Sexuation, the Stakes of the Phallic, and Gender (2022)

Sexuation, the Stakes of the Phallic, and Gender

 

Published online, October 2022.

#sexuation #fist-fucking #phallus #lacan #freud #foucault #not-all #phallic

Bibliographical references appear in the PDF file.

Oral presentation – January 2016 – seminar “Les enjeux du phallique” (Annie Tardits, Elisabeth Leypold – EpSF).

 

***

 

I will chronologically address several aspects of the gender clinic and the possibilities it opens up for thinking about sexuation, the stakes of the phallic, and gender in particular, and beyond that, consider some aspects of the phallic stakes in light of gender.

To do this, we will address the question of dilation with Jean-Louis Chrétien, that of fist-fucking and certain uses of drugs in a sexual context, to speak of Other jouissance, the not-all, and a little bit of yoga.

 

In attempting to reflect on “the stakes of the phallic” and “gender,” I ended up losing my way. I ended, or began, by no longer being able to explain the difference between the object a and the phallus, and further, no longer knowing what to do with the table of sexuation.

 

The image became blurred.

 

Then finally, it allowed itself to be thought through in this sort of confusion, which is not so surprising after all. For regarding the object a and the phallus, which one does not encounter so often as such in ordinary life, I could well lose, after all, the clarity of their presentation as concepts on the one hand, and on the other as the representation that they are of each other in psychoanalytic theory.

 

I found myself trying to clarify what a “practice of sexuation” might be. Seeking to extend what I attempted to describe in my thesis under the term “arrangements of sexuation”—which gender might help to support—and aiming to approach serenely—if such a thing is possible—the phallic question within a university course dedicated to gender.

 

The object a whispered a piece of the solution in my ear.

 

Suddenly, it appeared to me that sexuation, much like the object a, does not belong to the phenomenal world. Whereas the phallus, in some of its nuances, benefits from a kind of collapse with reality when it becomes an imaginary object, in Freud at least.

 

The so-called phenomenal world, for Kant—which is not unrelated to the writing of the formulas of sexuation—and others, is distinguished from the noumenal world. Let us remember that “phenomenon” has the etymology of “appearance,” “that which appears,” “that which shines.” A distinction is made on one side between reality, as we perceive it and which allows itself to be objectified, and on the other side the enigmatic, the unknown, God. That which is not of the order of the phenomenon is not accessible or cannot be apprehended by ordinary representation. The noumenal is a limit in its unlimitedness; it is on this point that it interests us. And perhaps more so in the use Hegel makes of it rather than Kant, beyond whom he proposes that even if we lack an experience of the thing-in-itself—or of the Totality—it can nonetheless be used, be practiced in thought.

 

Thinking of the object a as not falling within the phenomenal world seems to me intuitively a kind of self-evidence that raises no questions. It seems to be a very principle of its multiple conceptions, without the need to further emphasize this unrepresentability of the cause of desire.

 

Regarding the phallus, let us leave it suspended for the moment.

 

What are we talking about when we talk about sexuation? The formulas of the four-square table? Sexuation as it exists beyond its writing? Sexuation insofar as a practice of sexuation can be defined or observed? Or even sexuation insofar as it gives rise to various sexual, social, cultural, or political arrangements that we may encounter? And to summarize all these questions together: is it a matter of sexuation as a phenomenon or not?

 

I say that it is not a phenomenon.

 

To say that sexuation does not belong to the phenomenal world is to emphasize the non-representability of sexuation formulated by Lacan, and to insist on its effective production in a dimension other than that of the directly observable reality from which sexuation situates the bodies that biology sexes. Lacan, blending these two aspects, would say in …ou pire: “[…], it is through the signifier that you sexuate yourselves.”

 

The table functions on its own without any other heading. There is no need for one side qualified as man or another qualified as woman, which end up being quite embarrassing as they prevent us from benefiting from the effects of these formulas and distance us from the goal that Lacan himself seems to set in proposing or admitting them during his elaboration. The “x”s are sufficient to enter into the play of the formulas. This does not prevent the presentation of the writings from being separated by a median line, since the stake is indeed to highlight the paradoxically dual character of the non-relationship which necessarily opens onto a beyond of binarity.

