Destroy, Says They (2023)

Destroy, It Says

Published online, June 2023.

“Something happened, didn’t it?

I don’t know.”

(M. Duras, 1969)

1. Hey, ChatGPT, where do we stand on “a third sex”?
2. Keeping pace with the current reality of impossible sexes
3. Preformative
4. A third sex, the Trans sex. Characters
5. The “there is none,” from sex to the unconscious

 

Let us struggle-literate what we think we know.

 

What other possibility is there today?

 

One must escape ChatGPT.

 

***

 

Hey, ChatGPT, where do we stand on “a third sex”?

 

— According to Jacques Lacan, a famous French psychoanalyst, the concept of the “third sex” does not refer to a specific gender category, but rather to an aspect of the human psyche. Lacan considers sexual identity to be fundamentally linked to the structure of language and the symbolic construction of the subject.

In the Lacanian perspective, biological sex (male or female) does not automatically determine a person’s sexual identity or gender. Instead, Lacan proposes that sexual identity is constructed through a psychic and symbolic process, in relation to language and social signifiers.

According to Lacan, the structure of the human psyche is divided into three orders: the symbolic order, the imaginary order, and the real order. The symbolic order represents the realm of language, culture, and social meanings. The imaginary order concerns the mirror stage and the development of identity through identification with the self-image. The real order escapes symbolization and represents what is irreducible and indefinable.

In this context, Lacan argues that sexual identity is not fixed once and for all, but is continually at play in relations with others and in the construction of discourse. The “third sex” according to Lacan can be understood as a questioning of the traditional binary dichotomy between the male and female sexes. Rather, it emphasizes the complexity and ambiguity of sexual identity, as well as the role of society and language in its construction.

It is important to note that Lacan did not exhaustively develop his conception of the “third sex” in his writings, nor did he use this term in a precise or systematic way. Consequently, different interpretations can be made of his thought on this subject.

 

— But then, is there a sex to the unconscious?

 

— According to Jacques Lacan, the unconscious has no sex in itself. The unconscious is the realm of the psyche where desires, drives, and psychic conflicts are stored and operate symbolically. For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language, and it is through language that symbolic meanings are attributed to drives and psychic experiences.

Lacan developed the concept of the “Phallus” to explain the way in which sexuality and gender are symbolically constructed in the unconscious. The Phallus, in Lacanian theory, does not refer solely to the male sexual organ, but rather to a symbolic signifier that represents lack and desire in the psyche.

The Phallus is considered the central symbol of symbolic castration, which is a central notion in Lacanian psychoanalysis. According to Lacan, symbolic castration occurs when the child realizes that the two sexes are not equal and that there is a lack in sexual completeness. This awareness of lack is considered fundamental to the development of subjectivity and sexual identity.

Thus, from Lacan’s perspective, the question of sex in the unconscious is closely linked to the way in which symbolic meanings are attributed and constructed through language. The unconscious is structured by language, but this does not mean that it contains a direct representation of biological sex. Rather, sexual and gender meanings emerge in the symbolic construction of identity through psychic processes and relations with others.

 

— Hmm… a bit of truth, a bit of falsehood, a lot of falsehood in all that.

 

— However, it is essential to emphasize that many psychoanalysts have adopted more inclusive and gender-open approaches, recognizing its role in the formation of identity and subjectivity. Some have used psychoanalytic concepts to explore gender issues and the experiences of transgender or non-binary people. Contemporary psychoanalysis is a diverse field, where different perspectives coexist and evolve over time.

 

ChatGPT session, May 13, 2023.

 

***

 

Keeping pace with the current reality of impossible sexes

 

Analytic experience teaches us that the reinvention of the sexes is permanent in the place of the non-sexual relationship; it does not cease not to be written. And the sexes, which we call Man, Woman, Trans, are the impossibility of the permanent reinvention of their differences.

It is they who remain impossible, not their difference. This difference is realized and written. It is possible and endless. They are impossible and finite, though innumerable.

