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Secondary literature 2017

What Is Sex?

Alenka Zupančič

by What is Sex_

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Synopsis

Alenka Zupančič's What Is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017) takes as its guiding question not the empirical or moral content of human sexuality but its ontological status — what kind of thing sex is — and argues that the psychoanalytic answer to this question has irreducibly philosophical, and specifically ontological, consequences. The book's central wager is that Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis discloses sexuality not as a regional domain of human life but as the privileged site where a constitutive gap or "minus-one" intrinsic to the signifying order appears in reality; sex is therefore not a substance or a content but a structural contradiction immanent to being itself. Moving through Freud's theory of infantile sexuality, Lacan's "there is no sexual relation," the formulas of sexuation, and the death drive, Zupančič shows that each of these conceptual moves converges on the same point: the non-relation is not an absence that we mournfully compensate for, but the very motor of discourse, desire, and the social bond. Along the way the book mounts a sustained critique of the replacement of "sexual difference" by "gender" as a liberal ideological neutralization of the Real, and engages the contemporary speculative-realist debate (Meillassoux, speculative realism) to develop a distinctively Lacanian "dialectical materialism" grounded in contradiction and cut rather than in matter as primary substance. The book concludes by tracing the connection between sexuality and knowledge — the unconscious as a form of knowing that relates to the ontological incompleteness sexuality inscribes — and by situating love and the "new signifier" produced in analysis as the practical-political stakes of this ontological argument.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes What Is Sex? in the Lacanian corpus is its systematic refusal to treat sexuality as a regional topic within psychoanalytic theory and its insistence that sexuality is instead the very form through which ontological incompleteness becomes thinkable. Where most secondary literature treats the formulas of sexuation as a specialized contribution to the theory of sexual difference, Zupančič reads them as a general ontological claim: the two positions of sexuation are not descriptions of men and women but two logical configurations of the constitutive "minus-one" of the signifying order, configurations that are irreducibly biased and never neutral. This reframing allows her to argue that the shift from "sex" to "gender" in contemporary theory is not a liberation but a "desexualization of ontology" — a removal of the very tool (the Real of sexual difference) that makes the problem visible. No other secondary work in the corpus makes this specific argument with the same philosophical precision or connects it so directly to the ideology-critique of liberal pluralism and the "privatization of the negative" in capitalism.

The book also makes an unusually detailed and original contribution to the theory of the death drive. Rather than simply rehearsing the Lacanian revision of Freud, Zupančič performs a meticulous internal reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle to show that Freud's own text contains two distinct notions of the death drive — one reducible to a homeostatic "return to the inanimate," the other pointing to a constitutive negativity around which the drive circulates — and that what Lacanians mean by the death drive belongs to the second notion, which is also implied (if not explicitly theorized) in Freud's own shifts and hesitations. She then triangulates Lacan and Deleuze (on Difference and Repetition) to show that both reject the pleasure principle as primary and both identify the death drive as the transcendental condition of repetition — while Lacan's distinctive move is to insist that only the production of a new signifier (S1) within analytic discourse can effect a genuine separation at the heart of drive repetition. This sustained, three-way reading of Freud, Lacan, and Deleuze on the death drive is more philosophically dense and argumentatively precise than comparable treatments elsewhere in the secondary corpus.

Main themes

  • Sexuality as ontological problem rather than moral or identity question
  • The constitutive non-relation and its structural productivity
  • Sexual difference as configuration of the signifying order's intrinsic 'minus-one'
  • The death drive as repetition of constitutive negativity rather than return to the inanimate
  • Lacanian dialectical materialism contra speculative realism and correlationism
  • The 'privatization of the negative' in capitalism and ideology
  • Gender vs. sex: liberal desexualization as neutralization of the Real
  • Surplus-jouissance at the place of the missing signifier
  • Formalization, equivocity, and the Real in analytic interpretation
  • The short circuit between ontology and epistemology in the unconscious

Chapter outline

  • Introduction — p.1-4 (approx.)
  • It's Getting Strange in Here… (Chapter 1) — p.5-34
  • … and Even Stranger Out There (Chapter 2) — p.21-44
  • Contradictions That Matter (Chapter 3) — p.35-72
  • Object-Disoriented Ontology (Chapter 4) — p.73-150
  • Conclusion: From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel — p.141-150

Chapter summaries

Introduction (p.1-4 (approx.))

