Animal Sex
libido as desire and death

If there's one thing that animals don't need more information on, it's sex. That's because sex holds no mystery.

(Freedman 1977: 9)

We make love only with worlds.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 294)

Sex continues to obsessively fascinate human subjects, even if, as Freedman suggests, it holds little mystery for animals. That it lacks mystery, that sexual acts and desires are ruled by natural impulses, impelled by instincts, part of a natural cycle of life, reproduction and death, may not in fact be as clear-cut and uncontentious as Freedman claims, even in the natural order. But even if it is true that sex holds no mystery for the animal (a claim which is not in any case self-evident: what would 'mystery' be to an animal?), it is clearly not true that sex, in animal or human form, holds no mystery for man.¹ Animals continue to haunt man's imagination, compel him to seek out their habits, preferences and cycles, and provide models and formulae by which he comes to represent his own desires, needs and excitements. The immense popularity of nature programmes on television, of books on various animal species, beloved or feared, and the work of naturalists recording data for scientific study, all testify to a pervasive fascination with the question of animal sex: how do animals do it? How do elephants make love (the standard old joke: very carefully)? How do snakes copulate? What are the pleasures of the orang-utang, the gorilla, the chimpanzee?

It is ironic that in the rich plethora of animal sex that has been thus far surveyed, two examples taken from the microcosmic insect world continue to haunt the imaginations and projections of men perhaps more than any other examples taken from ethology -- the black widow spider and the praying mantis. These two species have come to represent an intimate and persistent link between sex and death, between pleasure and punishment, desire and revenge which may prove significant in understanding certain key details of male sexuality and desire, and, consequently, given the differential and oppositional structure of sexual identities and positions, in specifying elements or features of female sexuality and subjectivity.

It will be my claim in this essay that any attempt to understand female sexual pleasures and desires on the models provided by male sexuality and pleasure risks producing a model of female sexuality that is both fundamentally reliant on heterosexual norms of sexual complementarity or opposition, and that reduces female sexuality and pleasure to models, goals and orientations appropriate for men and not women -- models, in short, which reduce female sexuality to versions of male sexuality. Such manoeuvres short-circuit any acknowledgement of the range, scope and implications of erotic pleasure for understanding sexual difference. This is not to say that female and male sexualities must be regarded as two entirely distinct species, separate, sharing nothing in common, set up in absolute opposition, each with their own identities and features (an essentialist commitment): this would entail the possibility of attaining a precise and positive understanding of the independent features that characterize each sex (a project that has tempted many women, and perhaps even more men, to outline what they understand to be a universal, characteristic or essential femininity). Nor do I wish to suggest the contrary claim that the two sexes must be understood only in terms of each other, as mutually defined, reciprocally influential, each conforming to the other's needs and expectations (this is the dominant fantasy that has thus far governed the contemporary West's thinking about relations between the sexes, a fantasy that has left unacknowledged the social and representational constraints mitigating against any structural possibility of reciprocity).

Originally, I had planned to write this essay on female sexuality, and particularly on female orgasm. After much hope, and considerable anguish that I would be unable to evoke the languid pleasures and intense particularities of female orgasm -- hardly a project for which the discipline of philosophy, or, for that matter, psychoanalysis, could provide adequate theoretical training! -- I eventually abandoned this idea, partly because it seemed to me to be a project involving great disloyalty -- speaking the (philosophically) unsayable, spilling the beans on a vast historical 'secret', about which many men and women have developed prurient interests -- and partly because I realized that, at the very most, what I could produce would or could be read largely as autobiography, as the 'true confessions' of my own experience and have little more than anecdotal value. I could have no guarantees that my descriptions or analyses would have relevance to other women. Instead, in an attempt both to stay obliquely with my self-chosen topic, while avoiding these dangers and points of uneasiness, I decided to look at what seems entirely other to and completely different from women's pleasure and desire -- at men, at insects -- in an attempt, if not to say what female pleasure is, then at the least to say what it is not, to dispel accounts which bind women too closely to representations of men's or animals' sexuality, to clear the air of certain key projections, even if what is left is not a raw truth of women's desire but perhaps another layer in the complex overwriting of the inscriptions or representations that constitute the body or subjectivity. Thus, instead of focusing on various representations of women's sexual pleasure (in literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, pornography and so on) or on personal experience, as many feminists have tended to, I decided to explore the work of two apparently unrelated male theorists whose candour and intellectual honesty have for some time impressed me, and whose work represents a rare combination of openly expressed personal obsession and scholarly rigour, the rigorous reading and analysis of their driving personal preoccupations:² Roger Caillois, the French sociologist and co-founder of the College de sociologie,³ whose life-long preoccupation with insects, with the femme fatale and with rocks,⁴ signals early anticipations of what might be considered a 'philosophy' or perhaps even an 'anthropology' of the post-human; and Alphonso Lingis, distinguished American philosopher and translator of phenomenological theory (most notably, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas), the only professional philosopher I have read who writes openly yet philosophically, and at great length, about orgasm, bodily pleasures, lust and sexuality in its many permutations and extremes (transvestism, trans-sexualism, prostitution, pornography, pederasty, sado-masochism among them). Between them, Caillois and Lingis provide a coverage from among the most primitive and ancient of insects⁵ to the most developed and enculturated of human sexual practices -- a veritable panorama of sexual pleasures and practices which may help to specify what is masculine about representations of human, and non-human, sexualities.

