New Philosophies of Sex and Love

Thinking Through Desire

Sarah LaChance Adams, Christopher M. Davidson, Caroline R. Lundquist

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786602237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Our amorous and erotic experiences do not simply bring us pleasure; they shape our very identities, our ways of relating to ourselves, each other and our shared world. This volume challenges some of our most prevalent assumptions relating to identity, the body, monogamy, libido, sexual identity, seduction, fidelity, orgasm, and more. In twelve original and philosophically thought-provoking essays, the authors reflect on the broader meanings of love and sex: what their shifting historical meanings entail for us in the present; how they are constrained by social conventions; the ambiguous juxtaposition of agency and passivity that they reveal; how they shape and are formed by political institutions; the opportunities they present to resist the confines of gender and sexual orientation; how cultural artefacts can become incorporated into the body; and how love and sex both form and justify our ethical world views. Ideal for students both in philosophy and gender studies, this highly readable book takes us to the very heart of two of the most important dimensions of human experience and meaning-making: to the seductive and alluring, confusing and frustrating, realms of love and sex.

Part I

Desire’s Dissonance

Chapter One

Introduction

Desire’s Dissonance

Sarah LaChance Adams, Christopher M. Davidson, and Caroline R. Lundquist

There are moments when the world feels out of joint, when our familiar patterns of thinking and acting are disrupted. They arise, more often than not, when our accustomed ways of organizing, interpreting, and valuing are at odds with something else, something new. These moments of dissonance are unsettling, but we ought not to take refuge in the familiar on that account; for although we find dissonance uncomfortable, it overflows with philosophical promise. Dissonance alerts us to theoretically rich contradictions, indicating spaces of conceptual ambiguity in what had previously seemed to be plain truths or common sense. Hence, when we choose to dwell with—and think through—the unfamiliar, we can become conscious of, and begin to explore the deep significance of our intuitions and our pre-reflective experience in all their chaotic dynamism. There is no end to the insights that can arise as a result of the choice to go down these untrodden pathways of thought, where the familiar can become strange, and the strange, strangely familiar.

The chapters in this volume dwell with desire’s dissonance, and in so doing they uncover insights that are as intriguing as they are unsettling. Desire is the location of mystifying and invigorating tensions, the shifting nexus of apparent oppositions: deliberative reason and unformulated experience, power and resistance, one’s present becoming and one’s past being, cultural “knowledge” and embodiment, yearning and explicitly held values, deception and love of truth, exploitation and friendship, spontaneity and premeditated design, and so on. Seeming opposition often indicates a unique and vital relation.

The philosophical modus operandi of these chapters is to engage with lived experience, to embrace conceptual fluidity and ambiguity, and to think via the hermeneutic circle. For example, while some people might seek to distinguish between perverted sexuality and typical or “normal” sexuality, we explore how abject bodies can become objects of mainstream desire precisely because they are transgressive. While others seek to find a strong conceptual divide between consent and coercion, we wonder about the phenomenon of seduction as simultaneously deceiving and disclosing. We are especially interested in the way that marginalized experiences may expand, lend nuance to, or even undermine our previous understanding of the phenomena in question.

The authors in this anthology understand that any one method of revealing a phenomenon may conceal the truths that would arise via others. They recognize, for instance, that although medical narratives will have much to tell us about erectile dysfunction and intersexed embodiment, relying on these narratives alone risks overshadowing the sociocultural context that codetermines the meaning of these phenomena. Seeking a diagnosis, for example, may bar us from asking whether certain types of nonnormativity should be pathologized to begin with. Diagnosis, like many forms of judgment or meaning-making, arises in a particular setting that may have a role in constructing the precise condition that practitioners only intend to delineate. When we contextualize a diagnosis—or any other judgment—by noting how it assumes a certain conceptual framework, we can better see both its value and its limitations. Hence, the chapters in this volume reflect the belief that a dialogical engagement between disciplines with apparently different epistemological assumptions is critical to the most dynamic and robust inquiry. By going beyond any single approach to sex and love, such as cognitive science, classical phenomenology, first-person narrative, medical science, analytic logic, or social construction, these chapters travel around a phenomenon, marking and then exploring its convergent and divergent aspects.

These chapters are unique in that they place more emphasis on examining the workings of our normative assumptions than on arguing for positions of right and wrong. We wonder what certain ethical imperatives reveal about a worldview. For example, we ask what the cultural status of monogamy discloses regarding our beliefs about “real” love and fidelity. The authors of these chapters do not dictate the outcomes of ethical inquiry. Instead, they ask what perspectives and prejudices are hidden within our predominant cultural mores.