The Introduction opens with Lacan's provocative claim that talking can yield exactly the same satisfaction as sexual intercourse — an illustration of sublimation as non-repressive drive satisfaction. Zupančič uses this example to reverse the standard direction of explanation: rather than understanding satisfaction in talking by reference to its hidden sexual origin, she insists that satisfaction in talking is itself sexual, and that this compels a philosophical re-examination of what sexuality fundamentally is. The driving analogy is Marx's remark that human anatomy contains the key to the anatomy of the ape, not the reverse: the satisfaction in talking contains the key to sexual satisfaction, not the other way around.

The Introduction frames the book's central methodological commitment: sexuality is to be treated as a properly philosophical problem of psychoanalysis, involving ontology, logic, and the theory of the subject. Zupančič identifies a productive tension between psychoanalysis and philosophy — Lacan taught philosophy that abandoning classical notions (subject, object, truth, the real) means abandoning the battlefield rather than winning it, since what is problematic is not these notions but the disavowal of the inherent contradiction they imply. The book situates itself in this intersection, asking what sex is rather than what we should do about it, and insisting that this question has immediate political stakes.

Key concepts: Sublimation, Drive, Jouissance, Ontology, Contradiction, Signifier Notable examples: Lacan's example of talking vs. fucking as equivalent satisfactions; Marx on human anatomy and the anatomy of the ape

It's Getting Strange in Here… (Chapter 1) (p.5-34)

Chapter 1 opens with Freud's scandalous lecture on infantile sexuality depicted in John Huston's film, using the violent audience reaction to pose the question of why sexuality — even today, among practitioners of psychoanalytic psychotherapy — continues to provoke avoidance and discomfort. Zupančič surveys a contemporary empirical study showing that therapists systematically sideline sexual issues, and reads this not as mere prudishness but as symptomatic of a deeper theoretical problem. The chapter then turns to the paradoxical structure of infantile sexuality as Freud and Laplanche theorize it: it exists in the absence of both biological and symbolic frameworks, and — crucially — this state of things does not change much when we become adults. Laplanche's distinction between le sexual (drive sexuality) and le sexuel (instinctual sexuality) is deployed to show that drive sexuality does not mature into or get replaced by instinctual sexuality; rather, instinctual sexuality arrives to find the seat already taken by infantile drives.

The chapter's most original move is a reading of Christianity through Lacan's claim that what Christian spirituality represses is not perverse partial-drive enjoyment — which it in fact proliferates (Zupančič offers the images of martyred saints' cut-off body parts as cases in point) — but rather the link between enjoyment and sexuality. This link is what exposes the non-relation at the heart of every relation. Copulation is conspicuously absent from the Christian imaginary precisely because it is the point where the non-existence of the sexual relation becomes visible. The norm of 'natural' sexuality, far from suppressing partial drives, emerges as a fantasy-supplement that takes the place of the impossible image — a body fully wrapping around the Other's body — whose impossibility is the real condition of the norm itself.

The chapter concludes by establishing the ontological weight of the non-relation: it is not merely an absence of something that might be there, but is 'built into what is there,' constituting the structure of drive satisfactions from within. Partial pleasures and satisfactions are not the positive residue left after the failure of the relation; they are formed by the negativity implied by the non-relation. This is the chapter's key ontological thesis: the non-relation is real — it is the Real — and the fantasy of the sexual relation is generated from within the very structuring of the drives.

