On the ontological Concept of «sexual Difference»:

A material, dynamic, and synthetic Approach

Abstract

Men are women are sexually different, and differences matter. However, such differences

have little to do with the dualism of gender stereotypes and power hierarchies articulated by

phallogocentric ideology. This paper aims at reconsidering sexual difference from a non-

dualistic concept of differing, and an expanded conception of sexuality capable of

encompassing the entire existential becoming.

Key-words

Gender, embodiment, assemblage, intra-action, plasticity.

1) Introduction

At first sight, sexual difference appears to be a self-evident and immediate fact,

cornerstone of both patriarchal domination and women’s struggles. It has been a key category

of feminist theory and praxis, basis and assumption for any analysis of power structures or

social inequalities, as well as for all politics of women’s emancipation and empowerment.

However, the immediate evidence of sexual difference fades away as soon as one intends to

reflect on it, and account for its internal consistency. Is sexual difference a merely biological

fact? Or a simply cultural construction? Is it a discursive fiction? An immutable essence? A

constitutive or accidental determination? Is it intrinsically material or extrinsically

materialized? The answers of feminist and post-feminist theories are multiple and diverse

according to previous ontological or anti-ontological decisions. But whatever the answer

might be, the question of sexual difference turns to be inevitable (Irigaray 1993; Grosz 2011;

Braidotti 1994, 2002).

Nowadays, the question of sexual difference arises with renewed interest for a number

of reasons. First, and from a negative side, because of queer theories insistence on the

discursive character of sexuality, and its reduction to a nominating fiction within a de-

ontological, post-corporal and sociolinguistic framework (Butler 1993, 1999, 2004; Preciado

2003). The radical reduction of sexual difference to linguistic performances boosted the rise

of new material and ontological feminisms determined to rethink the immanent and creative

dynamism of active bodies, constitutively sexed, from a realistic framework (Gatens 1996;

Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Coole and Frost 2010; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). From

another side, both evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis have claimed for a proper

approach to sexual difference irreducible to biological or sociological facts, although

entangled with them (Irigaray 1985a; Buss and Malamuth 1996; Copjec 2002; Zupančič

2017). Lastly, natural sciences have recently questioned the epistemic usefulness of sex-

gender system, based on dualistic exclusion between body and culture (Jordan-Young 2010;

Bluhm, Jacobson and Maibom 2012).

All that has led to reconsider sexual difference outside of dualistic pattern of

difference and biological reduction of sex. In such a context, the current article aims at

approaching the question of sexual difference from an ontological, synthetic and dynamic

perspective. The starting point of this paper is that men and women are sexually different,

and their differences matter. However, such differences have little to do with the dualism of
gendered stereotypes and power structures, they rather respond to a complex and

heterogeneous self-differing that opens multiple ways of being and becoming, a myriad of

sexualities in continuous movement. The main focus of following pages will be–not to make

a list of biological, psychic or cultural differences between sexes, but–conceiving the

immanent dynamism of differing as vital energy.

2) Conceiving the «Concept» of sexual Difference

I assume sexual difference as a concept, and that implies a very precise ontological

meaning. Namely, sexual difference is not a formal and fix representation produced by the

understanding ability to abstract and generalize from the particular, but a concrete action in

continuous becoming produced by its own differing. What precisely assumed here is the

concept as immanent development arising from within its own energy, in Hegelian terms,

“the innermost moment of the objects, their simple life pulse” (Hegel 2010, 17), the

“immanent motion or self-movement” (Hegel 1979, 26). Like the vital pulse in a living

organism, concept is everywhere, invades everything, always retaining an “absolute power”

that “lets its difference go free” (Hegel 2010, 536). In more recent terms, authors like Gilles

Deleuze, Félix Guattari or Elizabeth Grosz describe concepts as “centers of vibrations”

(Grosz 2011, 79), affective mediums capable of generating and regenerating all energy.

While abstract representations perform the epistemological activity of discriminating,

fixing, and defining formal essences, concepts achieve the ontological activity of reflecting

and unfolding the immanent content of reality, what implies a double or dialectical movement

of negation and affirmation, destruction and creation at once, in order to keep the effective

dynamism of actuality. Therefore, concepts are never immediate, straightforward or fixed

forms, but always mediated, complex and dynamical movements. Given its immanent
unfolding, all concept implies space, time and history. They reveal a processual becoming

instantiated by multiple negations and reaffirmations that configure a continual differing.

When authors like Hegel, Deleuze, Guattari assign to philosophy the task of producing

concepts (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 36), they address the ontological identity of being and

thought, theory and praxis, capable of creating a new order of things. And such is also the

purpose of sexual difference.

To assume sexual difference as concept intends to account for the immanent

dynamism and complex identity of any sexuate individual, irreducible to mere gendered

representations or social identifications, although permeated by them. As immanent

movement, sexual difference reflects on its simple representation in order to negate its

immediate being, and open the possibility for becoming itself, i.e., for differing. The concept

of sexual difference is in and by itself denied and contradicted, and precisely such negative

determination makes possible its continual transformation. Because of its self-reflective

negation, sexual difference is both material and not-material, subjective and objective,

individual and universal; it become multiple and heterogeneous, instantiated by various

levels of comprehension–biological, psychical, social, political, etc.–, all of them synthesized

in the unique and unrepeatable action of being singular individual.

