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Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, "Hatred of Sex" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
00:49:20
An interview with Oliver Davis and Tim Dean
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Podcast Network Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:32]
Eugenio Duarte
Hi everybody. Welcome to New Books in Psychology. I am Eugenio Duarte, your host as well as a practicing psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in Miami today. My guests are Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, and they are the authors of the book Hatred of Sex published by University of Nebraska press in in 2022. I'd like to take a moment to introduce my guests. Oliver Davis is a professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick. He's the author of Jacques Rancier and editor of Rancier Now. And Tindeen is James N. Benson professor in English at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign. He's also author of the book Unlimited Intimacy Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking and Beyond Sexuality. Oliver Tim, welcome to the show.
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Oliver Davis
Thanks so much, Rohini. And thanks so much for this opportunity to talk about our book with you and your listeners.
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Eugenio Duarte
It's my pleasure. I first of all want to congratulate you on the book and I want to know how you feel now that it's done and it's out.
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Tim Dean
It seems like a miracle to me that it is done and out. Maybe because that's how one feels about every book that one manages to. To finish and publish. But this was certainly the first time I had written a book with anybody. And when Oliver and I sort of hatched the idea over a drunken dinner at Warwick University in 2013, and we sort of came up with the title Hatred of Sex, I knew the moment that we came up with that title, that we had to write the book because we had a great title. But it's never clear to me the one. The good ideas come to fruition. This one somehow did, which has taught me something about collaboration and the process of collaboration. And Oliver has been a pleasure to work with, and I have learned a lot, and I continue to marvel that we managed to pull this off.
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Eugenio Duarte
So maybe I'll direct this to you, Oliver, to follow up on what Tim is saying. He said that the title came first, but how, as a question about your creative process, how does that work? Like, how did you come up with the title? When you came up with the title, did you know what you wanted to write about?
- [04:03]
Oliver Davis
I would say the title is inspired really by Jacques Ranciere, whom you mentioned, by his book Hatred of Democracy. And in a way, we kind of borrow and adapt and displace and reconfigure the conceptual problematic in that book that perhaps we'll have a chance to talk about later. So we came up with the title, but we'd also had a number of discussions over the years prior to that drunken dinner that Tim mentions a few years ago, in which we talked about our views on sexual intimacy, speaking really as people who identify as gay men and who have worked in the areas of queer theory and philosophy, and to some extent, Tim much more than me in psychoanalysis as well.
- [05:00]
Eugenio Duarte
So what is this book about?
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Tim Dean
You know, I think to sort of follow up on what Oliver has just said. As I was reading Rancieres and struggling to really reading Ranciere in translation and struggling to get a handle on it and wanting to learn from Oliver about Rancier. I was also seeing tremendous affinities between Ranciere's political philosophy of democracy and equality and my understanding of psychoanalysis, particularly as it is inflected through the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche. And so, even though Rancier himself, I think, is either indifferent to or maybe hostile to psychoanalysis, I was seeing these affinities between the way Ron conceptualizes the political and how I think about sexuality, that I thought we could actually bring those two things, those two discourses together, irrespective of. And this was not my worry. It may have been Oliver's but irrespective of how Rancier himself might feel about being sort of appropriated for queer theory and being connected to, linked to, redescribed in terms of psychoanalytic concepts. So we bring those two things together and trying to use the idea of the psychoanalytic ideas about sex in a context in which it seems to me everybody talks about sex, but people don't, including in psychoanalysis, always talk about, don't necessarily acknowledge the difficulty of sexuality, what makes it disturbing, what makes it unsettling, what makes it overwhelming, overwhelming. What makes it unpleasurable as well as pleasurable.
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Eugenio Duarte
And correct me if I'm wrong here, so you're borrowing a little bit, drawing some inspiration from Ranciere's analysis about democracy. His book is aptly titled, like yours, Hatred of Democracy. I don't want to detract from your ideas, but because Ranci are so central to your thinking, what. Why does he think that? Or how does he believe that we hate democracy? And how does that map on to the ways that you think we hate sex?
