A Light-Hearted Eros
In order to get rid of sexual wretchedness, we must put an end to the perverse logics that enable it. These include the notion of desire-as-lack; considering pleasure (in the form of the fusional couple) to be the nadir of this alleged lack; ignoring the natural necessity of the family and turning it into a concession for the libido, which is itself a problem; glorifying the monogamous, loyal couple that shares the same hearth every day; sacrificing women and the feminine within them; and the transformation of children into the ontological truth of the parents’ love. These fictions are useful and necessary for a certain kind of society. But they are ultimately fatal for the individual. Going beyond them will help us construct a light-hearted eros.
To begin with, we need to disassociate love, sexuality, and procreation. Christian morality confuses them and obliges one to love one’s partner through the sexual act, with the intention of creating a child. Moreover, that person cannot be a transitory relation, but must be a duly married husband or expressly wedded wife. If not, one has sinned.
Changing customs, along with changes in science, have given us a chance to truly master reproduction with the aid of contraception. While the Church publicly denounces it, contraception allows for a revolutionary disassociation. It can give us sexuality for pleasure, without the fear of engendering something to be experienced as a punishment. The libido is free to find playful combinations, not just those that are obligatorily procreative. The Neuwirth Law and the Veil Law allow us to voluntarily terminate an unwanted pregnancy.1 Those were authentic revolutions.
Decoupling sexuality from love would be just as radical—if one defines love as commonly taught, that is, as the sentiment that overrides the exigencies of nature in service of the paradigm of the monogamous, devoted, and cohabitating couple. Decoupling sex from love does not prohibit the existence of sentiment, affection, or tenderness. If one does not desire to commit one’s life to a long-lasting affair, it does not foreclose the possibility of romantic sweetness. Sexual relations do not need to be directed toward future effects; they can be about fully enjoying the pure present, about magnifying the moment, about exhausting yourself here and now in your own essence.
There is no need to infuse the sexual relation with nonexistent, a priori heaviness and seriousness. Somewhere between animal innocence, the inconsequentiality of banal exchanges of flesh, and the saturation of the act in moralism, there is room for a new kind of light-hearted, soft, and tender intersubjectivity.
The traditional heavy eros indexes the sexual relation according to the death drive and what is associated with it—rigidity, immobility, domestication, the loss of creativity, repetition, ritualized and brainwashed habitude, and all the things that contribute to entropy. On the other hand, a light-hearted eros driven by an impulse for life promotes movement, change, nomadism, action, displacement, and initiative. We will have plenty of nothingness in the grave; we needn’t make offerings to immobility now.
Constructing light-hearted erotic situations is the first step toward an art of loving that is worthy of the name. It entails the creation of a field of atomic vibration where little perceptions of simulacra float around. In the spirit of Democritus and, via Epicurus and Lucretius, contemporary neurobiology, only the logic of particles can sunder the specters of Plato’s Ideas.
A predilection for the pure present does not exclude the possibility of its reproduction. The concatenation of instants forms a long-term state. Don’t start at the end; don’t bet everything on a story’s conclusion. Build it up piece by piece. Only that way can we come to imagine the present as a laboratory and crucible for the future. The present is not so much an end in itself but the architectonics of what movements are possible.
The Celibate Machine
My definition of celibacy does not carry the customary sense of a civil status. In my eyes, celibacy does not necessarily entail being alone or having no companion, husband, wife, or attentive partner. It more often entails one who, even though they may be in what we would call an amorous relationship, preserves the prerogatives of freedom. Such a person treasures their independence and enjoys their sovereign autonomy. They do not commit themselves to an indefinite contract, but rather to one that is determinate, possibly renewable, but certainly never obligatory.
Transforming oneself into a celibate machine within a couple’s relationship helps us ward off the consubstantial entropy that occurs within unions. The schema of nothing/everything/nothing so often characterizes aborted relationships, or those that are constructed poorly, merely endured from day to day, pushed along by the quotidian, or jolted forward. I believe it much better to develop a configuration of nothing/more/much.
All/nothing/all is the dominant model: we exist in isolation, ignorant of others; we finally meet; we abandon ourselves into the nature of the relationship; the other becomes everything, indispensable, the measure of our being, the gauge of our mind and existence, the meaning of life, the partner in all ways and in every detail. Then entropy sets in: they become cumbersome, a pain, tiring, annoying, an irritant, and eventually an outsider to be expelled through divorce and the violence that so often accompanies it. After that, they again become nothing—a nothing perhaps with a measure of hate added to it.
