Sexual Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism

Arun Saldanha, Hoon Song

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415836869
• eBook ISBN: 9781317396352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Throughout the twentieth century, psychoanalysis and feminism were the practico-intellectual fields most systematic and subversive in demonstrating that humanity is sexually fissured. More recently, further advances in the philosophy of difference and renewed emphases on embodiment, materiality and life offer possibilities for attending to dimensions of gender and sexuality that were previously underdeveloped. This collection examines these possibilities insofar as they can either deepen or displace the traditional centrality of psychoanalysis in matters sexual.

The authors come from a wide range of backgrounds and defend their approaches to the problem of sexual difference in a variety of idioms, drawing on key thinkers such as Lacan, Irigaray, Deleuze, Foucault and Badiou. It is rare to come across these thinkers together; but sex is too crucial a site for critical thought not to mobilize every conceptual power available.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

One, Two, Many

what is sexual difference now?

arun saldanha

tarzan

In the 1918 movie Tarzan of the Apes a white baby of noble blood is abandoned in the African jungle after an attack by hostile apes. Kala the mother-ape (apes are played by humans in ape suits) sees in him a substitute for her own prematurely dead infant and raises him with love. Tarzan "did not dream he was different" from the apes until, grown up, he discovers his reflection at the waterfront: fair, hairless, strong, erect. This experience of discovering his "I" is more primordial than what occurs in Lacan's mirror phase, for the difference constituting his imaginary is not only bodily and sexual but evolutionary, racial, ontotheological. The pond scene points at nothing less than the genesis of man in the heart of Africa, and he is already white. The whole film is a comment on secular modernity's deepest anxieties about Darwinism.

Upon recognition of his own species being, Tarzan (who gave him the name is unclear) goes in search of clothing and comes across his parents’ skeletons. Out of human instinct he picks up a schoolbook and recognizes the English words "boy" and "monkeys" as well as their meanings. He has entered the symbolic. He will protect civilization from the natives (played by topless African Americans) and wild animals (including jaguars and Indian elephants). He will assert his mastery over the jungle after an exuberant kill of a gorilla. His hut will bear the sign "killer of beasts."

Jane sails to Africa, engaged to a man in an expedition to retrieve the lost aristocratic boy for the health of the metropolis. She is vulnerable not only to wildlife, heat and illness but also her jealous and rapist husband-to-be. After saving her, Tarzan carries Jane away. He "struggles with his shyness" and is clumsy in his efforts to win her love. She says: "Tarzan is a man, and men do not force the love of women." Finally relenting, Jane chooses Tarzan above Europe and renders him fully human through sexual intercourse. After becoming man through imagination and language Tarzan will have to deal with the real of sexual difference, the scary unspeakable longings for a lost species-ambiguous mother which he cannot satisfy in his love for Jane. Their nuptial night in the trees marks the beginning of white settler society in Edenic wilderness.

Lacan has figured large in theorizing sexual difference because his work on the matter is the most intricate and abstract. The colonial myth of Tarzan and Jane nonetheless throws up some questions which could put strain on the Lacanian framework. Why would Tarzan relate to the death of his parents and the rules of culture the same way as a boy in Europe? Could brute violence (he kills ecstatically) be more determining than reflection, speech, and ceremony in his becoming human? Why did cinema turn so early to this highly sexualized origin story just when empires were perilously overstretched? Was this sexualization and racialization not part of a wider shift, as seen in psychoanalysis itself, towards managing sex as core truth of human being?

Is Tarzan an allegory for the humanist narcissism of wildlife preservation? Or does his slinging on vines and desire to both subdue and mimic the lion show he inherited an altogether nonhuman virility? Between ape and human, is there a leap or a continuum? And what about Jane – why did she forsake civilization? From what does the intimacy between her and the cheerful black maid derive? Simply from the fact they’re women? There are many dimensions to sexual difference and this introductory essay can only present a selective genealogy of conceptualizing the problem. Lacan will be shown to occupy a central place, even if others are gnawing at his legacy.

man as camera obscura

The Copernican Revolution of Kant defines humanity as the privileged site of truth, while truth is humanity unfolding its essence as perpetually unfinished being. Reason embarks on a quest for a set of rules for all thinking and acting, which are perfectible and inevitable for society to hold together. Inaugurating philosophical anthropology, Kant discerns the revolutionary possibility of thinking the transcendental One of humanity as a progressively self-realizing whole subsuming cultural and dogmatic peculiarities. His famous question in the Logic, "Was ist der Mensch?," can only be answered in the abstract. Whether we translate this question as "What is man?" or more recently "What is a human being?" has tremendous implications.¹ The problematic itself seems to violate any strong valuation of the fissures and proclivities constituting the species.²

Contemporary theory remains heir to the assumption that the power of human reason suffices to legislate what is good, but largely departs from the claim to universality. For critical theory today, a subject assembles itself only in and across linguistic, geopolitical, libidinal, and technological contingency. All great thinkers of difference, from Marx and Nietzsche to Adorno and Deleuze, made their name to a considerable extent by excavating the sociopolitical paradoxes underpinning Kant’s philosophical anthropology.

Hence Luce Irigaray sees in Kant a desperate effort at overcoming the loss of the mother-object and thus of reinstating masculinism at the most supreme level. The sensible realm, imagination, intuition, nature, beauty, extension, the body, the thing-itself: all of these concepts constitute the phantasmal feminine soil for the pure reflection of man. As with Descartes, an entire edifice depends on representation, except that now the subject fully comprehends that how the world is reflected within is no divine gift but his own sovereign responsibility to work out. All critical thinking still follows Kant insofar as this imperative to engage the world is acknowledged as its very impetus.