The negative dynamism of sexual difference expresses an indeterminate instance,

condition for being continuously re-defined. At this regard, Elizabeth Grosz asserts that “the

ontological status of sexual difference implies a fundamental indeterminacy such that it must

explain its openness, its incompleteness, and its possibilities of being completed,

supplemented, by a (later) reordering” (Grosz 1995, 80). Transitions from such a virtual

openness to concrete and actual determinations constitute the self-movement of the concept,

its particular and singular way of becoming sexuate individual. If formal representations of
sexual difference subsist as abstract generalizations, real concept exists as singular differing

of each sexuate person.

Whereas phallogocentric system forced sexual difference to fit into a dualistic model

and subsumed women in it, the historical progress of feminist Philosophy expresses the

struggle to release the potency of female difference. That is why Iris van de Tuin considers

it as “a hyperinternalistic or immanent affair, the most basic, ergo, the most virtual of feminist

objects and tools” (2014, 69). From a conceptual perspective, sexual difference is the turning

point of patriarchal hegemony and keystone of feminism thinking to the extent that it

determines the vital pulse of woman’s becoming. In Claire Colebrook words, “becoming-

woman is that concept that opens the conceptuality of concepts” (Alaimo and Susan Hekman

2008, 78), namely that self-movement able to disrupt the establishment of representations

and set in motion a new field of action and sense.

Strictly speaking, one should say that the concept of sexual difference as main

category of feminist philosophy was introduced by Luce Irigaray in the context of French

poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and second wave feminism. Irigaray converted

sexual difference from a mere representation to a proper concept. Coming back to sexual

difference today, under the umbrella of the third wave and the demise of postmodern

constructivism (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 25), reaffirms both conceptual continuity

and transgenerational alliance of feminist thinking. If sexual difference is a continual and

historical becoming–instead of an abstract representation–, then the task is to pursue old

questions by new means and strategies. That sort of feminist continuum claims a common

identity inscribed in a multiple and contingent differing.

Briefly, the concept of sexual difference brings us to the self-movement of a life

always reflected, denied, and contradicted, and then also mobile, unstable, and fragile.
Accordingly, some authors prefer to talk of differing–rather than difference–in order to

express the radical dynamism of sexual beings.

3) Sexual Difference as ontological Differing

Although sexual difference is a postulate of feminist thought and praxis, it was Luce

Irigaray who turned it into an ontological concept, key-category for philosophy in general

and feminist philosophy in particular. According to her, the history of philosophy ignored

the question of sexual difference, because it just thought a One and Same sex and interpreted

the whole reality according to a phallic homo-logic. Male sex has been indeed the only one

and all, the Subject, while female sex became the other: a degraded and imperfect copy of

him. Phallic homo-logic–adjust to an abstract self-identity–exiled difference to the realm of

unreal and impossible, and that is the place in which feminism found it. Irigaray restored

sexual difference into the immanent core of being, and turned it into “one of the major issues,

if not the issue, of our age” (Irigaray 1993, 5). The issue is not about adding women to

hegemonic system, but rather about a radical transformation of phallic homo-logic by the

emergence of sexual difference as “philosophical concept” (Grosz 2011, 103, 144). In what

follows, I will try to focus on such different ontology.

At first place, that what turns difference into a concept–instead of a fix and abstract

representation–lies in the immanent dynamism of identity from itself to itself, a self-related

movement capable of differing its own indeterminacy (Grosz 2011, 93 ; Stone 2002, 16). In

order to self-differ, identity must produce a twofold motion at once negative and affirmative,

namely, transformative. This twofold motion determines the conceptive movement of

difference, so that it can be described as a “generative force” (Grosz 2011, 94), the first and

foremost one, capable of all becoming, and thereby a positive determination of being.
 Ontology of sexual difference might be regarded as a “virtual” one (Colebrook and

Buchanan 2000, 228; Braidotti 2002, 7), meaning by virtuality the immanent potency to be

and become. The virtual is another name for that fundamental indeterminacy aforementioned

by Grosz (1995, 80), in a permanent state of redefinition. Being open to a virtual and possible

becoming–instead of already done–accounts for an uncertain future, whose contingencies

and particularities are unpredictable. At this regards, Iris van de Tuin comments that “sexual

differing is always already virtually at work for feminist futures and therefore has the greatest

potential for the generation of these futures” (2014, 69). The concept of virtuality is

inseparable from the dynamic consistency of difference, and its significance for a

regenerative project.

The negative and virtual character of self-differing–in contrast to the positive and

simple character of the identity– has been also defined by the principle of «not-one» or «not-

all» as radical deconstruction of all one. To be «not-one» and «not-all» means that “neither

you nor I are the whole nor the same, the principle of totalization” (Irigaray 1996, 105),

because there is always a gap, a failure, “a lack at the very heart of sex or, more precisely, it

concerns sex as the very structural incompleteness of being” (Zupančič 2017, 141-2).

