The Myth of Lack
Twenty centuries of wholesale Judeo-Christianity has left its mark on the Western body. Recycling the Pythagorean tradition and, above all, that of Plato has made the Christian European body schizophrenic. It hates itself, and it harbors the extraordinary fiction of an immaterial and immortal soul. It delights in the death drive that the dominant ideology cultivates.
If, as suggested by Crébillon,1 analysts’ sofas or sexologists’ chairs could speak, we would likely understand many things that confound us about the gendered use of the flesh, the ways and detours of the libido, and what I call a general sexual wretchedness that avoids everything from zoophilia to necrophilia and pedophilia. All of these show the unfortunate tendency of human beings to take pleasure in passive objects that can be dominated by violence. The archetypal heterosexual couple, to be specific, is also subject to brutality.
Erotism acts as an antidote for bestial sexuality. When sex speaks by itself, it expresses the most brutal instinct of the reptilian brain; as soon as it manifests itself in artifice, it brings together the best aspects of the civilization that produced it. We don’t find any Judeo-Christianity in the erotics of China, India, Japan, Nepal, Persia, Greece, or Rome. If we did, those cultures would manifest the same opposition to erotics: hatred of the body, flesh, desire, pleasure, women, and enjoyment. There is no Catholic art of enjoyment, just clever devices that castrate and destroy any kind of hedonist weakness of will.
One of the staples of this machine that produces eunuchs, virgins, saints, mothers, and wives is to demean the feminine within the woman. She is the first victim of this antierotism and is held responsible for everything on this earth. In order to establish this logic of sexual inferiority, the West creates the myth of desire as lack. Starting with the discourse on androgyny held by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, through the Pauline corpus, to the Écrits of Jacques Lacan, this fiction persists and endures.
What does it say? Specifically, that men and women proceed from a primitive unity split up by the gods as punishment for their insolent enjoyment of perfect totality. Pleasure is defined as the fantastic perfection of the spherical, complete animal. Desire-as-lack and pleasure that fills this lack are the cause of uneasiness and sexual wretchedness.
In effect, this dangerous fiction leads most people to search for the nonexistent, so they find nothing but frustration. The quest for Prince Charming or its female equivalent produces deceptions: the real never compares to the ideal. Wanting fullness inevitably leads to the sadness of incompleteness. Only defense mechanisms like denial keep us from being conscious of that truth. We stop fooling ourselves the day we index what is real to us according to what is imaginary—an imaginary that is driven by the dominant morality and fed by a combination of ideology, politics, and religion.
Yet desire is not lack. It is excess on the verge of bursting. Pleasure is not the specious realization of completeness; it is the conjuration of an effusive overflow. There is no metaphysics of primitive and androgynous animals, only a physics of matter and a mechanics of fluids. Eros comes not from the heaven of Platonic ideas, but from the particles of materialist philosophy. Hence, the need for a post-Christian erotics that is solar and atomic.
The Familial Ideology
According to the logic of this animal that must be reconstituted, the fusional couple is the crowning achievement of Judeo-Christian erotics. Most mammals are metaphysically incapable of staying on their own; they are instinctively social and run in packs and herds. Therefore, they have to find an antidote to their situation. When, in Madame Bovary, we read of love, soul mates, and princes and princesses, our reason sees them as social contracts or some kind of existential life insurance. This is also illusory.
Amorous discourse masks the truth: novels and media propaganda—advertising, film, television, and “women’s” publications—talk about fireworks, passion, the wonderful power of emotion, and LOVE. However, reason bluntly reveals another story, explaining everything from zoo cultures to the neocortex in terms of pheromones, biological needs, and blind designs of nature that tend toward homeostasis.
Biology picks up where philosophy leaves off. So does ethology, which depends on biology. Traditionally, the “Male” preexists man; “Female” preexists women; and the social partitioning of roles carries out the intention of the Creator. Not understanding the complicated mechanisms of reproduction, the burdened woman, tired from carrying her baby all day, cannot really accompany the Male on his hunting and gathering trips to hostile environments. She is tied to the home on account of the child or children who are already there.
Naturally, the family mobilizes the male and the female into very particular roles: Women take care of the fire, prepare food, cook, bake, weave, tan leather, stitch hides, sew, make wool yarn, and repair garments, among other sedentary activities. In the meantime, their companions hunt, fish, gather, farm, or live the nomadic life. Millions of years later, in spite of different cultural backgrounds and the civilization’s different intellectual strata, could it be any other way?
