Adaequatio Sexualis: Is There a Measure of Sexual Difference?

Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraklit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970), p. 243. Heraclitus Seminar 1966–1967,trans. Charles H. Seibert (University: University of Alabama Press, 1979), p. 146; translation slightly altered.Google Scholar

Sigmund Freud, “Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,24 volumes, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953). References to Freud will be by volume and page number (in this case, 1: 160–172).Google Scholar

The paper was in fact written in several drafts from 1886 to 1893, the first in French, composed shortly after Freud’s return to Vienna from working in Paris with Charcot. See the editor’s note to the text of the Standard Edition.Google Scholar

For a useful discussion of the way Freud’s theory disrupts the available models of scientific reasoning (on hypnosis, hysteria, animal magnetism, cathartic medicine and so on), see Léon Chertok and Isabelle Stengers, A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason, trans. Martha Noel Evans ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992 ).Google Scholar

Jacques Lacan, “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse,” Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 237–322. A portion of this volume has appeared in English as Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). Henceforth references will appear in the text preceded by E, French pagination first, English (whenever possible) second; in this case, E 275/64.Google Scholar

Jacques Lacan, “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud,” translated as “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud” (E 493–528/146–178).Google Scholar

See the chapters on “alienation” and “separation” in Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XI: Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973), pp. 185–208. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 203–229. References will be to the English edition, preceded by SXI. Translations are occasionally modified.Google Scholar

Jacques Lacan, “La Signification du Phallus”; “The Signification of the Phallus” (E 685–695/281–291). Also translated as “The Meaning of the Phallus” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985), pp. 74–85. This latter translation improves at several important points on the translation given in Ecrits: A Selection. References to Feminine Sexuality will henceforth appear in the text, preceded by FS.Google Scholar

For some clarification of this definition, see the case studies in Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan,ed. and trans. Stuart Schneiderman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), esp. Serge Leclaire, “Jerome, or Death in the Life of the Obsessional,” pp. 94–113; Serge Leclaire, “Philo, or the Obsessional and his Desire,” pp. 114–129; and Charles Melman, “On Obsessional Neurosis,” pp. 130–138.Google Scholar

The relation between Hegel and Freud is complex enough, but one might throw Heidegger into the fray. For the obsessional is “circumspect” and “fearful,” in Heidegger’s sense of 468 Charles Shepherdson these words, rather than ready for “anxiety.” In section 67a of Being and Time,Heidegger notes that whereas “the moment of vision… temporalizes itself… in terms of the authentic future… [i]nauthentic understanding temporalizes itself as an awaiting which makes present” (SZ 338). In section 67b, he speaks of the difference between the “moment of vision” and “awaiting” as a difference between “anxiety” and “fear,” both of which can be understood in terms of time: “anxiety is grounded primordially in having-been, and only out of this do the future and the Present temporalize themselves.” Thus, “[a]lthough both fear and anxiety… are grounded primarily in having-been, they each have different sources with regard to their own temporalization… Anxiety springs from the future of resoluteness, while fear springs from the lost Present” (SZ 344). Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1953). Being and Time,trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Pagination of the English edition includes that of the seventh (and subsequent) German editions. References will be to this German pagination, preceded by SZ,as above.Google Scholar

Also “resentment” and “revenge,” the last refuge of the slave, the only remaining satisfaction of the subject whose desire is not acted upon, but consumed in the passion of the “belle âme” who accuses the world of mistreating him, and now takes his pleasure in the resentment that makes the other responsible for his suffering. See the fine analysis in Guy Thompson, The Death of Desire: A Study in Psychopathology (New York: New York University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 64–87.Google Scholar

Jacques Lacan, “Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l’inconscient freudien”; “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious” (E 793–827/292–325).Google Scholar

Jacques Lacan, “La direction de la cure et les principes de son pouvoir”; “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power” (E 585–645/226–280).Google Scholar

The relation between Lacan’s remarks on sacrifice and the remarks of Derrida on sacrifice (which is linked to mourning, performatives, the relation to the other, and the proper name) calls out for discussion. See for example Jacques Derrida, “Mnemosyne,” in Memoires: For Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), esp. 26–35.Google Scholar

