JOAN COPJEC

The Fable of the Stork and Other False Sexual Theories

hy are there two sexes?" is a question often addressed to me in my role as defender of the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference. The term theory is often used currently where formerly one might have said philosophy. Comparative literature departments, for example, are just as likely, or more so, to claim they teach theory as philosophy. This suhstitution of terms signals that those who "do theory" consider theirs a more modest enterprise than the one undertaken hy philosophers. This modesty is a matter of the kinds of phenomena theorists are willing to investigate; the informality of the credentialing requirements for laying claim to the status of theorist; and, most significantly, the ahandonment of helief in any ahsolute. The lahel "theorist" vaunts the finitude of the suhject and the limits of knowledge. I state this paradoxically hecause however limited or modest theorists conceive their project to he, they do privately and puhlicly, theoretically and practically, evidence a certain immodest self-regard, hoth with respect to the rights and powers they are willing to accord to the finite suhject and with respect to the nontheorists whose investigations seem to them less worthy. The
V o l u m e 21, N u m b e r 1 DOI 10.1215/10407391-2009-017 2 o i o b y Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : Ajournai of Feminist Culturai Studies

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first pointthat the supposedly puny, demoted finite subject seems to have usurped through its very finitnde the center of the universe once againcannot be discnssed here. The second point has been vociferously made by the belligerent exponents of "post-theory," cognitivist-formalisthistoricists who try to puncture the patent immodesty of theorists' selfregard by attacking the self-delusions of these theorists' theory. Posttheorists maintain that the questions posed by theorists are too grand to be supported by the cultural artifacts under investigation and too far beyond the scope of the investigators' expertise to be answerable either by them or by their objects of study. Those of us who began studying film in the late 1970s, and who called ourselves "film theorists" to distinguish what we did from what we saw as the more casual approach to film that preceded ours, soon felt ourselves squeezed between, on tbe one side, post-theorists who refused our questions about how the viewing subject was sutured into a film (to cite only the most infamous example) in favor of more modest questions about minor and large technological innovations and the formal features that could be isolated to define the films of a director or a decade; and on the other, Deleuze's dismissal of our inquiries into the linguistic structure of film narratives in favor of questions about movement, time, and their relations. The (unoriginal) point I want to make through this brief sketch of currently available theoretical positions is that the debates that pit them against each other are total or disqualifying because they center on the questions posed. One takes the questions one asks as pertinent or correct and opposes those posed by others as impertinent or wrong. When you question another's questions, you attack what is most basic to her theory, since the entire field of inquiry is constituted by its founding questions. If a question becomes interesting to you, becomes your question, you are inducted into the theoretical fieldthe problematicto which it gives rise. If a series of questions does not grab you, you remain outside the field and bebold what goes on inside sometimes dispassionately, with more puzzlement than interest. A symposium held a couple of years ago titled Contesting Theories (of film) attempted to draw participants, who came from vastly different theoretical camps, into debate. Sparks flew on a few occasions, but for the most part no discussion was able to be sustained for very long, for simple lack of engagement. And yet, we must assume that this dispasslon and lack of engagement was a polite disguise designed to forestall the eruption of a dispute that would dissipate the appearance

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of civility we were desperate to maintain. For the disagreement over what constitutes a proper question is the hloodiest of all, a battle for the legitimacy of the terms by which one approaches the world. In several short texts, Freud is preoccupied hy the intellectual interest of children in the "riddles of sex." He offers his ohservations regarding their infantile questions and false theories as primary evidence that childhood is not the state of sexual innocence overprotective adults pre^tend it is. His attempt to dissolve the ideology of innocence serves a capital! function, for if it can be shown that "immature humanity" is endowed with sexual instinct at an "unexpectedly early age," then psychoanalysis is in a better position to add the following game-changing codicil to the philosophical theory of the subject: subject, as such, is sexuated ("Sexual Enlightenment" 155). That is, sex is no longer conceivable as a secondary characteristic of the subject, acquired through socialization, but becomes for psychoanalysis a primary or ontological fact. Or: sex is not a predicate of the subject, it predicates that there is a subject. There are very few thinkers as gifted as Freud at educing such far-reaching conclusions from such seemingly paltry and innocent data, such apparently modest material. But even when one realizes how consequential the sexual curiosity of children will become for the very conception of the subject, Freud's dogged querying of the sexual queries of children can try one's patience. It is not immediately apparent why he worries so much ahout the priority of one or the other of what he sees as the two prototypes of questions: 1) the question of whether there is a sexual distinction or not (whether girls do or do not have a "widdler"); and 2) the question about where babies come from. Gradually it becomes evident, however, that the question of sex is for Freud inextricable from the question of these questions. The following sentence from Freud's "On the Sexual Theories of Children" is critical to understanding the relation hetween sex and these questions: "A child's desire for knowledge on this point [that is, sex] does not in fact awaken spontaneously, prompted perhaps by some inborn need for established causes; it is aroused under the goad of the selfseeking instincts that dominate him, when [...] he is confronted with the arrival of a new baby" (212). This is a crucial point that a less thoughtful observer might have overlooked: the sexual questions of children cannot be prompted by the principle of sufficient reason, by a belief that there is a reason for everything, since this principle cannot be assumed to be innate and has no doubt not yet been acquired at this age. The queries.

