The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may gave the over-all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. […] Capture and seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement: parents and children, adults arid adolescents, educator and students, doctors and patients, the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his perverts, all have played this game continually since the nineteenth century. These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure (Foucault 1976, p. 45).
Pleasure and power – or, in Lacanian terms, jouissance and symbolic order – thus form a spiral, a knot in which they do not face each other from adverse positions, but “seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement” (Foucault 1976, p. 48). In short, we are still on the side of that inextricable interweaving between nature and culture seen by psychoanalysis and anthropology: sexuality, drive, pleasure, on the one hand, and, on the other, castration, symbolic order, institutional regulation are actually such only in the knot that ties them, not before or beyond this. With the Foucauldian warning that any will for truth about it, that is, any attempt to come to the core of this knot (at the base of every civilization and institution), bringing it to knowledge, is already an exercise of power (an attempt to shape civilization and its institutions). Any attempt to untie it is a way of knotting it up. Is it not, then, precisely the scandal in which Freud and Lévi-Strauss have come across, the impossibility of untying the knot between sex and the institution, what produces a willingness to know, that great talk (and make people talk) about the knot that is also a way of getting our hands on it? Isn’t it really the stumbling stone, that is, an impasse in knowledge, that generates the desire to know? What is scandalous is spoken about. And if, as for Foucault, every knowledge has always been power, one could rephrase the question as: it is not really an impasse of knowledge-power (the stumbling of culture, which is never quite itself, not being able to emancipate from every, even negative, reference to nature) to attract always new knowledge-power strategies (new kinds of culture, new norms and institutions, as if civilization was trying to escape from itself and from a hole that inhabits it from its origin)? Male/Female: Fluctuating Sex Where does sexuality come from and what would be the meaning? If this question is not innocent, if every discourse on sexuality is already a political action, a performance of knowledge-power, there seems to be no way for a “neutral” knowledge about sex: the truth about sex, its meaning and its origin is a barred path. Or maybe the same barred path is also the way out. This is what Judith Butler seems to think: if the meaning of sex is always a matter of political performance, the let us play at a political performance! Soaked up the Foucault lesson and becoming radicalized to the point of questioning the distinction between sex and gender (which had been central to feminism inspired by Simone De Beauvoir), the author of Gender Trouble aims to make the barred way, and of the same bar that divides male/female, a barricade (not so far from Lacan’s adage “there is no sexual relationship” ([Lacan 1975]). There is no “essence” or “ontological core” in being a man and being a woman: nothing pre-exists the performance, that is, to that practice, or set of practices, which gives shape to reality (also sexual) and its supposed essences. Referring to Derrida’s reflections on repeatability in response to the theorization of the linguistic acts of John Searle and J. L. Austin, Butler does not refer to a performative gesture that creates a new reality immediately in the very act of the performance (as in the performative statement “I declare you husband and wife”), but to a process in which socio-symbolic constructions, by force of repetition and reiteration, become nature. Therefore, every supposed nature (starting from the distinction between man/woman) is always the result of a “cultural construction” (Butler 1993, p. 28). Culture produces (as knowledge) and at the same time regulates (as power) what we call “nature”, which is a sedimented effect of its repetitions. But if reiteration is the way in which knowledge-power acts, it is also, at the same time, what allows – taking advantage of the intervals of reiteration, its fissures and instability – the rise of a counter-power capable of reshaping the socio-symbolic constructions (and therefore, over time, “nature” itself as their sediment): “As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened” (Butler 1993, p. 10). And these instabilities allow errant and unproductive sexualities (the Freudian “polymorphous perverse” sexuality revisited in a queer version) to destabilize from within the very process of repetition, putting into crisis the consolidation of sexual norms. Constructivism? Not quite. With Bodies that matter Butler attempts to move beyond the paradigms of essentialism (innate sexuality) and of constructivism (socially constructed sexuality) [2], adopting rather a deconstructionist perspective that would seem to make of the sexual difference the différance of Derrida. Against constructivism, the author stresses that “there is an ‘outside’ to what is constructed by discourse”, but she adds soon after, “this is not an absolute ‘outside’, an ontological there-ness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse” (Butler 1993, p. 8). This “outside” is not matter, for, Butler observes in Hegelian tones, “to posit by way of language a materiality outside of language is still to posit that materiality” (Butler 1993, p. 30). It is not even the body, since “there is no reference to a pure body that is not at the same time a further formation of that body” (p. 10). So, what is it? And what about the body and its anatomy? Where psychoanalysis wanted to distinguish three different stages in the sexuating process – as Geneviève Morel does, distinguishing anatomy, discourse of the Other and subjective choice of sex (see Morel 2011) – for Butler it would be easy to show that the first two are one. It is true that, in the first phase, the machines of science can detect even before the appearance of the sexual body the sex of the newborn. But what are the machines doing there, if not to embody yet another version of the Cucufa’s ring? They are part of the discourse of the Other and his “will to know”, from such discourse they are born and at its service they operate (what would the machines serve if not precisely to define the body by boxing it into the patterns of the symbolic order that pre-exists them and of which they are an extension?). Just as what we eat is not natural but cultural (in Lévi-Strauss’s terms, it is not raw but cooked), in the same way by naming the sexual organ or detecting it technologically there is nothing natural [3], being the nominee/detected already passed through the grid of the symbolic (never raw biology, human anatomy is always “gri[lle]d” [4]). If, paraphrasing Hegel with Lévi-Strauss, the symbol is the cook of the thing, the machines that detect sex are the same with which you prepare it, cook it and show it beautiful and ready to the wise view of the gynecologist. Removed the machines, the speech of the Other, the signifiers, what would remain (the gesture of the midwife who, unable to speak, indicates the genitals of the newborn) would not be an ostension of sexual difference (“there is this instead of that”) but an ineffable epiphany (a pure “there is”). Therefore, rather than “gender fluidity”, it would be said to be a question of “fluctuating sex”. This “outside” or pure “there is” is in fact sex as an unstable and fluctuating reference element of the discourse, which the discourse itself denotes but from which it is also always derailed:The linguistic categories that are understood to “denote” the materiality of the body are themselves troubled by a referent that is never fully or permanently resolved or contained by any given signified. Indeed, that referent persists only as a kind of absence or loss, that which language does not capture, but, instead, that which impels language repeatedly to attempt that capture, that circumscription—and to fail (Butler 1993, p. 67).
