Sex and Mankind in Progress

By Pio Curatolo

Despite the change in customs and the apparent facilitation that has ensued with regard to sexual relationality, the subject still maintains a need for further study, in view of its always desirable improvement in concrete interpersonal and collective life. This book can be considered as the second element of a diptych, together with the previous OLTRE L’ARENA (2017) dedicated to the innovation of the economic and political scenario. While here we intend to analyze and elaborate the socio-philosophical and intersubjective data of sex, also innovating metapsychological paradigms and outlining new interpretative and therefore educational, relational and anthropological realities, in the perspective of a general and particular improvement of human life.
Trying to respond to what was initially expressed as follows: "... A lot seems to me to depend on the authenticity and freedom of cognitive interest, that is on the ability and possibility to have a deeper, more complete and responsible understanding; by certain circumstances that place us or not in the condition of giving an audience and order to that space of the “unspoken” that we spoke about at the beginning of this introduction; when one discovers the admissibility - as some authentic or lucky philosopher has managed - to look at the things that are pertinent to our intelligent life with an always excited and new look, and precisely to know them, guarantee them, live them, love them better.
Under this condition, the unspoken is no longer and is never a dark and worrying remnant or an insignificant one to flee from, or the enemy of the stability and quality of the object of what has been said, asserted and accepted, or the danger to lose the freedom and the joy of rediscovering and renewing the things that matter and that we really care about; but it is the “space” that is necessary for us to be and to become, and it is the air that even the aforementioned needs in order not to suffocate and not suffocate us ... ".
The author, with a health and sociological background, worked in the mental health services of Trieste and Perugia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pio Curatolo
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220815345

Book preview

Petersburg).

Introduction.

Here we want to discuss a theme which, due to its complexity and relevance, implies the responsibility of the author as well as of the reader. That is, for both the commitment to combine substance and method, discourse and reflection, sincerity and understanding, life and knowledge.

It is evident and undeniable that our theme places a conformed horizon of principles of existence and consolidated truths in front of its discussion, alongside a defensive and conservative reflex that understandably turns towards its reinterpretation or its questioning. Often without wondering whether from this readiness to stand up in defense of the existing one can objectively infer a real responsibility or, even more, a true understanding towards what that existent, and its structure, have inevitably relegated to the unspoken sphere, of the unexperienced, of the non-existent.

If the thesis according to which the precariousness, insecurity, pain, deception and disenchantment that historically accompanied man's life, are the result of clumsy attempts to alter the stability of system of meanings that man has produced on himself and on his unfolding in the world, this should not exclude the adhesion and adaptation to the logics handed down by many generations, and considered obvious and indispensable to insert himself in a shell of proven existence, make that insertion risk-free and fallacy-free. Nor should a review and reworking of traditionally accepted and prescribed assumptions be immediately interpreted in terms of injury, insignificance or even subversion, if it is given reasons and arguments that may be different from usual.

When individuals rely on the regulatory choices that organize their existence, they explain it with the double need to establish a certain map of individual and reciprocal paths, and with the hope of profitably and fully realizing their humanity within those shared routes. A greater or lesser degree of awareness, culture, or passivity, formalism, uncertainty about these choices, does not change their nodal function; not even historical disappointments or incompleteness in concrete individual lives, ours or that of others, often have enough strength or recognition to call for a reconsideration of this rooted structure, because it is entrusted with the inalienable hopes on the fulfillment of that double requirement.

Perhaps it should be precisely this indispensability that does not make us discard a priori the need and the possibility of deepening the research on what I first defined as unspoken, unexperienced, non-existent. In other words, that fluid on which the vessel of the traditional belief floats and in which we are all housed. Fluid in which, denied or forgotten in favor of stable and tested beliefs, the sea of lost evolutionary possibilities is unceasingly and perhaps senselessly undermined. Remaining a furrow, behind the millennial race of our animated vessel, destined to close immediately after its passage, and in which those reflections and answers, diverging from the predetermined, together with the a priori indifference or denial of which we have drown deign, and of which we therefore absolve ourselves with the same simplicity of the closure of that wake, once the vessel that produced it has gone, unchanged, forward.

