WHAT IS SEX? AN INTERVIEW WITH ALENKA ZUPANČIČ

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
Heterosexual Relationships ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ontological Problem

In her latest book What is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017) Alenka Zupančič avoids such tiresome topics as heterosexual relationships or the gender binary (and gender altogether) and instead cogently explains sexual difference, the elusive “beyond” of the pleasure principle, infantile sexuality, the materiality of signifiers, the hole in being, the non-coincidence of truth and knowledge, primal repression, passion, the event, and the political importance of psychoanalysis. Sex for Zupančič is an ontological problem, co-extensive with a disturbance in reality, a signifying gap and structural impediment. Sex is attached to that which cannot be fully known or embodied and is therefore directly related to the unconscious. Subjectivity emerges from within the fault entailed in signification, as does surplus enjoyment. Important here, too, is the well-worn notion, but with a twist, that there is no reality prior or external to discourse. Zupančič reminds us that nature is not a pure and full presence before the arrival of the human but an object produced by and for science. The Real is an effect of language: the signifier invades the signified and alters it from within. Finally, and perhaps most mind-blowingly, the human in her formulation is not that which is merely in excess of the animal (dressing it up in language and culture, let’s say) but, rather, an unfinished and dysfunctional dimension: humanity as a veil that simultaneously points and gives form to animals’ ontological incompleteness. The interview covers these complex ideas as well as other pressing matters: the disappearance of the hysteric, the desert of the post-oedipal (the only one who managed to escape the Oedipus complex, Lacan noted, was Oedipus himself), and the status of love at the end of analysis.

Copula: The Logic of the Sexual Relation

Hypatia ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
Robyn Ferrell
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
The Body ◽  
Physical Assault ◽  
Sexual Relation ◽  
Heterosexual Relationships ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Important Sense ◽  
The Right

This paper argues that the slogans “A Woman's Right to Choose” and “The Personal is the Political” typify different traditions within feminist thinking; one emphasizing rights and equality, the other the unconscious and the personal. The author responds to both traditions by bringing together mind and body, and reason and emotion, via the figure of the copula. The copula expresses an alternative model of identity which indicates that value can be produced only in relation.Let us say that the problem is violence. At its most naive: how can the sexual relation, which is supposedly full of love, be violent?I mean the sexual relation in its resonances and ambiguity—to indicate the relation between the sexes, and the relation between lovers. In no way can the relation be confined to love, either heterosexual or homosexual, since it is often a contest. It cannot be reduced solely to a social relation, because in one of its aspects it addresses the most intimate subjectivity.In a certain feminist lifestyle advocacy, those women who are in same sex relations avoid sexual violence by avoiding men, and those who are in heterosexual relationships strive to find the “right kind”—that is, relationships of respectful and supportive love—rejecting all signs of aggression, from sexist disparagement and emotional cruelty to sexual humiliation and physical assault, as “abuse.”Strangely, this dichotomy does not explain the proximity of passion and aggression, whether in love between men and women or in same-sex relationships between feminist women. As rational counsel, it resists the important sense in which the erotic is, and is even valued as, the excess of the rational. And as an analysis of the oppression of women it defeats itself, for to insist on masculinity as violence itself, and/or on the sexual relation as properly governed by reason, seems to miss the point of both love and feminism.Stranger still, feminisms, which set out to address and redress the oppression of women, have become rivalrous themselves. Are these aggressions a legacy of the intellectual world they must take place in (but if so, why is the academic world so full of passion, when it so thoroughly divorces ideas from affects?). Have we overlooked an aspect of the relation between sisters? Feminism has not addressed the question of aggression in feminism as anything more than contamination.Perhaps, after all, the thing that feminism has not yet successfully addressed is love. The “battle between the sexes” has not rendered the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. As a species of theory, feminism has relished the rigor of distinction and has not found it easy to tolerate the proximity of opposites.And yet, in evoking the body, some feminisms approach closer to this difficulty. It remains to take up the relation between the body and the concept more thoroughly, in order to find out whether sexual difference could ever be philosophical.

