Why All Desire is Sexual (For Psychoanalysis)
Today, psychoanalysis is easily dismissed as a discredited theory and practice due to its seemingly paradoxical statements and provocations (like the Oedipus complex). And yet, at the same time, Žižek dominates both contemporary pop philosophy (Youtube lectures and memes, as the communist pop star) and also in reinterpretations of political concepts by academia (ideology and all its mechanism) using those very same psychoanalytic and “absurd” concepts. How can we make sense of this?
In my view, it’s by way of nothing other than presenting psychoanalysis as the one theory that can make sense of contemporary subjectivity. Here is what this article is about: outlining a simple interpretation of why we desire.
As an introduction to psychoanalysis by a less dense methodology, these notes will focus on the notion of (sexual) enjoyment — different from pleasure — outlining a way in which we can “enjoy suffering,” so to speak. It is the dimension tackled by both the psychoanalysts Freud and Lacan (which, along with Hegel and Marx, form Žižek’s core thought).
This will serve, beyond an introduction, also as a light criticism to approaches towards psychoanalysis such as Lastrevio’s (perhaps the most online Lacanian of today), which think that for sex, “Lacan, in a sense, is the opposite of Freud,” because Freud finds a way to interpret every desire or symptom as something unconsciously sexual, while Lacan directly says that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.”
What we shall aim to demonstrate is that, on the contrary, when Lacan says that, he makes the most definitive possible return to Freud. Anything beyond this horizon, such as Jungian psychology or cognitive behavioral therapy, therefore won’t fall under the narrow scope of this text.
Far from devaluing Lastrevio’s (and others) overall contributions to a contemporary theory of the sexual, here there is little refuting of actual, practical content, and so we shall present this only as a shift in perspective: a lens through which Lacan does actually remain Freudian with regards to sex, adding a singular wrinkle on the conventional image. And as an introduction to the basics of psychoanalysis, hopefully it should help to clarify the absurd, and turn what’s clear into disturbing at last.
I — Void
Let’s start with Lacan’s infamous statement, “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship”, the supposedly founding principle of psychoanalysis.
One of the first things to do is to establish that Lacanian psychoanalysis is heavily indebted to Kantian concepts, chief amongst them being Infinite Judgment. It is the passage from negating a predicate (S isn’t P) to affirming a non-predicate (S is not-P). Now, what does that mean?
This seemingly linguistic shift (which Kant uses to differentiate what’s “not human” from what’s “inhuman”) is well defined by Lastrevio’s example using the verb “plan”. Let’s take two slightly different phrases:
- I wasn’t planning on doing X.
- I was planning not to do X.
In the content of the phrases, not much changes, at the level of the subjective point of view, this formal shift changes things entirely. In (1), “doing X” would require planning, going against the natural course of things without subjective intervention, whereas in (2), “doing X” is already the natural course of things, and the subjective intervention, what would require planning, would be in fact “not to X”.
What in the first case was counted as inaction, in the second counts as an action, and vice-versa. It’s a complete change in the frame of reference, of what the natural course of things is without intervention from the subject. This is how we can make sense of everyday phrases like, “I couldn’t help but do it,” which, if taken from another perspective, might leave confusion.
This shift in perspective, where inaction starts being counted as an action, where an absence starts being counted as a presence, is exactly the key to what should be done to Lacan’s (in)famous statement: instead of reading, “there is no sexual relationship,” simply negating a predicate (S isn’t P), we should fully affirm a non-predicate (S is non-P), as in, “there is a sexual non-relationship.”
Such a logic of counting a void as a positive entity is what occurs in Žižek’s often quoted example of Sherlock Holmes:
“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night‐time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night‐time.”
“That was the curious incident.”
The curious incident of the “non-relationship” is a metaphorical black hole, devoid of determination, that nevertheless still has an effect on its surroundings by way of a gravity-like force. Lastrevio, as the author of this elegant metaphor, often gets this logic of the formal shift correct, but I would argue that it’s still not properly followed up on in some cases.
But let’s get back to the core of psychoanalysis. With this shift of perspective akin to the Kantian “infinite judgment” (affirming a non-predicate), let us first define “non-relationship”.
II — Non-relationship
First of all, how can we contrast non-relationship with relationship?
Say, if we are comparing two objects in abstract (A and B), there are two basic possible relationships:
- Identity (A=B)
- Difference (A=/=B).
Either they are equal, or they are not.
In this case, a non-relationship would be something simultaneously escaping identity and difference at the same time. It would be a category paradoxical for our cognition, escaping signification, i.e what Lacan calls “Real” (not to be confused with “reality”).