Is Butler not here saying in her own way what we have said earlier about an impasse in knowledge that generates the same willingness to know? The contact that persists as absence or loss is the stumbling point of language (of culture) that incites the same language (culture) to attempt to capture it. [5] Again, what scandalizes makes people talk about it. Cucufa’s ring, Butler seems to say, has always been inscribed in language. It should also be remembered, with Foucault, that in all this talk (as effect of stumbling), it is not only a question of knowledge, but also, and always, of power, that is, we would say, of culture in the broadest sense of the term (language, symbolic order, institutions, standards) as what distinguishes man from animal. There is an impasse in every institution (starting with language, the first and original institution of the human being, according to De Saussure) which calls for an incessant renewal of the institution itself, since it never ceases to retie its knot. The stumbling point of the institution is then its own institutional instance: the way that leads to impasse is also the way out. Sex? Cream-free A guy goes into a restaurant and says to the waiter: “A coffee without cream, please”. The waiter replies: “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re out of cream. Could it be without milk?”. This joke, very popular in the school of Ljubljana,[6]exemplifies the operation of the signifying structure in the last Lacan. Where does sexuality come from? According to Alenka Zupančič, right there, in the fact that the signifying structure appears since the beginning with a signifier less (with-without something). Again, an impasse in knowledge (or, in Foucault manner, in knowledge-power), but with a significant shift from Judith Butler. Sex originally has nothing to do with sex: rather than in the genital organs, it is in language and its significant structure that the origin of sexuality in the human being (both phylogenetically and ontogenetically) should be sought. For Lacanian psychoanalysis it is in fact the advent of the word that makes the human body a sexual body. But how to enter the world of words? It is generally thought that language is simply composed of signifiers and that the signifiers are its condition: the child, invested by the significant structure, would learn a little at a time to inhabit it and to handle it by entering its game of cross references. We have gotten used to speaking about nature being somehow interrupted, thrown out of joint, by the “emergence of the signifier”. But what exactly does this mean? In What IS Sex? Zupančič says: “in the context of Lacan’s late work, it seems that we could also put things in a different ‘mythological’ perspective – mythological to the extent that no narrative about the Beginning can avoid constructing a myth that best suits the real of actual observation” (Zupančič 2017, p. 47). In this alternative perspective, the human (hi)story begins not with the emergence of the signifier, but with one signifier “gone missing”. We could indeed say that nature is already full of signifiers (and at the same time indifferent to them); and that at some point one signifier ‘falls out’, goes missing. And it is only from this that the “logic of the signifier” in the strict sense of the term is born (signifiers start to “run” and to relate to each other, across this gap). In this sense, and from this perspective, speech itself is already a response to the missing signifier, which is not (there) (Zupančič 2017, p. 47). So, a gap appears along with the significant order as it is internal to it (the famous “empty box” structuralism talks about: see Deleuze 2004). Strictly speaking, it is not a question of a simple loss (we do not refer to a simple lack or negativity) since from the beginning the structure appears not without but rather with-without a signifier: as suggested by the waiter’s answer in the joke, “without” something means “with the lack of something” (compared to the simple lack there is also a spectral and paradoxical entity that inhabits the dimension of negativity). It is with this with-without that the signifying structure affects the body of the human being, that so begins to speak (the signifiers begin to “run”) as well as to enjoy (enjoyment appears at the place of this gap and, through it, ties itself to the significant order). Sexuality emerges, that is, in the space of this void: it is a confused and precarious attempt to mend the gap. Here then is the difference, seemingly subtle, but indeed large, with Judith Butler. There is an impasse in not knowledge because there is a pre-colloquial reference (what we have previously called “fluctuating sex”) that is never completely or permanently resolved in the symbolic order (hence the errant sexualities that exceed the symbolic norms). If anything, there is an impasse in knowledge because the significant structure is given, from the beginning, with an empty box which has the form of an internal contradiction (the “with-without”). And sexuality is this same impasse, the always precarious attempt to come to the head of the contradiction. In Zupančič’s words: “Sexuality is not some being that exists beyond the symbolic; it ‘exists’ solely as the contradiction of the symbolic space that appears because of the constitutively missing signifier, and of what appears at its