Sensing new possibilities for homo passional assemblages

Frequently, representations about passional encounters – literally being swept away by the heat of the moment – describe intense bodily affects as being "on the edge of pleasure (where)...the rational self, the subject who might know and assess risks and opportunities through careful reflection, disintegrates". These representations of ineffable bodily pleasures pose a limit to health promotion strategies concerned with risky sexual practices as they become dumb matter, represented as unmediated experiences or negative unconscious material that limits rational risk management or ethical reflexivity. After the event of HIV/AIDS, the guilt-free pleasures of unprotected sex between men are re-territorialised as being anachronistic, out of place and time (unless these pleasures are re-constituted using rational criteria for risk management that deploy reflexive scientific knowledge). Safe sex campaigns are narrowly premised on modernist temporalities where rationality, responsibility, ethics, sensibility, and intentionality come before passion to insure a better 'after'. These campaigns sustain heteronormative temporalities about longevity and the time of "what if", an anticipatory temporality concerned with the good life and longevity, which demands self-responsibility in health care and death avoidance. The biopolitics of safe sex inevitably falls back on models of subjectivity involving bodily position and body-reflexive practices. They deploy concepts of "responsibility" or "sexual ethics" modelled on a self who uses either instrumental reason or a sexual ethic that is either self-interested or that incorporates the Other (by means of altruism, mutual interest or mutual obligation). These models incorporate the notion of an autonomous individual subject who possesses a reflexive capacity to rationally "stand back and assess experience through a detached, unencumbered way of knowing".This rational person is both "socially unencumbered" and "corporeally unencumbered" being able to master emotional states and bodily experiences in order to make ethical, healthy and reasoned choices. By relying exclusively on the rationality of body-reflexive practices and its techniques for achieving equilibria in discursive positioning, technologies of safe sex remain imprisoned within a freeze-frame that limits new possibilities for joyful ethical responses to the problem of homo passion. This essay begins a line of movement focused on the question of "what can a body do?" to investigate the conditions of possibility for the construction of a collective homo sexual ethics that does not fall back on state regimes concerned with risk rationalities. Instead, I will investigate how intensification in bodily states might bring about qualitative changes in homo passional assemblages whereby new bodily movements and affects might be sensed into being. This essay refuses to accept its grounding within the conservative politics of stasis with its over-reliance on discourse dependent ethical practices that seek to position the passional subject. When we focus on a point of arrival or a desired future destination we run the risk of over-coding the subject from the perspective of "positionality" , losing vision of the subjects' dynamic processes of not only emergence, but also of mutation and transformation.