El descubrimiento del espíritu

El descubrimiento del espíritu
Bruno Snell. Trad. de J. Fontcuberta
Acantilado. Barcelona, 2008. 534 páginas, 29 euros

Lecturas como ésta vuelven innecesaria la ficción. También la filología griega puede ser inmensamente seductora. Quienes aman el mundo grecolatino están de fiesta. Un libro así actúa como imán sobre nuestras manos. Quien lo inicia no puede abandonarlo. Todo comienza con un fascinante acercamiento a Homero. El gran filólogo alemán se limita a constatar dos evidencias: en las grandes epopeyas homéricas no existe el alma ni el espíritu. Tampoco el cuerpo. Algo no existe si no puede reconocerse su existencia. Es postulado filológico el berkeleyano esse est percipi. Algo es, existe o se da si es posible percatarse de ello: si se tiene conciencia de esa cosa; si se la puede nombrar.

Homero no podía nombrar el cuerpo. La palabra sôma no significa cuerpo. Corremos siempre el fatal riesgo de confundir el lenguaje homérico con la lengua griega del siglo V. El vocabulario de los trágicos o de Heráclito nada tiene que ver con el homérico. Cuerpo, sôma, significa en Homero cuerpo muerto. Cadáver. Como si sólo en su forma inerte, sustraído el hálito vital, fuese el cuerpo cuerpo. Como si tan sólo en su presencia cadavérica compareciese unificado. En vida lo que desde los pitagóricos llamamos cuerpo no posee palabra alguna. O mejor, tres palabras se reparten la expresión. Palabras que aluden a miembros más o menos coordinados en movimiento.

Lo mismo el alma. No existe, no se da, no puede ser nombrada. Psyche en Homero es principio vital. La propia palabra significa en su etimología hálito. Alude a la respiración. Se reparte su significado con el célebre thymos, tan relevante en Platón. En Homero alude vagamente a un órgano de emociones y sentimientos diversos. Y Noús significa tan sólo percepción intuitiva, inteligencia espontánea, algo relativo al percatarse (ni por asomo nada que implique razonamiento e inferencia).

¿Cuándo, cómo, de qué modo se produce el descubrimiento del alma, del mundo interior, de lo que posteriormente se llamará Espíritu (desde el estoicismo hasta el idealismo)? Aquí aparece la genial intervención de este filólogo especializado en lírica griega. El alma no la descubre la religión órfica, pitagórica, mistérica, eleusina, coribántica (como puede pensarse siguiendo a Edwin Rhode, o al propio Werner Jaeger).

Es una mujer quien inventa el alma. Es una mujer quien descubre el mundo interior. Es una mujer quien desgaja emociones y sentimientos en el sentido en que aun hoy los reconocemos. Sabe complacerse en las cuitas de amor. Reconoce en ella el principio lírico en su quintaesencia. Eso sucede mucho antes de la “revolución psíquica del siglo XII” de que habla en su célebre libro Denis de Rougemont. Antes de trovadores y troveros. Antes de la materia de Bretaña. O de Tristan et Iseult. O de Minnesinger y demás cantores del amor desdichado. Una mujer, además, enamorada de otra mujer. O de otras mujeres. O que trae a Afrodita por testigo para que ese alumbramiento del Alma se produzca. En su natal isla de Lesbos ejerce su papel de partera de la lírica. Da un paso de gigante en relación a Baquílides. O a los primitivos Arquíloco y Tirteo. Prepara el terreno al gran Píndaro. Deja el camino expedito a los grandes trágicos y a los filósofos.

Errores históricos de la planificación familiar

March 23, 2008
Birth Control for Others

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

FATAL MISCONCEPTION

The Struggle to Control World Population.

By Matthew Connelly.

Illustrated. 521 pp. Harvard University Press. $35.

The first large-scale scientific test of family planning took place in Khanna, India, beginning in the early 1950s. Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, researchers asked 8,000 villagers how often they had sex, whether they wanted to conceive and the details of the women’s menstrual cycles. The researchers met the villagers monthly and provided contraceptives, while closely monitoring another group that was given no contraceptives. After five years, the women given contraceptives had a higher birth rate than those who hadn’t received any assistance.

