The Corps-à-corps of Queer Love: Sex with Hegel and Derrida

For Hegel, sex is fundamentally an issue of rationality, one in which the manifestation of the seed or semen becomes the phenomenal substance par excellence for the sublation of life itself. Man’s ability to relate to himself, as a form of internal mediation, is similar to the generative work of the seed, which manifests in order to produce himself again as another kernel of self-relation. Spirit, as it is described in Philosophy of Right, is the filiation between father and son, the expression of rational ‘love’ that binds the family structure together and which concretises the father’s position as its head. There is no deviation from this according to Hegel, no queer divergence from the family unit or its understanding of love as the substantive feeling which unites members together under the auspice of one spiritually endowed sex which privileges male power, authority and sexuality. Queer love, it seems, has no possible place in Hegelian thinking.

In Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, however, resides a love story that departs from Hegel’s idealised notion of filiation, a corps-à-corps that engages with the formidable work of sublation and its attempt to rationalise sex as such. Corps-à-corps, from the literal French “body-to-body”, is a phrase that invokes “a dual,” “handto-hand combat,” “wrestling,” but also “intercourse,” “love-making,” or “a sexual embrace.” For Derrida, this corps-à-corps correlates with an intimate struggle or relationality that exists at the heart of translation itself, an operation that is always mediated by the violent threat of self-interruption and the irrevocable loss of meaning. Watching Queer, we are invited to contemplate Derrida’s corps-à-corps alongside Hegel’s notion of love, to consider the queer differences that ‘fall away’ as the remainders or excrements of desire which cannot be synthesised by sublation as such.