Sex and Philosophy Symposium

The Sex/Philosophy Symposium (opens in a new window) took place on April 1st, 2013 at Critical Path, a choreographic research laboratory in Rushcutters Bay, Sydney. It was a day of reflections and meditations with contributions from philosophers, therapists, academics, sex professionals and enthusiasts. This initiative was driven by the desire to foster a culture of thoughtful conversation about sexuality that is not divorced from, but remains linked to, direct physical and emotional experiences. Taking place the day after a large three-day festival on sexuality, called Xplore (opens in a new window), it was intended that reflections on sexuality at the Sex/Philosophy Symposium would be supplemented by a practice of sexual exploration, to which participants had been exposed at the Xplore festival. 

It was also the aim of the Sex/Philosophy Symposium to emphasize and promote certain philosophical values in the discussion of sexuality: values such as attention, economy and rigour in the use of language, permission to question intellectual presuppositions and unspoken assumptions, listening, tolerance of non-understanding and of conceptual aporias.

The idea for the symposium came from a recent study by French philosopher and psycho-analyst, Anne Dufourmantelle, entitled Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy.[1] Avital Ronell wrote a lengthy introduction to this text. An hour-long skype interview with Professor Ronell (NYU) was the plenary address, which opened the symposium. The occasion of Dufourmantelle’s study is a casual, almost whimsical remark by Jacques Derrida that philosophers themselves almost never write about their own sex lives, as if such disclosure were taboo, as if it would endanger the capacity of their work to be taken seriously. Although there are exceptions to this rule, (notably Michel Foucault and feminists such as Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Buttler), for the most part philosophers rarely attempt to broach the relationship between sexual desire and the work that they do, as if the two were utterly distinct.

Contributions at the symposium included: “Queering Heterosexuality” with Janet Hardy, “Sex/Philosophy” with Avital Ronell; “Reinventing Pornography as a Commercial Genre” by Gala Vanting; “Lessons from a Whore” by Artemisia de Vine, “Ecstatic Experience, BDSM and Subspace” by Coleen Mullin, There were also artist talks by Dasniya Sommer and Garth Knight, a video of Berlin-based choreographer Felix Ruckert in conversation on the history and concept of the Xplore festival and a discussion with Peter Banki on “Leading a Double Life and Exploring Integration.”

A proposal for publishing the proceedings of the conference is under review with Cambridge Scholars Press.

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[1] A. Dufourmantelle Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy Catherine Porter (trans.) (Evanston: University of Illinois Press, 2008).