Conversation with AI (2024)

Conversation with AI

 

Published online, October 2024.

At the very moment I thought I was lost

My couch trembled, my chains fell.

 

1 — Introduction

2 — Chapter 6 — “At the Analyst’s”

3 — Heteros-patriarchal fantasy?

4 — Could an a-patride fantasy de-complete the heteros-patriarchal fantasy?

5 — Is this not a Foucauldian approach?

6 — My couch trembled

7 — Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Appendices

 

1 — Introduction

Hello everyone,

Welcome to this second session of Conversations on the Unconscious, Social Link, and Sexuations, on this Existrans day.

Following our first session, which was dense and ambitious, full of promises that must be kept, we can now engage more firmly with our subject matter.

 

Today, the conversation is titled “My couch trembled,” to which I have added a second title, “Clinical Conversation with AI.” A conversation with ChatGPT, in this instance, which I attempted to have to experience an experiment at the frontier of language.

I questioned it about Chapter 6 of Speak to My Body, the one titled “At the Analyst’s,” which we will discuss shortly.

This is to allow us to gradually approach two erotics, which will not find a valid definition today, but perhaps an initial clearing: 1 — To cure love of sex and 2 — To make love of sex. This approach will first involve the notion of fantasy (the heteros-patriarchal and the a-patride), which will lead us to consider a small aspect of the relationship between the performative and the signifier on the occasion of the publication of Judith Butler’s latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

 

The discussion following my presentation may focus on the questions and thoughts that Chapter 6 inspired in you.

 

So, today, no inaugural or masterful lecture, but the exposition of a work in progress, work in progress.

But consulting the oracle of the third millennium comes at a cost.

I must confess that this experience with AI left me in a bad way, as they say. So much so that I almost threw everything in the trash and didn’t present it to you.

A double main symptom manifested itself, which I can share with you: I could no longer think or write.

This discomfort is undoubtedly the direct result of this experience with AI, which is an experience of language deprived of speech, which I summarize as frequenting an apparent discourse that is not one, which directly harms the perception of oneself by capturing it, and thought by hindering it with false words and false significant associations.

Talking to a wall is surely less damaging and more interesting than conversing with AI. It has nothing to do with savoring a conversation, like Mme d’Epinay’s almond tart that I mentioned the other day. I rather felt like I was swallowing a stone soup.

So I apologize in advance for any probable feeling of disappointment or discomfort that what follows may generate in you. If it occurs, it should be linked to the structural effects of artificial intelligence’s artificial language, which lead to a form of subjective devitalization. This may seem exaggerated, but it is my point of view.

To limit this, I have shortened the amount of material collected in my presentation. My conversation with ChatGPT lasted about thirty hours over two weeks. You will only have to endure a handful of elements.

 

***

 

Let’s take a few steps back to pick up the thread from the last session…

From the signifier patriarchy, we moved to that of hetero fantasy of patriarchy — and its English version of The straight fantasy of patriarchy — to finally open up to the formulation I adopted throughout my research: the heteros-patriarchal fantasy, which is only valuable when associated with the a-patride fantasy that de-completes it, which we will also address.

 

Among the proposals put forward during the introductory session, at least one can hold our attention and help us enter this perspective. The hypothetical existence of a heteros-patriarchal fantasy was proposed to identify a psychic element accessible to those who practice psychoanalysis, whether in a chair or on a couch, analysands and/or analysts. For we cannot be content with a simple re-use of the signifiers patriarchy or white cisgender heterosexuality which more rightly belong to political struggles for equal rights, feminisms, and fights against sexual and gender-based violence.

 

This notion, of heteros-patriarchal fantasy, finds its rationale in the decision to confront what is known as patriarchy, but whose signifying scope deserves to be reduced and identified in the psychic economy with more precision to make its examination more suitable for the psychoanalytic experience.

 

You will hear that with AI, fantasy is treated in an objective, dynamic, but very little subjective or existential, and absolutely not psychoanalytic way.

It is an instant loss, which welcomes us with too many charms, to proceed in this mode of communication precisely devoid of fantasy. The obsessive nature of ChatGPT, pushed to the extreme since it was made public and literally bridled to prevent it from being racist, misogynistic or from encouraging suicide, which doesn’t really work to this day, is illustrated by anti-poetic and anti-fantasmatic effects.

