ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 13 number 2 august 2008

sex and gender

ontemporary discourses on sexuality are
largely underpinned by the historicist
assumption that, as Charles Shepherdson puts
it, subjectivity has no essential form, but is a
product of history, whereby the body itself
is considered as yet another constructed
phenomenon which, like clothing, social
norms, or gender and all other of the subjects
role[s] in the symbolic order, would shift with the
fashions of history (85). According to this
historicist view, Shepherdson continues, any
reference to sexual difference as not a historical
construal will be taken as an appeal to
naturalism or essentialism (94). Yet psychoanalysis claims that there is a distinction between
gender roles, which are indeed historical products, and human sexuality, which, far from
being ahistorical, is both inevitably historical
and not a product of history (99). Far from being
natural, the human sexual drive is itself intrinsically perverted insofar as, as Freud demonstrated, the purportedly normal sexual object
can at all be replaced by a substitute object
(86). The fact that the sexual drive is
constitutively denatured, that it does not follow
the automatic machinery of the instinct in
nature, means that sexuality in the human
animal is intrinsically bound to representation,
which is why, to repeat, human sexuality is
inevitably historical (8687). The distinction
between the instinct and the drive already
indicates that psychoanalysis is not concerned
with a naturalistic conception of the body, or of
sexual difference (88).
But the historicist might ask why, then, sex is
not a historical product. Because, as Lacan
argued, unlike gender a historico-discursively
constructed positive predicate of the subject sex

a. kiarina kordela
GENRE
with and beyond gender
and sex (a psychoanalytic
intervention)
indicates the direction toward which [meaning
(sens)] fails (echoue) and the discourse encounters its limit (Book XX 79; Livre XX, 74).1
For psychoanalysis, beyond historical representations, including their constructions of gender,
there is no nature but the sexed failure of
representation itself. If there is sex, as something
real beyond representation, it is not because of
some essentialized nature but because thought
(representation) necessarily fails.
That is, thought always fails to form the
totality of its object, be it the world or the
subject. To clarify this point, let us turn to Kants
distinction between the understanding, which
refers to experience so far as it can be given,
and reason, which aims at the completeness or
absolute totality of all possible experience

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/08/020093^15 2008 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/09697250802432203

93

genre
[which] is itself not experience but a transcendent concept, such as the totality of the
subject or of the world (Kant, Prolegomena 70).
The task of reason is to form a totality out of all
possible experience, and, because this is impossible, reason necessarily fails. Reason fails
means the constitution of the totality fails.
But why is this failure sexed, or even dual
rather than single? There are two aspects in which
reason examines the totality of experience: the
limits of this totality in time and space, and the
causal relations that determine the totality. Kant
calls the first aspect mathematic, as it involves
the addition of temporal or spatial parts, and the
second dynamic, as it examines the causal
dynamism governing the totality. In both cases,
reason fails because it arrives at antinomic
conclusions.
When it inquires into the causality determining the totality of experience, reason is forced to
admit as equally true both the thesis that
causality in accordance with laws of nature is
not the only one from which all the appearances
of the world can be derived; rather, [i]t is also
necessary to assume another causality through
freedom in order to explain them; and the
antithesis that there is no freedom, but everything in the world happens solely in accordance
with laws of nature (Kant, Critique 48485;
B472/A444B473/A445). This is the dynamic
antinomy, whose falsehood . . . consists in representing as contradictory what is compatible
(Prolegomena 83, x53). For, while natural
necessity and freedom might appear to be
incompatible, if natural necessity is referred
merely to appearances and freedom merely to
things in themselves, no contradiction arises if
we at the same time . . . admit both kinds of
causality; natural necessity can attach to all
connections of cause and effect in the sensuous
world [appearances], while freedom can be
granted to the cause which is itself not an
appearance (but the foundation of appearance
[i.e., the thing in itself]) (8485, x53).
When, on the other hand, reason examines the
totality of experience in terms of its limits in time
and space, then it is initially misled to admit as
true both the thesis that the world has a
beginning in time, and in space it is also enclosed

in boundaries, and the antithesis that the

world . . . is infinite with regard to both time and
space (Kant, Critique 47071; B454/A426
B455/A427). What reason momentarily forgets
here is that space and time, together with the
appearances in them, are nothing existing in
themselves and outside of my representations,
that is, reason forgets that the thing- or the worldin-itself is not in space and time (Kant,
Prolegomena 82, x52c). Since the question
addressed here concerns the limits of the world
in time and space, the true referent of world is
not the world-in-itself but the world as appearance, that is, our representations of the world.
Hence, Kant concludes, in the case of the
mathematic antinomy, both the thesis and the
antithesis . . . are false (82, x52c).
However, the fact that the thesis and the
antithesis of the mathematic antinomy are
false with regard to the totality of the worldin-itself does not mean that they do not provide
true statements about the totality of another
object our cognition or representation of the
world. In Kants words, in the case of the
mathematic antinomy, I cannot say the world is
infinite . . . nor will I say that it is finite;
instead, I will be able to say . . . only something
about the rule in accord with which experience . . . is to be instituted and continued,
thereby determining the magnitude (of experience) not the magnitude of the world (Critique
526, 528; A520/B548, A523/B551). As for the
world in itself, the mathematic antinomy entails
an indefinite judgment, that is, an unanswerable question, as to whether the world as a totality
exists beyond our representations (Prolegomena
82, x52c).
Having seen that reason has two ways of failing,
the question now arising is: which of the two
antinomies articulates each of the two sexes?
Having designated the totalizing function of
reason as the phallic function [], Lacan
aligned the male sex with the dynamic antinomy,
by stating that the male totality or man as whole
acquires his inscription (prend son inscription),
with the proviso that this function is limited due
to the existence of an x by which the function x
is negated (niee) (Book XX 79). To paraphrase
foregrounding the Kantian undertones, the