But since we see only it—the endless reinvention of the difference between the sexes—and we do not see the impossible sexes that it fails to extract from the real where they are caught, it is on it that we place our demands, our reproaches, and all our expectations regarding the sexes. It is the difference between the sexes that we make bear the impossibility of the sexes that we do not grasp, since we do not cease to hastily cover them with ready-made meaning and symbols, plugging the holes in knowledge that destabilize us.

We miss them by covering the real too much with the symbolic, when it is rather the real that forces us and allows us to treat the symbolic.

Then the impossible sexes disappear under the evidence of the difference between the sexes, and it is the knowledge impossible to say and impossible to write that fades away; we lose the trace, and believe that this suits us—dear debility. We lose the trace until an encounter occurs, one day, one moment, and the reinvention of the sexes that does not cease not to be written precisely ceases, for a time, not to be written.

In the fortuitous, strange, or queer encounter, it sometimes happens that the difference—the one that exceeds the difference between the sexes which is not one—is written, in the flesh. This difference between the sexes, the one created by virtue of this contingent encounter, indeed exists, as a product, as an emergence and form of this impossibility of the real of the impossible sexes that the imaginary extends here by giving them a form.

Then we grasp, once again, in this appearance of the difference between the sexes that it does not pre-exist the sexes with which it ends up establishing a kind of relationship.

A relationship of sexual difference that masks the non-sexual relationship, which camouflages it with all its precariousness, and the weakness of a poorly tailored coat. It collapses under the same conditions as it appears, performative and vain. The difference between the sexes fails to account for the impossible sexes; it barely circumscribes them.

Only writing, only the letter can account for this impossible, for what does not cease not to be written. The writing of the sexes is therefore the only tenable project for translating the impossibility of the sexes into a dimension other than the overly imaginary one of sexual difference. This writing of the sexes, unlike the writing of sexuation, is possible as a supplementary writing to that of sexuation. Gender, a vector of sexuation, imposes itself as the necessary tool for this writing of the sexual encounter to identify therein a writing of these impossible sexes. And since the truth of the impossible sexes, because they are different, returns to us under the appearance of sexual difference, we find in the transferential space the traces of these impossible sexes possibly erased by the sexual difference that covers them too quickly.

 

It is tempting, no doubt, to hope regarding things one does not want to part with, that they remain indifferent—that they turn a deaf ear—to the fatally discriminatory words that separated them. It is tempting to oppose this with something that exceeds understanding—nonsense, which escapes comprehension—to maintain the promise of an idealized, hoped-for suture capable of stemming the sexual hemorrhage that creates incoherence and incompatibility.

How to cross this sound barrier and ensure that the one who has come to speak is heard, to put their hand back on the unique, unheard-of track of the sexes as they were constituted in their time within diversity?

 

The new sex makes itself heard, the cry of the sex finally undone becomes a sound carried by the voice, and which soon the resignified subject can emit and speak under the sway of the signifiers of the new sex. Thus gender undoes sex and creates sex in the in-between of its intermittent trouble, at the moment of stability where it experiences itself. The first undone “sex” not being identical to the created “sex.” Thus gender allows for the reinvention of the sexes and no longer merely the renewal of the sacrosanct difference between the sexes with which we manage so poorly in psychoanalysis. Thus gender simply encourages us to do without this difference between the sexes in order to prefer creating the new sex which constitutes a much better response to impossible sexes than traditional bipolarity.

 

***

 

— But who would want it, the new sex, if the impossible sexes work so well together, after all, not in reality, but in logic, suited to hold the structure together without revealing it?

 

— Is it human to access this experience? Is it more humanity, therefore more progress and suffering? Is it conceivable to always refuse what is coming?

 

***

Preformative

 

— Oh, it’s a boy.

And the subject is said to be.

— (Yes). He has his grandmother’s nose.

And the subject is said to have.

 

Being precedes having in discourse, for the subject of the unconscious; and having is confused as a justification for being. Yet, the inverse reading wins the match in terms of responsibility, most of the time, not without the participation of the other. This other of the sexual who has followed the same path of the said being who has and who has not. Who thinks they are from having or not having, and is confused in their inverted truth, reflected at the threshold of one another, where the self emerges.

 

How can the subject believe in anything other than the effects of this saying that is forgotten in the said, that they are before they have? Very easily. Too easily.

