ABSTRACT
The first part of the book presents Freud’s “discovery” and subsequent obscuring of the sexual drive (or simply, the sexual), setting psychoanalysis in relation of both discontinuity and continuity of the philosophical tradition. Psychoanalyst and French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle maintains that philosophy and sex had not encountered one another before Freud, and that only psychoanalysis could have introduced the theme of sex into Western thought. This first chapter demonstrates, not without irony, how in the modern philosophic tradition there have been anticipators of the Freudian notion of sexual drive. Contrary to what we might expect, despite his appeals to vitality, Nietzsche, following Schopenhauer, confirms philosophy’s incapacity to think the sex that Dufourmantelle discusses. Yet before him, however surprising it may be, two moralistic and cowardly philosophers like Hobbes and Kant, in an attempt to expel the sexual as such from the social (and to include the sexual in the social only in the redeemed form of procreative heterosexual marriage), had understood well the uncanny character of the sexual that Freud later interrogated.
