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What Is Sex... If Love Is Possible PDF
What Is Sex... If Love Is Possible PDF
What IS Sex?
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aesthetic dimensions. This will lead us to a brief overview of the theme of tragedy
and comedy between Ethics of the Real and her more recent works. Finally, we will
return to the central theme of sexuality, but from an alternative perspective: I would
like to conclude this review by arguing that even though Zupančič is probably the
philosopher who took the furthest the theme of the “Two” in psychoanalysis, there is
still one more step to take in this direction, only implicitly touched upon in her work -
the one which thinks the “twoness” of psychoanalysis itself, caught up in an
irreducible tension between the impossible as "cause" and as “consistency".
Where is sex?
The project of investigating “the very nature and status of sexuality” (2017, 1) was set
out by Zupančič almost ten years before the publication of What is Sex?, with her
previous book-length study, Why Psychoanalysis? (2008b). This short book serves as
an important point of inflection in her intellectual trajectory. Divided into three
“interventions”, the project not only condensed some of the crucial results of her
previous investigations - an essay on causation and freedom recuperating themes
already at play in Ethics of the Real (2000) and The Shortest Shadow (2003), and a
study on the relation between comedy and the uncanny continuing the brilliant The
Odd One In (2008a) - but it also sets out, through the opening essay, titled “Sexuality
and Ontology”, the stakes for What is Sex?. However, more than simply juxtapose
previous and future research projects, Why Psychoanalysis? helps us to recognize a
certain asymmetry between the ethical, aesthetic and ontological investigations - a
certain overdetermination of the first two by the latter.
The essay dedicated to the question of sexuality begins with a petition of
principle:
“The question of sexuality should indeed be brutally put on the table in any
serious attempt at associating philosophy and psychoanalysis. Not only
because it usually constitutes the ‘hard core’ of their dissociation, but also
because not giving up on the matter of sexuality constitutes the sine qua non
of any true psychoanalytic stance, which seems to make this dissociation all
more absolute or insurmountable” (Zupančič, 2008b: 6)
We could surely interpret this claim in line with the more general project of the
Slovene Lacanians, but I believe that a much more productive reading is possible if
we focus on the fact that Zupančič is not only joining the ranks to defend the
concrete universality of psychoanalysis as a “theory and practice that confronts
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individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence” (Žižek, 2006: 3), but
rather affirming that sexuality is the operating concept which allows for the transitivity
between the concrete and the universal within analytical matters. There is a subtle,
but crucial difference between claiming, like Žižek does, that “neuroses, psychoses
and perversions have the dignity of fundamental philosophical attitudes towards
reality” (ibid 4) and affirming that sexuality is the “sine qua non of any true
psychoanalytic stance”. While the former statement already supposes that the
universality of psychoanalysis is a matter for philosophy, the latter goes a step
further, claiming that sexuality is what ties the particularities of analytical thinking to
its own universality.
This might seem like a mere shift in emphasis – and, certainly, these are not
incompatible claims - but what the above-mentioned passage renders intelligible is
that the task of “associating” psychoanalysis and philosophy must face an additional
challenge when we do not simply map these two fields onto the division between
singularity and universality, but rather accept that psychoanalysis has its own access
to universality. This challenge affects in a profound way the very delimitation of what
pertains to the psychoanalytic realm: is philosophy convoked here because there is
an unthinkable kernel in psychoanalysis - only accessible from an external point of
view - or is philosophy interested in the analytic field on account of what it thinks?
We will try to unfold some of the consequences of this distinction as we go along,
but for now it is enough to that Zupančič’s emphasis on sexuality places it in two
“spaces” at once: as that which justifies the interest of philosophy in “associating”
itself with psychoanalysis and as what functions, within psychoanalysis itself, as the
marker of its own autonomy, the index of its “dissociation” and independence from
philosophy. The problem with sexuality for philosophy, as Zupančič argues, is not that
it is “too particular” to be of philosophical interest, as if philosophy was too serious to
condescend to these “dirty matters” – if anything, philosophy has become
increasingly obsessed with finding a place within itself for the small and the ordinary,
very much in line with our “progressive liberalism of morals” (2008b:11). Rather, the
reason why sexuality is both a necessary and an impossible dimension for
philosophy to consider when it seeks to establish an articulation with psychoanalysis
- the cause of their association and dissociation - is that it provides psychoanalysis
with a different, non-philosophical position from which to think universality: an
“operator of the inhuman” (ibid 12) that seems to bypass the mediation of the
concept.
