Sexual Non-Relation

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (79)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.158

   *Signifying Contributions*

   Theoretical move: Through detailed clinical reconstruction of a boot fetish, Fink demonstrates that the fetish object is constituted through a dense web of overdetermined signifiers that simultaneously mark and collapse sexual difference, functioning as a condensation of ambiguous sexual meaning rather than a simple substitute for a missing object.

   a lack of difference between the sexes, since he too had a butt... the boot became, for W, a marker of sexual difference and nondifference

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.167

   BOTH/AND LOGIC IN A CASE OF FETISHISM

   Theoretical move: The passage uses a clinical case to demonstrate how a fetish object (fabric/hem) functions as a plug for the lack in the (m)Other, where the symptom of imaginary stabbing and its fetishistic alleviation are shown to be structurally organized around the subject's encounter with sexual difference and the mother's desire.

   'A sperm in an egg is like a dagger in my heart,' the sperm and the egg being likely representatives here of sexual difference.

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.177

   INTER(OED)DICTIONS

   Theoretical move: This clinical vignette (from Bruce Fink's case presentation of "Slater") traces the formation of a fetishistic fixation on the female buttocks, situating it at the intersection of anatomical ambiguity around sexual difference, paternal transmission of a scopophilic/sadistic enjoyment, and the compulsive logic of fantasy—illustrating how a symptom organizes itself around a specific object that both screens and gestures toward an unresolved question about sexual difference.

   drawings in which he could not tell whether the penis in a particular picture belonged to the man or the woman...nor to whom belonged the scrotum in the picture

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.230

   **Surplus Sexuality: Freud's Early Work on Hysteria and Obsession**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurotic structure (hysteria vs. obsession) originates in a primordial traumatic encounter with surplus sexuality, and that the clinical presentations of each neurosis paradoxically invert the expected reactions to that encounter; it then reformulates the distinction in terms of three registers—love, desire, and jouissance—anchored by the assertion that love covers over the sexual non-relation.

   while there is such a thing as a love relationship, there is no such thing as a sexual relationship. And it seems quite likely that hysterics and obsessive compulsives rely on love in different ways to cover over that non-relationship.

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.243

   **What is love, then?**

   Theoretical move: Love is theorized as a mediator between demand, desire, and drive: while these three registers diverge and do not share the same object, love is what allows jouissance (drive-satisfaction) to become available with the person one desires, providing imperfect but potentially fulfilling alignment between the registers.

   Lacan never says there can be a perfect harmony between demand, desire, and drive, but maybe, through love, we can find something fulfilling enough.

6. #06

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.81

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Harmony Between the Sexes?**

   Theoretical move: Lacan's denial of the sexual relation is the theoretical fulcrum here: the fantasy of a primordial harmony between the sexes—rooted in ancient cosmology and surviving in post-Freudian genital-stage theories—distorts psychoanalytic theory and practice, and eliminating it is constitutive of the ethics of psychoanalysis. The Newtonian/Keplerian displacement of the sphere by the ellipse with an empty focus serves as Lacan's epistemological analogue for the decentering psychoanalysis demands but consistently fails to sustain.

   Lacan emphatically denies that there is such a thing; for an explanation of what he means by that see Fink, 1995a

7. #07

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.98

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Semblance**

   Theoretical move: Fink maps Lacan's concept of semblance across the three registers (Imaginary/Symbolic/Real) and argues that all discourse is constituted by semblance, while psychoanalysis distinguishes itself by attending to the truth of the unconscious that semblance systematically excludes — with the Name-of-the-Father and the symptom serving as paradigm cases of signs whose referent remains unknown.

   'there's no such thing as a sexual relationship'… The latter claim appears in this seminar for the first time in Lacan's work

8. #08

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.102

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Phallus**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's concept of the phallus is not a biological organ but the structural operator of linguistic mediation itself — simultaneously the signifier of desire, the bar between signifier and signified, the obstacle to any sexual relationship, and ultimately identical with semblance — such that language as a whole possesses only one signification (the phallus), and all speech is motivated by the non-existence of the sexual relation.

   there is no such thing as a sexual relationship because 'The sexual relationship is speech itself' (Seminar XVIII, p. 83)

9. #09

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.111

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Notes**

   Theoretical move: This is a notes/endnotes passage providing bibliographic and textual references that anchor several theoretical claims (the subject divided in fantasy, sexual non-relation, language as metaphor/metonymy) without itself advancing a sustained theoretical argument.

   There is no sexual relationship because there is 'no way in which to write it currently'

10. #10

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.151

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > A Preliminary Exploration

    Theoretical move: The passage sets up a comparative inquiry into theories of love across Western (Greek and Catholic) and psychoanalytic (Freud and Lacan) traditions, using Lacan's equation of Eros with libido as a theoretical bridge, while foregrounding that the sexual non-relation ("things do not work between man and woman") motivates the entire inquiry.

    The ultimate truth is that things do not work between man and woman.

11. #11

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.184

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Relations with Women**

    Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Wesley, Fink demonstrates how the absence of a gap/lack in the (m)Other produces a subject unable to locate female sexuality, desire, or separation, and how the mother's persistent desire for something beyond the child (rather than paternal intervention) is what partially enables separation and forestalls psychosis.

    women's bodies are impossible . . . there is this flat, enormous pubic area—the most outrageous thing I've ever seen!

