A-sexuation: perversion of the phallic and function of castration (2021)

a-sexuation: perversion of the phallic and the function of castration (2021)

Published online, September 2021.

From the “sex/gender, race, class” mantra to identity-based proximity

Transitions (of sex and/or gender) have little to do with sexuation

Sex, gender, and sexuation seen from the unconscious

Without transition

M.D.

Laplanche

And regarding the knots?

Course of maneuvers in a cure

Openings

Conclusion

And what if we pushed psychoanalytic discourse a little further, even if it means exploring the dark continents of the theorization of experience and continuing to open our language to the knowledge it contains.

The ambition of this text is not immense, but perhaps a little complex, since it involves articulating, from the perspective of psychoanalytic practice, certain famous notions whose irresistible careers currently illuminate the field of ideas: gender; identity: in the perspective of the direction of the cure, of the conduct of the psychoanalytic cure. Identity carries with it what interests us at the margins of gender, and leaves us with enough to delimit what I place under the term a-sexuation, this manifest perversion of phallic sexuation that should be isolated and described to situate current sexual productions, where unconscious knowledge about the sexual is actualized. A less symbolic sexuation, returned to the imaginary that makes it consist, with and beyond the image (specular and non-specular), escaping the prior logical closure that until now accounted for only a restricted part of what situates the sexed beings designated by sexuation—restricted, but primordial, where symbolization supports subjective erection, beyond which we can, thanks to this century of psychoanalysis, explore further what would otherwise remain dark continents where many speaking beings needlessly blind themselves. With ears wide open, there is no way to remain without a gaze.

Beyond this, the aim here is to progress toward a description of the technical maneuvers of the cure in cases of gender, the distinction between transitions of sex or those of gender, and to situate on the dextrorotatory Borromean knot what the clinical practice of gender in psychoanalysis continues to teach us, where we identify jouissances, identities (as well as the idea-tary and identification) and many other things that will undoubtedly be condensed here, but which future discussions will allow us to deploy at will.

 

The text here is not formalized as an article, strictly speaking, but rather as an assemblage that distinguishes the different sources of questioning proposed here into a bundle, so as not to immediately conceal the scaffolding.

 

**

 

From the “sex/gender, race, class” mantra to identity-based proximity

 

Let us begin immediately by evoking this recently appeared concordance of terms, this happy disposition of signifiers and their uses, which facilitates their convergence and makes them practicable. The notions of race, gender, and class are undeniably useful categories for thinking; a dynamic efficiency blossoms in their proximity, to the point of supporting intersectionality—which I do not view as a thought (a real put into form), but as a reflection (a cognitive opportunity).

But are these merely categories? No, for the signifiers race, gender, and class also exist outside their very efficiency, where their radiance escapes control through meaning, where the combinations and schemes, the sleights of hand they activate for our greatest joy as thinkers, make meanings and their signifying territories swirl, thus always differing from themselves in each of their uses, far from their categorical virtues, distinctly from all their apparent or semantic qualities. Identity here covers a zone that is still undefined, although summoned to the rank of arguments in the recurring current events of its emergences, with which I intuitively associate the signified causes of race or class, which are not to be confused, but also recognized in their intersections. We shall not, however, treat them here for the moment.

Faced with this inter-signifying profusion, we must relaunch the exploration, to extend it, of the field of our experience in using them, closer to the discursive limits where rhetoric gives way to the underlying, to the unconscious itself and to the unheard-of, which command the conduct of our existences more determinately than our wills.

To emphasize once again and affirm how much psychoanalysis (its theorizations) has not determined its approach to and use of gender, nor even of race, identity, or the identity-based, which remain without a recognized psychoanalytic definition, barely a clinical description conducive to the elaboration of a common idea to be debated (aside from a few sententious judgments argued under the seal of academicism, the discarding of which we need not discuss).

To determine what consequences and opportunities invite themselves into our practices, where they tell the story of psychoanalysis creating itself.

 

In 2016, toward the end of the year, an invitation was sent to me to participate in the July 2018 colloquium at Cerisy, dedicated to the work of Laurence Kahn (psychoanalyst), titled Psychoanalysis: Anatomy of its Modernity.

I proposed to speak there aiming for this: “Das endliche und das unendliche Geschlecht or From Gender to the Identity-based.” I must resume, here, the lines of work of this attempt, which was not very conclusive at the time but has since become clearer; time is our friend.

