Nonsense Sex: Ontology between Drive and Norm

Abstract

This article aims to reclaim the primacy of the absence of meaning as a constitutive node of psychoanalytic ontology. It is a qualitative theoretical-conceptual study whose trajectory consists in revisiting and problematizing central concepts implicated in the constitution of the subject and in the forms of inscription of the sexual within theory. By critically analyzing how psychoanalysis approaches the sexual field in theoretical-clinical conceptualization, we show how political commitments have guided conceptual choices, enabling normative and conservative readings of sexuality. We revisit the concept of the drive as a fundamental psychoanalytic concept that permeates the emergence of the subject in its coexistence with the sexual, as well as the incorporation of biopolitics through the Oedipus Complex and to ways of confronting the sexual field through a return to the ontological lack of meaning of sex. Thus, through critiques directed at psychoanalysis, we delineate how contradictions related to the sexual are intrinsic both to the object and to the constitution of psychoanalytic theory. Finally, we argue that a psychoanalytic position regarding sexuality must sustain the absence of meaning in sex as an ontological core, recovering the radicality of the Freudian legacy to prevent the theory from reproducing the constructions it critiques.