Sense and sexuality: Wittgenstein, psychoanalysis and queer theory

Can there be a radical social critique, if we mean by this a critique that would go all the way to the sources or to the roots of 'the social'? The question invokes a picture which seems to trap us. For how are we to disentangle the very means by which we are to formulate our critique from the very sociality - its conditioning structures - we aim to expose and critique? And if we cannot disentangle our critique from 'the social', would not any critique thereby precisely lack radicality - and would this not entail that any, as it were, 'positive' features of a discursive critique ultimately and inevitably in fact ended up contributing to the reproduction of the social reality we sought to critique? The sober voices of Enlightenment optimists might attempt to calm such deep suspicions about the possibilities of discursive rationality by pointing out that it is our discursive capacity that has enabled the awareness of a need for social critique. We are not, in other words, trapped and determined by 'the social'; discursive rationality has a dimension to it that transcends that which is in need of, and can be the object of, critique.

It is not that one cannot or that one has no right to be convinced by such reassurance. The question is, rather, what the appeal of such a reassurance is. For it certainly does not constitute a knock-down argument - or, if it does so, one has already been drawn by its appeal. One might, in other words, simply take any such reassurance as Enlightenment blackmail ¹ and hold that the appeal of a belief in discursive reason is underpinned by an anxiety about the negativity entailed by the idea of radical social critique; a critique, and a negativity, which 'the social', perhaps our very subjectivity, might not survive.

Contemporary queer theorist Lee Edelman belongs to those who have most insistently followed this path of negativity, not shying away from the radically disruptive implications entailed for 'the social' by it. In this chapter we critically examine some of the defining philosophical ideas informing Edelman's theory by juxtaposing them with key elements in both the 'early' and the 'late' Wittgenstein. In our reading of Wittgenstein, we suggest a somewhat novel way of understanding the relationship between his 'later' philosophy and psychoanalysis, which in turn will allow us to pinpoint the trouble we have with Edelman's account.

Edelman's radical queer critique and the inexpressible in Wittgenstein's Tractatus

At the heart of queer theorist Lee Edelman's definition of queerness - mainly derived from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory - we find the claim that queerness proper is identified as what Edelman calls 'ab-sense': that is, a pure negativity or pure indifference (non-differentiation), which is, according to Edelman, 'a priori absent from being' - 'being' being 'symbolically' constituted. ² In this way queerness is assigned to the (theoretical) realm of the Lacanian 'Real'. ³ Conversely, only by 'absenting' the 'ab-sense' feature of reality - only through a negation of negativity as such - does the symbolic structure (differentiation) sustaining being come into being. ⁴ Consequently, the order of symbolic being, the authoritative power upholding the order of being, necessarily represses (and suppresses) the pure negativity or nondifferentiation looming beneath each symbolic differentiation. What is repressed, however, inevitably resurfaces or returns - as both Freudian psychoanalysis and everyday experiences tell us. Queerness, with its declared connection to the Real, to the repressed as such, manifests this eruptive return, Edelman contends, in 'an enjoyment in excess of the pleasures associated with the good, [and] figures meaning's collapse and the encounter with ab-sense ⁵, 'any enjoyment', that is, 'that seems to threaten a world'. ⁶ Edelman here (implicitly) ascribes queerness a universal property - a contradiction in terms, one might say. ⁷ Queerness is in this way omnipresent, looming in or beneath each individual's identity and self-understanding, while specific cultural and historic contexts, with their specific normative structures, contingently - yet as a necessary feature of any culture - force some individuals ('woman', 'black', 'gay', etc.) to 'embody' the repressed ('nonnormative') negativity precisely because they occupy positions that potentially threaten the sense of the prevailing world by not fitting into it. ⁸ In its radical form, social critique cannot, consequently, contribute any positive content. 'Queer theory teaches us nothing', as the subtitle of Edelman's latest book proclaims. Rather, it contributes to the withdrawal from the reproduction of the social into a primordial negativity.

