The Transsexual in Badiou's SAINT PAUL

• Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism. Ray Brassier trans. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2003.

The cover design they didn't choose.

I was surprised to come upon this here. I was searching in all my ARG-poached files for any reference to trans* and Badiou's book on Paul popped up. Go figure. In the text, Badiou is giving a snarky sort of litany of hyperbolic identitarian positions and asks who will "eulogize the cultural­ marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual?" and the collision of these varied terms is an index of the general scorn that Badiou has for what he calls identitarian or minoritarian logics. Below is reasonable chunk (I hope) of Badiou in which the reference to the transsexual appears, to help provide a sense of why the transsexual appears at all and what Badiou's point may be, and to what degree we can assume it to have any bearing on trans* persons as such. 

For those not versed in or perhaps even familiar with Badiou this might be steep reading. Keep in mind that for Badiou universalism is not a bad thing and truth and 'truth procedures' are crucial. I'm not the best expositor of this stuff because I am not sure I follow once things get articulated as set theory. Still, in one example (that I might sort of get), that of "politics" being replaced by "management" (see below), part of the point is that politics maintains antagonism as politically constitutive (a point Badiou had made in the 70s but which is independently arrived at by Laclau and Mouffe later in a formulation that is more well known) whereas management elides antagonism, presenting it as something that can administered out of existence by better management. There is a similar elision at work when the terms sexuality, technology and culture replace those of love, science and art in Badiou's analysis. & Badiou's thoughts about love and its truths are related to Lacan's (lack of sexual relationship) if by no means equivalent. (Big topic, not going there.)

Also important to Badiou's philosophy are events and truths and subjects that they create. Being super schematic about all of that…  An event is what can not be predicted based on how the situation or status quo is at any given moment (an event is then not a consequence of what there is, it is an interruption in that field). An event happens and it manifests or embodies a truth in one of the four 'conditions' [art, science, politics, love] and this truth creates subjects, in that subjects hold to the truth, live so as to sustain that truth, in the sense of remaining faithful to that truth - this is what Badiou calls fidelity to truth. To reneg on that, to lose faith in the truth found in some event is evil. (Yeah, no shit, he goes to that word! …which gives you another glimpse of what is so unusual about Badiou.) Anyway, here is the passage from Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism…  

The contemporary world is thus doubly hostile to truth procedures. This hostility betrays itself though nominal occlusions: where the name of a truth procedure should obtain, another, which represses it, holds sway. The name "culture" comes to obliterate that of "art." The word "technology" obliterates the word "science." The word "management" obliterates the word "politics." The word "sexuality" obliterates "love." The "culture-technology-management-sexuality" system, which has the immense merit of being homogeneous to the market, and all of whose terms designate a category of commercial presentation, constitutes the modern nominal occlusion of the "art-science-politics-Iove" system, which identifies truth procedures typologically.

Now, far from returning toward an appropriation of this typology, identitarian or minoritarian logic merely proposes a variant on its nominal occlusion by capital. It inveighs against every generic concept of art, putting the concept of culture in its place, conceived as culture of the group, as the subjective or representative glue for the group's existence, a culture that addresses only itself and remains potentially nonuniversalizable. Moreover, it does not hesitate to posit that this culture's constitutive elements are only fully comprehensible on the condition that one belong to the subset in question. Whence catastrophic pronouncements of the sort: only a homosexual can "understand" what a homosexual is, only an Arab can understand what an Arab is, and so forth. If, as we believe, only truths (thought) allow man to be distinguished from the human animal that underlies him, it is no exaggeration to say that such minoritarian pronouncements are genuinely barbaric. In the case of science, cultural­ism promotes the technical particularity of subsets to the equivalent of scientific thought, so that antibiotics, Shamanism, the laying on of hands, or emollient herbal teas all become of equal worth. In the case of politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for determination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of // these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant political operators. Lastly, in the case of love, there will be the complementary demands, either for the genetic right to have such and such a form of specialized sexual behavior recognized as a minoritarian identity; or for the return, pure and simple, to archaic, culturally established conceptions, such as that of strict conjugality, the confinement of women, and so forth. It is perfectly possible to combine the two, as becomes ap­parent when homosexual protest concerns the right to be reincluded in the grand traditionalism of marriage and the family, or to take responsibility for the defrocking of a priest with the Pope's blessing.

The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogene­ity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring. Who will maintain the self-evident superiority of the competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager? But who will de­fend the corrupt-religious-polygamist terrorist? Or eulogize the cultural­ marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual? Each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce.

Breaking with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identitarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particularity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formulated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity?

(Badiou, Saint Paul, 12-13)

These days, I restrict myself
to lacy underthings - Alain Badiou

I feel a certain use value in the critique of the "culture-technology-management-sexuality" system launched from the POV of "art-science-politics-Iove" but I am unsure precisely where Badiou stands on some of these. What I guess I am responsive to is in part to the aesthetics of the critique itself, the way that, by ref. to an event the universality of truth creates subjects to that truth (in one of those four areas, art - science, love, politics) a subjection that requires fidelity. So, while I respond to that critique, it also makes me a bit nervous in that "Honor" and "Duty" and all manner of other suspect master signifiers seem to lurk in the wings, waiting for the old narratives to take off running with this purportedly new rationale. After all, I respond to tear-jerkers just like the next moron, but so what?

Another point of ambivalence for me concerns Badiou's thoughts on love. Apparently there is a new book on love out now by Badiou (In Praise of Love), though I've not seen it or read anything about it so far. Again to shoot from the hip; Badiou's language seems to shut things down to the terms of the extant sex/gender regime in what I have read, and he does not seem to be thinking about those who do not fit within it - and yet, the arguments that he makes about love as an event that creates of two people - the lovers - subjects of this shared event, does not seem to be predicated upon sexuality as such and thus, perhaps not to be limited to any M/F predictability. So these various terms like fidelity and truth, and the narrative that is implied in his discussion chimes uncomfortably close to the find your soulmate and never let go dicta that underpins so much of the popular ideology of love. But what if I think sexuality is important too? Can there be no truth of sexuality? Seemingly not for Badiou, events just don't come from there. Yet another wrinkle is added when one tries to factor in that the vast majority of the times when two people both get all gooey for one another and declare that they are in love, that this is probably not "love" as Badiou conceives it. 

Here though is a passage from Žižek's book Violence,

Alain Badiou develops the notion of “atonal” worlds - monde atone - which lack the intervention of a Master-Signifier to impose meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality. // A basic feature of our postmodern world is that it tries to dispense with this agency of the ordering Master-Signifier: the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally.  Every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it must be deconstructed, dispersed: “the modern apology for the ‘complexity’ of the world…is really nothing but a generalized desire for atony.”  Badiou’s excellent example of such an “atonal” world is the politically correct vision of sexuality as promoted by gender studies with its obsessive rejection of binary logic: the world is a nuanced world of multiple sexual practices which tolerates no decision, no instance of the Two, no evaluation, in the strong Nietzschean sense of the term.(34-35)

I'd be curious to read Badiou on Gender Studies, not sure where that is to be found though - the quote that Žižek embeds is from the French version what in English is Logics of Worlds, so perhaps it is found there. What strikes me as a bit weird in this account of atony is that Slavoj tells us that the effort is to get rid of S1s - master signifiers - and yet he writes "the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally" which, to my mind, nominates COMPLEXITY to the status of S1 - even a more aggressive S1 in that - like the Borg perhaps - it attacks and assimilates all other rivals to itself. But might we not also observe that the assertion of complexity might be understood as pushing the Symbolic in relation to the Imaginary? A strategy that might be thought of as contributing to the loosening of Imaginary fixations. 

