The umbrella definition common with the asexual community defines asexual as “someone who does not experience sexual attraction”. I remember encountering that in my mid 20s and suddenly realising that while I did experience sexual attraction, I was completely unable to articulate what this is. There was a peculiar inarticulacy I realised was not simply located in myself but instead reflected a broader tendency to leave what was assumed to be uniform largely, if not entirely, unsaid. I’ve just been looking through the multiple papers I wrote about asexuality in the early 2010s (e.g. what I suspect will always be my highest cited paper, despite being the most descriptive thing I’ll ever write). It’s striking how I was drawn to the distinction between romantic and sexual attraction found within the asexual community, perhaps overplaying the salience of this distinction because of how significant it seemed to me personally at the time:

Within this group of romantic asexuals, orientation varies: heteroromantics onlyfeel romantic attraction to the opposite sex, homoromantics to the same sex, bir-omantics to both sexes and panromantics without reference to sex or gender.2Some romantic asexuals actively seek relationships because, as Brotto et al.(2010) suggest, ‘the closeness, companionship, intellectual and emotional connec-tion that comes from romantic relationships’ is personally desirable. Others aresimply open to the possibility, given their experience of romantic attraction, with-out actively seeking it or assigning it any priority in their lives. Aromantic asexual sexperience no romantic attraction and have no desire to pursue romantic relation-ships. In some cases this may be a matter of simple lack of interest and a prioritization of the platonic, as in the case of one respondent who, when explaining their lack of interest in ideas of romance, wrote ‘I vastly prefer to maintain close friend-ships. I would rather have a romantic relationship than only have loose friendships,h owever’. Similarly Scherrer (2008) found that ‘self-identified aromantic asexual individuals tend to describe their ideal relationships as primarily friendship-like’. Inother cases though, romance may be actively and viscerally rejected, as exemplified by the respondent who wrote of their ‘disgust’ at ideas of romance and annoyance at the priority commonly ascribed to them within people’s lives

I was quite hostile to Lacanian theory at the time I was writing this, largely because I had met more than one Lacanian practioner whose instinct was to pathologise asexuality. To define oneself in terms of this lack was seen as an obvious expression of trauma. But it does seem to me with the benefit of hindsight that Lacanian theory has something to say about the experiences which have been problematised by proximate social networks in ways which lead individuals to define as asexual i.e. as I suggest in this model recognising yourself as different from the apparent behaviour of your peer group vis-a-vis sex and relationships, then having that difference explained away, creates an experienced problem which the identify label of asexual ‘solves’.

Lacanian theory draws attention to how different love, desire and satisfaction are in their emergence and unfolding. For example the most satisfying sex might be with the person you love the least, whereas the least satisfying sex can be with the person you love the most. You can love someone deeply without desiring them and vice versa. From a Lacanian perspective the question is not why, as a biographical fact, these three elements fail to coincide but why, as a social fact, we ever expected they would in the first place. In fact not only do they rarely coincide, and never in a durable way, they actively frustrate each other because they often entail opposing positions within a structural situation. The folk wisdom of ‘wanting what you can’t have’ benefits from an intricate and enticing theorisation in Lacan’s approach, albeit one which I increasingly suspect is not entirely consistent. At its root is the basic orientation towards the imagined object of completion, the excitement (and pressure) with which it sets our desire into motion, as well as the inevitable dejection with which we greet the mundane reality if our pursuit is successful.

