Articles/Alenka Zupancic/Sexuality Within The Limits Of Reason Alone

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'Sexuality Within the Limits of Reason Alone' by Alenka Zupančič

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O. Shalev and H. Yerushalmi published a stunning study concerning the status of sexuality among contemporary therapists involved in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The paradoxical status of infantile sexuality as discovered by S. Freud could be summed up in two points. Firstly, it exists; yet secondly, it exists in the absence of both real/biological and symbolic frameworks of its existence. The quintessential biblical story that casts sexuality and knowledge as inseparably bound to the scene of the original sin is thus pointing in the right direction. In the wider field of theory the Freudian/Lacanian concept of sexuality and of its central importance also continues to function as the line along which some of the major struggles and dividing lines take place. One could even say that human sexuality is "sexual" precisely insofar as the unification at stake, the tying of all the drives to one single purpose, never really works, but allows for different partial drives to continue their circular, self-perpetuating activity.