- Why is Freud's 1905 work called Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality? What makes sexuality a theoretical issue? The Three Essays are
famous for their focus on a wide range of sexual expression (the perversions) and on
infantile
sexuality. Freud was not the first to explore the former and he did not discover the
latter. The
theoretical issue emerged out of their integration. The understanding that the supposedly
exceptional, abnormal "perversions" are rooted in universal, normal infantile sexuality changed
the assumption that sexuality is grounded in the biology of reproduction, and therefore has
natural, pre-formed objects. Auto-erotic, "polymorphously perverse" infantile sexuality is the
foundation of a new theory of sexuality. From the first, this theory is temporal. Freud gives
sexuality a much more complex history than it had before. This history extends
over a life, even determining adult neuroses. The great issue, then, is the linkage of an
expanded sexuality and time in the theory of unconscious processes.
- The temporalization of the seemingly immutable has been central to
changing essentialist assumptions about nature. Species evolve. Particle emission
explains how elements are transformable. Space itself can contract and expand.
Sexuality changes over time. All of these changes compel rethinking time itself.
They imply that time is not only a measure of duration, but shares qualities with
evolution, sub-atomic processes, cosmic space, and sexuality, if they are all
mutable. This means that science itself has to meet the philosophical rethinking of
time.
- In this essay, I wish to pursue this topic by extending some of the thinking about
sexuality and time I elaborated in Interpretation and Difference. I
necessarily
synthesize some of that book (the arguments from Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze; Freud on
Eros, bisexuality, and primary scopophilia). New are the dialogues with Laplanche and with the
relational psychoanalysts from Gender In Psychoanalytic Space and the expansion of
Winnicott's conception of transitionality.
Sexuality, Tension, Time
- In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud offers
practical advice about the end of analysis: "Our aim will not be to rub off every
peculiarity of human character for the sake of a schematic 'normality,' nor yet to
demand that the person who has been 'thoroughly analysed' shall feel no passions
and develop no internal conflicts. The business of analysis is to secure the best
possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego; with that it has
discharged its task" (250).
- What are the "best possible conditions" in the realm of sexuality? In
Freud's early and middle periods, neurosis is a conflict between infantile sexual
wishes and repression. To reverse repression is to make such sexual wishes
conscious. In his later ego-psychological phase (reflected in his statement about
the "business of analysis"), anxiety is the central motivating factor for repression.
Neurotic anxiety is mostly a question of the super-ego's threats of punishment should
the ego ally itself with forbidden id impulses. In the realm of sexuality, "the best
possible conditions" would thus be the ego's freedom from infantile anxieties,
irrational defenses, and super-ego pressures. This is the picture of an ego made
stronger and more autonomous as a result of analysis, an ego not in conflict with the
id and the super-ego. Such liberation is possible because psychoanalysis recognizes
that all sexuality, even the most apparently "normal," is polymorphously perverse.
The successfully analyzed neurotic no longer has to repress "unacceptable" sexual
impulses.
- Yet Freud is perfectly aware that sexuality will always resist
enlightenment (in all senses of the term). It is not simply illusory to think that
the thoroughly analysed person will feel no passions or conflicts, and that there is
no schematic sexual normality. Sexuality is conflict itself. In Civilization
and Its Discontents Freud said that there is "something in the nature of
the [sexual] function itself which denies us full satisfaction" (104). He gives two
examples of such sexual impasse in Analysis Terminable and Interminable.
One is his notorious statement that the repudiation of femininity is "bedrock," a
"biological fact, a part of the great riddle [Rätsel] of sex" (252).
What Freud means here is that the castration complex is the source of
unmodifiable--immutable, apparently atemporal--envy and anxiety. One can justifiably
criticize his phallic monism, his blind insistence on the "reality of castration" as
a wound to all women and a warning to all men. And one must also note Freud's
typical inconsistency: what he is calling "biological fact" is actually the
inevitable fantasy of castration. But the riddle, the mystery, is the castration
complex itself. What makes it such a stubborn interference with sexuality? Why is
there conflict at the heart of sexuality?
- The other example of sexual impasse concerns something Freud calls "normal in
mental life" (Analysis Terminable 243)--but normal only for an enlightened
psychoanalysis. He is referring to bisexuality,[1] to the
distribution of libido "either in a manifest or a latent fashion, over objects of both sexes"
(244). Some people do not experience bisexuality as a problem. But for many, homo- and
heterosexual trends "are in a state of irreconcilable conflict" (244). One would expect Freud to
attribute this conflict to the castration complex, but he does not. Rather, he speaks of
conflict itself: "An independently emerging tendency to conflict of this sort can
scarcely be attributable to anything but the intervention of an element of free aggressiveness"
(244). When this "free aggressiveness" is turned inward, internal conflict replaces external
conflict. Freud then speaks of Empedocles's cosmic principles of philia
(love) and
neikos (strife), eternally contending with each other (246). Normal bisexuality, then,
is a manifestation of philia, Eros, the life drive, and is inevitably attacked by
neikos, discord, destructiveness, the death drive. Why?
- One has to recall that Eros, for Freud, is a "disturbance" because it
counters the basic trend of the id toward tension reduction (Ego and Id
46-47). Sexuality as Eros raises tension by endeavoring "to combine what exists into
ever greater unities" (Analysis Terminable 246). But because sexuality also
serves tension reduction, attempting to "dissolve . . . combinations" (246), again
sexuality is at war with itself. Laplanche comments on this aspect of Freud: "psychic
conflict . . . is a drive conflict between the 'sexual death drives' . . . and the
'sexual life drives' . . . . It could be defined . . . as the struggle
between two
principles: binding and unbinding" ("Aims" 75). If Freud sees "normal bisexuality" as
part of the sexual life drive, it must bind. It "combines" what might be thought of as
two opposed entities: homo- and heterosexuality.
- Can one interpret Freud here? Is the binding tension of normal bisexuality
destructively unbound to create the apparently irresolvable conflicts of the castration complex?
The castration complex then would not be "bedrock," but rather--in Laplanche's terms--the fantasy
produced by the "sexual death drive" in conflict with the "sexual life drive." The tension of
sexual binding will always be met by the tendency to reduce tension, creating a conflicted
bisexuality.
- The relation of sexuality to the increase and decrease of tension, to
binding and unbinding as Laplanche puts it, always gives Freud a great deal of
trouble. He summarizes the problem in "The Economic Problem of Masochism." Here his
most basic idea is that mind works to get rid of stimuli, making unpleasure an
increase and pleasure a decrease of "mental tension" (159-60). The pleasure
principle warns "against the demands of the life instincts--the libido" (160). (This
is why Freud called Eros a "disturbance.") But he then cedes the obvious objection:
"there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations of tension. The state
of sexual excitation is the most striking example of a pleasurable increase of
stimulus" (160).
- How to define pleasure and unpleasure if the mind seeks tension increase
and tension decrease? Freud says he does not know, but wonders whether they
have to do with "the rhythm, the temporal sequences of changes, rises and falls in the
quantity of stimulus" (160). In a footnote, Strachey reminds us that Freud already
raises the issue of sexuality, tension, and rhythm in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. In its last paragraph, Freud says that we experience not only pleasure
and unpleasure, but also a
peculiar [eigentümlich] tension, which in its turn can be either
pleasurable or unpleasurable . . . . [I]s the feeling of tension to be related to
the absolute magnitude . . . while the pleasure and unpleasure series indicates a
change in the magnitude of the cathexis within a given unit of time?
(Beyond 63)
Here Freud is thinking about time and tension.[2]
In itself, this is not unusual. We often call cyclic states of tension increase
and decrease "biorhythms." It is unusual, however, to think time in relation to a
tension between pleasure and unpleasure.
- We have quickly accumulated several mysteries: "the riddle of sex" in
relation to the castration complex, the inevitable conflict over normal
bisexuality, tension increase and tension decrease, the possibility of a tension
that is potentially pleasurable or unpleasurable, and last, but hardly least,
sexual tension as time and rhythm.
- The time factor is perhaps the greatest mystery. In Freud's early
work on trauma, sexuality explains why adult neurotic symptoms are linked to the
infantile past. Changing our understanding of sexuality itself, Freud then gives
it a long, complicated history, beginning with birth. Although this aspect of
Freud's theory is well known, it is less well known that he thought that the
infant's original relation to the breast is simultaneously self-preservative and
erotic (Three Essays 222). Sexuality emerges as a force independent
of self-preservation with the infant's exploratory stimulation of its own body--the
great example being thumb sucking. Infantile sexuality is auto-erotic and spread
over the entire body--polymorphously perverse. Moreover, we do not proceed
directly from infantile, non-reproductive sexuality to adult reproductive
sexuality. Because of the latency period and the relative repression of infantile
sexuality, the sexual past is carried over into the sexual present. Infantile
sexuality continues to act after the fact; it has the temporality of
Nachträglichkeit, deferred action. Psychoanalysis emerged as a
temporal, historical discipline at first because of Freud's investigation of
memory. But because this theory of memory became a theory of sexuality, history
itself became sexual and sexuality itself became temporal.
- When we think of history as temporal, we usually think of time as the medium in
which events unfold. But Freud also occasionally thinks of a time internal to
sexuality. When he writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a sexual
tension that
in itself is neither pleasure nor unpleasure and wonders what it has to do with rhythm, it is as
if he is looking into sexuality as tension. He is envisaging a temporal process that
does not act on the larger scale of connecting past and present, even by deferred effect. It is
rather a pulsation within sexuality: the variable beat of sexual rhythm between pleasure and
unpleasure.
Laplanche: Sexuality, Time, Otherness
- The relation between historical, sexual time and the time internal to
sexuality has been examined by Laplanche in "Time and the Other." The title of the
essay indicates its place in his thought. For Laplanche, there is an "uncompleted
Copernican revolution" in psychoanalysis. Although Freud went very far in
decentering consciousness, making the unconscious the "other" within, Laplanche
thinks that he used this theory to re-center the subject. The originally
auto-erotic, wishing unconscious makes everything come from within "me," even if
from a "me" I do not know. Hence, Laplanche counters Freud's idea that sexuality
is originally auto-erotic. For Laplanche, sexuality emerges in the infant's
relation to the other's other, i.e., the mother's unconscious. There is an
inevitable "implantation" of the mother's incomprehensible, "untranslatable" sexual
wishes (enigmatic signifiers) into--or rather onto--the infantile psyche.
Disturbing enigmatic signifiers make sexuality an "internal foreign body," always
acting by deferred effect (256). Deferred effect is of course a temporal concept,
but Laplanche thinks that his revised sexual theory demands a more sophisticated
relation to time, one that makes time itself "other."
- Laplanche distinguishes four "levels" of time: 1. cosmological or
world time; 2. perceptual time, the time of immediate consciousness; 3. the time of
memory, of "the individual project, the temporalization of the human being"; 4. the
time of the history of human societies (238). Where does psychoanalysis fit into
these four levels? Laplanche says that Freud mainly works at the second level, the
level of perceptual time, but that he has an implicit, undeveloped theory of the
third level, the temporalization of the human being. Laplanche states that
"Heidegger and existentialism" have done the most to explain this level, which has
the greatest potential for thinking an "other" time. Laplanche also claims that
the theory of the enigmatic signifier is situated there, "on the same
terrain of being" as Heidegger's rethinking of temporality as the "ecstatic"
"stretching out" between past, present, and future. (I explain what this means in
the fourth section of this paper.) In other words, the inevitable deferred effect
of the enigmatic signifier, which accounts for unconscious sexual history, is
conceivable in Heideggerian terms. Sexuality is always "other," and its time is
the other time of Heideggerian ek-stasis, "standing outside."
- This is a brave attempt to integrate a theory of unconscious
sexuality with perhaps the most important rethinking of time in twentieth-century
philosophy. It indicates where psychoanalysis has to go if it is to come to grips
with what has always been at its heart: that the mystery of sexuality is
the mystery of time. However, although Laplanche asks the right question, I do not
think that he comes up with the right answer. To explain why, I need to say
more about the second level, perceptual time.
- Laplanche reminds us that in "The Note on the Mystic Writing Pad" Freud offers a
theory of time that he (falsely) claims to have kept secret until then. In "The Note," Freud says
that consciousness of time is a result of the unconscious stretching out of "feelers, through the
medium of the system Pcpt.-Cs." (231). The "feelers" are withdrawn "as soon as they have
sampled the excitations" of the external world (231). This is a periodic, rhythmic
turning on and off of consciousness by the unconscious. Freud suspects that "this discontinuous
method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the
concept of time" (231).
- What does this mean? Freud is saying that consciousness is transitory, because the
unconscious is the greater, if invisible, permanent part of the mind. When the unconscious
"samples" the external world, consciousness is "turned on." When the "sampling" ends,
consciousness is "turned off." This explains time as periodicity. It is a different version of
the rhythmic theory of time from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (This is why
Freud's claim in "The Note" that he had kept this theory of time secret was not true.)
- In both "The Note on the Mystic Writing Pad" and Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, time is discontinuous. Freud's idea is that because unconscious tension states
are rhythmic, consciousness is periodically "lit up." An obvious analogy is to the baby
periodically aroused by needs that can only be relieved by the "external world"; later, sexuality
will function in the same way. This is the familiar picture of the cyclic increase and decrease
of tension. However, this picture is too simple. As Laplanche cannily remarks, Freud is linking
consciousness of time to "the time of time . . . to rhythm. Linear time . . . must be
reduplicated materially as rhythm--the rhythm precisely of interruption and connection"
("Time" 239). Laplanche finds this opening to a rhythmic thinking of time intriguing, but
deficient: "Not one of the major concepts of theory and practice can be found there: sexuality is
absent, as are repression, defense and transference" (240). Moreover, there seems to be no way to
integrate this theory of rhythmic time into the theory of "temporalization" that accounts for the
"history of a life" (240), the theory that would have to be linked to Heidegger's ecstatic time.
