The Power of Pleasure Research Group

In her work, we find the first formulation of a proletarian ideology of love, which transcends thought on couples’ or strictly sexual relationships, to theorize the ability to love in the broadest sense of the term, breaking with the hierarchy that ranks our relationships from most to least important and with the competition or contradiction between different types of emotional ties.

In other words, in Kollontai we find a proposal for a break with monogamy that is not based on personal preference or convenience, but rather on the evidence that the ideal of comprehensive love through a single person, besides being unattainable, is in direct contradiction with the interests of our class. This is the definition of love-comradeship: a love based on complete freedom, equality and friendly solidarity, where it is not the form but the content of the emotional ties that matters. It includes mutual equality, recognition of rights and closeness based on comradeship – factors that can only be achieved collectively in and through political struggle and which transcend any debate on polyamory and free love, to build more complete and fairer ways of relating to each other.

Julia Cámara: In the Name of Equality, Liberty and Love, introductory essay to Kollontai 150: Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, p. 27-28

Solidarity is not only an awareness of common interests: it depends also on the intellectual and emotional ties linking the members of the collective. For a social system to be built on solidarity and co-operation it is essential that people should be capable of love and warm emotions.

The proletarian ideology, therefore, attempts to educate and encourage every member of the working class to be capable of responding to the distress and needs of other members of the class, of a sensitive understanding of others and a penetrating consciousness of the individual’s relationship to the collective.

All these ‘warm emotions’ (sensitivity, compassion, sympathy and responsiveness) derive from one source: they are aspects of love, not in the narrow, sexual sense but in the broad meaning of the word.

Love is an emotion that unites and is consequently of an organizing character.

Alexandra Kollontai: Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth (1923)

(from Kollontai 150, p. 92)

Female Desire is a collection of essays about pleasure: about things women enjoy; about things women arc said to enjoy; and about things women are meant to enjoy and don’t.

[…]

I see the representations of female pleasure and desire as ‘producing ‘ and sustaining feminine positions. These positions are neither distant roles imposed on us from outside which it would be easy to kick off, nor are they the essential attributes of femininity.

Feminine positions are produced as responses to the pleasures offered to us; our subjectivity and identity are formed in the definitions of desire which encircle us. These are the experiences which make change such a difficult and daunting task, for female desire is constantly lured by discourses which sustain male privilege.

Rosalind Coward, Female Desires: How They Are Sought, Bought and Packaged, 1984

In reality, there are not two sides but a multitude of sides, inclinations, reliefs, and boundaries. A multitude of genders and even clitorises. In any case, we do not own our bodies. Rather, it is gender that mediates the subject, setting it into motion, much like a machine would. This machine is a network of logistical, biomedical, and cultural norms that systematically disrupt the heterosexual order. […]

The question is not Who am I? nor What is my gender and sexual identity? but rather How does this work? How can its functioning be influenced? And most importantly: how could it function differently?

…

There are no untouched bodies. No bodies that are, by nature, what they are, whose gender identity has undergone no transformation.

Catherine Malabou: Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought

Directed by Tjaša Črnigoj

A series of lecture-performances on sexual pleasure of women*

Performers: Lina Akif, Sendi Bakotić, Nika Rozman, Vanda Velagić; sound performer: Tea Vidmar; with appearances by: Tjaša Črnigoj, Tijana Todorović

*by women we mean all women (trans, intersex and cis)

Klara Otorepec: Feminist Book Club as a Reparative Method and a Form of Female Pleasure

(text excerpt – full version was published in Maska magazine 217-218)

Tjaša Črnigoj: The Practices of Sex Education II

(text excerpt – full version was published in Maska magazine 217-218)

On Reparative

Back to Basics:

Reparative reading was discussed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, queer and affect theorist, in Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or: You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You (published in Slovene in the essay collection Dotik občutka by Emanat in 2007; original essay from 1997).

• According to Sedgwick, what we demand from criticism is the same as what we demand from critical theory: paranoid reading. This type of reading seeks to know more, expose ideology, arrive first at the “crime scene,” and act as a detective.

