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What IS Sex?
Alenka Zupančič
Top 10 Best Quotes
“When I talk about a “fundamental contradiction” I am not referring to some contradiction buried deep down in the foundation of things, and influencing them from there. Contradiction is “fundamental” in the sense that it is persistent, and repeating—yet always in concrete situations, on the surface of things and in the present. It is by engaging with it in these concrete situations that we work with the “fundamental contradiction.” Contradiction is not something that we simply have to accept and “make do with”; it can become, and be “used” as, the source of emancipation from the very logic dictated by this contradiction. This is what analysis ideally leads to: contradiction does not simply disappear, but the way it functions in the discourse structuring our reality changes radically. And this happens as a result of our fully and actively engaging in the contradiction, taking our place in it.”
“What (Lacanian) psychoanalysis brings to this debate about the human animal shares something with the Nietzschean suggestion: there is no “human animal” understood as a fully operative and self-sustaining animal entity in men. There is no animal, zero level of humanity (“human animal”) which, left to itself, would function on a kind of autopilot of survival or self-preservation. There is no zero level of the human (animal), as a quasi-neutral basis, from which a human being would then eventually diverge and rise toward higher and properly human aspirations and accomplishments. The human animal is a half-finished animal, that is to say, an animal that does not work/function as it is supposed to. The plus (what in human is more than animal) takes the place of the less (what in human is less than animal).”
“To spell it out in full: human sexuality is the placeholder of the missing signifier. It is a mess, but it is a mess that actually compensates for the sexual relation as impossible (to be written). This, I believe, is a crucial reversal of the common perception that we need to make: the messiness of our sexuality is not a consequence or result of there being no sexual relation, it is not that our sexuality is messy because it is without a clear signifying rule; it emerges only from, and at the place of, this lack, and attempts to deal with it. Sexuality is not ravaged by, or disturbed, because of a gap cutting deep into its “tissue,” it is, rather, the messy sewing up of this gap.”
“To put it even more strongly: the revolution of Galilean science consists in producing its object (“nature”) as its own objective correlate. In Lacan’s work we find a whole series of such very strong statements, for example: “Energy is not a substance ..., it’s a numerical constant that a physicist has to find in his calculations, so as to be able to work”. The fact that science speaks about this or that law of nature, and about the universe, does not mean that it maintains the perspective of the great Outside (as not discursively constituted in any way), rather the opposite. Modern science starts when it produces its object. This is not to be understood in the Kantian sense of the transcendental constitution of phenomena, but in a slightly different, and stronger, sense. Modern science literally creates a new real(ity): it is not that the object of science is “mediated” by its formulas; rather, it is indistinguishable from them, it does not exist outside them, yet it is real. It has real consequences or consequences in the Real. More precisely: the new Real that emerges with the Galilean scientific revolution (the complete mathematization of science) is a Real in which—and this is decisive—(the scientific) discourse has consequences. Such as, for example, landing on the moon. For the fact that this discourse has consequences in the Real does not hold for nature in the broad sense of the word, it holds only for nature as physics or for physical nature.”
“This is a truly political lesson of psychoanalysis: Power—and particularly modern forms of power—works by first appropriating a fundamental negativity of the symbolic order, its constitutive non-relation, while building it into a narrative of a higher Relation. This is what constitutes, puts into place and perpetuates, the relations of domination. And the actual, concrete exploitation is based on, made possible (and fueled) by, this appropriation, this “privatization of the negative.” This is what distinguishes—to take the famous Brechtian example—the robbing of a bank (common theft) from the founding of a bank (a double theft which appropriates the very lever of production and its exploitation).”
“This brings us back to the point made earlier, to which we can now add a supplementary point: the desexualization of ontology (that is, ontology no longer being conceived as a combinatory of two, “masculine” and “feminine” principles) coincides precisely with the sexual appearing as the real/disruptive point of being. This is why, if one “removes sex from sex,” one removes the very thing that has brought to light the problem that sexual difference is all about. One does not remove the problem, but the means of seeing it, and of seeing the way it operates.”
“There is no struggle here: life is a circuitous route to death, and conservative instincts are the pavement of this route, they are one with it, indistinguishable from it. They don’t “want” anything, they don’t “struggle” with death, they simply do their job of making this particular circuitous path to the inanimate operative. Strictly speaking, they work at maintaining this path, and not simply at “maintaining life.”
“There is no natural need that is absolutely pure, that is to say, devoid of this surplus element which splits it from within. Drive can neither be completely separated from biological, organic needs and functions (since it originates within their realm, it starts off by inhabiting them), nor simply reduced to them.”
“The unconscious desire is not the content of the hidden message, it is the active designer of the form that latent thoughts get in a dream. This is why the key in psychoanalysis is not a key to a hidden meaning, but the key that “unlocks” this form itself (makes what has been associated to compose the hidden meaning dissociate). And this is what “the right word” does.”
“The lesson and the imperative of psychoanalysis is not “Let us devote all our attention to the sexual (meaning) as our ultimate horizon”; it is instead a reduction of sex and the sexual (which, in fact, has always been overloaded with meanings and interpretations) to the point of ontological inconsistency, which, as such, is irreducible.”
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