Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

Sex as the things we cannot say

I was blown away by this paragraph in Jennette McCurdy’s Half His Age (which incidentally echoes Alenka Zupančič’s argument in What is Sex?) and I now can’t get it out of my head. From 2,864:

That’s what sex is for me now. Recreating—or attempting to recreate—how things were in the beginning, when sex represented the affections, the desires, the wishes, hopes, and dreams. The longing. The promise of what could be. The chemistry. The potential. When sex represented all the things we couldn’t say. Now, sex represents the apologies, the differences, the disconnection. The mourning. The acceptance. The melancholy for what used to be. Still the things we can’t say. Just different things.

And I told you to be patient
And I told you to be fine
And I told you to be balanced
And I told you to be kind
And in the morning I'll be with you
But it will be a different kind
And I'm holding all the tickets
And you'll be owning all the fines