Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality

Examines the consequences of utter affirmations of our world as it is, exploring the themes of transgressive sexuality, political anarchism, addiction, death, and embodiment.

Sartwell presents an extreme and provocative philosophy of life. He explores what happens if we love this world precisely as it is, with all of its pain, with all of its evil, with all of its bizarre and arbitrary and monstrous thereness. In a highly personal and brutally direct style, Sartwell explores the themes of transgressive sexuality, political anarchism, addiction, death, and embodiment.

The author engages contemporary and historical debates in cultural criticism, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, and expresses deep suspicions about them. He asserts that scientific philosophical conceptualization is a movement toward death, a rejection of reality

The author engages contemporary and historical debates in cultural criticism, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, and expresses deep suspicions about them. He asserts that scientific philosophical conceptualization is a movement toward death, a rejection of reality

Moral and political values-the ethical rejection of the particular precisely from within the particular-are, Sartwell claims, an assault on human authenticity. Thus, transgression-which is described as the affirmation of embodiment through obscenity-is something we radically require.

Crispin Sartwell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama. He is the author of The Art of Living: The Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions, also published by SUNY Press.