8.4 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Media type Print (Paperback) ISBN 1-57027-011-2 Subject Sex | 4.2/5 Goodreads Language English Pages 300 Originally published 1981 Page count 300 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Polysexuality (1981; second edition 1995) is the tenth issue of the journal Semiotext(e), designed to illustrate "the plural aspects of sexuality." Edited by Canadian psychoanalyst François Peraldi, it was first published in 1981. The work reproduces images of genocide, massacre, and political disaster. The second edition of the book noted that Peraldi had died of AIDS in 1993.
It reprinted material by writers and philosophers such as Pierre Klossowski, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, William S. Burroughs, Paul Virilio, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Guy Hocquenghem, together with an introduction written by François Peraldi.
Reception
Sue Golding reviewed Polysexuality in the gay magazine The Body Politic, writing that the book was an "intellectual drag show" and that most of the material it included was disappointing. Polysexuality was attacked in the United States Congress for its alleged advocacy of bestiality. Sylvére Lotringer stated that the purpose of its images of genocide and massacre was not to communicate terror and despair, but rather to connect sexuality to all the other flows that permeate society and to represent the death drive. They were intended to communicate ecstasy or jouissance.