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Excesses: Eros and Culture
Excesses is a very successful attempt to break out of the closets in which we conceptualize our identity and our eros. Lingis has travelled to, and participated in, some of the last remaining oases of “primitive” cultures. He combines an obvious poet’s eye with a not-so-obvious philosophical ability to discriminate systematically and to generalize. We are helped to see the shape―and limitations―of one of our own cultural identity through the amazing contrasts which Lingis sets up like screens for our inspection.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
166 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
3 people are currently reading
136 people want to read
About the author
Alphonso Lingis
42 books57 followersAlphonso Lingis was an American philosopher, writer and translator, with Lithuanian roots, professor emeritus of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization included phenomenology, existentialism, and ethics. Lingis is also known as a photographer, and he complements the philosophical themes of many of his books with his own photography.
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September 25, 2023
this is one of the most beuatiful books ever written if you can get past the violent othering. that is a big if
Preface
• In this book I set out to explore the impulses—the excessive impulses—of our eroticism in new ways, in remote places.
• I first show how I came to think that the craving and longing in eros are not really cravings of the I, longings for the I. The dismembered and voluptuous eye seeks, in the deep, for the look of the other.
• In East Africa I saw the primary process libido inscribed on the surfaces, producing surface and ephemeral egos.
• In Khajuraho, in medieval India, I came to distinguish three kinds of sublimation.
• In Bali I found a solar version of the death drive.
• In the New Guinea highlands, I found a cannibalism that was not the inauguration of civilization, that is, in Freud’s terms, of castration.
• In a Tantric ritual witnessed in Sri Lanka, I saw a face of sovereignty. Not the sovereignty of the person, but of the compas¬sionate no-self, eyes open upon the universal impermanence.
• What then would be the association of men who are not civilized, that is, not determined by instinctual renunciation, not castrated, not tooled for one another, not agents of an exchange economy? At the end of the book I thought about that, thought about six encounters in the East where contact was made across the most remote social distances.
1. The Rapture of the Deep
• Since the individual identifies himself with the phallus inserted in the vagina and with the spermatozoa swarming into the body of the female, he also repeats symbolically the danger of death which his animal ancestors victor¬iously overcame in the geological cataclysms of the drying up of the sea
• The deep is all in surface effects. The rapture of the deep is not different from the delight before the fugitive inventions in foam and spray of the waves at the surface.
• Yet why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss?
• If the law of thought is that it should search out profundity, whether it extends upwards or downwards, then it seemed excessively illogical to me that men should not discover depths of a kind on the “surface,” that vital borderline that endorses our separateness and our form, dividing our exterior from our interior. Why should they not be attracted by the profundity of the surface itself?
• Portman introduced the idea of “organs to be looked at.” Before the plumage and display behaviors of the bird-of-paradise, before the coiled horns of the mountain sheep, one has to admit a specific development of the organism to capture another eye.
• Denuded of one’s very postural schema, of one’s own motility, swept away and scattered by the surge, one does nothing in the deep. One takes nothing, apprehends nothing, comprehends nothing. One is only a brief visitor, an eye that no longer pilots or estimates, that moves, or rather is moved, with nothing in view.
• For the eye moved by the thalassa complex the deep is an erotogenic zone.’ The eye adrift in the deep is not penetrating, examining, interrogating, surveying, gauging. It passes over surface effects, caresses.
• The caress that passes over the surface abdicates its force, it makes contact only to expose itself. It has no ends in mind, is not manipulating means, does not know what it wants. The organ that caresses does not take up or take over, does not appropriate. It returns without return, without profit. The organism that caresses is not gathering sensations, gathering information, perceiving, is not a sense organ. It does not circumscribe forms, is not informed by what it fondles.
• It violates every secrecy without learning anything; it profanes. Profanation designates the violence of the one that breaks into the sacred precincts, the templum, that forces the tabernacle where the secret, the wisdom and the law, abide, without discovering anything, finding himself in the presence of the utterly strange, the god.
• The imperative to go down into the deep, the thalassa complex, is undoubtedly futile—the deep is not the way to the profound or the substantial—and regressive.
Savages
• In Vanishing Africa^ Mirella Ricciardi reveals how she was arrested and almost expelled from Kenya after the Maasai, who at first welcomed her fully, gradually came to think her interest in photographing the nakedness of their young men was pornographic. When she managed, through connections in high government ministries, to get back to them, she found it advisable not to photograph young men head-on. And now we find that the Maasai section of her book begins with four close-ups of the bare behinds of warriors.