This double condition of sexuality in psychoanalysis, the crossing point
between its singular and universal dimensions, is enriched by another, correlate
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ambivalence, also mentioned in the early stages of Zupančič’s research. Even though
“Sexuality and Ontology” goes through a detailed analysis of Freud’s Three Essays on
Sexuality and important passages of Lacan’s eleventh seminar, the question of the
ontological import of sexuality begins and ends with the problem of where to
position oneself within psychoanalysis. This is particularly clear in the concluding
lines of the essay - which were later recuperated as part of the introduction to What
is Sex? (2017: 3-4).
The greater part of the text is dedicated to introduce the sexual as “the
concept of a radical ontological impasse” (2008b: 16), demonstrating that “Freud
discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation) and not as
something with which one could eventually explain every (other) problem” (2008b: 7),
subverting the common idea that psychoanalysis would reach towards generality by
filling the world with sexual meaning. Instead, Zupančič masterfully argues how, for
both Freud and Lacan, sexuality is not something which renders our ethical and
cultural motivations inconsistent, distorting our path towards some hidden
satisfaction, but something which is itself inherently inconsistent and only “becomes
what it is” through these mediations which seek to oppose or integrate it into a
meaningful horizon - in one of her greatest one-liners: sexuality is “a paradox-ridden
deviation from a norm that does not exist” (ibid).
What interests us here, however, is that, after arriving at the sexual as the
concept of a “fundamental inconsistency of the objective world itself” (ibid: 16), she
shifts her attention to the related, but irreducible, question of psychoanalysis’ own
relation to this paradoxical objectivity. This is a telling shift also because it brings into
play one of the few mentions to Althusser and Marxism in her work:
“In any social conflict, a ‘neutral’ position is always and necessarily the position
of the ruling class: it seems ‘neutral’ because it has achieved the status of the
‘dominant ideology,’ which always strikes us as self-evident. The criterion of
objectivity in such a case is thus not neutrality, but the capacity of theory to
occupy a singular, specific, point of view within the situation. In this sense, the
objectivity is linked here to the very capacity of being ‘partial’ or ‘partisan.’ As
Althusser puts it: when dealing with a conflictual reality (which is the case for
both Marxism and psychoanalysis) one cannot see everything from
everywhere (on ne peut pas tout voir de par tout); some positions dissimulate
this conflict, and some reveal it. One can thus only discover the essence of this
conflictual reality by occupying certain positions, and not others, in this very
conflict.
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What I would like to suggest is that the sexual is precisely such a ‘position’ in
psychoanalysis.” (Zupančič 2008b:19)
There is here a slight change of perspective here, from the analysis of the
“concept” of the sexual – as the name of an ontological impasse for a subject – to the
analysis of the sexual as a “position” which unveils a conceptual field – that is, the
sexual as a site for psychoanalysis. Perhaps we could recuperate here a distinction
dear to German Idealism (Hegel 1977: 155-173): to say that the sexual is the concept
of a “conflictual reality” is to think the “objectivity of the subject-object” – to locate the
indeterminate, inconsistent impasse of subjectivity within material reality – while to
say that the sexual is “a position within psychoanalysis” is to think the “subjectivity of
the object-subject” - to think how certain positions allow us to participate in the
constitution of a space of thinking which both touches and constitutes something of
the real. The question of the ontological import of sexuality - the problem of the
“what” of sex – is here transformed into the question of a site, marked by the
inconsistency at the heart of sexuality, from which the reality of the unconscious is
thinkable – that is, turned into the problem of the “where” of sex.
