Abstract Sex

Concept and work

Abstract sex is Luciana Parisi's name for mutations produced when heterogeneous bodies enter symbiotic compositions without a reproductive telos, a genealogical line, or a guarantee of novelty. Her compact formulation follows a catalogue of reverse abduction, viral transmission, nuclearization and multiparasitism: “I call these mutations abstract sex.” It designates the potentials of intensive mutant matter and is neither progressive nor regressive (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Essays/Abstract Sex.pdf, pp. 4–5). The phrase is also the title and organizing concept of Parisi's 2004 book Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire.

The abstraction is material rather than a retreat from bodies. Sex is detached from copulation, binary gender and two-parent reproduction and redistributed across bacterial trading, endosymbiosis, parthenogenesis, genetic engineering and technical communication. The book's glossary accordingly defines abstract sex as the abstract machine of endosymbiosis, a network of mutations crossing biophysical, biocultural and biodigital strata (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Books/Author/Luciana Parisi - Abstract Sex_ Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Transversals_ New Directions in Philosophy Series).pdf, pp. 216–217).

Symbiotic mechanism

The biological lever is Lynn Margulis's account of mitochondrial endosymbiosis and microbial genetic exchange. Parisi treats the eukaryotic cell as an assembly of distinct lineages and bacterial sex as transmission across organisms rather than inheritance down a protected germ line. The relevant evolutionary rule is chance encounter: symbiotic trade produces compositions that need not resemble their parts and does not amount to cumulative improvement (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Essays/Abstract Sex.pdf, pp. 1–4).

This expands sex without making every relation metaphorically sexual. The operative test is material transmission and transformation: each participant in an assemblage is modified, and the resulting capacities cannot be read off from the identities of host, guest, parasite or apparatus. “There are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis,” Parisi writes, locating sex in ecosystems of micro-mutations moving at different speeds (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Essays/Abstract Sex.pdf, p. 4).

Micropolitics and non-climactic desire

Abstract sex contests two forms of political naturalism. Kevin Kelly's self-organizing networks turn randomness into a working whole—“control without control”—while Hardt and Negri retain a clean opposition between the creative multitude and an exterior parasitic Empire. Symbiotic modification allows neither purity: capture can inhabit collective production, while counter-power can hijack the channels of capture (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Essays/Abstract Sex.pdf, pp. 5–6).

The alternative is a pragmatics of encounters organized by capacities to affect and be affected rather than by fixed kinds. Its desire is non-climactic: it does not discharge toward a final object, and small interventions can resonate unknowably across a composition. This makes abstract sex a micropolitics of mutation, not a promise that mutation is emancipatory (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Essays/Abstract Sex.pdf, p. 7). Microfeminine warfare is the book's name for the political practice built from this account.

CCRU composition

In Matthew Fuller's interview, Parisi says that science fiction in Abstract Sex does not represent a separate reality but participates in fabricating the real: texts become bodies, affects and collective agents. She places this compositional method inside the CCRU machine, whose writings and events she describes as intensive experiments and whose concepts-actions intervene affectively in the social field (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Interviews/Matthew Fuller - Luciana Parisi Interview (2004).pdf, pp. 11–12). Abstract sex therefore intersects theory fiction and hyperstition, but its preferred mechanism is contagious composition rather than belief becoming true.

CONTRADICTION Andrew Goffey reads the book's conceptual proliferation as productive but also says that terms can appear to be named into existence without conventional justification, and asks whether the historically burdened word sex is adequate to nonhuman propagation (Luciana Parisi/Secondary Sources/Texts/Reviews/Goffry - Sex Cells (Review of Parisi - Abstract Sex) (Mute) (2009).pdf, pp. 1–2). Parisi's CCRU account treats precisely this nonrepresentational naming as an experimental intervention rather than a defect of exposition (Luciana Parisi/Texts/Interviews/Matthew Fuller - Luciana Parisi Interview (2004).pdf, p. 12).