Thinkers of sexual difference such as Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Alenka Zupančič, or even

Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou read difference in terms of an ontological gap that breaks and

passes through the core of any sex, always dialectically other. Ontologically speaking, «not»

is at the beginning of all one, that is, the virtual gap from which all become. Such primordial

differing is–asserts Žižek–“that of woman and Void (or death: das Mädchen und der Tod)”

(2016, 11). Woman-void, woman-other, not-woman disposes the matrical condition of life as

if she were that ancient chaos open in an infinite yawn.

 Female’s differing expresses that particular potency able to become two subjects, so

that the dialectical principle of not-one and not-all turns out to be the relational principle of

«being-two», because the incompleteness of one. The hetero-logic disrupts the simple homo-

logic of one, and boosts–by the creative force of differing–the economy of being-two-

subjects (Irigaray 2000, 141 ff.), a way of two between which there is not dualism but

relational unity. In fact, being-two is duality without dualism because it subsists in the

immanent dynamism of not-one, instead of standing as abstract individualities extrinsically

related one to one. Being-two means the relational constitution of no-one, whose

incompleteness makes room to differing. In this regard, Alain Badiou names female identity

as “a passage of between-the-Two” (Badiou 2017, 94), a process–more than a position–of

mediating no-one and another.

According to Irigaray, being-two is the ontological category for a relational and

reciprocal not-subject always involved with another. Indeed, subjective relationships are said

in many ways and respects, but all of them involves an immanent movement that somehow

negates and recreates the two at stake. When Irigaray claims that “the universal is two” (2000,

29), so that sexual difference constitutes “the most appropriate content for the universal”

(Irigaray 1996, 47), she radically deconstructs the perfect ideal of Identity in order to assert

immanent negativity of all one. The universal is two not because it is two substantial things,

but rather a dynamic not-all always becoming other: the generative force of self-differing.

Ontologically speaking, the concept of sexual difference cannot be reduced neither to

the difference between man and woman–as two opposite substances–nor to the hetero-genital

choice of object or the bio-political regime such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler or Paul-

Beatriz Preciado interpret it, because all that assumes the dualistic and phallogocentric

representation of difference as the only tenable alternative. On the contrary, as stated, sexual
difference constitutes the self-reflective, negative and relational dynamism for which finite

and incomplete no-one reaches itself. The negative and reflective structure of the self-

differing opens up the possibility of multiple, heterogeneous and diverse determinations,

based on the law of not-one as intensive and virtual center of vibrations. It can be said,

therefore, that sexual difference implies an assemblage of minimal differences, intensities,

elements, actions in permanent becoming.

Even in the case of reproductive binarism, being-two must be thought according to

the hetero-logic of not-one, so that woman-man leaves behind dualistic representations that

opposes and reifies them, in order to unfold complex and heterogeneous dynamisms of self-

differing in relational way. Conceiving difference in the pattern of self-differentiating let it

be free, multiple, diverse, both within and between sexes.

Summing up, the concept of sexual differing release the immanent potency of identity

to be not-one, other, double, two, between, many, diverse, multiple, heterogeneous. Such

dynamic conception characterizes feminisms of sexual difference, for which women never

are one but always plural and fluid (Irigaray 1985b, 26, 28, 106 ff.), nomadic (Braidotti

1994), volatile (Grosz 1994), generative and relational subjects (Battersby 1998). Instead of

a male Identity confronted with a female otherness, sexual difference put in motion the

otherness of any identity.

4) A material and embodied Differing

Sexual difference is material, embodied or embedded in the flesh. However, inasmuch

as sexual difference is dynamic and active process instead of fixed and received trait,

therefore should be abandoned the representation of sex as a thing or a sum of things, parts

or characteristics befallen over the body. By contrast, from the viewpoint of concept, sexual
difference is the reflection of matter itself, its unfolding and transparency, what certainly

transforms the classic hylemorphism and challenges new material ontologies.

In fact, according to a classic notion, matter opposes to form as the passive, obscure

and amorphous substratum to the active, rational and determinant cause; it is privation and

empty recipient for perfect and generative actions. On the contrary, according to new material

ontologies, matter is active potency, autopoietic energy that, following Manuel de Landa,

“has morphogenetic capacities and does not need to be commanded into generating form”

(Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 33). Matter is itself action, a creative virtuality arising from

its own indetermination in order to become actual, a reflective dynamism engaged with its

own differing. Material concept deserves a closer attention.

New material perspectives take distance from mechanistic atomism–for which

physical particles are independent of human mind–as well as from historical-dialectical

materialism–for which social-economic relationships determine material structures. Instead,

for new materialisms, matter is an active dynamism at once subject and object, origin and

result, cause and effect of its own generative energy, in permanent self-differing. Therefore,

matter becomes a reflective substrate involving negativity, otherness, incompleteness, so that

its ontological formula turns out to be “not-All is matter” (Žižek 2006, 168). Against

positivist materialisms for which matter is simply all and one, conceptual matter is always

fractured, contradicted, tensioned by opposed forces, and empowered by a virtual origin that

at once performs and deconstructs everything. The immanent negativity from which not-all

emerge, makes room for im-material phenomena like conscience, affectivity, freedom,

culture.