Unless we remember, for example, how the primal repression thought to weigh on S1, first, was specified to weigh on S2 of the signifier chain. Might there not be matter here to compare, to inspire our understanding of the saying and the said of sexuation, which are not sexuation, which on many occasions betray it, travesty it, to the point of generating what should be called: the common error — that of the subject deceived by the deception of the other, without the possibility of retaining the effectiveness of the predicted error?

I was before having and not having, then I feared being from having and not having; I am, from being and walking — literally — on the trace of the said that made me; it will be reached when I know how to say, beyond the effort, the risk, the opportunity to believe in it, if I am willing to endure exploring existence outside of God.

 

***

A third sex, the Trans sex. Characters

 

But then, what does this a-sexuation open up to, in fine?

The answer is simple.

It opens up to a third sex.

Not “the” third, mind you! Let’s not get ahead of ourselves… no.

“A” third sex; that is enough to relaunch the Phallus for all. And to reopen the dialectic of the already known sexes, which deserved to be carried further, as symptoms, in order to appreciate what, from an effective solution, what knowledge deserves to be further extracted from it that could not be grasped previously. Here, a knowledge refused on the occasion of a denial concerning the real of the bisexual psychic constitution, a real opening to a better consideration of space, outside of the time that weighs so heavily on the historical solution presiding over the sexual regulation of speaking-beings by the signifiers “Man” and “Woman,” by sexuation to express the articulation of the subject to the phallic function and to enjoyment.

 

And the first shall be last. The farandoles of the sexes spin the function of the refusal inherent in rejecting that of the sexes which leads to a belief in the evolutionary conspiracy. Who is superfluous?

For a long time it was the other, the woman, The Woman, and a bit of the Man too, but only a bit. Then the Trans, certainly, for not having been overtaken by the false sexes of sexual orientations believed to be what they are not.

Trans is a sex.

Whether they are illustrated and figured by the thousands or billions does not matter, just as the Man weighs on every man, etc. Trans exists, now, and for a very long time, finally.

 

If we said it exists now, as if it were self-evident, in the sequence of known sexes, they might appear to be the third, and we would, in the same stroke, make the same error, so common, as with the one and the other already recognized sexes. This is the error present in current developments concerning non-binarity in particular, where binarity is never more than the front of its back, a logical error of being instituted in reality too relative to our eyes shadowed by the invisible.

A third sex which, certainly, elucidates, in part, the separation of the other two from each other, but does not come to lodge itself in the interval where those two are situated by not ex-sisting to it, if not to the Subject. Who does not need, except in the fantasy that welcomes the other two so well, to be approached as an in-between whose function would be to confirm the prevalence of the other two. No one is prevented from believing that dad must complete mom, or vice versa, nor from believing that mom wears the pants in compensation for the penis she does not have (often enough), nor from being able to be a mother like a Man, etc.

Trans, then, a sex.

A sex that comes to tell reality, in body and form of being, what the in-between of the intermittent trouble of the unstable sex, of the impossible sexes, is all about, just as gender has allowed us to elucidate its action in the maneuver I proposed in the definition of said gender.

But Man and Woman are not sexes. Certainly. We have said, written, and repeated it enough. The signifiers designate here, not the sexes that may be associated with them, nor even the anatomies that may be linked to them, but Subjects — of the unconscious, who have no sex in the unconscious. Enough to get confused, or to perpetuate the common error just pinned down. Certainly. It is because we must try to think about the interactions to be described, between places that do not respond to the same dispositions. Who knows how to do that, without an AI?

