Jason B. Jones

School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
jason.jones@lcc.gatech.edu

 

Review of: Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2000.

 

In an interview familiar to English readers, “The Confession of the Flesh,” there is a terse exchange between Michel Foucault and Jacques-Alain Miller over the former’s history of sexuality. Miller doggedly insists that “There isn’t a history of sexuality in the way that there is a history of bread” (213). Foucault replies by likening the history of sexuality to that of madness, and the interview takes a different turn.¹ It is a pity that Miller and Foucault should have allowed this particular point to drop, for it reveals the central conflict between psychoanalysis and the historicism exemplified by Foucault: psychoanalysis, specifically its Lacanian inflections, contends that historicism misrecognizes sexuality by turning it into an effect of discourse.² This conflict has wide-ranging repercussions, touching on fundamental questions of identity, sexuality, power, representation, and the nature of history and historical change.

 

The year 2000 saw the publication of eagerly awaited collections by two of the most invigorating and provocative writers on psychoanalysis and historicism: Tim Dean’s Beyond Sexuality and Charles Shepherdson’s Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. Dean and Shepherdson begin their books with statements of the same goal: to recapture the “theoretical specificity of Lacanian theory” in the face of an Anglo-American reception that has tended either to assimilate psychoanalysis with Foucault or to dismiss it as either essentialist and ahistorical, on the one hand, or as reducing everything to language, on the other (Shepherdson 8; for similar statements from Dean see 8, 15, and 22). One great merit of Beyond Sexuality and Vital Signs is the way they move debates over sexuality and identity beyond facile, sterile arguments between essentialism and constructionism–an opposition, Shepherdson points out, that plays out in postmodern clothes the nineteenth-century, and thus basically pre-Freudian, opposition between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturewissenschaften (15, 183).

 

Dean and Shepherdson start from the same place: the Lacanian proposition, derived from Freud, that sexuality represents a failure of identity constitutes the sharpest insight of psychoanalysis, one with ramifications that are still far from being understood. The Lacanian argument is profoundly antipsychological and anti-commonsensical, as Dean observes: “human sexuality involves persons only contingently…. We misconstrue sexuality’s functioning when we begin our analysis of it from the point of view of men and women, rather than from the perspective of language and its effects” (18). Shepherdson explains that, because Freud’s theory of sexuality binds the drives to representation, psychoanalysis fundamentally conceives of a sexuality constitutively opposed to nature, reproduction, or any other telos. In Dean’s lovely expression, “Language and the body are permanently out of synch, though not always in the same way” (59).

 

In addition to this attention to sexuality’s failure, the two books share other emphases, such as clarifying the differences between the Imaginary and the Symbolic (including between the image and the word), and most notably a sustained engagement with Catherine Millot’s work on transsexuality.³ As a consequence of their attempt to bring psychoanalysis into sharper relief, both writers are also somewhat polemical, digging through the reception history of Lacanian psychoanalysis and what is usually called French feminism in order to demonstrate how and why certain concepts have been obscured–or simply not understood. Despite their common interest in clarifying the theoretical stakes of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Dean and Shepherdson also have significantly divergent interests and methods. Dean’s Beyond Sexuality offers a radical rethinking of sexuality on impersonalist grounds, revealing the value of Lacan’s conception of the objet a to queer theory–and, splendidly, the extent to which the objet a deserves to supplant the phallus in Lacanian theory. Dean eloquently demonstrates the vitality of heterodox–or, perhaps more precisely, of original, non-acolytic–readings of Lacan, as well as the crucial importance of Lacanian analysis for social phenomena such as safe-sex education. Shepherdson’s disentangling of the three elements of his subtitle–nature, culture, psychoanalysis–works to defamiliarize French feminists such as Irigaray, Kristeva, Lemoine-Luccioni, and Millot. In fact, reading Vital Signs leads to an astonishing conclusion: we have never understood how to read these writers, and an extensive rereading will have to begin.

 

Readers of Postmodern Culture may recognize “History and The Real: Foucault with Lacan,” Shepherdson’s fifth chapter, since a version of it appeared here previously. The precision and expositional grace of Shepherdson’s prose will thus already be familiar. Vital Signs is revelatory, with every chapter overturning commonplaces of the American misunderstanding of French psychoanalysis. A partial list of his main claims will suggest the importance of this project: “sexual difference is neither ‘sex’ nor ‘gender'” (2); the body is neither natural nor cultural, in anything like the normal understanding of those terms; for Lacan, the mother only emerges in the Symbolic order; psychoanalysis distinguishes women from mothers, and both from the fantasy of a pre-Oedipal mother; for psychoanalysis, “human sexuality is inevitably historical” (99), and so forth. In addition to these far-reaching theoretical questions, Shepherdson also provides lucid accounts of Lacan’s Schema R–which clearly indicates the crucial importance of the mother for the Symbolic order–and of the shift from the Oedipus myth to the myth of the primal horde, the Freudian basis for Lacan’s arguments about jouissance after Seminar 7.

