Is there any proportion between sexes ?
Guy Le Gaufey
During the last ten years of his teaching, Lacan frequently uttered (if not shouted): “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel”. A very ambiguous proposition, in vintage Lacan’s style, insofar as in French it means at the same time: “There is no sexual relationship” (provocative falseness), and “there is no proportion between sexes” (assumed truth). Indeed, the French word “rapport” means as much the common “relationship” (therefore: “intercourse”) as the mathematical “ratio” or “proportion”. So that this central proposition turns to be a nightmare for any translator in English or in Spanish, where there is not such an ambiguity.
Why did Lacan consider this as a key affirmation for psychoanalysis? Any reader of Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality can answer to that if s/he keeps in mind Freud’s affirmation according to which we should “loosen” (German: “Lockern”) the link between the drive and its object. This Freudian consideration was a straight and precise retort to a central affirmation in Western psychiatry of the second half of nineteenth century: there did exist a certain “genetic instinct” that pushed man towards woman and reciprocally. Up to the point people not going this way could be considered as “perverts”, whatever their “perversion” could be.
All this is rather easy to trace back. What is more difficult to guess is why continental psychiatrists, deprived of any evidence about such an instinct, were so eager supporters of the idea that this kind of fixed “rapport” between the sexes did exist. Regarding this point, we can only assume that a mixed and confused set of religious thinking, scientific mood, upper middle class moralities and political agendas made them extremely receptive to a very distant idea, forged almost seven centuries ago, along what is called the “Gregorian Reform” in the Roman Catholic Church, that is: the concept of “counter nature”.
Of course, the Latin expression is much more ancient, and appears in many juridical Roman texts. But the idea was reshaped during the Gregorian Reform, running all along eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. According to the notion that “Nature” has been created by God, everything conceived as “contra naturam” came progressively to be understood then as something perpetrated against God’s will. It is very significant that Pierre Damien, the first and one of the strongest voices of this Gregorian Reform, forged in 1050 a new word to mean a new quality of sin. On the pattern of “blasphemia”, he created the word “sodomia”, from the famous name of the city eradicated by God’s will because of its sexual life, to point to any kind of sin which would go “contra naturam”. Not only anal sex, as we understand this word today in a very narrow meaning, but as well masturbation, coit interruptus, adultery, etc., all that will not lead the semen in the “good vase”, that is: the uterus of the wife. And so heretics, blasphemers and the new “sodomites” were from then on treated on the same level, as bad as each other because they went equally against God’s will.
This historical detour shows us how to decipher Lacan’s assertion, at least in its political dimension: the idea of “Nature” is united, neither by itself nor “scientifically”, but through its relationship to God’s will. It is only resorting to such an indivisible will that “contra naturam” could be conceived in such a way that man and woman have, in any case, a “rapport”, i.e. a relationship between two terms that always produces a definite and single value: either a child, or a “marital duty”, or… a sin, the one called: “sodomia”.
But I will not conclude without taking into account the fact that, at the very end of his teaching (January 9th 1979), Lacan declares that his assertion has not other support than the fact that he had uttered it. “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” is eventually not considered by him as the new scientific and definitive truth about man and woman and their problematic relationship. And indeed, a huge majority of human beings strongly believe today, as yesterday and probably as tomorrow, the other way around. And not only among the true believers in the myriad of religions present on this earth, but sometimes among Freudian and Lacanian people as well (even if more discretely). So that on this point, we are confronted with a political choice, crucial in its clinical consequences. By the way, what do you guess about man, woman and their “rapport”?
Bibliography:
Paul Moreau (de Tours), Des aberrations du sens génésique, Paris, Asselin & Cie, 1880 (never reedited).
Jacques Chiffoleau, « Contra Naturam. Pour une approche casuistique et procédurale de la nature médiévale », Micrologus, Lausanne, Sismel, 1996 IV, p. 265-312.
Megan McLaughlin, Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000-1122, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality
Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1997.
Jacques Lacan, L’acte analytique, and the session of 1979, January 9th.
Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality. Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, Harvard Universtiy Press, 2001. Especially chapter 3.
Hervé Guillemain, Diriger les consciences, guérir les âmes, Paris, La découverte, 2006. |