 

Outside-the-phallus, and not beyond (which signals a conception of the not-all as an escape or overflow of an imaginary whole that is no longer phallic, only despotic: just look at what women suffer from it), as I have begun to define it, a-sexuation accounts for the sexuating logic at work in the sex called Trans by exaggeration and convenience, just as it works very well for the sex Man and the sex Woman — which are not sexes either, but which can be called such: this calling interests us. Not so far from Lilith evoked by Lacan when he speaks of the possibility of “a third sex” (he does not make the mistake of not noting the error, by saying the), but not as close as we would be tempted to read the myth as a user manual. Not to escape, perhaps, the seat of the infertile woman (Lilith) forever non-mother, but forever temptress, which fit well with the fantasized figure of the transsexual of yesteryear, from which one would no doubt like to release them from a trap, although it may be a matter, since we haven’t theorized what is happening for so long, of already going further by recognizing that a-sexuation opens up to two additional variations of the sexes in theory, already present in life for a very long time, which would then be the trans man and the trans woman, discussing the sexuation of the man and the woman. Men the color of woman and women the color of man are now becoming current, becoming precise. And in doing so, assuming being bleary-eyed to the reality that doubles like drunkenness the doubled sight before the seen. Four deceptive sexes: man, woman, trans man, trans woman, which do not exclude the outside-sex (finally considered for what it is without confusion with the trans situation as Catherine Millot was able to begin to say something about it in the early 1980s, in the darkness of the cellars blocking the view of the true, encouraging the dream of the true, in her work Horsexe).

 

Reality, certainly. But which one?

 

No reason to think, however, that the so-called trans sexes are the doubles of the other two, which is the function Lilith occupies for Eve and Adam, not just for Eve. For the double — Lilith —, here, of the woman who can be a mother — Eve —, is only valid for the man of the scene — Adam —, where the analogy between this genesis and the fantasy I have qualified ashetero-patriarchal at work in the explanation of sexuation in formulas (those written by Lacan). For, better than a duplicate, or double-bottom, the trans sexes called trans man and trans woman carry further than an extension would the symptomatic formation of all sexes, and reveal it more, this sexual symptomatization which, from the same refused knowledge, first supported the production of the man and the woman so well adjusted — we need this adjustment — with some things, small or large, that anatomy, that physiology have left us, practically, sticking our makeshift explanations on their backs which also serve as social norms (in the sense that there are social norms only in the absence of all sexual norms).

Here, it is indeed the knowledge of the bisexual psychic constitution that is the object of this refusal. A refusal associated with a distortion, a rewriting, based on the myth quickly forgotten for not being the source, nor the code, but the wounded soldier on the battlefield of the sexual, who must be cared for, healed, repaired, and whose scars must be allowed to teach distorted knowledge, but adjusted to the cultural comfort necessary for life to continue. A denied knowledge that returns to the Imaginary, therefore to reality and to bodies, where the trans sexes are illustrated. These do not answer to the fantasy hetero-patriarchal, or rather to answer it, in a way. They say, these trans sexes, that another fantasy is possible, I have called it a-patride. Because it bears witness to an articulation in sexuation where the object a plays the part of the Phallus suspended for a time, without replacing it, but by opening it to what it refused to know, for, it must be recognized, in support of the myth in its function, that in the hetero-distribution of roles and functions recognized in our Oedipal civilization, the bisexual psychic constitution is not truly admitted, except partially: when the “at the same time” takes precedence over the community of space, which is nevertheless closer to the unconscious psychic truth than the residue of meaning we extract from it, stripped of its timeless characteristics to suit our realistic requirements that are ignorant, by choice, of the real.

In other words, it is the denied knowledge of psychic bisexuality that returns to the trans sexes, just as the so-called male and female sexes were also, previously, residues of an arrangement that sexual experience imposes on unconscious knowledge, always to the detriment of unconscious knowledge.

And already the deceptive and bleary-eyed reality that makes us see in double and multiple, where genders swarm and proliferate, asks to be left behind in order to reduce its arguments, to make them compatible with the formations of the unconscious and its structure “like a language.”

And the moral and physical attacks against Trans people are directed against the Trans sex as it functions, serving as a function just like the other sexes, as a makeshift of the real of sex in reality. As mentioned in “ The Queer Experience and the Uncanny “, the refused knowledge returns to the Imaginary (to reality and the body) where it can be the object of an aggressive aim, a deployment of the death drive hoping for the unbinding of what imposes itself as existing. This confirms the nature of the return of knowledge, and the innocuousness of the sexes, of the three sexes (Man, Woman, Trans) to govern or treat the real of sex whose structure, and not quality, is expressed by psychic bisexuality.