Edelman's notion of queerness qua the (Lacanian) Real as that which necessarily exceeds all attempts at symbolic representation has, we suggest, an interesting affinity with Ludwig Wittgenstein's (in)famous closing lines in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (henceforth TLP), 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'. ⁹ The affinity here would, of course, consist in the fact that both Edelman and the 'early' Wittgenstein (in TLP) seem to propose that there is perhaps not a something but a reality, or an essential feature of reality that we cannot signify as such; a reality more real than anything we can signify as real. On the other hand, this affinity, or proximity, also comprises an important, decisive even, difference between the two, one worthy of consideration.

Whereas for Edelman the inexpressible comprises a pure negativity of sense, an 'ab-sense', something that can, nevertheless, somehow erupt into the symbolic in the form of an enjoyment that disrupts and threatens the being of the world, for Wittgenstein the unsayable does not form a contrast or opposition to, a disruption of, sense. Rather, in TLP the inexpressible is the sense of the world: 'the sense of the world must lie outside of the world'. ¹⁰ Wittgenstein is certainly in agreement with the Edelmanian-Lacanian idea that meaning and sense cannot be grounded; that any symbolic structure contains a hole, or a lack with respect to the grounding of sense. But in contrast to Edelman, TLP simply observes that the structure of logical properties, or the logical form of propositions (in general), cannot be said, explained or represented. This is for the simple (logical) reason that one cannot represent - that is, 'say' - what the 'form of representation', the sense of propositions, is, as it is exactly by way of the forms of representation that we mean what we say. ¹¹ Any account, explanation, representation or theory of the sense of propositions presupposes the sense of the explanatory proposition or theory itself. So, while it certainly is possible to define one's uses of words, to explain them, the sense of this and of any proposition must, according to TLP, 'show itself' ¹² - and, we might add, with reference to Wittgenstein's later thought, that it shows itself in/as our understanding of the proposition, an idea to which we return below. Consequently, and pace Edelman, the inexpressible does not, in the Tractarian universe, 'threaten' the structures or the sense of the world as such. Rather, the inexpressible shows itself as the sense of the world. There is no logical room for an encounter with 'ab-sense' in TLP. What lies outside of sense is 'simply nonsense', ¹³ non-thought disguised as thought, under the pretence of making sense. The unsayable is not an other to sense, not absolutely indifferent to sense.

The intersubjective nature of sense: from Tractatus to Philosophical Investigations

Much has been written about what Wittgenstein thought were his 'grave mistakes' ¹⁴ in TLP and how his second major book, Philosophical Investigations (Henceforth PI), combatted, perhaps even overcame, some of these mistakes, putting forward a new understanding of language and meaning, and of philosophy. For the purposes of this chapter, it will suffice to focus on one aspect - one that we nonetheless believe to be crucial, if not essential. Moreover, we argue that this aspect is also essentially connected with Wittgenstein's interest in psychoanalysis (specifically in Freud's writings), an interest that grew on him especially in the early I930s when he was beginning work on PI and continued to the end of his life in the early i950s. ¹⁵

Regardless of his critique of Freud's theory and despite his warnings against the temptations to misunderstand psychoanalysis produced by psychoanalysis itself, ¹⁶ Wittgenstein nonetheless reportedly told his close friend in the mid I940s that he was 'a disciple' and 'a follower of Freud'. ¹⁷ At first glance, however, one might certainly wonder in what such a discipleship might consist. Not only does PI seem to lack any theoretical rigour and any explicit reference to psychoanalytic theory and concepts. It also lacks the one thing one would expect to find in a work by a disciple of Freud, namely the question of sex and sexuality. Can one be a follower of Freud without talking about sex? Perhaps not. Yet, given the way sex(uality) inflated itself in Freud's theory to every corner of human life - that is, given Freud's observation that one cannot think a human life without thinking of it as sexual, and the reasons for why this was so - it is not unambiguously clear that PI does not discuss the question of sex. ¹⁸

