It's Getting Strange In Here
Reflections Inspired by Alenka Zupančič What Is Sex?
Philosophy Portal x Theory Underground will be teaching What Is Sex? in the spirit of thinking the politics of our moment. The course starts May 7th.
Alenka Zupančič (AZ) opens What Is Sex? with the provocation that the Freudian discovery of unconscious sexuality, and specifically the discovery of infantile sexuality, was not only perceived as morally reprehensible due to the “Victorian morality” of Freud’s time, but that this discovery is still perceived as morally reprehensible (just now with a different cultural accent). One could say that, whether a society is closed or open to sexuality, as in the stereotypes of traditional religious society (closed) or contemporary progressivist society (open), both extremes are repressions of the real of sexuality. Repressing what? For AZ, repressions of the fact that at the core of unconscious sexuality, we find the real of the subject as the inhuman operator of the abyss. Its much easier to operate with the ideological identity of a religious extremist or a progressivist activist, then it is to confront this real, let alone mediate it.
We see the truth of this fact in the history of 20th century Western culture. In an admittedly simplified narrative, throughout the 20th century, the predominance of 19th century Victorian morality (fundamentally associated with sexual repression) faded, and was eventually overthrown by what is often perceived as the 1960s counter-culture in North America, Europe, and the Western world more broadly. This counter-culture movement represented as major tectonic shift in global cultural sensibilities throughout the late 20th century, especially as it relates to sexual mores. As it relates to the social, we see the sexual opening correlated with the opening of marginalised, subaltern identities affirming their rights and normalising their being vis-a-vis the traditional majority (in the 19th/20th West).
This affirmation tends to be related to race: White vs. Other, gender: Man vs. Woman, and sex: Hetero vs. Homo/Bi/etc. To simplify to the extreme, White Heterosexual Men were framed as the “Powerful Political Norm” against which “Others” must emancipate themselves. It is also relevant to emphasise that this turn also involved a general rejection of monotheistic Christian belief systems, and an affirmation of a wide variety of indigenous, Eastern, New Age spiritual belief systems. Moreover, this counter-culture, originally totally anti-institutional, started to become institutionalised as the younger intellectuals of the 1960s started to become the leaders of the next generation, throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Here there was a push to a conceptual view of the world which equalised against the “White-Hetero-Norm” towards the “normalisation” of all identities in Western public spaces. In the New Century, however, it seems this view has led, not to an equalisation of racial, sexual, gendered identities, where a genuine multiplicity affirms itself without enemy, but rather has become hegemonic against its perceived enemy (“White-Hetero-Norm”). The logic of the movement seems to be, if we could eliminate this norm, true liberations of the “Others” would be actualised/achieved.
To express this shift, from emancipation of all identities to an identity politics regime upheld against a normalised enemy, philosopher Slavoj Zizek has noted that the further you get from the “White-Hetero-Norm” the easier it is to directly affirm your identity (Black, Indigenous, etc.), and the closer you get to the “White-Hetero-Norm” the more difficult it is to directly affirm your identity without risk of being labelled a neo-Nazi (or some other extremist right-wing identity). The same dynamic tends to unfold on the spiritual level, between, for example, eastern spiritualisms and Christianity. This dynamic is undoubtedly what produces or breeds conservative and fundamentalist reactions against the new progressivist cultural hegemony. What progressivist politics has unreflectively risked here is a revolution that eats itself, and produces its own worst nightmare.
In this precise context, is it possible for a new politics to universalise the abyss of adult sexual identities, and liberate towards a terrifying encounter with the inhuman? Indeed, it is AZ’s central premise: that adult identity, whether progressivist identitarian or conservative reactionary, is basically obfuscating the sexual real, where we find the subject as the inhuman operator of the abyss. Here AZ shifts her attention to the counter-intuitive and ingenious question: Where Do Adults Come From?
She starts by affirming, not this or that adult identity (whether governed by sexually repressive Victorian morality or sexually liberal progressivist morality), but by affirming the discovery of infantile sexuality itself (what she will call drive sexuality). For AZ, infantile/drive sexuality is a free-floating undefined zone of polymorphous impulses or pulsations which paradoxically precede instinct. She notes that it is the greatest of paradoxes that drive sexuality precedes instinctual sexuality in humans (vis-a-vis The Animal, as governed by instinctual sexuality). Moreover, it is the primal repression opening drive sexuality itself, which AZ argues, constitutes this or that form of adult repression. In other words, if “this” or “that” thing is repressed by adult identity, say Christians repressing natural sexuality itself, or Progressivists repressing its ethical social mediation (or at least underestimating what is involved in such ethical social mediation), what is “repressed as such” is infantile qua drive sexuality itself.
