Month of Jouissance
with Barry Taylor, Nina Power, Pamela von Sabljar
The first three months at The Portal have been a blast and a huge learning experience. We have the foundations for a fantastic learning and thinking community, and I could not be more grateful to those of you who have made that possible. Moreover, in this first three months, I was able to surprise myself in deriving the same concept scheme that ended up structuring my original dialogos sessions with Kevin Orosz and Daniel Dick in the creation of the book: Sex, Masculinity, God. In other words, the first three months were organised under the themes Libido, Communism, Sacred; and I recognised the similarity with the structure Sex, Masculinity, God. In order to make this a little more reflexive and in service of The Portal project, I have decided to move forward in The Portal with the repetition of this triadic structure, as opposed to just designing months with different themes in a spurious open-ended way. So moving forward, the meta-thematic structure of The Portal will repeat the following categories:
- Sexuality
- Community
- Metaphysics
And then each month will have a "sub-theme" that reflects those "meta-themes". For example, this month we will be focusing on the concept of "Jouissance" as the sub-theme, in the context of the meta-theme of "Sexuality". To start the month, I will be leading a Concept Cave on the concept of Jouissance this Monday April 8th. After this we will be hosting theologian Barry Taylor in The Edge for a session designed around discomfort, and officially titled F*cking Comfort, which was the ideal name for the book with editors forced him to call Sex, God, Rock N' Roll. In Thought Lab we will welcome philosopher Nina Power, inspired by both her book and our recent conversation of the same name, What Do Men Want? (book, video), for a session on Sex, Evil, and Forgiveness. Finally, we welcome evolutionary mentor Pamela von Sabljar (website), for a session on Living Eros, a topic that she also published on in the second Philosophy Portal anthology, Abyssal Arrows.
The month as a whole should be a perfect way to both understand the excessive nature of our pleasure, how we can never just enjoy life's simple pleasures, but encounter a self-destructive extreme of pleasure, where we also confront our own violence and evil. Theologian Barry Taylor walks us into The Edge of this phenomenon because he has lived a life on "the edge", and has leaned into discomfort. Philosopher Nina Power is the perfect thinker to lead a Thought Lab here because she has experienced first hand the excessive violence of mob evils, as well as thought through deeply the irreconcilable tensions between the sexes in a post-Christian culture. Finally, life coach Pamela von Sabljar has been trying to develop new coaching styles and practices by working with the ground of eros itself, inclusive of all its excessiveness. All in all this month will be unlike any other format for exploring the concept of Jouissance. I hope you join us.
Month of Jouissance