That initiative was an early warning that population policy can be very difficult to get right. In “Fatal Misconception,” Matthew Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, carefully assembles a century’s worth of mistakes, arrogance, racism, sexism and incompetence in what the jacket copy calls a “withering critique” of “a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry.”

Efforts to control population have long been ferociously controversial, and the United States under George W. Bush refuses to provide a penny of funding for the United Nations Population Fund because of its supposed (but in fact nonexistent) links to forced abortion in China. Critics of family planning programs will seize gleefully upon this book, and that’s unfortunate, because two propositions are both correct: first, population planners have made grievous mistakes and were inexcusably quiet for too long about forced sterilization in countries like India and China; and second, those same planners have learned from past mistakes and today are fighting poverty and saving vast numbers of lives in developing countries.

“Fatal Misconception” is to population policy what William Easterly’s “White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good” (2006) was to foreign aid: a useful, important but ultimately unbalanced corrective to smug self-satisfaction among humanitarians. Connelly scrupulously displays a hundred years of family planners’ dirty laundry, but without adequately emphasizing that we are far better off for their efforts. One could write a withering history of medicine, focusing on doctors’ infecting patients when they weren’t bleeding them, but doctors are pretty handy people to have around today. And so are family planners.

En memoria de Albert Ellis

The Journal of Sex Research February 1, 2008

In memory of Albert Ellis (1913-2007). Reis, Ira. L

I knew Albert Ellis as a friend for more than 50 years. I will try to afford the reader insight into the Albert Ellis I knew. Al did not do much small talk or attend many cocktail parties–he focused on doing therapy, writing books, and discussing controversial issues. My interaction with Al consisted primarily of our discussions about controversial issues concerning sexuality. I will focus here on the two key periods in our relationship: first, the period during the 1950s and 1960s when Al was founding our organization (the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality [SSSS]) and also establishing his Institute of Rational Living; and, second, the 2000-2003 period when we did a book together and also debated a major assumption of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). I believe this approach will afford you insight into Al Ellis’s thoughts and feelings and make clear some of the crucial roles he played in the advancement of sexual science in our society.

El caso Hildegart

Toda la verdad sobre el caso Hildegart      J. Ors - Madrid

El nueve de junio de 1933, a las ocho de la mañana, Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira entró en el cuarto de su hija y la mató de cuatro disparos. Sacó del cajón de la mesita de noche el revólver, aquél que había comprado para defenderse de posibles agresores, y la descerrajó los tiros mientras dormía. El cuerpo quedó inmóvil, en el lado izquierdo de la cama, con dos balazos en la región temporal derecha, uno en la mejilla, otro en el pecho y la pistola, humeante, extraviada por el suelo. La noticia conmocionó a la sociedad española y ocupó los principales titulares de la prensa. Hildegart, la «virgen» roja, uno de los iconos de la Segunda República, solamente tenía 18 años.

Después del parricidio, la madre dejó su domicilio, en calle Galileo de Madrid, y daba cumplida cuenta de los hechos, sin aportar un solo detalle que la exculpara, al abogado Juan Botella Asensi. En ningún momento eludió su responsabilidad. Durante el juicio, en el que compareció vestida de negro y con un ramo de claveles rojos entre los brazos, confesó: «Me aproximaba a ella, revólver en mano, como si una fuerza superior a mí me empujase al crimen. El instinto materno habíase esfumado repentinamente ante el impulso gigante de la voluntad, que me trazaba inflexible el doloroso camino a seguir. Era mi pensamiento como una flecha lanzada que no se detendría hasta clavarse en el blanco». Con absoluta frialdad defendió su derecho a eliminarla. A fin de cuentas, argumentaba, la había creado ella.

Control de la natalidad en Gran Bretaña

 

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (February 200

Kate Fisher. _Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain, 1918-1960_.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 294 pp. Figures, bibliography,
index..
$125.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-926736-1.