- [07:29]
Oliver Davis
Sure, perhaps I'll take that one. I mean, I think both sex and democracy are messy, disordering, and that's the kind of point of similarity that we depart from. And so in Hatred of Democracy, Rancia analyzes critically a lot of the detractors of the democratic system that had sprung up in France around the turn of this century, for whom democracy was a kind of a disorderly mess, essentially not the most efficient way to govern a society. And Rancier really takes those criticisms and says that, well, they go back as far as the origins of democracy itself in the Athenian city states, in the Greek city states. And so hating democracy and actually existing democracies have been kind of intertwined as long as democracy has been a kind of system of rule. And that was really the point of departure. And in functioning democracies, then there is always an attempt to kind of, sort of suppress the kind of unruliness of democracies. So, I mean, in Rancier's analysis, you know, liberal democracies today would be a kind of a sort of semi suppressed form of that originary disorderliness, you know, because in ancient, in democracy, in ancient Greece, what happened then was that people who had no kind of particular training or expertise or entitlement or status or rank to govern, nevertheless governed and took turns to govern. And so there is something kind of, from a sort of sociological perspective, if you like, there's something very disturbing, very messy about democracy. And we felt on the basis of those conversations that we'd had that there was something sort of relevantly similar there about sex and the way that sex is hated. It's disordering effects on identity and on secure established social relationships. There was a similarity there that we wanted to. To draw out.
- [09:54]
Eugenio Duarte
I'd like to give our listeners a taste of your writing and read a passage from your book that I think captures what you're talking about. You say on page 15, if rancieur. I'm sorry, if I'm saying that wrong. If Rancier claims that contempt for democracy is built into democracy as the government of those who are not entitled to govern, then we claim that antipathy towards sex subtends even the unmistakable joys of sex. The problem is internal to sex as it is to democracy, and therefore cannot legitimately be glossed over by treating it as a contingent defect in an otherwise functional system. I think what you're saying here, but tell me if I'm wrong, is that this is not just an accident or some sort of unfortunate side effect of sex or of democracy, that it is a necessary part of how sex works. But can you talk about that? Am I getting close?
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Tim Dean
I think you're getting it exactly. I think you're hitting the nail on the head, Eugenio. Absolutely. I think when Oliver was. When Oliver was glossing Ranciere about democracy and said that the actually existing democracies, the democracies we have today, barely just suppress the unruliness of democracy in its original state. When I read something like that, what I hear is. It sounds very Freudian to me. Right? That is sexual orientation, sexual identity, all the polite ways we talk about sex suppress the unruliness of sexual. And the ways in which it disorders us. And therefore it is something integral to sex. From a psychoanalytic point of view, that is entirely analogous to in our thinking, what is the unruliness that is integral to democracy and can't simply be fixed? It can't simply be corrected by some ideal arrangement that we would like to come up with but have not yet come up with, that of sort. Sort of never going to happen. And so I think you. You put it. You, You. You got it. Exactly.
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Eugenio Duarte
Oliver, can you follow up on that and talk about what. What is the unruliness of sex? I mean, how does it disorder us? What are you talking about there?
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Oliver Davis
Oh, well, I mean, if you think just about the way in which sexual fantasy, sexual thoughts colonize attentional space. I mean, that is a very, very direct way in which sex kind of disorders the ways in which we like to kind of lead our Lives in planned and organized ways. And that's a very. In a way. I mean, it's not a very. It's not a very dramatic kind of disordering, that one. But there are obviously more. More dramatic forms of disorder that sex can be. Can be associated with.
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Eugenio Duarte
There's another quote from your book that I. That I want to read and have you comment on. It's on the next. On two pages later, on page 17, you say, @ the root of hatred of sex, L. The problem of pleasure. What do you mean by that? How could pleasure be involved in our hatred of.
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Tim Dean
Sex? That's a great question, Eugenio and I appreciate your opening these questions to us. I think what we mean by that. We are talking about the different ways that pleasure functions for human subjects and the way the pleasure can become excessive and overwhelming and tip over quite easily into something that is unpleasurable, painful, distressing, unsettling, etc. Often when we talk or think about pleasure, we simply think we want more of it. Different forms, different partners, different slices of cake. Oliver and I, both British, and we were talking yesterday on the phone about cake, and I was longing for some English cake. That as we think of pleasure as something straightforward that we simply need to access, and that the difficulty lies in not being able to access it or enough of it. What we are trying to point out is something different, which is the difficulty of pleasure lies in the ways in which it can be actually overwhelming. And much of our lives are dedicated to organizing things so we don't get overwhelmed by pleasure. We don't have too much of it. We don't get unsettled, dysregulated, disorganized by.
