From its etymological roots, sex is related to a scission: latin for sectus/secare,

meaning 'to divide or cut'. Therefore, regardless of the various studies applied to
defining sex as inscribed by discursive acts, i.e. merely a 'performatively enacted
signification', there is something more to sex than just a social construction or an
aprioristic substance. Sex is irreducible to meaning or knowledge.

This is why psychoanalysis cannot be formulated as an erotology nor a science

of sex (scientia sexualis). Following this argumentation, in the final class of his
eleventh seminar, lacon asserts that psychoanalysis has proven to be uncreative in
the realm of sexuality. Henceforth, sex does not engrave itself within the symbolic:
only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. In this matter, sex
escapes the symbolic restraints of language; however, it is through its failure that
it manifests itself through the symbolic, e.g. symptoms or dream life. So, what is
sex? Sex and Nothing embarks upon a dialogue between colleagues and friends
interested in bridging psychoanalysis and philosophy, linking sex and thought,
where what emerges is a greater awareness of the irreducibility of sex to the
discourse of knowledge and meaning: in other words, sex and nothing.

'I was determined to hate this book, partly because I'm not in it, partly because I
really don't like sex when it is followed by nothing. Yet now that I have read it, I
think it is by far the most consistently brilliant collection of essays on psychoanalysis
and philosophy I have come across in a very long time. I now understand why
I'm not in it - the cast of characters, which includes some of the most sparkling
intellectuals of our age and some equally coruscating emerging scholars, is just
perfect- and I have also learnt to appreciate the importance of nothingness, and
not just as a companion or a consequence of sex. This book belongs on all the
bedside tables of all the better houses on the planet.'
-Professor Dany Nobus, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for External Affairs at Brunei
University london, and Chair of the Freud Museum london

ALEJANDRO CERDA-RUEDA is a practising psychoanalyst in Mexico City.

He is Professor at Universidad lberoamericana, Mexico, and senior editor for
Paradiso Editores.

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KARNAC BOOKS
www.karnacbooks.com 203384
 SEX AND NOTHING
Bridges from Psychoanalysis
to Philosophy

Edited by
Alejandro Cerda-Rueda

KARNAC
First published in 2016 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 SHT

Copyright© 20 16 to Alejandro Cerda-Rueda for the edited collection, and to

the individual authors for their contributions.

The rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work have
been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and
Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Cover photo: Untitled. Copyright© 2016 to Andrea Tejeda Korkowski

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A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library

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CON TE N TS

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS vii

INTRODUCTION xi
Alejandro Cerda-Rueda

PART 1: FROM LJUBLJANA . . .

CHAPTER ONE
Sexuality within the limits of reason alone 3
Alenka ZupanCic

CHAPTER TWO
Officers, maids, and chimneysweepers 19
Mladen Dolar

CHAPTER THREE
Events through Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real 37
Slavoj Zizek

v
Vi CONTENTS

CHAPTER FOUR
The unsoundable decision of being 57
Jelica Sumic

CHAPTER FIVE
Psychoanalysis and antiphilosophy: the case of Jacques Lacan 81
Sarno Tomsic

PART II: . . . TO ELSEWHERE

CHAPTER SIX
The sexual compact 107
Joan Copjec

CHAPTER SEVEN
Mathematics in the bedroom: sex, the signifier,
and the smallest whole number 139
Sigi Jottkandt

CHAPTER EIGHT
Ich-psychologie und Massenanalyse: a Zi.zekian reading
of Lacan' s impasse 157
Gabriel Tupinambd

CHAPTER NINE
The aesthetic process as reversal 179
Christina Soto van der Plas

CHAPTER TEN
Love, psychoanalysis, and leftist political ontology 1 93
Daniel Tutt

INDEX 211
A BO U T T H E EDI TOR A ND CON T R IBU TO R S

Alejandro Cerda-Rueda is a practising psychoanalyst in Mexico City.

He is Professor at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico, and senior edi­
tor for Paradiso editores. He gained his PhD from the European Gradu­
ate School in Switzerland. He is the editor of Schreber. Los archivos de la
locura (2009).

Joan Copjec is an American philosopher, theorist, feminist, she is pro­

fessor of Media at Brown University. Her work focuses primarily on
the grounds of philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and film studies.
She is the founder of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and
Culture at the University of Buffalo, as well as the Umbr(a) journal. She
has published Read My Desire. Lacan against the Historicists (MIT Press,
1994; Verso, 2015), Imagine There's No Woman. Ethics and Sublimation (MIT
Press, 2002), as well as various book compilations like Shades of Nair
(Verso, 1993), and Supposing the Subject (Verso, 1994).

Mladen Dolar is a Slovenian philosopher and former Advising

Researcher in theory at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht,
Netherlands. He teaches at the University of Ljubljana as well as the
European Graduate School, while his work focuses on psychoanalysis
vii
vi i i AB O UT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

and philosophy, including topics such as Hegel, French structuralism,

film (i.e., the work of Ernst Lubitsch), and music theory. His published
books in English are Opera's Second Death (Routledge, 2002), co-authored
with Slavoj Zizek, and A Voice and Nothing More ( MIT Press, 2006). He has
published various books in Slovenian.

Sigi Jottkandt is the Senior lecturer for the School of the Arts and Media
at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her research
interests are in nineteenth and twentieth century British and American
Literature (especially Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov), Lacanian
psychoanalysis, and contemporary French philosophy. Co-founder
of Open Humanities Press, and S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for
Lacanian Ideology Critique. She has published Acting Beautifully: Henry
James and the Ethical Aesthetic (SUNY, 2005), First Love: A Phenomenol­
ogy of the One (re.press, 2010), as well as the edited collection Penumbra
(re.press, 2013), co-edited with Joan Copjec.

Christina Soto van der Plas was born in Mexico, she is currently a PhD
candidate of Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her work focuses
on the boundaries between life and forms of fiction and how this rede­
fines the aesthetic process of literature in a constellation of authors from
the twentieth century in Latin America. She has also translated into
Spanish Alenka ZupanCic's book The Odd One In under the title Sabre la
comedia, published by Paradiso editores (Mexico).

Jelica Sumic is a Slovenian philosopher and researcher at the Institute of

Philosophy of the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy
of Sciences and Arts. She also teaches at the University of Nova Gorjca
and is member of the International Society for Psychoanalysis and
Philosophy. Her research topics include ethics, political theory, and
psychoanalysis. She has written on the relations between legal systems,
ethics, and politics, as well as on the philosophy of Badiou, Ranciere,
and Agamben. She has published in French, Singularite dans la psycha­
nalyse, singularite de Ia psychanalyse (ruF, 1998) co-authored with Michel
Deguy, as well as various books in Slovenian, and articles for different
English-based journals such as Umbr(a).

Sarno Tomsic is a Slovenian philosopher and postdoctoral researcher

at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. He has written on
 ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ix

structuralism, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy, as well as

translated numerous classical and contemporary authors into Slovenian.
He has published The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (Verso,
.
2015), and Ja cques Lacan. Between Psychoanalysis and Politics (Routledge,
2015), co-edited with Andrej a Zevnik.

Gabriel Tupinamba was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he is a practic­

ing analyst, a member of the international collective Pensee, and the
coordinator of the Circle of Studies of the Idea and Ideology. PhD by
the European Graduate School, he has published the book Hegel, Lacan,
Zizek (Atropos, 2013), as well as written chapters in The Zizek Diction­
ary (Acumen, 2014), Repeating Zizek (Duke University Press, 2015), Zizek
and Education (Sense, forthcoming), and Zizek and Dialectical Materialism
(Palgrave, forthcoming). He is currently working on a new book called
Thinking, in Psychoanalysis.

Daniel Tutt was born in Portland, Oregon (United States), he is pro­

fessor of Media Studies and Critical Theory at the Global Center for
Advanced Studies (GcAs). He is a member of the Lacanian Forum of
Washington, DC. His work focuses primarily between psychoanaly­
sis, philosophy, and politics. His writing has appeared in Philosophy
Now, Platypus Review, International Journal of Zizek Studies, and The San
Francisco Society for Lacanian S tudies.

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is senior

researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the Univer­
sity of Ljubljana in Slovenia . Distinguished professor of German at New
York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for
the Humanities in London. His work mainly focuses in bringing phi­
losophy (Hegel), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and politics (Marx) together.
Some of his books published in English are The Sublime Object of Ideol­
ogy (Verso, 1989), The Plague of Fantasies (Verso, 1997), The Parallax View
(MIT Press, 2006), Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical
Materialism (Verso, 2012), amongst various chapters written for books
and articles published in journals and newspapers.

Alenka Zupancic is a Slovenian philosopher and full-time researcher

at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and visiting professor
at the European Graduate School. Her work focuses on psychoanalysis
X ABOU T T H E E D I TO R AN D C ON T R I BU TO R S

and philosophy, tackling several topics including ethics, comedy, and

love. She has p ublis hed in English: Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan
(Verso, 2000), The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two
(MIT Press, 2003), The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2007), and
Why Psychoanalysis? (Aarhus University Press, 2008), amongst various
ch apters for books and articles for journals.
IN T R OD U C TION

Alejandro Cerda-Rueda

Ljubljanski zmaji
A couple of meters away from the emblematic Triple Bridge (Tromo­
stovje) within the Preseren Square lies the baroque-style Franciscan
Church of the Annunciation. As we take a stroll down the streets we
come across the Zmajski most, a triple-hinged arch bridge over the
Ljubljanica river. There, one is met by four fiery sheet-copper dragon
statues standing on pedestals in every corner of the overpass. Even
when the overpass-formerly known as the Jubilee Bridge of the
Emperor Franz Josef I, in honour of the Austro-Hungarian monarch,
and later renamed Dragon Bridge in 1919-prevails as a landmark for
bystanders and visitors, the reference to the steadfast creatures cannot
be ignored. In short, Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, is prominently
known as a land of dragons.
Where do these dragons come from? According to Slavic mythology,
the slaying of a dragon released the waters and ensured the fertility of
the earth. Furthermore, written records by Sozomen and Zosim, Antiq­
uity writers from the fifth and sixth century, establish that when the
Argonauts traveled through this region, while returning home after hav­
ing taken the Golden Fleece, they found a lake surrounded by a marsh
xi
XI I I N T R O D UCTI O N

inhabited by dragons. Legend has it that when Jason killed a monster

that lived in the marshlands, which turned out to be a dragon, Emona
was founded, an ancient Roman colony serving as a mythical ancestor
to Ljubljana. Moreove1� according to the Slovenian art historian Gorazd
Makarovic, the knowledge of dragons within Slovenian folklore was
only introduced during the fourteenth century by church depictions of
Saint George (the city's protector) slaying dragons. Notwithstanding, it
is also important to denote that the Greek word bpt±Kwv preserves the
ambivalent disposition dragons hold towards humans: they can either
be benevolent companions or evil opponents. In addition, it is interest­
ing to point out that in Slovenian, a dragon is commonly referred to by
using the masculine form of the word for snake, zmaj.
However, this book is not about dragons, but rather it is about a town
inhabited by them. Ljubljana is a capital with a vast history expand­
ing across many centuries, from a strong Catholic influence prior to
the Second World War to being part of the former socialist republic of
Yugoslavia. Indeed, its background is rich and what concerns us here is
its global relevancy in the field of psychoanalysis and philosophy. What
is it about these dragons that still inhabit the city's hearthstone?
In this sense, while walking along the asphalt streets of Ljubljana
under a summer sky, approaching the zmaji that await ceremoniously
on the overpass, it is tempting, as when Oedipus addressed the Sphinx
at Thebes, to ask these monumental sheet-copper statues a fundamental
question: why is sex so important?

Freud and the mark of sex

In his renowned Letter 52 (December 6th, 1 896), Freud asserts to a spe­
cific annotation concerning sex: it is uninhibitable. He describes that
while other psychic processes compromise to inhibitions in order to
maintain normal defenses (or even pathological ones), there is, indeed,
one case in which inhibition does not suffice. He explains: "If A, when it
was current, released a particular unpleasure, and if when it is reawak­
ened it releases fresh unpleasure, then this cannot be inhibited. [ ] This
. . .

case can occur only with sexual events, because the magnitudes of the
excitations which these release increase of themselves with time (with
sexual development)" (Masson, 1985, p. 209). Therefore one could be
misled to relate sexual events only to unpleasurable increasing amounts
of tension, which is not the case, but rather one should focus on the con­
sequences of such mixture between pleasure/unpleasure cathexias.
 I N T R O D U CT I O N xiii

According to Freud, a sexual event is uninhibitable in any phase of

development, be it during childhood or the adult stage. Even when not
all sexual experiences release unpleasure, which usually most of them
release far greater pleasure, "this reproduction of most of them is linked
with uninhibitable pleasure" (Masson, 1985, p. 209). This is what Freud
called "compulsion". Henceforth, following Freud's thoughts in this
missive, the process of translation from one successive registration to
"successive epochs of life" will remain inhibited while the sexual event
is constant (i.e., uninhibitable) . In a way, we could understand this as
a female patient pointed out: "I don't understand why I need to talk
about this [an early sexual experience] if it happened a long time ago."
In short, we could say that that which "happened a long time ago" was
never inhibited and thus is happening hie et nunc.
On the other hand, let us focus for a brief moment on the critiques
that have plagued an ubiquitous commonplace signaling towards
a certain Freudian pansexualism. Apparently, everything that Freud
considered relevant had to do exclusively with sex. In a way, these
remarks are right and wrong at the same time. There is, indeed, a
special place for sex in psychoanalysis, but this is usually not the locus
many individuals (and even psychoanalysts) tend to imagine it to be.
Rather than being a firm ground of placement and archetypal symbols,
it is more closely related to a cornerstone of disjunction-one might
even say, the unobtainable missing piece of an undeterminable puzzle.
If Freud pinpointed so adamantly towards sex, it meant that it had to
do with something other than everything. Sex, in this case, is basically
linked to nothing.

The subject stumbles with its limit

From its etymological roots, sex is related to a scission, Latin for sectus,
secare, "to divide or cut". Therefore, regardless of the various studies
applied to defining sex as inscribed by discursive acts, i.e., merely a
"performatively enacted signification", there is something more to sex
than just a social construction or an aprioristic substance. As Copjec
contests: "If sex is something that is 'made up,' it can also be w1made"
(Copjec, 1994, p. 202). This does not enable the individual to make /
unmake sex at will, but rather it allows the possibility of establishing a
division within, an internal fissure. Consequently, when psychoanalysis
confronts the question of sex, in fact, it is attempting to comprehend the
problem of limit. In this sense, the concept of limit is best understood
XiV I N TRO DUCT I O N

as the subject's finitude, most importantly distinguishing it as a sexed

being. Nevertheless, this does not mean that sex is exclusive to human
activity, since other animals employ it as means of reproduction as well.
In order to maintain this specificity of sex, one should not rush into
balancing sex with gender, nor reducing it to a discursive practice, a
biological aim, or a cultural phenomenon. This is why in Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality, published in 1905 (Freud, 1905d/ 1953), Freud
clearly described a significant fact concerning sex: there is absolutely
nothing natural about it.
In relation to the concept of limit, we are confronted with the problem
of language. What exactly is this limit about? What does it limit? In this
sense, such limit should not be taken as a siege or a stretched-out fence,
but rather the subject's division through the effects of language, ergo
a sectis. Furthermore, this limit is what enables the subject to speak, a
limit concerning the subject's finitude, not as a complete entity, but as a
constitutive mark that allows the individual to emerge as a split subject
in itself. In short, sex is there to remind us that we are never complete.
However, this doesn't imply then that there is a complementarity to this
incompleteness, henceforth Lacan's foremost statement "Il n'y a pas de
rapport sexuel". In fact, the limit is established in order to delineate the
incommensurability between sex and sense. If according to Copjec, "sex
is the stumbling block of sense" (Copjec, 1994, p. 204), this means that
sex doesn't aim to make sense, that it is most assuredly ridiculous as it
opposes all types of interpretations that want to reduce it into some­
thing palpable and enduring of signification. On that account, sex is the
rock where the subject constantly stumbles upon.

For sex is here not an incomplete entity but a totally empty one-it is
one to which no predicate can be attached. [ . ] Sex is disjoined from
. .

the signifier, it becomes that which does not communicate itself,

that which marks the subject as unknowable. To say that the subject
is sexed is to say that it is no longer possible to have any knowledge
of him or her. Sex serves no other function than to limit reason, to remove
the subject from the realm of possible experience or pure understanding.
(Copjec, 1994, p. 207)

Sex is irreducible to meaning or knowledge. This is why psychoanalysis

can not be formulated as an erotology nor a science of sex (scientia sexu­
al is), as Foucault misleadingly contested. Following this argumentation,
 I NT R O D U C T I O N XV

in the final class of his eleventh seminar (June 24th, 1964), Lacan asserts
that psychoanalysis has proven to be uncreative in the realm of sexual­
ity. He says: " [Psychoanalysis] teaches us nothing new about the opera­
tion of sex. Not even a tiny piece of erotological teclmique has emerged
from it" (Lacan, 1981, p. 266). In line with Lacan, this knowledge of sex
is better left to be discovered in books of Arab, Hindu or Chinese tradi­
tion. But, then, what is it that psychoanalysis presents when dealing
with sex? Lacan continues: "Psychoanalysis touches on sexuality only
in as much as, in the form of the drive, it manifests itself in the defile of
the signifier, in which is constituted the dialectic of the subject in the
double stage of alienation and separation" (Lacan, 1981, p. 266) .1 While
sexuality is not of the exclusive domain of psychoanalysis in terms of
knowledge and technique, it is, in fact, bundled up and swirled into
the jumbled grounds of the drive. In conclusion, Freud was not, by all
means, an early sexologist, but rather what Merleau-Ponty has claimed:
a true philosopher of the flesh.

Lacanian gourmet
Sex does not engrave itself within the symbolic: only the failure of its
inscription is marked in the symbolic. In this matter, sex escapes the
symbolic restraints of language, however, it is by this failure that it
manifests itself through the symbolic, e.g., symptoms or dream life. If
we understand sex as the limit of reason, a failure in the signification
process, then it is necessary to compare sex to an open latch where its
attributes and qualities do not make us fundamentally human at all.
On the conh·ary, sex is what dehumanises us, it sets the field for a cer­
tain deviant road away from our "human" nature. According to Alenka
Zupancic, what is considered sexual for psychoanalysis is, in fact, a
radical disorientation factor, an inherent contradiction that doesn't nec­
essarily make us individuals, but fairly subjects. She explains: "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 emerging of the
subject" (Zupancic, 2008, p. 12) . In other words, it is through the scis­
sion of the effects of language that cause an intrinsic limit by which a

1 Italics are mine.

XVi I N T R O DU C T I O N

subject comes about. How so? This is where psychoanalysis touches on

sexuality in the form of the drive.
In his text "Position of the unconscious", written for the 1960
Bonneval Colloquium but rewritten in 1964 as a major contribution
to Lacan's eleventh seminar, we are introduced to a novel cogitation
to the concept of libido. Libido is not a free flowing fluid, reduced to
mere sexual "energy", nor can it be divided up. Instead, Lacan takes the
notion of libido and formulates it as an organ in its own right. He says:
"This image shows 'libido' to be what it is-namely an organ, to which
its habits make it far more akin than to a force field" (Lacan, 1964/2006,
p. 718) . But, what is this image? The image Lacan talks about is that of
a lamella: "something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. [ . . . ] It
goes everywhere. And as it is something [ . . ] that is related to what the
.

sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed
beings, immortal-because it survives any division, any scissiparous
intervention" (Lacan, 1981, p. 197). In short, the lamella is unending
and indestructible. However, the importance for this mythological con­
tribution from Lacan is addressed toward what happens to the subject
in relation to libido.
In accordance with Lacan, the sexed being loses "something" through
sex, something that is considered an intimate part of the subject itself.
In order to illustrate this loss, Lacan applies a cooking metaphor, thus
inviting us into the unruly delights of Lacanian cuisine by showing
us how to make an hommelette. By doing so, he jokes around with the
homonym usage of homme (man) and omelette (beaten eggs quickly
cooked) as he introduces this neologism. He writes: "Man (!'Homme) is
made by breaking the egg, but so is the 'Manlet' [l'Hommelette]" (Lacan,
1964/2006, p. 717) . He later continues to demonstrate that this "large
crepe [ ] moves like an amoeba, so utterly flat that it can slip under
. . .

doors, omniscient as it is guided by the pure life instinct, and immortal

as it is fissiparous" (Lacan, 1964/2006, p. 717). This hommelette is nothing
but the metastasis of the lamella or libido once the egg is broken and the
placenta removed. If it is divided or cut up, it then reproduces itself like
the Hydra in the ever-enduring task of seeking a pure existence through
means of partiality: "My lamella represents here the part of a living being
that is lost when that being is produced through the straits of sex" (La can,
1964/2006, p. 718). h1 other words, once that "something" is lost, the lost
object in situ, then the partiality of the drive will seek through the lamel­
la's margins-the erogenous zones and orifices which generate gaps to
the unconscious-a divergent road towards a vacillating reunification.
 INTRODUCTION XVi i

However, this operation can not be left exclusively in the field of the
drive, it must be partially experienced and attained precisely in the field
of the Other (according to Laplanche (1992), the sexual invariable leads
to the questfon of the other). Henceforth, if sex is the breach that causes
the subject to emerge through the effects of language, then something
is always subtracted by means of sexuality: immortality. Likewise, just
as sex is fixed as the mediator to the drive, it is also the founding stone
only as a cut (secare) for the subject where the partial drive proliferates
into its own vicissitudes. When the egg is broken the partial drive exudes
the subject into a haven separate from its own nature.
Lastly, let us recall that sex is an empty entity. What is this empti­
ness all about? Does it represent an image of a limitless void, or does
it convey the breaking point, a form of gap, between the subject and
the drive? This empty entity would be exactly nothing. Therefore this
places us once again remotely closer to the constitution of the subject,
if not exactly on it. Lacan expresses it as follows: "the fact of being born
with the signifier, the subject is born divided. The subject is this emer­
gence, which, just before, as subject, was nothing, but which, having
scarcely appeared, solidifies into a signifier" (Lacan, 1981, p. 199). In
other words, before the signifier is inscribed the subject is nothing, and
out of this nothingness, the subject becomes visible through the means
of an inscription (i.e., a signifier) . This is why one should not take this
nothingness (neant) as an abysmal vacuum, but certainly as a nothing
from which the subject emanates. It is this nothingness that counts as
something, not in nihilo, but as a rupture in the subject and its effects of
language through the displacements caused by the drive. In short, this
nothing operates as the support for unconscious desire. So, instead of
professing the metaphysical apothegm ex nihilo nihil fit ("nothing comes
from nothing"), we are tempted to conclude with the following: sectus
ex nihilo. Or in psychoanalytical terms: the knowledge of sex only cul­
minates in the experience of castration.

From Ljubljana . . to elsewhere

.

The purpose for this book started in Mexico City, during Mladen Dolar 's
and Alenka ZupanciC's first visit as they offered a series of lectures sym­
bolically entitled "El sexo y la nada: el cine entre el psicoanalisis y la filosofta"
(Sex and nothing: cinema between psychoanalysis and philosophy) at
the Universidad lberoamericana and Cine Tonala. However, the idea
of compiling their lectures into a small book led to propose another
XViii I NTRO D U C T I O N

onslaught of ideas: the gathering of various authors from Ljubljana and

elsewhere. Before we continue, I believe it is important to offer a brief
background detailing the whereabouts of some key figures that led to
what might be called the first generation of Slovenian scholars curious
about the intersections between philosophy and psychoanalysis, and
the residual effects it had elsewhere.
In a sense, the Slovenian sprawl has been progressive since the
mid-seventies. Starting with the incursion during Lacan's final semi­
nars until his death in 1981, four individuals (Dolar, Mocnik, Riha, and
Zizek) decided to make Paris their temporary home. In 1986, at a col­
loquium in Paris on 1/Hysteria and Obsession11, Slavoj Zizek met Joan
Copjec, who was then an editor for the influential journal October. She
immediately invited Zizek-at this point still completely unknown to
the American public-to publish an essay on Hitchcock in the journal,
and the following year selected him to be a keynote speaker at a confer­
ence on Lacan's Television. In a review of the October conference, Zizek
acquired one of his most famous epithets, 11the giant of Ljubljana��, and
thus forged a new path beyond Ljubljana in the United States.2
But the dissemination of Zizek's ideas and the work of the rest of
the Slovenian philosophers took some time to catch on.3 While Paris
remained a city of analysis and academic education for many Slovenian
scholars, just like Berlin currently holds the same place of honor,
it wasn't until the middle of the 1990s that Copjec and the graduate
student cohort founded the on-going journal Umbr(a), in the Center
for Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University of Buffalo, in 1995
(Ji:ittkandt & Copjec, 2013), thus opening a space for new vibrant phi­
losophers from arotmd the world, receiving significant contributions by
various Slovenian pundits. Notwithstanding, the United States hasn't
been the only recipient of the Ljubljanski thought, there has been a wide­
spread amount of work related to these philosophers in other parts of
the world like England, Argentina, Australia, Korea, to name a few.
Strictly speaking, it would be unfair to reduce the complete arsenal
of Ljubljanski thought to merely a troika, like Zizek likes to address his
close friends. In such matter, the intersection between German idealism
(specifically Hegel), Lacanian psychoanalysis, a strong influence of

2 Special thanks to Joan C o pjec for sharing this anecdote and for her description of the
events.
3 One of the first English-based journals to publish works by a Slovenian author was

Analysis, a journal issued by the Australian Center for Psychoanalysis. See Analysis, num.
3,1991.
 I N TR O DUCT I O N XiX

Marxism (indebted to Slovenian Marxist Bozidar Debenjak), and a pecu­

liar keen interest in cinema (e.g., Alfred Hitchcock and Ernst Lubitsch),
as well as an active political framework, has been highly regarded as
the wholesome theoretical bone to gnaw on from these comrades: an
emblematic distinction from many in Ljubljana and elsewhere that pur­
sue the same struggle to keep thought and jouissance alive and kicking.
There is a first generation of philosophers like Mladen Dolar, Rastko
Mocnik, Rado Riha, and Slavoj Zizek, later joined by Eva Bahovec and
Jelica Sumic, that conform the genesis, but there are others like Miran
Bozovic whose philosophical work is influential, and finally others in
the likes of Alenka ZupanCic, Renata Salecl, or Peter Klepec that may
be situated as part of a second generation. However, there is a younger
crowd building their own voice like Sarno Tomsic or Tadej Troha, and
others (like Agon Hamza, who is actually from Kosovo, or Ukraine-born
Julie Reshe, who studied under the supervision of Alenka ZupanCic) that
integrate what can be possibly defined as a third generation of thought.
But there is elsewhere too . . . friends and colleagues from Australia,
Brazil, Mexico, and the United States that are included in this publica­
tion and that have also been stirred by the Ljubljanski zmaji.
As a result, this book consists of two parts. The first one, "From
Ljubljana .. . ", compiles several papers from Slovenian authors, while
the second part, " . . . to elsewhere", is an extension of their ideas by dif­
ferent psychoanalysts and philosophers from abroad. This is not a com­
pilation describing a school of thought or what has been unofficially
named as the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. It is not our inten­
tion to draw a picture of what is the contemporary framework of
psychoanalysis or to reduce a city's historical compendium to single
figures. What this compilation tries to embark upon is a minor dialogue
between colleagues and friends interested in the footsteps that bridge
psychoanalysis and philosophy, the links between ljubezen and thought,
where if something emerges from this ensemble of essays is a discussion
around . . . nothing.
I would like to thank (hvala) each author that generously participated
in the completion of this project and for kindly regarding the publica­
tion of their articles with the greatest and utmost trust. I would also
like to express my gratitude to Paul Boshears, Berit Jane Soli-Holt, and
John Gullick for their support in proofreading the material included in
this endeavor. The only thing that remains after everything is gone is
precisely nothing, however it is through this countable nothingness that
we can start again.
XX I N T R ODU C T I O N

To conclude with this introduction, I a m reminded of the Slovenian

illustrator, Damijan Stepancic (2010), and his children's book Zgodba o
sidru (The story of the anchor), a story about the imaginary origins of an
anchor located in the middle of the city's main square. It is a tale situat­
ing Ljubljana at its epicenter of imagination. Who left the anchor there?
What ship forgot to take it as it sailed away from the city? Why was it
left there? All of these questions unravel during a little boy's dream
of a nightscape while walking the streets of Ljubljana and meeting the
captain of a floating ship who is, curiously enough, in search of drag­
ons. Each colorful illustration details the story of the captain's ship, its
journeys, and how it briefly anchored in the capital. While both pro­
tagonists are marveled by the city's landscape, they are immediately
shocked to see that one of the four dragon statues is missing; when all of
the sudden, they feel a grappling thrust from underneath the deck. As
they venture down to see who or what was it that caused the commo­
tion, they are awed to find a puckish dragon chewing on the anchor 's
chain. Without delay, the captain and his ship sail off into the skies leav­
ing the mooring behind. At this moment, it is very hard not to relate the
causality of this mishap and what Freud called false sexual theories.
Isn't infantile sexuality the anchor for the unconscious? However, if sex
is not the anchor for humanity, then what is?

References
Copjec, J. (1994). Read my desire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Freud, S. (1905d/1953). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S. E., 7.
London: Hogarth.
Jottkandt, S., & Copjec, J. (eds. ) (2013). Penumbr(a). Melbourne: re.press .
Lacan, J. (1964/2006). Position of the Unconscious. E crits . New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1981). The Sem inar of Jacques Lacan. B ook XI. The Four Fundamen tal
Concepts of Psychoanalysis . New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Laplanche, J. (1992). La revo lution copernicienne inachevee. Paris: Aubier.
Masson, J. M. (ed. ) (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess . 1887-1904. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Stepancic, D. (2010). Zgodba o sidru . Ljubljana: Mladinska knija.
Zupancic, A. (2008). Why psychoanalysis ? Uppsala: Nsu Press.
 PART I

FROM LJUBLJANA ...

C HA P TE R ONE

Sex u a l i ty w i th i n t h e l i m i ts of reaso n
a lo n e

Alenka ZupanCic

The state of sexual things

When we think of the original outrage provoked by the Freudian notion
of sexuality (which included infantile sexuality)-it is very easy, from
today's point of view, to miss what was and still is going on in this par­
ticular resistance, and to attribute the violent reaction to the Victorian
morals of Freud's time.1 We have learned to "tolerate" a lot and to
speak of sexuality quite openly; we know that "sexuality is nothing to
be ashamed of", and that it is even good for our (mental and physical)
health. We also think that Freud's discoveries about the determinant
role of the "psychosexual" in our development have become largely
integrated in the therapeutic practices of psychoanalytical lineage,
even if in somewhat diluted form. So it might come as a big surprise to
learn that this is far from being the case. In 2009, Shalev and Yerushalmi
published a stunning study concerning the status of sexuality among
contemporary therapists involved in psychoanalytic psychotherapy
(Shalev & Yerushalmi, 2009). The results of this study prompted Kaveh

1 A first version of this text has been published in Hartel, I. (ed.). Eragene Gefahrenzonen:

Aktuel/e Produktionen des (infantilen) Sexuellen. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2013.

3
4 SEX A N D NOT H I N G

Zamanian to publish an article in which he sums up some results of this

study in the following way:

With respect to the first theme, the therapists in the Shalev and
Yerushalmi study tended to believe that sexuality serves as a defense
against deeper and more difficult issues such as intimacy and self­
identity. [ . . . ] In fact, sexual issues were viewed as an impediment to
the goal of helping patients adjust to their surrounding and overall
functioning. The third factor was a blurring of lines and utter con­
fusion about intimacy versus sexuality. [ . . ] They focused on sexual
.

encounters rather than psychosexual aspects of development.

Amazingly, two therapists expressed that "sexual issues should
be treated by sexologists and not by psychotherapists. " Notably,
most of the therapists in the study did not separate sexuality from
intimate relationships and even confused love and sexuality. As
an example, one therapist concluded that his patients "rarely talk
about sexual issues" and that their discussion of romantic rela­
tionships "never [has] sexual connotations." The fourth and final
factor, and for me the most troubling, was the therapists' tendency
to avoid sexual issues out of discomfort. Several therapists in the
study experienced discussion of sexual matters as a "form of hos­
tility directed at them" and even felt "abused by their patients."
Again, shockingly, one therapist described one of her patients in
the following manner: "It was as if he was thinking, this is therapy
so I can talk about everything" (Zamanian, 2011, p. 38).

Considering Freud's formulation of the one and only rule or imperative

involved in psychoanalytic treatment, which is to say absolutely any­
thing that comes to our mind, however unimportant or else improper it
may seem to us, this last line actually sounds like an excellent psycho­
analytic joke.
If this is the state of things in "psychoanalytic psychotherapy", we
should not be surprised that the general Stimmung concerning sexuality
is not very different. This is in no way contradicted by the blatant
media exposure and their use of sexuality. There is no contradiction,
because what is involved here is a systematic reduction of the notion
of sexuality-its reduction to (different) "sexual practices" as constitut­
ing "sexual intercourse" . This is clearly how sexuality comes across for
the therapists involved in Shalev's and Yerushalmi's study: as naughty
things that one does or does not, and that one can eventually harass
 S E XU A L I T Y W I T I -I I N T H E L I M I T S OF R E A SO N A L O N E 5

his or her 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". The ironic point is, of course, that for Freud sexu­
ality was the."deeper and more difficult issue" behind different sexual
practices-that it was something inherently problematic, disruptive
of identities-or that "only a very small portion of unsatisfied sexual
tendencies [ . . ] can find outlet in coitus or other sexual acts" (Freud,
.

1910k, p . 137) . What is going on here could be thus described as follows.

In the first step, one diverges completely from the Freudian notion of
sexuality, reducing the latter to a factual description of a certain kind
of phenomenon. Then, in a second step, one discovers that sexuality is
exactly what one has reduced it to in the first step: namely an overrated
epiphenomenon. When one assumes, for example, that psychoanalysis
claims that all our (neurotic) problems come from bad or insufficient
sex, there is no more room left for-what? Psychoanalysis, precisely
(Freud, 1910k, p. 173). Which is exactly what the two seemingly oppo­
site therapeutic perspectives-the one claiming that sex is the answer to
everything, and the one dismissing sex as overrated-have in common:
there is no room left for psychoanalysis in neither of them. There is no
room left for psychoanalysis, because the latter sees the impossibility of
a full sexual satisfaction-in the absence of all external obstacles-as a
constitutive part of the unconscious sexuality as such.
In the wider field of theory (contemporary philosophy, cultural the­
ory, gender studies) the Freudian/Lacanian concept of sexuality and of
its central importance also continues to function as the line along which
some of the major struggles and dividing lines take place. This can take
the form of simply dismissing it (sexuality and sexual difference has
no proper ontological dignity or relevance, but constitutes a kind of
epiphenomenon), or the form of a more direct confrontation, combat
against psychoanalysis and its concept of (unconscious) sexuality.
In this perspective, psychoanalysis and its take on sexuality is seen as
more or less siding with the oppressive norms, and/ or as technology
of biopolitics (Foucault) . Gender theory, often and amply inspired by
Foucault, has largely forsaken the category of "sexual difference" in
favour of the neutered category of gender. As Joan Copjec, who pointed
this out, comments:

[ . ] it is specifically the sex of sexual difference that dropped out

. .

when this term was replaced by gender. Gender theory performed

one major feat: it removed the sex from sex. For while gender
6 S E X A N D N O TH I N G

theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to ques­

tion what sex or sexuality is; in brief, 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 quali­
fier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit
naughty. (Copjec, 2012, p. 31)

We can say that, in respect to the Freudian category of sexuality, the

move that Copjec detects here is exactly the same as the move involved
in "contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy". So, what exactly
is lost in translation when we pass from "sex" to "gender"? If this is
indeed a "defence" against something involved in the Freudian theory
of sexuality, what exactly is this something? For one thing is sure: we
must resist the temptation of taking the defence against sexuality as
self-explanatory; it is not "sex" that can explain the defence, rather
the contrary, it is the defence that could shed some light on something
inherently problematic about the nature of sexuality-something which
inevitably puts us on the track of some deeply metaphysical issues.

Where do the adults come from?

One-let's call it progressive psychoanalytic-explanation traces the
discomfort in sexuality not so much to the difference, as to the irreduc­
ible proximity or continuity between infantile and adult sexuality.
The paradoxical status of infantile sexuality as discovered by Freud
could be summed up in two points. Firstly, it exists; yet secondly, it exists
in the absence of both real/biological and symbolic frameworks of its
existence. It exists in the absence of both natural and cultural parameters.
Biologically speaking, sexual organs are not up to their function; and
symbolically speaking, children have no means of understanding prop­
erly and making sense of what is happening to them (sexually). One can
understand that this kind of undefined, free-floating zone, unattached
to any symbolic chain, can function as particularly sensitive-both in
itself as well as in the imaginary of the adults. But there is a further
and more important reason. If infantile sexuality constitutes such a
dangerous and sensible "zone", it is not simply because of its difference
and contrast with sexuality of adults, but rather the opposite, because
of their proximity. If infantile sexuality is something that is covered
 S E XU A L I T Y W I T H I N THE LIM ITS OF R E A SO N A L ON E 7

neither by biology nor by the symbolic ("culture"), the next and perhaps
greatest scandal of Freudian theory consists in suggesting that, all in all,
this state of things doesn't change all that much when we become adults.
_
The "maturity" of sexual organs dramatically fails to make these organs
function as exclusive sites of sexuality as well as to produce a solid basis
for clear understanding and making sense of our sexuality. 2
Jean Laplanche probably went the furthest to expose this conflict and
duality of the sexual by introducing the difference between drive sexu­
ality (le sexual) and instinctual sexuality (le sexuel). In brief: le sexual is
essentially related to different partial drives and their satisfaction; it is
not innate, not object-based, and not procreative. It refers to autoerotic,
polymorphous, perverse, nongender-constricted, protean sexuality.
Instinctual sexuality, on the other hand, is hormonally based, and more
or less pre-programmed. This is the type of sexuality that arrives after
pre-puberty, that is after drive or infantile sexuality. So that "when it
comes to sexuality, man is subject to the greatest of paradoxes: What
is acquired through the drives precedes what is innate and instinc­
tual, in such a way that, at the time it emerges, instinctual sexuality,
which is adaptive, finds the seat already taken, as it were, by infantile
drives, already and always present in the unconscious" (Laplanche,
2002, p. 49).
In the same line of reasoning, and based on Freud's Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality (Freud, 1905d/2000), one can sum these issues
up by the following narrative: the "genital sexual organisation" is far
from being primordial. It involves a unification of the originally het­
erogeneous, dispersed, always-already compound sexual drive, com­
posed of different partial drives, such as looking, touching, sucking,
and so on. This unification bears two major characteristics. Firstly, it is
always a somehow forced and artificial unification (it catmot be viewed
simply as a natural teleological result of reproductive maturation) . Sec­
ondly, it is never really fully achieved or accomplished, which is to say
that it never transforms the sexual drive into an organic unity, with
all its components ultimately serving one and the same purpose. The
"normal", "healthy" human sexuality is thus a paradoxical, artificial
naturalisation of the originally de-naturalised drives (de-naturalised in

2 Thi s is, of course, not to say that there is no i mp ortant difference between infantile

and adult sexuality or that se xu al abuse of children is any less condemnable, rather the
contrary.
8 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

the sense of their departing from the "natural" aims of self-preservation

and /or the logic of a pure need as unaffected by another supplemen­
tary satisfaction). One could even say that human sexuality is "sexual"
(and not simply "reproductive") precisely insofar as the unification
at stake, the tying of all the drives to one single purpose, never really
works, but allows for different partial drives to continue their circula1�
self-perpetuating activity.
Yet, there might be something wrong with this account, at two
points. Firstly, in how it advances from the supposedly original, free
and chaotic multiplicity to an (always) forceful unification; and, sec­
ondly, in the way in which (much in line with Laplanche and his notion
of "le sexual") situates the properly (or "humanly") sexual of sexuality
simply on the side of the drives and their satisfaction (as opposed to
the instinctual /reproductive sexuality) . Not that this is utterly wrong,
rather things are a bit more complicated, and something crucial is miss­
ing in this account. This something concerns precisely the point of the
encounter between enjoyment (the drive as surplus pleasure that tends
to be produced in the process of the satisfaction of vital needs) and
sexuality. It is precisely at this point that the strongest resistance to the
notion of infantile sexuality is at work: what makes the child's sucking
of its thumb (or any other pleasure seeking activity) sexual? Is it sim­
ply that we can deduce this retroactively from adult sexuality in which
these surplus satisfactions play an obvious and important role? This
seems to be the answer of what I called above "progressive psychoana­
lytic explanation": if we look at adult sexuality, we can see that many of
its elements (that is many ways of finding satisfaction) are things that
children "practice" as well.
One major drawback of this account is that it somehow leaves
out the central concept of psychoanalysis: the unconscious. Hence
Laplanche's adjustment of this theory, which could be briefly put
as follows: (Infantile) enjoyment becomes sexual because it is
contaminated, from the very outset, by way of the child's universe
being constantly intruded by "enigmatic signifiers", that is by the
unconscious and sexually charged messages of adults. 3 Infantile activ­
ities that seek pleasure for the sake of pleasure are sexual because

3 According to Laplanche, enigmatic signifiers are enigmatic for the adults as well, and

the sexuality intruding the infant's universe is, for the most part, unconscious. See for
example Laplanche (1999).
 S E X U A L I T Y W I TH I N T H E L I M ITS O F R EASON A LO N E 9

of their entanglement with the signifiers which, so to say by default,

involve the unconscious (sexuality). We will say more about the nature
of this intrinsic link between the signifier and sexuality a bit later, for
the time being it suffices to emphasise the following: what makes the
enjoyment related to the drives sexual is the unconscious and not, for
example, their entanglement with sexuality in the narrower sense of
the term (sexual intercourse) . When the latter takes place, it can only
become part of the already existing sexuality.
This account, while indeed helping us to focus on the heart of the
problem, nevertheless leaves the latter unanswered. Namely, what is it
that makes something about sexuality constitutively unconscious? That
is to say unconscious even when it first occurs, and not simply due to a
subsequent repression? What is it about sexuality that can only appear
as repressed? What is it about sexuality that only registers in reality in
the form of repression (and not as something that first is, and is then
repressed)? The relation between the unconscious and sexuality is not
that between some content and its container; sexuality pertains to the
very being-there of the unconscious.

Christianity and 11polymorphous perversion "

According to the common and general perception, the cultural (social,
moral, religious) normatively promotes the so-called natural sexuality
(heterosexual intercourse) and tends to ban or repress the drive sexuality,
which is seen as perverse, a-social, serving no purpose outside itself
and hence escaping individual and social means of control . . . but is this
really so? Is it not possible that-beyond a very superficial level-this
perception could be dramatically wrong? Christianity is usually taken
as the magisterial example of the kind of attitude that bans the drive
sexuality and promotes only "purposeful" reproductive coupling. Yet,
it suffices to shift the perspective just a little bit (and at the right end) ,
as Lacan does in the following passage, to get a completely different
picture:

Christ, even when resurrected from the dead, is valued for his body,
and his body is the means by which communion in his presence is
incorporation-oral drive-with which ClU'ist's wife, the Church
as it is called, contents itself very well, having nothing to expect
from copulation.
10 S E X A N D NO T H I N G

In everything that followed from the effects of Christianity,

particularly in art-and it's in this respect that I coincide with the
"baroquism" with which I accept to be clothed-everything is
exhibition of the body evoking jouissance-and you can lend cre­
dence to the testimony of someone who has just come back from
an orgy of churches in Italy-but without copulation. If copulation
isn't present, it's no accident. It's just as much out of place there
as it is in human reality, to which it nevertheless provides suste­
nance with the fantasies by which that reality is constituted. (Lacan,
1999, p. 113)

What is the point of this stunning and stunningly true passage? On the
one hand, there is nothing necessarily a-social in partial drives: as auto­
focused as they may well be, they nevertheless function as the glue
of society, as the very stuff of the communion. On the other hand, there
seems to be something profoundly disruptive at stake in "copulation".
For the kind of (social) bond it proposes, Christianity does not need
the latter, which functions as the superfluous element, something on
top of what would be (ideally) needed, and hence as disturbing. This
is why even the "purest" sort of procreative sexual copulation is con­
nected with sin. Or, as Saint Augustine has famously pointed out: sexu­
ality is not the original sin, but the punishment for it, and the locus of
its perpetuation-it is subsequent addition to the original creation. It is
something problematic enough to be seen as a punishment, a curse.
Indeed, as favoured as it is in the religion's doxa, "natural (procreative)
intercourse" is utterly banned from the religious imaginary, whereas
the latter does not recede from, for example, images of canonised saints
eating excrements of another person.4 If we take a look at eminent sto­
ries (and pictures) of Christian martyrdom, they are surprisingly full of
partial objects in the strict Freudian meaning of the term. A real treasury
of images of objects related to different partial drives. Saint Agatha's
cut-off breast and Saint Lucy's gouged-out eyes are just two of the most
well-known examples, portrayed hundreds of times by different artists.5
If looked at from this perspective, Christianity can indeed appear as

4 See for example The Autobiography of Saint Margaret Mary. Charlotte, 2009.
5 For a really impressive collection of these images it suffices to search the internet for

Saint Agatha (and Saint Lucy)-images.

 SE X U A L I T Y W I T H I N T H E L I M I T S O F R E A S O N A L O N E 11

centred around the "jouissance of the body" (Lacan, 1999, p. 113). 6 Par­
tial drives and the passion or satisfaction they procure are abundantly
present in many aspects of Christianity and constitute an important
part of its official imaginary. In this precise sense one could even go so
far as to say that in its libidinal aspect the Christian religion massively
relies on what belongs to the register of "infantile sexuality", that is,
to the satisfaction and bonds that take place by way of partial objects,
with the exclusion of sexual coupling. The pure enjoyment, "enjoyment
for the sake of enjoyment" is not exactly what is banned here; what is
banned, or repressed, is its link to sexuality.
It is clearly of utter importance for the Christian religion not to
acknowledge these (polymorphous perverse) satisfactions of the drives
as sexual, while not banning them in themselves. But why exactly? Why
this necessity not simply to fight all enjoyment, as it is often wrongly
believed, but to separate enjoyment from sexuality (in the narrower sense
of the term) as neatly as possible? It is as if the strong social pressure
put on "natural sexuality" (copulation) to function as the norm were to
hide its own abyssal negativity, much more than to keep the supposedly
disruptive partial drives away.
This observation might point us in the right direction concerning the
question: what exactly is being banned or repressed here? It seems to
concern some kind of ontological negativity of the nature itself.
In other words, this questioning brings us not so much to the cul­
tural, as to the "natural" aspect of sexuality: reproduction and sexual
difference. It is as if this "natural" aspect was in fact the most problem­
atic. There seems to be something in nature itself that is dramatically
wrong at this point. The problem is not that nature is "always already
cultural", but rather that nature lacks something to be Nature (our
Other) in the first place. Culture is not something that mediates, splits,
de-naturalises natural sexuality (as supposedly present in animals, for
instance); it is being generated at the very locus where something in the
nature (as sexual nature) is lacking.
One way of putting this is to say that there is no sexual instinct
that is no knowledge ("law") inherent to sexuality which would be
able to reliably guide it. Yet this claim can itself be understood in two
ways. According to the usual perspective, this lack of sexual instinct

6 The "doctrine speaks of the incarnation of God in a body, and assumes that the pas­
sion suffered in that person constituted another person's jouissance".
12 SE X A N D N OT H I N G

(as a reliable auto-pilot) is perceived as something specifically human,

induced by human constitution (and culture following from it) . In other
words, there is sexual instinct in nature (in animals), but not in human
beings (who are the point of exception in respect to nature) . Humanity,
at its most fundamental level, is a deviation from Nature, and nota­
bly from the Animal. With humanity, something particular occurs that
makes it decline from Nature and complicate the way that the laws of
the latter function in the territory of the human.
But there is still another possible perspective on this. Namely,
humanity is that point of nature where its lack of knowledge acquires a
specific and singular form. It is not an exception to nature, a deviation
from it, but the point of a specific articulation of nature's own inherent
negativity. There is knowledge in nature ("knowledge in the real" as
Lacan calls it), but this knowledge lacks at the point of sexuation, and
this includes sexuated animals.
What, then, is the difference between human animal and other (sex­
ual) animals? A difference that is not based on man's exception from
nature, but on a different kind of articulation of a certain impasse of the
sexuated nature as such?
If we start out from a fundamental lack of knowledge in nature
(nature doesn't know how to be sexually, and we share this with other
sexuated animals), the difference is the difference between two ways
of not knowing: a simple way, and a way that is in itself split in two.
Animals do not know (that they don't know) . Not completely joking,
we could say that sexuality is not problematic for animals because they
do not know that it actually is? Now, what distinguishes the human
animal is not that it knows (that is, doesn't know), and that it is con­
scious or aware of this lack of sexual knowledge in nature, but that it is
"unconscious of it". In other words, with human animal the "we don't
know" (that we don't know) is of a slightly different kind, it is in itself
twofold or split: It involves not knowing that we know ( . . . that we don't
know). Which is one of the best definitions of the unconscious (.Zizek,
2008, p. 457) .
Freud's discovery of the unconscious was something very precise,
and it went against two predominant views on the question. On the one
hand, it directly challenged a traditional philosophical view in which

7 They sometimes do very "strange" things as part of sexual (mating) rites, but they do
not seem to find anything "strange" about it, it does not seem to bother them in the least.
 S E X U A L ITY W I TH I N T H E L I M I TS O F R EA S O N A LO N E 13

" psychical" (or "mental") meant " conscious", so that to speak of "uncon­
scious psychical processes" amounted to a contradiction in terms. On
the other hand, Freud's conceptual suggestion was also very different
from the existing psychological notion of the unconscious (shared also
by certain philosophers), which was used merely to indicate the con­
trast with the conscious: there are psychical processes going on with­
out us being aware of them. Freud's thesis was much stronger: there
exists another more specific form of the unconscious, which refers to
something inadmissible to consciousness. This implied several important
things. It implied, for instance, that the unconscious thinks; the uncon­
scious is not the other of thinking, but is itself a mode of thinking. It is
also a knowledge: a knowledge that doesn't know itself. This "doesn't
know itself" is not, howevet� the result of a lack of reflectivity (lack of
reflective knowledge), on the contrary, it is the very form of its exis­
tence. The unconscious is not "pre-reflective", it is the constitutive ele­
ment of the reflectivity as such.
The singular and revolutionary Freudian notion of the unconscious is
thus not simply about not knowing as opposed to knowing. It is about
knowing in the form of not-knowing, or about not-knowing as a form
of knowing. A knowledge smuggles in, yet knowledge that only exists
in the form of its own repression. And-we are thus returning to the
initial question-it is this originally repressed knowledge (knowledge that
has never existed otherwise but as repressed) that sexualises the enjoy­
ment (the surplus pleasure related to the drives) .
The quintessential biblical story that casts sexuality and knowledge
as inseparably bound to the scene of the original sin is thus pointing
in the right direction. There is something concerning the (signifying)
knowledge that is constitutively involved in the becoming sexual ("sin­
ful") of sexuality. And in this way we can now come back to infantile
("polymorphous perverse") sexuality. According to Freud-at least in
one of his accounts (Freud, 1908c/2000)-infantile sexuality becomes
"sexual" when traversed by (a quest for) knowledge, usually organised
around the famous question: "Where do the children come from?"

Do we really know where the children come from ?

One of Freud's major insights relates to infantile sexuality as the realm
within which the quest (desire) for knowledge takes off. This Freudian
genealogy of the passion for knowledge is in itself complex and
14 SEX A N D N OT H I N G

intriguing, although it may look extremely simple (Freud, 1 908c /2000) .

This is its basic outline: there is no original drive for knowledge in
people. It only takes place at points of existential difficulty, for example
when children feel threatened by the fact (or else the possibility) of get­
ting a sibling. (Procreative) sexuality very soon becomes an obvious
player in all questions of being (there) of oneself and of others. It enters
the scene with the question of being ("How do we come to be?"), and it
enters it as negativity, as unsatisfactory character of all possible positive
answers. For while it is obviously involved in the becoming of being,
sexuality nevertheless provides no point of attachment, no anchoring
point in the explication of being (as being) . Moreover, for the inquisitive
infant sexuality is bound up with stories and myths, embarrassment
and avoidance, sometimes even with disgust and punishment.
It is crucial to once more acknowledge that the true question only
begins at this point. The embarrassment at and the covering up of
sexuality (by adults) should not be taken as self-explanatory, that is
as explained by the "traditional" cultural ban on sexuality, but rather
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 is not there, and that is (or would be) of the order of
knowledge. The fairy tales with which we explain sexuality to children
are there not so much in order to mask and distort the realistic explana­
tion, but to mask the fact that there is no realistic explanation, and that
even the most exhaustive scientific explanation lacks the signifier that
would account for the sexual as sexual. What is at stake with this lack
is not a missing piece of knowledge about the sexual (as a full entity
in itself), what is at stake is that sexuality and knowledge are struc­
tured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point
of the unconscious. The unconscious is the concept of an inherent link
between sexuality and knowledge in their very negativity.
In this sense, culture is not simply a mask of the sexual, it is the
mask or rather a stand-in for the ontological lapse involved in sexuation;
it is a stand-in for something in the sexual which "is not". And it is
in this precise (indirect) sense that culture (as well as the political as
seen above) is-as the classical Freudian stance goes-sexually driven,
"motivated" . It is not driven by that in the sexual which is, but rather
by that which is not.
In this way we again arrive at the junction between the sexual and
the pleasure involved in drives. Why are partial drives "sexual"?
 S E X U A L I T Y W I TH I N T H E L I M I T S O F R E A S O N A L O N E 15

We can propose the following articulation of the two. Firstly, sexua­

tion is a lapse in being, a point where being itself is not fully being. The
term lapse should be taken here both in the sense of a "crack" or "gap",
and in the n1ore Freudian sense of a "slip". This lapse only exists as an
epistemological lack: as an impasse of knowledge and its consequences
(symptoms) . Secondly, this lapse of being as the point of sexuation is the
very void around which circulate the drives, while they are attached at
the same time to this or that partial object. In this precise sense, sexu­
ation (as pure negativity) "precedes" the drives and makes them what
they are, that is to say "sexual". One could also say that the drive in the
strong (Lacanian) sense of the term (the death drive as the fundamen­
tal level of all the drives) is not opposed to the Eros of reproductive
copulation, but rather appears in it in its pure negative state (not cov­
ered by a specific sexual or genital partial object) . This would further
imply that we have to distinguish perhaps not so much between the
drives and normative sexuality, but rather between two levels of the
drive itself: drives as involved in all kinds of partial satisfactions, fol­
lowing the well-known list (oral, anal, scopic), and the drive as purely
disruptive negativity that propels them. As cultural and acquired as it
indeed is, the drive only becomes drive when it gives body to a funda­
mental negativity of "nature", that is when giving (positive) form to the
negativity, the lapse of being hwolved in sexuation. This also means
that the supposedly original, chaotic, fragmented multiplicity of the
drives is already a result of some "unifying" negativity-as opposed
to the rather romantic and much too simple idea about an original free­
dom and spontaneity of the drives, which is later tamed by repressive
and unifying norms. Their freedom is rather a result of a fundamental
impossibility.
The conclusion we can draw from all this would thus be the follow­
ing. Whenever it comes to social, cultural, religious covering up of sexu­
ality, we can be sure that it never covers up only what is there (say the
sexual organs), but also some fundamental ambiguity which is, from the
outset, of the metaphysical order. In other words: the more we try to thh1k
sexual as sexual (that is the more we try to think it only as that "what it
is"), the quicker we find ourselves in the element of pure and profound
metaphysics.
A great and direct illustration of this can be found in the form of
a problem that early artists faced when they painted Adam and Eve.
Should they portray them with or without navels? Adam was moulded
16 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

from spit and clay, and Eve from Adam's rib. They were not born of
women, so how could they have navels? Yet they looked strange with­
out them: they were the first men, and they should look like (other)
men. But if as men they were created in God's image, God also has
to have a navel, which generates new conceptual difficulties . . . Artists
often dodged the question by extending fig leaves so that they covered
not only the sexual organs, but the lower belly as well. Is this extending
of the fig leaves to hide more than just sexual organs not a perfect illus­
tration of the argument that we are making here? Namely that by cover­
ing up "the sexual" one always also-and perhaps primarily?-covers
up a deeply metaphysical issue or ambiguity that is inseparable from
it. And it should come as no surprise that it is precisely this additional
point that is the principal locus of myths and fantasies about procre­
ation and about (our) origins.8
The extended fig leaf covers not simply the sexual, but the navel as
elected figure of the scar left by the lapse of being-the lapse of being
involved in sexuation (and sexual reproduction). If sexuality only exists
on the antic level and has no proper ontological dignity, the reason is
not that it corresponds to nothing on the ontological level, but rather
that it corresponds to a gap inside this ontological level. And, speaking
of navels, it is perhaps no coincidence that we find in Freud the famous,
as well as curious, expression: der Nabel des Traums, "the dream's navel",
related not to what we can know, but to the hole in the very net of knowl­
edge that can be laid out in the psychoanalytic interpretation.