Because what differs is not-all, then material beings are always twofold: at a time

internal and external, subject and object of a same self-reflective movement. On the one hand,
matter is “inside”, the “interiority” of any sensation, perception, memory, consciousness,

unconsciousness etc. (Nancy 1993, 191-192; Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 71). At this regard,

sexual difference constitutes a “hyperinternalistic” issue (van der Tuin 2014, 69) immanent

to any affect, idea, representation, desire, etc. On the other hand, matter is “outside” (Nancy

1993, 192), the exteriority of any sensation, perception, memory, consciousness, etc, so that

sexual difference also shapes the surface of any body. Material dynamism ex-poses pars

extra pars while im-posing them into subjective reflection as its immanent content.

Matter produces parts extra/intra parts, and synthesizes them in dynamic and

relational organizations, qualitatively more than the mere juxtaposition of its elements. New

materialisms have called that sort of dynamic organization “assemblage” (Gratton 2014, 122-

123; Žižek 2017, 40): a key category that overcomes the abstract order of self-identical

substances by the synthetic order of self-differential realities, composed by and

heterogeneous agencies, material and not-material, human and nonhuman, natural and

cultural. Assemblage unifies multiple actants that–in the collective organization–negate as

single element and differ their particular effects in a common distributive action.

Assemblage’s action does not come from a single main center, but from multiple agents

reciprocally intra-active, and whose final result is unpredictable given the virtual

indeterminacy from which differs. Assumed by new materialisms, the synthetic category of

assemblage reframes the concept of sexual difference, as the following lines will try to show.

Another category introduced by new materialism in order to account for an immanent,

continual and unpredictable differing is “plasticity” (Malabou 2005, 186): an alternative

name for a self-mobile matter. A plastic matter contains both virtual indeterminacy and actual

determination in reciprocal exchange and continual becoming. Catherine Malabou names as

“freedom” (2008, 17) the material capacity to move from a negative indeterminacy to an
unpredictable, contingent and accidental determination. Such a material freedom makes

possible to break the pre-existing state of play and start a new order of things by a sort

“epigenesis” (Malabou 2016) that transforms any result in a new beginning.

Material ontologies work in tune with new scientific disciplines focused on

complexity, non-linearity, instability, volatility, mosaicism, or unpredictability of matter,

such as quantum physics –working with particles, charges and waves in constant emergency,

attraction, repulsion, fluctuation–, neurosciences–aimed at horizontal and decentralized

networks of neurons in permanent recombination–, and genetics–addressed to pluripotent

stem cells in permanent self-differing and transpositions–. Such are the frameworks in which

sexual difference emerges as immanent event of a living matter, conceived in non-lineal,

complex, instable, entangled and contingent dynamisms.

From the point of view of new materialisms and material feminisms, matter is

constitutively sexed inasmuch as its energy remains differing, not-one, and virtual. Sexuation

is not an external process that comes from without upon matter as if it were a passive and

receptive substrate waiting for a life-giving breath, but the proper dynamism of matter itself,

its immanent act of mattering. Hence the ontological significance of sexual difference as a

conceptive process synthetized by multiple pars, layers, vibrations in continual becoming.

While «gender» notion as socio-linguistic category aims at making visible the cultural

construction of biological sexes, instead sexual difference points out a transversal differing

immanent to multiple energies inside and outside, subjective and objective. Biology,

psychology, history, culture, etc. are sexuate fields. What follows intends to approach this

entanglement of sex.

Biologically speaking, sexual difference brings into play multiple factors and

complex mechanisms, beginning with sex determination by genes, chromosomes, and

gonads, and continuing with a program of differentiation that includes hormones, external

genitalia, brain striatum, phenotypes, heart, muscles, bones, liver, fat, etc., mirrored in

behaviors, timings, diseases, mechanisms and so on. The entangled agency of all these actans

shapes the sexual DNA of any single individual, unique and unrepeatable. Indeed, biological

difference matters, “bodies matter—genes matter, hormones matter, brains matter. But

how?” (Jordan-Young 2010, 20). The how of sexual difference involves a very complicated

entanglement of minimal parts in permanent becoming.

According to a dualistic and substantialist pattern, sexes are 2, and both opposed,

mutually exclusive and related as the active to the passive, the subjective to the objective, the

rational to the material, etc. By contrast, according to a dialectical materialism, both inside

and between man and woman there are multiple differences proceeding along a continual

differing, and knotted in heterogeneous synthesis. Therefore, sexual dimorphism turns to be

much more diverse, disseminated and reticular than the oversimplified representation of two

opposite sexes (cf. Wilson 2004, 58-59; Fausto-Sterling 2000, 30 ff.; Richardson 2013, 197

ff.). From the angle of neurosciences, Rebecca Jordan Young highlights mosaicism and

overlapping as immanent features of sexual differences, while Luciana Parisi considers the

genetic entanglement of micro particle-forces in permanent tension and movement (Parisi

2004, 32). Even Darwin, a century and a half ago, alluded to the rudimentary presence of one

sex into the other on the grounds of evolutionary monogenesis and continuity (cf. Darwin

1981, 207-8), what is ontologically explained from a material and dialectical immanence.