- Is it possible to integrate the discontinuist, rhythmic notion of time with the
notion of time as the "temporalization of the human being"? I believe so, and I believe that this
integration depends upon a greater understanding of the mysteries of sexuality, for example, the
riddles of "unanalyzable" castration anxiety and inevitable conflict about bisexuality. In fact,
some psychoanalytic relational thinkers have already taken important steps in this direction.
Although these thinkers say nothing about time, their ideas potentially open onto it.
Sexuality, Difference, Tension, Transitionality
- In the collection Gender In Psychoanalytic Space, Ken
Corbett, Muriel Dimen, Donna Bassin, and Jessica Benjamin all speak of sexuality as
tension between what are usually taken as essential opposites. Corbett, for example,
says:
opposites that are held in a dialectical tension are not negated through such tension. They may
contradict one another. They may fold into one another, as passivity may fold into activity, and
thereby be transformed. But contradiction and transformation do not neutralize the dialectical
poles; rather they hold them in a qualified tension. (25)
Corbett's particular focus is the sexual experience of gay men. He makes the simple
observation that most gay men "interchange activity and passivity in sexual
relations." He goes on to say that this takes one into
the heart of the mystery: gay men move between passive and active sexual aims that do not reflect
the kind of binary tension falsely associated with heterosexual masculine activity and feminine
passivity . . . . The deconstruction of this binary tension not only speaks to the
mystery of
homosexuality, but to the mystery of sexuality---the ways in which all sexualities are informed by
the push and pull of activity and passivity. (27)
When Corbett says that the binary tension of masculine activity and feminine passivity
is falsely associated with heterosexuality, he is thinking of the castration complex.
He wants to separate masculine and feminine identifications from the equations
phallic-active, castrated-passive. Corbett says that gay men do indeed experience
both masculine and feminine identifications during sex, but he claims never to have
met a gay patient whose fantasy that passivity equals femininity also made
him feel castrated. Fantasies of castration lead to a "shut down of sexual . . .
behavior" (31).[3] Being penetrated, even if
accompanied by a fantasy of feminine identification, is arousing:
For the man who is simultaneously penetrated and erect, orgasm is generally achieved following
manipulation of his penis by his partner; this behavior is underscored by the wish for his partner
to see and manipulate the penis, not deny it . . . Through their reluctance to imagine a male body
that is simultaneously penetrated and erect, analysts have conflated passive phallic arousal with
castration. (31-32)
The last point is extremely important. Corbett is implying that Freud's assumption of
the castration complex as bedrock betrays the psychoanalytic project: the commitment
to the kind of unblinking look at sexuality that acknowledges that penetration can be
arousing for men. Such an unblinking look would have compelled Freud to think about
the "mystery of sexuality" as the "push and pull of activity and passivity."[4]
- Muriel Dimen takes this argument one step further by focusing on
gender not as masculinity or femininity, but as the difference between them. Dimen
here broaches an enormous philosophical question: the nature of difference itself.
She grasps a position first articulated by Nietzsche: traditional thinking is
oppositional thinking (1968, passim.). Since difference always implies
both separation and relation between things differentiated, it cannot be confined
to oppositions.[5] Sexual difference, the relation
and separation of masculinity and femininity, is a "space between." It is
transitional, in Winnicott's sense of a "third," "intermediate area of
experiencing" ("Transitional" 230). Dimen contends that the conventional meanings
of masculinity and femininity are a result of splitting, in either the
psychoanalytic sense (splitting of the ego or the object), or the cultural sense
(privileging of "dichotomies and dualisms") (41-42).
- Dimen then addresses Freud's question about the relation between
tension and pleasure. She cites Edith Jacobson--a classical ego psychologist--on
the question of constancy. Jacobson redefined constancy as an axis with "'a
certain margin for biological vacillations around it'" (qtd. 55). Pleasure is
paradoxical: it is an oscillating cycle of increase and decrease of tension. In
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud already began to think in these
terms when he spoke of a potentially pleasurable or unpleasurable tension
linked to rhythmicity. But Freud (apparently) does not do what Dimen does here:
she links tension and oscillating rhythmicity to difference itself. If sexual
difference is transitional in Winnicott's sense (the intermediate space between
masculine and feminine, active and passive), then one should think of something
like transitional tension. Dimen envisions this possibility when she says that
movement between positions "might be regarded as pleasurable . . . [but] when we
leave the preferred polarity [i.e. occupy the space between positions] . . . we
are . . . extraordinarily uncomfortable" (56). Again, this discomfort is handled
by splitting, whether in individuals or in theories.
- Dimen's idea of "theoretical splitting" can certainly describe
Freud's position on the castration complex as bedrock. It exemplifies the
"uncomfortable" response to normal--i.e., differential, transitional, tension
raising--bisexuality. While Freud does not make this connection, he certainly does
link bisexuality to the "tension of life," and does give us a tool with which to
rethink the castration complex as a destructive, tension reducing conflict
(Laplanche's binding and unbinding). Transitional space as "binding tension" (not
part of Winnicott's formulation of transitionality) will always be met by a
tendency to tension reduction.
- This is the point at which the intrapsychic and the cultural--the preference for
fantasies of opposed positions--meet. It is why one can find the same kind of splitting in
individuals as in theories. There is a potential expansion of the political implications of
psychoanalysis here. Freud familiarly thinks that civilization demands repression of
the drives,
heightening both aggression and guilt. But when he envisions something like
aggression
(neikos) inevitably attacking the "life drive" (philia) manifested in normal
bisexuality, we can interpret it to mean that the tension of "sexual transitionality"
will also inevitably
provoke an aggressive splitting response. This splitting can range from the outright murderous
and persecutory, to the construction of theories designed to eliminate, marginalize or attack such
transitionality, to the self-attacking manifestations of individual psychopathology. Such
splitting always appears to provide relief from the disturbing tension of intermediate states; it
feels like protection against the unbearable.
- Donna Bassin also emphasizes oscillation and splitting, raising a
point that is addressed in the last section of this paper. Freud does say that in
fantasy, dreams, and some sexual practices--e.g., voyeurism and exhibitionism,
sadism and masochism--apparently opposed active and passive positions are
transformable. Bassin comments:
I postulate an interchangeability of positions
within fantasy which Freud (1915) discussed in 'Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes' . . . Whatever the individual choice, the opposite aim is
simultaneously being realized and gratified in the unconscious. What appear to be
dichotomies are merely defensive surface splits. (167; emphasis added)
Like
Corbett and Dimen, Bassin extends this idea to gender polarity conceived in terms
of active and passive, a polarity that "masks the underlying oscillation" (167).