place (enjoyment)” (Zupančič 2017, p. 42). Otherwise, sex is real: it is not a symbolic construct and not even an extra-symbolic reference, but what marks the irreducible (contradiction) limit of the symbolic order, the point at which the symbolic stumbles into its own lack of identity. Zupančič insists on the gap as a co-original to the giving of the signifier structure. But how do we understand this lack? You can think of it as a void that you give next to a full. But, given the insistence of with-without, it would perhaps be better to think of the relationship between emptiness and fullness as an “inclusive exclusion”, that is, emptiness as a fold of the fullness. Let’s try here to translate the question in terms of knots, giving a representation in an only sketched and very stylized form. Nature and culture (or, as by Deleuze “instincts and institutions”) are not two strings that knot onto each other (they should otherwise already exist separately). There is only one rope (nature) that knotting forms culture (institutions are a knot, you may call it “social bond”, or a series of knots one on top of the other). In this sense nature (the rope) has always inhabited culture (the knot) and something about culture has always inhabited nature (the rope is the power to tie oneself). Only when it bends, does the rope reflect on itself, seeing “nature” (as mere rope) being already “culture” (node). The gap is nothing more than the space that the rope forms by knotting itself, the iato that allows the rope to be tighter or loose, which allows unknotting as well as re-tying. The gap is not a void, nor a lack, but a possibility of sliding: impasse of knowledge-power, that is, of every institution, which never ceases to tighten and to loosen, but also passe, passage point, possibility of new knots. The Command Bar Where does sexuality come from? There is no ‘neutral’ answer, but this impasse is a passe, that is, it is an im-passe: an im-possible place to be symbolized precisely because point of curvature and passage from which the symbolic order takes place like this order instead of that other one. In these terms Žižek reads the sexual difference, which, on Lacan’s basis, defines as real-impossible: Sexual difference is for Lacan not a firm set of “static” symbolic oppositions and inclusions or exclusions (heterosexual normativity that relegates homosexuality and other “perversions” to some secondary role), but the name of a deadlock, of a trauma, of an open question, of something that resists every attempt at its symbolization. Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very “impossibility” that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what “sexual difference” will mean (Žižek 2012, pp. 612-613). Precisely as it cannot be definitively symbolized, the bar that divides man/woman as differentiating (making and undoing) the difference is the real terrain of conflict: unrepresentable border between male and female, point of encounter and clash between the sexes, discriminatory excess and therefore lever for any discrimination, perennial imbalance and gender disparity, this difference is the turning point (or bending) and therefore the command bar impossible to grasp, exceeding any grip, but precisely for this reason continually disputed. Precisely to the extent that it is pre-political (before the sphere of institutional politics) it is the real, impossible but necessary stake of any politics of the sexes. Žižek writes again: “Insofar as sexual difference is real/impossible, it is precisely not ‘binary’: but, again, that on account of which every ‘binary’ interpretation (every translation of sexual difference into symbolic dualisms: reason versus emotion, active versus passive, etc.) always fails” (Žižek 2012, p. 748). It is non-binary precisely because it is the extra place of making and unmaking of every binary opposition and it is precisely this curving (without ever annulling itself), at the same time instituting and dismissing, to open the games of knowledge-power and to keep them going. It is the excess that always runs through sexuality, the excess proper to every sexual identity, what in sex exceeds every norm because that is the point from which every norm is created. Paradoxically, one of the founders of the LGBT rights movement, the activist Guy Hocquenghem, who also was an inspiration for Foucault’s research into sexuality, had, on rights, a distant and distrustful position, recently dusted off and taken in more or less provocatively, with more or less radical tones by some queer theorists [7]: there is something in homosexuality that is excessive to the symbolic order and makes it unassimilable to law and impossible to institutionalize through a policy of rights, so that the idea of a “constant progress, in terms of bourgeois ideology, towards the liberalization of public morals and respect for the individual” is to be considered a mere “bourgeois myth” (Hocquenghem 1993, p. 62). This position should first be extended to all forms of sexuality and then overturned: precisely because there is always something in sex that remains “out law” and can never find peace in institution, it is always necessary to challenge the law and never leave the institution in peace, forcing it to continue adjustments in a perpetual negotiation. Sex and institution are a knot that requires to be continual r-eknotting.