 

To briefly clarify some of these claims, I shall try to follow Shepherdson’s argument about sexuality and history, the thread connecting the chapters in his book. He begins with the Freudian distinction between “instinct” (Instinkt) and “drive” (Trieb). The first consequence of this distinction is that sexuality is irrevocably disconnected from reproduction and the natural. In fact, “one cannot properly speak of an ‘originally natural’ sexuality that would (later) be distorted by external and therefore merely accidental deformation by the particular conventions of a given culture–the analysis of the sexual drive should lead us to speak of its original emergence as unnatural, as intrinsically constituted through an organization that is beyond the ‘law’ governing the organism alone” (34). It is because the drive is not natural–that is, because there is a gap between instinct and drive–that sexuality can have a history. Actually, this can be put more dramatically: insofar as it interrupts the biological determinants of the body, human sexuality simply is history. The Symbolic order is thus the threshold of history.

 

The cultural studies equation of Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic order with actually existing institutions in a particular society has thoroughly confused this point.⁴ For Lacan, the Symbolic order is, in effect, the law underpinning culture itself; in other words, it is the condition necessary to allow social institutions to exist at all. To continue to use the example of sexuality, it is the introduction of the Symbolic–here, the order of representation–into a biological, instinctual understanding of sexuality that allows the varieties of human sexuality to come into being. Once these sexualities have begun to emerge, the historicist thesis becomes more appropriate, but it is always a second-order understanding. As Shepherdson comments, historicism and psychoanalysis address fundamentally different questions. Historicism can help us understand “the contingent, historically constituted forms of life,” while psychoanalysis focuses on the “inevitable dimension of sexually marked embodiment” (88).⁵

 

By providing an account of how the biological organism becomes “the body,” psychoanalysis refuses the opposition between nature and culture that has governed discourse on sexuality since the nineteenth century. It is therefore highly comic to find this opposition being used to dismiss psychoanalysis–both as endorsing biology over culture (essentialism) and as focusing too relentlessly on the signifier (constructivism). The first two chapters of Vital Signs address themselves to this irony, seeking to uncover in Irigaray, Kristeva, and others a psychoanalytic argument about embodiment and history that has literally been ignored in the course of their Anglo-American reception. For example, “everyone knows” that Kristeva distinguishes between the (feminine) semiotic and the (masculine) Symbolic. Both hostile and sympathetic critics often begin their responses to Kristeva with this point. However, Shepherdson demonstrates that gendering the semiotic/Symbolic distinction misses Kristeva’s point entirely:

 

Such an account presupposes a commonsense account of sexual difference; thereby circumventing the questions psychoanalysis is seeking to address, namely, the question of how sexual difference in the human animal is subject to representation rather than being naturally given. Thus, the semiotic is not automatically a domain of maternal or feminine identity, but a domain in which sexual difference is not yet established, and consequently it cannot be gendered without returning to a pregiven sexual difference (based on common sense and anatomy) that avoids the very question Kristeva’s categories seek to address. (61)

 

The reception of French feminism is, for Shepherdson, simply one egregious instance of the general misunderstanding of psychoanalysis’s interrogation of sexuality.

 

Shepherdson’s reading of “Stabat Mater” demonstrates the limitations of our current understanding of Kristeva. In his view, Kristeva emphasizes the importance of maternal desire to the Symbolic order. In other words, not only is it not the case that women and mothers are relegated to the Imaginary, it is also not the case that the move to the Symbolic is predicated on the father. Shepherdson’s reading depends on two related points. First, there is no sexual difference without the Symbolic order. As a result, whenever we speak of the “Imaginary mother,” we are dealing with a fantasy of maternity that is already the product of the Symbolic: The Imaginary mother is “the archaic maternal image,… a phallic figure that cannot be understood in terms of sexual difference” (61). Second, the advent of the Symbolic order is not first heralded by the child’s recognition of the father, as so many literal-minded readers of Lacan claim. Instead, the child is confronted with the astonishing fact that the “mother” (which, as I’ve just said, cannot be conceptualized with reference to sexual difference) wants something beyond the child. By incarnating desire for the child in this way, Shepherdson poetically writes, the “symbolic mother thus performs a second birth, a symbolic labor, which escorts the child out of the organic night, out of the imaginary world of blood and milk, out of the oceanic world of primary narcissism, and into the world of speech, where desire can be articulated” (69). The fundamental lesson of Vital Signs is this: by paying attention to the theoretical specificity of psychoanalysis, we can discover a perspective on sexuality far richer than any available alternative. The refusal of psychoanalysis to yield pride of place to either nature or culture gestures towards a turbulent field of trauma, fantasy, and the excesses of symbolization and language. The work of understanding this field, Shepherdson tantalizingly suggests, has yet to begin.

