Being or Sex, and Differences

Abstract

This essay focuses on three differences, on the basis of which it eventually revises current conceptions of biopolitics. First, there is the difference between sex and sexual difference. Sex pertains to virtual time and is another term for the death drive or Being (or substance, in the Spinozian sense), as the power of its self-actualization, because of which Sex or Being is self-referential; by contrast, sexual difference introduces (actual) time and mortality. The second difference concerns sexual difference itself, as the two modes of having a rapport with the failed Oneness of Being, due to the latter’s self-referentiality. The third is the theoretical difference between Lacan and Deleuze, which – as I argue by focusing on central concepts such as automatism, machine, affect, signifier, virtual and actual time, death drive, narcissism, and lack – is structured like sexual difference, that is, as the abyss of incommensurability between the sexes that persists and is required, in spite of all similarities, for the affirmation of a third unassimilable and unknown Other – Being qua self-referentiality. As between the sexes, the most intimately shared point by the two thinkers is the recognition of the indispensability of this radical Otherness, which in their case is condensed in their common assault on empirical (actual) linear time. Finally, I argue that biopolitics has nothing to do either with the repression of sexuality – one’s rapport with the One’s self-referentiality cannot be repressed, for repression applies only to signifiers – or with its discursive production (as in Foucault’s inversely symmetrical criticism of the “repression hypothesis”). Rather, biopolitics in capitalist modernity is an effect of the commodification of labor-power, that is, of the potential of labor to actualize itself. This unprecedented “commerce of the potential as potential” (Virno) amounts to the commerce – i.e., the attempt to inscribe within (economic) representation – of that which persists only as long as it cannot be established in the enunciable: Being or Sex.

Keywords:

• biopolitics
• Deleuze
• Lacan
• Lévi-Strauss
• Marx
• Spinoza

Notes

1. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Latter,’” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988) 44.

2. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 218; emphasis mine.

3. Elizabeth Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics,” Topoi 12 (1993) 174.

4. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981) 250.

5. Ibid. 211.

6. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 49, 312; idem, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2002) 392.

7. Idem, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991) 73; idem, Four Fundamental Concepts 52 passim.

8. The article by Laplanche and Pontalis to which I refer here is referenced recurrently by Deleuze, and has evidently had a major impact on his thought: Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality” in Unconscious Fantasy, ed. Riccardo Steiner (London: Karnac, 2003); originally “Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origins, origine du fantasme,” Les Temps Modernes 19.215 (1964). As Edward Kazarian remarks: “it seems that some of the ‘credit’ … should be given to Laplanche and Pontalis” for the major shift that occurred in Deleuze's thought between 1961 and “some time after this, but before 1967” – notably, his reevaluation of Freud, the concomitant abandonment of “his forceful endorsement of Jung,” and the effects of his exposure to the “direction of ‘structure’ in a sense that Deleuze will adopt.” Edward P. Kazarian, “The Revolutionary Unconscious: Deleuze and Masoch,” SubStance 122 39.2 (2010) 106 n. 17.

9. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality” 119.

10. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 106, henceforth cited as DR; Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality” 118.

11. Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory 72.

12. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 311.

13. Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory 3 passim.

14. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 81. While on the ad hominem aspect of the theoretical difference between Lacan and Deleuze, one of the latter's own anecdotes about their transferential relation seems in place. In an interview – worth reading in its entirety – shortly before his death, Deleuze was asked by Didier Eribon about his relationship to Lacan, and Deleuze responded: “Lacan noticed me when he devoted a session of his seminar to my book on Sacher-Masoch [1967]. I was told … that he had devoted more than an hour to my book,” and a “few months … after the appearance of Anti-Oedipus [1972],” about which Deleuze thought that Lacan would take “it badly[,] he summoned me – there's no other word for it. He wanted to see me. And so I went,” to be told by Lacan: “C’est quelqu’un comme vous qu’il me faut” (What I need is someone like you). “Le ‘Je me souviens’ de Gilles Deleuze,” interview with Deleuze by Didier Eribon, Le Nouvel Observateur 1619 (16–22 Nov. 1995) 50–51. Excerpts from this interview are cited, with interesting commentary on the further triangulation Lacan–Deleuze–Žižek, in Daniel W. Smith, “The Inverse Side of the Structure: Žižek on Deleuze on Lacan,” Criticism 46.4 (2004) 635–38.

15. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 55.

16. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia UP, 1999) 212; Bruce Fink, “Knowledge and Jouissance” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan's Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, eds. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State U of New York P, 2002) 34. Bruce Fink attributes this line to Shelly Silver. For further commentary on Butler's thesis see Dorothea Olkowski, Deleuze and the Ruins of Representation (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999).

17. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality” 131.

18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 55.

19. Jacques Lacan, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992) 177.

20. Écrits, trans. Sheridan 66.

21. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis 83.

22. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone, 1989) 113.

23. “Time” is “genesis,” “from the virtual to the actual” (DR 180).

24. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau; ed. Allan Bloom; trans. James H. Nichols Jr (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980) 139.

25. Ibid. 146.

26. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1992) 135. This reference to Sartre's thought is not to deny in general its considerable Hegelian tint but rather acknowledges that Sartrean “lack,” far from being reducible to a kind of dialectical negativity, bespeaks, to borrow from Deleuze's own homage to Sartre, a “faithful” commitment “ever and always to the friend Pierre-who-is-never-there,” to the “peculiar destiny to circulate pure air … even if this pure air, the air of absence, is difficult to breath.” Gilles Deleuze, “He was my Teacher” in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004) 80.

27. Sartre, Being and Nothingness 138.

28. Thus, as in a repetition of World War I's primary murder of Freud's “wishful thinking” and consummation of the advent of the death drive in the world, World War II confers, in Deleuze's epic cinematographic reconstitution of time, the fatal blow because of which cinema becomes capable of the act that was to end action: the movement-image is crushed, and the novelty of the time-image emerges to express the empty form of time, “time … no longer subordinated to movement” (DR 89). See also Deleuze, Cinema 1, and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995). Zsuzsa Baross's reading of Deleuze via Blanchot also argues that death produces the new as the time-image; “Lessons to Live: Deleuze,” Deleuze Studies 3.2 (2009): 162–84. My gratitude to Cesare Casarino for referring me to this work.

29. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel 139.

30. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 84.

31. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality” 131.

32. Ibid. 133.

33. Gilles Deleuze, “How do we Recognize Structuralism?,” trans. Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale, in Desert Islands 180.

34. Ibid. 184.

35. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 13.

36. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 250.

37. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994) 102.

38. Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994) 225.

39. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993) 5.

40. Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes” 167.

41. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference 5.

42. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke G. Schoepf (New York: Basic, 1963) 224.

43. Ibid. 213–31.

44. Ibid. 216.

45. Ibid. 217.

46. Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994) 212–13.

47. Jacques Lacan, Book XX. Encore, 1972–1973: On Feminine Sexuality; The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998) 6.

48. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 197.

49. Baruch/Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985) 412; Part I, prop. 7, dem.

50. Beth Lord, Spinoza's Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010) 21.

51. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 197, 195.

52. Elsewhere I have argued more extensively that in secular ontology Being can be conceived only as differential; A. Kiarina Kordela, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (Albany: State U of New York P, 2007).

53. Lacan, Encore 6–7.

54. Ibid. 34.

55. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1989) 56–57.

56. I am referring to the atomistic (represented particularly by the line Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius) concept of clinamen, a minimal indeterminacy in the motions of atoms, an unpredictable swerve, without which we would be “automata,” that is, entirely predictable – assuming that we and all nature would have existed in the first place, something which, according to the atomists, would have been impossible because in that case no collision between atoms would take place and no nature out of atoms would be created. Lacan explicitly bases his argument in the section “Tuché and Automaton,” in Seminar XI, on this opposition between “automaton” and “clinamen” or, as Aristotle called it, “tuché,” the “encounter with the real,” which “lies behind the automaton,” being its very cause (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 53–54, 63).