Why?
Well, first off, adult identity tends towards a stable social reification that is somehow informed by the dominance of the genital impulses encountered/traversed in puberty.1 However, as already stated, AZ emphasises that the greatest paradox is that infantile sexuality precedes this instinctual sexuality which comes to dominate adult identity towards, ultimately, the reproduction of the species. What this means is that the appearance of stable social reification of adult identity is always-already undermined by the free-floating undefined zone of polymorphous impulses or pulsations that characterise infantile sexuality. Adults in general, irrespective of closedness or openness to natural sexuality, irrespective of this or that social/religious/spiritual identity, do not know what to do with this free-floating undefined zone of polymorphous impulses or pulsations (that is, they do not know how to think its logical mediation).
As a consequence, for AZ, infantile qua drive sexuality constitutes a double mystery, a mystery on the side of infant’s in-and-for-themselves, and a mystery on the side of adult’s in-and-for-themselves which then “contaminates” infant’s in-and-for-themselves (in a very strange loop between infants and adults). We see this fully on display in the contemporary “global digital culture” where instinctual sexuality aiming for reproduction becomes overdetermined by drive sexuality aiming for self-referential enjoyment. In order to illustrate this disturbing point, consider PornHub’s Year In Review articles, which represent the pure immediacy of human reflection vis-a-vis sexual drive. These articles reveal the raw information on regional traffic to the most popular porn website today. If you look at “The World’s Most Viewed Categories” by region, you find the following categories dominate “Western” countries:
Canada: Lesbian
USA: Ebony
Mexico: Lesbian
Brazil: Trangender
Europe: Lesbian/Anal (mixed)
Australia: Lesbian
What these data reveal is the systematic connection between the libidinal and the political, as it relates to the aforementioned point that progressivist politics has become hegemonic. Far from “open sexuality” liberating us towards a “sex positive” future, in the precise “Zupančičian” perspective, our libido reflects negativities of social essence (i.e. our sexual drive enjoys obstacles of the social), e.g. the same countries dominated by “Lesbian,” “Ebony,” and “Transgender” porn, are the same countries dominated by political signifiers like “The Future is Female,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “LGBT+.” However, the reverse is also true, our social essence reflects negativities of libido (i.e. our society creates logic gates around the sexual drive), e.g. political signifiers like “The Future is Female,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “LGBT+,” represent “logic gates” for sexual drive. This is basically never reflectively mediated by political activists themselves, and yet, is likely the very source of the appearance of conservative/fundamentalist reactionaries, from Trump lunatics to Christian zealots.
What is important to consider here, is that the unreflective and contradictory adult identities, whether progressivist woke, or conservative reactionaries, in their “strong identitarianism,” are imprinting on the next generation, i.e. children, their own sexual-political ideology (think again how AZ emphasises the “double mystery” produced by the infantile/drive sexuality). This typically results in either confusing children with he idea that the “White-Hetero-Norm'“ is “Bad/Evil” (responsible for all the colonial oppressions, all the social violence of World History, etc.), or confusing children with the idea that you should strongly identify with your “White-Hetero-Norm” (i.e. that “white identity” or “male identity” is “under attack” and that we need to “re-establish it”, etc.).
While both extremes have a partial truth, neither is the truth of our becoming in the sense of a political totality that could constitute the new global digital culture. For the progressive woke side, there is a tendency to open/liberal politicisation of sexuality (where natural sex can be liberated from long-term community bonds, and community bonds are often thought without mediation of natural sexuality), and on the conservative reactionary side there is a tendency to closed/conservative politicisation of sexuality (where natural sex is inherently sinful and to be strongly and overly-regulated as if natural sex is the devil itself). Here, again, we must think the double mystery of how both adults and children struggle with the mystery of infantile sexuality constituting the drive as such.
We need to go deeper to the roots of the mystery, at least through the lens of Western culture, and how Western culture has come to influence the global digital (which requires its own analysis). For AZ, she emphasises an intense paradox of Christian religiosity, namely that Christians elevate the drive body constituted by infantile sexuality, as the motion required for the reification of communion. In this process, what gets banned, primordially repressed, etc., is any representation of natural sexuality. For Christianity, there is an insistence on the drive body as non-sexual. Why? Because this is a precise mechanism for hiding the lack/abyss of natural sexuality itself (hence why Freud was so adamant that Christianity was fundamentally a reflection of childishness).
