The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic

Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World

Mario Perniola

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350349445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ästhetik in der Philosophie

In The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, Mario Perniola puts forth the radical argument that we are shifting away from organic sexuality, based on desire and pleasure, and moving towards a more neutral inorganic and artificial sexuality, a sexuality always available but indifferent to beauty, age or form. Perniola takes the reader on a tour of Western philosophy, from Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Sartre, to reframe our understanding of personal experience and the aesthetic world around us. In order to realize the sex appeal of the inorganic Perniola argues that we must become 'things that feel', we must think ourselves closer to the inorganic, creating an alliance between senses and things. Examples from contemporary culture that, for Perniola, are emblems of the sex appeal of the inorganic, include progressive rock music, fashion, deconstructive architecture and the novels of Georges Perec.

CHAPTER 1
SENSES AND THINGS

To give oneself as a thing that feels and to take a thing that feels is the new experience that asserts itself on contemporary feeling, a radical and extreme experience that has its cornerstone in the encounter between philosophy and sexuality, and constitutes the key to understanding so many disparate manifestations of present-day culture and art. What may generate anxiety and constitute an enigma is precisely the coming together of two opposite dimensions in a single phenomenon such as the mode of being of the thing and human sensibility. It would seem that things and senses are no longer in conflict with one another but have struck an alliance thanks to which the most detached abstraction and the most unrestrained excitement are almost inseparable and are often indistinguishable. Thus, out of the union between philosophy’s speculative extremism and sexuality’s invincible power something extraordinary is born in which our age recognizes itself, and which after Walter Benjamin we can call the sex appeal of the inorganic. ¹

CHAPTER 2
SEX PLATEAUX

The alliance between the senses and things allows access to a neuter sexuality that entails a suspension of feeling. This is not the annulment of sensibility, which would imply the absence of any tension, but the entrance into a displaced, decentred experience, freed of any intention of reaching a purpose. To feel like a thing that feels means first of all the emancipation from an instrumental conception of sexual excitement that naturally considers it directed toward the attainment of orgasm. The usual way of representing sexual activity by means of a diagram that measures excitement precludes the mode of being of the thing. As long as we think of sexuality in terms of a curve that, starting from zero, rises more or less slowly toward the acme of orgasm, only to decrease suddenly and return to the starting point, we remain a victim of an attitude that experiences sexual feeling as a more or less long preparation for a very brief climax destined to precipitate to the zero point of a normality deprived of tension, from which it seems that one has never moved after all. To devote all one’s attention to the prolongation of the preliminaries of sexual intercourse and to attribute to orgasm a cathartic and liberating meaning precludes from the start the possibility of feeling like a thing. Thus, one is stuck within a model that compares sexual feeling to mountain climbing which, on the one hand, implies a slow and progressive climb, and, on the other, a precipice whence one must necessarily throw oneself to return downhill in ten seconds. The relation between sexuality and knowledge has so far been left obscure and inscrutable because a valley mentality has prevailed which has separated with the greatest precision a normality without tension from the exceptional nature of sexual ascent and descent. After all, how can a speculative attitude originate in a process that is made up of a merely instrumental and preliminary first part and a very short second part that cancels hastily what was prepared with so much care? It is hard to avoid the impression that something one wants quickly to return to zero cannot, indeed, be worth more than zero. To free oneself of orgasmomania, which has raged for decades and has conditioned negatively the lives of generations, is the first step toward the neuter, suspended and artificial sexuality of the thing that feels. It emancipates sexuality from nature and entrusts it to artifice, which opens up a world where the difference between the sexes, form, appearance, beauty, age and race no longer matter.

CHAPTER 3
GOD, ANIMAL, THING

Having exhausted the great historical task of comparing man to God and to the animal, which in the West began with the Greeks, what claims our attention now and raises the most urgent questions is the thing. It has become the focus of both our preoccupation and the promise of happiness. The play of resemblances and differences, affinities and divergences, correspondences and disparities that has characterized the comparison between God and man, and between man and animal, has concluded in a tie. Man is an almost God and an almost animal. God and the animal are almost man. But who has the courage or the desperation to say that man is an almost thing and the thing an almost man?