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then, do not open a disinterested investigation, prompted by reason, into the way things work, but are, rather, self-interested. They bear directly on the child herself and are prompted by her experience of sex. This selfinterested dimension of the child's questions appears in the citation in the observation that they are goaded by the arrivalthe "unwelcome arrival," Ereud stresses in an earlier essayof another child. Ereud's remarks here pertain specifically to the question, "Where do babies come from?" Later, however, when he makes the decision to attribute the other question, the one about sexual distinction, exclusively to the girl, he associates that question with the much-despised notion of penis envy. It is the girl, who observes the anatomical difference between herself and little boys, who is preoccupied by the question of sexual distinction. Not finding the notion of penis envy compelling, I have, like others, regarded it as a misstep on Ereud's part. But I never noticed until recently the symmetry between the two questions, which are both said to be instigated by envycaused, on the one side, by the sudden appearance of another child, on the other, by the sight of the boy's penis. What is it that Ereud is trying to remark by this symmetry if not the dissymmetry in each case between the child who begins posing questions and other children, who are enviously regarded by the child as different from herself, if not outright rivals? Philosophers, too, have often noted a dissymmetry between the subject and others that stems from the fact that from the subjective position from w^hich she observes others, she is unable to observe herself and thus remains uniquely invisible among all the other subjects in the world. Here is Ereud's description of the "momentous discovery which little girls are destined to make": "They notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to penis envy" ("Some" 252). The problems with this account have been amply rehearsed. That the little girl could, through an untutored, naked look, assess in a split second the superior value of the boy's little organ, and thus of the little boy, strains credibility. But it is Ereud himself who points this out as he chastises Alfred Adler for "hopelessly mix[ing]" the "biological, social, and psychological meanings of'masculine' and 'feminine.'" Ereud insists that "it is impossible, and is disproved by observation, that a child, whether male or female, should found the plan of its life on an original depreciation of the female sex and take the wish to be a real man as its 'guiding line.' [. . .] Children have.

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to begin with, no idea of the significance of the distinction between the sexes [. ..] the social underestimation of women is completely foreign to them" ("On the History" 55). All the little girl sees at a glance is that the hoy's tiny appendage, his sex, is "strikingly visible." But this is enough, this is the crucial point; what the girl sees in a flash is not the superior social value of the hoy, hut the fact that despite the obviousness of his sex, the boy is still visible, visihle as a sexed heing. We witness here how the! psychoanalytic codicil alters the argument of the philosophers. The human subject is not simply that heing whose being remains a question for her; rather, the human subject is, as sexuated being, the heing whose being raises questions for her. Or: it is specifically the experience of sexuality that raises the question of heing by rendering the suhject inconspicuous, opaque to herself. This is true for the boy no less than for the girl. It is the sexual instinct that causes the boy to experience the sudden appearance of a sibling as an intrusion, almost a visual assault. For there is an ohviousness of otliers that is unsymmetrical with the boy's feeling of inconspicuousness. The question "Where do (these intrusive) habies come from?" is aimed at remedying the boy's own feeling of invisibility, at allowing him to appear before himself. But Freud is at pains to stress that however eager they are to have their questions answered, children are never taken in by the fable of the stork or any of the other tales that are offered as answers hy their parents. We cannot assume that their failure to be satisfied by these tales is accounted for by the fact that their powers of reason are greater than we give them credit for, because Freud has already taken this option off the table. These small children are not the father of Leihniz; it is no fledgling principle of sufficient reason, but the experience of sexuality that prods their incessant questions. What, then, is the source of their dissatisfaction? Why do children distrust every story, those proffered by their parents an'd those they concoct on their own, and begin to suspect that there is something forbidden, some secret, that is withheld from them by means of these obviouslyjalse tales? If belief is not ultimately forthcoming, this is because there re nains for the child "a piece of ignorance that cannot be made good," despite all the answers aimed at dislodging it (Freud, "Sexual Theories" 215). A quota of libido, or of the "sexual drive," which attaches to the subject by virtue of the fact that his being is sexuated, cannot be vulgarized or visualized by narrative or reason. The conspicuousness of the subject's inconspicuousness, experienced as a secret withheld from him or her.

