The Erotic Pact
The logic of instincts, passions, and impulses is undeniable. Everyone knows it, senses it, sees it, and experiences it. But there is also a rarer kind of erotic reason that is able to sculpt these blocks of savage energy. It permits us to not let nature have its brutal way, transforming humans into animals that submit to a fate determined by acephalous laws. Erotic culture combines with biological sex to produce ethical artifices, aesthetic affects, and joys that are unheard of in the jungle, cowshed, or pit.
Here, as elsewhere in ethics, as we have discussed, contracts define intellectual, civil, and political forms and resolve the problem of natural violence. We see evidence of ethology in the natural sexual state. There is nothing but territories marked by gland secretions and demonstrations of power, males battling to possess females, postures of domination and submission, hordes set on the weak, the destruction of those less adapted, and the feudal pleasure of the dominant male before he is replaced by someone younger, stronger, or more determined.
There is no eroticism in the herd, pack, or sheep-like organizations. On the other hand, any kind of intellectually constituted microsociety does permit it. The hedonist contract maps a territory policed by two beings (at least) that want to construct their sexuality according to their reasoned caprices, by means of a language that specifies the modalities of what they do. The contract demands a promise; hence, it requires a degree of developed civilization, a certain refinement, at least some kind of refinement.
Of course, this ideal ethical and aesthetic configuration requires certain types of contractors. They have to be clear about their desires; they can’t always change and fluctuate; they can’t be hesitant or plagued by contradictions; they must have resolved their problems and must not wear incoherence, fecklessness, or irrationality on their sleeves. What characterizes the kind of person just described? Perpetual promise-breaking, opinion-changing, selective and self-interested memory, a taste for verbal and verbose tergiversation that legitimizes their about-faces, and a consummate talent for not doing what they say and for doing the opposite of their announcements. You cannot have a contract with this kind of citizen; once you detect them, walk away.
On the other hand, contracts become possible with people for whom language is monetized. What form does this take? Lawyers call it a synallagmatic contract: if one of the two people disengages from it, the contract suddenly ends because its clauses were not respected. What is its content? It is up to the people concerned: a tender game, a playful erotic perspective, an amorous combination, a long-term arrangement, a one-night stand, a lifelong commitment…Each time the relation is custom-made.
Nobody is obligated to sign a contract; no one is compelled or forced. On the other hand, once the pact is made, there is no reason to extricate oneself from it, except in cases where one party does not respect the clauses. When that happens, in this light-hearted eros, fidelity takes on a different meaning than it does in a heavy eros. The latter defines it as the enjoyment of another’s body in a relationship of pure ownership; the former defines it as honoring one’s word. There can be no fidelity except when there are oaths of fidelity. Whoever has not sworn will not perjure. So, as with marriage, it would seem wise to know what one is promising when one says “I do” in the context of this fatal act.
Hence, it is in one’s interest not to get into a contract that one cannot honor. The content of the contract should not exceed the ethical capabilities of those who consent to it. How logical would it be, for example, to promise “mutual fidelity and assistance”—and if this “for better or worse” is written in the civil code—for the rest of one’s existence? And we’ve said nothing of the religious vows that one, so immodest in his wishes, binds himself with for eternity and beyond.
In this situation, fidelity is first an arrangement between oneself and oneself. The freedom to choose implies the obligation to keep one’s commitments. Thus, one figures out the right distance between oneself and the other, between the part in oneself that commits and the part that gauges the other person’s loyalty. This distance creates the conditions for a harmonious intersubjectivity—one equidistant from an excessive union and from too much solitude—within the serenity of an ataraxic relationship.
Playful Combinations
A contract is rich with whatever is put into it. If it’s not fed, it is empty, and it is full as long as it is charged with promises of happiness. We have to commit to a nominalist ethics in order to avoid relations calibrated toward platonic friendship, literary love, ancillary affairs, bourgeois adultery, tariffed trades, inevitable clandestine trios, and other banalities. So what should we do?
What playful combination best allows us to fulfill fantasies, even within a contractual logic? When Sade built his libidinous castles, he developed a feudal kind of logic. The master takes, abuses, consumes, destroys, and kills according to his desires. There are no contracts, just scenes of intense debauchery unfolding in a state of Nature. On the other hand, when Michel Foucault defined sadomasochism as an ethics of sweetness, he illustrated a new kind of voluntary intersubjectivity.1
The combinational art of light-hearted eros is closer to Fourier, who wanted the members of his phalanxes to be able to pursue their personal desires: we just have to express them and solicit a companion, an accomplice with whom we can build an original, custom-made erotic dalliance.2 To express original ideas, Fourier created neologisms: luxisme, angélicat, faquirat, unityisme, bayadérat.3 He describes new kinds of passions: “fluttering,” “pivotal.” He theorizes about orgies: “noble,” “museum-like,” and so on. He broadened sexual possibilities and included children, old people, the disgraced, and the deformed. He celebrated universal prostitution and powerful love. He classified different kinds of cuckolds: “transcendent” vs. “crafty,” “long-horned” vs. “outdated,” “apostate” vs. “emergency,” “debonair” vs. “blustering,” and about one hundred more varieties. He proposes, as the title of his major work suggests, A New Amorous Order.