Caillois' pioneering contributions to ethology have long been recognized. His by now well-known analysis of the function of mimicry in the insect world⁶ has proved salutary for any analysis of materiality that reduces it to instrumentality, any attempt to define form in terms of function, being in terms of telos. He shows, in this study and in a number of his earlier writings, that the particular characteristics defining an insect species -- its colouring, its camouflage abilities, the organization of its sense organs, etc. -- are always in excess of their survival value. There is a certain structural, anatomical or behavioural superabundance; perhaps it is the very excess or superfluity of life itself, at work over and above the survival needs of the organism:

It is obvious that the utilitarian rôle of an object never completely justifies its form, or to put it another way, that the object always exceeds its instrumentality. Thus it is possible to discover in each object an irrational residue. . . .

(Caillois 1990: 6)

This 'irrational residue', this going over the mark, this inherently exorbitant expenditure which functions in an economy of luxury becomes a locus of fascination for him. In his work on mimicry, Caillois makes it clear that an insect's ability to camouflage itself does not have survival value -- it does not protect the creature from attack or death, and in fact may leave it open to even more hideous and unimaginable forms of death; he cites cases of the caterpillar cut in half by pruning shears, or the insect devoured by a member of its own species who mistakes it for a leaf. Camouflage is excessive to survival, just as the plumage of the peacock is excessive to sexual reproduction. Instead of demonstrating the finality of instinctual determinations, an existence defined in Darwinian terms, Caillois introduces an excessive, wanton dimension to his explanations of such features of animal existence. Camouflage, the capacity to imitate one's habitat or surroundings, far from performing an adaptative function, witnesses the captivation of a creature by its representations of and as space, its displacement from the centre, from a 'consciousness' of its place (in its body, located in space) to the perspective of another. The mimicking insect lives its camouflaged existence as not quite itself, as another.⁷ In comparing the phenomenon of mimicry with the psychosis of legendary psychasthenia, Caillois suggests that there is a disintegration of the bond tying consciousness to its body: the subject feels outside him- or herself, what is inside may be perceived as coming from another.

Caillois, who described himself as an 'insect collector' (1990: 62), seems to have had a life-long fixation with the Mantis religiosa, or praying mantis. He claims to have been attracted to this species partly through frustrated curiosity: where he had lived as an adolescent, they were not to be found. His curiosity piqued, he was determined to possess, to see, to know. His description is couched in the terms of an impassioned epistemophilia: '[t]he difficulty of getting a specimen only increased my desire to possess one. I had to wait two years, and finally during a summer vacation in Royan I was thrilled to capture a fine Mantis religiosa (1990: 63).

Part of the attraction the praying mantis holds, not only for Caillois, but for very many others, which may help to explain the insect's privileged status in the myths of many cultures,⁸ is its close and curious association with femininity, with female sexuality, and, above all, with the fantasy of the vagina dentata; with orality, digestion and incorporation; and with women's (fantasized) jealousy of and power over men. Moreover, its richly evocative power, its ability to be used as a source of projections and an object of fantasy and speculation, a site for overdetermination (in Caillois' distinctive sense), must no doubt in part be attributed to its uncanny resemblance to the human form, the isomorphism of its limbs with human ones:

of all insects it is the one whose form most reminds one of the human form, mainly because of the resemblance of its rapacious legs to human arms. As for its ordinary pose, it is not that of someone praying, as common consensus would have us believe (one does not pray lying on one's stomach), but that of a man making love [men on top!]. This alone is enough to justify an obscure and constant identification. One can now see why men have always been so interested in the mantis and its habits, and why it is so aptly associated as much with love as with hatred, whose ambivalent unity it condenses so admirably.

