If there is no sexual relationship, might there not be one between genders? (2014)

If “there is no sexual relationship,” might there not be one between genders?

Notebooks of the Sigmund Freud School of Psychoanalysis, no. 96, 2014, p. 107-114.

As the discussion developed around the book in other directions, time ultimately ran out to put these few questions to Guy Le Gaufey, so they will now be put to him in writing. No matter: even without the exchange they might prompt, let us wager that they also serve as commentary on this work, which is interesting in more than one respect.

 

The first point I would like to highlight concerns the chapter on sodomy and the “against nature”…

Your work explores, through several paths and approaches, what we might call adjustments to that which, in sex, creates a gap, a hiatus, a displacement… You draw our attention to the effects of the non-relationship and to the consequences of those effects, in particular those illustrated in the desire to control certain sexual acts through certain forms of knowledge and power. In the chapter entitled “Sodomy and Against Nature,” you invite us to grasp what is at stake where the converging interests of the moral theology of the Gregorian reform meet those of the moralizing psychiatry of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, the invention of sodomy in the medieval period by theology, and its classification among crimes of lèse-majesté, precedes—historically and conceptually—the nineteenth-century psychiatry in its treatment of things said to be “against nature.” Both, in very different periods, work toward establishing and delineating a limit, a point beyond which it will no longer be permitted to remain within the human order. This fabrication of exclusion—and, to that end, of discrimination through differentiation—is built up step by step, from theories of the generative instinct, through crimes conceived as against nature, then those conceived as against the spirit, up to, through the literary and

spiritual audacity of a few, the invention of a practice of what had until then been regarded, at most, as an act.

The moral and divine judgment that designates the intention and will of practitioners—differently from the act itself—serves to warn those who, likewise practitioners but in another capacity, must henceforth keep their distance, thanks to the distance thus introduced, from certain sexual matters deemed improper and since grouped under the term “sodomia ” (you rightly remind us how sodomia could refer to so many different acts before being fixed in its reduced modern conception, of which you specify that “with it one reaches such a maximum in the order of sin that there is no longer any need to provide a subtle and detailed description³”).

In both cases, theological and psychiatric, you say: “What is at stake is to install a break in continuity within sex, a rupture that makes it possible to strictly fold sexual encounter and reproductive necessity onto one another⁴.” An attempt which aims, if I understand correctly, to invent discontinuity in order to give form to the absence of continuity in sexual matters.

You detail all these efforts of classification, evaluation, and the construction of an almost encyclopedic approach reminiscent of Foucault’s, for example in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge⁵, which have recently found an echo in efforts to classify, inventory, designate, assign, and invent discontinuity with regard to what should be like this and never become like that, in the initiatives of La Manif Pour Tous (LMPT).

We have seen various spiritually motivated attempts to draw from the complexity of modern lives natural, cultural, divine, historical, and other arguments, likely to serve as proofs and supports in favor of the proposal to maintain and preserve a backward-looking status quo against the contemporary drift that would inevitably carry us beyond the human order. I am thinking both of the substance of the arguments and of the form taken by certain assertions and demands, written as equations, where one could read: “a child = a dad + a mom,” sometimes written out in full, Dad and Mom with capital letters, or else symbolized by the outline of silhouettes of a child, a blue dad and a mom

in pink, or again “dad + mom: there’s nothing better for a child,” “all born of a man and a woman,” etc.

Thus, both medieval theology, inventing sodomy in its time, and LMPT re-inventing in the twenty-first century a theory of how children are made (from a dad and a mom, and no longer merely from a male and a female) work in the classification and fabrication of limits from simple boundaries perceived at the heart of already existing practices, in order to distinguish what is admissible and inadmissible in sex.

My question: is this what it means to understand the ways in which attempts are constituted to fight against the absence of continuity within sex, by inscribing within it—forcefully and with conviction—discontinuity, so as to benefit from the privilege thus created of being able to designate it, combat it, and legitimately attempt to reduce or annul it? Is this what it means to understand one version of the interest in formulating that there is no sexual relationship?

 

Moreover, after rightly reminding us of Lacan’s introduction of jouissance with meanings different from those ordinarily attributed to the term, you take up again the thread of the radical heterogeneity of male and female jouissances. Sexual jouissance “blocking the [sexual] relationship⁶”—you quote Lacan here—the formulas of sexuation become necessary in order to write “this difference in the approach to the phallic function⁷,” under the auspices of this renewed conception of jouissance.

This gap between jouissances calls to mind, since the formulas are at issue, the gap between the anatomical and the modalities of approaching the phallic function, and thus of jouissance, which the subject comes to assume with more or less Happiness. The anatomical gap partly causes the gap between jouissances, and we know, by extension and clinical experience, that in this game all singular anatomies compete, without any need to correspond too closely to the ordinary anatomical expectations of what is reputed to be a man or to be a woman—having it or not, being it but not all the time, etc. This observation of the gap between jouissances illustrates another reason for formulating that there is no sexual relationship.

