The Sexual/Political engages with contemporary political issues in sexuality through a survey of modern philosophy, psychoanalytic thought, 20th-century political theory, and more recent queer philosophies.
The book investigates how the sexual has perturbed philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic thought and how this has fed into discrimination against the LGBTQI community. It analyses the social stigmas applied to public and private sexual acts and the psychopolitical processes leading to the prevalence of neo-fascist populism in Italy and the world. Tracing the history of sexuality through Freud, Marx, Fanon, and Foucault, among many others, Bernini considers why the sexual has always been an exceptionally difficult object to consider in political theory.
This book will be of key interest to scholars in queer theory; antisocial theory; psychoanalysis and politics; drive theory; political philosophy; critical theory; LGBTQIA+ issues; gender and sexuality studies; and Italian studies.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Introduction to the English Edition
Prologue: Merde alors!
Part I
Freud
1. The Pig Roast
1.1 The Curse of the Übermensch
1.2 Crimina Carnis Contra Naturam
1.3 The Political Body in the Boudoir
2. Feel Your Way with Freud
2.1 To Do Justice
2.2 The Phases of (Hetero)Sexual Development
2.3 The Perverse Sexual, or the Drive
3. Sigmund on the Couch
3.1 The Forbidden Step
3.2 Demons
3.3 Again and Again
Part II
With Marx, Fanon, Foucault
4. Foreclosures
4.1 Bodies in Alliance without Sex
4.2 The (Hetero)Sexual Revolution
4.3 Hedonistic Resistances
5. Flying Anuses, or Of Another Tradition
5.1 In the Name of Anna
5.2 Elements of a Pansexual Critique
5.3 The Golden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
6. The Sexual/Political
6.1 Foucault without Organs
6.2 Bastardized Space
6.3 Caliban’s Phallus
Epilogue: Hyenas in the Sauna
Bibliography
Biography
Lorenzo Bernini, author is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Verona, and one of the most important voices in the Italian queer debate. He founded the Research Centre PoliTeSse (Politics and Theories of Sexuality) which he now directs, and he is also one of the founders of GIFTS, the Italian network of gender, intersex, feminist, transfeminist, and sexuality studies. Among his books are Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory (2017) and Queer Theories: An Introduction. From Mario Mieli to the Antisocial Turn (2019).
Matthew Zundel, translator is Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow with the Core Curriculum at New York University, where they also received their PhD in Italian Studies. Their research concerns the intersection of queerness, social movements, theory, and literature in 20th-century Italy. They have published on the work of Mario Mieli and Pier Paolo Pasolini alongside translations of Italian political philosophy from Luciano Parinetto to Andrea Righi. They are currently working on a book project about the materialist roots of Italian queer and feminist social thought in the 1970s.
