Why Read "What Is Sex?"

Three Reasons...

Last night David McKerracher of Theory Underground and I discussed “Three Reasons” why one should read Alenka Zupančič’s What Is Sex? You can find that video below. This Friday (March 24th, 5pm CET), we will be offering a full/co-led lecture on the Introduction of What Is Sex? To attend LIVE, use the Zoom link in the Philosophy Portal Community tab at the start time.

So, what are these reasons? First, who is Alenka Zupančič (AZ)? AZ is a philosophical theorist of psychoanalysis, and is associated with the Slovenian school of philosophy, along with thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar. She has been developing theory since the mid-1990s, and her work includes:

• Ethics of the Real (1995), which attempts to think Kantian ethics against the background of the Lacanian Real,

• The Shortest Shadow (2003), which counters the fashionable narrative that Nietzsche was ahead of his time, arguing that what makes Nietzsche Nietzsche is his fundamental unfashionableness in any time (a constitutive out-of-place-ness),

• Why Psychoanalysis? (2008), which outlines the ontological, ethical, and aesthetic spheres of psychoanalysis, and reinterprets Kant’s philosophical categories,

• The Odd One In (2008), which applies psychoanalysis to understand the practice of comedy, and investigates the ways comedy can help psychoanalysis recognise some crucial vicissitudes of humanity, and finally,

• Let Them Rot (2023), which explores the reasons why Antigone has resurfaced again and again as a central text of Western thought, and approaches the seemingly self-evident question: what is incest?

While you can see that her work focuses on several disparate themes and issues, what may be thought of as “holding it altogether” in a singular drive, is something like her philosophical interest in Lacan’s “Return to Freud.” As she notes in the Introduction to What Is Sex?, many philosopher’s tend to the view that psychoanalysis is merely a particular discipline without universal relevance to philosophy, and that this view is misguided. However, and at the same time, she also notes that psychoanalysts who think that the clinic is the “Holy Grail,” and that philosophy is no longer of relevance to understanding the human condition, are also misguided.

She walks the line of psychoanalytically informed philosopher, and thus embodies the philosopher who has traversed the psychoanalytic moment (with Lacan’s creative reinvention of Freud as its paradigmatic intellectual standard).

This core of AZ’s work is front and centre in her work What Is Sex? (2017).

But again, why read it? Here I propose three reasons:

1. Sex and the things-in-themselves (continental philosophy from Kant to Heidegger) fail to theorise sexuality in the scientific-technological universe

2. De-ontologised epistemology: gender constructivism very loosely or not connected at all to the ontological real of sexuality (from Foucault’s social history of sexuality to Butler’s gender performativity)

3. Paradoxes of free sexuality in progressivist politics leads to anxiety/social paralysis in which we risk conservative/fascist return to traditional/fundamentalist views of sexuality

Let’s break each point down:

1. Sex and the things-in-themselves

AZ notes in the introduction of What Is Sex? that the Lacanian intellectual moment had a surprising consequence for philosophy:¹

“At the moment when philosophy itself was just about ready to abandon some of its classical notions as belonging to its metaphysical past, from which it was eager to escape, along came Lacan, and taught us an invaluable lesson: it is not these notions themselves that are problematic; what is problematic (in some ways of doing philosophy) is the disavowal or effacement of the inherent contradiction (or antagonism) they all imply, and are part of. That is why by simply abandoning these notions, we are abandoning the battlefield, rather than winning any significant battles.”

This quote has relevance to the point regarding sex and the things-in-themselves. Consider the way, in her first major work, Ethics in the Real (1995), AZ, rather than deconstructing Kantian philosophy, as many have attempted to do before, she rather complicates or problematises Kantian philosophy by situating Kant’s moral law against the background of the Lacanian Real. What she is able to achieve in this move, is not an abandonment of philosophy’s metaphysical past, but rather a deep confrontation with one of its inherent contradictions, i.e. the paradoxes and impossibilities of Kantian morality (especially when applied to the level of sexuality).

Think about how, in Kantian morality, we must act according to a maxim whereby we can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law (the categorical imperative). Consider this maxim in the context of the sublimation of sexuality: say, in making an unbreakable vow, in getting married for life, we will this act as universal law (a society upholding the ideal of life-long marriage). While there is something without question noble in such a striving, there is at the same time, confrontation with immanent paradox and impossibilities: how Real-istic is it, to expect the whole planet to will this morality as a universal and to actualise it as a normative standard? Rather, in proposing such a universal law, what the striving to actualise this law achieves, is rather a confrontation with immanent paradoxes and impossibilities of the universal normative standard itself. This does not mean we should not strive for such a universal law, but rather that, we should see such a striving inclusive of engagement vis-a-vis a paradoxical/impossible background (what we find is the Real of our Ideal striving).

