The unconscious is not bisexual. It is bisexuality (2022)

The unconscious is not bisexual. It is bisexuality

 

Published online, November 2022.

Below is the text of an oral presentation, aimed at suggesting the modalities and conditions necessary for moving beyond binarity, from a psychoanalytic perspective. The reference to theoretical contributions from the field of psychoanalysis is, here, very clearly approximate, in order to limit the remarks, within the 20 minutes allotted, to the evocation of modes of thinking.

To view the slides and illustrations, please download the PDF document.

 

Hello to everyone and the others,

I will begin by telling you a few silly things, to introduce my main argument, which will come in the conclusion, through a few metaphors and analogies.

I practice psychoanalysis not far from here, on the border of the 4th arrondissement Marais and the 3rd arrondissement Marais.

For a long time I went to bed early, thinking, since my arrival in the neighborhood which is starting to date back, that the 4th arrondissement Marais had something different, a sort of extra something, compared to the 3rd arrondissement Marais.

More beer, more gay bars, more Rolexes, and above all, more and more consumers who, every weekend, come to celebrate the morbid capitalism of the city center like a tsunami of erect credit cards.

The 3rd arrondissement Marais is different; it has more museums, more private mansions, more organic restaurants, more CBD shops.

And I was not the only one to notice this difference. Every year, when tourists ask during the last days of June, “Which way to the Marais?” they are looking for Rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie, not Rue Chapon.

 

Then a new distinction appeared, under the name of Haut-Marais.

Boom!

The downgrade!

In a word, I went from the Marais to the Lower Marais, which some call the Swamp.

Subjective destitution!

 

So, I changed neighborhoods without moving. The qualities of the time before slipped into defects or new qualities. The cursor moved, my place of life changed symbolically, through the competition of names, and especially imaginarily, through the modification of the phantasmatic representation of the places.

 

One identity can therefore hide another; the transitions of one identity transform another, without needing to ask its opinion, or even needing to move it: the change of space and place of subjectivity, the transformation of an identity also occurs, and above all, without apparent movement, although illustrated in reality. Identity is a fantasy; welcome to the Metaverse.

Spaces are modified, I am displaced, my environment engages, through its transformations, my continuous transition toward modalities of existence that are always initially unknown to me. To which Marais am I identified now? How to find out? Only one method, as always: follow the White Rabbit, and join Alice on the other side of the looking glass.

 

Subjective experience, as we identify it in consciousness, always follows a logic of face-to-face, where the binary alternation of one or the other is experienced this way by everyone: “I am in or I am not,” “I am one of them or I am not,” etc.

The argument of this session proposes to question binarity insofar as it represents the structuring function of sexual difference, this constituting—as a hypothesis—an impasse, a dead end for psychoanalysis as well as sexology in their attempts to move beyond binarity.

To reflect on this question, I have chosen to address the fate of another notion: psychic bisexuality. For one simple reason: I believe there is a link between certain erroneous understandings of psychic bisexuality and the difficulties encountered during attempts to move beyond binarity. Misunderstood, psychic bisexuality encourages a flattening, a failure of attempts to move beyond binarity. This is my hypothesis. It is the path I myself took, starting by being mistaken.

I am not going over the history of this notion of psychic bisexuality, known as one of the main Freudian propositions of the early 20th century, including the subtleties of its emergence during the intense and subliminal dialogue between Freud and Fliess. All of this is available in books and articles, including Freud’s Homosexuality, by Lionel Le Corre.

 

I hesitated with another title, which would have been The Unconscious is Not Relative, but Quantum. Then I thought to myself that a presentation on quantum physics was going to be a bit much for a Wednesday morning, so we’ll stick to a presentation on psychoanalysis (it’s much lighter, isn’t it?).

Yet another title would have been: Why Three is Better Than Two? Another way of stating and questioning the conditions for the success or failure of what is hoped for and perceived as an opening, as a moving beyond the couple, but which, very often, due to the forced energy savings of the psychic apparatus—which likes neither change nor expense—gets bogged down very often in the binary spectrum, never reaching what would be the 3, and settling for its arithmetic decomposition.

