Table Of Content

What Is Sex? Contents Contents Short Circuits Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič, and Slavoj Žižek, editors The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj Žižek The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, by Alenka Zupančič Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud, by Jerry Aline Flieger Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, by Alexei Monroe The Parallax View, by Slavoj Žižek A Voice and Nothing More, by Mladen Dolar Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, by Lorenzo Chiesa The Odd One In: On Comedy, by Alenka Zupančič The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? by Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, edited by Creston Davis Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology, by André Nusselder Lacan at the Scene, by Henry Bond Laughter: Notes on a Passion, by Anca Parvulescu All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity, by Andrew Cutrofello The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis, by Aaron Schuster The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan, by Lorenzo Chiesa What Is Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič What Is Sex? Alenka Zupančič The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Joanna and Copperplate by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-262-53413-0 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Series Foreword vii INTRODUCTION 1 1 IT’S GETTING STRANGE IN HERE … 5 Did Somebody Say Sex? 5 Where Do Adults Come From? 8 Christianity and Polymorphous Perversity 12 2 … AND EVEN STRANGER OUT THERE 21 The Quandary of the Relation 21 The Anti-Sexus 25 “The Invisible ‘Handjob’ of the Market” 30 3 CONTRADICTIONS THAT MATTER 35 Sex or Gender? 35 Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology 44 Je te m’athème … moi non plus 62 s t n e 4 OBJECT-DISORIENTED ONTOLOGY 73 t n Realism in Psychoanalysis 73 o C Human, Animal 84 Death Drive I: Freud 94 Trauma outside Experience 106 Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze 110 Being, Event, and Its Consequences: Lacan and Badiou 128 CONCLUSION: FROM ADAM’S NAVEL TO DREAM’S NAVEL 141 Notes 145 Bibliography 151 vi Series Foreword A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network— faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by Series Foreword the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short-circuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy, that is to say, Series Foreword economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the highest ethical notions through the lens of the uncon- scious libidinal economy). What such a reading achieves is not a simple “desublimation,” a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its “unthought,” its disavowed presuppositions and consequences. And this is what “Short Circuits” wants to do, again and again. The under- lying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged instrument of such an approach, whose purpose is to illuminate a standard text or ideological formation, making it readable in a totally new way—the long history of Lacanian interventions in philosophy, religion, the arts (from the visual arts to the cinema, music, and literature), ideology, and politics jus- tifies this premise. This, then, is not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, d r o w but a series of “connections in the Freudian field”—of short Lacanian inter- e r ventions in art, philosophy, theology, and ideology. o F “Short Circuits” intends to revive a practice of reading which confronts a s e classic text, author, or notion with its own hidden presuppositions, and thus i r reveals its disavowed truth. The basic criterion for the texts that will be pub- e S lished is that they effectuate such a theoretical short circuit. After reading a book in this series, the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing— side of something he or she knew all the time. Slavoj Žižek viii Introduction “For the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking.” This is the example that Lacan comes up with to illustrate the claim that sublimation is satisfaction of the drive, without repression. We usually tend to think of sublimation in terms of a substitute satisfaction: instead of “fucking,” I engage in talking (writing, painting, praying …)—this way I get another kind of satisfaction to replace the “missing” one. Sublimations are substitute satisfactions for a missing sexual satisfaction. The point that Lacanian psychoanalysis makes, Introduction however, is more paradoxical: the activity is different, yet the satisfaction is exactly the same. In other words, the point is not to explain the satisfaction in talking by referring to its “sexual origin.” The point is that the satisfaction in talking is itself “sexual.” And this is precisely what forces us to open the question of the very nature and status of sexuality in a radical way. Marx Introduction famously wrote that “human anatomy contains the key to the anatomy of the ape” (and not, perhaps, the other way around). In a similar way, we should insist that the satisfaction in talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around), or simply a key to sexuality and its inherent contradictions. Hence the simple (and yet the most difficult) question that ori- ents this book: What is sex? The way in which I propose to approach the question of sexuality is to consider it a properly philosophical problem of psychoanalysis—with everything that resonates with this term, starting with ontology, logic, and the theory of the subject. Psychoanalysis (in its Freudo-Lacanian lineage) has been, among other things, a very powerful conceptual invention, with direct and significant resonances in philosophy. The encounter between philosophy and psychoanalysis has turned out to be one of the most productive construction sites in contemporary philosophy. It has produced some impressive new and original readings of classical philosophers and of classical philosophical