Cinsellik Nedir?

“I'm not making love right now, I'm talking to you. Come and see, I can experience the same satisfaction I experience while making love.” Lacan gives this example when explaining his claim that sublimation is the satisfaction of instincts without repression. Sublimation is often thought of as a substitute gratification: instead of “making love,” I am talking, writing, or painting, for example. In this way, I get another kind of satisfaction in place of the “missing” satisfaction. However, Lacanian psychoanalysis makes a more paradoxical determination: The activity is different, but the satisfaction is exactly the same. In other words, the main point here is that the satisfaction obtained from talking is not explained in terms of its sexual origin, but that it is sexual in itself. This is what forces us to radically address the question of what the nature and status of sexuality is. Let's remember Marx's famous sentence: "The key to ape anatomy lies in human anatomy" (and perhaps not the other way around). Similarly, we must insist that the satisfaction derived from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction or sexuality and its inherent contradictions (and not vice versa). The simple but at the same time the most difficult question that determines the direction of this book arises from here: What is sexuality?

-Alenka Zupancic-

(From the Promotional Bulletin)