Onto-Epistemological Short-Circuit

Introducing Sexuality into Philosophical Discourse for the Mediation of Real Masters

David McKerracher of Theory Underground and I will be teaching an intensive mini-course on Alenka Zupančič’s What Is Sex? starting May 7th.¹ This will be undoubtedly the most comprehensive treatment of Zupančič’s core theoretical bomb ever conducted.

How common is it, both within the history of philosophy, and in contemporary ideology, to see thought collapse into an unreflective ontology or an epistemology without grounding? Both tendencies can be found at the foundation of philosophy itself, in the works of Parmenidean Being or Thales’ natural philosophy, all the way up to contemporary philosophical paradigms, like Derridean deconstruction or Harmanian Object-Oriented Ontology.

The tendency to a simplistic reification of an unreflective ontology or ungrounded epistemology, is something that Alenka Zupančič’s What Is Sex? labours to avoid at all costs. In terms of ontology, we have reflexive mediation from a psychoanalytic perspective. Here we can no longer fantasise a complete or coherent relation to Being, i.e. Being qua Being, but rather must accept that, to include the subject, we must recognise that something has fallen out of Being, or something in Being has lapsed. Zupančič asks us to think on the idea of Being qua Real as the impossibility of the subject Being-itself (this impossibility of being itself is the subject’s deepest truth).²

In terms of epistemology, we have an attempt to ground our symbolic knowledge or constructive methods in this very self-impossibility, as opposed to its fantasised (imaginary) completion, and in this way, are opened to a new perspective on failure and mistakes in general. For Zupančič, epistemology must recognise that The Signifier (the signifier that would represent the sexual qua sexual) is not only what is missing in the human being, but what the human being knows is missing (in contrast to The Animal), and this form of knowledge which does-not-know itself is what Zupančič refers to as the unconscious, and the location of the sexual.³

It is on this level, the level of onto-epistemology, where the impossibility of Being and the failure of knowledge meet, is where we may think sexuality, and specifically the objectivity of the sexual subject.⁴ The stakes are high. Philosophy aims for the truth of its object (the Eternal, the Absolute), but has failed to confront the truth of the sexual subject as objective, and thus, has failed to theorise or think the relation between the Eternal Absolute and the sexual (which seems like an understandable, and yet a big, mistake). This topic is particularly alive in the philosophical work of Deleuze, who locates the eternal in its traditional opposite: repetition and difference (opposed to the Platonic self-symmetrical One). What is the sexual but the “production of a repetition on the basis of difference” and “selection of difference on the basis of repetition” (to paraphrase Deleuze’s formulation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return)?⁵

I guess we’ll try to find out.

For Zupančič, her project opens thinking not only the aforementioned onto-epistemology, but specifically the sexual as the short-circuit between ontology and epistemology. We know that, for Zupančič, ontology is the impossible Being and epistemology is the failure of The Signifier, but what is the short-circuit between the two? First, we should say that the technical description of a short-circuit suggests that it is an “abnormal connection between two nodes of an electric circuit intended to be at different voltages.” What the short-circuit allows is “an excessive current flowing through a loop,” whereas its opposite, an “open-circuit,” does not allow the mediation of flow.

This is all interesting because of the way Deleuze’s work points towards thinking the immediacy of open flows of desire (in all of its rhizomatic glory). It is almost as if Zupančič’s work is opening an oppositional reversal of the Deleuzian project, turning an open-circuit where sexuality cannot mediate the immediacy of flow between the two (onto-epistemology), to the short-circuit, where sexuality, in its excess, flows between the two (onto-epistemology).⁶

Here we can more fully think Zupančič’s claim that sexuality is the short-circuit of ontology and epistemology. We can propose that: Sexuality is the abnormal connection between two nodes that allows an excessive current to flow through a loop between impossible being and epistemic failure.

How does it do this? For Zupančič, it does this by precisely stopping repetition by way of a Third. The Third is, for Zupančič, the result of analytic work (whether clinical or not), that of the production of an S1 or a Master-Signifier which sutures the gap/disruption of the sexual between impossibility of Being and failure of knowledge (where excessive immediacy reigns supreme). In other words, we might say, that whereas the Deleuzian project attempts to keep the libidinal repeating its senselessness and meaninglessness, through the work of analysis (whether clinical or not), what is at stake in the working-through the excessive flow of the sexual, is the S1, or Master-Signifier, that the subject uses to work the gap of the ontological impossibility and and the epistemological failure.

However, this One (S1) is not an “old One” (Parmenidean Being, Traditional God, Conservative Authority, etc.), but a “new One,” a “new One” that, while bringing an end to repetition, is an actual difference, is a true singularity. This actual difference and true singularity is what we need to bring an end to the joke of contemporary political leadership. Consequently, while Deleuze focuses on the primordial, eternal cite of repetition and difference, where surplus and excess reign supreme, this eternity is not the philosophical Eternity, it is not the philosophical Absolute.⁷

Zupančič, in working through Lacan, points towards the importance of the mediation of this eternal excess:⁸

This, then, is an important conceptual feature that separates Lacan from Deleuze: the surplus (“the erratic/unbound excess,” enjoyment) is not in itself the real scene of emancipation, but the means of production of that which eventually realizes this “emancipation”; the eventual tectonic shift does not take place at the level of this surplus, but thanks to the newly produced signifier.

It is as if Deleuze is the immediacy (of lack-excess) to which Lacan is the mediation (analysis). It is as if Deleuze saw the immediacy of the subject and Lacan tarried with it, in the truth of its singular negativity. While Zupančič is the midwife that forces us to think this truth, politically. The political ramifications of Zupančič’s project are enormous: instead of reacting against modern excesses, as contemporary conservatism and religiosity does, reifying a superficial ontology with ancient epistemologies unfit to withstand the true differentiation of the subject; and instead of unreflectively aligning with progressivist politics, which is the immediacy of modern excess itself; we must bring analysis to the political, we must mediate the political and birth new signifiers and new singularities.

As I have discussed with my course partner, David McKerracher, we are these signifiers, we are these singularities. Thus, it is not just that we need to birth new signifiers and new singularities, but those signifiers qua singularities need to be able to network, to mediate together, in order to kill off the senseless/meaningless repetition of immediate excess, and to open the possibility of true mediation (in all the arduous negativity that it implies). In that sense, the very performativity of the What Is Sex? course, between Dave’s Theory Underground and my Philosophy Portal, is:

Sexuality is the abnormal connection between two nodes that allows an excessive current to flow through a loop between impossible being and epistemic failure

The course starts May 7th.

1. Special announcement: Alenka Zupančič herself will be a part of the course, participating in both a mini-interview with Dave and I, as well as open to a student discussion.

2. There is something to be gained in thinking the history of philosophical ontologies from this perspective, especially if we start with the Parmenidean assertion that Being is a pure perfect One, which, importantly, does not lack.

3. Which is why the sexual should be thought of as the proper location of the disruption of the traditional intellectual.

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5. Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition. p. 42.

6. Here, why not, let us think ontology qua impossible Being as Woman, and epistemology qua failed Signifier, as Man.

7. Return to Hegel, see: Science of Logic.

8. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 127.