https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/sex-without-identity-feminist-politics-sexual-difference/

In your work, you posit the relevance of both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist theory to feminist struggles today. How do you understand the connection of these theories to feminism?

ALENKA ZUPANČIČ: I’m convinced that there is a very strong affinity if one understands feminism as something that is not reducible to the struggle between two sexes or genders — like men and women — but as the movement and the theory that brings out and insists on tectonic points which structure this and other social struggles. Feminism is a social movement. It cannot be reduced to a description of different kinds of discrimination. It should always bring in the question: What is it that makes and sustains this kind of discrimination and division, say, into hierarchical genders? What purpose does it serve? To say that it serves the purpose of subjecting and subduing women would be a tautological answer. Feminism is also not simply about the psychology of the sexes. It insists that there is something in the social structure itself which sustains and generates this division. This is what characterizes emancipatory struggles in general, and why they should, whenever possible, combine and support each other instead of fighting their own feuds. If they are truly emancipatory, they use and activate these world-structuring points of negativity, rather than focus on questions of identity.

Your last book, What IS Sex?, revolves around this notion of negativity, which is at the heart of the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality. Can you elaborate on negativity as a concept? How can we theorize sexuality outside of a framework of identity?

The term “sexual” or “sexuality” has always been a core notion of psychoanalysis. A core notion which was not at all about naming something which we might describe by way of sexual activities that cohere into identities. This positivist notion of sexuality — that we all know what it is — dominates today. But for Freud, sexuality is not, as is sometimes said, at the bottom of every other problem, but something that, in and of itself, constitutes a problem. A problem for every subject to grapple with, that every subject is divided by. It is a negative core of any identity, not its positive foundation.

This is why there are no direct, immediate sexual identities. Even when one identifies with one’s anatomy, this is already an identification, there is nothing immediate about it. Sex involves much more than anatomy, even when it coincides with our anatomy. The popular opposition between genders as biological or else socially constructed is a false opposition: there is no “biological gender” in the sense of identity, because identity is by definition never immediate, “biological” in this sense. Biology, anatomy is obviously a factor; it is far from insignificant. But a sexed subject does not simply emerge out of this or that anatomy, but out of its symbolization, including its rejection. Biological versus social is a misleading opposition in this respect, if we take “social” simply to refer to an alternative, non-biological positivity and forget that the social is predicated upon a fundamental non-immediacy — this is what I call negativity. Social is not simply the opposite, or the other of biological. It involves a relationship to the biological. And the term relationship as such testifies to a constitutive gap, interval, non-immediacy. I am what I am, but never simply directly. One always becomes what one is, and this is to be taken quite literally. It does not mean that at the end of some long and painstaking formative process we finally become what we are: it means that even our most “immediate” identity already involves a becoming in the sense of what one could call with Kant a “transcendental decision” or transcendental choice of character.

I believe psychoanalysis was the first theory to articulate that there was no such thing as a natural sexual identity. This is what Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were all about. Freud constantly emphasized that there was nothing spontaneous or directly self-evident in the sexual identities that we tend to adopt, let’s say at the age of puberty, if not before. This is why he looked closely into so-called infantile sexuality, for which he was very much scorned. There is in fact a whole process of identification, of repression, of desire, and of course, of elected ways of enjoyment that occurs in order for sexuation to take hold. But even when it takes hold, it does not simply do away with these polymorphously perverse drives that for Freud were characteristic of infantile sexuality. They do not simply disappear when we become sexually mature. Yet I don’t see this polymorphous perversity as constituting, in itself, the disruptive or “emancipatory” element of human sexuality. Far from being simply disruptive, it rather functions as a glue in the patchwork of our sexual identity, compensating, as it were, for the absence of both biologically and symbolically pre-established or guaranteed “sexual relation,” to use the Lacanian formula. It is the latter — the nonexistence of an immediate, “guaranteed” sexual relation — that constitutes the disruptive and disorienting element of sexuality.

To sum up, psychoanalytic theory conceives of sexuality as something which fundamentally disorients the human being, not as something which provides him or her with a solid identity. If the notion that sexuality is at the basis of identity has any meaning, it can only have it in this sense: it is at the basis of any identity because it uproots the subject from the immediacy of her being. And this uprooting, this non-immediacy, is the condition of any symbolic identity. In fact, we can use psychoanalysis in order to interrogate identity itself, both conceptually and as a meeting ground for social struggle.

