Ganze Sexualstrebung

The ganze Sexualstrebung — literally "the whole/total sexual drive" (Freud's German) — names the hypothetical unity of the sexual drive as a complete, integrated whole. Lacan's theoretical move in Seminar XI is to insist that this totality is structurally inaccessible to the subject: it is nowhere apprehensible in the subject precisely because the subject is constituted through division. The subject does not contain drives as a container holds objects; rather, drives are always already partial, fragmentary, and decoupled from any totalizing genital or reproductive telos. Genitality and love — those functions that might seem to gather sexuality into a unified whole — do not belong to the subject's economy but are constituted in and through the field of the Other, specifically through the structuring operation of the Oedipus complex. The ganze Sexualstrebung is thus not repressed or forgotten but is, in a strict structural sense, never present: it is dispersed across the cultural-symbolic field.

This concept functions as the negative limit-term that makes the theory of partial drives coherent. The drive, as Lacan emphasizes throughout Seminar XI, is always partial — it represents sexuality in the psyche only ever fragmentarily (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory). The ganze Sexualstrebung marks what the partial drive is not: the impossible wholeness against which partiality becomes legible. Because the subject is split ($) through alienation in the signifier, no totalizing sexual representation can be constituted from within the subject's position. What appears as sexuality's unity (love, genitality, the couple) is an effect produced on the side of the Other — specifically through the Oedipal structuring of the symbolic — and not something the subject can appropriate from within itself.

The concept appears once, in jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1 (p. 203), at the heart of Lacan's reformulation of Freudian drive theory. It belongs to the same theoretical movement as his discussion of the partial drive: because every drive is partial, the ganze Sexualstrebung functions as the structural absent totality — the whole that the parts never add up to. This directly extends the canonical concept of the Partial Drive: if every drive is partial and heterogeneous (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory), then the ganze Sexualstrebung names the unified sexual drive that never comes together into a single representation. The concept also articulates with Alienation: because the subject can only exist by entering a signifying chain (the field of the Other) at the cost of its being, no unified sexual selfhood is available from within — the totality of sexuality belongs to the Other's side, specifically the Oedipus Complex, which structures love and genitality as symbolic operations rather than natural drives. It further touches Splitting of the Subject: the split ($) is precisely what prevents any whole sexual drive from being represented in the subject. Finally, the endless sliding of Desire (metonymic, never arriving at a final object) is itself a symptom of the ganze Sexualstrebung's absence — desire moves from object to object in part because no single moment of sexuality can consolidate into a whole.

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.203)

The ganze Sexualstrebung, the representation of the totality of the sexual drive, is not to be found there... for the ganze Sexualstrebung is nowhere apprehensible in the subject.

The phrase "nowhere apprehensible in the subject" is theoretically decisive: it does not say the totality is hidden, repressed, or lost, but that it has no locus within the subject at all — making the ganze Sexualstrebung a structural impossibility rather than a developmental failure, and grounding the partiality of every drive as a necessary and permanent condition of subjectivity.