Dimorphic structure of human genome–XX and XY for all mammals–is an

assemblage of thousands of genes multiplied by each one of the million cells, jumping from

one chromosome to another, and open to external interactions. That is how sex start mattering
from inside. Each cell is sexually differing, and at this regard Rosi Braidotti asserts that

sexual difference is “encrypted in the flesh, like a primordial memory, a genetic-data bank

that pre-dates entry into linguistic representation” (Braidotti 2002, 46). Namely, sexual

difference is indelible no matter how culturally it is expressed or classified, or better, it is

readable through all its representations.

Biologically speaking, sexual difference is a reproductive mechanism having an

evolutionary purpose, even if it is not “intrinsically” only a reproductive process (Beukeboom

and Perrin 2014, 5), to the extent that there are also asexual ways of reproduction in which

sex is facultative. Evolutionary purpose of sexual reproduction consists in the widest range

of individual variations that it introduces in the specie, so that sexual dimorphism is cause of

human evolution at the same time as it is outcome of that evolution, based on the principle

of natural and sexual selection. And this inevitably leads us to Darwin, who has placed sexual

difference at the core of evolutionary biology. Since Darwin onward, sexual difference

abandoned the rigid essentialism of two immutable forms in order to gain the plastic

entanglement in environment and time.

Some material and feminist authors have reached a sort of speculative synthesis

between Darwin’s biology and self-differing ontology, and hence the outcome of a neo-

darwinism that renews the “evolutionary imperative” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 53) for

contemporary materialisms. They share the basic tenet of a material, dynamic and continuous

immanence, intra-acted by internal and external pars along a plastic becoming. A fervent

advocate of such a synthesis is Elizabeth Grosz, for whom Darwin’s evolutionary biology

prefigures “an ontology of sexual difference” (Grosz 2004, 10). Grosz traduces Darwinian

evolution in the ontological terms of pure difference, so that “distinguishing, rendering more

and more distinct, specializing and adapting” matter becomes itself (Grosz 2004, 46). Given
the dynamic continuum of life, there is not a clear and distinct fact–the sudden appearance of

some otherworldly spirit–by which inorganic turns into organic beings, not-alive into living

matter, matter into consciousness, or nature into culture, but rather a complex and progressive

transition whose effect is greater than the sum of all the parts, and in that sense novel and

unpredictable. Although Darwin did not get to know genetic mechanisms or cellular

symbiosis, the framework of his evolutionary economy remains valid.

Over the course of phallogocentric history, one of the great myths regarding sexual

dualism has been brain sex. In fact, brain’s size, weight, lateralization, or hormones has been

argued to justify the mental inferiority and political subordination of women. Nowadays,

neurobiology continues investigating how much is myth and how much is real about sexual

differences in women’s and men’s brain. Despite the fact that dualistic interpretations of male

and female brain, mirror of male and female gendered representations, seems to be overcome,

however scientists disagree on manner and extent in which brain expresses sexual differences

(Nelson 2017, 172-4). For sexuate bodies, neurons are sexed, but how?

Generally speaking, neuroscientists accept the hypothesis that brain exposure to

androgens and estrogens in the prenatal period produces in some areas differences in

structure, density, volume, and wiring, much of them are largest in the prenatal period and

diminish with age. Brain differences transcribe genetic differences, while could be

themselves transcribed in different behaviors, skills, interests, preferences, or timing. But

how? Causal relation between one thing and the other is certainly diffuse, and the idea of a

linear and irreversible effect of hormones on brain circuits is a highly controversial issue for

a number of reasons. First, because of brain developments depend on interactions with

environment, what prevents a linear development, and fosters its malleability, adaptable to

unstable contexts. Rebecca Jordan-Young calls it an “inseparable fusing” (2010, 286) of

inside and outside, innate and acquired factors entangled into subjective experience. Second,

because of the immanent flexibility or plasticity of brain itself, inconsistent with rigid bio-

programs or fix neuronal circuits. Far from an inexorable determinism, plasticity means, as

Malabou asserts, that “humans make their own brain” (2008, 1). Third, due to the difficult

correspondence between hormones and behaviors, genes and skills.

One of the myths around average differences in skills and preferences considers that

men would be better at math and spatial cognition, while women would be better at verbal

and social competences. However, recent researches argue that there are small sexual

differences related to these abilities, except for three-dimensional mental rotation and

aggressive tendencies, in which men stand out (Buss and Malamuth 1996, 116 ff.). Men and

women brains show a mosaic of countless features overlapped and intra-acted one into other.

And the truth is that differences can be much greater between individuals of same sex than

of the other sex.

Briefly, neuro-biological discussions on brain sexuation are now abandoning the bias

of a dualistic difference in order to consider a complex and heterogeneous sexual differing

fraught with continuities and similarities. They are also overcoming the dualistic pattern

between biological sex and social gender, by a dialectical synthesis of nature and culture,

both self-active and tensed into reciprocal interactions. The assemblage of sex does not have

a single control center but multiple agents of a distributive action, so that not only gonads

and genitals, but also brain is a “reproductive organ” (Jordan-Young 2010, 21; Nelson 2017,

194-5), crucial factor for sexual identity and reproductive success. If brain is a reproductive

organ, cerebral activity is also sexual, whence it follows that “brain governs sex”, and sexual

libido is “one manifestation among others of a neuronal dynamic” (Malabou 2012, 3).