The ambition of this speech was to highlight the path that gender offers us to take, or retake, from sex in some of its qualities to sexuation, and then to extend or hope for its fruitful extension to the tensioning of the identity-based vis-à-vis identity and identifications, for if psychoanalysis knows and defines identifications, it remains less prolific on the rest—which was already the case, and remains so to this day, regarding gender and sex, which psychoanalysis has not admitted, while sexuation is an authentic theoretical proposition of psychoanalysis in experience that we have not yet exhausted through our readings and commentaries.

Revisiting and clarifying what led to thinking these notions with these tables of topical, dynamic, economic, and Borromean mappings now seems essential, along with an explanation of the conduct of the cure with gender, as these same tables bear the trace of it. This is to clarify the bridge I identify there with the identity-based and its acolytes.

 

**

Transitions (of sex and/or gender) have little to do with sexuation

 

To this are added some important clinical observations. Let us say it clearly. Most transitions of sex or gender do not concern sexuation; they neither contest nor question it. This is an evidence that remains difficult to affirm, although daily experience confirms it. Of sexuation, where the subject’s relationship to the phallic function and castration is revealed, there is usually no question, whereas of desire, of its cause, there is almost always a question. Far from confronting the Phallus or phallic stakes in the mode of a challenge, gender and sex transitions confirm, from this point of view, the variety of ways of “saying no to castration”: which remains for everyone the best way to recognize it and deal with it, despite everything. And which does not fall under the “refusal of castration,” another matter… Almost all so-called “normal” subjects are so by saying no to castration: since it is in negations that the essentials of being are constituted: transitions of sex and/or gender do not escape this normalization of the subject to reality.

However, transitions specifically challenge a dimension of the sexual expression of speaking beings that has not yet been elaborated, where the object a, cause of desire, as the phallus allows for its signifying articulation, relaunches the appreciation of its sexed consistency beyond its symbolic inscription to finally give it the territories of its representations in reality to explore. In reality, where these “saying-no to castration,” previously repressed within the fold of madness and pathology, are expressed and imaginarized. Thus, the ordinary (including trans) responses to the universality of the Phallus unfold day after day, assuming the disentanglement of the prior collage between the object and the symbolization of the lack of the object (which is not its real nor its reality), liberating the evolutionary representation of this lack of the object for humans, accessing post-modernity, perhaps “post-patriarchy,” which exclude neither the moderns nor the patriarchs from the community of the living, but resituate them in the course of the revelations of unconscious knowledge as they appear. Thus, sex can be returned to its reality (to its imaginary), disentangled from the governing instance where it swooned exclusively or almost so. This reality where we can see it evolve differently, returned to the circulation of its representations between the body and its beyond, between the body and the other. This reality also where we can appreciate this present expression of the constitutive psychic bisexuality supported by Fliess and Freud, which does not believe in the meaning of supposed sexual orientations, which knows the soothing nature of its proposition in the face of the ravages of sexual difference, finally informed as we can be by our unconscious knowledge about what would no longer need to be denied, rejected, or repressed but better welcomed for the evidence it constitutes: the Phallus is to the universal what the object a is to the particular, its impossible materialization.

New generations want to be named and designated by multiple pronouns, children and adults declare themselves “non-binary”… Why should we be surprised? Since with the partial erosion, not of patriarchy, which sociologists can appreciate better than I, but at least of phallic centrality beyond its true qualities, leaving to the cause of desire the task of embodying in erotic reality what does not fall under the Phallus as a symbol of its own lack, but offers itself to the presence of the other toward whom new relational and erotic modalities can finally unfold, somewhat freed from the rigors and austerities characteristic of past misunderstandings of the sexual. What is missing can well be symbolized, but that does not prevent it from also being practiced in reality, with the body in particular. Symbolization is not the only perspective for treating lived experience; its shaping or representation constitutes a psychic treatment of experience just as much. Phallic primacy, one example among all of symbolization, is only a small part of our psychic experience. A symbolic primacy to which we can add the gestalt of the imaginary that speaking beings have not yet explored or thought about that much, but which the latest developments on gender and co. expose on a large scale.

In this respect, the profusion of vocabulary to describe the innumerable, the uncountable sexual identities demonstrates in its inefficiency the irreducibility of the form taken by the sexual for a subject in reality, regardless of how that same sexual is apprehended as an object in the symbolic. Symbolization reduces to the lowest common denominator what deserves to be returned to its proliferation in reality, in the imaginary.

