It is nearly impossible to divorce the history of the body from the history of sexuality. There is no clear analytical method escaping the difficulties with this genealogy, considering that the body is alive and history is dead. Art exercises its right to visualise and map this genealogy onto the present and future.

When we think about sex, we face our habituated notions of desire which embed themselves in the Post-Fordist regime of late neoliberal capitalism. Arguably, some future which offers a safe and loving environment for the body, means the enactment of a massively different quality of collective libido. Mark Fisher’s final lectures offer us this notion as a necessity. The question is posed: what is a libido which doesn’t need immediate fulfilment? From where does it emerge, and if it emerges can it rewrite the laws of the economic systems which govern the planet?

It is nearly impossible to divorce the history of the body from the history of sexuality. There is no clear analytical method escaping the difficulties with this genealogy, considering that the body is alive and history is dead. Art exercises its right to visualise and map this genealogy onto the present and future.

When we think about sex, we face our habituated notions of desire which embed themselves in the Post-Fordist regime of late neoliberal capitalism. Arguably, some future which offers a safe and loving environment for the body, means the enactment of a massively different quality of collective libido. Mark Fisher’s final lectures offer us this notion as a necessity. The question is posed: what is a libido which doesn’t need immediate fulfilment? From where does it emerge, and if it emerges can it rewrite the laws of the economic systems which govern the planet?‍

Text: Josseline Black

Photo: Photodocumenta; Zoe Wolker

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