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Repetition? I think not. Or, at least, it's not I who repeat, but gender. Let me explain.
What Mitchell's Freud deemed conclusive is not final; whether sexuality necessarily seals the distinction between self and other is an open question, not a quasi-fact. As far as I can tell, Mitchell construes sexual difference thus because of its procreative function, not its unconscious or cultural meaning. Her argument—that sexuality's ultimate purpose is to facilitate the conjugation of two engendered beings so that they may “engender”—not only effaces desire, it also reprises the least creative, dialectical, and psychoanalytic part of Freud, that is, his scientific wish to ground psychology in biology, a project that Mitchell elsewhere disavows.
I do not believe that repeated appeal to Freud (one of Mitchell's rhetorical strategies) adjudicates any given argument. However, I want to point out that my project of understanding sexual difference as in tension with selfhood, not as the guardian either of the psyche or of the species, is one that Freud himself also inaugurated but could not carry out because he lacked the notion of “gender” as a simultaneously psychological and cultural category. With sexuality reframed by gender, however, a feminist-informed psychoanalysis is positioned to complete that very project. Instead, then, of arguing that our ancestors said it all before us, I suggest we steal the Promethean fire and forge ahead. That you were once a gleam in someone's eye doesn't mean there can't be anything new under the sun.
Pun in hand, let us return to gender. Mitchell's reading of Freud proposes a developmental line in which (sexual) difference emerges from sameness. I am countering this argument for linearity with a more dialectical interpretation of gender identity (whether ontologically or