A Spy Coup in America?

December 18, 2016

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/18/a-spy-coup-in-america/

Exclusive: As the Electoral College assembles, U.S. intelligence agencies are stepping up a campaign to delegitimize Donald Trump as a Russian stooge, raising concerns about a spy coup in America, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

As Official Washington’s latest “group think” solidifies into certainty – that Russia used hacked Democratic emails to help elect Donald Trump – something entirely different may be afoot: a months-long effort by elements of the U.S. intelligence community to determine who becomes the next president.

I was told by a well-placed intelligence source some months ago that senior leaders of the Obama administration’s intelligence agencies – from the CIA to the FBI – were deeply concerned about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump ascending to the presidency. And, it’s true that intelligence officials often come to see themselves as the stewards of America’s fundamental interests, sometimes needing to protect the country from dangerous passions of the public or from inept or corrupt political leaders.

It was, after all, a senior FBI official, Mark Felt, who – as “Deep Throat” – guided The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Watergate investigation into the criminality of President Richard Nixon. And, I was told by former U.S. intelligence officers that they wanted to block President Jimmy Carter’s reelection in 1980 because they viewed him as ineffectual and thus not protecting American global interests.

It’s also true that intelligence community sources frequently plant stories in major mainstream publications that serve propaganda or political goals, including stories that can be misleading or entirely false.

What’s Going On?

So, what to make of what we have seen over the past several months when there have been a series of leaks and investigations that have damaged both Clinton and Trump — with some major disclosures coming, overtly and covertly, from the U.S. intelligence community led by CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey?

Some sources of damaging disclosures remain mysterious. Clinton’s campaign was hobbled by leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee – showing it undercutting Clinton’s chief rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders – and from her campaign chairman John Podesta – exposing the content of her speeches to Wall Street banks that she had tried to hide from the voters and revealing the Clinton Foundation’s questionable contacts with foreign governments.

Clinton – already burdened with a reputation for secrecy and dishonesty – suffered from the drip, drip, drip of releases from WikiLeaks of the DNC and Podesta emails although it remains unclear who gave the emails to WikiLeaks. Still, the combination of the two email batches added to public suspicions about Clinton and reminded people why they didn’t trust her.

But the most crippling blow to Clinton came from FBI Director Comey in the last week of the campaign when he reopened and then re-closed the investigation into whether she broke the law with her sloppy handling of classified material in her State Department emails funneled through a home server.

Following Comey’s last-minute revival of the Clinton email controversy, her poll numbers fell far enough to enable Trump to grab three normally Democratic states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – enough to give him a victory in the Electoral College.

Taking Down Trump

However, over the past few weeks, the U.S. intelligence community, led by CIA Director Brennan and seconded by FBI Director Comey, has tried to delegitimize Trump by using leaks to the mainstream U.S. news media to pin the release of the DNC and Podesta emails on Russia and claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally trying to put Trump into the White House.

This remarkable series of assessments from the CIA – now endorsed by the leadership of the FBI – come on the eve of the Electoral College members assembling to cast their formal votes to determine who becomes the new U.S. president. Although the Electoral College process is usually simply a formality, the Russian-hacking claims made by the U.S. intelligence community have raised the possibility that enough electors might withhold their votes from Trump to deny him the presidency.

If on Monday enough Trump electors decide to cast their votes for someone else – possibly another Republican – the presidential selection could go to the House of Representatives where, conceivably, the Republican-controlled chamber could choose someone other than Trump.

In other words, there is an arguable scenario in which the U.S. intelligence community first undercut Clinton and, secondly, Trump, seeking — however unlikely — to get someone installed in the White House considered more suitable to the CIA’s and the FBI’s views of what’s good for the country.

Who Did the Leaking?

At the center of this controversy is the question of who leaked or hacked the DNC and Podesta emails. The CIA has planted the story in The Washington Post, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets that it was Russia that hacked both the DNC and Podesta emails and slipped the material to WikiLeaks with the goal of assisting the Trump campaign. The suggestion is that Trump is Putin’s “puppet,” just as Hillary Clinton alleged during the third presidential debate.

But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has publicly denied that Russia was the source of the leaks and one of his associates, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, has suggested that the DNC leak came from a “disgruntled” Democrat upset with the DNC’s sandbagging of the Sanders campaign and that the Podesta leak came from the U.S. intelligence community.

