Johannes Scott, December 2021.
Since ancient time, we have been lured to sex, almost like bees to pollen. But since modernity, we have been caught by the gaze of sex like a fly trapped in honey.
This brief writing navigates contentious issues relating to sex, social construction of gender, fantasy of love, symbolic violence, and public desire for trauma.
SEX AND SCIENCE
It was during second wave of feminism that the French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir, addressing the theories of the revolutionaries Marx and Freud, challenged the social capture of womanhood. However, feminine and masculine binaries remained biologically trapped in the assumption that historical progress is subject to universal structuralism. In other words, that gender is fixed by the permanent structure of nature.
Two decades later, the intellectual work of Michel Foucault displaces the structuralism of Marx and the poststructuralist Jacques Lacan reinvents Freud’s outdated psychoanalysis.
In his publication History of Sexuality, Foucault researches the difference between Scientia Sexualis and Ars Erotica. The latter was practiced since ancient Greece and Rome, throughout the Middle Ages and up to the Renaissance. This practice of sex was seen as a personal way of taking care of the self – an aesthetic of living experienced as sensual pleasure.
The historian’s research shows that since the ancients and up until premodernity, the idea of sexual identity did not exist. As noun, sex allocates biological status. As verb, it describes an activity. That the activity of sex should give rise to an identity is, Foucault clarifies, a fallacy of our modern times.
In Scientia Sexualis, Foucault shows how sex transformed in 17th century Europe from personal, intimate experience to the inhuman perspective of distanced observer. In modernity, knowledge about sex is obtained by means of the human sciences examining and researching the sexual activity of others, such as those in the colonial territories. This transformation marks a shift in power relations during a time when the ruling authority began to restrict the working class with repressive laws in favour of industrial productivity. By the state power of jurisdiction, modern individuality and subjectivity was invented – along with the fallacy of sexual identity.
Within a decade after Foucault’s publication, gender theory became recognised as academic study distinct from biological anatomy. Gender was no longer seen as determined by nature, instead, gender became recognised as social construct. In other words, male and female organisms are studied as natural science while the narrative of men and women, as socio-cultural products, belong to gender studies. Within the same period, Lacan added to gender studies a psychoanalytical theory of subjectivity that decentred masculinity and femininity as intertwined linguistic and fantasy constructs.
Less than a decade later and during the third wave of feminism, the historian Joan Scott and philosopher Judith Butler transformed the American academic landscape by insisting on the inclusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, and Faucauldian-Nietzhean definitions of power as theoretical categories for scientific analysis of gender.
Poststructuralist literary theorists such as the French feminist Hélène Cixous, Bulgarian-French feminist Julia Kristeva and Indian postcolonial intellectuals Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha consolidated the academic inclusion of the French trio, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan.
My writing now shifts to focus on Lacanian psychoanalysis where the human subject is seen as split from nature and driven by desire to compensate this loss. The desire to reunite with the object of nature is not driven by need but by pleasure – resulting in the perversion of everything natural. In other words, ‘Human desire has no firm ontological ground, but is based on a principle of “ontological perversion”: pleasure.’
Moreover, it is the task of psychoanalysis to establish and maintain an ethical distance to the object of desire in order to sustain desire. The logic here is that getting too close to the object of desire result in trauma, misery and death while keeping an ethical distance means we can sustain desire, which is essential for the survival of human life. Such ethical distancing can be established and maintained in our relations to the symbolic world and its associative objects of fantasy.
SEX AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
To fully understand sex, we need to demarcate experience, imaginary image, and symbolisation. The Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic psychoanalytic registers provide us with such a demarcation.
Real sex
We have no meaningful experience of natural, primordial sex because it has no symbolic index of difference. It can best be described as an alien contact with partial objects consisting of primal limbs, orifices, and other unobservable body parts. This primal Thing escapes both imaginary and symbolic register because it can be ecstatic, traumatic, animated, and inanimate all at the same time, without pause or difference. Real sex is unintelligible to humans because it is without gender, history, and symbolic representation.
It is within this context that Lacan’s controversial statement that ‘there is no sexual relationship’ must be read. He meant that a symbolic relationship is not possible in the real. The lover’s discourse, or intimate relationship plays out within the realm of fantasy.