Throughout this essay, we are reminded of Heidegger’s remarks on language, in this case of the remarks on Stephan Georg dealing precisely with the term “renunciation” (Versagung), which appear in two of Heidegger’s lectures, both of which begin with a reference to the following line from Stephan Georg’s poem, “Das Wort”: “So I renounced and sadly see: where word breaks off no thing may be.” See Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959); On the Way to Language, trans. P. Hertz and J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). This text will henceforth be cited as OWL. The two essays are “The Essence of Language” and “Poetry and Thinking: On Stephan Georg’s `The Word”’ (the latter translated in the English edition simply as “Words”). See also the discussion by Robert Bemasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being ( Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1985 ), pp. 49–64.Google Scholar

Slavoj Zikek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out ( New York: Routledge, 1992 ), pp. 165–186.Google Scholar

This point is especially developed in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter ( New York: Norton, 1992 ).Google Scholar

A more detailed analysis could establish the link between the “drive” and “demand”: we would thus be able to show here why the matheme for the drive is written $ O D: the drive is regarded here as that portion of bodily enjoyment that is not “dialectized,” but rather remains caught, transfixed by symbolic demand (D); the formula for the drive thus designates a part of the subject ($) that is bound to demand, lost or stuck in a compulsive repetition that remains outside history. See “The Subversion of the Subject” (esp. E 817/314 and 823/320–321). See also Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 21.Google Scholar

I will not explore this formulation in detail here. For a closer account of the relation between Adaequatio Sexualis 469 hysteria and the question of woman, see my analysis of a case study by Eugénie LemoineLuccioni in “Biology and History: Some Psychoanalytic Aspects of the Writing of Luce Irigaray,” Textual Practice 6, no. 1 (Spring 1992), 47–86.Google Scholar

Jacques Lacan, “D’une question préliminaire à tout traitment possible de la psychose”; “On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (E 531–583/179–225).Google Scholar

A series of important articles has addressed the question of the relation between (and relative priority of) sexual difference and Heidegger’s conception of ontological difference, beginning with the work of Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray. See: Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht: différence sexuelle, différence ontologique,” Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp. 395–414, first published in Cahiers de l’Herne (no. 45): Martin Heidegger, ed. Michel Haar (Éditions de l’Herne: Paris, 1983), pp. 419–430, and simultaneously in English as “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” Research in Phenomenology 13 (1983), 65–83; Luce Irigaray, Éthique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984), An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 ), esp. Chapter 8, “Something Like Sexes, Something Like Spirit,” pp. 252–291; and Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers ( New York: Routledge, 1995 ).Google Scholar

It should come as no surprise, then, that the psychotic, for whom lack has not been given a place, for whom lack has been foreclosed (so that primary repression can be said not to have occurred), will be not only unable to inhabit language in the manner of the “normal neurotic,” but also unable — and we recall here the two forms of the “question of being” that are decisive for the neurotic — (A) to distinguish birth and death, and (B) to find a place within sexual division, even at the level of a question. Without lack, the psychotic is thus outside sex and mortality. These correlations are established in the case of Schreber. See Alphonse De Waelhens, Schizophrenia, trans. Wilfried Ver Eecke ( Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978 ).Google Scholar

I explore the distinction between the “time of history” and the “time of natural development” in more detail in “Vital Signs: The Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis,” Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993), pp. 22–72.Google Scholar

See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,Chapters 13 and 14, “The Deconstruction of the Drive” and “The Partial Drive and its Circuit,” pp. 161–186.Google Scholar

Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 ), p. 23.Google Scholar

Heidegger again, not merely distinguishing between the “body” and the “physiological explanation,” but also elaborating the consequences for our conception of language: “Speaking implies the articulate vocal production of sound. Language manifests itself as the activation of the organs of speech — mouth, lips, teeth, tongue, larynx” (OWL 114). But this physical explanation will not bring us to the essence of language. It is on a par with the concept of language as a tool, the idea that “we ourselves… have the ability to speak and therefore already possess language” (OWL 111–112), a notion that conceals not only the nature of language, but also our own nature as well. “The sounding of the voice,” Heidegger says, “is no longer only of the order of physical organs. It is released now from the perspective of the physiological-physical explanation” (101); and “the mouth is not merely a kind of organ of the body understood as an organism” (OWL 98). These remarks, written in commemoration of Rilke’s death, were made the same year that Lacan delivered his “Proposal on Psychic Causality,” which begins with a critique of Henri Ey’s “organicist theory of madness,” citing Paul Elouard in the process (E 151–193).Google Scholar

Here again, the relation between Lacan, Heidegger and Derrida calls for elaboration. In Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question [trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)], Derrida questions the “privilege of the question” in Heidegger. Presumably the same issue might arise with Lacan’s formulation of the symptom as a question. But this is not the only or even the main problem, for Derrida also explores the concept of the body that Heidegger detaches from the order of 470 Charles Shepherdson nature. For example, on p. 25, Derrida cites Being and Time (section 70, p. 368): “Neither can the spatiality of Dasein be interpreted as an imperfection which would be inherent to existence by virtue of the fatal ‘union of spirit with a body.’ On the contrary, because Dasein is ’spiritual,’ and only because of this, it can be spatial in a way which remains essentially impossible for any extended corporeal thing” (I have combined the translation of Bennington and Bowlby with that of Macquarrie and Robinson). Thus, the vocabulary of “spirit” and “body” (taken as extended substance) leads us to misunderstand the very concept of the “spaciality” of the body, properly understood.Google Scholar

In fact Freud’s colleague, Joseph Breuer, was the Brentano family’s physician, as Ernest Jones points out. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,Vol. 2, entitled 1901–1919: Years of Maturity (New York: Basic Books, 1955), p. 56. For Brentano’s course, given during the 1874–1875 academic year, see p. 37.Google Scholar

Two authors have recently contested this claim, for quite different reasons. See Mikkel Botch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master,trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), esp. 210–218; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. 57–91, though the issue runs through the book.Google Scholar

As Lacan says in the “Remarque sur le rapport de Daniel Lagache” (E 647–684), the Other is established even “in the most pure moment of the specular relation”: “Car l’Autre où le discours se place, toujours latent à la triangulation qui consacre cette distance, ne l’est pas tant qu’il ne s’étale jusque dans la relation spéculaire en son plus pur moment: dans le geste par quoi l’enfant au miroir,” etc. (E 678). See the discussion by Claude Léger, “Quel est donc cet autre auquel je suis plus attaché qu’à moi?” Lacan,ed. Gérard Miller (Paris: Bordas, 1987), pp. 33–57.Google Scholar

See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter ( New York: Harper and Row, 1971 ), pp. 165–186.Google Scholar

See Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom,pp. 169–170.Google Scholar

This is of course the famous turn toward the theory of “trauma” as a “fundamental fantasy” rather than a “real memory” that has been repressed — a theoretical debate that is being played out all over again today in discussions of “repressed memory syndrome,” where the debate hinges on the question of whether these “recovered” memories are “real” events or not. But for our purposes, we also notice that Freud returns to “mimesis” at this point in his theory. In “Some General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks,” Freud writes that he now views these “attacks” as “nothing else but phantasies translated into the motor sphere, projected onto motility and portrayed in pantomime” (9: 229, emphasis added).Google Scholar

See Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman,trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. vii—viii.Google Scholar

If death as experienced in Others is what we are enjoined to take as the theme,“ Heidegger writes, ”this cannot give us, either ontically or ontologically, what it presumes to give“ (SZ 239). Such an approach ”rests on a presupposition,“ namely ”the opinion that any Dasein may be substituted for another… so that what cannot be experienced in one’s own Dasein is accessible in that of a stranger“ (SZ 239). ”Death,“ he goes on to say, ”is in every case mine.“ Thus, ”dying is not an event; it is a phenomenon to be understood existentially,“ such that ”mineness and existence are ontologically constitutive for death“ (SZ 240). At the same time, the ”ordinary“ understanding of death is not thereby canceled: ”Of course, ‘dying’ may also be taken physiologically and biologically“ (SZ 241) but the ”medical concept“ (SZ 241) does not coincide with death as understood by fundamental ontology.Google Scholar