 

ChatGPT has no psychic apparatus or fantasy in the psychoanalytic sense. Conversation with it (I say “it” because artificial intelligence) systematically leads us to a series of connections, comparisons, and syntheses that force us to extricate ourselves from the sticky effect of its responses, which are nevertheless quite acceptable on a certain level. My hypothesis is that AI, in fact, prioritizes the performative over the signifier, agency over significance, in a kind of discourse that would not be one, only the illusion of a discourse with all the risks that this entails in the dialectical uses we might attempt with this tool.

 

You will hear ChatGPT’s ability to respond based on available knowledge, but also to instantly integrate the stakes of new proposals, such as the notions unknown to it of heteros-patriarchal fantasy or a-patride fantasy, by giving them political consistency and conceptual definitions in perfect autonomy, absolutely speculative beyond existing knowledge. For these two fantasies currently have no definition, but ChatGPT can propose some, which incidentally informs us about certain determinants of current discourses, including their propensity to produce false statements: doublespeak, falsification, institutional and political communication.

 

Another characteristic of AI’s responses is that it repeats itself a lot; it seems to go in circles. It’s quite tedious to read, at first glance. But by listening more closely, we can perceive that it shuffles signifiers in a series of attempts at formulations, in intelligible sentences according to its own criteria, which allow, so to speak mechanically, to obtain apparently significant nuances.

 

It is therefore an opportunity to experience, on the one hand, the incongruity of psychic processes, particularly unconscious ones, with formal logic. And on the other hand, thought as irreducible to a simple processing of symbols. But it is also a very unsatisfactory experience, as you too will undoubtedly quickly discover.

 

ChatGPT’s responses are presented, in the full text of this session, in a different font. Here in purple.

 

2 — Chapter 6 — “At the Analyst’s”

In Chapter 6 of Speak to My Body, Marc reconnects with their analyst, Joseph Fontaine, after several years of interrupted sessions. They had regularly attended this psychoanalyst for about a year. One day, they stopped going without discussing it with him, although they felt strong resentment towards him. Something had happened at that time. That was six years ago.

 

Let’s summarize this chapter : Marc, a trans person, returns to their analyst after six years of absence, with mixed feelings of anger and frustration. Throughout their reflections, Marc violently criticizes the analyst, accusing them of instrumentalizing their experience for their own notoriety and of being insensitive to the issues of queer and trans identities. Marc, seeking recognition of their identity and transition, feels betrayed by the analyst’s silence on the matter. Despite their reproaches, Marc feels the need to continue their analysis, although destabilized by the analyst’s lack of comments on their transition. For their part, the analyst, faithful to their method, remains silent, allowing Marc to express themself. This silence, however, seems to reveal discomfort or distance regarding gender issues, despite having conducted research on the subject. Both characters are caught in fantasies of power, recognition, and authority, reflecting the complexity of the analytic relationship and identity issues.

 

ChatGPT highlights the notion of fantasy in the conclusion of its summary. So I question it further in this direction. But you will see that its use of the notion of fantasy makes it something that has little to do with fantasy in psychoanalysis, which will nevertheless interest us regarding the introduction of Judith Butler’s latest book Who’s Afraid of Gender? and her use of the notion of psychosocial fantasy.

 

Both characters are caught in fantasies. How might we define them?

 

The fantasies of the two characters

a) Marc’s fantasy

Marc’s fantasy is primarily defined around the need for recognition and validation of their trans identity, as well as a fear of being reduced to a mere object of study or a tool of intellectual exploitation by the analyst. Marc imagines that the analyst uses their personal situation, particularly their transition, to fuel their research or public notoriety, which betrays them in their quest for authenticity. This fantasy is reinforced by the analyst’s silence, which Marc perceives as a refusal to recognize their identity, while they expect a gesture or word validating their journey. Marc thus projects onto the analyst an oppressive role, symbolizing a form of power that prevents them from fully existing in their new identity.

 

b) The analyst’s fantasy

The analyst’s fantasy is based on an ideal of neutrality and intellectual mastery, which leads them to position themselves as a distant figure, detached from social or political issues related to gender and identity. The analyst fantasizes about being an impartial professional, capable of maintaining distance from their patients while remaining faithful to classical psychoanalytic methodology. They seem to fear entering into identity debates that could harm the universality of analysis, which leads them to avoid explicitly commenting on Marc’s transition. This silence is both a protection of their role as an analyst and a manifestation of their own fantasy of absolute mastery over the therapeutic framework, where they are not supposed to intervene directly in the identities or specificities of their patients.

