A New Philosophical Interpretation of the Libido

Alphonso Lingis

SubStance, Vol. 8, No. 4, Issue 25. (1979), pp. 87-97.

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A New Philosophical Interpretation of the Libido

ALPHONSO LINGIS

Working with new concepts of impulsive intensity- libidinal space, libidinal time, libidinal identity, Jean-Francois Lyotard's Economie libidinale' sets out to interpret in a coherent discourse the essential data of psychoanalysis, which had been formulated in a fragmented- physicalist, mechanist, hydraulic and mythical-language, or, in the plhenomenological reworking, in mentalist, intentional, language. But Lyotard's book does not only devise a philosophically more coherent language for the findings of psychyanalysis; it also elaborates an interpretation of the data themselves. Assembling literary and theological texts along with certain Freudian texts given a new importance, Lyotard's book shows how theoretical activity and political economy reverberate with libidinal processes, and how the primary process libido continues even in its matured and sublimated forms. This new concept~ral elaboration is principally due to a divesting of the Freudian conceptual apparatus of its phallocentric and repro- ductive normativity, and even of the idea of organism as a norm. If wholeness, organism, is the general form of any norm, then we can say that this philosophy presents a libido without norms.

Just what kind of theoretical work do we have here? It is not really an autonomous phenomenology of sexual experience, taken to be an exhibition of the pretheoretical, preconceptualized given experience. Phenomenology could pretend that it could, with its own vocabulary allegedly framed after immediate intuitions, elaborate a purely descriptive account of, among other things, sexual experience, which could then function as a criterion against which to judge the theoretical elaborations of science, because it thought it had found an autonomous locus of access to the primary and preconceptual experience itself. This locus was self-consciousness. It was originally all intuitive: an intuition of itself in its primary, that is, intuitive, acts or contacts with various zones of mundane reality.

Lyotard's work is, to be sure, philo!~ophical and not empirical. In what sense? Not in this phenomenological sense. The "thing itself," the libidinal life, is not a succession of acts essentially intuitive. These sensuous sensations would not fit in, with ~ninor adjustments, to thie Husserlian concept of perceptions

Sub-stance No 25 , 1980 87

88 Alphonso Lingis

understood as objectifying the primary intuitions of the observer. And the phenomenological project is possible only if all the moments of the primary process, the pretheoretical experience, were accompanied by a possible "I think," were open to a structure of self-intuition. But sexual impulses are not reflexive structures in which an ego-identity is formed and maintained, but precisely processes in which the ego is dismembered and dissipated in discrete intensities, which discharge as soon as they form.

There is then no direct andl autonomous access to the libidinal sphere through philosophical self-consciousness. Lyotard's work is rather in the direction of what Freud called "metapsychology," a reflective work on the concepts with which the empirical research was assembled and formulated. We know that Freud did not invent a new vocabulary for the psychoanalytic domain; its terms are borrowed from neurology, physics, chemistry, hydraulics and mythology. This was not due to some lack of inventive imagination or boldness or consistency; it expressed Freud's deep conviction that theoretical rigor would have to lead to a unified discourse encompassing the psychic phenomena into the physical universe. Freud's metapsychology is a provisional effort in the way of a metaphysicr,, in the Aristotelian and Whiteheadian sense, a universal and unified categorical system which could function to establish translatability between the data accounted for in physical terms and those accounted for in psychic terms.

Lyotard's work is in the direction of this same metapsychology, this meta- physics. But the physics of today is no longer the physics of Freud's time; the universal theory has to work with entirely different local theories. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari, in Antt-Oedtpu~,~actively attempt to construct a first project for such a theory, but following the paths in contemporary micro- biology, where the differences but also continuities between microphysical and microbiological entities have to be formulated. Lyotard's work is not yet on that level. His book maintains a specifically psychic language, and is rather an effort to reformulate the concepts fixing psychic processes in more clear and more comprehensive ways. This effort is directed mainly against the two most important contemporary enterprises in the same direction: that of phenomeno- logical intentionalism and of Lacanian neo-Hegelianism. It is then a regional theory preparatory for the universal metapsychology or metaphysics. But it also constantly extends itself into the socio-economic field; Lyotard frames his concepts in such a way that they would also function as the principle terms of political economics.

The Libidinal Zone

In "the most obscure and inaccessible r e g i ~ n , " ~ or in the beginning, or at the core, at the essence of life, there are excitations. Of themselves they are intensities, moments of potential that accumulate and discharge themselves, moments of feeling both pleasure and unpleasure.

They are surface effects in the sense that they occur at the point of

Interpretation of the Libido 89

conjuncture between a mouth and a breasl., a thigh and the other thigh, lips and another's lips, lips and the pulp of fruit, toes and sands. They do not occur on a pregiven surface, but by occurring mark out a surface, make skin, down, vulva exist for itself and not for the sake of the interior or of the whole. Surface effects that d o not express an inward or deep meaning or signify an exterior object or objective. Effects without causes-for that an excitation can be out of all proportion to the stimulus that preceded it is the most elementary datum of psychoanalysis.

Singularites and not auto-identifying syntheses, utterly affirmative but not ascribable to an underlying ego identity as its acts or as its accidents, intensities are anonymities.

And they are, Freud said, "in themselves 'timeless.' This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be applied to them."4 An intensity is not a synthesizing process, surpassing but thereby retaining a past of itself, projecting or anticipating a future of itself. It is just passing, discharge of itself. It is a tense, Lyotard says-a singular tense. A movement, a moment, a passing, without memory and without expectations, ephemeral and useless, which can be surprised, and be as a surprise, a pleasure or an unpleasure.

Freud supposes that unpleasuire corresponds to an increase in the quantity of the unbound excitation, and pleasure to a diminution. And that the organism endeavors to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible, or at least to keep it constant. The organism tends to stability, to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world. The most universal endeavor of all living substance is in reality a death drive. Of course an excessive excitation could achieve this by shattering definitively the stability of the organism, and making its reconstitution impossibde. But the organism, by its organic constitu- tion, endeavors to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. If it endeavors to neutralize every excitation that occurs in it, that is only in order to be able to pursue the form of death immanent in itself.

But that means that there are two incidences of the death drive: inasmuch as it is predicated as intrinsic to the organism, and inasmuch as it is immanent to -the excitation as such. The excitaition is a 'solar' compulsion of an excess of potential to discharge itself. The pleasure is in the release, solar pleasure, Nietzsche said, that of the sun which as it: descends to the earth, to its death, pours its gold on the seas, and, like the sun too, feels itself happiest when even the poorest fisherman rows with gallden oars.' "We have all experienced how the greatest pleasure attainable by us, that of the sexual act," Freud wrote, "is associated with a momentary extinction of a highly intensified e~citat ion."~ The expenditure at a loss, the loss of force, it not sadness here, and it occurs without regret and even without recall or memory. The pain involved in the libidinal excitation is that of the excess-not of force, but of incompossible figures being affirmed at once. It is; the murmur or the disorder of the amorous nonsense that affirms and cries out that she open up, that he take me, that she

90 Alphonso Lingis

resist, that he tighten his hold, that she give way, that he begin and stop, that she obey and command. It is the Bacchantes' frenzy, that of women bearing the masks of gods and of contradictory gods, goat-gods (but their civic womanhood is a figure, a mask, in exactly the same sense), bearing masks without having, being identities behind them, and whose contradictory speech intensifies into screams and explosions of laughter. It is the babbling of pleasure of the infant holding the teat between its lips, the warm pulp of the breast in its indexterous fingers, its neck cushioned in the female fat of the shoulder, dismembered eddies of surface excitations, the maternal eyes seeking oscillations of pleasure in the unfocused orbits. The specific pain of the intensity does not consist in sensing the incompossibility of all that the libido desires at once- that is, in sensing the lacking, missing totality, which is not yet conceived. It rather consists in the multiple, scissioning ways in which the intensity seeks to discharge and to disintegrate. Tlhis pain of the excess and this pleasure of the dying must not be separated; they are originally indecidable and constitutive of libidinal intensity. It will only be ex postfacto, once the organism is constituted, that the pain of this excess is apprehended by the organism as a disturbance of its stability, and the pleasure of this discharge recorded in the remembering membrane of the organism as the maintenance of its own path to its immanent death. Originally one would have to conceive this excess as a pleasure in its discharge, and this dying as a pain in its very excess.