But sometimes, yes, there is one; it seems that there is. Sometimes jouissances seem to come together, as if not yet separated, or no longer separated, to the point that there is a semblance of a sexual relationship, to the point that jouissance would no longer block it.

Certain recent drugs, sought after in the context of sexual practices, are now an occasion to live physical and mental experiences worthy, for users, of what it may be appropriate to call a sexual relationship, for better and for worse (let us remain within the sacred bond of marriage). The entactogenic, empathogenic, and hallucinatory effects of drugs from the cathinone family are, according to practitioners, indescribable. The best-known of these molecules gives its name to many of its derivatives: mephedrone. Under the effect of these products, physical communion and sexual jouissance no longer encounter the barriers of former times. Sexual jouissance no longer seems to block the relationship.

But on closer inspection, one must consider—contrary to appearances—how sexual jouissance is literally displaced by the effects of the drug in question, displaced and projected onto the screen of hallucinatory phenomena shared by the protagonists brought together, to the point that it is sometimes possible to experience a hallucination as a pair. The same hallucination for two. Whereas LSD offers participants the possibility of sharing their singular hallucination, mephedrone, in certain non-systematic cases, makes it possible for two people to see the same hallucination, in which visual productions seem to undergo the simultaneous influence of the two psyches engaged in the adventure, while at the same time each benefits from being its spectator, accompanied by the other spectator. Without needing to retain the details of these cases—quite rare but spectacular in their after-effects—these new molecules give rise to experiences of a very high level of sharing, sensational communion, and dilution of the barriers classically erected by sexual jouissance (signing the non-relationship). Erections and orgasms are dissolved into other possibilities of sensation and other modes of jouissance, or else abandoned (loss of erection, inability to reach ejaculation), to such an extent that one is permitted to think that sexual jouissance is specifically kept at a distance thanks to the molecule; without, however, preventing—quite the contrary—the practice of other sexual practices and other types of jouissance, ultimately making it possible for the relationship to play out, to give it a form in reality (between the imaginary and hallucination) and thus to make it exist somewhere, for a time.

My question: does the substance-drug take the place of—substitute itself for—the substance-jouissance and, by suspending it, reopen the temporary possibility of the sexual relationship? Do you think that sexual jouissance remains as a barrier to the relationship, even though current technical advances sometimes seem to allow for the abolition of the barrier while maintaining an apparent jouissance, or even multiplying it?

 

Finally, in what we might call a general way, you explain very well—and this clarified a great deal for me—the interest in identifying the fundamental nuance between contrary and contradictory, in its different nuances, in order to approach the non-relationship productively. The sexes are not contraries but contradictories, as I understand it in reading you, even if you do not formulate it as literally as I do.

You address contrary/contradictory toward the end of the book, no doubt because each and every one of us holds this dialectic in order to think the non-relationship; nevertheless, when I came across it, it set me thinking. In the first pages of the book, it is evident to me that you unfold—without making it explicit in those terms—that the sexes maintain a relationship that we might qualify as antithetical, in the sense of antithesis. This struck me immediately from the introduction, because at that moment I was working, on my side, on the theoretical explication of a relationship between genders that I call prosthetic—since it resonates directly with antithetical.

The rhetorical figure of antithesis is defined as illustrating an opposition of viewpoints at different moments of a complete contradictory argumentation, which common sense makes play the game of the opposition of contraries, thus minimizing the quality of the contradictory. Antithetical is not the strict opposition of two halves, but also reaches the figure of style through being set in opposition: it is said, in a system of conjugated fractures, of faults whose play occurs in the opposite direction to the principal accident (Littré). Going in opposite directions does not prevent one from being simply contradictory. That the sexes are antithetical highlights what the non-relationship designates in part, namely that they are neither complementary nor necessary, but contingent and related to one another by something other than a sexual relationship (through the mediation of the phallus).

Gender, if it is not thought of as social sex that would be reduced to the anatomical, can be thought of as one of those moments of sex in which, thanks to an intermittence in the certainty we grant it, there emerges the space of a beat favorable to taking into consideration a beyond of the dialectic of antithetical sexes, from which we can think the part of what grounds them in common, for lack of being commonly grounded.

Hence my question: if there is no relationship between the sexes that could be qualified as sexual, do you think there is one between genders? Would it be of a nature to express the prosthetic relation that genders maintain with one another, in the sense that this time the elements of the contradiction advance here in the same direction and no longer in directions opposite to the principal accident—which does not prevent them from remaining contradictory in other respects, as we can observe every day.

Vincent Bourseul