Here, in chronological order without pretending to be a summary of its most important points, are cut-outs from Sex Appeal of the Inorganic. Before going in any one direction with the book, I wanted to relate some of its oddity, give you a sense of its persuasive insanity. Having grouped the passages by their chapters, I will also provide some minimal context in places (anything after a heading’s colon marks is quoted directly from Sex Appeal:
From the beginning, “Senses and Things”:
Contemporary feeling, a radical and extreme experience that has its cornerstone in the encounter between philosophy and sexuality(1).
Things and sense are no longer in conflict with one another but have struck an alliance thanks to which the most detach abstraction and the most unrestrained excitement are almost inseparable and are often indistinguishable…philosophy’s speculative extremism and sexuality’s invincible power(1).
Maybe an allusive homage to Gilles Deleuze, the next chapter it titled, “Sex Plateaux”:
To free oneself of orgasmomania, which has raged for decades and has conditioned negatively the lives of generations, is the first step toward the neuter, suspended, and artificial sexuality of the thing that feels(3).
From “God, Animal, Thing”:
When I say that man is a thing that feels, at first I extinguish, blunt, and close off the feeling, or, at least, I take away its liveliness, its brio, its flagrancy, but secondly I promote its extreme sharpness, I make it similar to a point, to a needle, to a sword(6).
From “Becoming Extraneous Clothing”:
The body experienced by neutral sexuality is not a machine, but clothing, a thing(10).
It is precisely up to the philosopher…his task and his responsibility to state that the kingdom of things is not so much the triumph of technology and capitalism as much as the empire of a sexuality without orgasm(11).
As long as sexuality is tied to vitalistic and spiritiualistic representations, the sharp feeling of philosophical abstraction functions as a block: thus, and not without irony, one could recommend a philosophy course to those who suffer from premature ejaculation(11).
From “Exemplary Addictions”:
It is not a question of getting inspiration from immoderate and excessive experiences in order to compose texts or write books, but of understanding philosophy as a practice that creats a dependency similar to that instituted by drugs, as a need that cannot be satisfied unless in a temporary and unstable manner, because it is infinite(15).
It is not at all a question of using common drugs as instruments for philosophizing or for the practice of sexuality–to have interesting thoughts or some exciting images–rather, that the encounter of philosophy and sexuality generates a similar effect as opium and its by-products. thus it seems that philosophy and sexuality move on the side of evil in a much more essential and constitutive manner than ever before(16).
From “Kant and the Spouse as Thing”:
Precisely because of their excess, sexuality runs toward marriage and philosophy towards the university…It is time to see marriage and the university on the side of evil, as pushers of sexual and philosophical excess that one cannot do without, rather than on the side of good as remedy to sexual and cognitive libido(19).
From “Sadism and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:
The empire of the senses, that is the infinite search for always new sexual sensations, proves the inability of sexuality to reach excess on its own(25).
The excess of Philosophical sexuality is not something that one reaches through a progressive increase of sensations and situations but is already given all at once..It neither states: “I feel” or “we feel”, but asserts impersonally “one feels”(26).
From “Philosophical Cybersex”:
Neutral sexuality is not inhumane or inhuman, it is perhaps, posthuman in the sense that it finds its starting point in man(29).
We have not yet accessed the artificial and always available world of things that feel. This access is made easier if we start from parts of the human body that are less sexually characterized…The breath unites the greatest sensorial stimulation because it strongly arouses our sense of smell, with the greatest abstraction, because it evokes two cavities, the lungs and the stomach, which we will never be able to penetrate…In the breath, the noble exhalation of the lungs, which one imagines having a pinker and thinner coating than the vulva’s or the anus’s, mingles with the heavy exhalation of the stomachs contents, to which be added, alas in an invisible way, our sperm(31).
The corneous quality of hair gives an impression of the inorganic. But hair, at the same time, presses with force to come out of the cutis of the head, so that the absence of life of the thing is connected with the experience of an abstract power(32).
From “Bodies as Clothing”:
The real opposition is not between body and soul, but between life and clothing(46).
As long as we remain prisoners of the idea that living bodies excite us more than clothes, we will never escape the organisicistic aestheticism that consider sexuality in terms of life(46).
From “Fetishism and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:
How can the fetishism of borrowed money constitute an imaginary, symbolic, and emotional reference point for the philosophical sexuality of the thing that feels?(59)
From “Hardcore Sonority”:
The essence of music is neither sentiment nor life, but more essentially, sound, understood precisely in the neutral and inorganic indifference evoked by this word(65).
What distinguishes the inorganic from the disorganic, the pile, the mess?(66)
The sex appeal of the inorganic relies on the generous and hospitable spatiality of the world of things–bodies, sounds, and thoughts–that infinitely welcome us with unlimited accessibility(69).
From “Plastic Landscapes”:
Architectural experience is a drifting, an uncontrollable dragging through which the continuous change of perceptive framework changes continuously what can be seen(84).
In deconstruction is implicitly an architectural and philosophical maximalism which is solidly anchored in the neutral, impersonal, and suspended character of experience. It puts into motion a device of de-spiritualization and de-vitalization that can be applied to any material(87).
Cyberspace is the practical realization of Schelling’s idea according to which architecture is spatialized music(91).
From “Desire and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:
The opinion of Ignatius Loyola, according to whom eternal love is even more ready to bestow holiness than we are to desire it, fits in with this tradition whereby what is given, what is available, namely, the present is much more valuable than what is desired, coveted, that is the future(98).
The sex appeal of the inorganic is closer to an existence full of wonder than to the very equal and apathetic life of the Sceptics…The sex appeal of the inorganic is more an after-desire than a without-desire(99).
The checkmate of desire consists precisely in the impossibility of maintaining the tension between existence and carnality(100).
From “Overflowing Installations”:
The collection represents an important step toward teh sex appeal of the inorganic because it despiritualizes and devitalizes what it collects(103).
The libido of collecting is not yet a neutral sexuality because it is still too cautious and timid.
Installations are a kind of happening represented by things rather than by people(107).
From “Division and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:
Androgyny seems to me as remote as one can imagine it to be from the sex appeal of the inorganic. It is the victory of organic unity over sexuality, metaphysics over neuter, thinking over feeling. Closer to the sex appeal of the inorganic is hermaphroditism…[not] the unification of opposites [but rather] their neutralization(115).
Inorganic sexuality is not able to understand why there should only be two sexes, and not as many sexes as there are numbers, that is, infinite sexes(117).
The Stoics [claim] that all bodies can be divided to infinity and that man, as a result, is not made up of a greater number of parts than a finger, or the universe of a greater number of parts than man. As a result, there are no ultimate parts and the whole real is solid, continuous(118).
From “Inclusive Metawriting”: Why do I find the expression ‘inclusive metawriting more loaded with sexual intensity than most obscene words(126)?
From “Pleasure and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:
And now we come to the saddest topic of this book: pleasure!(132)
Hedonism is characterized by an inane and conceited idleness, an indolent and mellifluous self-complacency, a self-important and obtuse enervation which is only capable of bragging of its own savoir-vivre(132).
All the defenders of pleasure are more or less, openly or secretly, partially or entirely, enemies of sexuality(132).
From “Perverse Performance”:
“I would rather go crazy than feel pleasure,” Antisthenes used to say(142).
(the book’s very end)The sexualization of philosophy and the arts is probably a perverse effect, that is an unforeseen and undesirable consequence provoked by the political irrelevance of these activities. But an even more perverse effect would be that through the sex appeal of the inorganic one would re-establish a live relation between them and society(144).
Tags: Perniola, Inorganic, Sex Appeal, Cut-Outs