Key concepts: Infantile sexuality, Partial Drive, Repression, Non-relation, Fantasy, Real Notable examples: John Huston's film Freud: The Secret Passion; Laplanche's distinction between le sexual and le sexuel; Christian martyrdom imagery (Saint Agatha, Saint Lucy); Saint Augustine on sexuality as punishment for original sin

… and Even Stranger Out There (Chapter 2) (p.21-44)

Chapter 2 extends the ontological analysis of the non-relation into the domain of politics and the social bond. Zupančič begins by recovering the connection — signaled by the chairman's remark in the Huston film — between politics and the Freudian theory of sexuality. Against two symmetrical errors (the philosophical-radical dismissal of sexuality as merely regional, and the liberal-psychoanalytic dismissal of radical politics as necessarily pathological), she argues that both politics and sexuality relate structurally to the Real: neither is a simple ontological category but each deploys something not of the order of being, namely the Real as being's inherent impasse.

The chapter then conducts a sustained reading of Platonov's 'Anti-Sexus' — a fictional device that would masturbate users to provide standardized, socially neutral satisfaction, thereby liberating them from dependence on the Other. Zupančič reads this as the reductio ad absurdum of the revolutionary fantasy of liberating humanity from sexuality. Schuster's observation that the emancipatory question is misframed (is sexuality to be liberated, or is humanity to be liberated from sexuality?) sets up Zupančič's Lacanian rejoinder: the aim to abolish the non-relation is itself the signature of social repression. The Anti-Sexus and Christian spirituality are shown to converge on the same fantasy — 'otherless Other' or 'sexless sex' — and are both structurally impossible because the Other and enjoyment are 'extimately' related: each is found at the very heart of the other's supposed purification.

The chapter's political climax is the analysis of capitalism as a mode of exploiting the non-relation. Modern power — paradigmatically capitalism — operates not by abolishing constitutive negativity but by appropriating it: by 'privatizing the negative,' building the non-relation into a narrative of a higher Relation (the 'invisible hand of the market' is Zupančič's example). Marx's concept of the proletariat names precisely the structural point of this disavowed negativity within the capitalist social formation. The distinction between abolishing the non-relation (the catastrophic revolutionary fantasy) and exploiting it (the logic of domination) establishes the book's central political-theoretical claim: emancipation cannot mean the dissolution of the non-relation but must engage it at its structural level.

Key concepts: Non-relation, Objet petit a, Jouissance, The big Other, Ideology, Surplus-jouissance Notable examples: Andrei Platonov's 'The Anti-Sexus'; Adam Smith and the invisible hand of the market; Marx on the proletariat and social antagonism; Brecht's bank robbery / bank founding distinction

Contradictions That Matter (Chapter 3) (p.35-72)

Chapter 3 is the book's most philosophically dense chapter, organized in three movements: the sex/gender debate, the ontology of sexual division, and the Badiou/Cassin dispute over equivocity and formalization. The opening section argues that modern psychoanalytic therapy's systematic avoidance of sexuality mirrors a broader cultural shift: the replacement of 'sexual difference' by 'gender.' Zupančič reads this substitution as ideologically consequential. Judith Butler's performative ontology, which generates both the logos and the being of things from within the discursive, is carefully reconstructed and acknowledged as to a great extent compatible with Lacanian theory — but Zupančič insists on a decisive irreducibility. When the signifying order operates, something else gets added to it: not produced by the signifying gesture but 'together with and on top of it' — the surplus that is neither symbolic nor constituted by the symbolic, but parasitic on its productivity. This is the place of the Real and of surplus-jouissance, and it is precisely what disappears when 'sex' is translated into 'gender.'

The central section reconstructs Lacan's formulas of sexuation through a close reading of Freud. Freud's claim that there is no second sex — that libido is invariably 'masculine,' not because masculinity is a positive essence but because pure masculinity and femininity do not exist — is taken as the key. Sexual difference arises not from there being two sexes but from the non-existence of the 'second sex,' from a constitutive ontological deficit. Zupančič then shows how Lacan's late work reconceptualizes this: what splits into two is not two pre-given sexes but the very non-existence of the One that would be the radical Other. The phallic function (Φx) is the operator that marks the constitutive minus of the symbolic order, and castration is a 'subjectivizing reiteration of the inaugurating minus.' There is no sexually neutral subjectivity: the zero level of subjectivity is already biased by the logical parallax in which the ontological deficit of the signifying order is inscribed. Copjec's reading of the formulas of sexuation through the Kantian antinomies — where the contradiction does not exist between the two sides but each side is a parallel configuration of the same contradiction of the signifying order — is affirmed and developed.

