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Where
Philosophy and Sexuality meet: Queering Autoerotics
Janine
Hoek
Department
of Philosophy
University
of the Western Cape
South
Africa
I share with Roland Barthes
a weakness for cruising where “the body is in a state of
alert, on the lookout for its own desire”. In a swift
conceptual leap, he moves “from the order of the erotic
quest to the quest [for] texts” (quoted in Hayes, 2002:
34) resisting any sense of a pre-designated erotogenic
zone. This perverse undoing of a fixed site for erotic
stimulation within an encapsulated body structured by a
stable gender identity results in an excess of
subjectivation “above and beyond what power needs to
produce subjects, [which] is re-articulated as resistance”
(Ffrench, 2004: 301). Following Barthes’ into the
queering of the “Text” as an irreducible plural
experienced only in an activity of production (1971) where
the writer simultaneously and instantaneously
becomes-first-reader, the full complexity of the
particular and the universal is embodied as the ecstasy of
words penetrate through social identities, “to the very
core that is me” (Lingis, 2005: 441). To be affected by
text, to affect text, is to find one’s very self turned
inside out; to have the most tender nerve-endings revealed;
to know intimately the sensation of the heart beating
outside a body, as if skin is of no consequence. It is to
constitute and reconstitute the self as sensual semiosis
in an autoerotic textual space where philosophy and
sexuality rub up against one another “in the coherent
and rigorous unfolding of philosophic prose the inexorable
movement that brings you to lick the cunt, the cock or the
arse of your partner” (Perniola, 2000L 16). In this
textual sensual sense, all discourse leaked and ingested
through the body, expresses and demands agency to
articulate the breath inhaled, now exhaled, between words
where the body self-translates as it divides and relates
itself to itself and to others; repetitively, compulsively
along multiple borders: crossable: no limit no way on the
sentences being turned mouth (frag- ile paper tiger mouth)
spaced out jagged crack an opening to make you talk lick
you like an asshole improvise around an anus I’m not
confusing things. Lipstick. Vaseline. (Brossard, French
Kiss, 2003: 294). Seeping through porous borders to
perform textuality in the reading of one’s own writing
provides a profound expression of fluid subjectivity where
autoeroticism becomes polyamorous, where there can be no
clear distinction between insider/outsider zones and where
boundaries begin to break down. Writing and speaking with
sex organs, my tongue caresses palette, teeth, and inner
flesh spaces, my hands tap keys as I would a lover’s
nerve endings and I read with the same eyes that absorb
and reflect desire. Through surrendering to the fleshy
infinite sexual investment, not of a perineum, not of a
membrane separating, but to the irrational, casual,
fragile fucking that philosophy demands I am engaged in a
physical expression of ideas, I am engaged in an
autoerotic discourse, I am engaged in a “shudder of
meaning” (Barthes, 1986: 79).
About Janine Hoek
Completing a Masters in
Philosophy degree working in the area of sexual desire as
an agent of social change.
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