(1990: 63)

The ambivalence is derived primarily from a narcissistic identification facilitated by the apparent resemblance of the mantis' posture to the human form; the closer this identification, the more horrifying are the consequences, for the more ominous is the fate of the human/male subject identifying with the mantis. Above all, what seems most to provoke Caillois' fascination are its terrifying nuptial habits, the well-known inclination of the female mantis to devour the male in the act of coitus. The female mantis is the most ungrateful of mates, engulfing and ultimately destroying her lover in a frenzy of self-seeking. This scene is of course rife with the possibilities of projection, and Caillois does not hesitate to suggest that the mantis may serve as an apt representation of the predatory and devouring female lover, who ingests and incorporates her mate, castrating or killing him in the process. The femme fatale writ small.⁹ This small insect is heir to, and comes to embody, a whole series of fundamentally paranoid projections, whereby it is not the male subject or the phallus which threatens the female lover but, rather, the female lover who threatens the phallus. The father's castrating position vis-á-vis the son is transformed into the image of the devouring mother; the mother is no longer the potential object of rape, but the perpetrator of a theft, castrating the son and keeping his phallus for herself, in a kind of retaliation against the father's authority and law.¹⁰

Psychoanalytic theory is clear that this is not what the mother does to the son, but rather what the son fears of the (fantasmatic) mother, what he projects on to her. She, no less than the mantis, is the projective vehicle for his worst fears. This may help explain the anthropomorphic identification of the female mantis with the female human -- a neutralization of his investment in the father's image as a threat and a danger, the cost of which is linking castration to the mother, producing the phallus and sexual pleasure in connection with mutilation or death. Indeed, for Caillois, this links the mantis to a series of other parasitic images -- the bat, the vampire and the mandrake -- which, by virtue of their resemblance to the human, particularly the male, form, renders them objects of projection and identification:

The anthropomorphic appearance of an element seems to me an infallible source of its hold on the human imagination. This is the case, for example, with vampires and mandrakes and the legends about them. It is by no means coincidental, in my opinion, that the belief in bloodsucking specters uses a bat as a kind of natural point of reference. The anthropomorphism of the bat runs particularly deep and goes well beyond the level of a general structural identity (the presence of true hands with a thumb opposed to the other fingers, pectoral breasts, a periodic menstrual flow, a free hanging penis).

(Caillois 1990: 73 n. 10)

But, in spite of this series of stereotypically feminine images, which focus on the role of the female mantis, the subject that is probably the object of his most intense fascination is the role and functioning of the amorously imperilled male.

The female mantis had been 'scientifically observed' since at least the sixteenth century in the act of decapitating the male, not only after or during coitus but even before! He would be devoured completely after copulation. For centuries it was believed that such acts of cannibalism could be described in terms of utility: needing protein to make the newly fertilized eggs grow, the female could find great quantities in devouring her mate. However, it seems more likely that the male's decapitation may well serve not only procreative but also specifically sexual functions for the female mantis:

Dubois's theory . . . wonders whether the mantis's goal in decapitating the male before mating is not to obtain, through the ablation of the inhibitory centers of the brain, a better and longer execution of the spasmodic movements of coitus. So that in the final analysis it would be for the female the pleasure principle that would dictate the murder of her lover, whose body, moreover, she begins to eat during the very act of making love.

(1990:81-2)

The female decapitates the male to facilitate more vigorous coital movements! What seems to preoccupy Caillois most is the automatic nature of the male's sexual drive: headless, without a brain to take in representations or to undertake voluntary behaviour, it nonetheless doggedly persists in its automatic sexual movements, and is even able to utilize various autonomous strategies to evade danger and predators while nonetheless, in a certain sense at least, dead (but still kicking!):

[t]he fact is that there are hardly any reactions that it is not also able to perform when decapitated. . . . In this condition, it can walk, regain its balance, move one of its threatened limbs autonomously, assume the spectral position, mate, lay eggs, build an ootheca, and, quite astoundingly, fall down in a false corpse-like immobility when confronted by danger or following a peripheral stimulation. I am deliberately using this indirect means of expressing myself because our language, it seems to me, has so much difficulty expressing, and our reason understanding, the fact that when dead, the mantis can simulate death.