The human difference that makes a difference vis-a-vis The Animal, for AZ, is that human beings know that they do not know (the abyss of sex as “missing knowledge”). This is what Christianity reifies as “original sin.” However, it is not that sex is sinful, it is that knowledge of the missing knowledge opens one to knowledge of Good and Evil. Sin could be perceived as the abuse of this knowing (like when Catholicism paradoxically opens up the systematic rape of children). In other words, when one discovers the lack in the Signifier, or “The Signifier” that would represent the sexual qua sexual, and then covers it over with some ideal of an absolute communion with a supernatural entity, one is really deeply at risk of “sin,” i.e. in one sense: not taking responsibility for the human condition as the operator of the inhuman abyss.
What I am going to conclude this reflection with is a simple idea: that whether one becomes a fundamentalist Christian, or whether one becomes a fundamentalist progressive (as many have noted, the basic structure of progressivist woke seems to eat itself in the same way that traditional Christianity eats itself), both are strategies for avoiding fundamentally thinking primal repression (or the lack of The Signifier).
Western culture is indeed based on repression of primal repression, and this is most evident in the religious foundation of Western culture, Christianity, which bans any sexual imaginary of natural sexuality as a defence against the void located at precisely this most intimate Otherness). In this sense, the 1960s, counter-culture was correct to locate emancipation at precisely this defensively guarded metaphysical boundary. However, this very same counter-culture failed to reach the level of Philosophy proper (let’s be honest, the counter-culture did not produce a “Hegel”, as hard as Deleuze tried). What the counter-culture did was affirmatively positivise sexuality, and thereby, it has produced one of the most interesting and perhaps also cataclysmic oppositional reversals in the whole of history. The counter-culture occupied the banned cite of primal repression vis-a-vis Christian religiosity and turned it into the cite of pure affirmation (i.e. sex positivity, polymorphous perversity, etc.), which is clearly on display in contemporary liberal-political approaches to digital sexuality, where massive international corporations can commodify the liberalisation of our unconscious/unreflective sexual drive.
Is there another way?
If we oppose the absolute obfuscation of the abyss of natural sexuality in the formation of a communal ontology lifted and separated from natural sexuality, and if we also oppose the absolute affirmation of the abyss of natural sexuality in the formation of a liberalist ontology capable of exploiting unreflective sexuality, we are opened to thinking the dialectics of the abyss. Luckily, a type of speculative dialectics of the abyss exists, it is called the Science of Logic. Far from reinstating an absolute ban on natural sexuality or instating an absolute affirmation of natural sexuality, the Science of Logic calls us to mediate the “lack in the Signifier”, that Being (the Absolute Signifier) is Nothing, and Nothing is Being (the Absolute Signifier).2 For Hegel, this must be thought on the level of the relation between our instinct and our intellect:3
“The profounder foundation is the soul standing on its own, the pure concept which is the innermost moment of the objects, their simple life pulse, just as it is of the subjective thinking of them. To bring consciousness this logical nature that animates the spirit, that moves and works within, this is the task. The broad distinction between instinctive act and act which is intelligent and free is that the latter is performed consciously.”
In other words, we cannot use fundamentalist ideologies to mask the necessity of fundamentally thinking, and this thinking, must be situated between instinct and intellect, for the mediation of instinct.
Consequently, the affirmation of the truth of the unity of Being-Nothing, is Becoming. But we must think this on the level of the libido, the discovery of infantile/drive sexuality, and its political implications. For historical reasons, this task necessarily escapes Hegel’s own logical gaze (but not necessarily his logic). Who best understood both the truth of libido and Hegel’s logic? The answer is obvious: Jacques Lacan. That is why Alenka Zupančič, in What Is Sex?, attempts to mobilise the Freudo-Lacanian tradition, towards thinking our political moment.
Philosophy Portal x Theory Underground will be teaching What Is Sex? in this spirit. The course starts May 7th.
This is why contemporary progressivist ideologues are attempting to introduce “puberty blockers”, so that they do not need to think the necessary mediation of puberty.
Here, against Heidegger’s distortion of Hegel’s Logic with the idea that we must replace “is” with “:”, we must affirm Being Is Nothing, Nothing Is Being. We must carry such metaphysical risk, of affirming a proposition and carrying it through to the end, towards AZ’s work: What Is Sex?