None of which is to say that I also do not see a point to his criticism, just that it has these contrary associations as well. I am thus asserting the complexity of the potential meanings of complexity to Žižek (who is surely still reading). 

I bet Žižek likes this notion of atony as well as it echoes his analysis of the rhetoric around wars - where they have profit incentive they are insistently make-or-break, into the breach, combattings of the "obvious" evil etc, but where no profit motive, complexity rules and it is impossible to ascribe clear blame to anyone, the conflict is intractable, time to step back, queue the sociologist-historian, etc. Thus complexity acts as an apology for inaction - there is something to that, and I largely buy his earlier analysis…  just not sure that I can sign off yet on atony as discussed here (though it further contextualizes Badiou I guess).  

Žižek's evocation of the binary is also a bit off-putting, but is anyone seriously reading him for gender politics? The question I can't answer is whether Badiou's thinking about such matters is any different or an sort of "improvement".

To the extent that Badiou's rephrased critique of the "it's a black thing, you wouldn't understand" idea is generalized to all similar identitarian claims, I am intrigued by the charge of barbarism (and how he seems to liken this to essentialism via the brute animality of humans). But, I am uncertain how Badiou gets from there to being in a position, it seems, to blame this logic for the proliferation of all manner of things which it appears he dislikes, things like "Shamanism, the laying on of hands, or emollient herbal teas" (recall that the transsexual above is 'media friendly' and 'homeopathic', the latter term surely fitting in to a sequence with emollient herbal teas for Badiou). So, given that I think that homeopathy is ridiculous (I do actually) am I to see the transexual, who is media-friendly (really?) and culturally marginal, as also being ridiculous (guilt by association?). Or to cut to the quick, is identifying oneself as a "transsexual" (or a "manager" or "straight") in and of itself enough to sustain the charge of barbarism that he formulates? 

& can we really let that "media-friendly" pass without further question? With the terms manager and terrorist (with which transsexual would seem to be substitutable) what would being media-friendly mean? Certainly the media has been thriving on terrorism and transsexuality and in a vastly different way on managers/management - but even with those terms - it seems to me that they are, what they are, in ways that exceed what the media is "friendly" towards and about. Is the media-friendly transsexual the one parodied on Jerry Springer and the one troped as psychotic killer and the one marked prostitute and etc… If so, then it seems ludicrous to name this construct a product of an indentitarian or minoritarian logic as there seems to be nothing behind this "identity" or "minority" at all but refusal, a various phrased but quite insistent "That's not me". 

& throughout, are we implicitly limiting to trans women in this discussion? I ask as the discussion of the media invisibility of trans men is not uncommon and I am having trouble thinking any similar set of delimited connotations for trans man (has there ever been a trans man prostitute story for example?). For terrorist and for manager we have a bewildering variety of associations, the difference being that for terrorist the "positive" connotations are few and far between and the term acts as a flashpoint for negative affective connotations. By contrast manager is rather neutral, or simply open to positive and negative connotations. Transsexual has by contrast has been heavily overdetermined by the few possible articulations (stereotypes might be a better term) above and few others as all (already well-critiqued by folks like Julia Serrano), with actual trans people being pushed or pulled or crammed into one or another of these few narratives.

Anyway, all of this to gesture at how fraught it is to conjoin "media-friendly" with "transexual" as Badiou does.

Maybe something can be extracted from the passages on politics to help think about this…

"In the case of politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for determination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant political operators."

…which echoes a statement that will come later

"The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogene­ity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring."

…this feels to me like the real teeth of this critique. That is, if we had good reason to doubt or dispute that "identitarian protest" was in a relationship of "reciprocal maintenance and mirroring" with the "abstract homogeneity of capital" then this critique would have no bite to it. But do we doubt this? Do I, I suppose I ought to ask. 

I recall a discussion a decade or more ago with this poet who was insistent that every artistic form had already been politically neutralized. I asked about graffiti. He acted like I was an idiot and told me exasperatedly that there had been graffiti shows in NYC galleries since the 80s at least, ergo, graffiti had absolutely no status outside of the commodity. The "one drop rule" just flitted through my head, but that's a pretty fraught analogy to work from, even if it works. I'm uneasy with the idea that the potential for politics to emerge from within any group thought to have an "identity," if that identity has, at any time, anywhere, been positioned as a social category to be administered by the economy in some fashion, is thereby liquidated. Certainly I am not trying to uphold barbarism in the form of an "it's a My Identity®™ sort of knowledge (so I just have it) and you are not of my identity (so you never can know it)" but I worry that assuming that because there is a socially mediated niche seemingly already present and something appears to fit there, that whoever that "something" is has become tainted through and through. Does the existence of one "uncle Tom" politically neutralize all African Americans? I don't see how that can be right. 

Another Badiou wrinkle to keep floating nearby is that for him, until one has been subjected to a truth, one is not a subject at all. Badiou is unconcerned with "identities" as generally conceived and does not extend subjecthood on the basis of membership in a group such as women or african americans, dead white guys or male lesbians, etc.

For him, it appears that the sequence of "the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images" could probably be re-articulated endlessly, he gives us "the competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager (…) the corrupt-religious-polygamist terrorist (and) the cultural­ marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual" which would seem to allow extensions, such as the vegan-hacker-genderqueer or the bipolar-leather bear-derivatives investor which would have to entail the same scorn from Badiou for making use of the same "identitarian or minoritarian logic." But at this hyperbolic and parodic level are we perhaps failing to address what it Badiou is implying here? That is, the conjoining of all of these terms and insistent S1s in someone's life is not so monovalent as this is it? Does Badiou thereby elide the differences and ambivalences in investment even in the terms most insisted upon? Does he flatten the relational aspect of these things? 

That is, there are probably some who identify strongly with being a manager - but does that have anything like the same range of effects and consequences that being identified as man or woman, straight or queer, muslim or buddhist, etc has for a person? Context is crucial here, no? I frankly find it hard to imagine a symbolic economy wherein the designation transsexual gains or loses in currency or legitimacy in a reciprocal relation with a term like manager - the two seem to operate in radically different zones of social meaning. Admittedly Badiou is probably using these somewhat synecdochally to refer to any and every such term one could produce and thus - by implication the system of differentially constructed identity terms. (This would connect to his claim that in the situation as such, all we have are bodies and languages - until a truth appears that is. See here for more).

Recall though that after his list of compound identities he writes "Each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce."

