My earliest substantive encounter with Lacanian theory was encountering clinicians who had a creepy and epistemically violent inclination to explain away asexuality. I just stumbled across this thesis which seems to be engaged in a non-pathologising Lacanian analysis, which looks extremely interesting. These are good questions to be asking from page 10 of the dissertation:
- Are experiences in earliest childhood responsible for the formation of asexuality? If so, are these experiences part of a common set of experiences for all subjects?
- If the asexual experiences nothing of sexual arousal or sexual attraction for another person, what pleasure or jouissance, if any, is being derived from this?
- Does asexuality derive a counter-intuitive pleasure from experiencing no sexual attraction? If so, is this different to the non-phallic jouissance which Lacanian theory posits as feminine only?
- If asexuality is not sexually attracted to another person does this indicate that no object-choice has been made or is asexuality aimed at an object which has not been considered so far?
- Because sexual desire is absent, could asexuality represent a departure from the Lacanian concept of human desire as the desire of the Other? If so, can Lacanian theory offer an understanding of this departure?
- Asexuality represents an absence of sexual desire. Can this absence be accounted for using psychoanalytic theory which posits that libido, as sexual energy, is present for everyone?
- In approaching an understanding of asexuality from a psychoanalytic perspective, is it possible to do so without pathologising it?
- Does asexuality represent a new paradigm in which a subject can create their own support in terms of meaning around the absence of sexual desire and which, in turn, establishes a new relation to the object as other person?
The notion of a distinctively asexual jouissance feels important to me, as it flips the pathologising narrative on its head. Rather than seeing asexuality in terms of a loss of enjoyment, it asks the question of what forms of enjoyment allosexuals might lose through the hegemony of the sexual assumption? This is essentially what fascinated me about the research topic as a non-asexual who nonetheless felt rather alienated from allosexual culture. My instinct was essentially that the epistemic hegemony of the sexual assumption (i.e. everyone experiences sexual attraction and its more or less a uniform experience) occupied a space where a possible deeper form of experience could reside, even if I lacked the psychoanalytical language to fully articulate the point at the time.
Mark Carrigan 