• Of all that is savage about savages, the most savage is what they do to themselves. They paint, puncture, tattoo, scarify, cicatrize, circumcise, subincise themselves. They use their own flesh as so much material at hand for—what? We hardly know how to characterize it-- Art? Inscription? Sign-language? Or isn’t all that more like hex signs?
• What we are dealing with is inscription. Where writing, graphics, is not inscription on clay tablets, bark or papyrus, but in flesh and blood, and also where it is not historical, narrative. Where it is not significant, not a matter of marks whose role is to signify, to efface themselves before the meaning, or ideality, or logos. For here the signs count: they hurt. Before they make sense to the reader, they give pain to the living substrate.
• Inscription, then, writing, does not simply originate from care for and respect for oral speech. Plato’s innocence can no longer be ours—Plato who took writing to be a copy of a copy, visual imitation of the phonic stream of vocal signs, which is itself a copy or imitation of the logos, the chain of ideas. Significant writing, historicizing writing, begins with empires; it is invented to inscribe the decrees, the ipsissitna verba of the despot. Then it is lined up with oral language, becomes subordinate to it, making possible its reproduc¬tion.
• But before historical— narrative, signifying, phonocentric, logocentric—inscription, there is a savage inscription not yet despotic, not serving oral speech. It pains, rather than signifies.
• The body of a savage is so much earth, so much clay, a cuneiform tablet. It is not, as ours for us, the very expression, moment by moment, of an inward spirit," or a person belonging to himself.
• There is inscription, and there is codification. Operations strange and uncivilized, as well as not natural, not biological. Inscription and codification of what? Of, we shall say, excitations.
• In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud was working at a concept of the libidinal essence of life. He did not begin with the concept of intentions, or of sensations, that is, signifying impressions; he worked with the concept of excitations. The Freudian distinction between primary processes and secondary processes is not a distinction between sensations, intentional processes, and the pure excitations that would have been their raw material. It is rather a distinction between freely mobile excitations and bound excitations.
o The term excitation is not a physico-chemical term; an excitation is not the simple effect of a stimulus, a transmission of energy. It occurs in the physico-chemical mass of material nature when there is an effect disproportionate to its cause. These effects are libidinal life itself. Their nature can be circumscribed, at least, with the terms intensity and discharge, pain and pleasure, putting together these two sets of concepts, physical and psychic. They are moments when force intensifies, when a surplus builds in the machinery, when a potential upsurges, a superabundance, that then discharges. The release of this force, its dying, is felt as pleasure.
o This libidinal life should not be pictured, topographically, as a depth of inward life. It is superficial, all surface. It is the slippery effervescence at the conjuncture of mouth with breast, anus and exterior, urethra at the point where the urine surfaces, thumb with lips, finger with nostril. Couplings, for the sake of the surface effects—that is the machinery of the libido. The libidinal zone in the body is the skin—skin and the mucous orifices that prolong it inward, but where the finger, tongue or penis will make contact with more skin.
o Even when one enters into the orifices that open on the body surface, the finger, tongue or penis that penetrates does not make contact with a sphere of immanence, a control-room or broadcasting studio; it only slides in into more surface effects. Wet pants, pap slobbered over one’s chest and thighs, what difference, for the finger that plays with that, from the saliva in one’s mouth, the poo in one’s anus? Wet inner surface of the lip dragged over the shoulders, ejaculating penis rolling over her breasts, labia rubbing over his nose, two lovers are sea cucumbers turning their organs inside out, as sluggish.
• Whence the instability characteristic of these subjectivities, these nodes of identity, that form in the erotogenic zone. Are they the subjectivities of this core body, this Id, in the sense that, in the classical body, the soul is the form of the amorphous prime matter of the body? Are they somehow the cause, or at least the finality, of its being a unit? Or is subjectivity transcendental; are they related as transcendental ground is to the empirically conditioned? Or is the ego the function through which the Id enters into relationship with the outside? Answer: none of the above.
• ON SCARS: The eye that looks at them does not read them; it winces, it senses the pain. ****
• They are points of high tension; intensities zigzag across them, releasing themselves, dying away orgasmically, into a tingling of pleasure. In voluptuous torments, more exactly, and not in contentment, that is, comatose states of equilibrium.
• The oral and anal phase not overcome, renounced, but deviated…the phallic dominion decentralized.