Although Assange recently has sought to muzzle Murray’s public comments – out of apparent concern for protecting the identity of sources – Murray offered possibly his most expansive account of the sourcing during a podcast interview with Scott Horton on Dec. 13.

Murray, who became a whistleblower himself when he protested Britain’s tolerance of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, explained that he consults with Assange and cooperates with WikiLeaks “without being a formal member of the structure.”

But he appears to have undertaken a mission for WikiLeaks to contact one of the sources (or a representative) during a Sept. 25 visit to Washington where he says he met with a person in a wooded area of American University. At the time, Murray was at American University participating in an awards ceremony for former CIA officer John Kiriakou who was being honored by a group of former Western intelligence officials, the Sam Adams Associates, named for the late Vietnam War-era CIA analyst and whistleblower Sam Adams.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, a founder of the Sam Adams group, told me that Murray was “m-c-ing” the event but then slipped away, skipping a reception that followed the award ceremony.

Reading Between LInes

Though Murray has declined to say exactly what the meeting in the woods was about, he may have been passing along messages about ways to protect the source from possible retaliation, maybe even an extraction plan if the source was in some legal or physical danger.

Murray has disputed a report in London’s Daily Mail that he was receiving a batch of the leaked Democratic emails. “The material, I think, was already safely with WikiLeaks before I got there in September,” Murray said in the interview with Scott Horton. “I had a small role to play.”

Murray also suggested that the DNC leak and the Podesta leak came from two different sources, neither of them the Russian government.

“The Podesta emails and the DNC emails are, of course, two separate things and we shouldn’t conclude that they both have the same source,” Murray said. “In both cases we’re talking of a leak, not a hack, in that the person who was responsible for getting that information out had legal access to that information.”

Reading between the lines of the interview, one could interpret Murray’s comments as suggesting that the DNC leak came from a Democratic source and that the Podesta leak came from someone inside the U.S. intelligence community, which may have been monitoring John Podesta’s emails because the Podesta Group, which he founded with his brother Tony, served as a registered “foreign agent” for Saudi Arabia.

“John Podesta was a paid lobbyist for the Saudi government,” Murray noted. “If the American security services were not watching the communications of the Saudi government’s paid lobbyist in Washington, then the American security services would not be doing their job. … His communications are going to be of interest to a great number of other security services as well.”

Leak by Americans

Scott Horton then asked, “Is it fair to say that you’re saying that the Podesta leak came from inside the intelligence services, NSA [the electronic spying National Security Agency] or another agency?”

“I think what I said was certainly compatible with that kind of interpretation, yeah,” Murray responded. “In both cases they are leaks by Americans.”

In reference to the leak of the DNC emails, Murray noted that “Julian Assange took very close interest in the death of Seth Rich, the Democratic staff member” who had worked for the DNC on voter databases and was shot and killed on July 10 near his Washington, D.C., home.

Murray continued, “WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the capture of his killers. So, obviously there are suspicions there about what’s happening and things are somewhat murky. I’m not saying – don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that he was the source of the [DNC] leaks. What I’m saying is that it’s probably not an unfair indication to draw that WikiLeaks believes that he may have been killed by someone who thought he was the source of the leaks … whether correctly or incorrectly.”

Though acknowledging that such killings can become grist for conspiracy buffs, Murray added: “But people do die over this sort of stuff. There were billions of dollars – literally billions of dollars – behind Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and those people have lost their money.

“You have also to remember that there’s a big financial interest – particularly in the armaments industry – in a bad American relationship with Russia and the worse the relationship with Russia is the larger contracts the armaments industry can expect especially in the most high-tech high-profit side of fighter jets and missiles and that kind of thing.

“And Trump has actually already indicated he’s looking to make savings on the defense budget particularly in things like fighter [jet] projects. So, there are people standing to lose billions of dollars and anybody who thinks in that situation bad things don’t happen to people is very naïve.”

An Intelligence Coup?

There’s another possibility in play here: that the U.S. intelligence community is felling a number of birds with one stone. If indeed U.S. intelligence bigwigs deemed both Clinton and Trump unfit to serve as President – albeit for different reasons – they could have become involved in leaking at least the Podesta emails to weaken Clinton’s campaign, setting the candidate up for the more severe blow from FBI Director Comey in the last week of the campaign.

Then, by blaming the leaks on Russian President Putin, the U.S. intelligence leadership could set the stage for Trump’s defeat in the Electoral College, opening the door to the elevation of a more traditional Republican. However, even if that unlikely event – defeating Trump in the Electoral College – proves impossible, Trump would at least be weakened as he enters the White House and thus might not be able to move very aggressively toward a détente with Russia.