Sex and love are inherently risky. Among their hazards is the productive undermining of our most cherished certainties. For this reason, we hope this anthology will be more provocative than conciliatory. The authors here share the spirit of daring by examining the established pathways for sex and love, observing the grooves established by experience, and reading from them the etchings of conformity and resistance. They explicate both common and nonnormative experiences—demonstrating that ignored, misrepresented and disciplined bodies may reveal unfamiliar, but exciting, new options. Our desires are reflective of where we have been; who we want to be; our self-betrayals, self-restraint, and self-discoveries; our powers to create and deceive; and our political and vocational investments. Desire is elusive, conflicted, shifting, fleeting, and nonlinear. It can be manipulated, corrupted, faked, and medicated, but it also can be a source of power, creativity, compassion, and wisdom. As philosophically minded thinkers, it behooves us to attend to desire’s dissonance, to esteem an attitude of humble and respectful curiosity, and to recognize that if we are not risking what we think we know, then we are not venturing enough.

The chapters in part II go beyond traditional taxonomies of love and desire to explore inclusive descriptions that can account for the variety of their manifestations. The authors entertain questions such as: What is love’s essential character? What is its scope? Are its boundaries clear or ambiguous? What qualities are held in common between diverse kinds of love? What distinguishes “real” love from false loves that dominate or distort?

In chapter 2, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. revives the myth of Eros as a self-contradictory creature created through the drunken copulation of Poros (resource or “a way”) and Penia (poverty). Eros yearns because he is always in need like his mother, but like his father, he also has the ability to stretch for what is outside of his grasp. Drawing on the Ancient emphasis on process, Ruprecht questions the contemporary subject-seeking focus on sexual identity as substance. Eros, he claims, is not focused on the self, but rather on the space between self and the other. It is a reaching-beyond-oneself toward another, unsettling the very effort toward grasping self-definition. Desire is about what one does not have. If desire were viewed as the having-of-an-object, then it would always be a failure since objects ultimately fade, dissipate and die. The successful “end” of desire can only be natality (procreation and/or creation), but this finale is really an overture that is, hopefully, destined to exceed one’s own existence. Thus, for Ruprecht, desire seeks infinity.

In the Symposium, Socrates blends the myth regarding the origin of Eros with a description of philosophy. Philosophizing starts in response to the confusion of an aporia (the absence of a way, a-poros), when one comes to know that one does not know. Philosophy, a la Socràtes, is knowledge of ignorance. Similarly, Ruprecht’s vision of philosophy is in between having and not having, and pulses with the dynamic push–pull of eros: “Greek philosophy is tragicomic thinking, the attempt to think the unthinkable by thinking in the middle, attempting to join what has been separated far too casually: love and sex, Eros and Aphrodite, the thinking of desiring thought itself.” The process that animates both love and love of wisdom never comes to rest in a fixed object; it is in between beginning and finishing.

The meaning of love has changed quite radically over time, which makes engagement with the philosophical questions to which it gives rise notoriously difficult. An even more fundamental issue is that it is not clear what kind of definition we ought to seek. Rather than seeking a strict normative definition of love, which might exclude important experiences, or a minimal definition that would leave the concept thin on meaningful content, Chiara Piazzesi argues in chapter 3 that we ought to fashion a description of love that is both pliable and robust. As she explains, to minimally define a living room only by a floor, a ceiling, and some number of walls may work—but a similarly minimal definition of love would tell us very little.

Piazzesi notes that our definition will need to analyze discourse and social roles. The emotions of love require an understanding of our contemporary discourse because they do not occur in a purely subjective immediate intuition. We do not experience “love as such” and then try to talk about it. Discursive ways of making meaning are inseparable from a feeling of love itself. Situating how love feels within the ways we find ourselves talking about love gives us a much firmer grasp on the phenomena. Moreover, discourse analysis allows for a wide range of “loves,” both good and bad, to be understood and sorted without forcing normative claims into the definition itself. Approaching love’s meaning in this fashion highlights the implicit structures of the wide range of understandings of love operating in our culture today.

Like Piazzesi, Michael Kim in chapter 4 emphasizes both the difficulty and the importance of thinking about love, reminding us that while love is simultaneously among the hardest things to think about philosophically, it is also one of the most critical. Instead of asking what the definition of love would be, Kim asks “how is love possible at all?” What are the conditions of possibility for the emergence of love? Whereas Piazzesi emphasizes the social and discursively contextualized contexts of love's historical, shifting nature, Kim links the difficulty in defining love to its ontological status: at the limit or crossing of self and other, and life-world transformation.

In a desperate but common move, many lovers try to realize their love as a fixed, discrete thing: the intimately offered body reduced to a brute proof, or the declaration of “I love you” as an externalized self. However, following Sartre, Kim claims that love cannot be reduced to an object; it is not an act, a feeling, or a simple state of affairs. In fact, there is a double difficulty preceding the emergence of love: not only must we let our beloveds be who (not what) they are, we also must not make ourselves into an object. Nevertheless, if the central focus of love was respect for individual autonomy, then it could be reduced to a relatively distant, contractual affair. Each lover would remain largely unchanged by the other. Marion, with his concept of the “crossing” of two subjects, provides the corrective. The changes that come to us in love are not the kind that can be chosen by a single self; they are much more radical than what can be achieved by two free existents’ coinciding wills. Love gives birth to a new world and is, therefore, the most radical of changes. Love surpasses drawing closer to another, interchanging ideas, or sharing experiences. Love is an emergence that does not arise in a place, Kim argues, but rather in the displacement of oneself.

