Foucault Tomorrow We Will Have Sex Again in French
"I n recent years, two requirements have emerged for good sex: consent and self-knowledge," Katherine Angel writes. Judging by the number of freshers' week workshops and op-ed articles devoted to the subject, consent is vital for better sex. This seems like progress – it takes women at their word and defuses the potential for sexual violence. But its conceit of absolute clarity, Angel argues, "places the burden of good sexual interaction on women's behaviour".
Faced with the hurt that many experience as a result of sex, the idea of transparent self-knowledge is appealing. Angel marks the development of consent from the "No means No" slogan of 1970s anti-rape campaigners through to the sex-positive "post-feminism" of the 1990s and early 00s (with obligatory reference to the Spice Girls). As consent culture has evolved, it has assumed some of the characteristics of Sheryl Sandberg-style confidence feminism, prizing sassy self-expression and individual empowerment over political transformation. The risk for Angel is that exhorting women to know and express their desires in the language of positive affirmation places the responsibility for preventing sexual violence on women's conduct, rather than examining why violence occurs in the first place. As such, "rape … and responses to it, are privatised".
Part of what bothers Angel is that formalising such an idiosyncratic, unwieldy thing as desire is practically impossible. Desire doesn't work like a legal contract: it's difficult to always know what you want, a sense of intimacy changes in the heat of the moment, and a "yes" given at one point may be retracted soon afterwards. The language of consent is asked to stand for so much it begins to strain under the weight of its significance. It becomes unable to reflect the truth that, so long as sex is had under unequal conditions, people may feel compelled to say "Yes" when they really mean "No!" (Or as Angel puts it: "Repression can operate through the mechanisms of speech.")
Angel borrows the title of her book from a sardonic line in the first volume of Michel Foucault's extensive study of sexuality. The French philosopher was paraphrasing the stance of countercultural progressives in the 1960s and 70s, who mistakenly cast sexuality and pleasure as a proxy for political emancipation, thinking this would help throw off the moralising tendencies of their parents' generation. Angel is equally concerned that simply saying something doesn't amount to anything beyond saying it: "Speech and truth-telling are not inherently emancipatory." If someone tells you confidently about their sexual proclivities, it doesn't make them politically enlightened (or interesting).
One might be surprised by this perspective, given that Angel has written a book of passages about her sex life. Her 2012 Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell refracts the unruliness of desire through allusive monologues and truncated aphorisms (some occupy no more than three words on a page – "Am I pornography?"). Though it sounds strange, it works, but where Unmastered seems as though it was written in opposition to most things (sex positivity, the idea that pornography is necessarily degrading, taking out the recycling), this new book feels like the elaboration of an argument for something, the outlines of which could previously only be half-glimpsed. "I like there being no words! No method. No rules. I don't like taking instruction," Angel wrote in 2012. Words exist to protect people, but in Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again she is reaching towards something else: a world where desire does not have to be known and fixed in advance to protect people from violence. That this is an unlikely prospect doesn't make it any less attractive.
As this is a nonfiction book about the politics of desire, Angel is almost obliged to reference #MeToo, Brock Turner and the trials of Harvey Weinstein. These stories have by now already been picked over, and the challenge is to interpret them in a way that doesn't feel stale. Angel succeeds: she also considers the history of scientific research about sexuality and the people who thought their sex research was at the cutting edge of liberation, such as William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who tirelessly catalogued female desire using implements such as the intriguing "penis camera"; and Alfred Kinsey, a former entomologist who studied sex much like he did insects, carefully quantifying the number of orgasms people reached and how.
In both studies, the data was skewed from the start. Desire is notoriously subjective and difficult to trap; "no technique is neutral, and sex can shift its shape endlessly". Where the impressionistic form of Unmastered reflects this trickery, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again stares the problem of subjectivity in the face. People don't want what they say they want, nor what their better selves might want to want. So how can you measure something that refuses to show itself, or use these measurements as the basis to judge when sex is good? In Unmastered, Angel quotes the philosopher Jonathan Lear, who wrote: "A person is, by his nature, out of touch with his own subjectivity. Thus one cannot find out what it is like for a person to be just by asking." That Angel still has no answer to this problem is beside the point – it's the conviction of those who pretend they do that troubles her.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/20/tomorrow-sex-will-be-good-again-by-katherine-angel-review
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