Lust Regressions Available to Purchase

In their polemical Hatred of Sex, Oliver Davis (a professor in French studies at the University of Warwick, known primarily as a scholar of Jacques Rancière) and Tim Dean (a prominent voice in psychoanalytic queer theory, author of the essential Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking) diagnose a universal “hatred of sex,” whose symptoms they identify in a litany of fields: queer theory, gender studies, intersectionality, affect theory, attachment theory, ego psychology, traumatology, the #MeToo movement, satanic panic, and QAnon. Their understanding of “hatred of sex” is analogical to what Rancière calls “hatred of democracy”: the constitutive tension of the simultaneously ordering and disordering forces of democracy. Davis and Dean argue that psychoanalytic theories of sex show us that sexual pleasure is similarly occupied by contrary “centripetal and centrifugal” forces. “Sex disorders us” (20), they write, following in the footsteps of Leo Bersani's reframing of Laplanche's...