- One might question Bassin's emphasis on fantasy here. In "Instincts
and Their Vicissitudes," Freud certainly does explain that active and passive,
voyeuristic and exhibitionistic, sadistic and masochistic fantasies are always
linked. But Freud is also interested in the fact that a voyeur can
actually become an exhibitionist, a sadist a masochist, and vice versa.
And "normal bisexuality" is a reality--an old theme for Freud. (The first chapter
of the Three Essays counters any irreducible essentialism about homo-
and hetero-sexuality by observing the movement between them in the histories of
many people's lives.) Corbett's observation that penetration itself is arousing for
men makes this reality mysterious: it is the reality of oscillation in Dimen's
transitional sexuality. Dimen could even say that transitional sexuality itself
would make us wonder about a simple opposition of reality and fantasy. If both
sexual fantasy, as Bassin emphasizes, and sexual reality, as Corbett and Dimen
emphasize, take us to the place of oscillation, then another mystery of sexuality
might be its position between fantasy and reality. This idea is part of
Winnicott's conception of transitional space. His claim that transitionality is
between the subjective and the objective explains why transitionality is the
possibility of "fantasy related to fact, but not confused with fact" ("Depressive"
267). He emphasizes that the baby's relation to the famous transitional object is
neither active nor passive, because the question whether the baby creates it or
is given it is not to be posed ("Transitional" 239-340). However, it does not occur
to Winnicott to integrate the theory of transitionality with the theory of
sexuality. Corbett, Bassin, and Dimen do so, with their emphases on oscillation
between active and passive as the very nature of sexuality.
- Jessica Benjamin takes these questions in another direction. She
understands difference itself as both separation and relation.[6] Relation moves toward sameness, separation toward difference.
But this means that an opposition between sameness and difference, which in
psychoanalytic theory generally leads to a privileging of the latter over the
former, is impossible. Benjamin is well known for her position that the
coexistence of sameness and difference means that we need room for identification
alongside object love, which she extends to sexual difference. She argues for
bisexual "over inclusiveness," so that one can retain cross-sex identifications.
Referring to Dimen on transitional sexuality, Benjamin speaks of oscillating
opposites in a state of pleasurable tension. And like all these authors, she wants
to overcome "split polarities." Uniquely, though, Benjamin says that to reduce
difference to the "one Difference" always implies that "identity exists on either
side of the line" (182). Sexual difference itself, then, is plural. Benjamin
wants to overcome the split between "the One Difference, gender dimorphism" and
the "polymorphism of all individuals" (204).
- Benjamin might be surprised to learn that her critique of the One Difference echoes
some of Jacques Derrida's thinking. In Glas (1974) Derrida devotes a
great
deal of attention to the way in which Hegel insists on transforming sexual difference as natural
diversity into sexual contradiction, sexual opposition (168). For Derrida, Hegel's
insistence on sexual opposition is a model for the way in which all oppositions (e.g.,
active/passive, the example I am emphasizing) function in order to guarantee the purity,
independence, and mastery of each term (223). To conceive sexual difference as something other
than opposition, Derrida says, means to understand how "sexual differences efface
themselves and determine themselves as the difference" (223).
- In another context, discussing Heidegger's insistence on the sexual neutrality of
Dasein (the human mode of existence), Derrida similarly says that Dasein is
"asexual" only as concerns the One Difference. He expands:
[Dasein's] asexuality would be determined as such only in the extent to which
one immediately takes sexuality as binarity or sexual division . . . . If
Dasein as such
belongs to neither of the two sexes, this does not mean that the being it is is without sex. On
the contrary, one can think here a . . . pre-dual sexuality, which does not necessarily mean
unitary, homogenous and undifferentiated . . . . And on the basis of this
sexuality more
original than the dyad, one can attempt to think a "positivity" and a "power" . . . the positive
and powerful source of all "sexuality." ("Geschlecht" 402; emphasis added)
For Derrida, as for Nietzsche, to think outside metaphysics is to think difference as that which
makes self-enclosed identity impossible. This is why he is so interested in Hegel's attempt to
formulate sexual contradiction, or why he sees Heidegger's sexual neutrality of Dasein as
an alternative to the One Difference. Difference, for Derrida, is always the relation to
an otherness that one is. Difference is the oscillation between identity and otherness.
This oscillation is a binding tension. In their respective ways, Corbett, Dimen,
Bassin, and
Benjamin speak of the tension holding together the sexual as transitional, and of oppositional
thinking as a splitting of relational difference. They can thus be said to participate in a
non-metaphysical theory of sexuality. But they say nothing about time.
- For Derrida, difference is temporal in two ways. It is always
related to temporal deferral, as in Freud's Nachträglichkeit. It is
also unthinkable without repetition, as in Freud's rhythmicity. Derrida shares the
idea of difference as repetition with Deleuze, who defined difference as the
interval between two repetitions, and repetition as the differentiator of
difference (Difference 76). Derrida says that the most important
point of intersection between the deconstruction of metaphysics and psychoanalysis
is around the repetition compulsion ("Resistances" 32). Integrating the themes of
time and the transitional, Derrida conceptualizes difference as the rhythmic
repetition of the intermediate "zone" between apparently opposed terms (Post
Card 351-52). If there is any justification to Derrida's position, then
everything Corbett, Dimen, Bassin, and Benjamin say or imply about
transitionality has to be linked to a thinking of repetition.
- Freud, we know, does begin to think the sexual in terms of a rhythmic
tension between pleasure and unpleasure. We might interpret this as an opening to
thinking the mystery of sex as the mystery of time, as the repetition of
the intermediate. Laplanche wants to think sexuality in relation to Heidegger's
rethinking of time as "ecstatic," but does not find a way to integrate this project
with Freud's theory of discontinuist, rhythmic time. To bring these strands
together, we need a better understanding of Heidegger's conception of time, of
temporality as ecstasis and as auto-affection.
Ecstasis, Auto-Affection, Transitionality
- What does Laplanche mean when he cites Heidegger on the
"temporalization of the human being" as the "ecstatic stretching out" between past,
present, and future?
- Heidegger's overall project is to develop an understanding of the history
of philosophy as the history of a forgetting--the forgetting of the question of Being
(Sein). Being is necessarily forgotten when it is equated with the
present. In our era, the present is what is objectively present for a
subject. The objective is externally there, independent of the subject whose
mind functions so that the objective can be known. The scientific method emerged out of
these metaphysical positions.
