LO INCONSCIENTE, LA DIFERENCIA SEXUAL Y LAS TRAMPAS DE UNA ONTOLOGÍA BINARIA

This essay investigates heterosexual binarism through a number of conceptual junctures, focusing on the difficult relationship between “feminism of sexual difference” and psychoanalysis, especially around the “gendered” nature of the unconscious as an influential political factor. The extraordinary persistence, at the level of the collective unconscious, of the heterosexual dual ontology is analysed in its historical evolution from de Beauvoir and through the 1970s, with Lonzi, Irigaray and Melandri. The useful nexus for understanding the durability and solidity of the binary ontology, both at the conscious and unconscious level, lies in the intertwining of the political action that feminist movements undertook to claim rights, the theoretical-conceptual and epistemological critique of those devices on which the social organisation and the patriarchal material and symbolic order is structured, and the collective experiences of self-consciousness and the “practice of the unconscious” probed to unhinge male domination based on compulsory heterosexuality.