Sexual desire is only one metaphor for bodies’ symbolic exchange of signs
Evidence
Each mark, each trace, each scar left on the body is like an artificial invagination, like the scarifications of savages […]. Only the wounded body exists symbolically — for itself and for others — “sexual desire” is never anything but the possibility bodies have of combining and exchanging their signs. Now, the few natural orifices to which one normally attaches sex and sexual activities are nothing next to all the possible wounds, all the artificial orifices (but why “artificial”?), all the breaches through which the body is reversibilised and, like certain topological spaces, no longer knows either interior or interior […] Sex […] is largely overtaken by the fan of symbolic wounds, which are in some sense the anagrammatisation of the whole length of the body — but now, precisely, it is no longer sex, but something else […] The savages knew how to use the whole body to this end, in tattooing, torture, initiation — sexuality was only one of the possible metaphors of symbolic exchange, neither the most significant, nor the most prestigious, as it has become for us in its obsessional and realistic reference, thanks to its organic and functional character (including in orgasm). — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1047
Categorization
- XREF: Fisher’s body-as-signifying-surface echoes his usual Baudrillard/Bataille frame but also connects to the earlier highlighted material on bodily scarification and goth as ritual. — connects to: Erotic desire is constituted by signs and technology, not natural sex — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1045; Eroticism is constituted by signs and machines, not just mediated by them — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1045; The body-as-metaphor legitimated social hierarchy as naturally given
- QUESTION: The quoted passage is Fisher quoting someone (possibly Lyotard on libidinal economy given the topological/body-libido language) — worth identifying the source text. The internal ellipses and bracketed […] suggest it is a cut-together quotation.
Broader Connections
- Eroticism is constituted by signs and machines, not just mediated by them
#expands(0.86) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1045 - The body-as-metaphor legitimated social hierarchy as naturally given
#expands(0.72)