Is Sex Passé?

Zupančič expands her concept of sex as ontological problem with political consequences

Libidinal as political?

Alenka Zupančič visits Thought Lab January 22nd to present and discuss her most recent article: “Is Sex Passé?”¹

Thought Lab is part of The Portal, a live event space designed to bring philosophy to life in new forms. As part of the larger live event space structure, Thought Lab aims to establish a type of implicit professorship. Thought Lab aims to platform those individuals that I think have put in the timenergy to build a concept that may help the culture as a whole.² Zupančič could not be a better representative of this leadership position, as someone who has been dedicating much of her intellectual career to questions of the real, ethics, inclusive of their relationship to the origin of sexuality and violence.³

Throughout her article “Is Sex Passé?”, Zupančič continues to develop a thesis that was established in her theory-bomb What Is Sex?, that sexuality is an ontological problem with political consequences. From this directionality, some of the major themes we will be discussing in Thought Lab include:

1. Psychoanalysis and contemporary social movements

   1. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious in speech about sexual problematics comes from a different time period. Consequently, do the traditions that stem from the Freudian lineage have anything meaningful to say about contemporary sexual movements and their political issues?

   2. In particular, Zupančič highlights the main sexual movement of the past that seems influenced by analytic theory, namely the “Sexo-Left” of the counter-cultural revolution. This movement emphasised the deregulation of sexuality in reaction to the social constraints of a Christian or a generally repressive traditionalist culture.

   3. Zupančič also highlights the paradoxes of the main cultural system that has emerged from the counter-culture of the “Sexo-Left”, that is the system of Identity Politics and its Political Correctness which functions as a de-facto regulation of sexuality by other means, i.e. as opposed to a Christian regulation of sexuality with traditional gender identity, Identity Politics and its Political Correctness regulates sexuality with a liberalist multiplicity concept of identity.

2. Psychoanalysis and Politics

   1. Strangely, what both of these movements share is a “sex positive” concept, which is actually an obfuscation of Freud’s deepest insight, which has something to do with what we might call “sex negativity”. Zupančič refers to this in What Is Sex? with the clever reflection that Freud did not say “sex is natural” in relation to Victorian sensibilities about “sex as dirty” but “what is this sex that people keep talking about?”⁴ In short, for Freudian psychoanalysis, there is a type of ontological scandal at work in sexuality, a constitutive lack or absence, a nodal point of negativity which is (obviously) correlated with the emergence of subjectivity.

   2. Consequently, this zero-level of sex negativity or ontological lack must be taken into consideration when thinking about epistemological approaches to sexuality (i.e. different forms of political regulation, religious or otherwise). At its core, we are dealing with a sex negativity which needs/requires sublimation on the level of intellectual enjoyment, i.e. Zupančič often notes that activities like talking or poetry or music are not merely replacements for sex negativity, but rather reflect forms of enjoyment that do not differ in any significant way from sexuality itself.

   3. Thus we must think about the singularity of sex on the level of speaking beings, even to the point that “every speaking being has its own sexual identity”⁵ which marks a certain process of individuation. However, this does not imply a total chaos of sexual identity, nor a neutral place from which we can judge sexual identity, but rather brings us to a type of impasse where we must address antagonisms constitutive of social space which are constituted by a singular negativity⁶ (i.e. we all share a certain sexual negativity even if our processes of sublimation must be understood as multiplicity).

3. Sex as real, meaning crisis as positive,

   1. Zupančič also makes a theoretical move which we could articulate from Judith Butler’s epistemological focus to Joan Copjec’s ontological focus. She emphasises, following Copjec, that all gender identities must struggle with sex as the impossibility of “complete meaning” (wholeness), and thus think with “structural incompleteness” that takes the form of a certain non-relationship or lack. Consequently, meaning (in gender identity, for example) is always making up for lack, but never fundamentally resolves lack. Furthermore, this “disjointedness” between sex and meaning is fundamental to emancipatory struggle and differs from any approach to an “emancipation through meaning” (what we often see in not only gender studies, but also many religious and scientific movements).

   2. Structural incompleteness/fundamental lack at the level of sex opens a strange historical circle between culture and anti-culture.⁷ Culture attempts to regulate social relations (our living together) and demands ever more complex repression of the drives (which can cause neuroses). Consequently, culture also causes ever greater sources from which “libidinal anti-culture” can emerge as response to repressive regulatory structures which seek to either destroy, undermine, or transgress those repressive regulatory structures. Philosophy needs to think at the level of the loop between cultural regulation and libidinal anti-culture as opposed to identifying with one of its explicit historical movements.

   3. On the level of sex, displacement is constitutive and more fundamental than a politics of belonging.⁸ In other words, sexual displacement is fundamental, and gendered belonging is built from and must include sexual displacement. One way to think about this is that the repressive social structures which the first psychoanalytic movements sought to undermine, are themselves built from sexual negativity. Consequently, we cannot totally get rid of repressive social structures, but must learn how they are sourced from sexual displacement. Zupančič gives the example of family structures as social constructions that emerge from a void/gap in being and produce the nodal point of subjectivity in the “knot called sex”.⁹

For a video outlining an introduction to our Thought Lab, see:

Join us on January 22nd at 6pm CET @ The Portal.

1. Zupančič, A. 2023. Is Sex Passé? In: Underground Theory. Snelgrove, A., McKerracher, D., Lawrence, M. (Eds.). Theory Underground Publishing. p. 215-223.

2. Timenergy is admittedly a political problem, as well as a developmental and structural libidinal problem. For an angle on the political dimensions, see: McKerracher, D. 2023. Timenergy: Why You Have No Time Energy. Theory Underground Publishing. (link)

3. See: Zupančič, A. 1995. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. Verso Books. (link)

4. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 7.

5. Zupančič, A. 2023. Is Sex Passé? In: Underground Theory. Snelgrove, A., McKerracher, D., Lawrence, M. (Eds.). Theory Underground Publishing. p. 216.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid. p. 219-220.

8. Ibid. p. 221.

9. Ibid. p. 222-223.