The libidinal excitations do not take place in a pregiven space, or invest a pregiven region; they extend a libidinal body, or, more exactly, a libidinal band, an erotogenic surface. This surface is not the surface of a depth, the contour enclosing an interior. When one enters the orifices of the libidinal body, one does not enter an inwardness, but extends the surface of pleasure. The libidinal movement discovers a continuity between the convexities and the concavities, the facial contours and the orifices, the swelling things and the mouths, every- where glands surfacing, and wh,at was protuberance and tumescence on last contact can now be fold, cavity, squeezed breasts, soles of feet forming still another mouth. Anything can bt: conjoined to anything to form an intensive contiguity: the libidinal band is a patchwork and not an organism. It is the discharge, the passage, the differential or the continuous displacement of the excitation that extends this surface.

The libidinous zone then is a Mobius band, where by following the outer face one finds oneself on the inner face, where one everywhere finds oneself on a surface and never in an inwardness. Or it is interminable, labyrinthian extension where there are no landmarks and no issue. Again, we should not say that the libidinal intensities occur in a labyrinthian space, but that they describe such a space by their very displacement and passage. There are indeed inter- sections and encounters, but the encounter is each time fled in terror or in gaiety, and this rebound traces out banks of transparent walls, secret thresholds, open fields and empty skies in which the encounter is fled, is diffused, is forgotten. The agitated caressing hand is not seeking an entry, nor a hold, nor a secret; it is only departing from the point of encounter, losing

Interpretation of the Libido 91

itself, describing a space in which it can lose itself. There is a sort of exclusion and tautness involved in the excitation that has

to be described for itself: each intensification that is produced as a this, a here- now, evokes "cries of jealousy" from the entourage, and thus extends an expanse where an other, an elsewliere, appeals and incites. The this, without lacking or craving anything, is revealed as a non-that. This exclusiveness of the intensity does not suppose a totality, an organic fieid first given, and thus the intensification of the this is not from the first a desire for, an intention aiming at, a lack of, the not-this. It is a surge of force arousing plenitudes about itself. This libidinous intensity and its spatiality is thus essentially different from the distance phenomenology accounted for in terms of an intentional and ecstatic ex-istence, anxious and needy, a lack or a care. It is not the Heideggerian Er~t-Jernung.

The force t h a ~ intensifies at any point takes over surrounding forces, -pumps off their energy, and tears from them "cries and exhalations of jealousy." Labyrinthian spaces are delineated by the appeals of other points for the libidinal intensity- by the jealousy of the vulva for the mouth, the jealousy of the nipple for the testicles, the jealousy of the woman over the book her lover is writing, the jealousy of the sun over the closed shutters behind which the reader reads that book.

The libidinal space is made both of the appeals of other sites and other expanses, and the displacement of the intensity made of the unstable affirma- tion of incompossible figures. Its displacement is both its expansion, describing an extension, and its dissipation, describing a space without verticality, the essentially supine libidinous zone. If the Nietzschean joy is the feeling of ever expanding, auto-affirming and auto-affecting, and elevating power, there is also a libidinal gaiety, whose incredulous and insolent laughter assents to nothing, posits nothing and awaits no one's recognition, and moves horizontally, through metamorphoses, whose buoyant and nervous agitations do not take pleasure in the dance-form they may be describing, but in this pointless and self-mocking turmoil.

The Organism

Life begins in the libidinal incandescences that circulate and describe an erotogenic zone, structured as a labyrinth without landmarks, points of outcome or issue, a Mobius band. all surface. But it organizes itself into a func- -tional and expressive apparatus-an organism. Lyotard refuses to see in the determinative factor in an organism an intentionality which would direct it teleologically to some end- and ultimately on ending as such- a movement that would take everything present as a reference, a sign, or a relay-point toward something absent, beyond, signified, and that, within the organism itself, would take every member or organ as a representative or substitute for another and thus for the whok:. That is to interpret a body philosophically, metaphysically, as a system of functions where a part can figure functionally

92 Alphonso Lingis

inasmuch as it can represent another and the whole, and as an expressive and desiring system which takes itself ,as reference to, an openness upon, a desire of, something beyond, exterior, the exterior world or the signified ideal reality, and finally exteriority or openness of nothingness itself.

Lyotard is working rather with the Freudian idea that the organism is the place where the freely mobile excitations can be bound, that is, fixed, deter- mined, acquire identity, acquire position with respect to one another, and thus value. It is not their being directed upon an exteriority, absence or nothingness, that makes them significant and functional, but first their occurring in a field, a space of compossibility. For them to acquire sense, value, is for them to acquire identity and position, for each to be itself and not another- and be determined in its own identity by this not-being-another. This process is both the constitu- tion of a register, a theatre, where they can be together, and, for each excitation, the scission of its ambivalent intensity.

The process is not to be conceived as an intentional arc traversing the field of excitations, movement of ex-istence which, for Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty, is the very essence of an organism. It is coi~ceived by Lyotard as a slowing-down of the intensities. The tension in their inner incompossibilities disintensifies by disjunction: each becomes excitation of, affirmation of, this. . . and not that. This disjunction is a fixing of the r his in it:; identity, and a synthetic exclusion of the non-this from it. The this and the non-this are both posited, but not at once: the differentiation is made in a movement of deferring, in a temporalizing that affirms the present and defers the absent, makes the past pass and the future to come. The constitution of the context, the field, a surface where traces are inscribed, is this very moment.

It occurs then as a slowing down of intensities, an internal deferring of the incompossibles converged in them, a temporal disjunctive synthesis. Temporali- zation is disintensification and disjunction. Now each this, each excitation is held, maintained in its identity, as it refers to, tends toward a non-this which is reserved, retained, absent, or deferred. An excitation becomes a sensation, by virtue of this tension toward what is deferred or temporarily removed from it, of which it is fixed as a trace. The inner space of an organism is constituted as this retentional field, the memory of the intensities, localization of their passages.

Freud supposes that the freely mobile excitations are thus fixed, bound, in order that they can be disposed of- that is, neutralized, such that an organism is the place where excitations are reduced, tranquillized, where the inorganic state, or death, is effected. Yet the organic structures that take form, if they can be read as issues toward death, are also accumulations of life force, and libidinal investments. If the organism as such is a stabilized structure, within which the excitations are fixed, consigned and conserved, the whole structure can in turn be the occasion of a libidinal excitation. A neurosis according to Freud is a compromise, a stabilization which both deadens and builds up excitation. The economic fixations which hold and stabilize excitations also block their circula- tion, and engender compulsive frustrations, disruptions, repetitions,

93 Interpretation of the Libido

malfunctionings, which are excitations in their turn. When on the body of a hysteric segments of the libidinal surface are bound, desensitized and excluded from the circulation of affects, partial systems are taking from and beginning to function on their own. The contracted, locked muscles, the tightened respiratory system become asthmatic, pit their bound farces as resistances to the analysis, and function as a sort of separately organized mechanism, in which psycho- analysis will be able to find its own logic, its own code, its own intelligbility. If its excitations are controlled, regulated, and the hysteric held in sterile repetitions, the partial organization is lethal inasmuch as it obstructs and disrupts the larger organism with which it is bound. But the very disorganization and malfunction produced in the larger orgasism also intensifies the excitations where they are blocked, such that they invest in this frozen channel or elude it in devious and ingenious ways. The partial system can be seen as a figure of the death drive, inasmuch as the bound configurations a,f intensity are rendered inert, inorganic, but also as a locus where c-xcitations are composed and discharged, as a harrowing of Eros.

