What IS Sex? Quotes

“The unconscious desire is not the content of the hidden message, it is the active designer of the form that latent thoughts get in a dream. This is why the key in psychoanalysis is not a key to a hidden meaning, but the key that “unlocks” this form itself (makes what has been associated to compose the hidden meaning dissociate). And this is what “the right word” does.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“In short: the common ground shared by psychoanalysis and science is nothing other than the Real in its absolute dimension, but they have different ways of pursuing this Real.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“When I talk about a “fundamental contradiction” I am not referring to some contradiction buried deep down in the foundation of things, and influencing them from there. Contradiction is “fundamental” in the sense that it is persistent, and repeating—yet always in concrete situations, on the surface of things and in the present. It is by engaging with it in these concrete situations that we work with the “fundamental contradiction.” Contradiction is not something that we simply have to accept and “make do with”; it can become, and be “used” as, the source of emancipation from the very logic dictated by this contradiction. This is what analysis ideally leads to: contradiction does not simply disappear, but the way it functions in the discourse structuring our reality changes radically. And this happens as a result of our fully and actively engaging in the contradiction, taking our place in it.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“It is not out of (false or sincere) modesty that Lacan says “I learn everything from my analysands,” “I borrow my interventions from them.” Rather, this is a procedure, a method that is carefully thought out, and actually recalls Hegel’s warning, in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, against the kind
of (philosophical) proceeding which concerns itself only with aims and results, with differentiating and passing judgments on things. This kind of activity, says Hegel, instead of getting involved with the thing, is always-already beyond it; instead of tarrying with it, and being preoccupied with it, this kind of knowing remains essentially preoccupied with itself. The proximity of “practicing analyst” Lacan and “speculative philosopher” Hegel on these questions of method should be enough to prevent any hasty conclusions drawn in terms of theory versus practice, philosophy versus antiphilosophy, or singular versus universal.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“It is perhaps not enough to say that there is no essence of femininity; one could go a step further and say that the essence of femininity is to pretend to be a woman. One is a woman if one carries castration as a mask.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“There is no struggle here: life is a circuitous route to death, and conservative instincts are the pavement of this route, they are one with it, indistinguishable from it. They don’t “want” anything, they don’t “struggle” with death, they simply do their job of making this particular circuitous path to the inanimate operative. Strictly speaking, they work at maintaining this path, and not simply at “maintaining life.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“The death drive names a kind of fundamental or ontological fatigue of life as such. It is the steady undercurrent of life in all its colorful and exuberant forms. It is not the opposite of these forms, but it is present in all of them.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“But one could go even further and radicalize these claims by extending them to “nature” or material reality as such, and suggesting that the deviation from the course of natural laws (or from the norm) is not coextensive with humankind (originating in it), but constitutive for the reality and the norm as such, and synonymous with what Žižek calls the “incomplete ontological constitution of reality.” The speaking being is neither part of (organic) nature, nor its exception (nor something in between), but its Real (the point of its own impossibility, impasse). The speaking being is the real existence of an ontological impasse. So, what is at stake is not that man is distinguished by the declination from nature and its laws; man is not an exception (constituting the whole of the rest of nature), but the point at which nature exists (only) through the inclusion of its own impossibility.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“Lacan’s point here could be summed up as follows: the relationship between life and death is indeed trivial, or would indeed be trivial, if it were not always- already interrupted, complicated from within. On a most basic level, jouissance, enjoyment as “a disturbed relationship to one’s body,” refers to the fact that enjoyment, by contaminating, flavoring with enjoyment, the satisfaction of all the body’s basic needs, introduces in the (supposed) immediacy of living and of satisfying one’s needs a crucial gap, a décalage, on account of which things can take a different course than what is supposed to be normal or natural. (Recall: “If an animal eats regularly, it is clearly because it doesn’t know the enjoyment of hunger.”) Jouissance is what breaks up the (supposed) circle of animal life, and wakes us up to metaphysics. ...”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“There is no natural need that is absolutely pure, that is to say, devoid of this surplus element which splits it from within. Drive can neither be completely separated from biological, organic needs and functions (since it originates within their realm, it starts off by inhabiting them), nor simply reduced to them.