sexuation – objet (a)

Interview with Alenka Zupančič

Philosophy or Psychoanalysis? Yes, please!
Agon Hamza & Frank Ruda Crisis and Critique Volume 7 Issue 1.

Here is a talk by Zupančič at Freud Museum June 2019

At the moment when philosophy was just about ready to abandon some of its key central notions as belonging to its own metaphysical past, from which it was eager to escape, along came Lacan, and taught us an invaluable lesson: it is not these notions themselves that are problematic; what can be problematic in some ways of doing philosophy is the disavowal or effacement of the inherent contradiction, even antagonism, that these notions imply, and are part of. That is why, by simply abandoning these notions (like subject, truth, the real…), we are abandoning the battlefield, rather than winning any significant battles.

The Clinic should not be considered as a kind of holy grail providing the practitioners with automatic superiority when it comes to working theoretically, with psychoanalytic concepts.

Psychoanalysis is not a science, or “scientific” in the usual sense of this term, because it insists on a dimension of truth which is irreducible to “accuracy” or to simple opposition true/false. At the same time the whole point of Lacan is that this insistence doesn’t simply make it unscientific (unverifiable, without any firm criteria…), but calls for a different kind of formalization and situates psychoanalysis in a singular position in the context of science. And here philosophy, which is also not a science in the usual sense of the term, can and should be its ally, even partner. They are obviously not the same, but their often very critical dialogue shouldn’t obfuscate the fact that there are also “sisters in arms”.

My claim is that the Freudian notion of sexuality is above all a concept, a conceptual invention, and not simply a name for certain empirical “activities” that exist out there and that Freud refers to when talking about sexuality. As such, this concept is also genuinely “philosophical”. It links together, in a complex and most interesting way, language and the drives, it compels us to think a singular ontological form of negativity, to reconsider the simplistic human/animal divide, and so on…

One of the fundamental claims of my book is that there is something
about sexuality that is inherently problematic, “impossible”, and is not
such simply because of external obstacles and prohibitions. What we have
been witnessing over more than half a century has been a systematic obliteration, effacement, repression of this negativity inherent to sexuality
– and not simply repression of sexuality.

I’m not interested in sexuality as a case of “local ontology,” but as possibly providing some key conceptual elements for the ontological interrogation as such.

What we have been witnessing over more than half a century has been a systematic obliteration, effacement, repression of this negativity inherent to sexuality – and not simply repression of sexuality.

Sexuality has been, and still is, systematically reduced, yes, reduced, to a self-evident phenomenon consisting simply of some positive features, and problematic only because caught in the standard ideological warfare: shall we “liberally” show and admit everything, or “conservatively” hide and prohibit most of it? But show or prohibit what exactly, what is this “it” that we try to regulate when we regulate sexuality? This is what the title of my book tries to ask: What IS this sex that we are talking about? Is it really there, anywhere, as a simply positive entity to be regulated in this or that way? No, it is not. And this is precisely why we are “obsessed” with it, in one way or another, also when we want to get rid of it altogether.

this is probably the most daring philosophical proposition of the book. Namely, that sexuality is the point of a short circuit between ontology and epistemology. If there is a limit to what I can know, what is the status of this limit? Does it only tell us something about our subjective limitations on account of which we can never fully grasp being such as it is in itself? Or is there a constellation in which this not-knowing possibly tells us something about being itself, its own “lapse of being”?

There is, I believe; it is the constellation that Freud conceptualized under the name of the unconscious. Sexuality is not simply the content of the unconscious, understood as a container of repressed thoughts. The relationship between sex and the unconscious is not that between a content and its container. Or that between some primary, raw being, and repression (and other operations) performed on it. The unconscious is a thought process, and it is “sexualized” from within, so to say. The unconscious is not sexual because of the dirty thoughts it may contain or hide, but because of how it works. If I keep emphasizing that I’m interested in the psychoanalytical concept of sexuality, and not simply in sexuality, it is because of the fundamental link between sexuality and the unconscious discovered by Freud.

Sexuality enters the Freudian perspective strictly speaking only in so far as it is “unconscious sexuality”. Yet “unconscious sexuality” does not simply mean that we are not aware of it, while it constitutes a hidden truth of most of our actions.

Unconsciousness does not mean the opposite of consciousness, it refers to an active and ongoing process, the work of censorship, substitution, condensation…, and this work is itself “sexual”, implied in desire, intrinsic to sexuality, rather than simply performed in relation to it.

McGowan

Why Loss?

Enjoyment and Sacrifice.

Constantly engage in self-destructive behaviour, humans fight wars, unleash loss on ourselves and others. Loss becomes enjoyable and produces something enjoyable, objects only have their worth through sacrifice and loss.

If we sacrifice something, we give the object transcendent value, in the process of losing it. Loss gives us something to desire. There are no values that just are, values come into existence through sacrifice.

Loss and sacrifice create an object to desire.

Loss gives us something to desire, it creates a value, value comes into existence through the act of sacrifice or loss.

Interview with Todd McGowan, Crisis and Critique Volume 7.2 Issue 2.

We can see now that there is no such thing as bare life. All life is politicized.
Even the attempt to protect or promote life is part of a political form of life, to use Agamben’s terms. The reluctance of conservative leaders to impose strict regulations reveals that regulating life is not inherently a conservative or ideological operation. The logic of capital demands the flow of commodities so that nothing gets in the way of accumulation. The outbreak interrupts this flow, thereby exposing how protecting life puts one at odds with the logic of capital. This means that we can see how the state—in its role of protecting life—is not just the servant of capital. If it were, we would not see the arrest of the flow of commodities. The catastrophe shows us that the state can be our friend, not just our enemy. The great revelation of the coronavirus catastrophe is the emancipatory power of the state, the ability of the state to serve as the site for collectivity rather than acting as just the handmaiden of capital. This is something that the theory of biopower can never accept. The anarchic tendencies behind this theory need to be shown as fundamentally libertarian, not leftist. This is what the virus has demonstrated to us.

Alenka Zupančič interview

2014

Alenka Zupančič : The Lacanian concept of the Real allows for a problematization of this opposition which had become paralysing and unproductive philosophically. We must of course be wary of the tendency to see in this Lacanian move a simple affirmation of a naive realism – the Real understood in this objectivist fashion. The ‘Real’ for Lacan is not reducible to the discursive but neither is it simply an advocation of an ontological realism, understood unproblematically. Especially since Lacan introduces a key difference between the notion of the Real and that of being. They are related via a ‘third dimension’, that of the ‘signifier’, but they do not coincide.

What Lacan wants to tell us is that the signifier has ontological significance, the signifier tells us about ontology in a way that the notion of the signified is unable to (this latter being the usual realist referent; the object as the signified).

The signifier is interesting not because we could reduce everything to it and to different signifying operations (this reductionist question is completely false), but because there is something in the signifier and its operations that cannot be reduced back to the signifier and its operations.

This is the crucial point, and not some mythical or original outside of the signifier, irreducible to it. This is also what the ‘materialism of the signifier’ amounts to. Not simply to the fact that the signifier can have material consequences, but rather that the materialist position needs to do more than to pronounce matter the original principle. It has to account for a split or contradiction that is the matter. It has to grasp the concept of the matter beyond that imaginary notion of ‘something thick and hard’. I’m not saying: ‘For Lacan, the signifieris the real matter’, not at all.

I’m saying that, for Lacan, the signifier is what enables us to perceive the non-coincidence between being and the Real, and that this is what eventually leads to a new kind of materialism.