• SUMMARY HERE: the libidinal point of view is where the egos are multiple and superficial, surface effects. They form at the couplings, where an excess potential develops.
• This is not yet a semiotic system
• The civilized body is not an erotogenic surface, spreading perversely its excitations over a closed body without organs beneath. It is body and soul one
Khajuraho
• Hindu’s pray naked. Decency is not at stake
• Making love with his wife, a Hindu thinks of God of which she is an
• expression and a part. How beautiful it must be to have a woman who understands that, who spreads immensity over the small but so troubling and decisive spasm of love, over this sudden and great abandon.
• The erotic impulse is equivocal
o On one hand, its exclusionary
o On the other, sensuality spreads, generalizes.
• The sense of the equivocation in the sexual drive is at the core of the Platonic ,and Freudian theories of sublimation. That is, the hypothesis that the search for knowledge, the striving for justice, the longing for beauty, the metaphysical nostalgia for unity and whole¬ ness in the diversity and the transience of experience owe their force to genital rather than cerebral drives, represent transformations of or disguises of libido.
• Freud, too, explained the most sublime by the most carnal. Resisting the Socratic identification of truth with the good, of curiosity with virtue, he sensed something devouring, penetrating, violating in the craving to know.
• Freud’s positivist concept of libido is divested of all teleology. Libido is not a, lack, a penia, that ceaselessly seeks the unending, but an excess tension that tends to neutralize itself and is unending because it has no ends; it is desire without being desire for something, desire for nothing or desire to be nothing, compulsion of an excess to discharge itself.
• For Freud if the polymorphously perverse libido has no natural object, it itself has a nature, a proper realization: it is a tropism of release, of immediate gratification. The Freudian analysis is not a phenomenology but a physics: the libido is not equal to the succession of its forms; it is the invariant force behind all of them, a force ever transforming forms but never itself transformed.
• Could one then imagine an eroticism that would spread every¬ where, invade all the domains of high culture, and not be a contagion of misery, not be driven by frustration?
• To visualize such a thing, it is enough to go visit Khajuraho, in central India, and its wonderful temples.
o Auto-erotic stimulation, .dual and multiple cunnilinctio, penilinctio, copulation, homosexual and bestial intercourse circulate about the temple walls, without primacy of place or of artistry given to any figure. There is nowhere suggestion of audacity or provocation, the leers that would suggest civic taboos being violated in the sacred precincts. Within the erotic there is not selection of with whom and for what being taught, but an extensive intelligence deriving all the possibilities and an artist sensibility perfecting the form and equilibrium of each mode.
o And the human body here does not only, in its orgasmic intensity, contract every organic form, it does so to the point of carnal’ intercourse with every form of body.
o Here pleasure is not being conceived in the psychoanalytic way, as the immediacy of sense gratification, and tension release. On all the tableaux of Khajuraho the intensity of the serpent charge is being maintained. It is sustained because what is immediately disclosed in carnal contact is the most remote and strange things, scorpion, sea anemone, comet in oneself.
The Rangda
• In a village in Bali where a malaise has for some time now been making itself felt, a halian falls into a trance and announces it is time to take out the mask of the Rangda, which is kept in the Pura Dalem, the temple of Death.
Black Gods
• For Freudian psychoanalysis human society is founded on the castration complex: the prohibition of immediate gratification is the first law of civilization. From the interdiction of a field of immediate pleasure objects there is elaborated systems of implements, economic commodities, markets, political identities, aesthetic and ritual objects, linguistic constructions, which do not give immediate gratification but offer significance. Objects have become significant, pleasure¬ surfaces have given place to signs. Psychoanalytic interpretation consists in finding phallic significance in tools, artworks, cognitive entities, sacramental objects. The first pleasure object to become significant, through the prohibition of immediate gratification, was the object immediately on hand, one’s own body; the castrated penis became a phallus.
• The phallus is first constituted in repression; it is that which was first discovered as a lack, a want of being. This lack opens the space beyond the immediately given into which signs signify. The objects that have become signs, that do not offer immediate gratification but refer beyond themselves, refer clandestinely to this absence. The objects open to civilized, that is, castrated, man are metaphors and metonymies of the phallus.
• Levi-Strauss had proposed to elucidate elements like the Polynesian mana by their structural function in the field of signs.* Terms whose signification is not circumscribed by opposition to other significations, they figure as floating signifiers.” Their occurrence, and even necessity, can be understood by the modern structuralist treatment of cultural orders as semiotic systems.