- In philosophy, time has always been a problem. On the one hand, time
is conceived in terms of presence. Time is the infinite series of now points,
stretching endlessly backward and forward, such that every now passes into a
successive now. On the other hand, time is never present itself. The difficulty
is that what makes presence possible, time as the now, is not itself present. Time
is somehow real, but never objectifiable. (As Heidegger says, one can take apart
any device for measuring time, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated,
and one will never find time within it.) The question of what is, Being
itself, is tied up with this problem of time and presence. The history of
metaphysics conflates time with the present in order to forget other ways of
thinking the "is," ways that would disrupt the presumed certainties of philosophy.
- From Heidegger's point of view, Being and Time is a
prolegomenon to the rethinking of the "is." Heidegger chooses to investigate the
human mode of existence--Dasein--as a way of reviving the forgotten
question of Being. Dasein is his point of departure because, in however
unformed and intuitive a way, Dasein always has a sense that it exists.
By starting with the simplest observations about how Dasein exists,
Heidegger eventually develops a complex way of thinking about time that is not
confined by the metaphysics of presence. His first observation is that
Dasein is not a "free floating" independent entity. It only exists in
relation to others and things; it is always in a "world." Since Dasein
only exists in relation to others and things, it cannot be a self-enclosed
interiority. Dasein is always open; it always has the possibility of
encountering others and things, and is always related to them. For Heidegger,
because Dasein is always in a "world," it is always "outside itself."
This being outside itself makes Dasein never simply "at home" with itself.
Heidegger says that "being-in-the-world" is always unheimlich,
"uncanny"--a theme he conspicuously shares with Freud. "Being-in-the-world" is
itself the source of Angst, existential anxiety. Dasein always
flees what it "is"--open, in a world--in order to evade uncanniness and
Angst. One result of this flight is the severing of the relatedness of
Dasein and world. The metaphysical assumption that the world is external
objectivity and the person is internal subjectivity is precisely the result of what
Heidegger calls Dasein's evasion of itself. The discomfort and tension
(uncanniness, Angst) of relatedness is split into an opposition
of subject and object. Here we have a philosophical account of splitting that
calls for integration with the psychoanalytic, cultural, and political ones (see
Dimen et al., above).
- This bare bones description cannot capture the complexity of
Heidegger's analysis, and what is to follow summarizes even more complex material.
Heidegger calls Dasein's way of existing "care" (Sorge). At
first, care simply means that whatever Dasein does takes time.
Dasein's encounter with anything implies "being with" it, depends upon
time. Out of this simple statement, Heidegger develops a complex structure of
care. The key is that Dasein is always "outside" itself (an extension of
being-in-the-world). Dasein is always "ahead of itself," always in
relation to what it is not yet, its possibilities, its future. Ultimately
Heidegger articulates a temporal structure of care out of being-ahead,
being-in-a-world, and being-together with things and others. Care is at once: 1)
possibility, the relation to the existential future; 2) "always already" being in a
world prior to Dasein, the existential past; 3) being together with others
and things, the existential present. I have used the word "existential" to stress
Heidegger's point: as temporal modes of relating, future, past and present are not
present themselves. Further, these modes of relating only exist together--they are
what make Dasein an historical being whose present is always related to
its future and its past. Time itself is this interrelation of the three
coexisting temporal modes. As the non-present possibility of presence, time is
their "stretching toward each other" (the phrase cited by Laplanche). Time thought
beyond presence, time as the "temporalization of the human being," is this
"outsiding relation." Time is ecstasis. Just as Dasein's flight
from itself as being-in-the-world produces the metaphysical assumptions of subject
and object, so the forgetting of the question of Being "levels down" time as
ecstasis into time as the infinite series of now points.
- One of Heidegger's most counter-intuitive points about time as
ecstasis is that it is finite. He sees the assumption that time is
infinite as part of the privileging of the present--again, the infinite series of
now points. However, when Heidegger says that existential, ecstatic time is finite
he does not mean that time stops. He means that Dasein's relation to its
possibilities is most of all a relation to the future it assumes as soon as it is:
the possibility of its death. After Being and Time, Heidegger had
serious reservations about being-toward-death. But he did not waver in his
thinking of ecstatic time as finitude, as the possibility of relatedness, as
openness, and as tension and uncanniness.
- Another difficult aspect of Heidegger's conception of time is the understanding of
how it "works." Clearly time is the possibility of all history and all change. One might call
time "process" itself. If time is process, and if it is never an objectifiable entity, then how
does it "temporalize"? Heidegger's answer is that because time cannot be "acted upon" by an
object or a subject, it makes history and change possible by acting upon itself. Time
temporalizes itself. He elaborates the idea that time temporalizes itself in
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, the immediate successor to Being and
Time. Here Heidegger uses the thinking of time as "auto-affective" to develop a theory
of what can rigorously be called the "transitional." His point of departure is an explication of
the problem that Kant set for himself in the Critique of Pure Reason: How do human
beings, whose capacities are finite, i.e., who do not create the things they encounter,
know what they do not create? Like Descartes, though more than a century later, Kant
is elaborating the metaphysics of scientific method. Or so it is usually thought. For Heidegger,
the Critique of Pure Reason is about the possibility of "mind's" encounter with
things. As Kant himself says, this makes the Critique a "transcendental"
investigation, i.e., an investigation that is not dependent on any particular experience of
objects. In Kant's familiar terms, pure reason is experience-free, a
priori. Starting
from the position that empirical knowledge has two "stems," sensory perception and concept
formation, Kant seeks to elaborate a transcendental version of the sensory and the logical. At
the beginning of the first Critique, this produces what Kant calls the
"transcendental aesthetic" (from the Greek aisthesis, sensory), with its famous
statements about space and time as the a priori conditions of all perception.
- Throughout Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger emphasizes
the relation of transcendence and the a priori to time. In the transcendental aesthetic,
Kant speaks of space as the pure external sense and of time as the pure internal sense. For Kant,
time as the pure internal sense is what Heidegger calls "the subjectivity of the subject," but
such that the "subject" is open to beings. As always, Heidegger is thinking time as relation,
making Kant's conception of the a priori synthesis a question of "ontological
connectedness" (Being). Kant opens up this theme when he speaks of time as "synopsis," the
possibility of connectedness. Heidegger seizes upon synopsis and synthesis as two aspects of
time. He pays particular attention to the way Kant himself synthesizes the transcendental
aesthetic (the sensory) and transcendental logic (the conceptual). The key moment in the first
Critique for Heidegger is when Kant says that the possibility of synthesizing the
aesthetic and the logic is the "transcendental imagination" (44).
- Heidegger pursues all of Kant's references to the transcendental
imagination that show it to be a) the faculty of synthesis itself; and b)
intrinsically related to time as synopsis. For Heidegger, the transcendental
imagination as the "third faculty" of mind, between the sensory and the conceptual,
is not simply the external tying together of the other two. Rather, as synthesis
itself, the imagination is the "structural" belonging together of the two stems, a
"third" that is "first" in its relation to the a priori (41). It is
impossible not to think here of Winnicott's idea of the transitional as the
"intermediate area of experiencing," which is neither subjective nor objective,
neither internal nor external, neither active nor passive, but that which brings
them together while holding them apart.