 

The more I work on this question, the more I am convinced that these formulas are not to be read, nor even deciphered. The elements they articulate can be read separately from one another, but not the whole they form in coherence, unless one embarks on a strange exegesis or interpretation.

 

If the separate pieces or elements are of interest to be read, thought, or elaborated, it is by remembering, as Annie Tardits points out, that at the various moments of their production, it is not yet a question of calling all this “sexuation” in Lacan’s remarks. This unification is produced secondarily to the discussion and conception, by Lacan, of these precursor elements of the final table.

 

In this way, I believe it is possible to benefit from the effects that gender offers us in order to blur the tracks of a current reading of these formulas that is so effective it fixes their pulsation, their radiance, into an overly finalized coherence of the thought of sexuation. Perhaps too phallic, precisely when the formulas of sexuation are sometimes summoned or taught to state and show the being of man and the being of woman, whereas our era invites us to consider many other signifiers likely to occupy the place of the “x”s in the formulas. I mean by this that the set of genders, for example the 70-some genders on Facebook, can perfectly well be inscribed there.

 

However, if it is necessary, for all practical purposes, to situate the sexes sometimes called man or sometimes woman in relation to sexuation, it is by firmly maintaining the idea, which I believe was brought by Lacan, that the subject never has any sex other than that which counts as the other sex for another subject: in which case there are indeed always two sexes, two sexes present (or more if there are affinities, but I am not sure that an orgy can exceed the experience of two sexes, even if it were composed of twenty or thirty different people).

 

I also understand in this way that Lacan’s use of quantifiers, like others before him, is part of a kind of surpassing of Kantian propositions. The stake of the not-all phallic, for Lacan, in his discourse, is indeed to surpass the limit of the quantifiers that until then fixed the inventory of the existing to what is designated, without further regard for what, by the same stroke, finds itself rejected and yet no less existing. This is a stake of the not-all.

 

This is to assert that what does not benefit from the primary discrimination of the judgment of existence is no less existing. The division introduced by distinction, by castration, cannot account for that from which it separates itself in order to build itself. This state of affairs, noted by Freud, opened the way to the thought of castration and its effects, its remains, including the imaginary phallus invested with a logical primacy of existence necessary for the experience of the contingency of presence/non-presence as soon as it is lived and extrapolated to the experience of existing/non-existing.

 

So there remain “x”s which are so many possible signifiers, just as Lacan proposes to “make use of the quantifiers.” To use them to continue, he says, to “count,” the only thing having more of a grip on the real than sexed signifiers, according to him; to count in order to pursue the examination of knowledge derived from experience, from the experience of the judgment of the existing, and to ever more closely tighten the limits and stakes of what Freud designated as castration.

 

As a final reminder to complete these preliminaries, I give you or give you back the “results” of a work concerning, among other things, the trans question, which led me to encounter gender as an imaginary object, since that is how it was heard and seen in the subjective speech of some patients and their representations. Thinking of it this way had non-negotiable logical consequences. Those of defining sex in relation to what gender imposed as a new approach to the sexual landscape. What emerged was this first table of dimensional identification.

 

	Imaginary (1)	Symbolic (2)
Gender (1)	object (1)	process (3)
Sex (2)	instance (4)	object (2)

 

***

 

Without transition, let us now dive straight into the vast bath of spacious joy offered by drugs within the framework of sexual practices. La joie spacieuse, essai sur la dilatation [Spacious Joy, Essay on Dilation], is not the title of a fist-fucking manual, but indeed that of a work by Jean-Louis Chrétien on this flood of space, which carries and tears—in his terms—which he explores through the productions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Victor Hugo, Paul Claudel, or Henri Michaux.

 

The indistinct is at the heart of his discourse, in which it is not easy, moreover, to identify what would distinguish what we call phallic jouissance and Other jouissance. But his propositions, even if they do not untangle the jouissances of psychoanalysis, can serve us.

