ABSTRACT
The sexual is therefore removed from Freud’s own thought. And in subsequent philosophical thought that questions the relation between politics and sexuality is even in great part foreclosed, or radically and psychotically negated, according to the definition of foreclosure provided by Jacques Lacan. The second part of the book is dedicated to analyzing the absence of the sexual of much of 20th-century political theory that should have discussed it. In particular, this chapter gives an account of how the authors that inspired the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, had neglected to take into consideration Freud’s more disturbing theses on the sexual; they give a desexualized representation of sex, which is reconciled with the demands of civilization. The same move occurs in the predominant strand of queer theory, inaugurated by Michel Foucault and relaunched by Judith Butler, that has politicized gender and sexuality making them into social constructs, perpetuating the desexualization of sex (Foucault speaks of a “sexual apparatus,” Butler of “gender norms”: this is not usually what comes to mind when we hear the word “sex”). As a reaction to this, the so-called antisocial queer theories of Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman put the theme of the sexual back on topic for queer theory, which, by insisting on the antisocial character of the sexual, run the risk of depoliticizing queer theories, rendering the sexual subject incapable of political action.