Sex and fantasy
For meaningful pleasure, an imaginary or phantasmatic screen transforms or distorts primordial sex into an image or scenario that we can identify with – the imaginary image replaces the primordial Real. We experience this fabricated image as a fascinating performance in which there is an intimately rewarding and consensual role to play. The engendered scene is usually constructed with masculine and feminine scenarios, tools of masquerade such as clothing and innuendos, and fantasy relations.
To the external glance, from outside the intimate fantasy, the split or inconsistency between the primordial act and its imaginary representation is often seen as comical or disgusting. For the voyeur, for example, who cannot find meaningful reflection in the ‘occupied’ scenario, this may spell malaise.
The split between the primal act and imaginary scenario can also affect the intimate role players. For example, a gab in the performance brought on by a lapse of focus or an external annoyance can affect their performance and bring the scenario to a ridiculous halt. Or worse, an egotist partner’s inability to satiate the other.
In sex therapy addressing lack of intimate satisfaction, an inept imaginary scenario would be a common problematic. The worst advice would be to try and be your egotist self during the performance. The best proverbial advice would be to wrap the bed of the fantasy scenario in the flag of your country, doing it for your country; and if that does not work, put up a foreign flag and do it with the enemy.
Sex and the symbolic subject
The Symbolic world exists on the other side of the Imaginary realm, forever severed from the Real. Meaning here comes about through the speaking subject who arranges words and names to suit some or other imaginary scenario. In one arrangement, a word can mean this, but in another scenario, the name means something entirely different. For a word to acquire this or that symbolic meaning, difference is essential – difference to other words, other scenarios, and other symbolic meanings. No name has meaning in and for itself.
In other words, the symbolic world has no ontological root because meaning shifts along from subject to subject. For example, the word ‘sex’ has different meanings for the subject of love and the subject of science. Moreover, for both these subjects, the word ‘sex’ is forever severed from the primal Real – the word ‘sex’ has no smell.
For psychoanalysis, the human subject is like the signifier, it is also forever severed from the natural – the indifferent, embryonic organism it once was. This lack of wholeness of identity reconfigures as desire, for which solace is found in symbolic subjectivity.
In the symbolic world, the subject slips and slides amongst fields of identities without ever getting stuck on one true designation. Here, the subject is a stranger to nature, the Real is gone, and in its place, we have, for example, gender as socio-cultural construction.
For example, in the following phrase, we see the lack of a unitary identity in the split between "I" and self; we see the symbolic subject articulating gender identity by means of linguistic difference: ‘I was young and beautiful and worked as a femme fatale for the local spy agency, but I was no adulteress because I never betrayed the intimate bond my husband and I shared. Now, after my hero husband became a martyred soldier, I am a retired widow living it up like the girl next door in Annie Hall.’
The fantasy screen coordinates desire and keeps the subject at a safe, ethical distance from the Real object of desire.
SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE
There are two distinct forms of violence, subjective violence which is visible and objective violence which is invisible. In addition, we have two objective kinds of violence, symbolic violence and systemic violence. Systemic violence is perpetrated through exploitative ideologies that, for example, makes it seem natural to identify ethnicity or sex with identity, such as in sexism and racism. My focus here will be on symbolic violence, which is often exacerbate by adolescent culture and the public’s desire for traumatic sensation.
The modus operandi of this type of objective violence is to disable the Imaginary that mediates between the Real and the Symbolic. With the imaginary screen disabled, the symbolic subject is vulnerable to be dehumanised and humiliated. This form of attack is sociopathic because the ultimate target is to disable the functioning order of society that designate individuals with the dignity of symbolic relations.
The act of symbolic violence can range in severity from school bully, vitriol, and sociopath – from trolling to body shaming, rape threats and blackmail. The limit is criminal insanity such as the murder of the iconic John Lennon, whose phantasm (his music and the image that went along with it) was world renowned. The psychotic Chapman, incapable of maintaining an ethical distance to his object of desire, the symbolic Lennon, targeted the imaginary Lennon by interpreting the musician’s poetics literally – calling it communist and against God – to muster support and fascination amongst his wide circle of friends. In Chapman’s popular prayer group, they sang, ‘Imagine, imagine if John Lennon was dead.’ Failing to dismantle the imaginary screen and ‘reveal’ the symbolic Lennon as ‘phoney,’ Chapman went to New York and stalked him, amongst other artists also on his hit list. During the murder trial, forty years ago, the killer was diagnosed with a personality disorder cluster, namely, paranoid schizophrenia – the sociopath wanted to erase the symbolic status of Lennon in favour of his own delusional grandeur.
