The Sexual Compact

Abstract

This paper is a full-out defense – and development – of the psychoanalytic position that there are two and only two sexes. It proceeds by problematizing all the main terms at issue, including: the two (which it views as a more complex notion than that of the multiple); sex (as irreducible to raw biology or social convention); and relation (as the unique phenomenon of a distance however close its terms may be brought together). It also introduces the term compact, taken from mathematics, to distinguish the sexual relation radically from the idea of the social contract.

Keywords:

• one
• two
• sex
• relation
• compact

Notes

1. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays in Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987) x.

2. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam, 1972) 10–11.

3. For a thorough analysis of these questions see Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual” in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992) 297–319.

4. For more on this debate see, for example, Jorge Gracia, ed., Individuation in Scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation (Albany: State U of New York P, 1994). My own interest in the question of individuation was ignited by the defense of the medieval Islamic philosophers’ position on this subject mounted by Henry Corbin; see his “Apophatic Theology as Antidote to Nihilism,” trans. Roland Vegso, Umbr(a): Semblance (2007): 59–83. This essay was originally published as a chapter in Corbin's Le Paradoxe du monotheism (Paris: l’Herne, 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questioning of the two of sexual difference on the basis of a more sophisticated notion of the One in an excellent unpublished manuscript, “One Splits into Two.” See also the fine work of our colleague Alenka Zupančič on the problematic nature of the two in The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2003).

5. Christian Jambet discusses the Islamic concept of the “unity of God” (tawid, in Arabic), which this formulation expresses, in his remarkable essay “The Stranger and Theophany,” trans. Roland Vegso, Umbr(a): The Dark God (2005): 27–42. This essay was originally published in Jambet's Le Cache et l’apparent (Paris: l’Herne, 2003). Lacan – not coincidentally – employs the Islamic 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. Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988) 158.

6. See Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969) 210. In Arabic the phrase “eternal haecceity” is ‘ayn thabita; it means “eternal ‘essence’ or quiddity,” but no mere translation does the term – which requires considerable theoretical unpacking – justice.

7. Jacques Lacan, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Book XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998) 3.

8. For a lucid discussion of failed vs. real repetition, I recommend Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2008) 149–82.

9. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 123.

10. Ibid. 131; Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE), trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966) 1: 356.

11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 6.

12. Freud, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” in SE 19: 231.

13. Juliet Mitchell, “Introduction 1” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École freudienne, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982) 20.

14. Fethi Benslama uses the term “monotheistic” in relation to sex in the title of his interesting essay “Le Sexuel monotheiste et sa traduction scientifique,” Cliniques méditerranéennes 73 (2006): 89–95, without, however, telling us what this adjective 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 regional tale of a Western retiring of the term sexual difference in favor of gender during the 1980s. As it turns out – Benslama recounts – the Arabo-Islamic world – once thought by Foucault, among others, to be the last bastion of an ars poetica against the scientia sexualis that steadily took over the West since the nineteenth century – became subject in the 1980s to this particular form of “Westoxification.” At this point what had been the most common Arabic word for sex, farj, was rapidly replaced 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 centuries been used for men and women, farj simultaneously became restricted in scope and began to designate the sexual organ of women only. At the same time, jins, which carried with it scientific, specifically bio-medical, connotations absent from farj, narrowed the sense of sexual relations or affairs to the genital register.

15. Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Book XVII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007) 144.

16. Ibid. 208.

17. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978) 143.

18. Ibid.

19. Michel Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger, Dream and Existence, ed. Keith Hoeller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1993) 102.

20. Foucault, History of Sexuality 140–41.

21. Ibid. 157; Foucault also calls sex a “fictitious point” (156) and an “imaginary point” (155).

22. Ibid. 154.

23. Ibid.

24. Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec; trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Norton, 1990) 30.

25. Lacan, Encore 11.

26. Henry Corbin, “Prophetic Philosophy and the Metaphysics of Being” in The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1998) 208.

27. Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Femininity” in SE 22: 116; my emphasis.

28. Lacan, Encore 21.

29. Freud, “Femininity” 114.

30. Idem, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” in SE 14: 122.

31. Idem, “Project for a Scientific Psychology” in SE 1: 331. This comparison between Descartes and Freud is made by Monique David-Ménard in “Sexual Alterity and the Alterity of the Real for Thought,” Angelaki 8.2 (2003): 137–50.

32. Lacan, Encore 112.

33. Ibid. 23.

34. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents in SE 21: 65.

35. Ibid. 66.

36. Ibid.

37. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 47.

38. Lacan, Encore 9.

39. Ibid. 10.

40. Ibid. 3.

41. Freud, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” in SE 11: 18; my emphasis.

42. Deleuze, The Fold 85.

43. Corbin, Alone with the Alone 155.

44. Ibid. 154.

45. Ibid. 156.

46. Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference” in A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 386.

47. Ibid. 387–88.

48. Ibid. 393.

49. Lacan, Encore 49: “In other words, there are three of them, but in reality, there are two plus a. This two plus a, from the standpoint of a, can be reduced, not to the two others, but to a One plus a.” My entire essay may be summarized as an attempt to spell out the meaning of these brief sentences.