The Politics of Repression: Marc Gafni

Whenever we divorce sex from the overarching frameworks of eros we vastly diminish its power. If we either strip it of eros or alternatively make it the exclusive focus of our erotic desire then we exile the Shechina. The result is a crisis of emptiness of overwhelming proportions both within the sexual and in the rest of our lives. When we allow sex to rise to her natural place of modeling eros, sex responds by allowing us to step out of the separation and into the erotic love affair that courses through all of reality.

Sexuality has a natural affinity with freedom: the Eros and dignity of liberty. This is why sexual repression so often goes together with repressive and fundamentalist regimes. One of the first thing the Taliban did in Afghanistan when taking power was to de-eroticize the country. Not only sexuality, but all music, art, bright colors, and so many other things that express our essential aliveness were outlawed. The true job of religion: re-ligare, is to reconnect that which has been rent asunder. Instead they responded to the West’s divorcing of sex and love by attempting to crush the sexual and fully de-eroticize the public sphere. In doing so they created the kind non-erotic distorted reality which could produce evil in the name of God.

marc gafni
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