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Libido
Life energy, will to power, will to intensity, will to expand. Libido is often associated with sexual energy but according to both Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung is a considerably broader concept which comprises all sorts of life energy, in both liberated and sublimated form. Libido thus comprises both desire and drive, the two focal points for Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical methods. This means that the alpha and omega of syntheist ethics are finding, following and liberating both the agent’s and the community’s libido. See, by way of comparison, the infinite now.
The human gaze is so libidinally attracted to symmetrical patterns that it fancies that it finds these in nature, in the same way that the human being tautologically formulates them in mathematics. But however appealing such symmetries may be to the human libido, they are unfortunately not to be found in nature, and above all they are never necessary. Nature does not make it easy for itself, quite simply because nature does not need to (or cannot) make it easy for itself in the way that man must (and sometimes even can) maximise his conditions for survival on a planet where the constant lack of food, energy, housing and other resources is a fundamental living condition. The Universe on the whole exists in fact in a state of immeasurable bounty. It is only in a world characterised by scarcity that the genetically conditioned search for symmetries that is typical of mankind arises, as if these symmetries were some kind of metaphysical signs of health.
However, the problem here is that the human libido never allows itself to be satisfied. It never gets enough, never lets the human being settle down, satisfied. The libido emanates from desire’s constant search for new unsatisfied desires, in its constant postponement of satisfaction in order to keep itself alive. When desire is relegated to anthropotechnics, the libido is therefore shifted from sexuality to asceticism. Anthropotechnics strengthen desire through constantly postponing or re-locating it. Therefore the human being’s self-domestication presupposes a libidinal castration, and the Abrahamic religions with their stronger anti-sex moralism fit perfectly for this purpose. The anthropotechnical practitioners get their energy from the dictates of the law, and since according to Sloterdijk the human being constantly strives for verticality – a longing to create a connection with the divine, to be able to satisfy the syntheological imperative of finding and subordinating herself to a functional metaphysical story – this leads to the law becoming synonymous with God himself.
The more acute the alienation, the more powerful the narcissism becomes. In late capitalist society with its hyperalienation, the Cartesian fantasy transitions into a hypernarcissism, a state characterised by a complete distrust in all intersubjective intentions other than the purely instrumental. Hypernarcissism is internalised as the subject’s own instrumentality world view, where other people are reduced to isolated bodies, monitored and controlled by an authority with a far-reaching mandate and with the aid of game theory calculations. This is a subject whose libido is obsessed with strategic planning, conquest, colonisation, plundering and displacement. When the libido tries to adapt itself to hypernarcissism’s instrumentality view of humanity, the result is not only a consistent sexualisation of all intimate relationships, but also a powerful fetishisation of sexuality per se. The hypernarcissist – whose own sexual activity ironically can be both manic and minimal, often oscillating violently between extremes – sees reproductive organs everywhere and in nearly everything. Culture is filled with them to the extent that it almost becomes parodical. In this paralysed libidinal state, no living fellow humans remain, but only dying bodies drenched in disdain for their lack of Platonic perfection. The alienation is complete, and the living religion is conspicuous by its tangible absence.
Morality also has a rationality, but it is produced from an external subject that is irrational in itself. This dark origin of morality can be summed up under the term the crazy dictator syndrome. In order to be able to maintain the requisite claim on universal validity, morality namely requires as its foundation an abundant libidinal power, that which the Abrahamic religions refer to as the divine omnipotence. The problem is just that power in abundance must logically be viewed as irrational. The dictator in question cannot make himself subservient to any external power, and every form of logic assumed in advance would be precisely such an external power. He must therefore be illogical and irrational, that is, in fact crazy, in order to be able to autocratically dictate the laws and rules of morality. As law, morality thus must apply to everything and everybody, without exception, except precisely the one who creates the morals. God, the nation, the State and the leader – that is, the great Other – need not follow the law. The creator of morality must not in fact follow the law, but must be fundamentally amoral and thereby evil in order for morality to be coherent. The price for morality’s apparent external consistency is thus that it is entirely subject to a single internal amoral source, namely the crazy dictator’s capricious libido.
If we use Iain McGilchrist’s division between the role of the cerebral hemispheres in The Divided Brain metaphorically, the left hemisphere thus constitutes a centre of eternalism, subjectification, objectification, mathematisation, individuality, hierarchisation and logical cogency. If left to its own devices, or if allowed to dominate too much, it leans towards neurosis, and remains at a distance and acts indirectly vis-à-vis the surrounding world. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, is the centre of mobilism, motion, change, holism, dividuality, diversity and intuition. If left alone or allowed to dominate, it leans towards psychosis, and it remains engaged and acts directly vis-à-vis the surrounding world. The left hemisphere is thus the centre of the drive.html">death drive, and its transcendental philosophers champion immortality as a principle, which means that the present life that we are actually living should be ignored and should just be gone through and stoically endured, since its intensity can be postponed in all eternity anyway. Correspondingly, the right hemisphere is the centre of the libido, and its immanent philosophers fight for survival as a principle, where the actual life that we are actually living is to be lived with the greatest possible passion and intensity, since it gets its subliminal quality precisely from its transience.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58