Michèle Montrelay, “The Story of Louise,” in Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, ed. and trans. Stuart Schneiderman ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980 ).Google Scholar

Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” Histoires d’amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983), pp. 225–247. Originally published in Tel Quel 74 (Winter 1977), pp. 30–49. Also available in Tales of Love,trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), and in The Kristeva Reader,ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University 1986). I cite from The Kristeva Reader,p. 162. Adaequatio Sexualis 471Google Scholar

There is no longer any way, therefore, of reducing this Elsewhere to the imaginary form of a nostalgia, a lost or future Paradise; what one finds is the paradise of the child’s loves, where, Baudelaire de Dieu!,something’s going on, I can tell you“ (E 548/193).Google Scholar

For an excellent analysis of Lacanian objections to the “good enough mother,” see Parveen Adams, “Mothering,” The Woman in Question,eds. Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 315–327.Google Scholar

A note on translations. I cite here from Feminine Sexuality,p. 80. This translation is to be preferred, in the case of this passage, where the text of Écrits: A Selection is misleading. See also Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master,pp. 201–211, for some corrections of the English translation and further detailed remarks on this passage. These remarks are useful, though it will be clear that my reading does not entirely coincide with them, above all because I cannot find the reduction of desire to demand that BorchJacobsen appears to see in Lacan.Google Scholar

For a brief, lucid account of the terms “gift” and “debt,” see Moustafa Safouan, Le Structuralisme en psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil [Points], 1968), esp. 55–69.Google Scholar

The French edition reads “anorexie mentale,” the English “anorexia nervosa.”Google Scholar

Monique David-Ménard, Hysteria From Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Catherine Porter ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989 ), p. 66.Google Scholar

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1980), p. 67. They note that there is no known physical cause for the disorder, and that anorexia is found 95% of the time (but not exclusively — that is,not “by nature”) in females, adding that “many of the adolescents have delayed psychosexual development, and adults have a markedly decreased interest in sex.”Google Scholar

Readers will recall that in Speech and Phenomena,Derrida follows the fragile “parallelism” that Husserl maintains, not between the “psychic” and the “organic,” but between “transcendental” and “worldly” life. Derrida writes of “the enigmatic concept of `parallelism.’ Husserl evokes the surprising `parallelism’ and even, `if one may say, incorporation’ of phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology” (12). This enigmatic “parallelism,” and especially the separation of levels which it sustains, the contamination it keeps at bay, is crucial to the maintenance of phenomenology itself and requires the exclusion of the materiality of the sign,demanding that the material component of language be construed as secondary, as a derivative and dispensable aspect of signification. Thus Derrida asks: “Does not the concept of parallelism,which defines the relations between the purely psychic — which is in the world — and the purely transcendental — which is not — and which thus sums up the whole enigma of Husserl’s phenomenology, already present itself here in the form of a relation between two modes of signification?” (30). See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

Later, Freud explicitly writes of this false “parallelism” as follows: “I object to all of you (Horney, Jones, Rado, etc.) to the extent that you do not distinguish more clearly and cleanly between what is psychic and what is biological, that you try to establish a neat parallelism between the two.” Letter to Carl Müller-Braunschweig, 1935; cited from the editors’ introduction to FS, p. 1.Google Scholar

Monique David-Ménard, Hysteria From Freud to Lacan,p. 19.Google Scholar

The same motif we noted earlier in Heidegger’s Being and Time,concerning the inadequacy of the terms “body” (taken as “an extended corporeal thing”) and “spirit,” will appear again more than thirty years later, not under the theme of spaciality this time, but when Heidegger turns to language.Google Scholar

I cite Plato’s Symposium from the Loeb edition, Vol. 5, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, translated by W.R.M. Lamb ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961 ).Google Scholar

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1975), pp. xii—xiii.Google Scholar

Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley ( New York: Vintage, 1990 ), p. 9.Google Scholar