And we remember that Man and Woman only ended up consisting, one day, to support us in the possibility of believing we know what the sexual and its effects are. The trans sexes; the Trans sex, then, let us begin the conceptual reduction, bears witness to an advance in our psychic exploration of this unconscious knowledge, on the occasion of the lifting of a denial concerning part of the qualities of the bisexual psychic constitution. We had accepted, let’s say officially, culturally, socially… a part — of this knowledge —, the part more in line with the relativity of our reality of experience, our psychic reality. Fortunately, through psychoanalytic experience, and through the effects of knowledge about the sexual put into circulation by psychoanalysis, crucial aspects of this unconscious knowledge end up making themselves known in their turn, little by little.

Thus are the trans sexes — and here we are saying “the” again — which punctuate this collective, cultural advance, being able to recognize not what justifies the privileged models until now that must be maintained at all costs, but reopened to knowledge first, even if meaning wavers at first, before finding the adequate cultural forms so that lives can be livable: what culture must be able to serve and not prevent in our infinite, unfinished exploration of the unconscious and its knowledge.

At this moment of return, I proposed the so-called a-patride fantasy. Because it is just as much as the hetero-patriarchal one a fabulous aim, non-realistic with regard to the real, but capable of supporting the smooth running of desire just as the fantasy lends it a framework.

It is easy, therefore, to think of the landmarks that facilitate the task, to orient us to the point of believing in sexual orientations, in particular. Here the hetero-patriarchal, of course, with its figures of ordinary, not to say traditional, families, man-dad-woman-mom-thechildren, and the a-patride in the form of motherlikeaman-thechildren toward which, both of them, we already know very well how to address our critiques in caricatures and dead ends: these two fantasies deserving to be put through the mill of all critiques in exaggerations, regular assessments necessary for the erosion of these excessively idealized arcana, for subjective comfort, on all sides.

We believe in our makeshift solutions turned into structural points, to the point of believing that no addition, no adjustment deserves to be welcomed when it emerges. It is the fierce and foolish opposition, attesting to a foolish use of knowledge, which is illustrated in the rejection of one, then the other, and vice versa. This being valid for any fantasy charged with arranging the maintenance of a movement of desire.

For the historical and majority solution, at this hour, only holds its best support in the rejection of the other solution, of the other solutions coming to discuss it where it forgets that it does not hold the truth, nor can it claim a superiority of value. This is why there is reason to appreciate the flaws of each of these ways of forming the sexual in reality, where we approach it in a relative mode, while in the unconscious it is not dimensioned under the same conditions. Let us dare to support ourselves, once again, with a difference between the relative and the quantum which, with abuse, can illustrate and make one grasp for a moment this irreducible unconscious-reality gap.

This highlights, in passing, that the hetero-patriarchal fantasy accommodates and supports itself through the denial of constitutive psychic bisexuality in its timeless dimension, while the a-patride fantasy supports and accommodates itself through the denial of constitutive psychic bisexuality in its spatial dimension. Two fantasies, two attempts to support desire in a makeshift arrangement, guilty of a partial denial of the bisexual psychic constitution bearing both on two distinct aspects of the matter: two symptomatic solutions.

 

Can we envision, in this way, that formulas come to write a-sexuation just as sexuation found its own?

I attempted this, taking into account an articulation based on the object a and no longer just the Phallus, thought to be foreclosed for the occasion (working hypothesis). The result was disturbing, leading to a reduction of the sexuating dialectic to arrive at this fraction of the not-all/all leaving the “not” isolated. I first thought of a dead end. Then, by dint of repeating and harping on it, I believe it is possible to read the result as an exploitation of the denial of constitutive psychic bisexuality, namely the existence of only one sex in the unconscious (which we could call the accountant, for the occasion) which is not one, which I can call the no sex.

