[Submission] Fear Before Pleasure: Vanishing Beyond the Point of Existence.
Exploring the motivations behind our desire to fade from the present moment, and the experience of using pain or pleasure to preemptively return to a point of pre-ego.
Although conditioned as children to see sex as either for pleasure or purpose, it would be ignorant for any consenting adult to believe that sex and physical relationships are not more expansive than such reductive conclusions. Day by day, we wade through existence, longing to be dragged through the swamp of experience by our hand, hoping each day will somehow become purposeful or, at the very least, manageable. One aspires in one way or another to achieve what Bataille refers to as “White Heat”: “the blind moment when eroticism attains its ultimate intensity.” (Bataille, 19861) My intention with this essay is to explore the motivations behind our desire to fade from the present moment and the experience of using pain or pleasure to preemptively return to a point of pre-ego.
More than just our sexual desire, eroticism is our motivation for life and creation, it is a “psychological quest...eroticism is assenting to life even in death.” (Bataille, 1986). Freud and other psycho-analysts viewed our sexual motivations as Eros; the pleasure drive, named after the Greek god of love, fertility, and passion. Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest, is assenting to life even in death. However, for there to be life there must be death, thus within our psyche we simultaneously contain Thanatos, or “death drive”: the desire to put oneself in harm's way in hopes of returning to nothingness. In short, Thanatos represents a desire to return to the womb; the “mutterleibsphantasie”. Through this, the individual has been lured into the soft embrace of maternal stillness and thus recalls the womb as “a place where a return to a state of stasis is anchored in biological experience and no split between subject and object is possible.” (Silver, 2007
Although in opposition, these points are driven by the same force; The Libido; “the fundamental interest in life. [It] is a kind of free-floating power investing the objects in the environment with colour and desirability for the organism” (Forest, 19472). Through carrying out actions of destruction and creation, one hopes to be distinguished from the object. Thus our purpose is to defend against “not reality but the loss of reality.” (Lear, 19963)
However, what one is doing through expelling the libido, is to connect with the object, and become one with it. Destruction and creation work to intertwine the body with the environment blurring our fleshy forms back into the darkness of the womb. Through the exchanging of libido between subject and object one hopes to endure our present existence by melting into our surroundings. Through this process of cathexis or libidinal transference we prevent ourselves from achieving the death fantasy, placing part of our psyche into the object. However, in doing so we, temporarily, lose a part of ourselves.
The motivation behind both Eros and Thanatos is for us to seek out experiences that prove our humanity, whether we test the human condition by an expansive lineage or the ability to teeter on the edge of death's call, the intention is the same. For example, when one considers Freud’s understanding of sadomasochism, the intersection of pain and pleasure become manifestations of the desire to return to the point of pre-ego: “Freud distinguishes two types of sadism: the first is purely aggressive and only aims at domination; the second is hedonistic and aims at producing pain in others. The masochistic experience of a link between one's own pleasure and one's own pain falls between these two forms of sadism” (Deleuze, 19914)
One sadist is unbothered by the journey to the response and instead only interested in the psychological experience of the submissive. On the other hand, the second is inspired by the pain itself, interested in witnessing the physical response. Both are general in their practices, motivated by the creation of new experience. The masochist is instead focused on the experience and the response, unwavering in the feeling they hope to create. In these moments of recognising our existence, the masochist in these moments is laid naked and bare before the womb, unable to feed themselves, to want, to dream. All we are aware of is our exemplary personhood that is immaculate and yet totally unremarkable. The spectrum of sadomasochism intersects not just pain and pleasure, but destruction and creation; what the sadist and the masochist share, is the desire to use physical or psychological deconstruction to inspire the Eros.
These experiences allow the sadist and the masochist to deconstruct the social order and rebuild it within the context of their desires as “Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns (..) the patterns of regulated social order” (Bataille, 1986). To do so, they must return to a point before the creation of the human requirement to adhere to social structures, this being the pre-ego psyche. As we return to the womb, we are reminded of the human capability for ultimate peace. Once that moment fades around us we attempt to pick up the pieces of our present existence, using the remnants of stillness to rebuild the world around us in an image more pleasing, more desirable. As colour leaks back into the rosy canvas of our skin, we are dragged back from the border of existence and thus reminded of our position on the mortal coil and consider this experience of “White Heat” in relation to Kristeva’s abject as similarly, “a place where meaning collapses.” (20245) Central to Kristeva’s theory was identifying the moment which disturbs the social order, the very structure of our existence, the key motivation behind the creation of pain and pleasure. Thus the aim of the sadomasochist is for the body to “extricate itself, as being alive, from that border.” (Kristeva, 2024) We become both alive and dead, pain and pleasure become indistinguishable and we understand that libido will draw us into the same tunnel of possibility, guiding us towards the reminder of existence within a larger picture.
One can go so far as to compare blood to cum as both breach that wall between self and environment. Looking back to Kristeva’s “Powers of Horror” one can see how our biology along with our psyche contains things that disturb the social order. Her essay suggests that “urine, blood, sperm, [and] excrement (..) show up in order to reassure a subject that is lacking its own and clean self.” (2024) As we are raised to understand that blood is indicative of pain, its presence is rarely welcome. Our natural reaction is to recoil at the idea of our person existing simultaneously with the blood and viscera that lies within us. However, the red of the blood is a reminder of our human condition, much like semen or other sexual fluids; it is symbolic of the possibility for creation, and therefore death. This duality pulls us into the same corridor of nothingness, shedding the importance of our present existence and the simple foundations of our supposedly complex humanity. Whilst one understands the impossibility of convincing someone of the merits of my experiences of pain or pleasure, and to some, it may sound shocking to suggest blood is comparable to expulsions of pleasure.
At the peak of these moments we enter the womb and return to the primordial darkness that shocks the system, grounds our thoughts in what, in the loudness of the day-to-day, had become so far, so distant from the screams of the modern day. This darkness is just as all-encompassing as one squeezes their knuckles in ecstasy or winces against the sharp sensation as blood breaches the flesh. Just as one steps into the sea, cold, salty water stinging around the knees, begging for the safety of the warmth, I strive for the absence of such, of thought, of existence and push further into expansive nothing, trusting, understanding and being.
About the author: Meshi is a multi-disciplinary artist hoping to explore how we can get life to stop being so loud, through movement, talking and doing.
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Bataille, Georges. (1986), “Erotism: Death and Sensuality”. City Lights Books.
Forest, I. (1947), “The libido concept”. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 17(4), 700.
Lear, J. (1996), “The introduction of Eros: Reflections on the work of Hans Loewald”. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44(3), 673-698.
Deleuze, Gilles & von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold (1991), “Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs”. Zone Books.
Kristeva, J. (2024), “Powers of horror: An essay on abjection”. Columbia University Press.