Now, let’s take a more complex example: what if instead we introduce physics and there are relationships of attraction (A><B) and repulsion (A<>B)? As something that escapes both, is the non-relationship then simply indifference? This, precisely, is the mistake to be avoided.
If we were to graph a spectrum between points of attraction and repulsion, it would be possible to synthesize them, find an equilibrium, and then speculate that a relationship can perfectly well be of indifference (A~B), in contrast to influence relationships (AxB), a category-genus which can then be split into the two species of attraction (A><B) and repulsion (A<>B). All three are still very much relationships, not at all paradoxical:
1. Indifference (A~B)
2. Influence (AxB)
| 2A. Attraction (A><B)
| 2B. Repulsion (A<>B)
Then, using the same logic again, a true non-relationship is something that escapes both the category of the indifferent and of the influential — it marks the sublime point beyond a pair “unsynthesizable” into equilibrium.
Thus, the index of reaching the non-relationship is a certain paradox, a difference impossible to synthesize — to attempt is like trying to find the midpoint between motion and stasis. If you start from motion and try to get to the middle point between X motion and stasis, you’ll always get 0.5X motion ad infinitum (0.25X, 0.125X…). If you start from stasis and try to work your way up, you’ll always overtake the desired point, falling into motion again (X>0). And so, we can conclude that there is a missed encounter: we always either come up short of the sublime point between, or go too far past it.
For psychoanalysis, the outcome of this definition is that between subjects there can’t be of the intuitive relationships of attraction or repulsion… but also not of a synthesizable and thinkable indifference, which remains a relationship, even if one could call it a “narcissistic” one.
A non-relationship is something much more radical, a sublime point we can’t reach — a gap, a void which nevertheless has significant effects when counted as a presence. To grasp the full consequences and justifications behind this, we only have to look at Žižek’s views on politics.
III — Politics
If there is anything to take away from this text, it’s this: radical difference is impossible to synthesize. Nowhere is this clearer than when Žižek talks about politics.
For the best explanation of Lacanian sexual difference in all its radicality, we can quote what is perhaps his most coherent available lecture, The Reality of the Virtual:
(39:22) “It’s not that, in a certain society, if we take into account all political forces, we can say: ‘These are right-wing forces, these are left-wing forces,’ and then all the intermediate phenomena, ‘in between, center, center-left,center-right, whatever you want.’ It’s different. It is that…if you ask a right-winger, how is the entire social field structured, you will get a totally different answer than if you ask a left-winger, or, for that matter, if you ask a centrist.”
“To simplify it: a right-winger will tell you that society is an organic, harmonious unity, at least the traditional right-winger, and that left radicals are external intruders. What is anathema for radical conservative is the idea that there is an antagonism, an imbalance inscribed into the very heart of the social edifice. For a left-winger, the struggle is admitted as central. So, again, the point is that there is no neutral way to define the difference between Left and Right. In itself it’s a void. It’s just that you can approach it either from the leftist or from the rightist point of view.”
In other words, there is no position that perfectly synthesizes Left and Right. We can easily find symptoms of this non-existence today in the common political reproach to “centrists”:
Just like there is no midpoint between motion and stasis, there is no midpoint between, say, killing all minorities and not killing any, for a proposal to kill “only some of them” is always-already on the side of genocide: trying to minimize motion and get closer to stasis still remains in motion, and there is no compromise between positions that argue for inequality and for equality for the very same reason.
This political divide, according to Žižek, is exactly what sexual difference really is:
“(…) For Lacan, it’s exactly in the same way that also sexual difference functions. Sexual difference is not a difference between the two species of humanity in general, but from the male perspective sexual difference itself appears in a different way than from the feminine perspective. So, again, difference paradoxically comes first.”
In conclusion, between subjects there is only this paradoxical non-relationship, something sublime, which for synthesis is impossible to achieve (insofar as it is defined by this very impossibility).
To be properly Lacanian and psychoanalytic, we have to be very radical (in the anti-centrist, anti-synthesis sense) and locate the sexual non-relationship in a dimension beyond any synthesis whatsoever.
IV — Against all Synthesis
This, in short, is my sole problem with Lastrevio’s recent article, “There is no such thing as a (purely) sexual relationship”, which finally inaugurates our divergences: for the author, sexual enjoyment consists in a synthesis of intercourse and seduction. For me, this is still confusing the concepts of pleasure and enjoyment (or jouissance), since in reality, there is no possible synthesis. We shall see that sexual enjoyment is impossible, because the psychoanalytic subject is always-already castrated, barred from it.