 

**

Sex, gender, and sexuation seen from the unconscious

 

In 2013, I proposed this first table:

 

Mapping of gender, sex, and sexuation (2013)

 

	Imaginary	Symbolic	Real
Gender	object	process	impossible instance
Sex	instance	object	impossible process
Sexuation	process	instance	impossible object

 

Presenting the elements of gender, sex, and sexuation as psychoanalytic experience has allowed me to encounter them. Namely, gender in the first place, an imaginary object, such that in this dimension reality serves as a fantasized surface, where the body imposes itself as a projected surface. Followed by sex as a symbolic object that gender reveals more in its qualities, not of imaginary and real consistency as we usually treat it, but indeed as an object in the symbolic insofar as it achieves an effective articulation there in the constitution of the order of the same name, the symbolic order: the supreme seat of the so-called “difference of the sexes” where the two, not real but imaginary and symbolic, holds its rank, for the real of the sexes is not the couple nor even the two of the so-called two sexes (but rather its dissidence), whether composed of two elements or more. This is so as not to lose the dimension of the negative entity of jouissance, of jouissances as they support a non-positivist approach to the experience of sexual difference, but rather its extent vectorized by the lack-of-being of the being for which the subject accounts.

Thus, a cure, if one can consider things in these terms, begins, with gender, by a piece of imaginary thread where the gender object functions in reality, between specular representation and its beyond—which belongs above all to the interior of subjectivity, a matter of felt affect.

 

Transcribed by Pascal Nottet, this can be read as follows:

1. “gender appears as an imaginary object
2. sex appears as a symbolic object
3. gender becomes a symbolic process
4. sex becomes an imaginary instance
5. sex is experienced as an impossible (and real) process
6. sexuation appears as relating to an impossible (and real) object
7. sexuation becomes an imaginary process, while also being a symbolic instance insofar as it is articulated with the impossible instance of the real.”

 

This faithful reading of the table, as the different elements constituting it appear and work together, is based on a historical perspective of the state of gender and sex in our usages. The recent stages of these elaborations can be presented in a historical sequence situating our current moment in a fourth assertion, all situated from the 1970s to today:

 

1. undoing gender
2. gender creates sex
3. my sex is not my gender
4. gender undoes sex and creates sex

 

**

 

Without transition

 

He says: “I am not a man, I have never felt like a man.”

There, for example, is a spoken sentence that allows the complexity of the enunciation to be heard, without concealing it.

To the analyst’s ear, “I” is not the subject, as we repeat from time to time. Is it so certain? Let us keep this question aside, for the “I who speaks” is not “Simon says,” to which we might too quickly attach the rules of formal usage of an all-Lacanian psychoanalysis, if we were determined to the extreme.

The subject of philosophy or even the subject who does not know themselves can well say “I” without being suspected of a fallacious origin where the palimpsest of the Phallus suddenly risks being deceived: what a blunder to read into it a belief, without concluding, in the origin of a prior error; subjective determination cannot know the soul of the truth that deceives it. We know this from hearing it. And let us say it as clearly as possible: most questions related to gender in transition, in transformation, in surpassing and creation do not aim at sexuation in any way. At least not the one we have been discussing until now. Most question and challenge an entirely different point of being, of the subject’s structure, of their neurotic or perverse creations, of their psychoticizing geniuses and other unreal performances where reality is involved as a creditor.

Where the perception of oneself flirts with the perceptions processed by the psychic apparatus as they allow the writing of the subject’s reality to be heard: the fabrication of this beyond, and beneath, the real inviting a singular interpretation of lived existence. Where the inscription of the subject also weaves, not at the same time, but just as much, the signifying hook and individual expression.

 

Can we say something similar for the so-called “sex” transitions and transformations, or something different? Does this involve our understanding of a psychoanalysis in a not-all Lacanian version, where the generativity of sex is no longer mistaken for the Phallus that it is not, which it has only been in the exclusive approach so rigorous in recitation among certain analysts, so soft in its clinical qualities that we must deplore it for its damage, for with this ultimate proposition of reading the table by P. Nottet, the impossible instance of the real to which sexuation (imaginary process, symbolic instance) is articulated belongs at least as much to the Phallus as to something else that remains to be described, since the time has come to say it.

Here, I am venturing forward. Could it be the object a ? Or another to be named anew. One or the other dismissing the phallic primacy where sayings on sexuation are articulated and firmly screwed, on the sexuations of which many prefer other primacies, outside primacy. An a-nnexed sexuation, a-rticulated outside the Phallus, to the object a at least for the time it takes to think it, if it does not last, when the work of the cure operates in the elucidation of sex as it is found for each one, then in the creation of the new sex of each one. Provided that this temporary extra-corporealization of gender at work where sex is founded is bearable on the part of the analyst. Not everyone can bear not being held to it, except as unconscious phanera. A-sexuation which, from the Phallus, does not detach itself from the stakes of the phallic, distinctly and in proximity to the articulation of its function.