(1990: 82)

The automatism of this whole procedure strikes Caillois as one of the significant features of the mantis; not only can the mantis 'act dead' while decapitated, its sexual behaviour is induced reflexively, like a wind-up (sex) doll. It can perform its functions without the organizational structure of consciousness (whatever that might mean in the case of the mantis), the structurings provided by a central nervous system or an intact perceptual apparatus.

The mantis is a perfect machine; not a machine for survival, but a sexual machine, a fucking machine (much as the shark is commonly referred to as the perfect feeding or killing machine), whose reaction, under threat of imminent death, is automatically coital. Yet, if the mantis is a human-like machine, an android, it is distinctively coded as female:

Indeed, the assimilation of the mantis to an automaton -- that is, in view of its anthropomorphism, to a female android -- seems to me to be a consequence of the same affective theme: the conception of an artificial, mechanical, inanimate, and unconscious machine -- woman incommensurable with man and other living creatures derives from a particular way of envisioning the relation between love and death, and, more precisely, from an ambivalent premonition of finding the one within the other, which is something I have every reason to believe.

(Caillois 1990: 82)

Caillois posits a network of associations, an implicit linkage between the praying mantis, religiosity, food and orality, blood-sucking vampires, the mother who feeds the child, cannibalism, the vagina dentata, the devouring female, the femme fatale , the mechanisms of automatism and the female android. He has the insight to suggest, that this is not somehow a natural or innate set of connections, but largely a function of a constellation of concepts that have become inextricably linked, overdetermined in their mutual relations: by linking sexual pleasure to the concept of death and dying, by making sex something to die for, something that in itself is a kind of anticipation of death (the 'little death'), woman is thereby cast into the category of the non-human, the non-living, or a living threat of death.

Caillois' intuition about the formative character of the link between sexual pleasure, death and dying, finds clear confirmation in abundant examples in everyday life: the production of weapons on the model of the phallus, the functioning of the phallus as a weapon of war and retaliation, the very dependence of the function of the phallus on the castration complex, the operations of psychical impotence, the link between male orgasm and detumescence, the depletion of psychical energies after orgasm, the fantasmatic projection on to woman of phallic power during the act of intercourse,¹¹ the 'evolutionary' linkage of the death of the individual to the (sexual) reproduction of the species (the perceived link between sexuality and immortality) prefigure or attest to the tenacity of the link between desire and death.

In turning away from Caillois' musings about the praying mantis, I will now look in more detail at the work of Lingis on erotic sensibility, libido or lust to see if we can glean a better understanding of the connections between sexual pleasure and death, and, in a more challenging and difficult fashion, to see if these two terms might be extricated so that their relations of influence and their particular specificities and details, and thus their possibilities of transformation and change, may be explored.

Lingis distinguishes between corporeal needs and satisfactions, and lust or erotic desire. Corporeal gratification takes what it can get, lives in a world of means and ends, obtaining satisfaction from what is at hand. He links gratification or need to the functioning of the body-image or corporeal schema -- and through it to an atom physiology and the capacity for movement¹² -- which maps inner physiological and psychological functions on to the exterior or 'objective' movements, comportment and posture of the body through a mediating representational schema. Lingis makes it clear that the body-image provides the subject with an experience, not of its own body, but of the ways in which its body is perceived by others. The subject's experience of the body is irreducibly bound up with both the body's social status and its status in the eyes of others.

Libido or erotic desire involves a certain dis-quieting, troubling or unsettling of the body-image even while functioning in conformity with it. Rather than resolving itself, gratifying its urges as quickly and simply as possible, erotic craving seeks to prolong and extend itself beyond physiological need, to intensify and protract itself, to revel in 'pleasurable torment' (Lingis1985a: 55). It no longer functions according to an 'intentional arc', according to the structures of signification, meaning, structure, pattern or purpose;¹³ voluptuous desire fragments and dissolves the unity and utility of the organic body and the stabilized body-image. The limbs, erogenous zones, orifices of the other, provoke and entice, lure and beckon, breaking up the teleological, future-directed actions and plans of a task to perform. Sexuality, desire, cannot be seen in terms of a function, purpose or goal, for this is to reduce it to functionality; materiality, as I have already suggested following Caillois, is always in excess of function or goal. This is one of the problems with the sex-manual approach: 'how-to' books on sexuality presume a certain principle of the performance of a chore or task, not the uncovering of desire, which cannot be summarized, put into a formula or learned by rote. Lingis will argue that the voluptuous sense of disquiet engendered by and as lust disarrays and segments the resolve of a certain purposiveness, unhinging any determination of means and ends or goals.

