The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World PDF Free Download
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The Sex Appeal
of the Inorganic
SELECTED TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES
The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams
Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno
Being and Event, Alain Badiou
The Language of Fashion, Roland Barthes
The Intelligence of Evil, Jean Baudrillard
Key Writings, Henri Bergson
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda
A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Michael Dummett
Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm
Truth and Method, Hans Georg Gadamer
All Men Are Brothers, Mohandas K. Gandhi
Violence and the Sacred, René Girard
The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari
The Essence of Truth, Martin Heidegger
Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer
Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre
Libidinal Economy, Jean-François Lyotard
Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri
The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière
Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure
Understanding Music, Roger Scruton
What is Art?, Leo Tolstoy
Interrogating the Real, Slavoj Žižek
Some titles are not available in North America.
The Sex Appeal
of the Inorganic
Philosophies of Desire in the
Modern World
Mario Perniola
Translated by Massimo Verdicchio
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published in Italian as Il sex appeal dell’inorganico
© Giulio Einaudi s.p.a. Torino
This English translation first published in 2004
English translation © Bloomsbury Publishing 2004, 2017
Bloomsbury Revelations edition first published 2017
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Contents
1 Senses and Things 1
2 Sex Plateaux 3
3 God, Animal, Thing 5
4 Descartes and the Thing that Feels 7
5 Becoming Extraneous Clothing 11
6 Exemplary Addictions 15
7 Kant and the Spouse as Thing 19
8 Sadism and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic 23
9 Philosophical Cybersex 29
10 Kant and the Feeling of the Thing in Itself 37
11 Masochism and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic 41
12 Bodies as Clothing 45
13 Hegel and the Thing as ‘Not This’ 49
14 Fetishism and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic 53
15 Hardcore Sonority 63
16 Hegel and the Thing as ‘Also’ 69
17 Vampirism and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic 75
Contentsvi
18 Plastic Landscapes 81
19 Hegel and the Thing ‘All of One Piece’ 89
20 Desire and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic 93
21 Overflowing Installations 99
22 Heidegger and the Thing as Reliability 105
23 Division and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic 111
24 Inclusive Metawritings 117
25 Wittgenstein and the Feeling of ‘This Thing’ 123
26 Pleasure and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic 127
27 Perverse Performance 135
Notes 139
Index of Names 141
CHAPTER 1
SENSES AND THINGS
To give oneself as a thing that feels and to take a thing that feels is the new
experience that asserts itself on contemporary feeling, a radical and extreme
experience that has its cornerstone in the encounter between philosophy
and sexuality, and constitutes the key to understanding so many disparate
manifestations of present-day culture and art. What may generate anxiety
and constitute an enigma is precisely the coming together of two opposite
dimensions in a single phenomenon such as the mode of being of the thing
and human sensibility. It would seem that things and senses are no longer
in conict with one another but have struck an alliance thanks to which
the most detached abstraction and the most unrestrained excitement are
almost inseparable and are oen indistinguishable. us, out of the union
between philosophy’s speculative extremism and sexuality’s invincible
power something extraordinary is born in which our age recognizes itself,
and which aer Walter Benjamin we can call the sex appeal of the inorganic.1
CHAPTER 2
SEX PLATEAUX
e alliance between the senses and things allows access to a neuter
sexuality that entails a suspension of feeling. is is not the annulment
of sensibility, which would imply the absence of any tension, but the
entrance into a displaced, decentred experience, freed of any intention
of reaching a purpose. To feel like a thing that feels means rst of all the
emancipation from an instrumental conception of sexual excitement that
naturally considers it directed toward the attainment of orgasm. e usual
way of representing sexual activity by means of a diagram that measures
excitement precludes the mode of being of the thing. As long as we think
of sexuality in terms of a curve that, starting from zero, rises more or less
slowly toward the acme of orgasm, only to decrease suddenly and return
to the starting point, we remain a victim of an attitude that experiences
sexual feeling as a more or less long preparation for a very brief climax
destined to precipitate to the zero point of a normality deprived of
tension, from which it seems that one has never moved aer all. To devote
all one’s attention to the prolongation of the preliminaries of sexual
intercourse and to attribute to orgasm a cathartic and liberating meaning
precludes from the start the possibility of feeling like a thing. us, one is
stuck within a model that compares sexual feeling to mountain climbing
which, on the one hand, implies a slow and progressive climb, and, on the
other, a precipice whence one must necessarily throw oneself to return
downhill in ten seconds. e relation between sexuality and knowledge
has so far been le obscure and inscrutable because a valley mentality
has prevailed which has separated with the greatest precision a normality
without tension from the exceptional nature of sexual ascent and descent.
Aer all, how can a speculative attitude originate in a process that is made
up of a merely instrumental and preliminary rst part and a very short
second part that cancels hastily what was prepared with so much care?
It is hard to avoid the impression that something one wants quickly to
return to zero cannot, indeed, be worth more than zero. To free oneself
of orgasmomania, which has raged for decades and has conditioned
The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic
4
negatively the lives of generations, is the rst step toward the neuter,
suspended and articial sexuality of the thing that feels. It emancipates
sexuality from nature and entrusts it to artice, which opens up a world
where the dierence between the sexes, form, appearance, beauty, age and
race no longer matter.