Proof of this lies in the risks incurred: a bladder for a lantern, an organ for a sex, a sex for an identity, a gender for a real, etc.: so many entirely interpretative errors such as interpretations are, for better or worse.

 

This is a direct consequence of the addition perpetrated on the formulas of sexuation in Frères d’âmes ou La Communauté dépassée, where the circulation returned to the object, without fearing libidinal perversity, supports a shift in the gaze directed toward it, and no longer only cast upon the shadow of the said object overhanging the human mass to be sorted, for whom only gender melancholy would remain to dispute an ounce of freedom. We can never thank J. Butler enough for her Butlerian reading of Freud.

Such modified formulas of sexuation can, perhaps, better support the Freudian proposition of the Three Essays, without losing the effectiveness of this Lacanian quadrupole in situating, further than the “factor” of the “biological acting as a bedrock,” the ek-sistential determination of the subject of the unconscious, without the comfort of the interpretative caesura of students little inclined to cross-dress (although) the masters, either Sigmund or Jacques who, nevertheless, adorned themselves in the most delicate attire.

 

Thus, it is a matter of establishing the theorized bases of an a-sexuation that would no longer get bogged down in the mire of sensible understanding, where it must be limited to significance, in the first place, before reaching more serenely that of an off-phallus that will not be its beyond. A happy way of saying how much this Phallus counts, that there is no need to carry it excessively, that it counts where it weighs, that it supports the being in failing to postpone the requirements of sex that gender comes to treat since S. Freud, as the cures teach us.

 

Let us answer the question asked above: can we say as much of gender transitions and sex transitions in regard to sexuation? No. We say that most gender transitions do not concern sexuation, and that most sex transitions concern a-sexuation as a technical and clinical perspective under construction in analysis. This is the name of the maneuver that I had not known how to give at the time to the project of creating the new sex in the cure, described in the chapter “Writings of Sex” in Le sexe réinventé par le genre.

For all useful purposes, let us reformulate. If the analyst has a small chance, in their armchair, as a semblance of the object a, of being of some use, it is certainly not by playing the Phallus through the approach of its real. They can, the analyst, adorn themselves with it enough to act and influence the analysand’s cure, but they must not ignore that they will play with it, and perhaps take jouissance from it as an imaginary instance: which, it must be said, leaves little room for anything other than a poorly thought-out counter-transference. Supporting the work of a cure by the winged Phallus of old decorating Rome is perhaps not the happiest mark of a present welcomed with respect, but in appearance the gastric reflux of what, from the said Phallus, brings to the body enough to clutter it in its transit.

But how to distinguish between gender transitions and sex transitions? Is it relevant? Let us keep this question and look further.

 

**

M.D.

 

How can one not think of M. Duras, from whom I took a verbatim for the conclusion of Le sexe réinventé par le genre, where she seems to confuse the Phallus and the object a, which she calls the Thing translated as The Thing, in the interview given to Gaipied magazine. What she calls “The Thing” regarding triangulation seems to be an interpretation of the object cause of desire, the object a, as Phallus: an abusive interpretation revealing of other things, a common initiative to others besides her in whom the perversion of the libido makes one fear little or nothing before morality; it is also that of many readers of J. Lacan regarding the formulas of sexuation, who have remained rather discreet.

But it is also a formidable intuition, that of a-sexuation, in my view, sexuation outside the Phallus (but not beyond), as I attempt to express it here.

 

“— You know what I call the sea, I call it: the thing. What we have just spoken about, this wavering, wandering notion, I could also call it: the thing. Your sex. Mine. Our difference. And this third term, this incessant triangulation, by which we join each other. The thing.”

 

**

Laplanche

 

How can one not think of J. Laplanche’s propositions from this point. The constitution of the sexual unconscious can be thought of from the experience of generalized seduction as he situated it. Established in a time prior to what S. Freud would have developed as access to organizing genitality, a-sexuation can here support access to a conception of the subject’s sexual organization according to what does not need to be already phallically instituted, or let us say in Laplanchean terms: what has not already been translated, which we link to the subject’s validation of the phallic offer in this structural undertaking.

In these early times of the subjects’ ages, let us follow J. Laplanche to remember what we do not recall, which carries the realism of the unconscious. Neither gender nor sex is important as sexual valences to which nothing prevails other than what will cause desire. The translatable and the untranslatable enclosed, unenclosed, etc., sharply debate with the versions of the object a its dialectical trappings, while the Phallus, signifier of jouissance according to J. Lacan, seizes the symbolic emergences proper to the subject’s articulation regarding the phallic function of course, but also regarding jouissance as its signified which it is tempting to marry, imaginarily, with the seduction of the fundamental anthropological situation. I will attempt to return to this.

