Jacques Lacan was one the most controversial intellectuals of the past century, revered by proponents of post-structuralism and critical theory, but dismissed by some (Noam Chomsky and François Roustang) as a charlatan. I examine one of the most intriguing theses of Lacan, that “there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship”, that “it is impossible to found a sexual relationship” because “Jouissance, qua sexual, is phallic – in other words, it is not related to the Other as such.” (Lacan 1998, 9) According to Alain Badiou this means that “in sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other” (2012,19). On this account, all sex is just masturbation by means of other people, driven purely by auto-erotic desire, and the only thing that could cause us to discriminate in regard to whom we want to masturbate with is sexual repulsion, the ‘disgust’ we feel for some sexual objects but not for others. In light of the Lacanian thesis, disgust may be something functionally indispensable; a defining characteristic of human sexuality.

For Lacan, we are attracted only to sex, to sexual ecstasy, jouissance; not to the sexual partner, who is simply an instrument for obtaining our own sexual satisfaction, even if our satisfaction is conditional on being an instrument of their own satisfaction. In that context sexual desire is essentially auto-erotic. This, on its own, would seem to entail unlimited openness to sexual experience, but in practice something restricts us to only some pleasure instruments while rejecting others, despite self-centredness of our desire. The short-circuit of auto-eroticism is modulated and diverted outward, by sexual disgust. As Camus puts it, “one recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it” (1975, 103), and perhaps in the same way we choose our sexual partners, not those we are explicitly attracted to but, rather, those we are not disgusted by. We are ready to use sexually anyone who satisfies this simple criterion, and everything else is just a play of circumstances. Curiously, Lacan does not deny that we may be attracted to someone else, but real attraction is always asexual, while sexuality is always auto-erotic.

If Lacan was right that there can be no real relation based on sexual attraction to the Other then we must accept the logical consequence that heterosexuality is just auto-eroticism that is intrinsically modulated by minimal homophobia, understood as repulsion from homosexual acts, and, conversely, homosexuality is auto-eroticism intrinsically modulated by minimal heterophobia. Bisexuality my be associated with a more complex pattern of sexual of disgust, or perhaps its absence. Inbar et al. (2009) offers some empirical support for this thesis: “The more disgust sensitive participants were, the more they showed unfavorable automatic associations with gay people as opposed to heterosexuals.” We may deceive ourselves and others about the influence of disgust, we can even act as if we are not disgusted, but sexual orientation is essentially adversarial, discriminatory, expressed as auto-erotic arousal modulated on the structural level by sexual repulsion, not a sympathetic relation with some ‘external’ source of arousal but a negative space, a relief in the field of disgust.

Sexual orientation defined in terms of auto-erotic desire and sexual disgust has the capacity to explain the ‘paradox’ of physiological arousal in heterosexual subjects when encountering homosexual erotic imagery, and vice versa. The mechanism of arousal may involve auto-erotic affinity with the sexual arousal of another irrespective of their sex, and irrespective of how they were aroused; not by the desire to participate in the same sexual act. Another way, when vicariously participating in a sexual act we may experience ‘sympathetic arousal’; being aroused not by the sexual act itself but by the imagined or sensed arousal of the active participants with whom we identify and empathise. The fact that prevalence of physiological arousal to sexual acts that are contrary to the professed sexual orientation of the subject is higher among women (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine) may count in favour of the sympathetic arousal hypothesis, given that women, in general, experience affective empathy for other women more strongly than men do for other men (Stuijfzand et al. 2016). This explanation is more parsimonious than the popular hypothesis (Psychology Today) that the most homophobic individuals are actually same-sex attracted but are not aware of their ‘true’ sexual orientation, and are subconsciously resisting it. In any case, sexual arousal to erotic imagery does not of itself define sexual orientation; “genital arousal (…) provides little qualitative information on the mental states underlying sexual arousal and desire.” (Safron et al. 2017) The most direct (but potentially unethical) way to determine the ‘true’ sexual orientation would be to compare responses to a range of sexual acts attempted or performed by the test-subject on individuals of the same sex and the opposite sex, respectively. The hypothesis of sympathetic auto-erotic arousal could then be provisionally tested by comparing the degree of sexual arousal associated with (direct) performance of sexual acts on a passive partner against those obtained passively, via visual stimulation alone.

Irrespective of sexual orientation, when the auto-erotic desire is not neutralised (by love, according to Lacan) or is persistently and involuntarily unsatisfied, the inherent antagonism of real sexuality may be projected on every aspect of life, and ultimately on the identity of others. Auto-erotic frustration may transpose sexual disgust on every point of difference that does not serve to satisfy the desire. Disgust may then become the primary lens through which we experience the world, but disgust which had failed in its constructive function can easily become the force of violence, destruction and hate. We have the propensity to hate that which we need to satisfy our sexual desire if the instrument of satisfaction is withdrawn from us, or withdraws itself because of its own disgust. As humans we nonetheless have the capacity to resist and defeat the crushing force of sexual frustration, either through love (of a person, family, tribe, nature, divinity etc.) or by turning sexual disgust against our own auto-erotic desire, as a more or less successful attempt at erotic renunciation.

It is often overlooked in the analytical discourse about sexuality that unmitigated participation in sex-acts accomplishes only ever-diminishing returns, and that sexual ‘success’ ultimately leads to frustration in its own right; frustration arises from the failure of sex to satisfy us on a more fundamental level. Once the sexual use of others is no longer adequately satisfying and the auto-erotic desire is seemingly quelled, this does not produce peace or fulfilment but lays bare a deeper source of frustration, perhaps the ultimate ‘lack’ which is independent of desire: “ab-sense”, the lack of a fundamental, non-contingent purpose or meaning (Badiou & Cassin 2017, 49-50). Awareness of this lack is both a form of transcendence of the practical lack signified by mere desire and the source of metaphysical doubt: what is the sense of my being? This way of defining the challenge is in all likelihood also ab-sensical, a remnant of the logic of desire and itself in need of transcendence. If being (existence) and sense (meaning) are mutually conditioned then it makes little sense to ground one in terms of the other, and it may be the case that the goal of our yearning, the remedy for our metaphysical lack, is not its elimination, not some immutable, universal truth, but acceptance of ab-sense (lack) as the transcendental principle in which the triad of life, agency (consciousness) and value is grounded. “[Totality] is present in the particular as that which is absent, as a constitutive lack which constantly forces the particular to be more than itself, to assume a universal role which can only be precarious and unsutured.” (Laclau 2007, 15) Awareness of the lack (of the absolute) may just be the source of all contingent meaning and value, and therefore that which ensures that the Self, the Subject of frustration and desire, is itself not lacking.

Badiou, Alain. In Praise of Love . Profile Books Ltd., 2012.

. Profile Books Ltd., 2012. Badiou, Alain and Cassin, Barbara. There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship . Columbia University Press, 2017.

. Columbia University Press, 2017. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus . Penguin, 1975.

. Penguin, 1975. Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D.A., Knobe, J., & Bloom, P. Disgust sensitivity predicts intuitive disapproval of gays . Emotion, 2009.

. Emotion, 2009. Lacan, Jacques. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge . W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

. W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. Laclau, Ernesto. Emancipation(s) . Verso, 2007.

. Verso, 2007. Safron, Adam, et al . Neural Correlates of Sexual Orientation in Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Homosexual Men . Scientific Reports, 2017: 41314.

. . Scientific Reports, 2017: 41314. Stuijfzand, Suzannah, et al. Gender Differences in Empathic Sadness towards Persons of the Same- versus Other-sex during Adolescence. Sex Roles, 2016: 434–446.

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