Let us say then, more accurately, that a-sexuation allows us to support, with the help of the Trans sex, the verification of a hypothesis so often covered by some convenient beliefs, namely that in the unconscious there is a “no sex” in place of sex. And not the unique, male sex, or witness to phallic primacy that would hold for all. A “no sex” produced by the experience of the other of the sexual, a factor in the constitution of the self. Since the sex encountered is that of the other, of the other of the sexual, which by existing in the self-in-becoming, in the subject-in-becoming, leaves them with the infinite mark that there is none, at the start, of a sex of one’s own that is prior. A “no sex” quickly covered, by being preceded, by signifiers, pinned down by signifiers, fixed more or less to the body by signifiers which henceforth represent the subject for other signifiers, without the possibility, or even the need, for an authentic sex to be constituted for oneself, with or without what some call “anatomical conformity,” even when in discourse the subject allows themselves to be represented in the signifier chain.

A “no sex” whose “no” stems from the “not-all,” which expresses at least its premises, but does not qualify it too quickly, as often happens, as being “one” to which the other should respond, whereas it is from the experience of the other, the other of the sexual, that the “no sex” ex-sists to the subject. Whether the latter is represented in discourse by such a signifier (Man or Woman or Trans) cannot erase the primacy, not of the one, but of the “no” over the sex that there ends up being in the other before there is one in oneself. Before being it, before being, before having which, a flushed-out oddity, only precedes the possibility of being in the subjective experience, fatally retroactive of a process that will have seen them follow one another in an order other than the one commonly held: having or not having, then being or not being. William S. was right, to be or not to be is the question, let us add, the first question, the one that determines the second question, that of having, soon promoted to being taken for the previous one.

All this so as not to contradict the negative dialectic of traces as the unconscious is constituted, long before being perceived from reality, via the positive concretions that serve as our supports, in the light of a precisely obscene positivity.

But then, four sexes? No, three. In discourse, to date, let us note that Trans shares the quality of master signifier like Man, and like Woman. If variations are identified as occurs for each sex, this does not bipolarize the Trans sex into x possibilities, in the unconscious, nor does it unify it.

 

Not a sex in the unconscious.

In reality, it is another matter.

In discourse, three impossible sexes (see chapter “writings of the sexes, in Sex Reinvented…). “Impossible sex,” an admissible translation of Geschlecht, already recognized for “genderofsex.”

 

***

 

Three sexes, designated here by three signifiers, by abusing, let us not forget, a convenient reduction, a normative schematization of the elaboration. Because if we told the truth of the unconscious about sex, we would only say the sex that isn’t there, by its name: there is none.

 

At this stage, to this day, and it only continues. Three sexes that we can situate, to grasp a piece of contemporary interpretation, with the three consistencies of the Borromean knot, whether we think from the Bo knot in three dimensions 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, or the generalized Bo knot illustrating 3 = 4 – 1, values of homotypy reduced by continuity, a kind of correction that isn’t one, let’s say rather the movement of the knot which is not spared by Life.

S, for symbolic, let us allow the sex Man to hold to it.

I, spontaneously, or let’s say at first, suits the sex Woman if we think of the Trans sex whose refused knowledge I rave about in return for a lifting of denial, therefore of the Real where we might want to assign it, making the sex Woman the tenant of the Imaginary.

 

In a second step, we can identify a small verification of the solution presented here. Does it stick?

A little.

Quite so, no doubt.

Trans sex in the Real clearly illustrates the opportunity to consider the atemporal spatial nature of sex in the unconscious, quite differently from the programmatic relativity of reality, which takes advantage of the bipolar windfall of inscription in ‘there is/there isn’t’ mode, as basic as a ‘peek-a-boo’ of sex in the unconscious/reality.

 

Accursed “Fort-Da” when you make us believe it appears.

 

The so-called Trans sexes, Man and Woman, are three impossible guarantors, in a way, of the non-sexual relation, but above all of sexual non-complementarity. Each of them is necessary for the specificity of the other two, first to ensure the possible series, to move beyond the couple where everyone considers themselves number one, and further, to bear witness to a specificity, a singularity no doubt, that cannot be shared with the other two, as sexes are founded on being impossible: they never cease not to be written.

 

Each sex, as we have considered them, represents three impossibilities.

 

Therefore, it is entirely problematic that their respective failures fuel discrimination beyond the necessary separation between each of them, unless we consider that this authentic failure is not acknowledged, and continuously becomes the object of a refusal to know about this structure of sex that is not present in the unconscious for speaking beings. This is our interpretive option: a disavowal of the reality of sex that isn’t, in place of constitutive psychic bisexuality.

