Those Against Others (2024)

Those Against Others

Published online, April 2024.

Minors could be prohibited from sex/gender transition in France, should Parliament follow a contingent of its members in their fantasy of omnipotence to legislate matters of sex, at the urging of certain individuals.

Who? Who? Parliamentarians, psychoanalysts, and certain individuals.

With a flurry of arguments unworthy of the most fundamental clinical ethics, since this is precisely a characterized refusal to welcome and hear the lives of certain others.

Let us note in passing that these proposals have been motivated for several years by lobbying efforts that have nothing to envy in the movements fighting for equal rights and just consideration of subjective and social necessities, except perhaps ethics. Not only do we find here the signs of ordinary and systemic transphobia, but also the defense of child psychiatry, whose many professionals have been convinced that their problematic lack of resources should be assessed against those devoted to welcoming and supporting minors who come to question their place and function in the sexual landscape. The anti-convergence of struggles always operates through multiple divisions: we may know this, yet we still fall for it.

We must therefore revisit two or three small matters, to contest the approach that occupies them, at its core where we can read a tenacious misunderstanding of the psychoanalytic advances of the 1970s, while we are already in 2024: when something gets stuck, it stays stuck for a long time, it resists!

I oppose, in one sentence, to their multiple arguments contesting clinical and even statistical evidence, that the sexed being, while authorizing themselves only from themselves, is not without authorizing themselves from certain others.

Where does this come from? From an echo, in the present, of Lacan fifty and sixty years ago, reviewed in transpective, not without sexuation, supported by current psychoanalytic experience (that which takes place every day, every session).

Return to Lacan

On the analyst, in the early 1970s, Jacques said that they authorize themselves only from themselves (see the session of April 9, 1974, Les non-dupes errent). From which he expanded the subject to include the sexed being, encouraged by the experience of The Pass in his School. After which it is clear that the sexed being like the analyst, without comparison, authorizes themselves only from themselves and from certain others. Which he would expand even later, anticipating our updated formulation above, through this knotting of themselves with certain others, not as an addition, nor an accumulation, but a knotting that balances the stakes of the sexed being to function in the ordinary sexual landscape, authorized not solely on their own authority nor only by others, but from a piece of the real of sex founding an act to say of sex what belongs to no one: what makes a knot for all, provided one encounters the conditions favorable to its creation for all.

What does this mean?

First point. That dealing with one’s sex, for the speaking-being, proceeds from an act. An act by which the Phallus operates in its default for all, as a missing signifier (insofar as it is itself lacking in signified and thus exemplary of pure signification, the ground of creativity and linguistic supportability). Guided in this matter, the subject is guided in this task by the unconscious or their symptom. In other words, the subject says what they are founded upon beyond, beneath, above the visible affirmation of the utterance: what makes truth through their enunciation.

Yes, this seems very complex at first glance. This is because it involves nothing less than traversing a piece of fantasy, including that of sexual difference, and in this, analysts know (let us hope), even Ulysses’ Odyssey seems like a walk in the park.

First point. Like the analyst, let us locate ourselves. That there is some analyst never says there is one, Jacques specifies. And that in authorizing themselves, the analyst cannot be so from anything other than themselves (from themselves, and not as), except to believe it, to take themselves for (narcissistic impasse). Thus the analyst, seen through Lacan’s advanced sexuation contemporary with these elaborations, is situated on the “side” of the not-all phallic, where the royal exception of the Father on the phallic “side” (in place of the exclusive exception of a dictatorial all-phallic) does not prevent this bi-polar knotting necessary for the analyst or the sexed being to authorize themselves in Lacan’s manner (neither only performative, nor only in act, nor only dialectical, nor only symptomatic).

Second point. Like man or woman. That there is man or woman never says there is one. Still, for the subject, they must say it, that from which they found beyond their symptom the subjective truth that engages them in this complexified authorization of a singularly autonomous act where they are not alone in deciding it; where the decision of desire need not encounter the censorship orchestrated by those who exceed it beyond their solitude. The authorization from themselves and the linked decision are not confused with an authorization from certain individuals to the detriment of the necessary help from certain others.

Therefore, like the analyst, the sexed being is heard and allowed to be (not allowed the being) only in territory of listening desaturated from sexual symptoms encumbering the individual. This knotting is delicate, it implies that the unconscious be taken into account, amply, deeply. Without which an analyst can authorize themselves from their reflection where their myself crushes the themselves— always taken from the body of the other (see in the experience of The Pass, how the passant can take from the body of the passers this themselves from which they are founded in the choice of function).

In other words, recognizing oneself as analyst, as man or woman, is not listening to the merely symptomatic unconscious. If this had succeeded, then there would have been only men able to become analysts. But this is not the case, since the first practitioners of psychoanalysis in the process of inventing itself were hysterical women, followed since by an immensity of women analysts to whom Psychoanalysis owes everything, in the sense of man’s excessive phallic pretension in times of patriarchy.