There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted

dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become
aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is
a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which
moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the
dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down
into the unknown. (Freud, 1900a, p. 671)

I suggest to read the term "unknown" not as referring to something

"unknown to us", but in a stronger sense of a knowledge that is

8 Different theological theories surrounding the issue of Adam's navel-say the

"Pre-Umbilist", "Mid-Umbilist" and "Post-Umbilist" theories-constitute a truly fasci­

nating reading.
 S E X U A L ITY WITH I N T H E L I M I TS O F R EASON A LO N E 17

originally missing, "missing in the real", and constitutive for the uncon­
scious as such ("primal repression"). And if, for Freud, the unconscious
is by definition sexual, this is not because it always has a sexual content,
but because-this properly ontological lapse, break or "fall" is only trans­
mitted by sexuality. The term "h·ansmitted" should be understood here
also in the sense in which we speak about the transmission of knowl­
edge (or in this case about a constitutive impasse of knowledge) .
There is a famous saying by Ronald David Laing: "Life is a sexually
transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent." Per­
haps we could reformulate this for our purposes and say: The lapse in
being is a sexually transmitted disease of being itself.

References
Copjec, J. (2012) . The sexual compact. A ngelaki, 2 .
Freud, S. (1900a) . The Interpretation of Dreams . New York: Penguin.
Freud, S. (1905d / 2000) . Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie. Studienaus­
gabe (pp . 37-145). Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000.
Freud, S. (1908c /2000). Ober infantile Sexualtheorien. Studienausgabe
(pp . 137-145). Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000 .
Freud, S. (1910k/2000) . Ober "wilde" Psychoanalyse. S tudienausgabe
(pp . 133-141). Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000 .
Lacan, J. (1999) . The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. Encore. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Laplanche, J. (1999) . La psychoanalyse comme anti-hermeneutique. En tre
seduction et inspiratio n . Paris: PUF.
Laplanche, J. (2002) . Sexuality and attachment in metapsychology. In:
D. Widlocher, Infantile sexuality and attachment (pp. 37-54) . London:
Karnac, 2004.
Shalev, 0., & Yerushalmi, H. (2009). Status of sexuality in contemporary
psychoanalytic psychotherapy as reported by therapists. Psychoanalytic
Psychology, 26: 343-361 .
Zamanian, K. (2011). Attachment theory as defense: What happened to
infantile sexuality? Psychoanalytic Psychology, 28(1): 33---4 7.
Zizek, S. (2008). In Defense of Lost Causes . London: Verso.
C H A P T E R T WO

Offi ce rs, m a i ds, a n d c h i m n eysweep e rs

Mladen Oo/ar

0ren Kierkegaard (1843), in his astounding book on repetition,

S a book that everyone should read, at some point discusses the

proposal that the entire humankind can be divided in just three
categories, and only three: officers, maids, and chimneysweepers.
One can immediately appreciate the brilliance and the craziness of
this proposal, it possesses the cheek and the wit, boldness and audacity,
nonchalance and imagination. If one makes a quick opinion poll among
one's friends, philosophers, and non-philosophers alike, one can see that
the suggestion immediately produces laughte1� enthusiasm, approval,
and good humour. It is more difficult to see where precisely lies the
brilliance of it.
One can imagine the protestation, or a mock protest: officers,
maids, and chimneysweepers, all right, but where am I in this? Which
category do I belong to? The first answer could be: are you an officer?
A maid? A chimneysweeper? Sorry, then you are not part of human­
kind. Why do you think you qualify as human? On what basis?
You should reconsider your automatic presupposition. And do you
believe that one can be part of humanity without belonging to any of
its categories? If you don't fit in any of these, which one do you think
you fit?
19
20 S E X A N D NO T H I N G

Another strategy could then propose that if one doesn't fall into the
three categories on offer, one should supplement them by additional
ones. For example, humankind can be divided into officers, maids,
chimneysweepers, and professors of philosophy. One can quickly see
that the extensions will not ameliorate the initial proposal but rather
make it worse, or the absurdity of the first proposal will only be made
more apparent. If one continues adding in this way, one will inevitably
end up with the classification of animals proposed by an alleged Chinese
Encyclopaedia, that Foucault (1966) enthusiastically quotes at the open­
ing of The Order of Things, taking it from Borges, where one has four­
teen different categories of animals, but with each category belonging
to a different kind of classification.1 I can only add that psychoanalysts
don't need an additional category. The first psychoanalytic patient, who
became famous under the name of Anna 0. (her real name was far less
romantic, Bertha Pappenheim) and who was treated by Josef Breuer in
1880-1882, invented two names for this new treatment, and since one
of her symptoms was that she spoke only English with her doctor, she
proposed them in English: "She aptly described this procedure, speak­
ing seriously, as a 'talking cure', while she referred to it jokingly as
'chimney-sweepingff/ (Freud, 1895d, p. 83) . So psychoanalysts are chim­
neysweepers, and therefore human. For the rest of us this seems far less
certain. And we must keep in mind this extraordinary and far-reaching
description of psychoanalysis, proposed at its dawn, at the moment of
its birth, a description so apt that one hasn't ever come up with a better
one: talking cure avec chimney-sweeping. We will come back to this.
There is a third possibility: since one cannot find oneself in any of
the proposed categories, one can easily and eagerly find oneself in the
standpoint which enables such a classification, in the viewpoint which
looks on society from outside and from above, and from where one can
shamelessly classify others. One can instantly engage in a parlour game,
inventing dozens of classifications, one more extravagant and . exotic

t "[ ] the animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed
• • •

ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray
dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were
mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair b ru sh; (1) etcetera;
(m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies"
(Borges, 1 999, p. 231). This famous quote stems from the essay "Jolm Wilkins' analytical
language", written in 1942. Borges ascribes the quote to Dr Franz Kuhn, an important
German sinologist and translator, but of course this is a hoax, Borges made it up himself.
 O F F I C E R S , M A I D S , A N D C H I M N E Y SW E E P E R S 21

than the other. Yet one can soon see that this game is quickly over, or
that it has been actually already over with the first move accomplished
by Kierkegaard, and that any new nutty proposals can hardly surpass
his own, they all rather appear as pale epigones vainly hoping to match
the brilliance of the first attempt. No doubt a great deal of merriment
provoked by this proposal stems from placing oneself into the shoes of
the classifie1� ultimately the shoes of the Mastel� for the Master is the
one who can classify others shamelessly and arbitrarily, according to his
whim, looking at society from the supposed bird's eye view. And what
defines the Master is that he can classify without being thereby himself
classified, or at least this is the illusion of his position. This is part of
the charm of Kierkegaard's example, it exposes and displays this arbi­
trariness precisely by classifying in such a grandiosely implausible way,
while also ironically delivering part of the pleasure of this position as an
im1ocuous parlour game. Anybody can step into the Master 's shoes for a
moment, and Kierkegaard was the grand master of irony (that is, accord­
ing to Quintilian's definition, of "saying the contrary of what is being
said"-a wonderful definition of a basic property of language as such).
If the structural illusion of the Master is that one can classify without
being thereby classified Gust as in Bentham's proposal of Panopticon, and
we will come back to Bentham, the lure is that of seeing without being
seen), one can extend the initial proposal: humankind can be divided into
officers, maids, chimneysweepers, and the one who has made this classifi­
cation and who is invisibly present in it by his point of enunciation, by his
bird's eye. Classification includes a category which is itself classified, in
the American sense of the word, like a state or a military secret. The clas­
sifier is its invisible condition. His hope may be that he will remain classi­
fied (i.e., kept secret), not realising that one is always also already classified
(i.e., being on display by the classification one has made).
Kierkegaard is not the author of this proposal, he invokes an unnamed
source: "A witty head once said that the humankind can be divided into
officers, maids, and chimney-sweepers." The scholars scrutinising his
work have dug out the source: in 1827, a Danish humourist (also a logi­
cian, somewhat like a Lewis Carroll figure) who signed his pieces only
by the initials B. C., published in one of Copenhagen's newspapers a
piece called "Om indelinger" ("On divisions"), which starts with this
opening salvo: "Even someone who has never studied logic knows how
important it is that classification be made according to a single fruitful
principle. Thus everyone understands that the division of humankind
22 S E X A N D N O H -I l N G

into officers, maids, and chimneysweepers doesn't obey such rule. "2
Kierkegaard was fourteen years old at the time, so either this quip stuck
in his mind or it gained enough popularity with Danish public to be still
around sixteen years later, in 1843, when he used it.
B. C.'s proposal is given at the beginning of his piece as a demonstra­
tional device, an obvious case of how not to go about with classifica­
tion. The case is so glaring that it doesn't even need disproval, it sins
so spectacularly against all common sense. B. C., after this conspicuous
opening, then went on to tackle a particularly tough nut to crack, the
classification of women (with all the male-chauvinist innuendos one
can imagine, but which were common at the time) .3
Kierkegaard had quite a bit to say in his work about the unclassifi­
able nature of women, but his purpose, when he brings up this proposal
in Repetition, is directly opposite to that of its author B. C . :

A witty head once said that humankind can b e divided into officers,
maids, and chimneysweepers. This remark is in my view not only
witty, but also profound and insightful, and one would need a great
speculative talent to propose a better division. When a classifica­
tion doesn't ideally exhaust its object one should by all means give
precedence to the contingent, for it brings imagination into motion.
A partly appropriate classification cannot satisfy reason, and even
less so imagination, so it has to be wholly rejected, even though it is
greatly honored by daily use, partly because people are very stupid
and partly because they have very little imagination. (Kierkegaard,
1843, p. 164)

This is Kierkegaard's point: the proposed division is actually excellent,

one would be very hard put to come up with a better one; it has a

2 Kjebenhavns Hyven de Post no. 40/ 1827. For this quote and the background of the story

see Depelsenaire, Y. (2004) . Une analyse avec Dieu (pp. 110-101 & pp. 129-135) . Brussels:
La lettre volee.
3 There are all the self-evident cliches of the era: women can be e.g., divided into those

who soil the borrowed books before returning them, and those, very rare, who don't­
they obviously soil the intellectual products by the very femininity; or they can be divided
into those who go to theatre with a hat, and those, very rare, who don't-for why would
a woman go to a theatre except to display her hat? Etc. Briefly, the problem with the clas­
sification of women, at the bottom, seems to be that they don't want to comply with the
category which is reserved for them in the first sentence, namely that of maids. They want
to read books, go to theatre etc., but their maid's nature betrays them.
 O F F I C E R S , M A I D S , A N D CH I M N E Y S W E E P E R S 23

sp eculative depth. More plausible ones would seem more acceptable

only because they lack two seemingly opposite things: reason and
imagination. There lies a speculative depth in the contingent which
brings forth ·far more than a plausible classification. Actually, it brings
forth far more than a classification which would "ideally exhaust its
object", if such a thing ever existed. If classification is the way to divide
the universal genus into particular species, with the most strenuous
endeavour to fully exhaust the universal by the particular, then the con­
tingent classification, in its outrageous extravagance, points to the fact
that this never quite works. Can there be an exhaustive classification
of humankind, and in particular, in the most particular, an exhaustive
division into men and women 7 For we may see in the officers the carica­
ture embodiment of men, and in the maids the caricature embodiment
of women, but then the question arises: why do we need the chimney­
sweepers? This will be our question. Why can't officers and maids, men
and women, relate to each other without the chimneysweepers?
Kierkegaard only needs three items for the maximum effect. Borges's
classification, brilliant as it is, seems also a bit too stretchy, so that per­
haps the fourteen categories of animals do the job less well than the three
categories of humankind. Three is just enough: if in officers and maids
one can see the beginning of a classification, starting with the cliche
men par excellence and women par excellence, then the chimneysweepers
are the representatives of pure contingency as such, and thereby, this is
the essential part, the representatives of universality. Human as such is
a chimneysweeper. The third and last category brings forth the unex­
pected mover of the series which begins with the two first entities.
Let me give some more examples. I guess the most famous and
significant one comes from Marx's Capital, val. 1, where Marx proposes
the series "freedom, equality, property, and Bentham". The market
economy is:

[ ] the very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule
. . .

Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham. Freedom, because both

buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labor power, are constrained
only by their own free will. [ . ] Equality, because each enters into
. .

relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and

they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each
disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks
only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts
24 SEX A N D N OT H I N G

them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and
the private interest of each. Each looks to himself only, [ . ] and
. .

just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre­
established harmony of things, work for the common wealth and
in the interest of all. (Marx, 1909, p. 195)

To make it brief, "freedom, equality, property, and Bentham" presents

another case of a sequence that we are after, a sequence where the last
term, which is out-of-series, or its unexpected surplus, coming from
another register, retroactively sheds light on the first three, with which
it is placed on the same level. The beginning of the series gets its sig­
nificance from its end, from Bentham, that unsurpassable theoretician
of utilitarianism (and of Panopticon) who managed to reduce all pos­
sible diversity of human motivation to the simple calculation of private
interests and thus displayed the "subjective economy" which under­
lies the elevated slogans of freedom and equality. There is no freedom
and equality without Bentham, this is Marx's bottom-line. Kierkegaard,
I think, would have loved it. The first two terms are taken from the slo­
gans of the French revolution, but already the third and particularly the
fourth put forth its hidden truth, its spring, the underpinnings of the
system where those great slogans have served as political guidelines.
Their emancipatory potential took support in a hidden clause which
conditioned their impact throughout. The genus of human and political
rights encounters in Bentham its particular species, or rather an indi­
vidual instance, which with a single stroke jeopardises everything.
Marx's famous series may well have been inspired by a predecessor
whom Marx knew well and whom he perhaps took as the model in
this case. It is well known that he had struck a close friendship with
Heinrich Heine in the 1840s in Paris. Heine, in the second part of his
Reisebilder, Das Buch Le Grand (Images from travels, The Le Grand Book,
1827) states that he has a particular passion for "love, truth, freedom,
and shrimp soup" (Heine, 1972, p. 19). The series begins in the same
manner with high ideals and then, on the same level with them, ends
with shrimp soup which sheds a questionable light on those ideals.
It would have been too easy to take this quip as a commonsensical
reminder that the high ideals don't go very far unless one takes care
of one's stomach (although Heine himself says things which go in that
direction: "My stomach has no taste for immortality, I have thought
it over, I want to be half immortal and wholly full"). It would have
 O F F ICE R S , M A I D S , A N D CH I M N E Y S W H P E R S 25

been too easy because the entire booklet i s constructed o f three parts,
following the slogans of love, truth, and freedom, where the shrimp
soup represents the unstoppable appendix which inherently overturns
these slogans, showing that none of these can be taken on its own with­
out the absurd addition which endows it with its sting. Shrimp soup
is not just the · indication of our bodily needs and their discrepancy
with the high ideals, but the necessary and the contingent not merely
bodily appendage which provides the viewpoint from which one can
consider these ideals in the first place and adopt them. One should
beware of people who cherish freedom, love, and truth without the
shrimp soup .
Heine loved classifications like this one. In Harzreise, he says, for
example: "The inhabitants of Gottingen are divided into students,
professors, philisters, and asses; these four categories are by no means
separate." In school, he said, he was submitted to so much "Latin, beat­
ings, and geography. " The technique of classifying is the same. Freud
loved Heine and it comes as no surprise that he enthusiastically took so
many examples from Heine in his book on jokes (Jokes and their Relation
to the Unconscious, 1905). And so did Marx-what Freud and Marx defi­
nitely had in common was their enthusiasm for Heine-could one say
particularly for the type of odd classifications with the appendix?
There are several more instances in Marx. Slavoj Zizek never tires of
using the example from Marx's Class Struggles in France (1851), where
Marx says that the two fractions of French royalists, i.e., the legiti­
mists and the orleanists, could only find their common denominator in
republicanism. Should they promote royalism, then the question would
immediately arise as to which king they actually support, and tl1ere
could be no agreement, so the only way to be a royalist as such was to
be a republican, i.e., antiroyalist. So the genus of royalism is divided
into three species, legitimists, orleanists, and republicans. Marx's great­
est example comes from the first version of the first chapter of Capital,
where he speaks about money as the commodity as such:

It is as if, apart from lions, tigers, rabbits and all other actual
animals which by their groups form the various genuses, species,
subspecies, families, etc., of the animal kingdom, there would exist
the Animal, the individual incarnation of all animal kingdom. Such
a particular which in itself comprises all actually existing species of
the same kind, is a universal, like an Animal, a God, etc.
26 S E X A N D N O TI-I I N G

This example seems to b e like the opposite of the previous Bentham

one: there we had the universal notions (freedom, equality, etc.) that
were supplemented with a singular name which was metonymically
put on the same level. Here we have a set of particular commodities
(particular animals as lions, tigers, and rabbits) supplemented by a uni­
versal commodity as such, appearing in the same series with all particu­
lar commodities (the Animal as such) . But the two logics are actually
two perspectives on the same point: what is at stake is the short-circuit
between the singular-contingent and the universal. The seeming uni­
versality of money as the general equivalent hides its particular nature
of being a particular commodity, while the seeming singularity of
Bentham conceals its being the hidden condition which strikes all uni­
versals with particularity. The metaphysics of genus and species is our
everyday metaphysics in the world of commodities and money.
One can state in general terms that in the relation between genus
and its species there is always something that doesn't work, (:a cloche,
and this mismatch is presented by a species which appears inside of
series of species as its internal outside, a contingent addendum that
'
sticks out and seemingly contravenes the rule, acts as an exception
which incarnates the genus as such in its universality while at the
same time putting into question the nature of this universality, strik­
ing it with contingency. How come that one can never quite classify
in such a way that everything would fall into allotted spaces without
a contravention? Why is it that one can never quite classify by the
Aristotelian mould of genus proximum and differentia specifica? Why
does classification never exhaust its object ideally, as Kierkegaard
put it, so that there always appear Benthams, shrimp-soups, and
chimneysweepers?
So what I am interested in is the type of classification for which
Kierkegaard's proposal provides the model: officers, maids, and chim­
neysweepers. A series begins like a plausible classification, and then the
last element spoils its smooth run and puts it into question while at the
same time embodying its secret condition. Minimally three elements
are needed. I have taken my examples haphazardly from Kierkegaard,
Heine, and Marx, but already at first glance it is obvious that they all
stem from the same period, or rather from the same historic moment­
the moment that one can at the shortest designate as "after Hegel", the
after-Hegelian opening, or a new departure for philosophy. And one can
see that this formal device is actually only possible after Hegel, and that
 O F F I C E R S, M A I D S , A N D C H I M N EY S W E E P E R S 27

there is a logic in it which came fully to the fore only with Hegel. Perhaps
I stre tch Kierkegaard' s proposal too far or make it carry too much weight,
but one can see in it a certain exit from the logic of classification which
largely ruled. from Aristotle to Hegel, and which Kierkegaard refers to
as "exhausting its object ideally", i.e., without chinmeysweepers. (It was
Hegel who brought this logic to its point of reversal. I can only remind
you of the notorious Hegelian equation "spirit is a bone", where the uni­
versality of spirit, the universality par excellence, gets its equivalent in a
contingent dead thing. One cannot have the universality of spirit without
the contingent addition of the bone. But I cannot pursue this further.)
Before going back to our initial classification and looking more closely
at the mysterious chimneysweepers, let me give my last and the crown
example, stemming from another period. It comes from Shakespeare,
from his rarely produced play Cymbeline, a convoluted and obscure play,
in the middle of which there is suddenly a rather wonderful poem, the
flash of vintage Shakespeare. Let me quote just these two lines: "Golden
lads and girls all must/ As chinmey-sweepers come to dust" (Act IV,
scene 2). There is something strangely magic in the simplicity of it, the
perfect disposition of a few words that only Shakespeare could manage.
The connection which underlies this image is clear: ashes to ashes, dust to
dust, and if there is one profession which has to do with ashes and dust,
then this is the chinmey-sweeping. These lines are in strange echo with
Kierkegaard's proposal: we have a division by sex, into lads and girls,
and then the chimneysweepers as the third, which is here given as the
metaphorical addition, a comparison by which both sexes face the same
human destiny, while in Kierkegaard's example the third term is the met­
onymical prolongation, the extension of the series, so that the metaphori­
cal condition of the series is embodied in the last term of the metonymy.
Let us now go back to our initial classification. We have seen that
this classification starts off by the sexual difference, bringing forth the
caricature embodiments of men and women, brought to a patriarchal
grotesque. Men are by their standing and their calling supposed to be
the officers, this is where their manly nature is displayed, while the true
feminine nature is to be maids of one kind or another (be it in the sub­
lime form of wives and mothers) . Some very crude assumptions are
tacitly made about the nature of men and women. But what about the
chimneysweepers, which in their very contingency embody the human
as such, the Animal as such apart from the male and female animals, the
general equivalent, as it were, of men and women?
28 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

Freud, who spent so much time and effort trying to figure out what
does it mean to be a man or a woman, has also actually occasionally
written about chimneysweepers. For example:

The amulets that bl'ing luck are altogether to be seen as sexual

symbols. Let's consider such a collection which is carded around
in the guise of small silver appendages: a four leaf clover, a pig,
a mushroom, a horseshoe, a ladde1� a chimneysweeper. [ . . ] the .

chimneysweepe1� carrying a ladder, belongs to this gathering

because he practices a profession which is vulgarly compared to
sexual intercourse. His ladder was recognized as a sexual symbol
in dreams. (Freud, 1916-1917, p. 202)

This association exists in many languages, including my own. Chim­

neysweepers are there as the very necessary contingency, a contin­
gency inherently pertaining to sexuality, and the contingency that
spells this out, the sexual addendum, the necessary appendix, is the
question of phallus. So Anna 0. hit the mark very well when she quali­
fied psychoanalysis by this double definition: talking cure with chim­
ney-sweeping. If officers are archetypal men and maids are archetypal
women, then the chimneysweepers are precisely the phallic element­
sexuality as the third which is added to the two genders. How many
sexes are there? Why do we need three to have two? What is the sex of
chimneysweepers? (By the way, are there any female chimneys weepers
anywhere in the world?) On the one hand the phallic element is what
enables the relation between men and women, on the other hand it is
what troubles this relation and impedes it. If there was a sexual rela­
tion, if it existed in a straightforward manner, then officers and maids
could do without chimneysweepers, but since-according to Lacan's
notorious dictum-there is none, we cannot manage without chimney­
sweepers in sexual matters. One of the most famous slogans of Lacan
maintains precisely that "there is no sexual relationship", Il n'y a pas de
rapport sexuel. 4

4 Lacan, by the way, knew Kierkegaard's quip and loved it. He used it in one of his

lesser writings, "Hommage a Ernest Jones" (1959), where he says: "These lines [of Jones]
reminded me, with a feeling of returning to the light of day, of the immortal division of
human functions that Kierkegaard promulgated for all posterity, a division that is, as we
know, tripartite including only officers, maids, and chimney-sweeps" (Lacan, 1959/2006,
,

p. 600). What is particu l a rly remarkable in this is Lacan's passing aside is that it hints to
the tripartite division, re ferring to the famous tripartition of humankind proposed by
 O F F I C E R S , M A I D S , A N D C H I M N E Y SW E E P E R S 29

What, if anything, is phallus? How do we get to the point of this equa­

tion: chimneysweepers = contingency = tmiversality = the phallic element?
What is the basis of this short-circuit? And how do we equate this point
with the sigti.ifier? This is what Lacan (1958/2006) maintains in one of
his most famous essays, "The signification of phallus", where one should
read the title precisely as a thesis, positing a sh·ong link, or even a mutual
implication, between the two terms, phallus and signification, which also
means a close link between the contingency of a bodily appendage and
the universality of meaning. There is something in phallus which is tightly
connected to signification as such. Lacan says that much:

In the Freudian doctrine, the phallus is not a fantasy, if we are to

view fantasy as an imaginary effect. Nor is it as such an object (par­
tial, internal, good, bad, etc.) inasmuch as " object" tends to gauge the
reality involved in a relationship. Still less is it the organ-penis or
clitoris-that it symbolizes. And it is no accident that Freud adopted
as a reference the simulacrum it represented to the Ancients. For the
phallus is a signifiet� a signifier whose function, in the intrasubjec­
tive economy of analysis, may lift the veil from the function it served
in the Mysteries. For it is the signifier that is destined to designate
meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them
by its presence as signifier. (Lacan, 1958/2006, p. 579)

There is something baffling and counterintuitive in Lacan's very notori­

ous statement. Phallus is thus not an imaginary entity playing its role in
fantasy (e.g., as the bearer of potency and might) nor is it an object (such
as breast or faeces or other embodiments of "object a " , partial objects)
nor is it the organ to which it is nevertheless necessarily tied. Maintain­
ing that phallus is a signifier-what does it mean?
What is a signifier? It is a creature of pure difference, this was the
simple and profound lesson of Saussure. It is an entity composed only

Georges Dumezil as the matrix of all Indo European culture, that into p riests, warriors
-

and laborers. Lacan's hint is that Kierkegaard s proposal matches the Indo-European
'

tripartition as its p ost scriptum and ironic t ranscri p tion . If officers are obviously war­
riors, and maids are obviously workers providing for survival, then the chimneysweeps
can only be the priests, the unnecessary addition whose function is nevertheless crucial:
they establish a relation, a relation between the one and the other, between the visible
and the invi sible a relation between what has no relation. This fleeting reference is no
-

coincidence, since Dumezil's famous book, L'ldeologie tripartite des Indo-Europeens, was
published in 1958.
30 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

of difference and nothing else, with no substantial hold, features or

qualities and with no identity. What singles out the signifier, as opposed
to all other modes of being, is that it is an entity which rests on differ­
ence alone. "In language, there are only differences, without any posi­
tive terms", as Saussure maintained against all odds in the single most
famous sentence of his Course. If signifiers are nothing but the bundles
of differences, with no other hold, sustaining each other in their differ­
ence, then the condition of their possibility is pure difference as such,
not a difference between any two existing entities. And here is the crux
of the matter: in the contingent appendix this difference must appear as
such, within the order it conditions, it has to get an embodiment, and its
incarnation can only be a purely contingent element whose function is
that it presents the pure difference which drives the structure. It is like
a reflected form of the universal transcendental condition, appearing
as its opposite, the appendix. Differentiality, which enables significa­
tion, is embodied in a contingent surplus, an addition, which doesn't
signify anything. This is the function of the phallic element, this is what
conditions the necessity of chimneysweepers. It seems that everything
makes sense except for this point which appears senseless, but which
incarnates meaning. This is why Lacan says that this signifier is "des­
tined to designate the meaning effects as a whole". One doesn't find
this in Saussure, chimneysweepers are an addition to his theory, and the
first simple criticism of Saussure could be that he didn't see the struc­
tural necessity of chimneysweepers, i.e., that in the universal necessity
of differential structural determinations he didn't see the necessity of a
contingent appendage. This appendage is by itself not yet something
psychoanalytic, we could see it functioning in Kierkegaard, Heine,
Marx, and we could maintain that its necessity stems from Hegel, the
Hegelian speculative insight which surfaces time and again at various
points in his system, where the highest spiritual universal has to find its
counterpart in a contingent thing, a bone, or where the universal nature
of political reason in a State has to find its embodiment in the contingent
and trivial person of the monarch. The universality of genus has to find
its counterpart and embodiment in a particular contingent species.
As far as Saussure and structuralism are concerned, one could say
that the structural revolution properly started only at the moment when
Claude Levi-Strauss came up with the lucid and far-reaching insight
that there is no differential structure without chimneysweepers. His
name for it was mana, a signifier without meaning added to the infinite
 O F F I C E RS, MAI DS, A N D C H I M N EYSWE E P E R S 31

list of signifiers endowed with meaning, embodying the very condition

for all others to make sense, while mana itself, as the ubiquitous myste­
rious magic property, means "everything and nothing". It means only
th at it mean s, it means meaning as such.
The properly psychoanalytic step is made with Lacan's bold thesis
that this element is phallic by its nature, so that the chimneysweep­
ers ' appendage has to be brought together with the contingent bodily
appendage. This brings us ultimately to the question of how to match
two kinds of difference: the signifying difference, the pure difference
that all signification is based on, and on the other hand the sexual differ­
ence, which seems to be the most obvious natural difference, providing
a model for all others.
The first simple and obvious answer would be this. How does lan­
guage treat sexual difference? It treats it as just another signifying dif­
ference. Sexual difference is only available in language as a difference
which is reducible to a presence or an absence of a mark, a distinctive
trait. This is what makes a signifying difference: the difference just
between the presence and an absence of a distinctive mark. And what
makes possible to reduce the sexual difference to a signifying difference
is precisely the bodily contingency of phallus as a distinctive mark of
gender, thus the model for all distinctive marks. What could be more
glaringly obvious? A child is born, and the first question is "Is it a boy
or a girl?", and the question is easily decided by the presence or the
absence of an anatomical marker. This is where the signifier, a disem­
bodied entity composed of differences alone, meets the body in its mate­
riality and physiology, and among the myriad bodily differences this is
the one which behaves most conspicuously as the signifying difference,
the difference between a plus and a minus. Differential necessity of a
disembodied structure here crosses its path with the anatomic contin­
gency. Sex pertains to linguistic structure by the bodily mark of sexual
difference, which provides the first model for establishing a signifying
difference. It is the paradigm of difference: witness the basic classifi­
cation of nouns in practically all languages, which is the division into
the masculine and the feminine gender, the grammatical gender taking
its cue from the supposedly natural gender difference. This opposition
is used as the most elementary guideline to sort out our vocabulary.
But its spectacular proliferation in all directions testifies to the impos­
sibility of the task-everything can be grammatically sexed, posited
on either masculine or feminine side of the divide, but when anything
32 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

can be sexed, then nothing can be, and the very instrument of such
classification is ruined by its own success. In Truffaut's Jules et Jim there
is a famous line where Oskar Werner, as a German, tells Jeanne Moreau
(this French woman par excellence) : "What a strange language is French
where l'amour is masculine and la guerre is feminine." In German, with
die Liebe and der Krieg, it's the opposite, supposedly how it should be if
we are to follow "a natural pattern". In Germany, "love" is the domain
of women and "war" is the domain of men, while in France, reputed
for its hang for perversion, it seems to be the other way round. "Make
love not war" would have a completely different meaning and impact
in Germany or in France. So taking the sexual difference as the pattern
of grammatical gender makes for the infinite possibilities of extension
in any direction, while the guiding principle becomes completely use­
less. Everything can be accounted for in terms of gender and squeezed
into its mould, except for the sexual difference itself which served as the
model. The difference on which everything may be modelled persists as
a real which cannot itself be seized as a difference.
One can add that not merely the grammatical gender, but also all
the basic ontological oppositions follow the same model: matter /form,
nature / culture, subject/ object, body I spirit, intuition/understanding,
sensuality /reason-all of them tacitly presuppose or display a sexual­
ised basis, they are never sexually neutral, the opposition is always seen
as male vs. female, and perhaps the psychoanalytic addendum is that
one should, in this bipartition, always consider the chimneysweepers.
The supposition that there is a complementarity of two principles, that
there is a relation, and ultimately a sexual relation between the male
and the female conceptual side, this supposition has largely under­
pinned traditional ontological assumptions.
There is perhaps the best known figure of an image of the two, which
is the image of yin-yang and its disposition in the Tao sign. It is an
image which has massively served as support for an entire cosmology,
ontology, social theory, astronomy. It gives figure precisely to the two
poles of masculine and feminine, and the image is formed in such a way
that they complement and complete each othe1� in perfect symmetry.
There is a circle, and the circle itself is divided by two half-circle lines.
The masculine and the feminine principle, their conflictual comple­
mentarity, are taken as the clue which informs every entity, indeed the
entire universe. What does this image convey? There is a strong thesis
presented in it which one could spell out like this: there is a relation.
There is a sexual relation. Every relation is sexual. The relation exists
 O F F I C E RS , M A I D S , A N D C H I M N EYSW E E P E R S 33

emphatically, conspicuously, in a demonstrative manne1� in the comple­

mentarity of the masculine and the feminine, in their perfect balance, the
perfect match, and can serve as a paradigm for everything else. Every­
thing can be 1nterpreted in the light of this image. The thesis implies
and manifests even more: there is sense, this is the visual embodiment
of sense that can endow everything else with sense. If there is relation
there is sense, and only relation "makes sense". The paradigm that regu­
lates sense also regulates the sexual relation. It has the power to bestow
sense, which emerges from the complementarity of the two. For Lacan,
the Aristotelian ontology is like our western version of yin-yang, it
makes analogous assumptions about hyle and morphe, matter and form,
the feminine and the masculine, the passive and the active. And this
goes for the bulk of traditional dichotomies: matter and form, body and
spirit, nature and culture, intuition and intellect, active and passive-all
of them are secretly sexualised, premised on the assumption about the
relation. There is a theme to ponder: ontology and sexuality. To what
extent were ontological assumptions always underphmed by sexual
assumptions, the assumptions about the sexual relation, its existence as a
guiding principle, the hidden assumption about the relation? What psy­
choanalysis adds to this is the necessity of chimneysweepers which put
the complementarity out of balance. Not only this is not a complemen­
tary relation, but one has to get out of its relationality, and the symptom
of this is the innocuous and conspicuous addition of chimneysweepers,
falling on neither side of the divide. So the proper division would be
into yin, yang, and chimneysweepers, and the site of the emergence of
meaning, signification as such, is not the balanced match between the
two sides, but the quirky phallic addition.
But if one equates this element with phallus, how to avoid the mas­
sive objection of phallocentrism?
This is where the massive debate about phallocentrism takes its hold,
or even more, phallogocentrism, the term invented by Derrida and which
combines two previously proposed terms: "logocentrism" was invented
by Ludwig Klages, a German Lebensphilosoph in the 1920s-it was the
contention of his philosophy of life that logocentrism was the major sin of
all western philosophical tradition; and "phallocentrism" was hwented
by none other than Ernest Jones in the late 1920s, actually as a part of his
critique of Freud's take on sexuality which seemed to him to be male­
biased. Both were meant as the terms of denigration. Derrida's invention
of this term was underpinne d by the contention that the two go hand
in hand, that logocentrism always takes its support in phallocentrism,
34 S E X A N D N O T!-I I N G

albeit a hidden one, so they form a pattern which has ruled what is mas­
sively referred to as "metaphysics". Metaphysics is logos avec phallus,
one didn't have to wait for Freud. The objection to psychoanalysis would
thus be that it has indeed transformed phallus into a signifier, a meaning­
less element, this is the novelty in relation to tradition, but it has thus, in a
negative form, nevertheless maintained its central and determining role.
It sustained, in a more sublimated and roundabout form, the connec­
tion between logos and phallus, which was the basis of the metaphysical
tradition all along. The centre may well be empty, meaningless, but it is
still a centre, with its negative mode one hasn't done away the centrism.
Psychoanalysis perpetuates its centrality. One may well talk about phal­
lus as Aufhebung in the signifier (as Lacan does),5 but one hasn't thereby
lost the reference to the more trivial privilege of the male organ and its
fantasmatic sway. This is the objection massively present in a great deal of
feminist literature, which largely sees in Freud and Lacan the promoters
of phallus. One can answer in three steps.
First. Where does this notion of phallocentrism come from, as a diag­
nosis of an entire epoch'? It is obvious that it could only appear on the
basis of psychoanalysis, that such a vocabulary was only made avail­
able by psychoanalysis, and was only made possible by the psychoana­
lytic intervention. In the period which was indeed heavily phallocentric
nobody would ever speak of phallocentrism, and it was this silence that
made this structure persist in its place. It had to be veiled, reserved for
Mysteries, as Lacan says, in order to function. So there is a supreme
irony to the objection that psychoanalysis is a continuation of phallo­
centrism with other means.
Second. The fact that phallus was named, and pointed out, as it were,
has massive consequences, and naming it was actually tightly linked to
the advent of psychoanalysis. What was veiled as a mystery turned out
to be the banal overlapping of the signifier and the bodily contingency.6
Phallocentrism could rule only veiled by mystery. With its naming this

5 "[Phallus] can only play its role when veiled, that is, as itself a sign of the latency with

which any signifiable is struck, once it is raise (afgehoben) to the function of signifier. The
phallus is the signifier of this very Aufhebung, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disap­
pearance" (Lacan, 1958/2006, p. 581).
6 "Phallus [ . ]-the analytic experience ceases its not being written. This to cease not
. .

being written implies the point of what I have called contingency. [ ] Phallus which was
. . .

in ancient times reserved for mystery, has through psychoanalysis ceased not to be writ­
ten precisely as a contingency. Not any more" (Lacan, 1999, pp. 86-87) . See ZupanCic
(2008), especially p. 205ff.
 O F F I C E R S , M A I D S , AN D C H I M N EYSW E E P E R S 35

tra dition stops, its naming isolates it and relegates it to contingency.

What seemed to be the hidden necessity turned out to be based on a
contingent coupling between the signifying difference and the anatomic
contingency ·of a bodily appendage. The transcendental condition was
secretly linked with the triviality of anatomy, but when this is unveiled
it loses its transcendental hold. Let me give a simple parallel: it is just
as the notion of geocentrism could only lose its sway when Copernicus
named it and pinned it down. The geocentric era never considered itself
to be geocentric, its geocentrism was concealed and self-evident (the
analogy is not entirely true, but nevertheless instructive), and this is
what made it geocentric. Once this was named, then geocentrism lost
the status of the obvious framework, it turned out to be based on the
triviality of our particular placement on this contingent planet. Nam­
ing it dethroned the earth, and naming phallus is setting the limit to
phallocentrism.
Third. It was only with this dethronisation of phallus, not with its
promotion, that the problem of sexual difference could appear as such.
It was only now that it became properly insistent, once it was no lon­
ger covered by the phallic fw1ction. What insists as not being written,
symbolised, seized by the signifier, is precisely the sexual difference in
so far as it is irreducible to phallic difference, irreducible to a differ­
ence between a presence and an absence, a plus and a minus. It is not
a signifying difference, and this impossibility of turning into a binary
opposition is the source of its problem and its drama, and this only
became fully apparent with the advent of psychoanalysis. It can never
be pinned down by the simple operation of presence or absence of a
marker. It insists through all differences that try to pin it down to some
differential traits or properties, it insists as a difference irreducible to
any usual difference. So there is nothing that would be more opposed to
the phallocentric logic than "the signification of phallus."
Psychoanalysis ultimately discovered two objects which hitherto
haven't been conceived as autonomous objects: the unconscious and
sexuality. If we divide this monster of phallogocentrism into its two
constitutive halves, then one could say, simply and minimally, that the
invention of the unconscious presents what inherently contradicts logo­
centrism, it is the rift of logos, its slip. If phallus is posited in line with
signification, as the transcendental signifier of meaning, then one should
say that psychoanalysis is precisely not a pursuit of meaning, H is not
after unearthing hidden meanings, buried deep in the unconscious, but
36 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

the exposure of a cleft, a rupture of meaning-the name of this rupture

is the unconscious. On the other hand, the invention of sexuality pres­
ents precisely what contradicts phallocentrism, it is perhaps the best
way to get out of its horizon. The unconscious and sexuality are worthy
of theoretical elaboration precisely by what sets them in opposition to
the basic assets of phallogocentrism.
Amm 0. hit the core right at the birth of psychoanalysis in two simple
qualifications, "talking cure" and "chimney-sweeping". Talking cure
is the way how to enlist the forces of the unconscious to work against
the logocentric focus on meaning, while chimney-sweeping aims at an
elaboration of sexuality that would escape the phallocenh·ic logic. If we
return to the initial Kierkegaard's proposal for the division of mankind,
then it is clear that chimneysweepers expose the contingency of the series
which started off by the exemplary embodiments of Men and Women,
and they at the same time undermine the validity of presuppositions
which conditioned their roles as officers and maids. In chimneysweepers
the signifying logic joins hands with the logic of sexuality, they present
the contingent appendix from where it is possible to disentangle both.

References
Borges, J. L. (1999). The Total Library. Non-fiction 1 922-1 986. London:
Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1966). The Order of Things . New York: Vintage, 1994.
Freud, S. (1895d) . Studies on Hys teria . New York: Penguin.
Freud, S. (1916-1917) . Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis . New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 1966.
Heine, H. (1972) . Ideen. Das B uch Le Grand. Stuttgart: Reclam jr.
Kierkegaard, S. (1843). Repetitio n . New York: Harper, 1964.
Lacan, J. (1958 /2006) . The signification of Phallus. E crits. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1959 / 2006) . In memory of Ernest Jones: On his theory of symbol­
ism. E crits . New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1999). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. Encore. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Marx, K. (1851). Class S truggles in France. New York: International Publish­
ers, 1964.
Marx, K. (1909) . Capital, Volume One. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co.
ZupanCic, A . (2008) . The Odd One In . Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT
Press.
C H A P TE R T H REE

Eve n ts th ro u g h I m a g i n a ry, Sy m bo l i c,
a n d Rea l

5/avoj Zizel<

n his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes the French historian

I Andre Monglond: "The past has left images of itself in literary texts,
images comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a pho­
tosensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough
to scan such surfaces perfectly" (Benjamin, 1999, p. 482) . The first name
that jumps up here is Shakespeare, whose ability to prefigure insights
which properly belong to the later epochs often borders on the uncanny.
Was not, well before Satan's famous "Evil, be thou my Good?" from
Milton's Paradise Lost, the formula of the diabolical Evil provided by
Shakespeare in whose Titus Andronicus the unrepentant Aaron's final
words are: "If one good deed in all my life I did,/I do repent it from
my very soul?" Was not Richard Wagner 's short-circuit between seeing
and hearing in the last act of Tristan, which is often perceived as the
defining moment of modernism proper (the dying Tristan sees Isolde's
voice) clearly formulated already in Midsummer Night's Dream? In act V
scene 1, Bottom says: "I see a voice; now will I to the chink, To spy if I
can hear my Thisbe's face." (The same thought occurs later in King Lear:
"Look with thine ears.") And what about the extraordinarily modern

37
38 S E X A N D N O HI I N G

definition of poetry, also from Midsummer Night's Dream, act V scene 1,

where Theseus says:
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!"

Indeed, as Mallarme put it centuries later, poetry talks about "ce seul
objet don't le Neant s 'honore" . More precisely, Shakespeare articulates
here a triad: a madman sees devils everywhere (he misperceives a bush
as a bear); a lover sees sublime beauty in an ordinary face; a poet "gives
to airy nothing a local habitation and a name". In all three cases we have
the gap between ordinary reality and a transcendent ethereal dimen­
sion, but this gap is gradually reduced: the madman simply misper­
ceives a real object as something else, not seeing it as what it is (a bush
is perceived as a threatening bear); a lover maintains the reality of the
beloved object, which is not cancelled, but merely "transubstantiated"
into the appearance of a sublime dimension (the beloved's ordinary
face is perceived as it is, but it is as such elevated-! see beauty in it,
as it is); with a poet, transcendence is reduced to zero, i.e., empirical
reality is "transubstantiated"-not into an expression/materialisation
of some higher reality, but into a materialisation of nothing. A madman
directly sees God, he mistakes a person for God (or Devil); a lover sees
God (divine beauty) in a person; a poet only sees a person against the
background of Nothingness.1

1 TI1e second part of the argument is no less interesting with its Nietzschean line of

argumentation-not so much the last two lines (with their standard wisdom: fear makes
 E V EN T S T H R OU G H I M A G I N A R Y, S Y M B O L I C , A N D R E A L 39

Maybe we can use this Shakespearean triad of lunatic, love1� and poet,
as a tool to propose a classification of events based on the Lacanian triad
of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real: a lunatic dwells in the imaginary dimen­
sion, confusii1g reality and imagination; a lover identifies the beloved
person with the absolute Tiling in a symbolic short circuit between -

signifier and sigtufied which nonetheless maintains the gap that forever
separates them (the lover knows very well that, in reality, his/her beloved
is an ordinary person with all failures and weaknesses); a poet makes a
phenomenon emerge against the background of the void of the Real. Lacan
h·eats these three dimensions as a knot in wluch they are intertwined (knot­
ted) in such a way that no two dimensions are directly connected but are
held together only through the third one, so that if we cut out the third
dimension, the other two are also disconnected-the point being that
there is no (direct) relationship between any two dimensions, since each of
them relates to another only through the third one. It is only through the
Imaginary-the objet a-that the Real is linked to the Symbolic; it is only
through the Symbolic-S(A)-that the Imaginary is linked to the Real; it is
only through the Real-$, the barred subject-that the Symbolic is linked
to the Imaginary. If we apply this triad to the notion of event, we thus get
three evental dimensions:

- the imaginary event: the incorporeal flux of sense, the pure de­
substantialised sense-event, what ancient Stoics called lekta (the "say­
abies"), or, at its poetic purest, a haiku poem whose final line names
a pure impassive evental flash, a fleeting appearance that disappears
as soon as it arises-a splash of water, a blurred shadow . . . ;
- the symbolic event: the quasi-magic effect of "finding the right word",
the intervention of a Master-Signifier (S1), a point-de-capitan, the " quilt­
ing point" at which signifier falls into the signifier and which thus
introduces a new Order ("harmony"), providing a new structuring
principle of a field in question;
- and, finally, what is usually considered the specifically Freudian
notion of event, the real event (or, rather, event as/ in the Real): a trauma,
something "impossible" (or unthinkable) that nonetheless happens,
a shattering encounter or intrusion impossible to symbolise, to inte­
grate into our horizon of meaning, from rape to cosmic catastrophe.

you see what is not there, it makes you misperceive a simple bush in the night as a bear),
but rather the more precise previous lines: imagination substantialises a property (fea­
ture, emotion), imagining its bearer, its cause.
40 SEX A N D NOTH ING

This simple triangle of Imaginary-Symbolic-Real is, however, not

enough-one should add three other entities, each of them registering
the constitutive failure/ deadlock of one of the three basic dimensions:

• The flux of sense is always sustained by a singular point of nonsense:

in order to flow, it has to get stuck onto a glitch whose Lacanian name
is objet a, the object-cause of desire.
• The "harmony" imposed by a Master-Signifier always covers up a
constitutive disharmony, and the signifier of this disharmony is what
Lacan calls the signifier of the barred Other-a move to be made is
thus from 51 to S(,X') (say, from Nation to Class Struggle, to the name
the antagonism [impossibility] that cuts across the social edifice).
• Finally, the traumatic external Thing reaches its limit in the void
of the subject itself ($, the barred subject): Gandhi's well-known
dictum "Be the change you want to see in the world! " should be
paraphrased as "You already are the horror you are looking for and
fear in the world! "-the true trauma is the subject itself, its abyssal
focal point that Hegel called the Night of the World. Maybe, this is
how we should reread the famous chorus lines from Antigone: "There
are many uncanny /terrifying things in the world, but nothing more
uncanny /terrifying than man himself."

In this way, we get a (slightly changed) Lacan's scheme from his semi­
nar Encore (Lacan, 1999, p. 99):

Imaginary

What we find in the middle of the triangle is the central void of the
impossible Thing which threatens to swallow us if we get too close to it.
In terms of general relativity and quantum cosmology, we can designate
this central void as that of an Event-Horizon. In general relativity theory,
 E V E N T S T H R O U G H I M A G I N A R Y, S Y M B O L I C , A N D R E A L 41

an event horizon i s a boundary in spacetime beyond which events can­

not affect an outside observer; it is "the point of no return", i.e., the
p oint at whi �h the gravitational pull becomes so great as to make escape
impossible. Its best-known case is a black hole: it is "black" because
light emitted from beyond the horizon can never reach the observer.
As is always the case in relativity theory, it is crucial to specify from
which standpoint we observe an object approaching the horizon: for an
external observer, the object appears to slow down and never quite pass
through the horizon; however, if an observer were to be placed on the
traveling object itself, he would experience no strange effects, i.e., the
object would pass through the horizon in a finite amount of time. (For
Lacan, the central void is designated as J, the void of the Jouissance­
Thing which, if we get too close to it, threatens to suck us in.)
Although the three additional elements-S( ,��') , $, a-are to be strictly
distinguished, they nonetheless display the same reflexive structure
of an element filling in its own lack: the signifier of a lack of signifier;
the object which stands in for the very lack of object; the subject arises
out of its own impossibility, the failure of its own symbolic represen­
tation. So let us begin with a: Lacan defines objet a as objects which
"cannot be grasped in the mirror" since-like vampires-they "have
no specular image" (Lacan, 1960/2006, p . 694). But what if they are the
exact opposite, the virtual organ visible only in the mirror, as in the hor­
ror movies where I see something in the mirror that is not here in my
reality? Such a paradoxical object which stands for the very absence of
object cannot be deployed only at the level of content (a system of signs
or objects), one has to include the subject. Objet a is the point at which
the subject encounters itself, its own impossible objectal counterpoint,
among objects; "impossible" means here that a is the obverse of subject,
they cannot ever encounter each other in a direct opposition or mirror­
ing, i.e., there is no relationship between $ and a, they are like the two
sides of the same spot on a Moebius band. It is in this sense that objet a
is (Lacan's version of) the transcendental object, a mark of the "pure"
faculty of desire: it has no substantial consistence of its own, it is just
a spectral materialisation of a certain cut or inadequacy-or, as Lacan
put it concisely: "The object a is a cut" (l'objet a est une coupure) (La can,
2013). To render the hysterical frustration with every attained object of
desire, Lacan often repeated the formula: "I demand from you to refuse
what I offer you because this is not that." The point of this formula is
not simply that a positive object that we can get hold of in reality never
42 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

fits the ideal object-this ideal itself is just an imaginary representa­

tion, and if we were to get exactly such an object (with regard to its
properties), the same gap would be repeated. What this means is that
objet a is not the inaccessible ideal object to which no empirical object is
ade quate the object a is this inadequacy itself. In this sense, objet a is the
-

presupposed void in a demand, the void that sustains the experience of

"this is never that " : the universal ("object as such") comes to exists as a
pure gap.
And the status of subject is homologous to the status of this uncanny
object: subject cannot come to be without objet a as its objectal support:
the modern tradition from Sartre (and his notion of subject as negativity
transcending every object) up to Badiou (whose formula is sujet sans
objet), ignore this negativity has to be sustained by its impossible objectal
counterpart-there is no subject without object "as such", or, as Lacan
put it in Encore: "The reciprocity between the subject and the object a is
total" (Lacan, 1999, p 114). This may sound paradoxical, because objet
a is usually perceived as a singular remainder which eludes signifying
capture; howeve1� we should bear in mind that in objet a, the extremes
coincides as in the Hegelian infinite judgement: the object as such and
the indivisible remainder (itself split between the sublime je ne sais quai,
the cause of my desire, and the excremental) .
As Lacan put it in his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, sub­
ject is "that part-aspect of the real which suffers from the signifier
(ce que du reel patit du significant)" : a subject is the answer of the (living)
real to the invasion of the signifier, to its "colonisation" by the sym­
bolic order, the loss imposed by this "colonisation" . As such, subject
does not pre-exist its loss, it emerges from its loss as a return to itself:
a subject aims at representing itself, this representation fails, and the
subject is the void left behind by this failure of its own representa­
tion. This brings us to Lacan's definition of the signifier as that which
"represents the subject for another signifier": in a symbolic struc­
ture, there is always a lack, and this lack is filled in, sustained even,
re-marked, by a "reflexive" signifier which is the signifier of the lack of
the signifier; identifying the subject with the lack, we can thus say that
the reflexive signifier of the lack represents the subject for the other
signifiers. This is why there is always an element of imposture in a
Master-Signifier (the signifier which represents the subject) : its power
of fascination conceals a lack, a failure. Recall Spinoza's insight that
the traditional notion of "God" as a person above in heaven obfuscates
 E V E N T S T H R O U G H I M A G I N A R Y, S Y M B O L I C , AND REAL 43

a lack of our knowledge: the glory of "God" should not blind us for the
fact that God is effectively a negative designation, a name for what we
do not know. This is why we should accomplish the third move here:
a M aster-Signifier is an imposture destined to cover up a lack (failure,
inconsistency) of the symbolic order, i.e., it is effectively the signifier
of the lack /inconsistency of the Other, the signifier of the "barred"
Other. What this means is that the rise of a new Master-Signifier is not
the ultimate definition of the symbolic event, pace Badiou who seems
to concur with this idea, asserting the Master who imposes/ enforces
a new Order as the outcome of the feminine hysterical deadlock-a
subject needs a Master to elevate itself above the "human animal" and
practice fidelity to a Truth-Event:

[Elisabeth Roudinesco abbreviated as E.R. Eric Aeschimann abbreviated as E.A.

Alain Badiou abbreviated as A.B.]
E.R.: In the last resort, what was lost in psychoanalytic societies is the position
of the Master to the benefit of the position of small bosses.
E.A . : What do you mean by "master"?
E.R.: The position of the master allows transference: the psychoanalyst is "sup­
posed to know" what the analysand will discover. Without this knowl­
edge attributed to the psychoanalyst, the search for the origin of suffering
is quasi impossible.
E.A.: Do we really have to go through the restoration of the master?
A.B.: The master is the one who helps the individual to become subject. That
is to say, if one admits that the subject emerges in the tension between
the individual and the universality, then it is obvious that the individual
needs a mediation, and thereby an authority, in order to progress on this
path. The crisis of the master is a logical consequence of the crisis of the
subject, and psychoanalysis did not escape it. One has to renew the posi­
tion of the master, it is not true that one can do without it, even and espe­
cially in the perspective of emancipation.
E.R. : When the master disappears, he is replaced by the boss, by his authori­
tarianism, and sooner or later this always ends in fascism-unfortunately,
history has proven this to us (Badiou & Roudinesco, 2012).

