the tragedy of sex

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sat Jan 13 08:17:02 PST 2001


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


>Hey, what's tragic about dance: achieving beauty by giving one's own
>limbs economy, precision, & purposiveness without purpose?

That's not tragic. What's a little creepy about the passage you quoted is this:


>Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise
>his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them
>transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses,
>and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher
>social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

I'd say that that notion of transparency is a fantasy - that our "instincts" can never be that unambiguously known to us. And it's not some hideous distortions of capitalist society that make us that way, either. Too much transparency might well overwhelm us. And I'd also say that this aspiration to "master our own feelings" is not all that appealing - it sounds like obsessional neurosis, in fact. Sometimes you just gotta let 'em flow, you know. "Wo es war..."

Doug



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