Justin Clemens (The University of Melbourne)



Pornosophical Philotheology: Lacan on the Philosophical Management of Desire


In the Circe episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is stumbling drunkenly through Nighttown with his faithless friend Vincent Lynch, expatiating upon a hoary speculative theme: ‘So that gesture, not music, not odours, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm.’ In response to Stephen’s pompous and pretentious profundities, Lynch objects that this is: ‘Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburg street!’ Perhaps there is no better portmanteau affirmation of the rapport between pornography, philosophy, and theology. As Lacan himself notes in Seminar V—first of all with respect to the ancient tie between prisons and brothels, and then with respect to Jean Genet’s play The Balcony—in such houses of illusions, we confront figures as the Chief of Police and the Madame, exemplary agents of the management of desires in all their polymorphousness and perversion. Perhaps we can also speak of philosophy’s world historical complicity and collusion with such a management?