This shift recuperates the ambivalence at stake in the Zupančič’s introductory
remarks to “Sexuality and Ontology”, concerning the internal circuit between
singularity and universality within psychoanalysis, dividing it into the analysis of a
concept within psychoanalysis and the analysis of the position of psychoanalysis
within reality. It is my wager that it is only when considering this ambivalence at the
heart of Zupančič’s treatment of the sexual – both as a concept and as a position –
that the stakes of What is Sex? can be properly grasped. Were we to locate sexuality
in psychoanalysis exclusively as the analytical name for an ontological impasse, then
the universality at stake in psychoanalysis – the ontological import of sexuality
conceived as ontological – would only be accessible for philosophers, and the
passage from the singular to the universal would be isomorphous to the moving
away from psychoanalysis. It is only when sexuality is also understood as a partisan
position – an engaged stance which one must affirm in order to have access to a
conflictual totality - that psychoanalysis emerges as a field capable of being the
address – rather than only the object – of a claim to universality.
Even though this passage was reworked and utilized in the first pages of What
is Sex?, the question of the sexual as the marker of an engagement which
participates in the consistency of psychoanalysis is not often thematized in her latest
book, nor in her work in general. However, rather than take this for a sign of its
marginal status, I want to argue that it points to the underlying tension in her
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All of the members of the famous Slovene “troika” are known for their common
project of extracting the philosophical consequences of psychoanalysis, which is
then used as a basis for a profound rethinking of the ontological and epistemological
commitments of Marxist politics, contemporary art, etc. They are also known for
having recognized in Alain Badiou a “fellow traveler” and, in his work, an important
interlocutor. Not only was Slavoj Žižek responsible for the introduction of Badiou’s
work to an English-speaking audience, through long critical essays and a whole
chapter in his Ticklish Subject (Žižek 1999: 127-170), but both Mladen Dolar and
Zupančič have also engaged with his work on several accounts, using his ideas both
as a comparative stance against which to develop their own positions and as the
example of another philosopher who shares some of their main intellectual and
political commitments. However, unlike Žižek and Dolar, who concluded their studies
in psychoanalysis with Jacques-Alain Miller in Paris and gravitated towards Badiou’s
project later on, Zupančič wrote her doctoral dissertation under his direct supervision
– a thesis which would later be revised and published as the Ethics of the Real – and
has not only referred to Badiou as a philosophical and political ally, but as a relevant
interpreter of Lacan.
The trajectory and stakes of Badiou’s engagement with Lacan remain poorly
documented, and this is certainly not the place to fill this unfortunate lacuna . It is
1
important, however, to note that a common thread running throughout his work -
from his confrontation with Jacques-Alain Miller, in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse,
through the discussion of Lacan’s “Logical Time” in Theory of the Subject (2009) all
the way to Being and Event (2005) - has been the question of the regionalization of
psychoanalysis, which, I would like to argue, is an innovative way to connect the
“what” to the “where” of the unconscious. So let us take a quick detour and
reconstruct the basic tenets of Badiou’s position.
Let us consider, for example, how Badiou’s early critique of the concept of
“suture”, proposed by Miller as the basic operator of Lacan’s logic of the signifier
(Peden and Hallward ed. 2012: 91-101), did not lead him to reject it, but rather to
demonstrate that Miller’s (and Lacan’s) mistake was to generalize it beyond the
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problem to accept a third option, namely, that Lacan as a thinker was incapable of
accepting the status of psychoanalytic thinking as being part of a regional procedure
– this is a position which clearly informs, for example, his take on Freud in The
Century (Badiou 2007: 68-80), his debate with Lacan in Subject and Infinity (Badiou
2008: 211-227) and his confrontation with Jean-Claude Milner (Badiou 2013).
