The theatrical glamour of sexual philosophy: Charlotte Rampling, from Purple Fashion #13 (Photo: Olivier Zahm)

And why not theatre as the arena for a philosophy of sex and desire? Western philosophy and Greek tragedy originated at the same time — in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, prior to the desensualization of philosophy which began with the moralizing of Plato and Aristotle — and what one finds in the pre-Socratics one finds in Sophocles and Aeschylus, when one goes looking for it. The human is the race that philosophizes and makes art, particularly theatre: the sexualized, philosophic body on stage, in the community of the dark room: why not? And why not indeed the suggestion that the spectator seek jouissance in his own life, outside the theatre, as a means of subversion? And as a means of draping himself in the animality which even the human can’t fully escape, and finding a philosophical meaning there as well. Look at the textiles in which we care to drape our bodies: in some cases casual, yes, but in seeking glamour we look to animals in which to clothe our desiring anatomies: leather and silks, for example, which express that desire, but more, they are exhibitions of a metaphor for the desiring body. (They arrange our bodies within animal skin, so that this skin becomes ours: the black fabric falling in waves from the shoulders, the sharp high heels which provoke desire, they become us in more ways than one: good it is to be glamorous.) Do we show off, then? Theatre is the arena for the show-off, for the exaggeration and the creation of the sexual and philosophic metaphor, because fleshed and speaking, is the most direct expression of this desirousness, seduction. And the risk that comes in a full philosophical embrace of this sexuality and desirousness, for the risk is always that of loss of self in the moment of jouissance with another (the other lover, the other spectator: always outside the self). Sexuality is an entry into terror, as the Greek tragedians knew, but a terror which liberates into that totalizing wonderment and astonishment that constitutes the basis of the philosophizing consciousness. Lovers in the moment are both/and: male/female, outside/inside, speaking with each other’s voice/moving through each other’s flesh, becoming one/the other. Theatre and drama, a community of philosophizing lovers, valorizing risk over stasis, is far from a utopia. But what then is this world, quite as real in that dark room as the world outside of it?

Philosophy is made of words, like drama; sex is made of bodies, like theatre. The exquisiteness of a lyrical, philosophic desire, draped in the bestial which in your recognition of it makes your heart skip a beat, provides entry to thought which transcends taboo. The sacrifice is identity. The reward is knowledge. Which was the insult to God in the Garden of Eden, and even the killing of God is only a beginning. The tragic, sexualized, philosophical theatre brings body and thought together to the edge of the abyss. Will the fall produce an endless experience of ecstasy? Perhaps. But there is no knowing until you leap.