Pornosophy : Jean-Luc Nancy and the pornographic image

What happens when a philosopher gets a hard-on? Generally speaking, this is not a subject philosophers often discuss. Moreover, the slang, some might even say obscene expression ‘to get a hardon’ does not properly belong to the idiom of academic research. In place of ‘hard-on’, or the only slightly less offensive ‘erection’, one should probably say something like ‘tumescence of the penis’, presuming for the moment that a hard-on must refer to a penis, which in turn must be part of a male body identifiable as such. Nothing could be less certain. In any case, the boldness and directness of the idiom of ‘getting a hard-on’ should probably be avoided, since its place is rather in pornography or maybe the bedroom. And yet, in apparently complying with such a powerful taboo, one must be able to ask if an opportunity is thereby lost. ‘Male’ philosophers such Georges Bataille, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Schlegel and, closer to our time, feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray have not only reflected on sexuality, they have sought to bear witness to ways in which sexual arousal and desire touch their philosophical thoughts and writing. For this mode of sexualised reflection, Avital Ronell has proposed the term ‘pornosophy’. Has anyone in modern philosophy ever attempted to elaborate an ethics or politics of the hard-on? Enduring debates about what is called the gender gap in philosophy departments throughout the world,2 sexual harassment,3 not to mention the endless vexations and jokes about the virile comportment of philosophers, and philosophy itself, that have been circulating in the backrooms of the discipline since I don’t know when – all of this would support an argument that such an ethics or politics merits at least to be considered. In The Post-Card Jacques Derrida was not afraid to see that behind Socrates’ back, under his right leg, Plato had ‘an interminable disproportionate erection’.4 This image, which Derrida claimed to have discovered one day on a post-card in the gift shop of the Bodleian library in Oxford, is from a drawing by Matthew Paris (1217–59), which appeared in a thirteenth century manuscript containing a series of fortunetelling tracts. Derrida went on to announce that ‘this couple . . . these old nuts (ces vieux fous), these rascals on horse back (galopins à cheval) . . . this is us, in any event a priori, (they arrive upon us) (c’est nous de toute façon, a priori, (ils arrivent sur nous)’.5 In all probability Gilles Deleuze was on a similar wavelength when in a published letter he spoke memorably about conceiving the history of philosophy ‘as a kind of ass-fuck (enculage), or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception’.6 Taking from behind the older philosophers who apparently came before him, Deleuze imagined himself in a virile position that replicates that of Plato in The Post-Card. The image of intergenerational and, one must confess, white male coupling, or to use a subcultural term, barebacking,7 is from the point of view of Western philosophy scarcely one image among others. Both Derrida and Deleuze seem to agree; it belongs almost intrinsically to philosophy’s procedures of transmission, be they conscious or unconscious. Could one dream of or imagine different procedures of philosophical transmission?8 How might one begin to think the hard-on’s finitude?