This brief reconstruction of Badiou’s theory of compossibility is important not
only because it helps us to further systematize the “ambivalence” we have
recognized in Zupančič’s work on sexuality, but also because it spells out a model of
articulation that is informed by different commitments than Žižek’s basic strategy of
how to organize the relations between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Elsewhere, I
have highlighted the “borromean structure” of Slavoj Žižek’s theoretical space
(Tupinambá in Hamza ed. 2015: 159-179) – the way Žižek establishes connections
between philosophy, politics and psychoanalysis by adhering to a double principle:
the principle of immanent transition, which states that each field formulates
problems which are only consistently thinkable from the perspective of other fields of
thought, and the principle of non-complementarity, which conditions the passage
between any two of these fields to the mediation of a third. This is precisely the sort
of formal arrangement between philosophy and psychoanalysis which leads Žižek to
claim, as I have previously mentioned, that “neuroses, psychoses and perversions
have the dignity of fundamental philosophical attitudes towards reality” (Žižek 2006:
4) - this special “dignity” is not thinkable within psychoanalysis, but it becomes
consistent as an object of thought for philosophy – via the mediation of dialectical
materialism.
To understand the novelty of Žižek’s position, it is essential to recognize that
his proposal is an alternative solution to the impasses of Miller’s own previous
solution to the relation between psychoanalysis and politics - the theory of suture,
which, under the guise of relating these two “discourses of overdetermination”
(Peden and Hallward, 2012: 80) through a “logic of the origin of logics” (ibid: 92), the
logic of the signifier, improperly generalized psychoanalysis as the legislator of what
politics can and cannot think. Instead of articulating psychoanalysis and politics via a
general logic of discourse, Žižek introduced Hegelian philosophy as a third, equally
standing field of thought, and de-stratified the articulation of the three fields into a
space of possible transformations. It was, nevertheless, a solution conceived within
the basic matrix set out by the Millerian reading of Lacan, given that democratizes
rather than abolishes the possibility of one of the three fields to serve as the site for
another’s unthought kernel (Žižek 1989: 11-53).
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“In its tragic paradigm ‘to not give up on your desire’ is a subjective and solitary
business. It is an heroic enterprise of fidelity (“to a lost cause”), carried out by a
subject in the unbroken continuity of her will and determination. This fidelity
manifests itself in the fact that nothing comes close to the lost thing, which
functions only as a firm criterion of elimination, leading us to conclude of each
and every particular thing that “this is not IT”. In comedy, on the other hand, it is
clear that “not to give up on your desire” is something more objective than
subjective. It involves an interruption of the subject, her ‘absentness’ triggered
precisely by an unexpected emergence of this “IT” (as the impossible object).
The same time, and precisely because of this interruption, this discontinuity of
the subject, it cannot be a solitary business, something that a subject can carry
out all by herself. We could say: to not give up on your desire takes (at least)
two. We need a little help with this - from, for instance, someone who helps us
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“As for the ‘ne pas ceder sur son desir', we can say: the 'do not give up on your’
is not simply foreign to what the expression ' to give up on ' implies. Rather, it
implies that in order to preserve one thing, one is ready to give up on
everything else. In the case of Antigone this implies that she gives (away)
everything in order to preserve some final ' having'. In the end, she realizes
herself in this final ' having'; she merges with it, she becomes herself the
signifier of the desire which runs through her, she incarnates this desire. In the
case of Sygne, this goes even further. She does not give up on her desire
either, but she finds herself in a situation where this demands that she also
gives up on this final ' having', the signifier of her being, and realizes herself in
the ' not-having'. In the case of Sygne de Coufontaine, ' not to give up on her
desire ' implies precisely that she ' gives away' everything.” (Zupančič 2000:
258-259)
The shift here is not one between tragedy and comedy, but between two sorts
of tragedy: the Sophoclean paradigm, in which one “gives away everything in order
to preserve some final ‘having’”, and the Claudelian one, in which “not to give up on
her desire implies precisely that she gives away everything”. Lacan famously claimed
that “desire is not articulatable, because it is articulated” (Lacan 2006: 681) – that is, in
analysis one does not speak “about” one’s desire, it is desire that “speaks” through
what we say. But what Lacan did not develop, and what emerges in Zupančič’s
analysis of Sygne’s final act, is the question of the "objective" (or de-subjectified)
space in which our desire – now subjectively inaccessible – articulates itself, that is,
“stops not being written”. Where is desire articulating itself when we lose any access
to its articulation? This is precisely what the tragic paradigm cannot think – and,
appropriately, it is the place where Ethics of the Real interrupts its investigation. What
the tragic view of psychoanalysis misses – with its absolutization of the singularity of
desire, so tempting for us, in that it also assigns philosophy the monopoly of analytic
universality – is precisely the comprehension of the ambivalence we have been
tracking thus far: the idea that when we cease to dispose of desire – of a subjective
access to the inconsistency of being – we can still compose it – write something of
this impossibility in a consistency that only exists insofar as we participate in it.
