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1 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

No Sex, Please! We're Post-Human Jan. 22, 2000 by Slavoj Zizek, special to Britannica.com The Elementary Particles, a novel by French author Michel Houellebecq, triggered a sensational debate all around Europe following its publication in 1998. Now finally available in English, it is a story of radical desublimation if there ever was one. Bruno, a high-school teacher, is an undersexed hedonist, while Michel, his half-brother, is a brilliant but emotionally desiccated biochemist. Abandoned by th ...

Document Size:	31848
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sun Feb 11 13:20:11 PST 2001

2 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

> Jan. 22, 2000 > by Slavoj Zizek, special to Britannica.com <snip> > While this solution is fantasy at its purest, the deadlock to which it > reacts is a real one: In our postmodern, permissive, "disenchanted" > world, unconstrained sexuality is reduced to an apathetic > participation in collective orgies of the sort depicted in The > Elementary Particles. Or as Norman Mailer put it in 1968, sex without guilt is like an evening at the gymnasium. I had no ide ...

Document Size:	5388
Author:	Michael Pollak
Date:	Mon Feb 12 02:22:36 PST 2001

3 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

For a less intellectually rigorous but equally goofy take on the same subject, see the transhumans: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/01/09/cover-bernhard.shtml At least in their scheme, we become sex machines. Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com

Document Size:	5030
Author:	Michael Pollak
Date:	Mon Feb 12 02:26:27 PST 2001

4 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

Michael Pollak wrote: >I had no idea Slavoj thought modern life was so bleak. He's living in Essen, which explains a lot. Doug

Document Size:	4617
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Feb 12 06:22:01 PST 2001

5 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

>Michael Pollak wrote: > >>I had no idea Slavoj thought modern life was so bleak. > >He's living in Essen, which explains a lot. > >Doug Is housing especially cheap? Are municipal services especially good? Brad DeLong, who lives where housing is not cheap and municipal services are not good, but double lattes made from shade-grown organic fair-trade coffee are really plentiful...

Document Size:	4952
Author:	Brad DeLong
Date:	Mon Feb 12 09:00:29 PST 2001

6 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

Brad DeLong wrote: >>Michael Pollak wrote: >> >>>I had no idea Slavoj thought modern life was so bleak. >> >>He's living in Essen, which explains a lot. >> >>Doug > >Is housing especially cheap? Are municipal services especially good? > >Brad DeLong, who lives where housing is not cheap and municipal >services are not good, but double lattes made from shade-grown >organic fair-trade coffee are really plentiful... Zizek's in Lenin bec ...

Document Size:	5892
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Feb 12 09:26:28 PST 2001

7 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

>Michael Pollak wrote: > >>I had no idea Slavoj thought modern life was so bleak. > >He's living in Essen, which explains a lot. > >Doug Hey, what's wrong with Essen? Can't be any worse than Columbus, Ohio, USA? Yoshie

Document Size:	4804
Author:	Yoshie Furuhashi
Date:	Mon Feb 12 09:27:29 PST 2001

8 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: >Hey, what's wrong with Essen? Can't be any worse than Columbus, Ohio, USA? Never been to Columbus, so I can't say. Squat gray ugly buildings and not much Gemutlichkeit on offer in Essen. Nearby Dusseldorf is far more agreeable, though maybe it helped that I enjoyed Hinrich Kuhls's hospitality there. Doug

Document Size:	4827
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Feb 12 09:39:32 PST 2001

9 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

> > Never been to Columbus, so I can't say. Squat gray ugly buildings and > not much Gemutlichkeit on offer in Essen. Nearby Dusseldorf is far > more agreeable because Essen is proletarian and Dusseldorf is much more bourgeois? Johannes

Document Size:	4808
Author:	Johannes Schneider
Date:	Mon Feb 12 10:46:59 PST 2001

10 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

Johannes Schneider wrote: >because Essen is proletarian and Dusseldorf is much more bourgeois? Essen didn't look very proletarian to me. What struck my eye was that all the construction in Essen was new, and very ugly, because the city was flattened during WW II, while Dusseldorf still had some old buildings (and the Rhein). Doug

Document Size:	4827
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Feb 12 13:16:30 PST 2001

11 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

[Yes folks, I'm back, at least for awhile.] Actually, Essen along with Dortmund and some neighboring cities constitutes the largest metropolitan area in the German-speaking world, if all of that is counted as one. At one time that metropolitan area had the world's largest single concentration of industrial output on the face of the earth. I don't think that is the case anymore, between WW II and post-industrial slump. Barkley Rosser Professor of Economics MSC 0204 James Madison University Harr ...

Document Size:	6134
Author:	J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
Date:	Mon Feb 12 14:05:28 PST 2001

12 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

[Zizek:] >It is also not sufficient to replace this standard proposition with >the more refined notion of the "embodied mind" (see The Embodied >Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch). A human >being is not just the outcome of the interaction between genes and >environment as two opposed entities; he/she is, rather, the engaged >embodied agent who, instead of "relating" to his/her environs, >mediates, creates his/her life-world. Excep ...

Document Size:	9295
Author:	Maureen Anderson
Date:	Mon Feb 12 15:17:19 PST 2001

13 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

Maureen criticizes Zizek for not taking a Lacanian hint: >>In other words (and pace Steven Pinker), there is no inborn >>"language instinct." There are, of course, genetic conditions that >>have to be met for a living being to be able to speak; but one >>actually starts to speak and enters the symbolic universe only in >>reacting to a traumatic jolt. And the mode of this reacting - the >>fact that, in order to cope with a trauma, we symbolize - is no ...

Document Size:	7387
Author:	Yoshie Furuhashi
Date:	Mon Feb 12 18:11:23 PST 2001

14 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

At 05:05 PM 2/12/01 -0500, J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote: >[Yes folks, I'm back, at least for awhile.] Hip Hip Hooray! welcome back. a big fat wet smooch from the snitgrrRl! kelley

Document Size:	4639
Author:	Kelley
Date:	Mon Feb 12 18:50:21 PST 2001

15 No Sex Please - We're Post-Human! -- rank: 1000

I've been reading many posts lately but usually way too late to feel like I had a present-tense reply, but... Yoshie writes: > >Baby humans are of course born this way as the product of their > >species having biologically evolved into "naturally" symbolic, > >social, creatures. This symbolic evolution made humans more open > >and "undetermined," and made their childhoods exceptionally long, > >more biologically and psychically "traumatic&q ...

Document Size:	6828
Author:	Catherine Driscoll
Date:	Mon Feb 12 19:04:49 PST 2001