Bridging the Social and the Symbolic: Toward a Feminist Politics of Sexual Difference

Hypatia ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 19-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Zakin
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Public ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Language Law

By clarifying the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference (and contrasting it with a feminist analysis of gender as social reality), I argue that the symbolic dimension of psychical life cannot be discarded in developing political accounts of identity formation and the status of women in the public sphere. I discuss various bridges between social reality and symbolic structure, bridges such as body, language, law, and family. I conclude that feminist attention must be redirected to the unconscious since the political cannot be localized in, or segregated to, the sphere of social reality; sexual difference is an indispensable concept for a feminist politics.

Posthumanism and Gender, or the Fall Back into Nature

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-91
Author(s):  
Hedwig Fraunhofer
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Male Authority

Engaging with the scientific theories and popular concerns of the late nineteenth century, Strindberg’s naturalist plays enact the anxiety related to the renegotiation of the status of the human following the publication of Darwin’s work. The loss of human exceptionalism in the natural sciences intersects with the socio-political crisis of symbolic male authority in democratic modernity. An emerging posthumanism and the crisis of gender, i.e. ontological and socio-political questions, converge. Strindberg’s work problematizes the modern biopolitical, immunitarian lines of separation in terms of sexual difference, along a threatened binary gender distribution. While Strindberg’s work is part of the naturalist “dramatic” theatrical tradition -- a representationalist tradition centrally based on human dialogue and therefore generally considered “anthropocentric,” this chapter argues that Strindberg’s naturalist work, thematically if not yet formally, marks the intra-action of gender with a beginning posthumanism.

Czy dyskurs transseksualistyczny ma jednoznacznie wyzwalający czy ambiwalentny charakter?

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Urszula Nowak
Keyword(s):  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Queer Movement

Transsexuality, which refers to the conflict between gender and physical sex, can pose a challenge to feminist theory(ies) as well as to queer theory(ies) and queer movement. The aim of this essay is therefore to analyze the status of transsexual discourse within feminism, with the focus on Judith Butler's reflection, and within queer theory. The question, raised at first by Henrietta Moore, is if those who operate on their bodies and identities do really overthrow sexual difference and gender or maybe they are simply imprisoned in their murderous arms. It is being underlined that transsexual people can really point at instability and discontinuity of gender identities. However, this is somewhat problematic as, from the pragmatic point of view, it may cause a lot of problems to them, i.e. by limiting their access to proper medical treatment.

Psychoanalysis in the Twenty-First Century: Does Gender Matter?

2018 ◽  
pp. 708-726
Author(s):  
Louise Gyler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
First Century ◽  
Normative Values ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Self Development ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Variations ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter is concerned with exploring the relevance of gender as a critical category for clinical psychoanalysis. It recognizes two developments in the late twentieth century that may appear to present gender as either not a pressing issue in self-development or as sufficiently troubled and undone to have lost its regulatory grip. The first concerns the domination of the psychoanalytic imagination with preoccupations other than sexuality, sexual difference, and gender; and the second is linked to the deconstruction and reconstruction of hetero-normative gendered frameworks initiated by cultural gender theorists. It is argued that the gendered binary of Western thought with its socially normative values and assumptions shapes the unconscious minds of every person. Notwithstanding critical appreciation of the gendered discourses of psychoanalysis as well as expanded thinking about the possible repertoire of individual gender variations, gender continues to carry evaluative burdens.

‘Family Romance’ and the Oedipalization of Freudian Psychoanalysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Herman Westerink ◽  
Philippe Van Haute
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
Difference Family ◽  
Radical Theory ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Informative Text

Although Freud's ‘Family Romances’ from 1909 is hardly ever discussed at length in secondary literature, this article highlights this short essay as an important and informative text about Freud's changing perspectives on sexuality in the period in which the text was written. Given the fact that Freud, in his 1905 Three Essays, develops a radical theory of infantile sexuality as polymorphously perverse and as autoerotic pleasure, we argue that ‘Family Romances’, together with the closely related essay on infantile sexual theories (1908), paves the way for new theories of sexuality defined in terms of object relations informed by knowledge of sexual difference. ‘Family Romances’, in other words, preludes the introduction of the Oedipus complex, but also – interestingly – gives room for a Jungian view of sexuality and sexual phantasy. ‘Family Romances’ is thus a good illustration of the complex way in which Freud's theories of sexuality developed through time.