 

If Vital Signs shows how we have never fully understood psychoanalysis, Dean’s Beyond Sexuality demonstrates that psychoanalytic theorists have not always understood just how rich a resource they had. Subsequently, in addition to coinciding with Shepherdson’s argument about sexuality and history, Dean also advances a powerful new inflection of the theory of sexuality, arguing on ethical grounds for an impersonalist theory of desire, one that would recognize that psychically we have sex not with others but with the Other. The thesis of Beyond Sexuality is that the theory of the objet a, object-cause of desire, represents the key insight of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the theory emphasizing the phallus is a kind of retrograde legacy: “Lacan’s most profound ideological and affective convictions sometimes run counter to his most brilliant critical and analytical insights” (12).⁶ If we understand the objet a to provide the conceptual core of sexuality, then we can understand that “one would be defined by one’s sexuality no more than by any other contingent feature, because erotic desire would have been fully disarticulated from personhood” (21). Beyond Sexuality also shows that taking psychoanalysis seriously means neither self-importance nor obsequious deference to Freud or Lacan. Dean’s prose is both clear and witty, and he has a genius for the well-placed one-liner with significant conceptual implications. At one point, he sums up his de-emphasis of the phallus: “It is not so much that the phallus is really a penis–or, in Judith Butler’s reading, a dildo–as it is a giant red herring” (13-14). And elsewhere, he splendidly revises the familiar Lacanian maxim about transference and the “subject supposed to know”: “he whom I suppose to know how to enjoy, I hate” (127). Beyond Sexuality is an important intervention in both psychoanalytic thought and queer theory, and deserves a wide audience.

 

In this space I cannot address all of Dean’s claims, but I will instead try to explain why Dean prefers the objet a over the phallus, and what allows him to do so. In the chapter entitled “How to Read Lacan,” Dean provides a schematic periodization of Lacan, producing a series of Lacans both overlapping and discontinuous–a Lacan of the Imaginary, one of the Symbolic, one of the Real, and one of the sinthome, Lacan’s final reconceptualization of the symptom. By doing so, Dean avoids both the pitfall of over-contextualizing Lacan (which would reduce his concepts into epiphenomena of his life and times, an approach exemplified for Dean by David Macey and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen) and that of overly narrativizing Lacan’s thought (thus producing a “conversion narrative characteristic of ego formations” [37]; Dean finds this approach in Zizek’s well-known emphasis on Seminar 7 as the birth of the Real in Lacan). Viewed in the context of Lacan’s career as a whole, Dean claims, the phallus should be seen as a “provisional concept because so many of its functions are taken over by other concepts, in particular that of object a, which has no a priori relation to gender and, indeed, may be represented by objects gendered masculine, feminine, or neuter” (45). The ground for this argument is Lacan’s tendency to talk about the image of the penis as a metaphor for the phallus, leading Dean to infer that what’s being proposed is an analogy. As a consequence, “when we insist on invoking the concept of the phallus to talk about desire, we’re effectively mistaking the scaffolding for the building” (46-47).

 

Dean emphasizes the Lacan of the Real because his discussions of the Real drive Lacan to reconsider the status of the objet a. As soon as the Real becomes a separate conceptual register, we can see that the differences between “reality” and “fantasy” no longer hold: “Lacan suggests that fantasy and desire don’t concern imagined, hallucinatory objects as distinct from actually existing objects. Rather, objects of fantasy (objects a) are forever lost–even from the visual projections of the imagination–thanks to their cutting away from the subject that they thereby bring into being” (57).⁷ The last clause emphasizes the role of the objet a as object-cause of desire: it is both the thing desired and the source of desire–that is, it elicits the desire that then becomes attached to it. As Dean points out, the “cut that produces object and subject both is not a border separation, a more or less culturally regulated division between domains or acceptable objects of desire. Instead, this is an internal cut, one that constitutively ensures the separation of subject and object by making the subject’s reality and its desire depend on the object’s never coming into view, never entering the field of reality or of imaginary relations” (58). An immediate consequence of this view is that any attempt to connect sexuality with identity is thereby associated with the ego, and thus with the normative enemy of desire.