Even though the “comic turn” remains within the bounds of Freud’s theory of
the “witz” and Lacan’s own theory of comedy, it is not hard to recognize how the idea
of that a non-transferential space whose consistency depends on both analyst and
analysand has no name in Lacanian theory – in fact, the whole point of the theory of
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the desire of the analyst is to think the removal of any attempt by the analyst to share
in the consistency of the analysand’s speech. From the standpoint of comedy,
however, it is possible to recognize that one’s engagement with psychoanalysis – the
objective partnership between analyst and analysand, beyond all intersubjectivity – is
the “forced pass” through the very real that psychoanalysis localizes as an impasse . 3
Let us now skip ahead to What is Sex?, to see how the theory of comedy -
thoroughly developed in The Odd One In – comes back as an immanently
psychoanalytic answer to both Lacan’s reliance on the tragic paradigm and to
Badiou’s theory of the procedures. In the concluding pages of the book, Zupančič
engages in a confrontation between Lacan’s and Badiou’s projects, comparing their
different takes on ontology, on the role of the “void” and on the concept of the real.
The comparison does not stem very far, at this point, from other critical engagements
by Lacanians with Badiou – specially from Dolar’s and Žižek’s critiques of Badiou,
which are usually variations on the theme of denouncing Badiou’s incapacity to
consider the ontological import of the death drive. But after proposing several direct
conceptual mappings between psychoanalysis and his philosophy, Zupančič
analyses the concept of event as it appears for Lacan:
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“After making this point, however, Lacan concludes in a rather pessimistic way
beyond the temporal suspension of the non-relation, the love encounter has
no means of sustaining this suspension in its contingency, hence it attempts to
force its necessity. (..) This is, then, the move from contingency to necessity
which ‘constitutes the destiny as well as the drama of love’. It is my (im)modest
claim – developed elsewhere - that ‘drama’ is a significant word here, and that
the comedy of love, or love as comedy, entails a different logic. But if it is
indeed to work, the comedy of love is a much more demanding genre than the
tragedy or drama of love. (...) What if we reintroduced here the notion of a ‘new
signifier’ as precisely that which could make it possible, in this case, to build
something on the basis of a love encounter, without obscuring the
contingency of (its) being?” (ibid: 135-136)
We are now in a position to return to our initial remarks concerning the ambivalence
of the sexual in Zupančič’s work with a richer conceptual apparatus. As I have
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repeatedly claimed, the brief mention to Althusser in “Sexuality and Ontology” and
again in the beginning of What is Sex? should not be taken for a mere side-note.
They mark a line of enquiry that insists throughout her trajectory, even if rarely
thematized as such – an investigation which ties her to the problem of
psychoanalysis considered as what Badiou calls a “generic procedure”. After all, the
theory of regionalization, in Mark and Lack, of the real as consistency, in Theory of
the Subject, and of the compossibility of procedures, after Being and Event, are
nothing but an increasingly sophisticated elaboration of what Althusser touched
upon with his idea of “conflictual sciences”. What is rather surprising, however, is to
realize that, having following this thread all the way through, we end up with two
views of psychoanalysis, each “refracting” one of the senses of the sexual: a thinking
which disposes of a concept of the impossible kernel of sexuality and a thinking
which composes an idea of real love. More than one psychoanalysis, but less than
two.
