The Sovereignty of the Image in the Sexual

Rik Loose

In the first lecture of My Teaching Lacan says the following: “So when I talk about a hole in truth […] it is the negative aspect that appears in anything to do with the sexual, namely, its inability to aver”.[1] Something about the sexual cannot be stated or positivized. Lacan’s statement comes at the end of a section he had started by saying that what psychoanalysis said about the truth of the sexual no longer has much impact.[2] Indeed, we do not live anymore in Victorian times, times of (sexual) repression, about which, Lacan said that this was the cause of what Freud set in motion.[3] Lacan notes that something has changed, and that psychoanalysis has become much more public. He made these comments in 1967 and by then the world was on the verge of a change in that sexuality had become more visible. For example, the first softcore porn magazines were published in the 50’s to be followed by hardcore ones. Also, peepshows had begun to emerge. The hope that drove this push for visibility – made possible by science and finding its parallel there – was that the increased visibility would harmonize the subject’s relationship to sexuality and indeed to the sexual relation itself.

In the same lecture, just before he made these comments, Lacan mentions sexual life and via some wordplays including the word vice, he coins the phrase ça visse sexuelle implying that the subject is screwed in terms of his or her sexual life.[4] He adds that the psychoanalytic journals do not tell stories about fucking anymore and that they leave that to the dailies, i.e., mass media.[5] What Lacan predicted with ça visse sexuelle is that developments in the field of sexuality would lead to the object gaze becoming screwed to the image and to the screen. From then on, at least in the moment of capture, the subject would be all alone. These images function like ready-made fantasies framing the object gaze and as such keeping the subject in a vice-grip.

The image (of pornography) reigns supreme in our modern digitalized culture. It shows that the gaze is susceptible to being hijacked by it, but also that the visibility aspect of the image cannot capture the real of the sexual act and of the sexual relation. This results in a lack of ultimate satisfaction that is avidly sought, and which causes both the general proliferation of the pornographic image as well as the vice-grip the image has on the sexual life of the subject. The lure of the pornographic image is that – despite the lack of ultimate satisfaction – it nevertheless promises this satisfaction with the next image. This was articulated by an analysand with the following words: “you don’t get what you ultimately want with each image, but you can’t stop because each image suggests that you will get it with the next one”. This articulation concerns the promise implied in the seduction by the image as a veil over the hole where there is nothing to see.

rEFERences

[1] Lacan, J., “The Place, Origin and End of My Teaching”, in My Teaching, London: Verso, 2008, p. 22.

[2] Ibid., p. 17.

[3] Miller, J.-A., “Milanese Intuitions,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks 34, 2019, p. 94.

[4] Lacan, J, “The Place, Origin and End of My Teaching”, op.cit. p. 18.

[5] Ibid. p. 19.