94

kordela
function of reason in its dynamic aspect, which
subjects the totality of all appearances to natural
laws, succeeds only with the proviso that this
totalization is limited owing to the existence of an
exception, freedom, by which the total application
of the law is negated (on the level of things in
themselves). By contrast, the female sex will not
allow for any universality it will be a not-whole,
insofar as it has the choice of positing itself in x
or of not being there (de nen pas etre) (80).
Whether it posits itself in the totalizing function
that subsumes everything under the dimensions of
time and space, as appearances, or whether it is
not there but exists in itself, beyond appearances,
is a question which the female sex, with its
indefinite judgment, leaves open. Translated
into the more linguistically informed Lacanian
idiom, what remains indefinite is whether
woman poses herself entirely in the totalizing
function of representation (the signifier), or
whether, in Joan Copjecs words, there is something feminine jouissance [enjoyment], that
does not exist in the symbolic order, so that, as
Lacan puts it, Woman is not whole (pas toute)
with respect to the symbolic order or representation (Copjec, Read My Desire 224; Lacan,
Critique 7). It is this impossibility of the
formation of totality on the part of the female
sex, of the fact that woman cannot form a whole,
a universe, that is expressed in Lacans notorious
statement that Woman [La femme] doesnt
exist, that is, that there is no such thing as
Woman, Woman with capital W indicating the
universal (Copjec, Read My Desire 225; Lacan,
Television 38; idem, Book XX 72).
To formulate sexual difference in another way,
which will also clarify Copjecs reference to
feminine jouissance, another name for the
phallic function is phallic enjoyment, while
feminine enjoyment is what escapes the totality of
the phallic function. While phallic jouissance,
as Bruce Fink puts it, is a paltry or fallible
enjoyment, a satisfaction . . . [that] always leaves
something more to be desired, the feminine or
Other jouissance is an ideal of a better
satisfaction, a satisfaction that would never fail
us, never come up short, never disappoint us,
and which, since we can conceive of its
possibility . . . must be (Knowledge 37, 35).

95

And sexual difference, which we can thus see as

the index of the kind of jouissance that one is
able to obtain, consists in the following (36). By
totalizing the phallic function, by positing that
which escapes it (feminine enjoyment) as an
exception to which one cannot have access as long
as one derives phallic enjoyment, the male sex
can either give up the possibility of feminine
enjoyment or sacrifice phallic enjoyment altogether for the sake of feminine enjoyment. By
contrast, the female sex, which does not pose any
exception and thus does not form a totality, can
have access to both the phallic and, at least
potentially, the feminine enjoyment. In Finks
succinct formulation: a man is someone who,
regardless of chromosomes, can have one or the
other [enjoyment] (or at least thinks he can have
the other by giving up the one), but not both;
a woman is someone who, regardless of chromosomes, can potentially have both (41).
When combined, Finks reading of sexual
difference as the two ways in which the subject
relates to enjoyment, and the Kantian reading
thereof, as the two ways in which the subject
relates to the formation of an all, reveal that
jouissance or enjoyment is another name for
the All itself, even if, in the former case,
specifically the all of enjoyment, as opposed to,
say, the all of the world or anything else. This
observation is, of course, already obvious in
Lacans discussion of enjoyment in his seminar
XX, Encore, where the concept is consistently
discussed in terms of the One (i.e., the whole),
but it also makes clear that even the most atheist
and formalist conceptualization of human life and
the world, as Lacans, cannot escape, in fact, is
not far removed, from their most religious and
mythic accounts, whose aim, as Fink rightly
observes, is to form a whole. Lacan may have
strived for scientificity and have encourage[d]
his audience and himself to stop thinking in
terms of wholeness, such as shapes of circles
and spheres, as an approach that is as distant
from the religious and mythic haunting ghost of
wholeness as possible, but what he has actually
shown is that, even in the postmodern age of
ultimate deconstruction, these ghosts survive,
and they do so as nothing less than the sole
remnant of the real (Fink, Knowledge 31).

genre
These two different relations to jouissance or
the All pertain already to the abstract, universal
subject addressed by philosophy, even as philosophy has generally remained unaware of it.
For, as Copjec puts it, the universal subject is
necessarily sexed . . . because [its] failure, far
from being singular as is naively assumed,
occurs in one of two different ways: in the
mode of either the dynamic or of the mathematic
antinomy (Copjec, Read My Desire 21213).
What escapes discursive determination is the
failure of reason to conceive of discourse, and
hence of history, culture, and politics in their
totality. We could therefore say about sex and the
body as real what Hannah Arendt has said about
human nature in general, namely that it does
not exist, for it is not a positively given entity
but the sheer negativity effected by the failure of
positivity to form a totality (Arendt, The Human
Condition 193). Sex designates the two possible
failures of reason through which the subject can
relate to totality, and it is an effect, but not a
realization of social discourses (Copjec, Read
My Desire 210). In other words, sex presupposes
culture as its cause, but it itself is not realized
within culture. This is why sexual
difference . . . is a real and not a symbolic
difference though we must not forget that
the real itself is the failure of a historically
specific social, political, and cognitive order, and
as such, to repeat Shepherdsons words, inevitably historical (Read My Desire 207). In short,
sex and the body itself cannot take form
without undergoing . . . subjection to representation, yet it is the failure of representation
(Shepherdson 99).
Returning to Kant, the mathematic antinomy
shows us that reason cannot say what the object
is, but only how the empirical regress is to be
instituted, thereby revealing what he calls the
rule of reason as a regulative principle of
reason itself, as opposed to the principle of the
absolute totality of the series of conditions, as
given in itself in the object, which would be a
constitutive cosmological principle. And the
value of his intervention, Kant continues, lies in
preventing the subscription of objective reality
to an idea that merely serves as a rule, that is, in
preventing epistemological principles from being