Values and Gender Equality between Islam and the West

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Moulay Rachid Mrani
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
The West ◽  
Living Together ◽  
The Status ◽  
Muslim Intellectuals ◽  
Multiple Challenges ◽  
And Gender

If the development of technology, means of communication, and rapid transportation have made continents closer and made the world a small village, the outcome of the ensuing encounters among cultures and civilizations is far from being a mere success. Within this new reality Muslims, whether they live in majority or minority contexts, face multiple challenges in terms of relating to non-Muslim cultures and traditions. One of these areas is the status of women and gender equality. Ali Mazrui was one of the few Muslim intellectuals to be deeply interested in this issue. His dual belonging, as an African and as a westerner, enable him to understand such issues arising from the economic, political, and ethical contrasts between the West and Islam. This work pays tribute to this exceptional intellectual’s contribution toward the rapprochement between the western and the Islamic value systems, illustrating how he managed to create a “virtual” space for meeting and living together between two worlds that remain different yet dependent upon each other. 

State, Islam, and Gender Politics

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Dress Code ◽  
Main Site ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
Personal Rights ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Economy And Education

The existing literature on women’s rights and Islam falls short of addressing the relationship between the religious debate on women’s rights and the existing rules of law in Muslim-majority countries. This chapter will bridge this gap by analyzing the status of women in the legal systems of Egypt, Turkey, and Morocco. It will evaluate the influence of Islam on the shaping of these laws, compared to other factors like culture, socioeconomic development, and education. Except in marginal cases like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan under the Taliban, women’s rights in politics, the economy, and education have advanced in all Muslim countries. But there are some limitations placed upon women’s rights using religious arguments. Everywhere, personal rights about family life, sexuality, and dress code remain discriminatory against women. In this regard, the woman’s body has become the main site of the politicization of Islam, by state and non-state actors alike.

Schopenhauer and the Unconscious

2020 ◽  
pp. 496-516
Author(s):  
Stephan Atzert
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Sabina Spielrein

This chapter explores the gradual emergence of the notion of the unconscious as it pertains to the tradition that runs from Arthur Schopenhauer via Eduard von Hartmann and Philipp Mainländer to Sabina Spielrein, C. G. Jung, and Sigmund Freud. A particular focus is put on the popularization of the term “unconscious” by von Hartmann and on the history of the death drive, which has Schopenhauer’s essay “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual” as one of its precursors. In this essay, Schopenhauer develops speculatively the notion of a universal, intelligent, supraindividual unconscious—an unconscious with a purpose related to death. But the death drive also owes its origins to Schopenhauer’s “relative nothingness,” which Mainländer adopts into his philosophy as “absolute nothingness” resulting from the “will to death.” His philosophy emphasizes death as the goal of the world and its inhabitants. This central idea had a distinctive influence on the formation of the idea of the death drive, which features in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Thomas Aquinas on Sexual Difference: The Metaphysical Biology and Moral Significance of Human Sexuality

Pro Ecclesia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-215
Author(s):  
Paul Gondreau
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Human Sexuality ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Biological Design ◽  
Moral Excellence ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
The Mean ◽  
And Gender

Thomas Aquinas offers for his time a novel take on human sexual difference, in that he grounds human sexuality in what we might term a metaphysical biology and accords it a privileged role in the moral life. Though his biology is drawn from Aristotle, which leads Aquinas to make problematic statements on sexual difference, he nonetheless offers a perspective that remains deeply relevant and significant for today. His method or approach of tethering sexual difference first and foremost to our animal-like biological design remains perennial, particularly at a time when many seek to dismiss biology as irrelevant to sexual identity and gender difference. The latest findings of the emerging field of neurobiology, which have uncovered structural differences between the male and female brains, offer key support to Aquinas’s approach. Even more important, he holds, in an unprecedented move, that sexual design and inclination provide a veritable source of moral excellence. He goes so far as to locate the mean of virtue in our sexual design and appetites.

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