The Semen in the Subject: Deferral of Enjoyment and the Postmodernist Taoist Ars Erotica

Author(s): RON S. JUDY

Source: The Comparatist , Vol. 39 (OCTOBER 2015), pp. 135-152
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26254723

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 Ron S. Judy

The Semen in the Subject

Deferral of Enjoyment and the Postmodernist
Taoist Ars Erotica


還精補腦,可得不老矣
(Returning the semen to supplement the brain, one can achieve agelessness)1

Taoism, as most readers know, is the Chinese philosophy of the Way—an ancient
doctrine that stresses epistemological ambiguity, freedom of action, and the con-
cept of “naturalness” (ziran) in human affairs. What is perhaps less well known is
that from earliest times Taoism was closely associated with China’s ars erotica—the
so-­called “art of the bedchamber” ( fangzhong shu)—and that Lao Zi and other
early Taoists promoted “nurturing life” (yangsheng) through various arcane thera-
peutic sexual techniques. The dictum at the top of this page, often attributed to
Lao Zi, the Old Master, is one of the earliest formulations of the Taoist ars erotica
and states that one of these techniques, re-­circulating the semen to the brain (huan
jing), can indefinitely curtail old age. This Taoist concern with healthful sexuality
and matters of physiology seems only natural, for in contrast to the Confucian
moralists who stressed obedient observance of traditional rites and the mainte-
nance of early customs, Taoists were fond of pointing out that the Way is “natural,”
amoral, ever changing, and without any fixed grounds or meaning—or, as the fa-
mous opening lines of the Dao De Jing (The Classic of the Way and its Power) puts
it, “the way that can be followed is not the true Way; the name that can be named
is not the true Name.” Marginalized and more or less driven underground after the
establishment of Confucianism as the official state religion during the Han Dy-
nasty (221 BCE-­224 CE), by the late 6th century Taoism had evolved into secret
religious sects that stressed: experiments with a variety of esoteric “body practices”
aimed at cultivating life (yangsheng) and seeking a path to self-­deification (cheng
xian). Thus while Taoist philosophy did persist, it did so alongside an esoteric,
mystical discourse of the body—a discourse contained in intentionally obscure
manuals and records that teach meditation, dietetics, acupuncture, drug/herb use
and, of course, a complex set of therapeutic sexual techniques (Kohn).
Given this intense focus on the body in religious Taoism, the great historian of

135

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Chinese science, Joseph Needham, claimed that the medieval Chinese ars erotica
developed into an extremely advanced, proto-­scientific “Physiological Alchemy”
(Needham). Alongside Needham’s work in volume five of Science and Civilization
in China, the other great masterpiece on Chinese sexology in the twentieth century,
Sexual life in Ancient China (Engl. 1961; Fr. 1971), is also a magisterial work of cul-
tural history. Written by Needham’s friend, the Dutch scholar-­diplomat Robert van
Gulik, the work translates and distills a broad range of Chinese sexual discourse,
making the significant claim that sexual repression was relatively unknown to Chi-
nese culture thanks to Taoism. Van Gulik’s book is remarkable not merely as a work
of sinology, but as work that exerted a mesmerizing effect on the minds of sev-
eral important postmodernist thinkers—namely, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze,
Felix Guattari, and Jean-­Francois Lyotard.
Due to its connection to Foucault, a much recent scholarship on the Taoist ars
erotica comes from the fields of comparative literature and philosophy, focusing on
Foucault’s overreliance on van Gulik and his limited knowledge of the ars erotica.
Foucault’s well-­known, controversial claim that the West produced a Scientia Sexu-
alis (modern sexology) that applied scientific classification and methods of analysis
to the understanding of sex while the East, notably China, produced an ars erotica
tradition is problematic to say the least (History of Sexuality 1 59–60). According to
this, in the Asian ars erotica traditions, “truth is drawn from pleasure itself, under-
stood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in
relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to
a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as
pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its re-
verberations in the body and the soul” (57). The claim that the ars erotica tries to ac-
quire and prolong “pleasure” has drawn considerable criticism from contemporary
scholars interested in the Chinese ars erotica. For example Leon Rocha who, in his
recent critiques of Foucault’s comments on the Chinese sexual arts, accuses the au-
thor of “actively inscribing and reinforcing the East-­West divide himself—erasing
affinities, continuities, identities, similarities, contact and exchange between “East”
and “West.” Scientia sexualis/ars erotica turns from a defamiliarization strategy
into an indefensible historical claim” (Rocha 339). Rocha wants to argue that, fol-
lowing van Gulik, Foucault idealized the Taoist ars erotica by claiming that what
we in the West call “repression” did not exist in Chinese sexual culture prior to the
arrival of Western imperialism.2 Thus, over-­reliance on van Gulik likely under-
mined the veracity of Foucault’s research and succeeded in reinforcing his con-
viction that the “repressive hypothesis” of Freud and others was part of a larger
“incitement to discourse” about sex that emerged in the late-­19th century. Similar
to Rocha, Richard Shusterman has also called attention to Foucault’s misreading
of van Gulik, especially regarding his misunderstanding of the so-­called Chinese

