Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com Thu Jun 12 19:37:41 PDT 2008 Previous message: [lbo-talk] 'hetersex instinct' Next message: [lbo-talk] hetersex instinct Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] Search LBO-Talk Archives
Limit search to: Subject & Body Subject Author Sort by: Reverse Sort Robert Wood wrote:
> I think some work needs to be done to link this with a claim
> about instincts towards a 'heterosexual instinct' among humans.
> This is
> also true about the Feuerbach/Marx material, which seems to be
> missing a
> few steps.
Feuerbach's "materialism" isn't Marx's.
According to Marx, "human beings" have instincts, but, in contrast to other animals, they also have the potential for what Hegel called a "will proper" and and a "universal will," i.e. they can substitute rationally self-determined for instinctively determined thinking, willing and acting. This idea is found in Kant's idea of "autonomy," an idea that was sublated by Hegel and then by Marx. It's briefly summarized in the Engels passage setting out the relation between "freedom" and "necessity."
It's the degree to which this potential is actual that's socially "constituted" (through social relations understood as "internal relations"), a quite different idea from "socially constructed." The latter idea has no logical space for the ideas of a "will proper" and a "universal will," i.e. no logical space for a self able to determine itself.
So, when Marx makes a "sexual" relation - "the relation of man to woman" - a measure "the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man," he's making it a measure of the extent to which the "human essence," elaborated as the potential for a "will proper" and a "universal will," has become actual and acknowledging the strength of the sexual "instinct" and the consequent difficulty of making sexual relations "relations of mutual recognition" (in Marx's sense, not Butler's). All such relations require is that those involved in them be rationally as opposed to instinctively determined; no other restriction is implied.
Clinically narcissistic relations in which the Other is "constructed" through the projection, by a weak unintegrated ego, of split off parts of the "self" produce sexual relations that, though possibly very pleasurable, fall short of a "eudaimonic" sexual relation of mutual recognition.
Fucking yourself projected in this way can't match mutual recognition fucking.
Clinically narcissistic fucking will be found where the fuckers don't experience themselves as self-determined, as in the selves that experience themselves as "socially constructed" by a fetishized "disciplinary discourse."
Ted
Previous message: [lbo-talk] 'hetersex instinct' Next message: [lbo-talk] hetersex instinct Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] More information about the lbo-talk mailing list
Sent from my iPhone