It has been a long time since the civilized sexual morality of Freud’s time was dissolved, and psychoanalysis has a lot to do with it. Freud had advanced in his century by bringing to light the importance of sexuality in the psychic economy. His conception of sexuality clearly distinguished itself from biological studies of the subject, with its concept of sexual drive, and emphasized that the Freudian libido clearly goes beyond the register of the genital.
Can we speak today of a new civilized sexual morality? One of the challenges of the next WAP Congress will undeniably be to question the current myths of sexual and love lives, and their consequences on subjects that are addressed to psychoanalysis. Will we say, as does Stefan Zweig: “The world of yesterday has disappeared, and when I turn to my memories, I feel like I am a thousand years old”?
The entry into individualist modernity, which introduced the “autonomous individual” as the ultimate value, is undoubtedly explanatory and dominant in the current context of contemporary malaise1, but it does not allow us to grasp the full extent of the unprecedented upheaval that is the equality of genders and sexualities. Historically, there is a close relationship between the recognition of same-sex couples and the transformations of the couple linked to gender equality. We can thus measure that the push towards equality in its irresistible form, according to Tocqueville’s formula, constitutes a cardinal value of democratic societies. Indeed, the emancipation of women but also the fact that democratic societies are abandoning “the principle of hierarchical complementarity between sexes” have certainly had an impact on legal rights but have also led to the redefinition of all established relationships such as those of couples and marriage.
A recent large-scale survey2 in France on the emotional lives of young people after Me Too reveals major trends that cannot fail to interest us. I will particularly emphasize the impact of the dominant demand for equality between genders and sexualities. A new semantics is at work in which friendship occupies a central place. According to Aristotle, if excessive friendship resembles what one feels for oneself, then we can measure how much the cult of absolute equality and reciprocity places the couple under the attraction of the same, of the brother, thus giving the illusion of a perfect match, while the fantasy introduces a perfect dissymmetry given the differentiation of the jouissance of each partner.
The dissolution of civilized sexual morality has been succeeded by an unmarked path that leads each young person to seek his own path, the blurring of references leaving everyone in uncertainty. For this generation of young people born into a world already willing to be egalitarian, the vocabulary of experimentation, of permanent invention emerges in their discourse.
The protest movement called Me Too, which has gained a global audience in a few months thanks to the hashtag #Me too, began long before October 2017 with the Weinstein case and the movement of all those who joined the revolt of Hollywood actresses. The invention of a form of solidarity in the face of sexual violence began with the first campaign launched by Tarana Burke in 2007 in support of black women who were victims of rape, in parallel, the victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the United States in the 1990s. In France in 2015, the group “La Parole libérée” (“The Liberated Speech”) was created.
It was already a certain form of “talking to several” that was born in this way, with a passage from “me” to “me too”, marking the contemporary hint.
The politicization of intimacy is not new, and it has historically followed the feminist fights. Seeing public testimonies on love and sexual life being spread out, and again it is about first-person testimonies that simultaneously take on the value of political duty: “to have the social dimension at stake recognized in all its extent “. Declaring oneself so that the world changes.
We can see in it a new structure of a neo-feminism. J.-A. Miller has highlighted an “all women” structured in the mode of the myth of Don Juan: plus one, plus one, plus one… This form of expression also testifies the erasure of the intimate or unconscious cause in the contemporary subjectivity. The torments of love, which were once the subject of all literature, are now referred to the autonomous citizen, the subject of the will, and everything that is a failure is treated by society as a default of management or functioning. The discomfort that implies a questioning, or at least a self-reflection, is extracted from the subject. So much so that by projecting oneself onto the world stage, it is as if the subject recovers a part of his subjectivity. The testimony of Irène Théry, a renowned French sociologist, is particularly eloquent from this perspective: she heard herself talking on the radio in a primetime broadcast about a traumatic childhood assault. A story that she had never thought of telling. Furthermore, a story that she had never told anyone, and along these lines, that she had never returned to. A memory that had traversed more than sixty years of her life. “I found myself facing myself, my dilemmas, my limits.” Her political stance, far from being incompatible with her position as a researcher, then took a new dimension in the woman who, as a sociologist of the unmarried, had already been supporting for a long time the Me-Too movement and the feminist fight: saying “I” testified to a shared condition. “I don’t speak for myself: it’s my story that, tied to all others, speaks for us.”
The Me-Too movement has not only focused on people who are victims of sexual assault, it has participated in a remarkable recomposition of the distinction between what is allowed and what is forbidden. It tends to impose new references and common values, a new ethos that Irène Théry does not hesitate to refer as a “new sexual civility”. It is the consent to the sexual exchange itself that has become the criterion for the permission, regardless of the matrimonial regime. The vision of sexuality is transformed.
