As you know, Sigmund Freud contrasted libido, sexual desire, and prohibitions created by civilization that lead to its suppression. But isn’t the mechanism of inhibition inherent in the libido itself? Culturologist Mikhail Epshtein reflects on the ability for multifaceted and multi-stage pleasure, which includes the art of abstinence.
Libido is divided into two forces that play with each other, hastening and slowing down the climax of sexual intercourse. Satisfaction is achieved by orgasm, but desire turns intimacy into a series of escapes, into a long game that hastens orgasm — and at the same time tries to push it away. In this, eroticism, as a sphere of human desire, differs from animal instinct. Sexual thirst is looking for a speedy satisfaction. Erotic desire, on the contrary, seeks satisfaction in order to crave even more. The trick of desire is not only to bypass obstacles, but also to place them in front of you.
In this regard, the question arises: is culture really hostile to erotica, or, on the contrary, does it itself create and enhance it, turning it from simple natural sexuality into the art of prohibition and seduction? Suppression of desire is a way of strengthening it.
A desirable woman dresses and becomes even more desirable, and these covers themselves, complicating the path of sexual desire, limitlessly expand its area. As a result, everything is eroticized, down to the book that the desired being reads, or the city in which it lives. A closed or half-closed door to a room, a curtain, belonging to another class or an alien belief system, every word and intonation, even a grimace, awkwardness, “ugliness” — all this is permeated with the irony of an exciting allusion, repressed sex and conquering eros.
Our civilization can be seen as a grand game of libido with itself, a system of its growth through suppression. Classical Freudianism links civilization to neurosis and defines man as a neurotic animal. But, in my opinion, self-suppression of desire is a sign of his health, self-control. Only a weak erectile function causes an early orgasmic discharge, because it cannot withstand prolonged stress. The ability for multi-faceted and multi-stage pleasure includes the art of abstinence. Libido is divided into two forces that play with each other, hasten and slow down the climax. All the time go, intertwined, two sinusoids, two waves: amplification and containment. Desire nourishes pleasure and at the same time undernourishes it in order to keep it bridled, not to let it be carried and overturned into the abyss of orgasm, desired and murderous for both of them.
The desire for pleasure is a natural impulse. The enjoyment of desire itself is the acquisition of culture
For Freud, only the individual unconscious existed; Jung discovered a deeper layer of the collective. Is it not possible to speak of the erotosphere as a collective libido in the same sense in which Jung speaks of the collective unconscious?
The erotosphere of mankind has been built over thousands of years, and with each new era, its internal tension has increased. Modern civilization can hardly cope with the mass of accumulated desire. Here is how Michel Houellebecq characterizes this mechanism of self-producing desires in the novel «Elementary Particles» (in the words of the protagonist Michel Dzherzinski):
“The advertising-erotic society in which we live … tends to organize desire, to grow it on an unheard of scale, keeping its satisfaction within the intimate sphere. In order for such a society to function, so that the competition does not stop, it is necessary to multiply desire, it is necessary that, as it spreads, it devours human life.
Libido is a perpetual motion machine that is accelerated by the force of its inhibition.
Even earlier, the biologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz wrote about the commercial “processing” of desires, more and more diversely excited and more and more easily quenched:
“…People lose the ability to invest hard work in enterprises that promise pleasure only after a long time. Hence arises an impatient need for the immediate satisfaction of all barely born desires. This need for immediate gratification is, unfortunately, strongly encouraged by manufacturers and commercial enterprises, and consumers surprisingly do not see how they are enslaved by «accommodating» installment firms.
How long can this process of multiplication of desires that devour human life continue? The store of accumulated desire is too great, and there comes a premonition of that last spasm that will pour it out and devastate its resources. Isn’t this the source of the constant fears of the «end of the world», which are renewed with each generation? What can this dazzling orgasm become, in which the accumulated desire of humanity will immediately burn out? General promiscuity? Aggression of all against all? The sadism of some and the masochism of others, finding in each other the happiness of total (self) destruction?
There are three possible ways to work with desire:
- Suppress;
- Satisfy;
- Reinforce.
The first path is ascetic, the path of saints, sages and ascetics: renunciation of desires and external temptations leading to vice and suffering, self-mastery.
The second path is hedonistic: to satisfy all arising desires, to discharge their energy, to remove all obstacles leading to neurosis in their path.
The third path is productive, creative, between these two extremes, asceticism and hedonism: to nurture and nurture desires, not to give them complete discharge, but to use their energy for creative accomplishments. This is the path predominantly chosen by Western civilization. In general, the growth of civilization is possible precisely because of the growing «scissors» between desire and pleasure.
Both asceticism and hedonism offer an equation of desire and pleasure, either at the zero level (the renunciation of desires) or in the order of progression (desire turns into sensual pleasure and is fully realized in it). In both cases, there is no driving energy left to build a civilization. The growth of energy occurs with an increase in desire — and the inability to satisfy it. Such energy, not discharging in physical acts, creates cultural values. But these cultural values, including the power of prohibitions and the sobering «reality principle», in turn lead to an increase in desire, which itself creates obstacles to its satisfaction. Libido is a kind of perpetual motion machine, which is accelerated by the force of its inhibition. Hence the many paradoxes of civilization, which in this respect resembles the sweet and painful play of the libido: it rushes towards the discharge of desire and at the same time endlessly delays it.
More about the nature of the erotic and sexual, about the different shades of love feelings, the philosopher, culturologist Mikhail Epstein writes in his new book «Love» (Ripol Classic, 2018).