LOS ANGELES — One of the world’s most renowned philosophers, Slavoj Žižek, has penned a rumination about sex and porn in the age of COVID-19.
The essay, titled “Can COVID-19 Remind Us that Sex Is an Important Channel for Spirituality?” was published by the Russia-funded RT.com news site.
Žižek is the author of several important books on cultural philosophy, a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.
The Slovenian philosopher is also a popular figure in intellectual circles worldwide, thanks to his playful combination of psychoanalytic theory, media commentary and often provocative statements. His thought has been the subject of documentaries “Zizek!” and “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” and he’s a regular reference point for philosophy and political theory channels on YouTube.
“The COVID-19 epidemic will certainly give a boost to digital sexual games, but hopefully it will also lead to a new appreciation of physical intimacy and we will remember that sex between two people is a medium for spirituality,” Žižek’s essay for RT begins.
The philosopher explains the social distancing recommendations merely “conclude the process which was already going on with the progressive digitalization of our lives: statistics show that today’s adolescents spend much less time exploring their sexuality than surfing the web.”
Echoing the opinions of many online sex workers, Žižek explains that trying to reduce the gap “between the bodily reality of a partner and the universe of fantasies to a distortion opened up by patriarchy and social domination or exploitation” (as anti-porn crusaders would like to) is futile because “the gap is here from the very beginning.”
“I quite understand the actor who, in order to regain his erection, searched Pornhub — he was looking for a phantasmatic support of his performance. It is for this same reason that, as part of sexual intercourse, one partner asks the other to go on talking, usually narrating something ‘dirty’ — even when you hold in your hands the ‘thing itself’ (the beloved partner’s naked body), this presence has to be supplemented by verbal fantasizing.”
Žižek concludes that “the epidemics will definitely give a boost to digital sexual games without bodily contact. Hopefully, however, a new appreciation of sexual intimacy will arise out of the epidemics, and we will learn again the lesson of Andrei Tarkovsky for whom earth, its inert, humid stuff, is not opposed to spirituality but its very medium.”
To read Slavoj Žižek’s “Can COVID-19 Remind Us that SEX Is an Important Channel for Spirituality?,” visit RT.com.