Having rightly had at heart the maintenance of the happy or convenient effects deriving from the progressive structuring of social and relational life that history has produced over time, paradoxically determined a kind of unintentional emptying of that bet, of that total hope that was entrusted to the priority interface between the expectation of human fulfillment and the creation of discriminating rules. This paradoxical emptying does not seem to me to be due to the misunderstanding of a prejudicial extremism that someone could foreshadow in the reasoning that we want to propose here, that is to a hasty and symptomatic clash between hypothetical or smoky intentions and realistic or shared criteria of possibility. Nor is any underestimation of the negative impact that human defects and weaknesses have on the effective intertwining of personal and social behaviors meant, and therefore we do not want to diminish in the least the crucial importance of the permanent attention that civil societies exercise in defense. and a guarantee of the best that they have been able to produce, even by sanctioning degenerate or disturbing, problematic or destructive deviations. However, that emptying appears by itself when one simply compares what generically can be called expectation of human fulfillment to how much of it can objectively and sincerely belong to the contingent normative and paradigmatic paths that condition and guide individual, generational and historical-social events.

Certainly there is no dissociation of mine from the appreciation for all the goals of civilization and emancipation on the basis of which human societies derive a series of tangible benefits and more or less functional organizational arrangements, especially when they are shown to be amended by residues that are too extremist or coercive, and when, despite delays and imperfections, there is actually a potentiality of content in them that deserves to be pursued, implemented and defended. Only, and fundamentally, we wanted to take absolutely seriously the profound and most authentic value of what I would like to call a bet of global human achievement, perceiving its necessity and possibility despite the prevalence of the walls of standardized satisfaction and of the tested schemes of reassurance. conventional; objectively converging in determining a screen of a priori distrust towards those reflections that risk changing the pre-established meaning of human reality and its self-justification. While it should be clear that corroborating real existence with better reflection and self-awareness about our current mode of existence, far from constituting a theoretical digression or a utopian sketch, represents the first and most authentic place at our disposal, the condition more essential and real than existing and becoming.

The purpose of this book is to improve the understanding of human sexuality, its implications and expressions. Despite the fact that sexuality is an aspect of life that affects everyone without distinction, the contingent interpretation that has been given does not seem to me to be a sufficient or incontrovertible fact in itself, so much so that I conclude that there is no longer any need and possibility for reflection. to about.

The comparative balance of historical situations that humanity has known as a whole, and that which concerns the individual singularities considered in their contingent life span, testify to us a significant and lasting amount of errors, vicious circles, ostentation, insufficiencies, dogmatism and difficulties, but the ultimate link between the overall human hope and that historically and culturally current model remains intact. Because this has also been able to produce happiness, progress, usefulness, comfortable predictability and a certain amount of mutual respect. However, having rightly had at heart the maintenance of the happy or convenient effects deriving from that progressive structuring, paradoxically and inadvertently induced an emptying or a stagnation of the bet connected to the interface between the drive for human fulfillment and the creation of criteria for knowledge and discriminating rules.

Obviously without denying the due appreciation for all the goals of civilization and emancipation on the basis of which societies and individuals derive a series of tangible benefits and more or less functional organizational arrangements, here we wanted to rethink the deep and most authentic value of this. which I have called a wager of integral human fulfillment, perceiving its necessity despite the prevalence of the walls of standardized satisfaction and the tried and tested schemes of conventional reassurance. In the awareness that this type of recovery cannot be improvised, but also that the observation of the preliminary difficulty that touches those who express a new indication on this difficult and central topic, and is immediately hit by a lukewarm but corrosive objection is quite objective to make sterile and unwanted speculations or utopia. When, on the other hand, it should be clear that corroborating contingent existence with better reflection and self-awareness represents the first and most authentic place at our disposal.

Indeed, at times one may even have a well-founded doubt as to whether there really is a coherent need for knowledge in this regard, only if one thinks of so many forgotten, excluded or repressed answers without even having discussed or understood them, and to others that, due to their supervening dominance, have ended up, intentionally or not, by freezing the value and purpose of that cognitive question - universal as much as it is more or less felt or aware - with definitive, standardized and unchangeable interpretations.

At the conclusion of this introductory part, I would like briefly to address the reader directly to ask myself, together with him, if there is a contradiction between my assertion that the topic we intend to deal with does not concern an indeterminate non-place but concerns an immanent and fundamental human condition, and that which alludes to a certain frontier or in some way innovative quality of the discourse I am about to make. And if we still have to say something about how to approach this reading and whether or not there are things to do, more convenient or possible than others, when it has been completed.

I answer these questions in a unitary way, which absolutely does not want to preclude the free deductions of the reader. Much seems to me to depend on the authenticity of the interest, on the ability and willingness to have a deeper, more complete and responsible understanding; by certain circumstances that place us or not in the condition of giving an audience and order to that space of the unspoken that was discussed at the beginning of this introduction; since the admissibility was discovered, how has some authentic or lucky philosopher managed to look with an always excited and new gaze at the things that are pertinent to our intelligent existence, and precisely to know them, guarantee them, live them, love them better.