mistaken for ontological principles (Kant,

Critique 52021; A50910/B53738).
In terms of sexgenre associations, Kants
argument entails the distinction between a male
transitive knowledge, whose object is supposed to
lie outside itself (being or thing-in-itself), and a
female self-referential knowledge, whose object is
itself (knowledge or representation). In philosophical terms, this is the distinction between
ontology and epistemology, both of which,
however, can address the universal, the former
with regard to being, the latter regarding all
possible knowledge, as in Kants own Critique of
Pure Reason, which is a transcendental critique
of the possibility and limits of universal reason.
Contrary to the standard association of the male
gender with the universal, and of the female
gender with the particular, the KantianLacanian
conception of sexual difference indicates that the
female sex deals no less with the universal than
the male sex.
Extending the argument beyond the realm of
philosophy, this sexually defined genre distinction
corresponds to that between positivistic sciences
that assume that their object is given from the
outset, as a thing-in-itself that remains unaffected
by the act of knowing it, and those sciences that
presuppose a transferential relation between the
object and the knowledge that examines it,
notably among them psychoanalysis. However,
for psychoanalysis the thing-in-itself is nothing
other than the pure negativity of the failure of
reason, or, to put it in Slavoj Zizeks words, the
Thing-in itself is effectively a pure Thingof-Thought [Gedankending] . . . nothing but a
lack, which emerges only because beyond the
phenomenal appearance there is only a certain
negative self-relationship because of which the
positively given phenomenal world is perceived as
mere appearance (Sublime Object 172, 193).2 If
the thing-in-itself is a pure Thing-of-Thought,
then the difference between transitive and selfreferential genres of knowledge is only epiphenomenal; more accurately, it reflects the two modes,
male and female, of relating to this void or
negative self-relationship of representation to
itself. The two genres do not have two distinct
cognitive objects, being and representation, but
one common object: the thing-in-itself, which is

96

kordela
nothing other than the lack of representation. And
the apparent difference between the two emerges
out of the specific mode of reasons failure
pertaining to each. On the one hand, the female
failure of reason forgets that the so-called selfreferential genres are also transitive, or that the
regulative principle of reason is effectively the
constitutive principle of external reality; in short,
for female reason there are only regulative
principles. On the other hand, the male failure
of reason involves a short-circuit between appearance and external reality as the thing-in-itself,
whereby it perceives the laws of the former as the
laws of the latter, not because it is conscious of the
fact that the thing-in-itself is thoughts failure but
because it forgets the mediation of representation
altogether; in other words, for male reason there
are only constitutive principles.
In conclusion, the KantianLacanian conceptualization of sexual difference undermines the
traditional gendering of the universal and the
particular, and shows further that, even though all
genres of knowledge have one and the same
object the thing-in-itself which is a thingof-thought they appear as having distinct
objects being and representation because of
the two distinct failures of reason, that is, because
of sexual difference. The internal split of all
knowledge, the fact that its object is both the thingin-itself and the thing-of-thought, manifests itself
due to sexual difference as the external opposition
between transitive and self-referential genres.

bisexuality
But sexual difference itself, as I shall presently
argue, is an internal opposition that manifests
itself as external. The necessity of this conclusion
is pointed to, although not drawn, particularly in
Copjecs commentary on Lacans formulas of
sexuation. As Copjec writes, the rule of reason,
which can also be called the rule of language or
of the signifier, is itself a genuine contradiction, an antinomy. We must not miss the fact,
however, that the antinomy in question is neither
the dynamic nor the mathematic, but an
antinomy between these two antinomies. For, in
its mathematic mode, the rule of reason, as
Copjec writes, enjoins us . . . to believe in the

97

inexhaustibility of the process of meaning, in the

fact that there will always be another signifier to
determine retroactively the meaning of all that
have come before or, in Kantian terms, that
there will always be another condition in the
regress of the series of conditioned. On the other
hand, in its dynamic mode, the rule of reason
also requires us to presuppose all the other
signifiers, the total milieu that is necessary for
the meaning of one, as the simultaneity of all
signifiers or phenomena that is, it requires us
to presuppose the totality of all signifiers (Read
My Desire 205, 220). In short, the rule of reason
is the (female) demand of an infinite regress in the
diachrony of signifiers or phenomena coupled
with the (male) demand for the synchronic
totality of all signifiers. It is both antinomies
that constitute the rule of reason, that is, a rule
that, according to Kants dualism, should derive
only from the mathematic antinomy, whose field
is the realm of reason, and not from the dynamic
antinomy, which is supposed to provide cosmological and not regulative (i.e., epistemological) principles. In other words, Copjecs argument
inadvertently helps us see that linguistics already
presupposes what I have been arguing here,
namely the collapse of the traditional philosophical distinction between constitutive and regulative
principles, that is, between ontology and epistemology. The rule of language shows us that,
as Lacan puts it, the nature of things . . . is the
nature of words (Book XX 73).
Insofar as the use of language presupposes
both antinomies, every human being subject to
language employs both antinomies and is, therefore, bisexual. As Lacan puts it, referring to his
formulations of the two sexes: These are the
only possible definitions of the so-called man or
woman portion for that which finds itself in the
position of inhabiting language. The human
subject is internally split in two portions, the
male and the female, and, as is expressly
formulated in Freudian theory, at any given
situation every subject is allowed to inscribe
itself in this part or the other, regardless of
whether [it is] provided with the attributes of
masculinity attributes that remain to be
determined or not (80). Lacan refers here
specifically to Freuds argument that the human

genre
subject is characterized by an unconscious
general bisexual disposition [allgemeinen bisexuellen Anlage]. This unconscious bisexuality is
not meant in the common sense of the word
which refers to the practice of engaging in
bisexual relations for which, as Freud remarks,
Ferenczis homo-erotism [Homoerotik] would
be a better name but precisely in the sense
of an internal unconscious split between the
two sexes, regardless of ones male or female
attributes or conscious sexual practices (Freud,
Gesammelte Werke V: 4546 n. 1; idem, Three
Essays 13 n. 1).3