While PI completely lacks the words 'sex' and 'sexuality', or any explicit reference to them, Wittgenstein nevertheless opens his book with an element that lies at the epicentre of the psychoanalytic universe, namely with a primal scene. To be more precise, PI opens with a primal scene of language acquisition, one that is posited as a picture of 'the essence of human language'. ¹⁹ This scene, which raises fundamental questions about meaning and sense, can and should be understood, we contend, as a primal scene in a double sense. It is a primal scene in that it constitutes a primal picture or mythology and, simultaneously, functions as the primal scene of the work itself, the scene from which the work springs to life, to which it constantly responds, and which it therefore never can leave behind but constantly reiterates as a symptom. ²⁰ In other words, a primal scene in the Freudian sense. ²¹ There is also the following feature of the primal scene of PI that connects it to Freud: the scene locates the question of language and meaning as inescapably intersubjective, which is, arguably, the decisive difference to TLP where the defining relationality is between a (transcendental) subject and propositions (logical form). Even more so, the opening scene of PI is primal - and Freudian - because it places the question of 'the essence of human language' in the primary relation between infant and caretaker; it is a scene taken from Saint Augustine's Confessions ²² depicting the first instance of language acquisition as one in which the infant Augustine is ostensively trained by his parents to correctly learn the name of objects in order to be able to communicate his desires. ²³ As we shall argue, it is precisely by invoking such a primal scene that PI binds the question of meaning to what can be called 'love' and thereby to sexuality in the psychoanalytic sense. Moreover, as we try to suggest, Wittgenstein's peculiar treatment of the question of the 'essence of human language' may even show us something that becomes displaced in Freud's own thoughts and something that might encourage us to rethink Edelman's identification of queerness qua the Real in terms of the disruptive as such.

We have elsewhere ²⁴ discussed in detail the way in which the opening scene of PI unfolds and reiterates itself throughout the work and the particular way in which the question of meaning raised by the scene resists any grounding and exhaustive explanations, as well as in what sense, or how and why, the question of love emerges as central. We shall refrain from rehearsing all the arguments here and simply attempt to give a quick account of the essential parts. As mentioned, the scene from Augustine's Confessions depicts ostensive training as the primal form of language acquisition, a point that is reiterated in a few remarks following the opening paragraphs in PI when Wittgenstein makes the observation that when children learn the most basic forms of uses of words, they are taught this not by way of explanations or definitions but by way of training. ²⁵ The emphasis on training, as opposed to ostensive definition, is as relevant as it is self-evident, for what it does is to remind us that sense and meaning will always exceed any explanation or definition, precisely because explanations and definitions are ultimately preceded by 'training'. We have already in the opening remark of PI been presented with the idea that when trying to account for the meaning of words 'explanations', inevitably, 'come to an end somewhere'. ²⁶ This repeats the point made in TLP, namely that we cannot ultimately 'say' what the sense of a proposition is. PI, however, forcefully reminds us that the reason for this lies in the fundamentally intersubjective nature of meaning, and, even more so, due to the primary infant-caretaker relation in which the meaning of the world is inaugurated. In other words, explanations (of meaning) come to an end somewhere because at this point of 'somewhere' the very sense of what things mean is not grounded on explanations but shown in training.