Monogamy exerts such a strong normative hegemony that for many it seems like the only possible configuration of “real love.” In chapter 5, Erik Jansson Boström elucidates monogamy as embedded in a particular worldview in the manner of Max Weber. In the course of his analysis, Boström shows that there are distinct types of monogamy and polyamory, giving us a detailed taxonomy for understanding diverse ways of loving. Each has a unique internal logic, making sense of desire and love in wholly different ways. As Boström shows, sketching these ideal versions of each worldview lies somewhere between description and evaluation, revealing what makes a set of values “tick” by explicating some of its key features. Describing a worldview neither invalidates it nor justifies it, but making its premises explicit would be a propaedeutic to either end. Such a method of explication is especially important for monogamy, whose ubiquity has made it difficult to see. In the end, polyamory is understood as an alternate worldview, just as comprehensible and authentic as monogamy. Polyamorism clearly indicates new possibilities not only in terms of the quantity of relationships, but more notably, it opens up wider variety in the qualities that legitimate relationships may have.

Love, particularly as envisioned as something that one “falls” into or as something that occurs “naturally” between parents and children, is often posited as the antithesis of agency. Sex is frequently portrayed as either impulsive and risky, or as habitual and stale. Heteronormative gender dynamics are regarded as mere manifestations of biological and cultural programming. The chapters in part III challenge these unimaginative ideas. In their place, the authors offer friendship and comradeship, as manifested both in familial and romantic relationships, as ways of reclaiming agency.

In chapter 6, Elena Cuffari considers models of heterosexual relationships that depict men as immature boneheads who will pursue sex with as many women as possible at almost any cost, and that represent women as obsessed with fidelity, spending much of their time in desperate attempts to prevent, delay, and deal with the after-effects of male cheating. Moreover, Cuffari notes that in such stock accounts, female behavior is defined inversely, as a reaction against male tendencies. This makes cheating by females seem nearly impossible. But perhaps even more damaging is the fact that female friendships are imperiled as other women are construed as enemies to one’s romantic relationship. Although these images of female and male genders are quite different, they share the feature of being gender-based disavowals of agency.

Cuffari critiques spurious appropriations of scientific research that lend an air of authority to popular culture’s truisms about heterosexual relationships. She raises doubts about popularly accepted economic cost-benefit calculations, biological accounts, and universally enforced social norms. Turning to cognitive science, she gives a grounded philosophical account that avoids reductionism and makes sense of a biologically sensible freedom. As deployed by Cuffari, cognitive science undermines the false dichotomy of an unfettered, individualistic freedom versus strict determination that is emblematic of many pop-biological, sociological, and economic accounts. Ultimately, Cuffari asserts that couples together make a space where commitment can emerge, a process that shapes their agency without eliminating all sense of freedom.

Pussy Riot’s famous 2012 performance of musical protest in a Moscow cathedral embodied anger. But as Fulden Ibrahimhakkioglu notes in chapter 7, this anger was misconstrued as hatred by the court, by members of the Russian government, and by various popular media pundits. The case of Pussy Riot is a variation on an all-too-familiar theme: the misrepresentation of the complex emotions motivating feminist activism as baseless and impulsive “rage” or blind “hatred.” This distortion of feminist activism has all but absorbed the concept “feminist” in the popular imagination. The story of Pussy Riot illuminates a truth that has been covered over by the notion of the “angry feminist”: that feminist rage can be and often is motivated by love and solidarity.

Before we can correct such misconceptions, Ibrahimhakkioglu argues that we must begin by recognizing that in the political realm, love, anger, and action are often intertwined. In the context of the ACT UP movement, for example, anger functioned to mobilize those who had lost loved ones to AIDS. Here, as in so many cases of activism, anger was instrumentally effective and arose initially out of love. Anger may not sustain a movement, but anger and love may. If we attend to the overwhelmingly positive reception of Pussy Riot by the global community, then we will perhaps suspect that the old image of the bitter feminist may eventually be eclipsed by that of the socially aware “holy fool,” whose fury is born of love, who rages and rocks for justice, and whose ethos is infectious.

In chapter 8, Christine Overall examines a form of love rarely analyzed by philosophers: the love between parents and adult children. The dependency that comes with the status of child must be attenuated once the child becomes an adult, but numerous questions surround the relation. Are dependency and autonomy at all compatible? Exactly when does the child become an adult? Does the parent have a better understanding of their offspring (having known the child their whole life) or perhaps does the parent know less than friends and lovers once the child leaves the parent’s home?

Distinguishing between its ontological features (what a parent is, what a child is, what relations they necessarily have) and its epistem...