57. In all my publications prior to this, I have used the term “not-all” to designate both the set of all sets (the paradox of set theory) and the female not-all (the paradox of the mathematic antinomy, as we shall see below), even as I have been aware, and arguing for, a distinction between the two structures (see $urplus). I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers and participants of the “What is Sexual Difference Now?” symposium at the University of Minnesota, in November 2009, and particularly Joan Copjec, for inspiring discussions that eventually led me to introduce a new term for the paradox of set theory in order to avoid confusion. Thus, I will be referring to the paradox of set theory with the term “all-not-all” – since, indeed, it cannot be said about the set of all sets whether it is all or not (or, what amounts to the same, it is both at once) – while reserving for the female sex the term “not-all,” which is indeed defined by the characteristic, in Lacan's words, that it “will not allow for any universality – it will be a not-whole [pas-tout]” (Encore 80; Jacques Lacan, Livre XX: Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 74). In the present essay I generally take the opportunity to refine the relevant argument I made in the aforementioned book ($urplus 93–108); for a different approach to the Lacanian formulas of sexuation and Copjec's account thereof, with a focus on the relation between sexual difference and genre, see my “Genre with and beyond Gender and Sex (a Psychoanalytic Intervention),” Angelaki 13.2 (2008): 93–107, but also the entire journal issue.

58. As Deleuze points out, one of the criteria of structure is that it is “a combinatory formula” of purely negative elements that “have neither extrinsic designation nor intrinsic signification,” so that “the sites prevail over whatever occupies them” (Deleuze, “How do we Recognize Structuralism?” 173–74).

59. Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman 6.

60. Joan Copjec, “Sex is … ,” paper presented at the “What is Sexual Difference Now?” symposium at the University of Minnesota, 13 Nov. 2009.

61. Slavoj Žižek, “The Fetish of the Party” in Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. Willy Apollon and Richard Feldstein (Albany: State U of New York P, 1996) 7.

62. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 518; A505/B533; emphasis in the original.

63. Idem, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will be Able to Come Forward as Science, trans. James Ellington (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1977) 84–85; §53.

64. Ibid. 85; Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, ed. Rudolf Malter (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989) 120; §53.

65. In its extreme actualization, the dynamic or male side incapacitates the subject from simultaneously having both relations (Beziehungen), so that he can be either subject to the law (signifier) or free, but not both. In this case, the male rapport with the self-relation of the One can be severed, resulting in a restrictively dualistic approach via a Two that has essentially lost its connection to the One. This explains the by now standard psychoanalytic account of the male sex, according to which, as Bruce Fink puts it graphically, “a man is someone who, regardless of chromosomes, can have one or the other” – the “Other jouissance,” which is “ineffable,” or the “phallic jouissance,” which is mediated through the signifier – “or at least thinks he can have the other by giving up the one,” as in the case of “the courtly love tradition,” “but not both,” unlike a “woman [who] is someone who, regardless of chromosomes, can potentially have both” (Fink, “Knowledge and Jouissance” 40–41). Fink accurately notes that the “masculine structure is in certain respects synonymous in Lacan's words with obsessive neurosis” (Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995) 106). But I would like to suggest that the sustenance of the rapport between the dualistic structure of the dynamic antinomy (either/or) and the structure of the paradox of set theory (all-not-all) that underlies it, or the foreclosure of the latter and the entrapment within absolute dualism, corresponds to the distinction between the masculine sex and obsessional neurosis, respectively. By ignoring the all-not-all in accounts of sexual difference we only reinforce the reduction of the masculine structure to obsessional neurosis, both in theory and direct experience.

66. Copjec, Read my Desire 8.

67. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 526; A520/B548.