- This "transitionality" of the transcendental imagination is even more
marked in Heidegger's discussion of Kant on the sensory as receptive (passive) and
the conceptual as spontaneous (active). As the synthesis of the sensory and the
conceptual, the transcendental imagination "is the original unity of receptivity
and spontaneity" (107). (In Winnicott, the baby is neither given nor creates
transitional phenomena.) Here we confront the possibility of passive turning into
active because of their transcendental synthesis. One must always remember that
synthesis itself is time. Heidegger returns to Kant's idea that time is the "pure
internal sense," the possibility of sensory reception, i.e., of anything affecting
us. But where does time come from if it is to be an affecting yet never a present
entity? Time, Heidegger says, can only be a "pure affection of itself,"
auto-affection (132). Because time temporalizes itself, it is the pure possibility
of anything affecting us. For Heidegger, this is the key to reframing Kant's
question about the possibility of finite knowledge. As the synthesis of the
receptive and the spontaneous, the passive and the active, as pure auto-affection,
time opens us--relates us--to things.
- For Heidegger, the transcendental imagination as auto-affective time,
as pure relationality, is the "abyss of metaphysics" from which Kant had to "shrink
back" (Kant and the Problem 118). It is the "abyss" because it is the
place where Kant's own certainties would be undermined. As in Being and
Time, this rethinking of time demonstrates that time presumed to be the
infinite sequence of now points is a kind of splitting off of time as
auto-affection. Kant's own postulation of a universal, timeless cogito that
produces the binding rules of thought, the very possibility of Enlightenment, is
disrupted from within: the "I think" is made possible by time and by the
transcendental imagination. For Heidegger, the differences between the first and
second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason demonstrate Kant's
"recoil." In the second edition, the transcendental imagination is minimized,
particularly in Kant's transfer of the possibility of synthesis from the aesthetic
to the logic. In other words, the more familiar reading of Kant, the one that sees
him as the spokesman for modern science, while not incorrect, prefers his
retreat from what was gained in the first edition. When in the first edition Kant
describes the transcendental imagination as "a blind but indispensable function of
the soul without which we would have no knowledge whatever, but of which we are
seldom conscious, even once," the psychoanalyst can only wonder what this might
have to do with the unconscious (44). Given the thrust of Heidegger's reading,
however, the psychoanalyst would also have to wonder about the unconscious as
transitional, intermediate, and temporal.
- To summarize this rethinking of time: 1. Time as the infinite sequence of now
points is a "leveling down" of ecstatic time. 2. Ecstatic time is the coexistence of future,
past, and present as modes of relation. 3. Ecstatic time is finite. 4. Since it is not present
and is neither subject nor object, time temporalizes itself; it is auto-affection. 5.
Auto-affective time is both passive and active, the intermediate "third area" that precedes and
links passivity and activity, subject and object. 6. Auto-affective time is the possibility of
relation.
Primary Scopophilia
- There is a singular moment in Freud's theory of sexuality that integrates
these six points, while opening onto a thinking of a discontinuous, eruptive
time. For an instant, Freud conceives an intermediate, transitional organization of
sexuality in relation to history as time. This moment gives the answer to Laplanche's
question: how to integrate the theory of sexuality with the theory of time as ecstasis
and as periodicity, rhythm, repetition.
- The moment comes toward the end of the 1915 "Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes" (the unhappy rendering of "Triebe und Triebschicksale,"
"Drives and the Fates of the Drives"). Bassin reminds us that in this paper Freud
speaks of active and passive fantasies turning into each other, a familiar theme.
In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud had said that
the "component drives" of infantile sexuality occur as pairs of opposites, i.e. in
active and passive versions. Here he is interested in the genealogy of these pairs
of opposites. He first examines sadism-masochism and says that originally the
child simply wishes to "exercise violence or power upon some other person as
object" in a non-sexual way ("Instincts" 127). This non-sexual, active aim to hurt
is then turned around upon the subject, and the object is given up. The wish is
now to hurt oneself. As Laplanche emphasizes, a non-sexual wish to hurt
becomes sexual in the turning around upon oneself (Life and
Death 89). In a third stage, an extraneous object is sought to inflict pain
upon oneself. Freud calls this masochism proper. He notes that in the second
stage, originally active sadism is not yet passive. Rather, the "active voice is
changed, not into the passive, but into the reflexive, middle voice"
("Instincts" 128). The middle--intermediate--voice can be called the voice of
auto-affective processes. Laplanche claims that because erotism emerges in this
"intermediate" moment, it is sexually "primary" (Life and Death 94).
However, his emphasis, like Bassin's, is on fantasy. In Laplanche's reading,
sexuality as fantasy emerges in turning around upon oneself.
- When Freud examines voyeurism-exhibitionism, he initially finds the
same structure as in sadism-masochism. An active wish to look is turned around
upon the subject, setting up the passive aim of being looked at; then one seeks an
extraneous object who looks at one--voyeurism has become exhibitionism. But, says
Freud, this is actually not right, because there is a stage prior to the
active wish to look. He distinguishes between the genealogy of sadism-masochism
and voyeurism-exhibitionism: the wish to hurt is not originally sexual, while the
wish to look is. Once voyeurism is originally sexual, however, it has to be
thought in relation to auto-erotism, the essence of infantile sexuality. So, says
Freud, "the scopophilic instinct is auto-erotic; it has indeed an object, but that
object is part of the subject's own body" ("Instincts" 130). Moreover, the
"preliminary stage is interesting because it is the source of both the
situations represented in the resulting pair of opposites" (130). In the "preliminary stage," "oneself looking at a sexual organ" equals
"a sexual organ being looked at by oneself" (130). The first half of the equation
("oneself looking") becomes active looking at "an extraneous object" (the
voyeuristic subject); the second half ("at a sexual organ") becomes a part of
oneself passively being looked at by an "extraneous person" (the exhibitionistic
object) (130). The preliminary stage then, is one in which the oppositions
subject-object and active-passive do not hold. It can rigorously be called
transitional.[7] This "intermediate" moment is now
primary (131).
- The "auto-erotic stage of scopophilia" might seem to be a purely
theoretical inference. However, the idea that looking at a sexual organ equals a
sexual organ being looked at by oneself exactly describes the situation of the
infant and the breast. To interpret "primary scopophilia" this way, I must call
upon other things Freud says about the original "baby-breast" relation. The tie
to the breast is originally identificatory. In the oral phase, the baby
"incorporates" the breast. For Freud, as for Jessica Benjamin, identification is
the root of all love. At the end of his life, Freud expands this idea when he
says that "being" the breast precedes "having" the breast ("Findings" 299). He
could just as well have said that in 1914 he had described the original psychic
organization as one of primary narcissism, in which there is not yet inner or
outer, subject or object (74-75). In primary narcissism the baby "is" its
"objects." Even earlier, in the Three Essays, Freud says that the
original relation to the breast is both self-preservative and erotic. In the state
prior to the division of self-preservation and sexuality, there is always a
relation to what Freud calls an "object" (222). If one factors in primary
narcissism here, it is immediately apparent why "object" is the wrong word: there
is not yet a subject. Rather, one can say that there is originally a
relation to an other that one is. This is the structure of difference
itself: simultaneous connection and separation without a subject-object structure.