Freud first found the death drive as the meaning of systems of repetitive compulsions which make everything, even the most painful things, return- as in the dreams of traumatic neuroses. Yet the fixing of paths and the deter- mining of operations that are produced in them also produce new itineraries for the circulation and discharge of excitati~ons. Here the pleasure principle follows the death drive. But the accumulation of forces at the organic enclosure which will finally break through a r ~ d break up the partial system and even threaten the survival of the organism as a whole, and which is the very force of the pleasure principle, also makes the Nirvana principle ensue from the pleasure principle.

Thus, repetition compulsions, neuroses, paranoic seizures, stabilized lethal disorders or the organic functioning, memory systems, all these partial organisms figure as the paths through which a zone of excitation and life pursues its own amortizement and death. They do so inasmuch as they inhibit the circulation of affects within the whole organism and block its functioning. But Freud sees the very constitution of an organism as a stabilization of a field of excitations, a binding process, a tranquillization and a relapse toward the inert. The organism as such is then itself wh~olly a work of death. If that is so, then the formation of these partial organisms by which the whole is dismembered is not only so many partial paths of a single-minded drive at work everywhere. For do not these partial organisms, these. malfunctionings, neuroses and compulsive disorders, disrupt the general and immanent pursuit of death? These partial functionings which ,are organic malfunctionings ravage the organism- the crazed laughter that chokes and that asphyxiates the asthmatic, the local impotencies that drain off the force of those who shy away from the exercise of force, the obsessions that disintegrate the schizophrenic, the panic that dissipates the exuberant vigor o~f militants at a demonstration- and also, as unbindings, as releases, relieve and release the organism from the lethal system it itself represents-the orgasm that releases its seed, the drunkenness that releases its words, the dance that releases its musculature and its armor.

94 Alphonso Lingis

Thus, we no longer have two orders and two times, a primary process where the freely mobile libidinal excitations erupt and circulate as the very effer- vescence of life-force, and a secondary process where the organism takes form in a stabilization and a tranquillization, a deadening of these vital effervescences, and a return to the inorganic is intended. The primary process and the secondary process do not form fields of effects that would have to be read as composing two different systems, one of intensities, the other of functions or intentionalities. Or that would have to be read as forming two different -networks or significant structures, or even as ambivalent or polysemic effects, connecting up as signs whose meaning would be eros and also thanatos. In reality the composition of an organism in the libidinal zone is the constitution of excitations into sensations, into signs; the organism is a semiotic field. A bound excitation makes sense by virtue of the divergency it marks and the opposition it fixes. In an organism the material of life functions as signs. Yet they also constitute intensities in their potential and singularity, as the partial systems of bound excitations, and the whole organism, constitute intensities.

Thus, Lyotard is committed to a new account of organic totalities as not only systems where an inner politicall economy is seated, but systems which have also their place in the libidinal economy. He is committed to detecting the organism itself in its libidinous use, an erotogenic zone, to detecting the discharge of libidinal intensities in its apparent functions and operations, the specific pleasure of libido in its very sufferings and lacks.

The negativist heritage in the thought of recent decades set out to show the constitution of an irremediable Absence in the auto-constitution of every spiritual, or intentional, system, set out, with Lacan, to exhibit the constitution of the Other that makes of an organism a desiring system, the opening up of the dimension of absence that makes a semiotic system possible, to thematize the differing-deferring behind the Ideal Presence that the Western metaphysical culture seems always to pursuje, to exhibit the zone of absolute nothingness which makes the ideal of absol~ute Being possible, the God that is dead or the death that is God. Lyotard mecans to consign the organism as a totality made wholly intentional by virtue of its teleoliogcal openness upon utter alterity, or alterity as such, to be part of t~he same metaphysics, the same religion or the same nihilism.

