Jouir de la perte : sexualité et violence à l’ère post-#MeToo

Abstract

Context

In the post-#MeToo era, sexuality can no longer be conceived as the pure liberation of desire.

Objectives

This article reconsiders the promises of “unfettered enjoyment” (Kournif, Pall, Dompnier) in light of the systemic sexual violence that this utopia has sometimes obscured.

Methods

By tracing the critical reversal in discourses on sexual freedom—particularly within feminist (MacKinnon, Dworkin) and queer (Niedergang, Dustan, Rémès) circles—the paper demonstrates how the heroic paradigm of transgression collapses under the ethical imperative to reckon with vulnerability. This shift is examined through a corpus of intellectual interventions from the 1970s, now re-read in light of contemporary critiques (Alfandary, Allouch). Within this framework, psychoanalysis — especially in its articulation of fantasy, anxiety, jouissance, and the desire of the Other (Freud, Lacan) — offers a rigorous conceptual tool for reconfiguring our relationship to the sexual.

Results

Through a close reading of The Devil in Love by Cazotte, the article explores what it means to enjoy the loss: to accept the relinquishment of knowledge about desire, and to recognize that the obstacle is not external to the erotic but lies at its very core.

Interpretations

To think sexuality in this way is neither to exonerate nor to idealize it, but to confront what it demands most deeply: a fragile bond, stretched between a fading fantasy and an Other who insists—a bond made possible not despite the loss, but from within it.