Upon the vertical movement, rising toward the divine or descending toward the animal, follows a horizontal movement toward the thing. It is neither above nor under us, but beside us, to one side, around us. The high and the low, the lofty and the depths have ceased to constitute the reference points that give meaning to the life of the individual and the community. On the other hand, ecstasy and instinctual liberation, rapture and vital effusion, do not seem to be so opposed as tradition has made them out to be. To become God or animal, to rise spiritually or to behave like a beast, are they so different from each other, after all? Are they not both animated by an excitement, an agitation that can be defined as either spiritual or vital, divine or animal? One thing is sure. In both the divine and the animal throbs and beats the living, while this is not the case with the thing which we encounter as both the anti-divine and the anti-animal, as what makes it possible to grasp the complementarity that holds God and animal together.

The comparison requires, therefore, a more radical alterity than the divine and the bestial. Up to now the issue has been resolved in a very expeditious and casual manner by stating that the animate being feels while the inanimate does not. Feeling, then, marks the boundary between the living and the thing. Therefore, how can one say that man is a thing that feels? This definition appears absurd at first because it is not enough to add feeling to the mode of being of the thing to come up with man. But who is looking for man? Rather, it’s a question of finding the thing. Maybe the thing is a man who does not feel? Or who feels a little?

If I say that the thing is a man that does not feel, I place man once again at the centre of the universe and I make him the measure of the world. In this anthropologization of inert beings, a deep transformation of the human occurs that makes him completely alien and unrecognizable. Is it enough, then, that the paper on which I write perceives the movement of the pen on the page in order to seem already human? Is it enough that the pen feels the pressure of my fingers in order to erase all differences between it and myself? How is it possible that the great and infinite life-world has been erased to such an extent? How is it possible that all my humanity is only concentrated in the feeling of a pen that presses on me or of a hand that holds me tight? How is it possible that nothing else matters and has value outside of this contact where all experience and knowledge, all that one has loved, suffered, sought and known, is gathered and concentrated? How is it possible that the entire order and balance of life rotates around a pressing or a squeezing? Is it possible that everything is already given in this feeling as pen and paper? What promises and oaths, tears and embraces, may not add to the feeling of a thing that feels?

In fact, this is the great transformation that we are witnessing and of which we are the protagonists, that is, no longer to feel like God, or like an animal, but as a sentient thing for whom the least perceivable is the maximum perceivable or, better, in the least perceivable there is the maximum perceivable. In such drastically sensitive reductionism, we capture not the being in itself of the thing, its essence, or what it would be without the presence of man, rather, a human feeling reduced to its lowest terms. However, this minimum feeling does not seem to lose anything. In the slightest contact there is implicit all the superhuman and the infrahuman of which we are capable, all the hopes and abjections, all the intellectual and practical world. It is ready to spurt out from that point in which it is forced, limited, compressed and ready to unfold in a great wealth of manifestations, developing an operational effectiveness that extends to any field of activity. Therefore, when I say that man is a thing that feels, at first I extinguish, blunt and close off the feeling, or, at least, I take away its liveliness, its brio, its flagrancy, but secondly I promote its extreme sharpness, I make it similar to a point, to a needle, to a sword.

CHAPTER 4
DESCARTES AND THE THING THAT FEELS

A thing that feels seems somewhat different from a thing that thinks and moves. These last two notions are not a novelty as they have already been the object of Descartes’s meditations. The thing that thinks is the mind for which the self-consciousness of the I, and the idea of God as a very perfect being, is essential. The thing that moves is the machine, whose model serves to explain the functioning of living bodies, men as much as animals. The mind and the machine are the two things that make it possible to establish, on the one hand, a comparison between man and God, and, on the other, between man and animal. It sounds strange, however, that they are called ‘things’. In fact, the mind is a spiritual substance clearly distinct from the body and, therefore, at first sight, it is extraneous to the dimension of the thing. As far as the body is concerned, even though qualified by extension, it presents, essentially, dynamic characteristics that make it more similar to a functioning mechanism than to an inert thing. In fact, no lesser action is required for its rest than for its motion. Nonetheless, Descartes calls them both ‘things’ and considers the I to be a thing that not only thinks but also feels because of the fact that it is connected to the body. Feeling implies the union between body and spirit, mind and machine. A thinking thing can also not have a body, but a sentient thing has to have it. Who feels therefore is not God but the I, it feels because it thinks, because feeling, understood in its self-evident subjectivity, is none other than thinking.