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thus persists as a "piece of ignorance" and continues to pose the question of who he or she is. Here, then, is the final distinction: while philosophy posits the persistence of the unanswerahle question of heing in nonspecific terms, psychoanalysis maintains-on the hasis of the actual interrogatives of countless children and adults-that this question is formulated in two distinct ways. We noted that Freud hegan simply hy ohserving that the sexual curiosity of children expressed itself in two different questions and only later concluded that one of these, the question of sexual difference, was the exclusive province of the girl. The hesitant, interrogative mode of neurotics, hoth hysterics and ohsessionals, who seem never to know how they fit into the world, convinced Lacan that Freud was correct to put this question, "Am I a man or a woman?," in the mouth of the female suhject, hut Lacan rephrased the question that torments the male suhject. "Where do hahies come from?" hecomes "Have /heen horn yet? Am I dead or alive?" Freud's earlier investigations do seem to lend support to Lacan's later claim that for women the universe is riven from the get-go hy sexual distinction, which means that there is no all to which she feels she constitutes an exception. Those who hecome men, however, hegin as hoys for whom sex makes no appreciahle difference. There is for them, thus, an all to which they helong even as they experience themselves as exceptions to it. It is against the hackground of this entanglement of the question of sex with the question of heing that I want to return to the question I am often called upon to answer: "Why are there (only) two sexes?" I confess that the question usually leaves me cold, if not irritated. Once, upon heing taunted (the correct word in this particular instance) hy this question, I hecame suddenly determined that esprit would not accost me helatedly on some stairway, hut would serve me right then and there as a douhle-harreled shotgun: "Why? How many do you want?" No need to he sarcastic, I thought, when I heard the hlast hurst from my mouth, still hoping, of course, that I had managed to hit my Grand Inquisitor hetween the eyes. (Let me reassure you that I did not permit the conversation to end on this ahrupt note, hut attempted to present some reasons for my response to the questioner, the audience, and myself. And I have since returned on and off to this incident to check how far I have gotten in my thinking on this issue.) It is not that I cannot imagine ever having a thoughtful conversation ahout whether there are two or more sexes. What I cannot imagine is having a fruitful conversation ahout the suhject with anyone so averse

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to the discourse of psychoanalysis that she is willing to pour wax in her ears and strap herself to a mast in order to hear nothing of what Freud or Lacan have to say on the matter. It seems to me that to attempt to speak about sex without availing oneself of the resources of psychoanalysis is like trying to make a film without availing oneself of a camera. It is foolhardy not to recognize that one needs an instrument appropriate to the task at hand. Psychoanalysis is the only appropriate discourse because it is the only one to ask what sex is, the only one to approach sex on an ontological level to try to determine how it functions as a primary datum. Other discourses either take sex for granted without examining it in itself or reduce it to an effect of something else, thus ridding the world of sex as such. Foucault, for example, makes important arguments about the biopolitical conception of sex and the disastrous effect of this conception on modern life. But his mistake is to confuse a concept of sex with sex, even if he adamantly refuses to see it this way: "Now, it is precisely this idea of sex in itself that we cannot accept [though he is careful immediately to add] without examination" (152). The problem is his examination is flawed. Throwing Freud's on a pile with other discourses on sex, Foucault does noti bother to distinguish the former from the rest. The result of this commingling is a theoretical monster, a caricature of psychoanalysis, which according to Foucaultdefines sex as "something desirable" and affirms on the basis of this desirability "the rights of sex against power" (157). In fact, psychoanalysis is far from conceiving sex as simply desirable; on the contrary, sex causes the subject to turn away from it in disgust or horror and often thwarts the subject's will or prevents it from acting altogether. Nor is it correct to say that in the psychoanalytic view sex exists to resist or oppose power or to try to liberate itself from a power that represses it. This call for sexual liberation is foreign to psychoanalysis and is imported by Foucault from other discourses of the period, whose revolutionary cries for liberationhe correctly concludesare nothing but shams and ominous signs of their complicity with the biopolitical regime. In the end, Foucault gets rid of sex entirely, seeing it as an abstract idea, a mirage, created by a ramifying strategy of power.' His critique of tbe psycho-bio-political collusion completed, he begins to look around for a way to think what is missing and necessary, a different, more warm-blooded "economy of bodies and pleasures" that will expose the cold, "austere monarchy of sex" for the counterfeit it is, but: too late. If this economy is nowhere to be found, this is because he has thrown the baby of sex (in the psychoanalytic conception) out with the bathwater of his misconception of it.

