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MURIEL DIMEN'S new book brings together a selection of her papers from the last decade. She begins with a quote from Go Tell It on the Mountain. Is something religious in store? Is she hinting that she has a “word” to bring? If so, I'd say the word is that there is no one word. Many words in multiple tongues are spoken from this mountain-top. Dimen speaks the tongues of feminism, relational psychoanalysis, and political theory. In a prophetic voice she says we must abandon our naive faith in our particular language and recognize there is too much going on in the realm of sex for any one voice to be adequate. No one model is sufficient when it comes to thinking about sex. She urges us to open ourselves to diverse models, only then do we have a prayer of apprehending human sexuality.
Since the beginning of Western civilization, sex (eros) has been recognized as one of the major forces disturbing reason and order. Freud figures prominently among the legions of thinkers struggling to conceptualize the wildness of sexual drives but, as Dimen notes, his reasoning “beyond the pleasure principle” stumbles, falters, limps, and turns back on itself.
Dimen's distinctive style is, like Freud's, hard to characterize. She reminds me of a minstrel, dancing onto the stage with a bag of stories and tricks, carrying pins and balls that she undertakes to juggle in the air. She seems not to mind if one or two balls fall to the ground. With postmodern agility she recognizes that our thinking is a kind of compelling play with ideas, models, words, and stories. What she has to say is challenging and sometimes confusing, but she anticipates we will join her in the