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“formula of sexual pleasure” outlined in the second volume of The History of Sexu-
ality.3 As Shusterman explains, “[Foucault] is confused in thinking that pleasure,
for them [the Chinese], is more important than the sexual act because it is pleasure
that they seek to prolong by delaying and even abstaining from the act. Instead, it
is the act itself that the Chinese male seeks to prolong so as to magnify his yin and
yang powers and the salutary benefits these bring” (Shusterman 60). Neither al-
together non-­repressive nor centered on pleasure, the true nature of the erotic arts
in China seems to have eluded Foucault.
The problems with Foucault’s writings about Chinese sex that these scholars
point out are very important, but they tend to neglect the larger intellectual milieu
or cultural context in which Foucault’s remarks were made. The sexual revolution
of the late-­1960s, the drug counter-­culture that came with the invention of LSD,
and opposition to the wars in post-­colonial Vietnam and Algieria all combined to
make questions of race, gender, and sexuality seem increasingly important. If solu-
tions to these “body problems” were sought outside the West it seems only natural,
for the French postmodernist turn to Taoist sex in the 1970s sought to radicalize
and “other” our understanding of the function and ends of desire, re-­thinking sex
from new perspectives and philosophical orientations. Indeed, according to Alan
Sheridan, one of Foucault’s greatest interpreters, the critique of the Freudian “re-
pressive hypothesis” was really aimed at “freudo-­marxisme, a certain unsystem-
atic New Left amalgam” which Foucault believed was misguided (Sheridan 167). In
this case it is necessary to read Foucault and his contemporaries in the context of
an earlier generation of neo-­Freudian leftist sexology—“Freudo-­Marxist” writers
like the Herbert Marcuse of Eros and Civilization (1955) and the Norman O. Brown
of Life Against Death (1959).4 These influential works attempt a reconciliation of
Freud with Marx in such a way that it appears only an historic sexual revolution
to overthrow repression/oppression will suffice.5 Moreover, also forgotten in many
debates about Foucault’s research into the history of Chinese sexuality, is the fact
that Foucault’s interest in the Taoist ars erotica was preceded by three major fig-
ures in French postmodernist theory of the 1970s: Jean-­Francois Lyotard, Gilles
Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Although rarely mentioned as an important feature
of either, in both A Thousand Plateaus and Libidinal Economy we encounter sin-
cere engagements with the Taoist ars erotica—engagements largely indebted to the
presentation we find in van Gulik’s Sexual Life in Ancient China. To my under-
standing what is common to all of these writings, including volume two of Fou-
cault’s History of Sexuality, is the belief that the Taoist sexual arts allow us to think
about sex in a way that avoids the “problem of the subject,” which further allows
us to be really postmodern and imagine an altogether different economy of enjoy-
ment, or jouissance. In my view, however, only Foucault has the theoretical appa-
ratus capable of bridging the gap between east/west and seeing the ars erotica as a

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discourse of ethical self-­mastery. That is, while I grant that the other “postmodern”
readings of Taoist sex are legitimate attempts to think beyond the knowing subject,
only Foucault’s account allows us to see the ars erotica as a form of self-­cultivation
that attempts to “enhance the brain” and develop a philosophical body conscious-
ness as “technologies of the self.”6

The Taoist Body without Organs

In Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1972) the practice of the Taoist ars
erotica serves as an exemplary model for the creation of their famous Body without
Organs (BwO). Relying mainly on van Gulik’s history of Chinese private life, the
authors cite “a great Japanese compilation of Taoist treatises” in which the body is
a conceived as a “circuit of intensities between male and female energy” (Thousand
157).7 These ars erotica treatises describe how the “innate or instinctive force (Yin)
[is] stolen by or transmitted to the man in such a way that the transmitted force of
the man (Yang) in turn becomes innate” (Thousand 157). The circulation of these
immanent energies hinges, Deleuze and Guattari believe, on the practice of coitus
reservatus (deferred ejaculation)—an act which is supposed to return the semen to
the brain, replenishing and revitalizing it with the un-­ejaculated semen. Thus the
authors claim that it is “not a question of delaying pleasure in order to produce a
kind of externalizable surplus value, but instead of constituting an intensive body
without organs” (Thousand 157). It should be fairly clear that the “body without
organs” (BwO) is actually the Taoist erotic body, and it is described as a “dis-­
organized,” smooth surface across which intensities circulate, ignite, and pass away
in no particular order or systematic way. Unlike the modern, scientific Western
body that is “articulated” through its various functionalized organs, the authors
suggest a dis-­articulated body that can experience arousal and pain, being and
becoming, on a thousand different physical and metaphysical levels. In A Thou-
sand Plateaus the Taoist erotic “self ” is thus a description of a willful, ecstatic body
that is opposed to transcendence—or, rather, we could say the authors oppose any
desire which seeks to “overcome” (stratify) the eroticized body. Neither the psycho-
logical functions of the unconscious nor the materialist functions of surplus value
can explain the BwO’s desire, for it is inherently anarchistic and always escapes
from such transcendental “organization.” Taoist coitus reservatus liberates the body
from an ejaculatory jouissance that can be vented or expelled, instead preferring to
aim that intensity inward to self-­refinement:

Tao, a field of immanence in which desire lacks nothing and therefore cannot
be linked to any external or transcendental criterion. It is true that the whole
circuit can be channeled toward procreative ends (ejaculation when the ener-

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 gies are right); that is how Confucianism understood it. But this is true only for
one side of the assemblage of desire, the side facing the strata, organisms, State,
family. . . . It is not true for the other side, the Tao side of destratification that
draws a plane of consistency proper to desire. (Thousand 157)

