Abstract

In recent years, philosophers and political theorists began to treat sex as a serious intellectual topic. Though their work involves broad disciplinary and theoretical differences, it is in all cases characterized by a conception of sexual motivation. That is the topic I attempt to pursue here. Toward that end, I examine the behavioral specifications that analytic philosophers have given for states of 'sexual desire' ; I inquire into the problems of consciousness that phenomenologists have thought 'sexual desire' to entail ; I survey the attempts of moral philosophers to account for the moral dimension of sexual experience ; I examine the psychoanalytic attempt to isolate the emotional basis of 'sexual desire', and to account for the sorts of emotional conflict often given sexual expression . I give particular attention to feminist views of sexuality , and to political views of the liberating and/or repressive character of sexual experience . ;I offer two main arguments: Concerning the definition of sexuality, I argue that 'sexual desire' is neither a glanduar, bodily phenomenon nor a matter of social relations, but is best thought of as a subjunctive sort of desire, a desire in which bodily and social aims are mixed, and often distorted. Concerning the political significance of sexuality, I argue that political thinking about sexuality is unduly limited by contraints which derive from the work of Marx and Freud: Sexuality tends to be seen as either a model for communal relations or as a dangerous energy, best repressed. Neither view seems sufficient on its own. If there is to be a political theory of sex that will support a sexual politics, it must be a theory that maintains a critical perspective upon the psychologically ambivalent character of sexuality, while at the same time allowing for the possible reinvention of sexuality. Though no such theory has yet been advanced, this essay is intended as a step in that direction