 

Jean-Louis Chrétien, if only in his introduction, says that to take an interest in dilation is to account for the modalities of our common ordeal with space, the inside, the outside. He writes: “As soon as joy rises, everything broadens. Our breathing becomes fuller, our body, which a moment before was folded in on itself, occupying only its place or its corner, suddenly straightens up […] To laugh or to cry, to laugh while crying, to cry while laughing, what does it matter!, it is the response to the same excess of what comes. […] What comes? The to-come. But it is not only projected, calculated, anticipated, imagined; it arises here and now, and it is because this here and this now cannot be punctual that everything broadens.”

 

Dilation is a matter of the heart, of a heart that grows under the effect of invading joy, pushing back space and twisting time, or pushing back time and twisting space. It is the speech testifying to these experiences of extension and also emphasizes that this broadening “must always preserve the memory of the narrowness from which it tears itself away, and of the difficult victory that this tearing away will have been.” We can read there that there would thus be a non-reducible relationship between extension and intension. Chrétien adds: “There is indeed a mortal peril in any unlimitedness that loses sight of the limit, and that does not itself come to limit itself. […] The exaltation of mania is not the joy of dilation. And fabulation is not dilated speech.”

 

In other words, any expansion or any opening, exaggeratedly pronounced, artificially inflated, would not, in this sense, fall under the dilation explored by Chrétien, but rather under some hemorrhages where what should have held did not hold enough in this undertaking of opening and partial and selective unbinding, and not massive or exhaustive at the risk of death.

 

Among some patients who are practitioners of fist-fucking, I have sometimes been able to hear this persistence of the tipping point, the action of what seems to link the jouissances on this crest line.

 

After hours or days spent under the influence of drugs thanks to which sexual practices can unfold infinitely or almost, for 24 or 48 hours, some have clearly described this moment of completion, of interruption of themselves and their acts as a decisive time of suspense.

 

A patient says regarding this moment at the end of a session of fist-fucking and drug consumption: “I am as if dead, dejected, satiated, empty and formless, with no more life or almost. Then I am reborn, resume my activities, rid of what was encumbering me. I am full from having been filled with something that allowed me to empty myself of something else.” Apparent paradox here again or persistence of a double inscription?

 

Far from these scenes, a yoga teacher teaching pranayamic breathing encourages her students to exhale all the air from their lungs and observe this point where nothing happens before the inhale triggers again. At that moment, she says, the body disappears, the body broadens. Is this broadening in disappearance not paradoxical?

 

Psychologists and psychoanalysts often have only a rather violent vision of the practice of fist-fucking, obsessed no doubt by its invasive and supposedly brutal character due to its imaginary force. Vincent Estellon, in his work Les sex-addicts, writes: “If Michel Foucault speaks of fist-fucking as a kind of ‘anal yoga,’ one cannot ignore the part of destructive violence inherent in this extreme sexual practice.” These assessments overlook the reality of an eminently scrupulous and cautious practice, slow and progressive, without which accidents and damage would be commonplace.

 

Michel Foucault did, indeed, say something about fist-fucking. But he never qualified this practice as “anal yoga,” although a large part of the gay SM community may encourage this fraternal filiation with Foucault and this witticism.

 

What does Foucault say about fist-fucking?

 

Excerpt: “How do you see the extraordinary proliferation, over these last ten or fifteen years, of male homosexual practices, the sensualization, if you prefer, of certain previously neglected parts of the body and the expression of new desires? I am thinking, of course, of the most striking characteristics of what we call ghetto-porn films, S/M clubs, or fistfucking. […]

1. F. […] I think that S/M is much more than that; it is the real creation of new possibilities for pleasure, which had not been imagined before. The idea that S/M is linked to deep violence, that its practice is a means of releasing this violence, of giving free rein to aggression, is a stupid idea. We know very well that what these people do is not aggressive; that they are inventing new possibilities for pleasure by using certain bizarre parts of their bodies. I think we have here a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, one of the main characteristics of which is what I call the desexualization of pleasure. The idea that physical pleasure always comes from sexual pleasure and the idea that sexual pleasure is the basis of all possible pleasures, that, I think, is really something false. What S/M practices show us is that we can produce pleasure from very strange objects, by using certain bizarre parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations, etc. .”

 

To desexualize pleasure is somewhat to silence sex in the field of jouissance. I perceive here something that resonates with my proposition of gender/imaginary object which allows us to think of sex not as the phallus object that gender is, but indeed insofar as it is also deprived of this primacy, thus leaving access to its side as a symbolic object.