Fourier’s sole fault was his desire to organize a hedonist society. Deleuze opened up the perspective of a “revolutionary future of individuals” in which the goal is not so much to construct a closed society that is static and conducive to biased contingents of pleasure and the like. Rather, the point is to play with all possibilities, in the invisible spaces that we ourselves form through open contracts. The point is to promote a kind of dynamic and nomadic playfulness that is allergic to social petrifaction.
It is a major lesson to remember that the erotic richness of the world entails a multiplicity of characters. There is no being who alone can perform all functions at a given moment, who is an ideal incarnation who can do things perfectly. The traditional couple believes that the Other contains every potentiality: they are simultaneously child and master, father and son, strong and weak, protector and protected, friend and lover, educator and brother, husband and confident—and the same goes for the feminine. How could one person uphold the fair and proper role, ad hoc, in one instant? It’s nonsense.
The possibility of playful combinations entails a diversity of parties. Nobody can manifest all things in the manner of God: ubiquity, simultaneous efficacy, plasticity of passions, and polymorphic feelings. People do what they are able to: they provide sweetness, beauty, intelligence, availability, tenderness, devotion, patience, complicity, eroticism, and sexuality. They are a mix, a series, improbable configurations, nominalist figures of speech.
Such elective and erotic microsocieties gain nothing from being out in the transparency and light of the public. By being discrete, even secret, they gain efficacy by not exposing themselves to the moralizing judgments of those who lack the courage, qualities, temperament, imagination, and audacity to aspire to such erotic diversity, let alone partake of it. Following concepts as old as time, they drag anything through the mud that they are not able or don’t know how to attain. There’s no reason to give them the chance to spout a false moralism that masks their true resentment.
Discretion has another advantage: it prevents the jealousy (which is proof of our irrefutable membership in the animal kingdom, a clear demonstration of the truth of ethology) that devastates relationships in which a little bit of culture leads to a lot of eroticism. Traditionally, no one consents to another’s joy if that joy does not pass through them first. Such a pleasure leads the excluded party to believe they are not capable of providing the pleasure that a third party has given their partner. To avoid jealousy, it is best simply to not put yourself in the position to feel it…Discretion on your part requires you to refuse to accept another’s indiscretion.
A Libertine Feminism
A postmodern libertinage may be defined by the logic of a libertarian libido, the light-hearted eros, the celebration of the celibate machine, the metaphysic of sterility, the hedonist contract, and playful combinations. But these should not remain the propositions of men, to whom women must submit. If they remain so, they will contribute to our sexual wretchedness, increasing it significantly.
Libertinage is an ethical form that adopts the color of its historical era. There are Chinese and Greek versions, Etruscan and Roman, and even several in one geographic zone: Europe, for example, has feudal, traditional, modern, and postmodern varieties, covering a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of behaviors. What do these different historical moments have in common? The desire for a philosophical ataraxia, an ataraxia with respect to sexed and sexual relations that disturb the existential equilibrium we gain when we work on ourselves. Light-hearted eros starts with a regimen that aims for a philosophical state of libidinal serenity.
What would a libertine feminism look like? Or even a feminine libertinage? Ideally, the epithet “Don Juan” would stop being something valorizing of men and depreciative of women, for whom the equivalent word is very often “nymphomaniac.” It is profoundly unjust to use a word that carries the positivity of the literary register in order to qualify men with light-hearted eros, but to employ psychiatric vocabulary for the same tropism in women.
In order to rid us of the feudal libertinage that gives pride of place to the male and turns women into prey, like the prey displayed in a hunting painting, I propose a libertinage that is postmodern, egalitarian, and also feminist. This is needed because original feminism has, for a long time, advocated sexist antipathy in response to male misogyny. In fact, it has reproduced class warfare between the sexes. It has been useful for its dialectical role in counterweighting the scales, but this feminism strikes me as outdated.
We can talk of real equality once literature produces the equivalent of a female Casanova, a female Don Juan, and this proper name becomes a substantive that gives value to the individual it qualifies. But we seem far from that. Women must first free themselves from the tyranny of nature, from the destiny of their biological determinism. To become a woman, nature and mother must give way to artifice, the essence of civilization. This would be an exciting, inspiring, and joyful perspective.