/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13991307]

>With Diogenes' masturbating in public another chapter of sexual history begins. In this first Happening of our civilization, ancient kynicism shows its sharpest claws. They are partly responsible for the fact that in Christian-idealist usage, the word "cynical" describes a person to whom nothing more is sacred, who declares himself to be no longer ashamed of anything, and who embodies "evil" with a scornful smile. Those who want to make a plea for sublime love, for the partnership of souls, etc., come up against a radical counterposition here. This position teaches sexual self-sufficiency as the original possibility for the individual. The officially sanctioned married couple is not the first to have a chance to satisfy sexual urges; the individual human being, the laughing masturbator in the marketplace of Athens, is already in a position to do so. Plebeian onanism is an affront to the aristocratic soul-to-soul game, as well as to love relationships in which individuals, for the sake of sexuality, subjugate themselves to the yoke of a relationship. The sexual kynic, from the start, counters this with a selfsatisfaction unburdened by scruples. As soon as the kynic meets someone who wants to impress upon him that he is not an animal, Diogenes pulls out his organ from underneath his toga: Now, is that animalistic or not? And anyway, what do you have against animals? When someone comes who wants to dissuade human beings from their animal foundations, the kynic must demonstrate to his opponent how short the way is from the hand to the organ. Did human beings not initally through their upright stature find themselves in the position where their hands were precisely level with their genitals? Is the human being —seen anthropologically — not the masturbating animal? Is it not possible that human consciousness of autarky —more than is generally surmised — comes from the consequence of the upright stature just mentioned? The quadrupeds, in any case, have been spared this anatomical-philosophical complication. Indeed, masturbation accompanies our civilization like an intimately philosophical as well as moral "problem." Masturbation is to the libidinous region what self-reflection is to the intellectual region.