On this self-consciousness, Descartes founds his entire house of knowledge. Although, in his view, the thinking thing exhausts itself in the subjectivity that is aware of its existence, both the thing and the feeling constitute a remainder that is not absorbed in the clarity and distinction of self-evident thinking. If I say that man is a thing that feels, the being thing of what it feels and the feeling of the thing require a greater recognition than Descartes was prepared to grant them. The thing and the feeling demand to be considered in themselves and not in the function of a thinking subject. The strangeness of this request depends on their union. They have made common cause against the Cartesian thinking I who understands the thing as subject and feeling as thinking. According to Descartes, the thinking thing has superiority with respect to all the others because by virtue of its thinking it discovers that it exists, while to other things is not permitted the self-evidence of one’s own existence. In so doing, however, he considers the notion of thing as synonymous with substance and foundation, in a metaphysical sense that completely disregards the neutral dimension which is implicit in the notion of thing. As far as feeling is concerned, according to Descartes, it is not separable from thinking and from willing. The union of these faculties constitutes, precisely, a subjectivity that thinks itself as thinking, but not as an entity for which knowledge and action are rather a consequence of feeling.

What if feeling was not necessary to the subject? did not suit a subjectivity that says ‘I’? What if it were not able to grasp feeling as such unless it were on condition of transforming it into thinking? What if feeling were not accessible to an I? What if any effort made by the I to appropriate feeling were to lead inevitably to thinking? What if in feeling there was implicit and essential a neutral dimension that compelled us to say: ‘one feels’, but prevented us from saying: ‘I feel’? What if any attempt at saying: ‘I feel’ were to fatally resolve in ‘I think’?

The history of the modern appropriation of feeling by thinking begins precisely with Descartes for whom the thing that feels with immediacy and evidence is not the body but the mind. According to Descartes, from my body, from the extended thing that belongs to me, no clear and distinct knowledge can reach me directly. It is not any more evident to me than external bodies. However, this does not mean that my body is separated from the mind, but only that the mind feels what occurs in it. One would be tempted to claim against Descartes the rights of the body, considering it the bearer of a stronger and more vivid sensitive evidence than the intellectual one. But this is the way of sensationalism that in reducing all knowledge to a sensation has always been the poor parent of Cartesian rationalism.

The problem we have before us today does not concern the origins of knowledge, whether it is reflection or sensation, mind or body. At this level Descartes’s victory is definitive, only the mind is a thing that thinks, not the body. Not even opposing the thought of the mind to a supposed autonomous feeling of the body takes us very far. If feeling is thought of as something subjective, both in the first instance and in the last instance it can be referred to the self-consciousness of the mind. The rock on which Cartesianism trips is not the ignorance of the body, or its relation to it, but the very idea of a thing that feels.

Anyway, is the thing for Descartes really only metaphysical substance? He also speaks of the most common, inanimate, inert thing, for instance a piece of wax. If we remove all that does not belong to the wax, says Descartes, such as its colour, figure, size, what is left is ‘something extended, flexible, and changeable’, ¹ capable of taking on an infinity of shapes. Since the shapes that the wax can take are numberless, none of them, according to Descartes, is reliable. My senses do not allow me to see what the wax is, it is my mind alone that, aft er ‘the clothes have been taken off it’, succeeds in seeing it entirely ‘nude’ (II, 14). This is what interests us and this is what today we are comparing it with, not the thing that thinks, or the one that moves, and not even the thing that shines in a certain, stable sensitive form, but something opaque, indeterminate and open which is not self-evident and is not a machine. Maybe it feels? But what does it feel?