There is a bunch of stuff in this that needs unpacking. Let's start with his recognition that there is/are something called "communitarian identities", temporally marked as "recent" and also as "typical" (though what register that term relates to I am not sure) (are "atypical communitarian identities" not subject to Badiou's critique?). So he seems to acknowledge that communities do confer, in some cases, "identities" upon their members. Is that already a problem? That is, is the identitarian or minortarian logic already at work here in Badiou's POV? I'm not sure really, though surely this is an important question. It seems that these problematic logics are operant at least by the point at which such "identities" have been converted into "advertising selling points and salable images". 

Hi, I'm a spokes corpse!

Here we might think about the way that The Gap used images of Kerouac to sell khaki pants or chinos or whatever they're called. Beatnik as spokes-corpse. Surely the beats have long since been turned into "advertising selling points and salable images" and I am not likely to argue for their relevance to the poetic or literary moment (though I hear that Sha-Na-Na are doing a reunion tour) but I'd also dispute that because something called beat has entered into economic circulation that who the beats were and what their work might persist in provoking in new readers is somehow foreclosed by that fact. 

Is the economic dimension of this the top level of description? That is, when one of these figures "draws on the resources of the other" do we mean that they others are all literally "speculating on the financial markets" and this, their participation in the market, is what taints each and sets up the "relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring"? What about groups that don't speculate on the market? Or for whom such interaction with the market is not shared by all - surely even amongst managers there are many who do not invest in the market. Or, from a different direction we might ask if it makes any sense descriptively to discuss "transsexual market investors" as a group? 

I have no published position
on Homeopathy

What does it mean that "communitarian identities" have been used as "advertising selling points and salable images" and that "the most insular or most violent groups" are good at "speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce" - how is the latter a "counterpart" to the former? The answer would have to be for Badiou that they are exhibiting these suspect logics that he's been complaining about. But do they? Let's say that I am a terrorist and I am also great at speculating on the derivatives market and I have a great business plan where I draw my resources from gun running, drug and sex trafficking and this all funnels into and is exponentialized by my market speculation and thus do I plan and fund terror worldwide. How does that sit next to, as the demonstration of the same "logic" the situation of a transsexual, who is media-friendly, culturally marginal and "into" homeopathy? Ok, let's pretend that Chaz Bono is way into homeopathy. Let's also call him culturally marginal just to keep the game going. If we could maintain this thought experiment without it collapsing into stupidity would we see this purportedly identical logic at work in both cases? What sort of perspective would I have to occupy to see the investment savvy capitalist-terrorist and Chaz as equivalent operators or a cultural logic? What makes Chaz media-friendly is his parents and his transition, child of celebs + sex change is like a tabloid wet dream and 'media-friendly' surely encompasses such dreams regardless of whether they aid or victimize their subjects. So, while I would not wish to deny any agency to Chaz Bono and submit him entirely to the enjoyment of the media apparatus - the balance seems to be with the demand of that media apparatus. But in the terrorist example the terrorist as agent is all slickly capitalistic and knows how to work the system, but it does not appear that the terrorist is worked by that system in anything like the same fashion. If these are counterparts, how much weight do we put on counter, do we read "counterpart" as denoting an inversion or reversal? That seems possible if I use my close-reading glasses (which make it impossible to see as far as my toes) but really? Does it really seem that the same logic is in effect in these two scenarios? To me, it does not.

Badiou's discourse here about these identitarian or minoritarian logics doesn't feel to me like it has that solid a grasp upon the ways that identities are adopted, imposed, implied, revoked and many other such "identity processes" of the social take place. I'm unconvinced that such processes can be adequately conceptualized as all exhibiting an identical logic. The terms in question also seem to operate at different levels, mobilizing different potentials of investment and investment that is coded at times, coded along the lines of earlier identifications - as male or female, by race, etc - even as these things may work to inhibit or facilitate certain outcomes. How much more likely circa 1950 in the USA was it for a man than for a woman to attain to the position of "manager" in a business? More perhaps than ended up in that year becoming "firemen" probably, but being identified as woman for the social realm surely impacted what professions one might attain in that time, arguably making this imposed identity more fundamentally determinative than others like 'manager' or 'patriot' or 'vegetarian'. 

Perhaps if one drastically limited the terms to - for example - the designations available on any given US census, then we could begin with the pretense that these categories, all imposed by the same authority, operating on the same plane of reference, might be susceptible to reciprocal mirroring that Badiou discusses. But I am not sure that even in a setting where such is facilitated, like this one, that it can be unproblematically understood that way (which is not to exclude any understanding deriving from such a move, just to add a bracket for further consideration, a step back from the dogmatism of Badiou's presentations). 

The idea that, should any term of identification enter into circulation within the economy, that the "identity" so referred to by the term is now reduced to a commodity-cog of said economy without remainder, strikes me as false. Which is not to argue that when a term of identification enters the economy that there are not many effects - surely there are, only that they cannot be adequately thought along the lines of a 'one drop rule'. 

So, while I continue to find Badiou intriguing and provocative, here at least, little of what he is saying convinces me. My answer to my opening questions about the transsexual in Badiou's text is that - in principle - nearly any other identity term might have been chosen by him. So his use of "transsexual" feels largely spontaneous to me and given my thoughts above, largely irrelevant to whether anyone does or does not find transsexual a useful, necessary, problematic or irrelevant term for self-identification. 

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism. Ray Brassier trans. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2003.

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence; Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008. 

"Psychoanalysis needs a sex change" by Patricia Gherovici

Gherovici, Patricia. "Psychoanalysis needs a sex change." Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, 7:1. 2011 (3-18).

Patricia Gherovici

This article's got a seriously ass-kicking title I tremble and not having dreamt up myself… Psychoanalysis needs a sex change. Awesomeness. But, Patricia Gherovici is also the author of Please Select Your Gender; From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), a book that I read back in January but never wrote anything about. Essentially I recognized that I had many points of agreement and that I also had a ton of uncertainties and whether due to my having only just begun to think about trans issues and thus being somewhat inhibited in fully engaging Gherovici's book or if the text's central arguments might lack a bit of incisive force,.. whatever the case, I didn't feel up to writing through it as a whole at that time. That said, I am going to go back to it soon and give it the patient reading that it deserves. What I do recall about it is that it is all over territory that I want to know much better, has copious sources that I'll want to look into and references many things I have already read, and that in broad stroke it appears to be the only sustained lacanian work on the topic of trans that doesn't assume in advance of trans people that pathology is unquestionably present. 

Bolds are my emphases throughout, otherwise QBQ--quoteblatherquote.