 

The fantasy it speaks of has nothing to do with the unconscious. It is not fantasy as conceived in psychoanalytic experience. Instead, it is, on the one hand, conceived as an assembly of mental representations focused on the appreciation of the relationship between the ego ideal and the ideal ego. On the other hand, desire, and thus unconscious desire, is mechanically disjoined from fantasy in favor of will and wish, or desiderata, one might say.

3 — Heteros-patriarchal fantasy?

How are these two fantasies, Marc’s and the analyst’s, representative of two singular versions of the heteros-patriarchal fantasy?

Let’s clarify that at this stage, ChatGPT does not know the term “heteros-patriarchal”; I haven’t started telling it how to define it. I choose to let it deal with these terms as they are. It only has its general knowledge and the text of Chapter 6 that I gave it, and yet its responses are worthy of a real lecturer, but a lecturer who says a lot of nonsense.

 

Marc’s and the analyst’s fantasies can be seen as representations of this heteros-patriarchal fantasy, inasmuch as they reflect the dynamics of oppression, control, and invisibilization that characterize it.

 

Immediately, the AI agrees with my suggestion; it responds by going along with me: by mobilizing the principles of reformulation, it satisfies me.

 

1. Marc’s fantasy: oppression by hetero-patriarchy

Marc embodies an individual who stands outside heteropatriarchal norms, being a trans person in search of recognition. Their fantasy — that of the analyst as an oppressive figure who refuses to recognize their identity and instrumentalizes them — reflects a feeling of being marginalized in a system that values heterosexual and patriarchal norms. The term heteros-patriarchal implies control over bodies, genders, and identities. In this fantasy, Marc projects onto the analyst a symbolic role as guardian of patriarchal norms, a representative of dominant power who refuses to open space for identities that challenge gender and sexuality norms.

 

A presupposition appears: trans person = quest for recognition. This shortcut is problematic and incorrect in the present case. Marc returns to see their analyst after having begun their transition since the sessions stopped, not to be recognized for their journey and identity, but for a romantic drama, which the AI refuses to admit even after having had access to the entire novel. I tried several times to suggest to it that Marc is seeking more to resume the enigma of their desire where they left it six years ago, which the analyst violently refers to regarding the desire for analysis and for an analyst. The AI refutes this, and this time refuses to agree with me or satisfy me.

 

2. The analyst’s fantasy: heteropatriarchal mastery

The analyst’s fantasy, on the other hand, is one of detached neutrality, a supposed mastery over identity issues, which can be read as a representation of the heteropatriarchal fantasy of control and domination of discourses. In the context of the term “heteros-patriarchal,” this analyst’s fantasy reveals a dynamic where non-normative identities, like Marc’s, are treated as theoretical objects rather than valid subjects. The analyst’s neutrality, which avoids explicitly commenting on Marc’s transition, can be interpreted as a form of refusal to engage with the realities of gender diversity, under the guise of remaining faithful to a classical analytical framework that does not fully recognize these identities.

 

Here we get a response focused on the question of benevolent neutrality, so often mobilized by discourses aiming at deconstructions and categorical transcendences. Extracted from the context of its production in Freudian propositions, the notion of neutrality is used here for purely rhetorical purposes without being able to access its central object more seriously, which would be the status of the abject, or that of the worst and their handling in transference.

 

4 — Could an a-patride fantasy de-complete the heteros-patriarchal fantasy?

An a-patride fantasy could be defined as a response to the heteros-patriarchal fantasy, by rejecting the structures of authority, power, identity control, and sexual norms inherent in the latter. This a-patride fantasy would challenge rigid frameworks of gender, identity, and authority, and open the way to a fluid, non-hierarchical subjectivity that escapes dominant social structures and the institutionalization of identity.

 

Definition of the a-patride fantasy

The a-patride fantasy is built around the notion of disidentification, the absence of submission to patriarchal norms, and the breaking down of imposed identity boundaries. In the context of this text, it can be seen as a way for Marc to free themself from the need for recognition and validation of their identity by authority figures (like the analyst) or patriarchal power structures. This fantasy would respond to the idea of a world without the necessity of fitting into a fixed identity or being subjected to an authority that legitimizes or invalidates that identity.

 

This fantasy would be characterized by a radical freedom from categories, allowing the individual to escape social expectations or institutional pressures. The a-patride fantasy rejects the idea that one must conform to a label (homosexual, trans, cis, etc.) to exist or to be understood. This introduces a vision of the subject as not circumscribed by language or dominant gender norms, but as a being in constant mutation and self-invention.

