Posing Sex

Posing Sex: Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art views the long and provocative tradition of representing the sexual act in Western art as an occasion for challenging assumptions about personhood. It is uncontroversial that what Singer dubs the “sex image,” the artist’s posing of human figures in the act of coitus, is an enduring compositional armature for artists from antiquity to the present. Singer, however, makes the quite controversial claim that this aesthetic practice, in literature and painting especially, serves as a powerful métier for exploring how the mind is continuous with the sensuously lively body rather than its rationalistic antagonist. Singer draws upon a rich philosophical tradition—from the Greek Stoics, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hegel to contemporary theorists of perception and aesthetic agency—to show how the stakes of aesthetic experience epitomized in the sex image are essentially ethical. Referencing a broad range of image-based artworks—literary, painterly, and cinematic—Singer illustrates the proposition that “posing sex” broadens the scope of our knowledge about how feeling reciprocates with reason-giving.

This risk-taking, fearless book is a continually rewarding act of looking and feeling and thinking, insisting on their intimacy but also enacting it on the page, where Singer's intellectual reach and analytical rigor produce an abundance of arresting perceptions of sensuous aesthetic experience., Drawing elegantly on Hegel and Spinoza, as well as contemporaries like John McDowell, Alan Singer regards aesthetic depictions of sex not merely as lewd images, or objects for the male gaze, but as a matrix through which personhood is made intelligible. Posing Sex invites us to see in such images how conceptual capacities are at work in the deliverances of our senses, and how knowledge of self and others can be achieved where we least expect it., [R]emarkably sensitive and intricate in surveying how aesthetic moments may connect to more comprehensive aspects of life by virtue of the kinds of ‘mindfulness’ they pursue … Singer deploys a unique mode of argument that we might best characterize as philosophical bricolage., A leading virtue of Alan Singer's Posing Sex is its commitment to a theorization of literary and visual art that might please even the opponents of aesthetics. Those partisans will find no shrinking from action here … One value of Singer's literary-critical iconoclasm lies in his ability to bring into the domain of mindedness and action texts that range from Lady Chatterley's Lover to Henry Miller's Sexus to Lolita; and to do the same for erotically-charged visual art by Balthus or Bacon or John Currin, and for the film art of Lars Von Trier., I urge [readers] to ‘taste and see’ for themselves, and in the reading of the entire book … they will experience the surprises of informed and just critical judgments and the shocks of new aesthetic experiences.

Alan Singer is Professor of English at Temple University, USA. He is the author of four critical books, including The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art (2010) and Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos (2003). He is the author of many articles on aesthetics and co-editor of Literary Aesthetics: A Reader (2001).