Further, the Russia-bashing that is all the rage in the mainstream U.S. media will surely encourage the Congress to escalate the New Cold War, regardless of Trump’s desires, and thus ensure plenty more money for both the intelligence agencies and the military contractors.

Official Washington’s “group think” holding Russia responsible for the Clinton leaks does draw some logical support from the near certainty that Russian intelligence has sought to penetrate information sources around both Clinton and Trump. But the gap between the likely Russian hacking efforts and the question of who gave the email information to WikiLeaks is where mainstream assumptions may fall down.

As ex-Ambassador Murray has said, U.S. intelligence was almost surely keeping tabs on Podesta’s communications because of his ties to Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments. So, the U.S. intelligence community represents another suspect in the case of who leaked those emails to WikiLeaks. It would be a smart play, reminiscent of the convoluted spy tales of John LeCarré, if U.S. intelligence officials sought to cover their own tracks by shifting suspicions onto the Russians.

But just the suspicion of the CIA joining the FBI and possibly other U.S. intelligence agencies to intervene in the American people’s choice of a president would cause President Harry Truman, who launched the CIA with prohibitions against it engaging in domestic activities, and Sen. Frank Church, who investigated the CIA’s abuses, to spin in their graves.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Where Hegel wasn't Hegelian Enough: Sex, Rabble and Revolution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJmFM619lp4

Srećko Horvat & Yanis Varoufakis: The Hitchhiker's Guide through a Collapsing Europe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXq4jYpaIqE

Who Said It About Sexuality, Slavoj Žižek or Your Catholic Mom

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2015/12/who-said-it-about-sexuality-slavoj-zizek-or-your-catholic-mom.html

You might think your Catholic mother has nothing in common with the Marxist intellectual and legendary interpreter of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis — Slavoj Žižek. But give the latter a microphone and the former a third glass of wine and the two start to sound fantastically similar on issues of human sexuality. So without further ado, and in the spirit of celebrating the developing illicit love-relation between postmodern philosophy and the Church, I give you the quiz: Who said it, Žižek or your Catholic mom?

1. This book [50 Shades of Grey], it starts on the Internet, no? People are reading more than ever before with this technology, it is disgusting, wholly degenerate.

2. What if, in our postmodern world of ordained transgression, in which the marital commitment is perceived as ridiculously out of time, those who cling to it are the true subversives? What if, today, straight marriage is the most dark and daring of all transgressions?

3. What if sexual difference is not simply a biological fact, but the Real of an antagonism that defines humanity, so that once sexual difference is abolished, a human being effectively becomes indistinguishable from a machine?

4. I despise Leftists who think, you know, violence is just an effect of social alienation, blah, blah, blah; once we will get communism, people will live in harmony. No, human nature is absolutely evil and maybe with a better organization of society we could control it a little bit.

5. But this book, the Fifty Shades of Grey book, it is embraced openly, the women read it on public transport…It is the Other without Otherness, utterly obscene. In the liberal society, everything is permitted, every kind of sexuality; not only permitted, it is mandatory. The command everywhere is this: you must Enjoy! The truly radical act, this I claim, is to not enjoy.

6. With this [virtual reality] you will be able to have almost any kind of experience with just about anyone, real or imagined, at any time.” The question to be asked here is: will this still be experienced as “reality”? Is not, for a human being, “reality” ONTOLOGICALLY defined through the minimum of RESISTANCE – real is that which resists, that which is not totally malleable to the caprices of our imagination?

7. I like to live in a society where you do whatever you want. Just please — don’t express yourself too much, you know.

8. I like people who know how to control themselves. I believe in proper manners.

9. The specific human vocation does not rely on the development of man’s inherent potentials (on the awakening of the dormant spiritual forces OR of some genetic program); it is triggered by an external traumatic encounter, by the encounter of the Other’s desire in its impenetrability.

10. In our postmodern “disenchanted” permissive world sexuality is reduced to an apathetic participation in collective orgies.

11. How are we to get out of it? The standard way would be to somehow try to resurrect the transgressive erotic passion following the well-known principle, first fully asserted in the tradition of the courtly love, that the only true love is the transgressive prohibited one – we need new Prohibitions, so that a new Tristan and Isolde or Romeo and Juliet will appear…The problem is that, in today’s permissive society, transgression itself is the norm.