The sex of the Way is a circuit, a field, a plateau, or a plane of immanence that re-
turns energy to itself in a “circuit” that lacks a repressive social function or procre-
ative purpose. In short, for the authors, delayed ejaculation produces an interior
“plane of consistency” that is beyond repression (or lack), organization, or the
will to stratification (Confucianism) that would use it as an instrument for gen-
erational/familial transcendence.8 This circuit is on the side of becoming and is
not guided by lack, nor is it obedient to stratifying taboos about how or when the
bodily energies can be released; however, techniques of the body such as coitus re-
servatus are quite well developed within the Taoist canon, and in The Record of Cul-
tivating Nature and Prolonging Life (discussed below) we often see them in rigorous
opposition to a free-flowing sexual desire.
The goal of Taoist physiological alchemy is the “smelting of the inner elixir”
(lian nei-­dan), a process whereby the body’s energies are refined to such a point
that they are able to sustain life in perpetuity. Although Deleuze and Guattari are
not aware of the role that interdictions or taboos play in the process of achieving
agelessness through sex, their Taoist body without organs is an “anti-­organism.”
This is because it escapes the condition of lack so often ascribed to the body of the
western subject:

Significance clings to the soul just as the organism clings to the body, and it is
not easy to get rid of either. And how can we unhook ourselves from the points
of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant reality? Tearing
the conscious away from the subject in order to make it a means of exploration,
to make it a veritable production: this is assuredly no more or less difficult than
tearing the body away from the organism. (160)

The Taoist BwO is a veritable production in the sense that its verity, or truthfulness,
is not “nailed down” to an organized subjectivity (organism) but, rather, allowed to
follow the exploratory principle of the Way, which is becoming itself. According to
Taologis becoming of the Taoist body we discover that it is often associated with the
principle of the feminine, for the goal is to refine the “egg” of immortality, the dan
which will bring about the immanence of the pregnant female body (Schipper 136–
38). It is a bit surprising, then, to discover the same insight reiterated in A Thousand
Plateaus, where the authors claim “the BwO is the egg. But the egg is not regressive;
on the contrary, it is perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your
own milieu of pure intensity, spatium, not extension” (Thousand 164).

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 As egg, the Taoist BwO is fundamentally spatial, concerned with an embryonic
self that is enclosed within a shell that defines and protects it. This affective body,
as an internal network of qi channels and mystically charged essential forces (jing,
shen), can thus be thought of as an as yet unorganized space that demands a dis-
tinct style of desiring and becoming. Deleuze and Guattari, despite their limited
knowledge of practices other than coitus reservatus, are nevertheless correct to in-
terpret the Taoist circuit of desire as an attempt to achieve an immanent space of
becoming. However, described in this way, it seems we are forced to downplay the
role of language in the construction of the Taoist self, required to forget how dis-
course assists in the process of creating this spatialized plane of self-­overcoming.
Kristofer Schipper, in The Taoist Body, notes that she who follows the path of Taoist
inner alchemy is advised to always “Keep the One,” to remain collected, and peace-
fully preside over a place inside the self/body known as the Yellow Court. Ac-
cording to the early texts like the Classic of the Yellow Court, a treatise in regulated
verse that deals with Qi Gong, sexual practices, and the psychic geography of the
body’s inner realm, we learn that “there is someone in the House who never comes
down. / If you can manage to see him, you will never be ill” (qtd. in Schipper 140).
Here the metaphoric House is the body, a place which is haunted by the specter
of illness—a mysterious force which, could it be persuaded down, would bestow
good health on that “someone” who never appears.
Deleuze would no doubt appreciate the fact that spatial metaphors and other
symbolic figures are integral to the Taoist inner landscape, especially insofar as that
landscape can be considered as a series of plateaus or landmarks. The main point
of the “inner work” (nei ye) is to traverse this ground for oneself, to check up on
the organs and their various operations, and to monitor one’s progress toward lon-
gevity. Schipper notes that one peculiarity of the Classic of the Yellow Court (ca. 288
CE) is that it’s descriptions of the Yellow Court and environs—which are within
the body’s inner realm—are extremely opaque and often contradictory. Identifying
many of the same locations and spirits within the body in many different ways,
using different place names, Schipper suggests that a Zen-­like point is being made
since, after all, “the name that can be named is not the true Name.” Perhaps for the
Taoist to progress across/within this inner realm he must understand, in Deleuzian
terms, that “a plateau is a piece of immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus.
Every BwO is itself a plateau in communication with other plateaus on the plane
of consistency. The BwO is a component of passage” (Thousand 158). Forever re-­
territorialized in passage (as Tao, or Path), the Taoist body becomes defamiliarizing
change itself, motion along an axis of destratified jouissance that ultimately leads to
dis-­organization as health.