In primary scopophilia, reinterpreted as the baby-breast relation in an
organization of primary narcissism, the infant is the breast it sees,
making this a reflexive, auto-affective seeing. Because this "seeing" is not in
itself self-preservative but is sexual, it is, as Freud says, auto-erotic. And
because it occurs within the organization of primary narcissism, it is
auto-affective. This interpretation of primary scopophilia is an attempt to link
Freud on "being the breast" to Heidegger on being as relatedness without a
subject-object structure, a relatedness conceivable as auto-affective process. Or
more accurately, as Derrida would put it, as auto-hetero-affective
process: primary narcissism is a relation to an otherness that affects one as
affection of oneself.
- If this linkage has any internal coherence, it would have to be related to time,
finitude, ecstasis. Finite time for Freud is always a question of periodicity, a question he
immediately raises in relation to "primary scopophilia." He is attempting to account for the way
in which voyeurism can be succeeded by exhibitionism, because both derive from "primary
scopophilia." He writes:
The only correct statement to make about
the scopophilic instinct would be that all the stages of its development, its
auto-erotic, preliminary stage as well as its final active or passive form,
co-exist alongside one another . . . . We can divide the life of each instinct
[Trieb, drive] into a series of separate successive waves, each of which
is homogenous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose
relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of
lava. We can then perhaps picture the first, original eruption of the instinct
[Trieb] as proceeding in an unchanged form and undergoing no development
at all. The next wave would be modified from the outset--being turned, for
instance, from active to passive--and would then, with this new characteristic, be
added to the earlier wave, and so on. If we were then to take a survey of the
instinctual impulse from its beginning up to a given point, the succession of waves
which we have described would inevitably present the picture of a definite
development of the instinct [Trieb] . . . . This reference to the
developmental history of instincts [Triebe] and the
permanence of their intermediate stages should make the development of
instincts fairly intelligible to us. (130-31, emphasis added)
How does the "permanence" of the intermediate stages of the drives make their
developmental history "intelligible"? One can read Freud to say that because the
active and passive forms of looking derive from the preliminary phase, all the phases
actually co-exist. (This is related to Bassin's point that no matter what the overt
sexual behavior, the opposite position is alive in fantasy. But Bassin, like
Laplanche, does not raise the issue of the "primary, intermediate" drive organization
as reality.) Certainly either the active or passive form can appear to dominate a
given period of drive activity, like a discrete eruption of lava. The
collection of discrete "eruptions" is the history of the drive. But the "source" of
the "lava" is the primary, intermediate phase, which is "permanent." Otherwise, there
would be no "eruption" at all. Nor would one have a way of explaining how and why a
phase of exhibitionism can succeed a phase of voyeurism, despite their apparent
opposition.
- The "permanence" of the intermediate stage, the "volcanic" source of successive
eruptions, is the permanence of its periodic repetition. In Derrida's sense, it is the
repetition of the differential intermediate. Freud, of course, does not say this directly. But
one can link this disruptive repetition to one of Freud's rare considerations of a possible
relation between unconscious and conscious time. For a moment in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, Freud imagines a traumatic unconscious temporality that calls for the conscious
(specifically Kantian) notion of time as a protective device, a stimulus barrier.[8] I am pushing on this metaphor of the volcano to link Freud's idea of
disruptive time to the tension of intermediate states, the tension that Freud in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle links to periodicity and to something between pleasure and unpleasure,
and to the tension of "normal bisexuality" as "life," inevitably in conflict with tension
reduction.
- Further, because Freud explains the "developmental history" of the drive as a
function of periodic "eruption" of auto-affective, primary, intermediate drives, the
temporalization of the drives is the repetition of their transitional states. The
apparently self-identical organization of any given period, in which one can say "I am a voyeur,
an exhibitionist, a sadist, a masochist," or--if one thinks "normal bisexuality"--"a homosexual, a
heterosexual," is the tension reducing response to the "primary intermediate." To say, "I am now
. . . " is to privilege a presence made possible by the repetition of an intermediate state, a
state that can never be present. It is always split into active-passive, subjective-objective,
seemingly uniform periods. But the historical linkage of the periods, the fact that present
sexuality is always in relation to its past and its future, sexuality as ecstasis, is due to the
coexistence of the auto-erotic, auto-affective primary intermediate phase with the
passive-active, subjective-objective, phases.
- There is another element of the baby-breast relation that must be mentioned here,
one that goes back to Freud's very early work. From the 1895 Project for a Scientific
Psychology on, Freud always thought that the origin of unconscious wishes is the
registration of the "experience of satisfaction." His idea was that when the baby is fed it forms
an unconscious memory trace. This kind of memory formation has two axes: the opening of a pathway
and the storage of an image. The opening of a pathway depends upon one tension meeting another:
the force of what comes from the outside meeting the resistance of the inside. The result is a
differentiation of pathways (Project 317-19). If one imagines such memory formation
occurring within the organization of primary narcissism, then again one would have to think of it
as an auto-(hetero)-affective process.
- Here, the relation to repetition is clearly grounded in the rhythmic cycles of
bodily need (hunger). Need is finitude. Need is originally both self-preservative
and erotic. The inference is that repetitive bodily need carries the unconscious memory
of primary narcissism, of the tension between pleasure and unpleasure, of the primary,
intermediate, i.e., the transitional. In place of Laplanche's theory of the enigmatic signifier
of seduction, I am proposing this integration of registration of the experience of satisfaction
with primary scopophilia and primary narcissism. This is the model of how transitional sexual
difference temporalizes, because it is an ecstatic, auto-affective process: the needy, finite baby
is other than itself in order to be itself. (This is why Derrida's expression
"hetero-auto-affective" is critical. It brings "otherness"--à la Laplanche--into the heart
of auto-affection and ecstasis.) Being the breast precedes having the breast. The baby is "in
the world." And the future history of all the oppositions that will color the repetition of
sexual need, sexuality as the "stretching toward" each of past, present, and future, is written in
the tension of this ecstatic auto-hetero-affection. As a tension it will always be split into
what appear to be opposite essences, which can actually oscillate with each other (the voyeur
becomes an exhibitionist, etc). But here we also have the answer to Laplanche's question: a
conception of time as periodicity, as rhythm, is tied to a sexual time as ecstasis.
