Roland Boer has a quite interesting little post on his Stalin's Moustache blog - Sexy Writers or the erotics of knowledge. He asks:
And then goes on:
He then lists a group of writers who leave him "cold and totally uninterested" including Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. I've not read Deleuze or Derrida ( I made a start on one of his essays but never finished it). Foucault I have read some of but again could not really get into him. It didn't excite me or captivate me at all. I have determined to make a start on Derrida probably starting with what he wrote on hospitality. But Foucault, well I'm not so interested in trying again to make any connection there.
But Roland's post got me thinking about the erotics of knowledge, of writing. Good writing, sexy writing necessarily excites the mind. The mind is definitely aroused and excited by what one reads. And when the mind is all excited, there is what I think Plato would term an insemination take place. Sometimes it can be in the form of an affirmation or confirmation of ideas one holds already but often expressed in a much better way. Other times it can unlock thought flows of one's own or provide a whole new perspective that opens up new perceptions, dare I say conceptions of reality. Other times it's the analytical process itself that is mentally arousing. Sometimes it can be sheer joy to witness and participate in; all reading is participatory.
What's really curious for me is the number of women whose writing I find sexy. They have played a crucial role in teaching me, in awakening and exciting me. Eve Kosofky Sedgwick is one, Luce Irigaray is another. In biblical studies there's a whole suite of feminist writers, but I have to say that three important women, in terms of opening up my thinking to new possibilities, have been Avivah Zornberg, Margaret Barker and Mary Douglas. In my younger days Dorothy Day and Emma Goldmann were two women who I 'fell in love with' and soon Catherine de Hueck was another. And both Julian of Norwich and Maguerite Porete struck me very profound exciting and sexy writers who again opened my mind and spirit, exciting and arousing new possibilities and perceptions. These are some women I think of without really trying.
The irony is that I am a gay man, a homosexual, a homophile and yet intellectually am I more heterophilic? If writing is sexy can it have gender? Or when I read these women does my mind awaken to its lesbian dimension? (Perhaps that's why I thought J K Gayle was a woman because his writing excited my mind in its lesbian dimension?) Because I really am not heterosexual/heterophile at all. I know this from reading the writing of those I love. I have a friend in the US that I have yet to meet. I got to know him through the internet in the days when I was working on my thesis. He was working on a Master's thesis in theology at the same time. In it he critiqued an essay of mine that had been published. When he told me I asked if could see it and sent me the chapter in question. He was actually very nervous about it, perhaps due to a certain awe at the fact that my essay had been published in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. But on reading his critique I was quite excited, he had perhaps misread me but then perhaps he had highlighted an ambiguity in my own argument of which I was not aware. So I then wrote him into my thesis and thus into my book, acknowledging his point and giving a clarification of my own position. I sent him a copy of the chapter and he was chuffed, as I recall. I think he was even more chuffed when he realised that it was also included in my book. That I was determined to do.
So if writing is sexy, arousing exciting and inseminating the mind does it mean when we cite and acknowledge each other that we are making love one to another? Is that yet another dimension of the eros of knowledge, the eros of writing?
Why do we fall for some writers and not others? Why do we find the thought of one person sexy and another not? Why are some texts so seductive while others leave us cold?
And then goes on:
I know the writers I find sexy: Rosa Luxemburg, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer, Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Fred Jameson, Alain Badiou, Georg Lukacs, E.P. Thompson, Karl Kautsky, Jacques Lacan, and of course Marx and especially Engels. It's not that they are physically attractive (I don't leer at their photographs), but their thought is stimulating and gets my juices going, so to speak.
He then lists a group of writers who leave him "cold and totally uninterested" including Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. I've not read Deleuze or Derrida ( I made a start on one of his essays but never finished it). Foucault I have read some of but again could not really get into him. It didn't excite me or captivate me at all. I have determined to make a start on Derrida probably starting with what he wrote on hospitality. But Foucault, well I'm not so interested in trying again to make any connection there.
But Roland's post got me thinking about the erotics of knowledge, of writing. Good writing, sexy writing necessarily excites the mind. The mind is definitely aroused and excited by what one reads. And when the mind is all excited, there is what I think Plato would term an insemination take place. Sometimes it can be in the form of an affirmation or confirmation of ideas one holds already but often expressed in a much better way. Other times it can unlock thought flows of one's own or provide a whole new perspective that opens up new perceptions, dare I say conceptions of reality. Other times it's the analytical process itself that is mentally arousing. Sometimes it can be sheer joy to witness and participate in; all reading is participatory.
What's really curious for me is the number of women whose writing I find sexy. They have played a crucial role in teaching me, in awakening and exciting me. Eve Kosofky Sedgwick is one, Luce Irigaray is another. In biblical studies there's a whole suite of feminist writers, but I have to say that three important women, in terms of opening up my thinking to new possibilities, have been Avivah Zornberg, Margaret Barker and Mary Douglas. In my younger days Dorothy Day and Emma Goldmann were two women who I 'fell in love with' and soon Catherine de Hueck was another. And both Julian of Norwich and Maguerite Porete struck me very profound exciting and sexy writers who again opened my mind and spirit, exciting and arousing new possibilities and perceptions. These are some women I think of without really trying.
The irony is that I am a gay man, a homosexual, a homophile and yet intellectually am I more heterophilic? If writing is sexy can it have gender? Or when I read these women does my mind awaken to its lesbian dimension? (Perhaps that's why I thought J K Gayle was a woman because his writing excited my mind in its lesbian dimension?) Because I really am not heterosexual/heterophile at all. I know this from reading the writing of those I love. I have a friend in the US that I have yet to meet. I got to know him through the internet in the days when I was working on my thesis. He was working on a Master's thesis in theology at the same time. In it he critiqued an essay of mine that had been published. When he told me I asked if could see it and sent me the chapter in question. He was actually very nervous about it, perhaps due to a certain awe at the fact that my essay had been published in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. But on reading his critique I was quite excited, he had perhaps misread me but then perhaps he had highlighted an ambiguity in my own argument of which I was not aware. So I then wrote him into my thesis and thus into my book, acknowledging his point and giving a clarification of my own position. I sent him a copy of the chapter and he was chuffed, as I recall. I think he was even more chuffed when he realised that it was also included in my book. That I was determined to do.
So if writing is sexy, arousing exciting and inseminating the mind does it mean when we cite and acknowledge each other that we are making love one to another? Is that yet another dimension of the eros of knowledge, the eros of writing?
