On 3 February 2025, the WAP evening was held in Paris, inaugurating the work towards the XVth Congress, which will take place in Paris in the spring of 2026 on the theme “There is no sexual relation”. Introduction by Christiane Alberti, Presidente of the WAP.
The title of this Congress, “There is no sexual relation”, calls for an immediate remark: this is the first time the term “sexual” has appeared in the title of a wap congress. We therefore have the opportunity to question what made Freud’s discovery so scandalous, but also so successful, if we consider that Freud contributed to the dissolution of civilized sexual morality, by bringing to light the importance of the sexual in the psychical economy, to the extent of pointing out infantile sexuality. He extended its significance far beyond animal mating and genitality, considering, for example, that in infantile sexuality (referring to the paediatrician Lindner[1]), it is in sucking that we must see the prototype of the sexual drive: a primary, primordial claim to voluptuousness, independent of vital need, a state of the silent body in relation to itself. As he writes, radically, in “‘Civilized’ sexual morality…” the sexual drive behaves in a self-willed manner.[2]
Since Freud’s era, sexuality has undergone radical change. Sexuality is omnipresent, made visible, splashed all over the web and social networks. Shortly before 1968, in My Teaching, Lacan underlined the clear evidence that this is the actual change: sexuality has lost something of its clandestine, transgressive jouissance, giving way to a sexuality that has “something much more public, […] in the open air.”[3] As a result, subjects see themselves stripped of a part of their intimacy and secrecy, as if hurled beyond themselves onto the public stage. This is all the more present nowadays in the era of the development of sexuality in digital spaces.
A recent, well-documented Inserm survey on changes in the sexuality of French people aged 15 to 89 recently published results that are worth noting.[4]
Firstly, the results confirm trends that are not novel: major changes linked to the promotion of the norm of equality between the sexes and sexualities, and profound upheavals in family structures in a context where the law is extending its reach over marriage and parenthood.
What’s most interesting is what’s pinpointed as new and dubbed the “contemporary paradox of sexuality”.[5] It is characterized by a greater diversity of sexual activity—an increase in the number of partners, an extension of sexual “practices” (less penetration and more masturbation)—at the same time as a lower frequency of sexual intercourse. These trends are also observed in other countries (Germany, USA, Finland, Japan, UK).
In a way, these elements are not unrelated to what is found in psychoanalytic referrals. This is particularly true of subjects who, in their frantic multiplication of partners, under the imperative of immediate and permanent jouissance, abandon themselves not to the destiny of the unconscious, but to a consumption in which all division is annulled in strict bodily dependence; sexuality thus joins the regime of addictions as so many forms of filling the void. Acting is the subject’s defence against shame.
But there are also cases where sexuality is put at a distance in the form of the fraternal couple, the mirrored duo, in which the illusion of being one is carried to its peak, in the avoidance or negation of the entanglements of love and desire.
In one sense, Lacan gives us a reading of this paradox through what in Seminar xi he calls “desexualization”.[6] In a civilizational context where having has taken precedence over being, where the object is in the command seat, contemporary observers take the view that the erotic order is aligned with the imperatives of the market, in a way that is, let’s say, disembodied, disaffected. Lacan gives us another, less simplistic reading, illuminating more precisely what happens when the objects of reality take precedence over the intimate cause of the subject. With regard to the oral object, he points out that the eroticized zone is only valid for drive satisfaction insofar as other, desexualized zones are excluded. But what happens in the opposite movement, when it’s the sexual object itself, the partner, that runs towards the slope of reality? The subject, Lacan tells us, then enters a fall zone known as the reality function. Reality takes precedence over the real drive, flesh over the body. Is this not a key in reading contemporary sexual disenchantment, even cynicism?
The remainder of the study underlines the extent to which the question of sexual assault occupies a preponderant place: a step has been taken in the direction of a culture of contract, notably to ensure consent.[7] We need to reread “Kant with Sade”[8] to realize that a contract-based society, far from standing in the way, encourages the cynicism of pleasure and new “laws of hospitality” such as swinging [mélangisme].
Today, the imaginary of the rivalry between men and women tends to be reduced to the mode of confrontation, of un-nuanced radicalism. From these clamours, it is the regime of absolute equality of subjects that takes precedence over the differentiation of the jouissance of men and women, the differentiation of jouissances altogether, through the illusion of an identity-based sharing of jouissance. The underlying axiom is that of the separation of the sexes, leaving each to his or her drive solitude. It’s a question of detaching oneself from the Other, always suspected of violence[9] and the rape of being. Dissymmetry with the big Other is denounced as a relation of domination, whereas Lacan asserts that only the artefact of the Other makes possible what is of the order of sex, of the sexuated relation.[10]
Let’s make no mistake about it: this separatism does not expose the non-relation, but rather desexualizes it, prescribing the sexual relation as it should be, making it exist in denial.