The overall point is that, in What Is Sex?, we are asked to reflect on the ways in which fundamental philosophical concepts (like Kant’s categorical imperative) require deep thinking in light of the fact that they have been thought, as if from the perspective of asexual or de-sexualised subjects. And yet, on the other hand, the libidinal unconscious, for psychoanalysis, is intelligent, it thinks and speaks (think about the thought and speech in the sexual act itself). This thought and speech of the libidinal unconscious may be read in the very philosophical concepts that are thought to have been derived from pure self-conscious rationalisations (as opposed to grounded by unconscious “perverse” motivations). Whether we are thinking about Kantian morality, Platonic metaphysics, or Heideggerian Dasein, there is a way in which philosophical concepts themselves, can be lifted to a new perspective, via psychoanalysis.

Consider another example: if one searches through the totality of Heidegger’s Being and Time, one will not find “sex” mentioned once. Is Dasein — the experience of being peculiar to the human being — asexual? If we consider this “slip” in the text of Being and Time from the perspective of psychoanalysis, we may reflect on the fact that, for psychoanalysis, sex is not something “positive” or “present” (either ontologically or ethically), but rather a constitutive absence or lack in being. How might one interpret Being and Time when thought of from the perspective of the positive absence of sex in the very text itself? In the same way that we can read Being and Time as a text pointing towards our being-towards-death, what would it look like to read Dasein’s being-towards-sex into the very text of Being and Time itself? How might this help us think the dynamics of masculinity/femininity, or the desire for a child (either organically or spiritually)?

Now let us focus on an even deeper background for this provocation. Consider a great interview with the philosophical deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, where he is asked about what he would want to ask his favourite philosophical figures (e.g. Hegel, Heidegger, etc.). His response is he would want to know about “their sex lives”; to be specific:

“I’d love to hear about something they refuse to speak about (sex). Why do these philosophers present themselves asexually in their work? Why have they erased their private lives from their work?”

Now, even if we do not have detailed explorations of the way certain sexual dispositions may have influenced the emergence of philosophical concepts, it is not as if there is no precedence for philosophers entertaining the question of sexuality as one of great intellectual importance. Freud notes in the Introduction to this Three Essays on Sexuality that Arthur Schopenhauer:²

“Showed mankind the extent to which their activities are determined by sexual impulses - in the ordinary sense of the word.”

If we must at least entertain the possibility that the ground of our motivations are determined by sexual impulses, should we not think about the way in which they are entangled with the emergence of philosophical concepts? Moreover, Schopenhauer’s protege, and arguably, Freud’s precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche, made a point to explicitly include sexuality in his philosophical writings. Consider the following notes on sexuality from “On the Three Evils” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:³

“Sex: the thorn and stake of all hair-shirted body despisers, and cursed as world among all hinterworldly, because it mocks and fools all teachers of muddle and mistakes

Sex: the slow fire on which the rabble are burned

Sex: innocent and free for free hearts, the garden of happiness on earth, all the future’s exuberant gratitude for the now

Sex: a sweetish poison only for the wilted, but for the lion-willed a great fortifying of the heart, and the respectfully reserved wine of wines

Sex: the great parable-happiness for higher happiness and highest hope

Sex: but I want fences around my thoughts and around my words too, so the pigs and the partiers do not break into my garden!

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra certainly makes one’s head spin with such reflections. If anything, we can say that his thought embodies and works through the paradoxes and impossibilities present in sexuality as such. This type of thought is what we must cultivate new discursive spaces for, as opposed to engaging the unreflective immediacy of sexuality as if we do not encounter a disorienting Real here.

Moreover, Freud was quick to note, to all those philosophers who did not want to entertain the importance of sexuality, and its enlarged significance within the psychoanalytic tradition, we should recall that the origins of Western philosophy may have grounds in discursivity mediating libido itself (again from the Introduction of the Three Essays on Sexuality):⁴

“As for ‘stretching’ the concept of sexuality which has been necessitated by the analysis of children and what are called perverts, anyone who looks down with contempt upon psycho-analysis from a superior vantage-point should remember how closely the enlarged sexuality of psycho-analysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato.”