The dissension revolves around how to conceive subjective sovereignty. Irigaray asks:

Are we to assume that a mirror has always already been inserted, and speculates every perception and conception of the world, with the exception of itself, whose reflection would only be a factor of time?...Does the subject derive his power from the appropriation of this non-place of the mirror?³

The answer is "evidently." Irigaray laments the arrogance of such a self-founding gesture, typical as it is for men’s assumption of and appeal to independent wholeness. Forgetting that woman-soil-nature is the "imaginary sub-basement" for his house of splendid words, man fathoms his mission is to comprehend the correlation between the laws and categories of the universe and their reflection inside. If she had a voice woman would tell him otherwise:

the action is always inside his house, his mind. And what or who can now put it outside? Only a messenger of revolution perhaps? Or else the fact that this hearth is made of glass and that those glasses – rather tarnished by age, their brilliance dimmed, having always in fact been unsilvered or blackened by smoke – mirror so deadly a boredom that, whatever one’s firm intent, one might finish by wishing to die – to die of love, were that still possible – rather than have things just go on. Forever.⁴

Man suffocates himself in the prison-house of disembodied cognition, disavowing his lovesickness for the (m)Other and the tediousness of the stories he tells himself. Evidently Kant is no solipsist: the transcendental subject is a formal function deriving from the ongoing effort to find its parameters. Per definition it can be embodied in any concrete individual. But crucial is that subjectivity exists only through its distinction from animal nature and mere things.

Quentin Meillassoux argues in vastly different vein that it was Kant’s magnificent misstep to consider that relevant reality exists only insofar as it is engaged. Henceforth philosophy would aim at discovering and regulating the correlation between realms separated by the European canon – mind and body, idea and matter, interiority and exteriority – an epistemological inclination Meillassoux calls correlationism. "The great outdoors," the overwhelming magnitude and absolute contingency of the universe itself, is foreclosed for direct understanding.⁵

As Deleuze’s more nuanced involvement with the transcendental turn and critique of representationalism shows, Kant in fact introduces exactly the kind of abyssal, "absolutely frightening," fully secular formalism Meillassoux seeks, though it is true he could not follow through the radical conceptual possibilities he had unleashed.⁶ What concerns us here is that a range of critiques proclaim a complicity between the Enlightenment’s philosophical construct of man-as-humanity and patriarchal Eurocentrism. For Irigaray, Kant has an obsession with erectitude and closure (just a few peepholes filtering what arrives inside) and such is what male subjecthood itself aspires to. Combining Meillassoux and Irigaray, the Great Outdoors can be understood as nothing but femininity at its/her most expansive, feared for its/her immense amorphous plenitude, kept at bay through the very devices of representing it/her. Whereas space is feminized and fixed, time appears as the progressive development of man.⁷

Inspired by Irigaray as well as Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz’s corporeal feminism retrieves the maelstrom of spacetime, of the ontologically perverse Outside. Ethics and politics emerge not from the interiority of a reasoning and rule-bound mind but within the kinetic and affective forces of situated encounters between bodies. A consistent emphasis on bodies guides Grosz from Freud to relativity theory and biology: philosophical anthropology unfurls into a general ontology. We inherit a long tradition from Euclid, Galileo, Newton, and Kant of thinking space and time as absolute coordinates into which life inserts itself. Grosz asks whether another physics can be conceived starting from assumptions men have for centuries been ignorant of:

in order to conceive bodies, and to understand the kinds of active interrelations possible between (lived) representations of the body and (theoretical) representations of space and time, the bodies of each sex need to be accorded the possibility of a different spacetime framework.⁸

What the ongoing debates about Kant’s legacy show is that sexual difference is inscribed into philosophy’s most basic decisions.

sexual antinomies

A second feminist strategy consists of repeating the transcendental turn to squeeze out its implications for one basic parameter of human existence, namely being sexed. When Lacan says that Kant’s morality has as its necessary obverse the contemporaneous fantasies of Marquis de Sade, and that they together invented modern ethics, he asks how reason and law have to be desired through signifiers and are therefore ambiguous and violent to the core.⁹ Joan Copjec’s essay ‘‘Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason’’ performs a similar short-circuit (a combustively charged because illicit conjoining) between philosophy and psychoanalysis, by anchoring sexual difference in the famous antinomies of the Critique of Pure Reason.¹⁰ Copjec affirms Kant’s reconstruction of rationality but only as split between its two versions, the masculine and the feminine. These versions do not join into a binary. Sex is two like oil and water are two, two incompatible kinds of being liquid without in-between. Men and women communicate and mingle but the real of their difference is thereby rendered thoroughly opaque.

According to Copjec, then, and unbeknownst to himself, Kant was the first to theorize sexual difference in its logical dimension. Kant thinks that at its purest reason is in conflict with itself, structured around four antinomies of two kinds. The first antinomy of time and space and the second of divisibility are the ‘‘mathematical’’ antinomies, concerning fu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. One, Two, Many: what is sexual difference now?
• 2. The Sexual Compact
• 3. Being or Sex, and Differences
• 4. The Nature of Sexual Difference: Irigaray and Darwin
• 5. Sexual Difference beyond Life and Death: or, feminism and the biopolitical turn
• 6. The Body, Sexuality, and Sexual Difference
• 7. Two is Infinite, Gender is Post-Social in Papua New Guinea
• 8. Against Yin-Yang: the dao of feminist universalism
• 9. Afterword: complexity, materialism, difference
• Index