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Gherovici's abstract promises that the "paper discusses the crucial part played by psychoanalysis in the history of transsexualism and assesses the controversial yet central role of sex-change theory for psychoanalysis" and that it "argues for the depathologisation of transgenderism." and that "Lacan's theory of the sinthome offers an innovative framework for rethinking sexual difference. With the help of this theory, one can challenge the pathological approach too often adopted by psychoanalysis. This calls for a more fruitful dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the clinic of transsexualism."(3)

The point about depathologization is crucial and I've made the argument here in a variety of ways already. But to say it once again, I see no justification analytically speaking for assuming that non-normative gender expression, cross-gender identification, or any of the behaviors that one associates with transgender most broadly conceived can signify, in advance, that the (trans)subject in question is of any particular structure of desire. To assume such a thing would seem to be strictly comparable to assuming that dreaming of walking up stairs always relates to coitus - & yes, I picked one of Freud's weaker, more problematic and arguably Jungian moments (gasp!) to make the point that Freud (and Lacan and everyone) is quite prone to failing to live up to the radical consequences of her own insights (or his) and here is a moment when Freud fails, slipping into a sort of 'dream dictionary' mode that elsewhere he warns against. As Fink's Clinical Introduction book is at pains to show, subjects can have psychotic or neurotic or perverse traits without having that as their fundamental structure of desire. While I would argue just as staunchly against understanding manifestations of trans identification as psychotic or obsessive traits just as much as I do against assuming that a trans person's desire is structured in any particular way because they are a trans person (and for the same reasons), the notion of traits that bear the mark of a structure's mode of desire is perhaps worth thinking about in connection with my idea about specific jouissances discussed here.

Would Gherovici agree with me that transgender cannot be equated with any one structure? I am not certain. It seems that she primarily associates it with hysteria and, at the same time, or so I am understanding her, with the sinthome and thus, perhaps, with psychosis to a degree as well. This is complicated though and I'll try to attend more carefully to this question below. Also, to the extent that she writes of "the clinic of transsexualism" I m moved to wonder how she is understanding the specificity involved - is being trans akin to being hysteric, or obsessional - is it a structure in that sense and thus another 'clinic' to comprehend? Or is she writing more loosely here, such that the clinic of transsexualism is simply a reference to any and all clinical interactions with trans persons? My insistent and motivated (mis)understanding of these issues and my argument against pathologization is found at the ding (hear it like an oven timer and imagine cookies are coming!). 

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Gherovici's Introduction starts with a bang,

"Psychoanalysis has a sex problem in more than one sense. Transgender activists and scholars have been wary of psychoanalysis, with good reasons. In both subtle and brutal ways, psychoanalysis has a history of coercive hetero-normatization and pathologization of non-normative sexualities and genders. Such a homophobic and transphobic history, however, is based on a selective reinterpretation of the Freudian texts."(3)

To underpin the selective, if not coercive nature of this use of Freud, we turn next to struggle against popular misunderstandings of Freud which all who care to understand him better must struggle with (far more than seems just at times). Gherovici approaches this task, not surprisingly, through homosexuality,

"Freud never condemned homosexuality and has a very tolerant attitude facing it. Furthermore, (…) the founder of psychoanalysis never considered same sex desire pathological. Freud was not voicing liberal tolerance but rather making a radical  move, because for [him] homosexuality was a sexual orientation as any other, and as contingent as heterosexuality. (…) For Freud, human sexuality was essentially polymorphous and perverse because the erotic drive does not follow any 'natural' course" (…) "Freud 'perverted' sexuality when he separated the drive from any instinctual function and described its object as 'indifferent', that is, not determined by gender."(3)

…but, as Dean and others have argued, this is Freud being very queer about sexuality. Something that unsettled his contemporaries and which many of his followers denied, disavowed or foreclosed…

‎"What irritated people most in Freud’s early sexual theories was not the scandalous claim that children were sexual beings, but rather his non-essentialism in the definition of sexuality. Freud’s later notion of the drive is also non-gender specific; this was the real scandal that would clash with Victorian sensibility and it was thereafter repressed by post-Freudians."(3-4)

It is this collapse of analysts post-Freud back into heteronormative-ideological understandings of the psyche that troubles so many of us that are committed (queerly or not) to analytic thought. Gherovici asks,

"How then could psychoanalysts after Freud talk about 'normal' sexuality assuming it means heterosexual genital function when Freud acknowledged that the mutual interest of men and women is 'a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact'."(4) [Her quote is from Three Essays, though not the SE version.]

Sadly it is not that hard to imagine how this was done. Take some heavily cathected beliefs and watch them find themselves projected anywhere they search long enough.

"As Dean & Lane (2001) note, one of the greatest paradoxes of the history of psychoanalysis is that its institutions have developed normalizing moralistic and discriminatory practices that are antithetical to psychoanalytic concepts."(4)

Anyone who has read me much here on this blog can probably guess at my thoughts about some of this. On the one hand, I am profoundly suspicious of the Ego Psychology version of "psychoanalytic" thought that held sway in North America for so long, and am inclined to see lacanian thought as a corrective to this. At the same time (the other hand) I am wary as well of lacanians' tendency to orthodoxies. This perhaps colors me as a psychoanalytic "utopian" for some of you, in that I want a psychoanalysis that is not connected to the State, irrelevant to the institutionalization of people or any cure derived from or constituted through the State's demand, I want a psychoanalysis that is radically non-normative and anti-pathologizing. I do not think that this is of necessity utopian, but your mileage may vary.  

It occurs to me that Gherovici, though she cites many folks in the U.S. does not address herself to the 'doctrinal' adherences of the players involved (are they 'object relations' thinkers? 'ego psychologists'? would they best be described as relational or perhaps humanistic, or - who knows, Adlerian? — any and all of which might be classed as "psychoanalytic" depending on who is speaking). That might well be a huge task, but it would seem to be a potentially useful one to a degree and it is not as if Lacan doesn't have things to say about psychoanalysis American style. Though, perhaps as a practicioner in the States, this might feel impolitic for the rhetorical situation as Gherovici feels it, that is, as an analyst assuming she will be read by other therapists and analysts? 

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Gherovici then surveys some terminological history relevant to the topic which she is pursuing to highlight certain connections to psychoanalytic thought, a job that is sort of does, though I think that on whole, a bit less history and more discussion of her cases studies and more explication of her use and understanding of the sinthome would have suited me better.

Magnus & friends (that's MH in the lower right, seated,
wearing glasses, behind the masked person)

"Transvestite" was Magnus Hirschfeld's coinage from back in 1910, himself an occasional cross-dresser, Hirschfeld propounded a theory of sexual 'intermediaries' (basically a continuum idea). Gherovici, observing that the title of Hirschfeld's book Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress relies on the analytic notion of the drive, nonetheless she cautions against equating Hirschfeld's use with Freud's(5). She also notes that Hirschfeld was convinced of a biological basis for these behaviors(5).

& there is some other interesting stuff about Freud's and Hirschfeld's connection… 

Freud published in Hirschfeld's journal devoted to sexology, his "Hysterical Fantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality" appeared in its inaugural issue. & that journal published other folks from Freud's circle in its subsequent issues.(4)

& then comes some dirt on Jung (who, it seems to me, routinely has his dirt denied or swept under a rug)…

"But Sigmund, we can't have analysts sucking cock!"