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 Semen as Sexual Capital
The radical phenomenology of the Taoist body presented in A Thousand Plateaus is
far more erotic than anything we might expect to find in theoretical treatises else-
where in the twentieth century, and yet there are others. Two years after the publi-
cation of Capitalism and Schizophrenia Jean-­Francois Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy
attempted a similar postmodernist theory of the Taoist ars erotica. The extraction
and hoarding of libidinal “energy” is the key purpose of the Chinese ars erotica
in Lyotard’s view and his book makes an ambitious attempt to formulate an eco-
nomics of desire that relies on the alterity of Taoist sex. Lyotard’s “economy” re-
tains the sense of “coming from the household” and his approach to understanding
the ars erotica focuses on its use in the proper administration of desire within the
home, the place where good government was supposed to originate in China. Thus
in contrast to Deleuze and Guattari’s “anti-­organism,” Libidinal Economy addresses
the problem of a Taoist inner “economy of desire” by claiming that the practice of
coitus reservatus is a technique whereby “the energetic substances dormant in the
folds of the body (of the earth-­woman) are gathered up, stock-­piled [. . .] and sub-
sequently put back in circulation as a means of production” (Libidinal 210). Taoist
sex is thus a kind of mercantile exchange in concubines and wives, which represent
the raw material for the hoarding of female semen which, later on, can be trans-
lated into healthy offspring. Heubel notes that, unlike Foucault, Lyotard is con-
cerned chiefly with the Taoist ars erotica as metaphor for the circulation of social
desire. That is, for Lyotard, “energetic vampirism”—i.e., the Taoist adept’s practice
of leeching away the feminine pneuma, or yin-­qi, to enhance his own vitality—was
the real basis for the production of Taoist bodies. However, Heubel indicates that
both Foucault and Lyotard frame the difference between East/West sexuality within
the context of a larger “meditation on the relation between energy (force) and the
self ” (Heubel 286). Furthermore, both agree that, “unlike Christianity, both the
Greeks and Chinese avoid demonizing sexual potential” and regard it as an essen-
tially neutral value (Heubel 270). Thus for Heubel, Lyotard misunderstands Taoist
sex as a form of “energetic vampirism,” or a means of appropriating “feminine va-
pors,” or yin-­qi, that thereby enhance masculine vitality. Heubel is correct that, un-
like Foucault, Lyotard is concerned chiefly with the Taoist ars erotica as a metaphor
for the circulation of social desire, but Lyotard fixates on the adept’s stock-­piling of
“reserves” of vital semen. In Libidinal Economy he tackles this “seminal” problem
by asking

What is this Chinese semen? The object of a saving? More: of a capitalization. A

saving would simply be the retention of the semen in the occasional jouissance.
The act of saving is reduced to a pressure of the fingers of the left hand on the

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 seminal duct [as in coitus reservatus]. But Chinese erotics requires many things
apart from this act: it wants to extract from the partner as much force as pos-
sible; therefore introducing into a body, which will be the reproductive body,
new quantities of energy. (Libidinal 210)

As an accumulation of reproductive energy the “Chinese semen” represents

capital—the accumulation of reserves of reproductive potential—which can be
utilized to expand the life force. Taoist coitus reservatus, “this remarkable dispotif,”
Lyotard tells us, is aimed at a mercantile trade in which concubines and wives rep-
resent a raw material for the hoarding of male sperm which can later be trans-
lated into healthy offspring (205). Oddly enough, Lyotard’s speculations have been
confirmed by sinologists working in the field. However, before we discuss these,
there are several things to consider in Lyotard’s libidinal interpretation of “Chi-
nese semen.”
First, what he fails to understand is that the Taoist male is trying to impregnate
himself with the elixir/pill which will finally give birth to his immortality “egg”
(dan). Second, as regards the extraction or harvesting of energy from the woman’s
body—fluids from her mouth, breasts, and vagina but also her breath—it is impor-
tant to remember that the female body represents the passive (yin) element and the
male body the active (yang) force. Immortality is thus available to both sexes, and
indeed Schipper translates a passage from the The Classic of the Yellow Court that
supports this point nicely:

The Mother, Queen Mother of the West, obtained the Tao by nurturing her
feminine forces. Such a woman has only to mate once with a man for him to fall
ill from exhaustion, while her complexion becomes radiant, and she no longer
has any use for cosmetics. . . . The Holy Mother has no husband. She likes to
make love to young men. But one should certainly not divulge publically the
real nature of the Mother! (Schipper 147)

Surely it does sound as though the Queen Mother was able to vampirize the mascu-
line (yang) energies of men, but the point is that she achieved her divine status—
that is, “obtained the Tao”—by consuming men for their yang energies. Thus, when
Lyotard claims that, in “the majority of texts it is the man who vampirizes the
energy of women,” he is simply incorrect. Even according to the principle legend
of the ars erotica it was a woman (xuan nu, the “dark woman”) who taught the
Yellow Emperor the sexual arts for the first time, so we must remain cautious when
discussing the patriarchal power of the Taoist “libidinal economy.”9
Finally, whereas Deleuze and Guattari stress coitus reservatus as a technique
for producing an immanent body without organs—a becoming body inside/across
which energies are re-­circulated on different planes of desire—Lyotard stresses the

