SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

sexuality--a world of meanings that accrue to and come to be associated with the sex act in a
given culture.
Sexuality symbolically links and attempts to harmonize nature, culture, history and
individual imagination. fantasy and desire. Its referents exceed anatomy and the sex act, and
herein lies its interest to the present discussion. Some of the meanings of sexuality are related to
the social conventions governing the selection of a partner (just mentioned), but most are
metaphoric. In the West, this multiplicity of meanings that surround sex increased rapidly during
the postmodern era, creating a complex, mirroring set of reflections, often bewildering, of
bodies and words, images and ideas, and ideologies. Sexuality came to encompass ways of
thinking about one’s own body, the bodies of others (especially children), and the social “body”
by incorporating notions drawn from mythology and religion, ethics and the law, and that host
of products of the human imagination, art and literature. In its fundamentals, however, sexuality
is also based and built on the imperative of biological continuity effected by the sex act, albeit
now woven into an elaborate, multilayered story of the co-unfolding of nature, history and
imagination.
Thanks to Dr. Freud, discussions of sexuality preoccupied most middle-class Western
intellectuals in the 20 th century and created the “climate of opinion” in which we have all
become prereflectively implicated. Sexuality has become implicated in nearly every aspect of
everyday life, from deportment, gestures and ways of speaking, to clothing and comestibles,
and political agenda. In short, existence was sexualized. But let us again emphasize that this
web of meanings termed sexuality was spun out over only a brief period of time, a few dozen
decades.
As for the notion of gender (other than its meaning in grammar), it is only a bit more than
a half-century old. Unfortunately, this has not prevented some from back-reading thousands of
years of myths and tales passed along to us in written texts and on the surfaces of works of art in
such a way as to have mistakenly identified sexuality at the inception of Western history, where
nothing of the sort was to be found. Attempts to find sexuality in non-Western worldviews and
religious traditions were undertaken. Sometimes these readings have been compelling, but they
are simply wrong-headed. One well-known example of this is the remarkable accomplishment
of Sir Richard Burton, in 1883, of identifying the Kama Sutra (a text likely from the 6 th century CE)
as a “sex manual.”
No. Sexuality is an invention of Western postmodernity that took on a life of its own, a life
that now courses through the electronic media at blinding speed, very far in excess of the mere
three feet per second speed of blood as it leaves the human heart to course through the body
or the slightly greater speed of conductivity of “messages” relayed through the human nervous
system (about five miles per hour), where the technicians of neuroscience assure us they can
see sexuality racing along in the form of chemical transactions between neurons.
Without further digression, this is what I want to emphasize: Sex and its symbolic and
metaphoric penumbra, sexuality, leave a great deal unaccounted for. We are not, as Freud
taught, primarily sexual beings, whether sexuality is described in terms of psychodynamics, social
customs and rituals, or desire. Significantly, as Derrida pointed out, sexuality is missing from
Heidegger’s Analytik of existence in Being and Time. This should not be at all surprising. To his
credit, Heidegger realized that sexuality is not the epicenter of existence. This is a lasting, though
insufficiently acknowledged contribution of Heidegger to philosophical anthropology and
clinical psychology. Of course, his major concern was not clinical practice but the question of
be[-ing] and the means of access to it provided by existence.
But here we must take a turn away from Heidegger. I would not maintain, as he does,
that existence is the topos of human experience. Clearly, nor is sexuality. What remains, then?
This, I would suggest, is eros. What, then, is eros?
3. Eros is the context of existence. As we know, the word was first a proper name—the
name of a young male Greek god. Again, back-readings of ancient texts have made him out