 

Dean lays out the stakes of allowing the ego to take over desire in “Transcending Gender,” a chapter demonstrating the limitations of gender theory’s frequent celebration of drag and transsexuality as exemplifications of the social construction of gender. From a psychoanalytic point of view, drag has a somewhat different implication. To the extent that the successful performance of drag is often associated with “scrupulously accurate mimesis” (69), it thus stresses the normative implications of gender identity: “theories of mimesis or imitation represent the wrong approach to gender altogether, because formulating questions of gender and sexuality in terms of the mimetic or imitative generation of reality effects restricts vital political questions to the arena of ego identifications” (71). Rather than subvert the reigning paradigms of sexual difference, then, gender performance theory surprisingly reinforces them: sexuality is an affair of the ego, and the vicissitudes of unconscious desire can be deprecated as distasteful or politically objectionable.

 

Against this view psychoanalysis makes an astonishing claim: “the unconscious has no knowledge of sexual difference” (86). This point continually slips from view in discussions of psychoanalysis. However, it is the conceptual basis for Dean’s project: “Lacan maintains that there is no signifier for sexual difference in the unconscious. Hence the phallus cannot be a signifier of sexual difference; instead, it counts as a signifier of the total effects of the signified–that is, of meaning. If there is no signifier for sexual difference in the unconscious, then as far as the unconscious is concerned heterosexuality does not exist…. Sexual difference does not organize or determine sexual desire” (86-87).⁸ Our tendency to read sexual difference and sexuality in terms of each other, and to read sexual difference in terms of men and women, corresponds to a pre-Freudian, psychologistic understanding of sexuality. Worse, it endorses an identification of sexuality with the ego, with normative, idealizing results (229).

 

In “Lacan Meets Queer Theory,” Dean explores the possibility of a genuinely non-normative sexuality, one built around objets a rather than personhood and identitarian claims. The chapter engages such diverse thinkers as Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, Michael Warner, and Guy Hocquenghem in order to sustain a conversation between antinormative strains in queer theory and psychoanalysis. The fundamental congruence that Dean observes among these writers is an emphasis on depersonalization, the recognition that sex–whether alone or in the presence of others–is a relationship with an object and with the Other. The confusion of one’s object-choice with a person, or a kind of people, “entails a kind of sublimation, an idealizing consolidation of the object…. Erotic desire for another person itself depends on some sort of sublimation–rather than sublimation standing as the alternative to interpersonal desire” (268). In the age of AIDS, Dean asks us to see that depersonalizing desire could be a way of saving lives. If taking another person as a sexual object is a form of sublimation, then perhaps other forms of sublimation could equally well serve as gateways to jouissance. Understanding sexuality (as well as all relations with others) as impersonal clarifies that “jouissance remains irreducible to sex, since although the Other has your jouissance, it has no genitalia” (171).

 

Beyond Sexuality and Vital Signs are provocative, even polemical, books; their tone may be misconstrued–or, perhaps more exactly, their tone may invite a particularly unproductive mode of “wild analysis.” For example, both writers use “psychoanalysis” to refer exclusively to the subset of psychoanalytic theory associated with French Freud: mostly Lacan, but also Bersani, Laplanche, Irigaray, Kristeva, and Millot. This is not, as is commonly asserted, a manifestation of Lacanian arrogance. Instead, it is a consequence of striving to keep in focus aspects of psychoanalysis that always threaten to fade from view. This fading happens in two directions. First, both the unconscious and the psychoanalytic subject have at best evanescent “existences,” generally understandable only as instances of failure. As Dean in particular emphasizes, this “fading” of psychoanalytic specificity is present in Freud and Lacan, as well. Second, the reception of French psychoanalysis has tended to read it as a politically dubious species of poststructuralism. In certain chapters–some of the finest of both books (in Dean, “Bodies That Mutter”; in Shepherdson, “Hysteria and the Question of Woman”), the argument about theoretical specificity requires an extended demonstration of what is actually in Lacan, and what is a confusion in the reception of Lacan. Another way of putting this is to say that the target of Dean’s and Shepherdson’s argument is rarely the theorist under consideration so much as it is the academic tendency to rely on intermediaries rather than engaging with Lacan’s work. Dean and Shepherdson argue that this reliance produces Imaginary misreadings of Lacan that are far more normative than anything in psychoanalysis (for an especially graceful articulation of this view, see Dean 13-17).