But how exactly is this training-cum-learning supposed to be achieved? As Wittgenstein points out, the very success of the most primordial forms of ostensive training already presupposes something, namely a shared - let us call it primordial - form of sense and/or understanding - or recognition - between infant and caretaker/teacher. ²⁷ For any pointing at a thing/object to be such a pointing presupposes that it is taken as, understood to be, exactly such a pointing (and not just, say, a finger/movement in the air - which in its own right would, of course, already presuppose an understanding or recognition of the other as doing something). ²⁸ Put in the terms of TLP, the sense of the pointing must, ultimately, 'show itself'. But whereas TLP can only logically exclaim, because of its disavowal of the intersubjective nature of meaning and sense, that such a showing must be present, in PI the sense shows itself, in its primordial form, both as and in an always-already present attunement or address ²⁹ between us, here between infant and caretaker. We say 'always-already' because the infant is always-already someone for the caretaker, someone addressing the caretaker - even in its prenatal stage. ³⁰ It is this address, the inescapable significance others have for us, which ignites, inaugurates and forever determines the path of the infant's life and/as its responses to the address.

Wittgenstein avec psychoanalysis: on issues infantile and adult

The peculiar thing with the picture or primal scene of the origin of sense and meaning - as it manifests in the picture of the infant-caretaker relation - is the entanglement between something undetermined and something determinate which such a scene inevitably contains. For, on the one hand, we seem to be forced to say that the world of the infant is not one of specified, determinate, fixed, normative, meanings. Rather, the infant finds itself in what we might call a polymorphous domain of meaning and sense; everything is loaded with meaning and anything that invokes an address will excite a sense of meaning, yet more or less without any clearly identifiable specifications or determinate objects/things. On the other hand, and because the very thing that always-already situates the infant in a universe of sense is the address of the other, this polymorphous primal scene is not in fact completely, consistently, undetermined. That is, the polymorphous landscape of proto-meaning - if we are allowed such a term - is in its origin already injected with adult determinations which, nonetheless, from the outset inform themselves in enigmatic ways.

Yet, as constantly alluded to in PI, the entanglement works both ways; that is, indeed, what an entanglement is! For the universe of adult meaning, its determinations, is not 'total' in itself either, but rather always retains something of the order of polymorphous proto-meaning. ³¹ That is to say, while (adult) language use certainly has normative standards and rules, these do not constitute, or govern, not to mention ground, meaning. Ultimately, and fundamentally, in language use we say things to each other and the sense, the meaning of what we say must in the end answer to our understanding of each other; an address and understanding that is, primordially, already there in the very origins, in the primal scene of language, and inseparable from the way in which we address each other as such. We say what we say to each other and we understand what we understand. Rules do not give or constitute sense, which is not to say that we need not learn 'the rules of language' in order to talk in a specific language with each other - and a language is always a specific language. On the other hand, it is at this very point that the dialectics of our fundamental entanglement (between the adult and the infant realms of sense and meaning) demands that we simultaneously remind ourselves that language and sense are always also diachronic, in that our primary scene of human language does not allow for two infants constituting the world of sense. Rather, the primal scene is one in which the infant is taken care of by someone who already possesses language, because human infants cannot survive without caretaking. As we might put it, language, the realm of sense and meaning, cannot be accounted for by polymorphous proto-meaning alone, while it is just as true that polymorphous proto-meaning, and thereby sense as such, cannot be accounted for solely by the determinate structures of established 'adult' language either. Language and its sense is an entanglement of these two; an entanglement of the differentiation, that is, of the address between self and other.

Although Wittgenstein does not use the term, we have obviously made use of the term 'polymorphous' here to indicate what we believe to be an important affinity between Wittgenstein's characterization of meaning and sense and Freud's famous identification of infantile sexuality as 'polymorphously perverse'. ³² Our claim is that the picture of meaning and sense that, as we have suggested, emerges out of the primal scene of PI follows more or less exactly the same logic as Freud's idea of the nature, or 'essence', of human sexuality, precisely because both posit the questions of origin and essence in and through primal scenes of the same kind. It is this, we contend, that is the unexplored feature of Wittgenstein's Freudian discipleship.