Moreover, if libidinal impulses are fundamentally decomposing, de-solidifying, liquefying the coherent organization of the body as it performs functional tasks, unhinging a certain intentionality, they are more dependent on the sphere of influence of otherness, on an other which, incidentally, need not be human but which cannot simply be classified as a passive object awaiting the impressions of an active desiring subject. The other, this otherness, solicits, beckons, implores, provokes and demands. The other lures, oscillates, presenting everything it has to offer, disclosing the whole body without in fact giving up anything, without providing 'information' as such.¹⁴

Carnal experience is uncertain, non-teleological, undirected. While not entirely involuntary, it lacks the capacity to willingly succumb to conscious intentions or abstract decisions. It upsets plans, intentions, resolutions; it defies a logic of expediency and the regimes of signification (one often cannot say or know what it is that entices and allures, a gesture, a movement, a posture or look, which becomes loaded with more affect and impetus than is required to explain it). It is like an ever-increasing hunger, a hunger that supplements itself, feeds itself, on hunger, and can never be content with what it ingests, that defers gratification to perpetuate itself as craving, languishing in its erotic torments rather than hastening to quench them. Its temporality is neither that of development (one experience building on the last in order to create a direction or movement) nor that of investment (a relation between means and ends). Nor is it a system of recording or memory (erotic pleasures are evanescent, they are forgotten almost as they occur); the memory of 'what happened', or movements, setting, gestures, behaviour may be open to reminiscence, but the intensity of pleasure, the sensations of voluptuousness, the ache of desire have to be revivified in order to be recalled. In this case, there is not recollection or recreation, but always creation, production:

Carnal intimacy is not a practical space; it does not open a field for action. The erotic movements are agitation that handles and fondles without keeping anything in its place, without extending its force outward and without going anywhere. Here nothing will be accomplished; one will waste time, unprofitably. Voluptuousness has no tasks and no objectives and leaves no heritage; after all the caresses and embraces, the carnal is left intact, virgin territory. . . . It is not the locus from which would emerge the meaning of one's history.

(Lingis 1985a: 67)

This very flesh, exposed and palpable, no longer sighing subtle meanings, heavy and panting, no longer illuminating a field of significance, incandescent with ardour, afflicts the physical and natural continuity, afflicts me and the phenomenal field I appropriate, as other. In the contact of our common flesh, the spasm of disorder that demoralises my position is a trace of radical alterity. The approach of the other is dismemberment of the natural body, fragmentation of the phenomenal field, derangement of the physical order, breakdown in the universal industry.

(Lingis 1985a: 72)

If the sexual drive is object-directed, and takes for itself a specific, if interchangeable, series of objects, it is significant that eros, desire, has no objectives, no privileged objects, only a series of intensities. Having outlined the elements of a phenomenology of carnal experience relying on the various writings of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, Lingis shifts his focus in Libido (1985a) away from the structures of consciousness, intentionality and givenness to look more directly at what might be understood as a materialist analysis of sexual desire using the work of Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari. He moves away from a framework which privileges the psyche and systems of representation, which understands carnality in terms of concepts, reasons, motives, causes, intentions, fantasies, projects -- that is, in terms of interiority, however conceived -- to one which privileges the erotogenic surface, the body's 'outside', its locus as a site for both the perception of the erotic (as phenomenology recognized) and also for the inscription and intensification of bodily regions.

The orgasmic body cannot be identified with the organic body, but is more an interference in and displacement of the body of 'nature'.¹⁵ This is not the intervention of a supervising consciousness, but the reorganization or the rebinding of bodily energies, passing along the body's surface. Relying on a model established by Lyotard in Libidinal Economy (1993), where the subject is viewed in terms of the twisting, contortions and self-rotations of the Moebius strip,¹⁶ Lingis refigures carnal desire in terms of the lateral (horizontal) contamination of one erotogenic zone or bodily surface by another, rather than in terms of a horizontal relation between (bodily) surface and (psychical) depth. The intensification of one bodily region or zone induces an increase in the excitation of those contiguous with it. Significantly, the two or more interacting zones or regions need not be part of the one body but may come from different bodies and different substances. Their relations cannot be understood in terms of complementarity, the one completing the other (a pervasive model of the heterosexual relation since Aristophanes), for there can be no constitution of a totality, union or merging of the two. Each remains in its site, functioning in its own ways.

