MAO: Live in the Studio Day 4 (pt 1)

Eleanor Sikorski is on her way. I'm going to write this, then she's going to arrive and make everything work. I've had an idea. I'm glad about that.

Perversity and Bodily Desire

At the heart of sex is abjection. An exchange of fluids - saliva, vaginal fluid, semen, anal mucous. In sex there is a tacit agreement to somehow ignore (transcend?) the historically/evolutionary produced psychological response to these materials as things to be cast off or cleaned up.

More than that. In sex, these abject materials are revered, they are the sacred fluids of shared bodily desire.

At the heart of sex is abjection, and this reveals a perversity at the core of bodily desire. And from bodily desire we lift the metaphor of all other desiring activity. There is no desire that is not a perverse desire.


The ultimate perversity is Thanatos, or, the death drive. The death drive is the drive (or the french "pulsion". I like pulsion, it feels less packed with agency, less about decision. Like the difference between choice and selection.) to return to a non-living state. The urge to be dead. It opposes Eros - the urge to survive and reproduce. They meet each other in sex.

The urge to love until you produce more life. The urge to fuck until you die.

No, that doesn't get it really. They're not really opposed. It's more like sex is somehow also death, la petite mort.