Why sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Consider
sublimation—conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual
satisfaction. But what if as Lacan claims we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we
get from sex from talking (or writing painting praying or other activities)? The point is
not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin but that the
satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to
sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around)—even a key to sexuality itself and its
inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming
question "What is sex?” rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series
Alenka Zupancic approaches the question from just this perspective considering sexuality a
properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis and by psychoanalysis she means that of
Freud and Lacan not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan "orthopedists
of the unconscious.” Zupancic argues that sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit”
between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental
negativity which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to
sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very
negativity.