From this point of view, we can say that Lacan develops the modern moment in philosophy, but as Žižek says, ‘he develops it with a twist’. Then there is the new concept of the subject – another Lacanian ‘revolution’ in philosophy, retroactively relating the subject of the unconscious to the Cartesian cogito. This is often one of the great misunderstandings of Lacan (and psychoanalysis), that it jettisons the cogito, that it is anti-Cartesian pure and simple. This is a significant misunderstanding of the psychoanalytical concept of the ‘subject’ which was one of the main concepts for the delineation of a specific Lacanian orientation in the first place. This concept of ‘subject’ distinguished Lacan from the wider structuralist movement and their notion of a ‘subjectless structure’.

But somehow this conception of ‘subject’ is interpreted as anti-cogito, as the ‘subject’ is the unconscious subject. Therefore, it was important to clarify the connection between cogito and the unconscious and for example, there is an important anthology from the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, where we explore this problematic in detail (Cogito and the Unconscious edited by Žižek [1998a] and including essays by all three thinkers as well as others in the Slovenian wider group of theorists). There is also the question of the radical break with premodern metaphysics involved in the Cartesian gesture, which Lacan judges crucial for the emergence of the subject of the unconscious.

This theme is crucial also for his understanding of ethics. In his important early seminar, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), he is discussing the history of ethical thought as it related for example to the metaphysical tradition. His specific example is Aristotle and there is obviously a debt here on one level to Aristotle’s Ethics as a text and conceptual scheme. However, there is also a clear and radical parting of the ways.

In my own work on ethics, in The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (Zupančič 2000), I draw out some of these themes. For example, I put forward a critique of what I term ‘bio-morality’ and which, in its contemporary developments, represents an allegiance (albeit in rather reduced ways) to Aristotle’s eudaimonistic ethics and metaphysics of being. This is not simply a criticism of Aristotle, but rather of what a revival of his conceptual paradigm today amounts to.

In relationship to the theme of ethics, I want to stress that what I develop out of Kant’s ethics must not be opposed or seen as completely distinct from politics. As Žižek very rightly pointed out, the contemporary fashion of playing (‘good’) ethics against (‘bad’) politics is more often than not a direct pendant of the ideology of late capitalism and its conception of democracy. Any rigorous political thought is conceived as potentially dangerous and leading to a possible ‘disaster’ (that is to say to a more fundamental change in how the present order functions), whereas ethics seems to be much safer, and centred mostly on our individual responsibility, rather than any kind of collective engagement. My own work on Kant and ethics already went against this tendency, pointing both at an unsettling dimension of Kantian ethics, as well as at its emphasis on the universal, rather than simply individual.

It is similar with psychoanalysis which supposedly also focuses on individual destinies and problems. Here, am I allowed to tell my joke about the grain of seed, or the man who thinks he is one?

He gets cured by the psychoanalysts and then he comes running back, crying that he has just been chased by a chicken. Don’t you know you are a human being, they say? Yes, I am cured. I know that I am a human being, and not a grain of seed. But, please, does the chicken know this? This is the crux of the politics (which is also an ethics) in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. It is not enough simply to deal with the plight of the ‘subject’ and fantasy, through psychoanalysis.

Rather, we must seek to transform the structures of the symbolic which sustain a given order, determine the Impossible-Real that they grapple with.

Sexuality

Alenka Zupančič: Yes, when we understand the question ‘why Freud and Lacan?’, or the question ‘why psychoanalysis?’, we come close to an understanding of the paradigmatic role which a revised notion of ‘sexuality’ must play in this discussion. Joan Copjec succinctly pointed out how, for example, in the term ‘sexual difference’ the term ‘sex’ has been replaced by the more neutered category of ‘gender’. As Joan – an allied member of the ‘Ljubljana School’ – put it: Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex. For awhile, gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.

This is very far from what both Freud (from his early, 1905 text Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [Freud 1977]) and Lacan have been saying. For Freud, the notion of the ‘sexual’ is significantly broader than contemporary notions of sex. It is not a substance to be properly described and understood (by psychoanalysis), but more like an impasse that generates and structures different discursive edifices trying to respond to it. It is linked to a notion of a fundamental ontological impasse; this impasse is irreducible for Freud.

But we also see here all the accusations against psychoanalysis, that ‘Freud reduces everything to sex’. In one sense, this accusation is true but what it misses is the complexification and radicalization of what we mean by ‘sexuality’. Freud discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem. He ‘discovered’ sexuality as intrinsically meaningless, and not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. A clarification of this point is one of my ‘interventions’ in Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Zupančič 2008b). Lately, I dedicated a whole book to these questions – it came out in 2011 in Slovenia, but I’m still working on its English version.

On Materialism

The materialism of psychoanalysis is not simply materialism of the body;
and Lacan has learnt the philosophical lesson that is essential in this
respect: in order to be ‘materialist’ it is not enough to refer to the matter
as the first principle from which everything develops.

For, in this, we easily succumb to a rather idealistic notion of a somehow always-already spirited (‘vibrant’) matter. In recent debates, psychoanalysis – in the same package with all of the so-called post-structuralist thought – is often accused of relying on the formula ‘always-already’ as its magical formula. But this accusation misses the whole point: for psychoanalysis, ‘always-already’ is a retroactive effect of some radical contingency that changes given symbolic coordinates.

What a materialism worthy of this name has to do today is to propose a conceptualization of contingency (a break that comes from nowhere, ‘ex-nihilo’ so to say) in its complex relation to the structuring of the world.

Also, thinking is not simply opposed to things (and to matter), it is part of the thing it thinks, without being fully reducible to it. To advocate materialism and the ‘Real’ is not to advocate anti-thought. Quite the contrary, we might say – it calls for more and more thinking. And this is a problem that I sometimes detect in the recent flourishing of ‘new materialisms’ – a kind of abdication of thinking when it comes to more complex structures and arguments, as if common sense simplicities were inherently more ‘materialist’ than something
which is more complex and perhaps paradox ridden.

On Nietzsche

Alenka Zupančič: A key part of the Nietzschean legacy is I think working against the ‘moralisation’ of the symbolic, which Nietzsche describes so well in The Genealogy of Morals, for example, and which for example is also a key theme in relation to the thematic of the ‘moralisation of politics’, which I mentioned earlier.

Concerning nihilism and to quote Ray Brassier, from his text Nihil Unbound, there are things to be said for nihilism. It depends, of course, on what we mean by nihilism. If we mean by it a certain materialist position which recognizes contingency of, for example, our being in the world, and which points to a limit of ‘making sense of (all) things’, then we must say that to a great extent we cannot go beyond nihilism.

Yet this does not imply for Nietzsche that we sink in the depressive feelings of ‘worthlessness of all things’. On the contrary, it rather implies what he calls ‘gay science’. But, we must simultaneously avoid what Nietzsche calls ‘reactive nihilism’ and this is, of course, bound up with his whole critique of ressentiment (or ‘acting against’, reactiveness). To say that there is no ultimate cause of things is not to say that nothing itself is the ultimate cause of things, which amounts to putting the Nothing in the office of the Absolute.

Describing the difference between active and passive nihilism, Nietzsche famously says that man would ‘rather will nothingness than not will’ (On the Genealogy of Morals). And we could say that what defines (contemporary) passive nihilism is precisely that man would rather not will than will anything too strongly (because the latter supposedly inevitably leads to some kind of ‘nihilist’ catastrophe). And this seems to become synonymous with what ‘ethics’ now is in contemporary culture and society and the wider ‘moralisation of politics’, ‘biomorality’ etc. (to which I strongly oppose an ‘ethics of the Real’). There is a ‘deactivation’ of the will, which is also a deactivation of the ‘political will’, of the political as such as a paradigmatic space and temporality of antagonism, of the ‘Real’.

In my view, the genuinely new Nietzschean notion of nothingor n egativity is not simply that of ‘active nihilism’ as opposed to ‘passive nihilism’, but rather a transfiguration of nothing. Nothing/negativity is not a kind of ultimate absolute, but rather the smallest yet irreducible difference that is inscribed in being qua being. This is what I argue in my book. I use Nietzsche’s own metaphor of ‘the shortest shadow’. When speaking of going beyond the opposition real world/apparent world, Nietzsche describes this moment as ‘Midday; moment of the shortest shadow’ (Twilight of Idols).

