Toward a Materialist Ontology (original) (raw)

Sex, ontology, subjectivity: In conversation with Alenka Zupančič

Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 2015

In this wide-ranging conversation, Alenka Zupančič engages with a number of important themes that animate her current work. Randall Terada begins by asking her first to address the striking connections in her work between sexuality, ontology, and the unconscious. Zupančič then moves on to the Lacanian theme of subjective destitution and her differences with Alain Badiou's theory of the subject. She highlights her most recent work on Kant and offers a subtle critique of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Laplanche. Zupančič lightens up the discussion somewhat by detailing an Ernst Lubitsch joke to illustrate the significance of the with-without for her Lacanian inspired ontology and in doing so points out why the sexes are not two in any meaningful way. Finally, the discussion closes with a candid and accessible commentary on being, multiplicity, and the One and its importance for a politics that is emphatic in its emphasis that it not take "nothing" or "non-being" for granted.

That Obscure Object of Ontology: Lacan, La femme, Lathouse and Her

Taking as its starting point Alenka Zupančič’s crucial observation in What is Sex? that psychoanalysis insists upon an “object-disoriented ontology”, which is to say, “an ontology as ‘disoriented’ by what [Lacan] calls the object a”, this paper will present a reading of film and philosophy for a new Lacanian Realism. First, I will consider the (im)material implications of object a as suggested by Spike Jonze’s techno-fable, Her (2013). The film’s smartphone-based intelligent OS, “Samantha”, presents an example of what Lacan calls the “lathouse”: the abundant object-cause of desire governed by science. It is, I will argue, a fascinating gadget implicated in the circulation of a masculine logic that is predicated on an image of the ineffable (feminine) Other, which fixes the subject in the infinite metonymy of a Lacanian object relation. In turn, I will suggest that a version of this logic can also be found in Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, which is similarly reliant on reference to a beyond (qua the “great outdoors” of arche-fossils and ancestral statements) while – as Zupančič forcefully argues – offering an impoverished conception of reality in which the subject is just another object. In short, I will suggest that Her puts into play (and thus allows us to consider in detail) both the subject and the object that Meillassoux’s project would seek to exclude. Neither, however, provides the foundation for a properly Lacanian Realism – the dialectical materialism outlined by the Slovenian School – that is grounded in the feminine logic of the not-all and the Real of an “in-here”, rather than myths of an “out-there” persisting from Kant to Meillassoux (and beyond).

The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies in Contact in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy

Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives, 2022

The philosophy of sexual existence as a mode of expression of the “con-being”, pivotal in his book “Sexistence”, occupies a relevant space in Jean-Luc Nancy’s late philosophical production. In this text, the body, the touch, the sex are protrusions that dot a conceptual map that is the result of a long philosophical militancy marked by an authentic “haptic ontology”, a sign of a thought of relationality, interdependence and “sexistencial vulnerability” that connotes the bodies in contact that we all are. But Nancy goes so far as to elaborate a “trans-ontology” through which the “r-existence (resistance) of sexistence” is manifested, that is to say that stubborn rejection of distinct and different bodies to the homologation and uniformity of the identical and of the identity shared by “trans-feminism” which makes its strong point of the inexhaustible combinatorics of the sexes. Thus, both for the sexistencial approach and for the transfeminist one, at the heart of every theory are th...

Castrated Ontologizing: A Lacanian Critique of Metaphysical Desire

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

In this paper, I aim to account for the desire at the root of metaphysical/ontological practice by drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s treatment of the formation of desire and language in human subjectivity. In §1, I condense the practice of metaphysics into the actual declaration of a single, highly peculiar ‘fundamental ontological proposition,’ and subsequently analyze its twelve ‘formally invariant characteristics.’ This argumentatively situates the phenomenon of metaphysical practice squarely within the field of desire in its connection to language. In §2, I explicate Lacan’s approach to desire/language through his notions of ‘castration’ and ‘le nom-du-père,’ which he elaborates in detail through his 1957-1958 treatment of the Oedipal dialectic and the writings of this period. I show the close relationship that erotic alienation possesses to the condensation of a subject of language. In §3, I return to the set of formally invariant characteristics of the fundamental ontological proposition, and interpret them in light of the just-explained Lacanian understanding of languaged subjectivity. I show that the fundamental ontological proposition can be interpreted as a means by which to, in fantasy, deny the structurally-constitutive castration of its speaker. I conclude with several suggestions toward further research at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalysis and metaphysical theory and practice.

THE MATERIALITY AND MOTÉRIALITÉ OF SEX

2021

An analysis of the intersection between the notion of "social relations of sex" from the French materialist feminism and Alenka Zupančič and Joan Copjec's reformulation of "sexual difference."

Being Sexed Žižek's Modern Ontology

Understanding Žižek, Understanding Modernism, 2022

As a quintessentially psychoanalytic thinker, Slavoj Žižek has been concerned since his earliest work with the epistemological implications of Freud's theory of sexuality, including its formalization by Lacan, for how we conceive of the limits of knowledge. Lately, however, alongside intellectual allies like Joan Copjec and Alenka Zupančič, the focus has shifted from sex conceived as a fault or inconsistency in the forms of knowledge to sex as a disruption or torsion in the very fabric, so to speak, of being. Staging a critical encounter with the most modern postmillennial discourses, from socalled object-oriented ontology and speculative realism to quantum physics and queer theory, Žižek has reintroduced the subject of the unconscious into the interrogation of being, insisting with great consequence that this being, or more precisely its failure or inconsistency, is not one-that it is necessarily, in other words, sexed. In what follows I will trace the relinking of being and sex in Žižek's recent work, situating it within a broader intellectual project premised on the contention that the development of the consequences of psychoanalysis for ontology has only just begun. I will take stock of the general significance of these consequences for philosophy and contemporary sexuality theory and then explore how they echo across Žižek's provocative and controversial engagement with MeToo discourse and queer theory. Two fundamental insights inform Žižek's intervention into the problem of ontology, the one psychoanalytic and the other, though inspired by Lacan's work, primarily philosophical. The first sees Žižek draw out the ontological consequences of Freud's idea of primal repression, which he links to his own BLO_04_UNMO_C004_docbook_new_indd.indd 61 BLO_04_UNMO_C004_docbook_new_indd.

La indistinción ontológica del discurso erótico: Coños de Juan Manuel de Prada

The article discusses Juan Manuel de Prada’s debut book Coños, departing from Brian McHale’s approach in Postmodernist Fiction and particularly focusing on the concept of “ontological indeterminacy”, considered by McHale essential for the study of postmodernism. The concept covers narrative methods and formulas often attributed to the postmodernist literature, such as mise en abyme, metalepsis, heterotopia, fragmentarism, transtextuality, procedural writing, parody, genre hybridity, autofiction etc. The present study emphasises two general aspects. On the one hand, it focuses on the transformations undergone by the genre literature (horror, adventure, erotic or crime fiction) which, in its canonical forms, has aimed at providing an intense verisimilitude effect. The latter has been however seriously relativised, although not suspended, by the postmodernist approach. On the other hand, as Prada’s erotic stories anthology is a remake of an avant-garde text by Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Senos), the analysis of the dialogue between the two discourses refines and corrects to a certain degree the opposition “epistemological dominant” versus “ontological dominant” used by Brian McHale as a criterion in distinguishing between modernism and postmodernism. Keywords: postmodernism, ontological indeterminacy, eroticism, resemantization of epistemological doubt, genre literature, remake.