**

 

Moving beyond binarity is a hope, and a historical psychoanalytic aim, although it has not had the career it deserved and remains even today struck by a severe obscurantism by many practitioners and theorists of psychoanalysis. The easiest example to identify is Freud’s attempt to move beyond the psyche/soma couple with the introduction of the economic, topographical, and dynamic conception of the psychic apparatus, to assert the unconscious as a hypothesis.

 

Since then, this has had unavoidable consequences on the way of thinking about the psychic determinants of sexual life, in particular.

In this psychoanalytic perspective, the beyond of binarity is not non-binarity—I am not talking about non-binary identity assertions which are perfectly capable of questioning binarity in reality and in discourse—therefore the beyond of binarity is not non-binarity, nor its only extension or apparent completeness that would be provided by a sort of thirdness illustrated and guaranteed in appearance by the existence of the 3.

For moving beyond binarity, through non-binarity or other means to be defined, moving from 2 to 3, runs up against binary identity, the identity of the 2 that one would need to be able to undo or destroy.

 

Many rhetorical and/or performative attempts are experimented with without always succeeding in overcoming this almost inevitable trap of being captured, in this damn reality, by the trinity making the third term, or the third sex, or the apparent bisexuality of certain sexual practices—stuck between heterosexuality and homosexuality—an eternal in-between caught between two stools, and whose function is reduced to confirming the validity of the 2 that preceded it.

 

In other words, increasing the number of terms, starting from 2, to move to 3, is an operation that can collapse into a simple addition, or a simple supplement. This transition from 2 to 3, if it does not reform the very existence of the 2, cannot relaunch identifications and reform identities.

If moving from 2 to 3 results in a 2+1, it’s marketing. It works for selling shampoo bundles; it plays on accumulation or the series, neither of which are true vectors of expansion, but rather means of acquisition.

Moving from the binary to its transcendence, which is not necessarily the ternary, is more complicated than we might have hoped. In other words, moving from the 2 to its beyond is not about reaching the 3; it is more about accessing a certain disposition of the 3, a certain structural arrangement of the 3 that forces it to exceed the cumulative limits of 2+1, or 1+1+1.

 

This is indeed Lacan’s initiative and explanation with his Real, Symbolic, Imaginary proposition aimed at pushing the experience of psychoanalytic knowledge further.

It was not enough for him to propose three terms to escape the temptation of the two. It was still necessary to specify the modalities of their articulations, of their hoped-for relations freed from classical dialectics. For this, chaining them together, these three terms were not sufficient; it would even have been completely counterproductive.

The three terms, from the conception of the Real, Symbolic, Imaginary registers, are knotted, and not chained in a sequence.

A knot is not a chain; this marks a first difference that we can qualify as being dynamic. First change, first step to move out of duality.

But it is still not enough. Furthermore, the spatiality of this knotting must be specified, and not only its dynamics. Then the Borromean quality of this knotting intervenes. The Borromean knot, as a quick reminder, has this specific feature: the three loops of string that constitute it are knotted, and not chained, to each other, and not between them, in such a particular way that cutting a single one of the loops is enough to free the other two.

We therefore have two identifiable qualities in this attempt to move beyond binarity: the dynamic aspect and the spatial aspect. We could say, with Freud, the dynamic quality and the topographical one.

But this is still not enough to avoid the risk of seeing these three elements fall back into a dual mechanic, which represents in the simplistic reality we quite often live in, a form of apparent comfort, quite unsatisfactory in terms of the experience of knowledge.

With the Borromean knot, Lacan made the economic not a modality of transaction or a tracking of flows, but its fixation by its most elusive determination, namely its cause, the famous object a planted in the middle of the Borromean knot, where there is not nothing, but an irreducible element, which like a black hole activates a movement, even guarantees it.

 

This cause is not a 4th term whose consistency or nature would be similar to the three elements that precede it here, but a beyond of the three terms or the three elements themselves; this false 4th element, which is the a, is a non-object for the 3 elements of a knot which, thanks to it, escapes its fate as a chain.

To have a small chance of seeing this 3 not collapse into 2+1, this x is needed, which increases it as much as it de-completes it.

Which gives us this heretical writing, but it is also a truth of the psychoanalytic experience.