universal and particular

As we know, it is a topos in all branches of
traditional philosophy, from ontology and epistemology to ethics and political philosophy, to
oppose the universal to the particular, and
to privilege the former. It is equally a classical
topos within feminist theories to deem the
universal as a male specialty, and to attempt
to undermine its claims through an alternative,
female voice, which invokes and foregrounds the
importance of the particular. This gesture
may indeed deviate from the philosophical
canon, with its general proclivity towards the
universal, but it is no less complicit in
sustaining and reinforcing the established opposition between the universal and the particular. In this section, I want to show that the
opposition between the so-called universal and
particular is due to a conceptual conflation
between universality proper and totality. I shall
also propose a reconceptualization of the relation
between universal and particular beyond the
traditional notions of either their opposition or
dialectic synthesis.
Once again, I shall take Kant as my starting
point to tease out certain insights from both what
appears to be accurate and what appears to be
problematic in his argumentation. In his notorious definition of Enlightenment, Kant posited
the totality of body politics through the postulate
that reason must always be free, allowing you,
the scholar, to argue as much as you will, and
about what you will before the reading
public, under the crucial precondition, as

Arendt writes, that there are restrictions on

this use, indicated by the words as a scholar.
For the scholar is not the same as the citizen,
the former being a member of . . . a [public]
society of world citizens, whereas the citizen
as a member of the (private) civil society, such as
in his capacity as an officer in service, has no
right to refuse to obey (Kant, Foundations 87;
Arendt, Lectures 39). Many have pointed out this
interesting reconfiguration occurring in Kants
text, whereby the traditionally public space of
professions and social services becomes
private, while the term public is reserved
for a space that transcends all society, public and
private (in the traditional sense of the words), as
the realm of the scholar. What has not drawn
so much attention is the fact that Kant fashioned
enlightened civil society exclusively on the model
of his dynamic (male) antinomy.
Kants predilection towards the dynamic
antinomy in this context may be justified by the
fact that his cornerstone in defining the totality of
civil society concerns not its spatial or temporal
limits but the causes determining any action
within this totality the alternative between
freedom and obedience or law which, as
such, pertain to the territory of the dynamic
antinomy. We recall that in the context of pure
reason, Kant subjugates all appearances to the
determinism of the law, while he reserves freedom for the exception to appearances, the thingin-itself. This dictate of reason finds here its
perfect correlate in political philosophy: if
unconditional obedience is reserved merely for
the citizen of civil society (appearances), and
freedom for scholars as world citizens (thingin-itself), no contradiction arises if the imperative, Argue as much as you will, and about what
you will, but obey!, is addressed to the very
same subjects, but in different relations on one
side, as members of the community in which
one must obey; and, on the other, as a
member of . . . a society of world citizens, where
the scholar certainly can argue without hurting
the affairs for which he is in part responsible as a
passive member (Kant, Foundations 87). To
enhance the historical irony involved here, we
could say that, by grounding civil society on the
dynamic antinomy, the Enlightenment rewrites

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kordela
the Cartesian cogito as: I think freely, therefore,
I obey.
The political stakes of this logical hat trick are
amply evident in Frederics II jubilant response:
Let them reason all they want to as long as they
obey (as cited in Foucault 34). He obviously
understood that the freedom granted to the one
realm is inconsequential to the juridical rigidity
of the other. As Arendt admonishes, political
freedom in Kant might be reserved only for the
spectator, the scholar capable of assuming the
general standpoint of impartiality, which
takes others into account but knows nothing of
how to combine with them in order to act
(Lectures 44). Yet Arendt continues to point out
that Kants intention is not a return to the ancient
Greek bios theoretikos (from theorein, to look
at) and the supremacy of the spectators way
of life (55). Rather, insofar as political action is
practical, and practical means moral in Kant,
always concern[ing] the individual qua individual, its true opposite would be, not theory,
but speculation the speculative use of reason
(61). And the speculative interest of reason,
Kant tells us, lies in grasp[ing] the whole chain
of conditions fully a priori and comprehend[ing]
the derivation of the conditioned, starting with
the unconditioned (Critique 498; A467/B495).
It is on the side of dogmatism or the thesis of
the dynamic antinomy which, we recall, posits
the exceptional domain of the freedom of the
thing-in-itself or of the world scholar that the
speculative interest of reason is expressed,
since it succeeds in stopping the regress in the
series of conditions for given appearances by
posing freedom as absolutely unconditioned.
By contrast, the antithesis in the dynamic
antinomy which acknowledges no exception to
the natural or civil laws cannot do this, so
that in it every event always has another event
above it as its cause, and hence the regress is
never allowed to stop (498, 520; A467/B495,
A509/B537).
What the realm of causality or of civil law
needs in order to constitute a totality is something unconditioned freedom to prevent the
regression to infinity in the series of conditions.
But, crucially, infinity is a category pertaining
not to causality but to extension in time and

99

space the concern of the (female) mathematic

antinomy, which we thus find nested within the
(male) dynamic antinomy in the guise of the
antithesis, as if turning the corner of one of
Lacans Mobius strips. Just as in mathematical
cases, every part leads to a still smaller part,
so, too, regarding dynamic causality, every
event always has another event above it as its
cause . . . [which is] supported again by others,
without ever getting stability and support from a
self-sufficient thing as an unconditioned original
being unless, of course, one poses freedom as
an unconditioned original being (Kant,
Prolegomena 82, x52c; idem, Critique 498;
A467/B495). This, however, is something that
the mathematic antinomy cannot do; so what we
really have here is a leap in reason, in which a
(female) mathematic question receives a (male)
dynamic response. Well, the society of
the Enlightenment has been patriarchal . . . What
is new?
Yet as much as Arendt discerns the pitfalls of
Kants political philosophy and its paralyzing
function within the realm of civil society, she
nevertheless persists on focusing on speculation. Is her persistence a profoundly, even if
unintentionally, anti-feminist gesture? Why
doesnt she, like many feminists and others,
invite us to forget the totality and focus on the
particular?
I want to suggest that her reasons relate to the
intimation that there is a way of constituting the
universal without forming a totality, that is, there
is a universal that forms itself without presupposing an exception, be it freedom or the particular.
This universal emerges not out of any antinomy of
reason but out of reasons failure and success,
known as the not-all set. In set theory, the obstacle
preventing the (male) totality from constituting
itself is not the (female) diachronic regression in
the series of the conditioned but the selfreferentiality of the synchronic totality. The
attempt to form the totality as the set of all sets
fails not because we always run the risk of
encountering yet another set but because it
cannot be decided whether or not it itself (the set
of all sets) is included as a member of itself. Thus
the set of all sets constitutes not a closed or
exclusionary totality but an open universality,

