Supplement to Sexual Theory (1): A-sexuation (2024)

Supplement to Sexual Theory (1): A-sexuation

Published online, October 2024.

To access the references for this article, consult the PDF version available for download.

This text introduces the psychoanalytic elaboration of a supplement to Sexual Theory as currently understood. It draws upon the results—clinical first, then conceptual—of the latest perversion to date, the perversion of the phallic, which responds, forty-eight years later, to Lacan’s regret over psychoanalysis’s failure to create a new perversion. One needed only to wait, and not lose the thread of psychoanalytic experience in closest proximity to the formations of the unconscious, to benefit from an anticipated passage from the necessary exclusive of the patriarchal world to the necessary inclusive of the world to come. Here is an introduction. The whole is conceptually acceptable and clinically effective if one agrees to follow the Lacanian letter to the trace, rather than Lacan’s trace to the letter.

Lacanian sexuation deserves our interest, even more so now than at the time of the writing of the formulas of sexuation. What has continued to evolve since the 1970s, in the lives of some and others, in practices and theories, has generated and still nourishes numerous updates, veritable updates in all directions of sexual life, concerning the sexualities that put us to the test. For the unconscious knowledge linked to sexuation does not cease to appear where it takes new form before our eyes, and where it pushes meaning into its normative entrenchments.

The Phallus, which must be named without delay, since they continue to be at the center of contemporary conceptual concerns, generates a thousand assessments, divisions, and tenacious misunderstandings, from which one must retain above all else, for each of them, the opportunity for theoretical elaboration screwed onto the perpetual reinvention of psychoanalysis, beyond inheritance. I write They for the Phallus, since it is the only pronoun, and very recent master signifier, capable of illustrating the bisexual psychic constitution of speaking-beings where they button down a sum thus signified, too long left adrift in our words even more divided than the subjects we are. One of the rare new signifiers of our time which, and this is where we recognize its reasons, does not retreat before the bisexuality that is the unconscious itself, in not being only bisexual.

The phallic, for its part, seems to have been, quite often, relegated to the shadow of its overly visible ambassador who suffers, where they insist, from their imaginary affiliation with the object they are not, but which nevertheless produces certain effects justifying the use of this signifier “phallus,” making inevitable, at each of its occurrences, the subjective trap it provokes where our confusion carries it away in its troubles. A discursive trap that still teaches us—if we accept in body to twist language to achieve it—that apprehension of the phallic and its stakes allows us to reach without excessively ignoring the imaginary compromises charged with sustaining us at the edges of certain failures of the experience of knowledge, and that of the nourishing lack of desire.

Hypothesis and Proposal

To set these notions in motion, in my bricolage of thoughts, I have proposed advancing on the track of a-sexuation. A so-called “beyond-Phallus” sexuation for the occasion, capable of accounting for current sexual and analytic experiences, as well as submitting to question certain historical conceptual propositions and their consequent interpretations (“man’s side versus woman’s side,” “feminine versus masculine,” and others, as so many faulty variations in regard to the formations of the unconscious).

What is my hypothesis? A-sexuation is a sexuation that distances itself and protects itself from the hindrances of Lacanian sexuation: not so much for what it strictly is (Lacanian sexuation), but for what continues to be denied, unrecognized, misinterpreted, and above all poorly repeated; that in which sexuation produces its effect, its effects beyond its formulation in writings. At the same time, it is a matter with a-sexuation of relieving what, in the interpretive imbroglio that has reigned concerning it for more than forty years, prevents the imaginary from shaping the real of sex (particularly the non-specular material so determinant of sexuation, including perceptions singularly) on the path of meaning whose treatment is required by experience.

For the sexual minorities of the dominant cultural norm have not ceased to advance, particularly since the 1960s, toward new possibilities of living with and among others (whatever the angry accusers of anti-universalist separatism and other clichés may say), they have even accentuated, in this sense, their proposals and initiatives: they are visible in movements fighting for equal rights in the broad sense, particularly homosexual rights, the fight against sexual and sexist violence, convergent or non-convergent feminisms on certain intersectional or identity front lines. Toward what goal? That common to all speaking-beings: to compensate for the absence of any sexual norm through social conventions (norms) supporting desire and, this is a modern novelty, to cherish diversity, better than has occurred in the past. To make unlivable lives more livable, as it is appropriate to summarize if necessary the guiding thread of these sociocultural innovations, because sexual in the first place, which strive to work toward maintaining the common of the sexual experience of all when it creates connection without alienations and/or exaggerated exclusions.