Catherine Malabou draws the ultimate consequences of synthetic approach to sexual

differing pointing out the transition from neuronal mechanisms to psychic libido.

Brain occupies a mediate position between body and mind, biology and culture, inside

and outside. It is the material condition for not-material effects such as consciousness, mind

and culture, emerging from epigenetic processes that at once negates and recreates the

immanent continuity of life. When Žižek asserts that “it is only materialism that can

accurately explain the phenomena of mind, consciousness, and so on” (Žižek 2006, 167), he

means that virtual and indeterminate not-one from which the unpredictable arises. By

extension, only biological conditions of sexual difference can accurately explain the sexuate

consciousness, self-consciousness, mind, culture. That is what the following lines intend to

consider.

5) Assembling psychic Sexuality from within

For human beings, “differences are one and all physical and psychical” (Malabou

2008, 81), and so are sexual differences as well. According to Malabou, biological

differences determine a sort of “proto-self” (Malabou 2008, 57 ff., 80) from which emerge a

psychic and spiritual subjectivity as mediate and reflective self. Psychic and spiritual

sexuality differs from biological one, that is, negates and recreates from within its immanent

continuity. Therefore, psychical energies such as consciousness, unconsciousness, libido,

desires, affects, pleasure, enjoyment, phantasy, knowledge, etc., are sexed, what does not

mean to be adjusted to gender stereotypes, but rather to become conscious of being sexuate

bodies, subjectivities, energies.

According to new realisms and materialisms, matter produces interiority (Alaimo and

Susan Hekman 2008; Grosz 1994; Johnston 2013; 2014), so that “matter feels, converses,

suffers, desires, yearns and remembers” (Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin 2012, 48). Such
material intimacy is what, in proper terms, philosophical tradition named as psyche: the

sentient and conscious “other” of the body, capable of being–intentionally–all things.

However, while for that tradition soul was the immaterial form of bodies, for the new

ontological trend soul is material and sexed. If it was Darwin who, according to Grosz,

established the relevance of sexual difference for evolution, it will be Freud who established

its importance for psychic development. Freud released sexuality from genital function in

order to conceive it as vital energy, libido or life drive, psychic expression of somatic

processes (Freud 2017, 2015; De Lauretis 2008). Unlike animal instincts, human sexuality is

not a rigid behavior program, but a plastic, open, and multiple drive that synthesizes

anatomical, imaginary and symbolic factors.

Psychically conceived, sexual differing moves away from the anatomical

determinism of sexes–which strictly speaking would be their socio-cultural determinism–as

well as from a relativist historicism for which matter is the passive recipient of discursive

constructions. Neither biology has to do with a passive and meaningless matter formed by

rigid cultural paradigms, nor culture has to do with an abstract system of arbitrary signifiers

unaware of living energies and senses. Indeed, both are reciprocally constituted, and psychic

differing expresses that imbrication in some specific way. Here again, psychic sexual identity

should be distinguished from gender identity, or better, from gender identifications. In fact,

the latter concerns socio-linguistic identifications discursively performed (Butler; Preciado),

while the former synthesizes anatomical dispositions, unconscious or conscious fantasies and

affects, socio-cultural structures, and collective imaginary, reciprocally intra-acted by a

sexuate subject.

Psychic sexuation, that is, the determination of a sexuate subject is a constitutive and

structuring action, base of psychic identity. As psychic dynamism, sexual differing also
means that the subject is «not-all», not the only one, that there is another irreducible to her

own will and desire (Irigaray 1996). Psychologically speaking, sexual difference

encompasses at least 3 meanings: a negative limit to the narcissistic omnipotence of «I am-

all»; a positive reality principle independent of individual fantasies; a relational being-two,

reciprocally intra-acted by another subject, and socially contextualized. In the latter sense, it

must be said not only that all subjectivation is sexuation, but also that all sexuation is

socialization. Sexuation processes involve a personal story, but also a collective history

whose identifications will be assumed, rejected or transformed by each singular individual.

The so-called from Jacques Lacan “formulas of sexuation” (cf. Žižek 2017, 87 ff.;

Badiou 2017, 94-95; Raglan 2004) does not relate to the dualism between a passive, castrated,

and envious woman opposed to an active, rational, and envied man, but rather to the

ontological differing of self-active subjects, negated by the immanent logic of not-all.

Psychoanalysts like Luce Irigaray or Alenka Zupančič consider that sexuation formulas are

“not the contradiction between ‘opposite’ sexes, but the contradiction inherent to both,

‘barring’ them both from within” (Zupančič 2017, 72). Thus, the ontological principle of not-

all has its particular expression in a psychic subject capable of bearing its own negation and

limit: the impossibility of being-all.