Infantile sexuality is polymorphous, Freud holds, because more or less anything in the infant's life can function as the 'source' for sexual stimulation and enjoyment: '[Freud] is eventually led to the position that every function and, finally, every human activity, can be erotogenic'. ³³ What is key here, and simultaneously connects to our discussion of meaning and sense, is that the infantile polymorphous perversion is ultimately sexual because of its relation to the caretaker. It is sexual because those forms of pleasures and enjoyment attached to or associated with the erogenous stimulations of infancy set the constitution for what will one day become the individual's 'adult' sexuality; adult sexuality will forever, regardless of the modifications involved in maturation, be embedded in a polymorphous perversion. However, as argued by Laplanche, the decisive factor here is not only that the psychic space of infantile sexuality will one day be replaced by adult sexuality - that is, sexuality proper. Rather, what ultimately determines infantile sexuality as sexual is the caretaker's inevitable understanding or perception of it as (proto-)sexual. Consequently, while infantile sexuality lacks the determinations of adult sexuality in one sense, it will nonetheless always-already be injected with or ascribed features of, a sense of, adult sexuality through the (sexual) messages coming from the caretakers' own sexuality. In other words, infantile sexuality will always-already contain elements/messages of 'adult sexuality', which, just as in our depiction of infantile polymorphous proto-meaning, are at the outset enigmatic. As with meaning and sense, sexuality - in the Freudian sense - constitutes an unbreakable entanglement between infantile polymorphous perversion and the determinations pertaining to the normative worlds of adults: none of these two are complete, consistent, whole, in themselves. Rather, they always-already flow into each other, as it were.

It must also be noted that the affinity between our Wittgensteinian picture of meaning and sense and Freud's picture of sexuality holds just as well for the other defining term of infantile sexuality, namely 'perversion'. If Freud 'discovers' that perversion is universal in human sexuality - manifest for example in dreams, fantasies, jokes and in everyday 'normal sexuality' - it might equally well be said that perversion is universal in human language and communication - manifest not only in arts and poetry, but just as much in the everyday use of language. But perverse in what sense? Well, in the precise sense in which Freud designates it, namely as something that does not serve, even something that deviates from, a vital function. ³⁴ Infantile sexuality, as conceived by Freud, 'ends up by undermining and destroying the very notion of a biological norm'. ³⁵

However, simultaneously as the 'sexual order' deviates from (and can thus work against) the 'vital order', the former order also replaces and sustains the latter. Perversion, as it were, carries the vital order with it: 'What is perverted is still the instinct, but it is a vital function that is perverted by sexuality'. ³⁶ Certainly human infants feel, say, hunger, and that is the impetus for eating. Yet this vital behaviour or instinct is always-already accompanied by an excess of enjoyment: the satisfaction of the vital need will always be exceeded by and in fact subordinate to sexual enjoyment - the 'sensuous sucking' - paralleled by the satisfaction of vital needs. Sexual enjoyment, in turn, will inseparably, despite its supposedly 'autoerotic' character, be tied to the other, the caretaker, who provides this satisfaction and enjoyment, who answers to the demand of the infant. ³⁷ A disturbance in the field of sexuality, in the love relation between infant and caretaker, may easily result in behaviour that works against the survival instinct; for example, a disturbance in eating habits. In other words, this fundamental relationality, with its field of sexuality and love, is not only what potentially deviates from the vital instinct, but also what sustains it because the very purpose, or sense, of human life will forever be determined by it. And precisely in the same sense that 'adult sexuality' continues to be polymorphous, despite its more stable structures and objects of desire, it continues to be, ultimately, perverse. ³⁸ Disturbances in love relations can lead to all kinds of deviations from vital functions: it is only because of relatively stable structures of love and recognition that we sustain ourselves, our purpose in life. Without these, or as responses to disturbances in these, vital needs (can) become empty, devoid of meaning and difficult to sustain.