12. The “sublime” moment of the love life occurs when the magic dimension transpires even in the common everyday acts like washing the dishes or cleaning the apartment.

13. The way – the only way – to have an intense and fulfilling personal (sexual) relationship is not for the couple to look into each other’s eyes, forgetting about the world around them, but, while holding hands, to look together outside, at a third point (the Cause for which both are fighting, in which both are engaged).

14. The use of the expression usually reserved for homosexuals (masturbation “brings self love out of the closet”) hints at a kind of implicit teleology of the gradual exclusion of all otherness: first, in homosexuality, the other sex is excluded (one does it with another person of the same sex) then…the very dimension of otherness is cancelled, one does it with oneself.

15. The basic injunction is ‘have a good time’ or to put it in more spiritualist terms ‘realize yourself. This is why I think Dalai Lama is such a big hit. He preaches enlightened egoism; be happy, realize your potentials and so on.

16. When you date online, you have to present yourself there in a certain way putting forward certain qualities. You present an image of yourself. You focus on your idea of how other people should perceive you. But I think that’s not how love functions, even at the very simple level. You cannot ever fall in love with the perfect person. There must be some tiny small disturbing element and it is only through noticing this element that you say, but in spite of that imperfection I love him or her.

17. In December 2006, the New York City authorities declared that the right to chose one’s gender (and so, if necessary, to have the sex-change operation performed) is one of the inalienable human rights – the ultimate Difference, the “transcendental” difference that grounds the very human identity, thus turns into something open to manipulation – the ultimate plasticity of being-human is thoroughly asserted. “Masturbathon” is the ideal form of the sex activity of this trans-gendered subject.

18. There are two topics which determine today’s liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of Otherness, openness towards it, and the obsessive fear of harassment – in short, the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other… In the strict homology with the paradoxical structure of chocolate laxative, tolerance this coincides with its opposite: my duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him, not to intrude into his/her space – in short, that I should respect his/her intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is what is more and more emerging as the central “human right” in late-capitalist society: the right not to be “harassed,” i.e., to be kept at a safe distance from the others.

ANSWERS

Okay, that was cheap: It’s all  Žižek. Žižek on Fifty Shades of Grey, Masturbation or Sexuality in an Atonal World (I cannot recommend this essay highly enough), No Sex Please, We’re Post-Human, Online Dating and Synthetic Sex, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, and The Puppet and the Dwarf.

One of the tricks to understanding Žižek’s paradoxical and challenging critique of the apathy and banality of postmodern sexuality is to understand him in reference, not just to Lacan and Hegel, but to G.K. Chesterton. Žižek waxes Chestertonian all the time — many thanks to Cosmos in the Lost for first cluing me in on the fact — and this is especially true when it comes to sex and love. As a side note, there’s a lot of ways that Žižek ain’t even a smidgen like your Catholic mom, so if you plan on following some of these quotes down the Žižekian rabbit-hole, you, fair warning: Your sensibilities and ethical principles will probably be offended.

Žižek on a 'Clash of Civilizations'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sO5BXmJaSo

Reply To My Critics, Part Two

By Slavoj Žižek

http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/reply-to-my-critics-part-two/

Two general observations about my numerous critics seem pertinent to me. First, the large majority of attacks on my text follow the rules of the tweet culture with short snaps, retorts, sarcastic or outraged remarks, and with no space for the multiple steps of a line of argumentation. One passage (a sentence, or even a part of it) is cut out and reacted to. For example, many critics countered my analysis of the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew as a foreign intruder who disturbs social harmony by accusing me of anti-Semitism and totally ignoring the fact that the claim about “Jews as foreign intruders” is for me the very claim I reject as the exemplary ideological operation of obfuscating social antagonisms. They simply cut those words out of the line of argumentation and used them to attack me… Even the “annotated” reply to my text by Virgil Texas and Felix Biederman is just a collection of tweet snaps, and I have neither the time nor the will to join that game and reply with my own annotations to annotations.