It has advantages, a-sexuation, and also disadvantages since it is a modality of sexuation, therefore imperfect in the homogenization of all (idealized by some under the reign of daddy’s Universalism).

Sex, secare in its Latin root, divides beings who do not exist without others, whatever they do. Sexuation, which reshuffles the cards and prevents it (sex) from achieving any subjective stability for anyone, does not escape its own defects every time an utterance claims to make it speak to tell the truth. Sexuation does not speak, it shows the point of the impossible relation, that of the sexual relation that does not exist between the sexes such that it can be written; distinct from the gender relation which does get written, a most appreciable novelty whose nuances should be presented in pages other than these.

Sexuation carries within it the necessity of this discrimination, in the literal sense of the distinction whose regular excluding and/or criminal exaggerations are perceived, and that of the subject’s existence in the general sexual landscape.

A-sexuation lives under the same regime from this point of view. It participates in the treatment of culture, that acquired through continuous civilizing effort, that afflicted with a malaise that founds it—not that weakens it as certain conservative pretensions of a reified past would have us believe—from which it engages the division of the subject from the real to the signifier via form. It theoretically testifies to sexual actualities that expose their attempts to arrange cultural norms to make them more livable, and it sharply challenges abusive, overly comfortable interpretations by the normed majority concerning sexuation as stated by Lacan. It can be a way of following to the trace and to the letter what these actualities illustrate in the present, namely ways of doing without the Name-of-the-Father on condition of making use of it : a way of saying “beyond-Phallus,” but not without the phallic (formula here preferred to its counterpart “without the Phallus,” but not beyond phallic, to maintain the effect of subjective trouble through the signifying interpellation of said “Phallus,” in other words the effect of signified, and in the case of the Phallus the signification itself).

If the emergence of psychoanalysis at the turn of the 20th century was a boon for thinking about our civilization’s entry into an ultra-violent liberal era associated with the decline of the father and the symptomatological reactions that this beginning entailed, it did not provoke it, but accompanied it at the beginnings of its potential fall (not effective to date), concerned with elucidating the motives likely to be reinforced in numerous reactions where refused knowledge making its return exploded into reality and bodies, through the effects of a conservative and pathological subjective dynamic (world and local wars, refusal of decolonization, refusal of sexual ambiguity, etc.).

Freud was the first to discover that knowing is not enough without the ethics that is lacking in numerous knowledges denatured into simple information. On aggressivity he knew how to speak of the insurmountable character of subjective fixations elevated to identity, the biological making bedrock has its reasons that the human animal can, or not, undertake to bring to knowledge if they envision themselves as subject of the unconscious. On the primacy of the phallus, he showed us a path, that of the articulation of desire, thus named after him, as perpetual metaphor of what will not be exhausted from the subject’s signification by themselves.

To which Lacan proposed his advances, including notably having grasped the metonymic movement of desire, completing the Freudian metaphorical scope. It follows that the Phallus since then is apprehended in the three registers: in the symbolic as signifier of jouissance, in the imaginary as signified, and in the real as sexual jouissance thus deduced.

Both specifically indicated in what ways nothing authorizes thinking of the opportunity of its fixity, but on the contrary its three-dimensional plasticity which does not allow thinking it from only one of them.

After them can be envisioned various additional subversions, perhaps complementary, acting in favor of one more step in the elucidation of the formations of the unconscious and the enigma of the sexual. This by relying on a proposition that forms a foundation among numerous theoretical elaborations beyond these two male theorists, including those of women psychoanalysts such as Klein, Horney, or Brierley: to think the economy of desire with necessity and contingency, form and matter, and other dialectics that at least one operator must logically pervert to de-complete them and generate the beginning of libidinal movement beyond the genital through the sieve of the structures of discourses. This position of exception, from which the exclusive and the beginning detach themselves, qualities of the Phallus, took on the features, through the father recognized in the function that surpasses him, of the paternal function supported by the effectivity of the myth (Totem and Taboo), then of the signifier of jouissance through the symbolic phallus identified with the lack of the Other whose jouissance is foreclosed .

