Dear editors,
In his short story The Sect of the Phoenix, Jorge Luis Borges writes of a secret society that passes down knowledge through the performance of a mysterious ritual in which a great Secret is revealed. The story never states what the Secret is, but a reader who takes to an internet search will find Borges’s extratextual answer: the object of clandestine whispers around which society is shaped, the thing created through its concealment, is sexual intercourse.
Sex, though, is not actually the object of all the desire that floats around throughout the world. If we’re to take the adage popularly misattributed to Oscar Wilde and combine it with a tenet of Foucault’s thought, we find an equation that matches what I’m getting at here:
Everything → Sex, Sex → Power, Power = Knowledge
Everything is about sex, except sex, which, in itself, is not about sex. Sex is about power, and power is forever determined by knowledge—who possesses it, who believes themself to possess it, and who is forever seeking it out.
Borges suggests elsewhere that certainty, instead of sex, is the ultimate seduction. At the end of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the languages of our world are subsumed into the made-up language of Tlön, which has become a puzzle whose process of solving has bewitched the entirety of humanity. Enchanted by the rigor of Tlön, Borges says, “humanity forgets over and over again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels.” As beings in a complex and chaotic world, we are always searching for a license to certainty, for a truth that stays true in all cases. As men and not gods, it would poison us to stop searching.
Isn’t what’s really seductive, though, to imagine that there exists a person who can take your hand and guide you to some higher level, where everything makes sense? Coming to certainty engenders a simple, absolute pleasure in the mind as sex does in the body, but where sex as sensation is merely quotidian, sex in this epistemic element is experienced as revelation.
To join with another person in one moment of particular, ultimately sensual, pleasure is a paradox. It allows us to be fully known, understood in our infinite complexity, and pinned down like a butterfly on a corkboard. Sex is a way we attempt to fulfill the desire to have mastered all of the learning, to have resolved every contradiction and thoroughly written out every nuance, such that our understanding can be considered closed. It’s the desire for a sort of sublation which reduces the world to line drawings, to defining characteristics.
Both sex and certainty have their place, but the desire for eternal certainty is mere greed. The brief totality of sensation that is felt in the body, the little death that makes sex what it is, is perverted when you seek its eternal proliferation in the cerebral pleasure of knowing and of being right. It’s perverted when you allow a person to stand in as the provider of all answers. Seduction is what happens when one mistakes the certainty of man for that of a god.
Borges is clear that abandoning humility is dangerous; the cultists in The Library of Babel foolishly go looking for their Vindications, mythological books that would absolve a person of every sin committed in their lifetimes. Of course, the chances, in the infinite library, of finding such books are zero. For all his shining intricacies, a human being cannot construct a total system because such ultimate knowledge is reserved for God. But when someone smiles down upon you from such great heights, from such great levels of conviction, you might mistake him for an angel.
So, it’s a greedy kind of concession, but it’s not all about sex. How could it be? After all, sex is not a fundamental object. We balk at its generality, balk at the fact that, even in the most loving and fulfilling of relationships, the corporeal experience democratically doled out to all stands in contrast to the fact of love as the ultimate particularity. In sex as an object in itself, we are flattened into expanses of skin on skin. What it’s about is the thing that drives us, the thing we desire above all—nothing more than justified rigor, nothing less than the absolute itself.
Desiringly,
Josie Barboriak
Image: Gustave Moreau, Jacob and the Angel, oil on canvas, 1878 (Fogg Museum)