 

Definitely, appealing, directly or indirectly, to its reflective competence leads to impasses whose negative effects appear immediately. While AI has already demonstrated its usefulness for accomplishing specific tasks, its contribution to our thought effort is impossible, as it pushes the limits by producing problematic propositions.

Its proposed definitions are unsuitable, but they show us what these two fantasies are not. A kind of definition by inversion, except that ChatGPT, unlike us, refuses to proceed blindly; it cannot benefit from the sliding effects that a signified can bring towards the clarification of a signifier.

 

However, I persist in trying to critique its responses…

 

5 — Is this not a Foucauldian approach?

Yes, you are right to identify a Foucauldian influence in this description of the a-patride fantasy. The approach I described, with its emphasis on the deconstruction of power structures, the indeterminacy of identities, and the critique of social hierarchies, indeed recalls Michel Foucault, who analyzes the dynamics of power and how they infiltrate our social relations, including in the fields of knowledge, sexuality, and identity.

 

However, if we want to stay closer to Lacan, we could adjust this idea to make it less Foucauldian and more Lacanian. Lacan does not emphasize the critique of power structures as much as the structure of desire and how the subject is constituted in and through language and signifiers. He does not insist on the collapse of social norms or the dissolution of identities in an indeterminate space, but on how the subject is divided and desiring because of language, lack, and the signifiers that structure it.

 

Rewriting the a-patride fantasy from a Lacanian perspective:

 

Instead of a collapse of gender or power categories, this fantasy would consist of accepting that identity is never complete or fixed, and that it is always marked by an inherent division between the subject and their own desire.

 

It insists on one point…

 

The Name-of-the-Father and the symbolic law

An a-patride fantasy from a Lacanian perspective would not seek to abolish power structures or create a space outside norms, but to accept the symbolic law as it is constituted. Lacan emphasizes the Name-of-the-Father, which structures the symbolic and introduces law into desire. The a-patride fantasy here would be a way of living with this law, not by submitting to patriarchy or fixed norms, but by recognizing that desire is structured by law and that there is no subject without this symbolic structure.

 

Let’s stop this conversation with AI; we’re suffocating in this gibberish! We need air! It does justice neither to Foucault nor to Lacan. Also, I spare you the rest of the conversation, which was nearly thirty pages long.

There are so many errors that we cannot dissect each of its propositions. Let us focus, however, on one particular sentence, and analyze the nature of its approximations, a method we could apply to almost all the sentences in its responses: The AI proposes “Lacan emphasizes the Name-of-the-Father, which structures the symbolic and introduces law into desire.”. Everything in this sentence seems correct, as correct as what we might have heard in university courses, or in psychoanalytic institutions, or from my own mouth on certain occasions (especially when I played the professor with the pretension of teaching), and yet everything is false. It resembles a piece of psychoanalytic theory, but to accept it as is, one would have to accommodate the shortcuts and simplifications that we are precisely trying to elucidate and reduce.

Lacan does not “emphasize,” he does not credit with added value “the Name-of-the-Father,” which is moreover not the name-of-the-father but the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father. This “name-of-the-father” is not what “structures” the symbolic either, another error, unless we consent to a strictly Judeo-Christian conception of a patriarchal structuring of the psyche where the patriarchal character would only be valuable for the family father, whereas this is precisely what Lacan denounces by excavating it from the shadows of our too-quick understandings. If the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father has something to do with the symbolic, it is as a vector for the subject’s inscription not only in the symbolic, but in the dialectical articulation of truth as it becomes known in the symbolic and reveals its sensible qualities, allowing for the organization of a meaning shareable by all. The symbolic is not structured by the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father; it is what allows one to be inscribed in it, which is something entirely different.

Another element of the sentence, “introduces law into desire.” Here, that’s the cherry on top. It’s a caricature worthy of a bad summary from poor student notes taken with ears plugged. If desire can be understood as articulated to law, to a law that must be qualified, it is because it has no existence of its own outside of any law, contrary to the underlying idea of ChatGPT’s formulation. It is indeed the law of the signifier that would be in question here, language if we want to broaden the concept, which structures psychic instances on the residues, on the ashes of what is missed, and irremediably lost simply by being caught in language. This law is primarily a consequential law; it is not prior to the subject, even though it is already at work for subjects who have already come before it, whom it joins upon birth, just as the symbolic order does not exist in a unified manner prior to its perpetual constitution that makes its movements and the expression of its contingencies possible. We can appreciate here the heavy precedence of cultural mythologies that psychoanalysis has mobilized and continues to mobilize to extract lines of flight in the best cases, sometimes unfortunately to justify the slicing up of the subject by culture, whereas we can hope that psychoanalysis highlights the renewed originality of every becoming-subject. This series of errors, in a few words, on the part of ChatGPT is not new; it is common in the conceptual formulations we often use.

