No: Foucault

An old accusation, resurrected by Foucault, held that Freud was a “pansexualist,” that he talked too much about sex and seemed to find it everywhere. I return to this charge not to deny but, once again, to confirm it.1 Yes, it is true that Freud discovered what we could call the promiscuity of sex, as long as we are clear that this promiscuity defined for him the nature of sex itself and not a moral judgment regarding an abuse of it. But if the charge of pansexualism, which aims to segregate sex, to confine it to its proper place, misses its target, it is because sex is not con-ceived within psychoanalysis as having a proper place, one it can claim as its own. Sexuality names not a discrete domain of life but the disjoint relation of speaking beings to their bodily exist-ence. Isolatable neither from meaning nor biology, sex does not belong to either realm and is manifest only in the disruptions, divisions, displacements, and distortions that affect both. This basic point has a history of getting lost, going back to the time when psychoanalysis was first invented. Freud was constantly forced to parry not only the squeamish objections and outright rejections of his theory of sexuality, but also the more insidious problem of its facile, and equally squeamish, acceptance. Too often enthusiasm for his ideas relied on an effacement of their complexity and rendered them anodyne.