Sex without sexuality, impulses without eroticism

The Lovers, by René Magritte, 1928. “Frustrated desires are a common theme in Magritte’s work. Here, a barrier of fabric prevents the intimate embrace between two lovers, transforming an act of passion into one of isolation and frustration.” - Commentary from MoMA

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Misery in Abundance :

Man dies in despair while the spirit dies in ecstasy.

Seraphita by Honoré de Balzac, 1835.

Putting the fake generalized sexual euphoria and the inflated sexual liberation statements aside, it would only be unprejudiced to qualify the state of my generation as a miserable state. It sounds paradoxical, but it is possible to witness misery even in the presence of abundance. To make the distinction between misery and poverty, Léon Bloy declared that “misery is the lack of what is necessary, and poverty is the lack of the superfluous”¹. Misery as an invisible ghost and sometimes an invincible evil in times of prosperity like in times of adversity.

There are many things, as Jankélévitch said, that words cannot fully express because speech and the spoken can be ineffable and not necessarily unspeakable². The ineffable is often inexpressible because there is infinitely, interminably to be said about it. Inner misery, which can also incorporate sexual misery is ineffable in nature. But, for the sake of describing it, it is observed that this misery comes at a time when sexual choices are abundant, where access to the satisfaction of one's most perverse sexual desire, if I use Freud's word³, is easy and inexpensive for the vast majority of young people… And yet, and yet! Never has youth rejected sex so fiercely, and when it embraced it, it was not enthusiastically. Statistics and studies⁴ on male or female sexlessness, voluntary or involuntarily celibate, have never been fertile. This proves one thing that I esteem essential: the manifestation of inner misery is expressed through rejection or withdrawal. Rejection because there is some kind of disgust, and withdrawal because of the possibility of a conversion of the sexual force into something else. Just like the stomach expels toxicity by vomiting, the mind can expel ideas by making the whole body fast. Men and women do not reject sexuality because they do not find each other attractive, but because sexuality itself has no meaning.

Our epoch is hyper-sexualized. Our generation is the most liberated from sexual taboos, and it is for the first time in the history of humankind that sex occupies such a great place in the minds that even political alliances and identities are being framed around it. We have never talked so much about sex and sexuality, and we have never been so far away from understanding it. Both men and women live the type of misery I described earlier; they live it differently; they handle it differently. But the reasons I will suggest gather, conceptually, the essence of what both sexes are and will be confronted to.

Mystic of sexuality

Public opinion always holds that sexuality is aggressive. Also, the idea of a happy, soft, sensual, jubilant sexuality, one does not find it in any writing. Where to read it?

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1975.

If there is something that is difficult to admit for many, is that the use of sexuality, its presence as well as its manipulation in the public and political sphere has had a cost: the erasure of intimacy. A gradual and almost certain erasure. 

The political became personal until the personal became non existential. Language tortures human sexual experience enough; our contemporaries, sadists by nature, have added politics to it.

Indeed, if the Marquis de Sade had to choose an era, he would gladly choose ours. If we had to list all of his suggestions and thoughts, only one would be missing: the creation of state-funded brothels⁵. But for the rest? We have accomplished almost everything, and we have even accomplished the most dangerous one: the transplantation of political solutions to sexual ones. The political and the ideological have absorbed the most sensitive human particle to make it submit to hypothetical rules and methods of “how things should be”. There was a bloody hunt for nature that has made the sexuality of men and women not just ambiguous but painful to live with. The new human is in the image of Atlas, holding excruciatingly his sexuality for eternity on his shoulders. 

Sexuality was wrested from the very possibility of existing as it was conceived, in its most primitive and primary form, as an individual experience and not a collective project. The spread of discourse around what constitutes sexuality, the global therapies on the natural and unnatural sexual inclinations, have only reminded man of his lousy disposition. By dint of wanting to draw the limits, reduce the spheres, flogging himself with rationalizations and chimeras, man has been deprived of the only thing he could control and be sure of being able to experience: desire and pleasure. 

Out of distrust of nature, men and women question their abilities to experience any sexual desire. Thus, we arrive at the limit of the Marcusian project, which consisted in making the individual a kind of perpetual political warrior for the Eros⁶. We have also arrived at the end of Freudian distortions, which consisted in the advocacy of satisfying all the impulses to avoid the emergence of indomitable death impulses⁷. The sexual liberation from the taboos imposed by society and institutions like marriage gave us the new taboo of sexual anxiety and sexual frustration. Few can fully admit their incomprehension of intimacy. Many indirectly express it through the complete rejection of sexuality.

Politics have destroyed the natural and innate apprehension of sexuality. Moreover, there is something mystical about sexuality and eroticism, which now neglected, religions and gnostic civilizations knew how to decipher. But what to say to a generation without a God? Detachment from the sacred does not mean that it disappears, but that it gets substituted. Religion, or in any case the belief in an end of leading an existence, had a definite purpose to sexuality and defined the virtuous circle in which Eros could radiate. Of course, I am not talking here about the different religious interpretations, but about the symbolism of sexuality in religion.

Sexuality is, therefore, left without transcendental meaning, without purpose. A nihilist spiral. It became a burden, like any other, that should be eliminated. A hole is created, a problem is invented, and here comes technology, hormone blockers before puberty, sex robots, and other types of “innovative methods”, to fill the void. Little people know, it means the end of our conception of humanity. 

Dehumanization is moving steadily onwards

"Listen to right and do not foster Violence (Hybris); for Hybris is bad for a poor man. Even the prosperous cannot easily bear its burden, but is weighed down under it when he has fallen into delusion. The better path is to go by on the other side towards justice; for Dike (Justice) beats Hybris (Outrage) when she comes at length to the end of the race. But only when he has suffered does the fool learns this."

Hesiod, Works and Days 214 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) .

Man always seeks to fill his inner void, his sexual misery, with other things. Except for this time, our era thinks it is clever and believes it has surpassed nature. The invention of sex robots, of the different applications of solitary pleasures, is not 'part of the satisfaction of desires’, but of the rejection of the nature of sexuality which requires another to be discovered. Techné is, therefore, used in such a way as to restrict any alternative of experiencing one's sexuality. The human who has known only his sexuality through the other, for thousands of years, now finds himself face to face with his ego, an anguished Narcissus. The sensations are not shared but reduced. Emotions are not experienced but erased. The machine, the technology, the screen, have replaced the other. The human who knew how to seize the body, the flesh, the spirit of the other, is now a slave to his little sexual whims and urges. 

The Greeks, such as Democritus and Aristotle, were open to technology: “generally technè in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish” said Aristotle in Physics⁸. But they drew a clear line that it can only imitate nature, not replace it. This is where nuance is crucial. This is where we, moderns, got it wrong. We got it so wrong that we are moving towards the replacement of the other, through which life and components of life such as sexuality are discovered. We have passed the stage of the impotence to conceive sexuality as a lived experience that cannot be reduced to political activism. We are at the stage where we have transformed the intrinsic character of sexuality, to completely dehumanize it.

Sexuality got replaced with sex, and sex is now only envisaged through ephemeral needs, temporary pleasures, that can easily become obsolete. Desire is not lived, not well-thought-out, but it is made up. Philosophers should no longer question what constitutes the human condition, but question the aptitude of humans to live a condition. The next generation will not know the eternal satisfaction procured from a kiss on the cheek from a loved one. It will only know sex without sexuality, impulses without eroticism.

Notes

1. Personal translation, “La Misère est le manque du nécessaire, la Pauvreté est le manque du superflu.” in L'Invendable (1904-1907), by Léon Bloy.

2. La Musique et l'Ineffable, 1961, by Vladimir Jankélévitch, (tr. into English by Carolyn Abbate)

3. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis , 1917, by Sigmund Freud.

4. “Male Sexlessness is Rising But Not for the Reasons Incels Claim”, 2018, by Lyman Stone” https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-not-for-the-reasons-incels-claim

5. Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 1971, by Roland Barthes.

6. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, (1955; second edition, 1966), Herbert Marcuse.

7. Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930, by Sigmund Freud.

8. Physics II. 8, Aristotle