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search for “annihilatory intensities.” Somehow these essentially negative intensi-
ties, aimed at leeching, expropriating, and “vampirizing” the energies of the oppo-
site sex, are nevertheless capable of undermining the possibility of subjectivity.
The science of coitus reservatus follows, from Lyotard’s standpoint, the economic
logic of production, exchange and transformation: semen, channeled up into the
brain for the sake of life, converts the body’s physical energies into mental/spiritual
energy. This means that, like money, the value of seminal fluids (jing) is that they
circulate on the basis of an original extraction and expropriation of energy. How-
ever, as Lyotard admits, “if the Tao is important to us libidinal economists, it is not
because of its nihilism, but because of its refinement in the search for and the af-
firmation of mutability, and thereby the non-­existence in it of the question of the
subject” (Lyotard 206). This bold assertion, that there is no “question” of the sub-
ject in the Taoist discourse of self-­refinement, needs further clarification if we are
to understand how (and for whom) mutability works at the level of jouissance. For
as Lyotard observes, “whatever the semen’s subsequent fate, the Chinese penis does
not act at all like the Athenian penis, which is only concerned, when he penetrates
the wife’s cavity, to deposit the semen there, as quickly as possible, with a view to
the utterly basic and general ends of reproduction” (204). Lyotard regards coitus
reservatus (and the symbolic Chinese penis) as a practice for using and manipu-
lating desire considered as a resource, but what needs to be said about this is that
in actual Taoist texts the goal is not to stock-­pile semen within the body but, rather,
to recirculate it and return it to the head/brain (as we see in the dictum that is the
epigraph of this paper). Taoist sexual phenomenology is surely based on exchange
and infinite mutability, but stock-­piling semen (as enjoyment or material energy)
is not part of the process: one exchanges seminal essence and qi with the partner,
extracting it for its own self-­(pro)creative purposes, so as to nurture the primor-
dial egg of immortality that grows within. If Lyotard’s Taoist libidinal economy
is a peculiar enactment of a cycle of nihilistic, vampiric jouissance-­consumption
this is because of the author’s inadequate understanding of the inner realm of the
Taoist body.

Taoist Sex and Techne Tou Biou

Having given this brief overview of the postmodernist appropriation of Taoist
body practices, we must return to Foucault’s notion of the “arts of living” (techne
tou biou). Inspired partly by his reading of classicist Pierre Hadot’s studies of early
Graeco-­Roman philosophy as a means of overcoming the passions, meditations
or spiritual practices, Foucault comprehends early philosophy in the west as being
concerned chiefly with “the care of the self ” (epimileia) in everyday life. In Fou-
cault’s genealogy of the discourse of “care of the self ” we discover a forgotten par-

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allel to the Delphic command to “know thyself,” a principle that deeply engaged the
West for hundreds of years and emphasized the work of self-­care rather than the
Platonic work of self-­knowledge as one of the key tasks of philosophy. Although
he died before fully articulating a coherent theory of these early techniques of self
care, in his late work Foucault does outline the contours of a theory of the “arts of
living.” Looking closely at a broad range of Greek and Roman texts Foucault shows
that self-­care was emphasized in numerous ways and developed an assortment of
“technologies of the self ”—e.g., interdictions against sexual activity, the injunction
to daily record one’s weaknesses and mistakes, and the custom of seeking philo-
sophical guidance from an older person. Foucault basically believes sexual inter-
dictions in the west are invariably about truth-­telling, but the ones we find in the
eastern ars erotica are about maintaining sexual and mental vigor far into old age.
Understood in relation to the techne tou biou, Taoist sexual ethics appears to have
a great deal in common with the Graeco-­Roman philosophy Foucault discovered
near the end of his life.
In the third volume of The History of Sexuality: the Care of the Self and in his late
lectures Foucault suggests that an ethos of self-­care, epimeleia heautou, held sway
over much early Western philosophy:

The notion of epimeleia does not merely designate this general attitude or this
form of attention turned on the self. The epimeleia also always designates a
number of actions exercised on the self by the self and by which one changes,
purifies, transforms, and transfigures oneself. [. . .] In short, with this notion of
epimeleia heautou we have a body of work defining a way of being a standpoint,
forms of reflection, and practices which make it an extremely important phe-
nomenon not just in the history of subjectivity itself or, if you like, in the history
of practices of subjectivity. (Hermeneutics 11)

It is interesting that Foucault adds “or, if you like, in the history of practices of
subjectivity,” for this would suggest that one can avoid discussing the history of
subjectivity per se and speak only of those “practices” of the self which prevailed
in different periods. As we have seen, the practice of the erotic self in Taoism in-
volves bodily process and regulation, so the construction of subjectivity and self-
knowledge appear to be beside the point. The chief goal of the ancient ars erotica
is to achieve wisdom and longevity, but also to become an immortal (cheng xian)
in the process of inner purification. “Returning the semen to the brain” through a
sustained deferral of ejaculation, of enjoyment, the sage engages in a process that
“purifies, transforms, and transfigures” her relation to herself.
Harold D. Roth, in his study of the Taoist techniques of “inner training” (nei
ye), follows the Tang scholar Sima Tan in claiming that what distinguished the