12. #12

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.256

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Notes**

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of clinical and theoretical endnotes to a case study chapter, touching on Lacanian concepts such as the sexual non-relation underlying trauma, masochism's relation to the superego and Oedipus complex, and the analyst's desire as an alternative to legalistic conditions in treatment — but is primarily footnote material with limited standalone theoretical development.

    The main reason Lacan seems to have put the words trou (hole) and trauma together in that context has to do with the fact that 'there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.'

13. #13

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.157

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > *"On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" (1957b)*

    Theoretical move: By closely reading Freud's 1912 essay on debasement alongside his 1921 text on aim-inhibited drives, Fink argues that the fusion/split of love and desire is structurally constitutive of Eros rather than accidental, anticipating Lacan's claims about the sexual non-relation and courtly love; moreover, Freud's 1921 revision retroactively reconstitutes affectionate love as secondary (the product of prohibition/repression), not primary, which reframes idealization and sublimation as effects of the failure of satisfaction.

    This might be viewed as a forerunner of Lacan's infamous and oft-repeated claim that 'there's no such thing as a sexual relationship'

14. #14

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.228

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Beyond the Oedipal Triangle**

    Theoretical move: By reading the "Freud Man" case through Lacan's formula that "fantasy is the Other's desire," Fink argues that the analysand's static standoff fantasy stages his interpretation of his mother's unknowable (castrating) desire, locating the clinical structure of neurotic fantasy at the intersection of the preoedipal and the Oedipal and showing how identification with the father functions as a defence against — rather than resolution of — that fundamental fantasy.

    As long as he declared nothing and she declared nothing, he did not risk being rejected and could simply enjoy being looked at or noticed by her

15. #15

    Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.47

    BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > FOUR LACANIAN TAKES TO RETHINK THE TRANS EXPERIENCE > REALNESS

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's Real—irreducible to both the Symbolic and the Imaginary, tied to trauma, foreclosure, repetition, and the sexual non-relation—offers a more rigorous framework than either Heidegger's unconcealment or Butler's performativity for understanding trans "realness," insofar as the Real names the constitutive impossibility (of full symbolization, of sexual complementarity) that underpins both gender identity and psychic structure.

    Lacan's assertion that 'there is no such thing as a sexual relation' does not deny the existence of sexual acts or relationships… but points to the fundamental lack of complementarity in human sexuality.

16. #16

    Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.66

    BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > FOUR LACANIAN TAKES TO RETHINK THE TRANS EXPERIENCE > BEING REAL

    Theoretical move: Through two clinical cases (Miranda and Lynn), the passage argues that the sinthome and the logic of disavowal—rather than repression or denial—structure the trans subject's relation to desire, jouissance, and the Sexual Non-Relation: Lynn's performed orgasms stage an impossible fantasy of sexual complementarity precisely as a defiance of castration and the fundamental gap at the heart of sexuality.

    Could this be her way of denying Lacan's provocative assertion that 'the sexual relationship does not cease not being written'? By faking her orgasms, was she attempting to assert the opposite: that there is, in fact, such a thing as a sexual relationship?

17. #17

    Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.85

    BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > FOUR LACANIAN TAKES TO RETHINK THE TRANS EXPERIENCE > BEAUTY

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's reading of Schreber's psychosis to argue that feminization functions as a structural stabilization strategy rather than an arbitrary fantasy, then extends this logic to theorize the transgender experience as a radical instance of "plastic" self-fashioning that unsettles fixed identity categories.

    to support jouissance while securing a sexual rapport that does not exist.

18. #18

    Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.96

    BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > FOUR LACANIAN TAKES TO RETHINK THE TRANS EXPERIENCE > LAUGHTER

    Theoretical move: The passage traces a genealogy of Democritus's laughter to argue that his neologism *den* ("less than nothing") anticipates Lacan's objet petit a — an atom of non-negating negation that is neither something nor nothing — and then uses this theoretical framework to analyse racism as a fantasy in which the ethnic Other is figured as a thief of jouissance.

    Lacan discusses this passage the jouissance of the body in the absence of the sexual rapport, which led Christian Fierens (2002) to interpret the 'clandestine destiny of the clam' as the poinçon, the diamond, that is at the center of Lacan's matheme of the formula of fantasy.

19. #19

    Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.104

    BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > FOUR LACANIAN TAKES TO RETHINK THE TRANS EXPERIENCE > SWERVE

    Theoretical move: Gherovici extends Lacan's sinthome theory by reading it through the materialist figure of the *clinamen* (Lucretius's atomic swerve), arguing that both Joyce's art and transgender identity-transformations function as creative re-knotting of the Borromean registers—thereby reframing trans symptoms as potential sinthomes rather than pathologies, and grounding sexual positioning itself (Lacan's "sinthome-he/she") in the irreducible Sexual Non-Relation.

    Lacan's assertion that 'there is no such thing as a sexual rapport' emerges from the understanding that sexual drive is fragmented, deriving jouissance from asymmetrical partial objects, which ultimately fosters a disconnect between sexual partners.

20. #20

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_181"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0205"></span>**sexual difference**

    Theoretical move: Sexual difference cannot be grounded in anatomy or biology but is constituted by a fundamental dissymmetry in the signifier: the phallus is the only sexual signifier with no feminine equivalent, so sexual positions (masculine/feminine) are symbolic constructions determined by one's relation to the phallus and formalised through the formulae of sexuation, with the result that no fully 'finished' sexual identity is achievable and the sexual relationship is structurally impossible.

    each side represents a radically different way in which the SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP can misfire (S20, 53–4)

21. #21

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_ncx_77"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_page_0096"></span>***G***

    Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary traces the theoretical development of several key Lacanian concepts—gap, gaze, genital stage, gestalt, and graph of desire—showing how Lacan progressively distinguishes his positions from Freudian ego-psychology, Sartrean phenomenology, and object-relations theory through a consistent emphasis on constitutive division, the non-relation, and the structured duplicity of desire.

    in the relation between man and woman…a gap always remains open' (S4, 374). This anticipates Lacan's later remarks on the non-existence of the SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP.

