Here’s a fun little discussion to take a look at, from the blog of Kirk Cameron’s ‘Way of the Master’ sidekick, Ray Comfort. I came across it through pure serendipity, because it’s linked back on the same CNN page from the article I wrote about last night.

Fundamentalist religion is a fascinating thing. It’s great for sparking atheist vitriol, and the necessary counterblasts of religious vitriol. Yet in the process of polemicization, atheists and advocates of religion tend to lose sight of the actual issues at stake. Putting my sanity at risk, I decided to throw a couple of pennies into the debate, and I thought I’d re-post my comments here for the edification of a rather less polemical crowd. I love reading when religionists and anti-religionists play with intensely philosophical ideas and pretend that they’re the first to come up with such notions. Religion and philosophy have long toyed with each others’ ideas, but it seems that religionists have now fully lost touch with the philosophical origins of their concepts.

Oh “Cypress Christian,” I particularly loved when you came up with your pat observation that “I love how they try to wriggle there way out of a straight forward question.” Apart from the funny there/their homonymy, we have the absurdity of trying to call Kalam’s cosmological argument ’straight forward.’ Since well before the time of Parmenides, this has been one of the most fundamental metaphysical questions ‘in existence.’ What does it mean to exist, and must all existing processes have a first cause? If one accepts the principle that they do, then indeed, you are 100% correct: the universe must have a first cause.

Unfortunately, this is just about the least straightforward of all conceivable questions. It’s absolutely not some creation ex nihilo of William Lane Craig, but simply one formulation of perhaps the most ancient problem of metaphysics. It might be prima facie simple, but it conceals all kinds of premises that don’t stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny. So here we go, I’m going to provide you with two refutations of the Kalam argument as proposed by religious folk, and then one tentative affirmation of its conclusions that almost certainly won’t lead in a direction they’ll like.

The first refutation stems from a denial of the initial premise : “Everything that begins to exist has a cause.” In the discussion, ‘Justin’ is already onto this line of reasoning. He says: “Name one thing that “began to exist” other than ‘the universe.’ Be careful that you do not refer to something that is simply a rearrangement of parts.” Logic tells us nothing without empirical premises, and there is no empirical confirmation for this premise of the Kalam argument. Phenomenological: yes; empirical: no. As Justin states, all that ‘exists’ in our actual space is a rearrangement of preexisting parts. Science shows that ‘everything which exists’ has no proximate cause for its existence but physical necessity and favorable circumstances. Given that I’m fairly sure religious ideologues don’t want to conclude that God is simply a handy name for physical necessity and favourable circumstances, this can’t be what Christians mean by cause. Their argument is thus inevitably circular, insofar as given the implied definitions of ’cause’ and ‘existence,’ the cause for the existence of the universe is also the cause for the material existence of every existing thing. With this argument, you’re essentially trying to infer the structure of the universe from the structuring of matter, on the basis of a false analogy. (cf. Aristotelian onto-theology). Faith is irrational: this isn’t really a bad thing, either, although some twisted ideologues might think so.

The second refutation stems from a denial of the conclusion, even with a hypothetical acceptance of its premise: I think ‘Justin’ must be a philosopher, because once again he comes around to a wonderfully nuanced argument. “The universe, as the sum of all that exists, cannot have a cause because its cause would not exist by definition.” This is essentially the non-affirmation of negative theology: “God is not,” because working from the vulgar definition of being, God must ‘be’ something which is *beyond* existence, ‘otherwise than being.’ If you want to argue that there is a first cause of the universe, and you accept the conventional physicist’s definition of the universe as totality of existence, then the cause of the universe simply, necessarily, does not exist. Justin then goes on to state that “nothing has ever been observed appearing de novo, regardless of causality… Since we have no idea whether or how it is that things “pop out of thin air” (as you say), we cannot say that a cause is required for those kinds of events.” Setting aside the question of quantum phenomena, logical arguments actually never prove the existence of God for this precise reason: the Universe appears, even to the physicist, to be a creation ex nihilo. The trouble is, we have no idea whether such spontaneous creation has anything like a ’cause,’ or what that ’cause’ could conceivably look like. We simply don’t know anything about causality prior to the Big Bang, or about anything prior to the beginning of the Universe as such.