The system of nothing/more/much has the same point of departure: two beings are not even aware of each other’s existence; they find each other; then they begin building on the foundation of a lighthearted eros. From then on, day after day, they build up a positivity that comes to define the more: more being, more expansion, more joy, and more acquired peace. When this series of more becomes a tangible sum, much appears and qualifies a relationship that is rich, complex, and developed nominalistically. The only law is the absence of Law: there are only particular cases, and everyone must build according to their own idiosyncratic blueprint.
The celibate flourishes in this situation. The modus operandi of the celibate is to refuse unity. They despise the heralded disappearance of two beings into a third form, a third force that is sublimated by love. Most of the time, it is not both parts of the couple that are negated; only one of them yields. Ethological laws ensure that the stronger one wins—the one who is more dominant or persuasive—and it is not always the one we would expect.
This amalgamation of singularities only lasts as long as denial allows. Sometimes, depending on the acuity of neurosis, Bovaryism lasts a whole life. Plato’s conceptual edifice is the foundation of the traditional couple, but it can be undermined by what is real, what is distilled down to the details, trivia, and minutiae of everyday life. The statue he built is a colossus with clay feet, a fiction maintained to make children believe in it. In such a model, everything turns to nothing.
A Metaphysics of Sterility
The celibate person goes hand in hand with a real metaphysics of voluntary sterility. Indeed, if a subjectivity is jealous of its own liberty, and if it has a child in its charge (a felicitous expression), it is hard to imagine how it could possibly preserve its autonomy or independence, its very faculty of agency even when it is not acting.
The physiological ability to conceive a child does not oblige us to do it any more than the ability to kill requires one to carry out a homicide. If nature says, “You can,” culture need not forcibly adjunct a “therefore you must” to it. This is because we can always submit our impulses, instincts, and desires to the analytical grid of reason. Why produce children? For what? To do what with them? What legitimacy do we have to cause a being to emerge from nothingness and to ultimately offer nothing to them but a brief passage on this planet before they must return to the nothingness they came from? To many people, giving birth is a natural act and they follow a logic that blindly concedes it. However, an act that is metaphysically and concretely serious should follow a choice that is reasonable, rational, and informed.
Only the celibate who absolutely adores children will look past their nose and calculate the consequences of inflicting the pain of life onto a nonbeing. Is life so extraordinary, joyful, happy, fun, desirable, or easy that one would make a gift of it to a little person? Must one love entropy, suffering, sadness, and death in order to offer it in this tragic ontological gift-parcel?
Having asked for nothing, a child is entitled to everything, most of all to someone who cares for it entirely, absolutely. Education is not livestock farming, which is what it sounds like when people speak of raising children. Rather, it is attention to every instant and moment. The neuronal training required for the construction of a being can’t stand a single minute of inattention. Beings are destroyed through silence, deferred responses, carelessness, sighs, and neglect because we are tired of everyday life and are unable to see that it is essential for a being-in-formation to play not just some of the time, but all the time, with no repetition.
There must be a great deal of innocence and inconsequentiality to educate a being. However, we usually do not even have the means to sculpt ourselves, or to construct our own couple into a form that matches our temperament. Perhaps Freud saw it first: no matter what, education always fails. One look at the biography of his daughter, Anna, shows how right he was!
In a family, a child definitively attaches the father to the mother. “De la Palisse” confirms that a man (or a woman) can cease loving his wife (or her husband) but she (or he) will nevertheless always remain the mother (or father) of their children.2 Conflating the terms woman, mother, and wife—as well as the terms man, father, and husband—in the classical couple causes irreparable damage to the child as soon as the formula disintegrates. Engendering becomes a trap that impedes a light-hearted eros and condemns us to the heaviness of an erotics that serves something other than itself—that tries to serve society.
On one side, there is the egoism of those who refuse children; on the other side, there is the sharing generosity of completely self-sacrificing couples. The alternative should not be one that opposes the egoism of those who reject children to the sharing generosity of self-sacrificing couples. Rather, beings should be able to discover what works for them, either way—to do their own thing. The egoism of progenitors who follow their inclinations is just as significant as the egoism of the person who chooses voluntary sterility. Yet I believe it can only be done well if it is founded on a sincere love of children.