Abstract
While Freud and Heidegger were antipathetic towards one another’s ideas, a number of commentators have argued that the Freud–Heidegger relation is actually quite complementary. This paper contributes to this position by engaging with the relationship through the mediation of their respective views on the ‘origins’ of sexuality; a topic that is implicit to Freudian psychoanalytic theory and which is often taken to be absent from Heidegger’s, with the consequence that it has been ignored when bringing them into conversation. Having shown that in the 1928 lecture course The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger does in fact address the question of sexuality in relation to the neutrality of Dasein outlined in the previous year’s Being and Time, I (1) bring Freud and Heidegger into conversation on the question of the ‘origins’ of sexuality to suggest that there is a strong affinity between the two on this issue, insofar as both (2) argue against any form of sexual essentialism by depending upon a processual (rather than substantial) ontology and affirming an originary sexual indeterminateness, which in the case of Freud takes the form of an initial bisexuality and in the case of Heidegger an ontological sexual neutrality, before (3) concluding that, while Freud’s initial bisexuality forecloses sexuality within a binary framework, Heidegger’s notion of an ontological sexual neutrality does not, and so goes furthest in laying the ground for a rethinking of sexuality in non-essentialist, non-binary terms.
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Notes
See, for example, Heidegger’s (1989) discussion of ‘enowning’ (Ereignis).
For example, in the Letter on Humanism, from 1947, Heidegger criticizes ‘metaphysics’ because it denotes a mode of thinking that (1) is based on and enclosed within a prior assumed conception of Being (1977: 226), (2) takes certain truths to be self-evident (1977: 225), and (3) is trapped within a logic of binary oppositions (1977: 232). For an extended discussion of this text and issue, see Rae (2014).
It is for this reason that Ben Vedder’s (1998) attempt to develop an ontic account of sexuality from Heidegger’s comments on ‘desire’ in his early seminars on Aristotle (2009: 61, 72) and the Ancient Greeks (2008: 228) flounders. As Vedder (1998: 9) admits, strictly speaking Heidegger does not talk of ‘desire’ in either his early or later works, with the consequence that Vedder uses similes (striving, willing, insufficiency, giving, thanking, and so on) to develop a Heideggerian account of ‘desire’. Putting to one side the validity of those conflations, Vedder therefore only provides an account of desire in Heidegger by collapsing the particularity of distinct concepts and experiences under the universal term ‘desire’ and then, presumably, also conflating this with sexuality. This, however, ignores the fundamental lesson of Heidegger’s analysis: each ontic expression (of sexuality) is unique, particular, and ever-changing based on the configuration of Being’s becoming subtending it; it cannot be subsumed under a universal a priori definition or preconception. It is for this reason that Kevin Aho’s (2005) claim that a substantive account of sexuality can be gleaned from Heidegger’s return to the question of the (ontic) body in his later Zollikon Seminars (2001) is also problematic. Not only does Aho fail to explain the connection between the body and sexuality—a topic that Heidegger does not explicitly broach in the Zollikon Seminars—but it also risks treating the body and, by extension, sexuality as universal categories rather than as a distinctly singular phenomenon. In order to let each ‘thing’ reveal itself as it is in its concrete, particular, determinations, Heidegger cannot and does not provide a determinate account of the body or sexuality per se, instead focusing on the ontological understanding that we, the phenomenologist, must ‘adopt’ to allow each phenomena to reveal itself in its concrete form, rather than as how we wish to see it or have been taught to do so.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the three reviewers for their generous and stimulating comments on previous versions of this paper.
Funding
This paper forms part of the activities for the Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Project ‘Sovereignty and Law: Between Ethics and Politics’ (2013–00415–026), co-funded by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration under Grant Agreement 600371, The Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitivity (COFUND2013–40258), The Spanish Ministry for Education, Culture, and Sport (CEI–15–17), and Banco Santander. More information about the project can be found at https://sovereigntyandlaw.wordpress.com/.
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Rae, G. Freud and Heidegger on the ‘Origins’ of Sexuality. Hum Stud 42, 543–563 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09525-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09525-3