But is this effectively the case? Is the only alternative to the Master the
(potentially "totalitarian") "boss"? In psychoanalysis, Master is by defi­
nition an impostor, and the whole point of the psychoanalytical pro­
cess is to dissolve the transference to the Master qua "subject supposed
44 S E X A N D N O HI I N G

to know"-the conclusion of analysis involves the fall of the subject­

supposed-to-know. With regard to politics, this means that the axiom
of radical emancipatory politics is that Master is not the ultimate hori­
zon of our social life, that one can form a collective not held together
by a Master figure. Without this axiom, there is no communist politics
proper but just pragmatic ameliorations of the existing order. Or, to put
it even more clearly: in politics an occurrence counts as Event only if it
refers to the domain of a social link without Master. Badiou should have
known it better: is the move from S1 to S(X)-from new harmony to
new disharmony-not an exemplary case of subtraction? Is the politics
of radical emancipation not a politics which practices the subtraction
from the reign of a Master-Signifier, its suspension through the produc­
tion of the signifier of the Other 's inconsistency I antagonism?
The Hegelian notion of totality provides the very concept of this
disharmony: "totality" is not an ideal of organic Whole but a critical
notion-to "locate a phenomenon in its totality" does not mean to
see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include into a system
all its distortions ( "symptoms", antagonisms, inconsistencies) as its
integral parts. In other words, the Hegelian totality is by definition
"self-contradictory", antagonistic, inconsistent: the "Whole" which
is the "True" (Hegel: "das Ganze is das Wahre") is the Whole plus its
symptoms, unintended consequences which betray its untruth. For
Marx, the "totality" of capitalism includes crises as its integral moment;
for Freud, the "totality" of a human subject includes pathological symp­
toms as the indicators of what is "repressed" in the official image of the
subject. The underlying premise is that the Whole is never truly whole:
every notion of Whole leaves something out, and the dialectical effort
is precisely the effort to include this excess, to account for it. Symp­
toms are never just secondary failures or distortions of the basically
sound System-they are indicators that there is something "rotten"
(antagonistic, inconsistent) in the very heart of the System. This is why
all the anti-Hegelian rhetoric which insists on how Hegel's totality
misses the details which stick out and ruin its balance misses the point:
the space of the Hegelian totality is the very space of the interaction
between the ("abstract") Whole and the details that elude its grasp,
although they are generated by it. Or, to shift brutally to a concrete case:
if you want to talk about global capitalism, you have to include Congo,
a country in disarray, with thousands of drugged child-warriors, but as
such fully integrated into the global system.
 E V E N T S T H R O U G H I M A G I N A R Y, S Y M B O L I C , A N D R E A L 45

The signifier of the barred Other is produced in this passage from

the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of this notion: it
names the constitutive inconsistency (antagonism, impossibility) of the
big Other-in short, it names the distortion constitutive of the Notion.
It names the dimension of crime inherent to the very notion of Law; it
names the "theft" inherent to the very notion of (private) property. It
names the antagonism which is not an effect of "things going wrong",
but constitutive of the very "normal" order of things. Say, "class strug­
gle" becomes S( ;.X') when it no longer designates only the conflict­
ing situations between labour and capital (strikes, protests, etc.), but
when it becomes the name for the structuring principle of the relation
between labour and capital as such, so that even when there are periods
of "class peace", this "peace" has to be interpreted as the (temporary)
victory of one side in the struggle. So what if thh;;-the production of
the signifier of the barred Other, and not just the production of a new
Master-Signifier-is the symbolic Event at its most radical, the Event
from which even the Real can function as an escape. How?
. The Japanese expression bakku-shan means "a girl who looks as
though she might be pretty when seen from behind, but isn't when seen
from the front". One of the lessons of the history of religion-and even
more of today's experience of religion-is that the same holds for god
himself: he may appear great when he is seen from behind and from a
proper distance, but when he comes to close and we have to confront
him face to face, spiritual bliss turns into horror. This destructive aspect
of the divine, the brutal explosion of rage mixed with ecstatic bliss, is
what Lacan aims at with his statement that gods belong to the Real.
An exemplary literary case of such an encounter of the divine Real is
Euripides's last play Bacchae, which examines religious ecstasy and the
resistance to it. Disguised as a young holy man, the god Bacchus arrives
from Asia to Thebes where he proclaims his godhood and preaches his
orgiastic religion. Pentheus, the young Theban king, is horrified at the
explosion of sacred orgies and prohibits his people to worship Bacchus;
the enraged Bacchus leads Pentheus to a nearby mountain, the site of
sacred orgies, where Agave, Pentheus' own mother, and the women of
Thebes tear him to pieces in a Bacchic sacred destructive frenzy.
The problem of Judaism is precisely� how are we to keep this dimen­
sion of the divine madness, of gods as real, at a distance. The Jewish
god is also god of brutal madness, what changes is the believers' stance
towards this dimension of the divine-if we get too close to it, then
46 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

"the glory of the Lord is like devouring fire" (Exodus 24:17) . This is why
the Jewish people say to Moses: "You speak to us, and we will listen.
But don't let God speak directly to us, or we will die!" (Exodus 20:19) .
So what if, as Levinas surmised, the ultimate addressee of the biblical
commandment "Don't kill" is god (Yahweh) himself, and we, the fragile
humans, are his neighbours exposed to divine rage? How often, in the
Old Testament, do we encounter god as a dark stranger who brutally
intrudes human lives and sows destruction?

On the way, at a place where Moses and his family spent the night,
Yahweh met him and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint, cut
off her son's foreskin, and covered his genitals with it, saying: "This
blood will protect you. " So Yahweh let Moses alone. Then she said,
"Protected by the blood of circumcision." (Exodus 4:24-26)

Indeed, when Levinas wrote that the first reaction when we see a neigh­
bour is to kill him, is the implication not that this primarily refers to
god's relationship to humans, so that the commandment "Don't kill"
is an appeal to god to control his rage? Insofar as the Jewish solution
is a dead god, a god who survives only as a "dead letter" of the sacred
book, of the Law to be interpreted, what dies with the death of god is
precisely the god of the real, of destructive fury and revenge. The title of
a well-known book on holocaust-God died in Auschwitz-has thus to be
turned around: God became alive in Auschwitz. Recall the story from
Talmud about two rabbis debating a theological point; the one who is
losing the debate call upon god himself to come and decide, and when
god effectively comes, the other rabbi tells him that his work of cre­
ation is already accomplished, so he has now nothing to say and should
leave, which god does-it is as it in Auschwitz, god comes back, with
catastrophic consequences. The true horror does not occur when we are
abandoned by god, but when god comes too close to us.
Recently, this paradox was succinctly formulated by Jiirgen Habermas:
"Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended
leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the break­
ing of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something
was lost" (Habermas, 2003, p. 110). Which is why the secular-humanist
reactions to phenomena like shoah or gulag (and others) is experienced
as insufficient: in order to be at the level of such phenomena, some­
thing much stronger is needed, something akin to the old religious
 E V E N T S T H R O U G H I M A G I N A R Y, S Y M B O L I C , A N D R E A L 47

topic of a cosmic perversion or catastrophe in which the world itself is

"out of joint"-when one confronts a phenomenon like shoah, the only
appropriate reaction is the perplexed question "Why did the heavens
not d arken?'; (the title of Arno Mayor 's famous book on shoah). Therein
resides the paradox of the theological significance of shoah: although it
is usually conceived as the ultimate challenge to theology (if there is a
God and if he is good, how could he have allowed such a horror to take
place?), it is at the same time only theology which can provide the frame
enabling us to somehow approach the scope of this catastrophe-the fiasco of
god is still the fiasco of god.
Judaism provides a unique solution to this threat of the divine
over-proximity: while, in pagan religions, the gods are alive, Jewish
believers already took God's death into account-indications of this
awareness abotmd in the Jewish sacred texts. Recall, from the Talmud,
the story about the two rabbis who basically tell God to shut up: they
fight over a theological question until, unable to resolve it, one of
them proposes: "Let Heaven itself testify that the Law is according to
my judgement." A voice from heaven agrees with the rabbi who first
appealed; however, the other rabbi then stands up and claims that even
a voice from heaven was not to be regarded, "For Thou, 0 God, didst
long ago write down in the law which Thou gavest on Sinai, 'Thou shalt
follow the multitude."' God himself had to agree: after saying "My
children have vanquished me! My children have vanquished me! ", he
runs away . . . There is a similar story in the Babylonian Talmud (Baba
Metzia 59b), but here, in a wonderful Nietzschean twist, God accepts his
defeat with joyous laughter: Rabbi Nathan met [the prophet] Elijah and
asked him, "What did the Holy One do at that moment?" Elijah: "He
laughed [with joy], saying, 'My children have defeated me, my children
have defeated me."' The outstanding feature of this story is not only the
divine laughter which replaces the sorrowful complaint, but the way
the Sages (who stand for the big Other, of course) win the argument
against God: even God Himself, the absolute Subject, is decentred with
regard to the big Other (the order of symbolic registration), so that, once
his injunctions are written down, he can no longer touch them. We can
thus imagine why God reacts to his defeat with joyous laughter: the
Sages have learnt his lesson that God is dead, and that the Truth resides
in the dead letter of the Law which is beyond his control. In short, after
the act of creation is accomplished, God loses even the right to intervene
in how people interpret his law.
48 S E X A N D N O TI-I I N G

However, the living god continues his subterranean life and errati­
cally returns in multiple forms which are all guises of the monstrous
Thing. As to today's Bacchantes, it is easy to discern them in today's
popular culture. Project X (Nima Nourizadeh, 2012) narrates the birth
of an urban legend: Thomas is turning seventeen, and his friends Costa
and J. B. are planning to throw a huge birthday bash at Thomas' house
to increase their popularity among their schoolmates. As Thomas' par­
ents are going away for the weekend, Thomas' father lays down the
rules (a maximum of five people at their house, not to drive his expen­
sive Mercedes, and no one is allowed in his office) .
Thomas worries that no one will come until, suddenly, cars start
pulling up in the neighbourhood and the party becomes an instant hit.
Gradually, things go out of control: the noise and scope of the party
causes televised news coverage; news helicopters fly over the house; the
police arrive with a SWAT team, which decides to let the party burn out
before moving in. But then an intruder with a flamethrower torches up
trees around the neighbourhood and cars parked on the road, and the
neighbourhood is left in flames until fire department helicopters extin­
guish it. When, next morning, parents do come home, Thomas's father
punishes him by using his college funds to pay for the damages; but he
nonetheless commends Thomas for the party-Thomas has shown he
has guts, while his father thought he is a coward and loser. This father 's
recognition demonstrates how the paternal prohibition functions: "In
fact, the image of the ideal Father is a neurotic's fantasy. Beyond the
Mother [ . ] stands out the image of a father who would turn a blind
. .

eye to desires. This marks-more than it reveals-the true function of

the Father, which is fundamentally to unite (and not to oppose) a desire
to the Law" (Lacan, 1960 /2006, p. 698) . While prohibiting son's esca­
pades, father discreetly not only ignores and tolerates them, but even
solicits them. It is in this sense that Father as the agent of prohibition/
law sustains desire/pleasures: there is no direct access to enjoyment
since its very space is opened up by the blanks of the Father 's control­
ling gaze. (And does exactly the same not hold for god himself, our
ultimate father? The first commandment says: "You shall have no other
gods before me." What does the ambiguous "before me" refer to? Most
of translators agree that it means "before my face, in front of me, when
I see you" -which subtly implies that the jealous god will nonetheless
turn a blind eye to what we are doing secretly, out of [his] sight . . . in
short, god is like a jealous husband who tells his wife: "OK, you can
 E V E N T S T H R O U G H I M A G I N A R Y, S Y M B O l i C , A N D R E A L 49

have other men, but do it discreetly, so that I [or the public in general]
will not notice about it and you will not put me to shame!".) The nega­
tive proof of this constitutive role of the Father in carving out the space
for a viable enjoyment is the deadlock of today's permissiveness, where
the master I expert no longer prohibits enjoyment but enjoins it ("sex is
healthy", etc.), thereby effectively sabotaging it.
But more relevant is the quasi-sacred character of the party: when it
runs out of control, it explodes into what one cannot but designate as
a collective experience of the sacred, an experience of what Bataille
called economie generale, the unrestrained expenditure, something like
the dance of the Bacchantes reinvented for today, a moment when
the lowest stupid adolescent partying turns into its opposite, a new
form of the Sacred. And, to avoid a misunderstanding, the point is not
to celebrate wild partying but to render visible the amphibious nature
of the sacred itself. Sergei Eisenstein saw the production of pathos as a
structural issue, not only as a matter of content. In The Old and the New,
there is a famous scene which renders the successful testing of a collec­
tive farm's new milk separator, with the enraptured farmers watching
how the white liquid starts to flow out-the machine becomes a grail­
like magic object which "intensifies" their emotions (Eisenstein, 1987).
Is it not exactly the same in Project X where a vulgar adolescent party is
"intensified" to a sacred orgy?
And is an even more extreme case of such "intensification" not the
pop music event of the summer of 2012: "Gangnam Style" performed
by Psy, a South Korean singer? The song is not only wildly popula1� it
also mobilises people into a collective trance, with tens of thousands
shouting and performing a dance that imitates horse riding, all in the
same rhythm with an intensity unseen from the times of early Beatles,
referring to Psy as a new Messiah. The music is psydance at its worst,
totally flat and mechanically simple, mostly computer-generated (recall
that Psy-the singer 's name-is a shortened version of psytrance);
what makes it interesting is the way it combines collective trance with
self-irony. Words of the song (and the staging of the video clip) obvi­
ously poke fun at the meaninglessness and vacuity of Gangnam style,
some claim even in a subtly subversive way-but we are nonetheless
entranced, caught in the stupid marching rhythm, participating in it in
pure mimesis; flash mobs pop up all around the world imitating moments
of the song, etc. Gangnam style is not ideology in spite of ironic distance,
it is ideology because of it: irony plays the same role as the documentary
50 SEX AND NOTH I N G

style in Lars von Trier 's Breaking the Waves in which the subdued
pseudo-documentary form makes palpable the excessive content-in a
strictly homologous way, the self-mocking irony of "Gangnam style"
makes palpable the stupid jouissance of the rave music. Many viewers
find the song disgustingly attractive, i.e., they "love to hate it", or, rather,
they enjoy to find it disgusting, so they repeatedly play it to prolong
their disgust. This compulsive nature of the obscene jouissance in all its
stupidity is what true art should release us from.
An escape from this vortex of the Real can be provided by the
Imaginary-how? In his Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze inverts Plato's
dualism of eternal Ideas and their imitations in sensuous reality into the
dualism of substantial (material) bodies and the pure impassive surface
of Sense, the flux of Becoming which is to be located on the very bor­
derline of Being and non-Being. Senses are surfaces which do not exist,
but merely subsist: "They are not things or facts, but events. We cannot
say that they exist, but rather that they subsist or inhere (having this
minimum of being which is appropriate to that which is not a thing,
a non-existing entity" (Deleuze, 1990, p. 5). The Stoics, who developed
this notion of "incorporeals", were:

[ ] the first to reverse Platonism and to bring about a radical

. . .

inversion. For if bodies with their states, qualities, and quantities,

assume all the characteristics of substance and cause, conversely,
the characteristics of the Idea are relegated to the other side, that is
to this impassive extra-Being which is sterile, inefficacious, and on
the surface of things: the ideational or the incorporeal can no longer
be anything other than an "effect" . (Deleuze, 1990, p. 7)

Stoics thus opened up a unique alternate line of thought, clearly opposed

to the substantialist metaphysics, which resurfaces in early Wittgenstein
("The world is all that is the case. [ ] The world is the complete sum
. . .

of facts, not of things. "), in Whitehead, and in Deleuze. In his under­

rated masterpiece, The Archeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault follows
Deleuze and delineates the ontology of utterances as pure language
events: not elements of a structure, not attributes of subjects who utter
them, but events which emerge, function within a field, and disappear.
To put it in Stoic terms, Foucault's discourse analysis studies lekta,
utterances as pure events, focusing on the inherent conditions of their
emergence (as the concatenation of events themselves) and not on their
 E V E N T S T H R O U G H I M A G I N A R Y, S Y M B O L I C , A N D R E A L 51

inclusion in the context o f historical reality. (Badiou, on the contrary,

asserts the rarity of the Event: event only happens when a new truth
interrupts the flow of being: a revolution in politics, a discovery in sci­
ences, a new .form of art, falling in love.)
Buddhist ontology seems to point in a similar direction, even radi­
calising it: reality itself is de-substantialised, reduced to a flow of fragile
app earances, so that ultimately everything is event(al) . The Buddhist
universe thus allows for two types of events: the event of Enligh­
tenment, of fully assuming the non-existence of the Self, and the
unique capture of a fleeting event, exemplarily in haiku poetry, what
Deleuze called a pure event of (non)sense. This seems to be the infinite
judgement of Buddhism: the overlapping of the Absolute (the primor­
dial Void experienced in nirvana) and the fragile flash-like tiny surface
effect (the topic of haiku). Here is Matsuo Basho's best known haiku (in
the translations, the kireji-the "cutting word" which marks a break in
the poem-is rendered by " . . . " or ";"):

Old pond . . .
A frog jumps in
Splash!

The true object is the splash-event (overlapping with silence that sus­
tains it?). There is no idealisation in haiku, just the effect of sublimation
where no matter how "low" a material act can give birth to the event,
so we should not be afraid to imagine a much more vulgar version
of a haiku focused on the same event-a friend from Japan informed
me that there is a twentieth century variation on Basho's splash-motif
which, precisely, should not be read as a parody:

Toilet bowl with stale water . . .

I sit on it
Splash!

The three-lines-rule of a haiku poem is well-justified: the first line

renders the pre-evental situation (a calm old pond, a bowl with calm
water); kireji marks a cut into this inactivity, the intervention which dis­
turbs peace and will generate the event (a frog jumps, I sit on a toilet
bowl); and the last line names the fleeting event (the sound of splash) .
Even when kireji is not followed by an active intervention, it marks a
52 S E X A N D N O H -I l N G

break between the general neutral situation and the particular element
which serves as the material support of the event-here are two further
haikus from Basho:

Spring:
A hill without a name
Veiled in morning mist.

The begirming of autumn:

Sea and emerald paddy
Both the same green.

The "object" is here first the morning mist, then the colour of green­
object not as a substance, but as an event, as a pure sterile effect in
excess of its cause (which, as we have just seen, can even be as vulgar
as pushing a piece of shit out of one's anus into a toilet bowl) . In such
an immaterial effect, the fleeting almost-nothing of the pure appearance
overlaps with eternity, movement overlaps with stillness, noise with
eternal silence, a singular moment of sense with Non-Sense-it is the
Zen way to say "Spirit is a bone". However, such a suspension of cor­
poreal reality is profoundly ambiguous: it can also function as a screen
obfuscating the horrifying consequences of our acts. Recall the title of
Robert Pirsig's perennial best-seller of New Age philosophy, Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig, 1984); one can easily imagine a
series of variations on the same motif: Zen and the art of sexual perfor­
mance, or business success . . . up to Zen and the art of gentle warfare.
Indeed, there exist books like this: Vernon Turner 's Soul Sword: The Way
and Mind of a Zen Warrior (Turner, 2000)-here are some lines from the
back cover of the book:

The power of the Warrior Mind is its ability to act from [ . . . ] a state of
No Mind. As a mirror reflects objects without clinging to the images,
the Warrior Mind is free to flow from one object to the next without
impediment. From this state arises instinctive wisdom, the power that
allows ordinary people to perform exh·aordinary feats. [ . . . ] It ftmctions
within us daily but is counteracted by the false mind and its endless
projections. The task is to still the mind to the point where "the action
and the actor [are] a seamless thread." Daily life is the battlefield for
the Warrior Mind. The author shows us how to "flow into the affairs
 E V E N T S T H R O U G H I M A G I N A R Y, S Y M B O L I C , A N D R E A L 53

of the day. [ ] Soul Sword is an active meditation for those who wish
. . .

to be in the world but not of it."

Within this attitude, the warrior no longer acts as a person; he is thor­

oughly de-subjectivised-or, as D. T. Suzuki himself put it: "it is really
not he but the sword itself that does the killing. He had no desire to do
harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim.
It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of jus­
tice, which is the function of mercy" (Victoria, 1998, p. 110) . Does this
description of killing not provide the ultimate case of the phenomeno­
logical attitude which, instead of intervening into reality, just lets things
appear as they are? The sword itself does the killing; the enemy just
appe ars and makes himself a victim-the warrior is in it for nothing,
reduced to the passive observer of his own acts. In the 1970s, at the time
of the military dictatorship in Brazil, the circle of the secret policemen
engaged in torturing political prisoners improvised a kind of private
religion: a New Age Buddhist mixture based on the conviction that
there is no reality, just a fragmented dance of illusory appearances . . .
one can well see how this "religion" enabled them to endure the horror
of what they were doing. No wonder, then, that, "struck by his leader's
cold demeanour and his utter ruthlessness towards their enemies, one
of his comrades once compared Pol Pot with a Buddhist monk who had
attained the 'third level' of consciousness: 'You are completely neutral.
Nothing moves you. This is the highest level'" (Ferguson, 2007, p . 623).
One should not dismiss this idea as an obscene false parallel: Pol Pot
does come from the Buddhist cultural background with its long tradi­
tion of militarist discipline. Along these lines, we can well invent yet
another haiku whose third line renders the pure event of blood splash­
ing from a body cut by sword:

Fat body wiggling in front of me

The swing of my sword
Splash!

Or, why not, even a step further, in the direction of Auschwitz:

Prisoners taking shower . . .

My finger presses a button
Cries echoing!
54 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

The point of these improvisations is not to engage in tasteless jokes, but

to make us see that a truly enlightened one should be able to see a pure
event even in such terrifying circumstances. From a broader perspec­
tive, this brings us to the topic of the ambiguous relationship between
poetry and power. Boris Pasternak characterised his poem "The temper
obstinate appeals . . . " (published in 1936 in the official daily Izvestija) as
a "two-voiced fugue" about the couple of the poet (Pasternak himself),
an obstinate recluse who eschews public gaze and is shy of his own
books, and Stalin, the "Kremlin recluse", "not a man but deed incarnate"
who acts with "terrifying greatness" and nonetheless "has remained a
human". Although the poet is "consumed by this genius of action" and
exists merely as its negligible pale echo, there is nonetheless a secret
link that connects the two, Pasternak's and Stalin's knowledge of each
other (this link was a fact: Stalin crossed out Pasternak's name from the
purge list prepared by NKVDs, scrawling on the paper "Do not touch
this cloud dweller!"). A brutally powerful leader who is a deed incar­
nate, who embodies the unconditional will to actualisation, is a poet's
dream: Stalin was living out a poet's dream, i.e., Stalin's ego-ideal, the
point of view from which he appeared to himself likable, was the poet's
gaze. Indeed, as a cynical CIA agent comments in the Hollywood politi­
cal drama on the Nicaragua war Under Fire (Roger Spottiswoode, 1983),
people fall in love with poets, poets fall in love with revolutionary lead­
ers who fall in love with themselves, and there we are . . . Pasternak's
1934 poetic encounter with Stalin thus maybe provides an unexpected
answer to the line from Hoelderlin's "Brat und Wein" out of which
Heidegger endeavoured to draw a lot of mileage: Wozu Dichter in durfti­
ger Zeit ? Why poets in a hollow (sparse, scanty) age? To obfuscate this
very hollow real, to produce myths that can serve as the screen for its
horrors. It is one of the commonplaces of the twentieth century opinion
(shared also by many philosophers) to blame philosophy for laying the
ground for the totalitarian horrors: from totality to totalitarianism, from
Plato to NATO-but is poetry not also to blame? Were not-behind
every nationalist brutality-poets concocting national myths? So what
if Plato was right here? What if he did stir up a sensitive nerve with his
idea of throwing the poets out of the city? Poets do lie, poetic mimesis
does entangle us into the interpassive game of practicing something we
do not really believe in, of experiencing emotions we know are not ours:
we are affected, although we know it is just a fiction. So what if, far
from just mistrusting emotions, Plato was rather disturbed by the weird
 E V E N T S T H R O U G H I M A G I N A R Y, S Y M B O L I C , AND REAL 55

e1notions which are not ours but make a s react a s if they are ours? Let us
take another, perhaps unexpected, example-here is, from Afghanistan,
the first strophe of Samiullah Khalid Sahak's poem "Humanity":

Everything has gone from the world,

The world has become empty again.
Human animal.
Humanity animality.
Everything has gone from the world,
I don't see anything now.
All that I see is
My imagination. 2

If nothing else, one can say that these lines (with the notable Badiou­
sounding expression "human animal") are not a simple war or reli­
gious propaganda. No wonder, then, that, when the volume The Poetry
of Taliban appeared, it was denounced as a propaganda which renders
the murderous enemy respectful by humanising these "fascist, murder­
ing thugs who suppress women and kill people without mercy if they
do not agree with them", as Robert Kemp put it. Understanding liber­
als made the same point about humanising, but from the opposite end,
as a good feature: William Dalrymple, for example, praised the book
for "humanizing and giving voice to the aspirations, aesthetics, emo­
tions, and dreams of the fighters of a much-caricatured and still little­
understood resistance movement" . What we should problematize is the
premise which underlies both approaches: the incompatibility between
brutal terror and authentic poetic spirit-the sad lesson is that they do
go together.

2 Quoted from www.kenanmalik.com/ reviews/ taliban_poe try.html.

56 S E X A N D NOT H I N G

References
Badiou, A., & Roudinesco, E. (2012). Appel aux psychanalystes. Entretien
avec Eric Aeschimann. Le Nouvel Observa teur. April 19, 2012.
Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Belknap Press .
Deleuze, G. (1990) . The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University
Press .
Eisenstein, S. (1987) . The Milk Separator and the Holy Grail. Nonindifferent
Nature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, N. (2007) . The War of the World. London: Penguin Books.
Habermas, J. (2003) . The Future of Human Nature. London: Polity Press.
Lacan, J. (1960 /2006). The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of
desire in the Freudian unconscious. Ecrits . New York: W. W. Norton &
Company.
Lacan, J. (1999) . The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. Encore. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (2013) . Le Seminaire. Livre VI. Le desir et son in terpretation . Paris:
Seuil.
Pirsig, R. (1984) . Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Main tenance. New York:
Bantam.
Turnet� V. K. (2000). Soul Sword: The Way and Mind of a Zen Warrior. Hamp­
tons: Hampton Roads Publishing.
Victoria, B. (1998) . Zen at War. New York: Weatherhilt.
C H A P TE R F O U R

Th e u nso u n d ab l e dec i sion of be i n g

je/ica Sumic

owadays we are used to seeing contemporary thought

N inscribed under the heading of "the End": the end of politics,

the end of history and, accordingly, the end of philosophy. Yet
the very possibility of a contemporary revival of philosophy, a return
to philosophy, as has been proposed by contemporary thinkers, such as
Alain Badiou in France, testifies to the fact that the end is by no means
destiny of thought. For this gesture of the return, as demonstrated by
Badiou himself, requires as its pre-condition a supplementary gesture:
that of finishing with the issue of the End. The revival of philosophy
would thus depend on its capacity to put an end to this "end business",
in particular as it appears to inevitably lead to the exaltation of finitude.
This decision to finish with the end does not suggest finishing with the
beginning, for that matter; on the contrary, it radicalises the issue of
the beginning. Not, of course, in the sense of some supposed purity
of origin, but rather in the sense of the audacity to take upon oneself
a beginning without support or ground. This double gesture of finish­
ing and re-commencing, while denouncing the imaginary character of
these two stopping points, the beginning and the end, constitutes the
perspective from which we propose to tackle Schelling's unrelenting
struggle with the true beghming of philosophy. The aim of our inquiry
57
58 S E X AND N OT H I N G

into Schelling's thought is twofold: first, to show that all "true" begin­
nings imply an Ent-Scheidung, a violent interruption and intervention
into a phantasmatic prehistory; second, to show that such a gesture of
interruption remains inseparable from an "unsoundable decision of
being" (Lacan, 1946 /2006, p. 145), to borrow Lacan's somewhat enig­
matic formulation, which in and of itself constitutes a "double birth":
that of the subject and that of the Other. In light of this "double birth"
we will argue that the originality of Schelling's approach resides in his
turning the question of the beginning into the question of the Other.
It should be noted from the outset, that there is no unambiguous figure
of the Other in Schelling. Indeed, there are two figures of the Other that
can be distinguished in Schelling's thought:
1) First, there is that figure of the Other whose incarnation is perhaps
best illustrated by a symbolic function that Pascal called the God of the
philosophers. It is this figure of the Other which could be identified with
the Lacanian Other of the Other, the Other as a law and as guarantor of
the symbolic that Schelling criticises, for reasons that will be explained
below. 2) There is, however, in Schelling's thought yet another figure
of the Other, instituted in the register of the real and which Schelling
designates as the living God or the real God.
It is now appropriate to develop this difference in order to see in
detail in what consists Schelling's specific solution to the problem of
the Other. Our question would then be: What could be considered to
be, according to Schelling, the proper status of this Other? More pre­
cisely, what, in Schelling's view, makes God real? The first, provisional
answer could thus be: for God to be veritably real, to be the Other
in the proper sense of the word, it is necessary that God represents
an insurmountable obstacle to reason, one that introduces what one
might call the discordance between God and thought. As we shall see
presently, the distinctive feature of the Schellingian God resides in His
capacity to unsettle reason, indeed, to provoke its derailment which
takes place whenever reason attempts to grasp such an Other in its
absolute otherness. Yet it is precisely this capacity to put reason out­
of-joint, and, consequently, to provoke its ecstasy, which constitutes,
as Schelling himself remarked, the ontological proof of the existence of
the real God, as well as its differentia specifica with respect to the God of
the philosophers, who, by contrast, is structurally incapable of causing
reason's disruption, since such a God is nothing but a concept, that is,
a product of reason itself.
 T H E U N S O U N DA B L E D E C I S I O N OF BEING 59

Certainly, the Schellingian God bears some close affinities to the

ra dical Othe1� but it would be too farfetched to suggest that Schelling's
interest centres principally on this absolute otherness. Were this the case,
all inquiry irito the question of revelation would immediately become
not only futile but also incomprehensible. In point of fact, there is, in
Schelling's thought, an obvious tension between the issue of the revela­
tion and the issue of the otherness of the Other. In what follows, we pro­
pose to re-examine several aspects of this tension central to Schelling's
thought, by using Lacan's concept of fantasy.

Schelling's fantasy
What exactly is meant by fantasy in Schelling's philosophy? 1 This is
by no means an easy question. Given Lacan's account of the structure
of fantasy, it is far from obvious that there is anything in Schelling's
thought to which this concept might apply. Let us note that at least one
of the things Schelling says about the mode in which God exists and
His genesis may confirm our interpretation. However, it is important to
emphasise that what we are interested in is not merely to demonstrate
to what extent the concept of fantasy can be of help to us in explaining
Schellingian philosophy, but also to what extent Schellingian philoso­
phy can, in turn, contribute to the elucidation of this concept.
A remark made by La can apropos Sa de can be of help here: "Sa de",
says Lacan, "is not duped by his fantasy, insofar as the rigour of his
thinking is integrated into the logic of his life" (Lacan, 1963 /2006,
p. 656). The same holds true for Lacan himself. In both cases we are
confronted with a rigorous logic that governs both thought and life. Or,
to be even more precise: in Sa de's as well as in La can' s case, the rigour
of thought and the logic of life converge but, as we shall see in what fol­
lows, this convergence is rendered possible through a specific fantasy.
Which fantasy, we may ask, can bring together the two logics, say,
in Lacan's case? This fantasy no doubt involves what could be called a
heroic posture-which, of course, is inscribed in the basic ethical maxim
of psychoanalysis, demanding of the subject that he /she not give up
on his /her own desire. Ultimately, a certain amount of heroism can be

1 A number of interesting remarks are made about the role of fantasy in Schelling's

thought that suggest other possible interpretations than the one we provide below. Par­
ticularly pertinent on this point is Zizek (1997).
60 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

ascribed to all im1ovators, to all Bahnbrecher. Typical in this respect is

Freud's heroism-the heroism of someone who, in the name of truth,
resisted all pressure to conform. Lacan's heroism, on the other hand,
consisted less in the struggle with a much greater adversary-although
such a resistance, in Lacan's case, cannot be denied either. It suffices
to recall his resistance to the International Psycho-Analytical Associa­
tion (ipa) and its pressures to conform, a resistance which resulted, as
is well known, not only in Lacan's exclusion (or, as he himself termed
it in Seminar 1 1 , his excommunication) from that association but also in
his founding of a new school of psychoanalysis. We are dealing here
with a paradoxical heroism, indeed the mock-heroism (Miller, 1991) of
someone who resists less as a hero than as a cast-off-or, in more strictly
Lacanian terms, object a. Put in another way, it is only insofar as he has
situated himself as trash or, which amounts to the same, as a saint (this
being, as Lacan himself puts it in Television, but another name for trash)
that we can say of Lacan that he resists.
Could it be said of Lacan himself what he maintained about Sade,
namely that he was not "duped" by his own fantasy of "heroic trash"?
This thesis has its value only to the extent that the analyst's role is elabo­
rated by Lacan in terms of object a, or, which amounts to the same thing,
of trash. 2 Rather than situating the analyst in the position of a subject
capable of seeing the object of fantasy invisible to the patient, Lacan
invites his analyst, whose task is to provide a testimony and a cause
of the Other 's desire for his /her patient, to take on the position of that
what remains after the completion of the analysis-that is, to situate
him/herself as a sort of a residue which cmmot be used in the circuit
and amounts to a simple leftover. Accordingly, to the extent that the
analyst occupies the place of the master, but does not "play his role",
thereby rendering visible the Master 's imposture, the lack that always
already pertains to the Other itself, the analyst has to situate him/herself
as someone who, instead of clinging to some institutional Other, takes
upon him/herself the role of the excommunicated, of the discarded. In
this respect, what renders the convergence of Lacan's thought, more
precisely, his theory of the analyst's function, and his life-which, as is

2 "Because there is no better way of p laci ng him [i.e., the analyst] objectively than in

relation to what was in the past called: being a saint . . . Saint's business . . . is not caritas.
Rathel� he acts as trash /dechet/ So as to embody what the structure entails, namely
. . .

allowing the subject, the subject of the unconscious, to take him as the cause of the
subject's own desire" (Lacan, 1990, p. 15).
 T H E U N S O U N DA B L E D E C I S I O N O F B E I N G 61

well known, was strongly marked by his status as an "outlaw", since

he was excluded, "excommunicated", from the ipa (Lacan, 1981)-is
his theorisation of objet a, that object namely, which can never be iden­
tifi ed with an ideal, an object which remains in absolute discord with
any Other.
It has been emphasised that all thought is structured or supported by
some kind of a fantasmatic framework. In accordance with this general
assumption, it could be argued that the fantasy that to a large extent
structures Schelling's thought is what could be called a fantasy of "the
great man" rather than a heroic fantasy. For how else are we to under­
stand Shelling's bitterness, his jealousy with regard to Hegel, whom
he considered as a rival, if not by assuming that Schelling surrendered
to his own fantasy "of being the greatest philosopher of his time"?
What could better explain his hostility, his ceaseless, more or less open
polemic with Hegelian philosophy (Tilliette, 1987)-a polemic which, it
must be admitted, is not only one-sided but also, to a large extent, post­
humous-if not this lethal relationship in which Schelling sees himself
as someone who has been dethroned and replaced by his double? And
conversely, one can scarcely doubt that, when Schelling was called to
a professorship at the University of Berlin in 1841, i.e., several years
after Hegel's death, with a mission "to extirpate the dragon's seed", this
call represented for Schelling less an opportunity to take revenge on his
great rival than a kind of an answer of the real.
While this particular fantasy of "the great man" explains not only
the vicissitudes of his life but, in some radical sense, decides the destiny
of philosophy itself, it is clear that this lethal imaginary relationship
of rivalry can hardly exhaust what is involved in the Schellingian fan­
tasy. There is another important issue that can be related to Schelling's
fantasy and which Schelling himself announced, in his Stuttgart Semi­
nars, in the following terms: "All philosophy is progressive proof of the
Absolute, a continuous showing of God" (Schelling, 1856a, p . 443) . Here
we are facing another aspect of the fantasy of "the great man", since
what Schelling is aiming at is nothing less than to be, if we may say so,
a scribe of the Absolute's history-God's biographer. To put this p oint
in another way, we might say that, at issue here is the way in which
Schelling's subjective position relates to his discourse, i.e., God's biogra­
phy. A brief sketch of such a position elaborated in The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psycho-analysis will provide a useful point of departure for
our consideration of this relationship.
62 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

In a certain sense Schelling, not unlike Lacan, can only accomplish

his task by occupying the position of objet a. But in Schelling's case we
are confronted with a different object a. Insofar as Schelling sees him­
self in the role of God's biographer, insofar as he sees himself as God's
instrument, we are dealing here with the aphanisis or evaporation of the
subject in his fantasy: in the face of some a uratic object, the subject fades
away. This subjective position can best be explained with the inversion
of the formula of fantasy: instead of the barred, divided subject, $, fac­
ing the object, we are dealing with a subject taking the place of an object.
The inverted effect of fantasy resides thus in the fact that fantasy, rather
than being at the service of desire, i.e., rather than being the cause of the
subject's division which renders the lack in the subject visible, operates
as a basis for the subject's identification.
Hence, it is possible to say that instead of a structural non-identity
with him/herself we are dealing here with an identity, a pathological
identity to be precise, insofar as the subject, defined as the lack of being,
attains the complement of his/her being, not at the level of the symbolic
or the imaginary order but that of the real. Consequently, the subject's
division, i.e., his/her difference from him/herself, always already
implied in "regular" identification, also disappears or is denied. Lacan
illustrates this point in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis,
for instance, by showing how the perverse subject situates him/herself
as the object in fantasy, whereas the division of this subject, now iden­
tical with him/herself, is delegated to the Other. As a result of such a
peculiar, irregular mode of identification through fantasy, a new subject
emerges: the subject of enjoyment or the subject of the drive, whose
differentia specifica, to repeat once more, resides in the fact that, when
faced with subjective division, such a subject situates him /herself as
object, or, rather, literally disappears in the object. What conclusion can
we draw from such a short-circuited, i.e., real identification with the
object where the subject, instead of looking for the means of identifi­
cation at the level of the symbolic, comes across an object that is sup­
posed to incarnate his /her "being", his/her Dasein? For one thing, the
very possibility of such a phantasmatic identification testifies to the fact
that alienation of the lack of being is insufficient for the determination
of the subjective position. What is needed, in addition, is yet another
step in the identification, i.e., identification with the subject's Dasein,
with that object which is the cause his/her desire. This is why a supple­
mentary effort is required that would make it possible for the subject to
 T H E U N S O U N DA B l E D E C I S I O N O F B E I N G 63

"recognise" him/herself in such an object and, in so doing, to assume

his/her subjective destitution.
In what follows we propose to show to what extent this strictly "per­
verse" position, if we may say so, makes it possible for Schelling to
write God's history-more precisely, to write it precisely as a fantasy­
and, second, how this fantasy of being "God's biographer", ultimately,
this instrumentalisation of the subject's position confers logic and con­
sistency to Schelling's work.
What, then, does it mean to be "God's biographer"? Schelling elab­
orates on this point in great detail and continually changes his per­
spective. We should not forget that Schelling's ambition is to be God's
biographer precisely as a philosopher. But how can Schelling-philosopher
assign himself such a mission in the first place? As is well known, this is
not Schelling's initial position. God was not designated as the privileged
object of his reflection from the outset. In his book Vom Ich als Prinzip der
Philosophie, oder iiber das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (1795), it is
freedom rather than God which is designated as the alpha and omega
of philosophy, as its supreme, unconditional condition. For this free­
dom, defined by Schelling as the self-positing of the absolute ego, this
freedom that even transcends God's personal being, constitutes the true
beginning of philosophy. Here, the emphasis is put not on the act of
unconditional freedom itself but rather on the begetting of philosophy.
Because, throughout his long career in philosophy, Schelling never tires
of repeating that the true problem of philosophy is that of its beginning.
Hence, it is possible to say that the guiding thread of Schelling's philos­
ophy as a whole is the following question: What is the true beginning of
philosophy? This question, which has been, as is well known, one of the
central questions of all modern philosophy since Descartes, is presented
from the Schellingian perspective as a task constitutive of philosophy as
such. What is also worth stressing here is that, in Schelling's case, this
task is a paradoxical one: while being characterised as necessary and
unavoidable, it remains essentially unrealisable.
The evidence of the impossibility of accomplishing this task is the
very fragmentary characte1� the incompleteness of almost all Schelling's
writings. It is not only The Ages of the World, which Xavier Tilliette, in his
excellent book, L'Absolu et la philosophie, appropriately characterised as
"his premature grave" (Tilliette, 1987, p. 18), it is Schelling's work taken
as a whole which can be considered as a series of false beginnings, or
"miscarriages" to borrow Lacan's term, because none of the proposed
64 SEX A N D NOTH I N G

beginnings proves to be a good or satisfactory one. Every writing and

every series of lectures is presented as "a start from the zero degree, as
a tabula rasa", says Tilliette, and ends up as a failure, thus demanding a
new start. And conversely, every new effort stigmatises the preceding
one as "this is not it! " Indeed, a series of departure points proposed by
Schelling one after another appears to be, in principle at least, endless:
the absolute, the ego, freedom, nature, God, etc. On the other hand,
however, this frantic and, at the same time, anxious quest for the "right
beginning" which cannot come to a halt results in the fragmentary and
incomplete structure of Schelling's work as a whole.
How is this incompleteness to be explained? What prevents Schelling
from dispensing, once for all, with the beginning? We will provisionally
put forward the following hypothesis: if the incompleteness which marks
the whole of Schelling's work is due less to some accident or chance and
more to structural necessity, this is because it originates in Schelling's
passion for and obsession with the begitming. The maxim of this truly
Schellingian passion for the beginning could thus be summarised by para­
phrasing the Sadean injunction: "Yet another effort, philosophers!", "Yet
another effort to define the true beginning of philosophy! " Crucial here
is that this silent injunction that traverses the entirety of Schelling's work
conceals a quasi-tautology, for the developed formula of the Schellingian
maxim could be formulated as: "Yet another effort, philosophers, if you
would become . . . What? Nothing other but philosophers!"
In other words, if Schelling fails to finish with the beginning, this is
simply because he cannot ( 01� rather, should not) finish with it, since the
very existence of philosophy depends upon such an endless quest. It is
precisely this continuous pursuit of the beginning which keeps philoso­
phy alive; it is this metonymy of false beginnings that constitutes the
condition of possibility for philosophy as such. Hence we could say that
philosophy remains alive if, and only if, it constantly misses its proper
goal, the proper object of its desire. Only one conclusion can be drawn
from this : if every search for the true beginning fails, it is precisely
because there is no such a thing as a true beginning. As soon as philoso­
phy comes across its true beginning, it would also come up against its
proper end. Hence, one is tempted to say that Schelling's ethical maxim,
his "not giving way as to his desire", can best be rendered in the guise of
the injunction: "One more effort to define the true beginning of philoso­
phy!" The question to be asked at this point is, of course: to what extent
does Schelling succeed in remaining faithful to his maxim?
 T H E U N S O U N DA B L E D E C I S I O N O F B E I N G 65

To answer this question it is necessary to distinguish two distinct

yet interrelated issues in Schelling's philosophy: the first is the issue of
the beghming, in the perspective of which philosophy itself is identi­
·
fied with an endless reflection on its own beghming; second is centred
around the Absolute, God, this beh1g the Schellingian big Other-that
is, around that instance to which Schelling ascribes a different, if not the
opposite, role. Indeed, the issue of the Other is presented from the outset
as the terminus ad quem and terminus ad quo of Schellingian philosophy.
To illustrate this point, it is enough to consider the following state­
ment drawn from Schelling's Stuttgart Seminars: "The existence of the
unconditional should not be shown as that of the conditioned. For the
unconditional is the only element, which allows for a demonstration
[ . ]. Philosophy is, strictly speaking, continuous proof of the Absolute"
. .

(Schelling, 1856a, p. 443). Stated otherwise, insofar as philosophy is

defined as a continuous proof of the Absolute, it cannot but begin with
that which, by remaining its goal, its end-point, is only susceptible to
constituting a true point of departure: the Absolute. The latter figures
at one and the same time as the beginning and end of all philosophy.
Indeed, the Schellingian Other, whether called the Absolute, or God for
that matter, is unequivocally presented as a stopping-point, an anchor­
ing point, i.e., as a point at which the beginning and end coincide.
How does Schelling, h1 view of the above, think this paradoxical
relationship between the metonymy of begim1ings, this desire that ani­
mates philosophy as philosophy, and this point of fixation ascribed to
God? Is it not rather the case that Schelling, in assuming the existence
of such an end-point, puts philosophy into question, which, as we have
seen, is assimilated to the metonymy of beginnings? How, then, can
Schelling think together the metonymic slippage from one beginning
to the next-i.e., that which, by definition, knows no rest-and God,
who, on the contrary, is supposed to provide an anchoring point? To
formulate the central problem of Schellingian philosophy in these terms
means that Schelling appears to be confronted with an alternative in
which only one option can be chosen. The other is necessarily cancelled
out: in choosing philosophy, i.e., the metonymic quest for the beginning,
Schelling seems to be losing God. If, however, he chooses God, it seems
that this is only possible at the price of the loss of philosophy, as the
latter seems to be reduced to a transitory phase in the ascent towards
God, that phase, namely, which will later be designated by Schelling as
negative philosophy.
66 SEX A N D NOT H I N G

How does Schelling evade this lethal aporia? In his Stuttgart Semi­
nars, as well as in his drafts entitled The Ages of the World, written
between 1811 and 1815, Schelling made numerous attempts to resolve
this problem by posing that God Himself was a question inherent in
the problematic of the begim1ing. In what sense can God be considered
to constitute, as Schelling suggests, the true beginning? The solution
provided by Schelling could be summarised as follows: if God is imma­
nent to the problematic of the beginning, this is only because the begin­
ning is immanent to the problematic of God. It is at this point that we
can introduce our second thesis, according to which the solution to the
paradox of the begim1ing requires a passage from God qua beginning to
the beginning of God. Let us examine this passage in order to measure
the impact of Schelling's solution.

The birth of the Other

This shift of perspective, which corresponds to a change in register­
from symbolic to real-suggests that, for Schelling, the Other is not
always already there. His critique of the Ontological Argument (Tilliette,
1987) provides convincing evidence for this. Against the being of God
upheld by philosophical tradition, that is, the being residing in thought
and taken to be its correlate, Schelling aims at demonstrating the exis­
tence of the living, real God. The gist of the Schellingian critique of the
Ontological Argument consists in demonstrating that proof of the exis­
tence of the Other, of God, is philosophically untenable to the extent
that it misses its goal: it aims at existence but attains only the mode of
existence, the existential modus which, in the case of God, can only be
necessary. Hence, in Schelling's perspective, the Ontological Argument
does not prove that God exists; rather, that God can only exist, if He
exists, necessarily. It should be pointed out that it is not with the aim
of denouncing its flaws and weaknesses, known since Descartes, that
Schelling launched his inquiry into the Ontological Argument. Rather,
it is to demonstrate that reason alone is incapable of acceding to God as
the latter maintains His radical alterity in relation to reason. The ques­
tion which arises at this point is the following: what could be supposed
to be a demonstration of the real, living God? How, then, are we to
accede to the "Master of Being", as Schelling puts it, if the way of rea­
son is not appropriate? And why reason cam1ot provide access to this
Beyond in the first place?
 T H E U N S O U N DA B L E D E C I S I O N O F B E I N G 67

What Schelling reproaches the philosophers for, beghming with

Des cartes, is their striving to demonstrate something that, by defini­
tion, cannot be demonstrated: the existence of the divine. To think the
existence of ·cod as philosopher-that is, to think it as a concept­
amounts to the same thing, says Schelling, as thinking the unthinkable.
This is, however, impossible according to Schellh1g: such an attempt is
doomed to failure, can only make you dizzy, or, to borrow Schelling's
own expression, it can only lead to the "derailment" of reason. As a
result, the ontological argument, according to Schelling, demonstrates
reason's impotence instead of providing proof for the divine existence.
It is at this point that the second twist in Schelling's argumentation
intervenes: the ecstasy-that is, the experience of reason's powerlessness
to seize divine existence-constitutes, for Schelling (who in this respect
follows a theological tradition), proof in itself, since this muteness of
reason cannot but be caused by the presence of an entity that stands
apart and outside of reason. In other words, that which "derails" reason
and plunges it into ecstasy, is an encounter with a pure, indubitable exis­
tent that evades reason as well as any attempt at conceptualisation-in
other words, an encounter with the real, radical Othe1� which is, accord­
ing to Schelling, nothing other than the living God.
Let us retrace our steps in order to check Schelling's procedure.
In denouncing the error which was supposedly committed by the
Rationalists, Schelling no doubt avoids the charge of demonstration,
since from their fault he draws a conclusion which, in our view, is no
less problematic. For Schelling's solution (i.e., proof of divine existence)
consists simply in an inversion: from the impossibility of the ontological
proof, Schelling concludes that we are confronted here with a real exis­
tent. Put in another way, the very impossibility of ontological proof
turns here into proof of the existence of the real God. It could therefore
be said that, from Schelling's perspective, divine existence is thus dem­
onstrated by default.
It is precisely at this point that we can identify the "unthinkable"
proper to Schelling's thought-the particular manner in which
Schelling's own "I am not thinking" is set in motion. As has been
emphasised, this Schellingian "unthinkable" manifests itself in the
guise of a misconception, a blindness for what is, ultimately, inconceiv­
able for Schelling, is the idea that God-as an instance of the radical,
external Other, which could best be designated as this other "to whom
I am more attached than to myself, since, at the most assented to heart
68 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

of my identity to myself, he pulls the stings" (Lacan, 1957/2006, p . 436),

as well as the limit against which reason is supposed to come up against
without ever being able to overcome it, as Schelling insists-is nothing
other than a barrier produced by reason itself. Hence, Schelling rejects
the idea that God-as that object that he denies to reason, forbids reason
from enjoying-might in the end turn out to be a foreign body, a para­
site that reason makes out of itself. Characterised by His disparity, His
absolute heterogeneity with respect to reason, God would designate the
impossible-real of reason, its extimacy, the barrier inherent to reason, a
problematic manner which redoubles and duplicates itself in order to
turn into its own object without realising it. This means that Schelling
succeeded in demonstrating the existence of God no more than did the
Rationalist philosophers. If, however, Schelling forbids the passage
from the notion of God to His real existence, a passage from concept
to existence or, which amounts to the same thing, a passage from the
symbolic to the real, it is because he starts with a concept of God that is
supposed to supersede a sterile notion such as the "God of the philoso­
phers", i.e., God reduced to a concept.
This also makes evident the stake in Schelling's critique of ontologi­
cal proof. In view of the initial assumption of this critique according to
which the relationship between God's being and thought is fundamen­
tally incommensurate, disproportionate, any attempt at demonstrating
God's existence would thus have an irremediable effect on the "smooth
workings of reason". What Schelling aims at in his critique of the Onto­
logical Argument is nothing less than the real of existence, to be taken
both as the real existence and the existence as the real. This is why, while
criticising Schelling's procedure, we cannot miss a remarkable similarity
between his procedure and that of Lacan. Let us recall what Lacan says
about existence: "By definition, there is something so improbable about
all existence that one is in effect perpetually questioning oneself about
its reality" (Lacan, 1988, p. 226) . It is in the light of this always problem­
atic or "improbable" existence, as Lacan puts it, that Schelling reveal
the paradox of the ontological argument: within the internal economy
of rationalist philosophy, the ontological argument appears to be neces­
sary and superfluous at the same time. It is necessary to the extent to
which, from the perspective of this philosophy, only that which can be
demonstrated by reason-that is, which can be symbolised-can also be
considered to exist. Hence, to state that God exists means that one is able
to demonstrate it. The difficulty with divine existence, which proves
 T H E U N S O U N DA B L E D E C I S I O N O F B E I N G 69

to be irresolvable for rationalist philosophy, lies in the fact that, as a

guarantor of meaning and being, God is always already presupposed,
always already there. The petitio principii thus seems to be inevitable.
Schelling's great merit consists, no doubt, in his pointing out that, in
order to account for the existence of the Other, such a rationalist perspec­
tive ought to be inverted. In short, to think God, the Other, in the register
of the real, i.e., that of existence as transcending the concept alone of God,
is only possible by changing the perspective, implying in this way that
God is not already there from the outset. This also explains why, instead
of conceiving of God as a given which goes hand in hand with reason,
with the symbolic, Schelling theorises God as a being whose "birth" we
must first account for. Another and slightly different way of putting this
is to say that, whereas Descartes in his ontological proof demonstrates
the necessary mode of divine existence without demonstrating the exis­
tence itself, Schelling points to the contingency of this existence, since,
according to Schelling, it is by no means necessary that God exists in the
first place. In this respect, the Schellingian drafts gathered under the title
of The Ages of the World can be considered as an elaboration of a myth of
the origin insofar as they provide a way of thinking about the birth of
the Other. For what is at stake in these writings is nothing less than a
history of God, suggesting in this way that God becomes God only at the
end of the process. This is clearly evident in Schelling's starting hypoth­
esis according to which there was an unthinkable, mythical moment in
which God was not yet there. But if God is not there from the outset,
how can He come to be and become God?
As has been remarked, Schelling's ingenious solution consists in pos­
tulating an original foreclosure: crudely put, an exclusion must occur for
something to come into being. Consequently, God can come into exis­
tence, as Schelling maintains, by being separated from something that
precedes Him. In order to come to be, God must separate Himself from
something in Himself, something unnameable, that which in God is not
yet God. Schelling uses various terms to designate this non-God in God:
being before being or the Grund des Seyns, the ground or foundation of
being, Grund der Existenz, the ground of existence. Seen in this perspec­
tive, the Schellingian God can be described as having a relation of inter­
nal exclusion to its Ground-the Ground being that which is excluded,
but on the inside, in a sense, it is what is most intimate, but at the same
time ejected out of oneself, hence extimate: it is thus exterior while
remaining intimate, and interior through remaining utterly foreign.
70 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

There still remains the task of giving a more detailed account of the
status of that excluded instance. As it is only that which is not fore­
closed from the symbolic order that can be said to exist, existence going
hand in hand with language, the ontological status of this ground of
existence is by definition problematic: insofar as it cannot have a place
within the symbolic register it must ex-sist as an instance excluded from
within and standing outside of the symbolic. In a sense, that which pre­
cedes being, this "being before being", can best be characterised as non­
being or, more precisely, as me on : a being in suspense, in abeyance, a
non-realised being (to use the Lacanian translation of this Platonic term
that both Lacan and Schelling employ). The question to be asked here
is, of course, which crack, which fissure in this Grund, in its solitary,
autistic consistence, does the Other emerge from, without existing, for
that matter, since Schelling, no more than Descartes, can demonstrate
its existence? Or, put in another way, how can the notion of God emerge
from the ground of existence to envelope this fundamentally solitary
ground, this Schellingian real which is considered to be unsignifiable?
Strictly speaking, this being in abeyance is not a being that simply is
or will be, but a being caught up entirely in its coming, a being that is
always to come. This also explains why God, according to Schelling,
is a God to come, the coming God. What characterises, at this stage, this
being before being which is not, yet which can be and which might be,
is a Willing-more precisely, a Willing that wills nothing: das nicht wol­
lende Wille. 3 And because it wills nothing, because it is indifferent both
towards what-is as well as towards what-is-not, that this Willing can be
considered as a will in the state of a groundless freedom or simply as
pure freedom.4 Freedom, then, is first of all freedom from being, free­
dom with respect to being. According to Schelling, God could simply

3 "Thus, we will now say that the unconditioned, the expressing of all essence, of every­

thing that is and of all being-considered exclusively in itself-is pure will in general. But
this same thing, with respect to its indifference toward what-is and toward being (or, to
say the same thing, toward existence), this is precisely that/state of/noncontradiction for
which we have been looking; it is the will that wills nothing" (Tilliette, 1987, p. 132).
4 According to Schelling, only the will "that wills nothing, that desires no object, to

which all things are equal, and which is therefore moved by none" can be designated as
pure freedom, whereas such a pure freedom or will is designated as being at one and the
same time everything and nothing: "Such a will is nothing to the extent that it neither
desires to become active nor craves any actuality. It is everything, because all strength
comes from it alone as the eternal freedom; because it has all things under it, and because
it rules all things and is ruled by none" (Tilliette, 1987, p. 133).
 T H E U N S O U N DA B L E D E C I S I O N O F B E I N G 71

decide not to be, not to exist, for "[ . . ] the Highest can exist, and i t can
.

also not-exist; this is to say it has all conditions of existence in itself, but
what matters is whether or not it draws upon these conditions, whether
it uses them as conditions" (Tilliette, 1987, p. 133). It is this ungrounded
freedom with respect to being that resides the true sense of Schelling's
somewhat enigmatic expression: the Master of being. For God can only
be considered to be the Master of being to the extent that he is indiffer­
ent to both: being and non-being.
What, then, is this das Grund der Existenz from which God must separate
himself in order to become God? It is remarkable that Schelling describes
the tenebrous ground of existence by using expressions which assimi­
late it with the Lacanian real: in his conference of 1836, he maintains, for
instance, not only that this non-being caru1ot be but also that it "ought
not to be, (nicht seyn Sollende) because this blind and limitless existence
is called to be repressed (verdriingt) by the Creation" (Schelling, 1856c,
p. 285). If the Ground qua Unseyende is that which cannot be-moreover,
which is impossible to be-this is precisely because it is presented as an
instance whose existence is, strictly speaking, forbidden. But what, in
God, qualifies as such nicht seyn Sollende? What precedes the living God,
His eternal beginning in Himself, says Schelling in The Ages of the World,
consists in His closure and refusal, His drawing of His essence from
the outside and its subsequent deployment within Himself (Schelling,
1856b, p. 225). As a result, the problem that the Schellingian God must
solve in order to simply come to be is of finding a way of getting rid
of this eternal pulsation between contraction and expansion, to which
one can easily apply the Lacanian notion of jouissance. Indeed, how can
God deliver Himself from the position in which He is but the partner
of his own solitude or, to say it with Schelling, where God is nothing
but the Passion of the One all alone? How can God rescue Himself and
break free from this autistic state in which He can be depicted as being a
partner of His loneliness? What, then, is a way out for God who, as the
"force of self-ness", to borrow Schelling's expression, is reduced to the
"eternal state of closing oneself off and being closed off", to a "ruinous
fire, an eternal wrath that tolerates nothing, fatally contracting" (Zizek,
1997, p. 171)? Schelling's famous answer to this question is well known:
"The original state of contraction, this ruinous fire, this life of unhealthy
yearning is posited in the past, but [ . . ] in an eternal past, in a past that
.

has never been present, a past that has been past from the outset and
forever [ . . ]" (Schelling, 1856b, p. 254).
.
72 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

In other words, God escapes the "ruinous fire, an eternal wrath tha t
tolerates nothing, fatally contracting" to use Schelling's own image,
by means of a " passage a l'acte", a passage to the act that consists in a
foreclosure of the ground, i.e., that in Him which is not (yet) God, in
the immemorial past. What characterises God's passage to being, this
divine "unsoundable decision of being", if I may borrow this expres­
sion employed by Lacan in his "Presentation of Psychical Causality",
what characterises this coincidence of the passage to existence with the
passage a l' acte, is nothing less than a foreclosure, a rejection. In the terms
that interest us here, the unsoundable decision of being is thinkable only
against the background of a primordial foreclosure, that is to say, of a
rejection of that which is presented as a primordial and unconditional
given: the ground as the non-God in God. The price to be paid for divine
existence, for the passage to being, is exclusion, expulsion, for what is
expelled by God's free, ungroundable decision is God Himself before
He would become God, i.e., the past of the Being which, for that reason
precisely, is transformed into the eternal past, an immemorial, abyssal
past that, as Schelling himself points out, "has never been present".
Certainly, Schelling does not try to demonstrate the existence of the
Ground, for no such demonstration is possible. In a sense, the Ground is
never more than supposed. Although the Ground is never more than an
assumption, it seems to be a necessary assumption for Schelling, with­
out which the becoming of God could not be accounted for. In that sense
its status is similar to that of what Freud calls the "second phase" of the
fantasy "A child is being beaten". As a matter of fact, the statement "I am
being beaten by my father" remains for the subject unthinkable, unsay­
able. At the same time, while admitting that "in a certain sense [ . ] it . .

has never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never suc­
ceeded in becoming conscious," Freud nevertheless insists on its neces­
sity: "It is a construction of analysts, but it is no less a necessity on that
account" (Freud, 1919e/1955, p. 185) . In a similar way, God's passage to
being can only be accounted for, and this is our third thesis, by postulat­
ing a specific linkage, a conjunction of freedom and madness.