After all of them can be envisioned another necessity, as demonstrated by psychoanalysts of the last century, which can detach itself more broadly from the paternalist imaginary having constituted, historically, the loom on which our elaborations were woven, modulating the necessary exclusive put forward by Lacan of the at-least-one who escapes the phallic function (the function of castration), to prefer to it, at present, the necessity of a detachment for all from the field of having from which the quotity of the speaking-being before lack emerges all the better. This necessity can now be formulated, instead of the at-least-one, by each one is not-all. This corresponds, literally, to passing from the necessary exclusive of the Father of the horde to my current proposition that I can call the necessary inclusive. It has the advantage of not relying on the patriarchal imaginary of yesteryear, nor on that of a hypothetical matriarchy, but on an enlightened perspective, woke or aware, of the lack of being for all-ones before the intermittence of having of some others. To isolate it, today, is a notable effect of the epicene, contemporary opening of inclusive writings offering us recently the means to twist language further where it teaches us a little more, a little better about the consequences of the bisexuality that is the unconscious.

In doing so, this amounts, after Freud and the “primacy of the phallus” installing a radical dissymmetry between the sexes from its common reference (the phallus), and following Lacan having specified it by making said Phallus the signifier of desire—thus de-completing the historical Oedipal triangle through the effect “of signification itself” that is the Phallus in his statements—to taking one more step in our effort to disengage unconscious knowledges, to recognize them as consequent signifieds of the economy of desire thought with the Phallus (Lacanian), and to attribute them less confusedly to the phallic function often confused with the imaginary one of the phallus. It is to take note of what has been said and heard for more than forty years, of which sexual actualities speak to us every day.

The four poles of Lacanian sexuation are displaced in this movement: necessary, contingent, impossible, and possible. A movement, a displacement operating in the mode of subversion previously employed by Lacan when he surpasses and extends Freud’s propositions, namely a subversion with dialectical aim to avoid the impasse of simple opposition, or of a simple reversal too quick to perpetuate the bilateralism of the phenomenal world where our bodies evolve, whose main consequence remains, with morbid insistence, that of sexual binarity. An additional step therefore, in the momentum of Lacan’s subversion of Aristotelian logic, which hit the mark for the writing of the formulas of sexuation. These poles can be read as follows, in a version of sexuation that is no longer backed by the father of the horde, the patriarch enjoying his sexual exclusivity to dispose of others, no more by the new herd leaders , otherwise and better said, doing without the Name-of-the-Father while making use of it, in response to Lacan’s invitation:

• necessary: each one is not-all
• contingent: not all is one
• impossible: not one is all
• possible: each all is one

Questions and Consequences

What then becomes of the distribution, thus renewed, of the formulas of Lacanian sexuation from this additional displacement? Does it undergo an inversion, a reversal, which would have as its only quality to preserve its state and its consequences? Does it contradict the one known since the 1970s? Does it supplement it?

On paper, where we encounter the flattening of writing charged with accounting for a matter that surpasses its encryption at every point, I have proposed this table:

Its reading, at first glance, may appear to show a simple inversion of Lacan’s initial quadripod on its vertical axis. But this table presentation disregards the intermediate steps leading to this proposition. To remedy this implies considering these questions in topological experience, in order to benefit more fully from the effects of this displacement, in the structure, as envisioned. In the language of topology, it is a matter of a modification of point of view, of the point of immersion from which we give ourselves an image of what presents itself to be seen mentally in attempting to grasp it, to feel it where meaning slips away, to experience the Thing in question.

This operates through the connection of the formulas of sexuation with the Discourses, namely the coordinated distribution of the elements of the formulas (the quantifiers revised by Lacan from the originals), with those of the Discourses (S, S1, S2, a). I take up in what follows the notes and propositions of Patrick Valas and the diagrams of Jean Brini which allow appreciation of the potentialities. This connection is illustrated as follows, where the Borromean knot, raised from its flattening into an armillary sphere, takes place in a cube allowing the useful tetrahedron(s) to appear for locating the distributed elements.

