In this seminar, we'll map out a provisional novelistic subgenre: the novel of sexual ideas, in which plots of sexuality develop through or alongside philosophical speculation and argument about ethics, identity, pleasure, the will, the body and its sensations, instinct and impulse, subjects and objects. Combining the abstraction of the novel of ideas with the immediacy of the novel of sex, the novel of sexual ideas represents but also formalizes and philosophizes erotic life. The tradition of the novel of sexual ideas overlaps but is not identical with such traditions as the critique of the marriage plot, the novel of adultery, sex comedy, and the queer and trans novel. Unlike the novel of ideas, which often breaks away from narration into extended passages of philosophical argument, the novel of sexual ideas is more concrete in its philosophizing; it thinks through and with the particularities of bodies and intimacies. Unlike the pornographic novel, the novel of sexual ideas turns sex into a theoretical object, an ethical and political problem, an occasion for thought. The paradoxes that come from merging these two seemingly opposed genres will fuel our discussion.