#corporeality

«The second error connected to the deterministic conception of sexuality is based upon reducing nature to the biological. If we reduce the body to physiology, to the processes of the body’s functioning, then they are conceived functionally, and as a result, as something that is the passive tool of determinism. In our contemporary world we are dealing with the universal biologization of our relationship to the world: Instead of teaching the history of people we teach the prehistory of hominids, instead of developing the ability to love in young people we talk about love as being a matter of chemistry. Such an anonymous and cold objectification makes the contemporary person unaware that his desire is love beyond death and that reality is something extremely intense. When it comes to the human body biological phenomena have nothing in common with what distinguishes man—and he is distinguished by speech in particular. The reality of our body is something qualitatively different. When a man looks at a woman her body tells him something; it communicates to him the existence of beauty. Even his desire goes far beyond a simple instinct for reproduction since it can be the expression, for example, of anxiety before death. In man corporeality is simultaneously spirituality and that which is spiritual is always already corporeal.» 

For Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice which confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence.