditional notion of Absolute disappears.
This is a move that HEGEL accomplishes in a more explicit way. If the subject is Absolute, we don’t absolutize the subject. It has no justification OUTSIDE OF ITSELF and this is what makes it ABSOLUTE. The subject is not Absolute and this is what is absolute