Freedom and madness

A conjunction of Lacan's two notorious formulae that bring together
freedom in madness can help us elucidate the apparently paradoxi­
cal character of the Schellingian God. According to the first formula,
 T H E U N S O U N DA B l E D E C I S I O N O F B E I N G 73

a "ma dman is the only free man"; the second formula, howeve1� seems to
invalidate the first since it characterises madness as the limit of freedom.
In order to be able to account for the emergence of the living God, it is
necessary to 1:ead them together (Miller 1987) . According to Lacan, this
means: "Not only can man's being not be understood without madness,
but it would not be man's being if it did not bear madness within itself
as the limit of his freedom" (Lacan, 1955 /2006, p. 479) . The same holds
true for the Schellingian God. Indeed, what the Schellingian inquiry into
the becoming of God aims at is to show that, without such a decision of
being, God would disappear either by being reduced to a pure hypoth­
esis or to an inert, blind necessity-in short, neither the Cartesian nor
the Spinozian deity can capture the gist of the living, real God.
From this it follows that it is precisely this ungroundable decision of
being which, as we have tried to show above, makes God exist via the
process of subjectivation. All subjectivation, whether divine and human,
involves such an unfathomable, unconscious decision for being. It should
be noted, howeve1� that this decision is not to be taken in terms of iden­
tification, for what is enigmatic and terrifying about such a decision is
precisely the possibility of a rejection of all identification. This rejection is
precisely what a madman and the Schellingian God have in common: both
reject, as a basis for subjectivation, all pre-given, common identification.
By designating God as the "Master of being", Schelling points precisely to
the possibility of such an inconceivable choice of non-existence. God, then,
is the Master of being only insofar as He takes His decision of being seri­
ously: for He can freely choose either to be or not to be. We are dealing here
with a "mad" decision in which the subject, be it God or a man, locates his
being, rather than in a symbolic identity, i.e., in a common identification,
in a non-symbolisable object, in an objectal moment that sticks out from
the symbolic order, a bit of the real situated beyond all identification. This
also explains why Schelling's God, unlike Yahweh, instead of saying "I am
who I am", proclaims "I am who I was, who I am now, and who I will be".
The expression the "Master of being" therefore does not mean that, in any
case, God will be who He will be or who He should be, where His exis­
tence is to be taken here in terms of His destiny, but rather, "I will be who
I will be", that is to say, "I will be who I want, to be".5
And it is precisely this rejection that brings out that which is crucial
in the subjective position of being: a risk of freedom itself. This may

5 See Courtine (1990).

74 SEX AND N OT H I N G

appear paradoxical, since the real (or, rathe1� the "psychotic") freedom
manifests itself in the very rejection of the forced choice between (real)
being and (symbolic) existence. In refusing to walk into the trap of the
forced choice according to which the subject can be "nothing but this
mark" or "not be" (Lacan, 1968), a psychotic, as the only free man,
denounces slavery to the signifier and refuses to admit that the only
freedom one can accede to is that which results from the fundamental
alienation in the signifier such as it is imposed by the forced choice. In
what sense, then, does this primordial, unthinkable position where the
subject seems to be taking seriously the choice between being and not­
being put freedom itself into question? Put in another way, what does a
psychotic refuse to sacrifice by refusing to sacrifice his/her freedom to
choose between his /her being or not-being? Crudely put, what a psy­
chotic thus refuses is to exchange that which is the most intimate to any
subject-namely, enjoyment-for the signifier. As a result of this rejec­
tion, enjoyment remains intimate to him/her. Hence, what Schelling's
God and madman reject in taking the freedom of choice of being and
not-being seriously is slavery to the signifier that only allows freedom
emerging from the forced choice. But the price to be paid for this rejec­
tion is another kind of slavery: slavery to enjoyment. Or, put in another
way: the psychotic gets rid of the chains of the signifier only to put on
the chains of enjoyment. The psychotic who refuses to sacrifice his /her
enjoyment is constantly at risk of being swallowed by enjoyment, by the
"ruinous fire", as Schelling himself puts it, forever condemned to vacil­
late between contraction and expansion.
From this it follows that it is necessary to distinguish clearly between
two forms of freedom: first, there is what could be called a symbolic
freedom, which results from the forced choice, i.e., from the speaking
being's subjection to the signifier. But this "Hegelian" freedom is not
a true freedom at all in Schelling's view; rather, it is its proper nega­
tion, the very sacrifice of freedom, or to use Schelling's proper term,
"the grave of God's freedom". We are dealing here with freedom that
condemns God to the forced labour, for God is forced to always redo
what He has already done, to endlessly repeat the same gestures and
actions. Yet Schelling is not blind to the fact that the choice of submis­
sion is necessary if one is to come to be as a subject, but it maintains
its status as a choice since it is nevertheless possible to refuse subjec­
tivity. In this respect we could state that whereas the Hegelian God is
altogether determined by the signifier; God according to Schelling is
 THE U N S O U N OA B L E D E C I S I O N O F B E I N G 75

partially determined by the signifier, but not wholly, since He experi­

ences both the symbolic and another kind of freedom. Howeve1� in cor­
rectly denouncing the reverse side of this freedom, its forced character,
its slavery to the signifier, Schelling, who criticises this symbolic concep­
tion of freedom, misconceives the price to be paid for its rejection: one
can reject the forced choice in which the symbolic freedom is grounded
only at the price of one's status as subject. Stated otherwise, the decision
not to allow oneself to become the slave of the signifier entails the loss
of oneself, in effect, such a decision forecloses the possibility of one's
advent as a subject.
Thus, the "I am not thinking" proper to Schelling consists in not
seeing that the real freedom that he attributes to the living, real God
implies subjection, not to the signifier, signifier, of course, but to enjoy­
ment 01� to be more precise, to the drives insofar as they never give
up demanding their satisfaction, even though this satisfaction usually
comes at the expense of the subject. This also explains why the subject
experiences this subjection to enjoyment as insupportable and tries to
evade it through a flight into creation. 6 Yet to the extent that the pas­
sage from real freedom to symbolic remains unnoticed in Schelling, the
very status of divine creation as well as the role of the subject within it,
remains profoundly ambiguous. For creation is, in itself, not necessarily
a sign of the subject's way out of madness. On the contrary, outbursts
of creativity are one of the most telling signs of madness. Thus, the cre­
ation of the universe by God may well be a delirious construction. What
could be considered as evidence that Schelling's God is capable of tak­
ing any distance towards His "role", that He is not fully identified with
it, that He doesn't "believe" in His "mandate"?
It is precisely in this context that the issue of the Revelation can be
situated. The Revelation is yet another aspect of the fantasy by means
of which Schelling accounts for the becoming of God, for his emergence
from the pre-symbolic ground. How is the issue of revelation intro­
duced at all? According to Schelling, the Revelation is necessary not

6 It is this interpretation that privileges, for instance, Marquet (1973). Marquet starts
with the assumption that God becomes God the moment he becomes the Creator. God,
then, delivers himself once he "remembers" that he should start "to play his role", when
he starts to behave the way one expects God to behave. To put it differently, God escapes
slavery to the obscure enjoyment of the Ground by assuming his "symbolic mandate".
TI1is would mean, however, that for Schelling as well as for Hegel and Lacan, the subject,
God or man, can endure only symbolic freedom.
76 SEX A N D N OT H I N G

only because man does not know God, but, first of all, because Go d
does not know Himself. The Revelation thus presupposes the obscure
grotmd, i.e., occultation and concealment, for what characterises the
ground is precisely the fact that it shies away from all revelation. And
vice versa, what Schelling shows us here by means of the fantasy of
divine origin is the becoming God out of the ground; or rather, the
becoming the I out of id.
But why does God not know Himself? If the Schellingian God does
not know Himself, it is precisely because He has been transformed by
His act. It is because of this act that God emerges different, other than
he was previously. For Schelling, as well as for Lac an for that matter, the
"unsoundable decision of being", constitutive of the subject as well as of
God, necessarily involves a misconception, a misrecognition: by being
created by such a foundational act, God and the human subject alike
can never recognise the effects of this act in its veritable inaugural con­
sequences. Put simply, the very act which "creates" the subject makes
it at the same time impossible for him/her to recognise himself/herself
in that object, in It, which preceded the subjectivation. By following
Lacan's Logic of Fantasy, it could be argued that God does not know or
recognise Himself because it was precisely His decision, His act, that
has changed Him radically. He does not know Himself because, from
this act, He emerges different than He was before.
The Revelation as a constitutive moment in God's becoming God
can also explain a curious identification between God and the finite
subject. It is because a man identifies himself with God that he is capa­
ble of knowing Him; conversely, it is because of man's identification
with God that the latter can reveal Himself to him. This identification,
however, is an "irregular", peculiar identification because it can only
be accomplished by means of fantasy. Indeed, what is at stake in such
an identification is a redoubled moment of "I am not thinking". This
means that both, God and His scribbler, when faced with the alter­
native "Either I am not thinking or I am not", i.e., the choice which
implies that one can "have" either thought or being, but never both
at the same time, opt for being. On the one hand, the blindness, the "I
am not thinking" of Schelling, the scribbler, who can only make God
exist by refusing to know anything about his own instrumentalised
position; on the other hand, there is God, who can only take on His
"mandate", "play His role", by refusing to recognise Himself in the
ground, in that in Him which is not (yet) God, to put it bluntly, in His
 T H E U N S O U N DA B L E D E C I S I O N O F B E I N G 77

" madness"-this being precisely the unconscious pre-history in which

God Himself is reduced to the object of the drives. But Schelling does
not want to know of this God's enslavement to enjoyment either. It
comes as no · surprise, therefore, that the story of the Revelation, the
history of God's becoming, is strictly one-sided: certainly, Schelling
renders visible how God becomes I where "it" was, i.e., the emergence
of God out of It. But at no time can Schelling's God recognise Himself
in what precedes Him and admit "Therefore I am it", i.e., a plaything
of His/My drives.
The very idea of the revelation thus seems to imply the division of
God: the Schellingian Other namely breaks down into two "parts",
of which one can certainly be associated with the signifier, while the
other-the real, unsignifiable God before God-remains reduced to
an object. This is why Schelling's God remains, not only for man but
for Himself also, Deus absconditus, that is to say, for ever torn, divided
between the God of the Revelation and the object that He was for His
drives, the plaything of enjoyment. To recall: to account for the Other,
by assuming its initial inexistence, to account for its birth, is only pos­
sible on the condition of yet another passage, a passage which usually
remains urmoticed. Indeed, we are dealing here with a "clandestine"
passage, an "illegal" passage, a passage from the problematic of
desire-the metonymy of desire incarnated, as it were, in an endless
quest for the beginning of philosophy-to the problematic of fantasy
and of the drives.
It is necessary at this point to return once again to the passage from
the truly philosophical problematic, that of the metonymy of philo­
sophical desire (as is testified by the "This is not it!" of a series of false
beginnings) to the problematic of the drives which, in turn, is more
linked with the status of the Other. So far we have tried to show the
way in which these two problematics can be interrelated by means of
the fantasy of God's birth. What implications for philosophy itself,
that philosophy, namely, which is assimilated to a metonymy, can be
drawn from this passage? Is not the very survival of philosophy in
jeopardy once the Other becomes the beginning and the end of all phi­
losophy? How can philosophy be "saved" once the Other becomes the
privileged object of its preoccupation? Or does the fact that philoso­
phy depends on the destiny of the Other imply a radical rethinking of
philosophy? And conversely: which figure of the Other makes it pos­
sible for philosophy to remain what is, namely endless metonymy?
78 SEX A N D N OTH I N G

In short, we are asking whether and in what way philosophy can inte­
grate the concept of fantasy, once it is admitted that the genesis of the
Other is, and this is one of Schelling's great merits, accessible only
through fantasy.
It is in the context of this interrogation that the issue of the Revela­
tion can be situated. For, as we shall see presently, it is only through
the Revelation that the desire of Schellingian philosophy can survive.
Let us examine this last thesis. The never-ending process of the revela­
tion has a twofold function in Schelling's thought: on the one hand,
its role is-as for all fantasy-to provide reality or history with some
sense (not, of course, the history of the world as such, but the history
of the world as God's creation) / although at the price of some essential
concealment. However, all fantasy, while conferring structure and con­
sistency to reality and to history, at the same time conceals something.
In the case of Schelling's fantasy, what is concealed by it is the very
fact that there is nothing that would require the revelation. In other
words, it conceals the fact that history, as such, is nothing other than
what Schelling himself describes as divine pre-history; that is to say,
an eternal pulse-like movement between contraction and expansion,
what chaos theory describes as an endless oscillation between construc­
tion and destruction, always punctual and provisory construction of an
order and its subsequent breakdown. On the other hand, however, and
precisely as such, i.e., as an endless, interminable story, the Revelation
constitutes a conditio sine qua non of philosophy. Hence, this endlessness
involved in the very process of revelation is constitutive both of God
and of philosophy. On the one hand, God remains God only insofar
as He can never fully penetrate into the obscure ground that precedes
Him-were God is capable of recognising Himself in "It", i.e., in the
vortex of the drives, He would disappear as God. On the other hand,
however, such an endless deferral of what could perhaps be best desig­
nated as God's "traversing of fantasy", ultimately involving God's des­
titution, is a condition of possibility of philosophy insofar as the latter
is identified with an endless metonymy. In a word, once the issue of the
Other becomes the alpha and the omega of philosophy, the impossibil­
ity of the revelation, its structural incompleteness, is a way in which
philosophy, for the later Schelling, can survive.

7 On Schelling's conception of history, see Frigo (1994) .

 T H E U N S O U N DA B L E D E C I S I O N O F B E I N G 79

References
Courtine, J.-F. (1990). Extase de la raison. Essais sur Schelling (pp. 207-236) .
Paris: Galilee.
Freud, S. (1919e/ 1955) . A child is being beaten. S. E., 1 7. London: Hogarth.
Frigo, G. F. (1994) . Conscience, mythe et histoire dans la Philosophie d e Ia
mythologie de Schelling. In: J.-F. Courtine & J.-F. Marquet. Le dernier
Schelling. Raison et positivite. Paris: Vrin, 1994.
Lacan, J. (1946/2006). Presentation on Psychical Causality. E crits . New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Lac an, J. (1955 /2006) . On a Question Prior to any Possible Treatment of
Psychosis. Ecrits . New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1957/2006) . The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or
Reason since Freud. E crits . New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1963 /2006). Kant with Sade. E crits . New York: W W. Norton & .

Company.
Lacan, J. (1968) . Le Seminaire. Livre XV. L'acte psychoanalytique. Unpublished
seminar of 10 January, 1968.
Lacan, J. (1981) . The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI. The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II. The Ego in Freud's
Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company.
Lacan, J. (1990). Television. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Marquet, J.-F. (1973) . Liberte et existence. Etude sur la formation de la philosophie
de Schelling. Paris: Gallimard.
Miller, J.-A. (1987) . La lec;on des psychoses. Actes de /'Ecole de Ia Cause freu-
dienne, XIII .
Miller, J.-A. (1991). Unpublished seminar of 29 May, 199 1 .
Schelling, F. W. J. (1856a) . Siimtliche Werke, 7 . Stuttgart: Cotta.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1856b). Siimtliche Werke, 8 . Stuttgart: Cotta.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1856c) . Siimtliche Werke, 10. Stuttgart: Cotta.
Tilliette, X. (1987) . L'Absolu et la philosophie. Essais sur Schelling (pp. 120-140).
Paris: PUF.
Zizek, S. (1997) . The A byss ofFreedom/Ages of the World. Ann Arbor, Michigan:
University of Michigan Press.
C H A P T E R F I VE

Psyc h oa n a l ys i s a n d a n t i p h i l osop hy :
th e case of J acq u e s Lacan

Sarno Tomsic

Why an tiphilosophy?
In 1975, when Lacan positioned his teaching under the title of antiphi­
losophy, the word was perceived as yet another provocation coming
from this structuralist enfant terrible. Its negative connotation immedi­
ately suggests that we are dealing with a simple rejection, degradation,
or mocking of philosophy coming from the pessimistic orientation of
Lacan's later seminars.1 However, as soon as we place it in the broader
context of his teaching, such simplistic reading comes up short. Despite
his perpetual criticism of particular philosophers and of the structural
features of philosophy (recall the identification of philosophy with the

1 The term "antiphilosophy" might be badly chosen for historic reasons. The expres­

sion dates back to eighteenth century, when it described the French Anti-Enlightenment
thinkers, who, in opposition to the authors of Encyclopaedia, defended religious dogmas
and church authority. Of course, Lacan gives antiphilosophy the opposite meaning, link­
ing it to the modern scientific revolution and to its consequences for the premodern, nota­
bly Aristotelian orientation in philosophy and science. Badiou later adopted the term in
order to designate a more general tendency in philosophy to dissolve the constellation
of its four conditions (science, politics, art and love) and to abolish the minimal distance
that separates philosophical discourse from truth procedures. For a historic account of
antiphilosophy see Masseau (2000) .
81
82 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

master 's discourse), he repeatedly associates Freud with unsurpassable

thinkers such as Socrates, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx. Thus, one cmmot
ignore the importance of Plato in thinking transference (Seminar VIII), of
Hegel and Marx when it comes to situating the political dimensions of
psychoanalysis (Seminar XVII), and most crucially, of Descartes in deter­
mining the philosophical importance of the subject of the unconscio us,
as Lacan's "epistemologic al" seminars at the Ecole Normale Superieure
(Seminars XI-XVI) demonstrate repeatedly. Of course, Lacan's readings
of philosophers always amount to counter-intuitive results and inter­
pretations, but precisely therein lies their conceptual value and philo­
sophical relevance.
In short, there are more than enough reasons Lacan's antiphiloso­
phy should not be interpreted in a negative sense, i.e., as dissolution
of old theoretical alliances and a complete deconstruction of the earlier
te a ching. 2 In the following, I want to examine Lacan's somewhat explicit
suggestion, which associates antiphilosophy with Koyre's discussion of
modern scientific revolution, in the context of which Lacan strived to
situate Freud's invention of psychoanalysis. I would also like to suggest
that Lacan's declaration be read in close reference to the critical tradi­
tion in philosophy, a tradition initiated precisely through the impact of
modern scientific revolution in the field of knowledge. In this respect
Lacan's antiphilosophical orientation shows several similarities with
the direction outlined by Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, which announces
his future involvement combining both a critique of political economy
and a critique of materialism, an essential subchapter of philosophy.
It was the necessity to create a materialism that entirely accounts for the
lessons of scientific modernity that lead Lacan to speak of antiphiloso­
phy, which seems to suggest that the modern development of philoso­
phy did not fully succeed in mobilising the subversive potential of new
sciences. The problematic of language stands at the very core of this
philosophical failure.
Marx's critique departed from a similar move, expressed in the di a g­
nosis that modern philosophical materialism failed to develop its own
theory of the subject. Self-proclaimed materialists, such as Feuerbach,

2 In his reading of Lacan, Jean-Claude Milner (1995) outlined the perspectives of such

reading. Although I agree with Mi lner ' s reading, I think that Lacan's antiphilosophical
moment no less contains an attempt to repeat the " C artesian " gesture of refoundation
of philosophy. See notably Lacan (2005, pp. 144-145), where he explicitly addresses the
philosophical potential of his Borromean mos geometricus.
 P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S A N D A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y 83

adopted the vocabulary of the theories of cognition (consciousness,

contemplation) or idealism (human essence), while a materialist orien­
tation would envisage in the subject a specific discursive consequence
irre ducible to. consciousness. This point is explicitly formulated in the
following theses:

• The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism-that of Feuerbach

included-is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only
in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human
activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to mate­
rialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism-which,
of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

And further:

• Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence.

But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single
individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.3

Marx leaves no doubt that the task of materialist orientation consists

in detaching the subject from the primacy of cognition, which mysti­
fied its true character and repeated the main operation of idealism, be
it religious, philosophical or ideological: they all conceived the subject
as a figure of centralised and conscious thought that assumes a cog­
nitive meta-position outside the contemplated reality. In this respect,
materialist theories of cognition remained in continuity with the ancient
episteme, whose hypothesis of metaphysical soul no less supported the
centralisation of thinking. The modern correlation of knowledge and
subject does not entirely abandon the ancient correlation of episteme
and psyche. Theories of cognition and philosophies of consciousness
therefore remain stuck in pre-modern idealism, not fully acknowledg­
ing the most subversive consequence of modern scientific revolution:
decentralisation not only of the universe but above all of thinking. The
downfall of the ancient cosmological hierarchy of the spheres implies
the abolition of the homeostatic model of thinking. Freud, on the other
hand, was fully aware that psychoanalysis abolished, not so much the
hypothesis of the soul, because the latter already lost its importance in

3 www.marxists.org.
84 SEX AND N OT H I N G

Cartesian rationalism, but that of the primacy of consciousness. Freud

indicated this when he associated his discoveries with the achievements
of modern physics and evolutionary biology: the psychoanalytic decen­
tralisation of thinking is inseparable from the astronomical decentrali­
sation of the universe and from the biological decentralisation of life.
According to Marx, the critical and dialectical materialism must show
that the subject is not an autonomous, conscious and substantial essence,
but a particular effect of the "ensemble of social relations": it is produced
in and through discourse, but as its real consequence-this is the main
materialist point-and not as a mere imaginary or performative effect.
As such consequence, the subject cannot be transcendental, it is part of
reality constituted by the dominating mode of production. But as we
know from the final result of Marx's critique, Capital, this inclusion is
not problematic, since the system encounters in the subject it produces
(in capitalism, the subject is fabricated as labour-power) its own contra­
diction, inconsistency, and instability. The object of Capital is necessarily
two-fold: to determine the source of value and to analyse the produc­
tion of subjectivity. Marx's "labour theory of value" fulfils both tasks: it
provides a scientific theory of value (in opposition to political-economic
fetishisations and mystifications of the source of value) and a materi­
alist theory of the subject (which no less mobilises the revolutionary
potential of modern scientificity) . If we return to his initial formulation
of the Theses, we can conclude that the focus on the "ensemble of social
relations", which brings the subject down from the idealist heights and
ranks it among the effects of the social mode of production, substitutes
the autonomy of consciousness with the autonomy of discourse. With
this materialist move, Marx anticipates two discoveries that marked the
twentieth century continental thought: the autonomy of the signifier in
structural linguistics and the causality of the signifier in psychoanalysis.4
For this reason, Lacan's teaching will eventually develop strong interest
in critique of political economy and the notion of antiphilosophy pro­
vides a condensed expression of this theoretical development.
Before beginning its discussion I cannot refrain from addressing a
misunderstanding that Lacan's term caused in the psychoanalytic com­
munity, making several analysts believe that it negated the pertinence
of philosophical concepts for psychoanalysis and justified a cynical

4 This would be the main point of Lacan's reading of Marx. I engage more extensively

with this double anticipation in Tomsic (2015).

 P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S A N D A N T I P I-I I L O S O P H Y 85

attitude toward philosophical and political questions. In the recent

decade, even the most prominent analysts have argued that Lacan's
later teaching directed psychoanalysis away from the universal and
the conceptual, these privileged fields of philosophical interest, to the
irreducible singularity of the unconscious. According to Jacques-Alain
Miller, this reorientation amounted to a "solitary psychoanalysis",
which supposedly decreased its interest in the "transference uncon­
scious" and instead focused on the "real unconscious" (Millet� 2008,
p. 134; Soler, 2009) . According to this line, the unconscious-as far as it
does not cover merely the "abstract" metonymic articulation of desire
in language but above all the "concrete" production of enjoyment (jou­
issance) in the living body-rejects every contextualisation and stands
outside the social bonds: in its real dimension it is autistic and hermetic,
penetrable only in the solitude of a clinical situation.
It is nevertheless questionable, whether this dualism of the uncon­
scious is truly at work in Lacan's teaching. We cannot overlook that
the notion of the real unconscious risks substantialism and essential­
ism, which turn the unconscious into some sort of ontological substance
accessible only to the initiated few, the analysts and the analysands.
Such a development comes suspiciously close to Freud's attempts in
linking the unconscious with phylogenesis and seeking its biological
foundations. But unlike Freud's bio-ontology, which, despite its prob­
lematic features, remained oriented toward politics, science and phi­
losophy, contemporary psychoanalytic attempts in substantialising the
unconscious drift in a mystification of clinical experience, even in self­
fetishisation, while their anti-scientific and anti-philosophical (in the
vulgar sense of the term) ressentiment presents psychoanalysis as some
sort of cultural heritage, which deserves permanent state protection.
Needless to say, this was never Lacan's path.
The notion of the unconscious challenges philosophy in a more fun­
damental way, by questioning its philia, its love for knowledge and
truth-not only because it goes against the primacy of cognition but
also because it examines the relation between the subject, thinking and
negativity. Psychoanalysis addresses this nexus through the concept of
castration:

What is the love of truth? It's something that mocks the lack in being
of truth. We could call this lack in being something else the lack of
forgetting which reminds us of its existence in formations of the
,
86 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

unconscious. This is nothing of the order of being, of a being that is

in any way full. [ . ] The love of truth is the love of this weakness
. .

whose veil we have lifted, it's the love of what truth hides, which is
called castration. (Lacan, 2007, p. 52)

Philosophical love "forgets" the link between being and negativity, the
inscription of negativity into being. This forgetting can be envisaged
as repression (in the Freudian sense) through which philosophy would
introduce the idea of wholeness or fullness of being. Freud, who in a
famous text on world views, criticised philosophy for filling the gaps
in reality, and envisaged in every formation of the unconscious a return
of this repressed negativity, the persistence of non-being within being,
and Lacan later linked this negativity with the set of questions that the
structuralist isolation of the signifier addressed to philosophy.
Through philia, pre-modern philosophy strived to establish a stable
and unequivocal relationship between aletheia and episteme, truth and
knowledge beyond the multiplicity of opinions, knowledge worthy of
love for its completeness, generality and invariability. For psychoanaly­
sis the unconscious reveals a concurrent form of knowledge, knowledge
that does not know itself, decentralised knowledge, which appears to
be without the subject, through which knowledge would come to think
its own thought. For this reason the unconscious reveals that the truth,
which still seems to be compatible with knowledge (truth as convention,
relation between words and things, adaequatio, etc.), represses another
truth, which concerns the constitution of the subject, a truth that Marx
envisaged in his shift from the subject qua essence to the subject qua dis­
cursive consequence. Marx and Freud determine two privileged social
embodiments of this concealed dimension of truth, the proletarian and
the hysteric, the perfect oppositions of the philosophical personification
of knowledge, maitre, master and teacher (today we would probably say
the expert) . Both critical personifications expose an underlying antago­
nism, be it class struggle or psychic conflict, within social relations and
modes of production. The symptom thereby becomes the privileged
form of truth marked by conflictuality, and it was this conflictual truth
that Freud linked to castration.
Lacan summarised the Freudian lesson in his definition of the signi­
fier: "The signifier is what represents the subject for another signifier."
Where is castration here? We first need to think away the dramatic bio­
logical and anatomical meaning of the term in Freud. In doing so, we
isolate its structural-logical meaning, which enables us to conclude that
 P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S A N D A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y 87

the concept o f castration addresses the fact that the subject can only
come into being in and through the difference between signifiers, or
more precisely, in and through the difference that is the signifier as such.
The subject's. being can only be metonymical, shifting from one signi­
fier to another, involving movement and instability. The philosophical
love mocks castration (the subject's "lack in being") by repressing the
displacement in the field of being and excluding the signifier (pure dif­
ference) from the field of ontological investigation. Here, we encounter
another echo of Marx's claim that the subject should be thought of in
relation to the ensemble of social relations. Only when the subject is in
conjunction with the autonomy of the system of differences (signifier
in Freud, exchange-value in Marx), we can correctly situate the flip­
side of philosophical love. In this respect, the Freudian discovery of the
unconscious contains an essentially philosophical anti-thesis regarding
the nature of thinking.
Because the unconscious signifies the decentralisation of thinking
and is as such a real discursive consequence, it makes little sense to
differentiate the transference unconscious from the real unconscious.
The transference unconscious (inconscient transferentiel) that Lacan pre­
sumably explored in the 1950s and 1960s, is no less real from the real
unconscious (inconscient reel) of 1970s, when his teaching elaborated
upon the concept of the real and was preoccupied with the problematic
of jouissance. What might appear as opposition reflects two imminent
aspects of the autonomy of the signifier: the transference unconscious
(the unconscious of desire) is the unconscious as it necessarily appears
through the logic of representation, while the real unconscious (the
unconscious of the drive) is the unconscious approached from the view­
point of discursive production. This shift from representation to pro­
duction overlaps with Lacan's move from linguistic structuralism to the
critique of political economy, a shift that radicalises the epistemological
and political implications of Saussure' s isolation of the signifier.5

5 Adopting Milner 's terminology we could call this transformed or intensified struc­

turalism a "hyper-structuralism"-see Milner (2008, pp. 211-230) . A possible footnote

to Milner would be that Lacan upgrades Saussure with Marx, addressing the relation
between representation of the subject and production of jouissance, for which classical
structuralism did not provide the necessary conceptual tools. There is no theory of dis­
cursive production in Saussure, and it was only Marx who enabled Lacan to situate the
causality of the signifier in a materialist way. La can thereby returned to a major Freudian
insight, namely that labour plays the main role in the unconscious. The Interpretation of
Dreams, indeed, proposed a labour theory of the unconscious.
88 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

Let us return to Lacan's critique of philosophical love. Among his

privileged targets is Plato, whose philosophy is said to contain ele­
ments of Schwtirmerei. This German expression describes enthusiastic
daydreaming, but more generally stands for knowledge rooted in fan­
tasy. Here Lacan's reference is to Kant, who used the term in his cri­
tique of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. Why such harsh
condemnation? Because Plato "projected the Idea of Sovereign Good to
[ . . . ] the impenetrable void" (Lacan, 1998, p. 13) and thereby repressed
the negativity of the signifier, which could have been discovered in the
autonomy of eternal ideas. Through this projection, Plato could associ­
ate the philosophical love, resumed in the tendency of the metaphysical
soul toward the supreme Good, with the ideal of knowledge without nega­
tivity, which is what wisdom is supposed to be. Loving the truth and
knowledge constructs the veil that conceals the lack in being, the rec­
ognition of which would undermine the founding philosophical axiom,
the sameness of thinking and being. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand,
finds in the subject of the unconscious the privileged embodiment of the
gap between thinking and being (as Lacan's discussion of alienation in
Seminar XI demonstrates). Here, too, psychoanalysis merely joins Marx's
critique of political economy, for which alienation is a structural feature
and thus constitutive for the subject of capitalism (labour-power).
Of course, Plato already problematized the sameness of thinking and
being in his discussion of sophistry, and several other thinkers in the
history of philosophy have taken the Parmenidian axiom with much
reserve. Nevertheless, it has persisted as a determining orientation of
philosophical discourse, together with another axiom that rejects nega­
tivity from philosophy: "Being is, non-Being isn't" (Lacan, 1999, p. 22) . 6
The figure of the sophist reminds philosophy of a scandal that is closely
related with language and that becomes the point of departure of
structuralism: that the signifier, as pure difference to another signifier,
contains nothing that would link it to the signified. By privileging the
autonomy of the signifier over its referentiality, Saussure rejected some­
thing that we might call linguistic fetishism, an attempt to conceive
language exclusively as "language of being" (Heidegger) . Differently

6 An axiom that Lacan at some point describes as stupid, undoubtedly because it con­

ceals the "stupidity of the signifier", the fact that the signifier neither supports a univocal
relation to the signified nor does it represent the subject in an adequate way but only for
another signifier.
 P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S A N D A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y 89

p ut, linguistic fetishism would be an attempt to establish a relation and

continuity between what Saussure called linguistic value (horizontal
relation between signifiers) and meaning (vertical and arbitrary relation
between the signifier and the signified) . In the history of philosophy
there are two prominent cases of fetishism, which determined subse­
quent philosophical views on language. First in Cratylus, where Plato
strives to demonstrate the relationship between words and things, and
to think of linguisti c value as a perfect correspondence to the natural
connection between the signifier and the object: "Then, as to names,
ought not our legislator also to know how to put the true natural
name of each thing into sounds and syllables, and to make and give all
names with a view to the ideal name , if he is to be a namer in any true
sense?" (Plato, 1963, p. 428) .
The mythic figure of the namer translates physis into language with­
out any loss. The development of the entire dialogue amounts to the
idea that language stands in a harmonious mimetic relation to nature,
so that even in its fundamental elements, the phonemes, we encoun­
ter the imitation of natural sounds. Plato thereby provided a mythical
expression to the idea that the relationship between the signifier and the
signified is rooted in nature, and that language serves as an approach
to external reality in a stable and univocal way. Of course, we could
immediately associate this imaginary scenario with Galileo's claim
that the book of nature is written in mathematical language. However,
Plato seems to formulate something else, the mythological version of
what would later become the doctrine of adaequatio, adequate relation
between words and things .

Another case of linguistic fetishism and another founding myth of

linguistics can be associated with the pragmatic tradition beginning
with Aristotle. This pragmatism no longer strives to demonstrate an
ontological link between logos and physis, but simply presupposes that
the true nature of language consists in reference and communication.
Language is defined as organon (tool and organ) whose value consists
in supporting exchange and grounding stable social relations. In this
respect, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and Habermas remain within the
Aristotelian paradigm. Aristotle's pragmatism abolishes Plato's mytho­
logical excess and isolates the "rational kernel" of his speculations on
the nature of linguistic signs.
Aristotle's main concern is to determine the good and the bad use
of language For him, the paradigmatic case of good use of language is
.
90 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

not simply communication, but even more so, the language of ontology
spoken by none other than being itself. Ontology understands itself as
an immense prosopopoeia of being and the ideal functioning of lan­
guage takes place in philosophy, whose love of knowledge is also the
exemplary foundation for stable social relations (love, as such, is a form
of social bond) . The linguistic ideal of philosophy becomes language
without negativity. In opposition to this, the sophists, these misusers of
language repeatedly demonstrate that language is not only about com­
munication, but also about production, that there is no correct use of
language, and consequently, that being is always-already contaminated
by the signifier. More precisely, the signifier is non-being, which has
an effect of being. And because the sophists are repeatedly accused of
seduction and deception, their preference for lies are at opposite ends
to philosophical love. Lies becomes synonymous to the dissolution of
stable social relations.
The same scandal of discursive production is met in economy.
What sophistry is in relation to language, chrematistics is in relation to
money. It detaches money from its social function, turning it into a
self-engendering entity, "money-breeding money" (Marx) . The soph­
ists separate language from its communicative aspect, turning it into an
apparatus of enjoyment, while the usurers liberate money from its social
function, inverting its teleology and making it its own reproductive goal.
If commodity exchange contains a social relation then usury stands out­
side society and undermines human relations by contaminating them
with monetary enjoyment. By delimiting the normal and the patho­
logical functioning of linguistic and economic systems-which is an
impossible task and calls for a fantasmatic foundation of the presup­
posed relation-these philosophical attempts overlook that the border
is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere in the system of values and
signifiers. From the philosophical condemnation of chrematistics and
sophistry, it follows that the main point of philosophical repression is
the intimate connection of language and production-that the signifier
is not merely a tool of communication but also a cause of enjoyment
and of alienation. Consequently there are at least two discursive
consequences/ which undermine the regime of positive being: the
stability of being is challenged through the subject of the signifier, the

7 For the discussion of psychoanalytic realism, which departs from the recognition of
real discursive consequences, see notably Zupancic (2011, p . 29ff) .
 P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S A N D A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y 91

negativity in being, and through the surplus object (jouissance, surplus

value), the excess in being. Language knows no right measure and the
Aristotelianism in linguistics is doomed to fail in constructing the ideal
lan guage.
·

The an tiphilosophical quadrivium

Lacan introduces antiphilosophy in a short and rather marginal text
published in 1975 to support the reform of the Department of Psycho­
analysis at the University Paris VIII. The text contains a proposition
of transmitting psychoanalytic knowledge without subjecting psy­
choanalysis to the university discourse. Lacan's interference with the
organisation of teaching provoked strong resistance in the Department
of Philosophy. In a short intervention published in Les temps modernes in
autumn 1974, Deleuze and Lyotard accused Lacan of Stalinist methods,
adding that a new order is being established "in the name of a mysteri­
ous matheme of psychoanalysis" (Deleuze, 2003, p. 56) . 8 Lacan's text
implicitly responds to these accusations, without mentioning the math­
eme. Instead, he introduces antiphilosophy, in which some readers see
a synonym for the matheme (Milner, 1995, p . 145) . 9
What is this mysterious matheme? A result of logical or mathemati­
cal formalisation, in short a formula, which is supposed to transmit
knowledge without recurring to interpretation (meaning or sense) and
without involving transference (love of knowledge) . In this regard it is
indeed the opposite of philosophical transmission, rooted in the figure of
the master (in both meanings of the word) and supported by philia. The
matheme doctrine involves a proposition of teaching, which suspends
the dimension of love and the hierarchy of knowledge (doxa, episteme,
sophia) . Formalised knowledge is also transmitted beyond commodi­
fication and institutional or disciplinary segregation, and as a result,
it rejects the logical frames imposed by the university discourse that
Lacan associates with capitalism. Transmission through formalisation

a For a detailed historical account of the events that accompanied the reorganisation

of the Department of Psychoanalysis, see Roudinesco (2009, pp. 1345-1359) . Here, I will
leave aside the problematic take-over of the Department and focus merely on the theoreti­
cal value of Lacan's intervention.
9 Badiou, on the contrary, interprets Lacan's matheme doctrine as the Platonist kernel
of Lacan's teaching. See Badiou (1991, p . 135ff). In the above discussion of matheme I
mostly rely on Milner's reading, although I'm not opposed to Badiou's developments.
92 S E X A N D N OTH I N G

stands in constant tension with the transmission through transference,

thereby questioning the institutional politics grounded in love and
desire. It imposes a different form of institutional organisation. It is true
that Lacan's institutional experiment ( E cole Freudienne de Paris) ended
in failure and a renewal of the sectarianism that the doctrine of formali­
sation was supposed to overcome. However, this does not undermine
or discredit the critical value of matheme.
In his short intervention, Lacan proposes the following definition of
antiphilosophy:

Antiphilosophy-with this I would like to entitle the investigation

of what the university discourse owes to its "educational" sup­
position. Unfortunately, the history of ideas will not deal with it.
A patient collection of imbecilities that characterize this discourse
will hopefully enable the evaluation of its indestructible roots, its
eternal dream. From which there is but a particular awakening
(Lacan, 1975 /2001, pp. 314-315).

This formulation leaves no doubt that the privileged target of antiphi­

losophy is not so much philosophy, but the university discourse, which
places the quarrel in a different light. La can' s theory of discourses
envisages in the university an intertwining of capitalism and scientific
knowledge, and in its socio-political context the rise of bureaucratic
power and the proliferation of experts. These privileged social embodi­
ments of seemingly neutral instrumental knowledge, which replaces
the pre-modern figure of the master and, integrated in the logic of
capital, grounds a new regime of domination (Lacan, 2007) . Through
the coupling with science, capitalism introduced a new fetishisation of
knowledge, different from its philosophical fetishisation through love:
namely, fetishisation through commodification.
In Lacan's proposition, antiphilosophy closes the list of disciplines,
which should be included in the formation of analysts: linguistics,
mathematical logic and topology, which already guide his return to
Freud, but which also indicate the epistemological horizon that enable
the isolation of the subject with the unconscious. Being the last in line,
antiphilosophy determines the critical value of other disciplines. La can' s
background in this matter is Koyre's discussion of modern scientific rev­
olution, whose crucial aspect consisted in detaching mathematical dis­
course from the "eternal dream" of pre-modern cosmologies, the ideal of
 P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S A N D A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y 93

totality and harmony. Modern mathematisation of natural phenomena

abolished the ancient division of the world on the superlunary sphere
of eternal mathematical truths and the sublunary sphere of generation
and corruption, initiating the path which grounds science not only on
exa ct experimentation but above all, on the autonomy of formal lan­
guage. Lacan's main epistemological claim was that there is only one
step from this mathematical autonomy to what linguistic structuralism
isolated in natural languages under the concept of the signifier. The lan­
guage of mathematics becomes a concrete case of the autonomy of the
signifier.
Structuralism and psychoanalysis-and to this list one should add
the critique of political economy-extend the lessons of scientific revo­
lution to the field of "human objects" (language, society, subjectivity) .
This extension, however, does not leave the scientific field unaltered.
Lacan already indicated this by claiming that the question to ask is
not "Is psychoanalysis a science?" but rather, "What is a science that
includes psychoanalysis?" (Lacan, 1965 /2001, p. 187). Psychoanalysis,
together with structuralism and historical materialism, transformed the
notion of scientificity by confronting modern sciences with the question
of the subject.
By isolating the signifier in its absolute autonomy, structural lin­
guistics extends the autonomy of mathematical language to natural
languages and thereby abolishes the "qualitative" distinction between
natural and formal languages. The limit of Saussure' s theory of language
is, however, that it does not operate with the notion of the subject. In
this respect, Lacan's first return to Freud had already advanced a step
beyond the initial frames of linguistic structuralism, when it equated
the structures of the unconscious (condensation and displacement)
with the linguistic structures (metaphor and metonymy) . Adopting the
Freudian association of psychoanalysis with the history of scientific rev­
olution, Lacan concluded that the subject of the unconscious couldn't
be other than the subject of modern science. We can recall that Descartes
made the first attempt in determining this subject in his deduction of
cogito, but ended up producing the abstract subject of cognition. In his
return to Descartes, Lacan claimed to have made the necessary correc­
tion of Cartesian rationalism, when he situated the Freudian subject of
the unconscious in the minimal gap in the enunciation of cogito, the
gap between thinking and being. This perspective necessitated a refor­
mulation of Descartes' formula into "I think: therefore I am", where
94 SEX AND NOTH I N G

the "I am" becomes the content of "I think". The gap remained over­
looked because of Descartes' immediate move from cogito to res cogita ns,
from enunciation to substance, in which thinking and being apparently
found their reconciliation. The antiphilosophical claim of Lacan's read­
ing of Descartes would be that modern philosophy is grounded on a
misunderstanding, which perpetuates the resistance to negativity that
marked the foundation of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle. Philoso­
phy did register that the modern scientific revolution no longer sustains
the hypothesis of the metaphysical soul, but it failed to isolate the actual
subject that corresponds to the autonomy of mathematical language,
which grounds the efficiency of scientific discourse.
The introduction of antiphilosophy accentuates that formalised
knowledge has nothing in common neither with philia nor with con­
sciousness. For this reason, Lacan argued that mathematics is "science
without consciousness" (Lacan, 1972/2001, p. 453). Formalisation
does not need a "thinking substance" in order to verify or falsify its
theories, and in this respect, too, Lacan's declaration follows Koyre,
who persistently rejected empiricist epistemology and its reduction
of modern sciences exclusively to experimentation. Experimentation
still presupposes a psychological observer, while the foundation of
science on the ideal of formalisation entirely depsychologises knowl­
edge. However, "science without consciousness" does not suggest that
science is without any subject whatsoever. On the contrary, it implies
that the subject of the unconscious is precisely the depsychologised
subject of modern science.
The problem for Lacan is that Koyre's history of scientific ideas cannot
deal with the university discourse, in which empiricist epistemologies
result more useful to a successful combination of science with the inter­
ests of capitalist economies. Koyre did criticise readings that depicted
Bacon against Descartes, yet he failed to raise the question of the subject
of modern science. Formalisation against verification, Descartes against
Bacon-this also means the subject of the unconscious versus the sub­
ject of cognition. The empiricist epistemology contains a normalisation
and recentralisation of thinking, as well as neutralisation of the emanci­
patory potential of modern science. 1 0

10 We can add that the revolutionary human sciences-critique of political economy,

psychoanalysis, and structural linguistics-find its corresponding "empiricist" coun­
terparts in liberal and neoliberal political economy, where the recentralisation takes the
 P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S A N D A N T I I' H I L O S O P H Y 95

As already mentioned, the university discourse stands for com­

modification of knowledge. Here, the notion of antiphilosophy most
explicitly abandons its negative connotation and shows its continuous
philosophical aspirations. By going further than the history of ideas,
antiphilosophy attempts to inscribe psychoanalysis in the critical tra­
dition, through which the philosophical and political signification of
Freud's efforts to link his invention with the epistemological frames of
revolutionary sciences is pushed to the foreground.
In conclusion I would like to summarise the central lessons of the
other three disciplines (linguistics, mathematical logic, topology) and
their importance for psychoanalysis and philosophy.

The linguistic lesson

Lacan's proposition on teaching introduces its disciplinary quadrivium

with linguistics. "Let it be clear that linguistics is principal here" (Lacan,
1975/2001, p. 313), stresses Lacan, but immediately adds that it does
not suffice him as an analyst. This additional remark, insignificant as
it may be, indicates that we are not dealing with simple application
of linguistic knowledge to psychoanalysis, but with a more subversive
engagement, which implies a reinvention of the linguistic field. For
instance, in Seminar XX, Lacan explicitly claims that his axiom "the
unconscious is structured like a language" does not belong to the field
of linguistics, even if it was developed with the help of its formalisa­
tion of operations such as metaphor and metonymy. This exteriority
is due to the productive dimension of the unconscious (production of
jouissance and production of subjectivity) that the Saussurean model
excludes from the science of language. In this regard, Lacan's material­
ist turn in the structuralist theory of language is entirely foreign to the
infamous linguistic turn in philosophy. The main difference between
Lacan's structuralism and the philosophies of language is that the lat­
ter were concerned solely with the production of meaning and with
the theory of performative, which neither questions the transcenden­
talism of symbolic nor does it propose a rigorous materialist theory of

shape of homo oeconomicus, the political-economic subject of cognition; in psychology,

where the same recentralisation concerns the renewed focus on the conscious ego as the
central instance in mental apparatus; and finally in the cognitive linguistics and analytical
philosophies of language, which renew the "organonic" understanding of language.
96 SEX A N D N OT H I N G

the subject. Lacan's radicalisation of the structuralist programme, on

the other hand, detects an "other production" behind the production of
meaning and the performative effects of language. This other produc­
tion is intimately connected with the dimension of the drive, but also
with the attempt to think the subject of the unconscious as a "response
of the real,''11 a non-psychological discursive consequence.
In Lacan's teaching the ties between psychoanalysis and structural
linguistics were loosened up by the critique of political economy an d
the problematic of jouissance, where it turned out that the unconscio us
necessitates a different notion of structure, without therefore losing
sight of the autonomy of the signifier. The notion of non-all (pas-tout),
which in Lacan's later teaching substitutes the term "structure", strives
to accomplish this necessary step: "The structure is to be taken in the
sense, in which it is most real, in which it is the real itself [ . ]. In gen­
. .

eral, this is determined by the convergence toward an impossibility. It is

through this that the structure is real" (Lacan, 2006, p. 30) .
The difference between the classical structuralist and the Lacanian
notion of structure is in fact already indicated in Lacan's founding
axiom: the unconscious is structured as a language. The indefinite arti­
cle prevents a total identification of the unconscious with the symbolic.
The unconscious is a quasi-language, "private language" but this does
not suggest that it is an impenetrable autistic One. A double rejection
is at stake here. The claim that the unconscious is structured rejects
the romantic and the hermeneutic conception, according to which the
unconscious designates an impenetrable and irrational depth without
order, the chaotic "night of the world" full of erring phantoms and mem­
bra disjecta. With the structuralist reference, the unconscious becomes a
thoroughly rational notion. However, Lacan's later developments shift
from the linguistic structure in the abstract sense to the dynamic of lan­
guage: "But does language plug into something admissible by way of
any life, this is the question that would not be bad to awaken among
linguists" (Lacan, 1975/2001, p. 313) . The structure of the unconscious
is hence not an abstract and static system of differences but a process of
becoming. Only here a materialist theory of the subject and a materialist
linguistics that Seminar XX calls linguisterie can be articulated.

11 "[ ] what concerns the analytic discourse is the subject, which is, as an effect of
. . .

signification, a response of the real" (Lacan, 1972/2001, p. 459) .

 P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S A N D A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y 97

It is not surprising that psychoanalysis began with the aetiology of

neurosis, reframing the problem of causality, in which the signifier was
ranked among material causes. Philosophy, on the other hand, always
refused to iri.clude the signifier among possible causes. To say that
language is an organon means that the signifier cannot become a cause.
But the Saussurean formalisation of language into an abstract system
of differences is not yet materialistic either. Only once the autonomy
of the signifier has been associated with production, and thus the cau­
sality of the signifier has been acknowledged, a critical and materialist
orientation can be integrated into linguistics. This orientation introduces
the split subject and the surplus object in the science of language.

The math ema tical lesson

The mathematical lesson concerns the already mentioned effort to sepa­

rate knowledge from its anchoring in transference love (fetishisation) .
The matheme is also Lacan's answer to the dilemma of the relationship
between theory and practice in psychoanalysis and a way to prevent
the closure of psychoanalysis from other disciplines. It is interesting,
nevertheless, that Lacan proposes precisely mathematical formalisa­
tion. Is jouissance, for instance, possible to formalise? This is actually
the wrong question to ask, since for Lacan mathematical formalisation
imports mainly because it reveals the paradoxes of the symbolic order
and provides the paradigmatic example of the realisation of structure,
next to the unconscious. 1 2
Formalisation in psychoanalysis thus uncovers and transmits above
all the symbolic deadlocks, like in the case of four discourses, which
expose the structural instability and demonstrate the rootedness of
social links in the inexistence of social relation (social contract, economic
contract, normative social model, etc.); or in the formulas of sexuation,

12
"Can't the formalization of mathematical logic, which is based only on writing,
serve us in the analytic process, in that what invisibly holds bodies is designated therein?
If I were allowed to give an image for this, I would easily take that which, in nature,
seems to most closely approximate the reduction to the dimensions of the surface writing
requires, at wh ich Spinoza himself marvelled-the textual work that comes out of the
spider's belly, its web. It is a truly miraculous function to see, on the very surface emerg­
ing from an opaque point of this strange being, the trace of these writings taking form , in
which one can grasp the limits, impasses, and dead ends that show the real acceding to
the symbolic" (Lacan, 1999, p. 93).
98 S E X A N D N O H -I l N G

which demonstrate the inexistence of sexual relation (radical absence of

normative sexuality) .
And so, the critical value of formalisation stands in the foreground.
For instance, Marx's Capital no less formalises the capitalist mode of
production and, at the same moment, denounces false naturalisation of
its relations of production, notably the fantasy of social relation sum­
marised in the four cornerstones of economic liberalism: freedom (of
the market), equality (in exchange), (private) property, and "Bentham"
(private interest) (Marx, 2008, pp. 189-190) . Marx's critique reveals
behind these ideological foundations exists a fetishist operation, which
mystifies the actual structure of social links (structuration through
alienation, class struggles, and contradictions) and imposes a set of fan­
tasies regarding the self-regulating character of the market and the self­
engendering of value.
The matheme doctrine exposes the split that defines psychoanaly­
sis from within. Situated between transmission and transference, and
one could say between science and philosophy, psychoanalysis needs
to reject this very opposition, without simply rejecting philosophy or
science, in order to maintain its autonomy. The critique of transference
detects in philosophy a possible resistance against psychoanalysis. This
was Freud's suggestion in his New Introductory Lessons on Psychoanalysis,
where he reduced philosophy to a worldview. Freud believed that psy­
choanalysis can bemme a scientific practice only by overcoming all
worldview illusions. One could even interpret the entire analytic pro­
cedure as an attempt to cure the subject from the philosophical love of
knowledge. Then, is psychoanalysis a way to extract philosophy out of
the illusions that determined it throughout history, a therapy of philo­
sophical thinking? From this viewpoint, formalisation would provide a
means for suspending transference through knowledge that resists love:
a knowledge that is not supported or centralised by a master-signifier.
Lacan's relation to philosophy is more complex. If philosophical
love of knowledge is the privileged terrain to study the mechanisms of
transference, this does not suggest that psychoanalysis assumes a meta­
position, from which it articulates its critique. If anything, then psycho­
analysis continually demonstrates the tension between formalisation
and transference and insists on the boundary which exists between the
two. This tension is what is most philosophical in psychoanalysis, and
precisely for this reason psychoanalysis is the heir to the critical and
materialist tradition.
 P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S A N D A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y 99

On the other hand, psychoanalysis needs to resist the temptation

to identify with science, a mistake that Freud made in his lecture on
Weltanschauung, claiming that by rejecting philosophical, political, and
religious worldviews, analysts should adopt the scientific one, namely
positivism. The only problem is that such a positivist worldview would
abandon the main psychoanalytic hypothesis, the subject of the uncon­
scious. If natural sciences produce knowledge without a subject and
even legitimise the "ideology of repression of the subject" (Lacan,
19 70/2001, p . 437), then neither the adoption of a scientific worldview
nor mathematical formalisation can be the ultimate goal of psychoanal­
ysis. What can be its goal is the transformation of the very idea of sci­
entificity, and in this respect Lacan's formalism again pursues Koyre's
efforts to counteract the empiricist epistemologies, whose reduction­
ist and pragmatist tendencies reject every critical and "speculative"
dimension in modern sciences. Formalisation matters precisely for its
materialist and dialectical value.