 

Moving from binarity to its transcendence would therefore have some chance of succeeding under several conditions—spatial, dynamic, and economic, without forgetting what prevents it from constituting itself as an identity of the 3. Here is a happy path that opens up, but which is difficult to hear and admit: transcendence is possible on the condition, as you will have understood, of renouncing or moving beyond the very identity of transcendence, which is undoubtedly not the case, for the moment, for binarity versus non-binarity, which always risks playing the role of a folding seat, due to having to hold combat positions in reality.

 

Why do we encounter these difficulties? Quite simply, I believe, because we think about this matter by constructing a mental representation of the reality of sexual and emotional experiences, for example, of what that can or cannot be. Forgetting that reality is a fiction, a surface with holes.

Thanks to this common error—human, one might say—we often fall back on a thought reduced to considering what happens for one vis-à-vis the other, and vice versa, without ever succeeding in bringing in what is neither of one nor the other or of their transcendence, and which yet determines the very possibility of their existence: what eludes them, what we call the unconscious, what is the cause of desire, or even desire itself which we only localize by interpreting it.

As a consequence of which: in the unconscious, there is no sexual difference, but only discretion, as a tracking, a distinction, of the other of the sexual.

This is how I understand constitutive psychic bisexuality.

It is not a way of stating the possibility of being masculine and feminine at the same time (ineffective notions in psychoanalysis), or of being man and woman at the same time (notions valid in psychoanalysis as signifiers, not as sexual truths), etc. This would be a thought of psychic bisexuality submitted to the imaginary superiority of reality.

 

Constitutive psychic bisexuality means that one is, to put it simply, or quantumly speaking: And man And woman And gay And trans, not at the same time, but in the same place: the unconscious.

The unconscious, which I remind you does not know time, so there is no way to think of it in a Macronist perspective such as the “at the same time,” so characteristic, moreover, of denial.

The unconscious is not bisexual; it is constitutive psychic bisexuality, for the unconscious is not so much relative as it is quantum. Therein lies a change of perspective, which is nonetheless present from Freud’s historical propositions on the matter, and taken up by Lacan and others. An epistemological change as well, to respond, in a way, to Paul B. Preciado—this quantum philosopher in many respects—on the urgency of moving out of binarity as a representative of sexual difference, and thus abandoning sexual difference as the epistemological foundation of psychoanalysis.

I recommend reading his lecture Can the Monster Speak?, and also reading his latest book Dysphoria Mundi, to explore the whole-world of Paul B. P. and its creative and resistant qualities.

 

This is how I think of the possibility for psychoanalysis not to wallow in binarism or non-binarism, if it settles for being only its opposite, which always risks being reduced to its simple contrary, where we hope for perpetual contradiction, outside of temporality, a continuous spatial contradiction, by taking up anew what constitutive psychic bisexuality is, which must be freed from the over-hasty interpretations it still suffers from today.

 

But then, you will ask me, what replacement epistemological foundation?

Well, perhaps none, or all. I don’t know. Perhaps only the other of the sexual, like a star whose constellation of belonging we would not have to name to satisfy our thirst for domination through knowledge, an unlocalizable other of the sexual, without representation, without sex, without identity, knowing the different modalities of enjoyments and the possibilities of passage, of transition from one to the other not by the laws of relativity, but as entangled states such as quantum physics gradually teaches us.

This is perhaps accessible through a reconceptualization of psychic bisexuality.

We cannot know it before experiencing it, which will make us know, after the fact.

This is precisely what is permitted by what I call the transpective, or the trans perspective, which is not a question, but the richest, most protean, most unstable, most creative, most exciting response (in the sense of the joy of knowing), but also the most contested and fought over of all the fundamental sexual evolutions that humanity has encountered until now, so as not to remain wide-eyed before the appearances or habits of our Culture, of our Civilization.

If this adventure continues to be refused, as it currently is, we are left only with the reactionary conservatism that we know very well, in and out of psychoanalysis, in and out of sexology probably.

Further, and I conclude, outside of this perspective—hallucinatory at first, necessarily psychedelic—psychoanalysis itself would risk disappearing as a social practice.

 

Note also that without the possibility of “iel”, there is no way to access this writing, as it circumscribes an additional point of the real relative to the unconscious. It is a beneficial effect, a knowledge effect of epicene writing.

Thank you for listening to me.

VB