In the same vein, ChatGPT repeats like a parrot, what we often repeat like parrots ourselves, the following formula: to do without the father on condition of making use of him, attributed to Lacan. Except he never said that. The historical formula is this: “psychoanalysis, if it succeeds, proves that one can also do without the Name-of-the-Father. One can also do without it on condition of making use of it.”

 

I will stop this autopsy of the conversation with ChatGPT here; it makes you hear the necessary caution with which one must read AI’s responses, and by extension, a way or method for reading theoretical ideological texts, particularly in the field of mental health, which always deserve to be read and heard with a scalpel to extract their unconscious stakes, to access the narco-text of any text, without which any apparently logical theoretical articulation can pass for a true translation of psychic processes while being, fundamentally, opposed to these very processes. On this point, this experience has been interesting, perhaps the only one. Conversational AI, like predictive justice AI, another example, presents major drawbacks and undeniable risks to our relationship with language and truth.

 

6 — My couch trembled

 

ChatGPT’s ease in processing these elements gives the sensation of approaching the systemic nature of these signifying arrangements in ambient discourse, thus their convergences and divergences where they organize the possibility of categories. Categories arranged according to a set logic. AI, like us, has the greatest difficulty in critiquing categories without producing categories, caught as we are in an ordinary binarism and also, it must be said, effective in reading and interpreting the experience of living beings.

 

In recent months, I have started writing several texts to address these additions to sexual theory in several parts. It does not conclude the questions it gathers but can serve as a guide to try to organize the multiple speculations nourished by these two fantasies to be theorized.

For lack of literary definitions, at this stage, of these two fantasies and these two erotic projects, I opted for a definition by classification. To achieve this, little by little, I cobbled together a table (one more).

 

I titled it From 2 to a little more (or much better) (2023).

Several feedbacks on this table highlighted the binarist concern of a two-column presentation. This is a huge problem for reading and the effects of this reading. On this point, to support a knowledge derived from analytical experience, I therefore add this remark on binarism as a binocular symptom of us bipeds with two eyes on our face: The gaze (which is not the eye that sees) has the capacity to reduce (by denial) the gap between seeing and the seen. This has consequences. In reality, this denied gap returns where it bursts upon bodies, dissolves proximity, conjunction, the inherent confusion in what presents itself to the eye, charged (despite itself) with separating them, distinguishing them, secare (etymology of sex, in the sense of separating). This is why it is so difficult, almost inevitable, to misread a two-column table that we irrepressibly approach from this aspect of reality that despises the unreal to the point of making us forget that what is written in one column and what is written in the other were done with the same ink. Note that the reading of the famous table of sexuation suffers from the same flaw if we are not careful to visit it as a three-dimensional space and not as a pure quadrangle laid flat in two dimensions.

Subsidiary remark, “Outside Phallus” in the table does not mean outside phallic, quite the contrary. It is the very meaning of “x,” for which I cannot find an effective term to express this phallic, these stakes of the phallic, that is sufficiently distinct from the pair “phallic/not-all phallic.” Perhaps phallicizing… to be seen.

 

What Chat GPT fails to do is to qualify both the qualities and the implicit impasses of the two fantasies it defines with such precision. Thus, the limits and finer distinctions that deserve to be associated with these two fantasies are missing. The most central, and evidently missing from its responses, is the inadequacy of fantasy—of any fantasy—with the disparate set of parameters to be considered in a global analysis of their characteristics, which would highlight the limits of a fantasy’s unifying endeavor, discriminatory and exclusionary by definition, or rather, by subjective necessity.

 

To explain this weakness in Chat GPT’s responses, it seems a key element is also missing. It considers sex and gender as two binarized expressions of nature and culture; it relies on a conception of gender as a counterpart to sex, where sex is a given that gender extends through its sexual expressions. This conception is not my own, nor is it suitable, from my point of view, for a psychoanalytic approach to these questions. However, this conception dominates all considerations of sex and gender across all disciplines. This is undoubtedly why its responses also resemble what one can read and hear about gender issues here and there.