That said, let us at least build up the whole argument in order to explain the thought process. In the article itself we can already see why intercourse and seduction alone cannot really satisfy us: seduction without intercourse is teasing, intercourse without seduction is vacuous. Or, as Lastrevio put it, “Sex without seduction (ex: prostitution) is like watching the ending of a movie without the rest of the movie. Seduction without sex is like watching everything but the ending of the movie.”
But is this analogy, of a harmonious fitting together of two incomplete pieces, really valid?
First, here we should make a critical distinction between intercourse (what Lastrevio recognizes as sex, in the domain of reality) and the psychoanalytic Sex (the non-relationship, in the domain of the Real). The cited passage from Badiou outlines a perfect critique of intercourse:
“At the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. (…) pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. (…) In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other.”
This is why Lastrevio says that “there is only masturbation with the other person’s body,” and if we’re talking strictly about intercourse, that is correct. But what should be pointed out, even against Badiou’s reading, is that intercourse is still nevertheless a relationship — even if it is a narcissistic relationship of treating the other subject as a tool or instrument, as an object. We can still think of it, it is still logic.
Second, here we should make another critical distinction between seduction (reducible to the social factor, what is called by the author “validation/attention-seeking”) and an often-equated dimension of fantasy (which for psychoanalysis, on the contrary, cannot be interpreted — only traversed). We find already in Lastrevio — despite the overall argument that today we are in a ‘crisis of meaning’, losing seduction and focusing only on intercourse — an implied critique of the logic of pure seduction:
“There is always some ulterior motive: social status? A feeling of liberation? A desire to feel responsible by respecting traditions? Validation/attention-seeking? (…) If I have a lot of sexual partners, it means I am desired, I am loved. I managed to convince the most popular person in the school to have sex with me? Then it means I am even cooler. The more of a challenge it is, the more I feel valued and of high status if I accomplish it. (…) receiving attention for the sake of attention. Social media and dating apps are desiring-production machines: the superficiality of having many short-term relationships one after another is a simulacrum that hides the even bigger superficiality of the validation received by getting many matches, talking to many people, getting likes, etc.”
Lastrevio, then, adds this symbolic aspect, which is defined as the core of sexual enjoyment (and so it escapes more direct criticism). It is enjoyment as a production of meaning, as a “journey which is part of the destination”.
Then, with intercourse as the realm of pleasure, and seduction as the realm of enjoyment, both sides of psychoanalysis are accounted for, and a synthesis becomes possible, joining to our intuitive image of carnal intercourse another symbolic side…
However, this is exactly the mistake to avoid. Seduction, far from being the realm of enjoyment, should still be identified with pleasure (alongside intercourse). For psychoanalysis, enjoyment is strictly opposed to the production of meaning, enjoyment is something only experienced when we are in the realm of meaninglessness (such as the paradoxical non-relationship, which breaks logic from within).
Rather than point away from the “natural” and “masturbatory” side of animal intercourse to the way of “cultured” seduction, we should highlight how even this side of the equation is already “masturbatory” in-itself, still on the side of pleasure.
Instead, sexual enjoyment itself, contained in fantasy (which in Lastrevio’s text is mixed and confused with seduction), should be properly defined as something sublime, that somehow escapes both categories.
This is a position of anti-synthesis, wherein enjoyment is irreducible to a combination of a masturbatory act (intercourse) and an ulterior process (seduction). Instead of sex for the sake of pleasure (in flesh or symbolic), we should look for the dimension of sex for the sake of sex, which is an altogether different thing in psychoanalytic terms.
We find here the ethical act: an enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle.
V — Ethics
At first, this will seem like a tangent. But note this: Kantian ethics (which, at bottom, persist in Lacanian psychoanalysis) are strictly opposed to utilitarianism, which is to be considered pathological, anti-sublime.
Here, we should use the pathologic-ethical distinction from Kant: if a person commits a good act to avoid punishment or to get a reward (that is, act with consequence and utility in mind) they aren’t really ethical. After all, is it good to refrain from assaulting someone (or from doing any other criminal act) only because there is a camera watching? No, to truly be good, one has to be good for good alone, regardless of reward or recognition.
This radical sense of ethics is what gives us a strange aversion to influencers holding charities while using clickbait and view-chasing (Mr. Beast’s recent controversy, where in spite of concretely positive actions, the intentions behind charity are always questioned), or why we feel averse to monetizing hobbies, as if doing so would somehow degrade them, so soon as they stop being for-themselves.
This way, there is an aversion in us towards too much utility, towards ulterior motives (the logic of doing things for a pleasurable consequence). It’s why we can say (arguably) that if you have reasons to love someone, you don’t really love them — your love becomes conditional. Here lies the difference between praying because you really believe, and praying just in case hell exists. It’s the difference between enjoyment and pleasure.