The very same logic pertains, we argue, to meaning and sense - that is, to language - as well. Certainly, language, or communication, serves the preservation of human life. However, it can just as well work against it - this we know all too well. It can do both of these precisely because the very sense of language and communication rests on the way, or ways, in which we are fundamentally addressed by each other. That is, the world of sense opens up, so to speak, for the infant as always-already tied to the address of and from the other/caretaker, and any purpose which language and communication serves or can serve will inescapably be tied to the sense, to the moral-existential weight, of this address. This is why we might say, with psychoanalysis, that the address, and thus its accompanying order of sense, perverts the vital order, forever determining it along the lines of love relations. There is, in other words, a continuous element of 'perversion' in adult language use, precisely because it is from adult language, from the adult address, that the infant first encounters this 'perversion' of its 'vital order': the 'perversion' is already there in adult language. ³⁹

Conclusion

It is now time to return to Edelman's account of queerness and to the question of the unsayable, to that which escapes all forms of symbolic representation, or symbolic 'being'. To reiterate, Edelman insists on what he takes to be Lacan's definite stance that sex is the bone in the throat of ontology in that sex is, originally, completely devoid of sense. The symbolic differentiation of sex, the passage of sex as 'ab-sense' to the domain of sense and meaning, forces, according to Edelman, a negation of sex's original pure negativity, its pure 'ab-sense'. This, Edelman holds, coincides with 'incest in psychoanalysis' in so far as incest constitutes, or would constitute (if it was not 'prohibited', i.e. impossible in the order of sense) a 'radical nondifferentiation'. ⁴⁰ That is, incest in (Lacanian) psychoanalysis refers to the impossibility of any absence - in the order of sense - of the differentiation of infantile (polymorphous perversion) and adult (normatively differentiated) sexuality.

However, it is precisely at this point, we claim, that Edelman confuses the logic of the Real. For what needs to be noted here is that in the strictly Lacanian sense the order of the Real resides not in the supposedly lost purity of infantile polymorphous perversion, that is, in a form of enjoyment and being unaffected by the normative-symbolic order of adult sexuality. For, as we have seen, in the Freudian scheme infantile sexuality is alwaysalready entangled with adult sexuality; neither one is whole or consistent in themselves. Rather, the Real - as the bone in the throat of ontology - resides in or as the very gap or incommensurability between things infantile and adult, which at the same time is the very thing that constitutes the differentiation as such. This is the point of negativity that cannot be symbolically represented as it is the very point sustaining the conditions for symbolic representation. Only that which is differentiated can be symbolically represented. Yet, while Edelman certainly is, on a theoretical plane, aware of the topological point of the Real in Lacan's theory ('pure negativity'), his identification and qualification of queerness (as coinciding with the order of the Real) retains too much of a reactionary position in order to appreciate the radicality of the issue at hand.

For when Edelman writes, for instance, that queerness manifests in 'an enjoyment in excess of the pleasures associated with the good', ⁴¹ or that 'infinitely mobile as an epithet for strangeness, out-of-jointedness, and nonnormativity, queerness colors any enjoyment that seems to threaten a world', ⁴² he both theoretically and humanly confuses the order of the Real as in strict opposition to human teleology and normativity. However, the only thing that, strictly speaking, could as such be nonnormative is the phantasmatic picture of infantile sexuality/enjoyment as complete or independent in itself - a form of enjoyment prior to, and as such independent of, the normative dimensions pertaining to the reality of the caretaker: a notion of sex(uality) as completely decoupled from the caretaker. In the Freudian scene, however, the nonnormativity of infantile sexuality is also always-already conditioned by, contains, the normativity of adult sexuality: sex or sexuality is an entanglement. To the extent, then, that queerness is supposed to be associated with 'any enjoyment that seems to threaten a world', Edelman's characterization of queerness seems to picture a form of enjoyment, built on the phantasm of infantile polymorphous perversion as complete in itself. That is, an enjoyment completely indifferent to the reality of the other. Consequently, Edelman seems to be claiming that radical social critique must be indifferent to the reality of the other.