Reviewed for H-Albion by H. G. Cocks, Department of History, University of
Nottingham

Getting Off at Mill Hill

Historians have long been puzzled by the decline in fertility which took
place in Britain between about 1870 and 1939.  Specifically, they have
wondered how exactly it happened, and have tended to assume that it was
the consequence of three interlocking factors: the spread of contraceptive
education by pioneers like Marie Stopes, leading to a wider awareness of
mechanical birth control methods; the gradual emergence of less
patriarchal, more “companionate” marriages in which women’s interests were more
readily voiced and discussed; and the consequent ability of wives to take control
of decisions about birth control and family size.  All of these, it is often
suggested, were a constituent part of modern attitudes to sex, fertility,
subjectivity, and society itself.  In particular, the increasing use of
birth control has been seen as a rejection of the “traditional” and
fatalistic belief that conception, and hence the future, could not be
controlled.  In contrast, small families and fertility control appear to
represent a revolutionary moment in the making of modernity, one in which
people began to develop a “modern” mentality of trying to control
uncertainty through careful planning.

A number of related assumptions accompany this narrative: first, that
women were empowered by taking control of contraceptive decisions–what was in
effect their natural province; second, that new methods of birth control
required more marital communication and hence were the key cause of the
decline in patriarchal marriages;  and finally, that the adoption of
increasingly reliable appliance methods occasioned the demise of birth
control techniques which historians have seen as unreliable, unsatisfying,
and harmful to the sex lives and psyches of those practicing them.  In
this account, the vagaries and frustrations of coitus interruptus are replaced
by more predictable condoms, caps, and pessaries.  This story is also central
to the rise of women’s sexual, moral, and political autonomy, a
narrative in which key obstacles to female sexual enjoyment–ignorance, insensitive
masculinity, unreliable contraceptive methods, and the possibility of
conception itself were gradually removed.

Mujeres bisexuales en el siglo XXI

Bisexual Women in the 21st Century

This book marks a new chapter in research by and about bisexual women.

By Amy Andre

In Bisexual Women in the Twenty-First Century (2003), editor Dawn Atkins, bi-academician extraordinaire, offers readers a collection of some of the finest research coming out of the bisexual academic community in the last few years. In each chapter contributing authors focus on a different element of the experience of bi women. Part of the book’s power and appeal comes from the fact that most of the researchers are bi women themselves, representing viewpoints from diverse members of bi communities. This is a key feature of the book: analysis of the bi women’s community is being conducted by its own members.

Writing styles vary from informal to highly academic, but there is a little (or a lot; see Elizabeth Whitney’s essay “Cyborgs Among Us: Performing Liminal States of Sexuality”) of each author’s personality in every piece. Certainly, each woman touches on the way in which her research resonates personally. In connecting with her research in this intimate way, each author connects with the audience as well. It is clear that this book was written for bisexual women, by bisexual women, and about bisexual women’s lived experiences. As a bisexual woman, student, educator, and researcher, I saw myself in every page of the book, even as I, at times, disagreed with an author’s analysis or conclusions.

The book covers a wide variety of topics, including: the ways in which bi women define “bisexuality” as a word and concept; relationships between various members of the LGBT community; the experiences of bi women in intimate partnerships with men; the role of bi women in sex work communities; analyses of bi women in film and literature; a bi women’s community in England; the difference between queer theory and bisexual theory; and much, much more.

El Sade de Sollers

 Jueves, 21 de Febrero 2008

Sade
Philippe Sollers
Trad. C. Vizcaíno. Páginas de espuma, 2007. 112 páginas, 12 euros
No está claro quién de los dos es más controvertido, si el famoso marqués de Sade (1740-1814), conocido por sus escandalosas novelas sobre la perversa Juliette y la desdichada Justine, o Philippe Sollers (Burdeos, 1936), que desde hace medio siglo levanta polémicas en el mundo intelectual francés a través de sus sagaces escritos y desequilibrantes afirmaciones contra la falsa mentalidad conservadora que nos rodea. Los dos textos reunidos en Sade –“Sade en el tiempo” y la hipotética carta al cardenal Bernis, “Sade contra el Ser Supremo”– se publicaron en Le Monde, después de la bella biografía escrita por Maurice Lever (Fayard, 1991). En ellos, Sollers resucita y encarna la personalidad del autor del siglo XVIII, dando no sólo una imagen de la historia de ese siglo sino también una razón de la locura que surge en nuestro tan moderno siglo XXI.

El futuro del matrimonio

The Future of Marriage

By Stephanie Coontz
January 14th, 2008

Any serious discussion of the future of marriage requires a clear understanding of how marriage evolved over the ages, along with the causes of its most recent transformations. Many people who hope to “re-institutionalize” marriage misunderstand the reasons that marriage was once more stable and played a stronger role in regulating social life.

For most of history, marriage was more about getting the right in-laws than picking the right partner to love and live with. In the small-scale, band-level societies of our distant ancestors, marriage alliances turned strangers into relatives, creating interdependencies among groups that might otherwise meet as enemies. But as large wealth and status differentials developed in the ancient world, marriage became more exclusionary and coercive. People maneuvered to orchestrate advantageous marriage connections with some families and avoid incurring obligations to others. Marriage became the main way that the upper classes consolidated wealth, forged military coalitions, finalized peace treaties, and bolstered claims to social status or political authority. Getting “well-connected” in-laws was a preoccupation of the middle classes as well, while the dowry a man received at marriage was often the biggest economic stake he would acquire before his parents died. Peasants, farmers, and craftsmen acquired new workers for the family enterprise and forged cooperative bonds with neighbors through their marriages.

Because of marriage’s vital economic and political functions, few societies in history believed that individuals should freely choose their own marriage partners, especially on such fragile grounds as love. Indeed, for millennia, marriage was much more about regulating economic, political, and gender hierarchies than nourishing the well-being of adults and their children. Until the late 18th century, parents took for granted their right to arrange their children’s marriages and even, in many regions, to dissolve a marriage made without their permission. In Anglo-American law, a child born outside an approved marriage was a “fillius nullius” - a child of no one, entitled to nothing. In fact, through most of history, the precondition for maintaining a strong institution of marriage was the existence of an equally strong institution of illegitimacy, which denied such children any claim on their families.

En busca del Kamasutra

Over the counter once more
Ian Pindar is glad that James McConnachie’s tome of good conduct for men, The Book of Love, has been rescued
Ian Pindar
Saturday December 15, 2007

The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra
by James McConnachie
272pp, Atlantic, £17.99

In The Book of Love James McConnachie lays to rest some of the enduring myths surrounding the Kamasutra: it is not a sex manual but a book of good conduct. It is not illustrated and it has nothing to do with Tantric sex.

Little is known about its author, Vatsyayana, but he probably lived in third-century northern India. What we do know is that he started a trend - some have called it a revolution - when he decided to write a sutra or scholarly treatise about kama or sexual desire.

The word kamasutra has become a sort of shorthand for “advanced fucking”, says McConnachie, but it doesn’t really deserve its reputation as a book of sexual gymnastics. The sexual positions Vatsyayana discusses (”the crab”, “the lotus”, and so on) are not especially acrobatic, nor are there all that many. Certainly not as many as can be found in The Horn-Book: A Girl’s Guide to Good and Evil (1899), which lists 62 positions - including the “view of the Low Countries” and the “elastic cunt” - or the Golden Book of Love (1907), which offers 531.

Vatsyayana organises sex into eight distinct topics: embracing, kissing, scratching (love marks were “a major fetish in ancient India”), biting, the notorious sexual positions, moaning, “the woman playing the man’s part” (women-on-top) and oral sex (the art of fellatio; cunnilingus is barely mentioned). The Kamasutra is a male fantasy aimed at nagarakas, wealthy young men in the cities, and it presents a world in which women are always available and compliant and never need to be seduced, only aroused in frescoed bedchambers filled with flowers and incense. The effect of the work, says McConnachie, is to surround us in a kind of “erotic cocoon”. If Vatsyayana has advice for women, it is how to keep men happy, not how to enjoy themselves sexually. His greatest crime in modern eyes is not that he never once questions the caste system, but that he appears totally unaware of the existence of the clitoris.

Historia de la ninfomanía

Journal of Social History. June 22, 2002

Nymphomania: A History. By Carol Groneman (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. xxiii plus 238pp. $24.95).

In her clever and elegant little book, Nymphomania: A History, Carol Groneman explores the changing meaning of the word “nymphomania” over the last two hundred years, and in doing so, manages to explain a great deal more about our altering understanding of female sexuality. How much sex is it permissible for a woman to have? And who decides?