Where does the erotogenic zone start and where does it stop? Where do organisms start and where do they stop? For ultimately it is the same processes that take pleasure in constituting systems and organic totalities that are at work in thought, and in the organization of the body politic- at least that which, like that of the young Marx, depend on the idea of society as an organic totality. And the intensities of the primary process are excitations at the conjuncture of one's own surfaces with one another, of one's surfaces with those of another, of one's surfaces with those of the physical and social world. There is a libidinous economy at work in the very circulation of goods and services which constitute the political economy of capitallism. At every point of his book Lyotard follows the movements of the psyche writ large on the modern capitalist state. If his

95 Interpretation of the Libido

analyses are more than pure analyses, they are not so much also critical- where criticism would denounce the movements of the capitalist political economy in the name of a more rational, more coherent, finally more organic conception of the whole-as they are excited by certain events or happenings- the May '68 general strike in France, the Berkeley Free Speech movement, the Prague springtime- that belonged more to the order of events than of movements, to the order of potentials than to that of power, to the order of intensities rather than to that of actions, to that of uprisings rat.her than to that of revolutions, to the libidinal rather than the political economy.

The Passionate Depersonalization

The libidinal relationship, according to Lyotard, is in no way an inter- subjectivity, or even an intercorporeality. To become passionate is to become anonymous conductor of a circulation of libidinous effects, dismembered body where intensifications undergo their metamorphoses. "Make yourselves completely into conductors of heats and colds, bitternesses and sugarinesses, mutenesses and acutenesses, theorems and cries, let it travel over you, without ever knowing if it will work or not, if there will result an unheard-of, unseen, untasted, unthought-of, untested effect or not. And if in fact this passage does not add on a new piece to the beautiful and elusive libidinal patchwork, then, for example, weep, and your tears will be this fragment, since nothing is lost, and the most harsh deception can give place in turn to effects."'

This does not mean that Lyotard is ascribing to a sort of Spinozist or Nietzschean ethics, that his "lyse" in~iolves some sort of valuation of the primary process over the secondary, of inteasities over disintensifications, or potential over impotency, action over reactiom. Eros and thanatos are undedicable, both in primary intensities and in the secondary organisms. His "lyse" finds meaning hidden in emotion, vertigo in reason itself. His discourse does not aim to be part of an ethics of the universal and of reactive force, as it does not aim to be part of an ethics of force, action, power, primary process over reactivity, secondary process fixations and reductions to inertia. It is not part of a project of organi- zation and politics, as it is not part of a conspiracy of disorganization and anarchy. What there can be and is is a sort of ars uitae of which his own text would be an example: a patchwork or collage itself, traces of intensities that have passed. Traces and signs covering over punctual incandescences, there is a duplicity inherent in its composition. "In the 'theoretical order' one has to come to the point where one procedes that way, like this bar turning in duplicity, not out of concern for mimicry or adaequatio, but because thought is itself libidinous, and what counts is its force (its intensity), and that is what has to pass in the words, that interminable disquietude, that incandescent dupli~ity."~

'Thus, the orgasmic will to become the pure conductor of libidinous intensi- ties, although it is certainly a disinvestment of 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, cannot be a will for a procedure of

96 Alphonso Lingis

dismemberment, dictated by a, theory of primary process libido. In fact the libidinal band is a labyrinth unchartable in advance, and the organism can itself be all incandescent. "One has tat operate on the pricks, the vaginas, the assholes, the skins so as to make love be the condition for orgasm- that is what the lover, man or woman, dreams about, so as to escape the frightful duplicity of the surfaces traversed by impulses But this operation would be an appropriation or, as Derrida says, a propriation, and finally a semiotics, in which the erections and discharges would infallibly signal impulsive movements. But there must not be such an infallibility- that is our ultimate and supreme recourse against the terror of power and the true. That fucking not be guaranteed in one way or another, neither as a proof of love nor as a gage of indifferent exchangability, that love, that is, intensity, slip in fortuitously, and that conversely intensities may withdraw from the skins of bodies (you didn't come?) and pass over upon the skins of words, sounds, colors, kitchen tastes, animal odors and perfumes, that is the dissimulation we will not escape, that's the anguish, and that is what we have to want. But this 'will" is itself something beyond the capabilities of any subjective freedom; we can meet this dissimulation only laterally, neben, as blind escapees, since it is unendurable and there is no question of making it 10vable."~

