Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: What is Sex?: An Introduction to the Sexual Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
- 1 Alien Sex: Octavia Butler and Deleuze and Guattari's Polysexuality
- 2 Heterotica: The 1000 Tiny Sexes of Anaïs Nin
- 3 Haemosexuality
- 4 Disability, Deleuze and Sex
- 5 Tongue and Trigger: Deleuze's Erotics of the Uncanny
- 6 (Hetero)sexing the Child: Hans, Alice and the Repressive Hypothesis
- 7 The ‘Non-Human Sex’ in Sexuality: ‘What are Your Special Desiring-machines?’
- 8 Deleuze and Selfless Sex: Undoing Kant's Copernican Revolution
- 9 A Preface to Pornotheology: Spinoza, Deleuze and the Sexing of Angels
- 10 Encounters of Ecstasy
- 11 Beyond Sexuality: Of Love, Failure and Revolutions
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
8 - Deleuze and Selfless Sex: Undoing Kant's Copernican Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: What is Sex?: An Introduction to the Sexual Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
- 1 Alien Sex: Octavia Butler and Deleuze and Guattari's Polysexuality
- 2 Heterotica: The 1000 Tiny Sexes of Anaïs Nin
- 3 Haemosexuality
- 4 Disability, Deleuze and Sex
- 5 Tongue and Trigger: Deleuze's Erotics of the Uncanny
- 6 (Hetero)sexing the Child: Hans, Alice and the Repressive Hypothesis
- 7 The ‘Non-Human Sex’ in Sexuality: ‘What are Your Special Desiring-machines?’
- 8 Deleuze and Selfless Sex: Undoing Kant's Copernican Revolution
- 9 A Preface to Pornotheology: Spinoza, Deleuze and the Sexing of Angels
- 10 Encounters of Ecstasy
- 11 Beyond Sexuality: Of Love, Failure and Revolutions
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
In his study of the eighteenth-century Britain, Roy Porter argues that between roughly the end of the seventeenth century and the early years of the nineteenth century there was a ‘relaxation of strict protocols [that] gave greater breathing space to personal relations’ (Porter 1990: 259). This was especially true of sexual relations. ‘The libido’, Porter argues, ‘was liberated, and erotic gratification increasingly dissociated from sin and shame’ (Porter 1990: 260). Dror Wahrman comes to a very similar conclusion concerning the eighteenth century. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, as has been noted by many scholars, there was a decline in the faith in ‘God's active and authoritative ordering [which] was superseded by mans own, more tentative and open-ended, which prompted the reconstitution of the relevant notions and categories of identity’ (Wahrman 2006: 200–1). In particular, the various categories of identity lost their moorings to God and to God's judgement and subsequently came to be understood as mutable, open-ended, and flexible forms of identity. Wahrman refers to this as the ancien régime of identity, which gave way, early in the eighteenth century to fixed forms of identity. As Wahrman puts it, there was a ‘shift from mutability to essence, from imaginable fluidity to fixity, from the potential for individual deviation from general identity categories to an individual identity stamped indelibly on each and every person’ (Wahrman 2006: 128).
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- Chapter
- Information
- Deleuze and Sex , pp. 153 - 173Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011