Under this condition, the unspoken is no longer and never is a dark and worrying remnant from which to flee or the enemy of the stability of what has been said, asserted and accepted, or the danger of losing the freedom and joy of repeating and find the things that matter and that we really care about; but it is the space that is necessary for us to be and to become, it is the air that even the already said needs in order not to suffocate and not suffocate us. And it is therefore also the freedom to express and accept the discovery that life can be improved even if it is changed - something considered paradoxical by the majorities and by the powers that guide them, from inside or outside -, a modality that man has available to approach his most proper condition and enter it fully.

Finally, I do not think that the reader should be further recommended the opportunity to always know how to distinguish between reality and intellectual reflection, between the possibilities of life granted by our current socio-cultural horizon and those that may become possible tomorrow or later: it is not in any case through the limitation or repression of the exercise of knowledge, or because it can appear borderline or disturbing, that one can be better guaranteed in the fact that individuals know how to make the best use of even that knowledge that today appears available, approved and current.

PART I - Release the moorings.

What do we know about sex and sexuality? If we try to be honest, we know ... what we know. There are things that only intelligence is capable of looking for, but which it will never find by itself; only instinct could discover them, but it will never look for them, Bergson said, aphoristically.

Commonly, an agent evidence and a pressing drag, inherent in sexuality, are elements so indisputable and self-contained as to answer most of the questions, or those that seem to be the most important and fundamental. This is why it is not difficult, indeed it is obvious, to have certain convictions about it, and any additional question risks appearing scandalous or disturbing or useless. But, while putting this into account, it is precisely this undoubted, intangible, configured immanence and excess of belief and demonstration of sex and sexuality that makes his beliefs potentially currently and tacit with respect to a more in-depth and revealing examination. Without this examination, we will have answers without real or complete questions, however adequate it may seem: can this be the best way to substantiate what we know?

It seems to me instead that the theme, and precisely to respect its undeniable complexity, deserves and even requires a series of dedicated reflections, by reason of what has been said in the introduction and also for an intrinsic need to the theme itself which will soon reveal itself from the first pages of this work. I will unravel these reflections in a series of successive stanzas which, if on the one hand may appear unrelated to a real progression of chapters, on the other hand they will better correspond to the reflective rather than treatise intent.

These rooms will involve some of the many questions that in my opinion the theme requires, with a series of answers, clarifications and references whose meaning will reside as a whole rather than in their separation. For this reason the reader will be able, if he wishes, to dwell on each of these pages even without following their order. Provided that, I would like to hope, this choice is not based on an arbitrary selection between the simple and the difficult, or between that apparently more congenial part compared to the more complicated or demanding one. What may appear complex immediately will become simple as its understanding becomes clearer, and what may appear simple will expand into an overall articulation if the attention has been more active and freer.

1

1. The idea and experience of sexuality is given by two inseparable extremes: being this and beyond this. There can be oscillation, prevalence, selection between one extreme and another: and it is precisely the problem, which does not exist until the evidence is disturbed or questioned or investigated. Evidence that has become so convincing that it does not even need principles of reality (this is how it is done, it is not possible to do otherwise). But if the latter are spoken of or are made to intervene, some justified doubt arises that the evidence of this can in itself be self-sufficient without the need for reflexive references, or under the illusion of being able to do without having to do with the beyond this of and in sexuality.

Starting with the obvious pairing that exists between sexuality and pleasure and happiness: the cause (the this) and the effect or its sense (the beyond this). Not infrequently leaving the desiring and imaginative apparatus of the individual, and his own assumption of a role of first selective and decision-making referent on the practical level, grappling with an beyond this that not rarely delays or escapes to be realized as he would expectation, simple and direct consequence between cause and effect.

But even this, that is, everything that belongs to the indubitable and concrete experience of the body, of its vital materiality, of its original destination to awareness and experiences that go well beyond corporeality, is neither trivialized nor taken for granted. And similarly, even if differently, also the beyond, that is, everything that transcends corporeality and is assigned to the conviction of an administered, liberated or exhaustively tested intimacy.

