Patipolitics: The Philosophy of Sexual Suffering

Patipolitics looks at what it means to enjoy the body under technocapitalism arguing that we need a new paradigm to talk about sexual enjoyment and suffering. It is not just biological life (biopolitics), nor even political death (necropolitics) that has power, but also regimes of enjoyment. In simple terms the paradoxical, ambivalent and traumatic realm of the sexual: a deadly enjoyment that demands satisfaction yet cannot be sated. This is Patipolitics, from the Latin patior- to suffer, which for psychoanalysis is also to enjoy.

The body is governed by a dizzying array of institutions: the family, social media, religion and the culture industries. These sites provide contexts for enjoying the body such as: self-image, object choice, identification, erogenous zones, taboos, codes of sexual morality, inhibitions, violence, and bodily abjection. But it is the ways in which these modalities are harnessed by apparatuses of power which makes them patipolitical.

Patipolitics examines how the body is instrumentalised, weaponised and fantasized through science, technology and capitalism. After highlighting the destructive and oppressive elements of patipolitics, the book elucidates the positive and generative dimensions to the patipolitical. The female body and its place in the masculine imaginary obscures a genuine enigma about the sexual body and power. Ultimately if patipolitics is to be affirmative as opposed to destructive we must ask what alternative future it can help us to imagine?

Isabel Millar is Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical Thought, the University of Kent, UK, and an Affiliate of the Global Centre for Advanced Studies. She is is author of The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence (2021).