ABSTRACT
The system of the insult, often accompanied by shouting and gestures, is very close to a language of action, corresponding to the negative aspect of libido—as repulsive rather than attractive or appetitive. It is the symbolic value of things which is aimed at. Erotic vocabulary talks not so much of ‘what the sexual image describes and names as how it itself is distinguished and named’. If there is one domain permeable to the most diverse sexual fantasies, encompassing a veritable catalogue of them for public use, it is certainly language. Eros, the universal principle of attraction, becomes the god of sexual attraction. The sexual metaphor has a far more powerful representational function than its equivalents. Such an idealisation of the sexual, which goes together with phallocentrism, elevated to such a lofty symbolic destiny, is accompanied by its antithesis: the degradation of the sexual.
