In his monumental theology of history, City of God, St Augustine, one of the most influential interpreters of Christian doctrine, describes the sexual act as a spasm during which the whole body is shaken by terrible jerks.
A sexual act, he says, ”takes such a complete and passionate possession of the whole man (sic), both physically and emotionally, that what results is the keenest of all pleasures on the level of sensations, and at the crisis [moment] of excitement, it practically paralyses all power of deliberate thought”.
To be sure, St Augustine had come to an avowedly bleak view of sex after having practised it himself for a long time. This admitted, could it be that human will and reason are defeated precisely in these anatomical and ”epileptic” zones of our body that sexual organs are? And that in this very capacity to defeat human will and to interrupt our capacity to think rationally lies the secret of sex and its power?ÂÂ
It is no exaggeration to say that the spectre of St Augustine hung residually over the recent Sex and Secrecy conference held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
The conference took place at a time when various studies have noted a generalised loss of social control over sexuality by families, churches and the state. In South Africa, the points of rupture are many. Prohibitions have been lifted. Access to pornography is more widespread. Dominant norms of masculinity are in crisis.
A new moral economy of individual pleasures has developed in the shadow of sexual exploitation and the pragmatics of daily survival. Female to female forms of desire and intimacy are expanding. Concurrently, sexually transmitted diseases have extended their reach and power. HIV/Aids now serves as the main regulator of demographic growth while at the same time pushing to its ultimate limits the cultural relationship between pleasure and pain or sex, death and destruction.
The presence of sex in the public sphere has never been so ubiquitous. That such visibility goes hand in hand with a tightening of the shroud of secrecy and shame may be due to the paradoxical fact that, in spite of appearances, possibilities of sexual happiness in our lifetime may, in fact, be more restricted than ever.
Restricted, that is, by our own bodily constitution, its vulnerability to overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction, chief among which is HIV/Aids.
Restricted too, at a time of maximum constitutional and political freedom in the making of sexual identities.
Moreover, we may well argue that a state of sexual happiness can hardly be achieved in a culture in which child rape, extreme forms of gender-based violence and homophobia constantly threaten to transform the body into a site of damage, violation and human bondage.
But there might be other reasons why sex is in danger of becoming so ugly and destructive. These may have partly to do with the inherited notion of sex as fundamentally unknowable. Unknowable because, in spite of all the progress in scientific and medical knowledge, sex and sexuality remain a challenge to human certainty and imagination. We are still puzzled by sexual anatomies and fluidities: the concavities, the lakes of blood and the streams of semen.
That we are still so fascinated by the outer and inner limits of the fragile carapace within which we live our lives, its various exit points and orifices, the differences in the shapes and shades of our bodies only adds to its mystery and to the power of sex to wrest us from the control of our fleshly desire and lust.
Finally, could it be that, after all, the deepest secret of sex is its relation to dirt? Dirt because the secret of sex has certainly to do with the unacknowledged attraction exerted upon the human psyche by various figures of the ugly and of evil. In the past, a figure of this evil found its expression in the fantasies of having a pure blood, not to be corrupted by racial mixing. The figure of the ugly, today, might also be read through the ubiquitous acts of rape and violation, especially of children.
Dirt, too, because we seem to no longer know how to imagine the relation between desire and those zones of the body no longer protected by the taboo.
In such a context, good old St Augustine might not be so wrong. Maybe, after all, the issue of human freedom and human will is really the problem of how to master one’s own libido.
That sex has become that war within us which drives us into war with one another only dramatises this point. Sex after liberation cannot simply be about the violence of genitality. In times of sexually induced mass death, we have to invent new forms of eroticism.
Professor Achille Mbembe is a senior researcher at Wiser (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research)