#perniola

[hvnxblade]

the second aspect of living for Hegel is irritability. It is an allergic relation, an exaggerated reaction to the environment with which it constantly struggles to maintain itself. its survival depends on the subjugation of the inorganic world. To life, therefore, inheres a polemical and aggressive disposition that leads it to identify sexuality with power. On the contrary, neutral sexuality stands on the tendency to establish and maintain states of equilibrium. These conditions of stability are not immovable, but constitute the result of ceaseless relations of feedback, retroaction, and self-regulation. Instead of struggles for life and death, there are dynamic equilibria among infinite interactive entities that unceasingly correct the deviations that could bring the entire system to collapse.

[hvnxblade]

to take a thing that feels means asking that one's own clothing be welcomed everywhere and for always, to the point of no longer be recognized either by oneself or by one's partner as belonging to someone. Thus the difference between giving and taking disappears and extraneous body, or better, extraneous clothing appears that does not belong to anyone.

[hvnxblade]

Music forms are the forms of being of heavenly bodies as such. But the mineral and inorganic character of music does not exclude the existence of an opaque and impersonal feeling that belongs to It essentially. In fact, music Is a type of spoken but non living word, something similar to a petrified god trasformed into thing.

[pornosophic]

It would be wrong to consider neutral sexuality as a reciprocal master and slave relationship, where the partners offer themselves to one another in turn in absolute and unconditional submission. To be sure, in order to access the anonymous and impersonal territory of things that feel, one must be able to say ‘do with me what you wish’ and be transported by an irresistible excitement in assisting the transformation of the person who burns and throbs in your arms to an inert and opaque entity which, nonetheless, is so receptive and sensitive to feeling the most tenuous caress, the most impercetible kiss, the slightest touch. To be sure, one must use the greatest cruelty in delaying the least perceptions, the transits, the modulations, the variations of feeling, so as not to give too many stimuli all at once, in too many places, at the same time. Certainly one has to be able to see that absence, silence, abstention are no less harsh and bitter than the unlimited exercise of arranging, ordering, demaning any services, subduing, squeezing and traversing the boundless regions of the body, ruling over them as if they were the clothing in one’s wardrobe, the pillows of one’s couch, the carpet of one’s floor.

[pornosophic]

[...] it is precisely within the sphere that seems most irrational, casual and fragile, that of sexual excitement, that the power of philosophy is demonstrated, to whose appeal I am incapable of resisting, even if I wanted to. Philosophy’s extraordinary power of excitement is probably connected to the fact that it has a similar power of inhibition.  (…) In neutral sexuality, philosophical and sexual excess nourish one another. Philosophical adventure seems tasteless and tarnished if it does not entail at least the possibility of transiting to a real dimension, in the etymological sense of the word res (thing) and, vice versa, the sexual adventure remains trivial and spiritless if it is not followed by a determination to pursue extreme consequences, which belong to philosophical thinking.

Mario Perniola

[pornosophic]

Excerpt from ‘Sex Appeal of the Inorganic’

The union of philosophy and sexuality in the neutral experience of giving oneself as thing that feels, creates a state similar to that created by drugs, because one is heedless of everything that is not one’s own infinite continuation and  repetition. Neutral sexuality  sets up an infinite dependency because it is removed from biological rhythms and cycles. It is constituted by the radical movement of philosophy and is nourished by its excessive and uncompromising thrust. It is not at all a question of using common drugs as instruments for philosophizing or for the practice of sexuality - to have interesting thoughts or some exciting images - rather, that the encounter of philosophy and sexuality generates a similar effect as opium and its by-products. Thus it seems that philosophy and sexuality move on the side of evil in a much more essential and constitutive manner than ever before. Evil here is not spiritual evil symbolized by rebellion and by diabolical challenge, or the bestial type of orgies and debauchery, but the inorganic evil of dependency and being unable to do without something physical, just like the substances used by drug addicts. When you find the realization of the Cartesian thing that feels in the cunnilingus or in the fellatio or your partner, when you notice in the coherent and rigorous unfolding of philosophic prose the inexplorable movement that brings you to lick the cunt, the cock or the arse of your partner who has become a neutral and limitless extension of cloth variously folded, when you yourself are able to offer your body as a desert or a heath so that it can be traversed by the detached and inexplorable examination of the eye, the hands and the mouth of your lover, when nothing else interests you or excites you or attracts you besides repeating every night the ritual of the double metamorphosis of philosophy into sex and sex into philosophy, then, maybe, you have both moved onto the side of evil and vice, you have celebrated the triumph of the thing over everything, you have led the mind and the body to the extreme regions of the non-living, where, perhaps, they were always already directed.

[deathdiary]

Fintanto che gli individui sono nell'ambito del positivo rimangono isolati: le loro espressioni mantengono una dimensione conoscitiva astratta e priva di qualsiasi intensità; il loro atteggiamento nei confronti degli altri sottintende sempre un giudizio di approvazione o di condanna. Solo l'esperienza del negativo li apre; essi esprimono allora più di quanto vogliano o sappiano, anzi l'ampiezza e l'energia della loro comunicazione è connessa proprio a questo non-volere e non-sapere, che rifiuta di giudicare gli altri (...).

Mario Perniola, Georges Bataille e il negativo, Feltrinelli, Milano 1977, p. 81.