genre
whereby one of its elements (the set of all sets) is
both inside and outside the set which, as such, is a
not-all set. As Kojin Karatani puts it, the moment
Cantor . . . treated infinity as a number, thus
making the set of all numbers (infinity) a member
of itself, the set of all numbers became not-all, and
set theory suddenly became pierced with paradoxes (70).
The first philosopher who articulated the
paradox of the not-all set avant la lettre, prior
to Cantor and set theory, was Karl Marx. As
Karatani puts it, by treating capital itself, and
therefore money itself the presumed exception
to all other commodities as a commodity,
Marx identifies a paradox in which a class of the
meta-level [money] descends to the object level to
occupy the same locus as the members [commodities]; in other words, to become a member of
itself (6970). For, as Marx points out, if gold
confronts the other commodities as money it is
only because it previously confronted them as a
commodity, and nothing could have won a
monopoly as the universal equivalent if it
itself were not like all other commodities
(16263). This is true not only as long as gold or
other more or less valuable objects of utility were
used as money; on the contrary, the fact that any
kind of money, including worthless paper money,
is also a commodity is evident particularly in
advanced capitalism, where money is a major
commodity, being sold by credit companies for
more money. Money, therefore, is both the
exception to and a member of the set of all
commodities, rather than a barometer conceived as the exception outside the totality of all
other commodities (Karatani 70).
Comparing Kants dynamic antinomy and
Marxs not-all set we can see the difference
between totality and universality: a totality is
grounded on the exclusion of an exception (as in
Kants enlightened civil society, into which
freedom is not allowed to step), and is as such
exclusory rather than universal; universality, by
contrast, is all-inclusive, which is why it is not-all,
that is, it does not exclude its own exceptional
precondition (such as the world of commodities,
which includes within itself money, its constitutive exception). Positing an excluded exception is
the mechanism through which the universal is

totalized. For instance, opposing the particular to

the universal as its exception is an act that, rather
than undermining the latter, totalizes it. The
feminine voice that pursues this practice reveals
that its true sex is male, contributing to the
totalization of the universal. Only the particulars
recognition as both universal and its exception
can undermine the totalizing tendency of the
universal and neither sex, as we shall see in the
next section, can obtain this recognition without a
further mode of subjectivation.
The stereotypical coupling of the universal
with the male gender, and the particular with
the female, is facilitated by the general conflation
of universality and totality. In truth, however,
universality and particularity are one anothers
supplements, and it is only the totalization of the
universal that pits them against each other.

the bisexual genre: ethics

Having distinguished the universality of the notall set from the totality of the dynamic antinomy,
now we must also differentiate the not-all set from
the not-all of the female infinite regress of the
mathematic antinomy a further distinction that
has not been made in extant accounts of Lacanian
theory.4 The relevant questions arising here are
two: if the two Kantian antinomies provide the
matrix of sexual difference, what is the not-all set
the blueprint of? And is there a genre that
operates according to the not-all-set logic?
The response to the first question is rather
evident: insofar as the not-all-set logic recognizes
the supplementary identity between the universal
and the particular what the two sexes mistake
for external opposites it is the blueprint of
Freuds aforementioned unconscious bisexuality.
Freuds thesis entails that, even as the subject
may consciously identify with either the particular or the universal, unconsciously it identifies
with both, without any contradiction, since es
gibt in diesem System keine Negation [there is in
this system [the unconscious] no negation]
(Freud, Gesammelte Werke X: 285). It follows
that, although both sex and the unconscious
pertain to the level of the real, their domains
within the real are distinct, as is evident in the

100

kordela
fact that negation is operative in sex and not in
the unconscious.
Lacan foregrounds the difference between the
unconscious and the sexual realms within the
register of the real by stating, first, that the status
of the unconscious is ethical and, second, that
ethics is manifestly beyond-sex (hors-sexe), or
outside of sex (Four Fundamental Concepts 34;
idem, Book XX 85, 85 n. 20). If sex is, the
unconscious and the ethical are what wants and
ought to be, respectively. Responding to our
second question, bisexuality or the not-all set
bypasses the perceived opposition between the
ontological question of what is and the
epistemological question regarding the representation of what is, and instead addresses the genre
of ethics, whose concern is what ought to be.
The ethical is pre-ontological because, like the
unconscious . . . it is neither being, nor nonbeing, but a manque-a`-etre, a want-to-be,
something unrealized or unborn which, as
such, may ought to be and, hence, may come to be
(Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 2930, 23).5
To understand the inextricable relation
between ethics and the not-all set we must spell
out Lacans distinction between discourse and
language, which is pivotal in Lacans conceptualization of the ethical act. Lacan introduced this
distinction already in his third seminar stating:
Firstly, there is a synchronic whole, which is
language as a simultaneous system of structured groups of opposition, then there is what
occurs diachronically, over time, and which is
discourse. One cannot but give discourse a
certain direction in time, a direction that is
defined in a linear manner . . . It is in this
diachronism that discourse is set up. (Lacan,
Book III 54)