Midday is thus not for him the moment when the sun embraces everything,
makes all shadows and all negativity disappear, and constitutes an undivided Unity of the world; it is the moment of the shortest shadow. And, what is the shortest shadow of a thing, if not this thing itself? Yet, for Nietzsche, this does not mean that the two becomes one, but, rather, that one becomes two. Why?

The thing (as one) no longer throws its shadow upon another thing; instead, it throws its shadow upon itself, thus becoming, at the same time, the thing and
its shadow, the real and its appearance. When the sun is at its zenith, things are not simply exposed (‘naked’, as it were); they are, so to speak, dressed in their own shadows. In other words: it is not simply that our representations do not coincide with things, it is rather that things do not simply coincide with themselves. There is thus an imperative to ‘think through’ this negativity. We
need to philosophize, as Žižek has said, philosophy is now more important than ever. It is not a game of textualism as some postmodernists would like to suggest perhaps.

The Subject

Alenka Zupančič: We can say that subject is ‘the answer of the Real’, as Lacan puts it somewhere, or that it is the effect of the rift/inconsistency of the structure. And we can indeed contrast this with the structuralist notion that there is a ‘structure without a subject’, a subjectless structure.

But what is at stake is above all a profound reconfiguration of what both ‘structure’ and ‘subject’ mean, refer to. We can begin with the notion of the structure which differs in Lacan from the classical structuralist notion. Very simply put: for Lacan, structure is ‘not-all’ (or ‘not whole’), which is what he articulates with the concept of the ‘barred Other’. This implies a lack, a contradiction as – so to say – ‘structuring principle of the structure’. Structure is always and at the same time more and less than structure. And this is where the new notion of the subject comes in. Subject is not the opposite of the structure, it is not some intentionality which uses structure to express itself, or which tries to get its more or less authentic voice heard through it.

Subject is a singular torsion produced by the inconsistency of the structure.

Take the simple example of the slips of the tongue: for Freud and Lacan, they do not bear witness to a hidden(unconscious) force repressed by the structure, which nevertheless betrays its presence by these slips.

Rather, they are singular existences of structure’s own inherent negativity. This is also the argument that I want to make in the context of the contemporary debates concerning realism, which often disqualify thought or thinking as something merely subjective (facing external reality). Put in a couple of formulas: Instead of taking it as something situated vis-à-vis being, we should conceive of thought as an objectivized (and necessarily dislocated) instance of the non-relation (contradiction, inconsistency) and rift inherent in being (in ‘objective reality’). Thinking is a necessarily displaced objectification (‘objective existence’) of this rift, that is, of the relation of being to its own
‘non-’, to its own negativity.

Although being is indeed independent of thinking, the rift that structures it only objectively exists as thought, and this perspective opens a new way of conceiving realism and/or materialism. This is precisely how I would also read the Lacanian subject. And this is why if we remove subject from the structure, we do not get closer to objective reality, but rather further away from it.

We can also say that the subject for Lacan is ‘objectively subjective’, there is an asymmetry in the subject, something in the subject which is not just subjective but which is also inaccessible to the subject.

We can see the connection back to Kant. The Kantian subject I would endorse is that ‘pure something, X, which thinks’, the transcendental unity of apperception. The point where subjectivity is not fully assumable and the point where the object is not reducible to or is ‘not yet’ objectivity (this is Lacan’s notion of objet petit a). Here, we see also that the Lacanian subject radicalizes the traditional ‘object’. The concept of the ‘object a’ is perhaps the most significant Lacanian conceptual invention.

Ethics

Alenka Zupančič: No, the notions of good and evil are not simply irrelevant to ethics, I would say, although they are indiscernible in advance. The responsibility we have is to decide what is good. It is difficult to overstate Kant’s significance in this respect. He did two things which may look incompatible: first, he founded ethics exclusively in human reason: no God or any other pre-established Good can serve as basis of morality. But instead of this leading to a kind of ‘relativised’, finitude-bound morality, it led to the birth of the modern thought of the absolute, the unconditional, and of the infinite as the possible, even imperative dimension of the finite.

Whatever objections we may raise to the Kantian ethics –for example, and already, from Hegel’s perspective – it was with Kant that the standing oppositions like absolute/contingent, lawful/unconditional, finite/infinite broke down, and the path was opened for a truly modern reconfiguration of these terms.

In the twentieth century, Kantian ethics has been largely domesticated to serve as an important ideological foundation of the contemporary democratic liberalism and of the gradual replacement of an emancipatory politics with the discourse of human rights or simply ethics.

I’ve always been astonished by the fact that a really radical, uncompromising and excess-ridden writing like Kant’s could be referred to in order to pacify the excess (of the political or something else). When the Nazi criminal Eichmann infamously defended himself by saying that in his doing he has been simply following the Kantian categorical imperative, this was of course an obscene perversion of Kant’s thought.

As Žižek succinctly formulated: what follows from Kant is not that we can use moral law as an excuse for our actions (‘oh, I wouldn’t do it, but the moral law commanded so’), we are absolutely responsible for the very law we are ‘executing’.

But Eichmann’s perverse defence did point at the unsettling core exposed by Kant: the unconditional law is one with (the excess of) freedom.

Lacan was probably the first to properly recognize this unsettling, excessive moment that Kant discovered at the very core of ethics.

When he wrote his famous essay ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan 2002b), the point was not that Kant is in truth as excessive as Sade, but rather that Sade is already a ‘taming’, a pacification – in terms perversion – of the impossible/real circumscribed by Kant. This is the thread I tried to follow in my book: Kant’s discovery of this unsettling, excessive negativity at the very core of Reason. I was not interested so much in ethics as ethics, as in this thing that Kant has formulated through his considerations of ethics.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Does this mean that the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ simply pits the Real against the symbolic or is there something else going on here? Also, how does the concept of ‘drive’ and especially the concept of ‘death drive’, which Žižek emphasizes,relate to an ethical dimension? Finally, what does the Lacanian concept of ‘desire’ (as he describes it in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) have to do with this? Is ‘desire’ simply jettisoned in the later work?

Alenka Zupančič: In respect to the relation between symbolic and the Real, there are certainly oscillations and shifts at work already in Lacan, as well as in the work of the three of us (together and separately). The idea that the Real is a kind of unbearable, repulsive thickness beyond the symbolic, left out of it and inaccessible to it, may have had some presence in our work at some point. But I think it is fair to say that for many years now we are all struggling precisely with the problem of a different way of relating them as absolutely crucial. There are some differences in the way we go about it,

but the main and shared shift of perspective that orientates our work could be perhaps summed up as follows: the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.

I started working on this issue first by getting a bit more into Nietzsche (the first, Slovene version of the Nietzsche book was published in 2001). Borrowing from Badiou his notion of the ‘minimal difference’ and relating it to Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘shortest shadow’, I tried to develop the notion of the Real as not that of some Thing, but of the fundamental non-coincidence of things with themselves. This non-coincidence is not caused by the symbolic; rather, the symbolic is already a response to it: it is discursivity as necessarily biased by the constraints of the contradiction in being.

Parallel to this work on Nietzsche was also my working on the theme of love, and later on comedy as possible ways of articulating what is at stake in the relation between the symbolic and the real. Lately, and for some time now, I have been working on this through the question of the ontological implications of the psychoanalytic notion of the sexual. I could perhaps put it in one formula: The real is part of being which is not being (or which is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of its appearance.

