Les fictions de la sexualité en science-fiction. Que suggèrent-elles à la théorie psychanalytique ?

Abstract

ContextSince the second half of the 20th century, psychoanalysis has been confronted with four destabilizations in the social field, which force it to revisit its concepts and its clinic. Come from outside the psychoanalytical field, these four destabilizations are: the loss of evidence of objective sex, the decrease of the exclusive legitimacy of the so-called normal sexual orientation, the emergence of “gender” to designate a contingent and arbitrary social role of sexual identity, the questioning of the patriarchal society. In order to carry out this re-examination, the article follows the path of literature, using it as a source of inspiration, theoretical imagination and confirmation of clinical intuitions. Science fiction (SF) literature, because it exposes fantasies, articulates its narratives to political and civilizational thought experiments, and attempts to construct myths, is a particularly heuristic literary genre. MethodsA corpus of SF texts, dating from the 1960s to the present days and dealing with sexuation and sexuality has been compiled. A descriptive historical approach is used, in line with literary studies. ResultsA first finding is that there has been a strong transformation of the literary genre S-F with appearance sexuality as a topic and the cross-influence of feminist expression in SF and feminism and queer theory in militant philosophy. A second finding is the prevalence in SF stories of fictions of sexual non-identity and utopias of the destruction of patriarchy. A third finding is that SF, based on the imagination of other societies and other family systems than those readers are used to, and based on fictions of sexual relations between humans and robots (androids, cyborgs), is led to question the nature of humans. ConclusionWhat lessons to be learned for psychoanalysis? We will propose four: 1 - SF invites us to persevere thinking about the human. 2 - At the epistemological level, SF stories reinforce the idea that psychoanalytic theory can no longer think about sexuality without taking into account the political and the legal, the normative discourses and models, the disciplinary devices, the biopolitics of bodies, insofar as all this affects the unconscious. SF invites us not to reject, but to generalize a series of psychoanalytical concepts, so that they can be applied to societies that are different from 20th century society and so that they are less likely to give rise to a normative use in the clinic and in cultural intervention. 3 - Through S-F fictions we can think sexuality as an unstable and singular process and the love meeting as the place where a sexual difference is (provisionally) created. 4 - SF invites us to deepen the concept of singular position for the end of the analysis, as a deconstruction of identifications, a deconstruction of gender supersets, and a replacement of the irrelevant question of identity by that of desire.