This kind of apparatus finds, a posteriori, some mooring points that I had not seen at first, where jouissances and identit-x are reflected, if we are willing to compare these two additional tables, perhaps complementary to the first, the juxtaposition of which must be resumed here.

 

Mapping of gender, sex, and sexuation (2013)

	Imaginary	Symbolic	Real
Gender	object	process	impossible instance
Sex	instance	object	impossible process
Sexuation	process	instance	impossible object

 

Mapping of the identitarian, identity, identification (2018)

 

	Imaginary	Symbolic	Real
Identity	Object	Instance	Impossible process
Identification	Process	Object	Impossible instance
Identity-based	Instance	Process	Impossible object (object a)

 

Mapping of three jouissances (2020)

	Imaginary	Symbolic	Real
Genital jouissance	object	instance	impossible process
Jouissance of the Other	process	object	impossible instance
Phallic jouissance	instance	process	impossible object

 

Each row and each column share a coordinate result with others. Should readings be extracted from them? Or should individual associations be allowed to occur?

What do I read there that speaks to me of my clinical experience? This is the only question each person can answer. For my own part, which does not serve as a model or indication, I read some questions and confirmations.

 

1. The identity-based, the material of trauma, is not in reality identity or even the meaning of movements to be repressed of misunderstood narcissistic demands from a sociological point of view to which we can oppose an ethical reserve. It remains rather that which is refused, by which identity is forged by no longer knowing it, although oriented by it. Where it crosses, not far off, phallic jouissance as it is founded on articulating to the invisible, for the subject, what in the individual’s mouth is chewed and ruminated as the advanced point of an object to be defended and feared.
2. I read there how genital experience shares with gender the qualities of an object in reality, imaginarized as they are, imaginarized as they make sex detached from its usual too-real conception while it does not belong to it.
3. I follow the trace of sex as an object in the symbolic through which the jouissance of the Other, the signified of the Phallus, supports object identification.
4. I think of the object a of which the analyst occupies the semblance, and the possibility opened by a-sexuation to allow the creation of the new sex to operate in the cure. On the edge of which is distinguished the common error of welcoming the subject’s analytic reforms in the cure by allowing oneself to be rationed by common sense to be a semblance of the well-seated, too-seated Phallus. Gender undoes sex and creates sex, once again confirmed as an effective technical maneuver.
5. I read there that the identity-based is less a new plague than the attachment of phallic jouissance to the rank of an imaginary instance, as we read and hear some colleagues distinguish themselves in this confusion, where the excess of premium on meaning offered to the concept always obstructs the thought that no longer comes.
6. Etc.

 

**

And regarding the knots?

 

Now, I would like to establish a proposed response and follow-up to Christian Centner’s presentation published here (https://vincentbourseul.fr/download/le-genre-en-psychanalyse-retour-de-la-critique-du-savoir-2014/), where he begins an answer to the following question: “How to situate the question of gender in relation to the Borromean knot”. Based on J. Lacan’s seminars Les non-dupes errent and RSI de J. Lacan, figures are identified to follow the thread of J. Lacan’s situating of the formulas of sexuation at the vertices of the tetrahedron, as well as those of the object a, sense, and jouissances on the flattened Borromean knot as we know it.

 

Later, following his presentation, I was able to take up some elements subsequently published in the book regarding these situations, for which I proposed this:

Levorotatory Borromean knot

 

Let us return to the explanation of this proposition.

Here, the flattening of the knot as it is most commonly known, where Lacan reveals the tetrahedral figure in the lesson of May 14, 1974, of the seminar Les non-dupes errent, where he situates “the object a, sense, and the two jouissances, at the beginning of the seminar R.S.I. “, accommodates sex, gender, and the object a.

Where sexuation remained literally unwritten, being thought of as impossible, I commented thus: “In the zone located around IS/Sense, sexuation as an impossible object — according to the previous identification — is not there; it delimits what the analyst activates sometimes on the side of the imaginary process that it is, sometimes on the side of the symbolic instance that it also is, but without the consistency that would allow it to be situated as the impossible object that it is not. The I-S/Sense thus identified is an empty space to be occupied by the analyst who, by assuming it, makes sexuation function as a situation determined by language, to which the analysand can access thanks to the suspension of sex allowed by the handling of gender.”

Here, the aim was to describe a first identification that precedes the one made possible by conceiving of a-sexuation as it is proposed today.

We can reconsider my commentary on the situation of sexuation at the flattened knot, corresponding to the identification of the four vertices of the dextrorotatory tetrahedron. Sexuation, described as an impossible instance, assumed by the analyst, can now be much better termed a-sexuation, which the highlighting of the dextrorotatory tetrahedron allows us to situate where I previously held the impossible instance of sexuation.

