May 2012
85 posts
“When I was a very young man, I was struck, almost disgusted, by a passage in Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’, where she describes, how after having sex, the man feels the women’s body is flat and flabby, and the women feels in parallel that the man’s body, apart from his erect member, is generally unattractive, if not slightly ridiculous. Theatrical farce or vaudeville makes us laugh with a constant usage of similar thoughts. Man’s desire is the desire of the comic, big bellied, impotent Phallus, and the toothless hag with sagging breast is the future that awaits all beauty. Loving tenderness, when you fall asleep in the others arms, is like Noah’s cloak cast over these unpleasant considerations. But Lacan also thinks the opposite, that love reaches out toward the ontological. While desire focuses on the other always in a somewhat fetishist manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock…love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life thus disrupted and re-fashioned.”
—In Praise of Love - A.Badiou (via circulationwithinmyskull)