This presupposes a return to the “there is no” of the aphorism “there is no sexual relation”. Jacques-Alain Miller comments on this in The Archacon Conversation: “Lacan’s ‘there is no’ is a blank page, it’s not inscribed. We must distinguish the negation of a written proposition from the non-writing of that proposition.”[11] J.-A. Miller has proposed a way of writing this by representing the absence of sexual relation with simply the symbol of the empty set and writing above it “the sigma of the symptom”. In this “there is no”, we’re dealing with a different lack from that of foreclosure. The “there is no sexual relation” is not a hole: it’s a pure “there is no”. It is therefore, insofar as it is “inscribable, foundational, as a relation”[12] that the sexual relation does not exist. So here we have to question the true value of what is written.
Lacan makes this clear in “L’étourdit”: “That there is no sexual relation does not imply that there is no relation to sex.”[13] That there is no sexual relation that can be inscribed is precisely what conditions the existence of relations—that there is something of the order of sex—those revealed by unconscious liaisons; relations that pass through jouissance, the body and language, through the know-how of the unconscious with lalangue, in other words, through the symptom. These liaisons are always symptomatic. Sexuality may be out in the open, but sex is always symptomatic. We’ll never be done with it. This is where psychoanalysis comes into its own, precisely at a time when the symptom has no place in discourse and is disinvested by the subject itself.
Following Lacan’s approach to the other side of contemporary life, this Congress will examine the consequences of this “there is no”, on the modern myths of sexual life and love. In the age of the Ones-all-alone, is the desire to form a couple still relevant? When no one believes in the “to each Jack his Jill” program anymore, is love still the preferred supplement for non-relation? What other forms of substitution are revealed by clinical practice?
Thus, following a Lacan connected to the underside (inverse, other side) of contemporary life, this congress will need to examine the consequences of this “there is no” on the modern myths of sexual life and love. In the age of the “Ones-all-alone”, is the desire to form a couple still relevant? When nobody believes anymore in the old script “to each their other”, is love still the privileged supplement to the non-relationship? What other forms of supplementation are revealed by clinical work and practice?
The Opacity of the Sexual
In an interview with Panorama magazine, Lacan remarked that “the all-pervasive sex mania is nothing more than a publicity stunt.”[14] Clearly, it will not solve the mystery of sexuality. Indeed, no matter how digitised it becomes, as Éric Laurent put it, “[the] programme of jouissance is not virtual”.[15]
In the Seminar Le Sinthome, it is precisely the term “sexual opacity”[16] that attracts attention. All thought, all knowledge, Lacan tells us, must be reconsidered from the perspective of the sexual act; language itself is relational to sex.
In an unpublished conversation with uforca on The Sinthome,[17]J.-A. Miller, sheds light on the opacity in question. Here, it does not refer to the impossibility of speaking about sexual desire. Rather, it presents itself as a stain in the visual field; the sexual opacifies the visual field, the visible face of [the] “there is no”. Miller specifies that the reference here is not to the enigma (the signifying register), but to the imaginary of the body as the consistency of the parlêtre. So much so that the question to be resolved would be: “How is it conceivable that the other parlêtre adores his body, and not mine?”[18]
I find this perspective compelling, not only because it sheds light on opacity, but because it allows us to accept that the light is shining on us, a way of not looking too closely, such that the mystery of sexuality remains intact.
[1] Cf. Freud, S., “Lecture xx, The Sexual Life of Humans,” Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1917), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume xvi, London: Hogarth Press, 1963, p. 313.
[2] Cf. Freud, S., “‘Civilised Sexuality’ and Modern Nervous Illness” (1908), se, Volume ix, London: Hogarth Press, 1959, p. 197.
[3] Lacan, J., My Teaching, trans. D. Macey, London: Verso, 2008, pp. 17–18.
[4] Inserm, Contextes des sexualités en France, 2024.
[5] Ibid., p. 39.
[6] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xi: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London: Norton, 1977, p. 155.
[7] Cf. Inserm, Contextes des sexualités en France, op. cit., p. 40.
[8] Cf. Lacan, J., “Kant with Sade,” Écrits, trans. B. Fink, New York/London: Norton, 2006, pp. 645–668.
[9] As the statistical increase in the reported questioning of the heterosexual choice indicates: the better to protect oneself from aggression. Cf. inserm, Contextes des sexualités en France, op. cit., p. 40.
[10] Cf. Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xviii, On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink Cambridge: Polity, 2025, p. 131.
[11] Cf. Miller J.-A., La Conversation d’Arcachon. Cas rares. Les inclassables de la clinique, Paris: Agalma, 1997, p. 260.
[12] Cf. Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVIII, On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance, op. cit.
[13] Lacan J., “L’étourdit,” Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 464.
[14] Lacan, J., “Entretien au magazine Panorama,” La Cause du désir 88, 2014, p. 173.
[15] Laurent, É., “Le programme de jouissance n’est pas virtuel,” La Cause freudienne 73, 2009, pp. 42–49.
[16] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xxiii: The Sinthome, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, p. 50.
[17] Remarks made by Jacques-Alain Miller during the uforca Journées on 21 and 22 May 2011, entitled “The Parliament of Montpellier, Around Seminar xxiii,” unpublished.
[18] Ibid.