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“What (Lacanian) psychoanalysis brings to this debate about the human animal shares something with the Nietzschean suggestion: there is no “human animal” understood as a fully operative and self-sustaining animal entity in men. There is no animal, zero level of humanity (“human animal”) which, left to itself, would function on a kind of autopilot of survival or self-preservation. There is no zero level of the human (animal), as a quasi-neutral basis, from which a human being would then eventually diverge and rise toward higher and properly human aspirations and accomplishments. The human animal is a half-finished animal, that is to say, an animal that does not work/function as it is supposed to. The plus (what in human is more than animal) takes the place of the less (what in human is less than animal).”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“Lacan’s definition of this difference is indeed extremely concise and precise. What is at stake is not that nature as scientific object (that is, as physics) is only an effect of discourse, its consequence—and that in this sense physics does not actually deal with the Real, but only with its own constructions. What is at stake is, rather, that the discourse of science creates, opens up, a space in which this discourse has (real) consequences. And this is far from being the same thing. We are dealing with something that most literally, and from the inside, splits the world in two.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“To put it even more strongly: the revolution of Galilean science consists in producing its object (“nature”) as its own objective correlate. In Lacan’s work we find a whole series of such very strong statements, for example: “Energy is not a substance ..., it’s a numerical constant that a physicist has to find in his calculations, so as to be able to work”. The fact that science speaks about this or that law of nature, and about the universe, does not mean that it maintains the perspective of the great Outside (as not discursively constituted in any way), rather the opposite. Modern science starts when it produces its object. This is not to be understood in the Kantian sense of the transcendental constitution of phenomena, but in a slightly different, and stronger, sense. Modern science literally creates a new real(ity): it is not that the object of science is “mediated” by its formulas; rather, it is indistinguishable from them, it does not exist outside them, yet it is real. It has real consequences or consequences in the Real. More precisely: the new Real that emerges with the Galilean scientific revolution (the complete mathematization of science) is a Real in which—and this is decisive—(the scientific) discourse has consequences. Such as, for example, landing on the moon. For the fact that this discourse has consequences in the Real does not hold for nature in the broad sense of the word, it holds only for nature as physics or for physical nature.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“One of the great merits of Meillassoux’s book is that it has (re)opened not so much the question of the relationship between philosophy and science as the question of whether they are speaking about the same world.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“It would be difficult to put it more precisely: the structure that attempts to articulate the Real is determined in its foundation by the Real it attempts to formulate. Yet this very determination, far from discrediting in advance all approaches to the Real by way of the structure, is precisely what can make them credible. It is this very determination that can eventually ground (or justify) the psychoanalytic claims to realism. This grounding of realism can take place only from a certain folding of the structure upon itself, and from a singular perspective (“looking awry”) on this folding. Psychoanalysis is what introduces this singular perspective.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“And here we come to the core of the difference between Lacan and Badiou, as Badiou sees it: what makes Lacan an antiphilosopher (or sophist) is his claim that we cannot speak about the Real (and that there is no truth about the real), and that the Real does not allow for metalanguage. However, on the basis of what has been said so far, we can already see the crucial difference that separates Lacan from, for example, the Wittgensteinian version of this claim. We cannot speak about the Real because speech is too close to it, because it can never fully escape the Real, but holds onto it. This is why, instead of the prohibition of the impossible, which we find in Wittgenstein (“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”—the famous lines from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), we have in Lacan its double reversal: go on, speak about anything whatsoever, and with a little luck and help (from the analyst) you will sooner or later stumble against the Real, and get to formalize (write) it. The Real is not some realm or substance to be talked about, it is the inherent contradiction of speech, twisting its tongue, so to speak. And this is precisely why there is truth, and why, at the same time, it is not possible to say it all.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“Minus one/plus enjoyment—this is the necessarily distorted structural topology where the subject of the unconscious dwells. This subject is never neuter; it is sexed, since sex(uality) is nothing but a configuring of the signifying minus and of the surplus-enjoyment: a configuring which cannot escape contradiction, the latter being the logical consequence of the one (the Other) that is not there.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“Sexuality and sexual difference are absolutely, and irreducibly, linked to the signifying order, yet this does not mean that sexual difference is a symbolic construction. Sex is real because it marks an irreducible limit (contradiction) of the signifying order (and not something beyond or outside this order).”