However, to say that the thing is ‘nude’ is misleading because it means that once more the demands of knowledge prevail over those of feeling; it means expressing a prejudicial suspicion on what is external. It means pretending to find the naked truth under deceitful appearances. From the point of view of feeling, the thing is rather clothing than nudity. It is similar to those ‘hats’ and those ‘clothes’ under which, for Descartes, ‘automata might be concealed’ (II, 13). Here, however, we must leave Descartes to his ghosts and his machines. We would like to bring our attention to those hats and clothing.

CHAPTER 5
BECOMING EXTRANEOUS CLOTHING

The body experienced by neutral sexuality is not a machine, but clothing, a thing. It is made of many types of fabrics juxtaposed and interwoven among themselves. To give oneself as a thing that feels means asking that the clothes that make up the body of the partner are mixed with one’s own, thus creating a single extension in which one can travel for hours, for days. To take a thing that feels means asking that one’s own clothing be welcomed everywhere and for always, to the point of no longer being recognized either by oneself or by one’s partner as belonging to someone. Thus the difference between giving and taking disappears and an extraneous body or, better, extraneous clothing appears that does not belong to anyone. Bodies have become rolls of material that fold and unfold on one another, so that, finally, it is possible to establish a new order, laying silk with silk, wool with wool, cloth with cloth. The tongue that permeates me and covers me, the sex that penetrates me and wears me, the mouth that sucks me and undresses me, all are clothing metaphors. The organs are clothes whose buttons and seams have vanished and return in the condition of pieces of material ready to be worked on. Thus, they can be united and separated according to new criteria that do not correspond to any function or purpose.

It is not I, it is not you that feels, but those hats and clothes mentioned by Descartes. They begin to feel from the moment in which they lose their shape of hats and cloaks, returning to be felts and fabrics that offer each other to one another, and that accept one another, without the intervention of spirits or machinery. Often I ask myself where this clothing libido comes from that cannot be satiated because it is not a hunger. It is pure and radical as the experience of philosophy, which with an incredible determination has always pretended to reduce to a few principles and concepts the immense variety of the world. Instead of the swarming and turbid viscosity of life, neuter sexuality opens up the timeless horizon of the thing. It is as if the bodies removed from the confused and contradictory vicissitudes of life were given the serene and eternal simplicity of an inorganic world, which nonetheless feels, beats and is caught in endless astonishment.

The cold lens of philosophy dismisses the tumultuous ambiguousness of the soul that constantly jumps here and there and is crowded and bewildered by opposite and incompatible representations. The fleshy clothes of our bodies are just like those that we leave on the armchair at night before we go to bed. Finally they are removed from the enantiodromia of contrary sentiments, the perennial chasing aft er each other of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, tenderness and aggressiveness, and the turning of one into the other. The folds of the female sex are no different from the depressions of a seat cover, the skin that runs along the rod of the male sex is similar to the covering of an arm rest. The fleshy clothing of our bodies, liberated from time and suspended in an enchantment without expectation, are the object of an infinite and absolute sexual investment that would seem more appropriate to a tailor, a seamstress, an upholsterer gone mad than to a philosopher. And yet, today, it is precisely up to the philosopher to proclaim the greatness and dignity of a sexuality without life and without soul. It is his task and his responsibility to state that the kingdom of things is not so much the triumph of technology and capitalism as much as the empire of a sexuality without orgasm. Thus, finally, it is precisely within the sphere that seems most irrational, casual and fragile, that of sexual excitement, that the power of philosophy is demonstrated, to whose appeal I am incapable of resisting, even if I wanted to.

Philosophy’s extraordinary power of excitement is probably connected to the fact that it has a similar power of inhibition. As long as sexuality is tied to vitalistic and spiritualistic representations, the sharp feeling of philosophical abstraction functions as a block; thus, and not without irony, one could recommend a philosophy course to those who suffer from premature ejaculation. Students of philosophy who have been lucky enough to have had a good teacher know very well that his mental image has an inhibitory effectiveness, beyond compare, greater than any other. But even this obstacle has its positive side because it teaches us to be detached from any orgastic vitalism and from any spiritualistic superelevation that marked the c...