If we reduce concept of the sexual only to its first facet, we risk hypothesizing
the singularity of desire, adopting a tragic attitude towards the theory of non-relation
and treating every form of consistency as imaginary. We also let go of the conceptual
resources which make the very existence of psychoanalysis as a procedure
thinkable for psychoanalysis – assigning philosophy the role of keeper of its inner
consistency. On the other hand, if we accept that the “comedy of love” is thinkable
within the theoretical space of psychoanalysis, we are not “completing” our
understanding of Freud and Lacan’s legacy, but rather opening a whole new
problematic field.
As Zupančič summarizes it, “we started with sex (in its “impossibility’) and
ended with love in its evental dimension” (139). In other words, we began with the
sexual as “concept of an ontological impasse” or inconsistency, and ended with the
sexual as an engaged position which gives us access to a consistent treatment of
this deadlock - that is, the comedy of love. But is this truly the “order of reasons” at
stake here? Arguing what comes before, the objective fidelity to the idea of love or
the theory of the sexual qua impossible might seem like a “chicken or egg” scenario,
but it is far from it: what is at stake is recognizing that psychoanalysis is not only the
theory which thinks the passage from the sexual to the love event, but a theory which
is only possible if an event has taken place. After all, are we not following here the
hypothesis that, were it not for Zupančič’s previous commitment to psychoanalysis as
a thinking of the love-procedure, her investigation of the ontological import of
sexuality would probably have remained within the limits of the “tragic” paradigm?
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Throughout her many books and essays, Zupančič has insisted on thinking
through the many expressions of the “irreducible Two” in psychoanalysis: the “two” of
enjoyment in Ethics of the Real (Zupančič 2000: 249-260), the “two” of the semblance
in The Shortest Shadow (Zupančič 2003: 150-163 ), the “two” of the phallic signifier in
The Odd One In (Zupančič 2008: 183-218) and, finally, the “two” of the sexual itself, as
both the impasse and the point of passage of sexuality, in What is Sex? (128-144).
What I am trying to suggest in this study is that, underlying this trajectory, there also
lies the “two” of psychoanalysis as such – both a critical and a constructive
procedure, even if these two perspectives remain irreducible, and incommensurate,
with each other. For the first, the event of love is, at best, still to take place, but
somehow forever out of reach of analytic theory and practice – though its de-
substantialized vision of the sexual as an ontological impasse already presupposes
an engagement which no objective analysis of reality can account for. For the latter,
the event of love has already taken place, as the very idea that something can derive
the consequences of there being a veritable ontological fracture in our constitution
as sexed beings – but this thematization of fidelity as pertaining to the analytic field
blurs the difference between the engaged partnership that underlies the clinical
setting and the one which binds lovers together, losing the specificity of clinical work
(Zeiher and McGowan, 2017: 55).
I believe that this last irreducible “twoness” makes itself legible in Zupančič’s
remarks on the “capacity of naming” and the role of a “new signifier”, just before the
concluding pages of What is Sex?. At first, she brings up the question of the “new
signifier” as a crucial operation within the procedure of love, as that which would be
“capable of naming, and hence sustaining, the minimal difference (contingency) on
account of which my lover keeps reminding me of himself” (Zupančič, 2017: 138).
Countering the “sublime expectations” of what a new signifier might look like within
the love procedure, she uses the example of intimate nicknames given by lovers to
each other in a relationship as a use of the signifier which does not work by closing
the minimal distinction between the love object and the existing object, but rather
“works at generating and maintaining the space for construction at the precarious
point of the Event” (ibid). This might be an ordinary example, but it is far from banal
or unimportant: what is at stake in such nicknames – when they do serve this
particular function - is precisely the shift from the drama of love to its comedy. From
the standpoint of the sexual as impasse, signifiers function as a means to represent
the subject to the Other – hence the “drama” of the che voi?, of finding out what the
Other wants from me if I have such and such nickname. However, from the
standpoint of the sexual as the possibility of real love, signifiers function as a means
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Zupančič’s last word on the topic, however, does not concern the comic
interiority of the couple’s intimacy, but rather the more general challenge of finding
signifiers “that name something about our reality for the first time, and hence make
this something an object of the world, and of thought” (ibid: 139). This shift, I believe,
is a good example of the sort of open question which considering psychoanalysis as
a thinking of real love brings to the fore: what distinguishes, if anything, the role of
naming in the aftermath of a love-encounter from the act of naming “something
about our reality for the first time” which constituted the Freudian event to begin
with? Not the quality of signifiers, but rather the space in which that difference makes
a difference – a couple is a certain form of partnership built out of the Other’s
inconsistency, but could we not say that psychoanalysis itself, as a certain
institutional space, is another? After all, has psychoanalysis – spread across its many
couches everywhere – not constituted itself an alternative address, a partner which is
capable of joining us in the inscription of impossible names in the world?