Audre Lorde and feminist perspectives

Lorde, in Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, advocates replacing guilt-driven self-critique with affirmations of life and eroticism as a source of empowerment.

• Can critique embody this?
• Can critique affirm positive affects, celebrate its subject, and multiply its life-affirming potential?
  
  This does not mean lowering standards but opening ourselves to being moved by art and theory in ways that go beyond suspicion and domination. However, I believe the negative affect of self-critique and the resulting paranoid loop is structurally more potent for those of us who identify as women.
  
  Male Clubs, Greater Paranoia, Self-Critique
  
  Women have traditionally had to prove themselves more to gain entry into traditionally male spaces, such as science, theory, or critique.
  
  Because women are subject to greater scrutiny, they reflexively develop a paranoid structure of self-critique:
  
  “There is nothing you can accuse me of that I haven’t already accused myself of.”
  
  In this sense, the erotic power that absolves such guilt and enables joy can be both liberating and reparative from a feminist perspective.
  
  Futurism and speculation
  
  Reparative reading and critique emphasize relationality over essence and seek hope.
  
  Science fiction offers fertile ground for speculative futures—radical scenarios free from current societal constraints.

The logical conclusion of the saying “just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean you don’t have enemies” is not necessarily “therefore, you’re never paranoid enough,” but could also be: “therefore, paranoia is unnecessary.”

On critical practice

What is traditionally expected of a critic?

• To think and judge more rigorously than others, on behalf of others.
• To critically and analytically anticipate points of potential content-related or formal weaknesses, without missing anything.
• To detect hidden places and details that open new interpretations.
  
  The Critic as a paranoid detective:
• Always hunting for the alien, the strange, the suspicious.
• The most suspicious is often what others overlook, the seemingly ordinary.
• The more obscure the discovery and interpretation, the better the critic.
  
  Changes in criticism
  
  In the meantime, society, the role of art, and that of the critic have undeniably changed:
  – Art has lost much of its societal value, becoming a marginalized social activity. – – The role of the critic, as a feminized profession, has become socially segregated and highly precarious. In privatized media, this unprofitable and under-read practice is increasingly marginalized
  – Critics today, informed by feminist theory, often avoid occupying the position of presumed authority without questioning it. Contemporary critique tends to be embedded, situated, and self-reflective. It considers not only rational discourse but also the affective turn
  – Critique often no longer seeks to outwit its subject, but this does not make it redundant. Instead, it introduces new ways of reading and offers alternative values to its own practice and the works it examines
  
  Reparative reading and changes in critique
  
  This shift aligns with Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, as described in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. It doesn’t aim to correct past errors or enforce discipline. It emphasizes how we actually read, rather than how we should read.
  
  While Sedgwick acknowledges the value of paranoid reading, she warns against it becoming the sole framework, as paranoia can be limiting even when it leads to critical breakthroughs.
  
  Failure, Opening Toward Something; What We Fear; What We Don’t Know; What It Might Bring
  
  It is notable that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick analyzes paranoid reading much more thoroughly than reparative reading. Yet she provides some hints about reparative reading: it involves a kind of “queer art of failure,” where failure no longer necessarily represents humiliation.
  In this approach, failure and mistakes are not merely sites of horror but also hold the potential for unexpected creativity, cognitive strength, and even joy. Reparative reading suggetsts that there are not only negative surprises to uncover, anticipate, and worry about but also positive surprises that can change the course of events.
  
  These surprises offer hope for a different future and remind us that even the past was not fully determined—it could have been different.
  
  Reparative reading emphasizes responsibility to reality – not to how things should be but to how they actually are. It affirms our own incomplete and partial positions, from which we, as critics, always speak. This does not mean diminishing ourselves, but rather trusting that our perspective can amplify, support, and give space to what we recognize as valuable.
  

NOTES ON FEMINIST METHODOLOGY (REPARATION & PLEASURE IN TEXTUAL WORK)