Like anything that presupposes a diachronic

direction or teleology, discourse is constituted in
the mode of the dynamic antinomy, that is, on the
basis of an exception, a signifier which Lacan calls
Master-Signifier, and which is excluded from the
rest of the signifiers, so that the latter form a
closed totality. As Zizek writes, the MasterSignifier brings about the closure of an ideological field by way of designating the Supreme
Good (God, Truth, Nation, etc.), which

101

determines the meaning and value of the signifiers

within the field in question, while imposing
specific moral (ideological) values that dictate its
telos (Tarrying 217). By contrast, when, according to the not-all set, the exceptional MasterSignifier is also included within the set of all other
signifiers, then its arbitrary monopolization of the
function of the exclusive signifier like that of
money in the set of commodities becomes
evident, and the ideology of the discourse runs
the risk of being undermined. If and when the
inclusion of the Master-Signifier within the
ideological field succeeds in undermining it,
then the discourse yields to language, whose
sole function consists in safeguarding the
identity of a being to itself, regardless of its
historical past and the value attributed by the
discourse to it, that is, regardless of any possible
teleology and ideological system of values.
To make the distinction between discourse and
language more clear, let us turn to Lacans
example of an ethical act in Sophocles
Antigone, and let us consider the proper name
Polynices, which designates Antigones brother
as much after his having become a traitor and
fratricide as it did before. King Creons decree not
to bury Polynices is conceivable only outside of
language, in the kingdom of discourse, for it is
only there that the opposition between good and
evil emerges, since in the realm of discourse the
being of him who has lived cannot be detached
from all he bears with him in the nature of good
and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or
of feelings for himself (Lacan, Book VII 279). By
contrast, from the value-free, non-teleological
perspective of language, once a being bears a
proper name, funeral rites cannot be refused to it,
regardless of its historical past, for there is no
moral measure from which to judge it. All that
remains is the universal recognition, shared by all
cultures in all times, that one cannot be finished
with his remains simply by forgetting that the
register of being of someone who was identified by
name has to be preserved by funeral rites a
recognition which, from the perspective of
language, cannot admit any exception (279).
Here we have the chance to see not only the
formal difference between the mathematic antinomy and the not-all set of language but also

genre
the difference in their ethical, and hence sociopolitical, implications. For both, the two possible
opposing judgments Polynices is bad and
Polynices is good are equally false because
they presuppose that ones redemptive value is
predicated on ones historical past, as judged by
existing norms. What if, from the perspective of
death, as it were (i.e., of funeral rites), people are
value-free, neither good nor bad?6 As Kant writes
in the context of the mathematic antinomy, if two
mutually opposed judgments presuppose an inadmissible condition, then, despite their conflict . . . both of them collapse, because the
condition collapses under which alone either of
them would be valid (Kant, Critique 517;
A503/B531). Indeed, both the mathematic antinomy and language reveal that the judgments of
discourse appear as true because of the inadmissible condition of excluding a third possibility: that Polynices may be value-free. Yet, unlike
the mathematic antinomy, language challenges
discourse and its inadmissible condition not by
means of a regression to infinity in the magnitude
(of experience), which would show that the
process through which we could arrive to the
absolute and true condition (the true value of
Polynices) is indeterminately far. In the mathematic antinomy, the absolute condition is posited
as given, even if out of reach. As opposed to this,
language shows hic et nunc that there is no possible
such condition because any discursive system of
values is by definition a not-all system that appears
to be teleological only through the prism of its
ideology, itself posited as unquestionable truth
only insofar as it excludes a suturing MasterSignifier outside the set of the rest of the signifiers.
Thus, unlike the mathematic antinomy, language passes judgment on social reality itself, not
on our knowledge thereof: language has a fatal
effect on discourse (history), for the permission to
bury Polynices presupposes the collapse of
Creons system of values. (Let us not forget that
Sophocles tragedy was written as part of the
attempts to establish in Athenian society a new
political system democracy.) This means that,
while any genre of knowledge has more or less an
impact on historical reality, when we speak of
ethics we speak of a genre with direct consequences on action and history.

Given that any value is ideological, and all

value judgments aim at sustaining the very
ideology that pronounces them, value judgments
are self-interested and, as such, as Kant would be
the first to admit, not ethical. Here we meet
Arendt once again, who argues that it is only on
the ethical level that the Who, the truly free
subject, emerges. For, in Kristevas summary of
Arendts argument, this subject is marked by the
uniqueness of an excess which is disclosed
only in and attached to an action, which
is distinguished . . . from labor and the
work, remains independent of what [the
acting subject] may achieve, and transcends
mere protective activity motivated by pathological self-interests (Arendt, The Human
Condition 17980, 211, as cited in Kristeva 174).
I will make a parenthesis here to stress once
more that the above distinction between the notall set and the mathematic antinomy has not been
taken into account even by the best, to my
knowledge, psychoanalytic commentaries on
ethics and/or feminism. For instance, Copjec
astutely points out that Lacans ethics takes off
from the proposal that being is not-all or there is
no whole being, but she quickly merges this notall with the feminine not-all of the mathematic
antinomy when she goes on to write that it is
woman who is guardian of the not-all of being
(Imagine theres no Woman 7).7 The present
argument suggests that a properly feminist
approach to the issue of gender, sex, and the
genres of ethics and politics should take off from
the difference between the two distinct logics out
of which a not-all emerges, the one being a
reduction to a kind of bad infinity, the other
being self-referentiality, as the proper ground for
defining the genre of ethics.
A further reason why the mathematic antinomy is easily conflated with the not-all set is
their shared affinity to self-referentiality. The
mathematic antinomy is said to be self-referential
because presumably its object is knowledge itself,
as opposed to external reality but this
opposition, as we have seen, is untenable. By
contrast, the not-all set is truly self-referential, in
that it includes within itself its constitutive
presupposition (e.g., money, ideological MasterSignifier). The latter self-referentiality has effects