The stance that sustains these tweet rejoinders is a mixture of self-righteous Political Correctness and brutal sarcasm: the moment anything that sounds problematic is perceived, a reply is automatically triggered—usually a PC commonplace. Although critics like to emphasize how they reject normativity (“the imposed heterosexual norm,” etc.), their stance itself is one of ruthless normativity, denouncing every minimal deviation from the PC dogma as “transphobia,” or “Fascism,” or whatever. Such a tweet culture, combining official tolerance and openness with extreme intolerance towards actually different views, simply renders critical thinking impossible. It is a true mirror image of the blind populist rage à la Donald Trump, and it is simultaneously one of the reasons why the Left is so often inefficient in confronting rightwing populism, especially in today’s Europe. If one just mentions that this populism draws a good part of its energy from the popular discontent of the exploited, one is immediately accused of “class essentialism”…

This brings me to the second observation. One of the problems at the center of my preoccupations—the link between the struggle for sexual liberation and what was traditionally designated a “class struggle” in all its diverse dimensions (not just the workers’ struggle but Third World crises, the plight of immigrants and refugees, etc.)—is more or less totally ignored by my opponents. I insist on this topic because one of the greatest tragedies of progressive struggles is, for me, the lack of contact (antagonism even) between the two. Nancy Fraser has shown how the predominant form of feminism in the US was basically co-opted by neoliberal politics. And while the exploding animosity of Third World countries towards gay struggles is widely known, the saddest thing is that they present their rejection of homosexuality as part of their anti-imperialist struggle. So, in the same way that the homophobia and anti-feminism of many Third World movements should make us suspicious about the level of their anti-imperialism, we should also at least wonder about the fact that individuals who personify the cutting edge of global capitalism, like Tim Cook, emphatically support LGBT+ rights. There is certainly nothing a priori bad in this fact, and there is a long history of big corporations acting against apartheid. In the old South Africa, foreign companies with factories based there, such as Mercedes, began paying black workers the same as they paid white ones and thus definitely contributed to the end of apartheid. True, one should listen to stories of how LGBT+ individuals are oppressed, victimized, etc., but one should nonetheless also note that they enjoy the full support of hegemonic political space and big business. This, of course, should not in any way problematize our full support for LGBT+, but it should make us aware of the politico-ideological background for the affair.

The Leftist call for justice tends to be combined with struggles for women’s and gay rights, for multiculturalism and against racism. The strategic aim of the Clinton consensus is clearly to dissociate all these struggles from the Leftist call for justice. The message from this consensus to Leftists is: You can get everything, but we just want to keep the essentials, namely the unencumbered functioning of the global capital. President Obama’s “Yes, we can!” acquires now a new meaning: Yes, we can concede to all your cultural demands… without endangering global market economy, and so there is no need for radical economic measures. Or, as Todd McGowan put it (in a private communication): “The consensus of ‘right-thinking people’ opposed to Trump is frightening. It is as if his excess licenses the real global capitalist consensus to emerge and to congratulate themselves on their openness.” That’s why I think it’s politically crucial to counteract this tendency and to fight for the solidarity of all our struggles. A truly radical gesture would have been, say, to get a Muslim lady, with her hair veiled even, to proclaim herself part of LGBT+. (Incidentally, for those hardline Muslims who insist that women should be covered, the question is how transgender individuals should be dressed since they belong to neither of the two hegemonic genders.)

But are there not exceptions to this tweet culture? Sam Warren Miell‘s reaction to my text[1] presents itself as such, challenging me to confront him who criticizes me from the Lacanian standpoint and reproaches me with misreading Lacan or at least with not keeping in touch with the new developments in Lacanian theory that are much more open to the LGBT+ topic and can enable us to grasp it in a new way. So what do we get there, apart from the standard, rather tasteless, puns on my account? Here enters the big surprise: quite a lot of his text sounds familiar, as it recapitulates the analyses by Joan Copjec and others, with which I fully agree. I’ve written literally hundreds of pages on how to read Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, so to preach to me how sexual difference is the point at which logos/reason breaks down sounds weird… Quite a lot, but not all. Referring mostly to the work of Tim Dean (whom I highly appreciate, by the way), he outlines a new approach to Lacan, which, so he claims, indicates that “Lacanian studies have decisively moved beyond Žižek and his generation. How appropriate that, in the field of psychoanalysis, we have killed the Father.”

