Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality [Paperback]

Examines the consequences of utter affirmations of our world as it is, exploring the themes of transgressive sexuality, political anarchism, addiction, death, and embodiment.

Sartwell invokes and comments in detail on selected texts of Emerson, Nietzsche, Havel, various anarchists, and Oglala Sioux. His book has made me examine more closely the relationship between my own philosophical concerns and the way I live my life. The book is clear, impassioned, personal, and engaging. --Cutrofello, Loyola University of Chicago

The book is astonishingly honest. Sartwell does not shy away from telling us anything about his past behaviors or attitudes. He manages to do this without posturing or pointing to his honesty. I also find the anti-interpretation of reality shocking and interesting. I like the book even though I disagreed with something on nearly every page. I think that that is always a sign of a book worth reading. I read it in two sittings in between which I wanted to get back to it. This seems something of a tour de force! --Leigh Brown, Northern Arizona University

Sartwell presents an extreme and provocative philosophy of life. He explores what happens if we love this world precisely as it is, with all of its pain, with all of its evil, with all of its bizarre and arbitrary and monstrous thereness. In a highly personal and brutally direct style, Sartwell explores the themes of transgressive sexuality, political anarchism, addiction, death, and embodiment.

The author engages contemporary and historical debates in cultural criticism, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, and expresses deep suspicions about them. He asserts that scientific philosophical conceptualization is a movement toward death, a rejection of reality.

Moral and political values--the ethical rejection of the particular precisely from within the particular--are, Sartwell claims, an assault on human authenticity. Thus, transgression--whiclC