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Eugenio Duarte
It. One of the points that helped me understand your argument is the distinction you made between sexuality and eros. Can you.
- [14:59]
Tim Dean
Explain? Sure. In making that distinction, we are drawing on. We're drawing on the work of Jean Laplanche and particularly his emphasis on the Freudian distinction between binding psychical energy and the unbinding of it. And he says his argument is that sexuality is hostile to binding. That is, sexuality at its most intense is what unbinds, what shatters, what perturbs the self. Eros. And this is. He takes it directly from Freud. Eros is what binds things together. Eros is the idealizing, loving version of sex. And therefore, sex and eros are not really synonyms for each other. Even though I think in my own previous work I treated them as if they were. They're actually more like antonyms or the antithesis of each other. And that Is. I think the key idea that I have drawn from the work of Jean Laplanche has been very helpful to me. So I think we have a tendency, including an academic culture, to speak about the erotic and it's, we sort of use it as a kind of euphemism. You know, it's a, it's a polite way of talking about really intense and difficult aspects of sexuality that actually nobody is in a position to, to.
- [16:30]
Eugenio Duarte
Master. And Oliver, following up on that, I mean, are you, is the point of your book to shine a light on a dimension of sex, the unbinding, destabilizing aspects of sex? That because you, you feel that these, this dimension has been ignored? In other words, like what. Why, why should anyone become. Be interested in that dimension of sex? You know, why would anyone. If there are parts of sex that are unbinding and destabilizing, why not try to keep sex tame and.
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Oliver Davis
Safe? I think that is what our culture tries to do, is to keep sex tame and safe and increasingly to manage it into kind of corners of enjoyment that tend to kind of eclipse that potential for, for radical unbinding. So I mean, the part of the book that is the argument about a certain kind of trauma therapy, for instance, you know, is in a way is a kind of argument about the kind of. The overspill from, you know, the justifiable attention that is now drawn to sexual abuse. You know, something that would have surprised commentators in the 1970s, you know, the extent of, of sexual abuse. But the problem, the problem that we kind of identify is, is that that sort of, that justified attention and that these new forms of clinical practice that develop to, to address it kind of over spills and has kind of cumulatively these, these kind of toxic cultural effects which, which serve to, to make, to make sex a kind of a dangerous thing that we, that we fear, we fear for its risk and its danger and we, we seek to manage and really become unable to enjoy because the air has become so stifling around these kinds of.
- [18:38]
Eugenio Duarte
Topics. Tim, can you elaborate on how you see current trends in therapy for treating trauma? How they're doing what Oliver is talking about, how they're creating a kind of paranoia or undue fear around.
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Tim Dean
Sex? That's a great question. I'm not entirely sure. I mean, I need to just say for your audience that Oliver and I are not clinicians. You are, but we are not. I have a lot of clinical experience as a patient. I've done long term psychoanalysis, I've done therapy. I've done all Sorts of things. But I think I hear what you're asking. I think that. I would say that modes of psychotherapeutic treatment and psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic institutions are obviously influenced by, because they are open to the culture in which they exist. And within that culture there is a very quick and easy move, which I think Oliver was using the term overspill for, in which the way in which sexual pleasure can violate the self, can violate the integrity of the self is translated into. That must mean somebody was abused. That must mean actually somebody's being harmed, that the pleasure is coming at somebody else's expense, and we need to intervene in some way. And I think that what that misses, what our book is trying to sort of put its finger on or lay out or draw attention to shine a light on, is the difficulty of sex is not simply the result of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, all the forms of oppression with which we are all too familiar. But it's. In fact, there's a difficulty within sex itself. And it doesn't help to simply recode that as abuse. Right. The feeling of. And this is, I know this is a controversial or provocative thing to say, the feeling of being violated in sex does not always mean you have been violated by somebody.
- [21:09]
Eugenio Duarte
Else. And correct me if I'm wrong, first of all, I appreciate that you appreciate how delicate this is. And I'm very clear that from reading your book cover to cover that you're not trying to dismiss or minimize people's experiences of abuse. But it does seem to me like you're trying to invite people to consider that maybe the experiences of being feeling violated or intruded upon or out of control are part of what makes sex sex. Am I hearing it.
