From Gender to A-sexuation – Book Presentation (2026)

Book Presentation

1. Situating the Work

From Gender to A-sexuation: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation constitutes the second volume of the series Clinical Perspectives on Gender in Psychoanalysis, whose first volume, Sex Reinvented by Gender (2016), had already laid the groundwork for an articulation between psychoanalytic theory and gender studies. Ten years after this first volume, Vincent Bourseul presents here the fruit of a decade of clinical and theoretical work closely engaged with contemporary transformations of the sexual, identities, and modes of jouissance (p. 14). This is a book of intervention, in several respects.

The work follows in the wake of Freud and Lacan, while seeking to move beyond a posture of reverential inheritance. According to the author’s formulation, it is a matter of “following the Lacanian letter in its traces, rather than following Lacan’s trace to the letter” (p. 117). This methodological gesture authorizes a relaunching of conceptual elaboration that neither merely applies known formulas nor rejects them, but topologically displaces them to reveal unprecedented potentialities.

The stakes for the analytic community are as follows: whereas so-called “gender” questions (and all they encompass) are often treated by psychoanalysis in a defensive mode—between denial, hasty pathologization, or rallying—this book proposes another path: that of a psychoanalytic interpretation of gender that renews the discipline’s concepts regarding sexuation. The Introduction (p. 9–18) outlines the program of this “irreverent wandering” that characterizes the entire approach; after the construction of the first volume, this second volume proposes an interpretation (p. 187).

2. The Central Concept: A-sexuation

The heart of the work, as well as its conclusion, lies in the elaboration of the concept of a-sexuation, developed primarily in the chapter “A-sexuation: Perversion of the Phallic” (p. 52–68). This neologism does not designate an absence of sexuation, nor a negation of sexual difference, but rather a modality of sexuation described as “outside-the-Phallus”—that is, a subjective process that operates beyond the traditional frameworks of Lacanian sexuation as it is usually interpreted, without however breaking with the phallic function. Bourseul’s precise formulation is: “outside-the-Phallus, but not without the phallic” (p. 7–8). This distinction between the Phallus (master signifier, laden with imaginary confusions) and the phallic (operative function linked to subjectivized castration) structures the entire reflection.

A-sexuation emerges, according to the author, as a perversion of the phallic—not in the sense of a clinical structure, but in the sense of a reversal, a structural torsion that responds, forty-eight years later, to the regret expressed by Lacan in The Sinthome regarding psychoanalysis’s ineffectiveness in creating a new perversion (p. 117). The perversion of the phallic subverts the discourses that Lacan had identified, revealing the efficacy and scope of the phallic beyond known reference points.

This concept possesses a dual virtue: clinical and theoretical. On the clinical level, it allows for the reception of contemporary subjective experiences—sex transitions, gender transformations, new sexualities—without reducing them to pathology, but by hearing them as formations of the unconscious testifying to psychic work on jouissance and desire. On the theoretical level, it proposes to free the formulas of sexuation from what, in the interpretive imbroglio of recent decades, prevents the imaginary from giving form to the real of sex (p. 52), particularly the non-specular material so determinant of sexuation, and so acutely affected by the effects of neoliberal agony on the social bond.

3. Major Theoretical Displacements

From Necessary Exclusive to Necessary Inclusive

The chapter “Supplement to Sexual Theory (1): A-sexuation” (p. 117–132) proposes a notable displacement of the work, concerning the treatment of the pole of necessity in the formulas of sexuation. Where Lacan had situated, on the so-called “masculine” side, the necessary exclusive—the at-least-one who escapes the phallic function, the Father of the horde enjoying his sexual exclusivity—Bourseul proposes to substitute the necessary inclusive, formulated thus: “each one is not-all” (p. 122). This passage from “there exists at least one” to “each one” is neither an inversion nor a reversal: it is a topological displacement that allows sexuation to be read from another point of immersion, by accepting to explore the dextrorotatory face of the Borromean knot (p. 62–66).

The four poles of sexuation are thus redistributed (p. 122): the necessary (“each one is not-all”), the contingent (“not all is one”), the impossible (“not one is all”) and the possible (“each all is one”). This redistribution makes it possible to no longer rely on the patriarchal imaginary of yesteryear, nor on that of a hypothetical matriarchy, but on an enlightened perspective of lack-of-being for all-ones before the intermittence of having as a new sexual ethics.

Four New Discourses

The tensioning of the revised formulas of sexuation with discourse theory leads Bourseul to formalize four new discourses (p. 126–131), obtained by rotating the elements (S, S1, S2, a) by a quarter turn in the discursive structure: the Trans Discourse (or Discourse of A-sexuation), the Feminist Discourse, the Ecologist Discourse, and the Identitarian Discourse. These four discourses are not sociological descriptions: they are discursive structures formalized according to the Lacanian method, each organizing in a specific way the relationships between truth, knowledge, jouissance, and subject.

The Trans Discourse appears as the reading of the Psychoanalytic Discourse from the dextrorotatory side of the Borromean knot: object a is in the place of truth, represented by knowledge (S2) which addresses the master signifier (S1) to produce the subject (S) (p. 126). This discourse constitutes an extension, even a consequence of the Psychoanalytic Discourse freed from the imaginary limitations of our interpretive readings. The three other discourses (feminist, ecologist, identitarian) are deduced from it by quarter turns and allow for an account of the discursive modalities that characterize our contemporary moment.

