Book explores sexual pleasure and language origins

In Petite préhistoire du rapport sexuel (érès), psychoanalyst Gisèle Chaboudez explores a speculative hypothesis: that the brevity of male sexual pleasure may have contributed to the emergence of language. The book, published by érès, is part of the "Figures de la psychanalyse" collection and was authored by Gisèle Chaboudez, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and editor-in-chief of the same collection. The book proposes a speculative history of sexual relationships and the words invented to overcome their limitations, tracing back to before Babylon, writing, and the Bible.

Two distinct forms of sexual pleasure

According to the book, prior to the development of language, there were two distinct forms of sexual pleasure that did not converge. Chaboudez draws on the work of Jacques Lacan, who suggested that the detumescence in the male has generated a special type of call that is articulate language. She considers this statement "completely isolated" in Lacan's work but notes that it "continues to flow" throughout his writings.

Disappearance of the penile bone

Chaboudez situates the disappearance of the penile bone, an osseous aid present in most mammals, around two million years ago. Humans, however, are deprived of this bone, leading to a vascular system that "tends to subtract the man's pleasure at its threshold and to suspend that of the woman before her threshold." She argues that this absence led to the development of a "sexual cause" among the origins of language, with women launching a call around 150,000 years before our era, which took the form of what Lacan calls lalangue, "the language in its original state, equivocal."

Sexual syntax and hierarchy

Men, according to Chaboudez, responded with a "sexual syntax coming from men," by a grammar of owners: the man is "what has," the woman "what he has." This hierarchical relationship, she suggests, served as a relationship between the sexes and masked the absence of a true sexual relationship, which Lacan defines as the conjunction of two pleasures, rather than the act itself.

Sedentarization and writing

The book traces how this relationship intensified with the sedentarization around -12,000 years and was inscribed with writing. It culminates in "The Bone of Genesis," where the single God removes a bone from Adam, interpreted by Chaboudez as the subtraction itself, attributed to God and compensated by the woman, resulting in "a single flesh."

Ancient wisdoms and sexual energy

In ancient wisdoms from China and India, such as "The Saying of the Ancient Tao" and "Ancient Tantras," attempts were made to push back the limit of sexual pleasure rather than submit to it. In Taoist traditions, the promise of healing all diseases is linked to achieving "dozens of coitus in a single day and night without letting go of his essence," while in Tantras, the feminine energy, shakti, is a power that the man loses only by emitting his semen.

Reinterpreting castration

Chaboudez also reinterprets the concept of castration, arguing that it does not originate from a risk of cutting or a lack of organ, but from a subtraction of pleasure "at work for both sexes." This shifts the focus from anatomy to the "physiology of pleasure," suggesting that the phallus, as a symbol, would cease to be necessary and become contingent.

A speculative and demanding text

The book is demanding, with dense language and prehistoric data that suggest more than they prove. Chaboudez presents her thesis as a speculation and entrusts her text to the reader "like a bottle in the sea." She leaves the question of whether we speak because of the lack of the sexual relationship, or if this lack comes from the fact that we speak, with the answer being "Both are true."