The proposal that the “two” of psychoanalysis – its existence oriented by an
impossible cause and by an impossible consistency – is more than an
underdeveloped ambivalence in the way sexuality appears in analytic thinking, has
the strange implication that psychoanalysis, as a clinical practice, might rely more
than it knows on the organized commitment of both analysts and analysands to the
forcing of new form of love into existence. It is a strange idea, but it is also quite
funny.
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1
Though an important contribution is about to be published, Reza Naderi’s Infinity and the Subject.
2
There is a fundamental ambiguity, in fact, in Lacan’s own original formulation of this famous
statement in his seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis: even though it has been taken as a sort of
general ethical imperative, it was first formulated in the context of a theory of the desire and position of
the analyst. A study of this ambiguity can be found in my contributions to Hamza (ed.) 2014 and Zeiher
& McGowan (eds.) 2017.
3
See Tupinambá 2014: 247-287.
4
It is my wager, in fact, that a truly novel use of Badiou's project for psychoanalysis should depart not
from the homonymous category of the subject, but from the further differentiation that the grammar of
infinity allows us to impose onto the concept of the Other and the object a.
References.
Badiou, A. (1999) Manifesto for Philosophy. New York: SUNY Press.
Badiou, A. (2005) Being and Event. London: Continuum Press.
Badiou, A. (2007) The Century. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Badiou, A. (2008) Conditions. London: Continuum Press.
Badiou, A. (2009) Theory of the Subject. London: Continuum Press.
Badiou, A. (2013) Le Séminaire: Lacan, l’ anti-philosophe. Paris: Fayard.
Chiesa, L. (2006) “Count-as-one, Forming-into-one, Unary Trait, S1” in Cosmos and History, Vol.2, n.1:
http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/29/58
Clemens, J. (2013) Psychoanalysis is an Anti-Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Hamza, A. ed. (2015) Repeating Žižek. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. New
York: State University of New York Press.
Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Irwin, J. & Motoh, H. (2014) Žižek and his Contemporaries: On the Emergence of the Slovene Lacan.
London: Bloomsbury
Novak, I., Krečič, J. and Dolar, M. (2014) Lubitsch Can’t Wait: A Theoretical Examination. Lubjliana:
Kinoteka
Hallward, P. & Peden, K. (2012) Concept and Form. vol. 1 London: Verso.
Tunambá, G. “The Idea of the Passe: Critique and Construction in Psychoanalysis”, Crisis and Critique
Volume I, Issue III: http://crisiscritique.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/gabx.pdf
Zeiher, C. & McGowan, T. (2017) Can Philosophy Love? Reflections and Encounters. London: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Žižek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (2006) How to read Lacan? New York: W. W. Norton & co.
Žižek, S. (2012) Less Than Nothing: Hegel and The Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso
Zupančič, A. (2000) Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan London: Verso.
Zupančič, A. (2003) The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Massachusetts: MIT
Press
Zupančič, A. (2008a) The Odd One In: On Comedy. Massachusetts: MIT Press
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CONTINENTAL THOUGHT & THEORY: A JOURNAL OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM
What IS Sex?
Zupančič, A. (2008b) Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions. New York: NSU Press.
Zupančič, A. (2017) What is Sex? Massachusetts: MIT Press.
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