Lacan and the Formulae of Sexuation

Exploring Logical Consistency and Clinical Consequences

Guy Le Gaufey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367420376
• eBook ISBN: 9781000761337
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Lacan and the Formulae of Sexuation provides the first critical reading of Lacan's formulae of sexuation, examining both their logical consistency and clinical consequences. Are there two different entities named Man and Woman, separated by the gulf of sexual difference? Or is it better to conceive of this difference as something purely relative, each human being situated on a sort of continuum from more or less 'man' to more or less 'woman'?

Sigmund Freud established the strange way through which sexuality determines being human: his concept of drive was no longer the heteronormative sexual instinct used by the psychiatrists of his time. With his provocative formula according to which 'there is no sexual relationship', Lacan has reinforced this perspective, combining logic and sexuality through the invention of a new operator, the concept 'not all', which points to a form of incompleteness at stake in his 'formulae of sexuation'. This book examines how these formulae have been constructed, and how we should read them in connection with, on one hand, their own logical consistency (a logical square different from Aristotelian tradition) and, on the other hand, a 'part object' in a very different sense to Melanie Klein's. The book also investigates the underlying logic of clinical vignettes, so much in favour in psychoanalytical literature today.

The book represents essential reading for Lacanian psychoanalysts, as well as researchers at the cross-section of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and gender studies.

1
THE LOGIC OF THE SEXUAL FAULT

That the sexes are two constitutes perhaps the most mysterious of certitudes, which divides in the most intimate way because it forces the path to a double regime of truth: yes, man and woman do indeed belong to the same species, the one called human (at the same time as they constitute, of course, the human genus [the French genre is translated as genus or gender in English]), but are they not so radically different from one another that one might believe that there exists between them a difference in the pure state, as decisive as irreducible? To the point that one takes up again the same word gender (genre) to differentiate, in the species, two classes of individuals, man/woman, whose union is crucial for the perpetuation … of the human genus! How can a genus be composed of a single species, which itself is divided into two genders? Homonomy! It will be said that the first genre does not have the same meaning as the second! And to be sure, it must indeed be so, but might there not be here an opportunity to envisage sexual difference in the logical and classificatory register in which it has been always expressed?

A metaphysical incest

God himself would seem to have made a mess of the affair, if one is to believe the short and enigmatic passage of Genesis I, 27, according to which ‘[s]o God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created him’ and the much more complex operation that we can read just a little further on in Genesis II, 18–24:

• 18 Then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.
• 19 So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them: and whatever the man called every living creature that was its name.
• 20 The man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field: but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.
• 21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and close up its place with flesh.
• 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
• 23 Then the man said this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called woman, for out of man this one was taken.
• 24 Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh.
• 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.¹

In Genesis I, 27 we witnessed a co-creation, man and woman emerging in parity, (almost) at the same time, without any logical advantage of the one over the other, scarcely a brief consecutiveness in the narrative; in Genesis II, 18–24, on the contrary, an order is put in place, which will serve throughout the millennia to justify the macho and religious patriarchies that we know.

If the woman is said here to proceed from the man, who was the first on the scene, it is, first of all, the guarantee the unicity of the genus. For in starting from the idea according to which every human individual comes from two parents, one is led to think of the origin of the species as a swarming.² Now, however little one might wish inversely to think of the origin as a principle, it is, on the contrary, imperative to pose a first term, as Aristotle himself invites us to (Metaphysics a 1) by affirming that for every genus, there exists an initial term, the principle of a series of elements that fall under the dominion of the genus.

The source alone – in this case, man – reduplicated in the woman fashioned by God gives a locus and a place for sexual difference and not, of course, the reverse; otherwise, it would have been necessary to make of this very difference the principle that would have held the entire genus under its dependency. Genesis II, 18–24, unfolds this progression from the one to the two then to the multiple, by affirming this time monogeneity, the engendering by a single one of his future partner and no longer a primordial couple (as in Genesis I, 27), which would have threatened the unicity of the genus and incurs a major risk: that man and woman might be conceived as two species within a same genus.

