June 29, 2015

Four quotations on sex

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The ubiquity of such struggles occurs, not because of some fundamentally problematic quality of sexuality, but on the contrary, because sexuality has qualities that draw other problems to it as people seek sexual solutions for the neverending conflicts and ambiguities of the hassle of living life as a human being, whether male or female. The entangled relationship between the sexes is the site of attempted solutions, which give the appearance of ‘problems’ only because the solutions are unsuitable. Sex is an arena within which other kinds of problems get played out.
– Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him



This is also why, for Freud, “everything has a sexual connotation,” why sexuality can infect everything: not because it is “the strongest” component in people’s lives, exerting a hegemony over all other components, but because it is the one most radically thwarted in its actualization...
– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing



Another paradox: Often the one most plagued with lust is the one most capable of restraining it. The monk and the philanderer are likely to be the same person.
– Qiu Miaojin, Last Words From Montmartre



In abstraction, sex reveals the intangible force of its own irreconcilability and becomes what it is in reality: a spell for togethering doubling as a boundary.
 – Paul Chan



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