The Body, Sexuality, and Sexual Difference

Abstract

Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis can be seen as a new discursive and conceptual arrangement which radically displaced the prevailing conceptual paradigms developed by the natural and historical sciences during the nineteenth century. These more familiar paradigms, however, continue to dominate the reception of psychoanalysis today, in the form of debates between those who see Freud’s legacy as anticipating arguments for the social and historical construction of sexuality, and those who see Freud and Lacan as maintaining a covert appeal to naturalism or essentialism, through their purportedly ahistorical and formalist arguments about sexuality. From a genealogical point of view, both these interpretations remain bound to the very paradigms that psychoanalysis was intended to displace. As a result, the conceptual distinctiveness of psychoanalysis tends to disappear in the very course of its reception. This problem can be seen in Freud himself, and Foucault was one of the first to diagnose this difficulty, in his work on Bataille and transgression.

Keywords:

• body
• organism
• sexuality
• history of psychoanalysis
• Freud
• Charcot
• Foucault

Notes

1. Sigmund Freud, “Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (henceforth SE), eds. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1953) 1: 157–72. Subsequent page numbers are given in the text.

2. For further discussion see Charles Shepherdson, “The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994) 158–84.

3. See idem, “The Epoch of the Body: Need and Demand in Kojève and Lacan” in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, eds. Gail Weiss and Honi Haber (New York: Routledge, 1999) 183–211.

4. See idem, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000).

5. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 81.

6. Ibid. 69.

7. See Freud's remarkable text “Negation” in SE 19: 234–39.

8. In his early seminars, Lacan follows these esoteric questions about the “location” of the unconscious, following Freud's own use of optical models in some detail, eventually revealing how Freud abandons these models in the face of the problem of representation in language. For a discussion of this issue with respect to the “anatomical location” of memory, see Charles Shepherdson, “Vital Signs: The Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis,” Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993): 22–72.

9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random, 1973). Originally published as Naissance de la Clinique. Une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: PUF, 1963).

10. In “The Mirror Stage” Lacan argues that the first formation of the ego is restructured with the arrival of language, such that even “libidinal normalization” is affected. “This jubilant assumption of his specular image,” Lacan writes, shows us the ego only in its initial form, prior to the dialectic of intersubjective recognition, a different structure which will in turn be modified by language: “the I is precipitated in its primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.” Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 2. Subsequent references to Ecrits are in the text.

11. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream V.i. The adjacent lines are worth recalling, since they include the poetic gift of creation, and the poet's use of imaginative “forms,” which must first be seen by the poet's peculiar “rolling” and “frenzied” eye, and then named or reconfigured by the pen:

The poet's eye, in a 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.

12. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety in SE 20: 140.

13. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952); and Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. James MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1952).

14. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (Part III) in SE 16: 393.

15. For further remarks see Charles Shepherdson, Foreword to Roberto Harari, Lacan's Seminar on “Anxiety”: An Introduction, trans. Jane C. Lamb-Ruiz (New York: Other, 2001) ix–lxii.

16. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. with an introduction by Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977) 29–52.

17. Ibid. 35. Subsequent page numbers are given in the text.

18. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1976) 6–7.

19. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents in SE 21: 64–148.

20. Idem, Totem and Taboo in SE 13: 1–255.

21. For further discussion see Charles Shepherdson, “Derrida and Lacan: An Impossible Friendship?,” spec. issue on “Psychoanalysis and Social Change,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 20.1 (2009): 40–86.

22. Ibid.

23. See Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundations of Authority’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992) 3–67.