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Oliver Davis
Right? That's exactly right. And if I may, I mean, I could just perhaps add a little bit about the critique in the book about Judith Herman and her particular practice of. Of trauma focused therapy. So we read very closely Trauma and Recovery in the fourth chapter of the book. And this is obviously the kind of classic sort of handbook or textbook for this kind of trauma focused therapy. And what we identify there is a very. A clear kind of line of persuasion and suggestion in the book encouraging the. The trauma therapist to really to dig around in the childhood, particularly of patients and to kind of find evidence for abuse, even when it's not kind of immediately presenting itself in the session. We trace this kind of line of suggestion and we just seek to kind of understand it really, and to acknowledge that it's. It's present in that book and in the whole real, really the whole approach to trauma focused therapy that that book has inspired. And we just think that. I think that a kind of a set of claims have been made about, about the kind of the centrality of traumatic experience in individuals lives and which reflects a kind of cultural preoccupation with trauma that are actually in their kind of wider effects, really, really problematic and probably also in their. Actually in their individual effects are problematic. Not necessarily the best thing to do actually for a traumatized patient to get them to fixate on their trauma as a kind of source of traumatized identity. I think that is a problem that we seek to kind of analyze and unpick a little bit in the.
- [23:51]
Eugenio Duarte
Book. I think this might be a good time to bring into the conversation a figure who. A person who figures very prominently in your book and who we lost earlier this year and who, prior to this interview, Tim was kind enough to share with me some of his own writing about this figure and his, of course, Leo Bersani. For our listeners who don't know who he is, could you tell us briefly who he is and how does he contribute to this.
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Tim Dean
Conversation? Leo Bassani was a friend of Michel Foucault, a friend of Jacques Derrida. He was a professor of French at Berkeley for many years. A professor of French like Oliver. And Leo happened to also become a very dear and close friend of mine. The way he's important for our book is essentially his famous essay from 1987, which was coming out of the AIDS crisis. The essay is the Rectum a grave. And the famous first line, the opening line of that book. Sorry, the opening line of that essay. There is a big secret about sex. Most people don't like it. And part of what we have done or we're trying to do in our book is elaborate Leo Bassani's insight for a different historical moment. And I think by. By thinking through the work of Jaquesier, which was a French philosopher whom Leo did not really engage in his career, we were able to think about the politics of sex in a different way than Bassani did. But he's very much an influence on, on the book and has been for many years an influence on my thinking. And you know, he died, I think, in February and I miss him terribly. But he lived. Sorry, he lived to 90, he wrote many books, he had a good life, he had a long.
- [26:00]
Eugenio Duarte
Career. How do you understand that opening line that you just shared with.
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Tim Dean
Us? I mean, I understand it in part through Bassani's use of La planche Right. And Bassani translates La Planche's concept of a brun le man. And I apologize also for my French pronunciation. He translates it to shattering. And he makes an argument around people don't like sex because sex is what shatters the self. And sex in the terms that we develop, sex is what brings out the deplorable part of ourselves. Right. And we also draw on, we make something of Hillary Clinton's 2016 speech where she talked about Trump supporters as the basket of deplorables, of what it means to cast a certain proportion of the populace as deplorable. And we try to turn that to show the ways in which what sex brings out is the deplorable in all of us. But of course, we also have a whole set of defense mechanisms for not recognizing that or coming to terms with that. And one of those defense mechanisms is to say there's other people who are deplorable, not us, to always other that side of ourselves. So we draw those things together. And Bassani was very helpful for.
- [27:46]
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- [28:58]
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Eugenio Duarte
Running one of the things that I enjoy or appreciate most about your book is the way that you address certain kinds of, for lack of a better term, cultural products and show the ways in which those cultural products actually participate in the hatred of sex. And we're not going to be able to cover all of them now, but one that I want to get to because I think it's kind of ironic, is queer theory. You address how queer theory seems to have this selective paradoxical inattention to sex that.
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Tim Dean
They.
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Eugenio Duarte
Something. Something they don't really address. What's up with that? And how do you understand the way that that contributes to hatred of.
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Tim Dean
Sex? I, you know, we, we do argue that queer. Queer theory and queer studies actually instantiate and exemplify the hatred of sex. We're talking about the field. The field begins with attention to sexual. And Gayle Rubin saying the time has come to think about sex. And then what we try to trace is all the ways in which queer theory has sort of forgotten about sex. In part. In part, I think that's a process of the. That's an effect of. As a consequence of the institutionalization of a body of work within the university in which in order for something to become intelligible within the structures of the university, it needs to be minimally respectable. And the deplorable is never respectable. Right. It is the antithesis of what is respectable. And so in becoming a discipline and becoming a very politically oriented discipline, Queer studies has actually left behind what is most troubling, deplorable, unsettling, and that is.
