The far-right Juan Manuel de la Prada recommends a new(ish) book on the perversion of human sexuality in today’s world by a left-wing Italian author Diego Fusaro.
Fusaro explains that starting with ancient Greeks, humans saw the sex drive as something that could make them nobler, more civilized. Standing in awe of beauty brought people closer to the divine. In Middle Ages, the ideals of courtly (or romantic, as we know it today) love valued the capacity to control our instincts. Love was a way for humans to come closer to God and for God to reveal himself to humans.
We, on the other hand, have been persuaded that throwing all this away and turning sex and love into a competition in consumerism is liberating when it’s the worst prison of all. The new erotic order that we are living in turns our love lives into meat markets. Those who don’t want to put their bodies into circulation on these meat markets are called oppressive, patriarchal, sexist and something-phobic.
More on Fusaro later.
Clarissa's Blog 
….so leftists (some of them, anyway) are right on certain things.
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It doesn’t seem to be available in English yet, alas.
But Marx, Epicurus, and the Origins of Historical Materialism has been translated, and that looks interesting! I will see if I can wrangle a copy…
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If I may make a correction: he is not left-wing, in reality he is very much an anti-communist, but he is, in his own words, a MarxIAN philosopher. He insists that he is not a MarxIST, and in the Italian philosophical tradition there is indeed a difference between Marxist and Marxian. The former means the same as in English, and has a distinct political connotation, in the pragmatic sense of the word. The latter, with which Fusaro identifies, refers to Marx as a political economist and a philosopher rather than to any Marxist revolutionary approaches.
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