22. #22

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part06.xhtml_ncx_5"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part06.xhtml_page_0010"></span>***Preface***

    Theoretical move: This preface to an introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis establishes its methodological framework: Lacan's discourse constitutes a unique, topologically structured language whose terms are mutually defining, and the dictionary form—itself a synchronic, self-referential, metonymic system—is the appropriate vehicle for exploring it, while the preface also theorises the dangers of ignoring the diachronic evolution of Lacan's concepts.

    to refer to a Lacanian formula, if there is no point of entry, there can be no sexual relationship

23. #23

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_182"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0208"></span>**sexual relationship**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically unpacks Lacan's formula 'there is no sexual relationship' as condensing six distinct theoretical points about sexual difference: the mediating role of language, the asymmetry of the symbolic order (one signifier, the phallus), the impossibility of harmony between the sexes, the partiality of the drive's object, the woman's reduction to the mother function, and the opposition of sex to meaning/relation in the real.

    il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel… The formula might be better rendered 'There is no relation between the sexes', thus emphasising that it is not primarily the act of sexual intercourse that Lacan is referring to but the question of the relation between the masculine sexual position and the feminine sexual position.

24. #24

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_111"></span>**love**

    Theoretical move: Love is constituted as an imaginary, narcissistic, and fundamentally deceptive phenomenon whose relationship to transference, desire, and demand reveals both its structural opposition to and its entanglement with desire — love as metaphor versus desire as metonymy — while simultaneously functioning as an illusory substitute for the absent sexual relation.

    Love is is an illusory fantasy of fusion with the beloved which makes up for the absence of any SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP (S20, 44); this is especially clear in the asexual concept of courtly love

25. #25

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.254

    **13** > <span id="page-248-0"></span>**Conclusion Taking It to the Dogs: Actaeon's Revenge**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the continuity and evolution of Lacan's "return to Freud" from "The Freudian Thing" (1955) through the early 1970s seminars, arguing that while Lacan jettisons his mid-1950s Heideggerianism (recasting ontology as "hontology"), he remains faithful to Freudian truth-as-unconscious, now reframed through the mythological figures of Diana and Actaeon as condensations of das Ding, the sexual non-rapport, jouissance, and the half-said.

    the concept-theme of the sexual non-rapport (à la "Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" [there is no sexual relationship]) eventually comes to occupy center stage in the later Lacan's theorizations of the 1970s especially.

26. #26

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.636

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > *VII. Misrecognitions and Biases*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that feminine sexuality cannot be reduced to phallic mediation or developmental schemas (Jones, Fenichel), but must be understood through the structural interplay of castration, the Other's desire, masquerade, and the specific position of women with respect to the object—culminating in the claim that female homosexuality reveals desire itself as structured around a sublation of the object and a jouissance contiguous with itself rather than subordinated to the phallic signifier.

    female sexuality appears, instead, as the effort of a jouissance enveloped in its own contiguity... in order to be realised in competition with the desire that castration liberates in the male in giving him the phallus as its signifier.

27. #27

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.737

    The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > Position of the Unconscious ⁸²⁹

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lamella (libido as organ) is the structural ground of the partial drive, establishing that sexuality can only ever be represented in the subject through partial drives because there is no signifier capable of representing sexual bipolarity — the subject's sexed being is constitutively split between the living organism and the locus of the Other, making the sexual non-relation a structural necessity.

    there is nothing in his dialectic that represents the bipolarity of sex apart from activity and passivity, that is, a drive versus outside-action polarity, which is altogether unfit to represent the true basis of that bipolarity.

28. #28

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.376

    The Freudian Thing > *The Thing's Order* > *The Locus of Speech*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured by symbolic (not imaginary) laws, that the desire for recognition governs the desire to be recognized via the signifier, and that sexual desire's privileged position in the unconscious follows directly from the primacy of symbolic exchange (kinship/marriage laws) over imaginary reminiscence — with the master/slave dialectic accounting for why hunger, unlike sexual desire, finds no representation in the unconscious.

    it is essentially on sexual relations [liaison]—by regulating them according to the law of preferential marriage alliances and forbidden relations—that the first combinatory for exchanges of women between family lines relies

29. #29

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no sexual relation by showing that the field between the small o (objet petit a) and the big Other is structured as a hole — not a unifying One — and that identification (ego ideal/ideal ego) operates in this gap; the Oedipus myth is then mobilised to demonstrate that jouissance itself is constitutively bound to rottenness and the hole, not to any unitive fullness.

    I called it ridiculous, this relation that people speak about as something which would have the slightest consistency when it is sex that is at stake

30. #30

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.181

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the golden number (φ) as a mathematical support to argue that sublimation cannot achieve a perfect 'One' or sexual relation—a gap always remains between even and odd power series—and then leverages this to attack the psychoanalytic myth of primary narcissism and the 'unitive' fantasy, asserting that the subject is 'measured by sex' as by a unit, not fused with it, and that no analytic sense can be given to 'masculine' or 'feminine' as signifiers.