Between these two polarities, which are not immediately or simply separable or coincident, we find ourselves, often denying it, as subjects who are a bit autarchic and a bit wandering, or as if destined to disciplinedly enter a role. And there is a space to be explored and traveled, where the individual is encouraged to become a centrifugal operator of intellectual and affective selectivity, but also an editor and manager, and a centripetal collector of arbitrations deemed justified and consequent. While, nevertheless, that space, which has become an environment, is charged with a widespread and insistent circulation of melodic pieces, romantic suggestions, together with pounding stimuli to live and desire further or slavishly.

A space, whose breadth is often overlooked; to recompose the excess or to merge with personalized conclusions: of a possible, to which the subject will attribute the right-duty of a golden realization in any case.

2

2. Starting from the simple and the obvious, two things can be immediately recognized about sexuality: the distinction between penis and vagina, considered a given as taken for granted as it is, and the distinction between male and female, another almost trivially animal and dichotomously elementary. However, it seems that human culture finds in the man-woman distinction a more suitable terrain for the development of the higher faculties that characterize the human species, compared to the penile-vaginal dichotomy, relegated to the level of organic primitiveness and unable to represent meanings with which the intellect can be deigned to compare.

This is an immediate evidence that therefore does not seem to require further information, and already from childhood and with regard to any other level of age and maturation. It is a constitutive and innate datum which, however, should not be understood as a reduction to the minimum terms of sexuality, since their inevitable significance should not be unaware of all those who, living and understanding, have experienced a certain collimation between the elementary aspects of bodily experience and the dimensions of emotion, feeling and thought, understood as more complex or less linked to organic corporeality.

But, beyond evidence or intuition, a recognizable complication is not long in coming. Because there is a destiny of interminable learning and progressive awareness that concerns the human subject in the face of his sexual constitution, since his childhood, and which, among other things, psychoanalysis considers constitutive and harbinger of an immanent and generalizable and even paradigmatic complexity. Because despite the very close interdependence between body and mind, for various reasons (embarrassment, customs, standardizations, etc.) in human culture, motives can be triggered to separate or distance what belongs to the body and what belongs to the mind, with real and inevitable psychological and practical effects. Because the space, in itself large, between the least terms of sex and the induced or elaborated reality of its beyond, expands and becomes even more complicated if we consider not only the contingent dilations contained in the already mentioned question, and which irreversibly affect a considerable part of practical life, but also the potential further development of a speakable daily mobilized, in experiences and thoughts, like an arrow constantly grappling with a target.

For these reasons, the very difference that children have already learned in their very early years is a theme that urges and occupies physiology and psychology, and which remains central and debated in the context of the existence and specifically adult consciousness of the two sexes. Reasons that therefore lead us not to take known things to be taken for granted, and not to consider further cognitive reflection unacceptable, beyond the vulgate of a formulaic rumor about gender equality or its placement in the context of an agreed conduct within a private reserve.

Therefore, there is some reason to believe that there is a possibility and a reflective-existential need on sexuality, which integrates, while understanding them, the special and almost eccentric aspects concerning the anatomical-physiological treatises and their profusion within of common and current language.

3

3. If naming and signification in the sexual sphere involve a linguistic problem similar to that connected to other meanings, the sexual organs fall within this problematic in a particular way. They are in fact very particular objects compared to those commonly presented to experience. First of all they are an integral part of the body of each individual. It is true that other parts of the body can also be considered objects, such as the hands, the eyes, the liver, the skull, every single cell, but the fact of considering these parts of the body as objects, can add or remove them only to a small extent. something essential in terms of definition.

The hand or the liver, for example, can be things that we use, see, know, belong to us or belong to other people, can have a more or less neutral or non-specific, or vital or organic or functional character. They can orient us, according to their regularity or irregularity, towards concepts of general identity (the vital capacity or belonging to defined but broad naturalistic categories) or particular (ability, form, individual degree of health or strength), but all this highlights a certain albeit articulated laconicity compared to the intrinsic quality placed not only in sexual difference but also in the sexual organs as specific objects.

While the hand object is now a prehensile organ, now expressive, now capable and strong and now sick and weak, a characteristic and unique object for individual psychophysical integrity, indispensable and very useful for various instrumental purposes, the sexual organ is part of almost all of these characteristics, but it has two others that the other body parts do not have, or do not have in a potentially relevant way. The first is that the male and female sexual organs are different but complementary, the second is that the penis and the vagina are eminently objects for the human being; and these two characteristics make them surplus to any attempt at a definitive or conceptual freeze frame.