At the same time, psychoanalysis still elaborates a concept of “sexual difference,” which is far from unequivocal. In everyday language, people usually think of it in terms of “difference between man and woman.” But Lacanian psychoanalysis understands it quite differently, as a “split” crossing the subject.

On the abstract or philosophical level, this singular notion of difference is not something radically new or unique. We find it in the history of philosophy, and Deleuze, for example, appropriates it with his distinction between individual differences and individuating difference. Simply put, this would be the distinction between differences that exist between individual entities, and a more radical difference that is involved in generating these individual entities as individual entities, or such as they are. What is unique in psychoanalysis is how it develops this [latter] distinction out of its findings concerning human sexuality and sexuation.

Sexual difference is not simply difference between sexes as individual entities but, more fundamentally, the difference — negativity — involved in the constitution of these individual entities. The problem that many people today have with psychoanalysis arises not simply with this distinction, but with the fact that it stops at two (or at “not (fully)-two,” yet somehow two-related). Why not multiplicity? At the level of logic, the answer is very simple: when dealing with multiplicity you only see individual differences, that is differences between individual entities. You don’t see the negativity or impasse that (possibly) generates and determines them. Whereas with sexual difference you get to see it, in a way: sexuation is the way in which this negativity or difference (the difference that makes a difference, so to say) is inscribed into positive entities by way of one of them not constituting an entity in the same way as the other. Otherwise you’d be back to difference as difference between individual, positive entities.

Obviously, both sexes are part of this sexual antagonism or antagonism of the sexual, but they are not situated at the same level. Feminine position embodies — not in any substantial sense, of course — the very contradiction of sexuality as such. In this sense, it is a difference that creates difference.

And this is also where many objections to psychoanalysis come in. The theory insists on a certain asymmetry of the sexes, and grants emancipatory potential to sexual difference because it brings out this asymmetry as a stumbling block of the symbolic order itself. I’m not speaking about inequality, I’m speaking about the asymmetry of the symbolic, social order, a certain inconsistency that the order struggles with. As it struggles, it produces all kinds of positive images and roles of men and especially of women — what women are, what they should do, how they should behave, et cetera — in order to cope with what is not there, the point of negativity of the symbolic order itself.

You said there was emancipatory potential in this asymmetry of the sexes. What would feminist struggles understood in this way actually look like? What can feminism do with this?

Feminism as social struggle had, and hopefully still has, the capacity to confront the seemingly smooth functioning of the social order with its hidden presuppositions and exclusions. Today we talk a lot about violence (against women, minorities), mostly in terms of specific acts of violence (rape, sexual blackmail), but we talk much less of the so-called systemic violence: the violence involved in, and required for the ordinary peaceful functioning of the given social order. Invisibility of this violence usually springs from the fact that it is engaged in framing injustice as something else than injustice, for example as a natural division of the social space. To fight this, it is not enough to expose this framing as an ideological smoke screen behind which we can see things as they really are. There is not “behind”; the frame is right there for everybody to see. But we don’t see it, because it only frames the picture in a negative way, for example by telling you where it starts. So you need to make this framing appear within the picture itself and problematize it.

And feminist struggle did this. When it started to occur as a political movement, it focused on inscribing the split, as a division between different worlds (public and private, masculine and feminine, et cetera), into one and the same world. Society is not composed of man and women; it is split, and this split is repressed. This is not the same as to say that women are repressed. Women were, are, oppressed, but this is not the same as repression, in the psychoanalytical sense of Verdrängung, of the split inherent in the structuring and curving of social space. Without making this split of negativity part of the picture, significant shifts in the structure cannot really occur. This is what feminism is about; it is not primarily about neutralizing social differences, but about bringing them to light, and attempting to affect the very structuring of the social space. To do something to/with this divide, and not simply to try to climb to the right side of it.

There is still this prevalent liberal picture of the social space: all fundamental social problems have been solved, there are just some remaining pockets of inequality that remain, and we can deal with them by means of identity politics and political correctness. But I think it is quite clear that some fundamental social problems are far from being solved, and we witness growth in the scale of social differences. As a social movement, feminism has to ask the question: on what side does it want to fight its struggles?