Two versions, or two sides are distinguished, one levorotatory, the other dextrorotatory according to the orientation of the knot as it is extracted from the point from which it is possible to read it. Lacan privileged the levorotatory knot as we know it in its common flattened representation, which does not exclude the opportunity to explore the other knot (let us say it thus even if it is the same).

For the mental construction proposed here, which consists of visiting the hidden face of the Moon, it suffices to start from one of them and deduce the other, without worrying about its primary or secondary orientation since they are interdependent on each other. In other words, modify the immersion, the point of view, go see from (since) the other side.

Now comes the necessity of inscribing the quantifiers of sexuation on one of the tetrahedra, to complete the envisioned connection. Lacan initiated it without completing it, according to Valas in whom we find the trace, in a personal note, of Lacan’s placement of a block of quantifiers from which was completed by Valas and Brini the following distribution:

From this proposition prior to today’s is discovered the possibility of a flattening of the dextrorotatory knot and its distribution of the quantifiers of sexuation as I have inscribed it in the previous table, called a-sexuation. Distribution amended, to finalize it, with the proposed formulations of the four elements (necessary, contingent, impossible, possible) doing without the Name-of-the-Father, which we could rebaptize for the occasion of opening to the Name-of-the-Sisters.

The signifier(s) of the Name-of-the-Sisters is, among others, the signifier “trans”; another version of the Name-of-the-Sisters is the signifier “they.” To which I propose the formalization of a new Discourse, distinct from those stated by Lacan (Hysteric, Master, University, Psychoanalytic, Capitalist), the Discourse of a-sexuation or Trans Discourse. Signifiers of the Name-of-the-Sisters just as competent as those of the Name-of-the-Father to testify to and constitute the so-called paternal metaphor, that very one produced by the so-called paternal function (with the paternalizing color of the vocabulary of their era).

Extensions and Openings

Let us recall, for the record, Lacan’s propositions on the Discourses.

The Discourse of a-sexuation then appears as the reading of the Psychoanalytic Discourse from the dextrorotatory side: in which it interests us all the more, as it is likely to bring consistency and operativity to a true extension of the latter beyond the limits it encounters on the levorotatory side. An extension, even a consequence of the Psychoanalytic Discourse liberated, in a way, from the imaginary limitations of our interpretive readings from the two-dimensional surface of its writing, where the phallic is too often confused with the Phallus by flattening effect. Without this leveling induced by the conveniences of conceptualization, the perversion of the phallic that we aim to illuminate does not run the risk of exceeding the phallic to the point of leaving it: an option undoubtedly theoretically absolutely subversive, but which could only illustrate a hystericization of the perversion envied by neurosis vis-à-vis the absolute of the Other, or of the hated/adored Father. I prefer to say “beyond-Phallus,” which comes to play the phallic, which recognizes it and manages it otherwise, without detaching from it, in order to ensure the qualities of the hoped-for/expected extension of our theorizations an authentic perversion of the phallic supported by the function of the same name, the phallic function (saying no to castration, in other words the function of castration) in order to be taught by it, without sacrificing it and repeating what from the murder of the Father of the horde led us to the impasses and consequences we know (including mainly sexual and sexist violence, according to the current formula).

Let us briefly appreciate the scope of the Trans Discourse. The irremediably lost object (a) is in the place of truth, it is represented by knowledge (S2) which addresses the master signifier (S1) so that it produces the Subject (S). In other words, the master signifier (“Trans” = S1), strong with knowledge (S2) on surplus-jouissance (a), produces the Subject (S).

Let us proceed for what follows to the displacement of elements in writing, by quarter turn as Lacan proposed for his Discourses. We obtain three other Discourses: the Identitarian, the Ecologist, and the Feminist.

Feminist Discourse: feminist knowledge in the place of truth is represented by the master signifier “Feminism” which addresses the Subject so that it produces surplus-jouissance. In other words, the Subject supported by knowledge on misogyny (feminist knowledge) produces a surplus-jouissance hitherto confiscated.

Ecologist Discourse: the master signifier “Ecology” is represented by the Subject who addresses surplus-jouissance charged with producing knowledge. In other words, the surplus-jouissance of unlimited growth of Humanity against the Environment supported by the division of the Subject produces environmental knowledge.

