Voyou This was Rousseau's argument in "Essay on the Origin of Language," but I'm not sure it's true. If I understand you right, you are arguing that the sexual instinct is fundamentally social because the instinctive sexual urge requires other human beings to satisfy it. But humans always acquire the means to satisfy our hunger or thirst through social production, that is, hunger and thirst require others for their satisfaction too; so wouldn't these instincts be just as social?
^^^ CB: Sex is unmediatedly or immediately , i.e. directly social, in the bodily sense. The satisfaction of thirst or hunger is mediatedly , not directly, social . And the social relations in social production are the means not the end. In sex , the social relation _is_ the end or purpose, not the means. In social production, the human producers relate socially as a means to the purpose of making some object to satisfy thirst or hunger, put an object in or on a body. In sex, the two people put their bodies on each other, and that itself is _social_, Sex is doubly social. It is unlike putting an object on or in a body. It is socially/symbolically putting a body on a body, body on body being a second level of sociality, a natural sociality. Human Sex _is_ a symbolically constituted practice. I am saying that all along. Most discussing don't notice that I am saying human sex is partly symbolically constituted, like all human activity. I have two degrees in ethnology or cultural anthropology , "for chrsts sake". Butler and you all are getting that from our discipline. Butler's main insight she gets from cultural anthropology. I understood the principle she is standing on way back in 1972, because it was the main thing Marshall Sahlins taught us in my senior ethnology theory seminar ( year long) The pervasiveness of the symbolic, of culture, in determining human conduct and affairs. But I am saying that uniquely of all cultural domains, human sex has a heavy signified determination. Compared to most cultural domains the influence of the signified is much greater and more equal to the influence of the signifier, the representer, I think Marx makes this point somewhere in the 1844 Manuscripts, but I can't find the exact reference right now ^^^ CB: Yes, 1844 manuscript. I thought I just sent to the list the quote from the 1844 Econ and Philos Manuscript on this. I got the idea of what I am saying here from Marx right there. My translation of the quote from Marx ( which I will send to list again)as follows: Sex is a unique combination of the social and natural, in which the natural has more of an equal role with the cultural than in most human endeavors. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