In this sense, we may think that sex is never ethical: it’s always too pleasurable. Because we are stuck within two realms, solitary masturbation and/or socially permeated performance, one can never get the enjoyment within it, never fully identify with sex for the sake of sex. It is always sex for pleasure (be it in the flesh or symbolic). This is why the human subject is a castrated subject, deprived of this enjoyment in sex.
The sexual itself has little to do with the act of intercourse or the process of seduction, other than that it is definitely independent of their presence. If there is a word to describe Kantian ethics, it’s this: independence.
In a traditional ethical act, say, you sacrifice yourself, you stand up for what you believe in (be it Truth, Justice, anything) regardless of whether you are killed for it or not, regardless of whether anyone recognizes you or not, regardless of whether it even makes a consequential difference. It is something you enjoy, “even in pain”, to the point that for anyone else it would seem meaningless, absurd. Žižek’s core theory deals with this enjoyment, and how it configures ideologies persisting against all refutations, against all odds.
Here can’t we see why seduction is also masturbatory in a symbolic sense, dealing with the “attention-seeking field” in a free market for recognition? Far from being something enjoyable, if the context changes, if a certain kind of relationship becomes “cringe,” the entire process of seduction changes: it is consequentialist, utilitarian, opposed to an enjoyment of sex purely for-itself, which seems more and more difficult.
Seduction is not pleasure-focused in the same way as solitary masturbation, but it is still pleasure-focused in the same way doing charity for views can be. If you stop doing an action when it stops being socially recognized, then you weren’t acting for enjoyment, you were acting for pleasure. If we take sex as only the presented dimensions of intercourse and seduction, then it is, of course, never “sex for the sake of sex”: but the problem is that there is something in us that wants it to be, that wants sex to be more than just for pleasure.
Lastrevio identifies this symbolic pleasure with the psychoanalytic (surplus-)enjoyment, conceives of enjoyment as meaning, as social recognition and validation — but the psychoanalytic enjoyment (or jouissance) is not at all derived from those things. Rather, we can follow Žižek’s example to see that it is the very opposite:
When the slovene thinker writes that “ideology serves only its own purpose, that it does not serve anything — which is precisely the Lacanian definition of jouissance,” (Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 92) or that “jouissance does not exist, it is impossible, but it produces a number of traumatic effects,” (SOI, p. 184) we should be clear: the “surplus” of enjoyment is fully barred, and everything surrounding it, from intercourse to seduction, is merely pleasure, reward or recognition.
This is how we should really interpret Zupančič saying that “the closer it gets to “just sex,” the further it is from any kind of “animality” (animals don’t practice recreational sex).” For it to be purely recreational, purely for-itself, it has to be beyond the domain of pleasures, it can’t be sex for the sake of something else (pleasure), it has to be sex for the sake of sex (even if it goes against pleasure completely).
That is, pleasure remains even in social rituals, insofar as “starting from the late 1950's (the Seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis), it is, in contrast, the symbolic order itself which is identified with the pleasure principle” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 146). And so we can define that here, in the market of attention, is not where sexual enjoyment lies.
VI — Split
With both intercourse and seduction defined as pathologic (actions whose goals are not themselves, but only pleasure in some way) let’s clarify why the mistake happens — they are different kinds of pleasures: one is Imaginary and the other Symbolic, in the strange vocabulary of Lacan.
Let’s imagine: if we were to take as true Badiou’s statement that “sex separates, doesn’t unite,” and Lastrevio’s that we have to “fill in the absence created by the non-relationship,” due to its masturbatory nature, then why is the sexual not as problematic for animals to the same extent?
The answer is simple: animals don’t find it problematic for the same reason an animal is capable of killing, but not of assassination. An animal cannot be immoral, only amoral, having never been within the realm of morality in the first place.
Therefore, Badiou’s notion of selfish sex does not in any way hinder animals from full pleasure — even though they, much like us, are merely proceeding in biological and masturbatory processes — because they were never even cognizant of a beyond-pleasure dimension in the first place: it is not barred, because they never had it.