Identitarian Discourse: the subject is represented by surplus-jouissance which addresses knowledge to produce a master signifier. In other words, the irremediably lost object leads the subject’s march against knowledge for its exclusive use of the master signifier delivered by forceps in the manner of “We are us“.

These four new Discourses, where one encounters the Trans, the Identitarian, the Ecologist, and the Feminist, are a version on the other side of the Hysteric, Master, University, and Psychoanalytic Discourses advanced by Lacan. It is not surprising to observe that supported by the necessary exclusive of the Father of the horde emerged those stated by Lacan, representatives in their way of the determinants of the discourse of a world of his time, and that supported by a necessary inclusive are deduced others that allow a very different world to appear from that patriarchal one so well pinpointed by Lacan. The passage from one to the other being justified by the emergence, in sexual actualities, of a saying other than the existing sayings do not raise to the point of encounter with the subjectivity of the era justifying elaborating new ones (new discourses, not new discourses). In other words, a beyond of patriarchy allows itself to be glimpsed as possible, that of a world where discourse is balanced by supports all different from daddy’s world, where one discovers discursive modalities of which are illustrated those contemporary to us, the Identitarian, the Ecologist, the Feminist, and the Trans (or Discourse of a-sexuation, which I have proposed is the function of castration of Lacanian sexuation).

Thus I can say, or submit that it is a matter in this supplement to Sexual Theory of appreciating a perversion generated by psychoanalysis in experience, one that subverts the Discourses previously disengaged by Lacan through the effect of a perversion of the phallic capable of revealing still its efficacy and scope beyond the landmarks known to date. Perhaps one of those awaited by Lacan whose absence he regretted, an absence tempered in The Sinthome by the finding noted in Joyce the writer: his writing capable of compensating for a failed knot. This in the continuity of a previous evidence, however not debated alas, which makes, in my view, gender an effect of the circulation of knowledges on the sexual by psychoanalysis.

Thus it is a matter of establishing the theorized bases (to be developed in the continuation of this introductory article) of an a-sexuation. Namely a sexuation that will no longer become mired in the mire of sensible comprehension, where it must limit itself to signifiance, in the first place, before reaching more serenely that of a beyond-phallus that will not be its beyond. A happy way of saying how much the Phallus counts—and more than it the phallic and its stakes—that there is no need to carry it excessively, that it counts where it weighs and lacks, that it supports being in lacking to postpone the demands of sex that gender comes to treat since Freud as the cures teach us.

Thus, the function of castration, assumed by a-sexuation when sexuation, fundamentally, seems to hollow out the illusion of an exception (that of the Father, of the at-least-one) without escape conducive to lodging there the woman who does not exist (necessary condition for maintaining universal man rejecting his females and associates from the kingdom of the phallic through excess of confidence and imperialism), 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.

What does this already open up to, and for the times that remain?