The feminine position is further analyzed through Riviere's 'Womanliness as Masquerade.' A woman cannot rely on a constitutive exception for her being; she relies instead on a constitutive deception — femininity is a masquerade, a putting-on of femininity. S(Ⱥ), the signifier of the barred Other as the Other's jouissance, marks the place where the Other's lack is inscribed in the Other itself; it functions not as an obstacle to the sexual relation but as the signifier of missing knowledge. Lacan's 'Ladies and Gentlemen' example is read as the showcase illustration not merely of signifier logic but of its constitutive presuppositions — the gap at the very core of the signifying logic, which is also the place of sexual difference as a non-signifying difference.

The chapter's final section ('Je te m'athème… moi non plus') stages the Badiou/Cassin debate on equivocity vs. formalization in Lacan's 'L'étourdit.' Zupančič argues that the apparent opposition is false: equivocity is not the opposite of formalization but its very condition. The 'right word' in analytic interpretation functions like a formula precisely by targeting the singular impasse — the contradiction — that the symptom 'solves,' rather than by conveying a determinate meaning. Formalization is not a truth about the Real but the formalization of the impasse of formalization itself — 'the point where truth holds onto the real.' The chapter ends with a sharp distinction from Wittgenstein: Lacan's position is not that we must fall silent before the impossible, but that any speech, with the right analytic assistance, will sooner or later stumble against the Real — speech is too close to the Real to escape it.

Key concepts: Sexuation, Not-all, Point de capiton, Splitting of the Subject, Signifier, Topology, Lack, Symptom Notable examples: Butler's performativity and Gender Trouble; Lacan's 'Ladies and Gentlemen' example from Écrits; Joan Riviere's 'Womanliness as Masquerade'; Badiou and Cassin, Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel; Lacan's L'étourdit; The 'It's started' joke as analytic intervention

Object-Disoriented Ontology (Chapter 4) (p.73-150)

Chapter 4 is the book's longest and most architecturally complex, consisting of six interconnected sections that move from realism through the human/animal distinction, through two detailed treatments of the death drive (Freud, then Lacan and Deleuze), to a sustained comparison of Lacan and Badiou on being, event, and their consequences. The opening section, 'Realism in Psychoanalysis,' situates the Lacanian Real within the contemporary speculative-realist debate triggered by Meillassoux. Zupančič argues that Meillassoux's 'correlationism' diagnosis applies to philosophies that posit the primacy of the relation over its terms, but that the Lacanian position is irreducible to this framing. For Lacan, modern science (the Galilean revolution) creates a new Real — a space in which discourse has real consequences (landing on the moon) — rather than merely mediating pre-existing nature. 'True materialism' is not grounded in matter as primary substance but in the primacy of a cut, of contradiction and split. Meillassoux's own gesture — absolutizing contingency as the only necessity — subscribes to the logic of constitutive exception (all is contingent, except the necessity of this contingency), while Lacan's axiom could be written 'the necessary is not-all': contradiction is the point of truth of absolute necessity.

The 'Human, Animal' section interrogates the two dominant philosophical framings of human animality — as untamed excess (the Christian figure of the sinful body) and as lacking any real excess (the Kantian figure of the 'pathological'). Zupančič argues that the Lacanian perspective cuts across both: the human being is not an exception to animality but a 'half-finished animal' whose structural incompleteness is the site from which jouissance opens the specifically human dimension. Jouissance — even in its 'modest,' surplus form — is not a marker of human finitude as closure but what disturbs the organism and wakes it to metaphysics, politics, and strange 'inhuman' behavior. The signifier keeps working during sleep, smuggling jouissance into dreams and disturbing even our most basic attempt at homeostasis. Human beings are not Nature's exception but the 'question mark' to Nature's own consistency: the point where Nature's inherent impossibility — its lack of sexual knowledge — becomes articulated as such.

