New Paradigms of the Relation to the Sexes
Anne Béraud Bogino
“Assuredly, what appears on bodies in the enigmatic forms of sexual characteristics – which are merely secondary –
makes sexed beings (êtres sexués). No doubt. But being is the jouissance of the body as such,
that is, as asexual (asexué), because what is known as sexual jouissance is marked and dominated
by the impossibility of establishing as such, anywhere in the enunciable, the sole One that interests us,
the One of the relation ‘sexual relationship’ (rapport sexuel).”
Jacques Lacan[1]
“The body makes its appearance in the real only as a malentendu.”
Jacques Lacan[2]
Freud situated the origin of anxiety in an inner danger, “a drive danger.”[3] For Lacan, the libido is jouissance, which is inseparable from the death drive since jouissance goes beyond the pleasure principle. Speaking beings are confronted with a jouissance that often takes on the aspect of an imperative to enjoy. An elimination of desire is the outcome, with its share of depressive affects and anxiety. Too much – too fast, too many objects, too intense, too much information, too many images, etc.. – sets the tone for the epoch. Nothing is enough to cover the noise of the world, so the race for more and more – the push-to-enjoy – leads even further to the side of the death drive. But not without a certain affinity with female jouissance in its infinite modality, not without the rise to the zenith of the object a announced by Lacan.[4]
To realise one’s fantasies
The realisation of sexual fantasies is no longer a matter of the perverse structure alone, and this is testified to by analysands.[5] Pornography has opened up a market of their possible realisations without limits, those fantasies which previously were confined to the imaginary sphere falling short of the act. Some subjects in analysis testify to the tyranny of the superego as Lacan puts it: Enjoy! “The greediness by which [Freud] characterises the superego is structural, not an effect of civilisation, but discontent (symptom) in civilisation.”[6] The superego is a “greedy” imperative of enjoyment serving the death drive, which BDSM[7] practices – widespread in Montreal – stage: to enjoy obeying, to submit, to be humiliated, where all of the objects a are summoned – voice, gaze, anal, oral, to which is added the proliferation of sexual objects that have been invited on the capitalistic market. Everyone participates according to their relationship to the object of their drive, extracted or not, and their relationship to the body, tied by the RSI knot or needing to be tied to hold on.
Gender fluidity or non-binarity
Freud started from the hysterical body as a symptom of the discontent of civilisation. The clinic, as a sounding board for contemporary discourses, shows that we are facing a paradigm shift. In “The Third,” Lacan poses the link between the discontent of civilisation and the anguish of being reduced to our body.[8] This formula resonates with the question of the inadequacy between sex and gender.
Gender fluidity begins with the fluidity of object choice, for which, in the case of many young people, gender no longer seems to matter. The coming out that concerned gays, lesbians and bisexuals some time ago is obsolete. They have joined the heterosexuals in their so-called normality, who have never had to come out.
That the Other does not exist induces a feminine logic of the series, and no longer the phallic logic of the whole with the phallocentric difference of the sexes. This observation is in line with what Lacan puts forward, namely that “a body enjoys itself [se jouit].”[9] Whether we consider it as a phenomenon of “social contagion” or not, the question of self-determination of sex by gender is posed in a new way for speaking beings.
There where hysterics questioned what is a woman through an identification with man by asking the question symptomatically “Am I a man or a woman?”, a step is taken with respect to this question with the possible social achievement of identification. Young subjects sometimes ask themselves this same question, without necessarily a transition to the other gender, but they state it with the master signifiers of the time. Where teenagers of the last century could wonder about their sexual orientation, those of today wonder if they are adequately gendered. This is not a radicalisation of a group. These issues cross the current discourses of society and everyone can feel concerned, affected by the circulation of these new signifiers.
With the table of sexuation, Lacan announced the premises of this shift: “The so-called man or woman portion[10] of speaking beings”[11] indicates that each speaking being is not reduced to the part that corresponds to his or her sex. Moreover, this induces that “man” and “woman” are signifiers, from which jouissance escapes. And with respect to jouissance, “every speaking being”[12] can be on one side or the other of sexuation.
The feminisation of the world, logically introducing the series one by one, results in the exit of the binary man-woman. The pluralisation of the names-of-the-father opens to an enjoyment less regulated by the phallic function. Do not these new stammering or asserted nominations try to identify a singular jouissance that does not let itself be caught by the universal logic? Overcoming the tradition, it is necessary to note that “in the position of inhabiting language,”[13] speaking beings invent new ways of saying the body that enjoys itself: non-binary, fluid, queer, transgender... Is it not taking seriously two propositions of Lacan: jouissance, as effraction, is always hetero in the sense of Other to oneself. And “there is no sexual relation” which can also be applied to this non-concordance between sex and gender. It never matches perfectly, and the real of this hole is not reducible. Do these new linguistic inventions, which sometimes go as far as the modification of the bodies made possible by science, not try to make up for the sexual relation that does not exist, or do they try to make it exist with one’s own body, as a patient testifies: “To make One of my body and my mind”?
As analysts, we are dealing, case by case, with a whole variety of questions, symptoms, inventions and solutions, up to “the moïsation of the own body [...] which is a relation of being[14] – being this body – contrary to the relation of adoration of the body which remains a relation of having. It is a matter, for an analyst, of being at the level of this real, that of the discontent in civilisation, as the interpreters of the epoch.
Translated by Amal Wahbi
References
[1] Lacan, J., Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (1972-1973), ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. B. Fink. New York/London, W.W. Norton & Co., 1998, pp. 6-7.
[2] Lacan, J., Dissolution, Aux confins du séminaire, Paris, Navarin éditeur, 2021, p. 74.
[3] Freud S., “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926), “Addenda B – Supplementary Remarks on Anxiety,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX, London, Hogarth Press, 1959, p. 165.
[4] Lacan, J., “Radiophonie,” Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 414.
[5] I'm speaking from where I practice: in Montreal, in this city where during the Prohibition era, US citizens came to party without restrictions; where university departments of feminist studies are very active; in this place of North America, which is different from the puritanism of the United States, and where current discourses and therefore morals, followed by the updating of laws, emerge and are developed between five and twenty years before arriving in France, eg. gay marriage, medically assisted procreation, or the assessment and evaluations processes developed at McGill University.
[6] Lacan, J., Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. J. Copjec, trs. D. Hollier, R. Krauss, A. Michelson, J. Mehlman. New York/London, W.W. Norton & Co., 1990, p. 28.
[7] Bondage, Domination, Sadism, Masochism.
[8] Lacan, J., “The Third,” tr. P. Dravers, The Lacanian Review, No 7, 2019, p. 104.
[9] Lacan, J., Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, op. cit., p. 23.
[10] Author’s emphasis.
[11] Lacan, J., Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, op. cit., p. 79.
[12] Ibid., p. 80.
[13] Ibid.
[14]Miller, J.-A., ”Pièces détachées,” The Lacanian Orientation, teaching delivered at the Department of Psychoanalysis of the University of Paris 8, 1 June 2005, unpublished.