"Hirschfeld co-founded with Karl Abraham the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in August, 1908 (Gay, 1998). In 1911, at the third international Weimar congress of psychoanalysts, Freud greeted Hirschfeld as an honored guest and a 'Berlin authority on homosexuality' (Bullough, 1994, p.64). Yet even with this recognition, Hirschfeld left the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society shortly after the Weimar meeting, despite Abraham's 'attempts at persuasion' to stay (Falzeder, 2002, p.139). Hirschfeld's departure had been precipitated by 'an external cause' (p.139) also described by Abraham as 'a question of resistances' (p.140). It seemed that Jung had objected to his homosexuality (p.141). Unlike Jung, Freud did not seem to mind Hirschfeld's advocacy of homosexual rights as a positive development and from the beginning he had encouraged Abraham to work with him (Gay, 1998, p.181)."(5) 

Magnus Hirschfeld

The workings of politics in the early psychoanalytic circle is some tangled and bizarre stuff. Undoubtedly here Freud's somewhat embattled mentality rather than his more daring theoretical self was ascendent and that is not a great outcome. When he writes Group Psychology later, how much do we suppose he was addressing himself to problems of groups that he knew very intimately? All this just to say that there still seems something a bit tepid in this accounting of Freud's stance when Hirshfeld withdrew - why is Abraham the behind the scenes man? Why could Freud not have made a definitive and inclusive statement about homosexuality to all psychoanalytic societies? 

But since we're dishing, how about another helping of Jung?

"But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man's prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, and a woman in her masculine part. None the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one's own background, and one's real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman." ("Women in Europe" from 1927, collected here)

With the echo of John Cage in my head I wonder about the should here and the claims of nature and the overt biologism peeking out from every turn in this thinker who is, it seems to me, unjustly praised for positing anima and animus as if this implied a more open-ended sense of gender identifications (and it is often mentioned as somehow a corrective to the presumed rigidity of Freud of Lacan vis-a-vis sexual difference) when it masks a rigidity of end points and a quite harsh endorsement of what hindsight would allow us to call cissexualism (though there is surely some homo- and trans-phobia in there too I'd reckon). & as certain meanings of the phallus will come up for discussion below I'll risk noting that in Jung's text above that to "achieve something important for the love of a thing" is rare for women but is "a man's prerogative" seems to require not simply a phallic attitude with respect to the fixing of meaning in an Imaginary stasis, but slips so easily into being phallic in the sense of masculinist-misogynist. Phallus schmallus. This will recur below with more nuance (I hope).

⚧   

There is little about Stekel or Gutheil's work on fetishism or transvestism that seems to rise above a rigidified and imaginarized version of whatever aspects of Freud might serve the desire to go on a safari amongst the more exotic of sexual pathologies and Gherovici doesn't add much to the mix, sufficing to point to the conceptual differences between these rather conventional thinkers and Freud.

Next she talks about David Cauldwell, a rather bizarre figure, who I again will mostly ignore save to note that in Gherovici's view he "just added the biological component to the old psychoanalytic formula of childhood trauma: when a generic predisposition was combined with a dysfunctional childhood, the result was the immaturity that produced a 'pathologic-morbid desire to be a full member of the opposite sex'"(6).

⚧ 

Harry Benjamin looking friendly

Gherovici has some interesting details about Harry Benjamin. She notes his use of the term "neurosis" with respect to trans, but remarks that "Despite the use of the term neurosis, Benjamin (1954) discouraged any psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic intervention, seeing these as 'a waste of time' (p.228). Benjamin argued that psychoanalysis did not lessen the wish to change sex but rather forced patients to hide this desire and therefore live miserable lives. As his close collaborator Hamburger (1953) put it. 'it is impossible to make a genuine transvestite [transsexual] wish to have his mentality altered by means of psychotherapy'"(p.392-393)(7)

"For transsexuals, Benjamin (1954) reiterated that therapy was of no use. He was also not naive, admitting that for a male-to-female transsexual surgery 'may not always solve [the transsexual's] problem'. His feminization craving may never end' (p.228-229). He also warned against performing sex reassignment on patients with psychosis or who were in danger of suicide or self-mutilation."(7)

Gherovici points to the curious contradictions in the conclusion to Benjamin's paper wherein he wrote "Transsexualism is inaccessible by any curative methods at present at our disposal. Nevertheless the condition requires psychiatric help, reinforced by hormone treatment and, in some cases, by surgery. In this way a reasonably contented existence may be worked out for these patients"(qtd 7) 

She also observes that "Benjamin maintained a very negative bias against psychotherapy and psychoanalysis but created a protocol for sex change therapy in which psychiatrists were given the power to determine who the potential candidates for surgery were; psychiatrists had the final word on the treatment decision but no say on the diagnosis."(7)

There are a couple of threads in this that I find instructive. First of all, Benjamin's impressions of what psychoanalysis is offering or insisting upon is that non-normative gender expression be cured, in the sense of being eradicated, those who had suffered from 'it' would then presumably comport themselves and desire and desire to be desired as men or women as understood by society, and thus ultimately via anatomical-genital reference? & of course it doesn't take much looking around in the writings of people like Socarides, Stoller, etc to begin to see something called "psychoanalysis" being used, as Gherovici put it earlier "In both subtle and brutal ways" to effect the "coercive hetero-normatization and pathologization of non-normative sexualities and genders" and so, I'm inclined to grant Benjamin's refusal a critical insight into the problems with American psychoanalysis and what I've called elsewhere the Psychiatric-I.S.A. Hetero-normatization and pathologization of the non-normative would be exhibit one in my critique of the american Psy-ISA. 

& with that in mind it seems that Benjamin and Hamburger are both being better analysts than those who take the term analysts upon themselves as both Hamburger and Benjamin speak about the desire of these people and are not seeking to deny them their desires, Gherovici's gloss on Benjamin is that in his perspective, the intentions of the Psy-ISA (for him simply "psychoanalysis") "did not lessen the wish to change sex but rather forced patients to hide this desire and therefore live miserable lives." Certainly no lacanian would seem to be able to reasonably sustain such a goal, of requiring the analysand to hide, deny or repress their desire (which is not to suggest that some lacanians might not effectively do so nonetheless). & the same recognition is present it seems in Hamburger's own words "it is impossible to make a genuine transvestite [transsexual] wish to have his mentality altered by means of psychotherapy". Both of these men seem to have taken the desires of their patients to be central, meaningful and not amenable to the imposition of norms, both seem to find in the desire of their patients the grounds of an ethical relation to them. Notably, Benjamin's comment that surgery "may not always solve [the transsexual's] problem" also seems to demonstrate a nuanced understanding of desire as something which desires to keep on desiring - a recognition that does not stop him from being the advocate of his patient's desires.

But there is still a but, and a curious one as well. While we are given to understand Benjamin as against psychoanalysis he nonetheless relies on certain psychoanalytic notions at key moments, as when he cautions against granting the desire for surgery to any patient that is psychotic. & more importantly in that his protocols give the decision about who is granted surgery and who not, to psychiatrists! What is not clear to me is how much of this is Benjamin's recognition that these are the powers that be and thus this is the audience he must address himself to, and how much this can be understood as his faith in these arbiters. I am inclined to read this as real politik more than deep-seated ideological confusion. 