Does it? Here enters the second surprise: the approach he advocates is based on—let’s call it, to simplify things to the utmost—the “from phallus to objet a” thesis. The idea is that the late Lacan, with his shift of accent from the Symbolic to the Real, also left behind the central role of the phallic signifier and of sexual difference, instead of which he asserted the central role of objet petit a (or surplus-enjoyment) as more primordial, as grounding the subject’s relation to enjoyment, and this object is, as Lacan wrote, “a-sexual.” From this premise, Dean deploys his impersonalist theory of desire, according to which we have sex not with others but with the Other. From this standpoint, of course, the phallus (the phallic signifier) has to appear as a kind of retrograde legacy: “Lacan’s most profound ideological and affective convictions sometimes run counter to his most brilliant critical and analytical insights.” The phallic signifier is part of these “convictions” and should be reduced to a “provisional concept because so many of its functions are taken over by other concepts, in particular that of objet a, which has no a priori relation to gender and, indeed, may be represented by objects gendered masculine, feminine, or neuter” (quotes from Dean’s Beyond Sexuality). (Incidentally, this is always a comfortable position: when you propose a reading that obviously has to ignore some of the interpreted author’s key theses, the easiest way to deal with it is to impute the inconsistency to the interpreted author him/herself.)

With regard to sexual difference itself, Dean evokes Freud’s “astonishing claim” that “the unconscious has no knowledge of sexual difference /…/ Lacan maintains that there is no signifier for sexual difference in the unconscious. Hence the phallus cannot be a signifier of sexual difference /…/If there is no signifier for sexual difference in the unconscious, then as far as the unconscious is concerned heterosexuality does not exist…. Sexual difference does not organize or determine sexual desire.” Miell sums up Dean’s position:

“Our tendency to read sexual difference and sexuality in terms of each other, and to read sexual difference in terms of men and women, corresponds to a pre-Freudian, psychologistic understanding of sexuality. Worse, it endorses an identification of sexuality with the ego, with normative, idealizing results. /…/ The fact that the unconscious contains no signifier of sexual difference means that it is essentially bigendered/bisexual (as Freud himself already suggested), which is why Shanna T. Carlson has concluded that one way a transgendered person might be viewed in terms of psychoanalysis is as personifying ‘the human subject as such, the unconsciously bisexual subject for whom sexual difference is only ever an incomplete, unsatisfactory solution to the failure of the sexual relation.’”

As expected, the line of thought concludes with a stab at me. Since sexual difference does not organize or determine sexual desire, “Žižek’s conflation of gender identities and sexualities is particularly surprising.” Really? I think this entire line of thought should be rejected as a pretty obvious misreading of Lacan. Not only do I not conflate gender and sex, I clearly distinguish the biological reality of males and females (though it remains a question if even here we are dealing with pure biology), gender identities (normative symbolic constructions of masculine, feminine, and other identities) and sexual difference (although Lacan never uses this term; he talks about masculine and feminine sides of his “formulas of sexuation”).

And this bring us to the crucial point. If we designate as “sexual difference” what Lacan renders with his formulas of sexuation, then, for Lacan, not only sexuality but human subjectivity as such is thoroughly “sexed” precisely in the sense of the trauma of sexual difference. The parallax gap between masculine and feminine positions, the two inconsistent ways to cope with—or, rather, to assume—the trauma of the impossibility of sexual relationship, is unconditional; there is no third way. Of course, our position is not determined by biology (a biological man can assume a feminine position) but the choice is unconditional: there is no “bisexuality” here; the gap is parallactic; one position excludes the other, which is why one precisely should not invoke “the human subject as such, the unconsciously bisexual subject for whom sexual difference is only ever an incomplete, unsatisfactory solution to the failure of the sexual relation.” Yes, every solution to the failure of sexual relationship is unsatisfactory and in this sense incomplete, but this does not mean that sexual difference is a secondary imposed frame which cannot even completely capture the wealth of the unconsciously bisexual subject. There is nothing outside this failure, for subject and language are themselves the outcomes of this primordial failure. As Lacan put it, the Real is an impasse of formalization, and this is to be taken literally: not that the Real is an external substantial domain that resists formalization (or symbolization, although they are not the same, of course), but that the Real is totally immanent to the Symbolic and is nothing but its immanent failure.

One should note that the only “function” operative in these formulas of sexuation is the phallic function. As Lacan emphasizes, what is “primordially repressed,” what is constitutively absent even from the unconscious, is (not the signifier of sexual difference but) the “binary signifier,” the signifier that would serve as the feminine counterpart to the phallic function in the way premodern sexualized cosmology talks about masculine and feminine “principles,” such as Yin and Yang. (To avoid any misunderstanding, this primordial repression of the binary signifier not only does not put women in a subordinate position; if anything, it elevates them into exemplary cases of subjectivity, since subjectivity is for Lacan defined by the missing signifier—this is how one should read Lacan’s mark for the subject, $, barred S, signifier.) Because the binary signifier is primordially repressed, there is no sexual relationship; sexual antagonism cannot be symbolized in a pair of opposed symbolic/differential features.