The relationship between these regions or zones cannot be understood in terms of domination, penetration, control or mastery, but rather in terms of jealousy, as one organ jealous of another, as the desire of organs and zones for the intensity and excitations, the agitations and tumultuousness of others. We have here another version of a Derridean notion of the violence of difference itself, its constitutive tearing or etching of a surface: in order that one bodily part (whether an orifice, a hollow, a protuberance, a swollen region, a smooth surface) intensify its energetic expenditure, it must drain intensity from surrounding regions. It seems impossible to conceive of a situation in which there is an even intensity throughout the whole of the body, a situation of pure equilibrium or stasis: any activity at all 'prefers' or privileges some bodily regions over others, and even sedentary inactivity focuses on some parts of the body at the expense of others. This creates a gridding or marking of the body in terms of sites of uneven intensity, patterns or configurations of feeling, labyrinthine maps of voluptuous pleasures and fluxes. Each organ envies the intensity of its surrounding bodily context, craves enervation, seeks incandescence, wants itself to be charged with excitations:

Every intensity induces intensities -- jealousy of the vulva for the mouth, jealousy of the nipple for the fondled testicles, jealousy of the woman over the book her lover is writing, jealousy of the sun upon the closed shutters behind which the reader reads that book.

(Lingis 1985a: 77)

Lingis seeks to evoke, to bring to discourse, to try to replay in words the intensities that charge all erotic encounters, whether the amorous relations of the carpenter to wood and tools, the attachment of the sadist to the whip, the linkage between the breast and a mouth, lips and tongue. There must be some coming together of disparate surfaces; the point of conjunction of two or more surfaces produces an intensification of both. It makes a hand a sexual organ, the fingers a site, not just for the production of pleasure in another, but for their own orgasmic intensities though they cannot be classified as a orifice or genital organ on a psychoanalytic or physiological model.¹⁷ The hand, while in a sense 'jealous' of the pleasure it induces in the body it caresses, also participates in the very intensities it ignites in a vagina or around testicles: it does not simply induce pleasure in another, for another, but also always for itself. The contiguity of hand and region instils in both a yearning for intensity and a craving for more intensity that both enlivens them, rouses their 'jealousy' of each other and propels them into a path of unpredictable and restless movement.

These sites of intensity -- potentially any region of the body including various internal organs -- are intensified and excited, not simply by pleasure, through caresses, but also through the force and energy of pain. Pain is as capable, perhaps more so, of inscribing bodies as pleasure. Sadism and masochism intensify particular bodily regions -- the buttocks being whipped, the hand that whips, the bound regions of the body in domination practices -- not using pain as a displacement of or disguise for the pleasure principle, but where pain serves as a mode of corporeal intensification. We cannot readily differentiate the processes by which pleasurable intensities are engendered from those by which painful intensity is produced. One craves repetition of these practices because the intensity is ephemeral, has no life span -- it exists only in the moments of its occurrence, in the present (even if not as pure presence; rather, its status is as the evanescence of pure difference, the momentary shimmering and dazzling of a zone or orifice; it is the trace, the marking of a pathway, frayage). This repetition (or rather, the inherent openness of these practices to repetition ad infinitum) produces the intensity of affect, pleasure or pain, but can never repeat its initial occurrence. Each repetition engenders an experience or intensity, without any presumption of identity. Strictly speaking, exact repetition remains impossible.

Erotogenic zones do not desegment the fully functional organic body, for the organic body is itself a product of the organization and hierarchization of localized and particular libidinal zones: the organic, unified body is the provisional end-result of the alignments and coagulations of libidinal zones. These regions, moreover, continually intervene in the functioning of the organic body and its attendant body-image(s). Instead of adopting the psychoanalytic position, which takes erotogenic zones as nostalgic reminiscences of a pre-oedipal, infantile bodily organization -- that is, instead of seeing the multiplicity of libidinal sites in terms of regression -- these libidinal zones are continually in the process of being produced, renewed, transformed, through experimentation, practices, innovations, the accidents or contingencies of life itself, the coming together of surfaces, incisive practices, inscriptions. There is nothing particularly infantile about these regions, insofar as to be effective, to function as the sites of orgasmic intensity, they must continually be invested through activity, use.