So when Cypress Christian attacks Justin’s argument, his polemicization blinds him to the truths immanent within both of their positions. He claims that Justin’s position is essentially that “yes, the universe did begin to exist and everything that I’ve seen that begins to exist has a cause. But since I’ve never seen anything begin to exist out of nothing, as the universe must have (since it’s not infinite), then there just can’t be a cause. Although there is a perfectly logical explanation on how something could come from nothing (as it seemed to have done), we can’t say for sure so therefore I don’t believe it.” He says that as though it were somehow inherently inconsistent. Really, it’s little more than a concise statement of the state of contemporary cosmology, although, again, most contemporary physicists do observe particles popping in and out of existence all the time. The last sentence is particularly fun. There *are* a number of interesting possible expanations for creation “seeming to have come” ex nihilo, first and foremost amongst which would be the claim that the creation of the universe was just a favorable conjunction of physical circumstances on a dimensional plane beyond ourse. The universe ’seemed to come’ from nothing indeed, and may well have come from something specific: not the divine will of God, but a physically predictable phenomenon, at least with an adequate physics.

However, this leads us to the third possible solution to your beloved Kalam argument: we might even agree with it. Philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas’ beautiful Totality and Infinity is perhaps the finest philosophical argument for why science is by essence incomplete, and why the implied hopefulness of Justin’s position (‘one day we’ll interpret the causality of the universe scientifically!’) might not be justified. Since, as I said above, we simply know nothing of pre-universal causality, scientific reason gives us absolutely no reason to discard the ‘God hypothesis’ out of hand. There might, after all, be an omnipotent and omniscient Creator whose divine will caused the creation ex nihilo in the Big Bang: only a complete physics could tell us otherwise, and physics, like all scientific theory, is very much incomplete. So the tenacity with which religionists hold on to their God is in many ways justified and certainly not incompatible with science, even though the polemics of both sides might lead us to question these facts.

Why do such polemics persist?

The answer is about as straightforward as any philosophical solution can be. Scientists disagree with theology because it’s fundamentally incompatible with their view of nature. Religionists reject science out of hand because it’s not yet capable of refuting the real essence of their argument from causation. Here we can reach a compromise dissatisfying to both sides, and therefore just. Reason can never refute God’s existence, any more than it can prove it. Kierkegaard was well aware of this truth when he described the ‘leap of faith’ phenomenon, fundamentally beyond reason and fundamental to all religious thought (whether ‘fundamentalist’ or otherwise). You religionists have already made your leap of faith, and unlike so many dogmatic atheists, I myself congratulate you for it. Indeed, I wish I was capable of such a leap, as I’m sure do many materialist scientists, however unconsciously. The problem arises when fundamentalists attempt argue from the perspective of this leap and disguise its conclusions in the language of reason, as rational or logical premises. They’re trying to rationalize an irrational decision, which is an essentially human impulse, but in this case woefully misguided. Science is an incomplete system of truths, founded on essentially nothing but the hope of a complete truth ‘to come,’ thus constructing for itself its own proper messianism. Religion, by contrast, is a relatively ‘complete’ system of falsehoods, founded on one profound truth, really little more than a question: the universe exists, and so there must be some reason or sufficient cause, however ineffable, for its existence.

And so here is no natural opposition between science and religion. Unfortunately, scientific reason is incompatible with religious theology. Perhaps you’re familiar with another argument, at least as old as that of Kalam. (I don’t really feel like checking dates.) It’s called the Epicurean Paradox, and it was a favourite of David Hume. It goes like this: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” Like any atheist, I agree wholeheartedly with the conclusion derived at from this paradox: God is neither able nor willing to exclude so-called ‘evil’ from this world, most likely because he operates in a dimension which transcends our categories of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil.’ Note, however, that this paradox says nothing of causation, only of the attributes which are to be ascribed to the cause. The Epicurean Paradox discards not the concept of a first cause, but the name ‘God’ for this cause, with its metaphysical baggage of nonsensical and inconsistent attributes. (I might add that, thanks to my modern understanding of l’arbitraire du signe, I would answer the final question of the Paradox simply as follows: we may as well keep calling the first cause God, suitably defined. It’s a good a name as any!)
Oh, ‘Cypress Christian.’ I apologize for dragging you so far out of your league. Here’s a philosophical argument that’s just as ’straightforward’ as yours ostensibly was, but I’d love to see you in the process of wrapping your head around this one. Your argument from causation certainly is onto something: and that something is the incompleteness of reason. Your religion, and its entire theology, is onto nothing: your image of God is incompatible with the image of the world He created. Thus science has always forced theology to adapt, even though it has never succeeded in troubling the God Hypothesis quite as much as it hopes. I’m coming around to religion myself, but certainly not any conventional theological one: my God, like that of Meister Eckhart, is not. He is not good, He is not evil, He is not just, nor does He have any of the analogical attributes you ascribe to Him. He does not exist, ought not rightfully even be called ‘he:’ it is simply the a priori cause of existence, eternally beyond ‘being.’ Thus my God is not in any way incompatible with the (non-)Gods of science. We know almost nothing of its attributes, and yet we can begin to draw inferences from physical science about this ‘Deus Absconditus’ and the necessary reasons for its decision to abscond.