CHAPTER 3
GOD, ANIMAL, THING
Having exhausted the great historical task of comparing man to God and
to the animal, which in the West began with the Greeks, what claims our
attention now and raises the most urgent questions is the thing. It has become
the focus of both our preoccupation and the promise of happiness. e play
of resemblances and dierences, anities and divergences, correspondences
and disparities that has characterized the comparison between God and
man, and between man and animal, has concluded in a tie. Man is an almost
God and an almost animal. God and the animal are almost man. But who
has the courage or the desperation to say that man is an almost thing and
the thing an almost man?
Upon the vertical movement, rising toward the divine or descending
toward the animal, follows a horizontal movement toward the thing. It is
neither above nor under us, but beside us, to one side, around us. e high
and the low, the loy and the depths have ceased to constitute the reference
points that give meaning to the life of the individual and the community. On
the other hand, ecstasy and instinctual liberation, rapture and vital eusion,
do not seem to be so opposed as tradition has made them out to be. To
become God or animal, to rise spiritually or to behave like a beast, are they
so dierent from each other, aer all? Are they not both animated by an
excitement, an agitation that can be dened as either spiritual or vital, divine
or animal? One thing is sure. In both the divine and the animal throbs and
beats the living, while this is not the case with the thing which we encounter
as both the anti-divine and the anti-animal, as what makes it possible to
grasp the complementarity that holds God and animal together.
e comparison requires, therefore, a more radical alterity than the
divine and the bestial. Up to now the issue has been resolved in a very
expeditious and casual manner by stating that the animate being feels while
the inanimate does not. Feeling, then, marks the boundary between the
living and the thing. erefore, how can one say that man is a thing that
feels? is denition appears absurd at rst because it is not enough to add
feeling to the mode of being of the thing to come up with man. But who is
The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic
6
looking for man? Rather, it’s a question of nding the thing. Maybe the thing
is a man who does not feel? Or who feels a little?
If I say that the thing is a man that does not feel, I place man once again
at the centre of the universe and I make him the measure of the world. In
this anthropologization of inert beings, a deep transformation of the human
occurs that makes him completely alien and unrecognizable. Is it enough,
then, that the paper on which I write perceives the movement of the pen on
the page in order to seem already human? Is it enough that the pen feels the
pressure of my ngers in order to erase all dierences between it and myself?
How is it possible that the great and innite life-world has been erased to
such an extent? How is it possible that all my humanity is only concentrated
in the feeling of a pen that presses on me or of a hand that holds me tight?
How is it possible that nothing else matters and has value outside of this
contact where all experience and knowledge, all that one has loved, suered,
sought and known, is gathered and concentrated? How is it possible that the
entire order and balance of life rotates around a pressing or a squeezing? Is
it possible that everything is already given in this feeling as pen and paper?
What promises and oaths, tears and embraces, may not add to the feeling of
a thing that feels?
In fact, this is the great transformation that we are witnessing and of
which we are the protagonists, that is, no longer to feel like God, or like
an animal, but as a sentient thing for whom the least perceivable is the
maximum perceivable or, better, in the least perceivable there is the
maximum perceivable. In such drastically sensitive reductionism, we
capture not the being in itself of the thing, its essence, or what it would be
without the presence of man, rather, a human feeling reduced to its lowest
terms. However, this minimum feeling does not seem to lose anything. In
the slightest contact there is implicit all the superhuman and the infrahuman
of which we are capable, all the hopes and abjections, all the intellectual and
practical world. It is ready to spurt out from that point in which it is forced,
limited, compressed and ready to unfold in a great wealth of manifestations,
developing an operational eectiveness that extends to any eld of activity.
erefore, when I say that man is a thing that feels, at rst I extinguish, blunt
and close o the feeling, or, at least, I take away its liveliness, its brio, its
agrancy, but secondly I promote its extreme sharpness, I make it similar to
a point, to a needle, to a sword.
CHAPTER 4
DESCARTES AND THE THING THAT FEELS
A thing that feels seems somewhat dierent from a thing that thinks and
moves. ese last two notions are not a novelty as they have already been
the object of Descartes’s meditations. e thing that thinks is the mind for
which the self-consciousness of the I, and the idea of God as a very perfect
being, is essential. e thing that moves is the machine, whose model serves
to explain the functioning of living bodies, men as much as animals. e
mind and the machine are the two things that make it possible to establish,
on the one hand, a comparison between man and God, and, on the other,
between man and animal. It sounds strange, however, that they are called
‘things’. In fact, the mind is a spiritual substance clearly distinct from the
body and, therefore, at rst sight, it is extraneous to the dimension of the
thing. As far as the body is concerned, even though qualied by extension,
it presents, essentially, dynamic characteristics that make it more similar to
a functioning mechanism than to an inert thing. In fact, no lesser action is
required for its rest than for its motion. Nonetheless, Descartes calls them
both ‘things’ and considers the I to be a thing that not only thinks but also
feels because of the fact that it is connected to the body. Feeling implies the
union between body and spirit, mind and machine. A thinking thing can
also not have a body, but a sentient thing has to have it. Who feels therefore
is not God but the I, it feels because it thinks, because feeling, understood in
its self-evident subjectivity, is none other than thinking.
On this self-consciousness, Descartes founds his entire house of
knowledge. Although, in his view, the thinking thing exhausts itself in the
subjectivity that is aware of its existence, both the thing and the feeling
constitute a remainder that is not absorbed in the clarity and distinction of
self-evident thinking. If I say that man is a thing that feels, the being thing
of what it feels and the feeling of the thing require a greater recognition than
Descartes was prepared to grant them. e thing and the feeling demand to
be considered in themselves and not in the function of a thinking subject.
e strangeness of this request depends on their union. ey have made
common cause against the Cartesian thinking I who understands the thing