The topological lesson

The topological lesson concerns the constitution and the structure of

the space of thinking. The link between La can' s teaching and topology
is manifested from the very outset. A significant break occurs at the
beginning of 1960s in the seminar on identification, where the aspheric
objects offer an indispensable tool for a non-metaphorical spatiali­
sation of psychoanalytic objects and structural relations, for instance
between the subject and the Other, the subject and the object a, desire
and drive, etc. The interest in topology will progressively escalate and
during the so-called Borromean seminars prevail over linguistics and
mathematical logic.
The first question concerns the surplus produced by the manipula­
tionof topological objects, for this differentiates Lacan's use of topology
from models and metaphors. It is well known that the topological refer­
ence was not unknown to Freud, who repeatedly referred to the spatial
dimension of psychic apparatus and for whom topology visualises the
relation between the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious,
and later between the ego, the id, and the superego. But for Freud topol­
ogy remained a metaphorical reference. He was searching the episte­
mological surplus in biology and thermodynamic, which lead him from
the logic of the unconscious to its pseudo-vitalist ontology.
1 00 S E X A N D N O H -I l N G

Milner argued that topology addresses the opposition of showing and

saying, which also marked Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy. What
is impossible to say, can be shown-this would be the basic premise
of the use of topology, suggesting that psychoanalysis encounters
something that cannot be said. There is a deadlock of enunciation,
requiring an external device, which will visualise the unspeakable.
Yet, the unspeakable in psychoanalysis does not imply the same as
Wittgenstein's imperative of silence. While Wittgenstein concludes from
the impossibility of saying to the necessity of silence, psychoanalysis,
on the other hand, strengthens the ties between the impossible and the
enunciation, the real and the symbolic . Lacan associates topology with
the attempt to construct a new "transcendental aesthetics", which will
support a materia li st orientation in thinking. This is the main point of
identification of topology and structure, which traverses Lacan's later
writings and provides further developments to the already mentioned
inclusion of the structure in the re al .
The peak of this orientation is " L'e tourdit", the programmatic ecrit
that inaugurates Lacan's later teaching. There we read the following
contextualisation of topological lessons:

Is topology not this no-space, where the mathematical discourse

leads us and which necessitates a revision of Kant's aesthetics? [ . . . ]
Structure is the real, which unveils itself in language. Of course, it
has nothing to do with the "good form." [ . . . ] Topology is not "made
to guide us" in structure. Topology simply is this structure-as
retroaction of the chain order that constitutes language. (Lacan,
1972/2001, pp. 472, 476 & 483)

What matters in topology is its materialist and realist perspective, where

the topological object is the thing itself, not a numb witness of the col­
lapse of language but an orientation that directs enunciation and think­
ing. As a support of materialist orientation, topology stands in strong
continuity with linguistics and mathematical logics. Its rejection of
Wittgenstein's imperative of silence places it on the side of what Lacan
occasionally calls "half-saying" (mi-dire) and "well-saying" (bien-dire).
In short, in bringing together both the real of structure and the struc­
ture of the real, topology is both a forcing and a disclosure of thinking.
For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, the space of thinking is a closed
totality of regulated enunciation and philosophical grammar, beyond
 P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S A N D A N T I P H I L O S O P H Y 1 01

which there is only the mystical. Nothing could be further away from
p sychoanalysis,13 for which there is no totalisation of the Other and "no
universe of discourse" (Lacan, 2006, p. 14) : the Other is inconsistent,
and precisely" this inconsistence needs to be visualised with topological
objects, which play the same role as mathemes in logics and signifiers
in linguistics. ·

Lacan complained that Freud's topology provided a misleading

image of psychic apparatus and insisted that the difference between
Freud and himself overlaps with the difference between the spheri­
cal and the aspherical topology: "There you have it: my three are not
the same as his. Mine are the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary.
I managed to situate them through a topology, the one of the so-called
Borromean knot" (Lacan, 1986, p. 82). He then continues that Freud's
notion of psychic apparatus is modelled on the sphere, which still pre­
supposes a clear division between the inside and the outside, thereby
neglecting the most crucial critical point of his own discoveries: that the
unconscious is not a phenomenon of psychic depth but an effect of the
curved space of language.
Unlike philosophy, linguistics, and mathematical logic, topology is
the only discipline that does not need any subversion: "Topology-! mean
the mathematical one, without the analysis (in my view) being able to
bend it any further" (Lacan, 1975 /2001, p. 314). Topology is enough
subversive in order to correct Freud's spatial metaphors: "[ . ] all the . .

forms, in which the space breaks or accumulates are made to provide

the analyst what lacks him: namely a support other than metaphor in
order to sustain metonymy" (Lacan, 1975 /2001, p . 314). In its critical
value, topology enables to construct a new mas geometricus, a formal
method, which repeats the gesture of Cartesian rationalism and allows
detaching philosophy from the discourse of metaphor (transference,
meaning).

* * *

13 For this reason Milner overestimates the �eight of the "Wittgenstein-problem" in

Lacan's final teaching. See Milner (1995). Another overestimation concerns the role of
Joyce, the perfect opposite of Wittgenstein. It is therefore worth doubting whether Lacan's
teaching truly amounts to the double deadlock of linguistic jouissance, on the one hand,
and mystical silence, on the other.
1 02 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

In conclusion, the three disciplines and their lessons turn around the
three crucial decentralisations conditioned by scientific modernity:
decentralisation of language, which suspends the organonic (pragmatic)
theory of language; decentralisation of knowledge, which detached it
from the human observer; and finally, decentralisation of space, which
progressively gave rise to non-Euclidian geometries and restructured
the space of thinking. The disciplinary knot is constructed under the
banner of antiphilosophy, which joins them as the fourth term that
links them in a Borromean way: linguistics, a science of the symbolic;
mathematical logic, a science of the real; and topology, a science of the
imaginary. Pursuing this Borromean reference, we can conclude that
antiphilosophy assumes the role of the symptom, which resumes the
main lesson of psychoanalysis: decentralisation of thinking. The move­
ment of La can' s teaching leaves no doubt that this symptom does not aim
at the abolition of philosophy but at the possibility of its reinvention.

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avec les philosophes . Paris: Albin Michel.

Deleuze, G. (2003). Deux regimes de fous et autres textes . Paris : Minuit.
Lacan, J. (1965/2001). Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychoanal-
yse. Autres ecrits . Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1970 / 2001). Radiophonie. A utres ecrits . Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1972/2001). L' eto u rdi t . A utres ecrits . Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1975 / 2001). Peut-etre a Vincennes . . . Autres ecrits . Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1986) . Le seminaire de Caracas. In: Almanach de Ia dissolution .
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W. W. Norton & Company.
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Lacan, J. (2006) . Le Seminaire. Livre XVI. D'un A utre a I'autre. Paris : Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2007) . The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII. The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis. New York : W. W. Norton & Company.
Marx, K. (2008), Das Kapital, 1 . Berlin: Karl Dietz.
Masseau, D. (2000). Les ennemies des philosophes. L'antiphilosophie au temps des
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Paris : Navarin.
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Milnet� J.-C. (1995) . L'oeuvre claire. Lacan, Ia science, Ia philosophic. Paris: Seuil.
Milner, J.-C. (2008) . Le periple s tructural. Paris: Verdier.
Plato (1963) . Cratylus . The Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press. ·

Rou dinesco, E. (2009) . Histoire de Ia psychanalyse en France. Paris: Fayard.

Soler, C. (2009). Lacan. L'inconscient rtHnvente. Paris: PUF.
Tomsic, S. (2015). The Capitalist Unconscious . London: Verso.
Zupancic, A. (2011). Realism in Psychoanalysis. European Journal of Psycho­
analysis, 32.
 PA RT I I

.. . TO ELS EW H E R E
C H A P TE R S I X

Th e sex u a l com p act

joan Copjec

The numbers game

In the mid-1970s a global warming began to melt the icy resistance of
feminists to psychoanalysis, thanks to the publication in England of
Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism; the upsurge in France of a
group of "New French Feminists"; and the work in the US of Shoshana
Felman, who made a persuasive argument for a feminist-friendly
"French Freud". For approximately a decade, psychoanalytic feminism
flourished as one of the most exciting and productive discourses of its
time. While never completely uncritical of Freudian theory, feminists
nevertheless deeply appreciated the fact that it was unique in accord­
ing a fundamental status to sexual difference and feminine sexuality
and thus in making the experiences of women an issue of far-reaching
importance, one capable of throwing into question some of the basic
assumptions underlying philosophical theories of the subject and polit­
ical theories of community.
By the mid-1980s, however, signs of another climate change in the
relations between feminism and psychoanalysis were already apparent.
Teresa de Lauretis, in her ground-breaking book, Technologies of Gender,
articulated the slogan under which the reverse winds would effectively
107
1 08 SEX A N D NOTH I N G

uncouple the two discourses, breaking apart their short-lived alliance:

"A feminist theory of gender [ . . ] points to a conception of the subject
.

as multiple, rather than divided" (De Lauretis, 1987, p. x) . The conse­

quences of this formulation and the growing interest it heralded in a
rigorous interrogation of psychoanalysis cannot be underestimated.
In many of us, however, there arose an uneasy sense that something
was being lost in this precipitous embrace of the newly defined cat­
egory of gender. As "the end goal of the feminist revolution"-at least
as defined by Shulamith Firestone "not just the elimination of male
privilege, but of the sex distinction itself"-seemed to draw nigh, some
wondered if sexual difference was really as eliminable as (we hoped)
class differences were and if it was desirable to strip the former of sig­
nificance (Firestone, 1 972, pp. 10-11).
1) My own disinclination only increased. To be clear, I do not mean
completely to oppose gender theory, which offers important analyses of
how social norms and stereotypes model the ways in which we appear
to ourselves and regard others. Thus, although I will continue to use the
term gender theory throughout this chapter, my critique is aimed more
narrowly at that part of its argument which reduces sexual difference to
a biological distinction and wants to take over its role in the theory of
subject formation. At the beginning of the mid-80s, when this polemic
began to gain ground, the psychoanalytic category of sexual difference
became suspect and was largely forsaken in favour of the neutered cat­
egory of gender. Yes, neutered; this is the point on which I will insist. For,
it was specifically the sex of sexual difference that drops out when this
term is replaced by gender. Gender theory not only thrust the term sexual
difference out of the limelight, it removed the sex from sex. While gender
theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question
what constituted the sexual. No longer the subject of serious theoretical
inquiry, sex simply reverted to being what it is in common parlance: a
secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject) or (when applied
to acts) limited to a highly restricted-and naughty-sub-set. In short,
gender theory reduced sex by turning it into a predicate and confining
it to a specific domain of life.
The turn away from the Freudian theory of sex and sexual differ­
ence meant that many of the important questions it posed would also
come to seem outdated, evaporated of their urgency. Take, for example,
the tired criticism of Freud's "pan-sexualism". This charge, that Freud
over-rated the importance of sex, found it everywhere, the ubiquitous
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 1 09

cause of everything, is stunning in its obtuseness. Noting, correctly,

that Freud was intent on thinking sex and cause together, his accusers
neglected to consider that this reconceptualization of the two in light of
each other would leave neither untouched, but would, on the contrary,
alter our commonsense notions of both. The Freudian concept of over­
determination blurted this fact out but this, too, fell on deaf ears, which
heard in the over only a surfeit: that is, that the causes of our actions
are never unique but always multiple. What ought to have been clear
from Freud's exposition is that over-determination cannot be adequately
approached except as acknowledgment of the subject's under-determina­
tion. As subjects we cannot trace backward from condition to condition
until we arrive at some final instance where a cause operates alone, in
a stark, lonely hour, to determine our actions. No external or internal
necessity guides subjects, who are thus susceptible to chance encoun­
ters that interrupt any linear plotting of their life-long drift, to a series
of relations in which it makes no sense to look for a "this follows that"
sequence because the relations are defined by delay, anticipation, simul­
taneity, and unconscious awareness. It is precisely there where he noted
a under-determination by animal instinct that Freud found it necessary
to invent the concept of drive, which was never a drive to . . . x, y, or z,
never connected by necessity to a particular object. What is essential is
not simply the substitution of a plurality of causes for a single one, but
also the fact that sex cannot be located anywhere, in any positive phe­
nomenon. If sex has a way of showing up everywhere, it is because it
has no proper domain. Freud argued that sex could not be found either
in the biological or in the cultural domain, and yet he never assigned it a
separate domain of its own. It first manifested itself to Freud in negative
phenomena: lapses, slips, interruptions that indexed a discontinuity in
the causal chain, unexpected dislocations in linearity.
2) The flight into the multiple, conceived as discrete instances, had
of course a number of other adverse consequences on the theory of
sexuality. If sexual difference became problematic for gender theory this
is because the former was presumed to be heterosexist. It divided sub­
jects into two genres and implied a necessary and/ or natural relation
between them. (You see what happens when you neglect to acknowl­
edge that sex emerges as a theory of under-determination) . Why-gen­
der theory asks-must there be only two genres of persons, two sexes,
rather than an infinite number of them? I like to think of this as the
Oprah Winfrey distribution of sex: "You get a sex and you get a sex and
1 10 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

you get a sex", in which sex is distributed to each and can be owned like
a car or some other piece of property. But property, Proudhon taught
us, is theft and so we would not be going too far if we accused gender
theorists of stealing sex from us by converting it into gender. Sex is not
a property or predicate of the subject; it ex-propriates the subject from
herself, de-sequesters her interiority by linking it to the common, that
is to say: jouissance.
Jouissance? Here is how Lacan defines this not very well under­
stood term in his Encore seminar: jouissance is a "negative instance"
that opposes itself to division, distribution, or reattribution. The word
is derived from an old legal term, usufruct, which grants one the use of
one's means, permits one to enjoy them, but not to acquire legal title to
them or use them up. 1 In order to prevent further squandering of this
common dimension, which we as subjects enjoy, let us continue our
examination of gender theory's basic assumptions.
First question: is it automatically the case that many are superior to
two? Many are more numerous, granted, but one balks at a precipitous
multiplication that would merely push aside questions that need to be
asked. Doesn't the proliferation of kinds of subjects represent a retreat of
thought rather than a theoretical advance? An analogy: Freud conceived
the drives as fundamentally divided in two. Though he was never quite
satisfied with the way he defined their duality. His enthusiastic contem­
poraries, however, pitched in to "improve" on his theory by multiplying
the drives such that every action in which a subject might engage was
explained by the existence of a separate drive. (Nevermind, again, that
drive was never conceived as a drive to x, y or z.) It quickly became evi­
dent, however, that the question of what caused these actions was not
answered by the ad hoc proliferation of drives; it was simply deferred.
The proliferation of genders repeats this same mistake; it multiplies
rather than thinks. Why multiple rather than divided; why not multiple
because divided? The former alternative shirks from thinking differ­
ence in favour of simply adding another one to a previous one, indefi­
nitely: 1 + 1 + 1 . . From where do all these individual ones come? What
.

makes them individual? In large part they come from common sense
observation that there are individuals, there are differences, which obser­
vation produces an ontological principle (the ontology of the multiple)

1 For a thorough analysis of these questions see Simondon (1992).

 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 1 1 1

to be defended, few questions asked. It is simply assumed that an indi­

vidual comes from herself, that whatever makes a subject this particular
subject makes her so per se. This is the nominalist position on which
gender theodsts largely depend (Gracia, 1994; Corbin, 2007) . 2 A serious
problem remains: the l 's are wholes unto themselves and the +'s signs
that relation has been expelled from them, precisely the relation which
jouissance supplies.
It is impossible not to sympathise, to a point, with the reasoning
behind gender theory's flight into the multiple, its attempt to get out
from under an overarching, englobing one in which all differences
would be included and greatly reduced to local and minor variations
in the nature that unifies them. We are right to resist labels and markers
of identity that would freeze us in essentialised forms of being or array
us under abstract categories that have no real but only a conceptual
existence. But this flight does not take us far and it is thus necessary to
plot another path. Fortunately, we have at our disposal a philosophi­
cal arsenal bequeathed to us by-this will surprise you-the extended
elaboration of the central concept of monotheism: the concept of the
One. The task of the monotheists was to credit-not just theologically,
but philosophically-the possibility that one God could serve as the
God of all peoples spread across the earth. It is easy to be cynical about
this endeavour, to view it as nothing more than a doctrinal mask for
the political ambitions of the one Church intent on consolidating its
power and gaining dominion over foreign armies and lands. The phi­
losophy of William of Occam and other medieval nominalists offered
sceptics of the Church a razor with which to shred this mask and expose
the Church's pretentions. There is, they declared, no other unity than
numerical unity, individual beings in themselves and of themselves. No
need to posit a separate principle or another reality, for whatever makes
an individual man a man produces him as concrete individual. There are
no universals, no universal man, no species or genera; all such entities
lack existence and are simply concepts fabricated by our minds-01�

2 Corbin's essay was originally published in Corbin (1981) . Working from a different
set of sources and questions, Mladen Dolar has begun a similar questioning of the two
of sexual difference on the basis of a more sophi s ticated notion of the One in an ex c ellen t
unpublished manuscript titled "One Splits i n to Two". See also the fine work of our col­
league in ZupanCic (2003).
1 12 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

more cynically, by minds intent on gaining power over us by means of

these fabrications.
The balloon-puncturing effect of the nominalist position has at first
blush a radical appeal, but ultimately the position of their adversaries­
the realists, led by Duns Scotus-is actually more radical, we will argue.
The realists held species and genera were not arbitrary groupings of
individuals, but real entities. Arguing passionately for the reality of
universalia, they insisted on defining a non-numerical unity. That is to
say: a unity or, One that could not be counted as one, since it was not
determinate, but open and non-self-identical. A real wuversal is for this
reason unable to determine the particular nature of any individual and
no individual could exhibit the nature of the principle, whether this be
the principle of humanity, or God. 3
Medieval Islamic philosophers contributed to monotheism a compel­
ling conceptualisation of the real, non-numerical unity of God, which it
expressed succinctly in the formulation, "There is no God, but God".
God appears in this formulation twice negated. The first negation com­
pletely removes Him from the order of living individuals, from human
existence; it thus produces the apophatic dimension of God who is thus
inaccessible to individual beings in his nondeterminacy (Lacan, 1988,
p. 158). The second negation announces the appearance of God in the
human order, but it does so without cancelling the first negation. Divine
being appears in each individual being as that being's innermost core,
as the eternal "thisness", the haecceity or Angel of its individuated
being; in this way individuals manifest God, but-again-negatively.
The second negation negates the superiority of another order, the exte­
riority of a founding God; it asserts that there is no other world but
this world. "There is no God, but God" negates the possibility of any
individual might exhibit or incarnate God, who exceeds the plurality
of individuals as well as each, individually. Consider Marx's famous
quip that he never once encountered in the streets a universal man, but
met there only concrete men. Islamic philosophers and realists in the

3 Christian Jambet (2005) discusses the Islamic concept of the "unity of God" (tawid, in
A rabic) This essay was originally published in ]ambet (2003) . La can-not coincidentally­
.

employs the Isl amic formula, "There is no other God but God", in his reading of the
"specimen dream" of psychoanalysis, the dream of Irma's injection, in order to drain
the formula for trimethylamine (a product of the decomposition of sperm) of its sexual
substance and reconstitute it as a empty signifier, a signifier that because it does not mean
anything is able to indicate that excess in language which gives rise to sex.
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 113

medieval sense would argue ins tead that the universal manifests itself in
concrete men insofar as it forms a part of them. And yet this part is pecu­
liar not only inasmuch as it is greater than the individual of which it is
p art but also · insofar as the it manifests itself negatively as something
withdrawn, as unassumable by the individual.
To all individuals subsumed by an abstract universal we can attach
predicates that identify them: he or she is (in his /her nature) X: homo
faber; a political animal; a thinking being. But the real universal does not
respond to this model of essences and attributes or predicates, which
undergirds the abstract universal; rather, the real universal puts all such
predicates into question. For, if it were true that the nature of God, or
man, or Polish people were really present in this person here and could
also be present in that person there, we could not truly say-the realists
argue-what the nature of God, or man, or Poles is. The real universal
withdraws from individuated beings any predicate that might be uni­
versally applied to them. The real universal is nevertheless not a fugitive
from the One, a flight into the multiple, a sceptic of group belonging.
It posits, rather, a fugitive One, a One that flees itself while multiplying
its singular presences. We might say that the real universal is a living sur­
plus able to negotiate with historical circumstances, not an abstraction
added to on an already existing world.
This discussion may seem to have taken us a very long way from
psychoanalysis, but my proposal is that the latter discourse holds to a
realist position. It is through its theory of sex, later also elaborated as
drive, that psychoanalysis universalises human nature as that which
has no nature or whose nature is radically plasticised. Devoid of instinct.
Or: if in psychoanalysis sex is a universal, it is so if not precisely in the
sense medieval realists understood it, in a sense that owes a great deal
to the medieval polemic against nominalism. The paradoxical presence
in every subject of an opaque excess, an inalienable, extimate core that
cannot be owned or encompassed by the individual subject is, like the
real universal, a part greater than the individual who "contains" it.
Freud is seldom given the credit for preempting the charge that he well­
knew would awaited his foray into group psychology-namely, that
this foray was an illegitimate incursion of psychoanalysis in a territory
outside of its expertise. At the beginning of Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego Freud warns off his soon-to-be-critics by insisting
that a defining tenet of psychoanalysis has always been that the divi­
sion between the individual and the group falls within the individual
1 ·1 4 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

subject. If group psychology was, indeed, a proper and legitimate sub­

ject of his science, it was because that science defined the individual
as a joint entity, psychic and social at once. There was for Freud no
solitary, completely autonomous subject, for each individual subject
"contained" an excess of sociality in a precise sense that is very much
in line with the real universal of medieval realists. Lacan gave to this
surplus reality the name jouissance precisely in order to underscore
its collective or common nature. Defined by Lacan as "an inheritance
[the subject] can enjoy/' can use, but not "use up", jouissance is a social
reality to which the subject has a non-exclusive right (Lacan, 1999, p. 3) .
Jouissance emerges in relation to others and is enjoyed in relation to
them, as common property.
What matters at this point is this: the one from which the theory of
sexuality starts out is a real one, a one that is paradoxical insofar as it is
not at one with itself. This one opposes directly the multiple with which
nominalists conduct their love affair. From this starting point, we can
begin to make be clear that the two at stake in sex does not conform to
that limited number to which today's nominalists object. Sexual differ­
ence is not conceived as a reduction of the multiple to a smaller multiple­
only two-because the two is not just a second one, added to the first.
Or: you are mistaken if you think that one plus one will give you the
two of sexual difference.
If the two of sexual difference was pressured by gender theory to
give way to the multiplicity of gendered positions, it was in order to
respect the historical variability and constructedness of the subject.
Although it was acknowledged that sexual difference was conceived
by psychoanalysis not as a biological given, but as an effect of a specific
technique, or apparatus-namely, language-the new wave of feminists
worried that the structuralist conception of language was ahistorical
and produced effects that were invariant. For this reason the apparatus
(l'appareil) of language was dislodged from its role as the smithy of sex
and replaced by historically variable technologies or dispos i t ifs-that is,
the complex machinery of social practices and knowledges, relations of
powe1� norms and ideals-responsible for constructing gendered posi­
tions and relations.
The recourse to technologies of gender quickly confronted a problem,
however: that of technological determinism. How to insure that what
came out of the machine was not simply what was put into it, that
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 1 15

the gendered subject was not completely stripped of autonomy? This

problem was fixed by a well-recognised and anodyne truth: techniques
had to be continually redeployed, repeated, but repetition always fails
because nothing can be repeated in the same way twice. Or: there is not
such thing as repetition (ZupanCic, 2008). It was on this denial of repeti­
tion that gender theory staked its hope, for the dooming of repetition
meant variation was inevitable and this margin of variation, this slim
difference, was seized upon as the site of resistance, the launching pad
of thousands of small differences.
The epilogue of Fear and Trembling relates an amusing anecdote to
which Kierkegaard would implicitly respond in the book immediately
following it, Repetition. "Heraclitus the obscure" had a disciple who was
so inspired by his master 's fine thesis that "one could not step in the
same river twice" that he was unable to prevent himself from embel­
lishing it further: "One cannot do it even once" (Kierkegaard, 1983,
p. 123). Somewhere Lacan, speaking of Heraclitus, refers to the "muddy
waters of [the latter 's] occultism", thinking perhaps not only of Jung
but also of the ancient epithet attached to Heraclitus's name, for Lacan
nods in affirmation of Kierkegaard's point in recounting the anecdote
of the over-zealous disciple. What exactly is Kierkegaard's point? That
the disciple inadvertently undermined his master 's purpose; for if
one remains content with a dismissal of repetition as impossible, one
cannot-as Heraclitus intended-affirm movement and change. What
the flat denial of repetition obscures is an important fact; if there were no
repetition, then the Eleatic denial of movement (with which Kierkegaard
opens Repetition) would be valid. But it is not valid; there is movement,
there is change, and these are possible because there is repetition.
Gender theory hangs its hat on the impossibility that something
could ever be "repeated backward", that is, that an act or experience
which had once taken place could take place or be experienced in the
same way again. The Greeks called that which gender theorists deny
recollection. Kierkegaard, however-and Freud, after him-distinguish
recollection from repetition, which proceeds in the opposite way by
"recollecting forward" an event that had never taken place or a memory
that had not "aroused [ . . . ] an experience" (Kierkegaard, 1983, p. 131).
One of Freud's first examples of this process clarifies what is at issue in
repetition as opposed to recollection (Freud, 1950a [1895] / 1966, p. 356).
Emma suffers from a phobia of entering stores by herself. The origin of
1 16 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

the phobia, it turns out, lies not in a single incident but in two incidents
taken together. In the first one, a shopkeeper grabs her genitals through
her clothes. An outside observer might say that she was in this incident
subjected to sexual assaulti but Emma is no outside observer and she
herself, too young to know anything about sex, could not and did not
experience the assault as sexual. Some time, having passed the age of
puberty, Emma once again enters the store alone. This time two shop
assistants laugh at her clothes. While an outside observer would see
in this incident no hint of sexual aggression, Emma, who recollects the
previous scene forward, experiences that former scene as iffor the first
time and senses a sudden "sexual release".
This canonical example of repetition is also-and significantly-an
illustration of what Freud calls the "di-phasic onset of sexuality" . What
is remarkable about the example is the fact that sex seems to be locat­
able in neither of the scenes, or snapshots, presented in the analysis.
In the first one, sex is absent from experience, while in the second it is
absent from the actions that transpire. One might be tempted to trot
out the old charge of pansexualism once again or to update it by accus­
ing Freud of perpetrating a "cinematographic illusion" of sorts, not by
stringing two still frames together on an abstract, homogeneous time
line to create the illusion of movement, but by doing something similar:
stringing together two perfectly innocent scenes on the same timeline in
order to create the illusion of sex. One need only to stop the projection
and both-movement and sex-would disappear, like a mirage.
To save both we need to follow the advice of Deleuze and recognise
that the instants or "frames" are not static, immobile but rather mobile
sections, snapshots, precisely, inasmuch as they are incomplete figures­
" in the process of being formed or dissolving"-of transformation. This
simple recognition makes the sequence of snapshots an "immanent
analysis of movement", or-in the Emma example-of sex, wherein
movement or sex appears as the active link between the instants or scenes
(Deleuze, 1986, p. 6). This analysis is deemed immanent by Deleuze
because it grasps the figures and scenes as they unfold in time, as finite
figures and finite scenes. Or, perhaps we should say: because it grasps
the finite immanently. We propose this refinement in order to make the
point that an immanent analysis regards the finite not as something that
is limited to a specific length of time or that is circumscribed chrono­
logically, but as what, in its ingoing singularity, has no term and as such
repels circumscription.
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 117

If the finite, approached immanently, is not defined by a boundary

that temporally demarcates it, it nevertheless, and for this very reason,
becomes subject to another kind of limit. Not one that cuts it off as a seg­
ment from tiine ongoing, but one that plunges into its midst. The latter
limit injects into finite being a heterogeneity that divides it internally
or-better-dephases it. The finite subject-subject to time-is subject
to delay rather than to the immediacy of the all-at-once, to a break, then,
in the all-at-once.
It is important to insist on this point in order to preempt the auto­
matic assumption that intervals or breaks are features only of an abstract
notion of time, which notion owes its abstract nature to the fact that it
breaks the vital flow of time down into discrete segments of dead time.
A non-abstract, immanent notion of time would, it is assumed, restore
the continuous flow by eliminating the breaks. In truth, howeve1� the
finite subject is not immediately present to a continuous unfolding of
events but to breaks, delays, obstacles, still points, to which Freud con­
stantly drew our attention through his invention of a series of concepts,
including: a "latency period" that divides the two scenes of sexuality
in the Emma case; a "periodic non-excitability" that interrupts psychic
functioning; and a "memory system" that he famously installed between
perception and consciousness, thus disjoining them, interrupting their
continuity. In his "Project for a scientific psychology" Freud describes
perceptions as too ephemeral to leave any trace, which means that the
perception system remains unsullied, hmocent, and perpetually ready
to receive further impressions, while consciousness is conceived as a
belated defence against unconscious memories that have already been
recorded. Although this model is altered a bit in " A note upon the 'mys­
tic writing-pad'", the disjunction between perception and consciousness
retains its prominence and leads Freud to this firmly stated conclusion,
"this discontinuous method of functioning of the system Pcpt-CS. lies
at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time" (Freud, 1925a/ 1961,
p. 231). (Given his early and continued commitment to these models of
an out-of-joint time, it is surprising that Freud was ever associated with
a theory of continuous biological development.)
. The crucial point is this: Freud gives sexuality the same structure
he gives to the temporality of psychic functioning. This relation is not
founded on mere analogy; neither term-time or sex-has priority over
the other. The two are co-originary. The subject is sexuated inasmuch
as she is finite, subject to time. Or: sex belongs not to the essence of the
118 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

subject but to her historicity; it defines her life of pleasure/unpleasure

inasmuch as she is finite, subject to time's vicissitudes.
In the temporal logic of psychic functioning as in the sexual logic
brilliantly illuminated by the Emma case, two incidents or moments
of time are divided by a break; the second repeats the first, but not
exactly. This non-coincidence is what triggers the nai:Ve, historicist
denial of repetition; "not exactly" is not enough by historicist lights.
For Freud, however, things are otherwise; it is non-coincidence, lack of
synchrony that repetition repeats. Post-pubescent Emma finds in the
earlier scene something-namely sex-lacking, though her discovery
is anachronistic, since sex was not lacking to prepubescent Emma so
much as to the distant observer whom the older Emma will come to be.
Anachronism-or temporal heterogeneity-is, moreover, doubled, for
not only does the past come to be infected by the sense of a displaced
present (thus introducing a premature sexuality, arrived too early to be
felt), but the present also seems to be infected by a displaced sense of
the past (creating a belated experience of sex as a kind of leftover of the
former scene) . Too early / too late: these are the times of sexuality as well
as the times of time itself.
But why not simply see in this a double failure of repetition, rather
than a successful repetition, the actual taking place of time and
sexuation? Why assert-against the historicist denial of repetition and
the Eleatic denial of movement-that the subject does actually become
immersed in the waters of sex/ time? These questions and denials all
arise from the same source: the misguided assumption that breaks and
flows are always antithetical. The Emma case belies this assumption.
The anachronisms produced by the diphasic onset of time testify most
assuredly to the persistence of a break rather than to a flowing into
each other of the two scenes precisely because what is produced is not
a homogenous stream of time. Emma does not make her older self pres­
ent to what could not have been present to her younger self (there is
no sense of a continuous maturation or education here), nor does she
reconstitute what was not as what now is. Each scene is thus internally
disrupted as Emma remembers forward what did not yet happen as
what had already happened.
Rather than a double misfire, however, we witness here the actual
onset of sexuality. Emma is sexed. The event of sexuated time happens
and to prove it there is a sudden burst-a now-in the sexual release.
This now, this burst, happens in a split second, a second that splits rather
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 1 19

than gathers the two scenes. Meanwhile, the movement, the passage or
flow takes place not between the two scenes but within each. The two
scenes in the shop remain the before and after of what divides them
and prevents-them from flowing together, yet each undergoes an altera­
tion not by the other but in relation to the other. As a result of this, each
scene opens up, loses its self-containment. Again we need to caution that
this does not mean that one scene comes to contain the other. Instead,
both of Emma's encounters-with the store owner in the first case, the
shop clerks in the second-become irreducible to the present moment
of their taking place. And this is precisely where continuity comes in,
finds its footing: for the later scene will find in the earlier one its point
of genesis-though this will be not in what happened there but in what
did not happen.
To respect history is to remain mindful of the fact not only that the
past bears on the present but also that the present bears on the past. The
two collude with each other, flow toward each other, but never into each
other. There is temporal continuity but only because there are temporal
breaks. The subject is finite, in time, only because she is divided by it,
out of synch with it. Staking so much on its denials of division and rep­
etition, gender theory, I would submit, relies not only an abstract, neu­
tered notion of the subject, but on an abstract notion of time as well.

Fouca ult en ters the mix

Having stated some of my objections to the turn toward gender in the
1980s, I would like to restart the discussion from a different historical
moment: the period in the 1920s when heated debates erupted over
Freud's theory of castration as essential for the formation of the sexed
subject. What many in the fledgling field of psychoanalysis-including
Ernest Jones, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein, and Karen Horney, among
others-found unpalatable was the universality of castration, its indiffer­
ence to the anatomy of the subjects it was supposed to bring into being.
If castration aims at the phallus and the little girl has none, so the reason­
ing went, then the theory does not do her justice and must be modified
to take account of her anatomical and biological differences from the boy.
Juliet Mitchell summarised these early debates in the following way:

The opposition to Freud saw the concept of the castration complex

as derogatory to women [ . ]. Women, so to speak, had to have
. .
1 20 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

something of their own. The issue subtly shifts from what distin­
guishes the sexes to what has each sex got of value that belongs to
it alone. In this context, and in absence of the determining role of
the castration complex, it is inevitable that there is a return to the
very biological explanation from which Freud deliberately took his
departure. (Mitchell, 1982, p. 20)

The first thing to note is that this early opposition to Freud was aimed
specifically at his "monocentric" conception of sex, that is, his thesis
that sex and sexual difference could only be thought on the basis of the
One (Benslama, 2006) . 4 There is only one libido, Freud insisted, and it
is male. Abandoning this counter-intuitive thesis like the plague it was,
his opponents ended up reducing sexual difference to the pre-linguistic,
brute difference between the sexual organs of boys and girls. The sec­
ond thing to note is that the shift from sex to gender which took place
during the debates of the late 1980s resulted in a symmetrical error.
The elimination of sexual difference in favour of a study of the social
technologies of gender construction left biology behind altogether and
produced subjects without any verdure, subjects without bodies or,
more precisely, subjects without sexual organs (in the way psychoanalysis
would define them).
Given the fact that so much of the work on the social construction of
gender relied for its inspiration on Michel Foucault's argument against
psychoanalysis in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, a second look at
the argument is warranted. Foucault, confronted with student demands
for "sexual liberation" during and after the events of May 1968, set out
in this work to show that this demand for liberation was politically

4 Fethi Benslama uses the term "monotheistic" in rel a ti on to sex in the title of his inter­
esting essay without, however, telling us what this adj e c tive means in this context. I was
happy to come upon this text in the midst of writing my argument here, since Benslama
confirms my own regiona l tale of a Western retiring of the term sexual difference in favor of
gender d u r ing the 1980s. As it turns out-Benslama recounts-the Arabo-Islamic world­
once tho u ght by Foucault amon g others, to be the last bastion of an ars poetica against the
scientia sexualis that steadily took over the West since the nineteenth cenh1ry-became
s ubj ect in the 1980s to this p ar ticula r form of "Westoxification". At this point what had
been the most common Arabic word for sex, farj, was rap i dl y rep la c ed by the term jins,
from the Latin genus or gender. And as jins, or gender, usurped the place of farj, the
word that had for c enturies been used for men and wome n, farj sim ultaneo u sly became
restricted in scope and began to designa te the sexual organ of women only. At the same
time, j in s , which carried with it scien tifi c, specifically b io - m edica l connotations absent
fromfmj, narrowed the sense of sexual rel a tions or affairs to the genital register.
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T ·1 2 1

misguided, the rallying cry of a flawed revolt fuelled, in significant part,

by Freud's "repressive hypothesis". In the face of this harsh accusation,
one must be precise about what the father of psychoanalysis actually
said about repression: he said, specifically, that ideas are susceptible to
repression and once repressed seek to return into consciousness; but
this leaves open the question of whether or not sex is repressed. In The
Other Side of Psychoanalysis, the 1969-1970 seminar he delivered in
response to these same May 1968 demonstrations, Lacan pointed out
that Freud's full claim was that in contradistinction to ideas, which alone
can be repressed, affect (or jouissance, in Lacan's vocabulary) is, dis­
p laced (Lacan, 2007, p. 144) . What purpose does this distinction serve? It
allows us to observe that affect is not inaccessible to consciousness, does
not elude the subject, in the same way as a repressed idea does. For, if
there is always a chance that a repressed idea will gain entry and be
recognised by consciousness, there is no chance that jouissance will ever be
anything but disp laced in relation to consciousness; it will never find a place
that is proper to it in consciousness. It is this crucial distinction which
prompts Lacan's warning that in parading their sexuality the students
were in fact allowing themselves to become the helots of a regime that
was pulling their strings (Lacan, 2007, p. 208). If they sought sanction in
Freud's theory of sex for these self-displays, for their attempts to "out"
their jouissance, they were knocking at the wrong door. And so was
Foucault when he attempted to lay a significant portion of blame for
the troubling rise of scientia sexualis (the hygienic, confessional, let-it­
all-out theory of sex) on the doorstep of Berggasse 19. Sex can never
be put on display because it is nothing other than that teetering, unset­
tling displacement which permanently throws the subject's identity off­
balance. In short, Foucault attributed to Freud a position he never held
and then attacked it, arguing that far from demanding release from the
shackles of power, sex operates in solidarity with it; sex, the notion of
sex, Foucault insisted, is saturated with power through and through.
In truth, Lacan and Foucault were on the same side in regard to the
way sex had-incorrectly-become a political factor during this period
and the role it was being made to play in the new paradigm of human
domination. Both cautioned the students that the demand for sexual lib­
eration did not oppose power but, on the contrary, played into its hands.
What they disagreed on was what sex meant, how it was conceived, in
psychoanalysis. Lacan argued forcefully that sex is not repressed in the
dynamic sense, that the mechanism of repression does not apply to it,
1 22 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

and for this very reason it made no sense to say that sex sought to be
liberated from repression. Lacan thus enjoined the students not to sacri­
fice their enjoyment to those in power by parading it, exposing it as if it
were a predicate-more: the major one-of their identity. In Foucault's vi ew,
sex was nothing more than a fictional construct of power that serves to
bind subjects to unified, determinate, and normative identities. Political
opposition to bio-power must take the form, therefore, not of liberating
suppressed sexual identities, but of liberating oneself from them, freeing
oneself from classification by their categories. Thus, while Lacan and
Foucault were allied in their opposition to the demand for the liberation
of sex, on the grounds that this demand was a ruse of power, Lacan put
all his energy into showing that sexuality or more precisely, jouissance,
was not answerable to the opposition liberation/repression and casti­
gated the jouissance restructured by the demand for liberation as a sham,
while Foucault pursued the idea that sex and the demand to be liberated,
to be known, to assert one's identity, were inextricably intertwined.
But the original historical claim for which The History Sexuality is now
best-known is this: a mutation took place at the end of the eighteenth
century which culminated in what Foucault named at the end of that
book "bio-power". The specific mutation that gave rise to this new
regime occurred, in his words, in the "mode of relation between history
and life". For, while life had previously been viewed as outside history,
"in its biological element", it was now also placed "inside human
historicity, [where it was] penetrated by the latter 's techniques and
powers" (Foucault, 1978, p. 143). The author of an introduction to
Ludwig Binswanger 's "Dream and Existence", Foucault endorsed the
argument Binswanger put forward, specifically that "life considered as
function [as instinct] is not the same as life considered as history"; the
two are by their very nature incommensurable and "it is their incom­
mensurability that justifies the existence of both concepts, each within
its own sphere" (Foucault & Binswanger, 1993, p. 102) . This "each within
its own sphere", the absolute separation of the terms, is placed in jeop­
ardy whenever their incommensurability is ignored, for at this point
one of the terms begins inexorably to annex the other. Foucault essen­
tially provides an historical illustration of Binswanger 's thesis in The
History of Sexuality when he argues that bio-power is the annexation of
life by power and that this particular denial of the incommensurability
of life and history was "an indispensable element in the development of
capitalism" (Foucault, 1978, p. 141).
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 1 23

The takeover of vital functions by human history (the latter consist­

ing not only of technologies and power, but also language and meaning,
everything that constitutes the lived experience of life) is the inevitable
result of the -"new mode of relation" that effaces the radical distinc­
tion between vital functions and lived experience. But because there
is, in fact, a radical split, because the terms are incommensurable-as
Foucault, following Binswanger, asserts-that which pretends to forge
a relation between the terms, or forges a fraudulent relation, must itself
be fraudulent or, as Foucault puts it, " a mirage" (Foucault, 1978, p. 157).
In Foucault's account the "mirage" that allows us to remain blind to
the incommensurability of life and human history is precisely sex,
inasmuch as the latter which is thus performs a synthetic function: " [T]
he [bio-political] notion of 'sex' made it possible to group together, in
an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts,
sensation, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this ficti­
tious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be
discovered everywhere" (Foucault, 1978, p. 154). (Once again the mis­
understood notion of pansexualism is treated with contempt.)
Foucault is claiming in effect that scientia sexualis, the science of sex,
attempted to make a science of relations, of the knotting together of incom­
mensurable, disjunct terms. If the fictitious entity, sex, was conceived
as a "thing with intrinsic properties and laws of its own" (Foucault,
1978, p. 154), these properties were those that defined a supposed
commonality among otherwise distinct and incompatible terms and its
laws were those that rendered the relations among them predictable.
The establishment of a commonality and of predictable relations sup­
ported the belief that life could be managed and made to yield greater
gains; they also undergird the development of the techniques that put
this belief into practice.
This historical thesis, as bold as it is complex, relies nevertheless on an
observation that is common enough. It has often been noted that binary
oppositions, while purporting to oppose two terms, tend in fact to negate
the negating power of one of these terms. Thus neutralised, the second
or marked term loses its independent value and is taken up, sublated
by the first, unmarked term. We saw that in the debates over feminine
sexuality that took place in the 1920s, the opposition between biology
and symbolic forms collapsed in favour of biology, while the reverse
happened in the gender theory debates of the 1980s: biology or vital
life was sublated into symbolic forms and produced de-corporealised
1 24 SEX A N D N OT H I N G

subjects or bodies without sexual organs. One scarcely needs to add

that the opposition male /female is the best-known example of this, for
in this supposed opposition the female term has often been shown to
have the value only of a minor exception, one that is easily absorbed
by the unmarked, male term that stands in for both. What was new or
unique to bio-politics, then, was the invention of something called sex,
which permitted life itself to be sublated by history. Prior to this, blood,
consanguinity had played a major role in the machinations of power,
but with the invention of the sexual mirage hereditary allegiances and
consanguine loyalties tended to be downplayed-if not completely
eliminated. Bio-power and the globalised economy of capital came to
depend on a more individualised notion of the subject, one less encum­
bered by the older order of hereditary allegiances. The invention of sex,
Foucault is saying, aided the construction of a completely individual­
ised notion of the subject, one that caused the realist universal to dis­
appear. Or: bio-power issues in the era of the multiple rather than the
divided subject.
In an interview he gave on French television just a few years prior to
the publication of The History of Sexuality, Lacan made a claim so dia­
metrically opposed to Foucault's that it stops one cold: "Back to zero,
then, for the issue of sex, since anyway capitalism, that was its starting
point: getting rid of sex" (Lacan, 1990, p. 30) . (Stated otherwise, as I will
argue, Lacan's message is this: Capitalism made sex-that in the subject
which is more than the subject-disappear.) The television interview
aired during the time Lacan was himself returning to zero, going back
to basics in his (1972-1973) Encore seminar on sex, sexual relation, and
feminine sexuality. In retrospect, the entire seminar can be read as a pre­
emptive strike against Foucault's misconstruction of the Freudian prob­
lematic of sex. Responsible for triggering much of the French and, later,
Anglo-American feminist interest in psychoanalysis in the 1970s, the
seminar is filled with conceptual breakthroughs that were not so much
challenged in the 1980s rejection of both psychoanalysis and sexual dif­
ference by gender theorists as they were ignored or left unmined. The
formulation for which Encore became notorious is the one that stated,
"There is no sexual relation" (Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel), even though
the meaning of this statement was immediately trivialised, thus ren­
dering it unworthy of the attention it received. Accepted as an effort
to expose the fact that actual sexual relations are inevitably freighted
with compromise and disappointment and ultimately doomed to
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 1 25

failure, this negative formulation was embraced as an incontrovertible,

pessimistic truth and the admission of failure was celebrated as sober
political wisdom.
One has to. be a little surprised that this impulse to trivialise did not
check itself by pausing to wonder why such dime-store psychology
would choose to express itself in this particular way, that is, as a negation
of the impersonal phrase, il y a (there is), a phrase alive with philosophi­
cal resonance. In philosophy this phrase is regularly employed to state
not something, but the fact that this something is, that it exists. In its
very structure, then, the phrase appears to append to beings a supple­
ment of Being. Everything happens as if the verb to be had so atrophied
that it required propping up by a prosthetic support of Being. Given this
philosophical perspective it becomes clear that Lacan's declaration that
there is no sexual relation does not deny that such relations exist, rather
it kicks away the prop of Being, which serves to "precomprehend" these
relations, turning them into prescriptions or formulas.
If there is no prop or support, no "ontological precomprehension"
of being, no Being common to all, this means-in this case-that the
sexes are incommensurable, they have nothing, no Being, that is com­
mon to them. The notion of their complementarity, which would con­
ceive them as two halves of a common humanity, is thus firmly rejected
and Freud's observation that men and women seem to be a phase apart
psychologically is pushed to the extreme: men and women are regarded
as belonging to different species. One must note, moreover, that the
casting aside of prosthetic Being is related to a second gesture which
Lacan refers to explicitly as the "lopping off of the predicate" (Lacan,
1999, p. 11). Lacan's text is particularly recondite at this point, although
the argument remains intact. Here, with a bit more elaboration, is what
it says. Refusing in the first gesture the support of a common being, or
in refusing to say that "a being is", which would imply that "its being
is a thing which is, that its existence is a thing which exists" (Corbin,
1998, p. 208), we are thereby permitted to "lop off the predicate", to say,
for example, that "man is" without saying what. Now, if "man is" can
be considered a complete statement, one that requires no predicate to
complete it, this is because the verb "to be" is no longer understood as
merely a copula linking a subject to a predicate term. The removal of the
prosthesis, which thus allows us to lop off the predicate, testifies on the
contrary to the fact that the proper status of the verb "to be" is verbal,
active, to be is to act. To say "man is" without feeling one has to say that
1 26 SEX AND NOT H I N G

he is something or other is to acknowledge that his existence is not a

thing, but an act of coming into being. Those who think that Lacan has
wandered off the Freudian reservation into some foreign philosophical
territory would do well to reread Freud's essay on "Femininity", where
the same point is made: "In conformity with its peculiar nature, psycho­
analysis does not try to describe what a woman is that would be a task
-

it could scarcely perform-but sets about enquiring how she comes into
being " (Freud, 1933a /1957, p. 116) . How she comes into being, not how
she is constructed as a woman by society (as this remark has mistakenly
been read) .

The myth of the third substance

Aristophanes' infamous myth of the two sexes as two halves of a whole
forever in search of one another is mocked and dislodged by Lacan in
the Encore seminar by an antic counter myth of "the third substance".
Lacan begins, seemingly resignedly, by noting, "Nowadays, well, we
just don't have that many substances. We have thinking and extended
substance" (Lacan, 1999, p . 21). This statement is non-controversially
true; Descartes reduced the number of substances to two only and the
inheritors of his streamlining have been puzzling ever since over the
problem of how to put them together. Having made this anodyne obser­
vation, however, Lacan grows more audacious, declaring next that for
psychoanalysis two substances are simply not enough. To make up for
this deficit, he therefore postulates a third, which he baptises enjoying
substance (la substance jouissante).
Had he had not preceded this myth with a warning against automat­
ically turning nouns into substances, had he not just effectively argued
that being is not a substance but an act, we might have been tempted
to think that Lacan was stating here that jouissance is a substance that
can be added to the other two to form a link between them, the one
that has gone missing at least since Descartes. Lacan would then be
performing before our eyes the crime with which Foucault was even
then preparing to charge psychoanalysis: the crime of inventing some­
thing called sex that would function as a mirage, as a vanishing point
where the radical incommensurability between what can be thought,
experienced, lived historically and the vital functioning of our bodies
was obfuscated. But Lacan did try to inoculate us against this misread­
ing of jouissance or ultimately of sex, in the Freudian sense. Freud, we
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PACT 1 27

have already stressed, did claim that the sexuality of the subject was
determinable neither by physical science nor by a psychological study
of social behaviour; sexuality cannot be grasped in the Freudian sense
either as anatomy or as convention (Freud, 1933a/ 1 957, p. 114). Neither
jouissance nor sexuality are conceived, however, as some third thing,
the missing link that sutures nature and culture, enjoyment and sense,
heals the split that disjoins them.
The counter myth of the "third substance" challenges the myth of the
severed sexes longing to be reunited once again, by invoking Freud's
own counter "mythology" of the drive. In a superficial reading, Freud's
metapsychological and widely dismissed "drive theory" would seem
less to challenge than to satisfy the longing to reunite what had been
torn asunder, would seem to confirm Foucault's thesis that the concept
of sex was just the sort of legerdemain bio-power needed in order to
sublate vital functions into political life. Listen, with Foucault's accusa­
tion in mind, to this familiar definition of drive given to us by Freud:
drive "appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental
and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli origi­
nating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure
of the demand made upon the mind for work as a consequence of its
connection with the body" (Freud, 1915c /1957, p. 122) . This definition
might be misconstrued to suggest that the drive, which occupies the
frontier, between the psychical and the somatic, is the missing link con­
necting them to each other.
The myth of the third substance resigns the above misreading of the
Freudian drive, however, to the museum of curious and demolishes
the notion that sex is a separate, third term that causes the incommen­
surability of the binary terms to vanish. If we seriously credit Freud's
positioning of drive as archaic, we are obliged in fact to take enjoying
substance as prior to the "substances" that emerge along its frontier.
In other words, the rupture traced by drive precedes and gives rise to
that which it ruptures. Yet sex, or enjoying substance, accounts not only
for the radical disjunction of the other two from each other, but also for
the internal disjunction of each. Sex in this way purloins the substantial,
or self-enclosed, dimension of each of the so-called substances. Before
proceeding, however, I want to state again as clearly as possible the
argument thus far: while Foucault argues that bio-power, abetted by the
Freudian theory of sex, eliminates the void space between life as func­
tion and life as historical experience, or between life and law, and thus
1 28 S E X A N D N OTH I N G

eliminates the political space in which human action is possible, Lacan

argues the opposite: Freud conceives sex as that which takes place in
and holds open this very space.
If being as such is sexed, if being-defined as an act-is bound up
originarily with jouissance, as Lacan maintains, we must look for evi­
dence of this claim in each of the two substances that are "nowadays"
assumed to exhaust the field of being. La can turns first to thinking sub­
stance to examine what becomes of it once Freud appears on the scene
peddling his theory of sexuality. Descartes, who baptised it res cogi­
tans, defined the function of "thinking substance" as the formulation
of clear and distinct ideas, a fact that makes Freud's instructions to his
patients-not that they should think clearly about what troubled them,
but that they should, instead, say whatever stupidity popped into their
heads-appear scandalous. Indistinct ideas and unsorted nonsense
acquire with Freud a value that would have dumbfounded Descartes.
But why? In "A project for a scientific psychology", in a statement that
profoundly alters the conception of res cogitans, Freud asserted that, "it
is in relation to a fellow human-being (Nebenmensch) that a human-being
learns to cognize" (Freud, 1950a [1895], p. 331). 5 Freud's premise is that
the occasion of thinking, the incentive for the activity we call thought, is
associated with this fellow human being, who was-Freud claims-the
first object of our satisfaction. This primal object is, however, enigmatic,
for it stays with us forever not as a familiar and fond memory but as a
thing, a residue that evades judgement.
This thing, this res, is the very thing that will desubtantialise thinking
substance. As with the classical notion of an underlying substance, this
thing, too, is said to stay with us forever, never to abandon us, and
thus to be the condition of our permanence or persistence as a thinking
subject. And yet, while underlying substance guarantees the subject's
self-identity, this thing is, on the contrary, the source of the continuous
aphanisis of identity, its continuous obliteration. It is a strange fellowship
we have with the Nebenmensch, for by evading apprehension it refuses to
offer any criteria for fellowship. This raises a key question, which Freud
himself will try to tackle only later in his essay on "The unconscious".
Why do we experience this fellow human being as a fellow, as uncan­
nily close, as inalienably internal, rather than as simply alien? Why do
we experience it, Freud asks in that essay, not as a second consciousness,

5 This comparison between Descartes and Frettd is made by David-Menard (2003).

 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 1 29

but as we do, that is, as such an intimate (if inassimilable) part of our
own consciousness that it can only occur to us as a surplus of ourselves
rather than as separate from us? Why do we count ourselves in our dif­
ference from ourselves not as two, but as one, albeit a paradoxical one,
a more-than-one?
We should not let the answer Freud gives to this question distract us
from the radical thinking behind his proposing it in the first place. For
not only does Freud make the question proceed from the point La can will
emphasise in the Encore seminar and elsewhere-that reason, for psy­
cho analysis, is not divorced from but intimately "concerns jouissance"
(Lacan, 1999, p. 112)-he also immediately understands this "first object
of satisfaction" as an unsettling of any easy distinction between the
other consciousnesses, the community of thinkers, with which thinking
puts us in touch and the singularity of our thinking process.
Encore's infamous pronouncement, "There is no sexual relation",
stands little chance of being understood if taken in isolation from its less
co-optable companion, "Y a d'l'Un" (there is [some] One) (Lacan, 1999,
p. 23) . We arrive thus once again at the question of the one, which we
will locate once more in Freud before discussing its role in Encore. Ear­
lier we made a point of the fact that psychoanalysis is averse to the cel­
ebration of any overarching or unifying one. This aversion is nowhere
more apparent than at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents,
where Freud voices strong resistance to a colleague's mistaken notion
of " oneness". The colleague and friend, Romain Rolland, had written in
defence of what he described as an "oceanic feeling", that is to say, "a
feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world"
(Freud, 1930a /1961, p. 65) . In a first step, Freud disputes Rolland's
ascription of this idea to feeling, insisting that it strikes him, rather, as
being "of the nature of an intellectual perception " (Freud, 1930a / 1 961,
p . 66) . The notion of oceanic oneness, Freud asserts, appears to be an
abstraction inasmuch as it carries, like all abstractions, no conviction.
Much as Kant disqualifies respect for the moral law as a "higher [non­
pathological] feeling", dismissing it as a mere "analogue" of feeling, so
Freud disqualifies "oceanic oneness" from the realm of feeling, even
though it may carry-he admits-some "feeling tone". Essentially, he
argues here that Rolland's abstract idea cannot necessitate the exis­
tence of the one, which has no reality in the empirical world; in short,
Freud views the idea of "oceanic oneness" as a generality, an abstract
universal, and as such rules it out.
1 30 SEX A N D NOTH I N G

This dismissal-which appears to be a straightforward nominali s t

rejection-is not, however, the end of the discussion, but the opening
onto Freud's articulation of another notion of oneness in which the out­
line of a realist position is visible. Refusing to validate his friend's notion
of an oceanic one, Freud nevertheless turns to his own theory to show
how that notion, while mistaken, might have found some confirmation
there. It appears that there is something of the notion of oneness that
Freud is not prepared to disqualify but wants rather to salvage by mak­
ing plain his own position. He begins by conceding that while we tend
to think of ourselves as "autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly
from everything else", his own theory has shown why a complete sepa­
ration of ourselves from the world is not possible, why "we cannot fall
out of the world", as he puts it. His answer leans on the argument he
developed in The Ego and the Id: the ego is, in fact, not autonomous but
this is so not because it is bound to an external and superior whole
with which it feels at one. Rather, it is because the ego is attached-or
semi-attached-to the id; ego is "continued inward, without any sharp
delimitation, into an unconscious entity [ . . ] designated as the id"
.

(Freud, 1923b / 1961).

Freud, in brief, rejects oceanic feeling on the grounds that it is not
really a feeling, not actually an affect, but an abstract concept and he
displaces it by referring us to the id, the real seat of affect, which by
definition escapes conceptual capture, remaining thus for the most part
unconscious. At certain moments, such as those of being in love, the
ego may become aware of its relation to the id, even if she misconstrues
this relation as an experience of fusion, of the melting of boundaries
between herself and the one she loves. This experience is, Freud insists,
not to be trusted, but it does enlighten us to the source of Rolland's erro­
neous idea of being taken up in an immersive oneness. But once this
confusion is set aside, what remains of the notion of oneness in Freud's
alternative account and how is it distinguished from Rolland's? Freud
retains Rolland's conviction that the subject is never really alone and
autonomous but disputes only that she correctly experiences herself
within a larger outside; the Freudian subject appears alongside some­
thing larger that does not only not encompass he1� but also does not
appear to have any boundaries, to constitute an object in any sense.
Rather than hovering above, the larger part is enfolded or involuted,
"continued inward", situated between the ego and its rest, its remainder.
If the experience of love permits ego to become aware of its relation
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 131

to id, to the unconscious affect that is normally hidden behind ego's

fa�ade, then we might have to conclude that the experience of oneness
is in fact an experience of the subject's own division, its own separation
from itself. For how could the heterogeneous instances, ego and id,
ever be anything but disjunct? In love, this disjunction could not be
abolished (indeed, such an idea, Freud says here plainly, goes against
"all evidence of our senses"), but must rather be altered; the division
between ego and id, becomes proximity, an affecting nearness in which
ego is awakened to its passive openness to id and feels itself amplified:
more than one with itself because capable of being other than itself.
Through this intimate relation, ego loses its rigidity and is able to remap
the contours of its relation to the external world.
The subject here acquires an "inner sense" of self, or of self-unity,
that is indistinguishable from a sense of self-division. While this will
strike some at first as (hopelessly) paradoxical, on reflection there can
be little doubt that it accounts for the concrete paradoxes in which it
is constantly manifest. For, the sense of belonging to a "we" seldom
prevents individual subjects from regarding themselves as exceptions,
albeit exceptions that do not contest the validity of the "we" to which
they belong. "I" and "we" remain in everyday experience antinomic,
in tension by definition, though this tension does not amount to a
contradiction: to an "I" or "we".

