Sexuation

SIC 3

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Edited by Renata Salecl

Duke University Press

Due/Published July 2000, 328 pages, paper

ISBN 0822324733

How to think about sexual identites and sexual difference? Perhaps it's socially constructed and/or performatively enacted--a fluid notion of identity. Or, is it a matter of a deeply anchored archetypal identity that provides a kind of safe haven in the contemporary confusion of roles and identities. In these essays, a third way of thinking about sexual identity and difference is discussed. It's not the cowboy way . . . it's the Lacanian way.

For Lacan, what we all recognize as sexual diffence is most significantly representative of a certain fundamental deadlock inherent in the symbolic order, that is, in language and in the entire realm of culture conceived as a symbol system structured on the model of language. For his, the logical matrix of this deadlock is provided by his own formulas of sexuation. The essays collected here elaborate on different aspects of this deadlock of sexual difference. While some examine the role of semblances in the relation between the sexes or consider sexual identity not as anatomy but still involving an impasse of the real, others discuss the difference beween sexuation and identification, the role of symbolic prohibition in the process of the subjects's sexual formation, or the changed role of the father in contemporary society and the impact of this change on sexual difference. In other words: This is your brain on sex, identity, Lacan, Salecl, Zizek

Contributors: Alain Badiou, Elizabeth Bronfen, Darian Leader, Jacques Alain Miller, Genevieve Morel, Renata Salecl, Eric L. Santner, Colette Soler, Paul Verhaeghe, Slavoj Zizek, Alenka Zupancic