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The Fable of the Storic

Freud lived to witness and vigorously contest an earlier and much less sophisticated attempt to reduce the question of sex to a question of power, this time hy the Swiss analyst Adler. Linking Adler with his Zurich colleague Carl Jung, Freud tarred them both with the same brush. He accused them of concocting a family romance for psychoanalysis wherein all its major ideas of "lowly"that is sea^ua/origin were assigned a "higher," more elevated pedigree. Where Freud said sex, they said power; where he said libido, they suhstituted abstract ideas that remained "mystifying and incomprehensible to wise men and fools alike." Ears plugged and wrists bound to the mast, they carefully picked out "a few cultural overtones from the symphony of life and [. . .] failed to hear the mighty and primordial melody of the instincts" ("On the History" 62). In other words, they eliminated the messy, disturhing notion of sex in favor of more "high-minded" cultural ideas. It seems to me that for all its talk of sex, much of contemporary theory adopts this same strategy: tinkering with concepts developed in psychoanalysis but disdaining any reference to jouissance, drives, fantasy, it weaves these concepts into philosophicalpolitical-ethical systems that distort or jettison the most radical insights of clinical analysis and render the world safe from sex. While examples of this problem are numerous, I will briefly mention just one more: Deleuze, since his engagement with psychoanalysis is, like Foucault's, at once deep and vexed and for this reason instructive. Deleuze often takes up psychoanalytic ideas, which he then disassembles and remakes. There is nothing to object to in this procedure except when one notices a certain systematicity that smacks of "family romancing" on a grand scale. Stripping sex of lack, objects of satisfaction, and the fantasies that structure it, Deleuze ends by positing a notion of becoming that stretches from the inorganic to human life. Following Bergson, he asserts that there is not merely perception of things, but perception in things themselves: "[T]he eye is in things, in luminous images in themselves. 'Photography [. . .] is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things'" (60). In short, Deleuze finds a way of throwing my earlier analogy into question by making the world over into cinema without availing himself of the use of a camera. Deleuzians argue that his represents a radical displacement of subjectivity; it strikes me, rather, as an enlargement or universalization of it. The question "Why two?" arose, on the occasion under discussion, out of a vague (that is, brandless) hostility to psychoanalysis. I responded by protesting that one of the first things psychoanalysis did was

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to relieve me of the obligation to answer the question as posed by removing purpose or utility from sex. Sexual difference serves no purpose; it

does not exist for some prescribed end. Erom Ereud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality on, psychoanalysis must be credited as the discourse that first refused to take genital copulation and procreation as the proper or natural ends of sex. It is thus pointless to try to go behind sex to ask why its bloom is double. Sex is "without why." I do acknowledge, however, that I am obliged to answer why I follow psychoanalysis in positing that there are two, and just two, sexes; that is, I must adduce some evidence for my position. When I responded to thc Grand Inquisitor with the counterquestion, "How many do you want?" I was preparing to acquit myself of this obligation by first casting doubt on her apparent supposition that a larger, most likely infinite, number was better than two. Erankly, I believe that a simple operation of pluralization or multiplication too often substitutes for thought. The first and closest example of this that comes to mind is the ad hoc multiplication of drives that took place during Ereud's time when other analysts began inventi n g separate drives for each activity in want of explanation. Not only did this out-of-control proliferation fail to clarify the act to which each was assigned as shadow explanation, it also did nothing to clarify the nature of the drive, as Ereud himself was attempting to do through a series of accounts of the double nature of the drive, the unavoidable recognition that it manifested itself as internally divided, rather than multiple. It is the same with sex. Those who claim there are a myriad of sexes adduce as evidence the infinite variety of persons and leave it at that. They do nothing to try to explain what sex is or how it contributes to the differences among persons. In other words, it is impossible to discern what question the answer "an infinite number" answers about sex or anything else; on the contrary, this answer seems calculated to skirt all the questions that might be raised by sex. Eor example: How and why do the myriad of individual sexes form themselves into groups? What is it ahout sex that makes it account for not only the distinction among subjects but also their willingness and ability to effect these differences? One is entitled to be suspicious of any cause or explanation of a phenomenon that too closely and simply mimics the phenomenon it purports to explain, that exhausts itself as the account of a single manifestation of a thing and cannotj account for different, even contradictory, manifestations of it. Eor psychoanalysis, sex is fundamentally but not only a question, the question of being, but it also provides answers to a number of

