Desexualisation of Libido

Desexualisation of Libido names Zupančič's critical reconstruction of a specific theoretical move in Freud's late metapsychology — the gesture by which Freud, in order to resolve the tension between the dualism of Eros and Thanatos and his earlier drive-monism, posits libido as a neutral, undifferentiated primary substance that is only secondarily distributed across the two opposing drive-principles. On this reading, libido becomes a kind of "raw energy" prior to the Eros/Thanatos split, and the sexual character of the drives is demoted: libido is no longer intrinsically and irreducibly sexual but is redescribed as a neutral substrate that the sexual drives happen to share with the death drive. The sexualization of any particular drive is then a secondary qualification rather than a constitutive feature.

Zupančič introduces this concept precisely to mark what she considers an unsatisfactory theoretical detour — a regression toward energetic or quasi-biological monism — that Freud himself entertains before arriving at what she reconstructs as the more radical Lacanian position. Where Freud's desexualizing move produces two complementary, symmetrical principles (life/death) held together by a neutral ground, Lacan's appropriation refuses this symmetry. For Lacan, the death drive is not a separate, complementary principle but the inherent negativity — the gap or void — structurally internal to every partial drive. Objet petit a functions as the "crust" that adheres to this void, making repetition possible without neutralizing the sexual character of the libido. Desexualisation of Libido is thus a concept defined negatively in Zupančič's argument: it is the move Lacanian theory does not make.

In what-is-sex-alenka-zupancic (p. 109), Desexualisation of Libido belongs to Zupančič's close reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a site of theoretical instability in Freud. The concept sits at the pivot point between three positions Freud successively occupies: drive-monism (libido = sexual energy), Eros/Thanatos dualism, and a renewed monism in which libido is desexualized into a neutral common ground for both principles. Zupančič identifies this third moment as a conceptual concession — it achieves theoretical unity only by evacuating what is most distinctive about the sexual.

This positions the concept as a foil for the cross-referenced canonical cluster. Against Desexualisation of Libido, the Lacanian death drive (see Death Drive) is not a separate principle anchored in neutral energy but the structural negativity — the Gap — immanent to every Partial Drive and to every circulation of the Drive as such. The concept also illuminates the stakes of Monism of Antagonism: where desexualization produces a monism of a neutral substrate with two complementary faces, Zupančič's preferred monism is one of irreducible antagonism — a unity constituted by its own internal split rather than by a common neutral ground. Objet petit a and the Pleasure Principle complete the picture: the void around which each drive loops is not neutralized libidinal energy but the gap that objet a encrusts, generating repetition within — not despite — the sexual economy. Desexualisation of Libido is thus both a historical marker of a Freudian impasse and a negative definition of the Lacanian solution Zupančič advocates.

What Is Sex?Alenka Zupančič · 2017 (p.109)

this desexualization of the libido in terms of a neutral primary substance, subsequently divided between different drives which are all part of this 'great whole' called the libido, and basically constituting two (complementary) principles.

The phrase "neutral primary substance" is theoretically loaded because it identifies the precise ontological move Zupančič contests: libido is reclassified from an inherently sexual force into a generic energetic substrate, which allows the life and death drives to be cast as merely "complementary" rather than antagonistic. The word "complementary" is equally significant — complementarity implies a symmetry and mutual completion that forecloses the irreducible gap (antagonism) Zupančič, following Lacan, insists must remain at the heart of the drive economy.