A New Philosophical Interpretation of the Libido

Author(s): Alphonso Lingis

Source: SubStance, Vol. 8, No. 4, Issue 25 (1979), pp. 87-97
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684218
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 A New Philosophical Interpretationof the Libido

ALPHONSO LINGIS

Working with new concepts of impulsive intensity- libidinal space, libidinal

time, libidinal identity, Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard's Economielibidinalel 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 phenomenological 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 conceptual 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, philosophical 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 minor adjustments, to the Husserlian concept of perceptions
Sub-Stance N? 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 and 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 metaphysics, 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 Anti-Oedipus,2actively 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 region,"3 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 breast, 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 do 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 isjust 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 unpleasure 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 impossible. 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 excitation 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 golden oars.5 "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 excitation."6
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. This 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 what was protuberance and tumescence on last
contact can now be fold, cavity, squeezed breasts, soles of feet forming still
another mouth. Anything can be 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 elsewhere, 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 field 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
Ent-fernung.
The force that 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 whole. 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 conceived 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 this in its 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,
 Interpretation of the Libido 93

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 forces 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 intelligibility. 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 organism 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 of intensity are rendered inert,
inorganic, but also as a locus where excitations 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 excitations. Here the pleasure principle
follows the death drive. But the accumulation of forces at the organic enclosure
which will finally break through and 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 wholly 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 of 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 political 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 pursue, to exhibit the zone of absolute nothingness
which makes the ideal of absolute Being possible, the God that is dead or the
death that is God. Lyotard means to consign the organism as a totality made
wholly intentional by virtue of its teleological 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 capitalism. At every point of his book Lyotard follows
the movements of the psyche writ large on the modern capitalist state. If his
 Interpretation of the Libido 95

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 rather 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."7
This does not mean that Lyotard is ascribing to a sort of Spinozist or
Nietzschean ethics, that his "lyse"involves some sort of valuation of the primary
process over the secondary, of intensities over disintensifications, or potential
over impotency, action over reaction. 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 vitae 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 duplicity."8
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 corpspropreand 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 to 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 mustnot
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 lovable."9
Thus, we no longer have the idea of a subjectof 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-maintaining organism, are personae, makes behind
which there is no personality or subjectivity or even causality. There is not a
libidothat 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 categorial system- the philosopher's reaction is first to
be struck with what this theory excludes, and which the other philosophical
attempts to conceptualize the libidinous zone put forth.
Most obviously, the Lyotard concept of intensity excludes the intentional
 Interpretation of the Libido 97

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
or 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. Lyotard 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, t]he pleasure for the individual. They are
obsessions with the impossible. The Lyotard metapsychology thus requires an
epistemology of phantasms. It further requires- an enormously difficult task!
- a theory that would stake out the production 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 PennsylvaniaState University

NOTES

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, CollectedWorks,Vol. XVIII, transl. by James
Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 7.
4. Ibid., p. 28.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, transl. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974),
?337.
6. Sigmund Freud, op. cit., p. 62.
7. Jean-Francois Lyotard, op. cit., p. 307.
8. Ibid., p. 42.
9. Ibid., p. 304.