⚧ 

Gherovici then turns to the work of Robert Stoller. I'll quote at length,

"Stoller further refined the notion of a separation of sex and gender with the idea of 'core gender identity', which corresponded to the internalised idea of the individual's belonging to a particular sex. Stoller initially supported the idea of a biological force, a drive determining gender. 'Gender identity' stressed more the subjective experience of gender and separated gender from sexuality. Based on the conviction of a distinct identity and the importance of the penis, Stoller systematised a distinction between the transsexual, the transvestite (cross-dresser), and the effeminate homosexual. He noted that in contrast with transsexuals, transvestites and male homosexuals identify as men; transexuals abhor the penis, which for transvestites and homosexuals is an insignia of maleness and a source of pleasure"(8).

I can't find a picture of Stoller, but
here is one of his books.

"By 1968, Stoller, always a believer in bisexuality, had completely moved away from a biological model to a psychological one and emphasised the psychological forces that resulted in transsexualism. Stoller was mainly interested in male transsexualism, which he considered a 'natural experiment' (Stoller, 1975, p.281) to measure variables in the development of masculinity and femininity, but also a pathology of psychosexual development caused in early childhood by 'excess merging with the mother' (p.296). He recommended ''sex change' surgery' for patients properly diagnosed as transsexual, requesting from his colleagues that 'everything should be done to assist them in passing' (p.279) and was quite humble about the goals of his treatment. Stoller opposed any attempt as 'converting' male transsexuals into masculine, heterosexual or even less feminine people, because 'the treatment of the adult transsexual is palliative; we must bear this and not, in our frustration, impatience, or commitment to theoretical positions, fail even to provide that much comfort to our patients' (p.280)."(8)

"Yet despite his efforts at contributing to psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, and perhaps because of the fact that he believed that transsexualism was a petri-dish for human sexuality - a 'key test, in fact the paradigm for Freud's theories of sexual development in both males and females' (Stoller, 1975, p.297) - Stoller developed a simplistic explanation with psychological overtones that he summed up in the formula: 'dominant mother, father pushed to one side, infant cuddly and lovable, mother-son too close' (p.193). In cases of male-to-female transsexualism, the key was the essential femininity passed from mother to son: 'What his mother feels is femininity; what he feels is femininity' (p.204). The model was one of mimetic imitation: The son copied the mother; the mother's excessive closeness to the son was considered to be a negative influence. Stoller also talked about a bisexual mother, who might have has a period of extreme tomboyishness, and of a distant // father. These factors contributing to the creation of transsexuality, especially male to female. For female-to-male transsexuals, Stoller's speculations can be rendered as 'too much father and too little mother masculinizes girls' (p.223-244). Importantly, Stoller stated explicitly that female transsexualism is not the same condition as male transsexualism, stressing that female and male transsexualism are clinically, dynamically, and etiologically different(p.223-244)".(8-9)

& then, in the wake of Stoller's work…

"…many psychoanalytic theories of gender identity development blamed gender trouble on identifications with the 'wrong' parent'"(9)

"And most psychoanalysts proceeded to view transgender expressions as an indicator or underlying pathology - be it a precursor of transvestism or homosexuality (Limentani, 1979), borderline disorders (Green, 1986), narcisistic disorders (Oppenheimer, 1991, Chiland, 2003) or psychosis (Socarides, 1970, 1978-79). Understandably, feeling relegated to the realm of pathology and abjection, transpeople rejected psychoanalysis."(9)

Obviously I'm going to need to read Stoller. Lacan mentions him in Seminar XVIII, so I at least need to figure out which text he is obliquely referring to. & simply given his centrality in American psychoanalysis and his influence on the thinking about these issues, witnessed, if by nothing else, by the ubiquity of his coinage of the phrase "core gender identity." But, that said - all the mother blaming and father blaming and just this immediate reduction of all issues to a highly routinized notion of the family romance read through a similarly rigid conception of developmental stages and the obsessive foregrounding of the penis all looks to me to be indefensible if named as psychoanalysis (assuming you share my S1s and not Stoller's I suppose). But here again it seems that Stoller's thought has to be read with and against the history of psychiatry's POV on homosexuality in the States. I discuss this to a degree here. & it is not as if Stoller is without empathy even if it is framed by pathologizing which makes him a complex character in this history. 

⚧ 

The discussion of Millot via Sheperdson and with Kate Bornstein's dubbing of Millot as a Gender Terrorist is interesting but ends too quickly for my taste. That is, it repeats something that Gherovici is wont to do in this text and in her book - she will often pose a question that I, as reader, very much want to see her then answer in some relatively clear fashion,… and then, she does not answer it to my satisfaction. For instance, with regard to Bornstein's critique of Millot, Gherovici asks "Is Bornstein's accusation of gender terrorism justified?"(10) The next sentence is not an obvious answer "Millot's interpretation of transsexuality is classic…"(10) unless we understand "classic" status as an answer (hopefully not). Gherovici's subsequent gloss on Millot may be accurate, but does not present itself as an answer to the question she posed. A bit later when she agrees with Pat Califia's critique of Millot (11) and then after a somewhat odd detour through the film Transamerica (which Gherovici seems to read positively, where to me it seems like mild trans-exploitation wrapped up in a 'feel-good' road movie) which then leads to some reflections on the phallus before returning to Millot, she writes,

"To return to Millot, then, it is in the inevitability yet variety of symptoms that I mainly disagree with Millot's generalised assumption that most transsexuals are psychotic…"(12).

So am I a gender terrorist or what?
[Catherine Millot]

This one-liner does not really open onto the question of whether Bornstein's criticism is justified, a query I would be curious to hear Gherovici's thoughts on. & this single line also falls short of charging Millot with pathologizing as Gherovici "mainly disagrees" which seems to leave open the possibility that she minorly agrees(?) that "most transsexuals are psychotic" - a reader may think I am being persnickety here about the language, but I am reading Gherovici to the letter, something one would assume she would expect (and to "mainly disagree" is a bit less than to disagree, is it not?). But then perhaps she means that the majority of her disagreement hinges on this issue but that the remainder of disagreement is due to other unnamed reasons with no agreement being implied at all… I am unsure.

I guess what I would have appreciated in this text is some way to distinguish between pathologizing and psychodiagnostics.

In spite of this qualm of mine with regard to her stance on Millot, Gherovici does have some things to say which distinguish her rather radically from Millot and the pathologizing analysts' club, such as this;

"I argue for a depathologisation of transgenderism and thus differ from the position taken by nearly all analysts. What I propose is an alternative to the usual psychoanalytic treatment of transgenderism. That is to say, transgenderism should not be systematically defined as pathology. If transgenderism is not pathological, then a sex change should not be considered either a treatment or a cure. My perspective follows Lacan's later theory of the sinthome to rethink sexual difference. This theory is a departure from the classical Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex and even from Lacan's first formulations that insisted on the symbolic and the father. It departs as well from a second period on Lacan's work when he would put the emphasis on the theory of fantasy and the object cause of desire. Lacan modified his whole position a last time in the mid-1970s when he elaborated a new conception of sexuality, just before discussing Joyce's writings.(12)