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Tao school was its emphasis on those “techniques of the Way” (Tao shu), or those
practices which allow one to prolong life and cultivate earthly happiness. Roth’s
understanding of the spiritual aspects of Taoism actually turns on its practical and
therapeutic techniques of living—that is, the practice of philosophy and inner-­
cultivation takes precedence over problems of discourse (Legalism and the School
of Names) and morality (Mohism and Confucianism) because these allow the
adept to extend and better understand “life.” As mentioned previously, in Science
and Civilization in China Joseph Needham also regards the Taoist ars erotica as a
proto-­scientific attempt to achieve body wisdom through experiments in “inner
alchemy.” What attracted Needham, who was chiefly interested in Taoist chem-
istry, to the ars erotica was its ambitious attempt to use sex as means of creating an
eternal bios.10 Taoist sex was thus an instrument for transcendence, one that de-
veloped into a highly experimental approach to the body. Through empirical ob-
servations about the body, its reaction to different techniques of stimulation and
chemical excitement, the ars erotica developed into a “discipline” in its own right—
his Physiological Alchemy—and one that emphasized not only interdictions, skills,
and attention to when and where to have sex, which foods to consume before and
after, and so forth. In doing so Taoism displayed a lively interest in experimental
knowledge otherwise absent from other areas of Chinese culture. My Foucauldian
footnote to this is: Taoism develops as a quest for ever more advanced technologies
of the body/self, such as coitus reservatus, cited in the dictum at the beginning of
this paper: “Returning the semen to supplement the brain, one can achieve ageless-
ness” (huanjing bunao, ke de bulao).
Lynne Huffer describes Foucault’s philosophy of history as an attempt to think
through bios in its myriad different forms, for “if bios is life as the object of tech-
niques, Foucault’s genealogies of the present are conceptual modes of working with
bios. But where rationalist modes of working with bios capture lives by pinning
them down as objects of knowledge, Foucault’s approach to bios is an art of living
that he describes as a ‘poetic attitude’” (Huffer 141). Ars erotica texts too are con-
cerned with “working with bios,” and to give but one fairly representative example
we can look at Tao Hongjing’s Record of Cultivating Nature and Prolonging Life. It
is a fairly well-­known Shang Qing manuscript of the Fifth Century and deals exten-
sively with the work of bios in the Chinese context:

Master Peng said: the higher cultivators of life sleep in separate beds from
women, but the mediocre cultivators sleep in the same bed, sharing a blanket
with women. Eating your full and taking medicine is not as good as remaining
independent and keeping your distance. Carnal sights (mei se) make men blind,
music makes them deaf, and delicious flavors make them lose their taste. If
one can, in the course of having sex, control ejaculation, regulate and curb the

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 emotions and control the flow of semen, one is doing the right thing—these all
contribute to human longevity. One day’s prohibition is: at night one cannot eat
too much; one month’s interdiction is, when drinking wine at night, one must
not get drunk; one year’s prohibition is: at night, one must escape from sex with
women (nü se); a lifetime’s interdiction is that, at night, one must always protect
the primordial Qi. (Record 247)

According to this, the legendary master of the inner alchemical arts, Peng Zu,
taught men to control their dependence on sex and to be aware of the dangers of
over-­indulging in “carnal sights,” sounds, and tastes. Moreover, “control of ejacu-
lation,” coitus reservatus, is here listed as one of a series of therapeutic practices
aimed at limiting the loss of physical vitality due to the passions. Most importantly,
however, Tao Hongjing supports Peng’s emphasis on the practice of self-­limiting
interdictions—that is, of avoiding over-­enjoyment of sensual pleasures because
such pathos has a numbing effect on the body when experienced in excess. Thus
perhaps contrary to Foucault’s view that “unlike other interdictions, sexual inter-
dictions are constantly connected with the obligation to tell the truth about one-
self,” here we have sexual prohibitions that have nothing to do with confession
or truth-­telling.11 Instead, these prohibitions aim to avoid the numbing and ex-
hausting effects of a sex that could possibly harm the primordial pneuma (yuan qi)
and lead to illness or, at the very least, a limited ability to cultivate life/bios.
In the Taoist phenomenology of sex, this dispotif of the healthful erotic arts, the
inner alchemist seems constantly threatened by excessive passions, sexual illnesses,
and qi-­vampirism. Thus questions of correct practice, rather than theory, are the
primary focus of this techne tou bios. Never compelled to speak about the truth
of his sex or confess his torturous desires, he sees sex in strictly formal terms as a
tradition-­informed practice devoted to somatic self-­enhancement.12 As Professor
Liu Dalin, one of the foremost contemporary scholars of Chinese sex, indicates in
his history of Chinese sexuality

the classical ars erotica does not merely have the aim of satisfying sexual desire,
achieving pleasurable sex, or even of controlling desire; rather it deals with cul-
tivating life and longevity [. . .] The ancient ars erotica of China focuses on the
function of health, since sexual activity must obey life-­cultivation [yangsheng]
and has a special set of sexual intercourse methods for the sake of this cultiva-
tion: sometimes one must observe [the sexual act] and sometimes one must re-
frain from it. Thus, China’s classical ars erotica could also be termed “the study
of cultivating life in the bedroom” [ fangshi yangsheng xue]. (Liu 348–49)

This “study of cultivation,” according to Liu, focuses on the healthy maintenance

of “life” (sheng) as an excellent and unquestionable value; a life that is built on en-