The two 'Death Drive' sections constitute the theoretical heart of the chapter. In the Freud section, Zupančič performs a close reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle to disentangle two distinct Freudian notions of the death drive. The first — the 'instinct to return to the inanimate' — is actually consistent with the pleasure principle (as a lowering of tension to zero) and thus does not correspond to what goes on 'beyond' the pleasure principle. What Freud notices but cannot fully account for is the compulsion to repeat unpleasant, traumatic experiences — which requires a different notion. Zupančič identifies two distinct 'splits' in the drive: the genesis of surplus satisfaction from organic need (the gluttony example), and a constitutive negativity — an 'inbuilt lack of being' — around which the drive circulates and which relates it to primal repression. The crucial correction of Miller's formula is that satisfaction becomes an object of the drive not simply as satisfaction for its own sake, but because it gives body to this negativity. The death drive does not want us to enjoy; the superego wants us to enjoy. The death drive wants to repeat the negativity — the gap in the order of being — even if this means enjoying. For the 'Trauma outside Experience' section, Zupančič follows Brassier and others in arguing that the trauma repeated in repetition-compulsion is not a repressed experience but something constitutively outside experience — a 'primordial aboriginal death' that preconditions the possibility of the pleasure principle itself.

In 'Death Drive II: Lacan and Deleuze,' Zupančič shows that both thinkers share a vigorous rejection of the pleasure principle as primary and both affirm the primacy of the death drive — understood not as a tendency toward destruction or homeostasis but as the transcendental/ontological condition of repetition. Deleuze calls the death drive the 'transcendental principle' of which Eros is only a psychological expression; Lacan argues that 'every drive is virtually a death drive.' Both identify a 'crack' or void that is the foundation of the drive's circulation. The sexual, taken at a speculative level, is identified with this crack: sexuality 'unifies' the drives not by organizing them into a coherent genital whole but as the hole/crack around which they circulate and to which they return. This is why 'sexual identity' is a contradiction in terms, and why the psychoanalytic 'predilection for the two' does not come from biology but from what is missing in biology and culture alike. The divergence between Lacan and Deleuze appears at the point of how separation from drive repetition is achieved: for Deleuze, the centrifugal force of repetition itself selects difference; for Lacan, only the production of a new signifier (S1) in analytic discourse can effect genuine separation.

The final section on Lacan and Badiou maps significant structural parallels between the Lacanian Real and the Badiouian Event — both are internal impossibilities of ontology, both belong to conceptual construction rather than empirical occurrence, both require interpretive intervention — but insists on a crucial difference. For Badiou, the impossibility of the Event is a consequence of the law of ontological discourse; for Lacan, being itself is inseparable from its constitutive gap (the 'minus-one'), so that the wandering excess is not the Real of being but its symptom. Lacan's 'para-ontology' (par-être) means that being is collateral to its own impossibility, not (as in Badiou) to the impossibility of the Event. Badiou's use of enjoyment remains pre-analytic — a personal hedonistic idiosyncrasy irrelevant to truth — whereas for Lacan enjoyment operates at the precise point where something is lacking in the discursive, and patience with its tiresome repetition is the condition for the production of the new signifier. The section closes with a discussion of love — the shift from 'stops not being written' to 'doesn't stop being written' — and the role of the nickname as a possible example of a new signifier sustaining the minimal contingency of love against its foreclosure into necessity.

Key concepts: Real, Death Drive, Surplus-jouissance, Repetition, Topology, Subject, Singularity, Gap, Beyond, Pleasure Principle Notable examples: Meillassoux's arche-fossils and ancestral statements; Galilean scientific revolution and physics vs. nature; Gosse's theological dilemma (Omphalos); Gluttony as paradigm of surplus satisfaction; Fort-da example; The 'It's started' joke revisited as analytic intervention; Badiou's 'Je te m'athème' anecdote; Deleuze on germen as 'the crack'; Hamlet's 'To die, to sleep' soliloquy; Marx Brothers (Groucho) on love recognition

Conclusion: From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel (p.141-150)

The Conclusion draws together the book's argument by advancing its most daring implication: that sexuality (as linked to the unconscious) is the point of a short circuit between ontology and epistemology. It is because something has 'fallen out' of the signifying structuring of being that the unconscious, as a form of knowledge, relates to the impossibility of being — an impossibility that is both transmitted and concealed by sexuality. The drive for knowledge does not originate in curiosity about sex; it surfaces precisely at points where sexuality exposes the structural incompleteness of being, where the 'last instance' is missing.