Of the Sinthome she writes,

"Lacan gave a new twist to Freud's Oedipus complex when he reformulated it as evincing the domination of the Name-of-the-Father. Later, Lacan (2005) went beyond the Oedipus complex and finally proposed the sinthome as a way of reknotting in the psychic structure what had been left unknotted because of the father's failure. (…) Since the sinthome is not a complement but a supplement, it is a vehicle for creative unbalance, capable of disrupting the symmetry. The sinthome is what helps one tolerate the absence of the sexual relation/proportion (Lacan, 1975, p.45). Instead of grief and reproaches for broken promises addressed to the Other as demands, the sinthome employs the Name-of-the-Father as a way of naming, as a path in the invention of new signifiers (Lacan, 1977). Lacan's notions of the sinthome thus connected fantasy, demand, the system of the symbolic, and the place of the real with the infinite possibilities that it allows for jouissance."(12)

This passage chimes suddenly with a book blurb I spotted on amazon today: Self-Organizing Men: Conscious Masculinities in Time and Space, Jay Sennett Ed. - the blurb for which includes the following; "…Noble, who discusses female-to-male transition as a racialized experience with very different ramifications of power and status for transmen of color, offers a new theoretical paradigm, which encapsulates the strengths of Self-Organizing Men: trans in-coherence, a positive, productive disharmony, a collective state of paradox and flux."

. . . can one not hear in this an echo of Gherovici's gloss on the sinthome above as "a vehicle for creative unbalance, capable of disrupting the symmetry." Perhaps the echoes are incidental, but surely it warrants consideration.

⚧ 

Gherovici next turns to the phallus and I so wish that she was a bit more explicit about the distinctions within that word between the imaginary phallus and the symbolic phallus, as it is there that so much trouble starts. Here though is what she writes, 

"It is true that the phallus, often confused with the limp little prick, is not much more than a signified of jouissance that sexual discourse transforms into a signifier. Lacan's dictum that 'there is no sexual relation' is another way of saying that for the unconscious there is no representation of the female sex, that the unconscious is monosexual or homosexual; there is only one signifier for both sexes, the phallus. The phallus refers only to phallic jouissance; other forms of nonphallic jouissance exist and can be experienced, although they remain outside signification."(13)

She continues this line of thought…

"Sexual positioning is predicated on an 'error' that consists of taking the real organ for a signifier of sexual difference. The error is to take the phallus as a signifier of sexual difference."(13)

The phrasing here has a bit more punch!

Quoting Morel, who is either quoting trans analysands of hers or paraphrasing, Gherovici writes; "This common error can be what the rectification proposed by some transsexuals is all about" 'If you think that because I have a penis I am a man, that is an error; I can be a woman who has a penis.' Or conversely. 'If you think that not having a penis makes me a woman, this is an error because I am a man without a penis (Morel 2000, 186). And, they are absolutely right, because for the unconscious somebody with a penis can be a woman or // someone without a penis can be a man. Sexual positioning is not based on organ attribution. The transgender phenomenon proves that there is nothing natural that would direct us to the opposite sex. Sexual identity is a secondary nature. Since the unconscious has no representation of masculinity or femininity, we cannot speak with certainty in terms of sexual identity of being a man or a woman, but only of an assurance, a happy uncertainty."(13-14)

It is in reference to this 'common error' that Gherovici's slight twist on Dean's now well know quote makes sense. Dean had written of the phallus as "red herring", on which Gherovici puns,

"I would like to suggest that the phallus is less a red herring than a 'read' herring - in fact, like gender, it is subject to interpretation, and it will always be read like a text"(14).

"the flying phallus"

There is a lot here to talk about. But let me highlight what might be a contradiction first. We are told that "Sexual positioning is predicated on an 'error' that consists of taking the real organ for a signifier of sexual difference." …and soon thereafter we are also told that "Sexual positioning is not based on organ attribution." It is hard not feel that she is demanding that "sexual positioning" (which is what exactly? Sexuation? Gender? Sex?) both is a consequence of the "common error" of equating penis with (imaginary) phallus (seeing it as the unambiguous mark of sexual differentiation) and at the same time asserting that it is not "based on organ attribution." Or let's not be shy - she is saying this, though I don't think that this is quite what she means to say. It would certainly help matters if "sexual positioning" were clarified, but I am not sure that is possible here.

Where things become muddled (it seems to me) is that when she writes that "Sexual positioning is predicated on an 'error' that consists of taking the real organ for a signifier of sexual difference" we are able to see this as beginning at birth (if not before) when a delivering doctor might announce "It's a boy" or "It's a girl" - and in this instance it is hard to credit this as a common error (which makes it sound sort of bland and easily avoidable) so much as an instituted protocol of misrecognition fully backed by a naturalized ideology which makes its avoidance structurally difficult. This error is not one that the infans has made, it is imposed on the body of the infans. But, when she writes that "Sexual positioning is not based on organ attribution. The transgender phenomenon proves that there is nothing natural that would direct us to the opposite sex. Sexual identity is a secondary nature. Since the unconscious has no representation of masculinity or femininity, we cannot speak with certainty in terms of sexual identity of being a man or a woman, but only of an assurance, a happy uncertainty"…here it seems that she does have something like sexuation in mind, a model of sexed being which allows for identification as the ground of positionality which trumps anatomy. This instability in the text as to what "sexual positioning" is, is vexing. Consider me vexed. In the first instance she seems to mean by it "assigned sex" and in the second instance to mean something not radically unlike what Stoller means by "core gender identity" even if, as a good Lacanian, she recognizes that "Sexual identity is a secondary nature" she surely understands how primarily it is experienced by subjects, as something which simply is, rather than it being a choice the subject makes. 

& then, while it is accepted almost as dogma that there is no signifier of sexual difference in the unconscious, I think that this statement runs some risks as well. To begin, it cannot be understood to suggest that signifiers like clitoris, or vagina, or less clinical and more slangy sexual ones are somehow barred from the unconscious. So if it does not mean that signifiers of the genitals are unknown in the unconscious, what does it mean that there is no signifier of sexual difference in the unconscious? That is, if we are all subjected to the common error at birth, that of being marked as male or female due to the presence or absence of the penis, such that the penis as bit of flesh and signifier signifies male to us in large part and if vagina as flesh and as signifier signifies female to a significant degree, then on what grounds can we argue that no signifiers of sexual difference are found in the unconscious? The predictable lacanian answer begins by pointing out that the penis is not the phallus - but if the penis is used, and it is, to ascribe sex to the new born - that is, if the penis is able to sustain that signifying function at the moment of childbirth and if that ascription "It's a boy" then serves as ground of the social identity that a child is raised to occupy - then it would seem difficult to maintain a straight face while arguing that the phallus is radically distinct from the penis. Certainly the doctor who delivers the baby is not relying on a lacanian understanding of the phallus in that moment, even if she or he might be treating the penis (or the vagina) as Imaginary phallus (if I am allowed to read their actions as a lacanian). 

Also what can it mean to say that "there is only one signifier for both sexes, the phallus. The phallus refers only to phallic jouissance; other forms of nonphallic jouissance exist and can be experienced, although they remain outside signification." That is, there is a slippage it seems between the penis understood as Imaginary phallus and phallus said to refer "only to phallic jouissance" (and, we might add, to phallus as Symbolic, that is, as master signifier or S1 - a relation that is involved with phallus as signifier of jouissance but not equivalent to it, or so it seems to me). 