To the extent that any subjectivity is not-all and self-different, there is always other/s

mediating sexual identity, starting with that first other from whom one is born: the body of

the (m)other, understood by Ellen Mortensen as the radical ontological difference (Mortensen

1994, 142). (M)Other’s mat(t)er, recognition and language are the first mediation of sexuate

subjectivity: the first body from which the one’s own body becomes; the first desire that

recognizes the one’s own desire; the first glance reflected as the one’s own consciousness.

Throughout life, many others will replace that first (m)other, and–like her–will mediate the
relational constitution of sexual identity, articulated as a mosaic of partial and changeable

identifications.

Sexual subjectivity is neither a thing nor a substance or a sum of abstract

representations, but a radical action, in which converge multiple and heterogeneous actants,

both internal and external. According to Freud, psychic sexuation entangles physical sexual

characters, instinctual dispositions, mental sexual characters–that is, masculine or feminine

representations–, personal experiences, and object-choice for genital practices (Freud 1955).

All these forces can be conscious or unconscious, and they compose a subjective assemblage

in permanent becoming, fraught with tensions and contradictions, and open to unpredictable

transformations throughout life-time. Socio-cultural representations of femininity and

masculinity–whose distinctions are, even for Freud, more conventional than scientific (Freud

1955)–are an element of sexual identity along with many other, so that sexual difference is

irreducible to those representations, even when it contains them. Sexual difference always

keeps an ontological “rest” outside any representation, a “Real” dynamism (Zupančič 2017,

142) and immanent potency by virtue of which it breaks, overcomes and recreates any fix

identification, whatever it may be.

Given the differencing of sexual elements and energies at stake–conscious and

unconscious, innate and acquired, internal and external–, one might say that sexuation

process interweaves multiples sexualities unified by the action of a singular subject.

Following the logic of a synthetic sexual self-differing, Grosz and Probyn speak of “petty

sexualities” (Grosz and Probyn 1995, x) capable of unfolding, in/exchanging,

communicating, expanding and recreating affective circuits. Therefore, formulas of

sexuation entail multiple petty sexualities such as “the sexualization of memory, of

departures and dislocations, of writing and collaboration, of urban movement, of skin and
surfaces, of silken ties, of mouthing words, of singing, of eating, obsessively collecting, of

conquering and imaging” (Grosz and Probyn 1995, x). Doing that is how the not-One and

being-two of sexual differing becomes multiple, connected to the entire world, virtually

always other.

Ultimately, to the extent that sexual difference belongs to singular subjects, it involves

what might be called spiritual or free element of self, meaning by that not an abstract

entelechy coming from outside, but a concrete and specific energy born of sexual matter. The

spiritual instantiation of sexual differing consummates it as individual, namely, as free and

self-conscious subject in continuous becoming. Neither subjective freedom is alien to sexuate

matter nor embodied subjects are alien to self-conscious freedom, because both are a same

singular individual. If sexual differing keeps open–as seen–the indeterminate space for all

determination, freedom is the potency that turns all determination into the self-determination:

a reflective movement that recognizes and poses sexed individual as free subject. Freedom

expresses the last determination, the proper becoming-self of a mosaic of partial and

changeable elements. It decides on the real face of each sexuate individual, not in the way of

an arbitrary decisionism but in the transparent and synthetic way of a self-conscious subject.

Such a free and transparent energy expresses, in other terms, what Irigaray called the

“transcendental” or “spiritual” level of sexual differing (Irigaray and Marder 2016, 5; Irigaray

2017, 4-5), meaning the last result of a progressive becoming that begins with a virtual

materiality to unfold the whole subjective, social and cultural field of human existence. In

this respect, Irigaray criticizes the phallogocentric idea of an abstract, neutral and asexual

spirit, dualistically fallen into or attached to a sexed body, and builder of an asexually

universal culture. On the contrary, to sexualize the spirit implies that it is not-all and the

universal is-two (Irigaray 2000, 29). Freedom has to choose because singular subject is never
One, All, pure clarity, but always negated, incomplete, finite, unconscious. But precisely

because of that sexuate individuals can always become other, multiple, heterogeneous,

different.

6) To conclude: Differing is political

Throughout these pages, I tried to approach the concepts of difference as self-

reflective differing, sexuality as material energy, and sexual difference as ontological

structure of human being. Ontologically speaking, sexual differing replaces the homo-

dominance of One and All substance, by the hetero-geneity of being-two, not-All, a fractured

and incomplete subject in continual becoming. Such a differing determines all physical,

psychic and spiritual levels of existence, each of which involves multiple actans reciprocally

related and synthetically unified by the singular subject.

According to sexual difference, matter matters because it acts, transforms, expands;

matter makes sense, self-consciousness, and culture. Nature and culture, body and spirit are

the one in/by the other to the extent that not-all matter continuously differ. Abstract

representations of both as opposite and independent terms externally connected or juxtaposed

miss the mark of what indeed constitute a mediate and synthetic being. In such a context,

being woman and man loses the dualistic sense of two opposite substances to gain the dual

meaning of a heterogeneous, multiple and complex self-differing.

