The Sapiosexuals

by Christina Stevens

I was instantly interested.  I had never met anyone in Los Angeles who had even heard of the great late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.  But at a party in West Hollywood, he said that my comment was very Lacanian.

“Lacan himself couldn’t utter his entire theory,” I claimed.  “Because he said the bones of the dead would not allow it.”

“You mean, his theory that there’s no such thing as an individual?”

“I mean, that our self is forged by negation,” I said. “I’ve always been fascinated by Saussure’s idea.  We learn what the letter A is, but we also learn what it is not – the letter B, for instance.  I only think I’m me, because I’m aware that I’m not you.”

“You mean, you’re aware of my phallus and your lack of phallus?”

“Precisely,” I said, giving him my sexiest smile.  “I’m very aware of your phallus.  Both synchronically and diachronically.”

“Diachronically?  You mean…?”

“Yes.  I want to go home with you.”

“Let’s go.”

We got in an Uber.   We switched over to Bataille, since it was taboo for me to be going home with him.

“You have a boyfriend?”  He seemed a little angry.

“Yes,” I said.  “And he’s a real idiot.  That’s why I’m attracted to you.  It’s your intelligence.  But that’s only going to be good for a one night stand.  For a long term relationship, I’m sorry, I have to be the smart one.  It just doesn’t work otherwise.  Epistemologically, I have no problem sparring about ideas.  But ontologically, it becomes unpleasant.”

“Everything’s unpleasant ontologically,” he said.  “Except the taboo.”

“So you don’t mind being the Other, with a capital O.”

“It not erotic unless it’s forbidden.”

“The tribe needs to make connections with other tribes, if it’s going to survive,” I agreed.  “Without taboos, the fathers will impregnate all their daughters and no economic or territorial bonds will be formed with other communities.  And we’ll all starve to death.”

“But that’s what makes it so damn sexy,” he said.  And he kissed me in the back of the cab for the first time.

“Excuse me,” interrupted the Uber driver.  “We have reached your destination.”

We stopped kissing and looked at each other.

“I feel a sensation of weightlessness,” I told him. 

“What Deleuze says is true,” he said.  “Our desire itself is a part of the economic infrastructure and the nomadic war machine.”

“We can’t separate ourselves from it,” I concurred.  “The delirium that exists in the heart of our self is the same delirium which exists in the structures of capitalism.”

“When we fuck, it’s going to be like McDonald’s fucking Amazon dot com.”

I laughed.

“Ok,” said the Uber driver, politely.  “So, as I said.  The destination is here, so…”

In a few minutes, McDonald’s (him) was taking Amazon’s (me) clothes off in his living room.

“Nudity,” he said.

“The real occurs as a gap in the field of immanence.”

“I like this gap.”

He stuck his fingers in the gap between my legs.

“But it’s not the real,” I claimed.  “It’s just signifier of an ancient power relation.”

“Oh?” he said.  “You like a man who takes charge?”

I nodded.  I was glad that he got my meaning.  For a moment I had thought that Foucault might have obscured the issue, now that we were in the Deleuzian realm of rhizomes.  But he immediately grabbed both my wrists and pushed me down on the couch. 

“By dominating me,” I said, “You’ve invented the possibility of a revolution.  Thank you.”

Suddenly I was on top of him, holding down both his wrists.

“Robespierre,” he joked. “L’incorruptible!  How I’ve longed to meet you.”

“Oh, I’m not incorruptible,” I said.  “I’m the unredeemable, Nietzschean female Zarathustra.”

“The Uber Frau?”

“Not sure.  My high German is a bit rusty.  But I’m fairly sure ubermenschen is gender neutral.”

I was fucking him now.  Uber Frau or Uber Mensch, it mattered very little.

“We’re the uberparr!” he claimed.  “The transcendent couple.  Nobody on earth understands a thing we say.  But what do we care?  We’re fucking on the mountain tops.”

“These are the mountain tops?”

I looked around his dingy artist’s hovel of an apartment, there on Venice Boulevard.  But for an instant, it was the mountain tops.

“What do you do for a living by the way?” I asked him.

“I’m a barista,” he said.  “At Pete’s.”

“Of course you are,” I said.  Some of the wind went out of my sails, spiritually.  But physically, I was still going strong.  I thought I might climax in a minute.  His cock was nice and hard, and I was ramming my clit down onto the shaft.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I sell advertising for Facebook,” I said.  “It sucks.”

“Of course it does,” he said.   “But hey, we’ve got the present moment.”

“If only the present moment existed,” I mused between breathless pants as the pleasure built. “As far as I can see it’s just the past pouring into the future.  And here we are, on the edge of a waterfall.”

“Oh God!” he cried.  “I’m about to go over the edge!”

“Me too!” I screamed.

And we came together.  That wasn’t bad.  That wasn’t bad at all.   We lay there exhausted, both physically and mentally.

We were the sapiosexuals.