Their relevance as a part, proper to the anatomo-physiological individuality, even autonomous and isolated, is at the same time convincing but peculiarly incomplete. Because the sexual organs, with respect to all other parts of the body, with the exception of the brain, find their most defining value in reciprocal integration, in a complementarity that directs them towards the relationship, research, the desire for the absent but implicated counterpart. Each of them is therefore exposed, intended, almost justified, for and by a reference to the complementary; the lack of which almost weakens even the centered individual property, problematizes that natural relevance that the other parts of the body peacefully have in the context of the integrated totality of the individual, and that every other object existing in the world finds without need for excessive justification.

These organs are parts of the body which, although belonging to single individuals, appear in some way as others, that is, as object entities with respect to subjectivity, and not only generically or specifically objective with respect to thought. They transfer the boundary between consciousness and object, from the relationship between the subject and things of the world to the relationship of the subject with himself and with other subjects. Towards which, and here their special objectity is highlighted, every sexual subject will then pose with the ineluctable awareness of a boundary, and also of an inclusion-exclusion gap, conditioned by the subdivision of the human race into two sexes.

Preconstituted boundary to language and words, a pre-verbal condition that is found in the complementary and implicative reality of the organic dichotomy of sexual characteristics and evoked from them, and in ways that tend beyond the organic yet with an irreplaceable basis in it . A boundary that therefore stands out as intrinsically dynamizing, indirectly also in relation to the operations of denomination and signification that we perform in relation to the neutrality and genericity of the term object. The sexual object, already appropriate in its nakedness, thus reveals itself as a non-term (not finished or terminable), that is, a dilator of the defining and binding power of the words and denominations that are given to it. There are objects, you have them in front of you, and here is the power of the word to get to work. Opening up a scenario, typical of language, in which we are constantly immersed and involved, precisely interminable but with stations or stops in which we decide that that's enough. This aspect would inevitably require not one but many books, but here it will only be kept in mind in its inalienable significance.

Also with regard to the sexual organs, understood not only as object evidence but also as an entity to which to speak, a language that does not stop at verbal etiquette can take at least two directions, in addition to eventually deciding to stop. One is that of the description, detailed and detailed; the other is that of the evocation and conceptualization of meanings that depart from the description but which this alone does not provide. These are two directions that must reconcile and supervise each other, so that the starting objects are not paradoxically silenced by the discourse on them, and this does not become deafening with respect to the reality in question.

4

4. Therefore to say penis or vagina, or male or female, is a conclusive and at the same time insufficient saying. But to say that not only anatomo-physiological geography is done but serves to correlate and connote personal experience and the relational and social biological purpose, therefore remains an inevitable possibility and an inalienable duty.

It is a potentially extended horizon, with respect to which we often resort to the anchor of these things are known, and their simplicity does not require excessive considerations. We experience sexual desire and satisfaction, we place ourselves disciplined within reproductive logic, and all of this seems to us to offer much more than we are willing to conceive as discoverable or searchable; were it not that it is precisely the nature of the topic that inevitably raises questions, even starting from the simple geography of common or conventional notions and experiences.

For example, go into more detail in the description of the sexual organs, consider these details indicatively included in the terms penis and vagina, or support an integrated evaluation of the person, accentuating their role of intersection and interaction between the sexes, which brings them back to the background with respect to the interpersonal event and its thought, they seem to summarize an exhaustive set of knowledge. But it is enough to pause, after having decided to do so, on the fact that the vagina, with its ascosity, virtuality, interiority, seems to be the polar opposite of the external visibility of a penis, which however also appears objectively singular due to its specific and physiological correlation. with the presence or absence of an erection, to understand how much the cognitive convention on the sexual datum cannot be limited to anatomy-physiology and shared and traditional knowledge. Not so much because even the mere distinction between the sexual organs puts us in front of certain characteristics that are actually unusual or singular from the point of view, even if only objective, but above all because these characteristics offer individuals an objectively and subjectively stimulating physical and mental experience, more and unlike any other type of object or objectivity, including the connotation of the substantial entity of the person. And it is in this sense that the sexual organs present themselves, as already mentioned, as eminently objects for human beings, as much as they are destined to be subjects for their own and others' objectivity.

This undeniable interdependence could be banal and obvious, and for this reason it is very often sufficient to conceive and close his speech, if it were not equally undeniable, at least reflected, that the objective and material side remains in its diversity with respect to the mental or ideational; that this diversity may therefore not necessarily constitute a goal of integration, but it can make its achievement more difficult and delayed, due to a recurrence of the partialities and differences presumed to be integrated, for their more than possible to constitute themselves in real detached steps. 'from each other, requiring, for this reason re-profiling as detached, operations that connect them in a conventional or provisional way, or a more demanding and complicated path of those steps, both up and down, with consequent and inevitable extension or reduction of what can be said and what has already been said, regarding both the parts considered as already integrated and which can be integrated in another way.

