Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

 (INCEPTION  PLOT SPOILER ALERT)

http://xkcd.com/817/

No such thing as a sexual relation exists.

This is one of the statements for which Jacques Lacan, 20th century French psychoanalyst, became famous. What could he have meant by this?

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

It’s quite clear to most of us that sex and gender exist, isn’t it? At least they seem to come up fairly often in conversation and in the media.

Most of us still intuitively think of sex as something taking place between two people, a woman and a man. (You’ll notice that I say “most of us” and “intuitively”. That should be enough disclaimers for now). It’s something which most of us experience every day, to some extent – if not in action, then at least at some potential level (flirtation etc.) or in imagination. But does the fact that sex happens, and that it involves two and not one, necessarily imply that we are dealing with a relation?

Here’s what I think Lacan was getting at:

The modern sexual experience involves, generally speaking, two things. It involves

his perception of her

and

her perception of him.

It may seem more or less cold or detached to describe sex in these terms, but nonetheless, these are the two basic perspectives involved.

Now, these two perspectives remain separate. His perception of her can never include her perception of him, and vice versa. He can try to imagine “what it’s like for her”, but this imagined perception is not real, and he knows that it isn’t. And vice versa, naturally.

So the two lovers can make an infinite series of attempts at becoming one with the other’s experience. They can indefinitely keep on trying to break out of their respective sexual fantasies about the other, but all that each is really doing is getting more deeply entangled in a fantasy about a fantasy about a fantasy etc.

He imagines what it’s like for her. But, of course, that includes imagining what she imagines that it’s like for him – because her imagination is part of what it’s like for her. (Read that sentence over a few times )

Find that a little complicated? Well, it gets worse, because it goes on indefinitely.

He never meets with her real sexual experience; he just keeps opening the infinite chinese boxes of imagined experiences. And the same obviously goes for her, only the other way round.

Their experiences remain two; they never become one. There is no relation; only – in all vulgarity – two minds masturbating while fantasising about the other.

 

We actually see this phenomenon in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception.

It happens between Dominick Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose relationship history (which has taken place prior to the actual plot line of the film) involves an obsessive expedition further and further into “dreams within dreams”. Mal and Dominick work so hard on making a true common reality of their relationship, that they end up in Limbo, a dream world isolated from the rest of humanity. In Limbo they can build and rebuild the entire scenery exactly as they please, and they take care to make it a cooperative project. Thus they seem to have succeeded in breaking out of their separate existences and finding true relationship.

But Limbo, an idea borrowed from medieval cosmology, can never be a stable reality because it is, per definition, an in-between state (between Heaven and Hell, in fact). Mal continues to be haunted by the idea that their dream world is not (yet) real. So she has to keep on endlessly building and rebuilding, and thus cannot return to the real world and live out the relationship she and Dominick have built. In the end, in order to make her give up her obsession, Dominick has to plant in her mind the idea that nothing is real, and that, therefore, it doesn’t matter whether they are in Limbo or on earth as we know it.

Does all this seem a little over the top? Am I taking things too far, making something simple very complicated? Should I just relax and have fun, not worry so much?

Maybe I could do that. But why is it that sex takes up such a central position in the entire scheme of “relaxing and having fun”? Why is it that the ultimate experience, or trip, that I as a self can give to myself, is an experience that per definition involves another?

Is it so far-fetched to think that sex might be our attempt at breaking out of this one perspective from which each one of us experiences his entire life? And doesn’t it matter a great deal whether such a breaking out is real or only imaginary?

In the film, Mal comes to believe that it is just imaginary, and her ultimate reaction seems to me quite fitting.

Now, like many stories which have been told since the middle ages, the film Inception makes strong references to Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy from the early 14th century. (Someone more perceptive than I had to point that out to me).

In the Comedy, Dante (who is himself a character in the narrative) descends through the various circles of Hell, which is echoed in Dominick’s descent though several levels of dreams. This will seem less far-fetched if we remember that the innermost circle of Hell is frozen – remember all that ridiculous skiing action towards the end of the film? (How boring was that, by the way?!).

Also, the fact that Dante, as well as Dominick, pays the world of Limbo a visit makes the parallel more clear. And then, last but not least, Dante’s story involves a relation between a man and a woman: namely Dante himself and his major(!!!) crush, Beatrice. Beatrice, the light of the poet’s life, becomes his guide as he ascends through the heavenly spheres towards the climax of the poem, when his love for Beatrice points him towards the even higher love:

the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

The love between Dante and Beatrice unfolds within the larger context of the medieval cosmos, where all things, including human beings, were imagined to have their ordained positions in a universal hierarchy, decreed by the triune God of Christianity. In other words, it is a true sexual relation, because it does not merely involve two irreducibly separate perspectives. Both perspectives are swept up inside a third, greater perspective – the Gods-eye view that sustains the “great chain of being”, including the sexual relation, in its real existence. And ultimately, the interwoven double perspective of human love points towards that highest of loves, saying

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, world without end.

I think I’ll leave us with these two visions, the modern one of Mal taking Dominick into Limbo, and the medieval one of Beatrice taking Dante up to heaven. “Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light”.

Oh, and a merry Christmas to all!