In Bruce Fink’s reflection on Seminar VIII he draws attention to the triangular structures in which obsessives and hysterics repeatedly find themselves. For the obsessive a third element is needed to frustrate this moment of encounter with the real of their love. This might be a third party, a specific or imagined rival, or even a situation which gets in the way of being fully present with each other. The point is to keep that lack at bay, affirming that the loved one will in principle bring happiness to you even if in practice it currently isn’t working. But there is also a disavowed enjoyment taken in this third element, in its capacity to stir things up and impinge upon the obsessive, which is crucial to the libidinal economy of their desire. They conceive of their desire as being directed towards their loved one, whereas in fact it’s set into motion by the frustration of that desire and the struggle against it towards an imagined future:

I had a dream, I got everything I wanted
It's not what you think
And if I'm being honest it might have been a nightmare

In contrast the hysteric confronts the lack head on, assuming a role as the object of the other’s desire while also resisting the satisfaction of that desire. The disappointment that there’s nothing more to found in the other’s desire, no final completion or fulfilment, is homologous to the obsessive’s need for their desire to be rendered impossible. Fink explores the triangular patterns this gives rise to, in which a deeper desire for someone else is inferred by the hysteric, raising the question of what this (imagined) object has which they do not have. There’s again a displacement at the heart of the libidinal economy, a third element which mediates the satisfaction imagined to inhere in the dyad, while accounting for the enjoyment which is really found within the situation.

But what explains who we are drawn into these triangles with in the first place? In part it’s the complex interplay of eroticised aspects which add up to allure: the micro-structure of resemblances to be found in how someone shows up to us perceptually, mobilising past evocations in a metonymic dance going all the way back to the primordial caregivers. If you associate to attraction it is possible, I think, to disaggregate what is experienced as a singular feeling into a multiplicity of reminiscences which rush on, as it were, all at once. The conscious content of attraction is the figurative iceberg above the water. But there’s also the macro-structure of the object of attraction (imposing my own conceptual vocabulary here to taxonomise Lacanian ideas) which Bracher has argued constitutes a twelve-fold model of desire. There are different kinds of relations (active, passive) to different kinds of desire (narcissistic, anaclitic) which play out in the imaginary, symbolic and the real. For example the desired object which would constitute you as a particular sort of figure in which you are invested or the object which promises to open up a particular sort of jouissance otherwise foreclosed. These relations will tend to be more or less discriminating about the libidinal micro-structure involved e.g. a broader range of objects of desire might facilitate recognition than are needed for a sense of your own completion.

The complex interplay between the micro-structure of eroticised aspects and the macro-structure of the object of attraction has profound implications for understanding the vicissitudes of desire in everyday life. If our attractions are indeed constituted by a metonymic dance of reminiscences, mobilising past evocations in ways that are largely unconscious, then the objects of our desire are always already imbued with a kind of phantasmatic significance. We are drawn to others not simply for who they are in their concrete particularity, but for what they represent in the economy of our own libidinal history.

This raises the question of whether any encounter with the other can truly be “new,” or whether we are always, to some degree, playing out the repetition compulsion of our own psychic past. At the same time, the macro-structure of the object of attraction, with its different kinds of relations to different kinds of desire, suggests that there is a certain plasticity to the libidinal economy. While we may be drawn to certain types of objects based on our own narcissistic or anaclitic needs, these attractions are not wholly deterministic. There is always the possibility of surprise, of being drawn to an object that breaks the mold of our usual patterns. Perhaps it is in these moments of rupture, when the expected circuits of desire are disrupted, that something genuinely new can emerge. But even here, we must be cautious not to romanticise the radical potential of desire, for as Lacan reminds us, every transgression is always already inscribed within the symbolic order it seeks to subvert. The task, then, is not to seek some mythical outside to the circularity of desire, but to find ways of navigating its repetitions with a greater degree of awareness and creativity, to embrace the intrinsic mobility of the libidinal while also recognising its points of fixation and stagnation.

This can condense and get stuck because desire takes concretes form in demands: I want this object (or at least something that resembles it). But there can also be periods of opening out, where the hold of these demands weakens and the relentless heterogeneity of the demand becomes primary once more. If we get exactly what we want, it can suffocate desire by depriving it of the lack on which it is predicated. But if desire never stabilised and condensed our experience of life would be fragmented and probably quite terrifying. The ethics of desire, as I understand Lacan’s proposal, challenges us to inhabit the metonymy without trying to either shut it down or escape it.