Would this have been relevant for a bisexually founded humanity? Of course not.

Are we rid of the risk of this invisible hierarchy? No, still not: that a homosexual/trans person can practice analysis as an analyst is still not self-evident, precisely where the exclusivity of the Father to preserve can nourish certain exclusions of gay, lesbian, or trans individuals from the function reserved for those among minorities capable of imitating and adopting the same defenses. There were nevertheless many women who became analysts, but of what gender? Of the not-all gender? Not always… (and this is damaging, for men as for women, to become analyst while avoiding the not-all, the only tenable option for the analyst whoever they may be).

What to hope for? That the analyst as man or woman authorizes themselves only from themselves, and not without certain others, freed from the fantasy where the symptom quenches its thirst.

The Pass runs through the streets, where gender has paved the way

Women and men (for example parliamentarians and psychoanalysts), authorize themselves to say that others than them would not have the right to say what they are not in the eyes of some while relying on certain others to say this being.

This elementary prohibition made to these beings to access and proceed, in Lacan’s manner, to knot their sexuation to the truth of the subject who knows not to know, unlike those authorized from themselves by virtue of their symptom, expresses a morbid wish: one of those that run among men, women, analysts so sure of themselves by virtue of a sex (that assigned by the parental Other) as of a psychoanalyst (the one that Lacan continues to be for certain individuals an Other).

Transgender children and adolescents take very seriously what psychoanalytic experience knows that certain psychoanalysts still refuse to hear and read in the subtle nuances of their former master.

Why then do they hear that there would be, in the requests of these children/adolescents, only a fallacious authorization because founded on a morbid alienation to the Other from which they suffer in the first place according to all likelihood? Is it that as analysts as man or woman they still have to suffer from an authorization tarnished by an imaginary legitimacy taken, not from the themselves non-specular, but from the me-I specular of the recognition of certain individuals (therefore the same) rather than from certain others (therefore the themselves)?

Transgender children and adolescents welcomed, heard, accompanied, supported, listened to have been for several years the proof of an extension of this authorization founded on the unconscious where enunciation, meticulously freed from the too self-assured one of the among-themselves of some refusing others, invites our unconscious. They are a current manifestation of The Pass at work returning to us from ordinary reality, just as gender testifies, according to my interpretation, to a return of knowledge about the sexual that psychoanalysis has put into circulation.

Thus, from the experience of The Pass introduced by Lacan in the psychoanalytic field, we encounter certain materials for knowledge about sex today, in 2024, through the mediation of the quarrel set up by our followers (the younger generations) with trans traits, as authentic passants depositing with the passers, toward the pass jury, that we can accept to be by elaborating pieces of knowledge about the sexual and the authorization of the sexed being as it goes for the analyst. The care systems for trans children and adolescents are, provided there is sufficient desire for analysis, genuine pass systems in their own way. Despite those authorized from themselves, in the reflection of months confirmed in their image, the requirement made of the analyst not to retreat before the real, the only dimension capable of treating the symbolic to make it progress.

A way of emphasizing, retrospectively, what in the experience of The Pass could, on many occasions, have bugged the initial project to pervert it into a machine for crushing knowledge to come to guarantee the knowledge of certain sufficiencies in the form of some to the detriment of others.

To the certain individuals who do not want others

The sexed being, while authorizing themselves only from themselves, is not without authorizing themselves from certain others.

You decide to refuse this knowledge, and you know who you are, and you know what you defend in this path subjectively determined not by the unconscious, but by the idea you have of it, the conceptual/theoretical unconscious. It weighs too heavy for your already well-filled pockets, so you divide it in two and prefer the part that authorizes you to prohibit. Thinking about this is dizzying. And what analytic experience has taught us among the essential of its contribution is quite simply despised, identically or almost to the refusals of knowledge having generated for more than fifty years the most abject political diversions of the experience of the pass.

See then how much the they so criticized constitutes, at the threshold of your resistance, a windfall as strong as that of bisexual psychic constitution. If you agreed to follow its course where they relaunches the Phallus to discourse and brings to light, available to anyone, the truth of the sexual ambivalence of the speaking-being against the imaginary habit of a sexuation despised by your appetite to make the untenable hold, to cover the real with your only specular imaginary, you would know a bit more, with Lacan and Freud without compromise as you like to ensure an insane filiation, about the sexual which is still not sex, nor gender, nor the being who recognizes themselves as one from themselves, but more authentically does not authorize themselves without others.

Imagine Circe meeting Freud in a fabulous garden. Dream their colloquium, their conversation. No other option for those who want, claim, to take seriously the Lacanian proposition on the sexed being and the analyst.

The unconscious will tell you what being is for sex. Listen carefully. And until then, speak less loudly: we have so much to hear that does not pretend as you do.