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richment, transmission, and maintenance of the body’s basic essences and ener-
gies (349). Nevertheless, even though we are dealing with a discourse of sexual
therapeutics that emphasizes the cultivationist aspects of storing, nourishing, and
transmitting the vital essences through careful copulation, Liu’s yangsheng–­ology
appears to rationalize the potential of this process, even fetishizing it as a mode of
intensive self-­care.13
Works like The Record of Cultivating Nature and Prolonging Life are often written
in the form of a treatise or record ( jilu) which collects the sayings and earlier wisdom
about life-­cultivation through sexual vitality, passing that on to other practitioners
(other alchemists and acolytes). Thus regardless of their alleged uses, we must try
to understand what sort of self these records and treatises presuppose, imagine, or
even produced after many years and even decades of use. Apparently no one today
really knows the exact experience of practicing the ars erotica for long periods of
time, but from the standpoint of literary studies we can appreciate the ways in
which these texts rely on a certain mythological body thinking which is foreign to
contemporary reason. That is, the Queen Mother of the West, Lao Zi, the Yellow
Emperor, the Dark Maiden, the True Men, and even Tao Hongjing’s “higher culti-
vators of life” are all important legendary practitioners of the sexual arts who have
achieved a higher level of awareness through the ars erotica. These legendary exem-
plars are important symbolic figures in a network of aesthetic values that could not
easily be accounted for from the pragmatic-­scientific perspective of Needham and
Liu, where analysis of the function of cultivation practices outweighs attention to
self-­care as a process of aesthetic embodiment. Moreover, the ars erotica tradition
is largely initiatory and, as a sacred discourse that is transmitted as wisdom from
master to adept, therefore intends to teach self-mastery.14 For example, in the pas-
sage quoted above Tao Hongjing cites the venerable Master Peng who is, in turn,
citing the Dao De Jing (“Carnal sights make men blind, music makes men deaf ”)
and linking those ideas to an apocryphal tradition that stretches back into the an-
tiquity to the time of the Dao De Jing.
In terms of practicing the ars erotica, which is different from having sex or
making love, does the adept primarily subject herself to the discursive principles
of Taoist desire found in the treatises, allowing it to shape her according to the
power embedded in its discourse? Or, rather, does she mainly experiment with the
techniques and re-­invent herself as a subject of the discourse? In other words, does
her work with bios exclude it from consideration as an aesthetic practice, or does
it prove she is treating her own life as an aesthetic object? In an important essay
on the aesthetics of the Asian ars erotica Richard Shusterman asks a similar ques-
tion “If the classical Chinese erotic arts were largely aimed to promote practical
matters such as health, does it then follow that we cannot speak of them as having
an aesthetic character?” (Shusterman 61). Shusterman believes we must, despite

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the “dogma of disinterestedness,” regard the ars erotica as involved in a form of
bodily aesthetic knowing, or somaesthetics, comparable in nature to painting or
playing the piano. However, I think his question highlights the problem Foucault
tries to discuss in his lectures on epimeleia—that is, rather than always focusing
on the subject’s knowledge of herself, one should also pay attention to her method
of self-­care and the degree to which it promotes wisdom and happiness. What
Shusterman’s question really shows us is the degree to which everyday, pragmatic
bodily matters (such as sex or eating) are often driven outside the demesne of phi-
losophy and treated simply as matters of health or medicinal concern. Foucault’s
major achievement, as Milchman and Rosenberg have noted, is precisely the way
in which he uses self-­care to establish “an intimate link between the aesthetic and
ethical domains, between an art of existence and care of self ” (Milchman & Rosen-
berg 57). Bringing aesthetics and ethics together in this fashion, Foucault’s work
allows us to conceive of the Taoist ars erotica as a more literal and a far more radical
version of the techne tou biou—for here our art of living is deeply involved in the
ethical transformation of the material foundation of the self—i.e., the body.

Conclusion: Taoism and the technologies

of the Pre-­Subjective Sexual Self
The postmodernist understandings of the Taoist ars erotica discussed above all de-
veloped out of highly creative readings of Robert van Gulik’s Sexual Life in Ancient
China. These readings represent important attempts to think of desire without ap-
pealing to an organic, rational, or repressed humanist subject: Deleuze and Guattari
see Taoist sex as a means of creating the BwO, that circuit of desire which produces
an immanence that is pre-­subjective, an awareness that exists on different plateaus
of desire, in intensities beyond dominant reality or its normative discourses of the
body. Moreover, although self-­care and cultivation are not directly mentioned in
A Thousand Plateaus the authors do suggest that the aim of Taoist sex is to decon-
struct the self as “organism,” opening up a plane of immanence where the being
can continue to develop as body. Similarly, Lyotard’s fascination with the practice
of coitus reservatus, which he describes as a process of accumulating sexual energy
(capitalization) and the “quest for annihilatory intensities,” is also considered as
a technique of self-­fashioning. Although not exactly parallel to these views, Fou-
cault’s depiction of the ars erotica as Western desire’s Other is significant because
it tries to suggest an alternative to the scientia sexualis understanding of the “truth
of sex.” Despite the dangers and limitations of this view, my argument here is that,
when understood as Foucault’s techne tou biou, we can understand the Taoist erotic
arts as an alternative, stylized form of self-­care that operates quite differently. How-
ever, considered in light of contemporary neuroscience, it is not altogether dif-

