Posthuman Sexuality

Posthuman Sexuality is a concept proposed within a five-stage dialectical schema tracing the historical and structural evolution of sexuality. In Žižek's argument (in slavoj-zizek-sex-and-the-failed-absolute-bloomsbury-academic-2019), sexuality passes through successive modes of actualisation of sexual difference—from asexual biological reproduction, through the institution of the symbolic order and its redoubling of the natural-biological level, to a posthuman endpoint where both levels simultaneously disintegrate. At this terminal stage, biotechnological intervention (scientifically engineered asexual reproduction) cancels sexuality not merely at the biological level but also at the symbolic level, since the symbolic elaboration of sexual difference presupposes biological sexuality as the raw material it works upon and transforms. The collapse of the biological substrate thus takes the symbolic with it, leaving neither natural nor culturally inscribed sexual difference intact.

Theoretically, this represents a limit-point that is not a simple negation but the exhaustion of the dialectical motor itself. Where each prior stage operated through something like Hegelian Aufhebung—preserving biological sexuality while elevating it into symbolic difference—the posthuman stage performs a cancellation without preservation, an Aufhebung that fails to sublate. What had been the structural asymmetry of the two sexed positions (constituted with respect to the phallic function, never with respect to each other) no longer has a substrate in which to inscribe itself. Posthuman Sexuality therefore names not a new form of sexuality but the implosion of the very conditions—biological and symbolic—that made sexuation possible.

Within slavoj-zizek-sex-and-the-failed-absolute-bloomsbury-academic-2019, the concept occupies the terminal position in a five-stage dialectical schema and serves as the reductio ad absurdum of the entire arc: it demonstrates, retroactively, that sexuality was never simply a biological given but always already a dialectical achievement—something that had to be instituted and re-instituted at each stage. The concept is in direct dialogue with Sexuation: the Lacanian formulas of sexuation depend on the impossibility of a direct sexual relationship, and that impossibility is itself grounded in the asymmetrical symbolic inscription of two non-complementary positions with respect to the phallic function. Posthuman Sexuality is the scenario in which that inscription has no medium left to operate in. It also engages Sublation (Aufhebung): each prior dialectical stage preserved and elevated what came before, but the posthuman stage performs a defective or broken sublation—cancellation without elevation—making it the moment where the dialectic exhausts itself. In relation to Symbolic Identity, the concept implies that the gendered symbolic identities produced by the symbolic order (man, woman, in their Lacanian-structural rather than biological sense) would also disintegrate, since those identities are effects of an inscription that posthuman conditions render impossible. Finally, the concept implicitly draws on Dialectics as its organizing logic—the five-stage schema is a dialectical progression—while also marking the point at which dialectics, understood as the movement that generates new modes of actualisation, reaches its own limit and collapses.

Sex and the Failed AbsoluteSlavoj Žižek · 2019 (page unknown)

finally, with the prospect of posthumanity, both levels disintegrate: the scientifically engineered asexual reproduction cancels sexuality

The phrase "both levels disintegrate" is the theoretically loaded hinge: it specifies that the posthuman cancellation is not merely biological (one level) but simultaneously symbolic (the other level), meaning that the loss of the biological substrate of sexuality takes down the entire edifice of symbolic sexual difference with it—a collapse that cannot be recuperated by any further dialectical movement, since both the material and the form of sexuation are abolished together.