For to contest the proposition identified in the effects of themselves thus considered, you take the mad, dangerous, deadly risk of preventing the speech of the analysand from thawing, whether they be trans therefore other, not only one, nor same as the others before them: that you seem to want to make hold at any cost for others only.

After Lacan

Since Lacan’s formulation of sexuation, describing the truth of the unavoidable articulations of the sexual commerce of speaking-beings, things have changed. The field of the impossible has been modified, and with it contingency, the possible and the necessary have mutated, evolved, progressed.

The old understandings, formulable, for example, in The woman does not exist, the woman meets a man only in madness, etc. must be completed to account for what has continued to transform: the libido and its infinite metamorphoses.

Lacan was able to revolutionize the Phallus engaged by Freud by reversing the Oedipal understanding of desire and its object. Where he was able, this is not nothing, to make of said Phallus the missing signifier of being itself lacking in signified, and itself again (in body and in object) signified of jouissance. We have grasped the opportunity of the distinctions of the imaginary Phallus and the symbolic Phallus, and have remained at our end, unavoidable, for the impossible real of the Phallus which operates only foreclosed.

Lacan’s invitation to think the not-all phallic is an incredible and fortunate— not merely a discovery, but a justice done to the sexual life of the speaking beings who were his contemporaries. Without renouncing the previous, Freudian invitation to hold language at its highest degree as a support for human beings in their sexual makeshift, where they have to manage the insoluble tangle, the enigma of the sexual, just as our condition as speaking beings specifies the qualities of our human condition. To the point that some believe it queer or almost, without thereby freeing themselves from the phantasmatic arcana of their dominating anthropie (not necessarily always dominant, therefore).

I was able to add to the formulas of sexuation proposed by Lacan an introduction—or rather a reintroduction—of perverse opportunity (kept in the shadows) by placing a punch between the Subject and the object a in the lower part of the table known as the table of sexuation. This is so as not to omit, a contemporary issue for Lacan’s followers—therefore for us—the prohibition of incest and thus the cause of children: a way of accounting for the MeToo event and its tributaries.

This made it possible to open Borromean mapping of sex and gender to that of the object a, of the Phallus and of sexuation, in support of gender clinic in psychoanalysis.

And further on, to allow a-sexuation, known as Trans Discourse, to be conceived from the impenetrable real in its effects.

And its consequences,

All of this is unfolded in the text “Chifoumi… ” where one can appreciate the exploration of the effects and consequences of the version toward the father proposed by Lacan for perversion. The not-all there takes the “place” of the impossible as exception, and reopens possibilities to the contingent that is too conditioned in times of patriarchy, etc.

The dialogue of versions—or rather of slopes, as we were able to explore them from the Borromean knot in its dextrogyre and levogyre slopes—makes audible and almost visible what was not before the post-Lacanian advent of gender. An instant of seeing: realizing that its irresistible rise has occurred, for psychoanalysts since 1980, without it, without Lacan, without the gender that Lacan held to be on the account of a few.

As a continuation, today it is possible to formulate the following.

No one encounters a man or a woman as man or woman themself, not even as a subject, but as a/Other of the sexual for that other.

Thus it is not the other whom one encounters as such, but they who encounter us as a/Other of the sexual by way of the themself through which they make themself be sexed in the sexual landscape, and reciprocally. We are encountered by them (the a/Other of the sexual) as man or woman or trans man or trans woman or non-binary, for example, but we do not encounter them in the reverse sense where there is no relation, even in sexed titles, only as other (the little or the big).

Two options, two slopes:

• ather of the sexual = a-sexuation

• Other of the sexual = sexuation

a/Other of the sexual, to whom it is appropriate not to attribute—neither too strongly, nor too quickly—either a sex, or a gender, or a race, or a class that is not in the subject, unless one takes them for an individual only, stupidly, and gives up from the outset that it is the advent of the subject of the unconscious that we aim at in the treatment.

As enigmatic as the field of which they make themself the ambassador. This a/Other eludes themself at the time of the encounter, hailed by the man, the woman, the trans man, the trans woman, the non-binary person who presents themself to them without knowing or being able to encounter them in a sexual relation, but a gender relation that exists there—at that place not yet a time, only a space where the impossibility and incongruity of intersubjectivity is revealed. Because it is not two subjects who meet in the potentially sexual encounter, but a subject encountered, as a/Other of the sexual by one in the place of others: as is the case with the analytic colloquy and the logical possibility of a psychoanalytic treatment, the analogy is no accident.

Two options that coexist in this present time in which the decline of the Father continues and keeps opening what it held exclusively. Where trans children and adolescents bear witness, without knowing it, to a traversal of the fantasy valid for others than those who, knowing, have remained deaf to their not-all phallic and outside-the-phallus enunciation that some Some maintain as a substitute for the paternal exclusive on which they founded themselves as analysts in the name of an Other, where there may nevertheless be only others with whom to continue inventing what knowledge does not yet know that it may not refuse, unless it still defends itself against it, in body as well.