We have, however, tried to argue that what can be deemed the order of the Real - the gap between things infantile and adult is not, cannot be, indifferent to the reality of the other. Rather, we argue, the real is the point at which, as one might put it, the reality of the other, the other's address, is everything - which is to say that it is not, cannot be, any specific or determinate thing in 'the world'. For, as we have tried to show, by utilizing elements from Wittgenstein's later work, the very gap constituting the differentiation and simultaneously the entanglement between infantile and adult sexuality, between the polymorphous order of sense of infants and the order of adult meanings, which sustains the symbolic order, is the address as such between self and other.

Certainly, this address as such cannot be captured by, nor identified as, any particular norm or set of norms. But not because it, or the Real qua address as such, is opposed to these norms or has nothing to do with them. Rather, the address is ultimately what gives them sense. 'Thou shalt not kill', just as any other norm, would be, per impossible, utterly senseless to us if not for the inescapable relevance of the other. ⁴³ But this only means that our understanding of norms and of their purpose/aim/function is entangled not so much with our knowledge of the address as such as with our openness towards it, towards the reality of others. ⁴⁴ This certainly makes any form of social critique more demanding than if we could simply refer to, and disrupt, structural traits - which is not to say that structural problems are not what we should focus on. The problems and difficulties we have with the relevance of others, the claim they make on us, is what structural problems are ultimately about. This is why any intellectual challenge pertaining to social critique is both paralleled with and underpinned by a moral-existential challenge. As we all know - do we not? - even the most intellectually sophisticated critiques and theories can be both informed by morally problematic sentiments (like ressentiment) and be blind to the moral reality underpinning human conduct and its reasons. If there is to be a radical social critique, it cannot be one that disavows the significance of the other, but rather the opposite. The possibility of a radical critique, we claim, must go through the reality of the address, the claims it exercises on us. This means that 'the social' - as the structures of normativity - is not-all.

---

Endnotes

Footnotes

1. 1. Cf. Michel Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?', in P. Rabinov, ed., The Foucault Reader, Pantheon Books, New York, 1984. ↩

2. 2. Lee Edelman, Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2022, p. xiv. ↩

3. 3. See, for instance, Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, trans. A.R. Price, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2016. ↩

4. 4. Edelman, Bad Education, p. xiv. ↩

5. 5. Ibid., p. 20. ↩

6. 6. Ibid., p. 19. ↩

7. 7. Cf. Heather Love, 'Review of Lee Edelman's Bad Education', Critical Inquiry, 17 November 2023. ↩

8. 8. Edelman, Bad Education, pp. 19-20. ↩

9. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; with an Introduction by Bertrand Russell, Routledge, London, 2005. In his seminar XIX, Lacan himself suggests a close affinity between his notion of 'the real' and Wittgenstein's closing lines in TLP. Jacques Lacan, ...or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, trans. Jacques-Alain Miller, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2018. ↩

10. 10. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.41 The Tractatus consists of numbered remarks. We will refer, as is conventional, only to the number of the remark and not to the page number. ↩

11. 11. See, for example, ibid., 2.172; 2.174. ↩

12. 12. See, for example, ibid., 4.022; 4.461; 6.12; 6.522 ↩

13. 13. Ibid., Preface. ↩

14. 14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th edn, Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, 2009, Preface. ↩

15. 15. See, for instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett, University of California Press, Berkeley CA, 1989; Brian McGuinness, 'Freud and Wittgenstein', in Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. B. McGuinness, Blackwell, Oxford, 1981. ↩