The key is that this selfish nature only becomes problematic once we are inserted in language, something social and “selfless”, and it’s only this existence, the plane of seduction, which makes the intercourse act seem selfish in comparison. There is an innocence lost, which is how we can read with Žižek the effect of the signifier in general:
“After a true historical break, one simply cannot return to the past, or go on as if nothing happened — even if one does, the same practice will have acquired a radically changed meaning. Adorno provided a nice example with Schoenberg’s atonal revolution: after it took place, it was (and is), of course, possible to go on composing in the traditional tonal way, but the new tonal music has lost its innocence, since it is already “mediated” by the atonal break and thus functions as its negation. This is why there is an irreducible element of kitsch in twentieth‐century tonal composers such as Rachmaninov — something of a nostalgic clinging to the past, something fake, like the adult who tries to keep alive the naïve child within.” (Less Than Nothing, p. 193)
What is problematic about the sign is how it retroactively makes things problematic: with this, there is no longer a pure, animalistic, act of intercourse. There is a cultural Symbolic seduction (which we can find a chore, teasing)… in contrast to which, the act of intercourse becomes merely an Imaginary nature, an imagined lost harmony (when in reality it was always vacuous, narcissistic).
Again, it is not as though there is Imaginary pleasure and Symbolic enjoyment: both are still pleasures, and the surplus of enjoyment lies elsewhere completely, in sex for the sake of sex, independent. Instead, we could say that the division between signified and signifier that the sign causes, the division between Imaginary and Symbolic, is already itself the problem, what separates us from the innocence of animals. When we are feeling the Imaginary pleasure, we miss the Symbolic pleasure, vice-versa, and all the time we feel a distinct lack of Real enjoyment.
This problematic mediating effect is what Lacan means when he says that “between male and female human beings there is no such thing as an ‘instinctive relationship’ because all sexuality is marked by the signifier.” The problem with the sublime object of sex is not that we can only achieve it as a masturbatory non-relationship: it’s that because it is a non-relationship, sublime, we can never achieve it! We are always either coming up short or going too far past it, stuck oscillating within Imaginary intercourse and Symbolic seduction but never beyond it: just as a sign splits the world into the incomplete forms of signifier and signified, its effect is a splitting of the subject, a castration, that impedes the sexual relationship.
And yet, by the same token, this splitting is also what allows us to conceive of enjoyment in the first place.
First, one result of this split is that we always operate at two levels: at the level of the masks we wear, we have our engagement in society according to certain contexts, as a pretending subject (for example, in actuality, money has no inherent value for animals, but if all of humanity pretends it does, then it becomes a social contract with actual value and effectiveness for them). At another level, beneath the mask, lies our supposedly “true” subjectivity, what we think when we do these actions, the part of us that recognizes the pretending, what we think that we really are.
Second, we recognize this split in the world surrounding us, in appearances and essences beneath, in the way things appear to us and the way they “really are”. We can perfectly desire objects, fully enjoy an ethical attitude (in the Kantian sense) towards them (Truth, Justice, etc.). We can fight for what we believe in, because we project and pretend to see the essence of Justice (or any other Notion) behind all the apparent phenomena which seem to go against us — we enjoy it even if it’s against pleasure (sometimes the pain only vindicates the standing up for what’s right).
As we see in Žižek’s texts on ideology, this is what we observe so soon as we find an object of desire (which can be anything): we become unstoppable. This is what being castrated offers us, in exchange for a certain aversion to pleasure and utility (an impulse beyond the pleasure principle which could be called the Freudian death drive).
VII — Unconscious
One question that I by now imagine should be plaguing the reader’s mind now is, “why can we enjoy ideology, function according to Kantian ethics (if rarely), but we are completely barred from the enjoyment of sex? What makes sex different from the other categories, i.e why do we always fall onto its pathological forms unlike in other activities?”
Solving this question offers us the key insight into psychoanalysis: the reason why we can’t enjoy sex for the sake of sex is because — and here psychoanalysis got nomenclature right — we are castrated, split subjects.
We are split between our masks and what we “really are” behind them, but this alone is not enough: what is truly problematic is that we then transfer this logic onto the world around us — we imagine that what we see are mere appearances, and that behind them are the “true” essences that govern things. So soon as we are immersed in the effect of the sign, of language, we start to suspect other people, that any action they do might be just pretending. We start to suspect their true desires, which is just the thing:
The very same thing which allows us to desire objects and enjoy against all pleasure (the faith in an essence behind appearances) is also what impedes us from desiring subjects. If we recognize the Other as such, as someone who, just like us, wears social masks on top of their “true” thoughts, then they can also have any desire whatsoever. Their essence, what’s behind their appearances, is strictly indeterminable: to desire them requires, by necessity, reducing them from subject to object, assuming an essence behind their appearances. In sexual fantasies, we objectify the Other, so that we don’t really desire them as subject, but as object. This is where sexual enjoyment — and its problematic nature— lie.