Differing is intrinsically political because the other belongs to its relational and

reciprocal dynamism. Therefore, it entails a political project tending to undermining

patriarchal structures of the One/All, and recreating open, plastic and plural institutions,

inspired by some basic tenets. First, say, the replacement of the homo-logic of one/all by the

hetero-logic of being not-one, always negated and limited, consistent with the principle of a
reciprocal existence continually intervened by another. Second, the tenet of material subjects

vibrant of energy and affects in permanent circulation and expansion. Third, a culture in

which fractures, contradictions, and tensions compose the assemblage of what never will be

one and all, but always will be new and other,

If sexual difference is not sum of representations, but self-active concept in

continuous differing, so it opens us the potential for further meanings and praxis.

References

Alaimo, Stacy and Hekman, Susan. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.

Badiou, Alain. 2017. The true Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Battersby, Christine. 1998. Phenomenal Woman. Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of

Identity. New York: Routledge.

Beukeboom, Leo and Perrin, Nicolas. 2014. The Evolution of Sex Determination. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Bluhm, Robyn, Maibom, Heid Lene and Japp Jacobson, Anne. 2012. Neurofeminism. Issues

at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Cognitive Sciences. New York: Palgrave

Macmillan.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

- 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity

Press.

- 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist

Theory. New York: Columbia University.

Buss, David M. and Malamuth, Neil. 1996. Sex, Power, Conflict. Evolutionary and Feminist

Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.

- 1999. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

- 1993. Bodies that Matter. On the discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge.

Colebrook, Claire and Buchanan Ian. 2000. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press.

Coole, Diana, and Frost, Samantha. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and

Politics. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Copjec, Joan. 2002. Imagine There’s no Woman: Ethics and Sublimations. Cambridge &

London: The MIT Press.

Darwin, Charles. 1981. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton &

New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

De Lauretis, Teresa. 2008. Freud’s Drive. Psychoanalys, Literature and Film. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1994. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia

University Press.

Dolphijn, Rich and van der Tuin, Iris. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies.

Michigan: Open Humanities Press.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body. Gender Politics and the Construction of

Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.

Freud, Sigmund. 2017. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. London & New York:

Verso.

- 2015. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Dover Publications.

- 1955. The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman. London: Hogarth Press.

Gatens, Moira. 1996. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge.

Gratton, Peter. 2014. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects. London & New York:

Bloomsbury.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011. Becoming undone: Darwinian Reflexion on Life, Politics, and Art.

Durham &London: Duke University Press.

- 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin.

- 1995. Space Time, and Perversion. Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York & London:

Routledge.

- 1994. Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington & Indianapolis:

Indiana University Press.

Grosz, Elizabeth, and Probyn, Elspet. 1995. Sexy Bodies. The Strange Carnalities of

Feminism. New York: Routledge.

Hegel, Georg W. F. 2010. The Science of Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press.

- 1979. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Irigaray, Luce. 2017. To Be Born. Genesis of a New Human Being. Macmillan Palgrave.

- 2000. Democracy begins between Two. London: The Athlone Press.

- 1996. I love to You. Sketch for a Felicity within History. New York: Routledge.

- 1993. Ethics of sexual Difference. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

- 1985a. Speculum of the Other Woman. New York: Cornell University Press.

- 1985b. This Sex which is not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Irigaray, Luce and Marder, Michael. 2016. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical

Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press.

Johnston, Adrian. 2014. Adventures in Transcendental Materialism. Dialogues with

Contemporary Thinkers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

- 2013. Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism. Volume One: The Outcome of

Contemporary French Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Jordan-Young, Rebecca M. 2010. Brain Storm. The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences.

Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press.

Malabou, Catherine. 2016. Before Tomorrow. Epigenesis and rationality. Cambridge: Polity

Press.

- 2012. The New Wounded. From Neurosis to Brain Damage. New York: Fordham

University Press.
-
2008. What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York: Fordham University Press.

- 2005. The Future of Hegel. Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. New York: Routledge.

Mortensen Ellen. 1994. The Feminine and Nihilism. Luce Irigaray with Nietzsche and

Heidegger. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Birth to Presence. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Nelson, Lynn Hankinson. 2017. Biology and Feminism: A Philosophical Introduction. New

York: Cambridge University Press.

Parisi, Luciana. 2004. Abstract Sex. Philosophy. Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire.

London & New York: Continuum.

Preciado, Beatriz-Paul. 2003. Multitudes Queer: note pour une politique des anormaux.

Multitudes 2 (12): 17-25.

Raglan, Ellie. 2004. The Logic of Sexuation. From Aristotle to Lacan. New York: SUNY.

Richardson, Sara S. 2013. Sex Itself. The Search for Male & Female in the Human Genome.

Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.

Stone, Alison. 2002. Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference. New York:

Cambridge University Press.

van der Tuin, Iris. 2014. Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a

Generative Approach. New York: Lexington Books.

Wilson, Elizabeth A. 2004. Psychosomatic. Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham

& London: Duke University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2017. Incontinence of the Void. Economico-Philosophical Spandrels.

Cambridge & London: The MIT Press.

- 2016. Disparities. London & Oxford: Bloomsbury.

- 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge & London: The MIT Press.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2017. What is Sex? Cambridge & London: MIT Press.