16. 16. McGuinness, 'Freud and Wittgenstein'. ↩

17. 17. Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, p. 41. ↩

18. 18. Much has been written about Wittgenstein's relation to psychoanalysis. For instance, McGuinness, 'Freud and Wittgenstein'; Gordon Baker, 'Wittgenstein's Method and Psychoanalysis', in G. Baker, Wittgenstein's Method: Neglected Aspects, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004; Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, trans. Carol Cosma, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1995. However, the focus in these works is more or less exclusively on Wittgenstein's 'therapeutic' method and its affinities with the method and aims of psychoanalysis. Notwithstanding the importance of such readings, we nonetheless claim that not taking into account the absence of sex in Wittgenstein's writings, or not attempting to place the question of sex in relation to Wittgenstein's philosophy/writing, leaves a deeper understanding of both Wittgenstein's relation to psychoanalysis and of the insights gained from this relation uncharted. ↩

19. 19. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §1. Like TLP, PI consists of numbered remarks. We refer only to the numbered remarks and not to the page numbers. ↩

20. 20. See Niklas Toivakainen, Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2023, ch. 5. ↩

21. 21. See, for instance, Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. J. Mehlman, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1976; Tomas Geyskens, Our Original Scenes: Freud's Theory of Sexuality, Leuven University Press, Leuven, 2005. ↩

22. 22. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Vernon J. Bourke, Catholic University of America Press, Washington DC, 1966. ↩

23. 23. The quoted passage reads as follows: 'When grown-ups named some object and at the same time turned towards it, I perceived this, and I grasped that the thing was signified by the sound they uttered, since they meant to point it out. This, however, I gathered from their gestures, the natural language of all peoples, the language that by means of facial expression and the play of eyes, of the movements of the limbs and the tone of voice, indicates the affections of the soul when it desires, or clings to, or rejects, or recoils from, something. In this way, little by little, I learnt to understand what things the words, which I heard uttered in their respective places in various sentences, signified. And once I got my tongue around these signs, I used them to express my wishes.' PI, §1. ↩

24. 24. See Toivakainen, Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire; Niklas Toivakainen, 'What Was Already There: On Scepticism and the Fundamental Reference of Signification', Nordic Wittgenstein Review, special issue, Moral Understanding, 2025. ↩

25. 25. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §5. ↩

26. 26. Ibid., §1. ↩

27. 27. Ibid., §§ 28 -36. ↩

28. 28. Lacan makes the same observation in his discussion of Augustine's treatment of ostension. See Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, trans. R. Grigg, W.W. Norton, New York and London, 1993. ↩

29. 29. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§ 241-242. See also Toivakainen, 'What Was Already There'. ↩

30. 30. See Toivakainen, Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire, ch. 5. ↩

31. 31. See, for instance, the famous 'rule-following paradox' in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §201. ↩

32. 32. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Essentials of Psychoanalysis, Vintage Books, London, 2005. ↩

33. 33. Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, p. 21. ↩

34. 34. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Sigmund Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, in The Essentials of Psychoanalysis, Vintage Books, London, 2005. ↩

35. 35. Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, p. 23. ↩

36. 36. Ibid. ↩

37. 37. See Jacques Lacan, 'The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectics of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious', in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink, W.W. Norton, London and New York, 2007. ↩

38. 38. Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, pp. 48-65. ↩

39. 39. This is the logic of 'primal repression' in psychoanalysis. See ibid., and also Alenka Zupančič, What is Sex?, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2017. ↩

40. 40. Edelman, Bad Education, p. xv. ↩

41. 41. Ibid., p. 20. ↩

42. 42. Ibid., p. 19. ↩

43. 43. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, 1969. ↩

44. 44. See, for instance, Joel Backström, The Fear of Openness: An Essay on Friendship and the Roots of Morality, Åbo Akademi University Press, Åbo, 2007; Hannes Nykänen, 'Repression and Moral Reasoning: An Outline of a New Approach in Ethical Understanding', SATS, 16(1), 2015, pp. 49-66; Fredrik Westerlund, 'What Is Moral Normativity? A Phenomenological Critique and Redirection of Korsgaard's Normative Question', in S. Heinämaa, M. Hartimo and I. Hirvonen, eds, Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity: Norms, Goals, and Values, Routledge, New York, 2022. ↩