Taking advantage of the PISA data, I had outlined an article about the mawkishness of pedagogical language. But, once finished, I thought it preferable to deal with a less controversial subject: the penis. Saint Augustine, who before being a friar was a cook, was the first to imagine the intimate history of Paradise in The City of God. Our first parents, he says, had sexual relations because they had to obey the commandment to "be fruitful and multiply". However, they were neither libidinous nor did they know shame. In Eden, there was nothing immodest. People spoke of sex as one speaks of the left elbow. All this ended the same day that man disobeyed God to please himself. The libido became independent of the will and blushing before nudity appeared. Adam and Eve, ashamed of their own body, ran to hide it.In the treatise De nuptiis et concupiscentia, Saint Augustine returns to emphasize that, after the apple blunder, the genitals became autonomous and, “although temperance or continence may curb their use a little, their excitement is uncontrolled". We should not be surprised by the absolute mastery of the body that existed in Paradise. Today there are also true virtuosos capable of controlling the movement of their ears or imitating any sound. There is no lack of those who, "without smelling, emit from the lower part of their body sounds so harmonious that you would say they are singing through that mouth". How can we not believe, then, that in Paradise all our members were subject to our will?Moses Nahmanides, a native of Girona born in 1194, translated this Augustinian interpretation of original sin into Judaism. In his Commentary on Genesis he asserts that in the Garden of Eden the bodies of Adam and Eve followed the perfect order of the celestial bodies: precise, but without free will. In their sexual relations there was not even a shred of lust. They sinned when, desiring a will of their own, they attained it.Rabbi David ben Joseph Kimhi, of Narbonne, reinforced the same thesis. After tasting the fruit of the tree, the genitals of Adam and Eve rejected all external authority, just as they had rejected the authority of God.
Following this tradition, Slavoj Zizek writes in The sublime object of ideology (1989) that the basic phallic experience is like a certain “everything depends on me, but, despite everything, I can do nothing about it”. To explain this contradiction to us, he deploys two arguments. The first, erudite, and the second, popular.The erudite argument borrows from Saint Augustine the idea that original sin implied the liberation of sex from any functional dimension; that is why it is untamable. Its non-functional drive turns the phallus into "the part of the man's body that escapes his control, the point where the body itself takes revenge on him for his false pride. Someone with enough willpower can starve to death in a room full of delicious food; however, if a virgin [sic] passes by, his willpower will not stop the erection of his phallus".The popular argument, as is usual with Zizek, is a joke. "What is the lightest object on earth?", he asks us. The answer is: "The phallus, because it is the only thing that can rise just with a thought".Zizek's conclusion is that phallus designates the crossroads where the radical exteriority of the body –insofar as it is independent and resistant to our will– converges with the pure interiority of thought. "While my body depends on me, with the phallus this dependence becomes a puzzle”. The phallus would mark the point of coincidence between the omnipotence of "everything depends on me" and the total impotence of "there is nothing I can do about it".I add a note about those who, "without smelling, emit from the lower part of the body sounds so harmonious that you would say they are singing". This was the case of Josep Pujol from Reus, who became famous in the world of Parisian music-halls by posing as a Marseillais with the stage name Le Pétomane. He played Au clair de la lune with a flageolet...April 1970. In the Francoist Cortes, there is a debate about sex education. The chronicler Joaquín Aguirre Bellver summarized the debate as follows: "A boy without sex education sees Sophia Loren pass by, thinks what he wants, and whistles. On the other hand, a boy with sex education sees Sophia Loren pass by, thinks the same thing, and does not whistle". It turns out that educating is also trying to contain within its limits (and in an always precarious way) that which always returns, because not everything in man is a social construct. The problem with today's school, in my opinion, is not its resistance to change, but, quite the contrary, its voluntary ignorance of what does not change in human nature: of what always returns.
