On Thursday, Trinity’s Metaphysical Society (Metafizz) hosted a lecture in the Arts Block that was an engaging and fascinating exploration of the relationship between sexuality and metaphysics by Slovenian Philosopher Alenka Zupančič, entitled “From Adam’s Navel to Dream’s Navel: Sexuality and Metaphysics”. Central to Zupančič’s argument was the difficulty of defining sexuality as such, and what this difficulty may tell us about its ontological status. Zupančič argued that although sexuality of course exists empirically, it remains unknowable to us because it does not seem to present any sort of “essential” aspect which would allow us to formulate a “Platonic idea” of it corresponding to its manifestation. This gives it, for Zupančič, a unique, “mixed” ontological status, which would mean that sexuality may ultimately be key to our understanding of ontology itself.
Zupančič argued that in psychoanalysis, sexuality is not so central as popular culture would have it, but that psychoanalysis from Freud onwards has in fact represented a “desexualisation of reality” (this is Lacan’s interpretation). Similarly, she contended that the upheaval and shock caused by Freudian theories of psychosexual development were not owing to Victorian prudishness but instead to the broader implications of his theories of sexuality for metaphysics. She argued that interpretations and representations that reduce psychoanalysis to concerns about sexuality are attempts to mitigate the threats created by the radicalness of Freudian thinking on sexuality. This radicalness is not the idea that sexuality is everywhere, but that, according to Zupančič, “we have put it everywhere because we don’t know what to do with it”. Sexuality does not represent what we do not know so much as what we cannot know, and it is this which places it at the heart of our experience and puts it in fundamental relation to the unconscious.
Zupančič further explained that in psychoanalysis the unconscious is not understood as the part of ourselves that is merely not conscious, but as the part of ourselves that exists as a process of not-knowing. Thus does the Freudian conception of the unconscious depend crucially upon sexuality (as lack or negativity), which furthermore has profound epistemological as well as ontological implications, informing the very structures of our knowledge. She argued that for psychoanalysis, all quests for knowledge are reducible to the lack caused by the impossibility of sexual knowledge – and that this was why Freudian theories of sexuality were so unsettling. Not because of what they said about sexuality, but for what they said about our means of knowing it. It was radical to say that sexuality may exist in a way that other things do not exist, that it has, as mentioned above, a “mixed” ontological status, a conception of which may profoundly alter other ontologies.
What can be said of the existence of sexuality? As Zupančič writes elsewhere, her model and psychoanalysis’ model of sexuality is not that of Judith Butler, that sexuality is entirely performative. This is why for Zupančič sexuality has such a complex ontology, capable of philosophical implications stretching beyond what might seem like the immediate domain of psychoanalysis. The paradox that one must attempt to grasp in the case of sexuality, according to Zupančič, is that although sexuality is a form of “negativity”, and thus is impossible to grasp in an essential way, somehow this negativity does inform sexuality as it is known. It is its absence that skews the performance of sexuality. Sexuality then, although it may be explained as a form of negativity, is “not a neutral space, but already curved in a certain space”. Its “absence affects what is actually there”.
Her ideas were explained engagingly and with colour and vivacity, as she drew variously on cultural analogues, which were generally biblical archetypes. For instance, the phrase in the Bible “knowing the other” which refers to sexual intercourse, she interpreted as an expression of sex as a mode of “engaging with the point in the other where knowledge is lacking”. The title of her talk was based on the difficulty of depicting Adam and Eve in medieval paintings: if they came from God and were not given birth to by a woman, should they have navels? If we are in the image of God then does God have a navel? Painters dealt with this difficulty by covering up the place where the navel should have been with the same fig leaf used to cover their sexual organs, and this treatment is also given to sexuality. In “covering up” our sexuality we do not merely cover up what we are culturally conditioned to be ashamed of, but we cover up the source of this shame – which is lack of knowledge (and not vice-versa, Zupančič emphasised: it is not that shame is the source of our lack of knowledge, but the opposite). This troubled knowledge and troubled ontology lead to the fig leaf which “covers the scar left by the lapse of being”. She pointed out that Freud used this case to examine what he called the “dream’s navel” – what we will never uncover from any examination of our dreams, a “gap in knowledge coinciding with the gap in being”. This gap is not sexuality, but is a gap discovered because of sexuality.
It was perhaps not the least of Zupančič’s achievements that she was able to delineate highly complex ideas with a great deal of lucidity. If this article has not done her justice, it at least has the sense to direct the reader to her forthcoming book on this subject, or at the very least, to her numerous articles on the subject.
