In the chapter of The Century on Freud, Badiou makes a number of admirably clear statements about sexuality:

[Freud]…anticipated something patently evident today: the creative resource constituted by the homosexuality - whether latent or explicit - of every human subject…Freud boldly maintains that homosexuality is only one of the components of generic sexuality. There is nothing either natural or obvious about the fact that the object of desire for a subject is borne by the opposite sex. Rather, it is the result of a long and fortuitous construction.

In the face of such a forceful declaration of the non-naturality of heterosexual libidinal investment, and the necessary participation of homosexuality in the generic multiplicity of sexual dispensations (given the fundamentally indiscriminate insistence of drives), one ought perhaps to hesitate before taking Badiou’s mathematized Lacanian theory of sexuation as inherently - even “rogueishly” - heterosexist or heteronormative. How many times will one be obliged to repeat that the Two of sexual difference is only nominally “masculine” and “feminine”, and that the impossible couple it forms is not the final destiny of all sexual beings but merely the most elementary figure of impossible-coupling or sexual non-relation?

The point of Badiou’s framing of love’s “coming aboard” in terms of the scene of Two has never been to deny that more extensive intersubjective configurations are possible (two, or three, or four… - in any case, always n+1, for any n that knows how to number its components), or even very common (what use would a theory of sexuation be that could not acknowledge the richest possible variety of tragicomic screw-ups?), but simply to isolate the figure which establishes the common non-viability - hence, the radical equality - of all intersubjective configurations.

There is no basis here for any sort of privilege of the heterosexual; still less of the familial mommy-daddy couple and its Oedipal offspring. Neither is it required that, between homosexual partners, there be a distribution of sexuated roles such that one maps on to the “masculine” and the other onto the “feminine” component of the heterosexual couple. That this sometimes appears to happen in practice is a contingency that should be approached with the utmost care. On the one hand, it does perhaps indicate the force of a heternormative compulsion that successive waves of feminist and queer insurgency have barely begun to dislodge from our culture. On the other hand, one should always be aware that things are not necessarily as they seem, and that the manipulation of semblance belongs to the technics of resistance as much as to the operational domain of societal control.

Badiou’s recent criticisms of the homo-heteronormative turn in sexual politics strike me as both timely and fully justified. The establishment in UK law of civil partnerships is in many respects a positive step, and I do not begrudge any of its beneficiaries the real advantages that they may have gained from it, but it revises the terms of inclusion in such a way as to entrench other exclusions, and has by no means put an end to the bitter unfairness of the legal nullification of non-standard social/sexual bonds. As I suggested a couple of posts back, the truth process attached to “the queer event” (which I identify, perhaps sentimentally, with the Stonewall riots and the politics of “visibility” which followed) entails an ongoing transvaluation of the value of “kinship”, an epic undertaking to which Badiou’s description of the composition of a truth as a process of fidelity without finality seems especially appropriate.

In effect, the reactionaries - churchmen, moralists, Daily Mail opinion columnists - are right to say that there is no clear limit to this transvaluation, that it overflows every predicative determination of kinship, leaving nothing untouched; but they are wrong to suppose that this process is therefore one of pure dissolution and social unbinding, delivering human society and biology alike to a catastrophic degeneracy. On the contrary, what is happening is that kinship is for the first time being thought beyond its Oedipal determinations, beyond the horizon of reproductive futurism, as the form of the social bond in its primary contingency, without concern for past (genealogy) or future (the symbolic child) but in the full force of its affinitive power and the present that it composes.