Let us be honest: Those of us attracted to The Emperor's New Nudity are in hopes of finding an intellectual hero who can lead us out of the digital, Fascist-tending labyrinth in which society now finds itself; and if we are to take into account qualities including a rational and penetrating investigative schema, astonishing erudition -- and a willingness to bare his own soul -- then Yuval Kremnitzer comes very close to being that hero for us.

The conventional wisdom is that the mass media has always tended towards the lowest common denominator, rife with the fears and prejudices and desires lingering from our biological evolution; with the internet, we have created an ultra mass media in which these obsessions have become prominent and inescapable fixtures in our daily lives; and it is in this environment that a public figure such as a Trump, Berlusconi, or Netanyahu has been able to gain traction.

Kremnitzer, however, goes much, much deeper in attempting to deconstruct this state of affairs; and in doing so he takes advantage, first, of the fact that his scholarly focus has been on the "unwritten law", i.e., precisely that never quite stabilized interface between our primal obsessions and a rational public order; and in engaging with an incredible "A" to "Z" of  philosophic, political, economic, and sociological thinkers -- from Aristotle to Zupančič -- his big success with this book has been in demonstrating that the "unwritten law" has always bedeviled society, and that our current chaos is but the past writ large.

And it is of course our sexuality which is at the heart of the "unwritten law":

“As Alenka Zupančič shows, sexuality is the primary site where nature and culture are paradoxically entangled, [ . . . which] is to say that nature and culture can neither be set apart as two independent entities nor integrated harmoniously into one.” (p. 55)

This passage, moreover, is an example of the second strength which Kremnitzer brings to his task: as one of the members of the Slavoj Žižek school -- and like their mentor, followers, in turn, of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan -- he is able to bring the insights of that discipline to bear; and so, as hinted at by his title, we must not be surprised to find that our human sexuality is perhaps the core subject of a book which The MIT Press has published as a work of political science.

And beyond this point the sensible book reviewer will not go, as  it would be quite difficult to summarize the author's conclusions. Instead, and by way of tribute to Mr. Kremnitzer, he has collected a set of key passages from the book, [1] and which will also provide an overall guide to its organization.

A caveat, however: Given that we actually do find ourselves in a digital labyrinth of our own making, we must have compassion for the author if -- like all of us -- he is in many passages blindly feeling the walls.

And a final, personal note: it is the hope of this reviewer that we can come to see our own era as a new Renaissance, and in which scientific and technological discovery goes hand in hand with an enlightened appreciation for the sensuous and beautiful human form.

Notes

[1] https://hcommons.org/?get_group_doc=1004163/1744394582-Selected_Passages_from_The_Emperors_New_Nudity.pdf.