Description

We live in a world where the one-time opposition between things and humans has been transformed, where the centre of the contemporary sensibility is the encounter between philosophy and sexuality, where sex extends well beyond both the act and the body. We live in a world where to be sexy is to ignore the distinctions between animate and inanimate objects of desire, where the aesthetics of sex are being revolutionized. An organic sexuality, based on sex difference and driven by desire and pleasure, is being replaced by a neutral, inorganic and artifical sexuality, a sexuality always available but indifferent to beauty, ago or form, a sexuality freed by thought from nature. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic takes the reader on a radical, new tour of Western philosophy - from Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Sartre - to reframe our understanding of personal experience and the asthetic, to examine how, if we are to remember how to feel, we must become a thing who feeds, think ourselves closer to the inorganic world and move further from our bodies. Mario Perniola is Professor of Aesthetics and the University of Rome at Tor Vergata. Massimo Verdicchio, the translator, is Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.