102

kordela
equally on thought and social reality, effects that
can be compared to an arrest of time and the
institution of a new order of things, with its own
values, laws, and causal relations. As Lacan puts
it, the unique value involved in Antigones
ethical contumacy is essentially that of language . . . that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama . . . [which] is
precisely the limit or the ex nihilo (Lacan, Book
VII 279). This limit alone deserves the name of
freedom, for it is not a freedom exiled from
civil society, as in Kants enlightened world, but,
as Arendt writes, it is a radical beginning, an
unconnected new event breaking into the
continuum . . . of chronological time, a thought
of an absolute beginning, a creatio ex nihilo
that abolishes the sequence of temporality and
establishes a Novus Ordo Seclorum [new order
of ages] (Arendt, Life of the Mind II: 208, 207).
However, one must always be very cautious
with this rhetoric of rupture in historical time,
for, as both Arendt and Lacan, with their shared
allusions to the Holocaust, remind us, the end of
the old is not necessarily the beginning of the
new, and the foundation legends, with their
hiatus between disaster and salvation only
indicate the problem without solving it; they
only point to the abyss of nothingness that
opens up before any deed that cannot be
accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and
effect, since the latter could account only for
events within the old order (II: 204, 20708; see
also Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 27476).
Even though the shape of the new order cannot
ever be predicted on the basis of the laws and
causal relations of the old order, this does not
mean that it is impossible to distinguish formally
between a rupture that instead of sustaining its
moment of freedom within itself leads to a
phenomenon such as the Nazi horror, and an
authentic historical break with the established
order. Can one know whether the rupture is
ethical, indeed introducing a new order, or
whether it is a delusional rupture that in truth
replicates and reinforces the old order? In other
words, can one distinguish between the genre of
ethics and the genre of horror in history?
In response to this question, and at a very
urgent historical moment, Zizek argues that

103

there is no guarantee against the possibility of

the excess the risk has to be assumed, it is part
of the very field of the political (Welcome to the
Desert of the Real 15354). I would venture to
argue, though, that as much as it is indeed
practically impossible to have a guarantee against
the possibility of the bad excess, this is not the
ultimate word regarding ethics and politics. I will
maintain that there is at least a formal criterion
between the ethical act and the excess of horror,
which will also help us define better the relation
between sex and ethics.
It is the not-all-set logic itself that provides this
formal criterion. As Alain Badiou has made this
suggestion, I turn here to his comparison between
Nazism and the ethical event introduced by
Marx. Marx is an event for political thought,
Badiou writes, because he designates, under the
name proletariat, the central void of early
bourgeois societies. By contrast, the Nazi
seizure of power in 1933 . . . although formally
indistinguishable from an event, only reinforces
the old order since it conceives itself as a
German revolution, that is, as a closed
particularity of an abstract set [ensemble] (the
Germans or the Arians), which, as such, is
exclusionary. My sole objection to Badious
argument is that, after all, Nazism is formally
distinguishable from Marxs event, for, unlike
Nazism, Marxs genuine event . . . relates to the
particularity of a situation [bourgeois society]
only from the bias of its void [proletariat], thus
preventing the universality of the situation from
becoming a closed totality, with its void as
its exclusion. As Badiou concludes: the fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to
inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for
which it is an event (69, 7374). An act, like a
genre, can be characterized as ethical only insofar
as it operates according to the bisexual logic of
the not-all set, which names its inadmissible
condition, the void that was excluded in the old
order in order for the latter to totalize itself as a
closed, teleological system of values.
It is evident, therefore, that the traditional
attribution of the ethical capacity to maleness and
the concomitant claim, made also by Freud, that
women are incapable of ethics, is profoundly
untenable. What remains open is how each sex,

genre
structured so that it either forms a totality by
positing an exclusion or forms no totality by
regressing to infinity, can enter the ethical mode
by forming a self-referential universality. The
answer to this question may involve, as Joan
Copjecs work suggests, two distinct considerations of the subjects relation to ethics, that is, a
masculine and a feminine ethics (see Copjec,
Imagine theres no Woman). But I will not
address this question here.

sub specie aeternitatis: the genre of

ethics or history
Continuing the above line of thought, while
borrowing Arendts succinct words once again,
the ethical genre sustains the inner duality of
the two-in-one (Life of the Mind I: 198). The
duality that the thinking being must sustain as
a relation of the two-in-one, rather than an
opposition, is thoughts ability to conceive of
reality and existence both in terms of time
and space and outside them, in terms of the
void of self-referentiality. As Arendt puts it,
generalization is inherent in every thought, just
as every thought is applicable everywhere, so
that looked from the perspective of the everyday
world of appearances, the everywhere of the
thinking ego . . . is a nowhere, which might be
conceived only as a Void. Yet the absolute void
can be a limiting boundary concept, so that the
mere fact that we are in possession of these
limiting boundary concepts enclosing our
thought within unsurmountable walls . . . does
not tell us more than that we are indeed finite
beings. Insofar as the duality of the twoin-one is sustained as such, it is the atemporal
void of thought itself that relegates us back to
time and space and makes us aware of our
finitude and mortality. Thus, Mans finitude,
irrevocably given by virtue of his own short time
span set in an infinity of time stretching into both
past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as
it were, of all mental activities. It is only due to
the deterioration of this duality into a split
capable only of relating to either the one or the
other side of the duality that introduces yet
another variation of the two-world theory,