• Rather with the first sign-system, the whole universe becomes significant, all signification is there, and the most rudi¬mentary language, that of the ooo-aah, Fort-Da language of Freud’s grandchild,^ is capable of signifying anything that has to be signified. The new signifiers that are introduced do not extend the field of what can be signified, but rather make new discriminations within it. There is, then, always a surplus of the signifiable over and beyond what has been discriminated by signs, and a floating signifier in each semiotic system functions to mark this excess.
• Lacan identifies the phallus not as such a floating signifier in the sense that the phallus would be a sign whose signification would be constantly shifting in the system. The phallus is rather the original lack in the system. It has been barred from the first. It is what is always signified by metaphor and by metonymy. It is the zero-signifier that is lacking from the first, and whose lack causes the shifting in the field of signifiers, the combinations and the substitu¬tions, the metonymies and the metaphors, in the speech addressed to the other.
• he terms of every language are formulated to mark the place of the absence of objects, and are themselves formed by the unreality of the objects; the infantile language, or more exactly the inscription, the hieroglyphics and the rebus, of the infantile dream continues to formulate only the demand still addressed to the other.
• In this situation the identification of the mirror image as himself is not merely a predicative and judgmental synthesis, “That is me!”; it is an affective and projective identification. Not an identification of it, but an identification with it. The infant is alienated into the image, captivated by it. For the mirror image functions vitally as a factor of integration: it presents the infant with an anticipated composition of the fragments of his body into a subsistent totality.
• GREAT SUMMARY OF LACAN HONESTLY
• Castration phobia in boys and penis envy in girls does not originate in real threats of castration addressed to the child by the real father (more often in fact formulated by the mother), but in the discovery that the penis is missing in the mother. Missing at the place from which the child has come to understand he has himself issued. There arises the phallus as what is signified by the desire of the mother, that which is addressed in the voluptuous desire of the mother the infant has felt by feeling it turned in his direction. There arises the voluptuous wish to be a phallus for the mother.
• The seriousness of the word of the father is engraved on the body of the mother, in the castration of the mother. It designates the phallus, pure signification and original absence, as that to which the desire of the mother has always been addressed. If the child can will to subject himself to the law of the father, if he can will the castration of his penis from his body as immediate pleasure-object, this is because he wills to be the absence designated by the craving of the mother, he wills to be the
Preface
• In this book I set out to explore the impulses—the excessive impulses—of our eroticism in new ways, in remote places.
• I first show how I came to think that the craving and longing in eros are not really cravings of the I, longings for the I. The dismembered and voluptuous eye seeks, in the deep, for the look of the other.
• In East Africa I saw the primary process libido inscribed on the surfaces, producing surface and ephemeral egos.
• In Khajuraho, in medieval India, I came to distinguish three kinds of sublimation.
• In Bali I found a solar version of the death drive.
• In the New Guinea highlands, I found a cannibalism that was not the inauguration of civilization, that is, in Freud’s terms, of castration.
• In a Tantric ritual witnessed in Sri Lanka, I saw a face of sovereignty. Not the sovereignty of the person, but of the compas¬sionate no-self, eyes open upon the universal impermanence.
• What then would be the association of men who are not civilized, that is, not determined by instinctual renunciation, not castrated, not tooled for one another, not agents of an exchange economy? At the end of the book I thought about that, thought about six encounters in the East where contact was made across the most remote social distances.
1. The Rapture of the Deep
• Since the individual identifies himself with the phallus inserted in the vagina and with the spermatozoa swarming into the body of the female, he also repeats symbolically the danger of death which his animal ancestors victor¬iously overcame in the geological cataclysms of the drying up of the sea
• The deep is all in surface effects. The rapture of the deep is not different from the delight before the fugitive inventions in foam and spray of the waves at the surface.
• Yet why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss?
• If the law of thought is that it should search out profundity, whether it extends upwards or downwards, then it seemed excessively illogical to me that men should not discover depths of a kind on the “surface,” that vital borderline that endorses our separateness and our form, dividing our exterior from our interior. Why should they not be attracted by the profundity of the surface itself?
• Portman introduced the idea of “organs to be looked at.” Before the plumage and display behaviors of the bird-of-paradise, before the coiled horns of the mountain sheep, one has to admit a specific development of the organism to capture another eye.
