Description
Book SynopsisJean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh discuss how a deconstructive approach to sex helps us negotiate discourses about sex and reconsider our relations to ourselves and others through sex.
Trade Review“Happily, no one will leave this book with an understanding of sex. To the contrary, these trenchant and provocative dialogues challenge any construction of sex that relies on a copular verb. As astutely as Irving Goh places sex in a politicophilosophical framework, just as astutely does Jean-Luc Nancy lay out how sex exceeds it. This results in an exemplary enactment of the becoming-word of sex, ‘leaving in us,’ to quote Nancy, ‘a sort of dizziness and bedazzlement’ by comparison with which ‘understanding’ sex can only seem delusional.” -- Lee Edelman, author of * No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive *
“In this fascinating dialogue between the renowned continental thinker Jean-Luc Nancy and the critic Irving Goh, the foundational terms of sex are brilliantly deconstructed in ways directly relevant to sensual experience, modalities of affect, intimate co-relationality and the fluid subjects of contemporary gender self-identification. Sexual philosophy, post-Foucault and post-Irigaray, gains a new classic with this indispensable text, topped by the bonus of Claire Colebrook's trenchant afterword on killjoy sex.” -- Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York University
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Sex "Is" Deconstruction / Irving Goh 1
0. The Deconstruction of Sex: Opening Questions 16
1. Troubling Thought(s): Sex and Deconstruction 20
2. On Touching—Sex 35
3. Who Comes before/after Sex? 53
4. S/exscription 70
Afterword: Sex and the Killjoy / Claire Colebrook 83
Acknowledgments 93
Notes 95
Bibliography 105
Index 109