Modes of greatest intensification of bodily zones occur, not through the operations of habitual activities, but through the unexpected, through the connection, conjunction and construction of unusual interfaces, through a kind of wild and experimental free play that re-marks, reinscribes orifices, glands, sinews, muscles differently, giving organs and bodily organization up to the intensities that threaten to overtake them, seeking the alien, otherness, the disparate in its extremes, to bring into play these intensities. The interruption and interaction of a surface with another, its disengagement from the circuit of organic functioning (where it operates within an hierarchical and systematic whole) so that it realigns itself in different networks and linkages performs the intensification of libidinal circulation that Lingis seeks. In this way, the subject's body ceases to be a body, and becomes the site of provocations and reactions, the site of intensive disruptions. The subject ceases to be a subject, giving way to pulsations, gyrations, fluxes, secretions, swellings, processes over which it can exert no control and to which it only wants to succumb. Its borders blur, seep, liquefy, so that, for awhile at least, it is no longer clear where one organ, body or subject stops and another begins:

To become passionate is to become an anonymous conductor of a circulation of libidinous effects, a dismembered body over which intensifications undergo their metamorphoses. There is not a libido that would be behind all that, and that could be identified with the consciousness or the intentional arc of the organism -- none of these are the telos of the libidinal processes.

(Lingis 1985a: 85)

Libido abdicates a certain sense of responsibility, the controlling operations of the ego and superego. It is not irrational, illogical or even non-rational; rather it exhibits a logic of its own that is governed by modes of intensification. It does not provide information or knowledge, although it probes (this may be part of the problem of the sexualized metaphor of knowledge-production as sexual conquest; conquest can only make sense where lust does not operate but something else does, the struggle for prestige, control). It breaches the innermost regions, secret parts, of the body, but does not learn anything. It learns only that it cannot hold on to what it craves. Lust cannot know itself, it does not know what it is or what it seeks. It does not discover or learn, but immerses itself, becomes. It resists pragmatics, any logic of functionality, of appropriation. Instead it insists on a certain formlessness, indeterminacy, that very excess of materiality that makes any creature resist reduction to its functions alone: it insists on an open responsiveness that can be viewed as a passivity or susceptibility to the appeals and resistances of the other. Lust throws one into the vagaries of the other's libidinal intensities.

Libidinal desire, the carnal caress, desire as corporeal intensification, then is an interchange with an other whose surface intersects its own. It is opened up, in spite of itself, to the other, not as passive respondent but as co-animated, for the other's convulsions, spasms, joyous or painful encounters engender or contaminate bodily regions that are apparently unsusceptible. It is in this sense that we make love to worlds: the universe of an other is that which opens us up to and produces our own intensities; we are placed in a force field of intensities that we can only abandon with libidinal loss and in which we are enervated to become active and willing agents (or better, agencies). The other need not be human or even animal: the fetishist enters a universe of the animated, intensified object as rich and complex as (perhaps more so than) any other sexual relation. The point is that both a world and a body are opened up for redistribution, dis-organization, transformation; both are metamorphosed in the encounter, both become something other; something incapable of being determined in advance, and perhaps even in retrospect, but nonetheless that has perceptibly shifted and realigned. The sexual encounter cannot be regarded as an expedition, an adventure, a goal, or an investment, for it is a directions mobilization of excitations with no guaranteed outcomes or 'results' (not even orgasm): 'Lust is the dissolute ecstasy by which the body's ligneous, ferric, coral state casts itself into a gelatinous, curdling, dissolving liquefying, vaporizing, radioactive, solar and nocturnal state. Exstase materielle, transubstantiation' (Lingis 1991: 15).

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919) Freud raises the question of the necessary binding or linkage of the pleasure principle with the death drive. He links the accumulation of unbounded intensities or affects with unpleasure, and the relief or satisfaction of libidinal impulses with pleasure. He uses Fechner's constancy principle to suggest that the organism attempts to keep the quantity of energy or excitation as low as possible -- not so low as to 'wind down', to approach death, but low enough not to 'overstimulate' the organism, causing it to seek all sorts of inappropriate outlets to vent the excessive energy which would otherwise accumulate. There is an entropic principle internally directing the organism towards simplicity and quiescence, impelling it gradually towards death. Life can be seen, on this Freudian scenario, as the limited deferment or delay of the death drive, the detour of the drive through the deferment provided by the pleasure principle. These two principles, Eros and Thanatos, life/pleasure and death/unpleasure, are both complementary and opposed: they function together, one operating through the other, and, as it were, against the interests of the other. The pleasure principle provides a way in which the death drive can express itself through the processes of gratification, in this 'unwinding' or diminution of psychical energies, and the death drive provides, as it were, the medium, the material -- the accumulation of tension -- through which the pleasure principle gains its satisfaction.