• Denuded of one’s very postural schema, of one’s own motility, swept away and scattered by the surge, one does nothing in the deep. One takes nothing, apprehends nothing, comprehends nothing. One is only a brief visitor, an eye that no longer pilots or estimates, that moves, or rather is moved, with nothing in view.
• For the eye moved by the thalassa complex the deep is an erotogenic zone.’ The eye adrift in the deep is not penetrating, examining, interrogating, surveying, gauging. It passes over surface effects, caresses.
• The caress that passes over the surface abdicates its force, it makes contact only to expose itself. It has no ends in mind, is not manipulating means, does not know what it wants. The organ that caresses does not take up or take over, does not appropriate. It returns without return, without profit. The organism that caresses is not gathering sensations, gathering information, perceiving, is not a sense organ. It does not circumscribe forms, is not informed by what it fondles.
• It violates every secrecy without learning anything; it profanes. Profanation designates the violence of the one that breaks into the sacred precincts, the templum, that forces the tabernacle where the secret, the wisdom and the law, abide, without discovering anything, finding himself in the presence of the utterly strange, the god.
• The imperative to go down into the deep, the thalassa complex, is undoubtedly futile—the deep is not the way to the profound or the substantial—and regressive.
Savages
• In Vanishing Africa^ Mirella Ricciardi reveals how she was arrested and almost expelled from Kenya after the Maasai, who at first welcomed her fully, gradually came to think her interest in photographing the nakedness of their young men was pornographic. When she managed, through connections in high government ministries, to get back to them, she found it advisable not to photograph young men head-on. And now we find that the Maasai section of her book begins with four close-ups of the bare behinds of warriors.
• Of all that is savage about savages, the most savage is what they do to themselves. They paint, puncture, tattoo, scarify, cicatrize, circumcise, subincise themselves. They use their own flesh as so much material at hand for—what? We hardly know how to characterize it-- Art? Inscription? Sign-language? Or isn’t all that more like hex signs?
• What we are dealing with is inscription. Where writing, graphics, is not inscription on clay tablets, bark or papyrus, but in flesh and blood, and also where it is not historical, narrative. Where it is not significant, not a matter of marks whose role is to signify, to efface themselves before the meaning, or ideality, or logos. For here the signs count: they hurt. Before they make sense to the reader, they give pain to the living substrate.
• Inscription, then, writing, does not simply originate from care for and respect for oral speech. Plato’s innocence can no longer be ours—Plato who took writing to be a copy of a copy, visual imitation of the phonic stream of vocal signs, which is itself a copy or imitation of the logos, the chain of ideas. Significant writing, historicizing writing, begins with empires; it is invented to inscribe the decrees, the ipsissitna verba of the despot. Then it is lined up with oral language, becomes subordinate to it, making possible its reproduc¬tion.
• But before historical— narrative, signifying, phonocentric, logocentric—inscription, there is a savage inscription not yet despotic, not serving oral speech. It pains, rather than signifies.
• The body of a savage is so much earth, so much clay, a cuneiform tablet. It is not, as ours for us, the very expression, moment by moment, of an inward spirit," or a person belonging to himself.
• There is inscription, and there is codification. Operations strange and uncivilized, as well as not natural, not biological. Inscription and codification of what? Of, we shall say, excitations.
• In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud was working at a concept of the libidinal essence of life. He did not begin with the concept of intentions, or of sensations, that is, signifying impressions; he worked with the concept of excitations. The Freudian distinction between primary processes and secondary processes is not a distinction between sensations, intentional processes, and the pure excitations that would have been their raw material. It is rather a distinction between freely mobile excitations and bound excitations.
o The term excitation is not a physico-chemical term; an excitation is not the simple effect of a stimulus, a transmission of energy. It occurs in the physico-chemical mass of material nature when there is an effect disproportionate to its cause. These effects are libidinal life itself. Their nature can be circumscribed, at least, with the terms intensity and discharge, pain and pleasure, putting together these two sets of concepts, physical and psychic. They are moments when force intensifies, when a surplus builds in the machinery, when a potential upsurges, a superabundance, that then discharges. The release of this force, its dying, is felt as pleasure.
o This libidinal life should not be pictured, topographically, as a depth of inward life. It is superficial, all surface. It is the slippery effervescence at the conjuncture of mouth with breast, anus and exterior, urethra at the point where the urine surfaces, thumb with lips, finger with nostril. Couplings, for the sake of the surface effects—that is the machinery of the libido. The libidinal zone in the body is the skin—skin and the mucous orifices that prolong it inward, but where the finger, tongue or penis will make contact with more skin.
