What IS Sex? (Short Circuits)
by Alenka Zupancic
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Consider sublimation -- conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not show more the other way around) -- even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, "What is sex?" rather more complex. In this volume in the 'Short Circuits' series, Alenka Zupancic approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan "orthopedists of the unconscious." 00Zupancic argues that sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit" between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity. show lessTags
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This was one of the most enjoyable critical theory / philosophy/ psychoanalytic / whatever books I've read in a while. I gave it five stars just for the number of brain explosions I experienced while reading it. A perfect compliment for Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, both in being a further exploration of the concepts and also a further regression toward the birth moment of consciousness and our awareness - across a slivered yet impassable gap - of a restful inanimate non-conscious existence we became only too aware we were no longer part of. What is sex? It's something we create to cover over the fact that we don't know why we ever started existing in the first place.
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Alenka Zupancic, a Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher, teaches at the European Graduate School and is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is the author of The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two and The Odd One In: On Comedy, both in the Short Circuits series, show more published by the MIT Press. show less
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Short Circuits (16)
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