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Eugenio Duarte
Sex. Oliver, do you care to follow up on.
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Oliver Davis
That? Yeah, I would say, I agree very much with Tim, that it's partly a product of queer theory's growing institutional prestige, if I can use that term. It's partly, I think, also the influence of a certain kind of sociological or sociologistic thinking within. Within queer theory. So the discussion in the book about intersectionality, you know, it's a very critical discussion of the prominence of, of intersectionality. And it's, and it's, it's absolutely not that we are unsympathetic to the kind of the aims that the people who want to talk about intersectionality want to pursue. We, we share those, we share those values, if you like, but we just think that trying to understand people and their behaviors and their views in terms of their sociological Position and identity, the characteristics that you add together to analyze somebody or a population sociologically is not a very instructive way to proceed and I suppose there is that. So that we're trying to bring a kind of critique of sociologism to queer theory, much as Ranciere did in, in his philosophical work in the 1990s especially was, was very critical of, of, of the, the prominence of identitarian thinking in the work of, of Pierre Bourdieu and a very influential leading French sociologist. So there is, we're trying to carry that kind of critique of, of the sort of sociologism inherent in, in sort of intersectionality which has really, I think kind of taken over kind of queer theory. Really. We're trying to bring that up to the present, the present moment to reconnect with Lancier's.
- [33:18]
Eugenio Duarte
Work. By sociologism, are you referring to our present day tendency to think of ourselves in terms of the identity categories that we belong to? I'm a gay man, I'm a white man, I'm a Cuban American man, I'm a first generation American. Is that what you're talking.
- [33:39]
Oliver Davis
About? All of the, and all of those, all of those determinants, all of those characteristics are important and they're all part of what make up our kind of facticity, our being in the world. But there are, there are other dimensions as well. And purely to kind of understand people in, within those terms and to, if you like to sort of hear what they say in accordance with our presuppositions based on our knowledge of their particular characteristics in those terms is, is a very limiting way of interacting with people. That's been my.
- [34:12]
Tim Dean
Experience.
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Eugenio Duarte
Anyway. Tim, I'd like to follow up with you and take this further because look, we're in a moment where we all know that at least in the queer community, lots of people are claiming their power, trying to find some power through their identities and feel like they, they need those identities in order to have that power and that visibility. And yet I appreciate the point that you're making that something can get lost when we engage in those identitarian politics. Tim, can you explain what it is? What is there to.
- [34:49]
Tim Dean
Lose? I think there's a lot to lose. The part of the book that I feel most strongly about is the critique of identity. I totally, I share your view, Eugenio, of how queer people are thinking. That is, I think we are thinking that way. I think it's a terrible trap. I think it's a terrible mistake. I think identity is imprisoning. I Do not think it's liberating. I think identity puts up the guardrails. It puts up barriers to making connections, psychologically, subjectivity, subjectively. It, it puts up barriers to discovering unexpected and surprising parts of oneself, probably the most troubling parts of oneself. I would describe identity as a culturally sanctioned defense mechanism. And I think psychoanaly, psychoanalytically, psychotherapeutically, the solution to defense mechanisms is not to multiply them. Right? It's not to keep generating more and more and more specific identities or defense mechanisms. It's to step away from that mode of being in the world which is about establishing yourself through an identity that is in fact a defense against otherness, alterity, including, and especially one's own otherness and alterity. So I think that a tremendous amount is lost in this quest for, for one's own authentic identity or one's own authentic group identity. I think it's how neoliberal power uses people, is how things are sold to us through our identities. I understand that people think it's liberating or empowering. I just. The book makes a different argument. The book makes a counter argument. And identity is always a defense against sex because sex is unbinding, unsettling, whereas identity is always a form of binding, a form of defining, putting boundaries around things, making something coherent and intelligible. And I, like everybody else, need to live my life through a certain level of coherence, a certain level of being intelligible to myself. But that is always militating against the, the, the, the tremendous power of sexuality and sex to, to unbind, to unsettle, to challenge who we think we.