    I can make understood, in just the right way, that there is no sexual act, which means, there is no act at a certain level and this indeed is the reason why we have to search out how it is constituted

31. #31

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.194

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "sexual relation" does not exist as a consistent dyadic unity — it is structurally a hole or gap between the small o and the big Other — and uses the cauldron metaphor (from Freud's Witz) to indict analytic theory for triply refusing to acknowledge this void; the Oedipus myth is recruited to demonstrate that accessing full jouissance covers over a foundational rottenness that truth cannot tolerate.

    I called it ridiculous, this relation that people speak about as something which would have the slightest consistency when it is sex that is at stake ... no one has ever dared to say that if A is the husband of B, then B is the wife of A.

32. #32

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.173

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the paradox that "man and woman have nothing to do with one another" as a strictly logical consequence of psychoanalytic doctrine—not a naturalist scandal—while simultaneously arguing that the psychoanalytic act culminates in the analysand rejecting the analyst as objet petit a (the "o-object"), a formulation he notes has gone entirely uncontested.

    Textually, they have nothing to do together. It is annoying that I cannot teach this without it giving rise to scandal. So then I do not teach it, I withdraw it.

33. #33

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.173

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the impossibility of the statement "I am not" to anchor the split subject of the unconscious, then extends this logical paradox to the claim that "man and woman have nothing to do with one another" — not as naturalist provocation but as a structural consequence of desire being constructed through the unconscious, with the psychoanalytic act defined as the analyst being rejected like the objet petit a at the end of analysis.

    Textually, they have nothing to do together... It is precisely because they have nothing to do with one another that the psychoanalyst has something to do with this affair.

34. #34

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.354

    Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally linked to the field of the big Other as the locus of knowledge, and that the objet petit a — as cause of desire and division of the subject — is what psychoanalysis reveals within that field; he further advances that there is no sexual relationship (logically definable), only the sexual act, which alone produces what would otherwise be an impossible relation.

    there is not, in the precise sense of the word relationship, in the sense where sexual relationship would be a relation that is logically definable, there is precisely none... Sexual relationship, what is usually called by this name, can only be made by an act.

35. #35

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.210

    Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 > Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation, as Freud formulates it, is a mode of drive satisfaction that operates *with* the drive (mit dem Trieb) rather than through repression, and that its satisfaction is achieved precisely by being goal-inhibited (zielgehemmt) — eliding the sexual goal while still satisfying the drive. This pivot is used to distinguish sublimation structurally from repression and to set up the question of what exactly is satisfied when the drive bypasses its sexual goal. The passage also stages a critical dialogue with Deleuze's appropriation of Lacanian concepts, particularly around the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.

    an anthill like a hive is entirely centred around the realisation of what is involved in the sexual relationship. It is very precisely in the measure that these societies are different from ours, that they take on the form of a fixedness which proves the non-presence of the signifier.

36. #36

    Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.14

    The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that there is no sexual relationship in the speaking being—not as mere wordplay, but as a structural impossibility grounded in the constitutive failure of jouissance and the irreducibility of lack at the centre of sexuality—while positioning the psychoanalyst's knowledge as the knowledge of impotence, distinct from both scientific and religious discourses.

    there is a thesis: there is no sexual relationship - I am talking about the speaking being.

37. #37

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.89

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 9 January 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that ontology is a product of the accentuation of the copula "to be" within philosophical/master discourse, that there is no pre-discursive reality (all reality is grounded in discourse), and that the sexual relationship cannot be written — a claim sustained by the bar in the Saussurean algorithm and the letter as a radical effect of discourse.

    the sexual relationship cannot be written. This is what that means, or more exactly that everything that is written is conditioned in such a way that it starts from the fact that it will be forever impossible to write the sexual relationship as such.

38. #38

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.165

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 10: Tuesday 15 April 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot provides the only adequate structural account of desire, the Symbolic, and the Name-of-the-Father: the Symbolic consists precisely in the hole it makes, the prohibition of incest is not historical but structural (identical with that hole), and the Name-of-the-Father is the Father-as-naming that knotted through that hole – a logic that admits an indefinite plurality of Names-of-the-Father, each resting on one hole that communicates consistency to all the others.

    there is a further step to be taken otherwise we comprehend nothing about the link of this castration with the prohibition of incest. It is to see that the link is what I call the sexual non-relationship.

39. #39

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.74

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 5: Tuesday 11 February 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses an anecdotal tour through Nice, Strasbourg, London, and his reading of Strachey's *Queen Victoria* to advance the theoretical claim that the sexual non-relationship is confirmed by historical-biographical evidence, while elaborating the resistance of different *lalangues* to the unconscious and reiterating that "The woman does not exist" but that women (as not-all) have a privileged, unmeasured relation to liberty and to the unconscious.

    this truth that I had found without it, in short, this truth of the sexual non-relationship

40. #40

    Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.64

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976** > W w e W.

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's riddle (the fox burying his grandmother) as an exemplar of the analytic response — necessarily "stupid" relative to the poem-like symptom — and argues that meaning is produced by suturing/splicing the Imaginary to the Symbolic, while simultaneously splicing the sinthome to the parasitic Real of enjoyment; the Borromean knot is the structural model for this therapeutic operation.

    the symptom constituted by the deficiency proper to the sexual relationship... Nonrelationship is indeed the following, it is that there is truly no reason why he should hold One woman among others to be his woman

41. #41

    Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.16

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday 20 December 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both analytic speech and analytic intervention are fundamentally acts of writing/equivocation rather than saying, and develops a topological identification of fantasy with the torus within the Borromean knot structure, mapping three coupled pairs (drive–inhibition, pleasure principle–unconscious, Real–fantasy) onto a 'six-fold torus'; simultaneously, he reframes the end of analysis as recognising what one is captive of (the sinthome), and characterises science, history, and psychoanalysis itself as forms of poetry rooted in fantasy.