On the theoretical level, it is interesting to note that this movement is imperceptibly if followed by a shift in the identitarian cause: men versus women, whites versus blacks, cisgenders versus transgenders. Opening to another approach, becoming more “Maussian”, called relational, and more critical, which makes room for the weight of morals, to the collective values or unwritten laws of a given society. Concomitantly, opening the possibility for an individual to question instituted or stereotyped ways of acting. The critique thus distinguishes itself from a theory of deconstruction and unveiling (from Bourdieu’s theory of domination: the hidden mechanisms of a supposed desire of men to appropriate women) to a critical approach that intends to distance itself from the impasses of the dominant-dominated schema and the politically-correct from identities. The criticism remarks notably that a priori the identitarian waves consider that the violence denounced always concerns the relationship between men and women, without questioning the relationship with the partner-symptom, beyond gender.
If the Me-Too is not reduced to a movement to fight against sexual violences and intends to work towards a new sexual civility with new expectations for the younger generations, we cannot forget to notice that the two dimensions have progressed together and have inevitably led to an excessive judicialization of relations between sexes. The attention paid to individual rights has extended the field of crime in people’s minds, which is in accordance with the Pauline principle formulated by Lacan: “it is the law that makes the sin”.
Today, the imaginary of rivalry between men and women tends to be reduced to the mode of confrontation, of radicalism without nuances, and the power struggle seems to dominate. It is necessary to read the issue of Ornicar, “Consent”, dedicated to the criticism of the notion of consent. In discourse, consent tends to be reduced to a single injunction with a legal threat at stake. To contractualise all exchanges in order to ensure the consent of the partners would be to submit to a new moral order based on the stigmatization of men as potential aggressors and on the Orwellian utopia of the transparency of intimate relationships.
If crime invades everything, then it is the logic of suspicion and generalized surveillance that will inevitably prevail. For there has never been a lack of inquisitors who have imagined reigning over consciences and hearts.
Who can imagine that the new generations will live in a world of transparent and guaranteed sex, and will no longer know anything of the squabbles of desire and torments such as the passionate outbursts of mad love? Nothing more of the sexual failing?
It is as if the debates raging on sexuality inevitably come up against the gap that reigns between the law, the morals, identities and modes of jouissance. Isn’t this how the shift in emphasis from identities to the norm of consent is to be read? As civilized sexual morality declines, the structure is revealed.
In a conversation with Jacques Rancière, J.-A. Miller had pointed out that identities lend themselves to all kinds of slippage, all metaphors and metonymies, because they are caught in signifiers, whereas the foundation in the mode of jouissance does not slip or change.
From there one must read and reread a lesson from the course of Lacanian Orientation, extracted from “The Flight of Meaning”3, which will soon be published on the Congress blog.
In it, J.-A. Miller deploys a thesis on sexuality that is as simple as obvious since Lacan: namely, the revolution that Lacan produced with the concept of jouissance. If in Freud the libido is paired with the drive, it is precisely the relation of jouissance to sexuality that is questioned by Lacan. Moreover, if jouissance in Freud was finalized by sexuality, by adding Oedipus to the theory of sexuality, that is to say, the machine that directs libido to sex, did he not thereby posit that libido is not naturally directed towards sex, questions J.-A. Miller?
Lacan will operate a reduction on the concept of sexuality by introducing the new concept of jouissance. The fundamental change lies in simply saying that it is essentially the relationship of one sex to another, of one sexual being to another, the relation of one sexual body to another. “This is the simple precision and reduction that Lacan brings to the Freudian concept of sexuality, it is a relation. This is how its value to say that, unlike sexuality, jouissance is not a relation as such, but rather its negation. As such, jouissance does not open to the Other, which is why I called it autistic.”
This epoch brings to light as never before that what circulates is in the sexual, changes, slides, invests, disinvests in the relationship with the Other. “It’s him, now it’s her” and there is what from the sexual does not relate to the Other and which must be overcome to make room for the relationship to the Other, hence the tension between pleasure and love: there is the sexual failing. At this point, Lacan recommends “to enlarge the resources thanks to which we would manage to do without this annoying relation, in order to make more dignified love.” It guides us to read the contemporary attempt to enclose jouissance in sex.
Jouissance is not a relation but a substance, which is the concept opposed to the relation par excellence, unlike that of sexuality. This is the powerful and clear thesis that J.-A. Miller extracted from Lacan. If we study it seriously, we will be able to appreciate the value of the aphorism “There is no sexual relation”.
1. To get to the bottom of things, I took as a reference Irène Théry’s book Moi aussi – La nouvelle civilité sexuelle.
2. Bergström M. (s/dir.), La Sexualité qui vient. Jeunesse et relations intimes après #MeToo, Paris, La Découverte, 2025.
3. Miller J.-A., “L‘orientation lacanienne. The Flight of Meaning” (1995-1996), lecture of 7 February 1996, unpublished. Text prepared by Christiane Alberti and Philippe Hellebois, published with the kind permission of J.-A. Miller. Not proofread by the author.
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Translated from French by Renata Teixeira / Proofreading Jared Elwart