How does this allow for progress? Perhaps in response to the question, framed as a work program, that Lacan articulates in this same lesson: “We will somehow have to question this: the step, not the exclusive step like the one just now, the step of what exists to say no to the phallic function. We will also have what says yes to it, but which is split, namely that there is the whole, on the one hand, and on the other hand the not-whole, in other words what I have called the not-all. Does it not seem to you that this is a program, namely to take into examination, to take the critique of what it is of the step, of what implies saying no, that is to say the interdict, and very specifically, ultimately, what, by specifying itself as saying no to the Phi(X) function, says no to the phallic function. Saying no to the phallic function is what we call, in the analytic discourse, the function of castration.”

The step that says no, and in doing so becomes the function of castration, cannot be qualified by its refusal if it makes it ek-sist. Where the semblance of object a that occupies the analyst in function reveals the possibility of a consistency and determination of the dextrorotatory knot where we complete the inscription, after object a (common to both knots), of gender, sex, and a-sexuation.

Gender and sex respond, in a way, to the two jouissances whose proximities and neighborhoods have been described in Le sexe réinventé…, as can be seen on the flattened knot above. Object a remains at the common vertex that forms the center in this figure. A-sexuation, for its part, responds in the sense that it opposes, that it says no to the symbolic primacy that creates the Phallus as a symbolic object, from which the phallic function draws its ground, administering, in logic, the distribution of the four modalities of sexed identification that constitute the four formulas of sexuation.

Thus, the function of castration, assumed by a-sexuation when sexuation, fundamentally, seems to dig there the illusion of an exception without a favorable escape route to house the woman who does not exist (a necessary condition for the maintenance of the universal man rejecting his female from the kingdom of the phallic), can finally function in our theorization, as it is already at work in the cure without being able to be discussed otherwise than delivered to the same fate as the appendix woman.

By moving from one knot to another, levorotatory (which says yes to the phallic function) to dextrorotatory (which says no to the phallic function; the not-all phallic which is therefore not without the phallic to say no to it), the gyre is preserved where Lacan placed object a. This, schematically, can give the following figure, by placing the four elements mentioned above, by featuring a-sexuation through the writing of the function of castration (which is not its refusal, but the consequence of saying no to the phallic function).

Let’s take another step, by showing on the diagram the areas corresponding to the inscriptions on the levorotatory knot, the two jouissances (phallic and of the Other) to which I add the one called genital, as the identification of the three jouissances is indicated in the table above.

And to further add these corresponding elements from the identification table of identity, identification, and the identitary.

Many thanks in advance to the topologists and Borromeanologists for attempting some comments that I would not be able to produce, as these languages are so foreign to me.

**

Course of a cure’s maneuvers

 

In other words, still from a Borromean perspective, the course, if I may say so, of the cure’s maneuvers, can be described as follows:

1. First movement — S/R: from supposed knowledge to the unconscious real
2. Second movement — R/I: from the real unconscious to the specular imaginary
3. Third movement — I/S: from the non-specular imaginary to supposed knowledge

This triad, serving, according to subjective situations, the different stages described, only guarantees the precautions deemed necessary for taking gender into account, up to the creation of a new sex, from the first movement to the third.

Nothing excludes that this approach could illustrate many other questions beyond those related to sex and gender. Perhaps it is an extraction from the experience of the cure tending towards a more general practice of the Borromean structure.

Could it be that through the reception of gender as I have proposed it, a broader theorization of a psychoanalytic cure perspective emerges? Where, once again, the real treats the symbolic.

One might notice an apparent discrepancy, suggesting an error in seeing the specular imaginary handled before the non-specular imaginary. The question long remained an enigma. But the constitutive primacy of the imaginary in the sense of the mirror seems to determine this necessity to introduce into the maneuvers what, from imaginarization, supports the becoming of the subject, without confusion with the image of being, where, in the course of the cure, this opportunity is located to associate what remains of this jubilant assumption described by J. Lacan in the mirror stage, regardless of the singular successes and failures encountered, in order to credit the construction in the cure not with a reframing of the subject, but rather with its subjective destitution, without which the analysis could delude itself with a problematic engendering. The analysand is not left out throughout the time the cure puts them to the test; analysis is not an original birth, but the creation of something new from previously acquired traces and structures, although the cure logically reserves for them the fate that one eventually comes to know.

