By Leo Bersani
Proficient and hugely prolific intellectuals, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, the following current a desirable discussion concerning the difficulties and chances of human intimacy. Their dialog takes as its aspect of departure psychoanalysis and its principal significance to the trendy imagination—though both vital is their shared feel that by way of deceptive us concerning the value of self-knowledge and the risk of narcissism, psychoanalysis has didn't discover its most fun and leading edge relational potential. In pursuit of recent varieties of intimacy they absorb quite a number issues throughout numerous contexts. to check the speculation that the essence of the analytic alternate is intimate speak with no intercourse, they evaluate Patrice Leconte’s movie approximately an accountant unsuitable for a psychoanalyst, Intimate Strangers, with Henry James’s vintage novella The Beast within the Jungle. A dialogue of the unconventional perform of barebacking—unprotected anal intercourse among homosexual men—delineates an intimacy that rejects the non-public. Even serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Bush administration’s battle on terror input the scene because the dialog turns to the best way aggression thrills and gratifies the ego. ultimately, in a analyzing of Socrates’ conception of affection from Plato’s Phaedrus, Bersani and Phillips demand a brand new kind of intimacy which they time period “impersonal narcissism”: a divestiture of the ego and a attractiveness of one’s non-psychological strength self in others. This progressive approach of in terms of the realm, they contend, may lead to a brand new human freedom by means of mitigating the frightening violence we blithely settle for as a part of human nature. Charmingly persuasive and daringly provocative, Intimacies is an extraordinary chance to eavesdrop on impressive thinkers as they discover new methods of puzzling over the human psyche. (20080111)
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Example text
Furthermore, it is by no means clear why unsafe sex is a better transmitter of sexual practices than safe sex; indeed, given the number of men who risk death as a result of unsafe sex, there may be fewer and fewer members of the culture to whom the honored tradition can be transmitted. There is, however, something else that can be extrapolated from barebacking manifestos and barebacking cinema. There is another way to formulate the intergenerational connections established through bareback sex.
But here the exciting “friction” is entirely mental (it is the blood-soaked exacerbation of a fatal fantasmatic scream), and what is ultimately evacuated is not semen but life itself. Unsafe sex becomes so tempting to Guillaume that, to escape that temptation, he gets a job elsewhere and leaves Paris. “If I stay here I’m going to die. I’m going to end up putting sperm in everybody’s ass and having them do the same thing to me. ” Why? There is perhaps the memory of the dizzying excitement Guillaume felt watching a condomless top transmit “the kiss of death” to his bottom.
Tim Dean speaks of a Paul Morris video in which semen collected from various sources is funneled into some one’s anus. We not only see several men fucking the handsome man introduced in the final scene of Plantin’ Seed; after the tops’ departure, another ) sha me on you ) chapter two ( 48 man uses a blue plastic funnel in which he has collected the semen of other men to inseminate young Jonas with the ejaculate of men he has never met. ” This is much stranger and more original than Morris’s pious invocation of the obligation to transmit cultural practices and traditions.