Groneman’s thesis is built around a familiar framework, within which she nevertheless contributes an original perspective. To the Victorians, “nymphomania” was a clear-cut concept: the “nymphomaniac” was a diseased woman as her excessive interest in sex so blatantly defied the cultural conventions of “passionlessness” and the “Cult of True Womanhood.” Groneman’s focus on medical and legal records causes her to unnecessarily exaggerate her case; of course “nymphomania” was proscribed but Groneman seems to choose the most lurid examples!! Thus, she has found evidence of gynaecological surgery designed to cure nymphomania, most alarmingly a clitorodectomy performed on a child in the 1890s. She delineates the fierce debate among the gynaecologists at the turn of the century and also cases of strong objection to surgical procedures designed to cure nymphomania. And, compellingly, she finds an “autobiography of a nymphomaniac” in which a long series of procedures undertaken is described. Yet one still wonders how t ypical such cases were. One is convinced of the prescription of nymphomania by doctors; not of the commonness of draconian cures. Equally, in a culture where reticence reigned, nymphomania cannot have had huge importance, as few people knew about it.

Historia del lesbianismo en Gran Bretaña

Women aloud

Rebecca Jennings’s A Lesbian History of Britain is full of brave and desperate women. For how long gay women will continue to be silenced or censored, asks Margaret Reynolds
Margaret Reynolds
Saturday December 15, 2007

A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Women Since 1500
by Rebecca Jennings
227pp, Greenwood World Publishing, £18.95

My favourite coming-out story is told by a friend who decided that it was time she spoke to her family. So she sat Mum and Dad down on the sofa and began. After a bit her father raised his hand: “OK, OK - You don’t need to go on. I understand. I’ve read How Deep Is My Well?”

It’s funny, but it’s serious too. Because this anecdote suggests some of the popular perceptions about lesbians: father would prefer not to speak their name, but he still has some notion of a public history, and yet muddles up Radclyffe Hall’s notorious title with a prurient Freudian slip. The myths of lesbian life are many. From the legend of Queen Victoria’s view that it didn’t exist, to the stereotype of the hairy-legged, man-hating butch, they are also at the extremes.

Rebecca Jennings’s serious and sensible book rejects the crude and salacious versions, but she also explains and counteracts the silences. For those familiar with queer history there will be little that is new here. But in recent years a great deal of scholarly work has been devoted to seeking out the traces of lesbian existence and tracking the varied manifestations that marked out different historical and cultural contexts. Jennings succeeds in synthesising all of this and in making clear the complicated interaction between what may, or may not have happened “then” and the political motives (or wishful thinking) of historians writing from the perspective of “now”.

Por la vuelta al matrimonio privado

November 26, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Taking Marriage Private
By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Olympia, Wash.

WHY do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

In 1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and obligations as a couple married in church: their children were legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights; the couple was subject to the same prohibitions against divorce.

Not until the 16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be performed under legal auspices. In part, this was an attempt to prevent unions between young adults whose parents opposed their match.

The American colonies officially required marriages to be registered, but until the mid-19th century, state supreme courts routinely ruled that public cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. By the later part of that century, however, the United States began to nullify common-law marriages and exert more control over who was allowed to marry.

Violación: Historia de 1860 a la actualidad

Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present
By Joanna Bourke: an examination of the many preposterous ways that rape has been explained over time by all manner of experts

Reviewed by Isabella Thomas

Rape, says Joanna Bourke, used to be understood as the act of sex with a woman who does not “belong” to the perpetrator. In the 19th century it was widely thought that an unwilling woman could not be raped because “merely by vibrating”, a vagina “could ward off attack”. A victim of rape was, therefore, a contradiction in terms. Some thought that if the woman had experienced orgasm in the act, or had finally succumbed, then she could not claim to have been raped. The belief that women were prone to lie about rape to gain attention was, of course, widespread, and rape trials were notorious for their prurient investigations into a woman’s past. In the past 50 years or so, western feminists have argued – with some success – that rape is more about power than sex. In British courts these days, rape does not have to involve violence to justify the name. Lack of consent (which is itself potentially ambiguous) suffices.

As Bourke shows in her scholarly historical survey of rape and rapists, part of the problem with this subject is that “imprecision permeates much of the clinical and psychiatric literature”. Her examination of the many preposterous ways that rape has been explained over time by all manner of experts – doctors, academics, lawyers, psychologists et al – is an attempt to lift the obfuscation.

Amigas íntimas: Mujeres que amaron a otras mujeres

Archives of Sexual Behavior.  Volume 36, Number 5 / octubre de 2007

Book Review
Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928
By Martha Vicinus, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004, 344 pp., $35.00 (hardback), $27.00 (paperback).

