(a)sexuality

By Andy Pink

Sex is not only traumatic. It is also curious. The pop artist, Andy Warhol, died a virgin. He said, "Sex is so messy." The queer philosopher, Michel Foucault, a kinky leather queen who died of AIDS in 1984, said, "Sex is boring." The psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, said that the object ( objekt ) of sex is mostly irrelevant to desire and its satisfaction. The feminist philosopher, Marilyn Frye, said that the gay worship of the penis belies a discontent with sexuality and a dislike of women. The psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, said that the erotics of foreplay is the proper object of sex. The philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, said that desexualization was the masochistic apex of eroticism. The queer literary critic, Leo Bersani, said that the secret of sex is that most people do not like it. If sex is messy, boring, objectless, discontented, impossible, resistant, and unlikeable -- then why do people even bother to have sex? The issue at this historical moment is certainly not Freud's obsession with the repression of desire and its return in the symptom. The issue is neither the subjective and objective conditions of repressive authority on the one hand, nor the cynical imperative for the emancipation of sex and desire from the dark recesses of libido, on the other hand. Western culture is in a transitional space between an economy of neurosis and its repressions and a future of perversion and its traces of madness. Sex is liberated. Now we are stuck with it. Sex is not only messy and boring. Sex is unsexy. If sex is unsexy, then what modalities of jouissance emerge after the Death of Sex? At the close of History of Sexuality Volume 1 (1975), Foucault cracks his fundamental insight about sexuality: "The irony of this deployment [of sexuality] is in having us believe that our 'liberation' is in the balance." Western civilization has finally liberated the unsexy. But now what? Such is -- "I'm tired tonight, Boy." [beat.] "Maybe tomorrow? "

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0BT6DVYDL
• ISBN13: 9798375213996
• Release Date: January 2023
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 110 Pages
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.3" x 5.0"