For avoidance of doubt I’m not suggesting we introduce concepts like obsessive and hysteric into asexuality studies. In fact having barely read anything in the field for years, I’m not suggesting anything really, only trying to offer some thoughts which have been percolating in my mind for a while. What I’m gesturing towards is that we might find in Lacan a way of thinking about the experienced dilemmas of libidinal economy which could be a useful psychosocial context for asexuality studies, without subordinating empirical work within asexuality studies to the conceptual categories of psychoanalysis. I was too polite to say it when I saw myself as participating in the field, but I was quite angry about the way the queer theorists waded in and subordinated the lived experience of the asexual community to a pre-existing avant garde theoretical agenda. However I do wonder if psychoanalytical thought can be brought in through a more careful and sensitive direction, which sees lived experience as paramount while recognising there is a value in understanding the parameters of that experience.

What is sexual attraction? I still don’t know despite the six years I spent working on asexuality studies and the last year I’ve spent obsessively reading Lacanian theory. But the latter has got me closer to an understanding of what it is not. In What is Sex? Alenka Zupančič cautions against reducing the sexual relation to the bodily real:

We must not make the mistake of conceiving of the existence of the sexual relation as a fantasy, which psychoanalysis would invite us to get rid of, and to accept instead the reality of partial drives and fleeting pleasures (“squeezing” here and there) as the ultimate raw reality as all there is.

Pg 18

This made me think back to Elena Tonra’s haunting account of a traumatic one night stand in Romance. If we reduce the sexual relation to the ‘squeezing’ then its logical outgrowth is to conceive the sexual partner as a collection of body parts, even a ‘slaughterhouse’:

With every stab wound and exhale, I promised myself
That I would never lose my useful fears of grown up men
I’m scarred with cruel intentions
I thought of another the whole time
Who would’ve never stared me like that
See, he saw me as a human
This one thinks I’m a slaughterhouse

Zupančič’s point (and I think Tonra’s as well, albeit in a very different register) is that “these partial pleasures and satisfactions are already (in-)formed by the negativity implied by the non-relation … They do not exist independently of it, so that we could have recourse to them, for lack of anything better”. There is not some material core of fucking which is left over when fantasy is abstracted away, but rather a physicality which is always defined by the aspiration for something more. The lack is already present in what remains. In Tonra’s case the encounter is haunted by the figure of the ex (“how little joy I realized within my time with my ex guy, before these statues arrived”) whose recognition of her contrasts with the unintentional violence of this “stereotype with strong hands”.

Tonra sings towards the end of the song: “See me here, meet me here … I wanna know who you are”. The trauma of the physicality is defined by the presence of absence, rather than being some dark kernel which is left over when intimacy is missing. You don’t get to the reality of sex by stripping away the romantic and intimate supplement to it, but rather by understanding how these are knotted together in complex and contradictory ways. As Zupančič later puts it, “Sexuality is not ravaged by, or disturbed, because of a gap cutting deep into its ’tissue,’ it is, rather, the messy sewing up of this gap” (pg 43). It is the place where bodily enjoyment meets language and the law, awkwardly perched between them in a way which permits of no resolution, as much as the obsessive in particular is prone to try.

So what is sexual attraction? If this seems obvious to you, in a way it’s not to either me or the asexual community, it’s worth dwelling on why this is. To what extent are you naming it? What work goes on when you put it into words? What is being excluded by the language you use? And does what you’ve excluded ever come back to haunt you? One reason I stopped working on this topic was because I realised my interest was in the aporias of sexual culture rather than the experience of asexual people, leaving me unwilling to predicate an investigation of the former on the empirical work I’d done with the latter. But it was the asexual community’s tendency to name what was otherwise unnamed, to raid the inarticulate in order to collectively understand their experiences, which felt to me like a significant contribution to our wider understanding of sexuality.