This would have been untenable since two species (save for the rarest of exceptions) cannot procreate, while man and woman are there biblically for that: to engender, to perpetuate the genus. It is necessary therefore for them to constitute only a single species, and hardly are they two, then they fold back into a single flesh, which is better understood if it is said in advance, as is the case of this very brief text, that the one is ‘flesh of the flesh’ of the other.

For copulation is not enough to organise such a logical and textual mystery: What is required so that the union of the principle (the man) and of what had then extracted from the principle (the woman) might produce something of the one? Nothing less than what Olivier Boulnois, in his article ‘Un et un font un’, names ‘un inceste métaphysique: le principe doit s’unir à ce dont il est le principe pour se réunir en une seule unité’ (a metaphysical incest: the principle must unite itself with what he is the principle of in order to be reunited in a single unity).³ To think through something so daring, the medieval theologians did not to be sure lack the means since the divine and the human, this irreducible duality, were found united in Christ, the one whose double nature in no way damages unity. But these same theologians, in order to sustain and, above all, to transmit conceptions so austere and rebellious to common sense, were obliged to support themselves more and more on authors – philosophers, logicians – which provided them with the tools for such an operation. This is where the story becomes complicated.

Nevertheless, it is worth the trouble to pause on the very long duration in the course of which there were forged the systems of thought which, still today, organise in an underhand way our reflections (and often our reflexes) on sex and gender. Thanks to the renewal of medieval studies, one can follow the business fairly closely, especially by finding support on the works of Alain de Libera⁴ Inasmuch as he has been able to distinguish and to sort out the threads of a history that was too teleological, in too much of a hurry to find in the text what it already knew it was looking for.

The entry into the quarrel

Speaking about genus, species, difference, proper or accident, could not be done throughout the quasi-millennium that is gathered together under the name of the Middle Ages without referring oneself, in one way or another, to Porphyr’s Isagogue since Boethius,⁵ the teacher of the whole body of the learned for centuries, had begun with that: a commentary of this Isagogue, this text which served as an introduction to Aristotle before (and even after) the massive arrival of the latter via the Arab world. We find ourselves here immediately caught up in a curious enfilade: every medieval student began by plunging into the ready of the commentary that Boethius had done of Porphyr’s Isagogue, a little text itself written around 270 CE by way of an introduction of Aristotle’s text on the Categories. This, judged not without reason to be too difficult, in effect, called out for a commentary and, at the request of his friend Chrysaorios, Porphyr, who had studied at Athens and rejoined Plotinus in Rome (in 298 CE, after the death of the master, he published the Enneades), took on the task of editing some pages in which there would be presented the essentials of the Aristotelian text.

Let us forget for the moment Boethius and his own personal equation in order to better grasp the chasm between Aristotle and Porphyr in the measure that the famous quarrel about the Universals – about which I am here making the hypothesis that it continues to weigh heavily in the current debates about the sexes – came to birth there. Given the destiny of these few lines, we may as well read them attentively:

1. Since it is necessary, my dear Chrysaorios, for receiving the teaching relative to Aristotle’s categories, to know what is (1) a genus, (2) a difference, (3) a species, a property, and (5) an accident, and since in order to give definitions for what concerns division as well as demonstration this study is useful, I will give you a short presentation on this subject, striving to go through, in brief, in the form of an introduction, what is found among the oldest authors, while all the time abstaining from entering into questions that are too profound, and only touching in a measured way on the easiest.
2. First of all, concerning the genus and the species, the question as to whether they exist or indeed whether they only consist in pure concepts (2) or, supposing that they exist, whether they are bodies or incorporeal, and (3) in the last case, if they are separated or indeed if they exist in sensible things and in relationship with them – these are questions of which I will avoid speaking, because they represent a more profound research and because they call for another examination, that would be much longer.⁶

It is therefore by wanting to avoid ‘questions that are too profound’ that Porphry produces a sort of algorithm that is going to function as a formidable topos. Generations of teachers will transmit to generations of students this commonplace which draws all its power from the fact of being presented as a crossroads between Plato’s realism and Aristotle’s conceptualism. From the first point, if one chooses to consider that genera really exist,⁷ the way is open to Platonic realism, according to which there exist before all separate forms in which singular individuals share; if one opts for a conception of the genus as a pure, conceptual entity which permits to gather by means of thought individuals that possess the same features, in order to constitute a class, then we find ourselves fully on the side of Aristotle.

