>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 05/19/00 01:14PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>CB: So is De Sade , beyond moldy in the grave. "It's so bourgeois".
Michel Foucault, quoted in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, pp. 368-369
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CB: Isn't Foucault kinda 90's ? old stuff.
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<quote> The idea that S&M is related to a deep violence, that S&M practice is a way of liberating this violence, this aggression, is stupid.
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CB: My impression of DeSade is more of domination of people, domination that only an aristocrat or slaveowner might dare think of.
This is the problem I see in the DeSade conception of sex. Call me working class, but I see it important that sex be egalitarian.
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We know very well that what all those people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body - through the eroticisation of the body. I think it's a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualisation of pleasure
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CB: Yes, I was thinking enterprising, like entrepreneurs, capitalists and their ever growing GDP of pleasure, more and more always better. The economy must grow. Still bourgeois.
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. . The possibility of using our bodies as a possible source of very numerous pleasures is something that is important. For instance, if you look at the traditional constructions of pleasure, you see hat bodily pleasure, or pleasures of the flesh, are always drinking, eating and fucking. And that seems to be the limit of our understanding of our body, our pleasures " .
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CB: Bit too limited. Sports can be fleshly ecstatic. Dancing is glorious. Ahhhhh music to my ears , those fleshy appendiges. But lets see what he is getting at. I guess expansion even more of fleshly pleasuring.
One can say that S&M is the eroticisation of power, the eroticisation of strategic relations .
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CB: Exactement
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.. the S&M game is very interesting because it is a strategic relation, because it is always fluid. Of course there are roles, but everyone knows very well that those roles can be reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end the slave has become the master. Or, even when the roles are stabilised, you know very well that it is always a game: either the rules are transgressed, or there is an agreement, either explicit or tacit, that makes them aware of certain boundaries. This strategic game as a source of bodily pleasure is very interesting.
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CB: Well, this sort of makes my original point. Geez, worse than bourgeois. To me this type of thing would be best placed in a museum, and mauosoleums, like the rest of slavery. It is good that DeSade is beyond moldy in the grave , a mon avis. We study him like old feudal armor and other old stuff.