In other words: from the very ground of Western Philosophy — Plato — we have deep meditations on the importance of sexuality, built into the very philosophical theory itself (clearly on display in works like The Symposium).

2. De-ontologised epistemology

We live in an age which has a somewhat strange pop concept of sexuality and gender. We live in an age where we fight against the traditional notion of sex as a given being, and at the same time, we fight against a concept of socially normalised gender. In contrast to these traditional notions, we demand liberation from sex as a given being, and we demand construction of identities independent of their “oppressive” traditional foundations governed by binary divisions between men and women. We think that we can “cut” sex and gender, and “freely” construct independent of the givens of being or the givens of sociohistorical process. There is a tendency to think that, in the past, society imposed gender categories as normative expectations on the biological body. There is a tendency to think that, today, we can free ourselves from the big Other of social normative expectations, and we can treat our sexual identities as a liberating ground from which we can pick this or that identity.

This “pop” culture is in part influenced by thinkers like Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976), and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). We should always remember that what philosophers are writing and thinking in one era, will filter downstream to pop culture in the next generation. Now what is emphasised in the works of Foucault and Butler is the positive power of social construction of gender identity as the liberating ground from sociohistorical repression. Here there is a tendency to emphasise epistemology (knowledge construction) independent of ontology (real being).

In Foucault’s work specifically, we get an interesting analysis of sexuality as a relatively recent discursive object expressed with the emergence of the modern individualistic world. Foucault emphasises that, in contrast to the stereotypical notions of prudish Victorian society, in the most recent centuries, Western culture has made more and more space, and encouraged us to express more and more, our sexual desires and energies outside of their normative boundaries vis-a-vis biological reproduction within a nuclear family. In this way Foucault counters the “repressive hypothesis” (i.e. that modern Western societies have been repressing our sexuality), and suggests that Western societies have opened many perverse alternatives to the normative law (i.e. constructing different rules/norms of performance). However, what Foucault may have missed in this positivisation of perversity against the background of crumbling neurotic norms, is an unconscious dimension of repression that is involved in a founding negativity of sexuality, i.e. it is not just society that represses our sexuality, but rather we internally repress our own sexuality as a defence against an abyssal ontological dimension. Thus, the constant pressures to universalise perversion, do not lead to “universal enjoyment” but rather “universal negativity.” Here AZ notes:

“What is lacking in Foucault’s account is the notion of the unconscious and of repression in the Freudian sense, which is not mentioned in the History of Sexuality, the “founding negativity” of sexuality itself.”

In other words, the idea that sex is gradually becoming “positivised outside the Law” is a misleading notion of the way individuals actually construct or work with their sexual desires and energies. When we construct our identities outside the Law, when we normalise transgression of the Law, we do not free ourselves from social oppression, but rather encounter all new, and arguably deeper, forms of oppression.

This can be connected to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, where we get the idea that gender is something that can be constructed or created in our performance of it (“gender as performing sexuality”). In the same way that AZ agrees with, and yet complicates, Foucault’s notion of the history of sexuality; AZ agrees with, and yet complicates, Butler’s notion of gender performativity. AZ agrees with Butler regarding the performativity of gender, that gender is upheld by certain performative repetitions which are retroactively constituted as eternal norms (men/women etc.), however, she also notes the lack of understanding regarding the founding ontological negativity of sexuality itself, in Butler’s work. AZ notes that what is missing from Butler’s performativity, is a conception of the Real as a point of internal contradiction and impossibility (of our gendered performances of sexuality). When this is missed, we conceive of either gender complementarity (men-women) or gender multiplicity (LGBT+) in positivist terms, as a liberation from the oppression of a traditional big Other. Here think about New Age spiritualists talking about the positive power of “twin flames.” Such coupling tends to unconsciously positivise the sexual relation as a type of divinity or eternity, only to find themselves in a series of failed intense flings that burn out as quickly as they flame on. Or here think about the post-modern “gender fluid” subject that plays with gender identities like playing with picking out a new outfit. Such identification is driven by fleeting emotional valences in periods of natural maturation and development involving negativities that are typically best to work through via the lens of self-contradiction, as opposed to uncritical affirmation.