Compactness : the erogenous zone

Zeno' s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise enters into La can' s discussion
of sexual difference in Encore as if to illustrate the radical differences
that divide men and women: swift versus slow; incremental half-steps
versus continuous movement; man versus beast. But this somehow
misses the point, for however different Achilles and the tortoise are from
each other, they do not simply go off in their own directions, diverge.
On the contrary, they constitute converging series, since each progresses
toward the same limit, which they eventually reach-even if tl1ey do
not meet there. At the limit Achilles will not catch up with the tortoise,
but surpasses her. So much for our romantic hopes of an ecstatic fusion.
The two remain a phase apart psychologically, retain their differences
from each other. What, then, is the point of noting their convergence?
Since Zeno we have been accustomed to conceiving the limit only
negatively, as unreachable, as defining an impossibility of movement.
1 32 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

Yet Deleuze, in his book on Leibniz, speaks of convergent series, which

tend toward a limit but do not always possess a final term, in positive
terms as entailing intensities (Deleuze, 1 993, p. 47) . Convergent series­
which tend toward a common limit without meeting inasmuch as an
infinite number of points permanently separate them-create a positive
condition, which has a technical name in mathematics, it is called com­
pactness. Lacan names this condition in Encore: "I will posit here the
term 'compactness'. Nothing is more compact than a fault" (Lacan,
1999, p. 9). What Lacan refers to as a "fault" is otherwise called a limit.
A fault or limit defines a locus or tight space, as Lacan acknowledges
when he asserts that "the space of jouissance [ . . ] proves to be com­
.

pact" (Lacan, 1999, p. 10) . A compact space, we could therefore say, is

an erogenous zone, or: compactness serves here to explicate the notion
of erotogenicity. Lacan makes this argument more or less explicitly
when he speaks in a rather strange way about a bed, as if were not
talking merely about a mundane object but a psychoanalytic concept.
Indeed we must read this seminar as his conversion of a bed, as space
of erotic encounter, into a concept by describing it precisely as compact,
a space in which two people "squeeze each other tight" or: experience
jouissance (Lacan, 1999).
The first thing to note is that compactness is a space of impossibility,
the impossibility of union or encounter, and at the same time a pace where
something out of the ordinary happens: an eruption of jouissance. This
draws attention to a truth on which psychoanalysis has always insisted:
sexual enjoyment-jouissance-emerges from an encounter with the
impossible, depends on a limit. Freud, for example: "an obstacle is required
in order to heighten libido" (Freud, 1912d / 1964, p. 187) . What prevents
this Freudian insight's reduction to the psychological observation that
libido is ignited by an obstacle-whether mounted by the other 's coy­
ness, social or familial taboo, or mere happenstance-that impedes the
subject's amorous approach to the other is the fact that in the psychoana­
lytic understanding the obstacle (the limit or impossibility) separating
the subject from the other is not breached or dissolved, but remains
fully intact. It (that is, the impossibility itself) and not its overcoming
ignites jouissance.
This point can be brought back to our earlier reference to the
Nebenmensch, the Thing, mentioned in "A project for a scientific
psychology". Freud inadvertently blocks our theoretical curiosity and
thus our understanding of this concept by defining it prematurely in the
text as the first object of our satisfaction. According to the theory he will
 T H E S E X U A L C O M PA C T 1 33

develop here and elsewhere, however, there is no object of satisfaction

before the loss of the object, no mother before her withdrawal. Thus, it is
not that the first object of our satisfaction is later lost, but that this object
is lost before it exists as an object. From this we conclude that it is the
object's status as inexistent that causes satisfaction or jouissance. In the
terms used in " A project for a scientific psychology", the Nebenmensch, or
Thing, evades judgement; thinking encounters a limit, an impossibility
beyond which it cannot go. On the other side of this limit there is noth­
ing, no existing thing, nothing to think. On this side, however there is
not merely an experience of absolute impasse, of thought's negation.
There is also affirmation in the form of satisfaction in an inexistent
object, in an object that escapes the judgement of existence.
Deleuze attributes to Leibniz an argument that light the path Freud
will take: "I must have a body because an obscure object lives in me
[ . ]. Leibniz's originality is tremendous. He is not saying that only the
. .

body explains what is obscure in the mind. To the contrary, the mind is
obscure, the depths of the mind are dark, and this dark nature is what
explains and requires a body" (Deleuze, 1993, p. 85) . Mind encounters
a limit, an obstacle, which is nothing more (or less) than an inexistent
object, a darkness. Yet this obscure object does not merely check the
powers of mind; it also incites an unshakeable conviction: there must
be a body. Body does not impinge on mind and thereby obstruct it, nor
for that matter does the mind collide with the body in its impenetrable
density. Mind and body do not encounter one another, rather: mind
encounters an obscure object that is neither purely internal nor purely
external to it and it is this object which persuades mind that something
other must exist.
Leibniz does not define this obscure object which disjoins /links
res cogitans and res extensa as "satisfying" or as the object-cause of
jouissance. It will be left to psychoanalysis to elaborate this dark spot
in the mind in terms of libido or drive, as the frontier between lived
experience and biological life. One can find, however, among earlier
philosophers-namely, the medieval followers of Avicenna, for whom
the concept of just such a frontier or barzahk (in Arabic) played a major
role in their thinking-a certain precedent for the direction in which
Freud would develop the Leibnizian notion of a mental darkness. For
those medieval philosophers the limit disjoined /linked the divine and
the sensible worlds, but precisely because this limit passed not simply
between these two worlds but also through the sensible, it (the limit or
barzahk) was often conceived in terms of a dialectic of erotic love, as
1 34 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

the disjoining/linking of lovers. And for Ibn 'Arabi, at least, the real
object of love was considered to be not what was obtained, that is, not
the beloved as such, but rather "something nonexistent [ . . . ] . The object
of loving adhesion in the moment when the lover has achieved union
[ . . . ] is again something nonexistent, namely, the continuation and per­
petuation of that union" (Corbin, 1969, p. 155) . That is, what one loves
in the other is "not a datum existing in actu", but not a mere nothing,
either (Corbin, 1969, p. 154) . Ibn ' Arabi brings this insight even closer to
the Leibnizean dark spot by insisting that "Love [which] is closer to the
lover than is his jugular vein", is so "excessive in its nearness that it acts
[ . . . ] as a veil" (Corbin, 1969, p. 156) .
In that compact space in which lovers, the sexes, res cogitans and res
extensa "hold each other tight", what one adheres to is not something
one obtains or grasps but that which escapes one's grasp inasmuch as it
inexists, has not yet happened. However long it lasts, real love is endur­
ing, it unites itself with a future that is not merely a receding horizon-if
not now, perhaps tomorrow-but the future's proleptic event in the
form of a surplus pleasure or (in Freud's phrase) an "incentive bonus"
that promises more (encore) to come. This future, which arrives before
it is actualised, is instigated by an encounter that is contingent, by a
meeting with chance, with the unexpected. Here clearly a distinction is
registered between a future that is anticipated, awaited, but forever put
oft a future always incompletely achieved-let us call it capitalism's
future-and the amorous future, which overtakes us (and the chron­
ological order of things) by surprise, as fore-pleasure. In his work on
jokes, Freud seems to define the incentive bonus or fore-pleasure as a
pleasure that slips through or hoodwinks the censor, but I think it makes
more sense in terms of his theory to interpret fore-pleasure as an affirma­
tion of the limit, or the hoodwink of the censor, a smuggled in statement
of the impossible: there is something I can neither know nor control.
And yet I know this, for through the veils and dark spots, the obscurity
in the depths of my mind this truth speaks, for this obscurity has its roots
not only in my mind but also in what is beyond it: the other, the body.

The return to two

The two of sexual difference must be thought in these terms. Not as
two separate and opposed ones, not "that binary partition one most
spontaneously thinks of [as] 'sexual difference"' (Derrida, 1991, p. 386),
 THE SEXUAL C O M PA C T 1 35

a "predual" sexuality, "more originary than the dyad" to which doxa

always seems to reduce sexual difference (Den·ida, 1991, pp. 387-388) .
More originary than the dyad is the cut, the split, which is not a split into
two "determfnities" (Bestimmtheiten), or into two determinate ones, nor
even an intervention or cut in an originary one (Derrida, 1991, p. 393) .
For, in the end the one is not that which is split, but rather that which is
formed from the splitting (as we saw in our reading of Freud's quarrel
with his colleague, Rolland). Because it is thus formed, the one is para­
doxical, a severed one, detached from the start from some would-be
whole; one is Lacanian-speak, a, or: 1 a. 6 =

Derrida's argument in "Geschlecht: Sexual difference, ontological dif­

ference" is that Heidegger chose the neutral term das Dasein for that form
of being that places its own being in question rather that man (Mensch)
not in order to disavow the ontological status of sexual difference but to
distinguish it from the common understanding of sexual difference as
dyadic in structure. This would make Heidegger 's position parallel to
that of Freud, who (we have already remarked) adamantly maintained
(against feminist protests) that there was only one libido and it was
male. This also draws Heidegger 's position close to that of Lacan, who
besides characterising woman as not-all, also spoke of feminine jouis­
sance only in the future conditional. It would be misguided, I believe,
to take the relation of femininity to futurity as the opening of a horizon
on which one day there might appear another jouissance on a par with
or superior to the masculine one. The futurity of feminine jouissance is
not merely something that may arrive, but something that in its not-yet­
arriving, its futurity, acts now to unground any ground that might be
attributed to the sexual as such.
Finally, as long as Heidegger has been entered into the conversation,
I will end by noting that Lac an once floated the term "being-toward -sex",
clearly referencing Heidegger 's "being-toward-death", in order pre­
sumably to displace the latter. The coinage of the new term goes beyond
a simple terminological substitution by seeming to call for a rethinking
of the arguments that led up to the original phrase. Where Heidegger
links anxiety to the encounter with death, for example, Lacan insists
that we understand anxiety as, instead, an encounter with jouissance.
As Alenka ZupanCic has noted, it would be an error to conclude that the

6 "In other words, there are three of them, but in reality, there are two plus a. This two
plus a, can be reduced, not only to the two others, but to a ne plus a" (Lacan, 1999, p. 49) .
1 36 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

naming of sex rather than death paints a rosier picture of the limit the
subject faces, given the psychoanalytic associations of sex with death.
Areduction of the difference between the philosopher and the psycho­
analyst to a matter of their respective levels of pessimism or optimism
not only trivialises their difference but once again expends with the
need for thinking through what is meant by the psychoanalytic claim
that speaking beings are sexuated. Perhaps the most significant agenda
behind Lacan's slightly mocking phrase is the forging of a new under­
standing of the common, one that in preserving the asymmetry of the
different ways sexual life is approached-an asymmetry the reference
to death does not make available-preserves the common itself, that is
preserves it full stop . As radical impasse. Irreducible antagonism.

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C H A P T E R SE VEN

Math e m ati cs i n th e bed roo m : sex, th e

s i g n i fi e r, a n d th e s m a l l est w h o l e n u m be r

Sigi ]ottkandt

"For this shall never be proved, that the things that are not are;
and do thou restrain thy thought from this way of inquiry. "
-Plato, Parmenides

"The expression 'not-man' is not a noun. There is indeed no rec­

ognized term by which we may denote such an expression, for
it is not a sentence or a denial. Let it then be called an indefinite
noun. "
-Aristotle, On Interpretation

Several times during his teachings in the mid-sixties, Lacan makes use of
a paradox, what he calls a "logical enigma", to demonstrate something
critical about the difference between writing and speech. "Madame", he
requests his assistant at one point, "take this little piece of chalk, make a
rectangle, write 1, 2, 3, 4, on the first line, [ ] and then write: the small­
. . .

est whole number which is not written on the board." The parenthetical
laughter noted in the seminar's transcript suggests that his assistant fell for
the trap. Lacan was not asking Madame to chalk up the number 5 (i.e., the
next smallest number once 4 has been notated), but rather to write the sen­
tence "the smallest whole number which is not written on the board".
139
1 40 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

In Seminar XIV (Logic of the Fantasy, 1966-1967), where this little

comedy took place, Lacan's concern is to chart the logical pathways by
which one can arrive at satisfaction. Our relations to jouissance partake
of what he call a "more fundamental" (principielle) logic than its modern
iterations. Lacan's immediate target here is mathematical and formal
logic, in particular that of George Boole and Gottlob Frege, as well as
the challenge posed to Frege by Bertrand Russell. Very briefly, since this
part of the story has been told many times and is consequently very well
known, Frege' s effort to construct a "formal language of pure thought
modelled upon that of arithmetic" was catastrophically ended by his
fellow logicist, Bertrand Russell (Van Heijenoort, 1967). Russell showed
that Frege's system for defining natural numbers by means of logical
terms was internally inconsistent. Frege, as Martin Davis explains in a
useful summary, sought to define numbers logically by making them
into sets:

The number 3 is a property of a set, namely, the number of its ele­

ments. The number 3 is something that all the following have in
common: the Holy Trinity, the set of horses pulling a troika, the set
of leaves on a (normal) clover leaf, the set of letters {a, b, c}. [ . . ]
.

Frege's idea was to identify the number 3 with the collection of all
of these sets. (Davis, 2000, p. 55)

Russell's devastating intervention was to show how Frege's system

was self-contradictory. If, for Frege, there must always be a set that con­
tains all the elements that meet the formal criteria for that set, Russell
proposed the paradox which has since borne his name, namely, the
paradox of the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Includ­
ing itself would contradict the set's formal criterion of sets that do not
contain themselves. But not including it would destroy the set's claim
to comprehensiveness: it would not be the set of all the sets that do not
contain themselves, since this set of all sets would be missing itself. As
Davis relates, this insight was fatal to Frege's project. "A mathematical
proof that runs into a contradiction is a demonstration that one of the
premises of the argument was false. This principle is used all the time
as a useful proof method: to prove a proposition, one shows that its
denial leads to a contradiction. But for poor Frege, the contradiction
had shown that the very premises on which his system was built were
untenable" (Davis, 2000, p. 56).
 M A T H E M AT I C S I N T H E B E D R O O M 1 41

Frege was shipwrecked on the observation that, in Russell's words,

"under certain circumstances a definable collection [ . ] does not form
. .

a totality" (Van Heijenoort, 1967, p. 125) . And much like Frege under
Russell's corrective gaze, Lacan's faithful assistant encountered simi­
lar a logical conundrum that day: which number should she write on
the board? Once the sentence "the smallest whole number that is not
written on the board" is written on the board, one enters into a logi­
cal conundrum, making it impossible to "solve" the problem. From the
moment that the above sentence is written on the board, the obvious
first answer to the problem (i.e., the number five) is "excluded", Lacan
observes, by being already written on the board (i.e., in the form of the
linguistic statement) . Lacan continues: "You have only to search, then,
whether the smallest whole number which is not written on the board
might not, perchance, be the number 6, and you find yourself with the
same difficulty, namely, that from the moment that you pose the ques­
tion, the number 6 as the smallest whole number which is not written
on the board, is written on it and so on."
This instructive demonstration occurred during the lesson of 23rd
Novembe1� 1966, which is also the session Lacan raised the problem
of Russell's paradox vis-a-vis writing and speech. Defining a set, Lacan
explains that it is founded on nothing other than the fact of its being
written. "Everything that can be said about a difference between the
elements [i.e., such that the elements that compose it may be radically
different from each other] is excluded from the operation. " As an exam­
ple of what he means, Lacan describes a set containing such disparate
elements as this "charming person" (who played the dupe in the little
sketch above), "the mist on this window and an idea which is just now
going through my head ". What transforms this medley of heteroclite
objects into a set, he claims, is simply that, saying no other difference
exists, I write them as if they were all the same. As it turns out, however,
this simple act of "writing" will introduce some interesting properties
that bear decisively on the paradox of the Russellian set.
But first let us note the lesson of Russell's paradox, which is the idea
that in any formal system there is nothing that can contain everything.
Lacan translates this paradox into the axiomatic statement that the sig­
nifier cannot signify itself. The signifier cannot signify itself because,
as a sliding movement of substitution, signification always involves
what Lacan calls another signification. What is represented by the sig­
nifier, as he cautions in a much earlier text, is never the signified but only
1 42 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

another signifier (Lacan, 1957 /2006; Lacan, 1999). It is on this insight,

along with its nested idea of the fundamental arbitrariness of the sign,
that the science of modern linguistics is based: the orders of the signifier
and of the signified are distinct, and separated by a bar that "resists
signification". The consequence of this separation is that signification
occurs through a chain; meaning emerges as a signified effect produced
by a signifying function (in the proper mathematical sense of this term).
We will have reason to return to this, but for now it suffices to note
with Lacan that this "operation of the signifier" means that no signifier
belongs "properly" to any meaning, and accordingly, nothing can be
guaranteed.1 Another way of expressing the same idea is Lacan's other
well-known statement, "the Other of the Other does not exist"; there is
no metalanguage that would guarantee the "universe of discourse" .
Now, although direct access to meaning or "Being" is perennially pre­
cluded by the operation of the signifier, Lacan suggests that an alternate
pathway lies open to us. This is through logic insofar as logic allows one
to isolate the "loci" and points in language in which language speaks
about itself (Lacan, 2002) . Without appealing to anything beyond
the "universe of discourse" to ground it, and without betraying that
universe's fundamental axiom of the signifier 's non-signifiability with
respect to itself, logic nonetheless procures us access to some sort of
Being to the extent that it "writes" all the possible (and impossible) rela­
tions to jouissance that are available to us. As we will see, however,
what Lacan means by writing here is very specific.
But first to dispel any fears the word logic might conjure up. Any view
of it as the preserve of the dusty classroom would be misguided for it is in
the soft recesses of the bedroom that this logical writing takes place-in
the twists and torsions of the sexual act. As it will become clear, however,
what Lacan means by the sex act is fiendishly complex, which appar­
ently enlists an array of mathematical and formal operations in its effort
to reach the holy grail of a One. A considerable part of the difficulty of
this seminar, in fact, lies in keeping straight the different meanings of the
various Ones that Lacan invokes this year. In his elaboration of the effect
produced through writing, for example, Lacan refers to what he calls an
"additional One" (l'un en plus). Shortly thereafter Lacan also speaks of

1 Lacan qualifies this statement by recalling the concept of buttoning points, points de
capitan, which function as paradoxical immanent points of guarantee within the world of
discourse.
 M AT H E M AT I C S I N T H E B E D R O O M 1 43

the unary trait as something that enables difference to be presented as

a One. And a little later in the seminar, he employs the One to describe
something he calls the "unit of sex", which is to be further distinguished
from the (second) One of the phallus. To grasp the logic of the fantasy
requires that we get a handle on these multiplying Ones.

The One of sex

Before proceeding any further, we must first institute a definitive break
between Lacan' s One of sex and any idea of a One understood as the
sum of two divided halves. The latter is familiar to us from the literary
and philosophical traditions as a mythical One, an original unity from
which we have been irremediably severed. Its most famous philosophi­
cal expression comes in Aristophanes' speech at Plato's Symposium.
Here, Aristophanes relates the myth of how men and women came to
be separate. Primeval man, we learn, was in those days round and pos­
sessed of two faces and four hands and feet. However, Aristophanes
relates, one day the gods became angry with mankind and split these
orbicular creatures in half. The comedian tells how, in their desire to
reunite with their other half, these divided beings came together, and
"throwing their arms about one anothet� entwined in mutual embraces,
longing to grow into one". Observing their distress, Zeus, in an unchar­
acteristic gesture of compassion, rearranged their genitals so that their
seed would enter each other rather than being scattered on the ground.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is
but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other
half. [ . . . ] And the reason is that human nature was originally one
and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is
called love. (Plato, 1956)

In contrast to this Aristophanean originary unity, Lacan's "unit of sex"

presents as a more prosaic entity. The One as sex unit merely describes a
point from which we can begin to calculate a certain value. Here one can
draw an analogy with a slide rule. Comprised of two fixed rulers and a
central movable strip, a slide rule enables one to solve complicated math­
ematical problems such as logarithms with ease. We do so by placing
the cursor in alignment with any point on one of the non-moving parts
of the ruler. We can then read off the correct answer for our calculation
1 44 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

from the fixed sides of the rule. In this analogy, what we designate as
"One" is therefore nothing more than the place from which we begin,
the point where we place the cursor with a view to obtaining the values
of the other elements of the equation. Rather than representing an origi­
nary unity, such a "One" contains no intrinsic meaning or content in
itself. Its value comes solely from its relation to the other numbers that,
in lining themselves up in relation with the cursor, become accessible to
us as the solution to our mathematical problem.
Something along these lines appears to be what Lacan has in mind
when he designates the One as the unit of sex. This One is a base point,
a place we can begin in order to count off towards the right or the left,
that is, towards the field of the Other (the symbolic) or into the domain
of the a (the real, jouissance) . Furthermore, as the analogy with the slide
rule suggests, while the numerical values of these points to the right
and left change depending on where you locate the "first" point on the
ruler, their ratios with respect to each other remain the same; there is a
constancy in their relative positions vis-a-vis their distance from each
other. But as the primary unit of measure within a symbolic system, this
One of sex has an important function for Lacan. It enables us to calcu­
late the "value" of the object a from any place within the symbolic that
we nominate as One. As Lacan puts it, "the One is simply in this logic
the coming into play of the operation of measurement, of the value to be
given to this small a in this operation of language" (Lacan, 2002).

An image of One
Although the suggestion would be that Lacan's One of sex is a purely
arbitrary starting place, this is not to say that just any point on our slide
rule will serve in this role. Or rather (since in fact any random point
can indeed offer itself as this function of the One), we must ask what
turns any-point-whatever into a One that can serve as the unit of sex?
We have already broached this question above in the discussion of the
paradox of Russell's set where Lacan proposed that writing provides a
way of inscribing a whole or totality without needing to seek recourse
in a metalanguage. We must now look in more detail at this question of
writing, as it plays a decisive role in the choice of where to position the
One of sex as the unit of measure in a signifying system.
When Lacan talks about writing, he invariably has something very
specific in mind. In Seminar XX (Encore, 1972-1973), for example,
 M A T H E M AT I C S I N T H E B E D R O O M 1 45

Lacan discusses writing or ecriture in relation to the signifying effect

that occurs in the field of speech and language. As mentioned earlier,
what one hears in speech is the signifier rather than the signified. The
signified, then, is not what we hear (in the auditory sense) but some­
thing that must be read. In order to signify, the signifier must undergo
an act of signification. In "The instance of the letter", Lacan describes
this process as the signifier, S, becoming shot through or "injected" with
signifieds, s, that have undergone a certain operation: a transfer occurs
whereby a signified crosses over the bar that separates signifier and sig­
nified to become a signifie1� S. Lacan writes this as the algorithm:

s
s

Once this first signifier, S, has been constructed, it can slide through the
signifying chain according to operations permitted by the two "funda­
mental structures" of metaphor and metonymy. By way of metaphori­
cal or metonymic substitutions, the "signifying function" generates an
effect that is characterised either by a plus (+) or a minus (-) of sense.
While metonymy's minus of sense (its famous deferral) oversees the
maintenance of the bar as the "irreducible nature of the resistance of
signification" (Lacan, 1957/2006, p. 428), metaphor permits further
crossings. Because of this potential for creation (Lacan calls metaphor's
signifiying effect "poetic or creative" (Lacan, 1957/2006, p. 429), it is
the structure of metaphor that will be of primary importance in Lacan's
discussion of sex in Seminar XIV.
Now, according to Lacan, writing is directly implicated in this
act of crossing the bar. The bar, he says in Seminar XX, "is the point
at which in every use of language writing may be produced" (Lacan,
1999, p. 34) . However, in Seminar IX (Identification, 1961-1962), Lacan
gives a more detailed explanation of what is involved in this transfer
and, in particular, the role that "writing", understood as the inscrip­
tion of an eruption of jouissance plays in this operation. In a discussion
that recalls our earlier discussion of set formation, in Seminar IX Lacan
conjures up a scene of writing. He imagines a prehistoric hunter jubi­
lantly recording a series of kills by notching them onto a fragment of
bone: "First two, then a little interval and afterwards five, and then it
recommences." Lacan notes how through the vagaries of their repeated
inscriptions these notchings inevitably begin to form little clusters or
1 46 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

patterns, and hypothesises how these patterns might start to take on

another meaning-while five notches might still simply indicate five
instances of the same event, a certain grouping of two markers might
at some point become shorthand for ten, for example. From the simple
repeated inscription of the mark we see the emergence of a shape or
symbol that stands in for-represents-a collection or number of kills
(i.e., eruptions of enjoyment).
Lacan conceptualises his happy hunter 's notation or "writing" of
these instances in terms of the application of what he calls the unary
trait. Originating in Freud's theories of identification and narcissism,
the unary trait is involved in the acquisition of identity through the
incorporation of what Freud calls the Einziger Zug. However, in Lacan,
this Einziger Zug or trait unaire acquires a far greater reach than in Freud.
For Lacan, the trait is implicated in the creation of the signifier. Recall
how in our earlier discussion the multivariate items Lacan proposed
made up a set only because each of the heteroclite objects were treated
as being in some sense the "same". Their commonality lay in the way
that, beyond all of their obvious and immediate ("small") differences,
their instances were recorded with the same mark. "Writing" them in
this way, that is, applying them with the unary trait, transforms each
item into something that can be counted as a member of a set, that is,
a part of a larger unity or whole.
We can make new additions to the set by notating them with the
same mark, regardless of whatever strange new objects Lacan decides
to include as members, for the unary trait can "write" all and any dis­
parate objects as if they were the same. However, as soon as we begin to
write things down in this way, naturally we begin to repeat. And with
repetition something strange may happen. As they start to be written
down, one of the traits may unpredictably transform into something
that represents something else, changing into a shape or figure that rep­
resents in shorthand a particular amount of unary traits, for example.
Through this action of representing more than just a single occurrence
of the trait, an image or "picture" of number emerges where previously
there had been only instances (i.e., signifieds) of repetition. 2

2 Although he does not conceptualise it in this way, Freud's account of primary iden­
tification follows this same trajectory. As the child copies and repeats a certain trait pos­
sessed by its parents (usually the father. Freud's examples are a cough or a certain look)
a meaning begins to be attached to it. The trait, that is, s tarts to represent something the
child wishes to emulate and, like Dora's father's cough, this feature becomes incorporated
 M A T H E M AT I C S I N T H E B E D ROOM 1 47

It is by means of a similar process that the unit of sex emerges.

Through the repeated inscriptions of the unary trait, a One blossoms
into being, forged by nothing more than a repetitive series of eruptions
of jouissance ·(signifieds) . As a result, the One that emerges as the unit
of sex on our slide rule both is and is not so arbitrary. It is arbitrary
insofar as any signified, that is, any sort of marker (a slash, a cough, a
chalk sign on the board) can serve as the unary trait, as a mark for an
enjoyment that can be repeated. Nevertheless, any signifier or One that
emerges from the repetition of this inscription will be intimately linked
to the trait from which it was generated. Created from a certain repeti­
tive writing of the trait in the body (Lacan, 2002)/ the One of sex is thus
never simply an act of free choice or decision where the subject says,
"let's begin from this point". But neither is this One of sex connected
in any "natural" kind of way to particular physical organs, which only
come into play afterwards, as imaginary and symbolic receptacles for a
jouissance that we are discovering is mathematical in origin. "It is not
the function that makes the organ," Lacan reminds us, "but the organ
that makes the function" (Lacan, 2002). Neither a voluntarist nor a bio­
logically determined One, the unit of sex comes into being through an
originary repetition that always precedes it. The result is that the One
of sex is never originarily marked but only re-marked. The One of sex
would be the symbolic registration of an originary falter, a re-marking
of the absent "first" One but which, in being so re-marked, inaugurates
the universe of discourse and its signifying chain.

A golden number
For Lacan, sex is the relation between the One and the Other. This
sounds fairly uncontentious but as our discussion above should have
already alerted us, this statement conveys far more than the idea of two

into the subject's behavior. Formed around the repetitions of the Einziger Zug, an image of
the self as a whole or One emerges.
3 In the lesson of May 24th, 1967, Lacan asserts that there is no jouissance except
of one's own body. The examples Lacan gives of this repetitive bodily "writing" are
largely mechanical, unthinking actions such as walking (and, one would assume, sex).
But since we are dealing at this point with the pre-lingual, pre-castrated subject-to-be, the
division between its own body and the Other has not yet occurred. For this reason, Lacan
can also say without contradicting himself that "The body itself, is, from the origin, this
locus of the Other, insofar as it is there that, from the origin, there is inscribed the mark
qua signifier" (Lacan, 2002 ) .
1 48 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

people coming together in coitus. Already it seems the sex act involves
considerably more entities in the bedroom than just the two lovers. We
have the unary trait, for one, whose repeated inscriptions in the Other
generated the One of sex and which tarry in the One like tiny pointillist
brushstrokes, visible only in extreme close-up . But we must also make
room now for a couple of new personages taking up precious space on
the bed. These are the famous third parties found in any sex act, the
object a, and its stealthy accomplice, the phallus.
In Seminar XIV, Lacan adverts to one of the great marvels of math­
ematics to illustrate the a's fundamental incommensurability of with
respect to the One. In three dense and complex lessons in April of 1967,
Lacan recalls the unusual properties of the golden ratio, which pro­
duces a number that can be defined in terms of itself. The golden ratio
produces what is called a "continuous fraction" which is created by
dividing 1 with the golden number and then adding 1, then dividing 1
again by the golden number and adding 1, and so forth to infinity
(1.61803 . . . 1 + 1 / 1 .61803 . . . ) Lacan assigns the object a the value of
= .

the golden number in this seminar to illustrate the a's fundamental

incommensurability with the One. The continuous fraction the golden
number generates is analogous to how the object a drops out from the
relation of the One and the Other in the sexual act. Traditionally written
in mathematics as phi ( <p), f or F, for its reciprocal, the golden number in
its fractional expression can be infinitely extended:

1
! = 1+­
{jJ
1
= 1+­
rp
1
= 1+-. ..
{jJ

What particularly interests Lacan in the golden ratio is the way it offers
an effective means for illustrating how the phallus comes to assume the
positive (or "symbolic") value of the a. Referring back to our slide rule,
the phallus arises in the zone over to the right of the One of sex (i.e., in
the field of the Othe1� the symbolic). There it bears a very exact value:
its numerical value precisely reflects the distance separating the One
and the object a on the left-hand or negative side of the One. Recall how
 M A T H E M AT I C S I N T H E B E D R O O M 1 49

Lacan told us that the One's sole function is to enable us to calculate

the value of the object a. Now we learn that we obtain the value of a
by counting away from the One to the left to the value of the inverse
golden number, i.e., 0.61803 . . The phallus is then assigned the recipro­
.

cal amount of this value on the right of One. On this, positive, side of
the One, the value of the phallus is thus 1 .61803 . . . As Lacan explains,
"the phallus design.ates [ . . . ] this something which constitutes precisely
the distance between the small a and the unit of sex" (Lacan, 2002).
We understand how the phallus makes its emergence by referring
again to our discussion of the emergence of the One through writing.
For it appears that in the repetitions by which the a drops away in the
relation of the One and the Other, a similar act of transfer, or "met­
aphor" occurs. Among all the partial objects or a's that are produced
and fall away as continuous fractions in the sexual repetitions, a single
one of them-i.e., the phallus-acquires the ability to represent or sig­
nify the infinite series of a ' s . Once again, Lacan resorts to some curious
attributes of the golden number in order to help us understand this. To
the extent that the golden number can be defined in terms of itself, it
also has the unusual property where, by subtracting the golden number
from 1 , the result is the square of the golden number. And reciprocally,
by subtracting the square of the golden number from 1, the result is
once again the golden number.4

1 -f=F
1 -F =f
What this mathematical analogy gives Lacan i s an image for conceptu­
alising how the object a, as object of desire (i.e., a Vorstellingsrepriisentanz
or representative of enjoyment), emerges from the objects of demand.
The breast, as object a, would be the breast "squared" to the extent that
it has been subtracted from the One of the unit of sex and comes to rep­
resent a portion of enjoyment that floats free, as it were, removed from
its physical location and origin in the body's needs and concomitant

4 An irrational numbet� the golden ratio approximates to 1 .6180340 . . . As noted

anonymously in the margins of the French transcription of the seminar, La can actually uses
the mathematical "inverse" of the golden number in his demonstrations, i e , 0.6180340 .
. . . .

T11e square of this number is 0.38196602515. Hence 1 - 0.6180340 = 0.38196602515, and

1 - 0.38196602515 . . . = 0.6180340 . . .
1 50 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

demands. The same goes for the cry, the look and the penis. Multiplie d
by themselves, these objects of demand result in their "squares" (in the
shape of the voice, the gaze and the phallus) .
What interests u s i s the way that, o f all o f these "squared" objects­
i.e., these objects a-a single one of them, the phallus, manages to cross
the bar to assume a representative function for them all. The phallus,
that is, is a metaphor in Lacan's precise sense of a signifier that stands in
for another signifier with the addition of extra sense (Lacan, 1957/2006,
p. 429). Crossing over the bar of repression, the phallus installs itself in
the symbolic as the signifier of the ever-receding series of a's as they
drop out in the repetitions of sex to cascade their way to infinity.5 At
this point, two points must be noted. The phallus is not the unit of sex for
this, as we saw, was generated through an anterior operation, in the
inscriptions of the trait in the Other. Rather, insofar as the phallus can
be said to make a "One" (i.e., a signifie1� a "picture" of the repressed a's),
it is always a One plus a fraction of jouissance. The phallic One equals
1 .61803 . . , to use Lacan's mathematical analogy. Second, to the extent
.

that the phallus provides a certain "cover", as it were, for the a within
the "universe of discourse", it inaugurates a very specific economy,
which Lacan calls desire.

One or none
Logic enables us to express all possible relations in a formal language
but it also allows us to make propositional statements which while
factually impossible can still be logically "true". This is why logic is so
vitally important to Lacan in this seminar. If it is to Aristotelian rather
than to mathematical or formal logic he turns to when he wishes to
define men and women, it is because Aristotle gives him a richer array
of types of negation than other logical systems. 6 Aristotelian logic, for

5 "[ • . . ] the small a is the metaphorical child of the One and the Othe1� insofar as it is
born as a piece of refuse from the inaugural repetition, which, in order to be repetition,
requires this relation of the One to the Other" (Lacan, 2002).
6 In addition, unlike in formal logic, in Aristotelian logic we are still dealing with que­
stions of Being: "In the las t analysis, the diversity of Aristotle's categories rests on the
concept of being and is of fundamental importance for logic since the root of the cate­
gories lie in Aristotle's theory of the concept. For formal logicians, l ogic essentially not a
way of obtaining knowledge, but only a group of rules of thought. Where Aristotle sees
a problem of knowledge, the formalists find only a question of observing certain simple
rules of thought" (Popov, 1947, p . 16).
 M AT H E M AT I C S I N T H E BED ROOM 1 51

example, allows for varieties of opposition including contradictions,

contrarieties, sub-contrarieties and sub-implications. The most well­
known case of Lacan's use of Aristotelian logic is his use of the peri­
patetic philosopher's square of opposition in constructing his famous
formulas of sexuation. While the thorny details of La can' s Fregean revi­
sion of the logical square need not concern us here, what we can observe
is that, by using Aristotelian logic, Lacan arrives at logical expressions
of the two sexes that are defined not in relation to each other, that is, not
as opposites, but as contraries defined in relation to a third term, the
phallus.7 The consequence of defining the sexes in this way is profound
as it opens up a number of ways that Man and Woman, as propositions,
relate to enjoyment. For if there is anything that intersects the two sexes,
it is jouissance.8 Defined logically, Lacan's propositions expressing the
two sexes-his famous formulas of sexuation from the Encore seminar­
imply not one but two forms of jouissance.9 One of these forms is liter­
ally "ruled" by the phallus insofar as the latter provides a universal
yardstick for measuring enjoyment. The Other, or feminine jouissance
famously, is not ruled by the phallic function.
In his lesson of 24th May, 1967, Lacan describes the part played by
the pleasure principle in establishing the phallic economy of desire. In
a cunning reversal, the limit of pleasure paradoxically turns around to
become the negative sign of the possibility and promise of an endless
jouissance. Lacan explains: "Detumescence, by being the character­
istic of the functioning of the penile organ, specifically, in the genital

7 For an excellent accotmt of the history of the square of opposition and contemporary
geometric challenges to it (including a brief description of Lacan's revision), see Moretti
(2009) .
8 Lacan's use o f Aristotle's modal categories-necessity, existence, possibility-adds
to our difficulties of understanding, allowing for such provocative statements such as
"Woman does not exist" that have elicited many misunderstanding, not to mention
feminist outrage . . .
9
The full formulas of sexuation are:

Masculine Feminine

3 x <I>x 3x <I>x
Vx <I>x Vx <I>x

Masculine: There is a t least one x that is not submitted to the phallic function/ All x's
are (every x is) submitted to the phallic function. Feminine: There is not one x that is not
submitted to the phallic function/Not all (not every) x is submitted to the phallic func­
tion. See Lacan (1999) and Copjec (1 994).
1 52 SEX A N D N OT H I N G

act-and precisely in the measure in which what it supports in terms

of jouissance is kept in suspense-is there [ . . . ] to introduce the fact that
there is jouissance beyond" (Lacan, 2002) .
To the extent that Man, in the sexual act, comes up against the limit
of the pleasure principle in the fact of detumescence, sex confronts him
over and over again with the fact of his castration. While this might
explain the famous post-coital sadness, what Man's sexual melancholy
misrecognises is the instrumental role that castration plays in generat­
ing the prospect that total satisfaction lies somewhere out there. The
inevitable failure of the sexual act is in fact not the consequence of cas­
tration. Rather, as Lacan explains in the same lesson, sex fails because
there is no phallic object. Sex fails because there is no object that would
be the opposite or logical complement of the phallus. In the sex act, we
have sex with the a, not with an other. However, insofar as we view our
sexual partner through the perspective of castration, we misperceive
the a as the other sex in all its glorious difference from us. When the
sexual relation subsequently fails, as it always does, we put this failure
down to something faulty in this particular sexual other, rather than in
sex itself. Back down the merry path of metonymic desire we head in
our search for the really "right" other next time.

One desire, two jouissances

Under the reign of the phallus, enjoyment circulates in the symbolic as
something that, in being limited, promises total satisfaction beyond.
Phallic enjoyment's very insufficiency negatively points to an unlimited
jouissance.10 The remarkable side-effect of this phallic "ruse" is that jou­
issance is henceforth turned into a commodity, something that can be
bought and exchanged. To the extent that it provides a way of symboli­
cally measuring the amount of jouissance that circulates in the economy
of desire, the phallus suggests a "bottling" operation, one that packages
the fractions of jouissance that slipped into the symbolic beneath the
phallic veil. Like a jar of preserves, the phallus cans the a, enabling it to
be handled and put into wider circulation. Registering this economy,
the phallus subsequently becomes something one can either "have" or
"be", for once it has acquired its signification as the signifier for absent

10 This unlimited jouissance is expressed in one half of the logical definition of Man:
"There is at least one x that is not subject to the phallic function."
 M AT H E M AT I C S IN THE B E D ROOM 1 53

jouissance, the phallus enters into a series of metaphorical and met­

onymic substitutions just like any signifier in the signifying chain. Thus in
the metaphorical substitution that Lacan calls copulation, phallic enjoy­
ment symbolica1ly passes from the male organ to the feminine object
which, sign ifying phallic value, comes to hold that value; the feminine
object "is" the phallus in this sense. By means of a metaphorical transfer
of phallic value, the woman as sexual object comes to represent man's
jouissance: "It is no longer the sexual organ of our bull-use-value­
which will serve for this sort of circulation in which there is established
the sexual order. It is the woman, insofar as she herself has become on
this occasion, the locus of transference of this value subtracted at the
level of use-value, in the form of object of jouissance" (La can, 2002).
Metonymic substitutions, on the other hand, take us into the realm
of the fetish. In both cases, jouissance slides effortlessly through meta­
phorical and metonymic chains of signification because of the character
of the phallic signifier 's character of "easy handling", as Lacan slyly
puts it (Lacan, 2002) .
While sex repeatedly aims at a One, in the economy of desire sex
delivers only in multiple fractions of enjoyment that secrete their way
into the universe of discourse under the cover of the phallus. If there is
a One produced in the repetitions of the sexual act, then, it is as Lacan
puts it, a perforated One, riddled with tiny holes that mark the absence
of the little a's. From this perspective, sex under the rule of the phallus
would be a paradoxical matter of the void attempting to plug the void. If
our earlier brief foray into Aristotelian logic has been of use to this dis­
cussion, it is found in how Aristotle prompts our recognition that there
are two ways by which this stopping up may be effected. Given that
the a logically precedes the phallic metaphm� it seems there is another
means through which sex may "plug" the hole in the universe of dis­
course. This word, however, is a misnomer, since it is only the phallus
that tropes the absent a's from the universe of discourse in terms of a
hole. The Other or feminine jouissance is neither the complement nor
the opposite of the phallic solution. Rather than plugging a hole, the
Other jouissance approaches the problem differently: it hollows out the
universe of discourse from the inside.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand. this is by turning to an image
Lacan proposes for feminine jouissance. In the lesson of 7th June,
1967, Lacan calls feminine jouissance the ocean that keeps the "ship of
Oedipus" afloat. The Oedipal ship, that is, the desiring subject dreaming
1 54 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

of total satisfaction under the steerage of the phallus, is a leaky vessel

that requires constant plugging with new fantasmatic objects in its
metonymy of desire. But this view regards sex from only from the mas­
culine side of the formulas of sexuation. If one were to completely sub­
merge the ship, the question of its "plugging" is altogether irrelevant.
The little barque, that is, no longer "leaks" because the water is both
inside and outside the vessel. It no longer makes sense to speak in terms
of leaking, sinking or stopping up at all.

Sex and the signifier: the s malle s t whole n umber

"Sex" is evidently an even more complicated activity than anyone
thought, involving not two partners but a bizarre series of Ones and
Others engaged in complex series of additions, subtractions, multiplica­
tions and divisions. What one aims for in sex, it transpires, is a math­
ematical unit, a One that represents the signifier of the other sex for us.
Unlike in love, where one aims for the other partner as subject, in sex, it
turns out, we aim at our partner as signifier. If we are men, sex delivers
us the signifier Man through the body of the woman. If we are women,
we seek the signifier Woman through the body of the man.11 Confirming
this, towards the end of Seminar XIV, Lacan describes the sexual act as
"the passage of the subject to the function of signifier". But the passage
that is to create the signifier Woman fails. While the chiasmus of sex
aims for a signifying effect, as a metaphor in Lacan's precise sense, sex
is thus an interrupted crossing. Sex will always frustrate the woman's
quest for the signifier that would make of her a One. As Lacan puts it in
the lesson of 14th June, 1967:

[ ] in the sexual act, [ . . ] there is a jouissance, that of the other,

. . . .

which remains in suspense. It is because the inter-crossing, the

required chiasmus-which would make of the bodies, by right, the
metaphor, the signifier of the jouissance of the other-it is because

11 To avoid misunderstanding it's vitally important to remember that Man and Woman
here are not biological distinctions but rather the different logical pathways through
which a subject relates to jouissance. Nothing stops a biological woman from approaching
jouissance through the masculine formulas and viceversa. Interestingly, the question of
homosexual sex is only briefly alluded to in his lesson of April 12th, 1967. While Lacan
doesn't give us any detailed account of which signifier is involved in the homosexual
sexual act, he calls masculine homosexuals homme-ils ("he-men" as opposed to homme-elles,
"she-men"). "He-men" are those who have the phallus in the phallic economy. Lacan
jokes that masculine homosexuality is "a society for the protection of homme-il."
 M AT H E M AT I C S IN T H E B E D ROOM 1 55

this chiasma is in suspense, that we cannot but [ . ] see this dis­

. .

placement which, in effect, makes a jouissance dependent on the

body of the other. As a result of which, the jouissance of the othe1�
as I tol d you, remains adrift.

The upshot of this is that sex is a logical enigma which repeats. What it
repeats is a surplus in the universe of discourse that was produced in
the originary act of creating the set that makes up the symbolic system.
At the level of the set's contents, this surplus is registered in the form
of the two sexes of Man and Woman whose irreducibility with respect
to one another is expressed in their fundamental maxims: "there is the
sexual act" and "there is no sexual act". From the masculine side, there
is the sexual act: sex produces the signifier, Man, insofar as he is defined
in terms of phallic enjoyment. On the feminine side, however, there
is no sexual act. The infinite generations of the a fail to coalesce and
produce a signifier for Woman, instead hollowing out the entire uni­
verse of discourse from the inside. Returning to Russell's paradox, one
could say that from the masculine perspective sex allows that the set of
all sets would include itself: this would be the masculine dream of an
exceptional One, the Father who enjoys all the women. This exceptional
One somehow manages to include itself in the very set that it describes.
From the feminine side, however, sex asserts that the set of all sets does
not include itself, and this failure of inclusion ultimately dissolves the
very set itself. From the Woman's side, that is, the universe of discourse
does not exist-although this by no means implies that Woman is there­
fore without some kind of language with which she insists, as a number
of notable Lacanian feminists have devoted themselves to discovering.
Sex presents us on a daily basis with the fundamental enigma that lies
at the heart of the universe of discourse. In our repetitions of the sexual
(non-)act, we repeat again the choice we once must have made: whether
to be a Man or a Woman. Thus if there is something originary about sex,
if sex can produce in us an uncanny sense of being the "first" man or
woman, this derives from sex's metaphor, the way it produces (or fails
to produce) what Lacan calls the "instauration of a signifier in the real".
In its small, quotidian repetitions, sex thus repeats an earlier repeti­
tion. It is the ghosting repetitions in our everyday lives of the originary
signifying Act through which we created our "universe of discourse".
Uniquely in our everyday life, sex thus presents us with the phenom­
enal re-creation of the logical (but never actually temporal) moment
when we originarily chose to enter language. This is, I think, also why it
1 56 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

is usually some kind of sexual difficulty that finally drives a subject into
analysis, to the talking cure. The sexual act re-presents us with our fun­
damental alienation, laying out before us on the bed the two different
pathways by which a subject may choose to enter language. Faced with
the forced choice of Being or Thinking, the speaking subject by neces­
sity chooses Thinking. However, the path towards Thinking is doubled
between a logic of the exception and a logic of the not-whole. Invisible
from the phallic viewpoint, this second pathway solely becomes visible
when the totality of our possible relations towards enjoyment is written
out in logical form. In this sense, logic shows us something that cannot
be seen from inside the framework of phallic representation.
To conclude, what is the smallest whole number not written on the
board? The question of Woman poses an unanswerable riddle within
the universe of discourse. Although the signifier of Woman cannot be
written (in the sense of producing a signifier, a "One"), the unconscious
nevertheless never ceases to (half-) speak of it. Perhaps in response to
Lacan's demand that day, Madame, the long-suffering stenographer
might simply have said, "c' est mo il "

References

Copjec, J. (1994) . Read my desire. C ambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Davis, M. (2000) . Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the
Computer. New York: Norton.
Lacan, J. (1957 /2006) . The instance of the letter in the unconscious, or
Reason since Freud. E crits . New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1999). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. Encore. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (2002) . The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XIV: The Logic of Phantasy.
Translated by Cormac Gallagher. London: Karnac.
Moretti, A. (2009). The Geometry of Logical Opposition. PhD thesis, Faculty
of Humanities Institute of Philosophy, University of Neuchatel,
Switzerland .
Plato (1956) . Symposium. New York: Prentice Hall.
Popov, P. S. (1947) . The Logic of Aristotle and Formal Logic . Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, 8 : 1-22.
Van Heijenoort, J. (ed.) (1967) . From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in
Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
C H A P TE R E I G H T

lch-psychologie und Massenanalyse: a

Z i ze k i a n read i n g of Laca n 's i m p asse

Gabriel Tupinamba

he following pages are an attempt to retroactively read certain

T crucial moments of Jacques Lacan's trajectory from the stand­

point of a short passage found in Slavoj Zizek's book The Parallax
View-namely:

[ . ] when Lacan introduces the term "desire of the analyst", it is

. .

in order to undermine the notion that the climax of the analytic

treatment is a momentous insight into the abyss of the Real, the
"traversing of the fantasy", from which, the morning after, we
have to return to sober social reality, resuming our usual social
roles-psychoanalysis is not an insight which can be shared only
in the precious initiatic moments. Lacan's aim is to establish the
possibility of a collective of analysts, of discerning the contours
of a possible social link between analysts [ ] . The stakes here are
. . .

high: is every community based on the figure of a Master [ . ], or

. .

its derivative, the figure of Knowledge [ . ]? Or is there a chance

. .

of a different link? Of course, the outcome of this struggle was a

dismal failure in the entire history of psychoanalysis, from Freud to
Lacan's later work and his Ecole-but the fight is worth pursuing.

157
1 58 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

This is the properly Leninist moment of Lacan-recall how, in his

late writings, he is endlessly struggling with the organizational
questions of the School. The psychoanalytic collective is, of course,
a collective of (and in) an emergency state. [ ] so what if, in the
. . .

constellation in which the Unconscious itself, in its strict Freudian

sense, is disappearing, the task of the analyst should no longer be
to undermine the hold of the Master-Signifie1� but, on the contrary,
to construct/propose/install new Master-Signifiers? ( Zizek, 2006,
pp. 305-306)

Our strategy will be the following: first, we will argue that there is a
possible reading of Lacan's teaching which divides it into only two
sequences-before and after the founding of his School, in 1964; then,
we will show that some of the most complex ideas developed by the
French psychoanalyst during the 1960s could be understood as dif­
ferent attempts to account for the novel situation brought to the fore
by this second sequence in his trajectory, a problem which remained
an impasse for Lacan until the end of his life; finally, having implicitly
demonstrated that ZB�ek's position allows us to confront a crucial and
lost problem at the heart of Lacanian psychoanalysis, we will propose
a definition of the field of study of the Slovene School that brings their
work to the centre of psychoanalytic considerations.

Institution, clinic, and concept: their knotting

before and after 1 964
Lacan's writings must be understood, in a manner similar to political
writings, as localised interventions. Rather than providing us with sche­
matic systematisations of his teaching-whose constant re-elaborations
were in fact tracked through his yearly seminars-his scripta served
above all as combative answers to specific problems posed by the con­
juncture of the psychoanalytic milieu of the time. This is why, in the
post-face to the French edition of his eleventh seminar, Lacan warns us
that his writings were made "not to be read"-"pas-il-lire" (Lacan, 1 973) :
they are meant t o intervene, dislodge o r divide, rather than describe,
summarise or condense.
Two consequences follow from this realisation. First of all, in order
to think with Lacan-and not merely to read him-we must consider
his writings together with the "context of struggle" in which they were
 / CJ- 1 - P S Y C H O L O C / E U N O M A S S E NA NA L YS E 1 59

produced.1 This implies, for instance, an attention to the challenges

faced by psychoanalysis at the time of each of Lacan' s interventions and
a capacity to distinguish, with this reference in mind, between condi­
tional and unconditional preferences, between the alliances and concep­
tual connections which had to be made, sometimes forcefully, for tactical
reasons, and those which can be said .to be intrinsic to psychoanalysis
as such, and which might perhaps only reveal themselves retroactively.
Moreover, the concern with the different battles fought by Lacan­
battles sometimes waged against his own previous positions-must
be supplemented by a refined attention to an important shift which
took place around 1963 in his relation with the French psychoanalytic
situation. Before his rupture with the Societe Fran<;aise de Psychanalyse
(sFP), Lacan's constant engagement with the decrepit state of psycho­
analysis in France, both in its clinical inefficacy and its conceptual
deviations, took mostly the critical form of accusations, ironic retorts
and a relentless concern with the return to the basic insights of Freud's
discovery. However, once Lacan lost his place within the International
Psychoanalytical Association (rPA)/ and his teaching was suddenly in
danger, he was faced with a new and fundamentally different task: that
of creating an alternative institution, the Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP),
organised according to his own ideas, and capable of positively inscrib­
ing in the world a position which, until then, had only been articulated
as a critical one.
The relevance of this second consequence cannot be underestimated­
in fact, it constitutes perhaps the only periodisation of Lacan's work
which truly distinguishes two separate moments in his teaching. There
are, of course, some convincing and useful ways to divide Lacan's
seminars into discernible conceptual sequences, but the distinction

1 In his "Petit Discours aux Psychiatres", in 1967, Lacan affirms: "There is something

quite astounding, which is that those who do quite well the work of transmission, [by
doing it] without actually naming me, regularly lose the opportunity, which is quite vis­
ible in the text, of contributing with the little idea that they could have presented there!
Little or even quite big. [ . ] Why is it that they would produce a small hmovation? It is
. .

because, in citing me, in the very fact of citing me, they would presentify [ . . . ] the context
of struggle ['contexte de bagarre' ] in which I produced all of this. From the sole fact of stat­
ing it within the context of struggle, this would put me in my place, and would allow
them to produce then a small innovation" (Lacan, 1979, p. 66).
2 The SFP was a French "branch" of the IPA. A ve ry useful diagram of the psycho­
analytic institutions from Freud's time up to the present can be found as an appendix in
Roudinesco (1997).
1 60 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

between two Lacanian "classicisms" (Milner, 1995), or between the "six

paradigms of enjoyment" (Miller, 2000), rarely accounts for the hetero­
geneous problems which resisted the previous conceptual sequence
and demanded the subsequent reformulations. Only the break which
distinguishes a before and an after the founding of Lac an's own School,
in 1964, could possibly refer to institutional, conceptual, and clinical
changes simultaneously.
The institutional break is somewhat evident: Lacan was suddenly
faced with the difficult task of combining his relentless critique of the
psychoanalytic establishment with a formative project which did not
succumb to any of these same deviations. The conceptual break, if we
consider solely the rupture we have already discerned, concerning
Lacan's "founding act", was equally profound: an aspect that is quite
clear throughout Lacan's seminars which took place after the famous
"interrupted seminar" of 1 962 was his concern with the problem of rigor
in psychoanalysis-namely, the problem of how to distinguish between
conceptual markers developed in order to rectify the metapsychologi­
cal and clinical import of psychoanalysis and their use as identificatory
traits by his disciples and followers. Concerning the clinic, the break is
even clearer: Lacan became quite infamous in the French psychoana­
lytic scene precisely because of some of his clinical inventions, such as
the variable length session, and these matters were brought up as rea­
sons for his expulsion from the SFP. It follows, then, that these technical
procedures would finally find their place in his own School, which
so openly invited psychoanalysts to re-invent the Freudian practice
in accordance with their own time. But the crystallisation of Lacan's
theory of logical time into a general principle of the analytic practice
was not the most evident of the changes which followed from the break
of 1964: the most important clinical development was surely the inven­
tion of the passe (Lacan, 1967 /2001)-an invention which was not only
clinical, but which in fact confirms that the founding of Lacan's School
concerned simultaneously the three registers we have just outlined,
given that the passe was supposed to be, at the same time, the marker
of the end of analysis (clinic), a communal and formative procedure
(institution), and a source of theoretical developments and problems for
psychoanalysis (concept) .
Our proposition is thus the following: the actual break in Lacan's
teaching is the one which distinguishes between the moment when the
relation between the clinic, the concept and the institution was held
 / C /-1 - P S Y C I-/ O L O C / E U N O M A S S E NA NA L Y S E 1 61

Institution
current situation of
psychoanalysis

Lacanian teaching before 1964:

extrinsic linkage through the critique of the
forgetting of the Freudian experience

Institution
new psychoanalytic
problem

Lacanian teaching after 1964:

intrinsic linkage through the formulation of an
immanent procedure to Lacan's teaching itself.

together-even if critically or negatively-by the psychoanalytic situ­

ation already established in Europe since the creation of the IPA, and
the latter one when it fell upon a singular site, Lacan's teaching, to
immanently knot these three dimensions of psychoanalysis together.3

3 We will leave to a second moment the demonstration that this knotting mu s t be

understood as a borromean link, that is, a linkage between institution, clinic and concept
where each domain is tied up to the other two without thereby establishing any relation
of complementarity with any one of the other domains. Leaving this demonstration in
suspense, we will use a very rudimentary form of visualization, akin to Venn diagrams,
in the present text in which this complex conceptual linkage is not addressed.
1 62 S E X A N D N O Tf-I I N G

Moreover, this ruptme does not merely divide Lacan's work into two
equally consistent sequences, it rather divides two distinct notions of
fidelity-one in contradiction with the psychoanalytic situation of the
time and another in contradiction with itself:

It is known, in effect, that the originality of Lacan's reading of

Freud resides in the affirmation of his Freudian orthodoxy and
in his refusal of all post-Freudian "detours". According to this
perspective, his entry into dissidence was not possible if not as a
renewal of the Freudian rupture, and only as such. Well, by creating
a school of his own, Lacan found himself constrained, if not to con­
fess himself a Lacanian, at least to validate the political existence of
a "Lacanism" . Through this self-recognition, his movement entered
into a contradiction with the very doctrine which sustained it and
which defines itself as Freudian. (Porge, 1998, pp. 71-72)

However, this important break cam1ot be understood as a clean, punc­

tual cut-it cannot be read, as it is sometimes intuited, even by Lacan
himself, as a cut marked exclusively by the "interrupted seminar" of
1 962 on the Names of the Father.4 When the first signs of an irresolvable
difference between his teaching and the general orientation of the SFP
began to appear, Lacan did everything in his power to remain within
the French branch of the Freudian society, and these disputes took many
years before culminating in the actual break. Accordingly, dming these
difficult years we find Lacan already working through the first neces­
sary elements for a theory of the immanent linkage of the Freudian
clinic, metapsychology, and community. The most telling of these is per­
haps a short but critical mention to Freud's text Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego, found in the class of 31 May of 1961 :

It could be said of what I am trying to do here, with all reservations

that this implies, that it constitutes an effort of analysis in the proper
sense of the term, concerning the analytic community as a mass
organized by the analytic ego-ideal, such as it has effectively devel­
oped itself under the form of a certain number of mirages, in the
forefront of which is that of the "strong ego", so many erroneously

4 Porge (1998) tracks the astonishing recurrent juxtapositions, throughout Lacan's

teaching, of mentions to the interrupted seminar of 1962, the "excommunication" from

the IPA and the concept of the Names-of-the-Father.
 I C H - PS Y C H O L O C / E U N O M A S S E N A NA L Y S E 1 63

implicated there where one believes to recognize it. To invert the

pair of terms which constitute the title of Freud's article to which
I have referred before, one of the aspects of my seminar could be
called Icit-Psychologie und Massenanalyse.
Moreover, the Ich-Psychologie, which was promoted to the
forefront of analytic theory, constitutes the jam, constitutes the
dam, constitutes the inertia, for more than a decade, which prevents
the re-start of any analytic efficacy. And it is insofar as things have
gotten to this point that it is convenient to interpellate as such the
analytic community, allowing some light to be shed on this matter,
on what comes to alter the purity of the position of the analyst
regarding the one to whom he responds, his analysand, insofar
as the analyst himself inscribes himself and determines himself
through the effects which result from the analytic mass, namely,
the mass of analysts, in the current state of its constitution and
discourse. (Lacan, 1991, p. 316)

This crucial passage, which mediates Lacan's remarks about transfer­

ence and identification, the themes of his current and following semi­
nars, respectively, must be at least reconstructed schematically. What is
the movement implied by the inversion of terms in the title of Freud's
famous text? Lacan's reasoning could be sketched as follows:

1) The analytic mass has organised itself--despite everything-in the

very way that Freud described the formation of groups through the
"introjection" of a h·ait into a shared ego-ideal (Freud, 1921 /2011, p. 65);
2) Given that the group of analysts is the set of those who position
themselves in a certain way within the clinical space-in a distant
resonance with the scientific community-the trait which binds the
analytic mass could not be located inside the psychoanalytic societies
in the figure of a leader, but must rather appear as an ideal for the
clinic (Freud, 1921 /2011, p . 55);
3) This trait, whose function was mainly to organise the analytic
society, had nevertheless a place within the clinic itself: it served
as the index in the relation between analyst and analysand which
verified one's belonging to the group of analysts. Accordingly, the
sense of permanence and the clear division between inside and outside,
both proper to relations of membership, returned in the clinic as the
ground for a particular metapsychological deviation-namely, the
"strong ego"-and the series of technical restrictions associated with
 1 64 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

the direction of treatment which assumes such a "muscular" egoic

force of defence and control as its guideline.