The real is part of being which is not being (or which
is not qua being), but which as such dictates the (symbolic) logic of
its appearance.
the Real is not any kind of substance or being. It pertains to being (and to the symbolic) as its inherent contradiction/antagonism.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Can you say a bit more about the two key Lacanian concepts (not without political ramifications of course) of ‘desire’ and ‘drive’. You have already explicated these, to some extent, but can you develop some of the tensions between them? Also, how do these concepts develop in your work, as they seem to have a paradigmatic status while undergoing some transformation for example from the ‘Ethics of the Real’ book to the book on ‘comedy’. Finally, are there philosophical tensions between your work and the other members of the troika on this fraught relationship between ‘desire’ and ‘drive’?

Alenka Zupančič: Certainly, you are right to point to these concepts as paradigmatic, and they are also crucial when it comes to the articulation of the relationship of the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real You are also correct that there are some differences here – one would expect nothing less in a philosophical movement worth its salt.

In my own work, I take up the themes of desire and drive throughout. In Ethics of the Real I focused mostly, although not exclusively, on Lacan from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and The Transference (Seminars VII and VIII). The concept of desire is in the foreground in both, but there is also a shift that starts taking place there, a conceptual move from das Ding as the impossible/Real as the focal point of desire, to the introduction of the object a. This shift then gets a further and very complex elaboration in Lacan’s subsequent seminars. But to formulate what is at stake very briefly and simply, we could say that what is involved here is a move from the Real as the abyssal beyond of the symbolic,

to a concept (of the object a) which undermines the very logic and nature of the difference on which the previous conception of the Real was based.

Object a is neither symbolic nor Real (in the previous sense of the term). It refers to the very impossibility to sustain this kind of difference between the symbolic and the Real, and it is this impossibility that is now the Real.

This also opens the door for a more systematic introduction of the concept of the drive. The notion of the object a is crucial both for desire and drive, they are different ways of relating this impossible non-ontological dimension (a) to what is, to being. In the Seminar X (Anxiety) Lacan provides a formula that I think is absolutely crucial and which I also took as the guiding line of my work after Ethics: he says that love is a sublimation, and then defines sublimation in a very surprising way, namely that sublimation is what makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire. If one remembers the famous definition of sublimation from Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (‘sublimation is what elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing’) then the shift is indeed dramatic and surprising. This new notion of sublimation becomes directly associated with the question of the drive, for sublimation is also defined as a ‘nonrepressive satisfaction of the drive’.

Now, in Lacan, as well as in our reading of him, there is indeed perceptible a turn from the logic of desire to that of the drive as somehow truer. But this is not simply a turn (of interest) from the symbolic to the Real, as it sometimes seems. What is at stake is rather the recognition of the fact that the status of the Real as the impossible Beyond of the symbolic is actually an effect of desire and its logic. Desire casts the internal contradiction that drives it in terms of the inaccessible Beyond to which it can only approach asymptomatically. With drive, the contradiction remains internal, and the impossible remains accessible as the impossible. This, I think, is absolutely crucial, and this is what

I tried to formulate with the formula the ‘Real happens’: the point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, and in this reading, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so surprising, traumatic, disturbing, shattering – or funny – about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it. It is always something that doesn’t fit the (established or the anticipated) picture, or fits it all too well. The Real as impossible means that there is no ‘right’ time or place for it, and not that it is impossible for it to happen (‘On love as comedy’, Zupančič 2000).

The Real happens precisely as the impossible. It is not something that happens when we want it, or try to make it happen, or expect it, or are ready for it.

So what is important to stress in this whole ‘turn’ to the logic of the drive is the following: this is not simply a turn to the drive on account of its supposedly being closer, truer to the Real (as established independently), but rather a turn toward a different conception of the Real as such.

With drive, the Real is no longer a relational notion (sustaining questions like ‘what is our attitude toward the Real?’). It rather suggests something like: our relation to the Real is already in the Real. This is why questions like ‘How to get outside to the Real?’ seem to be the wrong kind of questions.

This is because there is no outside of the Real from which one would approach the Real.

Zupančič interview What is a subject?

CRISIS & CRITIQUE Interview by Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda
VOLUME 6 / ISSUE 1 pp. 435 – 453.

Zupančič, A. (2019, April 2). Philosophy or Psychoanalysis? Yes Please! Crisis & Critique. 6(1) 435-453.

Question: Why psychoanalysis?

Zupančič: At the moment when philosophy was just about ready to abandon some of its key central notions as belonging to its own metaphysical past, from which it was eager to escape, along came Lacan, and taught us an invaluable lesson: it is not these notions themselves that are problematic; what can be problematic in some ways of doing philosophy is the disavowal or effacement of the inherent contradiction, even antagonism, that these notions imply, and are part of. That is why, by simply abandoning these notions (like subject, truth, the real…), we are abandoning the battlefield, rather than winning any significant battles. This conviction and insistence is also what makes the so-called “Lacanian philosophy” stand out in the general landscape of postmodern philosophy.

Question: Some claim that psychoanalysis, especially following Lacan, is first and foremost a clinical practice and should not be considered to be a “theoretical” enterprise. In this sense it would not be a science (and if we are not mistaken, Lacan famously remarked that the subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of modern science, but not that psychoanalysis is a science). What is your view on this?

I believe that genuine psychoanalytic concepts are not derivatives of the clinic, but kind of “comprise” or contain the clinic, an element of the clinical, in themselves. I believe it is possible to work with these concepts in a very productive way (that is a way that allows for something interesting and new to emerge) even if you are not a clinician. But you need to have an ear, a sensibility for that clinical element, for that bit of the real comprised in these concepts. Of this I’m sure. Not everybody who works with psychoanalytic theory has it, but – and this is an important “but” – not everybody who practices analysis has it either.

One of the predominant ways or strategies with which psychoanalysts today aim at preserving their “scientific” standing, is by trying to disentangle themselves from philosophy (or theory), returning as it were to pure clinic. I think this is a very problematic move.

The Clinic should not be considered as a kind of holy grail providing the practitioners with automatic superiority when it comes to working theoretically, with psychoanalytic concepts.

There are, perhaps even increasingly so, attacks coming from the clinical side against “mere theorists” who are condemned for being engaged in pure sophistry, operating on a purely conceptual level and hence depriving psychoanalysis of its radical edge, of its real. Yes, there are many poor, self-serving or simply not inspiring texts around, leaning strongly – reference-wise – on psychoanalytic theory, and producing nothing remarkable. But interestingly, they are not the main targets of these attacks. No, the main targets are rather people whose “theorizing” has effects, impact, and makes waves (outside the purely academic territories). They are accused of playing a purely self-serving, sterile game. I see this as profoundly symptomatic. For we have to ask: when was the last time that a genuinely new concept, with possibly universal impact, came from the side of the accusers, that is, from the clinical side? There is an obvious difficulty there, and it is certainly not “theoretical psychoanalysts” that are the cause of it, for there is no shortage of practicing analysts around, compared to, say, Freud’s time. This kind of confrontation, opposition between philosophy (or theory) and clinic is in my view a very unproductive one. (436)

Which brings us back to your inaugural question: psychoanalysis is not a science, or “scientific” in the usual sense of this term, because it insists on a dimension of truth which is irreducible to “accuracy” or to simple opposition true/false.

At the same time the whole point of Lacan is that this insistence doesn’t simply make it unscientific (unverifiable, without any firm criteria…), but calls for a different kind of formalization and situates psychoanalysis in a singular position in the context of science. And here philosophy, which is also not a science in the usual sense of the term, can and should be its ally, even partner. They are obviously not the same, but their often very critical
dialogue shouldn’t obfuscate the fact that there are also “sisters in arms”.

