Sex and Peace

Sex is supposed to keep everyone so busy that they don’t have time to fight. Make love not war has been the implicit slogan of nearly every utopian project in the modern age.

Augusto del Noce (Crisis of Modernity, 182-4) shows why this is not the case: “One common feature [of the sexual revolution] is psycho-erotic-Freudian-Marxist de-Christianization. Another is stopping at negativity and believing in the magic power of the idea of negativity. It must be followed by the quest for sensuous and emotional novelties through drugs, precisely in order to go beyond reality.” The sexual revolution aims to “push to the limit Marxism’s revolutionary aspect by linking it to psychoanalysis understood in a revolutionary sense – we understand by what process eroticism must lead to the quest for a surreal world through drugs, and because of this rejection of reality it must encounter anarchism, keeping only its nihilistic aspect and leaving out the moral one.”

Sexual revolution can only be carried out as “total negativism, not only against civilization and values but also against the very principle of reality, and is accompanied by the most sacrilegious and blasphemous expressions.” Rather than peace, the sexual revolution brings “‘permanent violence’ as a replacement for the ideal of [Marxist] ‘permanent revolution,” which was oriented toward a future peace.”

He finds in the eroticism of Bataille, for instance, a reversal of the biblical account of creation and fall: “eroticism is the precise opposite: its principle is, so to speak, de-creation, as opposed to creation. Having denied every trace of the divine image within human individuality, the process moves toward dissolution, fusion with totality through negation of individuality” and therefore “the separation, within eroticism, of love from generation, and the aversion against giving birth.”

An upside down sacred is inherent in eroticism, in ritualizations of sex. Del Noce observes that Christianity “separated religion from eroticism,” and that the fusion of the two returns in every heresy: “Today is the time when all heresies seem to have gathered together.”