The structure of Lacan' s argument binds together, therefore, institutional,

clinical, and conceptual dimensions around a problem that is irreduc­
ible to any one of the three domains: how to identify and group together the
set of those whose only shared property is to dissolve group identifications ?
But why would such a construction require Lacan to invert Freud's
terms? In order to understand this shift-which so clearly reflects
the change in Lacan's position before and after the foundation of his
School-we need only take notice of the rather unorthodox presupposi­
tion implied in his argument: that the overlap which binds the clinic to
the analytic community should not be the one between the practitioner
in the clinic and the member of the Freudian society-a positive link­
but between what simultaneously escapes the circuit of identifications
in transference and the ego-ideal in the institution. However, there is no
such negative cause in Freud's theory ofgroups that is to say, there is no real
-

of sociality as such. This is why Lacan stresses that he is engaging there

in "an effort of analysis in the proper sense of the term" even though he
is dealing first and foremost with an institutional problem: the proper
diagnosis of the impasse which would ultimately lead him to found the
EFP required a commitment with a new hypothesis, one which cannot
be found as such in Freud's doctrine, even if only in order to remain
faithful to Freud himself.
Before we move on to analyse in more detail the stakes of such Masse­
nanalyse, and its political and philosophical implications, it is worth not-
. ing that the supplementary problem, concerning the role of conceptual
elaborations in this impasse, would later also become a central issue in
La can' s teaching. This prominence is most clearly discernible in his sem­
inars from the late 1960s, dealing with the relation between knowledge
and enjoyment. Without going too much into this difficult matter, it
suffices to state that Lacan's investigations concerning knowledge as a
means for enjoyment posed an additional clause to the problem already
sketched by 1961 (Lacan, 2007, p. 39): how to group together the commu­
nity of those who do not belong to any groups without thereby constituting
the equally "revisionist" group of those who identify themselves as "without
identity"? That is, how to avoid the equally dangerous social link based
on the knowledge of a lack of identity? If we mobilise once more our triadic
model, it seems quite clear that the final threat to Lacan's teaching after
 / C /-1 - P S Y C H O L O G / E U N O M A S S E NA NA L YS E 1 65

the founding of his School was none other than La can' s work itself­
which, as Porge suggests, was inherently contradictory in regards to its
fidelity to Freud. In other words, one could disavow the task faced by the
EFP precisely by sticking too closely to Lacan's own elaborations, consid­
ering its hermetic body of knowledge as a substitutive guarantee to that
of the "strong ego", whose vicious function in the organisation of the
Freudian societies of his time Lacan had previously denounced.
The question becomes then: did Lacan ever resolve the new impasse
which delimited this second period in his teaching? The answer is clearly
negative: not only was the problem of how to tie conceptual, clinical,
and institutional matters in psychoanalysis never properly resolved,
but it was never thematised as such by Lacan. Undoubtedly, the theory
of the end of analysis as the passage from analysand to analyst, already
in its very first formulation, provides us with all the necessary materi­
als to construct the problem in a rigorous fashion, and we can easily
recognise how the mechanism of the passe would itself possibly name
the most consistent answer to this impasse, but it remains a fact that
Lacan's School dissolved in 1980 and that the passe, as early as 1978, was
considered by him "a complete failure" (Lacan, 1978, p. 181).

Desire, act, and discourse : three names for an impasse

We have proposed the following schema as a model for the break which
truly distinguishes two separate moments in Lacan's psychoanalytic
trajectory:

Institution

new psychoanalytic
pl'oblem

Clinic Concept

Lacanian teaching after 1964

1 66 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

We have also seen how this new impasse, according to Lacan's own
"analysis of the analytic mass", ties together, in an immanent way, the
form of organisation of the analytic community, the direction of treatment
in the clinic and the conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis. The prob ­
lem itself, however, is neither entirely institutional (it also concerns
problems of how to handle transference and of the conceptual grasp of
subjectivity), nor purely clinical (the different clinical positions in this
matter informing the constitution of the analytic community as well as
the place of transmission of knowledge in its consistency) or conceptual
(given that different "ontological commitments" regarding the place of
negativity and desire restrict in different ways the scope of the analytic
practice and social link) . Moreover, the excessive character of this impasse
ultimately redoubles the problem: after all, does a question which can­
not be assigned to any one of the domains of psychoanalysis remain
strictly psychoanalytical? No matter how we respond to this enigma,
it is nevertheless clear that we are dealing with a problem of impurity,
both in the sense that it taints each register with concerns belonging to
the other two, and in the sense that it includes into psychoanalysis itself
a question which seems slightly outside of its own scope.
Nowhere is this problem more clearly graspable than in a comparison
between La can' s two conceptualisations of the "desire of the analy:;t"­
first in the seminar on ethics and, after the break with the SFP, in his
eleventh seminar. As we have already seen, the question of how to find
an alternative ground for the position of the analyst, sheltered from the
circuit of counter-transference, group formations and conceptual laxity,
was very much in Lacan's mind by the end of the 1950s. In 1958, Lacan
wrote one of his most important texts, "The direction of treatment and
the principles of its power", in which we find the first clear articulation
of the need to distinguish between the desire of the analyst and the
desire to be an analyst-the latter being the conceptual form of the posi­
tion which would bind together the different psychoanalytic instances
in a positive, permanent, and recognisable point (Lacan, 1958 /2006,
p. 512) . Around the same time, Lacan began his famous study of the
Kantian moral philosophy, and we can now understand why: Kant's
problem-how to ground moral conduct on an unconditional point
without any need for a transcendental content?-was also the problem
Lacan was faced with within the psychoanalytic field (Lacan speaks
of a "critique of Reason [based] on the linchpin of impurity" (Lacan,
1963 /2006, p. 654)).
 I C H - P S YC H O L O C I E U N O M A S S E NA N A L Y S E 1 67

Institution
desire of the analyst
as quasi-tramcendental

Clinic Concept

Desire of the analyst between 1958 and 1960

Between 1958 and 1960, Lacan took upon himself to develop an elab­
orated critique of Kant's position, looking for an intra-psychoanalytic
instance which would serve as a ground for the ethical rectitude needed
of an analyst, who would have to be capable to doubt not only the pit­
falls of counter-transference, but also his recognition as an analyst by
his peers and the convenience of his own conceptual elaborations-in
short, a position which would have to orient itself by maintaining a
degree of distance from its own pathological attachments (Lacan, 1992,
pp. 300-301). At this point, Lacan elaborated a conception of the desire
of the analyst as a pure desire, as if the way to solve the impasse of imma­
nently knotting the institutional, clinical, and conceptual dimensions of
psychoanalysis could be achieved through a reference to a special kind
of moral rectitude, oriented by the empty form of desire in a way akin to
the role of the empty fact of reason in Kant's second critique. Howeve1�
by 1963, after the rupture with the SFP had taken place, La can concluded
his famous seminar on the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
with the following affirmation:

The analyst's desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain

absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted
with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a
position to subject himself to it. There only may the signification of
a limitless love emerge, because it is outside the limits of the law,
where alone it may live. (Lacan, 1981, p. 276)
1 68 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

The theme of ethics would completely disappear from his teaching

from then on, and the reference to the quasi-transcendental dimension
of desire would be substituted for Lacan's lasting investigation of the
Freudian theory of the drives. However, this shift should not be under­
stood as a development prompted by clinical or conceptual matters
alone: in fact, the claim that the desire of the analyst is not pure-in
the sense of grounded in an empty form removed from pathologi­
cal interests-has the fundamental consequence of blurring the limits
between analyst and analysand in the analytic procedure. In the quote
above, it already becomes somewhat clear that the kernel of the ana­
lyst's desire-and the pivot of its distinction from the "desire to be an
analyst"-is paradoxically on the side of the analysand. In short, by bring­
ing the theory of the drive, of the objectal dimension of the subject, to
the centre of psychoanalytic consideration, La can also shifted his theory
of the desire of the analyst towards the practical capacity of anyone
to sustain himself at the point of an "absolute difference" in relation to
the analysand's speech, rather than in relation to his own pathological
interests.

Institution
desire of the analyst
as bound up with the cause
of the subject's desire

Clinic Concept

Desire of the analyst after 1964

This transformation is nothing short of unprecedented. To be suc­

cinct, it allows us to conceive the institutional space of psychoanalysis
in a completely new way: just as the clinic would have to be reformu­
lated, after 1963, in accordance with the principle that the "unconscious
 I CI- I · P S Y C H O L O G I E U N O M A S S E NA N A L YS E 1 69

is outside" (Lacan, 1981, p. 123), so would the analytic community have

to come to terms with the idea that it is a community composed only of
its own exterior, that is, a community whose esoteric centre coincides
with its most exoteric material, the speech of those who seek analysis
in account of their suffering. But how to conceptualise this inconsis­
tent relation between the clinical practice and the psychoanalytic
School without offering its own theoretical apprehension as its point
of fixation?
Lacan's new account of the desire of the analyst introduced a cer­
tain indiscernibility or vacillation at the heart of the analytic procedure,
bringing closer together at the institutional level the two instances
which are in "absolute difference" within the clinical scene. This indis­
cernibility, we believe, is the motor behind a crucial conceptual thread
which cuts across Lacan's teaching in the 1960s: the investigation which
takes him, in quick succession, from the notion of the analyst's desire to
that of the analytical act (Lac an, 2002a; La can, 2002b) and then of the
analyst's discourse. (Lacan, 2007; Lacan, 1999; Lacan, 2011).

desire of the analyst (1963-65)

Institution
analytic act (1966-68)
discourse of the analyst (1969-73)

Concept

The knotting, from 1963 to 1973

These three concepts all have one point in common: they are all dif­
ferent attempts to grasp the point which holds together the psycho­
analytic procedure in all its dimensions simultaneously. However, the
main point of distinction between them, even at a superficial level, is
the extension upon which each conceptualization ties together analysts
and analysands at this impossible intersection of the clinic and the ana­
lytic community.
1 70 S E X A N D N O H -I l N G

The passage from the analyst's desire as an "impure" category to

the notion of the analytic act is itself connected, once more, with the
two other dimensions of psychoanalysis: Lacan's elaborations concern­
ing the object of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1965)-that is, the point of
incidence of analytic interpretation-and the initial steps of the Ecole
Freudiem1e de Paris, which was faced with its first real challenges, such
as the establishing of its processes of admission, formation and study
(Lacan, 1967 /2001). This concept must be distinguished from that of
the desire of the analyst in at least two fundamental ways: first, it seeks
to ground the position of the analyst on its consequences-that is, there
is an analyst only insofar as there are analytical consequences of an
interpretation-and, second, it produces an equivocation regarding the
one who acts-is the analytic act the act of interpreting a symptom or
the act of subjective destitution which falls on the analysand? In both
cases, the idea of an analytic act shifts the axis away from the figure of
the analyst and more towards an indiscernible point within the ana­
lytical setting itself, which is treated as the crucial dimension of the
analytic procedure (Lacan, 2002b) . It was within this framework that
Lacan developed his theory of the passe, which articulated the analytic
act with the traversal of fantasy at the end of analysis-the unbinding
of the objectal dimension of the subject and a third instance capable of
locating it at a representational level-and the passage from analysand
to psychoanalyst.
However, already in 1969, Lacan (2006, p. 296) would claim that he
had failed to formalise the concept of the act and proceeded to construct
his theory of the four discourses. This shift is usually perceived as a
change in focus, as an outward turn, away from psychoanalysis' own
problems, to the political upheavals of May 1968. We should neverthe­
less doubt such a worn-out explanation for at least three reasons: first,
other political events had already stirred the intellectual scene in France
since Lacan had begun his teaching, and never before had he turned
away from strictly psychoanalytic issues in order to comment on them
extensively, as it was supposedly the case with the seminars dedicated
to the four discourses; second, Lacan is quite clear in stating that the
discourse of the analyst, the singular form of social link introduced by
psychoanalysis, was the kernel of this new conceptual moment, and
it alone allowed him to formalise the three other discursive structures
which were so aptly used for certain political and historical analyses
 I C H - P S Y C H O L O G I E U N O MA S S E NA NA L Y S E 1 71

(Lacan, 2007, p. 69); and, finally, in light of our own triadic model,
which brings certain institutional problems of psychoanalysis to the
foreground, the question of a theory of social links which would be dis­
tinct from Freud's theory of group formations becomes a central one
for psychoanalysis itself. It is in accordance with this third reason that
we have no difficulty in grasping thatt he discourse of the analyst was
developed as a new answer to the original "impurity" of the desire of
the analyst, first presented in 1964, and which had been dealt with, in
the notion of analytic act, as an oscillation or indiscernibility between
analyst and analysand.
In the case of this form of discursivity, Lacan proposes a clear for­
malisation, binding the partial object of the drive, of which the analyst
makes a semblance, to the production of a new signifier on the side
of the subject of speech. This structure, which ties together what he
calls "the knowledge of the analyst", the meaningless signifier pro­
duced by the analytic act, the position of the analyst and the subject
of the unconscious, is now articulated as a social link-rendering it
apparent how the metapsychological and clinical dimensions of psy­
choanalysis must be thought together with their social or institutional
counterpart.
This brief overview allows us to at least superficially trace Lacan's
insistent attempts to locate, each time at a slightly different register,
through different formal procedures, the impurity which de-centres
the position of the analyst, making it conditional on an instance, the
subject's division, which paradoxically only exists as such within
analysis. He would soon stop referring to the analyst's discourse as
well, and what is known by exegetes as "Lacan's last teaching" would
supposedly begin from that point on (Miller, 2000; Milner, 1995) . It is
quite interesting to consider that the borromean knot became central
in Lacan's investigations precisely at the moment that the impasse we
have been tracking lost any explicit reference in his concerns. It was also
during this new conceptual moment that the Ecole Freudienne de Paris
slowly disintegrated.
Still, at the very moment of failure of Lacan's original institu­
tional project, we find a very special event which should serve us
as an indelible reminder of the necessity of returning to the chal­
lenge which haunted Lacan at least since 1964. We are indebted here
to none other than Louis Althusser. Althusser had already played a
1 72 SEX A N D NOTH I N G

crucial role in 1963, when he offered to Lacan a new place to teach, his
own students for its audience, and a renewed reading of Marx that
clearly influenced Lacan's subsequent elaborations. But on the 15th of
March of 1980, at the last meeting of the EFP, Althusser showed up­
uninvited-in order to confront the psychoanalysts with the impurity
at the core of their own procedure. This is how Althusser summarised
the affair:

I intervened to say that the affair of dissolving of the E F P was not

my business, but from listening to you, there is a juridical proce­
dure that Lacan has clearly started, whether he wants it or not,
and he must know it, for he knows the law, and the whole busi­
ness is simple: knowing whether one should vote yes or no tomor­
row on the subject of dissolution. On that I have no opinion, but it
is a political act, and such an act is not taken alone, as Lacan did,
but should be reflected on and discussed democratically by all the
interested parties, in the first rank of which are your "masses",
who are the analysands, your "masses" and your "real teachers"
which the analysands are, and not by a single individual in the
secrecy of 5 rue de Lille; otherwise, it's despotism, even if it's
enlightened.
[ . ] Whatever the case, I told them, in point of fact, you are
. .

doing politics and nothing else; you are in the process of doing
politics and nothing else [ . . ]. In any event, when one does politics,
.

as Lacan and you are doing, it is never without consequences. If

you think you are not doing any, wait a little; it will come crashing
down on your heads or rather, and alas, it won't come crashing
down on your heads, since you are well protected and know how
to lie low. In fact, it will come crashing down on the unfortunates
who come to stretch out on your couch and on all their intimates
and the intimates of their intimates and on to infinity. (Althusser,
1999, p. 132)

Althusser 's intervention touches at the two sides of the impurity we

have previously discerned. First, it points to the role of analysands in
the constitution of the analytical procedure, that is, the dependence of
analysts on their "real teachers". Second, it distinguishes the redoubled
or excessive dimension of the knotting of this procedure by naming it
a political act.
 I C H - P S Y C H O L O C I E U N O M A S S E N A N A L YS E 1 73

Institution the po litical surplus

of psychoanalysis

Clinic Concept

Althusser's intervention in 1980

Psychoanalysis, politics and philosophy: the axiom

of the Slovene School
Whatis, then, the enigmatic relation between politics and psychoanalysis?
As we have now learned, at the heart of psychoanalysis itself we find a
certain political surplus, distinct in its import from the political appli­
cations of psychoanalytic theory, as well as from Freudo-Marxist's
ambitions: the immanently psychoanalytic problem of how to bind
together the complex issues surrounding the idea of the desire of the ana­
lyst and the role of the analysands in the composition of the "analytical
mass". Accordingly, we are now in condition to supplement our initial
hypothesis concerning the essential break in Lacan's teaching with a
further proposal, namely, that the problem which guided his work in
the 1960s-and which was named by Althusser, in 1980, as the problem
of the "political act" immanent to the psychoanalytic procedure-is the
open problem that defines what it means to be faithful to Lacan today.
It is only in light of this impasse that we can fully appreciate the stakes
of the passage which has guided our investigation thus far:

[ ] when Lacan introduces the term "desire of the analyst", it is

. . .

in order to undermine the notion that the climax of the analytic

treatment is a momentous insight into the abyss of the Real, the
"traversing of the fantasy", from which, the morning after, we
1 74 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

have to return to sober social reality, resuming our usual social

roles-psychoanalysis is not an insight which can be shared only
in the precious initiatic moments . Lacan's aim is to establish the
possibility of a collective of analysts, of discerning the contours
of a possible social link between analysts [ ]. The stakes here are
. . .

high: is every community based on the figure of a Master [ ], or

. . .

its derivative, the figure of Knowledge [ ]? Or is there a chance

. . .

of a different link? Of course, the outcome of this struggle was a

dismal failure in the entire history of psychoanalysis, from Freud to
Lacan's later work and his E cole-but the fight is worth pursuing.
This is the properly Leninist moment of Lacan-recall how, in his
late writings, he is endlessly struggling with the organizational
questions of the School. The psychoanalytic collective is, of course,
a collective of (and in) an emergency state. [ . ] so what if, in the
. .

constellation in which the Unconscious itself, in its strict Freudian

sense, is disappearing, the task of the analyst should no longer be
to undermine the hold of the Master-Signifie1� but, on the contrary,
to construct/propose /install new Master-Signifiers? (Zi.zek, 2006,
pp. 305-306)

We have reconstructed Lacan's teaching from the standpoint of a wager

not itself explicitly articulated therein, a wager concerning Lacan's
"properly Leninist moment" : the hypothesis that the articulation
between the clinical practice, the Freudian metapsychology and the
psychoanalytic community must be thought, simultaneously, as a psy­
choanalytic and a political problem.
But what would allow us to conceive of this transitivity between
analytic and political concerns without implying thereby a relation
of complementarity between the two fields, like in the case of the
Freudo-Marxists, nor a space extrinsic to both fields, like in the case
of Althusser 's intervention in 1980? What is needed here is a theory
of the non-complementary relation between three fields: politics,
psychoanalysis, and philosophy. And this is precisely the way Zizek
describes his own project, in the introductory pages of his first system­
atic work:

[ . ] the only way to "save Hegel" is through Lacan, and this

. .

Lacanian reading of Hegel and the Hegelian heritage opens up

a new approach to ideology, allowing us to grasp contemporary
 I C H - P S Y C H O L O G J E U N O M A S S E NA NA L Y S E 1 75

ideological phenomena (cynicism, "totalitarianism", the fragile sta­

tus of democracy) without falling prey to any kind of "postmodern­
ist" traps (such as the illusion that we live in a "post-ideological"
condition) . (,Zizek, 2009, p. xxxi)

The structure described here is the following: the psychoanalysis of

Lacan leads us to a new reading of Hegel, which, in turn, allows us to
reconstruct Marx's theory from a renewed standpoint. Note that there
is no direct relation between psychoanalysis and politics, and that phi­
losophy itself does appear as a mediator between the two fields, but
rather as a third domain that is itself vivified by certain concerns proper
to the psychoanalytic field itself. This complex interrelation was then
formalised by Zizek into a proper linkage between the three fields:

[ . . ] Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and con­

.

temporary criticism of ideology. These three circles form a Borromean

knot: each of them cmmects the other two; the place that they all
encircle, the "symptom" in their midst, is of course the author's
(and, as the author hopes, also the reader's) enjoyment of what one
depreciatingly calls "popular culture" [ ] . (Zizek, 2008, p. 2)
. . .

This is why Zizek's position allows him to propose a reading of Lacan

which reveals the intricate problem we have tracked in this investiga­
tion: his own position is defined by a generalisation of Lacan's impasse,
turning it into a veritable theory of the knotting of psychoanalysis,
politics, and philosophy.

"popular culture",
that is, a community
with no inside.

institution

concept Zizekian philosophy

1 76 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

Finally, this preliminary investigation allows us to shed away the

often dismissive remarks regarding Zizek's use of popular culture,
usually taken as a sign of the thinker's superficial engagement with
these three different fields. On the contrary, we can see now that "popu­
lar culture" is the name, within the Zizekian project, for the very form of
the analytic community. It names the general form of the problem with
which Lacan was suddenly confronted in 1964 when, after the creation
of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, he had to extract the consequences for
a theory of the analytic social link of the fact that the unconscious is an
externality which tolerates no interiority. .
"Popular culture" stands in, we might say, for the courage to rise
up to the challenge posed by Lacan to himself when, in "an effort of
analysis in the proper sense of the term", he discerned the necessity for
psychoanalysts-if there is a true desire to inscribe psychoanalysis in
the world-to develop a theory of massenanalyse.

References
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versity Press.
Freud, S. (1921c/2011). Psicologia das Massas e Analise do Eu. Rio d e Janeiro:
Comp anhia das Letras .
Lacan, J. (1958/2006) . The direction of treatment and the principles of its
power. Ecrits. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1963/2006) . Kant with Sade. E crits . New York: W. W. Norton &
Company.
Lacan, J. (1965) . Le Seminaire. Livre XIII. L'objet de Ia psychoanalyse. Unp ub ­
lished seminar.
Lacan, J. (1967 /2001). Proposition du 9 Octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste
de l' E cole. Autres ecrits. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1973) . Le Serninaire. Livre XI. Les Quatre Concept Fondamentaux de Ia
Psychoanalyse. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1978) . Conclusao da s Jornad as de Deauville da EFP. Lettres de
! 'E cole, 23. Paris: EFP.
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EFP.
Lacan, J. (1981). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI. The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
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Lacan, J. (1999). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. Encore. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
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Zizek, S. (2009). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
 C HA P TE R NINE

Th e aesth eti c p rocess as reve rsa l

Christina Soto van der Plas

" novel is a mirror you turn this way and as you go down a path"

A (Stendhal, 1991, p. 80), reads the epigraph at the beginning of

chapter thirteen of The Red and the Black, one of the first and
most famous novels within the realist movement. Stendhal attributes
the phrase to Saint-Real, a seventeenth century French historian, but in
fact this quote is nowhere to be found in his work. Most likely, Stendhal
uses the historian's name only to ironically set the phrase in the mimetic
framework that, at the same time, he is trying to construct, implying
the founding principle of the kind of na'ive "saintly" realism that was
about to become the major novelistic trend during the second half of
the nineteenth century. Thus, under the paradoxical attribution of the
phrase to an historian whose name means "saint of the real", Stendhal
defines a way in which a work of fiction simply reflects the external
world through its characters, plotting, and inner thrust. And yet, later in
the novel, the narrator returns to the image in a long parenthesis adding
that "a novel is a mirror going along a main road. Sometimes it reflects
into your eyes the azure of the sky, sometimes the mud of the quag­
mires on the road. And the man carrying the mirror in the basket on his
back gets accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shows the mire,
and you accuse the mirror! " (Stendhal, 1991, p . 371) This phrase indeed
1 79
1 80 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

signals the way in which realism (Jameson, 2013) 1 has been historically
conceived both as a technique or mode that demystifies the principle of
an intentional, symbolical or allegorical representation (it can "reflect"
either the sky or the mud of the quagmires, without distinction since
there is no longer a pre-established hierarchy), and as being part of the
bourgeois construction of values and ideology (the man being accused
of immorality, the novelist itself, and how he structures bourgeois soci­
ety through its perpetual revolutionising (Zupancic, 2008, p . 151) 2 and
re-axioma tising of relationships) . In this sense, the realist novel Stendhal
is aiming at would not simply be a kind of reflection capable of convey­
ing particular fragments of reality, but more significantly, the road or
path narrative can pave to critique what it is reflecting. The other issue
that comes up in the quote is the problem of the relationship between
art and reality, mediated by ideology in the mimetic or representational
act since, according to the first quote, art would simply be the mirror
held up to the world. But, in fact, what realist art often mirrors is not
only the image reality itself but also "themes and myths of ideologies
through which human beings lived their relations to historical reality"
(Montag, 2003, p. 19).
And yet, every image in the mirror is nothing but the reverse of what
it is reflecting. If one looks in a mirror, one's image reverses: turn up
your left hand and you'll see your right hand going up. Thus, the opera­
tion a "reversal" signals is precisely the inversion or the turning upside
down, the process of reversing or changing to an opposite direction,
position, or course of action. From Marx's famous inversion of Hegel
or Nietzsche's "reversed Platonism" to the more recent coinage and use
of the term by the troika of the Slovenian School of Thought/ rever­
sal has been a philosophical manoeuvre for thinkers to relate to their
own tradition. But how does this operation work and what exactly is it
reversing? How does the aesthetic process operate through a reflection

1 Fredric Jameson's most recent book deals precisely with this problem in its intro­

duction, since realism has been defined in a myriad of ways and in opposition to
different categories, but what he does is take this oppositions and contradictions under
a dialectical scheme to cut across them an propose a shift in terrain and terminology in
the discussion.
2 ZupanCic argues that one of the variants of repetition is the "empty" repetition that

the bourgeois order needs in order to perpetuate itself.

3 Slovenian School of Thought is a term coined and used both by Alain Badiou and Ernesto
Laclau in reference to the work and common ground that the work of Rado Riha, Jelica Sumic,
and the troika, Slavoj ZiZ€k, Alenka Zupancic and Mladen Dolar, among others, share.
 T H E A E S T H E T I C P R O C E S S AS R E V E R S A L 1 81

or the reverse image of reflection? Is a reversal also possible with regards

to representation conceived as reflection?
On this vein, the present essay will try to go beyond the deadlock
that has been imposed by various Marxist readings of literature, which
have often been synonymous with a reflection theory of literature or
art in general, such as the one Stendhal poses in The Red and the Black.
This kind of reading has repeatedly been traced back to Marx's basis­
superstructure metaphor sketched in the preface to A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy (Marx, 1904, pp. 11-12) . As stated by
this hypothesis, art, like every element in the superstructure, reflects
more fundamental alterations in the economic conditions of produc­
tion. Further contributions by Lenin maintain this reflection theory
(Widerspiefelung) . Later, the most important Marxist art theorists of
the twentieth century still place reflection at the centre of aesthetics
(Lukacs, Sartre, Brecht, etc.), and even the less mainstream Marxist writ­
ers from the Frankfurt School to Althusserians are unable or unwilling
to relinquish reflection whenever they encounter the problem of art in
relation to ideology. This problematic frames the question I want to
pose: How is it that art can have political inference while at the same
time being an autonomous sphere? Is it possible to think art beyond the
millenary deadlock of its relationship to reality as reflection? How can
a reversal as the main operation of the aesthetic process work in this
framework?
In what follows, I will propose a somewhat different reading of the
relationship between art and ideology going through Althusser and
Macherey's reading of the relation, focusing on the question of the
possible autonomy of the aesthetic process that functions not simply
as a reversal or inversion of the basic Marxist's hypothesis, but also as
precisely the reversal space of the non-relationship that separates
and links simultaneously, the interval that becomes objectified by
art. Finally, I will discuss very briefly Macedonia Fernandez's posi­
tion against realism to propose a possible way of disentangling the
art-ideology-knowledge knot.

Althusser 's internal distancing

In 1 966, in the wake of his discussion of the four discourses (ideology, aes­
thetic, scientific, and of the unconscious) as an attempt to "come to terms
with the theoretical impact of psychoanalysis, especially through the
1 82 S E X A N D N O TI-I I N G

work of La can" (Bosteels, 2011, p . 62), Althusser published in La Nouvelle

Critique, the cultural journal of the French Communist Party (Montag,
2003, p. 38), an open letter in response to Andre Daspre on the ques­
tion of art, knowledge, and its relationship to ideology. Daspre, a young
professor of French literature, claimed Althusser had overlooked or per­
haps indirectly excluded art's affiliation with ideology as well as how
art can function as critique of ideology. In his brief response, Althusser
rules out from the beginning the possibility of "real art" belonging to
ideology, but also states that art does have a specific relation with ideol­
ogy. To locate the difficulty of art's function with respect to ideology, he
turns immediately to the broader problem of the correlation between art
and knowledge, arguing that art does not replace knowledge, but does
maintain a relationship of difference with it, since "a peculiarity of art is
to 'make us see' [nous donner a voir], 'make us perceive', 'make us feel'
something which alludes reality [ ] they make us see, perceive (but not
. . .

know) something which alludes to reality" (Althusser, 2001, p. 152) . Thus,

art is unable to produce the kind of knowledge that science constructs
(as concepts) even if the object is the same, since it contends with knowl­
edge in a different way, by making the reader or spectator see, perceive
or feel '"conclusions without premises', whereas knowledge makes us
penetrate into the mechanism which produces the 'conclusions' out of
the 'premises'" (Althusser, 2001, p. 153) . Art's function is, then, to oper­
ate as a mechanism that gives us back an image not of reality but of the
ideology in which the work of art is born and from which it detaches,
while alluding to it at the same time. Instead of mirroring the mud or
sky directly, a novel works creating a space of retreat or internal distantia­
tion (Althusser, 2001, p. 152)4 that can be thought more on the line of the
Brechtian distancing effect, rooted in the Russian formalist's ostranenie
or de-familiarisation, rendering visible the representation's technique
and devices in order to force the spectator to become critical within
that space torn away from identification. In a novel, for example, we
should be able to grasp the ideology from which it emerged since it
presupposes a retreat or a distance where criticism would be possible:
it is a visibility device that allows us to see the very own mirror myth of
knowledge (Althusser & Balibar, 1970, p. 19).5 As Althusser says, "it is

4 These te rms are Macherey's, as Althusser quotes in his response to D as pre

.

5 Althusser coins the term "mirror myth of knowledge" to criticise empi r icism and

its reading of "the given" as truth: "We are in a circle-we have relapsed into the mirror
 T H E A E S T H E T I C P R O C E S S AS R E V E R S A L 1 83

certainly possible to say that it is an 'effect' of their art as novelists that

it produces this distance inside the ideology, which makes us 'perceive'
it" (Althusser, 2001, p. 153) .
Art is located somewhere between science (knowledge) and ideology
and assumes a didactic utility of showing from within ideology's func­
tioning, rendering visible the mirror itself as coherent unity or perfect
reflection, or going back to Stendhal's metaphor, of the reality of what
happens in the road. For Althusser, art is the operation that not simply
makes reality visible, but renders perceptible through a decalage or gap
the myths that govern it, as well as our own involvement in it.

Macherey and the partial fragmented mirror

That same year of 1966, Pierre Macherey, a student of Althusser at the
time, had set out to discuss in an article further implications of his
teacher 's conception of Marxism within literature's criticism. In "Lenin,
critic of Tolstoy", Macherey intends to analyse Lenin's essay "Leo
Tolstoy as the mirror of the Russian Revolution", trying to account for a
more systematic Marxist aesthetic. His reading begins by summarising
Lenin's approach or critical method, saying that "the literary work only
makes sense if considered in relation to a determinate historical period
[ . . . ] but it can also be used to illuminate the period [ . ] there is a neces­
. .

sary relationship between the literary work and history, a relationship

which is reciprocal" (Macherey, 2006, p. 120) . It is precisely this recipro­
cal relationship what Macherey, going back to Lenin, characterises as
mirror relationship (Wasiolek, 1 986). 6 But, in another turn of the screw, he
considers the mirror relationship more akin to Lacan's mirror stage, in
which the work of art only reflects fragmented body images of reality
and never a totality, since it springs out from a specific and particu­
lar point of view (that of the author, rooted in his own social position,
determined by what it conceals and not what it reveals). Along these

myth of knowledge as the vision of a given object or the reading of an established text,
neither of which is ever anything but transparency itself-the sin of blindness belonging
by right to vision as much as the virtue of clear-sightedness to the eye of man."
6 Lenin says in his essay that "One could hardly c all a mirror that which ostensibly

does not reflect the phenomenon correctly. But our revolution is an extraordinarily com­
plex phenomenon. [ . ] And if we have before us a really great artist, at least some of the
. .

essential aspects of the revolution are bound to have found a in his works" (Wasiolek,
1986, p. 20).
1 84 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

lines, Macherey encounters it is necessary to "pose the problem of reali­

sation [mise en forme], which involves more than a mechanical trans­
lation" (Macherey, 2006, p. 129). Again, it is not about the mechanical
gestalt image that guarantees the permanence of the I, but the symbolic
operation of realisation or shaping. One of the most appealing solutions
he sketches out to unravel this problem comes from concrete analysis
of literary works which according to him "will use neither the scientific
concepts used to describe the historical process, nor ideological con­
cepts. It will require new concepts which can register the literariness
of the text" (Macherey, 2006, p. 133) . Avoiding the problem of "literari­
ness" one could still say this is an important task of criticism: elaborate
new concepts able to register the literary or artistic phenomenon and
build a vocabulary capable of conveying not only the meaning, but more
importantly, the form of what is being studied in all its complexity.
Macherey goes on further by proposing that the relationship between
the mirror and what it reflects, historical reality, is "partial: the mirror
selects, it does not reflect everything. The selection itself is not fortu­
itous, it is symptomatic; it can tell us about the nature of the mirror"
(Macherey, 2006, p. 135) . As such, the work as mirror is a privileged
way of encompassing reality not as an instrument of knowledge, but
as an "indispensable revelation, a revealer, and it is criticism that helps
us decipher these images in the mirror. The secret of the mirror is to be
sought in the form of its reflections; how does it show historical reality,
by what paradox does it make visible its own blindness without actu­
ally seeing itself?" (Macherey, 2006, p. 136)
Then, reality is as fragmented as the image in the mirror, and escapes
the reflective ideological tendency towards a totality. By rendering
absences "present (as absences), by making these silences audible
(as silences)" (Hallward, 2012, p. 128) this kind of criticism works as a
privileged domain of ideology critique. The trouble with Macherey's
exposition is that it still repeats Althusser's concern as well as Lenin's
reflection theory even if in a displaced notion of what art reflects, since
the work of art " embodies, expresses, translates, reflects, renders" (Macherey,
2006, p. 133). Isn't this precisely what the ideological and instrumental
use of literature is? The verbs he uses also have the drawback of being
"mirroring" verbs, that is, in its particular semantic field literature
must be realist or it will not serve a further political purpose. Under this
scheme, the aesthetic process as such has no autonomy and is bound
to work in relation to reality, even if this relation is not one of analogy
 THE AESTHETIC PROCESS AS REVERSAL .1 8 5

and is contradictory, since "the work is certainly determined by its rela­

tion to ideology" (Macherey, 2006, p. 149, emphasis added) . This kind
of determination or causality is linear, since the superstructure, art, is
determined by the economic base and that is why before ending with a
Tolstoian image remembering Anna Karenina and the train, Macherey
undertakes a strong defence of a certain kind of realism in literature:
"in this sense literature can be called a mirror: in displacing objects it
retains their reflection. It projects its thin surface on to the world and
history. It passes through them and breaks them. In its train arise the
images" (Macherey, 2006, p . 151). Certainly, the mirror is broken and
displaced, but it is still a mirror.

Badiou through the looking glass : scission towards autonomy

The same year that both Macherey's essay "Lenin, critic of Tolstoy" and
Althusser 's letter in response to Daspre on the question of art circu­
lated, Alain Badiou published his very first philosophical text entitled
"The Autonomy of the aesthetic process."7 The article was published
in a special issue on "Art, language and class struggle" of the Cahiers
Marxistes-Leninistes edited by members of the ujcml at the E cole
Normale Superieure in rue d'Ulm (Bosteels, 2013, p. 30) . Not surpris­
ingly, in this text Badiou already breaks away from the positions on
art and its relationship to ideology and science held by Althusser and
developed further by Pierre Macherey, aiming not only at a reversal, but
at a scission.
What Badiou delimits and demarcates is the field, first of art as such,
and later of what he will refer to as the aesthetic process. He sums
down its autonomy with respect to ideology, science and the effects it
has in aesthetic practice itself. In an initial manoeuvre, Badiou exposes
Macherey and Althusser 's arguments in the first couple of thesis of
his article, making them more radical and conclusive, rejecting the
assumption shared by them that a work of art relates to and operates
on a reality external to it (Hallward, 2012, p. 128). The first statement is
that art is not ideology (Badiou, 2013, p. 32) . Against the Marxist tra­
dition of reflection theory, he contends that art does not "reflect" the

7 Be fore this, Badiou had published a couple of novels en ti tled Almagestes (1964) and

Portulans (1967) . T11e text is dated June 1965, but was published in the Cahiers Marxistes­
Leninistes in July 1966.
1 86 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

real of history, but rather the aesthetic process splits from the specular
relationship, creating its own logic. As said before, Althusser already
criticised empiricism and its notion of "the given" as truth, the mirror
myth of knowledge. Badiou agrees that indeed the aesthetic effect is an
imaginary correspondence and it does not equal the real, but adds that
it rather is the real itself of the reflection.
The second statement is that art is not science (Badiou, 2013, p. 32) . In
this uneven ground, Badiou conceives the aesthetic effect as something
that is not knowledge. In the Marxist tradition in general, art is only an
ideological form among others with the only difference and privilege of
being a critical practice of the ideology it renders visible. Thus, the work
of art would contain a theoretical essence veiled by an ideological and
imaginary existence and the critical task would be, in this case, to deter­
mine the current or historical ideology and unveil the theoretical essence
that signals the singularity of such a work of art. This is a dogmatic
and limited vision and falls back on ideology itself. Badiou problema­
tizes in this model of the aesthetic process, among other things, the fact
that it is still an instrumental conception of art where it functions only
as an imaginary mechanism capable of revealing the contradictions or
veiling in its "core" the hidden truth of ideology, paradoxically reveal­
ing itself in the aesthetic formulation. There would be no specificity of
the field of art; it would only be one among others of the ideologically
permeated discursive forms. For Macherey and Althusser, as Badiou
says, it is still about the visible of ideology which is not known but shown,
and thus art is a device to show or render visible, to frame the ideo­
logical, but there is neither a division nor complete autonomy. Here is
where Badiou's intervention is fundamental, since it declares from the
outset the separation of both ideology and art, demarcating art's "func­
tion", which does not mean that it does not have any political potential.
The aesthetic process elaborates in itself the ideological contents, aes­
theticizing them. This is the principle of "regional autonomy" of the
aesthetic process where the "raw material" needed for the aesthetic pro­
duction is already aesthetically (and not ideologically) produced.
The third statement is fundamental for the development of Badiou's
argument; in it he affirms "we must conceive of the aesthetic process nor
as a redoubling but as a reversal [retournement] . If ideology produces
an imaginary reflection of reality, then the aesthetic effect produces in
return [en retour] ideology as imaginary reality. We might say that art
repeats in the real the ideological repetition of this real. Nevertheless
 T H E AEST H ET I C PROCESS AS REVERSAL 1 87

this reversal does not produce the real; it realizes its reflection" (Badiou,
2013, p. 34) . This quote uses a strong Lacanian vocabulary which is very
productive to think the way in which art not only functions at the level
of the imaghi.ary, or even the symbolic, but rather it works with the
real at the level of repetition and no longer of representation. It is also
important to note the conceptual movement from the reflection of real­
ity to the repetition of the real, where the real, as Alenka Zupancic says,
is "not something to be revealed under the always somehow deceiv­
ing reality (as essentially imaginary, or 'fantasmatic'), but something to
be constructed (which is different from being represented or imitated)"
(ZupanCic, 2005, p. 177) .
The shift is very subtle yet tremendously powerful, since it is now
about the logic of the repetition as fundamentally different from the
logic of representation. If representation still relies on linear causality,
repetition is able to free itself from this kind of determination. It is even
possible to say that in art repetition functions as a kind of retroversion
that turns the aesthetic materials back upon themselves, realising the
reflection of the real. As a result, the autonomy of the aesthetic process
"blocks us from conceiving it as relation" (Badiou, 2013, p. 35) where
no element of the process is by itself ideological or aesthetic. Badiou's
argument suggests that "the problem of the passage from ideology to
art cannot be posed as such" since "an element is produced as ideo­
logical in the structure of the aesthetic mode of production" (Badiou,
2013, p. 35) . 8
I won't go further into the rest of the statements, where Badiou anal­
yses what it means for the aesthetic process to be autonomous, what he
understands by aesthetic process ("the combination of factors whose
effect is to operate the reversal" (Badiou, 2013, p. 38)), and how it drives
or handles the open or closed ideological statements to produce both a
signification or presence effects in a double articulation. But I do want to
emphasise that Badiou's conception of the aesthetic process has no his­
torical or genealogical dimension where one could place this manoeu­
vre of autonomy, since the question about the historical conditions that
give a certain value to autonomy is not a question for him at this point.
It would be important to contextualise this reversal or self-referentiality

8 It would also be very productive to read this autonomy and self-referentiality with

respect to Badiou's later work, where truth is self-referential and universal.

1 88 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

within the aesthetic process or, if it is possible, to conceive it as an a

priori for all art.

Fernandez's novel in reverse

All along the twentieth century there are artistic attempts that deal with
what Badiou later will call in The Century "the passion for the real". It is
possible to say that one way of doing this is by distancing or breaching
the real from fiction or representation, a framing device, and as we have
seen is how Macherey and Althusser conceive art's critical function
of ideology. The other path might be the one that Badiou only briefly
begins to sketch out by delineating the autonomy of the aesthetic pro­
cess that operates as a reversal of the previous proposition, namely, that
the aesthetic effect produces "in return (en retour) ideology as imaginary
reality" (Badiou, 2013, p. 34). In this way, we can say these two pos­
sibilities might work either as a broken mirror or as a reversed mirror
that manages to go through the looking glass, somehow detached from
reality. And yet, as Bruno Bosteels has suggested elsewhere (Bosteels,
2012), isn't precisely this de-mystificatory assurance of an internal dis­
tancing, privileged within art, that has turned out to be the very model
of ideology's functioning? Isn't our dismissal or ironic distance as spec­
tators or critics our way of dealing with our own standpoint and the
pleasure we get from the detachment or the illusion of there being some­
thing hidden beneath ideology which we are capable of "revealing"?
We take pleasure in revealing the "true hidden meaning" of a contradic­
tion within ideology because that is precisely the ideological operation
of ironical distancing and because what we can't see as spectators or
readers is that the place of the "thing that always flits away back behind
the other side of the mirror of representational knowledge, is nothing
other than the gaze as the blind spot constituting the place of the subject
within the observed picture of things" (Zupancic, 2003, p. 106) . What is
missing from the previous accounts is precisely the place of the subject
which is included through exclusion from the aesthetic process, even if
reversed.
Let us take now an exceptional counter-example to Stendhal's mirror
and mire realism from the masterpiece of the Argentinian writer,
Macedonia Fernandez, The Museum of Eterna's Novel, a text made
up mostly of prologues, prefaces, and notes of the author before the
 T H E AESTHETIC PROCESS AS REVE RSAL 1 89

supposed novel. h1 fact, the novel itself is what we least would classify
as a novel since the characters are devoid of content; there is no plot
but endless conversations and reflections on literature and other topics.
In Macedonia's Museum it's possible to say that is in fact not only a
reversal of ideology as imaginary or art exhibiting its own process, but
perhaps more the work of a displaced repetition, including the sub­
ject's blind spot constantly through the different "readers" the narrator
conceives. In the following lengthy quote, Macedonia first does away
with realism as the mechanical reproduction of mirror copies to signal
at the end what he believes is the role that reflective works of art have
within reality:

Either Art has nothing to do with reality, or it's more than thati
that's the only way it can be real, just as elements of Reality are not
copies of one another. All artistic realism seems to arise from the
coincidence that there are reflective surfaces in the worldi therefore
Literature was invented by store clerks, which is to say, copyists.
What is called Art looks more like the work of a mirror salesman
driven to obsession, who insinuates himself into people's houses,
pressuring them to put his mission into action with mirrors, not
things. In so many moments of our lives there are scenes, plots,
charactersj the mirror-artwork calls itself realist and intercepts our
gaze, imposing a copy between reality and ourselves. (Fernandez,
2010, pp. 115-116)

Macedonia Fermi.ndez indeed diagnoses the problem of realism and

reflection theory accurately, since art is conceived as a mere copy or
instrumental device for a critique. Instead of this, the Argentinian
author proposes a more direct action with mirrors themselves in reality,
a certain pressure that drives to obsession the gap between fiction as
reflection and reality. As said before, it would be more about the repeti­
tion and insistence of the real and not anymore about representation as
mimesis. Fernandez's work challenges realism but not by fragmenting
its mirror, but by proposing the autonomy of fiction that has a certain
effect in reality.
Art as Macedonia conceives it can only operate as a reversal. But it
is a reversal not of ideology but of its own reality, including the blind
spot constituting the place of the subject within the observed picture of
1 90 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

things. Thus, the autonomy of art becomes quite literal when he pro­
poses that there can be a novel walking on the streets:9

It would be even better if I had put into action the "novel that went
out in the street" that I had proposed to a few artist fiends. We would
have really increased impossibilities in the city. The public would
have seen our "scraps of art", novelistic scenes unfolding by them­
selves in the streets, catching glimpses of one another among the
"scraps of the living", in sidewalks, doorways, domiciles, bars, and
the public would believe it saw "life"; it would dream the novel but
in reverse: in this case, the novel's consciousness is its fantasy; its
dream the external execution of its scenes. (Fernandez, 2010, p. 12)

The novel walking in the streets is the inverse or reversed realisation

of Stendhal's mirror along the road. Instead of reflecting reality in
Fernandez's anti-novel, the reflection goes out in the street. The internal
distance is breached when the symbolic is collapsed with the real, but it
does not mean that the critical potential of art is lost. Instead, we have
a "novel in reverse" that repeats the gesture of autonomy or art's dou­
ble elaboration of ideological and aesthetical materials in its process.
Hence, the reversal works when there is a suspension of the "mimetic
rules" and the real as "scraps of the living" witness art's autonomy.
The mirror reflection is the impossibility where there is no difference
between reality and what is reflected in the mirror.
Macedonio Fernandez's work, in general and with regards to this
particular matter, is a possible leeway opening up a different reading
of the relationship between art and ideology, as well as knowledge as
effect. The museistic novel not only makes us see how conclusions are
derived from premises, but also manages to have an effect in reality
by eliminating the distance between both. There is no ironic distance;
it is the "'over-realisation' with which we pass over to the other side"
(Zupancic, 2005, p. 184). And, at the same time, the novel walking in the
street is the complete autonomy of the aesthetic process reflecting back
upon itself and repeating a reversed symbolic structure. This, of course,
has more consequences that perhaps will have to go out to the streets to
signal our own impossibilities.

9 This, of course, reminds us of the anti-structuralist graffiti on a wall in Paris during

1968, discussed by Lacan: "Structures do not walk on the streets!"
 T H E A E S T H ET I C PROCESS AS R EV E RSAL 1 91

References
Althusse1� L. (2001). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Althusser, L., & Balibar, E. (1970) . Reading Capital. London: NLB .
Badiou, A. (2013). The autonomy of the aesthetic process. Radical Philosophy,
1 78.
Bosteels, B. (2011). Badiou and Politics . Durham: Duke University Press.
Bosteels, B. (2012) . Introduction. In: dOC UMENTA (13) . Some Highly Specu­
lative Remarks on Art and Ideology. Ostfildern: Ha* Cantz, 2012.
Bosteels, B. (2013). An introduction to Alain Badiou's "The autonomy of the
aesthetic process" . Radical Philosophy, 1 78.
Fernandez, M. (2010). The Museum of E terna 's Novel: The First Good Novel.
Rochester: Open Letter Books.
Hallward, P. (2012). Badiou and the logic of interruption. Concep t and
Form, val 2: Interviews and Essays on the Cahiers pour 1' Analyse. London:
Verso.
Jameson, F. (2013) . The An tinomies of Realism. London: Verso.
Lenin, V. I. (1908). Leo Tolstoy as the mirror of the Russian Revolution. In:
E. Wasiolek. Critical Essays on Tolstoy. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co, 1986.
Macherey, P. (2006). A Theory of Literary Production. New York: Routledge.
Marx, K. (1904) . A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Chicago:
Charles H. Kerr and Company.
Montag, W. (2003). Louis Althusser. Hampshire : Palgrave Macmillan.
Stendhal (199 1 ) . The Red and the Black. A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Cen tury.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ZupanCic, A. (2003) . The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two .
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Zupancic, A. (2005) . Reversals of nothing: The case of the sneezing corpse.
Filozofski Vestnik, 26(2) .
Zupancic, A. (2008). The Odd One In . Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT
Press.
C H A P T E R TEN

Love, psych oa n a l ys i s, a n d l efti st po l i ti ca l

o n to l ogy

Daniel Tutt

n his essay, "Potentialities," Giorgio Agamben divides philosophy

I into two lines, what he names the line of "transcendence" and the
line of "immanence". He writes of "a line of immanence (Spinoza,
Deleuze, Foucault, & Nietzsche) and a line of transcendence (Kant,
Husser}, Levinas, Derrida) " (Agamben, 1999, p. 23). What characterises
each group are a common set of theoretical tendencies in how they theo­
rise ontology, or being qua being. Procedures of division, antagonism, or
contingency characterise the sphere of ontology in the camp of transcen­
dence, and their concepts tend to rely upon a strong theory of the act/
event. For the immanence camp, on the other hand, ontology has com­
pletely absorbed the sphere of the political and a rupture with ontology
is typically rendered impossible. In the Empire series, Hardt and Negri
are clearly working within the immanence camp. For example, they con­
clude that ontology has absorbed the political completely; therefore, all
that is political is also biopolitical (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 26) . Similarly,
Agamben's own political ontology has drawn out the consequences of
this immanence-based orientation towards ontology as his thinking
examines the subjective and juridical status of human life outside of the
hegemonic juridical order. Yet for Agamben, homo saccer, or the excluded
citizen, is both within and outside of the biopolitical order, inhabiting
193
1 94 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

the threshold between bare life and socio-political life. Every effort to
re-think this political space must come with a clear awareness that we
no longer know anything of the classical distinctions between zoe and
bios. Agamben argues that we must think ontology and politics beyond
any relation of difference, which is why he aims to think the political as
a non-relation and goes even further than Heidegger in seeking a "new
non-foundational and non-relational ontology" (Strauthausen, 2006,
p. 22) . This makes a theory of the event nearly impossible in Agamben's
work, and this tendency is common amongst the immanence camp
more generally.