Susan Mumm

Dean of Arts and Science, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3M 2J6, Canada
While less original than some of Vicinus’ earlier books, this volume provides both a valuable synthesis and a wide-ranging discussion of women’s erotic friendships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Written in accessible language, the book is divided into four sections: same-sex relationships that mimicked heterosexual roles, “queer relationships” constrained by social or legal pressure, intergenerational love affairs, and “modernist refashionings” in the fin de siecle and interwar period. In this book, Vicinus chronicles mostly well-known female pairings, and her argument covers much of the same ground as Faderman did a quarter century ago.

Given the often scandalous nature of the relationships described here, Vicinus, like previous scholars, is working with patchy sources: bonfires and excised letters feature regularly as heirs and executors struggled to hide familial shame. Vicinus returns to the problematic nature of her sources throughout the book, in some interesting discussions of the interpretative difficulties involved in the use of the surviving material.

Vicinus displays her typically careful research in the book; she is widely read in both the standard and more eclectic sources. Although all of the classics of lesbian history are listed in her bibliography, the key concepts of these scholars remain surprisingly unattributed in the text, making this read at times more like a popular trade book than the scholarly book it primarily is. The text is attractively illustrated with well-chosen visual resources and there is a useful appendix giving potted biographies of many of the people discussed in the text, although there are some peculiar omissions, such as Lucy Tait, who is a major character in one chapter.

Sexo y placer en la cultura occidental

Archives of Sexual Behavior Volume 36, Number 3, June 2007 , pp. 471-472(2)

Book Review
Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture
By Gail Hawkes, Polity Press, Cambridge, England, 2004, 207 pp., £50.00 (hardback); £15.99 (paperback).

Dustin M. Wax1 Contact Information
Department of Human Behavior, Community College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas, NV 89146, USA

Published online: 18 May 2007

The regulation and management of sexual desire is one of only a few well-documented cultural universals. In every society that has been studied, there exists some form of restriction as to whom one can or cannot view as potential sexual partners, whether this takes the form of incest taboos that forbid sexual relationships with family members, marriage rules that prevent access to other people’s partners, legal frameworks that restrict one to one’s own racial, class, or other grouping, or informal aesthetic restrictions that do the same. These restrictions are often thought of in terms of minimizing conflict between individuals, controlling reproduction, and promoting the formation of alliances between groups or group segments, but Hawkes’ volume suggests that these restrictions also need to be understood in the wider context of control over the social order. In this perspective, discourses on the sexual body express anxieties over the control—and potential loss of control—of the body politic, and suggest as well the channels through which social control will be asserted.

This volume explores the ramifications of this thesis in the development of Western society, beginning with the Greece of Plato and Socrates and moving through early Christianity and the establishment of the Church, through the rise of modernity in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, through the Victorian era, and up to the present. Along the way, Hawkes tracks concerns over sex and sexuality as embedded in philosophical, religious, medical, legal, and, finally, popular discourses, revealing both the mutability of attitudes towards desire and pleasure and the endurance of the underlying need to establish social order through the instrument of the sexual body. Although her argument rests on discourse analysis and thus is subject to some of the shortcomings of that mode of analysis, the depth of Hawkes’ timeline makes this book an important resource for situating attitudes towards sex in their proper historical and political perspective.

Historia del deseo

Edward Shorter, Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire.
By Sethna, Christabelle
Publication: Labour/Le Travail
March 22, 2007

Edward Shorter, Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005)
IN HIS LATEST BOOK, Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire, Edward Shorter, the current Jason A. Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Toronto, argues that human brains are hard-wired to experience the desire to give and to receive what he labels “total body sex.” The term refers to sensual pleasure involving every part of the body rather than just the face and the genitals. According to Shorter, the brain drives the individual toward total body sex. The mind assesses how that drive can or cannot be exercised based on external constraints. In sum, says Shorter, human desire can be understood as “the history of the almost biological liberation of the brain to free up the mind in the direction of total body sex.”
To bolster his thesis, Shorter puts into place three caveats. First, he asserts that he is speaking only of the history of Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world because he is unfamiliar with non-Western cultures. Second, he claims that his work is based on the sexual practices of the more “innovative” segments of society. Third, he contends that research illustrating the existence of pleasure pathways in the brain indicates that desire can be brain driven.