As such, this concept is also genuinely “philosophical”. It links together, in a complex and most interesting way, language and the drives, it compels us to think a singular ontological form of negativity, to reconsider the simplistic human/animal divide, and so on … (438)

QUESTION: There is a widespread return of ontology, ontologies even, after a long period in which ontological claims were almost always bracketed as metaphysical or replaced by a straightforwardly pragmatist approach. But is this proliferation of ontologies symptomatic of something else? We read your most recent work as an attempt to offer, if not answer, this question. We are saying this because your reading of the concept of sexuality has a bearing on the most fundamental ontological concepts. Yet, at the same time, you do not simply suggest to identify the psychoanalytic account of sexuality with ontology – so that psychoanalysis would simply be the newest name of ontology. Rather in psychoanalysis, if we are not mistaken, we can find an account of being and its impasses and of subjectivity and its impasses. Both are systematically interlaced (in such a way that subjectivity with its impasses has something to do with being and its impasses). And this conceptual knot has an impact on our very understanding: not only of sexuality’s ontological import, but also on our understanding of ontology itself. Could you help us disentangle some bits of this knot?

There is this rather bafflingly simplifying claim according to which Kant and the “transcendental turn” to epistemology was just a big mistake, error, diversion — which we have to dismiss and “return” to ontology proper, to talking about things as they are in themselves. Kant’s transcendental turn was an answer to a real impasse of philosophical ontology. We can agree that his answer is perhaps not the ultimate, or philosophically, the only viable answer, but this does not mean that the impasse or difficulty that it addresses was not real and that we can pretend it doesn’t exist. The attempt to “return to” the idea of sexuality as a subject of ontological investigation is rooted in my conviction that psychoanalysis and its singular concept of the subject are of great pertinence for the impasse of ontology that Kant was tackling. So the claim is not simply that sexuality is important and should be taken seriously; in a sense, it is spectacularly more ambitious. The claim is that the Freudo-Lacanian theory of sexuality, and of its inherent relation to the unconscious, dislocates and transposes the philosophical question of ontology and its impasse in a most interesting way. I’m not interested in sexuality as a case of “local ontology,” but as possibly providing some key conceptual elements for the ontological interrogation as such. (439)

QUESTION: So what is sex?

We usually talk about or invoke sex as if we knew exactly what we are talking about, yet we don’t. And the book is rather an answer to the question why this is so. One of the fundamental claims of my book is that there is something about sexuality that is inherently problematic, “impossible”, and is not such simply because of external obstacles and prohibitions. What we have been witnessing over more than half a century has been a systematic obliteration, effacement, repression of this negativity inherent to sexuality – and not simply repression of sexuality. Freud did not discover sexuality, he discovered its problem, its negative core, and the role of this core in the proliferation of the sexual. Sexuality has been, and still is, systematically reduced, yes, reduced, to a self-evident phenomenon consisting simply of some positive features, and problematic only because caught in the standard ideological warfare: shall we “liberally” show and admit everything, or “conservatively” hide and prohibit most of it? But show or prohibit what exactly, what is this “it” that we try to regulate when we regulate sexuality? This is what the title of my book tries to ask: What IS this sex that we are talking about? Is it really there, anywhere, as a simply
positive entity to be regulated in this or that way? No, it is not. And this is precisely why we are “obsessed” with it, in one way or another, also when
we want to get rid of it altogether. 440

The question orientating the book was not simply what kind of being is sex, or sexuality, but pointed in a different direction. Sex is neither simply being, nor a quality or a coloring of being. It is a paradoxical entity that defies ontology as “thought of being qua being”, without falling outside ontological interrogation. It is something that takes place (“appears”) at the point of its own impossibility and/or contradiction.

So the question is not: WHAT is sex?, but rather: What IS sex? However, the two questions are not unrelated, and this is probably the most daring philosophical proposition of the book. Namely, that sexuality is the point of a short circuit between ontology and epistemology.

If there is a limit to what I can know, what is the status of this limit? Does it only tell us something about our subjective limitations on account of which we can never fully grasp being such as it is in itself? Or is there a constellation in which this not-knowing possibly tells us something about being itself, its own “lapse of being”? There is, I believe; it is the constellation that Freud conceptualized under the name of the unconscious. Sexuality is not simply the content of the unconscious, understood as a container of repressed thoughts. The relationship between sex and the unconscious is not that between a content and its container. Or that between some primary, raw being, and repression (and other operations) performed on it. The unconscious is a thought process, and it is “sexualized” from within, so to say. The unconscious is not sexual because of the dirty thoughts it may contain or hide, but because of how it works. If I keep emphasizing that I’m interested in the psychoanalytical concept of sexuality, and not simply in sexuality, it is because of the fundamental link between sexuality and the unconscious discovered by Freud. Sexuality enters the Freudian perspective strictly speaking only in so far as it is “unconscious sexuality”. Yet “unconscious sexuality” does not simply mean that we are not aware of it, while it constitutes a hidden truth of most of our actions. Unconsciousness does not mean the opposite of consciousness, it refers to an active and ongoing process, the work of censorship, substitution, condensation…, and this work is itself “sexual”, implied in desire, intrinsic to sexuality, rather than simply performed in relation to it. (440)

Phallus is not a signifier because men have it and masculinity is naturally favored, but because women don’t have it, and this negativity, this non-immediacy, this gap, is constitutive for the signifying order.

Now, the question of sexual difference is that of how one relates to this signifier or, which is the same question, how does one handle castration, relate to it. Men are identified as those who venture to put their faith into the hands of this signifier, hence acknowledging symbolic castration (the signifier now represents them, operates on their behalf), with different degrees of how (un)conscious this acknowledgement actually is. There are many men who strongly repress the dimension of castration involved in their access to symbolic power, and believe that this power emanates directly from them, from some positivity of their being, and not from the minus that constitutes phallus as the signifier. The anatomy obviously plays a part in facilitating this “masculine” identification, but the latter still remains precisely that: an identification, and not a direct, immediate consequence of anatomy. One can be anatomically a man and this identification doesn’t take place. Not all subjects identify with the signifier (of castration) in this way, accept its representation of them, take the symbolic order at is face value, so to say. Those who do not, identify as “women”, and tend to expose the “nothing”, the gap at the very core of the signifier and of symbolic identifications.

This opens a really interesting perspective on psychoanalysis and feminism, which is often missed. It is not that women are not acknowledged, fully recognized by the symbolic, oppressed by it; no, to begin with, women are subjects who question the symbolic, women are the ones who, by their very positioning, do not fully “acknowledge” its order, who keep signaling its negative, not-fully-there dimension. This is what makes them women, and not simply an empirical absence of an organ. This is their strength – but also the reason for their social repression, the reason why they “need to be managed” or “put in their place”. But these are two different levels. If we don’t keep in mind the difference between these two levels, we risk to fall prey to versions of liberal feminism which loses sight of precisely the radical positioning of “women”, depriving this position of its inherent thrust to question the symbolic order and all kinds of circulating identities, replacing this thrust with the simpler demand to become part of this circulation, to be fully recognized by the given order.

Contingency is not the same as relativism. If all is relative, there is no contingency. Contingency means precisely that there is a heterogeneous, contingent element that strongly, absolutely decides the structure, the grammar of its necessity – it doesn’t mean that this element doesn’t really decide it, or that we are not dealing with necessity. To just abstractly assert and insist that the structure could have been also very different from what it is, is not enough. This stance also implies that we could have simply decided otherwise, and that this decision is in our power. But contingency is not in our power, by definition, otherwise it wouldn’t be contingency. Ignoring this leads to the watered-down, liberal version of freedom. Freedom understood as the freedom to choose, for instance between different, also sexual, identities. But this is bullshit, and has little to do with freedom, because it doesn’t even begin to touch the grammar of necessity which frames the choices that we have. Freedom is a matter of fighting, of struggle, not of choosing. Necessities can and do change, but not because they are not really necessities and merely matters of choice.