    There is no sexual relationship, certainly, except between phantasies and the phantasy is to be noted with the accent that I gave it when I remarked that geometry … is woven by phantasies.

42. #42

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.92

    Tragedy and Pathos > Excessive Otherness

    Theoretical move: Comedy and horror share the same structural pairing of lack and excess, but differ in whether that coincidence is internal (comedy: the lacking subject IS the excessive being) or external (horror: the lacking subject CONFRONTS excess in an alien other); comedy goes further than horror by revealing that the monster is identical with the victimized subject, thereby genuinely threatening the subject rather than letting it off the hook.

    Frank performs what appears to be a sexual act— and yet it is a failed sexual act. Frank's sexual assault on Dorothy is excessive, but it shows that he cannot perform sexually.

43. #43

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.196

    Notes > Introduction

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section for the Introduction is largely non-substantive bibliographic and supplementary material, but it does deploy several theoretically load-bearing moves: invoking Hegel's "Sense Certainty" to argue that particularity cannot be addressed without universality (grounding the necessity of theorizing comedy), citing Badiou, Freud, and Lacan on jokes, and noting that comedy's power depends on the narrative/norm it transgresses.

    a typically ideological genre like that of the screwball comedy (which works to reconcile sexual antagonism through the production of the romantic couple).

44. #44

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.197

    Notes > Chapter 1

    Theoretical move: These endnotes to Chapter 1 elaborate the theoretical architecture of the main text: desire perpetuates rather than remedies incompleteness; the subject of the signifier is structurally distinct from the animal in its relation to excess and jouissance; contemporary capitalism commands enjoyment while punishing its excess; and the signifier's inherent excessiveness resists all attempts at logical or linguistic containment.

    The divide between sex and reproduction is fully evident in the very approach that subjects take toward sex.

45. #45

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.80

    POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT AS RITUAL RESCUE FROM PHOBIA AND PSYCHOSIS > THE FUNDAMENTAL WORK OF MARY DOUGLAS

    Theoretical move: Kristeva, engaging critically with Mary Douglas and structural anthropology, argues that abjection is a universal, subjective-symbolic phenomenon coextensive with the social-symbolic order, proposing that defilement rituals function as collective elaborations of the same border-logic that constitutes the speaking subject — thereby requiring Lacanian symbolic order and subjective dynamics to supplement (and correct) purely syntactic anthropological accounts.

    lacking a central authoritarian power that would settle the definitive supremacy of one sex—or lacking a legal establishment that would balance the prerogatives of both sexes—two powers attempted to share out society

46. #46

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.94

    POWERS OF HORROR > HIERARCHY AND NONVIOLENCE

    Theoretical move: Kristeva reads the two Oedipus plays as marking a transition in the logic of abjection: from a mythico-ritual economy of spatial exclusion and purification (*Oedipus the King* / pharmakos) to a symbolic-contractual assumption of abjection as the constitutive not-known of the mortal speaking being (*Oedipus at Colonus*), thereby locating the ground of abjection in sexual difference and the symbolic order rather than in any archetype of purity.

    the speaking being has no space of his own but stands on a fragile threshold as if stranded on account of an impossible demarcation

47. #47

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.186

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's Seminar VII account of beauty and *pudeur* (shame) as parallel defensive veils over the Real of death-tinged sexuality to argue that Lacanian metapsychology implicitly allows for unconscious affect, a position the passage then bridges to Damasio's neuroscientific three-stage model (nonconscious emotion → nonconscious feeling → conscious feeling) as a framework for resolving Lacan's underdeveloped affect theory.

    *pudeur* as a modest restraint shields one from the truth that '*il n*'*y a pas de rapport sexuel.*'

48. #48

    The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.113

    ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > The Successful Sexua l Relationship

    Theoretical move: Fantasy's fundamental function is to produce the illusion of a successful sexual relationship, compensating for the structural impossibility of the sexual relation that results from insertion into language; yet this same function constitutes fantasy's political danger by veiling the contradictions of the symbolic order, even as Lynch's films exploit fantasy's capacity to expose the points where that order breaks down.

    There is no sexual relationship because the categories 'male' and 'female' indicate a structural impasse... On the terrain of fantasy, within the narrative that it constructs, the impossible sexual relationship becomes possible.

49. #49

    The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.124

    <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **"There's no Such Thing** as a **Sexual Relationship"**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's formula "there's no such thing as a sexual relationship" is grounded in the claim that masculinity and femininity are defined separately and differently with respect to the symbolic order—not in relation to each other—such that each sex has a distinct mode of alienation by language and a distinct form of jouissance, making any direct complementary relation between them structurally impossible.

    there's no such thing as a sexual relationship ('il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel')... each sex is defined separately with respect to a third term. Thus there is only a nonrelationship, an absence of any conceivable direct relationship between the sexes.

