"While Lingis acknowledges the tightly scripted psychological dramas through which we tend to understand our own individualized libidos, he considers these to be an optical effect of human self-delusion and the rather pathetic desire to be lord of our own desires. The mental pressures we constantly feel are, as a consequence, primarily created by our own ultimately vain attempts to keep eros a private matter, between consenting, and highly choreographed, bourgeois bodies (ideally also between freshly laundered high thread-count sheets). For Lingis, “those channelling and excluding structures which are the ego, the person, the body as a closed volume, functional and expressive, as corps propre and organism,” are in constant tension with “the orgasmic will to become the pure conductor of libidinous intensities” (1979, 95–6). The latter is, by this account, more attuned to the actual physics of the universe. But it does not have much respect for sentimental keepsakes, like – well – identity. Certainly, we can often feel the architecture of our personalities shake, when orgasm approaches. But after the crisis passes, we hurry to mentally restore our sense of self, agency, and responsibility, faster than we even put on our clothes. Perhaps, then, one of the most absurd myths perpetrated by psychoanalysis, along with penis envy, is the existence of a libido: one that belongs to us, individually, rather than a shared “libidinal band” that both connects and severs. Such a band strikes the earth, like lightning, creating fleeting, ecstatic subjectivities in its wake; like glass in the sand, when the flames have died down.
All the same, and despite the seductive poetics of such rhetoric, isn’t the human the only creature capable of sustained sublimation? Perhaps the question is already compromised by its own assumptions. Yes, we can repress our sexual urges and use that energy instead to write a book, or design a rocket to the moon, unlike our animal cousins. But perhaps we are disproportionately valorizing the activities with which we fill our own lapses between erotic events. Libidinal life must necessarily obey the laws of thermodynamics in a general sense, even if it also whips up negentropic whirlwinds and explosions in local instances. Eros cannot simply scale up its excitations into a cosmic climax. The big bang already occurred, and we are all living after the cosmic orgy. What we congratulate ourselves on – art, science, commerce, wisdom – are not necessarily the fruits of productively channeling excess or gone energy, which would otherwise burn off uselessly into the ether. Rather, they may name our own way of recircling, and even enhancing, erotic occasions."
—Dominic Pettman, Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire
