ABSTRACT
My objective in this chapter is to trace the history of sexual politics from the origins of patriarchy in a historical period I call “the fear of the flesh,” through the challenge to male power in the process of liberalisation in the 20th century, up to the problem of neoliberal hyper-sexualisation and the exhaustion of desire in the contemporary consumer society. In setting out this history, I make the case that it is this situation, defined by a kind of Sadean politics where everybody is an object for the use of everybody else, which has given rise to the return of the authoritarian big man (Trump, Johnson, other right-wing populists) to the political stage. While these phallic big men promise to return sexual politics to a stage before liberalisation, my argument is that, in reality, they represent a cliched, decrepit, worn-out version of the original patriarchal big men (the Freudian father is the classic model), and what they actually signify is libidinal exhaustion and the passage beyond Oedipal sexual identity towards a new post-Freudian sexual politics I conceptualise through reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), Bataille’s Theory of Religion (1973), and a philosophy of intimacy. In sketching a new post-Oedipal sexual politics on the other side of sexual difference, I set out a theory of a utopia of intimacy beyond the authoritarian self and gender normalisation.