50. #50

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.146

    Structural Dynamics and Temporality of the Comical

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that tragedy and comedy are not different attitudes toward the same configuration of discrepancy but rather two standpoints *within* it: tragedy stands at the point of demand (articulating discrepancy as desire's constitutive non-satisfaction), while comedy stands at the point of satisfaction (articulating discrepancy as jouissance/surplus-satisfaction), and this difference in standpoint entails a reversal of temporal sequence in which satisfaction precedes and overtakes demand rather than trailing after it.

    What happens in a love encounter is not simply that the sexual nonrelation is momentarily suspended with an unexpected emergence of a (possible) relation... it is that the nonrelation itself suddenly emerges as a mode (as well as the condition) of a relation.

51. #51

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.320

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that global capitalism is uniquely "worldless" — it dissolves every stable representational frame rather than founding one — and this creates a fundamental aporia for Badiouian emancipatory politics (which traditionally intervenes from within a world's symptomal excess), forcing a parallax reading of the economy/politics non-relation as the key structural problem for any leftist project today.

    if, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no 'meta-language' enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint

52. #52

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.40

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Master-Signifier operates as a reflexive "quilting point" that transforms disorder into order without adding positive content, and that objet petit a functions as the "transcendental scheme" of fantasy mediating between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of objects in reality — thereby explaining how ideology schematizes desire and hegemonizes the void left by the primordially repressed binary signifier.

    The fact that 'there is no sexual relationship' means precisely that the secondary signifier (that of the Woman) is 'primordially repressed,' and what we get in the place of this repression... is the multitude of 'returns of the repressed'

53. #53

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.26

    The Kantian Parallax

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues, via Karatani's reading of Kant, that the "parallax view" names an irreducible structural gap between positions that cannot be synthesized or reduced; he then radicalises this by showing that transcendental subjectivity, freedom, and ontological difference all inhabit precisely this "third space" between phenomenal and noumenal—a space structurally homologous to the Lacanian Real as pure antagonism and to the Not-all logic of sexuation.

    Apropos of 'telling all the truth,' we should again apply the Lacanian paradoxes of the non-All; that is to say, we should strictly oppose two cases. Because truth is in itself non-all, inconsistent, 'antagonistic,' every telling of 'all the Truth' has to rely on an exception

54. #54

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.158

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the parallax structure—a purely formal minimal difference that inscribes the subject's gaze into the perceived object—is the shared logic of aesthetics (Richter, Pizarnik, Kalevala), psychoanalytic topology (objet petit a, death drive, sublimation), and political philosophy (Hegel's 'compromise' with post-Thermidorian reality vs. Hölderlin's Beautiful Soul), thereby grounding the concept of 'Good as the absence of Evil' and of creative silence in a unified parallactic ontology.

    this, of course, does not mean that there is a sexual relationship between Something and Nothing, but, precisely, its failure: this lovemaking is failed.

55. #55

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.132

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys the "parallax view" as a structural principle—no common denominator can resolve the split between incommensurable perspectives (First World/Third World, Milly/Densher/Kate)—and uses this to argue that genuine ethical acts consist not in symbolic reconciliation or hysterical clinging to fantasy, but in a traversal of fantasy that breaks the deadlock from within, as exemplified by Kate's refusal in James and Paul's self-sacrifice in Iñárritu.

    far from indicating some kind of 'feminine' indecision and passivity, Hyacinth's deadlock signals precisely his inability to perform a properly feminine act. The negative feminine gesture would be the only way to break out of this deadlock

56. #56

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.73

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > A Boy Meets the Lady

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the Bobby Peru scene from Lynch's *Wild at Heart* as a pivot to theorize the structure of the empty gesture, desire vs. want, and the "wild analyst" figure, then extends the analysis through Heidegger's reading of Trakl to argue that sexual difference is not between two sexes but between the asexual and the sexual — with the discordant *Geschlecht* being irreducibly feminine, not neutral — making the presexual "undead boy" a figure of Evil and the Real of antagonism.

    This, then, is Heidegger's version of 'there is no sexual relationship'—the reference and indebtedness to Plato's myth from Symposium is obvious here.

57. #57

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.16

    introduction

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a "minimal difference" (the non-coincidence of the One with itself) underlies apparent dualisms, and deploys the Lacanian enunciation/statement split and the Hegelian concept of concrete universality—illustrated through a mock-Hegelian dialectic of sexuality—to demonstrate how confronting a universal with its "unbearable" particular example reveals the tacit prohibitions sustaining symbolic universes.

    the very 'progress' from one form to another is motivated by the structural imbalance of the sexual relationship (Lacan's il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel)

58. #58

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.194

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the postideological "desublimated" call of jouissance short-circuits the symbolic mediation constitutive of the Other's jouissance, so that the apparent opposition between pure autistic jouissance (drugs, virtual sex) and the jouissance of the Other (language, narrative, remembrance) secretly converges in the Hegelian infinite judgment: the passion for the Real and the passion for semblance are two sides of the same phenomenon.

    what Lacan had in mind with his il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel: not only is masturbation sex with an imagined partner … 'real sex' has the structure of masturbation with a real partner

59. #59

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.259

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew mystifies constitutive social antagonism by displacing it onto an external limit, and that Milner's "Jewish exception" logic inadvertently reproduces this displacement; the properly Lacanian response is a "not-all" Europe in which everyone becomes an exception (objet petit a), dissolving the need for a constitutive Other — and he extends this critique to Jacques-Alain Miller's therapeutic-political proposal, which he reads as a socially conservative "compassionate cushion" that profits from the disarray of identifications rather than challenging the anonymous systems that produce it.