- [37:35]
Eugenio Duarte
Are. I, I want to, I want to stay with this a moment longer because I got to tell you, it was also for me, one of the most thought provoking parts of the book. And I want to see if we can understand what, at the level of day to day experience, what this looks like on the phenomenological level. Like, because I've thought about it, you know, if I move through the world identifying as a gay man, a cisgender gay man, what, what am I missing out on? How, how, how or what do you think I am defending myself against? And this is to Oliver.
- [38:13]
Tim Dean
Orton. Well, let me just say, Eugenio, you know, it's a wonderful paradox here. The psychotherapist is asking us what he might be defending himself against. And there's a weird turning of the tables that I was not really, I'm not really qualified to handle, but. I guess I would also, I Mean, I would say, say I routinely forget that I am a gay man. That I identify as a gay. Routinely. Yes, yes. I guess it means I just don't identify with the category very strongly. Not because I'm lusting after women, but I just don't. It just seems to me a kind of artificial and actually very limiting kind of category. How could one be so sure that that is all one is interested.
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Eugenio Duarte
In? Oliver, did you care to jump.
- [39:20]
Oliver Davis
In? Yeah, I mean, I, I suppose just thinking, thinking back to kind of Freud's notion of originally bisexuality, for example, you know, there would be ways of identifying as a cisgender gay man that wouldn't be kind of limiting. I think that wouldn't be closing down. But, but there would also be ways of identifying as a, as a cisgender gay man that would be, for instance, you know, if, if one therefore kind of came to the conclusion that, you know, certain kinds of places were the kinds of places I should go and certain kinds of people were the kind of places like people I should hang out with and indeed certain kinds of people are the kinds of people I should, I should fantasize about section. So I think that there is a kind of, there is a tendency, I think socially today, generally, not just in the field of sex, but to, to, to. To. To pigeonhole ourselves very, very precisely in a very, very restrictive way. And, and, and as Tim was saying, I mean, neoliberalism exploits that. The kind of, the sort of, the techniques of neoliberalism, the way in which kind of data, data driven bureaucracies seek to kind of manage us and manage our preferences and our, manipulate us to think and vote in particular ways. You know, the, the hooks for those machines are all identitarian. And in that sense, I think identity is, is. Is. Is. Is, is, Is a problem. But I mean, you know, we all have, we all have identities, we all have identity characteristics. And, and there's no, there's no pretending otherwise. But I think, I think there are more and less phenomenologically, more or less limiting ways to, to approach identity. So perhaps I might not go as quite as far as Tim in seeing identity is always, as always problematic, but certainly the argument in the book that we make together is that it's much more problematic than it seems to be for queer theory today and a lot of politics beyond queer theory.
- [41:19]
Tim Dean
Today. And let me just add to what Oliver has said. I think that what you see from our different answers there, Eugenio, is that although Oliver and I think similarly in lots of ways we don't agree with each other exactly on everything, which I think has been part of the pleasure and the process of the book. We have not staged a debate, although we could have. But we've also not thought it was important to simply agree with and identify with each other completely in order to produce something.
- [42:02]
Eugenio Duarte
Together. And yet you manage, or so I think, to write this book and to speak as though in one voice. How did you manage that? What was your process.
- [42:17]
Tim Dean
Like? It's a wonderful illusion, isn't.
- [42:19]
Eugenio Duarte
It? The illusion of.
- [42:23]
Oliver Davis
Binding. I mean, I think the conversations that we've talked about that we've had over the years prior to kind of saying, okay, we're going to write this book together, you know, which were quite wide ranging conversations about sex and sexuality and queer theory and, and all sorts of other things that helped to kind of establish that we had a kind of a pretty aligned way of thinking about these, the key, the key questions. And that was sufficiently different from what other people seem to be kind of thinking on these, on these topics to merit maybe trying to write about together. I mean, and then when we, you know, the kind of creative process, we, you know, we did a lot of, kind of reading of each other's work and kind of editing and, you know, it's, it's. We didn't sit down and write absolutely every sentence together. That would be excruciating for both of us. But I think it is, it's genuinely a common, common.
- [43:24]
Tim Dean
Project. You know, we live in different countries. We live six, six or seven time zones apart. I'm originally from Britain, but I, you know, I've. This is the first time I've seen Oliver in a couple of years, you know, and I've not been back to Britain in several years in part because of the pandemic. So we have also done this at a distance in a way that surprisingly, delightfully has.