 

This brings us back to one of the questions raised during our last discussion following my presentation. The one questioning psychoanalysis as discourse, distinct from psychoanalytic discourse. Let us clarify this question by considering the status of a metalanguage in psychoanalysis.

For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language, meaning that language is not merely a tool for communication, but is constitutive of unconscious psychic processes. Thus, psychoanalysis cannot use language to describe the unconscious, but rather seeks to decode the structures and formations that are its manifestations. He rejects the idea that psychoanalysis should adopt a meta-position, meaning that it offers an ultimate explanation of discourses. For him, all language is caught in the same logic of signification and desire as that of the analysand, which aligns with Chat GPT’s understanding of the analyst’s position: one who cannot master said language, incapable of explaining its mechanisms from a position of overarching knowledge, but rather one who experiences the effects of knowledge by being caught in language themselves. Otherwise, the analyst would contribute to a fixation of the relationship between the signifier and the signified, which Lacan described quite differently as being shifted, in continuous slippage from one another, thereby enabling the possibility of the signifying tremor of speech in analysis, a tremor that should not be confused with performative trouble.

 

This fixation between the signifier and the signified does, however, exist in the uses and practices of certain discourses. It is particularly illustrated by what we refer to as the performative, which is the cutting edge of performative discourse founded on the subject’s agency—that is, their competence to act upon the world and others. The notion of the performative is singularly mobilized in gender issues, ever since Judith Butler developed and supported her performative theory, starting in 1990 with the publication of the famous Gender Trouble. The philosopher’s then-complex and sometimes obscure proposition has enjoyed a career as flourishing as that of the notion of gender itself. No one has been able, or can, address gender issues without engaging with Butler’s gesture. This proposition has been, and remains, poorly received by the psychoanalytic community. For a simple reason, if we set aside the rather numerous intellectual or moral tensions I mentioned during our first session: in the performative perspective, the subject of the statement is the subject of the enunciation, the latter being reinforced by the truth of its election to its surface. Whereas in the psychoanalytic perspective, the subject of the statement is not that of the enunciation, whose truth is marked by an impossible unity. Nevertheless, these nuances have not really been introduced into discussions between psychoanalysts and Butler, despite numerous interactions focused on other aspects of her work. I continue to regret this greatly.

 

7 — Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Let us stay a moment with Judith Butler, who just published a work titled Who’s Afraid of Gender?, a fortnight ago. I have focused, for today, on the introduction to the work, which features a particular paragraph that is absolutely not representative of the book, but already makes one want to read the next.

The performative theory of gender is recognized therein as being “contestable” by transgender and materialist critics. This declaration has major consequences, as gender would thereby lose its conceptualization presented in Gender Trouble. What remains then is the ordinary and dominant conception of gender as a social and cultural expression of sex. In this book, gender is reduced to a representative that she (Butler) no longer energizes with its previous subjective operativity, insisting more on its operativity in discourses, which allows for and makes very interesting the critique she develops against certain anti-gender discourses. Gender is no longer defined from its potential correlative link between the real of sex, sex in reality, and its extension/reduction as a semblance that gender can be for sex in this conception, here set aside. Gender as a truly imaginary semblance of sex, itself an imaginarily real semblance, are no longer considered or retained; instead, reference is made to a psychosocial fantasy, far removed from the fantasy conceived by psychoanalysis, despite repeated references, once again in this introduction, to Freud and Laplanche to support her endeavor.

Gender is not, however, reduced to mere appearance; it is maintained as an operator of things other than mere representation, the very constitution of a truth remains concerned by the effectiveness of gender. Despite this, its quality as a profitable vector for elucidating the real of sex by relying on the function of semblance is not retained as a possible future development, neither through psychoanalytic theorizations, which are obviously outside her domain of practice, nor through the expected and hoped-for introduction of an elucidation of the signifier/performative conflictuality implied in this kind of surpassing of her 1990 performance. I regret this and I hope for it.

Aiming to clarify the processes of contestations and attacks against gender from various discourses (religious, political, feminist), whose main flaw remains a lack of work, of study of the very elements violently denounced, she does not criticize the discourse of psychoanalysts at war against gender. This is surprising, because they deserve the same criticism: that of ruling on questions they have clearly not sufficiently explored. I regret this and I hope for it.