    the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew enables us to obfuscate the non-All of the constitutive social antagonism, transposing it into the conflict between the social All (the corporate notion of society) and its external Limit

60. #60

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.3

    **TRANSGENDER PSYCHOANALYSIS**

    Theoretical move: This is a publisher's front matter/blurb passage introducing Gherovici's *Transgender Psychoanalysis*, arguing that trans embodiment destabilizes fixed notions of sexual difference and can productively reorient Lacanian psychoanalytic practice and ethics—non-substantive for theoretical extraction purposes.

    the impossibility of representing sexuality, an impossibility that implicitly subverts the fixity of all identitarian claims

61. #61

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.23

    **TRANSAMERICA**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's concept of "urinary segregation" to frame contemporary transgender bathroom debates as a structural impasse of sexual difference, then critically engages Baudrillard's reading of transsexuality as simulation/indifferent simulacrum to argue that trans subjects are not escaping sexual difference but are rather trapped within it — a point that psychoanalysis must take seriously against postmodern celebrations of groundless sign-multiplication.

    Lacan was at the time discussing how language sets up sexual difference as an impasse

62. #62

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.33

    **DEPATHOLOGIZING TRANS** > **Psychoanalysis is not a border patrol**

    Theoretical move: By juxtaposing the legal/bureaucratic processes of naturalization and gender amendment, and anchoring this in Lacan's self-description as "a poem being written," Gherovici argues that the subject is a creative, open-ended construction rather than a fixed biological or legal essence — thereby grounding the depathologization of gender variance in a psychoanalytic critique of normative sexuality.

    It also questions the notion of what is normal in sexuality and sexual identity in a movement towards depathologizing gender variance and sexual non-conformity.

63. #63

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.35

    **DEPATHOLOGIZING TRANS** > **Psychoanalysis needs realignment**

    Theoretical move: By reframing the trans experience through Lacan's sinthome (symptom as creative solution rather than pathology) and the concept of sexuation (unconscious sexual positioning independent of anatomy or social convention), Gherovici argues for a depathologization of trans experience and a realignment of psychoanalytic practice toward an ethics of tolerance for non-normative genders and sexualities.

    The assumption of a sexual positioning is the result of dealing with sexual difference. This is a difference determined neither by sex (anatomy) nor by gender (social construction); it is a subjective, unconscious choice.

64. #64

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.50

    **BRING SEX BACK**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has systematically repressed sexuality — its foundational concern — in favor of object-relations, attachment, and relational frameworks, and that this desexualization constitutes both a clinical failure and a theoretical regression; Lacanian sexuation and Zupančič's reading of the sexual as inherently identity-disrupting are mobilized to diagnose this suppression and call for psychoanalysis to re-engage transgender discourse as a site of productive contestation.

    There is something uncertain about sexuality that escapes our attempts to grasp it.

65. #65

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.55

    **STRANGE BEDFELLOWS** > **42** Strange bedfellows

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's revolutionary contribution was not pansexualism but the discovery of a constitutive negativity/lack at the heart of human sexuality—a structural incompleteness that distinguishes the drive from instinct—and contextualizes this within the historical collaboration and theoretical divergence between Freud and Hirschfeld over the origins and nature of sexuality.

    Freud noted that sexuality itself was symptomatic in the sense that there was something intrinsically amiss, lacking in sexuality that prevented the achievement of complete pleasure.

66. #66

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.80

    **FROM TRANCE TO TRANS IN LACAN'S REVISIONS OF HYSTERIA**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that hysteria and psychoanalysis converge in demonstrating that the drive has no predetermined object and sexuality is constitutively non-normative; the hysterical subject's disavowal of its own sexual knowledge enacts the Lacanian thesis that there is no knowledge about sexuality—a gap that is the very engine of the unconscious.

    what hysterics resist knowing is exactly that which their symptoms are unconsciously sustaining: they do not want to know that there is no knowledge about sexuality.

67. #67

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.95

    **THE SWEET SCIENCE OF TRANSITION**

    Theoretical move: Gherovici argues that being "outside sex" (hors-sex) is not a marker of psychosis but a structural feature of hysteria, and that trans men analysands often exhibit a hysterical structure characterised by an irreducible indecision about sexual positioning, dissatisfied desire, and a defensive strategy against castration — thereby relocating the clinical question of trans identity from foreclosure to neurosis.

    castration should be understood as the impossibility of achieving a harmonious rapport between the sexes, because the realization of such Utopia of complementarity would require the denial of sexual difference

68. #68

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.100

    **THE SINGULAR UNIVERSALITY OF TRANS**

    Theoretical move: Through the case of Henri/Anne-Henriette, Gherovici argues that Lacan's clinical approach to gender-variant patients enacts an ethics of sexual difference that refuses to ground sexual identity in organ attribution (the phallus as organon), insisting instead that the subject must ultimately subscribe to their own choice—a move that anticipates a structuralist account of the trans phenomenon.

    Can sexual identity be based on organ attribution? This is a crucial issue if we want to think about the trans phenomenon structurally.

69. #69

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.108

    **PORTRAITS IN A TWO-WAY MIRROR**

    Theoretical move: Gherovici argues that Lacanian castration—understood as a structural relation to lack rather than an anatomical fact—is indispensable for the psychoanalytic treatment of trans persons, because it reveals that gender-crossing symptoms are not evasions of sexual difference but heightened engagements with it; the clinical vignette of Amanda illustrates how masquerade, anxiety, and the phallus function together around the impossibility of sexual identity.