 

To clear sex of what is not sexual about it, unless one is mistaken, is to avoid covering it with an imaginary phallus that it is not or confusing it with it; it is to reopen the path to gender/phallus toward which the sexual converges, finally freed from the overly monopolizing sex.

 

The practice of fist-fucking, Marco Vidal reminds us, is not listed in the Kinsey reports of 1948 and 1953. It was only identified as such and under this precise name in 1960 when the TAIL (Total Anal Involvement League) was created in the United States, within which 1,500 people claimed this practice of fist penetration into the rectum or vagina.

 

To desexualize pleasure is somewhat to relieve sex, thought of as the incarnation of the phallus, of its functions. In 1975, when the famous establishment Les Catacombes opened its doors in San Francisco, Pat Califia and others frequented this club, which quickly became mixed due to the sexual practices taking place there, for which anatomy was only important in requiring each person to have a brain and a hand.

 

Pat Califia writes: “I have sex with faggots. And I’m a lesbian. Does that leave you perplexed? […] I no longer know exactly how many men I have shoved my hand(s) into and it still puts me in a trance. It’s impressive to be so close to another human being. Amidst the cans of Crisco, I often wondered how it is possible to cross the ‘gender boundary’ during this type of sex. First of all, fisting does not emphasize the genitals. In fisting parties, men in general are not interested in others’ dicks, but in their hands and forearms. It is normal for fistees to spend a night without getting hard. […] As I gained more experience within the SM community, I realized that it was also a sexuality that allowed people to cross the rigid boundaries of sexual orientation. I met lesbians who slept with straight guys for money (I also did that at one time). I met straight guys who fucked or got fucked by other men if their mistress asked them to. And since this took place under the authority of a woman, they thought they were behaving heterosexually. […] “

 

There was certainly no need to wait for the 1970s for the practice of intromission of the fist into the rectum or vagina to exist. An excerpt from Sade’s writings testifies to it as follows: “And you, madam, take care of my ass: it offers itself to you… Do you not see how it yawns, my goddamn ass? … do you not see then that it calls for your fingers? … Goddamn! my ecstasy is complete… you are shoving them in up to the wrist! Ah! Let us recover, I can take no more… this charming girl sucked me like an angel….”

 

***

 

But let us return to Other jouissance, as it seems to manifest itself, perhaps specifically, through the favors of drugs within the framework of sexual practices.

 

Between the 1970s and today in 2015, the then-emerging sexual practices we spoke of were specifically hit by the AIDS epidemic. I should even say, to be more precise, by the real of the HIV virus, a real object virus of imaginary scope capable of seriously interfering with the economy of desire and amorous capacities.

 

In a context of intra-community repression and strong discrimination, which I will not revisit today, HIV-positive homosexual or gay men have experienced, more than any other, a craze for drugs in a sexual context, since around 2004-2005-2006. Until that date, products such as GHB or MDMA, and sometimes but more rarely methamphetamines such as crystal, could be consumed between the party space and the bedroom, occasionally being preferred for the bedroom exclusively.

 

Since 2004-2006, the specific consumption of cathinones (drugs derived from khat)—of which mephedrone is the best known and often mentioned to designate molecules that are not—has exploded via sexual encounter social networks among MSM (Men who have Sex with Men) looking for “taboo-free” sex—meaning unprotected—looking for “chem ” plans—under products, chem for chemical in English.

 

In this, these searches for sex with drugs do not differ from the ordinary searches of a whole lot of other MSM. The difference lies first in the choice of products, as cathinones have come to occupy a specific part of the drug market. These products can be ordered on the internet, delivered by postal services in a few days, are inexpensive, diversified, and always new: synthetic drugs perfectly adapted to a capitalist logic intended for highly individualized people, even cornered by the permanent unconscious stigmatization they suffer, which is stronger today than in other past times of the epidemic.

 

Gender, in these clinical situations, is always summoned in processes of conception, of delimitation of meaning and signs in relation to sexual experience. This is, moreover, something I am gradually generalizing, just as the Sex/Gender identification table allows them to be situated in relation to each other in their phallic specificities as well. The dimension of gender comes to support an underlying elaboration regarding the identity command that sexual identities impose on the subjects they pin down or who recognize themselves in them. Gender participates very explicitly in the undertaking that links language to meaning. Whereas sex participates more explicitly in what links language to the body.