Interestingly enough, we’ve come now to the premises of a much more productive debate. It’s silly – as philosophers at least since Kant have observed – to debate about the substance or attributes of the Divine. This can only lead to antinomies and absurdities. What we can argue about, as philosophers, scientists, and religionists, is whether, and to what extent, we can know God. This, unfortunately, won’t happen as long as scientists and religionists think they’re debating about substance or attributes. They’re really talking about epistemology, and unfortunately for fundamentalist religion, I think when cast in proper terms, the debate is pretty one-sided. Fundamentalist religion wants to have it both ways: it wants to argue for a faith in God which transcends reason, but then it wants to prove that it’s right to be faithful – using reason. Its implicit epistemology is essentially anti-rationalist. Luckily, for those without decided loyalties on other side of the basic polemic, ideological science doesn’t come out all that much better. It wants to be entirely rational, to make its rational system both complete and ‘total,’ and yet it always wants to deny the fact that its longest-held epistemological premise (that is to say, the knowability of the universe in its totality) still needs to be accepted by the scientist on blind faith.

I’m dying to hear what Mr. Comfort thinks about these ideas himself. My own irrational belief is that most people who are attracted to so-called ‘fundamentalist’ religious movements just don’t have it in themselves to make a real ‘leap of faith’ and recognize it as such: thus I’ll probably get no reply from Ray. Maybe my comment won’t even get posted on his site. It’s so unfortunate that scientific reason appears to have the monopoly on intellectual honesty, because it certainly doesn’t need to be this way. Religion can find a way to argue for the core of its philosophy in the face of materialist science, without resorting to dogmatism and polemicization, even though I’m left believing it never will. Prove me wrong, (religious) folks!

“Republicans basically accept Mr. Bush’s vision of himself as a latter-day Harry S. Truman who has reorganized U.S. policy to meet this all-encompassing global threat. Like Mr. Bush, they see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the larger conflict with Islamic extremism, and Iran and its clients in the Middle East as yet another front. Democrats disaggregate these problems and balance them against challenges that have received too little attention from the Bush administration: the rise of China; the return of an autocratic and relatively hostile Russia; the danger of unsecured nuclear materials in unstable parts of the world; and global warming, among others. Ms. Clinton’s definition of the world the next president will inherit in a recent Foreign Affairs magazine essay fills a fat, 140-word paragraph and speaks of ‘an unprecedented array of challenges.’ In contrast, Mr. Giuliani begins with a single sentence: ‘We are all members of the 9/11 generation.’

Ms. Clinton’s view strikes us as more realistic. Al-Qaeda remains a grave threat, and the United States has a vital interest in supporting moderate Muslims against the extremist minority. But threats such as Shiite Iran should be understood and addressed differently than Sunni jihadist movements; and the rest of the world does not fit neatly into a bipolar struggle between two camps. The next president needs to be prepared to check aggression from China or Russia, or combat a pandemic.”

Read the rest of the article here.

So here’s the absurd statement: Not only were Hitler and the Nazis onto some important ideas, they were ‘geniuses’ of a sort when it came to the Jewish ‘Idea.’ This is not only absurd, but patently offensive to anyone with a reactionary mind. But this sort of reactionary mindset is eminently counterproductive. If we want to actually investigate evil, to understand the structural logic behind its genesis, then we can’t conduct our investigations from the perspective of the goodly thinker, the beautiful soul. Instead, we have to think about the conditions which determine the evil Idea, within its own absurd frame of reference. This is perhaps an ethnography of evil, minus the participant aspect: we have to obtain an emic understanding of what it’s like inside the evil mind, before we can begin to translate it into etic terms, understandable by those of us who are, if not ‘good,’ at least morally unobjectionable.

