Regarding the book “Body Memory” by Michael Epstein
He had already stopped searching for the truth, this
a cheesy substitute for desire.
Mikhail Epstein
Having published dozens of books and hundreds of articles in the humanities devoted to the search for truth, Michael Epstein (or is it his lyrical hero?) realized that all this activity is only a miserable substitute for desire and wrote The Memory of the Body. A brilliant move!
But since the intellectual legacy always stays with you, this memory itself has taken on very strange forms. The “body” has soaked into the “spirit”, giving rise to something centauric, or at least chironic: the biological nature of sex has become so intertwined with its meaning that the book as a whole sets a new level of comprehension of a seemingly well-trodden topic. It is very far from romance with its serenity and ethereality, and from pornography with its earthiness and primitiveness.
Sex is the universal, most important stimulant and at the same time tranquilizer in a man's life; the one thing that one categorically does not want to lose as long as one is alive. It has always seemed to me that only because of the universal availability of this simple remedy for everything
after all, masturbation is possible under almost any, the most atrocious conditions of existence, society somehow still endures the hardships of existence.
Whatever the system, whatever nasty things the authorities may throw out, no matter how poor you are, this joy is always with you. Sex is the most democratic of all the elements and the most spontaneous of all the democratic concepts that permeate society. Its language, unlike
from any other, understood by all. What Epstein does in his book is to try to bring his elitist ideas into this purely egalitarian field: to add to sex an intellectual intensity of communication, something not inherent in it by nature. Then you get a kind of erotica of a completely different class....
What Are the Objectives of the Award?
The primary goal of the Award is to support authors and promote Russian-language literature worldwide. We welcome all who write and read in Russian, regardless of citizenship or place of residence. We aim to foster a Russian-language culture free from political and imperial influences.
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