But what divides also allows better than anything else to reunite, to articulate, to nuance, to intricate the systems of which each one presents advantages and not a few disadvantages. And this all the more that from the second point – whether if these genera really exist are they bodies or incorporeal? – here, in a single stroke, there is introduced the other great philosophical family, Stoicism, about which A. de Libera shows the degree to which it forms part of Porphyr’s baggage, at several levels and in different ways.

The third of Porphyr’s problems finally – if the genera are incorporeal, are they to be situated in sensible things or outside of them? – takes up again in a more subtle fashion the great Plato/Aristotle opposition on the question of formal ontology: Is the universal a separate form, or a form that is immanent in the sensible?

With this, this text functioned not alone as the required introduction to the Categories but as the minimal questionnaire starting from which there were deployed the systems (Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism) that every teacher must learn, compare, and evaluate in order to be able to teach. This germinal aspect, drawn together in a simple form, was what gave its importance to this text of which Etienne Gilson asked himself already in 1942 ‘how could such an anodyne text have served as a starting point for such imposing metaphysical constructions which, from Boethius to the Renaissance, excited the most powerful minds’.⁸

Another point is here likely to attract our attention: nothing happened for five centuries. It is only at the turning point of the 11th and the 12th centuries that there explodes the quarrel of the universals, in other words – a remarkable thing – well before the arrival of the Aristotelian and Platonic corpus, at a time when the erudite have still nothing to get their teeth into than fragments of Greek texts: a fragment of the Timaeus for Plato, and the two first treatises of the Organon for Aristotle (the Categories and De interpretatione). It is therefore not confronted with the complexity, the riches, and the ambiguity of the Greek texts soon transmitted along the Arab route that the translation of Porphyr’s Isagogue by Boethius had taken on a sudden relief. The historians of philosophy lose themselves here in conjectures about the veritable cause of the debate, already fully attested by Abelard (1079–1142), hence the problem: To what should we attribute such a time of incubation? What happened for Porphyr’s lines translated by Boethius inflamed and opposed minds when, for such a long time, no one saw any malice in it? I am happy to hold with the hypothesis of Alain de Libera, even if the way it begins is very prudent:

It is probably, that here as elsewhere, trinitarian theology played a determining role. It is the mystery of the Greek definition of three persons as ‘tres usie, id est tres substantie’ which, together with the question of whether the three Persons were ‘only one thing (una tantaum res) or three distinct things (tres res per se)’, gave rise to the response of Roscelin de Compiegne, denounced by Anselm, according to which, it was really necessary that the Father, the Son and the Spirit were three distinct things if one wanted to avoid the theologically dangerous conclusion, that ‘the Father was incarnated at the same time as the Son’. By this, the fragments of Aristotelian ontology and semantics which the higher Middle Age had as its disposition were mobilised, and by unexpected paths the question ‘what is substance?’ about which Aristotle had made, in his Metaphysics, the question eternally pursued, had effectively rediscovered a second youth. … The reading of the Isagogue then changed its status. From a simple index of definitions, Porphyr’s manual became an index of questions.⁹

The mystery of the union in the difference, of the unity of a plurality, of the belonging of an individual to his genus, would then, first of all, have been divine in the measure that, in these regions and according to the options that one took up, one went very quickly from the pulpit to the stake. Here there was an urgency in settling what the majority of current affairs willingly left in the shadows. And therefore, even before the mass of Aristotelian and Platonic texts unfurled, Roscelin de Compiegne¹⁰ had, in a way, opened the quarrel by supporting extreme options.

The first steps

He c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Prologue
• 1 The logic of the sexual fault
• 2 Towards a critical reading of the formulae of sexuation
• 3 Some clinical consequences of the logical difference between the sexes
• 4 Scholion: a misuse of metaphor
• Index