whether this involves the afterlife or the two sexes

as an external opposition (I: 199201).
The affinities between Arendt and Baruch
Spinoza, the philosopher who founded modern
monism, go beyond the above monistic conception
of the world and the human subject. A further
Spinozian theme traversing Arendts thought
derives from his assertion that truth accompanied
by joy can be accessed not through imagination or
reason but only through a third kind of knowledge which does not explain the essence of any
singular thing but of the universal, without any
relation to time, but under a certain species of
eternity (481; Ethics, part II, prop. 44, cor. 2,
dem.). It is this kind of knowledge that is
presupposed for Arendts Who to be realized,
for, as she writes: one must not . . . consider man
as he is and not consider what is mortal in mortal
things, but think about them to the extent that
they have the possibility of immortalizing
(Arendt, The Human Condition 56, citing
Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics 1177 b31). As
Kristeva remarks, Aristotelian theater the
political art par excellence is important for
Arendt because of the capacity of narrated
action to immortalize the living, for the polis
was for the Greeks . . . first of all their guarantee
against the futility of individual life and was
reserved for the relative permanence, if not
immortality, of mortals (Arendt, The Human
Condition 188, 56; Kristeva 75).
Arendts invocation of Aristotelian theater
extends the above permeation of being and
thought by the atemporal dimension of the
nowhere into the historical domain of action
in time and space. In a paradoxical move, the
precondition for thought and being to be
historicized becomes the submission of historical
action to the narrative perspective under the
species of eternity. The precondition of historical
consciousness is the narrative de-historicization of
historical action. In other words, the fully realized
historical Who narrates history not from
within discourse but from within language.
There is, therefore, no formal genre difference
between ethics and any proper narrative representation of history.
This supplementary relation between historical
time and the species of eternity is comparable to

104

kordela
the other scandalous paradox of the twentieth
century: Freuds dependence of the pleasure
principle on the death drive, something beyond
the pleasure principle, which is nevertheless its
precondition.8 Each thinker transforms the one of
two opposite poles into the supplementary
precondition of the other: just as the death
drive becomes pleasures presupposition beyond
pleasure, the perspective of eternity becomes
historys presupposition beyond history. When it
comes to any opposition of traditional metaphysics, from the universal and the particular to the
historical or appearance and its beyond, only
bisexual logic can grasp their immanent or
supplementary relation.
I will conclude by recapitulating the most
important contributions of the above discussion
to feminist theory in general, and specifically to
the discussion of the relations among gender, sex,
and genre: (1) by going beyond the discursive
constitution of subjectivity and gender, and by
taking into account the real as the failure of
discourse, psychoanalysis allows us to focus on
sexual, rather than simply gender, difference; this
consideration of sex overcomes the traditional
couplings of genre and gender, both by undermining and revising traditional genre classifications and by revealing radically new
reconfigurations between them and the two
sexes. (2) The distinction between totality and
universality proposed here offers a decisive
contribution to the long debates, in various
fields from philosophy and social and political
theory to feminist theory, about the relation
between the universal and the particular, while
dismantling their canonical associations with each
sex. (3) The further distinction between the
feminine not-all and the not-all set allows for a
thorough redefinition of the genres of ethics and
historical narratives, while irrevocably severing the traditional
linkage between maleness and
ethics.

notes
My gratitude goes to Linda Schulte-Sasse, Mathew
Collins, and Ben Davis for thoughtful feedback
throughout various stages of the present work.

105

1 All brackets in citations are mine.

2 We must not, however, infer, as both Hegel and
Zizek do, that therefore [t]he supersensible . . . is
appearance qua appearance; for, albeit nothing
but a lack, this negative self-relationship of
representation to itself has real effects on representation, such as, to repeat Ziz eks words, to
make it appear as mere appearance, and is
therefore itself a real beyond appearance, even as
it cannot ontologically exist but in its effects
(appearance) (Hegel 89).
3 An affinity between Freuds concept of bisexuality and the common use of the term nevertheless
remains on the level of the unconscious, insofar as
allhumanbeings are capable ofmaking a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their
unconscious (Freud, Three Essays 11 n.1). Note also
that Lacans attribution of sexuality to the failure
of reason eliminates all biological remnants in
Freuds grounding of his thesis on a presumed
tendency towards bisexuality (Bisexualitat) in
higher animals in general (Freud, Gesammelte
WerkeV: 46 n.1; idem,Three Essays13 n.1).
4 I have introduced this distinction elsewhere
(see Kordela).
5 This distinction between the two realms of the
real may bear similarities to the distinction introduced by Jacques-Alain Miller in his class,
Orientation lacanienne, between two different
levels of the real, R1 and R2, which Fink describes
as follows: (1) a real before the letter, that is, a
presymbolic real, which, in the final analysis, is
but our own hypothesis (R1), and (2) a real after
the letter which is characterized by impasses and
impossibilities due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itself (R2), that is,
which is generated by the symbolic (The Lacanian
Subject 182 nn.11, 27). It is evident that sex pertains
to the level of R2, since it indeed comes after the
letter and is generated by the symbolic as its
byproduct. What seems more intractable in complying with this scheme is the unconscious, which
being, as Lacan has put it, structured like a language, is hard to be conceived also as before the
letter or presymbolic (Lacan, Book III 167). Yet if
we take into account that one of the central functions around which the symbolic is organized is
negation, and that this function is not operative
either in the unconscious or in language, as defined
here in distinction from discourse, then it may well
be that the statement that the unconscious is

genre
structured like language should be taken in this
precise sense of language, and then the
unconscious could be said to be presymbolic.
This hypothesis is supported by Lacans further
commentary on the above statement, which
asserts that the unconscious and everything that
belongs to analytic communication . . . whatever it
may be, isnt a language in the sense in which this
would mean that its a discourse ^ Ive never said
it was a discourse ^ but is structured like a
language (167).
6 Here I am paraphrasing Kants example of the
body that instead of having either a bad or a good
smell might be odor-free (see Kant, Critique 517;
A503/B531).
7 In my opinion, the feminine not-all relates to
hysteria ^ which is traditionally linked to woman,
as is clear both in Freud and Lacan and in later
commentators, such as Fink ^ an organization of
subjectivity that resists the ethical act, insofar as
the hysterics desire . . . is to sustain the desire of
the father (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 38;
see also Fink, The Lacanian Subject 107).
8 This in itself suffices to explain why Lacan
argues that toute pulsion [every drive], the oral,
the anal, the scopic, and the invocatory, est virtuellement pulsion de mort [is virtually a death
drive] (Ecrits II 215).

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