When, in seduction and in intercourse, we do find enjoyment, it’s not because of the pleasure of either, but because of this third added dimension of desire and fantasy. We can enter intercourse with another subject for pleasure, but what we really enjoy is attaining an object of our desire. We can try and seduce another subject for the pleasure of validation, but what we really enjoy is a meaningless fantasy, which cannot be interpreted in the guise of validation or recognition — it is independent of them.
Let’s recap the crucial logic which got us in this mess, but inverting the sequence:
First, again, what is really problematic is not our own division between the masks we wear and our internal “truth”, but that we see this division in other subjects, we start to enter the ground of suspicion, of doubt, of what is the “true” Other subject beneath the worn mask.
Here, appears the Lacanian question behind fantasies, Che vuoi? (What do you really want?) This is how we start to suspect the essences behind appearances, that the Other doesn’t really mean what they say.
Second, we should also note that, although we are deprived of enjoyment in sex, does it not appear as a driving force behind entirely different fields, such as ethics, in objects as we’ve seen?
It appears as though we project the enjoyment, that we were barred from in sex, onto another partial object that can actually be desired for-itself.
Here, we see part of how the “unconscious is structured like a language”, how we often deal with something traumatic by the mediation of something else entirely, like a metaphor, how when truth is too traumatic it assumes the form of fiction (like, as Freud observed, in dreams — but not just dreams): its fundamental process is transference, a displacement of enjoyment. We displace it from the failed sexual relationship into something else that we can actually achieve or at least strive for. Which raises the answered question: why can those succeed, but not sex?
The answer for the second point lies in the first, and the answer for the first point lies in the second. Sex is failed, it is a non-relationship, because so soon as we try to make it a relationship, it is no longer between subjects, but between a subject and a partial object. This objectification of the Other is the only way to account for their desire, by answering the question Che Vuoi? ourselves, and assuming an essence behind the Other’s appearance, so that we don’t really have sex with the indeterminate Other, but rather a partial object created by our desire.
This is the way in which the very difference between the sexes looks different according to each sex (or subject), why there is no synthesis, only an “impenetrable abyss,” without a middle point between subjects which are split, which can pretend and wear masks. That is, we cannot account for the desire of the Other, because even if they express it, do they really mean it? Or, let’s ask the reverse, in a very crude way: if we come upon a situation where we find someone torturing another, how can we be sure that it’s really torture, and not just some really kinky roleplay? After all, isn’t the jouissance of fantasy precisely enjoyment independent of pain?
Such is the precise sense in which “we could say that desire itself is a defense against desire: the desire structured through fantasy is a defense against the desire of the Other,” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 132). We transfer enjoyment elsewhere, into a partial object, since we can’t fulfill it in sex with another subject’s potential desire, in our dealings with an unknowable Other whose essence could be anything.
Going beyond the pleasure principle, beyond mere seduction and intercourse, for sex means that “it is not only always already dislocated in respect to its reproductive purpose but also and foremost in respect to itself. Human sexuality is ridden with this paradox: The further the sex departs from the “pure” copulating movement (i.e., the wider the range of elements it includes in its activity), the more “sexual” it can become.” Now we can make sense of how Zupančič points out the dimension of the Real and of fantasy, whereby the drive is directed not towards a whole person, but towards partial objects, in them or elsewhere.
This is the only way for the sexual to have the ethical enjoyment, of being purely for-itself, without any other end in mind. You can only desire objects and not subjects: since the Other subject is precisely indeterminate, it has to be objectified by fantasy. There is a desperate need to deprive the Other of subjectivity, to see the essence behind appearances. Otherwise, it is strictly impossible to determine if the Other really consents, if they really want you.
But this goes not only for sexual fantasies — or rather, we should say that every fantasy has this same unconscious sexual structure. This is the way in which Lacan very much remains Freudian, precisely as he affirms the non-relationship between the sexes. Every desire is derived from this sexual desire, insofar as it dictates how we create sublime object-causes. And so, we can conclude, that all desire is sexual.
VIII — History
But that, for Žižek, is not the end — merely the beginning.
Let’s look at this transference of desire at a societal level: fetishism. Acting as though we have access to a certain essence behind appearances — that’s the exact formula of it.
In commodities, the exchange-value is far from problematic in-itself. What is problematic is that we think (or at least act as if) exchange-value is an essential, abstract universal property that expresses itself in apparent, concrete particular use-values. That is, it’s,
“This inversion through which what is sensible and concrete counts only as a phenomenal form of what is abstract and universal, contrary to the real state of things where the abstract and the universal count only as a property of the concrete — such an inversion is characteristic of the expression of value, and it is this inversion which, at the same time, makes the understanding of this expression so difficult. If I say: Roman law and German law are both laws, it is something which goes by itself. But if, on the contrary, I say: Law, this abstract thing, realizes THE Law itself in Roman law and in German law, i.e. in these concrete laws, the interconnection becomes mystical.” (Marx, Capital Vol I, p. 132)
This creation of an objectified essence behind appearances is the function of desire, which is why it is radically heterogeneous with the Other’s subjectivity, the indeterminate essence par excellence.