o Even when one enters into the orifices that open on the body surface, the finger, tongue or penis that penetrates does not make contact with a sphere of immanence, a control-room or broadcasting studio; it only slides in into more surface effects. Wet pants, pap slobbered over one’s chest and thighs, what difference, for the finger that plays with that, from the saliva in one’s mouth, the poo in one’s anus? Wet inner surface of the lip dragged over the shoulders, ejaculating penis rolling over her breasts, labia rubbing over his nose, two lovers are sea cucumbers turning their organs inside out, as sluggish.
• Whence the instability characteristic of these subjectivities, these nodes of identity, that form in the erotogenic zone. Are they the subjectivities of this core body, this Id, in the sense that, in the classical body, the soul is the form of the amorphous prime matter of the body? Are they somehow the cause, or at least the finality, of its being a unit? Or is subjectivity transcendental; are they related as transcendental ground is to the empirically conditioned? Or is the ego the function through which the Id enters into relationship with the outside? Answer: none of the above.
• ON SCARS: The eye that looks at them does not read them; it winces, it senses the pain. ****
• They are points of high tension; intensities zigzag across them, releasing themselves, dying away orgasmically, into a tingling of pleasure. In voluptuous torments, more exactly, and not in contentment, that is, comatose states of equilibrium.
• The oral and anal phase not overcome, renounced, but deviated…the phallic dominion decentralized.
• SUMMARY HERE: the libidinal point of view is where the egos are multiple and superficial, surface effects. They form at the couplings, where an excess potential develops.
• This is not yet a semiotic system
• The civilized body is not an erotogenic surface, spreading perversely its excitations over a closed body without organs beneath. It is body and soul one
Khajuraho
• Hindu’s pray naked. Decency is not at stake
• Making love with his wife, a Hindu thinks of God of which she is an
• expression and a part. How beautiful it must be to have a woman who understands that, who spreads immensity over the small but so troubling and decisive spasm of love, over this sudden and great abandon.
• The erotic impulse is equivocal
o On one hand, its exclusionary
o On the other, sensuality spreads, generalizes.
• The sense of the equivocation in the sexual drive is at the core of the Platonic ,and Freudian theories of sublimation. That is, the hypothesis that the search for knowledge, the striving for justice, the longing for beauty, the metaphysical nostalgia for unity and whole¬ ness in the diversity and the transience of experience owe their force to genital rather than cerebral drives, represent transformations of or disguises of libido.
• Freud, too, explained the most sublime by the most carnal. Resisting the Socratic identification of truth with the good, of curiosity with virtue, he sensed something devouring, penetrating, violating in the craving to know.
• Freud’s positivist concept of libido is divested of all teleology. Libido is not a, lack, a penia, that ceaselessly seeks the unending, but an excess tension that tends to neutralize itself and is unending because it has no ends; it is desire without being desire for something, desire for nothing or desire to be nothing, compulsion of an excess to discharge itself.
• For Freud if the polymorphously perverse libido has no natural object, it itself has a nature, a proper realization: it is a tropism of release, of immediate gratification. The Freudian analysis is not a phenomenology but a physics: the libido is not equal to the succession of its forms; it is the invariant force behind all of them, a force ever transforming forms but never itself transformed.
• Could one then imagine an eroticism that would spread every¬ where, invade all the domains of high culture, and not be a contagion of misery, not be driven by frustration?
• To visualize such a thing, it is enough to go visit Khajuraho, in central India, and its wonderful temples.
o Auto-erotic stimulation, .dual and multiple cunnilinctio, penilinctio, copulation, homosexual and bestial intercourse circulate about the temple walls, without primacy of place or of artistry given to any figure. There is nowhere suggestion of audacity or provocation, the leers that would suggest civic taboos being violated in the sacred precincts. Within the erotic there is not selection of with whom and for what being taught, but an extensive intelligence deriving all the possibilities and an artist sensibility perfecting the form and equilibrium of each mode.
o And the human body here does not only, in its orgasmic intensity, contract every organic form, it does so to the point of carnal’ intercourse with every form of body.
o Here pleasure is not being conceived in the psychoanalytic way, as the immediacy of sense gratification, and tension release. On all the tableaux of Khajuraho the intensity of the serpent charge is being maintained. It is sustained because what is immediately disclosed in carnal contact is the most remote and strange things, scorpion, sea anemone, comet in oneself.
