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6 - Pornosophy: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Pornographic Image
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- By Peter Banki, University of Western Sydney
- Edited by Carrie Giunta, Adrienne Janus, University of Aberdeen
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- Book:
- Nancy and Visual Culture
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2017
- Print publication:
- 13 April 2016, pp 109-128
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
What happens when a philosopher gets a hard-on? Generally speaking, this is not a subject philosophers often discuss. Moreover, the slang, some might even say obscene expression ‘to get a hardon’ does not properly belong to the idiom of academic research. In place of ‘hard-on’, or the only slightly less offensive ‘erection’, one should probably say something like ‘tumescence of the penis’, presuming for the moment that a hard-on must refer to a penis, which in turn must be part of a male body identifiable as such. Nothing could be less certain. In any case, the boldness and directness of the idiom of ‘getting a hard-on’ should probably be avoided, since its place is rather in pornography or maybe the bedroom. And yet, in apparently complying with such a powerful taboo, one must be able to ask if an opportunity is thereby lost. ‘Male’ philosophers such Georges Bataille, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Schlegel and, closer to our time, feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray have not only reflected on sexuality, they have sought to bear witness to ways in which sexual arousal and desire touch their philosophical thoughts and writing. For this mode of sexualised reflection, Avital Ronell has proposed the term ‘pornosophy’. She introduces it as follows:
Closer to the mores of contemporary writers, Friedrich Schlegel to this day takes beatings from philosophical overlords who continue to press charges against the philosophical pornography machine, the pornosophy, his novel Lucinde indulges. As Paul de Man once drove home, the scandal of Schlegel consists in the crossover of genres, the wonton staging of incompatible codes, and the ensuing contaminations of reciprocally alien formalities, rather than in the build up of any specific or accreditable content. These writers, including, of course, the formidable Marquis de Sade, have tried to take philosophy to bed.
Has anyone in modern philosophy ever attempted to elaborate an ethics or politics of the hard-on? Enduring debates about what is called the gender gap in philosophy departments throughout the world, sexual harassment, not to mention the endless vexations and jokes about the virile comportment of philosophers, and philosophy itself, that have been circulating in the backrooms of the discipline since I don't know when – all of this would support an argument that such an ethics or politics merits at least to be considered.