The sexual in psychoanalysis is a factor of radical disorientation, something that keeps bringing into question all our representations of the entity called “human being.” This is why it would also be a big mistake to consider that, in Freudian theory, the sexual is the ultimate horizon of the animal called “human,” a kind of anchor point of irreducible humanity in psychoanalytic theory; on the contrary, it is the operator of the inhuman, the operator of dehumanization.

And this is precisely what clears the ground for a possible theory of the subject (as developed by Lacan), in which the subject is something other than simply another name for an individual or a “person.”

What Freud calls the sexual is thus not that which makes us human in any received meaning of this term, it is rather that which makes us subjects, or perhaps more precisely, it is coextensive with the emergence of the subject.

So this subject is not the Althusserian subject of interpellation, emerging from “recognition”. But this is not simply to say that (the Lacanian) subject is directly an antidote for ideological interpellation. Things are a bit more complicated than that. I would almost be tempted to turn Althusser’s formula around. Not “ideology interpellates individuals into subjects”, but rather: ideology interpellates subjects into individuals with this or that identity. In some sense, ideology works like “identity politics”. By turning the Althusserian formula around I don’t mean to suggest that subject is a kind of neutral universal substrate on which ideology works, like “individuals” seem to be in Althusser’s formula.

The subject is – if you’d pardon my language – a universal fuck-up of a neutral substrate, it is a crack in this substrate. But this in itself is not what resists ideology, on the contrary, it is rather what makes its functioning possible, it is what offers it a grip. Subject as a crack, or as interrogation mark, is in a sense “responsible” for the ideological interpellation having a grip on us.

Only a subject will turn around, perplexed, upon hearing “Hey, you!” But this is not all. Precisely because the subject is not a neutral substrate to be molded into this or that ideological figure or shape, but a negativity, a crack, this crack is not simply eliminated when an ideological identification/recognition takes place, but becomes part of it.

It can be filled up, or screened off, but its structure is not exactly eliminated, because ideology is only efficient against its background. So not only is the subject in this sense a condition of ideology, it also constitutes its inner limit, its possible breaking point, its ceasing to function and losing its grip on us.

The subject, as negativity, keeps on working in all ideological structures, the latter are not simply monolithic and unassailable, but also fundamentally instable because of this ongoing work. Ideology is not something that we can resist (as subjects). This usually gets us no further than to a posture of ironical or cynical distance. It is not by “mastering” our relation to ideology that we are subjects, we are, or become, emancipatory subjects by a second identification which is only made possible within the ideological parallax: say by identifying with the underdog, by locating the gaps that demands and generate “positive” repression… In a word, the subject is both, the problem and the possible (emancipatory) solution.

The fact that to be a “woman” has always been a socially recognized sexual position, did little to protect women against harsh social discrimination (as well as physical mistreatment) based precisely on this “recognized” sexuality. Part of this discrimination, or the very way in which it was carried out, has always led through definitions (and images) of what exactly does it mean to be a woman.

So a recognized identity itself does not necessarily help. And the point is also not to fill in the identity of “woman” with the right content, but to empty it of all content. More precisely, to recognize its form itself, its negativity, as its only positive content. To be a woman is to be nothing. And this is good, this should be the feminist slogan. Obviously, nothing” is not used as an adjective here, describing a worth, it is used in the strong sense of the noun.

Emancipatory struggle never really works by way of enumerating a multiplicity of identities and then declaring and embracing them all equal (or the same). No, it works by mobilizing the absolute difference as means of universalization in an emancipatory struggle.

I strongly believe, perhaps against all contemporary odds, that the inherent and radical political edge of sexuality consists in how it compels us to think the difference. A difference that makes the difference.

As for #MeToo, it is a very significant movement, already and simply because it is a movement. But movements have a way of sometimes inhibiting their own power. #MeToo should not become about “joining the club” (of the victims), and about demanding that the Other (different social institutions and preventive measures) protect us against the villainy of power, but about women and all concerned being empowered to create social change, and to be its agents. Movements generate this power, and it is vital that one assumes it, which means leaving behind the identity of victimhood. And this necessarily implies engagement in broader social solidarity, recognizing the political edge of this struggle, and pursuing it. (450)

To eliminate passion from politics is to eliminate politics (in any other sense than simple management). And this is what’s happened. But it is crucial here to avoid a possible misunderstanding: I’m not saying that politics needs to make space for passions as well, and needs to involve them as well. This way of speaking already presupposes the wrong divide, an original distinction between politics and passion, their fundamental heterogeneity: as if politics were something completely exterior to passion, and would then let some passion in when needed, and in right dosages. One should rather start by dismantling the very idea that passions are by definition “private” and apolitical (because personal). No, passion is not a private thing! Even in the case of amorous passion, it concerns at least two, and has consequences in a wider social space of those involved. Politics, different kind of politics, are different articulations of a communal passion, of how we live together and how we would like to live together.

To allow for political passion, or politics as passion, does not mean to allow for people to freely engage in all kinds of hate speech as expression of their feelings. First, feelings and passion are not exactly the same thing, passion is something much more systematic, it allows for organization, thinking, strategy… When I say “passion” I also don’t mean frenzied gaze and saliva coming out of our mouth. What is political passion? It is the experience of being concerned by ways in which our life in common (as societies) takes place, and where it is going. We are all subjectively implied in this communal space, and it’s only logical to be passionate about it. (452)

Žižek

Žižek The Mobius Strip of Sexual Contracts

Metastases of Enjoyment

September 20, 2011

Metastases of Enjoyment. New York: Verso, 1994.

[T]he problem that confronted Lacan was: how do we pass from animal coupling led by instinctual knowledge and regulated by natural rhythms to human sexuality possessed by a desire which is eternalized and, for that very reason, insatiable, inherently perturbed, doomed to fail, and so on? …

So the answer to Lacan’s problem is: we enter human sexuality through the intervention of the symbolic order qua heterogeneous parasite that disrupts the natural rhythm of coupling. 155

A. Zupančič St. Petersberg Feb 2018

Alenka Zupančič (The Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) The report will explore the encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy at the point where the two seem to be the most incompatible.

Sex (and psychoanalytic theory of sexuality) is something that philosophy usually doesn’t know what to do with; sex is the question usually left out in even the most friendly philosophical appropriations of Lacan and his concepts.

And ontology (as since of pure being) is something that psychoanalysis doesn’t know what to do with, or is highly critical about.

The report will take these two notions and cast them, so to say, in the opposite camps. It will argue that sex is the properly philosophical (ontological) question of psychoanalysis, and present some consequences that this shift of perspective has for philosophy.

European University at St. Petersberg Russia

Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
Philosophers in postmodern fashion gave up on traditional concepts: subject, truth, real, and put in metaphysical past. Then along came Lacan, who said the concepts are not problematic in themselves, but the way we use them.

neill calum phallus sexuation

Neill, C. (2009) ‘Who Wants to be in Rational Love?’, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 140-150.

We can understand that part of what Lacan is pointing to here in his invocation of the phallus as something which cannot be reduced to a mere physical appendage is that sexual difference is never simply a matter of the difference between two complimentary entities (in the sense of ying-yang).

There is always a necessary third party; the phallus. We are sexed in terms of our relation with or to this third position and, therefore, the difference between the sexes is always more than a simple difference. Rather the differences themselves are different. The phallus as a moment of the Other comes radically between the male and female subject. There is no direct relation between them but only distinct relations to a third. […]

In saying that there is no ratio between the sexes, then, we could understand Lacan to be saying that while there clearly is a relating of some sorts between the sexes, there is a conjunction, there is no stability and there is no way of notating this; “the sexual relation cannot be written” (Lacan 1998: 35), which would be to say that it is beyond comprehension

An important question we might raise here is, if there is no saying it all, no unproblematic communication between the sexes, then does this imply that there might be such an unproblematic communication between subjects of the same sex?

