Sensuality, Sexuality and the Eroticism of Slowness

Abstract

The notion of slowness, as applied to the erotic potentials of the body, raises some slightly different, but nonetheless seriously interesting, questions compared with its appearance in the ‘slow food’ or other movements. There is not — to my knowledge — a consciously political movement representing the advocacy of slow sex, although I will suggest that the contemporary Euro-American engagement with tantric practices and other rites of body-based spirituality come close to meeting this criterion.¹ Although slow sensuality is arguably a mode of ‘alternative hedonism’, rarely is its pursuit, as the cultivation and the critique of transcendent processes, comprehended as a catalyst for socio-cultural transformation, even if it might become such a catalyst. Understood as an essentially private engagement, the pursuit of slow sensuality is akin to mystical practice, which has traditionally constituted a bewildering domain for the social sciences, accustomed as they are to examining the structures of belief. Particularly challenging is the claim of mystical practice to conjure dimensions of experience that are beyond belief, beyond scientific conceptualisation or rationalisation, and indeed promissory of a profound experience of life that is transcendent and, so to speak, ‘pre-conceptual’ (indeed, an experience that has critical momentum against the conceptual pretensions of transcendent belief systems). Here I will discuss some of the possible significance of slow sensuality, asking what we might make of the notion of slowness in the light of the postmodern retrieval of the elementariness of our experiential embodiment, the fundamentality of bodily experience and the genuinely unsurpassable momentum of human erotics.