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2002-05-24 | 4:19 p.m.

If there is such a thing as an avant-garde, then there ought to be something like an outside guard (a dehors-garde?) where we do not expect others to follow in the footsteps of the transgressor, ever.

I am deeply annoyed by this article in the Guardian, which glorifies the promiscuity of a French intellectual, one Catherine Millet, to a degree that I find ridiculous. Millet wrote a book called The Sexual Life of Catherine Millet describing in controlled prose her anonymous sexual encounters with hundreds of men. Fair enough. Like Wilt Chamberlain's book, except Millet is an art curator and her book was published by a small press, so we are meant to understand that she is an intellectual and her behavior constitutes a kind of revolutionary political statement.

The reviewer implies that this sort of anonymous rampant promiscuity is not only purposefully intellectual, but constitutes a form of biological manifest destiny.

Well, fuck that.

When the article ponders "the issue of whether acts of sexual transgression still have the power to subvert," all I can think is, subvert what? Common sense?

I'm not saying all this at the expense of Catherine Millet, mind you, who (by the way) fantasizes about being a "spunk bag" at the disposal of "stressed executives." I read an excerpt of her book at the publisher's web site and it seemed reasonably interesting. But when the Guardian reviewer implies that Millet's way is the one true way, and anybody who disagrees with it as a raison d'etre is just a reactionary loser, then I get irritated.

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