Thus, we no longer have the idea of a subject of Eros structured as having, as being, an identity, seat of responsibility, agent of will and of power, lucid seer and foreseer. We have a libidinal band presenting itself as an anonymous and free conductor of intensities, polymorphous and feminine. What takes form in this band, partial organs produced by dismembering and deviation from their functioning in a whole self-maiiltaining organism, are personae, makes behind which there is no personality air subjectivity or even causality. There is not a libido that would be behind all that, and that could be identified with the subject or the intentional arc that makes it exist. There are an indefinite multiplicity of singular intensities in those incandescences, those effects.

Towards a Metaphysics without Norms

This theoretical formulation is in suspense; on the one hand, it is dependent on the findings yielded by the psychoanalytic techniques, which are external observations on processes essentially unconscious. (But it also importantly appeals to a certain literature--Artaud, Klossowski, Schreber, Augustine- which does not report on, but exhibits unconscious impulses.) On the other hand, it is provisional and awaits the universal theory, the metaphysics, which Lyotard would certainly rather call the universal materialism, which would be able to integrate it into the other regional sciences. Short of being able either to criticize the empirical data themselves which it intends to conceptualize- which would itself only be an empirical and not a conceptual task-or actually produce the universal categoria11 system- the philosopher's reaction is first to be struck with what this theory excludes, and which the other philosophical attempts to conceptualize the lilbidinous zone put forth.

Most obviously, the Lyotard concept of intensity excludes the intentional

97 Interpretation of the Libido

character phenomenology seen in sexual impulses. All phenomenology stands or falls on this issue. Undeniably the libidinal impulse is representational. For phenomenology this representational operation is not a production of "mental images," but a disclosure of being itself in the form of a phenomenon-object o r objective. This Lyotard denies. The libidinous impulse does not "aim at" an entity in order to disclose it; it is not a verification of the world. And it is not a teleological movement. The phenomenological distinction between psychic and physical movements is entirely one of a distinction between a movement drawn to a telos and one produced by a cause. For Lyotard the libidinous effect is without aim as it is without cause. What would be required then is a positive theory of the libidinous phantasms. 1,yotard criticizes the Klossowskian theory without really developing his own. The phantasm produced in libidinous impulses would have to be neither a true apparition of the beings themselves- would have to be false-nor an advance presentation of an objective-the libidinous impulses do not produce representations of either of their alleged objectives- the child for the race, the pleasure for the individual. They are obsessions with the impossible. The ILyotard metapsychology thus requires an epistemology of phantasms. It further requires- an enormously difficult task! -a theory that would stake out the piroduction of true phenomena out of these false phantasms. That is, a passage from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. Unless one would want, like Nietzsche, to try to produce an artist metaphysics which has no place for the reality principle. . .

We are not saying that such a metaphysics, which abandons the concept of telos and of true representation not only in the libidinal zone, but in all zones, is impossible or absurd. It was certainly the incredible project of Nietzsche. It is as a fragment of this stupendous effort that Lyotard's work belongs.

The Pennsylvania State University

1. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1974. 2. Transl. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977). 3. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Collected Works, Vol. XVIII, transl. by James

Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 7. 4. Ibid., p. 28. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, transl. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974),

4337. 6. Sigmund Freud, op. cit., p. 62. 7. Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, op. cit., p. 307. 8. Ibid., p. 42. 9. Ibid., p. 304.