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The APF Annual 2010 has just brought out its fourth volume, entitled Langues et courants sexuels [Languages and Sexual Currents]. Following its established procedure, it therefore cuts across several concepts. The most obvious is the concept of the ‘current’, evoking the Freudian duality between the tender and the sensual currents. Less obvious is the concept of ‘languages’, which has a nice ambiguity in the French title: does ‘sexual’ qualify ‘languages’ as well as ‘currents’? This question is loaded with a polemic that is readily fostered by the French alone on the international psychoanalytic scene: can the ‘sexual’ still claim its hegemony in the vast field of psychoanalytic concepts? If so, how? If not, why not? But more important still, in this Annual's title, is the ‘plural’ that defines ‘currents’ and ‘languages’. Languages exist only in the plural. Currents exist only in the plural. No language actually exists except in relation to other languages. This is a primary, insurmountable fact: entering into one language involves a self-differentiation from other languages and losing some of the possibilities among everything that is possible for the child. This probably also applies to the ‘sexual’ but in a more complex, more entangled way, never directly or purely. The status of the object changes when mastery, in anality, prevails over incorporation in orality. Tenderness, both a product and source of repression, leads to many different practices of sensuality - ranging from the most detrimental and destructive to the most promising and creative in love and hatred … Orality, anality, tenderness, sensuality … certainly have something to do with languages, beyond metaphor, in the specific sense that they are subject to the same principle of plurality and translatability as languages. Languages and sexual currents therefore have something in common here.
The papers collected in this Annual also show a plurality. They are linked, however, by an intuition. The multil