First: Why do I say that the Nazis were ‘geniuses?’ We are all familiar with the concept of the evil genius, but this sort of notion could be made a bit clearer by thinking about genius in relation to the Deleuzian plane of immanence. Reason is a process which takes place in the plane of representation, actualized in expression and formalized in a language (this would include formal languages, such as logic or mathematics). Reason, as I began to consider in a very preliminary way in last night’s post, is a delimitation and structuration of a differential plane of immanence within the body and brain of the subject, which for convenience we shall refer to as ‘the mind.’ Reason is the law of the mind, a set of social conventions which determines what expressions of that differential plane are acceptable in the context of serious rational inquiry. Genius, on the other hand, is quite different from reason. Genius is the process by which conscious thought directly accesses the mind’s plane of immanence and determines hidden connections between and within things, the genetic logic of a given existing thing; this virtual logic is always covered over in the actual, and inexpressible according to the conventions of representational reason. This is perhaps clearest in the case of the savant: they access the immanent plane of mathematics directly, and can perform feats of computation which seem impossible to those of us shackled by reason. Yet they generally remain unable to understand this process in a rational way, and are barred from the world of ‘real’ mathematics by their inability to ’show their work.’ This is the genius of the idiot, the genius which exceeds all possibility for rational determination. Rational geniuses, by contrast, try to make sense of the connections revealed by their genius in a reasoned way, to ensure that the connections they ’see’ with their genius are not merely figments of their poetic imagination, or worse, of their bad intentions. The most successful rational geniuses ultimately generate a paradigm shift of rationality: the laws of reason are remade in such a way that these hidden connections can now be grasped in the actual. This should make the opposing position of the evil genius clear: they recognize hidden connections, differential Ideas covered over in the process of actualization, but instead of interpreting these connections through the lens of reason (however difficult this process may be), they jump to conclusions. These conclusions are almost invariably not rational ones, but ones shaped in bad faith by their own prejudices and unconscious drives.

This discussion, interesting in itself, should help to illuminate the genius of Hitler, and the process by which it became an evil genius. Deleuze says that all Ideas are problematic. Hitler was therefore absolutely correct that the Jewish Idea ‘poses a problem;’ the problem posed by Hitler is how exactly he determined the Jewish problem in such a way that it led to a barbaric and unquestionably evil solution. The problem of the Jewish Idea is simple: why be a Jew? This formulation of course leaves a great deal unsaid, and so we ought to formulate it in a proper rational way as follows: why is it that the Jewish people have remained a Jewish people in the Diaspora, instead of assimilating? The genius of Hitler was that he recognized the problematic character of the Idea which structures the Jewish race as diasporic; the evil of Hitler is that the problem was formulated according to a logic in which the Jewish difference was necessarily subordinate to the unitary historical identity of the Germanic people.

This is not evil in itself, but evil in that it is absurd. The Jewish Idea not only pre-exists the Germanic one, but is eminently superior in terms of the depth of its historical ‘identity.’ While the Germanic race is a fictional pastiche of differential Ideas, both genetic and social, the Jewish race is perhaps the archetype of racial identity. Indeed, the Jewish problem can be more accurately formulated in these terms: why does the Jewish race seem so different? The answer lies precisely in its identity: Western (that is, European) culture is constructed in terms of various fluid identities which barely conceal an underlying play of difference. ‘We’ have progressed from intermingling tribes, to aristocratic families, to ‘peoples’ of the Germanic, Italian, Iberian, etc. type, onto this silly fiction of the nation-state, none of which are truly ’self-identical’ concepts, and yet we constantly proclaim the unity of these identities in a sort of reaction-formation on a grand scale. The Jewish people, constructed through centuries of subjugation by these fluid, territorialized identities, emphasizes its own difference from these constructed identities as a means of preserving its own internal cohesion. The result is an enduring ‘culture,’ a group identity far stronger than that to be found within these European pseudo-identities; thus it only makes sense that in the most intensive moments of the process of European identity-construction, Europeans have always sought to exclude or subordinate the Jewish identity.
Thus we are led past the Jewish ‘problem’ to its equally problematic cases of solution. Why be Jewish?
It should be noted that the Jewish Idea is no less problematic from within than from without, and indeed only takes the form ‘Why be Jewish’ from within. The various schisms within contemporary Judaism make it clear that different factions of Jews have very different solutions to the problem of Jewish identity. The first solution is the orthodox one: Be Jewish because of the will of YHWH, be Jewish because you are part of a Chosen People. This is an extremely strong solution, so long as people remain within their theological mindset; indeed, this solution, and the strict separation it has long entailed, is in part designed to keep the race within that mindset. Yet as intercultural barriers have broken down and more Jews have been secularized through European dissemination, this solution has become less persuasive. Thus we come to the solution of the less-orthodox and non-observant Jew: Be Jewish because you are, be Jewish because you are born into this identity and its entire history stands behind you. Thus a religion becomes an ethnicity. I don’t think of myself as a non-observant Catholic, but a non-Catholic, yet non-observant Jews tend to continue their self-identification as such. This is because Catholicism is a European pseudo-identity, an inferior simulacrum of the Jewish Idea, while Judaism in every form still understands the essence of identity-formation. I am not implying here that either mode of identity is superior – I enjoy the fluidity of my Europeanesque pseudo-identity – but simply pointing out the different cultural attitudes towards the concept of identity, and identity of the concept. The third solution that jumps out, perhaps simply because it is the most radical, and the only one acceptable from a Eurocentric perspective: stop being Jewish. This is assimilation, the radical negation of a given identity in favour of a self-made one. Of course, the (mass and individual) conversion of Jews to Catholicism has a number of interesting implications w/r/t the (forced or willing) trading of a ‘real’ (or at least more fixed and concrete) identity for a pseudo-identity; for now, I’ll move on.