But just as it can be transferred from sex to elsewhere, enjoyment also can be transferred between different objects: and this, in a way, is the historical process, one way of interpreting Hegel’s historicity.
Before capitalism, there was feudalism, and it still had fetishism: only it existed in the ‘relations between men’ and not in the ‘relation between things’: Marx says that “for instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king,” and Žižek completes it,
“Being-a-king’ is an effect of the network of social relations between a ‘king’ and his ‘subjects’; but — and here is the fetishistic misrecognition to the participants of this social bond, the relationship appears necessarily in an inverse form: they think that they are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, a king; as if the determination of ‘being-a-king’ were a ‘natural’ property of the person of a king.” (SOI, p. 20)
What is the historical passage from feudalism to capitalism, if not just the very transference of the fetishism from the ‘relations between men’ to the ‘relations between things’? It is as if “the retreat of the Master in capitalism was only a displacement: as if the de-fetishization in the ‘relations between men’ was paid for by the emergence of fetishism in the ‘relations between things’ — by commodity fetishism.” (SOI, p. 21–22)
We can observe in totalitarianism an attempt to reverse this displacement, of going back to the ‘relations between men’, and here we see the danger of how desire objectifies: by pretending to see the essence behind appearances, Nazis could create the sublime partial object known as “The Jew”, a figure caught in a double bind: if they perform bad actions, it is just them corresponding to their evil nature, but if they perform good actions, it is because they are so evil that they manipulate their appearances to mask their true essence.
This deprivation of the Other’s subjectivity is key for enjoyment. So soon as it is configured into a partial object, every attempt to refute an ideology starts to work as an argument in its favor: if the media tries to refute the ideology, for the ideologues it only reveals how the enemy has control even of the very media. It becomes something independent of empirical data, of reward and recognition; it goes beyond the pleasure principle. If you assume a certain essence exists, you can make sense of all appearances.
In this way, the enjoyment that is impossible in sex becomes inescapable elsewhere, and at a societal level, the different (and contingent, arbitrary) sublime objects only configure accordingly different epochs of history, wherein you always have to pay for a de-fetishization, for a breakthrough in one area, with the rise of fetishism in another.
IX — Consent
If today we have that the “sex positive” movement is simultaneously liberating and prude, there is therefore no contradiction: as Žižek says in a recent article,
“In one sense, the passage from Nazi ball crushers to the erotic kind used in sadomasochistic games can be seen as a sign of historical progress. But it runs parallel to the “progress” that leads some people to purge classic works of art of any content that might hurt or offend somebody. We are left with a culture in which it is okay to engage in consensual discomfort at the level of bodily pleasures, but not in the realm of words and ideas.”
In other words, we could in some way say that the de-fetishization in our actual relations, sexual liberation, was paid for by a fetishization of our worded relations, in the celebrated supremacy of consent.
This is the way in which today’s Left seeks to substitute inequality for difference. As a noble goal, it reflects that difference is tolerable (there can be a synthesis, or at least a coexistence, between different cultures and ethnicities, ways of living, and so on) but that inequality has no middle ground (there is no possible synthesis between proletariat and bourgeoisie, between intervention and genocide, so that we have to take a stance on the non-relationship, be necessarily partial). The prude consent, safe-space in words, would deal with the inequality, and then in our actions we would be free to enjoy all our cultural differences.
What this view misses, of course, is that every culture is already barbaric in some way, that even worded consent does not always signify actual consent, the subject is always Other. Here, we can go back and analyze the homology between sexual and political differences:
When we take the political positions towards the sexual to be, with Lastrevio, that “there is a problem with all mainstream attitudes towards sexuality,” and that most of them tend to be split into “sex positive” and “sex negative”, with all the spectrum of “in-between” takes in the middle, don’t we fall precisely into another “anti-Lacanian” trap, forming a synthetic spectrum? If we exchange a few terms, don’t we get “a relationship of contradiction between men [conservatives] and women [liberals], that the more feminine [sex positive] you are, the less masculine [sex negative] you are and vice-versa”?
The solution is, again, to reject this spectrum in the name of a more radical difference. For the Right there is a “harmonious unity” being attacked by “external intruders” (which is why they want to “restrict forms of sexuality into a smaller set”), but for the Left, “the struggle is admitted as central.” This is no spectrum where one can pick a middle position, just like there is no position between identity and difference, motion and stasis, influence and indifference, etc. And only like this can we explain some of the Left’s problems today.
