At 3:16 PM +0100 21/3/02, Martin J. Walker wrote:
>Pleasure is a waste, sensuality an embarrassment. To condemn
>pleasure was to condemn the imagination because the body is not only a
>wellspring of sensations but of images...In the name of the future the
>censure of the body culminated in the mutilation of man's poetic powers."
>One can argue about this (though consumerism is no refutation, being the
>unquenchable though permanently degrading source of un-pleasure.)


In his last book, The Double Flame, he has nothing good to say about
consumerism. "Modernity desacralised the body and advertising has
turned it into a marketing tool. ... Capitalism has turned Eros into
an employee of Mammon. ... No one ever imagined that commercial
dealings would supplant libertine philosophy and that pleasure would
be transformed into an industrial machine. Eroticism has become a
department of advertising and a branch of business. In the past,
pornography and prostitution were handicrafts, so to speak; today
they are essential parts of the consumer economy. It is not their
existence which alarms me, but, rather, the proportions they have
assumed and their nature. Now an institution, they have ceased to be
transgressions."

Reminds me also of a book I've thought about often since I read it,
Sylvere Lotringer's study of a method of dealing with sex criminals
called _Overexposure_. It's at once hilarious and horrifying. It's
simply interviews with everyone involved in this US program, which
seeks to "cure" sexual perversions by flooding them with sexual
imagery. By the end of the book the people who seem most perverse
are the psychiatrists themselves. Lotringer is talking about a
society where the concept of privacy no longer exists, where
sexuality pervades everything, which at the same time desexualises
everything (I remember the ironic comment someone made about
Madonna's book SEX - "well, it's not about sex, then") and where
people "couple like dogs". And he says that those looking for
authenticity in sexual experience are forced to further and further
extremes of transgression. Though it seems to me that
romantic/erotic love might be a sufficient transgression, since its
recognition of the irreplacability of the other is the reverse of
disposability, it does not recognise obsolescence, and it demands
exclusivity.

Best

Alison
--

"The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
                                        Albert Camus

Alison Croggon
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