Plasticity of Sex

The "plasticity of sex" is Copjec's diagnostic label for the Jungian — and, by extension, Butlerian constructivist — thesis that libido is infinitely malleable, that sexuality has no irreducible kernel and is therefore fully available for cultural re-inscription and resignification. In the argument of Read My Desire, the phrase names a theoretical error rather than a concept Copjec endorses: to posit the plasticity or malleability of sex is to collapse the distinction between drive and need/demand, between the psychoanalytic Real and the symbolic-cultural field. For Freud and Lacan, the drive is defined by its irreducible pressure (Drang) — constant, non-rhythmic, untethered from any natural object — and by its structural relation to the death drive. The drives are precisely what cannot "dance to a cultural tune" because they constitute the irreducible Other of culture, the remainder that language and social signification cannot absorb. To assert plasticity is thus, from within the Lacanian frame, to neutralize the Real dimension of sex and to return libido to the status of a formless biological substrate that culture shapes at will.

The concept therefore marks a precise border in Copjec's polemic: it designates what psychoanalysis must refuse in any constructivist account of sex, including Butler's performativity theory. If jouissance is the satisfaction of the drive "that serves no purpose," if the drive encircles an object it never reaches, and if foreclosure can only return what was never symbolised in the form of the Real, then sex cannot be simply deconstructed or culturally re-performed. The drive's circuit is a structure of repetition grounded in lack — the "two lacks" that Lacan articulates as the condition of sexuality — and this structure forecloses the voluntarist or culturally omnipotent picture implied by the plasticity thesis. The impossibility the drive introduces into language is precisely what makes sex irreducible to signification.

In october-books-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-october, the plasticity of sex appears on p. 220 as a polemical foil within Copjec's broader argument that Lacanian psychoanalysis and Foucauldian/Butlerian historicism are "totally incompatible." Copjec traces the plasticity thesis back to Jung's reformulation of libido as a generalized, culturally adaptive energy — the idea that sex "dances to a cultural tune" — and uses this lineage to argue that constructivism, despite its anti-biologism, reproduces the Jungian gesture of dissolving the drive's irreducibility. The concept thus functions as a symptomatic marker: wherever plasticity is asserted, the Real dimension of sex has been foreclosed in the theoretical move itself.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, "plasticity of sex" is best understood as the negative image of Drive, Jouissance, Repetition, and the Real taken together. The drive's non-adaptability (its constant pressure, its indifference to any given cultural object) is precisely what the plasticity thesis denies. Jouissance, as the body's satisfaction irreducible to the pleasure principle and excluded from the symbolic order, cannot be "resignified." Foreclosure, Lack, and Das Ding reinforce the same limit: the Thing is posited as an "excluded interior" that resists cultural assimilation, and the two lacks constitutive of sexuality are structural, not historical. Sexuation, in Lacan's formulas, names the very impossibility that sex cannot be totalized or made fully coherent — the opposite of a plastic, malleable field. The concept thus lives at the polemical edge of Copjec's corpus intervention: it names the theoretical position that Lacanian sexuation, the Real of the drive, and the logic of lack are collectively designed to refute.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 1994 (p.220)

It is this association that leads Jung to stress the essential plasticity or malleability of the libido: sex dances to a cultural tune.

The phrase "sex dances to a cultural tune" is theoretically loaded because it encapsulates the voluntarist, adaptationist picture of libido that Lacanian drive-theory is structurally designed to preclude: "dances to a tune" figures sex as responsive, rhythmic, and socially orchestrated, whereas the drive is defined by Lacan precisely as having "no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall" — it is constant, arrhythmic, and culturally inassimilable. The word "essential" in "essential plasticity" is equally telling: Jung predicates plasticity as the very essence of libido, which for Copjec is the move that erases the Real and turns sex entirely into a cultural-symbolic effect.