Equivocity

Equivocity, as it appears in Zupančič's argument in What is Sex?, names the ineliminable ambiguity or double-valuedness that inheres in speech and language at the precise point where language touches the Real. It is not a mere rhetorical imprecision or semantic vagueness to be corrected by more rigorous formulation; rather, equivocity is the productive structural feature of language — particularly lalangue — through which the Real's resistance to symbolization continues to make itself felt. Because no signifier can exhaustively pin down the Real, every formulation carries with it an excess of meaning, a surplus resonance, that escapes the communicative function. This is what Lacan exploits systematically through puns, homophones, and neologisms: the equivocal dimension of the signifier is not noise but the channel through which jouissance seeps into speech.

Crucially, Zupančič presents equivocity not as the opposite of formalization (the matheme, the formula of sexuation) but as its necessary correlate. The theoretical move at p.80 is precisely this: Lacanian formalization does not resolve or overcome equivocity; it formalizes the impasse that equivocity marks. Speech "holds onto" the Real not despite its ambiguity but through it. Equivocity and formalization are therefore two sides of the same engagement with the impossibility of inscribing the sexual non-relation. To oppose them — to demand either pure verbalization or pure formula — would be to misunderstand the structure of the analytic enterprise, which requires both registers simultaneously.

In what-is-sex-alenka-zupancic, equivocity appears at the junction between two of the text's central preoccupations: the status of Lacanian formalization (the matheme, the formulas of sexuation) and the irreducible role of language's material excess. It is positioned as the verbal or lalangue-side of a pairing whose formal side is the matheme — the two are not to be opposed but understood as jointly addressing the impasse of formalization, which is itself the central concept the book develops. This makes equivocity a specification of lalangue: where lalangue names the jouissance-saturated, non-communicative stratum of the mother tongue in general, equivocity singles out the structural double-valuedness of the signifier as the specific mechanism by which lalangue keeps language in contact with the Real.

Equivocity also resonates with the canonical concepts of Contradiction and Language cross-referenced here. Like Contradiction, it names an irreducible tension internal to a structure — not an error to eliminate but the motor of the structure's operation. Like the Lacanian account of Language (in its late, post-structuralist form), equivocity marks the point where language fails to be a neutral medium and instead makes a hole in, or holds onto, the Real. And insofar as formalization (the matheme) is the attempted inscription of the sexual non-relation — itself the site of jouissance and the impasse of sexuation — equivocity is what the matheme must reckon with rather than transcend. The concept thus bridges the verbal and the formal, the lalangue and the matheme, positioning their relationship as one of complementarity within a shared structural impossibility.

What Is Sex?Alenka Zupančič · 2017 (p.80)

Just as in the case of the relationship between equivocity and formalization… we should not oppose formulas and verbalization.

The phrase "we should not oppose" is theoretically decisive: it refuses a standard hierarchy in which the matheme (formalization) overcomes or supersedes the equivocal ambiguity of speech (verbalization), insisting instead that equivocity and formalization are structurally co-implicated — each requires the other as the condition for any analytic grasp of the Real's impasse.