If we then consider how and to what extent this question is, in addition to lived experience, implemented in language, with its verbal attestations and attributive clarifications, and is absorbed within the procreative process, in turn on the one hand self-evident and pre-established and on the other hand equally intrinsically invested by more mobile and extensive instances, namely by that requirement of additional genetic variability that sexual reproduction represents and guarantees for all the species that use it, and, for the human being and for very few others especially, from that irreplaceable manifestation of expression and realization connected to non-generative sexuality, it is clear how a discourse relative to those parts and their integration can and should be considered to be meditated upon with regard to its ways and aims.

5

5. The male and female sexual organs are complementary and this seems to condense, and in a way that could be called conclusive, both their functionality and their purpose. The simplicity of this observation is at the same time true but also apparent or tendentially reductive, for man and woman, because their subjectivity (which is anything but simple) is fatally and intensely dynamized by this constitution. And it is now evident that in this chase of simplicity and complexity, or of the various degrees or cases of description and possible evocation on this theme, we must try to avoid mistaking rigidity for completeness and ultimativeness for ideal certainty and practice.

Just as every act, every judgment, every reaction or impression that has to do with the inevitable confrontation between human intelligence and reality, susceptible to intentionality or causality, desiring completeness or abbreviation, are on the whole an event that imposes a reading and a notion of objective reality, that is, it frees it from that imposition, and which can be found with regard to the complementarity of the sexual organs.

A factuality that is not merely a physical or mechanical datum, because it is already in itself an ideo-practical prototype of relationship, reciprocity, complete expectation and primary certainty of what the other is; thing, in turn complemented with who the other is. Obviously, this primary foundation of relationality and promises of happiness and humanization does not close the relational completion in the fortuitous simplicity of coupling, but neither does it close the signification of the organs themselves to pure organic evidence or simplicity.

The object and mechanical aspect of the complementarity of the sexual organs is not trivially preparatory to the physical and instinctual simplicity of mating. Their being parts sui generis for each individual, involves a reasoning on their essential relationality, like an escape from that self-all that circumscribes and keeps their owner I united. They set in motion a conceptual machine destined to engage in a series of categories (part-whole, empty-full, activity-passivity, pleasure-frustration, etc.) whose implication is a prelude to their development in elaboration and awareness.

That is, their mechanics find a dynamic correlation in concepts, beyond the immediacy of a palpability and an action that with their evidence could silence any questions or curiosities of further knowledge, and this also beyond the concrete experiences that they seal their gratifying execution.

One of the terms that refers to the mechanics of the sexual organs is creep. A term that can be attributed to various objective or subjective phenomena (for example the flow of time or a river) but which in this particular case shows a very peculiar aspect to the relationship between objects of the world and intellect. Compared to other possible synonyms (friction, interlocking, filling, crossing, etc.) the term sliding is interesting, as well as suitable, because it indicates something typical and intrinsic to the life of organisms with a circulatory system, it can in fact recall the flow of the blood. Blood circulation brings out something more complex than the simple progression of a fluid. It would not be possible in the absence of the vessels within which to flow and of a force that makes the blood progress. The concept of sliding therefore recalls and implies another concept: channeling, as well as thrust.

And it is as if a concept could be the child of another concept (something that flows in or around, from or towards something else), and vice versa parent of other concepts, including the one that could be a child of it (the channel allows the scrolling of something compared to something else). In a significant reference in which the life of corporeality is not exempt from a typical and coherent conceptuality even in the various concrete ways in which it manifests itself. Blood flows in the veins, air in the lungs, impulses along the nerve fibers, the penis in the vagina, milk in the nipples, and feeling and knowledge flow from one individual to another.

There is an inevitable similarity between and within the facts that belong to the vital, which is accompanied and superimposed by an analogous reference between the concepts relating to them. Their reciprocal genealogy may appear forced or approximate, but only until the vital is recognized that necessity and possibility of signification whose legibility has to do simultaneously with facts but also with concepts. The unity of life can be an observation that does not need words, exists and lives in facts and in the living. But if concepts, on the other hand, do their duty, to which their reciprocal and ramified genealogy belongs, especially in the sphere of the vital, the separation between abstraction and concreteness, rather than being considered liberating and inevitable, is precisely what must be 'be not so much avoided but controlled and