Clearly, the answer would be no. Language is necessarily a medium and thus mediator. So why emphasise that there is no rapport between the sexes when there is no rapport between subjects? […]

while perhaps obvious, needs to be stated simply because it is here, in the sexual relation that we hope to find the communicative success which eludes us in other areas of life. Even here, there is no rapport. The Other is always the third party. We might hope to, in our ideal of sex, engage in a true coming together, a communication without or outwith language but such an idea is never anything more than a fantasy;

The four logical statements presented at the top of the diagram can be read as follows:

there exists at least one of those in category x who is not subject to the phallic function

all of those in the category of x are subject to the phallic function

there is not one of those in category x who is not subject to the phallic function

not all of those in category x are subject to the phallic function

*********

What this produces, then, are two seemingly contradictory or logically impossible statements on each side of the graph. The left side is the side of man, while the right side is the side of woman. Together they describe possible positions available to speaking beings, which is to say “Every speaking being situates itself on one side or the other” (Lacan, 1998: 79).

The logical statements on the left side can be understood to tell the story, or the logic, of the myth of the primal horde (Freud, 1950: 141-143). The one who would exist who is not subject to the phallic function, who has not undergone castration, would be the primal father.

Category x in this instance would then refer to the male position and all those in this position are subject to the phallic function, that is, they have undergone castration. There is, then, one man, the primal father, who is not subject to the function of castration which is the condition of possibility for all those in the male position. The contradiction here can be understood in the sense of an exception to a rule, in that it is the exception which is the condition of possibility for the rule to be a rule.

The statements on the right side can be understood to describe something of the tension between universals and particulars. The two statements might appear to present a blunt contradiction. If none of those in the category is not subject to the phallic function, then this would seem to suggest that all those in the category are subject to the phallic function.

But this is precisely what the second statement refuses. Taken separately, however, we can perhaps begin to make some sense of this. If the function of castration is the condition of possibility of entry into the symbolic order, then all speaking beings in order to be speaking beings would have to be subject to this function.

We can understand this first statement, then, as referring to each member on a one-by-one basis. Each woman – for this is the side of woman – in order to be a speaking being, must be subject to the phallic function. The second statement – the universal statement – should then be understood to refer to the group. The group as a whole, as a category, is not subject to the phallic function. What would this mean?

That, as a universal category, The Woman cannot be located within the symbolic order; La femme n’existe pas.

If one side of the supposed relation between the sexes can be said not to exist, if one side cannot be collapsed into a signified totality, while the other side can only assume a signified position as incomplete, then clearly the model of equal partners balanced in a neutral or exteriorly moderated system of exchange becomes manifestly inappropriate.

Lacan’s claim that there is no rapport between the sexes, that they cannot be composed into a ratio, that they have no relation, furnishes us with a step beyond the superficial and reductive assumptions which so apparently benignly dominate the social sciences.

In reducing intersubjectivity and sexual relations to modes of economy, one not only assumes an untenable equality of status between the supposed operators, but one also misses the crucial point that the pleasure, the jouissance,which might be the currency of such an exchange is never itself so easily quantifiable.

Just as actual economic exchange is problematised with the inescapable notion of surplus value, so intersubjective relations are properly rendered more complex with a notion of surplus jouissance. This surplus of jouissance, the fact that relations can never be collapsed into a whole, a oneness, or even into a two, insofar as there is always, necessarily, the insistence of objet petit a, means that the accounting we would impose on relations always already fails.

Moreover, this failure is inscribed already in our attempts to know – to corral in knowledge – how the relation works, what the ratio is, what mediates the rapport.

It is in stepping beyond this limit that the social sciences might begin to explore, without seeking to end in a finite knowledge, what goes on between the sexes.

shepherdson Sexuation

Shepherdson, C. (2003) “Lacan and Philosophy.” In: J. Rabaté (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. New York, London: Cambridge University Press, pp. 116-152.

Sexuation informative website

Phallic Jouissance

First path: the sexuation graph. Having taken this step towards the “Other jouissance,” in which the general law of symbolic castration is no longer the whole story, Lacan now develops Freud’s claim by means of symbolic logic, in the “sexuation graph” which maps out two modes of relation to the Other, correlated with sexual difference.

On the “male” side, the “normal” or “phallic” position is defined through the proposition that all subjects, being unmoored from nature, are destined to find their way through the symbolic order. Lacan expresses this claim in symbolic notation, with the formula

“All subjects are submitted to the phallic signifier”.

Now this position (the universal law of symbolic existence) is paradoxically held in place by an exception to the law, which Lacan elaborates in keeping with Freud’s analysis of the primal horde in Totem and Taboo, where Freud explains that the sons all agree to abide by the law (to accept symbolic castration), precisely in contrast to the “primal father,” who stands as the exception to the rule, in relation to which the law is to be secured. Thus, the “male” side of the sexuation graph includes another formula

“There is one subject who is not submitted to the phallic signifier”

and this second formula, which forms part of the law of castration on the male side, is cast as an excluded position, an exception to the law, as Freud also claims when he explains that the primal father must always be killed, since his expulsion from the community by murder insures that the symbolic community will be established.

The two formulae thus appear to present a simple contradiction, logically speaking, but in a clinical sense they are intended to define the antinomy that structures masculine or phallic sexuality, in the sense that the exception to the law, where the possibility of an unlimited jouissance is maintained, is precisely the jouissance that must be sacrificed, expelled, or given up for the field of desire and symbolic exchange to emerge.

Such is the logic of symbolic castration. It would obviously be possible to play out this “logic of masculinity” in some detail, with reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger and others, whose films represent the masculine fantasy in which the law of the civilized community can only be upheld, paradoxically, by an exceptional figure who is able to command an absolute power of violence, which is itself used to expel the monstrous, mechanical, or demonic figure (the uncontrollable machine or corrupt corporate demagogue) whose absolute jouissance threatens the space of democracy and capitalistic exchange.

In masculinity, democracy and totalitarianism are not simply contradictory, as though they could not exist together, but are on the contrary twins, logically defining and supporting one another.

Such elaborations – always too quick in any case – are not our purpose here, but we can at least note Lacan’s attempt to provide a rigorous theoretical account, through symbolic logic, of the “contradictions” of masculinity. 138

“Not all of a woman is subject to symbolic castration.”

While the “masculine” side of the graph provides a relation to symbolic castration which is total (“All men are subject,” etc.), the “feminine” side, by contrast, provides a second pair of formulae in which the subject is not altogether subjected to the law.

The second of these formulae, can be read as “Not all of a woman is subject to symbolic castration.” The universal, which functions on the masculine side (“All men”), is thus negated on the side of femininity (“Not all”).

Something of woman may thus escape symbolic castration, or does not entirely submit to the symbolic law (“they show less sense of justice than men” and “their super-ego is never so inexorable”).

“Feminine jouissance” is thereby distinguished from “phallic jouissance” by falling partly outside the law of the signifier. Subjected to the symbolic order like all speaking beings, the “feminine” position is nevertheless “not-all” governed by its law.

And as was the case on the masculine side, so here we find a second formula, but in this case it is not an exception to the law (as with the primal father). Instead, we find a formula that indicates an inevitable inscription within the law

“There is no subject that is not subjected to the symbolic law”

[…] it is worth noting that in this second formula, which articulates the feminine version of subjection to the law, we do not find a universal proposition, a statement that could be distributed across all subjects (“All men,” etc.).

Instead, we find a formulation that relies on the particular (“There is no woman who is not” etc.). The universal quantifier “all” (∀) is thus replaced with a quasi-existential “there is” (∃) …

Lacan remarks on the “strangeness” of this feminine mode of being: it is ´etrange, Lacan says, playing on the word for “angel” (ˆetre ange means “to be an angel”), this mode of being which falls outside the grasp of the proposition (“it is . . .”). We cannot say that “it is” or “it exists,” just like that, because it does not all belong to the domain of symbolic predication, and yet, this same impasse in symbolization means that we cannot say “it is not” or it “does not exist” (or indeed that “there is only one libido”).