As Innuendo Studios once put it succinctly, “which would you rather believe? In the Left’s framework, we are the cause of all the world’s problems. But to hear the fascists tell it, everyone else is the cause and we are the solution.” (12:33, I Hate Mondays) This minimal yet radical difference causes asymmetric phenomena like targeted harassment and leftist in-fighting: “The main difference is that, when the Right does this, it does it to the Left, and, when the Left does this, it does it to itself.” (8:22, The Ship of Theseus)
This can also help us make sense of the strange linking of postmodernism to identity politics, two apparently contradictory theories (postmodernism affirms an anti-essentialist cynicism towards all metanarratives, while identity politics is strictly about a plurality of discourses that each can occupy the position of essential metanarrative) — the struggle is central to the Leftist position, whereas for the Right it can be freely transferred out onto an enemy and so repressed. It is the central struggle for consent, for difference without inequality, to tame the Other’s subjectivity and clearly define it, which ends up objectifying them, contractualizing the relationship, and so on: we get all of Lastrevio’s succinct formulations.
Identity politics occurs when a given difference shows its inner inequality, the necessity of an anti-racist positioning, being intolerant towards intolerance (which, from the perspective of only difference and plurality, appears as essentialism, radical extremism). Postmodernism occurs when a given unequal position is treated as though it is a matter of difference (the rejection of all metanarratives inevitably ends up in relativism from the perspective of inequality, with statements like AllLivesMatter, in stark contrast to the unsynthesizable reality of a radically skewed situation, naive like claiming that both proletariat and bourgeoisie should just forget their differences and get along).
This is also the inner struggle which the Left has to deal with when it tries to pay for a raise in difference with a militancy against inequality, and which, where Consent is concerned, only highlights our problems with sexuality, our inability to know, even if it is perfectly worded and signed on, if the Other really consents.
X — Love
In conclusion, how can we deal with this problem homologous to the leftist in-fighting we see today in all corners of the internet? It is as if, so to speak, the fundamental problem for leftism today is to figure out what leftism really is, beyond being for difference and against inequality. What can we do at the point where such a strategy inevitably fails, when we confuse inequality and difference?
First, is there even a way out? Today, one answer is in a contemporary obsession: true philosophy now seems less and less like the love of wisdom, and ever more the wisdom of love — what, according to Badiou, supposedly fills in the gap left by sexual non-relationship, our inability to know the Other subject and their desire.
Here is Lacan’s precise definition of it: “Loving is to give what one does not have… to someone who does not want it.” (Seminar XII, 23rd June, 1965). We should, again, read this with infinite judgment in mind, where what “one does not have” is a definite thing, an absence counted as presence.
Now, entirely in the realm of my opinion, we should identify this void, “what one does not have,” precisely with the gap introduced by the sign, the split between our “true” subject underneath and our ego-mask persona. This is the gap we have to give to the Other: that is, recognize their subjectivity, the split between appearances and essence (to recognize this gap would have sufficed for Nazis to no longer objectify the Jew, for example, to not pretend to see the essence behind appearances), and recognize their freedom in full. Love is, in this sense, almost the opposite of Sex: it’s about recognizing the Other not as object but as subject, in the full radical freedom that this implies.
But then, what about the second part of the phrase, “to someone who does not want it?” At bottom, just as we enjoy objectifying others into partial objects, in the same move we objectify ourselves (so soon as we find an object of desire, we become unchangeable, inert, just like no empirical data can change the ideologue’s mind). Human freedom is at the same time more and less radical than what we usually think: it’s not the freedom to defy God, but instead the freedom to choose which God we serve. It is, in short, an unbearable kind of freedom, the freedom to give away our freedom.
When we love, we “subjectify” the Other. The only way to do this is to prevent them also from objectifying themselves, from objectifying others. Now, just as we have to deal with the Other’s desire, they have to deal with ours — and, going against sex as objectifying, this is perhaps one of the hardest things for a subject to do.
To give what one doesn’t have to someone who doesn’t want it means, then, to affirm another’s freedom, to admit you don’t know everything about them and their desires. There is no essence behind appearances, no guarantee, just an abyss. And to make us recognize, beyond just symbolism, this non-relationship between subjects, is what the primordial goal of psychoanalysis always boils down to. Due to a sexual castration, as we can see with Lacan, every desire is a transferred sexual desire.
Freud once said that “psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.” This, precisely, is how we can still be Freudians today.