Here, one can conceive of what the analyst can occupy and play as an anticipatory and regressive function necessary for re-stitching the material qualified as real, to which the cure will give form, which should undoubtedly not be chemically precipitated from the formless to the form, which would qualify the real-non-specular imaginary-specular imaginary maneuver, according to a photographic development logic. No. The analyst must preferentially support this thrown point of the specular imaginary where the analysand manages to follow the thread by which they learn how matter forms form, while the analyst maintains during this time a semblance of finalized specular production, through the presence of their body among other things. A suspension through which the subject can risk making this fundamental discovery of the underlying stakes in the historical imaginary capture in which they had to make a truncated image of themselves to stand up as one.

Proceeding differently would take the path of a confirmation in the mirror in which one would become entangled, deprived of the material to be extracted from the real unconscious. It would also be to play into the potential ego reinforcement at that point, which we prefer to set aside, depending on whether one adopts this or that respective approach to the cure or to coaching. For if it were a matter of working to make the symbolic cover the real, then we would have to follow that thread, but the cure could not lead, through the traversal of fantasy, to an experience of fictional reality and the ego’s febrilities, which it is almost always appreciable to see treated as the air pocket they mimic and make blow into the invisible of the image approached as a reflection.

 

**

Openings

 

What can this open up to?

1. To the possibility of welcoming sexual expressions and demands as questions, as propositions, including from the place criticized for being “victimizing” of a complaint in the making, which remains the necessary advent to the analytic process aiming for the cure. A complaint without which the sources of ethics could not be recognized by the subject for their own benefit in favor of a conquered freedom, separated from the historical identity alienations they suffer from.
2. To consider that alongside the subject of the unconscious exists the subject of the individual (the collective), inviting the analyst to consider the echoes of ambient discourses not as peripheral sociological phenomena affecting the individual, but as the reflected material of the individual subject that constitutes them in the social.
3. To extend the scope of the phallic stakes, and our understanding of them, beyond the Phallus where the not-all phallic also finds its extensions not necessarily inscribed in the throes of limitless jouissance that can lead beyond life.
4. To think of the “non-binary” proposition of certain speaking-beings differently than under the seal of a refusal of castration, but rather as an update of the psychic bisexual constitution supported by Fliess and Freud, with which we hear, of course, on the surface of the statement, the performative will of non-binary identity affirmation, but beyond which we can highlight what, in the enunciation, asserts the representation of the subject by a signifier — which, by being repeated, continuously metamorphoses. Where our understanding of constitutive psychic bisexuality emerges from imaginaries linked to fantasized sexual orientations endowed with a direction they do not have.
5. To confirming that the subject can choose their sex for want of deciding it—a decision that would belong to the field of the individual where the impact of the social sphere in which beings move is subjectified as a collective.
6. To the detachment of sexuation articulated to the Phallus—not its transcendence, which would merely overturn the table in a vain attempt to negativize the Phallus. A detachment capable of illuminating that by which the symbolic Phallus becomes the signifier of jouissance, where that which pertains to the object a and its bodily prerogatives provide the means for jouissance.
7. To recognize the Phallus anew, the very symbol of its lack.
8. To support a possible traversal and revision of sexuation in the cure from the semblance of object a that the analyst occupies in function. Far from the ideology of forced choice that the logic of the table of sexuation formulas seems to confirm as much an aporia as an inescapable fact, by reading their appearance in the quadrangle that conceals their writing effects before being read. Did Lacan not say that even unwritten, these formulas would have their effects? Beyond this, these formulas continue to be written: it is up to us not to be content with merely reading them.
9. To thinking that if the Phallus is indeed the signifier of jouissance, the object a remains nonetheless the primary object of its cause, such that desire is confounded with it. An object no less lacking than the Phallus that organizes the symbolic lack oriented by its centration, by its monolithism, which we can illuminate through the diversity of versions of the object a whose list cannot be fixed. Consequently, it cannot orient speaking beings around a master-signifier where the Other of the sexual is reflected, when we aim, through analysis, to clear the path that leads to the others of the sexual.
10. To recognize the shortfall of the imaginary Phallus, distinctly from the symbolic Phallus so well known through our theorizations where it escapes its more varied imaginarizations than it appears to the imaginary, through image and beyond image — to the non-specular imaginary.
11. To distinguish between gender transitions and sex transitions according to whether they are engaged from this or that possible dimensional entry, which are either gender as an imaginary object or sex as a symbolic object, which we recognize in reality, for gender, as an apparent factor of sexuation, for sex, as an agent of sexuation; in the symbolic, for gender, as the making of sex, for sex, as the signifier of jouissance (the Phallus): what is heard in what is said by the analysand.
12. Identifying that what was initially understood as “sexuation” in a first mapping on the left-handed Borromean knot is revealed, through the use of the right-handed knot, to be the function of castration. This underscores, in the same stroke, that sexuation proceeds from a situation of sexed beings, while A-sexuation proceeds from a function of these same beings in that they operate castration as such by not being not-all, none of them ever being able to prove or embody it. A-sexuation is the function of the castration of sexuation, so much so that by introducing object a where the Phallus plays the primary role, we obtain the path, the link, a bridge between these two modalities of the being’s situation, sometimes subject, sometimes themselves, before the desire that causes them to be seized as a signified of the individual. What collective can face this with open eyes? Where the subject approaches their desire, they object, without refusing it, by saying “no” to affirm themselves, always to the phallic, unless they try to embrace it with a deadly kiss, where they encounter the function of castration that saves from the impossible espousal of being to its cause.
13. A-sexuation testifies to what, not being in the field of sexuation, nonetheless remains phallic (not-all understood), but is illustrated in reality by the arrangement of this patriarchal schema in the unconscious reflected in reality, in imaginary consistency, etc.