    For psychoanalysis, sexual difference is not a norm but a real impossibility, which is to say, it is a limit to the speakable and the thinkable.

70. #70

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.112

    **PORTRAITS IN A TWO-WAY MIRROR** > **Anxious? Castration is the solution!**

    Theoretical move: By reading clinical cases of sexual ambiguity through Lacanian concepts of castration and lack, the passage argues that the psychoanalytic subject is constituted by subjectivized lack — not by a stable sexual identity — and that castration anxiety, properly understood, is a productive organizing force rather than a wound, one that psychoanalysis itself must now undergo in relation to transgender subjects.

    These cases seem to position themselves in a zone of sexual ambiguity... This uncertainty should make us rethink how we define sex and sexuality

71. #71

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.123

    **PLASTIC SEX, THE BEAUTY OF IT** > **Sex is a joke of nature**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that sexual difference is irreducible to either anatomy or social construction—sex must be symbolized and gender embodied—and that this irreducibility is tied to the death drive, castration, and the sinthome; a clinical case (Stanley) and aesthetic examples (Antigone, Trecartin) are deployed to show that trans subjectivity engages an ethical rather than merely imaginary relation to beauty, mortality, and singularity.

    There is a radical antagonism between sex and sense, as Joan Copjec persuasively contends. Sex is a failure of meaning, a barrier to sense.

72. #72

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.141

    **FREUD'S SCATALOG**

    Theoretical move: The anal object—feces as the first lost part of the body—grounds a universal, ungendered model of subjective loss and castration; by tracing its trajectory from bodily part through gift to agalma and finally to objet petit a, the passage argues that scatology underpins the constitution of desire, the demand of the Other, and ultimately Lacan's thesis of the sexual non-relation, displacing the phallus as the privileged site of castration.

    Freud is not discussing gender but presenting a thesis about unsatisfactory sexual relations, a precursor to Lacan's 'there is not such a thing as a sexual relation.'

73. #73

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.161

    **MAKING LIFE LIVABLE**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's late concept of the sinthome reconceives the symptom not as a hidden meaning to be deciphered but as a creative Real-knotting solution to the sexual non-relation, and that the Lucretian clinamen—via Democritus's den/void and tuché—provides the theoretical model for understanding how analytic technique (scansion, equivocation) introduces turbulence into repetition, thereby producing nomination rather than metaphoric substitution.

    A positioning such as male or female or anything else altogether can be seen as a creation to endure the non-rapport.

74. #74

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.173

    **BODY TROUBLE**

    Theoretical move: Using the 1907 memoir of N. O. Body (Karl Bauer) as a case study, Gherovici argues that transsexual/intersex experience does not mark a marginal exception but rather exposes the universal impossibility of fully representing sex, thereby challenging biological determinism and gender essentialism; the subject's "reknotting" through writing enacts a genuine transition of subjectivity.

    They point to the impossibility of fully representing sex that troubles the fixity of any identitary claim.

75. #75

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.176

    **BODY TROUBLE** > **Born This Way**

    Theoretical move: Gherovici argues that the transgender request is fundamentally structured around the Real of the death drive and the limits of mortal existence, not merely around sex/gender binaries; using Lacan's sinthome, the drive, and the mirror stage, she shows that gender transition is a "new birth" in which art and desire confront the border between life and death.

    if the drive is satisfied in the body of someone else, this exacerbates subjective division.

76. #76

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.199

    **INDEX** > **186** Index

    Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Gherovici's book on transgender psychoanalysis; it is bibliographic/reference material with no standalone theoretical argument, though it surfaces the book's key conceptual vocabulary through index entries.

    sexual non-rapport 30–1, 130, 149 see also sexual difference, sexuation

77. #77

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.104

    **THE SINGULAR UNIVERSALITY OF TRANS** > **Organon**

    Theoretical move: By reading Lacan's clinical interview with Primeau alongside his theoretical elaboration of the Schreber case, Gherovici argues that Lacan carefully distinguishes a delusional feminization (a symptom of psychosis involving excessive jouissance and foreclosure) from a legitimate demand for gender reassignment, thereby dismantling the Millot-led pathologization tradition and showing that Lacan's intervention is a clinical maneuver deploying the phallus-as-signifier to limit jouissance rather than a moralistic rejection of transsexuality.

    Schreber's transsexualist delusion, in his conviction of being transformed into a woman, Lacan found the lineaments of a new theory of sexual identity.

78. #78

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.155

    From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel > Chapter 2

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the non-relation is not a fixed ontological foundation subtending concrete relations, but is instead produced and repeated immanently within each concrete relation: every relation 'resolves' the non-relation only by re-positing its own constitutive impossibility, such that the non-relation is an effect of repetition rather than a transcendent remainder.

    every concrete relation de facto resolves the non-relation, but it can resolve it only by positing ('inventing'), together with itself, its own negativity, its own negative condition/impossibility.

79. #79

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.28

    It's Getting Strange in Here … > Christianity and Polymorphous Perversity

    Theoretical move: The non-existence of the sexual relation is not a mere absence but constitutive of the Real itself; partial drives and their satisfactions are not a positive residue left after the fantasy's subtraction, but are intrinsically formed by the negativity of non-relation—the lack does not supplement the drives from outside but structures them from within.

    non-relation is not simply an absence of relation, but is itself a real, even the Real… The lack of sexual relation is real in the sense that, as lack or negativity, it is built into what is there.