While admittedly, these examples are extremes of often more nuanced identitarian constructions (i.e. passionate love attachments, genuine self-questioning), in our culture of “positivised perversity” and “performative gender” we often fail to think about the way in which gender is inherently problematic, a response to a “fundamental negativity” which is at the very heart of the subject’s cause/reason for being. In other words, and again, we do not find the ground of self-liberation, but the grounds of a new form of self-oppression. One of AZ’s philosophical companions, Slavoj Žižek, notes in Hegel in a Wired Brain (2020), that sex itself should be conceived as oppressive, not oppressive as a result of social conditioning. He notes that while “partisans of LGBT+ endeavour to liberate sexuality from all “binary” oppressions” a paradox is opening up in modern sexuality: “liberation OF sexuality has to end up in the liberation (of humanity) FROM sexuality.”⁵ As I have written about, in the largest possible context, of the evolution of the human species itself in the midst of a new environment mediated by technology, there could be a fundamental competition at work, between biologically grounded sexuality and discursively mediated sexuality. To say this in a different way, we may be dealing with the difference between genetic reproduction and mimetic replication, which may be working silently in the background of "culture wars" about our interpretations of sex/gender.⁶

In short: what a post-modern focus on epistemology without grounding in ontology misses, is a too simplistic positivisation of sexual progress away from traditional oppression by social systems, rather than seeing traditional oppression by social systems as itself a civilisation response to a deeper negativity: sexuality itself. In AZ’s term, it misses the “short-circuit” between epistemology and ontology. As AZ notes in the Conclusion of What Is Sex?:⁷

Whenever it comes to social, cultural, or religious covering up of sexuality, we can be sure that it never covers up simply what is there (for example, the sexual organs), but also (and perhaps primarily) something which is not there; it also covers up some fundamental ambiguity which is, from the out- set, of a metaphysical order. In other words: the more we try to think the sexual as sexual (that is, the more we try to think it only for “what it is,” without censorship and embellishments), the quicker we find ourselves in the element of pure and profound metaphysics.

This means, far from identifying with the constructions of traditional social systems (i.e. social, cultural, religious covering up of sexuality), we need to rethink how we want to repress. Our freedom is not a freedom from social, cultural and religious covering ups, but rather the freedom to decide how we want to cover up. Take, as an elementary example, a naive consciousness that thinks the solution to sexuality is to remove all the covers qua repressions, for the repetition of “pure sexuality.” Far from reclaiming the “Garden” before the “Fall” this move tries to think sexuality as a positive substance that can be symmetrically in a harmonious balance with itself, rather than recognising that this very desire for a “pure sexuality” is a retroactive image created by the “Fall” itself. To engage “pure and profound metaphysics,” we rather need to think a new metaphysics from the “ground up,” i.e. sexuality is the very grounds of thinking a new intellectual culture itself.⁸

3. Paradoxes of free sexuality

Finally, as already alluded to, the results of endless “positive” “progressive” notions of sexuality (i.e. liberation from traditional repression, the power of gendered performance etc.) has not resulted in everyone enjoying their sexual energy or life force, but rather, a remarkable emergence of new anxieties, social paralysis and all-new isolationisms. If anything, the loss of a “big Other” for the containment of sexual energy has left the most immature or primal aspects of our mind open to attack and exploitation by technocapitalist parasites (i.e. from pornography, to OnlyFans, to the endless platforms hosting explicit/implicit libidinal content). What the loss of the “big Other” for the containment of sexual energy has left us with is the very real possibility that we are all reduced to “first profession”: “sex workers.” Now there is nothing inherently wrong with sex work, this is not a moralistic attack. I am merely pointing out that this has happened, largely unconsciously, and without reflective mediation of our new libidinal economic situation. Is this the reality we want?

Now, what we might want to think is a Hegelian contradiction at the core of 20th century philosophy and psychoanalysis itself: the difference between Freud and Deleuze on the question of repetition and repression. While, for Freud, we repeat because we repress, for Deleuze, we repress because we repeat. To put it in another way: for Freud, repression is primary, and for Deleuze, repetition is primary. Here, in Freudian terms, repression can be seen as a mechanism of (phallic) containment of sexual energy, and, in Deleuzian terms, repetition can be seen as a primal positive force connecting us to a post/pre-human real. While Freudians may be stereotyped as defending a type of phallogocentric discourse establishing a patriarchy without or beyond Christianity, Deleuzians, tend towards a “becoming-animal.”⁹ Is there not a higher-order Hegelian relationship between repetition and repression? Might not this question be something that can be worked through in AZ's What Is Sex? Perhaps.