The question implied by the Jewish problem from outside is a bit more contentious: What to do with the Jews? This has been the problem for any political entity which contains Jews within its territory; really this is the same problem posed by any political identity in its process of construction when it comes up against a pre-existing political identity. Barring assimilation, the process which the Jewish identity has been ‘designed’ to resist, there is one obvious answer: expel them. This was the ’solution’ to the original Jewish problem which made it an international one: if the insecure political identities of Babylonia and the Romans had not expelled the race from their respective territories, then the Diaspora would never have occurred, and the Jewish people would have remained a territorial assemblage. Instead, they became a territorial assemblage separated from its territory; rather than finding a new territory, as many European tribes in similar positions did, they dispersed around the known world, and developed new forms of deterritorialized identity which were nevertheless founded upon the historical territory and its loss. (We might note that the infrastructure of those very empires perhaps facilitated the distribution the Jewish population across a vast territorial expanse, while the resilience of the people and their textual culture served to perpetuate its now-distributed identity.) This process of expulsion merely served – in the eyes of nascent European cultures – to spread the ‘problem’ around; recognition of this factor is another element of Hitler’s evil genius. (I say European specifically because historical evidence makes it clear that most Arabic, Turkish and other empire-formations were in general less hostile to the Jewish identity.) Thus we arrive at Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem: not simply to expel the race from a territory, but from existence. For the Nazis, the Jewish problem and the deconstructive threat it posed to a nascent Germanic identity took precedence over all conventions of morality: the nation above all, this national fiction before the reality of human life. This is the structural logic of anti-Semitism: the persistence of the distinctly Jewish form of identity within the European implies that for the European form to succeed, the Jewish must be eliminated.

The self-evident (at least to anyone who isn’t an anti-Semite) immorality and absurdity of this logic leads to the real final solution to this ‘external’ formulation of the Jewish problem: learn from the problem, without trying to ’solve’ it. Following Levinas, we might propose that genius without evil demands openness to the Other; not necessarily the infinite Other of God, but all those forms of otherness which trouble ideal, ‘totalitarian’ concepts of nation.  In terms of an ‘instrumental’ justification of such openness (rather than a properly ‘ethical’ one), we need not refer simply to the fact that Judaism is one of the richest sources of historical material, or that its past can calerly shed light on the processes of cultural identity-formation in general. Both of these observations are essential in themselves. In a more immediate and concrete way, however,  we must stress the fact that Jewish culture, with its progressive movements of deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, is of central importance to any debate with regard to this supposed ‘postmodern crisis’ of the nation-state. As supranational corporations and subnational multiplicities began to supplant traditional political organization, the question of cultural identity and its relationship to politics, capital, and territory has become absolutely essential. We must question not only the apparent novelty of these territorial displacements, but also the fundamental premises of cultural identity, along with that totalizing impulse of political ‘unity’ which still persists. Until ‘we Europeans’ open ourselves fully to the value of the Jewish identity and its history in this light, the Jewish ‘problem’ will remain dominated by the pseudo-question of whether one ought to be anti- or pro-Semitic, along with all those absurd and often violent ’solutions’ which stem from such a question.