 

These cathinones present multiple interests, including producing powerful entactogenic and empathogenic effects. The sexual trips recounted express an experience of an intensity never before encountered, where the productions/distortions of the perceived/seen/felt/heard can, while being magically transformed, be shared with the partner(s). Some, even if they are not the majority, report experiences of common perceptions, of interactive hallucinations for two.

 

The majority of them say they can access a sense of self and possibilities for relationships with others that it is unthinkable to want to do without. Sexual jouissance no longer seems to block the sexual relationship. It is literally deported by the effects of the drug in question, deported and projected onto the screen of shared hallucinatory phenomena. These new molecules bring about experiences of a very high level of pooling, of sensational sharing, and of dilution of the barriers classically erected by sexual jouissance (signaling the non-relationship).

 

Erections and orgasms are dissolved into other possibilities of sensation and other ways of enjoying, or abandoned (loss of erection, impossibility of reaching ejaculation) to the point that it is permissible to think that sexual jouissance is specifically kept at bay thanks to the molecule; without however preventing—quite the contrary—recourse to other sexual practices and other types of jouissance, finally available to let the relationship play out, to give it a form in reality (between imaginary and hallucination) and thus make it exist somewhere, for a time.

 

These experiences all have one thing in common: being occasions for the suspension of personal sexual questions. Drugs obviously allow for relief from the price to be paid to encounter the other sex—even if it were the same in appearance, anatomically speaking or so-called speaking. The price to be paid being, as Lacan says, having to pass through the organ invested with the function of an instrument making it a signifier.

 

Thus, thanks to drugs, the phallic primacy which can confine itself to the reification of the organ when confusion operates—and because confusion must indeed operate in part for the organ to be invested—this primacy is thwarted as pragmatically as possible, by putting it at half-mast. Cathinones do not allow for getting hard and therefore do not allow for penetration to be done by the organ traditionally invested as an instrument, or at least not that one.

 

As with Pat Califia, another organ is invested as a phallic instrument through which the same process necessary to encounter the other sex is activated—even if it be through the anus, since for all practical purposes it is always the arm or the anus of a certain “x”/signifier through which subjects are willing to sexuate themselves.

 

Let us return to Other jouissance and its development vis-à-vis phallic jouissance to examine the way in which they seem, on certain occasions, to separate, to disentangle. The fatal risk of a then-mortal jouissance, identified earlier in the citation from Chrétien, must be taken up now, to elucidate whether its funereal horizon would stem from the dismantling of these two jouissances or from another process that would strike them at the point of their greatest distancing?

 

Some consumers of drugs such as cathinones, in a sexual context, die of overdose or respiratory arrest or other cardiovascular complications, as they say. Those who inject these drugs practice what is called slamming, which literally means: to send. You probably know, slam is an art of verbal jousting, it is a poetic art, a way of sending spoken texts, declaimed before an audience, addressed to a public.

 

The American poet Marc Smith developed this approach to reciting poems in 1986, to make the exercise more modern, more musical. A posture emerges from it, which engages the body in a certain way in this interpretation of the text carried aloud, standing before an audience. The slammer sends the text, he throws out the sound and the meaning.

On the value side, slam is considered and practiced by people in communities sharing an interest in freedom, the surpassing of barriers, and open-mindedness.

In English, “to slam the door” means to shut it forcefully, for example. Or else, to exhaust, to demolish, to crash against something. But it is also to win a grand slam. Or again, it is to hang up abruptly, “slam down.”

In summary, a slam is a chelem; to slam is to make something snap or bang.

 

When a consumer sends the product into the vein, they take a hit, they disconnect and slam the door on one moment of their experience to brutally enter another moment of their experience under the effect of the product. The equivalent of a flash, not identical to that created by heroin, is described, less intense, and quickly lost in favor of a multiplication of injections. Up to twenty or more per night, per session. The impact on the venous capital is considerable; the cardiovascular damage is potentially very significant due to the multiple impacts and their infections (abscesses, damage to the nerves and tendons of the hands and arms, or necrosis of the flesh or the penis when it is chosen as the injection point).