- Derrida writes of time, rhythm, tension, and difference as the
repetition of the intermediate. Deleuze, outlining the relation between difference
and repetition, also integrates his conception with the temporality of need: "The
repetition of need, and of everything which depends upon it, expresses the
time which belongs to the synthesis of time, the intratemporal character of that
synthesis. Repetition is essentially inscribed in need, since need rests upon an
instance which essentially involves repetition" (Difference 77). Here
Deleuze is speaking of repetition in the way that Laplanche speaks of rhythm, as
the "time of time."[9] These sentences are the
bridge between "the mystery of sex and the mystery of time." Need as repetition
opens a thinking of time as temporal synthesis--essentially Heidegger's project in
Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.
Sexual need, the "biorhythm" of a finite body, is the repetition of the unconscious
memory of the non-present, transitional tension in which need always opens us to
relation, a relation that undermines self-enclosed identity and the opposition of
essences.
- The tension of what Derrida called a "pre-dual sexuality," which is
not necessarily "unitary, homogenous and undifferentiated," will always be split
into what appears to be the "bedrock" of active and passive, from which all other
sexual "oppositions" derive. As finite temporal-sexual beings, we are constituted
by transitional tension and by splitting. This means that psychoanalytic
theory and practice have to expand. When "cultural," or even "philosophical"
splitting meets "intrapsychic" splitting, we all too easily assume that we are
saying something about foundational reality. (I believe that this is Freud's
problem when he calls the repudiation of femininity--i.e., castration--"bedrock,"
which implies immutability.) To take sexuality into the transitional realm is to
see why psychoanalysis has to challenge assumptions about reality, if it is not to
perpetuate splitting. This challenge inevitably opens onto time as repetition of a
tension between pleasure and unpleasure. This is no simple affair, either for
theory or for practice. But it is unavoidable, once sexuality and time inhabit
each other unconsciously.
- Above, I suggest the possible political implications of such
thinking: the inevitable social, theoretical, and individual violence directed
against "transitional tension." Laplanche also says something important about the
political implications of his theory of the unconscious:
In the face of the alterity of the other, the methods of defence are immutably the same: attempt
at assimilation, denial of difference, segregation, destruction. These are quite clearly found in
attitudes to cultural and ethnic differences. But what is lacking in all the analyses of 'racism'
is any consideration of the internal split inherent in the other himself: it is this internal
alterity which is at the root of the anxiety provoked by external alterity, it is this that
one seeks to reduce at any price. (230, n.21)
Laplanche here means that the "other's unconscious," first embodied by the mother,
is traumatizing. Violence against the other is the result of anxiety about the
"other's other." And Laplanche understands that this is also a question of time.
I am stating here that seeing time and sexuality as transitional tension, embodied
in all forms of relatedness not conceivable in oppositional, subject-object terms,
is a more consistent way of approaching this question. Once sexuality and time
inhabit each other unconsciously, the rethinking of both is a rethinking of
destruction--neikos --against life as love--philia--which is
disturbance, eruption, almost a volcano.
Philosophy Department
New School for Social
Research
and
Training Analyst and Faculty
Institute for Psychoanalytic Training
and Research, New York Freudian Society
BassAJ@aol.com
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Notes
1. Freud appends a footnote to the statement
about
"something in the nature" of sexuality that prevents satisfaction in Civilization and Its
Discontents, where he also speaks about bisexuality (105, n.3).
2. In a classic reading of Freud's entire
theory of sexuality, Bersani, influenced by the Laplanche of Life and Death
in Psychoanalysis, also emphasizes "pleasurable-unpleasurable tension" (89).
For Bersani, Freud's inconsistent positions about tension reduction and tension
increase can be shown to mean that sexuality is "that which is intolerable to the
structured self . . . . The mystery of sexuality is that we seek not only to
get rid of this shattering tension but also to repeat, even to increase it" (38).
Sexuality, then, is the common denominator of all sexual acts, e.g. intercourse,
beating, or masturbation with a fetish. Bersani says that the "ontology of
sexuality is unrelated to its historical development . . . . Sexuality is the
atemporal substratum of sex" (40). What I am trying to show here is that Bersani
is wrong: the mystery of sex(uality) cannot be divorced from the mystery of time,
but of course not time conventionally conceived. Perhaps Bersani calls sexuality
atemporal because he has no way of thinking time itself as
"pleasurable-unpleasurable" tension.
3. This is not always true. Fantasies of castration can be
arousing themselves, but can also, as Corbett says, kill arousal.
4. We will see below that Freud actually
does take important steps in this direction.
5. We just encountered the phenomenon of simultaneous
separation and connection in relation to time, in Laplanche's statement about "the rhythm . . . of interruption and connection" ("Time" 239).
6. Again, "interruption and connection."
7. Primary scopophilia--and its link to time--is not
mentioned by any of the thinkers of sexual "transitionality" discussed above.
8.
We have learnt that unconscious mental
processes are in themselves "timeless." This means in the first place that they are
not ordered temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that idea of
time cannot be applied to them. These are negative characteristics that can only
be clearly understood if a comparison is made with conscious mental
processes. On the other hand, our abstract idea of time seems to be wholly derived
from the method of working of the system Pcpt.-Cs. and to correspond to a
perception on its own part of that method of working. This mode of functioning may
perhaps constitute another way of providing a shield against
stimuli. (Beyond 28)
I have cited this passage many times, but never fail to
be astonished by it. Freud here envisages an unconscious temporality which itself
is defended against as if it were traumatic (hence the reference to the stimulus
barrier). The very assumption that conscious time is the only time is itself the
defense. But since every defense contains within it what is defended against,
conscious time would have to be shaped as a reaction to unconscious, disruptive
time. This is very close to the Heidegger who sees the infinite series of now
points as a leveling down of uncanny, Angst producing, ecstatic time.
9. But Laplanche, in both his early work
(sexuality divorced from the "vital order," from bodily need) and late work
(sexuality related to an ultimately unexplained implantation of the mother's
unconscious, enigmatic sexual message), deprives himself of the possibility of
integrating rhythm and ecstasis by not thinking of the implications of need (the
"vital order"), difference, and repetition--registration of the experience of
satisfaction as primary narcissism and primary scopophilia. This is turn prevents
him from thinking about the entire question of the "perversions" as Freud begins to
do when he links the drive's history to what I am calling the repetition of the
primary intermediate. Laplanche might object that I am not sufficiently emphasizing
his consistent understanding of sexuality as perturbation, trauma, and masochism,
although I am insisting upon the disruptive tension of the
sexual-self-preservative. Bersani moves in the direction of linking need to
disruption when he speaks--à la Laplanche-- of the "traumatic loving
initially experienced at the mother's breast" (46-47), but then construes this
"masochism which founds sexuality" as both "a threat to life and an evolutionary
conquest which protects life" (92).
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