This primitive ethological arrangement is recycled by politics and society. They give it the authority of a foundational law. From then on, the family, with its nomadic and sedentary poles, forms the foundational cell of society. It acts as the primary cog in the machine of the State and is given the task, consciously or not, of reproducing the gods’ plan for the world. Monotheism triumphs when the family reproduces the celestial order. The One God, the Father, is the model for the familial father. He has absolute authority based on divine right, the foundational gospel, the creative Word. It is his job to be at the peak of the hierarchy. The couple—God and his people—provides the schema for the City of God: the male and his tribe, the father and his family, the city of men.
Cut off, suffering from lack, he finds his other half and reconstitutes his primitive unity, rejoicing in the pleasure of this fusion. He finds peace in the reconstitution of a fictitious entity. The couple consummates this existential amalgamation by producing a third party and then several more. The nuclear family achieves the goal of the species by accomplishing the plan of nature.
Believing themselves to be free from ethological constraints, men invent a veil of concepts, a trivial reality that camouflages the animal alive within them.
A permanent and all-powerful natural determinism subsists in the most primitive areas of our nervous system. It is not that the family is the magnification of a love embodied by two beings who are free and conscious of their destiny. Rather, it is the destiny of every living form on the planet.
The Ascetic Codification
A priori, desire activates a formidable antisocial force. Before its capture and domestication into socially acceptable forms, it represents an energy dangerous to the established order in which nothing counts but what forms a socialized being: regimented and repetitive use of time, prudence in action, frugality, docility, obedience, and boredom. With domestication, desire conquers everything that opposes it: total freedom, whims, general imprudence, sumptuous expenditure, disobedience of prevailing values and principles, rebellion against dominant forms of logic, and complete asociality. In order to be and to persist, society has to bottle up these savage and lawless forces.
There is a secondary explanation for the ascetic codification of desires and pleasures: the wild will to reduce the incredible power of the feminine to nothing. The male learns quickly from experience, and in matters of sexuality, he follows only the laws of nature. Female pleasure mixes poorly with his natural barbarism, since it demands cultural artifice, erotism, and techniques of the body—whispers, mastering change, control, awareness of the layout of the body, and so on. For someone intent on following his nature, it is inaccessible—inaccessible and endless.
Clumsy, oblivious, and unthoughtful, man pleases himself, and when it comes to constructing an ethics of responsibility, he does not like his partner to remain on the threshold of pleasure. This is not because he is truly concerned with his partner, nor does he have moral empathy with her frustration; rather, he is too proud. In his eyes, he is just an impotent, an incompetent, an incomplete male; his power is fictive, since it is deficient. This is how he thinks. Women are not narcissistic enough; they injure male pride. In order to regulate the problem, he takes great pains to reduce feminine pleasure to the bare minimum. Judeo-Christianity excels in this baleful enterprise, as does Islam.
Individual males fear castration, and society fights against that fear. Thus, men, the conventional builders of the city, nation, religion, and kingdom, make the rules of sex. The rules for women’s sexual conduct are codified through no other authority than the male arbitrator. It all comes from the power of phallocentrism and the fear of castration…
How do we elaborate on and promulgate this code? With the aid of religion, of course—that excellent accomplice in the matter of extinguishing the libido. In order to pin down, reduce, and suppress the libido, those anointed by God—messiahs, apostles, priests, popes, Christian philosophers, imams, rabbis, pastors, and so on—decree that the body is dirty and impure, desire is shameful, pleasure is filthy, and females are unqualified temptresses and sinners. After that, they decree the solution: complete abstinence.
After renouncing the pleasures of the flesh as a whim of the spirit, and then setting the bar so high that it shames the poor wretch who cannot reach the ideal height, they seem to manifest benevolence and understanding by offering an alternative. We can’t completely sacrifice the body. They are willing to make a generous concession: familial chastity will suffice; marriage will be permitted. Look no further than the lucubrations of Paul’s Epistles.2
This solution grants society, and thus the species, free will in its own projects. By conceding one kind of sexuality (familial, monogamous, consecrated to Christian marriage), Paul and other Fathers of the Church grant people a small margin in which to maneuver. Most importantly, they open a boulevard for reproducing the species and ensuring the permanence of the human community as defined by the agents of this ideology of the ascetic ideal.
Over time, passion’s flame dies down and then disappears. There is boredom, repetition, and the bottling up of desire, which is essentially libertarian and nomadic. It is bound in a repetitive and sedentary pleasure that squelches the libido. Within the family, where most time is spent on the children and the husband, the woman dies; her only pride is in being a mother and a wife. These goals consummate and consume almost all of her energy.
Conjugal sexuality is inscribed in platitudes and jingles and locks the libido into Apollonian marriages, regulated family lives in which the individual disappears and is replaced by the subject. Dionysus passes away and sexual penury reigns. This works so well that servitude becomes voluntary, made so by dint of social pressure and all-out moralizing ideological propaganda. This is the epitome of alienation. The victim even ends up taking pleasure in renouncing himself.