Erobots and the deterritorialization of eroticism

Athens Journal of Philosophy, 2025

Each Erote symbolizes a distinct facet and impact within relationships, serving as mediators in our erotic experiences. Furthermore, these archetypes are reflected in the dynamics among characters in the Odyssey, providing insights into how these four types of erotic connections unfold over a lifetime. The selection of these specific Erotes and their modalities is primarily grounded in ontological considerations (Hartmann 1956, pp. 211-212), asserting that erotic agency extends from the physical body into the surrounding social milieu. The aim of this work is to gain a better understanding of our selforganization as individuals and members of a cultural tradition.

Postmodern Openings, 2017

The principles of extropy, supported by Max More, which are the foundation of transhumanist philosophy, are increasingly more often found in the individual's incidence space, through the effects of the augmentation, technologization and artificialization of sexuality, through pornography. Here, pornography leads to a deterritorialization of the natural regions of sex and to a reterritorialization of artificial and technologized pornography into a simulacrum of sexuality. The general objective follows the operating mechanism, together with the possible effects/benefits of a situation where we are talking about sexuality/pornography within the limits of singularity, starting from Ray Kurzweil's theories. That is where sexuality in pornography transitions from the physiological and natural paradigm, to the artificial paradigm of neural implants or nanobots. The theoretical objective is aimed at analyzing the shift of paradigm (in the sexual field) from the humanist man to the transhumanist individual, involving the Nietzschean argument of the Overman. With the purpose of emphasizing the often-ignored importance of technology's imminence into the life of human nature, resulting in the death of metaphysics and, in this situation, to human sexuality being reduced to functionalism. The methodology used is the argumentation of Friedrich Nietzsche's and René Descartes' philosophy, of Ray Kurzweil's theories, of Gilles Deleuze's deconstruction, together with the principles of Max More's extropianism.

Deleuze and Queer Theory

Contrary to the initial emphasis that was given on aspects related to intelligence and knowledge, we are finding that the web is increasingly becoming a platform welcoming aesthetic and ethic forms marked by senses, emotions and voluptuousness in pleasure as much as in its darker side. Previously, pornography was a hidden, obscure and marginal dimension of collective life. Nowadays, digital culture favors the advent of porn culture, where porn tends to become a symbolic matrix, an ordinary code, an atmosphere. In this visual and sensitive context, the obscene gets closer to the truth and the truth appears as an obscene. What imaginary presides over this mutation at work?

Teksty Drugie, 2015

The issue of human sexuality and eroticism is not a new topic in the humanities. Earlier studies focused primarily on the differences between sex and eroticism, classifying the former as a quality o f animals (including human animals), while the latter as uniquely human. This point o f view is entrenched in the anthropocentric perspective, as it emphasizes the uniqueness o f human eroticism when contrasted with the universal sexuality and sex drive of other species. I do not claim that these premises are false, but I would avoid drawing a clear line between that which is human and that which is animal in the sexual and erotic sphere. Research conducted by Darwin and, in turn, posthumanists, suggest that the efforts made by non-human animals to attract partners are both complex and sophisticated, and that a broad repertoire o f strategies (such as colorful plumage or fur, songs and mating dances) are deployed in order to arouse the partner. From the posthumanist perspective, it is more justifiable to speak o f human and non-human animals as having various (though not identical) forms o f emphasizing their own attributes than to stress the dichotomy between the animal (i.e., primitive) sexual instinct and the sophisticated human erotic sense. I believe that the repertoire of human strategies used to charm and attract the interest o f a partner includes the use of things/objects/accessories, and it is here that I perceive the difference between the human erotic-sexual sphere and that o f non-human animals. The preliminary study o f the issue, the results o f which I have presented in this article, involves such objects as clothing, lingerie and shoes, but does not exhaust the repertoire of erotically marked things and accessories. The erotic and pornographic market offers whips, handcuffs, masks and other objects used by people to enhance and add variety to their sexual experiences. Objects such as these that bear the stigma of obscenity also warrant further investigation in the future. When we write about things, we should not forget about those that now share the biological space of the body, particularly implants and prostheses. From the perspective o f posthumanism and the anthropology o f objects, this theme can also open up new perspectives on the relationship between people and things in the sexual-erotic sphere.

Foucault Studies, 2021

In an interview, two years after publishing the introductory volume of his Histoire de la sexualité (La Volonté de savoir), Michel Foucault boldly claimed that the future of philosophy depended on looking beyond its European home. “It is the end of the era of occidental philosophy,” Foucault declared to his priestly interlocutors on his 1978 visit to a Zen temple in Japan. “Thus, if there is to be a philosophy of the future, it must be born outside of Europe or it must be born as a consequence of encounters and impacts (percussions) between Europe and non-Europe.”1 Although he had already celebrated Asian ars erotica in contrast to the West’s scientia sexualis, Foucault did not explore the practices and discourses of those erotic arts in his subsequent work on the history of sexuality. Instead he confined himself to Europe, going back to the Greeks and developing his inquiry into Roman and ultimately Christian theorizing concerning sex. Overcoming that severe limitation was a key mo...

