Rogueish
bifo says relax by malcolm harris | thestate→
03/19/12
Late capitalist sex is severely pathological in Beradi’s figuring, and it’s hard to argue. As it’s more fully integrated into the circuits of value production, sexuality bends and mutates into a bundle of perverse symptoms.
Too tired from work to have sex. Do cocaine. Pop some Viagra. Have sex. Go back to work to afford the drugs.
But sex is also the pleasure in life that’s worth pulling away from capital for, a mode of exploring the world and one’s self. “Unless one is seized by avarice or psychotic obsession, all a human being wants is a pleasant, possibly long life, to consume what is necessary to keep fit and make love.” In the Franco Berardi book of human nature, our better angels fuck like bunnies.
“Man does not want a pleasant, possibly long life, to consume what is necessary to keep fit and make love. Only the Italian does.” - Nietzsche.
Work, Not Sex, At Last by Elaine Blair | The New York Review of Books→
03/07/12
The reduction of female characters to their sexual function is normally considered the paramount example of literary misogyny. I wouldn’t try to clear Houellebecq on all counts of this charge, but I think that his insistence solely on animal satisfactions when representing love is one of his brilliant impieties. He has found, with admirable precision, a node of prudish sentimentality: in spite of the importance we place on the pursuit of sex in life and its graphic depiction in entertainment and art, we continue to suspect that sex acts reduce us to anonymity, annihilate whatever it is that makes us “individual,” and therefore can’t stand in for what we love about a person. The novelist can write about hand jobs, sure, but if he’s going to write about love, he’d better talk about the elegant slope of her shoulders or her quick wit.
Houellebecq likes to scorn the idea of individual personality, which to him is all a matter of minor differences. (“Certain higher management types are crazy about filleted herrings; others detest them. So many varied destinies, so many potential ways of doing things.”) In writing about love, it would be precious and boring, from Houellebecq’s point of view, to go on about her unique qualities and his unique qualities and the subtle ways in which all of their qualities draw them together and pull them apart. There is an element of expediency in this position, for Houellebecq has no apparent ability to conceive of different personalities with unique qualities. He is a novelist with only one character in him.
Against Sex Positivity: The Long Awaited Second Draft
03/06/12
This attitude toward sex was, while often a negation of almost all hetero sex and much lesbian sex, ultimately a conservatism that aimed to protect and affirm a form of good sex – a defense of a supposedly pure sensuality. The cultural shift in analysis typified by the anti-pornography movement contained many of the problems that continued on into pro-sex or sex positive feminism.
Lots to think about in this excellent essay (I particularly want to spend more time mulling over the application of Marxist categories to sex); these two sentences are on point, but you should read the whole thing.
In the words of Foucault, sex is boring
12/17/11
Steve McQueen’s Shame is a porn film with slightly less explicit sex. I mean that structurally: all the woman in the film (with one partial exception) are, as in porn fantasy, immediately compliant and sexually available, and the sex scenes all have the stylized, athletic look of porn. It’s possible that this is intentional, and the film is representing the world as it appears to its sex-addict protagonist, Brandon. But the pornographic superficiality extends beyond the sex scenes themselves; the presentation of Brandon’s boss’s incompetent attempts to chat-up women are as broad as a Saturday Night Live sketch, and the romantic chatter on Brandon’s attempted date is equally trite. So if the superficiality of the film is intentional, it’s difficult to see what it represents except that the world itself is superficial; and that is, itself, a rather superficial message. The film seems to be structured around a division between the anonymous sex that Brandon has, and the genuine human connection he wants but is incapable of, both sides of which are presented simplistically - and the division is what enables this oversimplification.
Sex is boring because it is a cypher: the word “sex” doesn’t signify anything determinate. This or that particular sexual encounter may be boring or interesting depending on its specific determinations; but it’s just those determinations that are missing from Shame.