 

Conclusion

Sexuality is political; sexual acts are not political acts (except in contexts of domination such as aggression, incest, rape, totalitarianism, heteropatriarchy, etc.), as unconscious knowledge teaches us. We must continue to draw some conclusions, always temporary, to move forward with what is unprecedented.

Because we are not only subjects in the universal to which language restores us, but also, by the cause of desire — object a — particular beings: the Phallus is universal, object a is particular.

So yes, a-sexuation is a theoretical proposition, which I hope to see debated. Who knows…

What should be retained to define it?

Aa-sexuation is to sexuation what the not-all phallic is to the phallic, namely that it is neither its inverse nor its opposite. A-sexuation designates what, relying on sexuation, where the unconscious subject’s relationship to the phallic function and jouissance is articulated, partially objects to it precisely where it extends it: this beyond-Phallus (which is not its transcendence or its refusal) that makes possible the still-pending exploration of what the function of castration (saying no to the phallic function) is in reality, in the imaginary, and not only in the symbolic, as the experience of Psychoanalysis has, until now, largely studied it, reducing it to the rank of a negative reaction while it has always constituted a truly fertile, salutary, and creative proposition. To open, in particular, and to support the field of the not-all phallic (which is not without the phallic). a-sexuation refers to that which, while drawing support from sexuation—where the relationship of the subject of the unconscious to the phallic function and to enjoyment is articulated—partially objects to it at the very point where it extends it: this outside-the-Phallus (which is neither its beyond nor its refusal) that makes possible the pending exploration of the function of castration (the saying no to the phallic function) in reality and the imaginary, and not only in the symbolic, as the experience of psychoanalysis has, until now, largely been able to study by reducing it to the status of a negative reaction, whereas it has always constituted a truly fruitful, salutary, and creative proposition. In particular, it aims to open and sustain the field of the not-all phallic (which is not without the phallic).

It designates what is ordinarily so quickly amalgamated and qualified as a pathological identity phenomenon by many analysts who too quickly forget that they themselves refuse the castration that presents itself to Psychoanalysis through their opposition to questions “said of gender and co.” yet centered on the Phallus and its historical symbolism, which has too long masked its creative reality in service of constitutive psychic bisexuality.

It could support our attention in identifying and observing the nuances and extents of the not-all phallic, so often thought of as non-phallic; it could help us explore sexuation without wallowing in the perennial, falsely symbolic, purely imaginary arcana, where man and woman would have to find their side, for example, and many other hasty conclusions poorly deduced from formulas that are not to be interpreted but to be endured as one traverses a shifting experience.

a-sexuation is the function of castration as it articulates with sex and gender from object a forming an axis, on the right-handed side of the perspective of the Borromean knot laid flat.

It incompletes the Phallus differently than the phallic does with the not-all phallic, by opening the treatment of the symbolic to the real such that the imaginary can give it a form (with or without image) and access. Thus, what of sex imposes itself on being can also be thought from its formed real, and no longer only from its symbolic resonances.

A-sexuation can bring us closer to the real of sexuation, which can only be reached by letting go of the symbolic’s helm to traverse the very experience of sexuation to its elusive sources, without recoiling from its inspiring sexual actualities. A traversal that is also necessary for an analyst’s cure to be completed, thus an undeniable element of the analyst’s very training. No offense to some.

A-sexuation accounts, in a forthcoming table of formulas, for the subject’s relationship to the function of castration and its object relation.

Will Psychoanalysis be able not to refuse too much the castration that presents itself to it, in the guise of gender, at the risk of disappearing as a social practice? To simply say no to castration, anew, and thus reconnect with its historical foundations.

Vincent Bourseul