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Them without us: The ultimate in sexual politics

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Abstract

Lacan's understanding of feminine sexuation provides a way of reformulating the us/them or friend/enemy without losing the sense of antagonism that this distinction provides.

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Notes

  1. In her attack on consensus politics, Mouffe (2005) specifically targets liberal political theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty, as well as third-way politicians like Tony Blair.

  2. The male subject is in the situation of the master in Hegel's master–slave dialectic as described by Alexandre Kojève. Mastery depends on reducing the rival to servitude and gaining the proper recognition from the rival. This is an impossible task because the proper recognition can come only from a subject not reduced to servitude. This is why Kojève insists that ‘the master's attitude … is an existential impasse’ (Kojève, 1980, p. 19).

  3. Freud conceives of not having the phallus as a ‘deficiency’ (Freud, 1931, p. 233) because he does not see the possibility for a female sexuality that bases itself on not-having rather than on striving to imitate male having.

  4. The spurious infinite tries to pass alternation between two opposing poles as progress. As Hegel explains it, ‘what is required in order to see into the nature of the infinite is nothing difficult: it is to be aware that the infinite progress, the developed infinite of the understanding, is so constituted as to be the alternation of the two determinations, of the unity and the separation of both moments and also to be aware that this unity and this separation are themselves inseparable’ (Hegel, 1812–1816, p. 151).

  5. As Freud famously states toward the end of ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable,’ ‘At no other point in one's analytic work does one suffer more from an oppressive feeling that all one's repeated efforts have been in vain, and from a suspicion that one has been ‘preaching to the winds,’ than when one is trying to persuade a woman to abandon her wish for a penis on the ground of its being unrealizable or when one is seeking to convince a man that a passive attitude to men does not always signify castration and that it is indispensable in many relationships in life’ (Freud, 1937, p. 252).

References

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McGowan, T. Them without us: The ultimate in sexual politics. Psychoanal Cult Soc 14, 16–23 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2008.42

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