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“Freud’s point includes a much more paradoxical claim: if pure Masculinity and pure Femininity existed (if we were able to say what they are), they—or, rather, their sexuality—would be one and the same (“masculine”). But since they do not exist, there is sexual difference. In other words, sexual difference arises not from there being two sexes or two sexualities (at least in principle), but from the fact that there is no “second sex,” and from an enigmatic indifference of the “sexual thing” (polymorphically perverse autoeroticism) that appears at the point of the “missing sex.” Moreover, if the “second sex” is missing, this does not imply that we have only a “first sex” (masculinity), since one sex does not amount to “sex” at all: if there is only one sex, it is not a “sex” in any meaningful way....”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“This brings us back to the point made earlier, to which we can now add a supplementary point: the desexualization of ontology (that is, ontology no longer being conceived as a combinatory of two, “masculine” and “feminine” principles) coincides precisely with the sexual appearing as the real/disruptive point of being. This is why, if one “removes sex from sex,” one removes the very thing that has brought to light the problem that sexual difference is all about. One does not remove the problem, but the means of seeing it, and of seeing the way it operates.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“Lacan is led to establish a difference between being and the Real. The Real is not a being, or a substance, but its deadlock, the point of its impossibility. It is inseparable from being, yet it is not being. One could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no being independent of language (or discourse)—which is why it often seems compatible with contemporary forms of nominalism. All being is symbolic; it is being in the Other. But with a crucial addition, which could be formulated as follows: there is only being in the symbolic—except that there is the Real. There “is” the Real, but this Real is no being. Yet it is not simply the outside of being; it is not something besides being, it is a convulsion, a stumbling block of the space of being. It exists only as the inherent contradiction of (symbolic) being.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“In other words, sex is messy because it appears at the point of the breaking down of the signifying consistency, or logic (its point of impossibility), not because it is in itself illogical and messy: its messiness is the result of the attempt to invent a logic at the very point of the impasse of such logic. Its “irrationality” is the summit of its efforts to establish a sexual “rationale.” This, at least, is how Lacan conceived of the formulas of sexuation: they (re)state the issue of sexuality and “sexual relations” as a logical problem (problem of the signifying logic) out of which it springs.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“To spell it out in full: human sexuality is the placeholder of the missing signifier. It is a mess, but it is a mess that actually compensates for the sexual relation as impossible (to be written). This, I believe, is a crucial reversal of the common perception that we need to make: the messiness of our sexuality is not a consequence or result of there being no sexual relation, it is not that our sexuality is messy because it is without a clear signifying rule; it emerges only from, and at the place of, this lack, and attempts to deal with it. Sexuality is not ravaged by, or disturbed, because of a gap cutting deep into its “tissue,” it is, rather, the messy sewing up of this gap.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“The lesson and the imperative of psychoanalysis is not “Let us devote all our attention to the sexual (meaning) as our ultimate horizon”; it is instead a reduction of sex and the sexual (which, in fact, has always been overloaded with meanings and interpretations) to the point of ontological inconsistency, which, as such, is irreducible.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“This is a truly political lesson of psychoanalysis: Power—and particularly modern forms of power—works by first appropriating a fundamental negativity of the symbolic order, its constitutive non-relation, while building it into a narrative of a higher Relation. This is what constitutes, puts into place and perpetuates, the relations of domination. And the actual, concrete exploitation is based on, made possible (and fueled) by, this appropriation, this “privatization of the negative.” This is what distinguishes—to take the famous Brechtian example—the robbing of a bank (common theft) from the founding of a bank (a double theft which appropriates the very lever of production and its exploitation).”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“It is in this precise sense that one could reaffirm the well-known slogan “the sexual is political” and give it a new, more radical meaning. “The sexual is political” not in the sense of sexuality as a realm of being where political struggles also take place, but in the sense that a true emancipatory politics can be thought only on the ground of an “object-disoriented ontology”—that is, an ontology that pursues not simply being qua being, but the crack (the Real, the antagonism) that haunts being from within, informs it.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“... one of the primary tasks of psychoanalysis is to slowly but thoroughly deactive the path of this satisfaction, to render it useless. To produce sex as absolutely and intrinsically meaningless, not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. That is to say: to restore sex in its dimension of the Real.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

“... one of the primary tasks of psychoanalysis is to slowly but thoroughly deactive the path of this satisfaction, to render it useless. To produce sex as absolutely and intrinsically meaningsless, not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. That is to say: to restore sex in its dimension of the Real.”
― Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?