Here, in the dialectic of repetition and repression, there is a lot at stake. Due to the irreducible connection between sexuality and politics, and the role of a founding sexual negativity, perhaps first identified by Christianity in myth, and second identified by psychoanalysis in the clinic, we need to think repetition/repression for today. Without thinking sexuality politically, or politics sexually, and without problematising/complicating modern positive perversity (especially in the new digitised culture), we risk a large-scale revival of reactionary conservatisms, fascisms, and fundamentalisms. The question that I think becomes central is: what type of sexuality to we want to repeat? The answer to that question will give us a clue as to the form/style of repression that we cultivate as a response. This would not be a style of repression to moralise against sexual enjoyment, but rather a style of repression that actively aimed to enhance long-term sexual enjoyment. The release of sexuality without containment for pure repetition is not a utopia, but a nightmare.

The question I am basically asking is: is it possible to improve repression? Basically, the idea here is that, if we do not learn how to “repress well” (i.e. repress in such a way that we open repetitions we want) in our new environment (technocapitalism), then progressive politics can be exploited/manipulated by forms of politics that attempt to “fill the hole in the Other” by pretending that “they know” the “repetitions we want” and the “repetitions that work.”¹⁰ In contrast to this approach, we should affirm the mystery, the non-knowledge, at the heart of sexuality, while learning how to repress in such a way that avoids a moralisation of jouissance or the enjoyment of our symptoms. Here a philosophy of psychoanalysis, here What Is Sex?, might be an invaluable aid.

The truth is that, the reason What Is Sex? is an important philosophical question, is that we live in very different time in relation to the origin of Freudian psychoanalysis. This is largely “thanks” to technological transformations (which Freud was aware, would complicate his original understandings of the psychoanalytic project). While Freudian psychoanalysis facilitated the emergence of a new culture of openness to sexuality, today we have the problem of how to intelligently contain sexuality. In many ways, it is the reverse problem of what called forth psychoanalysis to the world stage (the “cracks” in traditional containment). It is the problem, not only of letting more space for the cracks in being to speak, but rather the problem of affirming the cracks in being so that they may find/embody a new drive in being. What this looks like, will undoubtedly (and thankfully) be more complex and diverse than the forms of sexuality that are contained underneath the banners of traditional repressive culture. But, at the same time, it will call forth a more nuanced relation to sexuality than we see in an ethic of total openness and unboundedness. We should strive away from a Deleuzian “becoming-animal,” and we should also strive away from a Freudian “patriarchy-without-Christianity,” for something that works the contradiction at the very heart of this repetition/repression dialectic. I would hypothesise that what we need to work with is the drive as such (which is not reducible to repetition or repression), but which sources enjoyment, and points towards a becoming-other (than either organic embodiment or traditional society).¹¹

It is this reason why I will be co-leading a course that seeks to dive into the cracks of AZ’s What Is Sex? The course starts May 7th 2023. The course will function as an intensive opening to teaching Lacan’s core writings, the Écrits.

1. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? The MIT Press. p. 2.

2. Freud, S. 1920. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In: Complete Works of Freud, p. 1463.

3. Nietzsche, F. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For None and All. Cambridge University Press. p. 151.

4. Freud, S. 1920. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In: Complete Works of Freud, p. 1463.

5. Žižek, S. 2020. Hegel in a Wired Brain. Bloomsbury.

6. Last, C. 2014. Human Evolution, Life History Theory, and the End of Biological Reproduction. Current Aging Science, 7(1), 1-8. DOI: 10.2174/1874609807666140521101610.

7. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? The MIT Press. p. 142.

8. This is how one should read the text Sex, Masculinity, God, a trialogue that I co-authored with Kevin Orosz and Daniel Dick, i.e. as an intellectual conversation starter for thinking through the mediation of sexual energy in the Information Age. In this text, we actually attempt to raise sexuality to the level of a surprising intellectual object.

9. As David McKerracher noted in our live discussion, in many Deleuzian conferences, there is the expression of “wanting to be a bumble bee.” Or as I have noted about the expression of desire on Deleuzian TheoryGram, there is the tendency to reify becoming a mushroom or some other non-human or even non-animal creature.

10. This is the basic form of conservative exploitation of progressive politics.

11. For more, see: Last, C. 2022. The Necessity of Absolute Knowing. In: In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Garner, D. & Last, C. (Eds.). Philosophy Portal Books, Independent Published. p. 284-304.