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questions ahout seemingly unrelated phenomena. Freud did not begin with the unexamined proposition that there are two sexes, hut first proposed that there was for immature subjects only one. This proposal, we saw, did not hold up under scrutiny of the girl's distinct form of sexual inquiry and thus two was proposed as an answer to the necessity of accounting for this unexpected difference. Other questions arose along the way, hut one of the most significant concerned the (already mentioned) discovery of major obstacles to genital coupling: a much less assured outcome of the sexuated suhject than was anticipated. Freud treated these obstacles as hard facts and gave them a determining role to play in his conception of what sex is. Pushing Freud's thinking much farther, Lacan's maxim "There is no sexual relation" was designed to expose the ontological stakes of the ohstacles encountered hy Freud. The maxim says: the obstacle is not extraneous to sex but part of its definition. What sexual ohstacles reveal is a fault, a tear, in the symbolic universe; a void opens and thus forces the symbolic to incline or curve away from itself. This void gives berth to sex, which can be defined as an investment in the void. Those who hold out for an infinite number of sexes do not form a unified front but are divided rather into roughly two groups. To one of them, this ontological turn of the psychoanalytic argument will sound foreign and nonsensical. For them sexual diversity moots any talk of sexual division. The other group, however, takes the ahove argument as confirmation of the singularity of the suhject, the radical uniqueness of each, and this uniqueness is thought to he compromised, straitjacketed, by the notion of sexual difference. If one accepts that sex divides and singularizes the subject, one needs to say why one continues nevertheless to insist on the two of sexual difference. My answer is this: every subject experiences the enigma of his/her divided, singular, sexuated heing from one or the other side of the symbolic tear, from the side of the void or the side of the symbolic. The difference in these positions gives rise to the distinct forms through which the enigma takes shape. I have begun to wade into deeper water than I can swim in here. Allow me to climb ashore with one parting remark. My perhaps too automatic quip "How many do you want?" stressed not only number, but also number's possible connection to desire. Be careful, I was hinting, that you do not confuse theory with wish fulfillment. During the disappointing reign of identity politics, such confusion was rampant. Now that this era is drawing to an end, the problem appears in a more philosophical light as worthy of careful consideration. How does one sort out these two impulses?

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My enduring fidelity to Freud has to do with my conviction that through theory and example he tried to show us the way.
JOAN COPJEC is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Engiish, Comparative Literature, and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, where she is aiso direetor of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. Her most recent book was Imagine There's No Woman. She is currently finishing a book manuscript tentatively titled "Between Paris and Tehran: Cinema, Psychoanalysis, and Islam." Note 1 I have elaborated this part of my argument in depth in my essay "Sex, Mirage, or Montage?"

Works Cited

Contesting Theories. Film Theory Exploratory Seminar. Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. May 2007. Copjec, Joan. "Sex, Mirage, or Montage?" Lacan. Ed. Volkan Celebi and Yesim Keskin. Spec, issue oiMonoKL 6-7 (Spring 2009): 575-88. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema i: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: u of Minnesota p, 1986. Foucault, Michel. Volume 1: The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Freud, Sigmund. "On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement." 1914. The StandardEdition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans, and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1957. 7-66. 24 vols. 1955-74. . "On the Sexual Theories of Children." 1908. The Standard Edition. Vol. 9. 1959 . 1959
209-26.

. "The Sexual Enlightenment of Children." 1907. The Standard Edition. \o\. 9.

131-39-

. "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes." 1925. The Standard Edition. Vol. 19. 1961. 248-58.

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