So, it’s been a considerable amount of time since I’ve posted much of anything on here. And I have a serious need of getting back into the discipline of thinking in text according to my own ideas, and I’ve also been having this really weird thought in my head since last night. I’m poring over the Critique of Pure Reason this morning, and this little germ of an idea keeps building upon itself in the ol’ think-box, so in a useful concatenation of mental state and external necessity, I’m going to walk said idea through a little bit of digital exegesis. In the interest of starting things off in a fun and provocative way, here is the most reactionary form of this ‘thesis’ that’s in my head: wrestling is sublimated homosexual rape. My goals with this exegesis are to uncover some of the interesting subconscious detritus which underpins wrestling and its curious subculture, but also to engage in a little bit of critical thinking with regard to rape and homosocial desire.

Here we go!

Because I do love to get into thorny issues, let’s start this discussion off with a little deconstruction of rape. For the sake of political correctness, I would just like to point out that no part of this upcoming paragraph (in spite of whatever knee-jerk readings may emerge in the intersection between reader and text) in any way delegitimizes the pain or trauma of the rape experience, but rather, this is merely an attempt to problematize the conventional ‘rational’ understanding of rape. I argue that, just as writing is not an inessential supplement added onto speech, rape is not an inessential and subordinate sexual practice, but in fact lies at the heart of the sex act. This is immediately evident when we witness the courtship patterns of animals. These are certainly not ‘courtship’ in the conventionalized human sense, but in fact bear a far stronger phenomenological resemblance to pursuit, forced submission, and rape. ‘Desire’ in the human sense cannot figure into animal sexuality. Thus, ‘rape,’ on its bare definition as sexual encounter in the absence of mutual consent, comes before this rational construct of desire that we call ‘consensual sex.’ With sex, animals are simply expressing an evolutionary ‘desire’ which is in our terms more along the lines of a biological imperative. Desire, in its highly rationalized and coded human form, is simply appended to the sex drive ‘itself.’ The ego-structure of the rational subject requires self-presence, and so we demand a rationalized (as opposed to forcible) mode of consent when it comes to our procreative instincts: rape is suppressed by the symbolic order, but endlessly resurges from the reptilian depths of the mind in both concrete (ie. actual rape) and sublimated forms.

Last night, as I was engaging in this wonderful and beautiful unity of rational subjects we call ‘consensual sex,’ I allowed my consciousness to engage in a little bit of drifting for tantra’s sake, and I was struck by the odd similarities between the play of leverage between bodies in the sex act, and the forcible contest of leverage that is wrestling. Setting aside for now the rather hilarious implications of this weighty realization in the context of the moment (let’s just say that these sorts of deconstructive tangents are far less useful for tantric purposes than, say, trying to remember the names of all 50 US states); this is a pretty significant connection. Given that wrestling developed as the exclusive province of nude, well-oiled male bodies in Ancient Greece, with all its well-known institutionalized perversions, it is certainly no stretch to draw the conclusion expressed at the beginning of this short piece. Wrestling, like all pseudosexual acts, is a game of submission: whereas consensual sex requires mutual, rationalized consent (itself sublimated into, and produced by, various human courtship rituals), rape is a strategy of forcible submission that culminates in a sex act. While consensualized sex is a play of leverage between agreeing subjects, wrestling enacts a play of leverage between aggressive bodies, which culminates in a conspicuously absent homosexual sex act.

This relates directly to Eve Sedgwick’s work on ‘homosocial desire,’ as when she asks of Reagan and Jesse Helms, “Doesn’t the continuum between ‘men-loving-men’ and ‘men-promoting-the-interests-of-men’ have the same intuitive force that it has for women?” Likewise, I ask: doesn’t the continuum between ‘men-raping-men’ and ‘men-forcing-men-into-submission’ have a self-evident intuitive force? Wrestlers play at homosexual sex by enacting a hidden desire. But while heterosexual rape enacts a subconscious desire for the dominance of a ‘male presence’ over a female body conceived (incorrectly, as it barely merits mentioning) as an opposite ‘absence,’ the sport of wrestling sublimates that same drive into a desire for a contest of equals, a play between two male presences which has become so highly coded and socialized that the implied sex act is no longer required.

This, of course, leads on to some extremely significant questions with regard to this concept of a battle between ‘presences’ as it relates to homosexuality in general, as well as the libidinal force which wrestling spectators often exhibit and how it may relate to a latent homosexuality which may underpin even the most conventionally ‘heterosexual’ social practices. For the time being, however, I will break with this particular bit of playful analysis and get back to my dear Immanuel.