sex, theory, power

2006-04-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

What is at stake is less a theory of cultural construction than a consideration of the scenography and topography of construction. This scenography is orchestrated by and as a matrix of power that remains disarticulated if we presume constructedness and materiality as necessarily oppositional notions.

There are no desiring- machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.
Each time this identity announces itself, someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, you're caught. Take it off, get free, disengage yourself. I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic. There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.

2006-04-12T19:31:00.000-07:00

This objectivation and this subjectivation are not independent of each other. From their mutual development and their interconnection, what could be called the "games of truth" come into being--that is, not the discovery of true and ethical things but the rules according to which what a subject can say about certain things depends on the question of true and false.

In sum, the critical history of thought/ desire is neither a history of acquisitions nor a history of concealments of truth; it is the history of "undressings", understood as the forms according to which discourses capable of being declared true or false (or ethical) are articulated concerning a domain of performative things. If gender is performative, it must be radically free. And it has seemed to many that the materiality of the body is vacated or ignored or negated here — disavowed, even. … But what becomes important is to go back to the category of sex, and to the problem of materiality, and to ask how it is that sex itself might be construed as a norm. What the conditions of this emergence were, the price that was paid for it, so to speak, its effect on reality and the way in which, linking a certain type of object to certain modalities of the subject, it constituted the historical a priori of a possible experience for a period of time, an area and for given individuals. I wanted to work out how a norm actually materialises a body, how we might understand the materiality of the body to be not only invested with a norm, but in some sense animated by a norm, or contoured by a norm. Crush thought under an image which is that of the Same and the Similar in representation, but profoundly betrays what it means to think and alienates the two powers of difference and repetition, of philosophical commencement and recommencement.

2006-04-12T18:29:00.000-07:00

Where is the subject? It is necessary to find the subject as a lost object. More precisely this lost object is the support of the subject and in many cases is a more abject thing than you may care to consider. There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.

If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.

2006-04-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called a "sexual event," if this loaded term did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural--or structuralist--thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term "sexual event" anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this sexual event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling. Making love--a sexual event--is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand.

There's a very specific notion of gender involved in compulsory heterosexuality: a certain view of gender coherence whereby what a person feels, how a person acts, and how a person ex presses herself sexually (a sexual event) is the articulationand consummation of a gender. It's a particular causality and identity that gets established as gender coherence which is linked to compulsory heterosexuality. It's not any gender, or all gender, it's that specific kind of coherent gender.

What is at stake is less a theory of cultural construction than a consideration of the scenography and topography of construction. This scenography is orchestrated by and as a matrix of power that remains disarticulated if we presume constructedness and materiality as necessarily oppositional notions.

There are no desiring- machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.
Each time this identity announces itself, someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, you're caught. Take it off, get free, disengage yourself. I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic. There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.

Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already

habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this
voyeurism of exactitude.