- [43:49]
Eugenio Duarte
Worked. You wrote this book without seeing each other in.
- [43:54]
Tim Dean
Person? Well, as Oliver said, we spent a lot of time together when I was visiting Britain on various occasions where we would get together. And I just have to say, you know, lubricated by like significant amounts of alcohol in the, in the great British way. You know, we had a lot of conversations and we made a lot of notes and we, we exchanged a lot of. We read a lot of each other's work, as Oliver says. But then when we actually were doing the writing, we were mostly at a.
- [44:25]
Oliver Davis
Distance.
- [44:26]
Eugenio Duarte
Wow. Wow, that's amazing. You know, I know I've taken a lot away from the book, but if there is one thing that each of you hopes that readers will take away from it. What is that? We'll start with you.
- [44:39]
Oliver Davis
Oliver. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I think psychoanalysis in the proper sense, you know, Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, Laplancian, psychoanalysis in those traditions, it's always taught us that sex is inherently complex and unsettling and disordering. You know, we shouldn't expect sex to be, to be stabilized into, into security and we shouldn't expect from, from sexual relationships something that, that secures us and our, our identities. I think, you know, we turned into inadvertently really quite a sex hating culture. And I'm hoping that's a, a temporary impasse and I'm hoping that this book will help lead us out of.
- [45:27]
Tim Dean
It, I suppose. You know, I suppose I think that we, we live in a culture that is tremendously schizophrenic about sex, that uses sex to sell things, that places an extraordinary premium on sexual satisfaction, on sex as the source of relationship, the source of happiness, the source of meaning in one's life. At the same time as the culture is also increasingly keen to control the messiness and the disordering capacities of sex. And I think the recent Supreme Court decision, the anti abortion one, is one more sign of a culture that actually hates sex in the sense that it wants to control women's bodies, it wants to control how sex works, it wants to get all the messiness, the mistakes out of sex. So there's a kind of cultural schizophrenia, if that's not a misuse of that term about sex. And I hope that what people might take from the book is a deeper understanding of why that is so, where that comes from, if not how to solve.
- [46:47]
Eugenio Duarte
It. And my hope is that, and I'm thinking on more the individual level, this is my specialty as an analyst. My hope is that readers will, after reading this book, they'll have an easier time owning those deplorable parts of themselves that they think don't belong there, or they think that they should not have and own them and reclaim them as, as an essential part of the experience of sex. And I feel that no book is better equipped to do that than this one. And I'm so grateful that you wrote it and that we get to share in your thinking. We're almost out of time. But before we go, what is each of you working on.
- [47:33]
Oliver Davis
Now? So I'm working on psychedelics at the moment. I'm working on the politics of the psychedelic renaissance and the way in which psychedelic therapy, among other forms of use of psychedelics is the kind of political implications of that and what we might hope for from.
- [47:55]
Eugenio Duarte
That. That's exciting. I'll want to hear about that when that comes.
- [48:00]
Oliver Davis
Out. Great. I'd be happy to talk to you about.
- [48:02]
Eugenio Duarte
That. I'd love to. What about you.
- [48:05]
Tim Dean
Tim? I've just finished a new essay on viruses. I've been trying to think about the current state of where we are in the pandemic, how the connections and the differences between Covid and hiv, aids, and now monkeypox. So I have a new essay in a special issue of On Viral Theory coming out soon, and the essay is called Barebacking in.
- [48:31]
Eugenio Duarte
Restaurants. That sounds provocative. If folks are interested in what you're working on and what you've got coming up. How do folks find you? Are you online? Do you have a.
- [48:42]
Oliver Davis
Website? I have a website at the University of Warwick. Which is the easiest way? Oliver Davis, Warwick Find.
- [48:49]
Eugenio Duarte
Me. Okay.
- [48:51]
Tim Dean
Okay. People should contact me@timdean123mail.com My Illinois email is deanllinois, and you only have to think for a moment about what that means to have Dean at Illinois as your email address to understand the email. That email account is a disaster. Contact me a.
- [49:11]
Eugenio Duarte
Gmail. Fantastic. Thank you. And I want to remind our listeners I've been talking to Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, authors of the book Hatred of Sex. And this is New Books in Psychology. I'm your host, Eugenio Dwarf. Tim Oliver, thank you so much for joining.
- [49:29]
Tim Dean
Us. Thank you for having us on the show. It's been great.