Anne Dufourmantelle.
UPDATE (4.40pm): I have appended to this post a 2011 lecture by Ms. Dufourmantelle, given at the European Graduate School, on “The Philosophy of Sexuality and Body.”
Philosophy is an art of touching, just as sex is an art of intelligence. Touch is the living experience of the world on the part of what “thinks thought” in us. Philosophy is an art of touching because it experiences what it thinks, because it appears only in and through that act, while sex, for its part, allows us to experience just what is untouchable in the other. That other who can be explored, restrained, enveloped, consoled, hurt, and brought to jouissance unveils in the rawest and most exposed intimacy the fact that some part will always escape not only desire but also even sex (a word that refers both to the sex act and to the associated organs), and that there is something untouchable in the body itself. Spinoza’s genius lay here: transcendence is in the most intimate proximity to the self, and you don’t know it. No one knows what a body can do. The body — its exact resonance, its matter, its history — is located in the blank spot of desire, of speech, of thought.
Sex is not named by philosophy. Or only in such an impoverished, caricatural manner that it’s almost funny: appetites, affections, lasciviousness — sex is found lying in ambush in a blank spot, in a deafening silence. Everywhere except where love is in question. Ignored, demonized, effaced, sex is the first philosophical aporia, the locus of philosophy’s obscure, nocturnal, indiscernible astonishment. Sex is touch unable to express itself; philosophy, which has no tactile surface, no skin or nerve endings, is an art of touching concepts: their imbrications, their meticulous constructions, their silence. A touch other than that of the skin, comparable to a musician’s touch, that is, a touch that sets up a precise virtuosic resonance in which the world is engaged.
Sex experiences itself as a philosophical aporia, a body mingling with another body or with other plural bodies, a world mingling with another world, another skin, another voice, and one that comes undone just where it is resolved. To enter into jouissance is to be nevertheless at that place where the body no longer belongs to the body, where it becomes pure resonance, pure intelligence of the other, and, in that abandonment, “thought.”
Anne Dufourmantelle
Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy (pp. 9-10)
If appetized for some considerations of Dufourmantelle’s ideas in a selection of theatrical contexts, the reader might enjoy my essay ‘Flirting with Disaster’, in Karoline Gritzner (ed.), EROTICISM AND DEATH IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010) – which also features an essay by George Hunka!
Prof. Rabey is correct — on both counts. You can order the book from amazon.com here:
http://www.amazon.com/Eroticism-Theatre-Performance-Karoline-Gritzner/dp/1902806921
This is cute, but it’s also very, very silly. I’m always struck by how sex is so flagrantly deployed as career currency in certain sectors of the academy. And you do realize that photograph is something like twenty years old; isn’t Ms. Dufourmantelle pushing 50?
Ms. Dufourmantelle writes about far more than sex, as her biography (linked from her name) attests, though you’re welcome to your opinion.
I have no idea what Ms. Dufourmantelle’s age — or the photograph (it’s from a 2002 conference, for what that’s worth) — has to do with anything.
Oh, please George. Obviously they have to do with everything. And also obviously, philosophy is not sex. Or if it is, it’s the worst sex you can have.
Neither one of those points is obvious to me, Tom. Philosophy and sex have been locked in a dance since Plato’s Symposium, and good or bad sex, or best and worst sex, have just as much to do with elective affinity, preference, and many other things, philosophy and language included — in which case, let a thousand flowers bloom.
Ok, ok, this is an old game, but carry on, by all means.