68. Copjec, Read my Desire 205.

69. The indefinite regress of the mathematic antinomy explains why, just as the masculine structure tends so easily to be conflated with obsessional neurosis (see note 65 above), the female structure is often taken as a synonym of hysteria and its endless sliding of objects of desire. The hysteric constant rejection of objects of desire (“this is not it!”) and the perpetual pursuit of new ones is the extreme version of that state described by Copjec in the context of the female indefinite regress of phenomena or signifiers, in which “we are restricted to endless affirmation, that is, to affirming without end … the contingent series of phenomena that present themselves to us” and, hence, to negating them as necessary or absolute (“this is it!”) (Copjec, Read my Desire 225). As with the masculine structure and obsessional neurosis, here, too, the total absorption of the subject by the not-all and the concomitant disregard (disavowal? – a term that would introduce elements of perversion) of the all-not-all of Being amounts to the reduction of woman to the hysteric, again both in theory and direct experience. In short, referring to both this and the preceding footnotes (and sexes), taken to the extreme – i.e., foreclosing (or disavowing?) Being and its all-not-all structure; for Being and relations cannot be repressed but can be foreclosed (and, for that matter, disavowed) – sexual difference deteriorates to the difference between obsessional neurosis and hysteria.

70. Copjec, Read my Desire 205; emphasis mine.

71. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 197–98; translation slightly modified: “Ce que l’être sexué perds dans la sexualité, c’est … immortel. Puisque ça survit à toute division … la libido, en tant que pur instinct de vie c’est-à-dire de vie immortelle … de vie qui n’a besoin, elle, d’aucun organe, de vie … indestructible … est justement soustrait à l’être vivant de ce qu’il est soumis au cycle de la production sexuée” (Jacques Lacan, Livre XI: Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973) 221).

72. For a more extensive presentation of this thesis on ethics see again my $urplus, where it is developed in a dialogue with the work of Alain Badiou, Žižek, and other readings of Lacanian ethics.

73. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. Rodney Needham; trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon, 1969) 24–25.

74. Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, ed. Michael Speaks; trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995) 95–96.

75. Ibid. 78. Castration or the prohibition of self-referentiality is that which, as Karatani writes, gives to any “self-referential formal system” – be it the One, Sex, language, or the symbolic order – an illusion of a “center that systematizes [the] system,” so that it can function on the level of action. As long as this (illusion of) center is lacking “the necessity of choosing ‘either this or that’ is replaced by the ‘both this and that,’” so that “the self-referential formal system is always dis-equilibrate and excessive,” as it is indeed on the virtual level. Not unlike Oedipus, the prohibition of incest is “exaggerated” castration, a castration on the collective level: “Lévi-Strauss understood the elementary structure of kinship … as a formal structure … Because he had chosen the structure of kinship as his object of analysis, Lévi-Strauss had to deal with the origin of the prohibition of incest, the very structure that makes the kinship system possible. Lévi-Strauss treated the prohibition not from the genetic viewpoint,” let alone the familial, “but as a logical sine qua non for the existence of a formal structure. The prohibition of incest thus became the prohibition of self-referentiality” (ibid. 93–94). For the (by Lacanian definition) “exaggerated” character of the Oedipal relation, see Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, particularly 9–15.

76. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), particularly the last two chapters of “Part Four” 103–31.

77. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin and New Left Review, 1993) 267.

78. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004) 82.

79. Ibid. 84.

80. Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec; trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss et al. (New York: Norton, 1990) 30.

81. Note that the present argument applies equally to images and verbal texts, once, with the advent of secular modernity, their interpretation has been set free. Free interpretation presupposes a gaze (imagined by me in the field of the Other) and, by that token, already constitutes society as specularized, at least on the virtual level.

82. Lacan, Encore 6; idem, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 103–04.

83. Sartre, Being and Nothingness 433–34.

84. Ibid. 434; Lacan, Encore 10.