Beyond the “yes” and “no” of the signifier, beyond symbolic predication and knowledge (is/is not), this mode of being, presented through the Other jouissance, would thus be like God, or perhaps (peut-ˆetre – a possible-being) more like an angel. Thus, as Lacan suggests, and as Irigaray also notes, though in a very different way, the question of feminine sexuality may well entail a theology and an ontological challenge in which the law of the father is not the whole truth.

“It is insofar as her jouissance is radically Other that woman has more of a relationship to God” (S XX, p. 83).

zupančič April 2014 Toronto

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. Continue reading “zupančič April 2014 Toronto”

mcgowan not-all

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

The figure of the enemy offers subjects within society an explanation for the loss that they experience as members of society and as subjects. Trotsky provides a reason for the failure of the Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union, and Israeli hegemony produces the misery that the Palestinians experience. Of course, in some cases, the enemy really does contribute to the loss that occurs within a society, but no enemy bears responsibility for loss as such, which comes first with subjectivity and then with the social order itself.

The enemy transforms an ontological phenomenon — loss within the social order — into an empirical one — instances of loss.

Through the obstacle that it places in the way, the enemy facilitates the belief that the collective identity within the social order or an authentic social bond is something that we might have. The barrier transforms an absence of collective identity into the illusory possibility of having this identity, and the possibility of having is integral to the male logic of exception.

Whereas male subjectivity is preoccupied with what it believes it has or should have, female subjectivity, as a structural position, involves an embrace of what one doesn’t have. To adopt the feminine position is ipso facto to recognize that all having involves having nothing.

Female subjectivity does not orient itself around an ideal of noncastration. There is no figure of the primal mother who appears to have the ultimate enjoyment and to hoard this enjoyment for herself. Though various ideals of female subjectivity certainly exist had have an impact on female identity, there is not simply one ideal. Instead, there is a plethora of them, and they often contradict each other. This is why Lacan insists that “there’s no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital W indicating the universal.” 157

The result is that female subjectivity rests on a more tenuous ground: without the exception as a reference point that the male has, the female subject has no unified category within which to place herself. Because an exception is necessary to constitute the rule (or an outside is necessary to constitute an inside), there is no coherent category of female subjectivity. What results instead is a series of singularities without a clear rule defining them. As Kenneth Reinhard notes, “Unlike the case of men, for whom there is a unified category, “all men,’ that they are identified as being members of, women are RADICALLY SINGULAR, not examples of a class or members of a closed set, but EACH ONE AN EXCEPTION.” The absence of an exceptional defining the category of female subjectivity renders female subjectivity as such exceptional. 157 – 158

Male subjectivity always strives for the ultimate enjoyment that it posits in the unattainable position of exceptionality. Its enjoyment is always futural, and it depends on the act of obtaining or having its object. Female subjectivity provides enjoyment through what it doesn’t have; one enjoys one’s loss as a female subject. This type of enjoyment is not exclusionary in the way that the male form of enjoyment is. It is not confined to a few exceptions, because there is nothing but exceptions, according to the logic of female sexuation. 158

The foundation of the social bond is a loss held in common, a collective sacrifice of nothing for the sake of the social order. This experience of collective sacrifice or loss provides enjoyment in the form linked to female sexuation. It is the enjoyment of a shared not-having, and it is the form that the social bond necessarily takes at first. Each subject sacrifices something in order to live together collectively, and through the shared sacrifice, subjects constitute the social bond. This bond is traumatic and shameful because its avowal places subjects in a position where their lack is completely exposed. When subjects experience the essence of the social bond — the moment of collective self-sacrifice — they simultaneously experience the humiliation of rendering their loss visible. The enjoyment of this bond comes with a steep price, and no society is willing to pay it for very long. 158

Consequently, every social order obscures the traumatic nature of the social bond, which operates according to the female logic of not having, through recourse to a male logic of exception, manifested most directly in the friend/enemy distinction. This male logic is a logic of the all — a totality forged through the position of the exception — and it continually leaves subjects in a state of dissatisfaction, seeking a completeness that they will never attain.

The female logic of not-having or universalized exceptionality is not a separate logic of the social order, a logic describing an alternative form of society. It is, rather, the hidden bond lying beneath the phallic order founded on exception. Every society has both logics simultaneously at work, but the underlying logic of the not-all is the one that societies find themselves unable to avow. 158-159

… the logic of the not-all posits that there are only enemies, only outsiders, and only exceptions. The point is not that everyone is a friend but that everyone is an enemy, including oneself. According to this idea of the universalized exception, we can’t erect a firm distinction between inside and outside because those inside — friends — are defined solely in terms of what they don’t have, and this renders them indistinct from those outside — enemies. 159

Our enjoyment of the social bond operates according to the logic of not-having: we enjoy the shared experience of loss. But the pleasure that we take in the social bond follows from the male logic of the all and the exception. We find pleasure in the possibility of having a collective identity that sets us apart from outsiders. This pleasure works in one sense to facilitate our enjoyment by hiding it from us. While most members of a society can accept the pleasure that derives from a sense of having a collective identity — almost no one objects to the affirmation of national unity embodied by a flag, for instance — few can embrace the idea that the social bond exists through a shared sense of loss. This is why the moments when the shared sense of loss become visible are often quickly followed by the attempt to assert a positive collective identity. Or, to put it in other terms, when enjoyment becomes visible, we retreat toward pleasure. 159

Žižek EGS 2009 sexual difference

Lacan and Sexual Difference Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (March 23, 2011) This lecture is longer by 15 minutes than the one below.
This is identical recording of Žižek’s lecture by another person.
Mp3 audio recording of lecture here.

Lacan reasserts the ontological status of sexual difference How can he re-sexualize universe without regressing in a premodern ontology.

Sexual difference is purely formal. The way SD functions in the human universe is not immediately linked to biological functions of sexuality. Even natural sexuality can be sexualized.

Formal structure and immediate reality: you can imagine a couple just doing it as a pure instrumental activity, doing it mechanically. And we do some things that have nothing to do w/ sexuality but can be sexualized. Imagine I meet you, we shake hands, the very simple act of squeezing your hand, and not letting go.

This act of repetition sexualizes it. Sexuality spills over, is not sign of its strength, but its weakness. It doesn’t work in its own domain so it must expand.
We should move to ontology of incompleteness. Like Kant mathematical and dynamic antinomies, the Lacanian not-all. This impossibility of getting it all, of getting a totalized reality. The first thing Lacan gets us to do: We move from Kant to Hegel.

Kant remains too epistemological, he thinks there is an objective reality out there and because of the limitations of our categories we can’t get at it. Hegel says what if we transpose this structure of failure hinderance into the thing-itself. Heisneberg thinks its epistemological way, but Bohrs, this impossibility is in the thing-itself.

Incompleteness of society The incompleteness of the structure of reality and in order to make it consistent is to supplement with a virtual fiction. Bentham’s point is yes we can distinguish what is fiction/reality, BUT if we take away the fiction we lose reality itself. This point was made by GK. Chesteron.
Necessity of fictional supplement: We all know that we want to do that (have sex) but the question in what way. You ask 5 men, what you want to do, the cloud should show you need a fiction to do it, that is don’t just show cloud of naked woman, but the cloud should show, while reading a book, while walking on the beach etc.
Reality structured like a fiction: show only reality, but to make us experience it as a magical fiction.
Children of Men At the very end, in a small boat to a scene where some kind of ship called ‘tomorrow’. It seems so obvious that although it is shot like reality, the ship is pure appearance, it was the dying dream. A radical ambiguity at the end.
Home Alone

Lacan formalization of Sexual Difference