"Sociology has traditionally been concerned with problems of social order and meaning, and with how modern societies confronted these challenges when reli- gion was in apparent decline, yet classical sociologists struggled to reconcile within their analyses the (dis)ordering and meaningful potentialities of eroticism. This article examines how eroticism has been viewed as a source of life-affirming meanings and as personally and socially destructive. Utilizing the contrasting theories of Weber and Bataille, we explore sociology’s ambivalence towards eroticism, and criticize contemporary sociological approaches to the subject, before turning to the writings of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva for alternative models of the religiously informed eroticization of daily life. The perspectives these French theorists bring to the subject, and the issues that remain unresolved in their work, identify new lines of inquiry and re-emphasize the importance of building a sociology of eroticism that can address adequately its relationship to questions of order and meaning. "

Teksty Drugie, 2015

Eroticism: Between Nature and Culture In h is 19 9 3 e ssa y “The D ouble F lam e: Love and Eroticism ”1 , the M exican poet and essayist Octavio Paz considers the intricate relationship betw een sex, eroti­ cism and love. Though connected, the three cannot be regarded as synonym ous. Paz illustrates this phenom enon o f sim ultaneous connectedness and difference using the m etaphor o f fire and the flam e: nature kindles the fire o f sex, over w hich quivers the subtle, blue flam e o f love. N either red nor blue flam es can exist w ithout fire, and yet they are distinct from the fire above which they hover. The M exican intellectual stresses that sex is the least hum an elem ent o f the triad, and the reason is that it applies to m any other species besides homo sapiens, and its goal is reproduction. W hile sex belongs to the sphere of nature, the flam es o f eroticism cannot be placed unam biguously in the sam e sphere, as they belong rather to the field of culture. Eroticism is ...

Response paper on a symposium of Ars Erotica in Foucault Studies. The full issue with the other papers can be found here: https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/issue/view/845