1. To the possibility of welcoming sexual expressions and claims as questions or propositions, including from the position criticized as being the “victimhood” of a nascent complaint, which remains the necessary advent for the analytical process aimed at the cure. A complaint without which the sources of ethics could not be recognized by the subject on their own behalf, through a conquered freedom, separated from the historical identity alienations they hold in abeyance.
2. To considering that alongside the subject of the unconscious exists the subject of the individual (the collective), inviting the analyst to consider the echoes of surrounding discourses not as peripheral sociological phenomena affecting the individual, but as the reflected material of the subject in the individual that constitutes them within the social sphere.
3. To extending the stakes of the phallic, and our understanding of it, beyond the Phallus where the not-all phallic also meets its extensions—not necessarily inscribed in the throes of limitless jouissance that can lead beyond life.
4. To thinking of the “non-binary” proposition of certain speaking beings as something other than a refusal of castration, but rather as an update of the psychic bisexual constitution supported by Fliess and Freud. With this, we hear, of course, on the surface of the statement, the performative will of non-binary identity affirmation; but beyond that, we can highlight what, in the enunciation, asserts the representation of the subject by a signifier—which, by being repeated, continuously metamorphoses. Here, our understanding of constitutive psychic bisexuality breaks free from the 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 recognizing the Phallus anew, as the very symbol of its lack, for everyone.
8. To supporting a traversal and the possible revision of sexuation within the cure from the semblance of object a that the analyst occupies in their function. Far from the ideology of forced choice that the logic of the table of formulas of sexuation seems to confirm as an aporia as much as an inevitability, through a reading of their appearance in the quadrangle which conceals their writing effects before being read. Did Lacan not say that even unwritten, these formulas would have their effects? Beyond which these formulas continue to be written: it is up to us not to be satisfied with looking at them imaginarily and symbolically, but to read them really, and therefore to write others.
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 recognizing the shortfall of the imaginary Phallus, distinctly from the symbolic Phallus so well-known through our theorizations where it escapes its imaginings—which are more varied than they appear to the imaginary—through the image and beyond the image: to the non-specular imaginary.
11. To the distinction between gender transitions and sex transitions, depending on whether they are undertaken from one or another possible dimensional entry point—be it gender as an imaginary object or sex as a symbolic object—which we recognize in reality, for gender, as an apparent factor of sexuation, and for sex, as an agent of sexuation; in the symbolic, for gender, as the fabric of sex, and for sex, as the signified of jouissance (the Phallus): that which 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 how they operate with castration as such—being not-all, none of them able to prove or embody it ever. a-sexuation is the function of the castration of sexuation, such that by introducing object a where the Phallus plays the primary role, we obtain a path, a link, a bridge between these two modalities of the being’s situation—sometimes as subject, sometimes as itself—before the desire that causes it to be seized as subject of the individual. What collective can confront 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, except when attempting to embrace it with a deadly kiss, where they encounter the function of castration that saves from the impossible (a necessary impossible) union of being with its cause.
13. a-sexuation testifies to what, not being of the field of sexuation, nonetheless remains phallic (not-all included), but is still predominantly illustrated in reality by the arrangement of this patriarchal scheme in the unconscious reflected in reality, in imaginary consistency.

Conclusions

a-sexuation is to sexuation what the not-all phallic is to the phallic—namely, it is neither its inverse nor its opposite. a-sexuation designates what, relying on sexuation—where the relationship of the subject of the unconscious to the phallic function and to jouissance is articulated—partially objects to it at the very point where it extends it: this “outside-Phallus” (which is not its beyond or its refusal) that makes possible the still-awaited exploration of what the function of castration is (saying no to castration) in reality, in the imaginary and not only in the symbolic, as the experience of psychoanalysis has been able, until now, to study it extensively, reducing it to the rank of negative reaction while it has always constituted a truly fertile, salutary, and creative proposition.

It designates what is ordinarily so quickly amalgamated and qualified as a pathological identity phenomenon by numerous analysts who forget rather quickly that they themselves refuse the castration that presents itself to Psychoanalysis through their opposition to so-called “gender” questions and the like, which are nevertheless centered on the Phallus and its historical symbolism that has for 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 mistakenly thought of as non-phallic; it could help us explore sexuation without wallowing in the eternal 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 supported as one traverses a wavering 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 de-completes the Phallus differently than the phallic does with the not-all phallic, by opening the treatment of the symbolic to the real as 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 real put into form, and no longer only from its symbolic resonances conferring upon it the meaning that does not exist in place of the non-relation through the ordinary perverting denial of fantasy.

a-sexuation can bring us closer to the real of sexuation, which can only be reached by releasing the bar of the symbolic to traverse the very experience of sexuation to its elusive sources, without retreating before its inspiring sexual actualities. A traversal that is also necessary, let us note without being able to develop it here, for an analyst’s treatment to operate to its end, thus an indisputable element of the analyst’s very formation.

a-sexuation must also be confronted with its supposed quality of being a sexuation of the included third, a mathematical question, and sexuation that of the excluded third. To relaunch and extend a bit further our approach to the relationship between knowledge and truth, notably. To grasp and profit from the different fertile morphisms of acquired elaborations on sexuations, to approach and discuss the profitable echoes with classifying topoi, to play at mathematics as a literary event. This to explore further sexuations as general topos, and the subject’s choice of genderofsex in the sexual landscape revealing the singular topos.

Will Psychoanalysis be able not to refuse too much the castration that presents itself to it, under the features of gender and sexual actualities, troubled by their faces of enigmas and equations, at the risk of disappearing as a social practice? To simply say no to it, to castration, anew and thus reconnect with its historical foundations that led it to contribute to the cultural effort.