Spheres and Organs: Towards a Retentional-Immunological Therapeutics of Sexuality

The question, “who am I?” can be understood doubly: as about memory, “how has my experience formed me?”, and about desire, “what do I want?” Bernard Stiegler links these questions, and understands memory in terms of the relationship of three retentional layers: genetic; nervous; artificial. This thesis notes the way that sexual desire traverses this entire problematic of retention and protention, and endosomatic and exosomatic, and it starts from the problems of sexual desire today, especially for young people. It proposes that desire is “stretched” between the biological and the noetic, and that Stiegler’s “general organology” can benefit from “immunological” considerations (discussed by Thomas Pradeu, Peter Sloterdijk, etc.).

Stiegler understands shame and justice as proto-feelings that open the possibility for humans to live together. They are characteristics of technical-noetic life, but cannot be divorced from their biological conditions, especially when it comes to sexual life. We therefore lay out some basic biological and physiological conditions of male and female bodies, and offer a preliminary discussion of how they shape the meaning of shame and justice in sexual life.

The ability to be open to what Stiegler calls “traumatypical experience” is the key to taking care of our shame in sexual life. Traumatypical experience forces us to do the work of rearranging our memory and desire in receiving and integrating an unexpected experience. We argue that care and control is what opens up this ability in our sexual life.

Care and control are especially important today because our technical environment (e.g. porn-distribution platforms) tends to undermine young people’s ability to receive and give such control and care. We propose that psychoanalytical ideas such as “withdrawal”, “regression” and “holding” can help us conceive the establishment of control and care in the sexual lives of the noetic beings that we hope to remain.