 

X% of these chemsexers die each year.

 

How does death occur from the fatal disjunction of the limit as an instance and dilation as a process? When does jouissance become mortal? Is it by reaching an extreme point of its expansion process?

 

Chrétien says that a limit must be maintained, and more than that, that it is part of the very possibility of this sort of surpassing of the limit that is dilation. This resonates with the previously mentioned idea of a not-all phallic co-occurring with the phallic and not its opposite. This allows us to envision that it is not only the unravelling of one from the other that would separate the jouissances beyond a point of no return.

 

A slamming patient was able to note, one day, how much the integration of a practice combining the liberating dismemberment of a certain expansion had to be kept associated with its holding in a delimited form. For him, it is writing, or the possibility of resuming writing after moments of breakdown during which the encumbrance prevented the liberation of the body through pre-written thoughts, all ready to come out through writing. The possibility of bringing them out through the words of speech in a session has never been and will never be a complete equivalent to what the written word produces, but it opened up the possibility of considering this practice of self in the service of an arrangement of this “appeasement in strength,” as the yoga teacher also says.

 

Entering the posture, the yoga teacher also says, exiting the posture is not summarized as striking a pose or no longer striking a pose, but she adds: “holding the posture and letting oneself flow into it like water into a vase.”

 

It is not softening, or slouching, or spreading out; it is extending, dilating. The not-all is the exact opposite of the famous “letting go” that some patients fly as a banner to state the meaning, after the fact, of their consumption. But how to distinguish a letting-go from a dilation or a regression? They do not have the same effects nor do they testify to the same subjective know-how. Not all are favorable to phallic restarts operating at a given moment, through which the effects of signifieds come to be represented by the phallus signifier, allowing the subject not to leave language, and not to die from a drive-based abandonment of their organs. When at the end of jouissance some do not get back up, perhaps that is what occurs…

 

Some patients describe the comedown moments as convalescence where food and care are entirely directed toward the body; others encounter there the resumption of writing in a regulatory profusion allowing them to return to the surface.

 

In these moments of eclipse, between fainting and recovery, gender appears to be that which the subject leans on from the phallus to pull themselves back up, following the diluting throes where sex seems to have led them previously.

 

The Other jouissance seems to ally itself more with sex than with gender, which appears every time it emerges to belong to or stem from phallic jouissance. All those who have taught me this anticipate the lack of the object in favor of that which functions even in its absence: is this a mark of a melancholic experience or the effect of an experience of the status of the object in neoliberal times? Some have been able to say: “since nothing is, then anything works; that is all that matters, otherwise one dies.”

 

A stake of the phallic here is undoubtedly to sustain, within the cure, another possible path than the one thus formulated, so that the capacity to regress is not reduced to a simple letting go with deleterious effects. And that a know-how of dilation can testify to a possibility of enduring the effects of the Other jouissance that traverses the subjective experience. May the experience of the not-all not only be synonymous with non-existence likely to trigger these rescue operations involving a mortal risk, but may it become a consistent support that gender allows us to illuminate regarding sex by what it is not.

 

Writing, yoga, or fist-fucking are perhaps, from this point of view, varied modalities aimed at developing a practice of dilation suitable for welcoming the effects of the Other jouissance, the effects of the phallic not-all.

 

PS 1:

 

I hope, by proceeding in this manner, to keep the reflection as close as possible to the phallus as a mark of the gap between jouissance and knowledge, and in doing so, to have a practice of sexuation while taking into account its non-belonging to the phenomenal world, and therefore certainly not genital, nor even sexual. Not even sexual, because I am not sure that the terms of the reasoning made possible by sexuation carry the Freudian sexual with them all that much, preferring instead the—Lacanian—real of sex and the real of language, that which is real in language.