In Eros and Ethics, Marc de Kesel notes that when the public fails to identify with the symbolic image of the artist, or for that matter, any celebrity, ‘the most harrowing libidinal dramas are reserved for the most successful megastars’ (2009:171). He means that we have no interest in the sex life of others until they become clad in a fantasy screen that is perceived as beyond our common reach. These talented individuals become the trolling targets of the vitriol, who will stalk and hack their private lives for anything peculiar that could be weaponised for the creation of sensation and public trauma.
The hacker is a pervert like the man in the coat exposing himself to innocent pedestrians, and the peeping Tom looking through the keyhole into the intimate bedroom. It is not what is seen that is perverse – the content is never perverse. It is the form of looking (the peeping) and the form of forceful exposure (the flasher) that perverts. The content becomes perverted in the hands of the pervert, whose intention is to use the weaponised content to pervert symbolic logic. The pervert coerces the public by luring their desire for traumatic sensation.
When the screen of fantasy is dissolved, the act turns into violence. The lure of trauma and consequent infliction of the Real on social reality often incites a ‘collective of individuals who are ready to share with others the solipsistic egotism of their stupid pleasure,’ writes Zizek. This psychological blindness disturbs ethical conviction and contaminates the logic of symbolic communication for reporting this form of violence to law enforcement.
The toxic function of symbolic violence becomes more obvious when seen by difference to love – where the same imaginary coordinates are at play, but with a very different trajectory.
LOVE (amour)
While symbolic violence perverts the imaginary screen, love embraces the function of the imaginary screen. As a result, love effectively strengthens the symbolic order because its structural support, the imaginary, is aroused for the ethical function of beauty – beauty as artificial treasure.
Artifice evokes the fantasy of oneness with the beloved other and, as Lacan argues, ‘it is this imaginary reciprocity between “loving” and “being loved” that constitutes the illusion of love. The metaphor, ‘I love you,’ essentially translates as, ‘I wish you love me,’ or, ‘I desire your love.’
Love is an imaginary phenomenon, an artificial situation of which, outside of poetics, it is almost impossible to say anything meaningful about. The more one tries to say something sensible about love, the more ‘one descends into imbecility.’ It is recognition of love as artifice that allows for one to maintain an ethical distance to this fascinating, beautiful object of desire, and thereby prolong the engagement and sustain desire.
In the journal, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Yen-Ying Lai from University of Queensland in Brisbane provides a Lacanian reading of the essential requirement for love. One cannot love someone without identifying with the other, for which an imaginary screen of assimilation is required. Lai writes, ‘Desire of the other subject is to desire what she desires, to desire for her in her place. To desire her, therefore, is to be her, or to attempt the impossibility of ever being so,’ on an imaginary, phantasm level.
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Lorenzo Bernini (1652)
In Bernini’s marble sculpture of Teresa of Avila at the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, we see the cupid of love, Eros, shooting arrows at the subject. It depicts the ecstasy of Saint Teresa after acknowledging the reception of mystical knowledge. In Lacanese, a mystical ejaculation – the arrows represent the pleasure of symbolic fantasy, ‘It points to a communion of desire and language, the way in which the arrow of the signifier, what St. Teresa called "the locutions of God," penetrates and inflames the body's most secret entrails.’
By contrast, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet tells a different love story. Unlike Eros and Teresa who share the same phantasm for symbolic fulfilment, Romeo and Juliet’s fantasy is trapped in adolescent ego, without symbolic support.
Love can be compared to the pleasurable experience of being on a rollercoaster, flirting with death – as in an ‘as if’ performance where the lovers flirt with danger. But the thrill of danger is within the safety of the imaginary realm and protected by symbolic order.
Romeo and Juliet’s thrill plays out in social reality – they assimilate each other in the face of symbolic rejection. We see this in Luhrmann’s cinematic version with DiCaprio and Danes. The two characters freeze whenever they lay eyes on each other. When looking at Juliet, Romeo does not see her and her symbolic relations, he sees only the imaginary reflection of his own ego image. Without the symbolic support of the feuding Montagues and Capulets, their flirtation with danger ends in tragic death – in the fictional performance where the audience’s desire for trauma is sustained at a safe distance in the fantasy of theatre.
Sources:
De Kesel, Marc. 2009. Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Evans, Dylan. 1996. Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Rabinow, P. (ed). 1984. The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books: New York.
Zizek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2001. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador.
Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); and with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.