Sex Negativity II (We Have Never Had Sex)


Continuing from the 2023 Sex Negativity seminar in Chicago, this panel thinks through sex and negativity in relation to psychoanalytic theories of the subject, feminist and queer sexual politics, and the “desexualization of sex” (Copjec 2012). Topics discussed at the 2023 seminar included. the racial history of sex negativity through the French gay liberation movement, the writing of Hortense Spillers, blackness in Heidegger and Irigaray, “genital negatives” and aesthetics. This seminar asks, what is the sex named as an object of inquiry today? Does the institutionalization of queer and gender theories domesticate the political and conceptual stakes involved in thinking about sex? If, as Davis and Dean suggest in The Hatred of Sex (2022), the “birth of queer presaged the death of sex” (46-47), then what might it mean to continue to tarry with sex as the subject's (queer) discontinuity from herself?

Sex Negativity is an attempt to think against the historical dyad of sex positivists and those deemed “anti-sex” or the norm/anti-norm topology still present in queer theory today toward a more contradictory site. "There is no sexual relation," Lacan declares, suggesting that sex is exemplary in the way it induces an encounter with an irresolvable structural antagonism that cannot be effaced. That this contradiction cannot be resolved means that sex is of ontological relevance, and further, that sex bears an unbearable relation to negativity. For Lacan the  non-relation  is not an obstacle to but the (il)logical condition of relational possibility. So sex names a structural antagonism without the optimism of ontological completeness: “We have never had sex,” declares philosopher Oxana Timofeeva. Negativity is relentless, unnatural, contrived. 


As Mladen Dolar insists, "speaking obliquely is the proper way to speak about sex" ("Running Wild," 90-91). Or, Joan Copjec: "sex as cause cannot be located in any positive phenomenon, word or object, but is manifest in negative phenomena exclusively: lapses, interruptions that index a discontinuity or jamming of the causal chain" (Copjec “Sexual” 32). Heeding the circumlocutionary mode that speaking of sex demands, this seminar will ask after the social bonds that could form, inhabit, and sustain (without foreclosing on) the negativity of sex.