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Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy. By Anne Dufourmantelle. University of Illinois Press. 144pp, Pounds 37.99 and Pounds 10.99. ISBN 9780252032639 and 074882. Published 1 January 2008
In this short book, translated from the French by Catherine Porter, Anne Dufourmantelle, who co-wrote Of Hospitality with Jacques Derrida, explores the relations between sex and philosophy. This wide-ranging, provocative book is partly philosophical, partly a literary evocation of the pleasures and difficulties of sex and of thinking. Along the way, she refers to topics ranging from genetic engineering to the letters of Nietzsche and Lou Salome.
Dufourmantelle's thesis is that philosophers have been silent about sex. They have tried to distance themselves from emotions and from the distractions of the body. Yet it is as bodies that we think and write, and if philosophical works affect us they affect us in our bodies. Moreover, she argues, there are...