 

It is surely not a coincidence that Dean’s and Shepherdson’s academic training is grounded in poetry (Dean 25 and Shepherdson 9, 187), suggesting the peremptory benefits of close reading, even for, say, a discussion of the epistemological virtues of gloryhole sex (Dean 274). First, Beyond Sexuality and Vital Signs share a commitment to exegetical patience, sticking to the nuances of the texts they consider. Second, they are both able to locate in Lacan’s style an “incitement to further thinking” (Dean 25). The merit of the two books, from this perspective, is their capacity for enduring the peculiar disorientation induced by Lacanian thought, a disorientation that eventually becomes productive rather than disabling. Beyond Sexuality and Vital Signs provide admirable models of reading, convincingly demonstrating the conceptual impoverishment induced by the Anglo-American reception of Lacan. In particular, Dean and Shepherdson offer unusually sophisticated accounts of the paradoxical normativity that can emerge from the reigning paradigms of historicism, gender performance theory, and queer theory. They call us to a re-reading of writers we may never have fully understood–a massive endeavor, the merit of which, Shepherdson concludes, is that “psychoanalysis has a future” (185).

 

Notes

 

1. Shepherdson makes a similar point: “we cannot treat embodiment as though it were simply one more human institution, another convention invented (in the course of time) by human beings, like agriculture or atomic weapons” (88). There is a comical side to the exchange between Miller and Foucault, as well. Miller points out a connection between Foucault’s work and the Lacanian “axiom” that “there is no sexual relation.” Foucault’s reply: “I didn’t know there was this axiom” (213). The inexistence of the sexual relation is, as even casual readers of Lacan will be aware, one of the principal leitmotifs of his seminars, on par with “the unconscious is structured like a language,” and “desire is the desire of the other.” For an exemplary account of the relationship between Foucault and Lacan around this question, see Lane, “Experience”; for more comprehensive efforts to engage Foucault with Lacan, see Lane, Burdens (12-30) and Copjec (especially 1-26).

 

2. For the rationales behind identifying Foucault’s style of thought “historicist,” see Copjec (1-14), Dean (2-10), Lane, Burdens (12-30), and Shepherdson (1-15, 157). Shepherdson frames the argument with characteristic precision: the carving of the body by the drives in Freudian theory indicates “why there can be such a thing as a ‘history of sexuality,’ for it suggests that human existence is not so decisively bound to the mechanisms of instinct, the force of evolution, and the singular telos of reproduction. And yet, this very capacity to have a history… should not lead us to conclude that ‘sexuality,’ or indeed the phenomenon of embodiment, is simply a ‘discursive product,’ the contingent construction of a particular culture or a given historical moment” (7).

 

3. This congruence is registered by Dean (66).

 

4. As Shepherdson has written elsewhere, assimilating the Symbolic order to the social-historical context identifies Lacan’s concept “with the very structures [it] was elaborated to contest” (“On Fate” 283). See also Vital (45-54).

 

5. This is why, as Dean points out, it is a mistake to claim (following Judith Butler) that Lacanian psychoanalysis has a melancholy attitude towards lost jouissance (85n37; 199-202). As should now be clear, such a stance would be historicist, not psychoanalytic.

 

6. Dean is following lines of thought developed by Arnold Davidson and Teresa de Lauretis.

 

7. Dean develops this argument through a wonderfully clear discussion of the differences between Lacan’s seminar on psychosis and the ecrit “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” which is ostensibly a summary of the seminar (56-58 and 100-03). He observes that the seminar focuses on the famous axiom that “what is foreclosed in the Symbolic returns in the Real,” a formula that for all its prominence in the seminar does not appear in the ecrit. The ecrit, by contrast, focuses on the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, an idea that is implicit in the parts of the seminar being summarized.

 

8. For a fuller discussion of the common ground between queer theory and psychoanalysis, see Dean and Lane.

Works Cited

 

• Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994.
• Dean, Tim, and Christopher Lane. “Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis: An Introduction.” Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. 3-42.
• Foucault, Michel. “The Confession of the Flesh.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. 194-228.
• Lane, Christopher. The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
• —. “The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis.” Lacan in America. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. New York: Other P, 2000. 309-47.
• Shepherdson, Charles. “History and The Real: Foucault with Lacan.” Postmodern Culture 5.2 (1995): 65 pars. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v005/5.2shepherdson.html and <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.195/shepherd.195>.
• —. “On Fate: Psychoanalysis and the Desire to Know.” Dialectic and Narrative. Ed. Thomas R. Flynn and Dalia Judovitz. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.