 

So much blood shed for that, it is a lot.

 

***

 

This confirms, from my point of view, that the circulation of knowledge about sexuality, through psychoanalysis, outside of treatment but not outside of transference, will have allowed the collective to learn two or three things about the individual that subjectifies it: through gender, the unreality of sex in the unconscious, beyond the initial Freudian observations where the phallic foam presents itself as a partial indicator, although it was initially interpreted as a complete truth; through Trans — a significant collective experience — of a third sex in discourse where sexuation allows itself to be spoken, as well as a-sexuation.

 

***

The ‘there isn’t’ of sex in the unconscious

 

So far, nothing indicates that sexual difference is inscribed in the unconscious in a differential or relative mode, such that man or woman, or male or female, of the species, could serve as a marker there other than as relics of the experience of sexual difference, an experience of sexual genders long before being anatomically invested during the genital assumption of child development.

We know that gender takes on the role, as an object in the imaginary, of introducing the subject to sexual difference where sex, primarily a symbolic object, serves as a marker in discourse. And that this leads to the establishment of sex difference as an authentic psychic creation aimed at harmonizing, at simplifying the experience of sexual difference. We could say of difference (simply), because it is the experience of difference, struck by the effects of the sexual against its traversal, that provides it, in the imaginary, with the form of binarism aimed at retaining the basic operation necessary for any marker: what am I as the experience of the other informs me? What am I, first, although it is always contaminated by the who of a circulating identity in words. What am I that precedes, of course, the what does the other want from me? To which we often, perhaps too quickly, associate subjective primacy…

It has often been said, and heard, that this perspective can support an understanding of the inscription of one sex in the unconscious, not two, without knowing which one when some voices maintain that this unique sex is inscribed there thanks to its phallic qualities (phallic primacy of Freudian libido) — in nostalgia for the invention of writing by man who wants to forget that it was writing that invented him, its possibility, even acquired, has always been the greatest of its precedents.

This is to forget that what the experience of sexual difference opposes to the subject is nothing more nor less than the unconscious’s inability to accommodate the nuances of phenomenal reality, where only a noumenal order (sic) seems to unfold without suffering from the absence of chronology indispensable to the phenomenon, only the intelligible which, like the unconscious, does not need time, only space — non-Euclidean, it must be specified.

Also, perhaps let us speak instead of an a-sex (for the privative, and for the cause of desire), to express the negativity of the trace, the negative constitutions of the subject, and to brutally propose that the object-cause of desire, object a, can find its place there, as precursor and product, therefore dual: that by which the sexual ambiguity of speaking beings is established in constitutive psychic bisexuality, where the unconscious is not bisexual, but “it is bisexuality“. For this is indeed what we always encounter in psychoanalytic clinical experience: no one easily accommodates the non-sex that they may believe they must constitute to respond to the demands of discourse that compel them to situate themselves in the sexual landscape. A a-sex in the unconscious (Real), induced by the gender of discourse (Symbolic), which precedes the sex created in reality, thus in the body (Imaginary). Man or Woman is only erected by giving form to the negative matter of the experience of sexual difference, from a-sex to sex, passing through gender, as we have proposed a definition and description in Sex Reinvented…

A negativity to discuss, however, because as a cause of desire, its privative quality is problematic. Here, the ” a” does not merely retain, or initiate; the “a” seals a place for sex: that of the constitutive remnants of the subject, an effect of the organizing negative dialectic. Thus conceived, the human procedure of constituting sexes through form is an unqualified invitation to binarity as a consequent projection of the bisexuality mentioned above (we know why we love cinema, we know in advance the horrors entrusted to AI). Binarity is necessary, not for its qualities of duality, but of division, against our flaw: we do not accommodate so well the fact that our unconscious does not absorb all dimensions of the reality we endure and live, forgetting that we create it. Of the dimensions of our lived reality, our psychic reality does not retain all of them. We are quite bothered by this, also deprived, fundamentally invalid. We compensate for this reduction of available complexity by erecting separations created from scratch to organize what seems to remain in confusion, in an unmanageable complexity in the unconscious.