Love and Sex in the Digital Age: A Semiotic Perspective, 2019

This second issue of our journal addresses an uneasy topic. It is uneasy exactly because it is too easy to speak about love and sex and yet say nothing. It is uneasy because there has not been tremendous academic interest in this topic within the field of humanities and social sciences, and contributions to the field have thus been sporadic and unsystematic. Moreover, it is uneasy because, compared to other aspects of our everyday life, love and sex concern our being in a way that it is difficult to observe in a neutral or scientific way. However, we are here: organizing a small conference on the consequences for love and sex upon the advent of the internet and digital technologies. We could not resist engaging this topic because our program as a research center concerns the cultural changes of the digital age, and we can hardly think of another sphere of life more affected by the development of digital communications technologies. In our preliminary research we have identified no less than six huge areas of semiotic interest (being helped by Sanders & Co, 2018): - Cyber dating and hookup culture - Erotica, pornography websites, and videogames - Webcamming, hidden cams, and online voyeurism - Sex workers’ platforms, websites, and forums - Digitally engineered sex - The dark side of the net: cyberbullying, online pedophilia, revenge porn, etc. In his paper “The Semiotics of the Face in Digital Dating: A Research Direction,” Massimo Leone is concerned with the problem of whether or not the human face will lose its aura as a result of the digital manipulations popular on dating sites. The first part of this paper offers a profound analysis of the face's semiotic essence and its role in the sociosemiotic reality of the everyday life. Then the analysis focuses on seductive behavior and the crucial role that the face performs in seduction. This analysis' depth comes from the comparative approach between humans and primates, where the face is seen as a communicative project. The second part develops the context in which images of the face are used on digital dating sites. Leone explores the possibility of digital dating faces' typology, wherein the degree of idealization varies. The semiotic tools of such idealization include make-up techniques (including modifications like false moles), a number of seductive facial expressions, and an infinity of digitally-assisted improvements or augmented reality effects used on the face. One representative of the new generation of semioticians – Gianmarco Giuliana – has developed an original and innovative approach to account for the use of love and sex in video games. His perspective is part of a new general approach that tries to overcome the limits of structural semiotics by analyzing the video-ludic experience, going beyond the textual occurrence of the potential or accomplished game. Love and sex are entwined with all the major semiotic aspects of video games. In his paper “I kissed an NPC and I liked it: Love and Sexuality in Digital Games,” Giuliana divides his study in semiotic typology into the representation, enactment, and economy of love and sex. The impressive variety of digital sexuality in gaming is explained and theoretically classified on the basis of a huge list of video games, tracing the field from its origins to the latest products of VR immersive experience. Following this young Italian scholar's line of analysis, we may expect that the role of love in the video games—and the role of sex in particular—is destined to increase and bring a qualitative leap to the market of experience. In his paper “Technology selling sex versus sex selling technology,” Konstantinos Michos (who is a PhD candidate from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) investigates advertising in the digital commerce of sexual and technological devices. His case study compares two extreme cases with a mirrored structure: that of the sexual device Lovense promoted through a website with a multimodal technological rhetoric, and a retailer brand that sells conventional technological products using heavy sexual (and even pornographic) rhetoric to advertise its offer. The author proposes a model that poses sex and technology as two extremities on a semiotic axis. We can position the huge variety of commercial appeals for the examined products and services along the semiotic axis. The paper of young Algerian researcher Mega Afaf is unique in our collection. It is situated between academic research and an anti-pornography feminist manifesto, and represents a strong ethical stance. For this reason the paper has been approved with certain reservations on the part of reviewers. However, we insisted on keeping it because this woman's brave act, coming from El Oued to Sozopol with all the obstacles of her socio-cultural reality. Her presence made our conference more valuable and significant. Shortly after announcing the call for papers, our journal was heavily criticized on Facebook by two or three feminists for having only male keynote speakers. Given the topic of our conference, they were quite right to raise the ethical issue of gender participation. The argument that these feminists did not want to accept was the fact that, as organizers, we made consistent efforts to invite two teams of female researchers from Leicester and Glasgow and a professor form UAS/Prague, all authors of important books on the transformation of love and sex in the digital age. These scholars were not available at the beginning of September, as is the case with many academics. More concretely, Mega Afaf's paper begins with a historical reading of the feminist movement's socio-cultural implications as read through Juri Lotman's semiotic model (as presented in the 2009 book from Culture and Explosion). She situates the phenomenon of pornography within this theoretical frame and, contrary to some currents in feminism, sees it as entirely negative and counterproductive for the feminist cause, as a modern form of civilized slavery. Can we talk about the “touristification of love” and of “lovification of tourism”? Questions about love and tourism motivate the research entitled “Sex of Place. Mediated Intimacy and Tourism Imaginaries,” by the young Italian PhD candidate Elsa Soro, presently working in Barcelona. Her fieldwork takes place on Tinder, and she analyzes the ways people increase their sex appeal and construct seductive strategies using images of touristic places and activities in their Tinder profiles. The study starts from a strong empirical observation: in the last few decades, global tourist activities have increased exponentially, at a rate that mimics the uptake of internet platforms for dating. The number of traveling people and the number of dating people has not only increased, but there is also an important lifestyle overlap between the two trends, suggesting there is solid ground for the cultural implications of this socio-economic reality. Soro makes a sociosemiotic typology of ways of being a tourist and performing tourism in Tinder profile pictures, which not only helps to decode the phenomenon but may also be used as a guide for performing a successful seduction strategy. Francesco Piluso from the University of Bologna gives an excellent example of semiotic critique in the tradition of Barthes, Eco, and Baudrillard. In his paper “From sexual community to exclusive sex: Semiotic translation on gay chat and dating applications,” Piluso applies the semiotic method to one of the greatest expressions of present-day social media capitalism: dating platforms. According to the young Italian scholar, LGBTQ dating apps like Grindr and PalnetRomeo make use of LGBTQ community capital to transform it into a heteronormative, individualized product of consumption to maximize profits. Apparently platforms like these are inclusive and community oriented, but an examination of their internal structure and hidden ideology reveals that they promote individualistic sexual experiences in a very neoliberal way, driven by profit-oriented filters. These platforms thus commodify (i.e. re-appropriate and assimilate) the core values of the LGBTQ community, namely the acceptance of the individual difference. This commodification takes place through the list of participants' qualities, qualities like weight, height, colour of skin, eyes, hair, and even the dimension of a user's genitals. Rather than a research paper, Mihail Vuzharov’s “UX & FOMO. Looking for Love or Looking for Options?” is an informative and analytical review of the latest trends in internet experience, with an explicit ethical stance and sound forecasts for the near future. It also contains a list of the most memorable phrases pronounced by the participants of the XXIII EFSS conference. One of the important things in this paper is the further elaboration of the notion (inspired by Eco’s reader model) of the “model user”, already introduced by Vuzharov in previous publications. Concerning love and sex, Vuzharov discusses the general behavioral trend among millennials (as well as other groups) of FOMO – the "Fear Of Missing Out" – as relates to new forms of sexuality and intimacy that emerged after the widespread adoption of dating apps. “Fomosexuality” is a term used to speak about the commodification of our relationships, love, sex, and affection, topics widely discussed during the conference. Kristian Bankov's paper, “The Pleasure of the Hypertext,” is an updated version of the already-published chapter in book, The Garden of Roses III: Lectures and Speeches (2007-2014), edited by prof. Bogdan Bogdanov. This is a reflection on the shift from the age of the “cult of the text” (of which Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, 1973 is emblematic), and the age of the Hypertext (which is more or less the last two decades), wherein the cultural impact of the internet and digital technologies is devastating.