A theory of transcendence: leftist political ontology

Oliver Marchart and Carsten Strauthausen have named a certain
post-Marxist strand of contemporary political ontology in continen­
tal thought "leftist ontology", a specific type of political ontology that
has largely abandoned the Marxist idea of the "relative autonomy" of
cultural politics (i.e., of thought) vis-ii-vis the economy. Leftist political
ontology in contemporary theory, "considers the potential productivity
of thought to disrupt the status quo, including its economic structure"
(Strauthausen, 2006, p. 12). According to Frederic Jameson, leftist
ontology "stops dialectics, embraces paradox, and ruptures thought"
(Strauthausen, 2006, p. 15) . It inaugurates a different kind of thought on
ontology because it thinks thought's relation to being differently than
the long line of left-Heideggerianism, and this difference implies a new
and distinctive role for the foundation of the social domain and for the
domain of the political.
This essay does not seek to provide an exhaustive account of leftist
ontology; rather, it seeks to lay down the basic contours of its thought
and its consequences for thinking politics and ontology. While leftist
ontology is largely seeking a way out of Heideggerian ontological dif­
ference, it is important to sketch out the ways that the spheres of the
"social", "politics", and the "political" are developed in relation to
ontology. In general, the social is thought as synonymous to the realm of
politics in the "ontic" sense-consisting largely of a play of differences
amongst finite beings. One of the defining characteristics of leftist ontol­
ogy is that thought can only occur if thought itself identifies substance
rather than form, i.e., if thought identifies with and alters the ontologi­
cal (the political) and not only the ontic (the social). The political is thus
 L O V E , P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S , A N D L E F T I S T P O L I T I C A L O N T O L O G Y 1 95

thought as the sphere of the ontological, similar to what Heidegger

referred to as Beying, or a sphere where a deeper form of ontological
rupture or change comes about. Thought, as such, now contains the
capacity for- thinking political change. Another way of stating this is
that thought must act as a part of substance (the political/ ontological)
rather than try to merely reflect the social, which is defined as the "state
of the situation" for Badiou, or what Ernesto Laclau simply refers to as
the "social".
Despite strong resistances to Heideggerian ontology, particularly
in Badiou's and Zizek's work, it is still nonetheless helpful to frame
the return to ontology in leftist ontology more broadly along the
Heideggerian distinction between the ontological and the ontic. In this
framework, the social is a neutralised sphere of being(s), where there
exists, to use the metaphor of signifier relations, an inability of any mas­
ter signifier to assume a quilting point. The relation between the ontic
(social) and the ontological (political) can be thought using Saussure's
curve, which Lacan highlights in Seminar III on psychosis. The top
curve consists of a flow of objects, feelings, crying, etc., what Lacan calls
"thoughts", while the bottom of the curve contains signifiers-each in
isolation to one another and metonymically separate. For the psychotic,
a quilting point, or a button tie between the two curves, or something
that can produce meaning, occurs when there is a linkage between a
signifier and a signified, but this never occurs and remains omitted in
the field of psychosis. This same relation can be graphed onto the social
and the political, wherein the social is a realm of pure signifiers in met­
onymic relation to one another, while the ontological is composed of
pure affective, imaginary signified relations. The signifier is what Lacan
says "polarizes meanings, hooks onto them, groups them in bundles"
(Lacan, 1993, p. 291), and while a signifier polarises meanings, it is also
what creates meanings (Lacan, 1993, p. 292) . In leftist ontology, the
social is a psychotic formation, stunted from achieving emancipatory
potential, which is why a theory of transcendence, or thought as break
and rupture is so central to thinking political ontology.

Love beyond tragedy: towards a humanised political /ave

How does psychoanalysis connect with the field leftist ontology?
Where might psychoanalysis be aligned within the two lines of tran­
scendence and immanence that Agamben sketches? When Lacan was
1 96 SEX A N D N OT H I N G

asked whether psychoanalysis has an ontology, he responded that the

unconscious has an ontological function, but he stated that, "the gap of
the unconscious may be said to be pre-ontological" (Lacan, 1981, p . 30).
As Justin Clemens has persuasively argued, what psychoanalysis gives
to the question of ontology is love, despite the well-known maxim that
love is always giving what one does not have. While love is the central
affect in psychoanalysis as it is what makes up the transference relation
between the analyst and the analysand, there are two different types of
love according to Lacan: love of Eros and love at the site of the social
bond. In his Group Psychology, Freud argues that it is the love for the
father that sustains the social bond. Mikkel Botch-Jacobsen develops
an important, albeit controversial, argument in The Freudian Subject
that counters Freud's central claim of love's role at the site of the social
bond. For Borch-Jacobsen, the social bond of love with the father leaves
no room for thinking an egalitarian, or even an emancipatory social
relation as he argues the father is in all cases reducible to a totalitarian
leader. While he claims that Freud maintains a reliance on Oedipus and
castration as a solution to the impasse of the violence inherent to every
social bond, it is the very basis of Freud's theory of desire-which he
sees as mimetic and inherently narcissistic-that ends up demanding a
totalitarian master or father to cement the social bond.
Putting Botch-Jacobsen's critique to the side for a moment and turn­
ing to Lacan's use of love, we find an all-together different set of theo­
retical approaches to the question of the social and the social bond. The
argument in what follows is that Lacan's theory of love places love
as a solution to the problem of jouissance and to the break of "imagi­
nary servitude" that riddles political emancipation projects. The conse­
quences of this are that psychoanalytic love is compatible to a theory
of transcendence, where breaks, cuts and ruptures with ontology are
central operations. Nowhere is this use of love as a political operation
more apparent in the work of post-Lacanians, or Lacanian influenced
thinkers, "love-as-transcendence" in the thought of Zizek, Zupancic,
Badiou, and Nancy. These highly diverse set of thinkers each share an
important theoretical touchstone in Lacanian psychoanalysis, despite
their theoretical differences and debates amongst one another. After
developing a footing in leftist ontology and Lacan's theory of love,
we will turn to each of these thinkers to examine more closely how
love is deployed in their thinking on the political and the question of
the subject.
 L O V E , P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S , A N D L E F T I S T P O L I T I C A L O N T O L O G Y 1 97

Whether Lacan's teachings present us with a more radical politics of

emancipation from capitalism is at best an ambiguity in his work, and
at worst, political emancipation is a pessimistic position on the side of
impossibility. In Television, Lacan famously said that to denounce capi­
talism, "I reinforce it-by normalizing it, that is, perfecting it" (Lacan,
1990, pp. 13-14) . Lacan thus paints the revolutionary as a tragic heroine,
who learns that "human jouissance depends on a transgressive move­
ment that ultimately reaffirms the very laws, social norms, or taboos
against which it is directed" (Starr, 1995, p. 57). Lacan famously told
the protestors, who crashed his seminars during the May 1968 period,
many of whom were asking for clarification on what he means by his
theory of the "Name-of-the-Father", that they secretly desire a new
master, despite their aversion to masters. There is a certain cliche of
Lacan's point as it pertains to the question of mastery, but it nonetheless
presents us with the haunting question of whether all political emanci­
pation is dependent on a master in order to facilitate a break, to pose a
rupture with a social order, and to open a new space of desire.
As Peter Starr argues in his essay "The tragic ear of the intellectual",
Lacan's warning to the revolutionaries of May 1968 indicates the revo­
lutionary subject's very inability to replace the master 's injunction.
Starr comments that the "liberationist ideology" of the 1968ers "veils
the master's power, thereby fulfilling the foremost precondition to its
continuing function as power" (Starr, 1995, p. 57). The problem Starr
pinpoints in Lacan's discussion of the master 's discourse is the way
that "the very intensity of the revolutionary desire that the rebel sends
into the communal system comes to repeat itself, on the far side of the
Other 's lack of response" (Starr, 1995, p. 58) . The rebel or revolution­
ary shows a love for escaping the master 's discourse, but this love for
an escape or rupture with the master 's discourse always goes to pres­
ent the revolutionary with "the specular image of the rebel's ego ideal"
(Starr, 1995, p. 59) . As Starr points out: "The knowledge of a fully self­
present and potentially consummate revolutionary moment, which the
militant originally supposes of the Other, can only be a narcissistic illu­
sion, an inverted reflection of the revolutionary's ego ideal in the placid
mirror of the subject presumed to know" (Starr, 1995, p. 59).
To return to the question of love, we find that love is what enters
at the point of inevitable specular misrecognition to sever and break
with this imaginary conflict. As Lacan comments: "psychoanalysis
alone recognizes the knot of imaginary servitude that love must always
1 98 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

untie anew or sever" (Lacan, 1949 /2006, p . 80) . In his later work when
the category of pleasure and jouissance become more and more preva­
lent, love is an affect capable of humanising an otherwise monstrous
jouissance, and I argue that this humanisation of love is what enables
psychoanalysis to think politics outside of the tragic key. What inter­
ests us in this context is how a "humanised love" is related to leftist
ontology, specifically in the line of transcendence as we have outlined it
above. The first indication of Lacan's use of love beyond tragedy comes
about in Seminar VIII, a seminar dedicated to transference, where he
claims that love makes the real of desire accessible without its tragic
dimension. This transition is evident in the turn from ethics to love in
Seminar VII on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis in 1965, to Seminar VIII in 1966
on transference love. As ZupanCic has pointed out, Lacan's ontological
theory of jouissance during the ethics seminar, results in a "heroism
of lack" paradigm, wherein all objects lack and "reality is constituted
based on a lack in the real" (ZupanCic, 2000, p. 241) .
Politics i s tragic for a would-be revolutionary because t o follow the
maxim from the ethics seminar, "do not compromise on your desire",
the result is self-defeat and tragedy. However, if we add the condition
of love to this situation, the subject's relation to desire and to jouissance
is transformed. Because jouissance in this tragic mode always relegates
the Other to the real, the Other materialises its presence as an excess.
Thus, to renounce jouissance, there is always some surplus enjoyment
left over and this means that every resistance to power will thus always
result in both subjectivation and de-subjectivation, since some remain­
der of the primordial lie (of desire) always clouds the scene of action
(the ethical). But in the second period of Lacan's ontology, he formu­
lates jouissance as that which subtracts from lack, which is what the
concept of the drive is aiming at (Zupancic, 2000, p. 242) . Pure desire,
or monstrous jouissance, what Freud calls the das Ding (the Thing) is
found at the end of the metonymic chain of desire-always pushed to
a "that's not it" . To think the final "that's not it" would be to think the
abolishment of the cause of desire itself. In this second period, Lacan's
maxim, "do not compromise on your desire", is achieved by sacrificing
the cause of one's desire itself. This moment of pure desire occurs in the
frame of the subject's fundamental fantasy, and it occurs as a psycho­
analytic act on the side of drive (ZupanCic, 2000, pp. 244-245).
When Lacan writes in the unpublished seminar Angoisse, "only love­
sublimation makes it possible to humanize jouissance" (Lacan, 2014)
 L O V E , P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S , A N D L E F T I S T P O L I T I C A L O N T O L O G Y 1 99

we should immediately note how different this version of sublimation

is from the type of sublimation he speaks about in the Seminar VII on
ethics, which is tied to sublimation as a raising of the object to the dignity
of the Thing: This earlier type of sublimation is based on the model of
elevation of the idealised object. Love-sublimation, on the other hand,
makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire. This is a type
of sublimation that "humanises jouissance" as Lacan states (Zupancic,
2004, p. 140), and this capacity for love to humanise jouissance means
that there is a split at the heart of love, similar to comedy. The split
inherent to love-and what makes it such an interesting ethico-political
category-is its capacity to both rupture the subject in the real, while
also maintaining a rapport with the most banal object in the Other. The
Other is sustained in love while the real is touched, but this touch does
not result in a thrown out of jointness of the subject, as we find in the
ethics seminar. Love is no longer on the side of the impossible desire that
one must follow into the depths of the unknown as we find in the Greek
models of Antigone and Oedipus, but is now, because of love, the site
of work and of struggle.
In this context, it's helpful to distinguish desire from love, and what
better way to frame the difference than with reference to Plato's met­
aphor of love in the Symposium. Plato's short fable imagines a hand
reaching out to clutch a rose, wherein the rose represents beauty and the
desired outcome of reaching out for the rose is that the hand receives the
rose in an embrace, and thus attain the object of desire. But imagine that
instead of the clutch-taking place, what actually takes place is that the
rose reaches back to the hand that reaches for it and embraces the hand
in another type of embrace than the one desired. It is this alternative
embrace that produces love for Plato. The lesson is clear: love is not
achieved when the hand that reaches for the beautiful rose meets the
rose itself, for this would be desire.
Love occurs when the hand that reaches for the beautiful rose experi­
ences a second hand-from the rose itself-that reaches back to it and
grasps it. In this fable, love does not elevate the One of desire, which
would have been the outcome of the unity of the object of desire with
that of the desiring subject wishing to obtain it. Love is rather that
which gives the subject a rapport with desire. If the rose was obtained
it would not satisfy desire, as desire always slips away into the met­
onymic chain, where it can never be pinned down, and is in a continual
relation of "that's not it" . Desire is always a desire of the Othe1� making
2 00 SEX AND N O H -I l N G

its object unobtainable in a way different than that. of love. Love is of

the Two precisely because it sustains desire, and gives the subject a
link to their desire. This is why love is such a crucial affect for working
through La can' s ethical maxim, "do not compromise on your desire", as
it enables a proximity to the das Ding of desire-that monstrous desire
where the Other (the Neighbour) resides.

Love-as-transcendence
As we have developed at the outset, the concept of transcendence
is what constitutes a break from the domain of the social, and as we
find in Lacan's work, love is an ethical procedure that both severs the
knot of imaginary servitude to the Other and humanises the mon­
strous jouissance of the Other. If we consider Hegel's political and
ethical thought, we also find a political ontology that develops out of
the master-slave dialectic. The master-slave dialectic is a theory that
accounts for a mode of coming into being with the Other. In Jean-Luc
Nancy's reading of Hegel, The Restlessness of the Negative, he argues that
love is the operative term in the encounter with the Other for Hegel. But
love, Nancy notes, is a tautology in Hegel, as the work of the negative
must manifest itself as struggle, and love becomes the truth of struggle.
Love is a tautology because love is what realises love-in a dialectical
fashion-through the upheaval of its own struggle over the appropria­
tion of the common (Hegel, 1977, p. 535) . To apply this dialectic to left­
ist ontology, love is what opens a wedge between the two domains of
the social and the political, opening the space of the common, or the
sphere of the political. When Hegel writes that the absolute is close to
us (Nancy, 2002, p. 88), this is an indication of Hegel's Christian integra­
tion of love into his larger philosophy. Love is central to Hegel's theory
of becoming, as "love designates the recognition of desire by desire",
and since "desire is the tension of the coming of the Other as the becom­
ing of the self" love is a negativity-for-itself (Nancy, 1991, p. 63). Desire,
unlike love, demands nothing but the Other, whereas love is a source
of becoming itself. This is why Hegel defines the position of love as
beyond any notion of alterity and he grounds his theory of love on the
reciprocity between two agents. Perhaps Hegel's most precise defini­
tion of love is, "having in the other one's own subsistence" (Nancy,
2002, pp. 86-87)-i.e., love maintains an ethical status in relation to his
larger theory of ethical life.
 L O V E , P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S , A N D L E F T I S T P O L I T I CA L O N TO L O G Y 201

Nancy's conception o f the common in the Inoperative Community is

formed by subtraction, and we must read this as a revision of Hegel:
that the community is subtraction itself (Nancy, 1991, p . xxx) . Nancy's
conception ·of subtraction is a revision of Hegel as it thinks the "we"
with no reference to Hegelian objective spirit, and thus unlike Hegel,
Nancy posits a non-relational ontology, through a re-interpretation of
Heideggerian mitsein (being-with) . Nancy's non-relational ontology
collapses alterity, and in its wake, otherness is stripped bare, and what
emerges in this space of break is love. As Nancy writes: "The encounter
with the Other only takes place with the stripping bare of every cultural
predicate: love is indissociable with the nudity of the other 's taking
place" (Nancy, 1991, p. xxvii) .
In his masterful essay, "Shattered love", Nancy writes that love is
that which exceeds the sublime. Love is an act of transcendence that ful­
fils nothing: it cuts, it breaks, and exposes so that there is no domain or
instance of being where love would fulfil itself. Love happens endlessly
in the withdrawal of its presentation:

The love break simply means this: that I can no longet� whatever
presence to myself I may maintain or that sustains me, pro-pose
myself to myself (nor im-pose myself on another) without remains,
without something of me remaining, outside of me. This signifies
that the immanence of the subject (to which the dialectic always
returns to fulfill itself, including in what we call "intersubjectivity"
or even "commw1ication" or "communion") is opened up, bro­
ken into-and this is what is called, in all rigor, a transcendence.
(Nancy, 1991, p. 97)

From a Lacanian perspective, love is thought as a mode of transcen­

dence. As Alenka ZupanCic writes, the true miracle of love consists in,
"preserving the transcendence in the very accessibility of the Other"
(ZupanCic, 2004, pp. 133-134) . Desire would be what we might intui­
tively think of as love, which is the transformation of some banal object
into a sublime object (ZupanCic, 2004, p. 144), but with love there
occurs a montage of two semblances: the banal and the sublime object.
ZupanCic writes:

The miracle of love consists in "falling" (and in continuing to

stumble) because of the real which springs from the gap introduced
2 02 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

by this "parallel montage" of two semblances or appearances, that

is to say, because of the real that springs from the non-coincidence
of the same. The other that we love is neither the two semblances
(the banal and sublime), but neither can love be separate from
them. Love is nothing other than what results from a successful
(or "lucky") montage of the two. In other words, what we are in
love is this other as minimal difference of the same that can itself
take the form of an object. (Zupancic, 2004, p. 135)

Love is always the reverse of a fetish whose logic goes: "I know very
well that this object is a normal object, but I still nonetheless believe that
it has magical powers. " The logic of love, as it pertains to the fetish, is
rather: "I know very well that this beloved is just another human being,
but I still believe that she is just another human being." For Nancy, love
is a constant withdrawal from the field of immanence and signification,
meaning that there is always some-thing outside of me in love. Similarly,
ZupanciC's Lacanian influenced conception of love results in the objec­
tive outside of the subject through a minimal difference of the same.

tizek's ra dical love

Zizek links love to his larger revision of La can' s psychoanalytic act.
Love is tied to Zizek's act insofar as the passage, or traversal of the
fantasy entails an affirmation on behalf of the subject that the big Other
does not exist. Love emerges at this abyssal point of nonidentification.
To examine Zizek's theory of radical love, I aim to place his work into
relation with Eric Santner, as it provides a helpful counterpoint position
where Zizek's theory becomes clearer. In Santner's theory of love, he
argues that subjectivity, or what he calls "seduction" is one that con­
sists of a negative solidarity with the family I communityI institution
and these attachments are always sustained by a transgressive enjoy­
ment structure sustained by fantasy. Santner 's ethics is less politically
engaged that Zizek's, and it seeks different ways to release from the
hold the Other has on one's superego in this situation of seduction. In
order to release the subject from the excitation of its superego demands,
the time and space of this release ends up becoming the very time and
space of the ethical encounter. Santner 's ethical encounter is an opening
of space where new possibilities of being-togethe1� of responsiveness to
the Other, can arise (Santner, 2001).
 L O V E , P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S , A N D L E F T I S T P O L I T I C A L O N T O L O G Y 2 03

In the three-part essay collection entitled The Neighbor, Sanh1er applies

a reading of the Jewish mystical philosopher Franz Rosenweig's con­
ception of "divine love". By invoking divine love, Santner is concerned
with re-animating the death-driven deadness of the socio-symbolic
order, or life that has been thrown by the crisis of symbolic identity
and investment into institutions. Similar to Zizek's project in Christian
materialism, Santner looks to religious sources, mainly the seminal
twentieth century Jewish mystical text by Rosenzweig, Star of Redemp­
tion. The possibility of reawakening the subject is what Santner refers to
"divine love", a psychoanalytic technique of identification that consists
of moving beyond the "undeadness of biopolitical life". Like sublima­
tion, Sanmer 's divine love is thus the name for an ethical strategy that
resembles that of Zizek's albeit diverts from it in terms of the way it
handles the engagement with the symbolic. Divine love is a moving
beyond that entails a transformation of the institutional flux that inter­
polates the subject and brings that subject into the midst of life, i.e., in
relation to their neighbour. This movement beyond is what Rosenzweig
refers to as "falling in love", a situation that involves more than just
positive affirmation of being-falling in love, or might we say, "loving
thy neighbour as thyself" is a subsumption into the too muchness itself.
Divine love is a subsumption into das Ding, but inhabited with an inher­
ent positivity, having negated the institutional flux of biopolitical dead
matter. Santner 's divine love is ultimately a form of singularisation, a
form of singling out of the subject, not of excluding (Santner, 1996).
Zizek argues that Santner 's divine love is in fact aligned with a
"heroism of lack" mode of ethics, which he identifies as an improper
reading of Lacan's ethics. Zizek's version of "shrugging off the fantasy
of the other", or "desublimation" in contrast to Santner is one that
results in a traumatic situation. As Zizek notes, "the gap separating
beauty from ugliness is thus the gap that separates the real: what consti­
tutes the real is the minimum of idealisation the subject needs to sustain
the horror of the real. " This ugliness of proximity of the neighbour ends
up requiring a sublime distance to maintain the neighbour 's fantasy
frame. Once the neighbour approaches their status of ugly existence in
the real, Zizek characterises the encounter as h·aumatic. This shrugging
off, or de-subjectification from the Other must also be understood
intersubjectively.
To understand Zizek's key divergence with Santner, we must turn
to his re-definition of love based on his reading of St Paul's foundation
2 04 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

of the Christian community. As Zizek states, "Lacan's entire theoretic al

edifice torn between these two options: between the ethics of desire /Law,
and lethal suicidal immersion into the Thing?" (Zizek, 1999, p. 201), and
as such, love is what emerges as the third option to get the subject out
of the ethical impasse at the core of Lacan's ethics. To pass through the
ethical impasse into a form of Pauline agape, Zizek claims the subject
arrives at a sort of mystical communion involving, "a passing through
the zero-point of night of the world" (Zizek, 1999) .
It is this intense confrontation with the Hegelian "night of the world"
and negation that Zizek closely aligns with the radical acts that St Paul's
community of believers enacted. St Paul's ethics presents the paradigm
for "unplugging" from the big Other 's hold on the socio-symbolic,
which is after all the primary aim of Zizekian ethics. Paul's "unplug­
ging" is achieved only by "throwing the balanced circuit of the universe
off the rails" (Zizek, 1999, p. 165). Love is linked to Christianity and to
the Christian community that Paul founded as love is non-dialectical,
serving as the ground-level abyss of the Christian community. As Zizek
notes, love is for Hegel a term that designates the mediation of oppo­
sites, love thus shows that there is no third that mediates two struggling
opposite forces (Zizek, 2012).
As stated above, with desire, there is always a gap between the object
of desire and its cause, whereas with love the object is not split off from
its cause. With love "the very distance between the object and cause
collapse" (Zizek, 1999, p. 165), and the most frequent example Lacan
refers to is that of courtly love, they way in which the lady is brought
to the level of das Ding, her proximity is denied of its jouissance. Zizek
waivers between preferring to simply "exist as a lacking subject" over
and above the Antigone version of desire induced symbolic suicide.
Zizek' s ethical position:

In no way condones suicidal persistence in following one's Thing;

on the contrary, it enjoins us to remain faithful to our desire as sus­
tained by the Law of maintaining a minimal distance to the Thing­
one is faithful to one's desire by maintaining the gap that sustains
desire, the gap on account of which the incestuous das Ding forever
eludes our grasp . (Zizek, 1999, p. 121)

The core ethical question for Zizek revolves around immersion into
the Thing or allegiance to the ethics of desire /Law. Unplugging in
 L O V E , P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S , A N D L E F T I S T I' O L I T I C A L O N T O L O G Y 2 05

this Paulinian mode offers the kind of radical break with the symbolic
coordinates via love that Zizek finds satisfactory to completely change
the coordinates of the fantasmatic supplement of the desire system.
Unpluggii1g is what Rosenzweig and Santner refer to as "revelatory
conversion", or an opening to and an acknowledgement of the Other
qua stranger, the Other who's face manifests a "spectral aura" of jouis­
sance. Unplugging results in a freeing of jouissance where the Other is
externalised, a process that in psychoanalytic terms is actually a freeing
of psychosis (Zizek, 1999).

Badiou: love as minimal communism

In Badiou's conception of love he radically eschews prior definitions of
love that were held at the level of consciousness, as we find in romanti­
cism, hermeneutics, and religious discourses of love, and is overturned
with a conception of love as linked to the subject and what Badiou calls
"truth effects". Badiou argues that if love is "consciousness of the other
as other" as we find in Hegel and Lacan, then the other is necessarily
identifiable in consciousness as the same. In contradistinction to this
position, for Badiou, love is of the "scene of the Two", which means that
love is not about a learning of the sexes, but is about "thought and iden­
tification with thought". Since no subject can occupy male or female
love produces a truth founded upon a disjunction of Lacan's maxim
"there is no sexual relation". That there is no rapport at the level of sex­
ual difference is for Badiou the site of love as the production of a new
law. As he remarks in his text on St Paul: "Love is a-cosmic and illegal,
refusing integration into any totality and signaling nothing. It delivers
no law, no form of mastery" (Badiou, 1997, p. 42) .
Love is always an unbinding and a break from the social bonds that
are tied to the Law of the symbolic. Love is exposed in its resistance to the
law of being and thus, far from "naturally" regulating the supposed rela..
tion between the sexes, love is what makes truth of the [social] unbind­
ing (Badiou, 2008). Therefore, love "produces a truth of the situation in
such a way that the disjunction is constituted as law. The truth composed
by love proceeds to infinity" (Badiou, 2008, p. 194)-and paradoxically,
"the scene of the two" that love emerges from, has no third. Similar to
Badiou's atheism, there is no third. mediation point (the big Other, God,
etc.) that situates or establishes the meaning of love in its own field of
expression. Love always remains tied to the logic of the two.
206 SEX A N D N OT H I N G

As one of Badiou's four "truth conditions", love is what might

include religion and psychoanalysis, two discourses that Badiou claims
are incapable of producing new truths. But love on the other hand,
produces new truths because it is a subjective encounter. Love is what
Badiou calls a "minimal communism" (Badiou, 2011, p. 90), because
love is a process-oriented encounter, grounded in the scene of the two.
The implication is that love is no longer a solitary and private-intimate
experience but is elevated to a universal experience. As Badiou states:
"From the moment that a truth of the situation proceeds as disjunct, it
also becomes clear why every truth is addressed to everyone and guar­
antees the uniqueness of the humanity function H(x) in its effects. For,
as soon as it is grasped in truth, it immediately re-establishes that there
is only one situation" (Badiou, 2008, p. 189).
Similar to Lacan's theory of sexuation, the feminine position appears
on the side of truth, and the feminine destination targets being as such,
whereas the masculine targets "the changing of the numbers, the pain­
ful fracture of the One by the supposition of the Two, and this is essen­
tially logical" (Badiou, 2008, p. 194) . The conflict of knowledge that love
opens thus shows that the One of a truth is also exposed simultaneously
as logical and as ontological at the same time. For Badiou, the feminine
position is what knots the four generic procedures together of politics,
art, science, and love. In each of these conditions, or generic procedures,
truth is tied to a process of fidelity to a Truth-Event centred on a naming
process. While the naming of politics always involves a fidelity to the
name of equality, it is the name of humanity that love names according
to Badiou. Thus, the condition of love is based on the declaration that
humanity exists! (Badiou, 2008).
But does Badiou's positing of sexual difference relegate man to the
same phallic position as many accused La can' s idea of sexual difference
as promoting? In Badiou's conception of sexual difference, he maps sex­
ual difference onto his larger, process-based approach to evental truth
production, and this superimposition of sexual difference runs less of a
risk of falling into a static conception of sexual difference. I argue that
Badiou complicates Lacanian sexuation by his very definition of subjec­
tivation, where a subject is presented that is capable of thinking beyond
the polarised masculine/feminine dichotomy. As Lindsay Hair points
out in defence of Badiou's subtle position on this question:

Badiou's project to explore the notion of love as a Thought

specifically attempts to exclude all elements of identificatory
 L O V E , P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S , A N D L E F T I S T P O L I T I C A L O N T O L O G Y 207

appropriation, whether imaginary o r phenomenological, yet the

fragments of experience constructed by the fidelity of the amorous
pair remain sexed, despite the fact that the "truth" of the encounter,
as participating in a universal, is of course unsexed, and does not
fall under the structuring laws of the symbolic. (Hail� 2005, p. 39)

In all the writings of Beckett, one feature remains unchanged: love

begins in a pure encounter, which is neither destined nor predestined
except by the chance crossing of two trajectories. Prior to this meeting,
there is only solitude. No Two, in particular, no sexual duality, exists
before the encounter. Sexual difference is unthinkable, except from the
point of view of the encounter as it unfolds within the process of love.
There is no originary or prior difference that conditions or orients this
encounter. The encounter is the power from which the Two, and thus
love itself, originate. This power, which nothing precedes in its proper
order, is practically without measure. It is, in particular, incommensu­
rable with the power of feeling and the sexual and desiring power of
the body.
The feminine polarity combines both wandering and narrative.
It concurs not with the fixity of the name, but with the infinity of its
unfolding in the world, in the narrative of its unending glory. It does not
stick to the sole prescription without proof, but organises the constant
inquiry and verification of a capacity. To be a "woman", in the context
of love, is to move about under the custody of meaning, rather than of
names. This protective effort implies the wayward fate of inquiries, as
well as its perpetual recounting in a story. Happiness is not in the least
associated with the One-the myth of fusion. It is rather the subjective
indicator of a truth of difference, of sexual difference, that love alone
makes effective.

Badiou and Laca n : love and subjectivation

To understand the different conception of love in Lacan and Badiou it
is important to start with unpacking their different conceptions of the
subject. Lacan's conception of the subject remains limited for Badiou
as it is still conceived in terms of the individual. For Badiou, "the indi­
vidual, in truth, is nothing", whereas the subject should be understood
in a wider sense, "as a network of capabilities that allow you to think,
create, share, act collectively to go beyond the singularities-one body,
one identity, social position, drives-but that is not reducible to it"
2 08 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

(Badiou & Roudinesco, 2012) . Badiou's subject is thought in the context

of what he refers to as a "world", and not solely in terms of language as
we find in Lacan. In "Meditation 36" on Descartes and Lacan in Being
and Event, Badiou presents what is perhaps his most crucial departure
from Lacan, which has to do with the notion of truth as cause of the sig­
nifier. Lacan returns to Descartes because the subject of psychoanalysis
is the subject of science, and through Descartes, Lacan maintains his
attachment to the "enunciation as subject"-in other words, Badiou's
subject is no longer tied to the "cause of the signifier" as we have in
Lacan (Badiou, 2005).
In Being and Event, the subject is thought along the status of a
procedure-of a conflguration in excess of the situation. The subject is
"at the intersection of knowledge and truth via language, but is sus­
pended by a truth whose finite moment it is" (Badiou, 2005, p. 392) .
This moment of suspension, what Badiou refers to as "fidelity" to an
event, is what shifts the coordinates of truth; making the subject a pro­
ducer of the truth itself. This is why, in Being and Event, Badiou defines
subjectivation as the "interventional nomination from the standpoint
of the situation, that is, the rule of the intra-situational effects of the
supernumerary name's entrance into circulation" (Badiou, 2005, p. 393) .
Subjectivation is thus a special count; distinct from what Badiou calls
the "count-as-one" that orders presentation, just as it is from the state's
re-duplication. What subjectivation counts is "what ever it (the subject)
faithfully cmmected to the name of the event" (Badiou, 2005, p. 393).
At the end of analysis, love arises at the moment of rest after
what Lacan calls the "pass". Mladen Dolar compares subjectivation
in Althusser and Lacan, by noting that Althusser cam1ot think in his
notion of ideological interpellation is precisely the two moments of sub­
jectivity in Lacan. The first is a moment of rest, which is one amidst
subjectivation, and the second is a moment of being a subject prior to
recognition, and it is this crucial moment that Althusser leaves out. But
the important question Dolar asks as it relates to our question is where
does love enter in these two movements of subjectivation in Lacan? As
is often the case, Lacan points the way to a new conception of love,
this time thought as the moment of rest in the process of subjectivation.
Here is a quote from Dolar that articulates Lacan's theory:

Love can function as a mechanism of ideology; it can serve as a

link between the most private and a social bond, only because
 L O V E , P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S , A N D L E F T I S T P O L I T I C A L O N T O L O G Y 209

i t c a n successfully produce that passage from the outer into the

inner and at the same time cover it up . Love masks the external
origins of subjectivity, concealing it not behind the illusion of
an autonomous subject as a causa sui, but quite the contrary, by
offering one's being to the Othe1� offering one's own particularity
in response to the external contingency. The rest of the Real
beyond the signifier demands the offering of that rest in the sub­
ject, the part of the "individual" that could not be subjectified,
the obj ect within the subject, and with that gesture, the rest is
dealt with and the Other is sustained. The opacity of the Other
is made transparent by love, the lawless becomes the lawful.
(Dolar, 1993, p . 83)

For Lacan, love arises at the moment of rest, in the first movement of
subjectivation, whereas for Badiou, love is a break with the state of the
situation (representation) . My claim is that for Badiou, as with Zizek
and Nancy, love is what permits the break (or transcendence) with the
domain of the social. Love-as-transcendence is the transition from the
social to the political, making love more than an affective procedure,
but the crucial link to a theory of subjectivation.

References
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Badiou, A . (1997) . S t. Paul and the Foundation of Universalism . Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Badiou, A. (2005) . Being and Event. New York: Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2008) . Conditions . New York: Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2011). Praise of Love. London: Verso.
Badiou, A. & Roudinesco, E. (2012). Fait-il brlller la psychanalyse? Le Dossier
de l 'Obs . April 19th, 2012.
Dolar, M. (1993). Beyond interpellation. Qui Parle, 6(2) .
Hair, L. (2005). The philosophy of Alain Badiou . Polygraph, 1 7.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977) . The Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford Univer­
sity Press.
Lacan, J. (1949 /2006) . The mirror stage as formative of the I function as
revealed in psychoanalytic experience. E crits. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company.
210 S E X A N D N OT H I N G

Lacan, J. (1981). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI. The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis . New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1990). Television . New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1993) . The Seminar ofJacques Lacan. Book III. The Psychoses . New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (2014). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X. Anxiety. London:
Polity.
Nancy, J.-L. (199 1 ) . The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Nancy J L (2002). Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Minneapolis:
.- .

University of Minnesota Press.

Santne1� E. (1996) . My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret
History of Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Santner, E. (2001). On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections o n Freud
and Rosenzweig. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Starr, P. (1995). Logic of Failed Revolts: French Theory After May 68. Stanford :
Stanford University Press .
Strauthausen, C. (2006) . Neo-left ontology. Postmodern Culture, 1 6(3) .
Zizek, S. (1999). The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso.
Zizek, S. (2012). Less Than Nothing. London: Verso.
Zupancic, A. (2000). Ethics of the Real. London: Verso.
Zupancic, A. (2004) . Investigations of the Lacanian field . Polygraph, 15/16.
INDEX
additional One, 142-143
adult sexuality, 8
aesthetic process as reversat 179
Althusser 's internal distancing,
1 81-183
art, reality and by ideology, 180
towards autonomy, 185-188
Fernandez's novel in reverse,
188-190
fragmented reality, 183-185
return ideology as imaginary
reality, 188
reversat 180-181
saintly realism, 179-180
Agamben, 193
aletheia see truth and knowledge
Althusse1� L., 176, 1 82-183, 191
internal distancing of, 181-183
intervention of, 171-173
analysand's role, 172
analysis of analytic mass, 166
analyst discourse, 170-171
A1ma 0., 20, 28, 36
211
antiphilosophical quadrivium, 91
see also antiphilosophy
formalisation in psychoanalysis, 97
formalisation to suspend
transference, 98
impact of positivist worldview, 99
knowledge transmission, 91-92
Marx's Capital, 98
mathematical autonomy to
linguistic structuralism, 93
mathematical formalisation, 97
matheme, 9 1
philosophy resists psychoanalysis, 98
science without consciousness, 94
scientificity of psychoanalysis, 93,
99
tension between formalisation and
transference, 98
topology, 99-102
unconscious as language, 95
antiphilosophy, 81, 92, 102 see also
antiphilosophical quadrivium;
psychoanalysis
212 I NDEX
autonomy and causality of signifier,
84
Being is, non-Being isn't, 88
castration, 87
consequence, 84
determines value of other
disciplines, 92
dualism of unconscious, 85
experimentation, 94
forgetting as repression, 86
formalisation, 94
human essence, 83
knowledge and subject, 83
labour theory of value, 84
Lacan's orien ta t io n, 82
linguis tic fetishism,
89-91
materialist orientation, 83
materialist theory of subject, 84
misunderstanding of Lacan's term,
84-85
object of Capital, 84
Pa rmenidian axiom, 88
philosophical love, 88
on psychoanalysis, 95
real unconscious, 87
reality, 83
resistance to ne g ativity, 94
subj ect, 84
transference unconscious, 87
truth and knowledge, 86
unconscious, 87, 93, 96
anxiety, 135
art and reality, 180
Badiou, A., 56, 91, 102, 185-188, 191,
205-206, 208
Balibar, E., 182, 191
barred Othe1� 45
Benjamin, W., 37, 56
Benslama, F., 120, 136
big Other, 47
Binswanger, 122
bio-power, 1 22, 124, 127
Borges, J. L., 36
Bosteels, B., 1 82, 188, 191
Capital see Ma r x, K.
capitalism, 44, 84, 88, 91-92, 122, 124,
134, 197
C arroll, Lewis, 21
castration, 87
cen tral void, 41
chimneysweepers, 19-23, 26-33, 36
chinmey-sweeping, 20, 27-28, 36
Ch risti an ity and p erversion, 9 see also
in fantile sexu ality
Chri sti a n martyrdom, 10
copula tion, 10
humanity and nature, 12
la ck of sexual instinct, 11-12
oral drive, 9
pleasure, 10-11
sexual ins tinct in nature, 12
sexuality banned, 11
sin, 10
unconscious, 12-13
consciousness, 128-129
as language, 95
science without, 94
contingent element, 30
Copjec, J., 5-6, 16, 151, 156
copulation, 9-11, 15, 153
Corbin, H., 111, 125, 135-136
Courtine, J.-F., 71, 79
David-Menard, M., 1 28, 136
Davis, M., 140, 156
De L auretis, T., 108, 136
Deleuz e, G., 50, 56, 91, 102, 116, 132,
134, 136, 193
denial of repetition, 115
Depelsenaire, Y., 22
Derrida, J., 134-136, 193
desire of analyst, 166-168
di -phasic onset of sexuality, 116,
118-119
discontinuous functioning, 117
divine over-proximity, 47
div ine Real, 45-47
Dolar, Mladen, xvii-xix, 111, 180,
208-209
double birth, 58
 I NDEX 213

doxa, 1 0, 91, 135 object-cause of desire, 40

drives, 7-11, 13-15, 75, 77-78, 110, 168, ontology of utterances, 50-51
207 poetry and powe1� 54--55
de-naturalised, 7 presupposed void, 42
infantile, 7 psydance, 49-50
partial, 7-8, 11, 14 real event, 39
Dumezil, G., 29 · signifie1� 42
singular moment of sense with
Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP), 159, Non-Sense, 52
164-165, 172 subject, 42
economie generale, 49 symbolic event, 39, 45
ecstasy, 67 Totality, 44
ego traumatic external Thing, 40
and id, 130-131 virtual organ, 41
self-positing of absolute, 63 experimentation, 94
Eisenstein, S., 49, 56
enjoyment, eruptions of, 146 fantasy, 29, 59, 76-78, 88, 143, 190, 198,
entities in sex act, 148 202
episteme 83, 86, 91 "of the great man", 6 1
erogenous zone, 131 o f the ideal Father, 48
events, 39 of the othet� shrugging off, 203
barred Other, 45 Schelling's, 59-66, 72, 75-76, 78
big Other, 47 significance of, 78
central void, 41 of social relation, 98
constitutive role of the Father, traversal of, 157, 170, 1 73, 202
48-49 Fathe1� constitutive role of the, 48-49
divine over-proximity, 47 feminine
divine Real, 45-47 jouissance, 153-154
economie generale, 49 psychoanalytic, 1 07
Event-Horizon, 40-41 Ferguson, N., 53, 56
failure of symbolic representation, Fernandez, M., 189-191
41 fetishism, linguistic, 89-91
gap between reality and finite, 116-117
transcendent ethereal Firestone, S., 1 08, 136
dimension, 38 forgetting as repression, 86
images of past, 37 formalisation, 94
imaginary event, 39 mathematical, 97
imagining, 51-54 in psychoanalysis, 97
incorporeals, 50 to suspend transference, 98
Lacanian triad, 39 tension between transference and, 98
Lacan's formula, 41-42 Foucault, M., 20, 36, 120, 122-123, 136,
Lacan's scheme, 40 193
Maste1� 43-44 fragmented reality, 1 83-185
Master-Signifier, 40, 42-43 fraudulent relation, 123
moment of modernism, 37 freedom, 70 see also unsoundable
object of desire, 40-41 decision of being
214 I NDEX
becoming God out of the
ground, 76
different emergence, 76
enjoyment as insupportable, 75
and equality, 23-24
Hegelian freedom, 74
issue of Revelation, 78
and madness, 72
madness as limit of, 73
Master of being, 73
metonymy of philosophical
desire, 77
not to sacrifice enjoyment, 74
real being and symbolic existence,
74
Schellingian Other, 77
significance of fantasy, 78
signs of madness, 75
subjectivation, 73
thought or being, 76
unconscious pre-history, 77
Freud, S., 5, 7, 13-14, 1 6, 20, 28, 36,
72, 79, 83, 115, 117, 1 26-129,
136-137, 163, 176
Freudian notion of sexuality, 3, 5
Freud's heroism, 60
Frigo, G. F., 78-79
gender theory, 5-6
assumptions in, 110
denial of repetition, 115
di-phasic onset of sexuality, 116
impact of gender theory, 1 08
God as doctrinal mask, 111
j ouissance, 110
non-numerical unity, 112
predicate for identification, 113
proliferation of genders, 110
real universal, 113
genital sexual organisation, 7
God, 45, 68 see also Schelling's fantasy
becoming, 76
as concept, 68
determined by signifiet; 74-75
as doctrinal mask, 111
existence of, 66-67
non-God in, 69, 72
proof of, 61, 66
golden ratio, 148-150
Gracia, J., 111, 137
Habermas, J., 46, 56
Hail; L., 207, 209
Hallward, P., 184-185, 191
Hardt, M., 193, 209
Hegel, G. W. F., xviii, 26-27, 30, 40,
44, 61, 75, 82, 174-175, 180,
200-201, 204-205, 209
Hegelian
anti- rhetoric, 44
dialectics, 175
equation, 27
freedom, 74
God, 74
infinite judgement, 42
night of the world, 204
notion of totality, 44
objective spirit, 201
philosophy, 61
speculative insight, 30
Heidegger, 54, 88, 135, 194-195, 201
-ian mitsein, 201
Heine, H., 24, 36
Heraclitus, 115
human essence, 83
human nature, 133
humanised political love, 195-200
humanity and nature, 12
humankinds, 1 9-21 see also sexuality
Anna 0., 20
basis of relation, 32-33
chimneysweepers, 20, 23, 26-28, 30
chimney-sweeping, 36
contingent element, 30
differences in, 31
freedom and equality, 23-24
maids, 23, 27
Marx's series, 24
mismatch in classification, 26
officers, 23, 27
phallic element, 28-30
phallocentrism, 33-34
 phallus as signi fier, 34-36
sexual difference in language,
31-32
sexuality, 35-36
signifier, 29-31
singular-contingent and universal,
25-26
talking cure, 36
unclassifiable nature of women, 22
unconscious, 35
humanly sexual, 8
Husserl, 193
Ich-Psychologie, 163
images of past, 37
imaginary event, 39
imagining, 51-54
immanence, 193-195, 201-202 see also
transcendence
impact of conceptual elaborations, 164
incorporeals, 50
individual and group psychology,
113-114
infantile sexuality, 6-7, 1 4
drives, 15
embarrassment in sexuality, 14
inquisitive, 14
point of sexuation, 15
quest for knowledge, 13-14
sexually driven culture, 14
sexuation, 15
instinctual sexuality, 7
institutional break, 159-160
institutional Other, 60
International Psychoanalytical
Association (IPA), 60, 159
Jambet, C., 112, 137
Jameson, F., 180, 191
jouissance, xix, 10-11, 50, 71, 85, 87, 91,
95-97, 101, 110-111, 114, 121-
122, 126-129, 132-133, 140,
142, 1 44-145, 147, 150-152,
154-155, 196-200, 204-205
feminine, 1 35, 151, 153
object-cause of, 133
two, 152-154
Jouissance-Thing, 41
Kant, 88, 100, 129, 1 66-167, 193
Kierkegaard, S., 19, 21-22, 36, 115, 137
knotting, 169, 172
knowledge
and enjoyment, 164
quest f01� 13-14
and subject, 83
transmission, 91-92
labour theory of value, 84
Lacan, J., 9-11, 16, 28-31, 34, 36, 41, 48,
56, 58-60, 68, 73-74, 79, 82, 88,
91-97, 99-102, 112, 114, 121,
124-126, 129, 132, 135, 137,
142, 144-145, 147, 149-154,
156, 158-160, 163-164, 166,
168-171, 1 76-177, 195, 198
exclusion of, 60
formula by, 41-42
heroism, of, 60
-ian triad, 39
misunderstanding term by, 84-85
orientation, of, 82
psychoanalytic trajectory Schema,
of, 1 65
reasoning on Freud's text by,
163-164
scheme by, 40
School dissolved, 165
teaching of, 161, 164-165
Lacan's impasse, 157
Althusser 's intervention, 171-173
analysis of analytic mass, 166
break in Lacan's teaching, 160-162
impact of conceptual elaborations,
164
desire of analyst, 166-168
difference between SFP and Lacan,
162
discourse of the analyst, 170-171
ethics, 168
Ich-Psychologie, 1 63
institutional break, 159-160
21 6 INDEX

Kantian moral philosophy study, of being, 73

166-168 -Signifie1� 40, 42--43
knotting, 169, 172 materialist theory of the subject, 84
knowledge and enjoyment, 164 mathematical autonomy to linguistic
object of psychoanalysis, 170 structuralism, 93
passe, 160, 165 matheme, 91-92, 97-98, 101
psychoanalytic trajectory Miller, J.-A., 60, 73, 79, 85, 91, 100, 102,
schema, 165 1 60, 171, 1 76
quasi-transcendental dimension, Milne1� J.-C., 82, 87, 101, 103, 160, 171,
167-168 1 76
reasoning on Freud's text, 163-164 Mitchell, J., 119, 137
revisionist group,164 mitsein see Heidegger
role of analysands, 172 mock-heroism, 60
strategy in discussing, 158 modern thinking, 3
threat to Lacan's teaching, 164-165 modernism, moment of, 37
transference and ego-ideal link, 164 money, 25-26
transference and identification, 163 -breeding money, 90
Laing, Ronald David, 17 monocentric conception of sex, 120, 190
language decentralisation, 102 Montag, W., 180, 182, 191
Laplanche, J., 7-8, 16 Moretti, A., 151, 156
latency period, 117
leftist political ontology, 194-195 Nancy, J.-L., 200-202, 209
Leibniz, 132-134 94
negativity, resistance to,
Lenin, V. I., 191 Negri, A., 193, 209
Levinas, 46, 193 Nietzsche, 180, 193
line of immanence see immanence -an, 38, 47
logocentrism, 33 Nima Nourizadeh, 48
lopping off of predicate, 125 non-God in God, 69, 72
love non-numerical unity, 112
-as-transcendence, 200-201
as minimal communism, 205-207 object of
object of, 134 desire, 40-41
philosophical, 88 love, 134
radical, 202-205 objet a, 39-42, 61-62
and subjectivation, 207-209 officers, 19-23, 26-29, 36
oneness, notion of, 129
Macherey, P., 183-185, 191 One of sex, 143-144, 147-148
madness eruptions of enjoyment, 146
as limit of freedom, 73 position of, 144
signs of,75 unary traits, 146-147
maids, 19-23, 26-29, 36 unit of sex, 143-144, 147
Marquet, J.-F., 75, 79 One or none, 150
Marx, K., 24, 36, 98, 102, 181, 191 ontology
Capital, 23, 25, 36, 84, 98 politics, 194
Masseau, D., 81, 102 of utterances, 50-51
Master, 43-44 oral drive, 9
 INDEX 21 7

Other, birth of the, 66, 69 see also
Schelling's fantasy
being before being, 70
divine existence demonstrated, 67
ecstasy, 67
eternal state of closing oneself off,
71
existence, 66, 68, 70
freedom, 70
God as concept, 68
impossible-real of reason, 68
non-God in God, 69, 72
paradox of ontological argument,
68
repressed existence, 71
Schellingian unthinkable, 67
OU1er, figure of the, 58
Parmenidian axiom, 88
passe, 160, 165
pathological identity, 62
perforated One, 153
phallic element, 28-29
function of, 30
phallic value, 153
phallocentrism, 33-34
phallogocentrism, 33
phallus as signifiet� 34-36
pltilia, 85-86, 91, 94
philosophical love, 88
philosophy, 97
divisions in, 193
revival of, 57
Pirsig, R., 52, 56
Plato, 89, 103, 143, 156
pleasure, 10-11
poetry and power, 54-55
point of sexuation, 15
political applications of psychoanalytic
theory, 173
politics and psychoanalysis
Althusser's intervention, 171-173
political applications of
psychoanalytic theory, 1 73
properly Leninist moment, 174
Zizekian philosophy, 174-176
Popov, P. S., 150, 156
Porge, E., 162, 176
positivist world view impact, 99
predicate for identification, 113
Project X, 48-49
properly Leninist moment of
Lacan, 174
psychic apparatus, misleading image
of, 101
psychic functioning and sexuality,
117-118
psychoanalysis, 97 see also
antiphilosophy
aversion, 1 29
object of, 1 70
resisted by philosophy, 98
scientificity of, 93, 99
unconscious, 86
psychology, individual and group,
113-114
psydance, 49-50
quasi-transcendental dimension,
167-1 68
quest for knowledge, 13-14
radical love, 202-205
real
being and symbolic existence, 74
event, 39
God, 58
love, 134
and symbolic, 100
unconscious, 87
universal, 113
reason
disruption, 58
impossible-real of, 68
repetition, denial of, 115
repressed existence, 71
repression, forgetting as, 86
repressive hypothesis, 121
reproductive coupling, purposeful, 9
return ideology as imaginary reality,
188
revisionist group, 164
218 I N D EX
Roudinesco, E., 56, 91, 103, 159, 176,
208
Russell, Bertrand, 140-141, 144-145
saintly realism, 179-180
Santner, Eric, 202-203, 205, 210
satisfaction, first object of, 129
Schelling, F. W. ]., 65, 71, 79
ethical maxim, 64
issues in philosophy, 65
-ian God, 58, 77
-ian unthinkable, 67
solution, 67
Schelling's fantasy, 59 see also fantasy,
Other, birth of the
and ethical maxim, 64
excommunicated from IPA, 61
existence of unconditional, 65
fantasy of "the great man", 61
Freud's heroism, 60
as God's instrument, 62
-ian Othet� 65, 77
incompleteness, 64
institutional Other, 60
issues in philosophy, 65
Lacan's exclusion, 60
Lacan's heroism, 60.
metonymic quest for beginning,
65-66
mock-heroism, 60
pathological identity, 62
as perverse object in fantasy, 62-63
proof of God, 61, 66
self-positing of absolute ego, 63
thought process, 61
trash, 60
unconditional freedom, 63
scientia sexualis, xiv, 120-121, 123
self-displays, 121
sex, 122, 147, 154
and death, 135-136
distinction, 108
monocentric conception of, 120, 190
no domain for, 109
sex as signifiet� 139, 154-156
additional One, 142-143
entities in sex act, 148
failure of sexual act, 152
formulas of sexuation, 151
golden ratio, 148-150
jouissance, 151-154
logical enigma, 139-140
One or none, 150
perforated One, 153
Russell's paradox, 140-141
signifier and signified, 142, 1 45
signifying phallic value, 153
sexual compact, 132 see also gender
theory
anxiety, 135
being-toward-sex, 135
bio-power, 122
denial of repetition, 115
di-phasic onset of sexuality, 116,
118-119
discontinuous functioning, 117
erogenous zone, 131
finite, 116-117
fraudulent relation, 123
Heraclitus, 115
human nature, 133
individual and group psychology,
113-114
instants, 116
latency period, 117
limit, 132
lopping off of predicate, 125
monocentric conception of sex, 120,
190
no domain for sex, 109
no object of satisfaction before loss
of the object, 133
notion of subject, 124
object-cause of jouissance, 133
object of love, 134
psychic functioning and sexuality,
117-118
psychoanalytic feminism, 1 07
real love, 134
repressive hypothesis, 121
scientia sexualis, 121, 123
self-displays, 121

sex and death, 135-136
sexual difference, 31-32, 108, 114,
120, 134
sexual liberation, 121-122
sexual relations, 124-125
sexuality and biology,
123-124
subject as multiple, 108
two sexes, 126
sexual instinct, lack of, 11-12
sexual liberation, 121-122
sexual relations, 124-125, 129
sexuality, 35, 36 see also Christianity
and perversion; humankinds;
infantile sexuality
adult, 8
being-toward-sex, 135
and biology, 123-124
as defence against issues, 5
to determine subject's, 127
di-phasic onset of, 116, 118-119
drive sexuality, 7, 9, 15
embarrassment in, 13-14
Freud and, 5
gender theory, 5-6
genital sexual organisation, 7
human, 7-8
infantile, 6-7, 14
instinctual, 7
and life, 17
metaphysical issue, 15-16
modern thinking, 3
no object of satisfaction, 133
ontology and, 33
progressive psychoanalytic
explanation, 8
psychic functioning and, 117-118
in psychoanalytic psychotherapy,
3-4
purposeful reproductive coupling,
9 ego and id, 130-131
quest for knowledge, 13-14
and sexually charged messages of
adults, 8
and sexually driven culture, 14
and sexuation, 15
I N DEX 219
two sexes, 126
unconscious sexuality, 8-9, 16-17
sexuation, 15
formula, 151
SFP see Societe Frant;aise de
Psychanalyse (s FP)
Shalev, 0., 3, 16
signifier, 29-31, 42, 86
autonomy and causality of, 84
and signified, 1 42, 145
Simondon, G., 110, 137
sin, 10
singular moment of sense with
Non-Sense, 52
Societe Frant;aise de Psychanalyse
(SFP), 159
Sole1� C., 85, 103
Spinoza, 42, 97, 1 93
Spottiswoode, R., 54
Stan� P., 197, 210
Stendhal, 1 79-181, 1 83, 188, 190-191
Strauthausen, C., 194, 210
subject, 42, 84, 124
knowledge and, 83
materialist theory of, 84
as multiple, 108
self-identity of, 128
subjectivation, 73, 76, 198, 206-209
symbolic event, 39, 45
symbolic representation failure, 41
talking cure, 20, 28, 36, 156
thinking substance, 128
thinking the unthinkable, 67
third substance, the, 126
being with jouissance, 128
consciousness, 1 28-129
counter myth of, 127
to determine sexuality of subject,
127
first object of satisfaction, 129
notion of oneness, 129
psychoanalysis aversion, 129
sexual relation, 129
subject's self-identity, 128
220 I N DEX

thinking substance, 128 double birth, 58

void space between life as function figure of the Othet� 58
and experience, 127-128 real God, 58
Tilliette, X., 61, 63, 66, 70-71, 79 reason's disruption, 58
Tomsic, s., 84, 103 revival of philosophy, 57
topology, 99, 101 see also Schellingian God, 58
antiphilosophical quadrivium true beginn in gs, 58
decentralisation of language, 102 utterances, ontology of, 50-51
misleading image of psychic
apparatus, 101 Van Heijenoort, J., 141, 156
ties between real and the symbolic, Victoria, B., 53, 56
100 virtual organ, 41
totality, 44,
141, 144, 184 void
transcendence presupposed, 42
and ego-ideal link, 1 64 space between life as function and
and identification, 163 experience, 127-128
leftist political ontology, 194-195
1 93
line of, Was iolek, 183
200-201
love-as-, women, unclassifiable nature
unconscious, 87 of, 22
trash, 60
truth and knowledge, 86 Yerushalmi, H., 3, 16
Turner, V. K., 52, 56 yin-yang, 32

unary traits, 143, 146-148 Zamanian, K., 4, 16

unconditional freedom, 63
unconscious, 12-13, 35, 87, 93
dualism of, 85
as response of real, 96
sexuality, 8-9, 16-17
unit of sex, 143-144, 147
unsoundable decision of being, 57,
72 see also freedom, and
madness; Schelling's fantasy
Zizek, s . , 12, 16, 59, 7 1 , 79, 158,
174-176, 203-205
Z izekian philosophy, 174-176
Zupancic, A., 90, 103, 111, 115, 135, 137,
180, 187, 190-191, 198-199,
201-202