Mario Perniola: The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World (2000/2004)

“We live in a world where the one-time opposition between things and humans has been transformed, where the center of contemporary sensibility is the encounter between philosophy and sexuality, where sex extends well beyond both the act and the body. We live in a world where to be sexy is to ignore the distinctions between animate and inanimate objects of desire, where the aesthetics of sex are being revolutionized.

An organic sexuality, based on sex difference and driven by desire and pleasure, is being replaced by a neutral, inorganic and artificial sexuality, a sexuality always available but indifferent to beauty, age or form, a sexuality freed by thought from nature.

The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic takes the reader on a radical, new tour of Western philosophy-from Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Sartre-to reframe our understanding of personal experience and the aesthetic, to examine how, if we are to remember how to feel, we must become a thing who feels, we must think ourselves closer to the inorganic world and move further from our bodies.”

First published as Il sex appeal dell’inorganico, Einaudi, Torino, 2000.

Translated by Massimo Verdicchio
Publisher Continuum, London/New York, 2004
Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers series
ISBN 0826462448
vi+147 pages

Reviews: Stella Sandford (Radical Phil 2004), Farris Wahbeh (J Aesthetics & Art Criticism 2006), Patricia Marino (J Hist Sexuality 2010).
Interview with author (1996-97)

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (7 MB)