with and beyond gender and sex (a psychoanalytic intervention)

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Notes

notes

My gratitude goes to Linda Schulte-Sasse, Mathew Collins, and Ben Davis for thoughtful feedback throughout various stages of the present work.

1 All brackets in citations are mine.

2 We must not, however, infer, as both Hegel and Žižek do, that therefore “[t]he supersensible … is appearance qua appearance”; for, albeit “nothing but a lack,” this “negative self-relationship” of representation to itself has real effects on representation, such as, to repeat Žižek's words, to make it appear “as ‘mere appearance,’” and is therefore itself a real beyond appearance, even as it cannot ontologically exist but in its effects (appearance) (Hegel 89).

3 An affinity between Freud's concept of bisexuality and the common use of the term nevertheless remains on the level of the unconscious, insofar as “all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious” (Freud, Three Essays 11 n. 1). Note also that Lacan's attribution of sexuality to the failure of reason eliminates all biological remnants in Freud's grounding of his thesis on a presumed tendency towards “bisexuality” (Bisexualität) in “higher animals” in general (Freud, Gesammelte Werke V: 46 n. 1; idem, Three Essays 13 n. 1).

4 I have introduced this distinction elsewhere (see Kordela).

5 This distinction between the two realms of the real may bear similarities to the distinction introduced by Jacques-Alain Miller in his “class, Orientation lacanienne,” between “two different levels of the real,” R1 and R2, which Fink describes as follows: “(1) a real before the letter, that is, a presymbolic real, which, in the final analysis, is but our own hypothesis (R1), and (2) a real after the letter which is characterized by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itself (R2), that is, which is generated by the symbolic” (The Lacanian Subject 182 nn. 11, 27). It is evident that sex pertains to the level of R2, since it indeed comes “after the letter” and “is generated by the symbolic” as its byproduct. What seems more intractable in complying with this scheme is the unconscious, which being, as Lacan has put it, “structured like a language,” is hard to be conceived also as “before the letter” or “presymbolic” (Lacan, Book III 167). Yet if we take into account that one of the central functions around which the symbolic is organized is negation, and that this function is not operative either in the unconscious or in language, as defined here in distinction from discourse, then it may well be that the statement that the unconscious is structured like language should be taken in this precise sense of “language,” and then the unconscious could be said to be “presymbolic.” This hypothesis is supported by Lacan's further commentary on the above statement, which asserts that the unconscious and “everything that belongs to analytic communication … whatever it may be, isn’t a language in the sense in which this would mean that it's a discourse – I’ve never said it was a discourse – but is structured like a language” (167).

6 Here I am paraphrasing Kant's example of the body that instead of having either a bad or a good smell might be odor-free (see Kant, Critique 517; A503/B531).

7 In my opinion, the feminine not-all relates to hysteria – which is traditionally linked to woman, as is clear both in Freud and Lacan and in later commentators, such as Fink – an organization of subjectivity that resists the ethical act, insofar as “the hysteric's desire … is to sustain the desire of the father” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 38; see also Fink, The Lacanian Subject 107).

8 This in itself suffices to explain why Lacan argues that “toute pulsion [every drive],” the oral, the anal, the scopic, and the invocatory, “est virtuellement pulsion de mort [is virtually a death drive]” (Écrits II 215).