Zupančič reconstructs Freud's genealogy of the passion for knowledge — starting from the child's questions about where siblings come from, where sexuality enters as negativity, as the unsatisfactory character of all possible positive answers — to argue that the fairytales with which adults explain sexuality to children are not distortions of a realistic explanation waiting behind them, but masks for the fact that there is no realistic explanation: even the most exhaustive scientific account lacks the signifier that would account for the sexual as sexual. The 'dream's navel' (Freud's term for the point in a dream where interpretation bottoms out into the unknowable) and 'Adam's navel' (the point in Gosse's creation-theory where the past is retroactively constituted without having been lived) converge as figures for the same structural point: the place where the unconscious holds onto the Real through the impossibility of saying it all. The book ends with a brief gesture toward love as the 'evental' dimension implied by this analysis, and a call for signifying invention — the new signifier that sustains the gap rather than foreclosing it — as the practical-political correlate of the entire argument.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Real, Repression, Gap, Truth, Language Notable examples: Freud on sexuality and the drive for knowledge; Gosse's Adam's navel (Omphalos theory); Freud's 'dream's navel' from The Interpretation of Dreams

Main interlocutors

  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
  • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIX
  • Jacques Lacan, Écrits
  • Jacques Lacan, L'étourdit
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar II
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII
  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Alain Badiou, Being and Event
  • Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel
  • Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
  • Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
  • Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
  • Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness
  • Joan Copjec, Read My Desire
  • Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
  • Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing
  • Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound
  • Catherine Malabou, Les nouveaux blessés
  • Guy Le Gaufey
  • Joan Riviere
  • Lorenzo Chiesa, The Not-Two
  • Mladen Dolar
  • Andrei Platonov, The Anti-Sexus
  • Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure

Position in the corpus

What Is Sex? occupies a distinctive position in the Lacanian secondary literature as simultaneously a systematic philosophical treatise on the concept of sexuality and an intervention in contemporary debates (speculative realism, gender theory, the Badiou/Lacan nexus) that are not primarily psychoanalytic. Its closest neighbors are Joan Copjec's Read My Desire — which pioneered the reading of the formulas of sexuation through the Kantian antinomies and against historicism — and Lorenzo Chiesa's The Not-Two, which develops the ontological implications of Lacan's later work on logic and sexuality; Zupančič cites and builds on both. It also shares terrain with Žižek's Less Than Nothing in its Hegelian-inflected ontology of contradiction and its analysis of capitalism through the lens of the non-relation, though Zupančič's treatment is more focused and philosophically disciplined. Readers should approach What Is Sex? after acquaintance with Lacan's Seminar XX (Encore) — the primary source for the formulas of sexuation — and Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, both of which are read in sustained detail throughout. It can profitably be read alongside Schuster's The Trouble with Pleasure (which covers similar ground on Deleuze and the death drive from a complementary angle) and before or alongside Copjec's later work on the sexual compact.\n\nWithin the broader Lacanian corpus, the book is especially valuable for readers interested in the intersection of psychoanalysis with continental ontology, the philosophy of science, and political theory. Its critique of gender-as-replacement-for-sex positions it as a significant, if controversial, intervention in feminist theory from a Lacanian perspective, and its account of 'dialectical materialism' grounded in contradiction (rather than matter) offers a distinctive alternative both to speculative realism and to straightforwardly Hegelian appropriations of Lacan. Readers in clinical psychoanalytic contexts will find the theoretical arguments more abstract than most clinical literature, but the stakes — why the sexual must remain central to analytic practice — are made unusually explicit.

Canonical concepts deployed