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ferent, and by way of a conclusion I would like to suggest that recent developments
in the study of neurological vitality have important implications for our under-
standing of the ars erotica.
Care of the self in the Taoist ars erotica tradition is ultimately nothing less than
an attempt to care for the brain (nao), and Catherine Malbou’s recent philosophical
engagements with the neuroscientific idea of plasticity suggest that the idea of
neural self-­care is the epitome of wisdom. In her view neuroplasticity is what keeps
us alert to change and mutable, but also evidence of the brain’s ongoing process
of “untying identity.” Plasticity is thus a process that prompts her to argue that
“we must find a way to think a mutation that engages both form and being, a new
form that is literally a form of being” (Ontology 17). To support this claim she offers
a reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, offering a “contemporary definition” of Spinoza’s
conatus as “the aggregate of dispositions laid down in brain circuitry that, once en-
gaged by internal or environmental conditions, seeks both survival and well-­being”
(24–25). The Spinozan conatus is thus similar to a quality of the brain’s structure
that allows it to be engaged by stimuli and continue to mutate as a result of this
engagement—to form itself and, at the same time, be formed by stimuli. When
that active/passive process breaks down, however, when the plastic conatus can
no longer maintain well-­being, as in old age, cases of brain damage or Alzheimer’s
disease, a radical mutation sets in and we witness “a metamorphosis that is a fare-
well to being itself ” (37). Thus in ageing, as we more and more “become ourselves,”
the brain increasingly dislocates (or re-­territorializes?) the self, displacing it and
forcing us to ask whether “the history of being itself consists perhaps of nothing
but a series of accidents which disfigure the meaning of essence” (91). As we have
seen, not only in Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard but also in Lao Zi and Tao Hong-
jing, the Taoist sexual self allows us to imagine a deconstruction of the “essential”
self. Through the deferral of jouissance, not just ejaculation but also the “release”
of death, self-­transformation is carried out as perpetual changing process. When
looked at in Malabou’s terms, then, the Taoist erotic “care of the self ” is the epitome
of Foucault’s utopian techne tou biou insofar as it attempts to prolong the physio-
logical vitality of the brain through change and exchange, mutation and reserva-
tion—forever forestalling a final loss of neural plasticity in rejuvenatory sex.15

 National Chung Hsing University

Notes
1 Many thanks to Douglas Wile for his assistance in explaining the origin and meaning
of this famous quote, which is here taken from Tao Hongjing’s The Record of Culti-
vating Nature and Prolonging Life 283.
2 Leon Rocha claims, in agreement with Goldin (2006), that van Gulik was “pressured”

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 by Needham into describing the Taoist ars erotica in such positive terms (“Scientia
sexualis” 337).
3 Foucault cites van Gulik twice in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, first mentioning the
“ancient Chinese ‘bedroom treatises’” and, later, with regard to the woman’s duty to
practice techniques that would enhance male pleasure and produce healthy progeny,
see 137, 143.
4 Lynne Huffer claims that Foucault’s “Eros is not a timeless form of expression delim-
ited by genre or discursive form. Nor is it a libidinal, Marcusian energy waiting to be
liberated—either through the talking cure or literary language—with a promise to
transform the conditions of work, the economy, and social institutions. Rather, eros
is the name we can give to an ethical practice of embodied subjectivity in relation to
truth” (138). It seems likely that what Foucault found unsatisfying about Marcuse’s ac-
count was its retention of the traditional idea of the bourgeois subject in a “repressed”
relationship to his nature/sexuality. According to Jessica Benjamin too, Marcuse was
“content to reveal the material, social interdependency and unconscious nature that
underlies the apparent discreteness of the bourgeois subject, but still retained nature
as an ultimate locus of authority;” hence, in this view “sexuality assumes the place of
nature as that which is repressed by civilization; much like it does in Freud” (81).
5 Although it is outside the scope of this article to examine his work in detail, it is worth
noting that Norman O. Brown also comments on Needham’s writings on the Taoist ars
erotica and has many interesting things to say about it. He claims that “Joseph Need-
ham’s interest in what we have called body mysticism, an interest which underlies his
epoch-­making work Science and Civilization in China, reminds us that the resurrec-
tion of the body has been placed on the agenda not only by psychoanalysis, mysticism,
and poetry, but also by the philosophical criticism of modern science” (340).
6 For explanation of the “technologies of the self,” see The History of Sexuality Volume
One, 10–12.
7 The tenth century Japanese work they discuss is Ishimpo, a medical text that transmits
and discusses the health benefits of the Chinese ars erotica.
8 The Great Learning says: “their homes being ordered, the state was ordered.”
9 For a more detailed discussion of so-­called “sexual vampirism” in the ars erotica, see
Goldin.
10 Although practicing inner alchemy (lian nei dan) involved the sexual arts, it also in-
volved meditation, qi gong, and the ingestion of various elixirs and hallucinogens.
11 See Martin, et al 16–49.
12 As Donald Harper points out, “Han commentaries interpret certain passages [of the
Dao De Jing] as constituting teachings on physical cultivation. The examples of cryptic
language and its application in the Ma-­wang-­tui physical cultivation texts strengthen
the probability that the Lao tzu was an important guide to physical cultivation in the
ancient ‘nurturing life’ tradition” (543).
13 Likewise, the authors of The History of Taoist Religion regard the ars erotica as a proto-­
science concerned with developing a superior health regime through sex, massage
techniques, and medicaments. See Qing and Tang 79–84.
14 Tao Hongjing was in many ways a scholar sage, a collector and annotator of Taoist

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 texts, especially the so-­called “Mao Shan Revelations” of Yang Xi. For more on his con-
tribution to the Taoist tradition of body cultivation, see Ching and Tang 81–83.
15 Perhaps as a kind of warning and/or promise to those embarking on the practice of
the ars erotica, the Chinese literary tradition comes down to us replete with stories of
fox-­faeries—immortal female Taoists who have practiced the sexual arts to the point
where they are capable of shape-­shifting, assuming human or animal form at will.

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