5. To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely THERE WHERE YOU ARE NOT-this is the beginning of writing.

What seems the whole of our earthly being, our ur-humanity released through our flesh as through the other’s flesh, our animality mastered and yet unleashed— recentering and transfiguring everything that we thought possible in human encounter—entails a spiritual surrender. And I think there ought to be no shame in living as innocents before it as we discover this power in the face of our objects of desire. We cradle one another. We rock one another. The expressiveness of kissing naturally takes on qualities of nursing and oral play. Tickling and teasing, ostensibly such instinctive games of childhood, become adult speech acts testing and pushing the limits of one’s self-definition.

So, in saying that a person without sufficient social and psychological agency is without ethics, Foucault is, in effect, maintaining that such a person does not truly have a Self. In the 21st century, one’s ethos is still seen by one’s dress, by one’s bearing, by one’s gait, by gestural grace, by the poise with which one reacts to challenges and events. As such, a person without sufficient social and psychological agency is lacking in embodiment. The truth-teller, the parrhesiast, must speak masterfully; he or she must express the world as her or his body, and must have courage to open its earthly awareness, its fleshly consciousness, to the flesh of the other. And it should also go without saying that without a body it is very difficult to have sex.