We split, we separate, we distinguish, we discriminate to try to gain control over what happens to us — we secarons (secare : sex), we sexuate ourselves. And we love this almost-splitting. It must be said that it is necessary for all basic psychic operations. It is one of the ABCs of the psyche, splitting (founded on discrimination, not power: accounting is not exercised for the unconscious, not at the threshold of sex, but just after it). Thus, binarity, which pushes us to debate and legislate where we confuse our egalitarian understandings, is the most idiotic thing on earth and the most necessary for the organization of masses, in that it allows, without too much energy expenditure, to situate oneself from the experience of the other. How to make it simpler? Perhaps it is impossible, perhaps it is the shortest and most economical means, therefore preferred, for the psychic apparatus. But the truth of experience, as every time the pleasure principle governs economically, is sacrificed at the risk of oversimplification. To do otherwise requires clarifying one’s unconscious: some speaking beings dedicate themselves to it, most do not.

 

Economical, before being accountable, the unconscious. Extensive, the psyche.

 

From this, it is easy to deduce that in the unconscious, only one sex is inscribed for everyone: the sex one does not have. And to deduce further, how binarity (a product of splitting) seeks to assert in common reality what, in the unconscious, holds in lesser dimensions not due to a lack of registers (representation of things, words, inscriptions of mnemonic traces, etc.), but due to their regime (can we say political?) which differs with regard to the sharing that the absence of time production imposes on the unconscious. Is reality relative where the unconscious is quantum? Let us abuse this non-analogy a little more, leaving this gap to projected representations.

And it is a mistake, because what there is is not having, but what there is not: the sex that is not there, which very quickly will invite the being to recognize themselves in it to finally enjoy what they have (two co-occurring actions, of which we mistakenly retain an order of execution).

 

This does not prevent us from emphasizing that, made as we are, it is indeed the Phallic that takes precedence here, by its primary efficiency which is its lack of a significant representative, inviting, once again, to consider the march of marks where the destiny of what is not there is hollowed out, pushing one to be, relative to having.

Phallic primacy is at the source of this possibility of the negative inscription of sex in the unconscious, and of the Phallus as a missing signifier. Without this, no inscription of the subject in the sexual landscape: which would be a pure formal asexuation — without any proximity to a-sexuation, if not the proof, in the imaginary, of its incomprehension, of its refusal.

The subject’s sex is first the one they do not have, then the sex the other is, then the sex they are not for the other, then the sex they do have, albeit in dynamic opposition to the one they historically do not have, which welcomes the possibility of being of this sex that exists for the subject, articulated to the phallic function offering it lack as a vector. What body would not enjoy this dance?

Thus continues, without ever ending or sufficiently consisting, the writing of impossible sexes that never ceases not to be written. This does not prevent us from wasting our weight in drafts of literary litanies, perpetually, as if they would eventually be written, as if these impossible sexes, condemned to their perpetual invention, would become possible, and to offer them to the market economy (an antechamber to the reality of the libidinal psychic economy), the only one capable of accommodating this type of formatting that we so often take for representations of sexes that they are not.

Not all representations have representatives.

 

Let us not forget, if possible, that in our lack of a geometric definition of the unconscious, we are tempted to superimpose our phantasmatic and no less fantastic imaginaries, thus projected, exaggeratedly, onto a surface devoid of reflection, as if we could reflect ourselves there, gaze at ourselves.

And we would then accept that the other remains incalculable to us, their sex impossible, ours partly dependent on theirs: all necessary conditions for the function of the Phallus, which make the phallic function necessary.

Without this, no phallic function and its forever missing signifier, which activates a profane dialectic of sexual encounter between a sex and its experience, whether it is made of another of flesh and blood and/or fragments of fantasies: the only true sexual freedom.

And we will continue to reflect on how gender is a precursor to sex, far from what we imagined, and even further from the social and imaginary or narcissistic comfort that always encourages us to reduce this gender to a modality of sexual expression, which it is, in fact, never, contrary to almost all appearances that we retain about it: what, unfortunately, too many analysts still believe today.