 

If we consider the way in which we can clinically observe cadences, intervals in which jouissances illustrate themselves and allow themselves to be appreciated for their respective qualities, is there not an opportunity here to think that jouissances repeatedly intersect at points of suture, of joints that punctuate as many possibilities for resumption if one—the Other jouissance—comes to no longer be limited, or if the other—the phallic—comes to fail at a point too phallic in its deployment—then requiring, in both cases, the relaunching of the phallus. So many possible resumptions so that the stitch does not run too far. Can we say as many phalluses? Or rather as many possible phallic relaunches by which the effects of signifieds would come to be represented by the phallus signifier, allowing the subject not to leave language, and not to die from a drive disentanglement of the organs.

 

It is in this way that the phallus could well be thought of as a mark of the gap between jouissance and knowledge, insofar as it would be the signifier of this gap, as much as the signified of jouissance, and in any case that by which the set of signified effects is designated as so many “alienations”—to put it with Lacan. Vital alienations.

 

A stake of the phallic is perhaps, here, that of a resumption of the theory of judgment and of what acts as a sign for the judgment capable of giving full place to what is judged and which is not a sign, but nevertheless a signifier; in other words, what does not symbolize, but which makes sense nonetheless.

 

In other words, to conclude: what gender allows us to illuminate about sex in what it is not, in order to maintain our investigation of knowledge regarding the unknown of the sexual, and the knowledge of psychoanalysis as necessarily not-all phallic.

 

PS 2:

 

But then why not use, more ordinarily, the organs classically invested with the status of instrument? It is perhaps—it is my conviction—that the imaginary/real/symbolic weight pressing upon certain organs can prove contrary to the very possibility of moving toward jouissance. It is not with the argument of subjective incompetence to deal with castration that I am tempted to grasp the meaning of these innovations, but rather by the fact of the knowledge about the sexual that subjects possess—including without knowing it.

 

This knowledge about the sexual which has, since at least the 1970s, made a whole host of men, women, trans, gays, lesbians, and heteros or straights understand that the organ is no longer to be confused with the sexual power that invests itself in it. And that as such, this power, heavily criticized in those same years of feminism and the struggle against discrimination, deserves only the strictest suspicion. A suspicion identical to that which provides the foundation for the discrimination addressed to HIV-positive gays within their own community, a discrimination charged with maintaining the mark of the relationship between the existing and the non-existing, of maintaining the phallus with the organ to suture the imaginary agitations that the virus activates. A suspicion that creates marks, a provider of flying phalluses all ready to land, to strike a practice or another involving this or that organ not sexually overdetermined, because it is too heavily charged.

 

Even more today than in 1970, gays know, due to AIDS, how much the jouissance that bars the sexual relationship nonetheless remains the key to a sexual relation for which new forms must be offered than those formerly guilty of the worst events that were and are sexisms, homophobias, but also infections; for among sexual inequalities, one must now count, in the case of MSM, with viral inequality.

 

Escaping discrimination, the judgment of the existing/non-existing, escaping castration for a time at least, or asserting the beyond of castration which cannot grasp everything through its process—this is indeed a modern or post-modern sexual program, in any case post-Freud, which we can name with Lacan: the not-all program.

 

But is the not-all to be conceived as the reverse of the all, which would be the obverse? There is no phallic all, but there is the phallic and the phallic not-all. This is important to emphasize, because the two are not the front and back of a field of jouissance whose two sides or faces we could attempt to define.

 

Differently from that, the not-all would be this domain where the action of distinguishing the different is no longer of the order of necessity but of the possible as much as not-all possible, that is, a relative contingent action. That it is initiated, even minimally, is enough to make the strictest of necessities fall into contingency; there is no need to thwart it entirely, a simple start is enough; the whole is therefore not to be considered in its attainment as a totality or a whole, but rather as an affected unity.

 

The not-all would be this field, this domain where the different can be recognized, but not necessarily raised as such, nor erected to the point of reifying it itself or that which of the subject is represented as a signifier. A not-all not contrary to the phallic, but co-occurring with the phallic, thus opening to the impossible, as beyond the possible. It would be, in this way, a manner of thinking or observing a possible alterity brought to the same without condemning this same to the judgment of the strictly different. A not-all allowing us to distinguish that sameness does not make uniqueness, and that the different reveals the uniqueness of a differential sameness. In other words, nothing but heteros. Nothing but another “x” whose apparent sex and claimed anatomy—whether unique or mimetic—cannot contradict or oppose each other.