Two Fantasies and Père-version

The chapter “From the Hetero-patriarchal Fantasy to the A-patride Fantasy” (p. 70–72) proposes the formalization of two fundamental fantasies. The first designates the mode of jouissance linked to the patriarchal necessary exclusive; the second names a mode of relation to desire that is organized from the necessary inclusive. This opposition is not reducible to a dualism: it allows for mapping subjective positions in their mobility, in articulation with the passage from père-version (the father’s version, the perversion of the Phallus as dominant regime: patriarchy) to a-version (the perversion of the phallic as an opening to new possibilities).

4. Clinical Stakes for Analytic Practice

The clinical scope of these elaborations concerns every practitioner confronted with contemporary subjective realities. Bourseul emphasizes that most questions related to gender in transition, in transformation, in transcendence and creation do not in any way target sexuation (p. 57), but other constructions that must now be interpreted (including a-sexuation). This reminder defuses the recurrent confusion between gender, sex, and sexuation, a confusion that has produced clinical difficulties when analysts believed they could interpret the formulas of sexuation instead of supporting them as one traverses an experience, even if it means seeing other horizons, other sexuations open up.

The “Letter to a Psychoanalyst of the Present” (p. 84–87) addresses a critique to what the author identifies as a refusal of castration on the part of many analysts themselves: those who oppose a flat refusal to questions “of gender and company,” forgetting that these questions are precisely centered on the Phallus and its historical symbolism, which has long masked its creative reality in the service of constitutive psychic bisexuality. In this sense, a-sexuation invites clinicians to sustain their attention to the nuances of the not-all phallic, so often wrongly thought of as non-phallic, and to explore sexuation without wallowing in the falsely symbolic arcana where man and woman would have to find “their side.”

Judith Butler’s contribution is acknowledged in the work: her Butlerian reading of Freud is appreciated for what it has allowed to reopen in the analytic field. But Bourseul does not stop there: he proposes a properly psychoanalytic articulation, anchored in Lacanian topology and the clinic of experience, even if it means taking it further, irreducible to the sole contributions of gender studies or queer theory.

5. Theoretical Interests in the Present: For the Psychoanalysis of Tomorrow

Why does this book merit attention today, and how does it prepare the psychoanalysis of tomorrow? Several reasons can be advanced.

First, it responds to a clinical urgency. Everywhere in the world, analysts receive subjects whose identity trajectories, sexual practices, and modes of jouissance no longer fit with the interpretive grids inherited from the past century. The alternative between pathologizing and trivializing is a dead end. A-sexuation offers a conceptual framework for hearing these experiences as formations of the unconscious in their own right, testifying to the subject’s work on jouissance and castration. It allows for distinguishing what pertains to gender (the gender relation can be written, Bourseul tells us) from what pertains to sexuation (the sexual relation cannot be written)—a distinction whose clinical consequences are notable.

Second, it renews the conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis without betraying it. The four new discourses are not a sociological improvisation: they proceed from the same formal logic as the Lacanian discourses, they are a rigorous topological extension of them (p. 126–131). Similarly, the passage from the necessary exclusive to the necessary inclusive does not abolish Lacanian sexuation: it explores its other side, the one that the flattening into two dimensions had rendered invisible (p. 122–125). The theoretical apparatus emerges enriched from this operation.

Third, it interrogates the defensive rigidities of psychoanalysis. One of the book’s contributions is to show that the resistance of many analysts to questions of gender itself constitutes a refusal of castration (p. 84–87). The reactive aggressiveness toward gender, the hasty pathologization of transitions, the retreat behind formulas recited without being traversed: so many signs of a subjective position that refuses the ordeal of the unknown. By proposing a theoretical framework that does not retreat before this ordeal, Bourseul offers analysts the means to sustain their desire to know without taking refuge in the comfort of a dead repetition.

Fourth, it opens the question of the Name-of-the-sisters. The chapter “Destroy, Says They” (p. 103–116) proposes that the signifiers “trans” and “they” function as versions of the Name-of-the-sisters, as competent as those of the Name-of-the-Father in sustaining the paternal metaphor. This proposition does not reject the so-called paternal function: it frees it from its paternalistic and patriarchal garb, in accordance with Lacan’s invitation to do without the Name-of-the-Father on condition of making use of it (p. 14). This proposition will have consequences for the understanding of psychosis, supplementations, and contemporary modes of knotting.

Fifth, it redeploys psychic bisexuality. The chapter “The Unconscious Is Not Bisexual. It Is Bisexuality” (p. 97–110) makes the pronoun “they” the signifier capable of illustrating the bisexual constitution of speaking-beings, recalling that the unconscious is bisexuality, and not the reverse (p. 117). Bourseul reinscribes at the heart of Freudo-Lacanian theory an element that had too often been eclipsed. Psychic bisexuality is no longer an embarrassing remnant of the theory of the Three Essays: it becomes the very pivot of understanding sexuation and its contemporary mutations.

Conclusion: An Ethics of Wandering

From Gender to A-sexuation is a demanding book, which will not yield itself without effort. It asks its readers to accept disorientation, to lose familiar reference points, to traverse the formulas instead of using them as a shield. This is the very condition of analytic thought, which the author qualifies as “irreverent wandering.”

For psychoanalysts of all orientations, this work constitutes an invitation to resume the work where the comfort of repetition had frozen it. The real of sex does not cease not to be written, and the subjects we receive continue to invent unprecedented ways of treating this impossibility. A-sexuation is not just another theory: it is a tool for not retreating before what our patients teach us, in traces and to the letter, about the becoming of sexuations.