However, the fact that there is no sexual relationship in no way implies that “there is no sexual difference in the unconscious,” that the unconscious is beyond or beneath sexual difference, a fluid domain of partial drives that defy sexuation. One can even say that the unconscious is thoroughly and only about sexual difference in the sense of an antagonism that is impossible to symbolize and that haunts the symbolic order. The impossibility of sexual relationship does not mean that sexual relationship is simply absent from the unconscious. It means that the very impossibility of sexual relationship is the traumatic point of failure which structures the entire symbolic space, or, as Lacan put it in his Seminar XX, “we take language as that which functions as a supplement for the absence of the only part of the real that cannot manage to be formed in being, namely, the sexual relationship.” That’s why objet a as a-sexual is not prior to the deadlock of sexual relationship but is already mediated by it, an object which fills in the lack/void sustained by this deadlock/impossibility. There is objet a because there is no sexual relationship. To put it in yet another way: yes, as Miell repeats, sexual difference is the point of failure of logos, of the Symbolic, but this failure absolutely does not mean that there is a domain of sexuality prior to (or outside of) sexual difference and its deadlock. Sexual difference/antagonism is not just the point at which logos/reason fails; it is nothing but the effect of this failure. For this reason, if I may quote myself, partial drives, through which the subject relates to objet a, 

“are not simply happy self-enclosed circular movements which generate enjoyment; their circular movement is a repeated failure, a repeated attempt to encircle some central void. What this means is that drive is not a primordial fact, that it has to be deduced from a previous constellation: what logically precedes drive is the ontological failure—the thwarted movement towards a goal, i.e., some form of radical ontological negativity/failure—, and the basic operation of drive is to find enjoyment in the very failure to reach full enjoyment. We should thus distinguish between drives with their partial satisfactions (oral, anal, scopic), and the disruptive negativity this circular movement of drives tries to cope with.”[2]

And, again, Lacan’s name for this negativity is the impossibility of sexual relationship, the impossibility formalized in his formulas of sexuation. For this reason, I also don’t think that the idea to conceive transgender identity as a “sinthom” in Lacan’s sense is of great use: it is either too general or too narrow. On the one hand, the sinthom is for (late) Lacan the most elementary “formula” of enjoyment, and, as such, provides the minimum of consistency to every human being. On the other hand, apropos Joyce-the-sinthom, Lacan reads Joyce’s work—his literary texts—as a sinthom, a synthetic formation, which allowed him to avoid psychosis, i.e., which served as a formation that supplemented for the missing Name-of-the-Father. But I don’t see transgender individuals as potential psychotics who avoided psychosis by creating a sinthom… I think that the ethical greatness of transgender subjects resides precisely in the fact that they reject “depersonalization” and remain subjects, assuming the deadlock of subjectivity even more radically than other more “normalized” subjects. If all this sounds abstract and crazy, well, that’s how Lacan is usually perceived. So, to conclude, I will shamelessly quote a long passage from my Absolute Recoil where I formulate the critical edge of my reading:

“One should reject the predominant view according to which hegemonic ideology in all its aspects (social, legal, economic, ethical, religious) privileges ‘natural’ sexuality (the standard reproductive copulation) and tries to repress or suppress the polymorphously-perverse sexuality of partial drives which is considered asocial and dangerous, and is tolerated only as a subordinate preparatory moment of the ‘normal’ sexual (fondling and kissing as a foreplay, etc.). The best argument against this predominant view is the history of its greatest advocate, of Christianity:

‘Christ, even when resurrected from the dead, is valued for his body, and his body is the means by which communion in his presence is incorporation – oral drive – with which Christ’s wife, the Church as it is called, contents itself very well, having nothing to expect from copulation. In everything that followed from the effects of Christianity, particularly in art – and it’s in this respect that I coincide with the ‘baroquism’ with which I accept to be clothed – everything is exhibition of the body evoking jouissance – and you can lend credence to the testimony of someone who has just come back from an orgy of churches in Italy – but without copulation.’[3]