The Rangda
• In a village in Bali where a malaise has for some time now been making itself felt, a halian falls into a trance and announces it is time to take out the mask of the Rangda, which is kept in the Pura Dalem, the temple of Death.
Black Gods
• For Freudian psychoanalysis human society is founded on the castration complex: the prohibition of immediate gratification is the first law of civilization. From the interdiction of a field of immediate pleasure objects there is elaborated systems of implements, economic commodities, markets, political identities, aesthetic and ritual objects, linguistic constructions, which do not give immediate gratification but offer significance. Objects have become significant, pleasure¬ surfaces have given place to signs. Psychoanalytic interpretation consists in finding phallic significance in tools, artworks, cognitive entities, sacramental objects. The first pleasure object to become significant, through the prohibition of immediate gratification, was the object immediately on hand, one’s own body; the castrated penis became a phallus.
• The phallus is first constituted in repression; it is that which was first discovered as a lack, a want of being. This lack opens the space beyond the immediately given into which signs signify. The objects that have become signs, that do not offer immediate gratification but refer beyond themselves, refer clandestinely to this absence. The objects open to civilized, that is, castrated, man are metaphors and metonymies of the phallus.
• Levi-Strauss had proposed to elucidate elements like the Polynesian mana by their structural function in the field of signs.* Terms whose signification is not circumscribed by opposition to other significations, they figure as floating signifiers.” Their occurrence, and even necessity, can be understood by the modern structuralist treatment of cultural orders as semiotic systems.
• Rather with the first sign-system, the whole universe becomes significant, all signification is there, and the most rudi¬mentary language, that of the ooo-aah, Fort-Da language of Freud’s grandchild,^ is capable of signifying anything that has to be signified. The new signifiers that are introduced do not extend the field of what can be signified, but rather make new discriminations within it. There is, then, always a surplus of the signifiable over and beyond what has been discriminated by signs, and a floating signifier in each semiotic system functions to mark this excess.
• Lacan identifies the phallus not as such a floating signifier in the sense that the phallus would be a sign whose signification would be constantly shifting in the system. The phallus is rather the original lack in the system. It has been barred from the first. It is what is always signified by metaphor and by metonymy. It is the zero-signifier that is lacking from the first, and whose lack causes the shifting in the field of signifiers, the combinations and the substitu¬tions, the metonymies and the metaphors, in the speech addressed to the other.
• he terms of every language are formulated to mark the place of the absence of objects, and are themselves formed by the unreality of the objects; the infantile language, or more exactly the inscription, the hieroglyphics and the rebus, of the infantile dream continues to formulate only the demand still addressed to the other.
• In this situation the identification of the mirror image as himself is not merely a predicative and judgmental synthesis, “That is me!”; it is an affective and projective identification. Not an identification of it, but an identification with it. The infant is alienated into the image, captivated by it. For the mirror image functions vitally as a factor of integration: it presents the infant with an anticipated composition of the fragments of his body into a subsistent totality.
• GREAT SUMMARY OF LACAN HONESTLY
• Castration phobia in boys and penis envy in girls does not originate in real threats of castration addressed to the child by the real father (more often in fact formulated by the mother), but in the discovery that the penis is missing in the mother. Missing at the place from which the child has come to understand he has himself issued. There arises the phallus as what is signified by the desire of the mother, that which is addressed in the voluptuous desire of the mother the infant has felt by feeling it turned in his direction. There arises the voluptuous wish to be a phallus for the mother.
• The seriousness of the word of the father is engraved on the body of the mother, in the castration of the mother. It designates the phallus, pure signification and original absence, as that to which the desire of the mother has always been addressed. If the child can will to subject himself to the law of the father, if he can will the castration of his penis from his body as immediate pleasure-object, this is because he wills to be the absence designated by the craving of the mother, he wills to be the
December 30, 2020
I am writing a review more of the man than of the book. I knew Alphonso Lingis a bit (1968). He was a philosopher who wrote from experience, even in the Cambodian jungle, not just his office at Penn State Univ. One may disagree with some of what he writes, but I think it will be harder to dismiss the authority of the person. As the old Packard Motor Company advertising slogan went: "Ask the man who owns one". Alphonso Lingis is in a higher league that that famous PR trickster Socrates whom so many people seem to idolize. Read his books. Engage with life.
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