Does it seem like I am clarifying anything to anyone? I feel like I am just making more murk in any already murky scene.

In the back of my mind here is again Dean's idea of supplanting the phallus where possible with objet petit a, a suggestion I find very interesting and which I want to explore further, but which surely does not always work. To help further undermine the reach of this term (which, denotes quite a few distinct and non-equivalent concepts) I've been advocating for the use of S1s, master signifiers or quilting points as terms when and where possible to supplant those uses of the phallus where it acts to ground meaning. & explicit in this is my feeling that the varied overdeterminations of the term are too suasive and operate at too many levels to make hanging on to "phallus" more generative or useful than less. What I cannot say is whether it is possible, as Dany Nobus suggested at a seminar I was at some years ago, to articulate the whole of Lacan's theory without using the term phallus. But it's not a bad project now is it?

So to return again to fail again to make clear why there can be no signifier of sexual difference in the unconscious… It would seem to hinge on both jouissance and the requirements of signification itself and thus desire and… lots of stuff. Starting with desire, we might argue as Dean does that desire, as it has no fixed object and as there is no natural relationality of sexes, that unconscious desire has no signifier of the other sex in the sense that it is not constituted by any such relation and precedes whatever objects it takes up (even where its object is what is denoted by such a signifier). Or perhaps, we might observe that as the unconscious is symbolic, is structured like a language, etc, that it cannot ever adequately signify jouissance, not for the subject and even less for the Other or any other positioned as such. & finally, if the securing of an S1 is in a sense a "phallic" relation to meaning then the sexual difference that cannot be signified, cannot be signified because it operates differently, if it could be designated as a meaning then it would not be other to meaning as exemplified/established by master signifiers generally (i.e., it could be called "phallic"). It is this that Gherovici seems to be getting at when she writes "other forms of nonphallic jouissance exist and can be experienced, although they remain outside signification." 

But, before I move on, this part again calls out for applause: "This common error can be what the rectification proposed by some transsexuals is all about 'If you think that because I have a penis I am a man, that is an error; I can be a woman who has a penis.' Or conversely. 'If you think that not having a penis makes me a woman, this is an error because I am a man without a penis. And, they are absolutely right, because for the unconscious somebody with a penis can be a woman or someone without a penis can be a man."

Maybe one thing that I wish was more present in Gherovici's discourse was the recognition that the trans person is there in the audience listening, if not perhaps that the big Other is a big transOther (whether existent or not) but simply that while trans people may be a small group numerically, that signifiers like transsexual and transgender and many others are already at work in the symbolic, already heavily cathected in diverse ways and operant in their lives. That meaning is something we battle over is indicative of its status as Imaginary. We need new symbolizations, and not more imaginarizations. We need greater attention to language which is renewed, re-distanced, stepped-away-again from its mediated habits. The attention to language is somewhat impoverished in this paper, regardless of where one stands on trans issues, or the use of new pronouns or words to designate people or refuse their designation with older words, the signifiers are there now - are extant - they cannot readily be foreclosed from signification. But the literal words are quite pristine in Gherovici's use (man, woman etc), their ramification is symbolic even as her lack of space-making for any third or queered sexual position implies (to me at least) that her discourse cannot escape fully the gravitational pull of the Imaginary of the sex/gender regime as is. Is that a general problem with Lacan too? Maybe. Though I suspect I owe you all more about this for it to be granted as a problem at all. 

⚧ 

She then turns to briefly sketching what would be involved in understanding transitioning as a sinthomatic writing. I am very interested in this, even with the qualifications and so forth, but wish that here Gherovici had spent more time to explicate. She writes,

"Certainly in some cases, writing about one's transexual transformation is of the order of the sinthome; there are many cases where the transformation is reported as achieving a reknotting of the three registers of the real, symbolic and imaginary. Then the sinthome shapes the singularity of an 'art,' a techne that reknots a workable consistency for the subject; this movement can best be evoked by saying that it moves the subject from a certain contingency to absolute necessity."(14) …she then looks to Jan Morris' book to clarify what this might mean for a subject who is trans, writing that "One can see why her sinthome was necessary: It was necessity itself. In Morris' case the sinthome has produced less a 'woman' than a 'woman of letters'. Sex may have its reasons but they remain unknown since sexual difference obstinately resists symbolization. This impossibility can produce a sinthome. The sinthome is something that cannot be rectified or cured. The sinthome is a purified symptom, it remains beyond symbolic representation and exists outside the unconscious structured as language. In this sense, the sinthome is closer to the real. Lacan reached the final conclusion that there is no subject without a sinthome. Lacan's contention that there is no sexual relation, and therefore that the relationship between partners is a sinthomatic one."(14).

If the sinthome is a purified symptom, what has been flushed out that it's purity might shine? The answer would seem to have to be anything we might signify of it, those semblants are still ghosts in the symbolic machine (I'm scatting here people) and the sinthome would be outside. One would then have to begin with a symptom and by isolating the Imaginary fixations which sustain it, resymbolize them so as to open them up to new connections and bring them back into symbolic circulation, until such time as what remains is no longer symptom but sinthome. What then is a sinthome? Is it the set of relations as cathected minus the determinate points at which a symptom had grasped? Obviously I need to spend more time in the seminars XX through XXIII.

She notes on page 14 that Lacan was the 1st analyst in France to work with transsexuals. There is a bit of discussion of this in her book, and I recall not being thrilled by it. 

Returning to Freud Gherovici draws attention to the moment in Three Essays when Freud writes "It is experimentally possible (E.Steinach) to transform a male into a female and conversely a male into a female"(14)(yes, it says the same thing twice here in Gherovici's text - but presumably that is a typo and Freud's second clause reversed things along the lines of an "& vice versa"). She also points to Freud's interest in sex hormones as dating back to 1896 and discussed in letters to Fleiss.

In her conclusion Gherovici writes,

"What makes a man a man and a woman a woman is a question that has come to psychoanalysis from hysteric patients. The position on bisexuality held by Steinach and Benjamin seems closer to a queer notion of sexuality in which genders are placed in a continuum beyond a strict binary. Paradoxically, the liberal discourses of gender identity support a sort of essentialism about gender identification. A collaboration between psychoanalysis and transgender discourse would thus open the way for an alternative."(15)

I've written elsewhere about my issues with a continuum model, so when Gherovici invokes an alternative to this, I'm on board immediately if standing near the life rafts. What does not come through for me in this article is a vantage from which I then might take a breath and say, ok, given this where now? Instead I am simply reeling amongst questions or my inability to use what is offered in such a way as to open things up more (where 'more' is obviously relative to wherever I might be said to 'be' and thus perhaps a measure of the 'dullardity' of my misunderstanding). 

Superego says: Bingo!

A trans friend of mine found this
cover offensive. You?

Whatever the case, Gherovici is going to be central to my dissertation.


& there is still so much in this paper that I didn't talk about at all!


I'm too lazy to type out the sources cited in the text of Gherovici's paper. You'll have to get it or ask me if you need that stuff.