I’ve been following your blog lately, and find it fascinating. I’m a Christian. I suspect you are not, but of course I could be wrong. Just so you know where I’m at. Anyway, I have thoughts on this post, which no one has yet mentioned in your comments, I don’t think…

When I read the following: “Delany’s is the only writing I know that answers Michel Foucault’s call for an ethics/aesthetics of the body and its pleasures, freed from the dreary dialectics of sexuality and transgression. As such, it provides an alternative as well to the relentless commodification that permeates every corner of our postmodern existence.”

…and (keeping in mind that I read your post on Delany, and have been in conversation with ktismatics (John Doyle, you’ve probably conversed with him) on David Lynch and Inland Empire and such things…regarding the difference between a structured unconscious and the consious as the formation of what stands beneath it) my first thought was, “Doesn’t marriage do the same thing, in terms of ‘freed from the dreary dialectics of sexuality and transgression’”? My thought here was based on something a good married friend of mine said recently…that, after marriage, sexual activity “wasn’t the same.” It didn’t provide the same “rush” that had previously come with its feeling “wrong.”

Thanks, man. Your blog is cool.

Jason

rups

“Delany presents “extreme” sex as a form of civility and community, an adornment of life, a necessary part of the art of living well.”

I don’t understand why Delany’s presentation of “extreme” sex as a form of civility and community, (etc.), doesn’t embody a logic of indifferent equivalence… I don’t understand why you offer Delany’s presentation as an alternative to that logic.

I appreciate that Delany’s presentations do not tie sexual allure and excitement to a sense of transgression understood as transgression against rules,laws, parental expectations, the order of the workaday world, (etc.) … That something is wrong if sexual drive is hinged to these.

But I think that in order to qualify as a logic of difference- nonequivalence of social relations, Delany needs to develop or retain some sense in which sexuality and having sex IS different and nonequivalent to, say, playing tennis or eating a burrito.

It’s not that great an accomplishment to normalize sexuality or any other human activity which so far in western history has fallen outside the domain of what’s been called proper social activity; what’s hard is to do that without molarizing that activity. ( Incorporating the activity by subtracting what is different about it.)

It is a similar problem to that of Delaney. The adventures of the character’s bodies seem to have no ‘impact’ on their physical being (I disagree that sexuality is ‘all in our heads’). Celebrating total sexual freedom comes accross as a kind of denial of even the most rudimentary social relations. Perhaps we are so used to the most figuratively visceral images to create the
desired ‘effect’.

Delany goes beyond the limits of pornography (doesn’t he call these works “anti-pornography”?) in the “art of living” sense mentioned above and through the complementary support of any sort of healthy desire (e.g. Marr’s defense of Stephen Dobolowski’s sexuality, a very moving support of a friend).

I’m interested in Delany’s use of the nightmarish beast in both The Mad Man and Phallos.