Description: Hatred of Sex links Jacques Rancière's political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche's identification of a fundamental perturbation at the heart of human sexuality. Sex is hated as well as desired, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean contend, because sexual intensity impedes coherent selfhood and undermines identity, rendering us all a little more deplorable than we might wish. Davis and Dean explore the consequences of this conflicted dynamic across a range of fields and institutions, including queer studies, attachment theory, the #MeToo movement, and "traumatology," demonstrating how hatred of sex has been optimized and exploited by neoliberalism.
Advancing strong claims about sex, pleasure, power, intersectionality, therapy, and governance, Davis and Dean shed new light on enduring questions of equality at a historical moment when democracy appears ever more precarious.Review Quotes: "Fascinating, formidable, and timely, this volume probes unexpected links between democracy and sexuality. Hatred of Sex will undoubtedly disturb established ideas that are widely and at times too reflexively adopted in current academic conversations about sexuality. A manifesto grounded in careful scholarship, this book has the makings of a classic."--Avgi Saketopoulou, faculty of the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University