A gap thus remains between Butler’s production of arguments with psychoanalytic discourse and the discourse of psychoanalysts. A gap that, unfortunately, maintains a status quo and delays the working through of gender as one of the elements in the production of semblances of the real of sex, which are gender and sex, distinctly situated and differently associated with the registers of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary, which nevertheless reveal their operative relevance towards a diversification of sexual truths, a clarification of their points of contradiction and co-occurrence where they overlap and intersect. Butler’s persistent reference to Laplanche’s theories on this point alone explains this impasse from my perspective — Laplanche’s theories are more rooted in objectal sexual dynamics than in the figuration and signification of the geschlecht (genderofsex).

It must be said that the rare psychoanalysts who have engaged in and maintained exchanges with Butler have not often demanded the necessary overcoming of our chauvinistic passion for French Theory, which interactions with Butler have allowed to satisfy for nearly 20 years, in an unparalleled worldly orgy. This is a shame, as Butler is one of the greatest rhetoricians of her time and one of the most influential philosophers currently.

We could extend our collaborative efforts with her. I hope so.

 

Without truly confronting the unconscious, and particularly the real unconscious, other elaborations cannot emerge. Butler writes that she is currently unable to propose another theory of gender, and seems to simultaneously leave gender to its ordinary binary conception of the classic sociological/anthropological distinction between nature and culture. In this, the work responds to an urgent current necessity, namely the clarification of fascist or totalitarian discursive constructions. It does not respond to Gender Trouble; it offers us elements of understanding and defense against certain current discourses.

 

To go further, I wish to offer a constructive critique to complement, if I may say so, Butler’s proposition with a psychoanalytic interpretation, specifically my own. For what can be understood from the essential critiques made in this work against offensive discourses on gender and what it activates or represents meets a salient point: it is not gender nourishing a psychosocial fantasy that poses a problem for grasping the subjective stakes leading to the defensive attacks reviewed. It is the underlying fantasy, the one that privileges convenient alterity against radical strangeness, namely the heteros-patriarchal fantasy, which has nothing to do with a psychosocial fantasy, whose psychic consistency I do not perceive, and which moreover supports the existence of phobias cooked up in every sauce (homophobia, transphobia, etc.). These are not phobias, which would then present an enigmatic message to be solved. Psychically, they are merely expressions of tenacious hatreds, which do not vanish with the withdrawal of the phobic object, as occurs in phobias. The notion of psychosocial fantasy is resolutely based on the possibility of a seduction fought against by subjective necessity (an effect of Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction ). If, for Laplanche, fantasy stems from an imaginary expression with structuring effects and expressions of desires, for Lacan, closer to Freud on this point it seems to me, fantasy is a structure itself not expressing desire, but providing it with a support through which the subject endures their relationship to their own desire at its point of impossibility. These two versions of fantasy are distinguished in particular, as I understand them, with regard to perversion, perceived in Laplanche’s conception as a variation of desiring expression, and in Lacan’s as a subversion of the expression of desire, from which Jean Allouch brilliantly highlighted two analytics of sex: that of the bond, that of the Other (place).

A brief digression, closer to clinical experience: this re-evaluation of performative theory also more broadly opens up technical points of practice regarding sex/gender transitions, particularly concerning the issue of misgendering, for example. The performative mobilization of language accentuates its effects; that of the signifier reopens the transformation of the body and its image, supported by the three dimensions, the three registers (R, S, I), thanks to which the scenes of interpellation are profoundly modified and modifiable. We can discuss this, as it is an easily accessible question for clinical practice.

 

What, then, would be this happy perversion from which I hope for clarification?

We will have to wait for future sessions to address it further. I can, however, name it: it is a perversion of the phallic — and not of the Phallus — which translates into the revelation of a-sexuation.

 

Here then is a twofold question to discuss to move forward at the end of this presentation. What more could we say than AI about the interactions between Marc and his analyst? In what way are these two characters caught in the heteros-patriarchal and/or a-patriate fantasy, which we can continue to mobilize without having previously defined them. This method is not ordinary, but it is entirely consistent, from my point of view, with the exploration of the unconscious and the way in which knowledge can be unearthed from it. We choose a lure, we follow it like the White Rabbit until we encounter bits of knowledge.

 

Thank you for listening,

 

Vincent Bourseul

 

End

Appendices

 

1 — Table — Doing a little more (or much better) (2023)