Lacan is very clear here: one should reject the endlessly repeated ‘critical’ thesis that the Catholic sexual morality imposes ‘normative heterosexuality’ on the subversive and destabilizing ‘polymorphous sexuality’ of humans. In contrast to the idea that partial drives are masturbatory, asocial, etc., while genital sexuality grounds social link (family as elementary social form), one should insist that there is nothing necessarily a-social in partial drives: they function as the glue of society, the very stuff of communion, in contrast to the heterosexual couple which is – as Freud emphasizes in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego – effectively asocial, isolating itself from its community, and is therefore distrusted by church and army, Freud’s two models of social link – or, to quote the concise comment of these lines by Alenka Zupančič:

‘So there is something profoundly disruptive at stake in copulation. For the kind of (social) bond it proposes, Christianity doesn’t need the latter, which functions as the superfluous element, something on top of what would be (ideally) needed, and hence as disturbing. Indeed, ‘natural’ copulation is utterly banned from the religious imaginary, whereas the latter doesn’t recede from, for example, images of canonized saints eating the excrements of another person. If looked at from this perspective, Christianity is indeed all about ‘jouissance of the body,’ about the body (of God) as constituting another person’s jouissance. Partial drives and the satisfaction they procure are rather abundantly present, and in this sense one would be justified in claiming that in its libidinal aspect the Christian religion massively relies on what belongs to the register of ‘infantile sexuality’: satisfaction and bonding by way of partial objects, with the exclusion of sexual coupling. The pure enjoyment, ‘enjoyment for the sake of enjoyment’ is not exactly what is banned here; what is banned, or repressed, is its link with sexuality, particularly in the form of ‘copulation’.’[4]

Christianity thus acknowledges the polymorphous-perverse satisfactions of drives, but it desexualizes them, it desexualizes the pleasures they provide. Pleasures as such are not problematic: Christian literature abounds with the descriptions of ecstatic heavenly pleasures provided by meditations, prayers and rituals, but it cuts them off thoroughly from sexuality. The irony here is that Christianity does exactly the same as the greatest analyst and critic of the Christian mode of subjectivization, Michel Foucault, who also endeavors to assert pleasures outside the domain of sexuality.”[5]

Again, as far as I can see, transgender subjects in no way follow this path of subtracting their space of enjoyment from intersubjectivity and asserting the search for enjoyment in direct dealings with objects. Their anxieties seem to concern precisely their position in social space. And, on the contrary, today’s consumerist capitalism does this subtraction quite well: instead of sex with persons, we have more and more sex with what Lacan calls lathouses, technologically created partial objects, all the “things that did not exist” prior to the scientific intervention into the Real, from mobile phones to remote-controlled toys, from air conditioners to artificial hearts:

“The world is increasingly populated by lathouses. Since you seem to find that amusing, I am going to show you how it is written. Notice that I could have called it lathousies. That would have gone better with ousia, it is open to all sorts of ambiguity. /…/ And for the tiny little a-objects that you are going to encounter when you leave, on the pavement at every street corner, behind every shop window, in the superabundance of these objects designed to cause your desire in so far as it is now science that governs it, think of them as lathouses.”[6]

As such, a lathouse is to be opposed to a symptom in the precise Freudian sense of the term: lathouse is knowledge embodied in a new “unnatural” object. Now we can see why, apropos lathouses, we have to include capitalism. After all, we are dealing with a whole chain of surpluses: scientific technology with its surplus-knowledge (a knowledge beyond mere connaissance of already existing reality, a knowledge which gets embodied in new objects); the capitalist surplus-value (the commodification of this surplus-knowledge in the overflow of gadgets); and, last but not least, the surplus-enjoyment (gadgets as forms of objet a) which accounts for the libidinal economy of the hold lathouses have over us. No wonder that, in Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, such a direct link between the subject and partial objects is located on the masculine side: although it bypasses the phallic signifier, it is no way outside sexual difference.

[1] https://differentcolouredhats.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/slavoj-zizek-is-wrong-about-stuff/.

[2] Op.cit., p. 206.

[3] Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (Seminar XX), New York: Norton 1999, p. 113.

[4] Alenka Zupančič, “Die Sexualitaet innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft” (unpublished manuscript).

[5] Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil, London: Verso Books 2014, pp. 200-201.

[6] Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton 2007, p. 62.

The Author

Slavoj Žižek

The Slovenian Marxist philosopher and cultural critic is one of the most distinguished thinkers of our time. Žižek achieved international recognition as a social theorist after the 1989 publication of his first book in English, "The Sublime Object of Ideology“. He is a regular contributor to newspapers like “The Guardian”, “Die Zeit” or "The New York Times“. He has been labelled by some the "Elvis of cultural theory“ and is the subject of numerous documentaries and books.