Paradoxically, the death drive and libido do not cancel out but reinforce each other. Libido or the life-drives produce self-preservative and pleasurable (respectively, instinctual and drive) processes which aim to protect the organism from dangers coming from without and from the unpleasant accumulation of energies from within the organism. In this sense, they allow the death drive to take its own course and its own time: they protect the organism from outside dangers, so that it can be carried towards death by its own immanent processes.

In Freud's phylogenetic perspective, sex or pleasure and death are internally linked. The pleasurable sexual activities of individuals are closely linked to the reproduction of the species, and the reproduction of the species is contingently dependent on the life, reproduction and death of individuals. Such an assumption has proved very strong in ethological studies: it is significant that the simplest of living organisms, amoeba and single-celled organisms, those which do not reproduce sexually through interchange with 'the opposite sex' but reproduce through the division of cells, are considered immortal. Sexuality introduces death into the world, or perhaps the converse: death is inevitable, and sexuality may function as a compensation for and supplement to death. Not only is the sexual act grosso modo linked to death and, through it, to the reproduction of the species, but more significantly for the purposes of my argument, the eroticism of orgasm -- at least of male orgasm (the case of female orgasm is considerably more complicated and it is not clear to what degree it conforms to this model, if it does so at all) -- is modelled by Freud on the build-up of excitation, the swelling of the sexual organ, the accumulation of energies and fluids, their release and then the organ's detumescence and state of contentment.

The immediacy and the directness of this link between death and sex is perhaps the intriguing thing about the praying mantis: it provides a tangible example of the worst possible fears surrounding the ways in which sexuality and relations between the sexes are conceived, the most horrific consequences of amorous passion (even though it is not clear that the mantis is either amorous or passionate outside of any anthropomorphic projection). Severing this link between death and sexual desire is particularly crucial at this historical conjuncture, not only because of the constricting effects it has on female (not to mention male) sexuality, but also because of its potentially lethal effects within gay men's communities.' ¹⁸

Lingis has recognized the link between horror and lust: the transformative, transubstantiating effects of erotic attachments, desire, are echoed in the seeping out beyond boundaries and the dissolution of lines of bodily organization prompted by orgasmic dissolution. There is something about the compulsive incitements of sexuality that may bring one to the brink of disgust and to the abject, not only to accept but seek out activities, objects and bodily regions that one might in other contexts disdain. The melting of corporeal boundaries, the merging of body parts, the dripping apart of all the categories and forms that bind a subject to its body and provide it with a bodily integrity -- so fascinating for the surrealists, not to mention the current android and cyborg fantasies that sell movies and feminist science fiction -- are at once imperilled in a way that alarms and horrifies, and, at the same time, entices to the highest possible degree. This is what lust has in common with the appeal of illicit drugs: their intensity melts a certain subjective cohesion, the 'high' more or less obliterates key boundaries between the body and its others, more or less pleasurably and more or less temporarily.

Although his perspective admits a connection between horror and desire, Lingis resists the temptation to make the link between desire and death intrinsic, as psychoanalytic theory has tended to. This may prove particularly instructive insofar as, in the last ten years, Lingis has primarily published material either directly related to sexuality (in its broadest sense) (Lingis1983, 1985a, 1991, 1992) or on the question of death (Lingis 1989) but has not attempted to link these two projects to each other. This may be because, in my understanding of his work on Eros, he is attempting, among other things, to disconnect the two, to sever the bond between sexual pleasure and the death drive, to think libido in terms other than the hydraulics of the Freudian model of sexual discharge or cathexis. All of Freud's works can be understood as a generalization of and abstraction from the model of male orgasm to the fundamental principle of life itself: the constancy principle, and indeed the pleasure principle, the notion of psychical investment or cathexis, the movements of repression which sever an ideational representative from its energetic intensity, all accord with this hydraulics of tumescence and detumescence. The death drive is not simply a 'new discovery' made by Freud in his later writings, for the notion of a closed energetic system, an hydraulics, is already inscribed in his understanding of the pleasure principle even in his earliest psychoanalytic writings.

The fantasy of the vagina dentata, of the non-human status of woman as android, vampire or animal, the identification of female sexuality as voracious, insatiable, enigmatic, invisible and unknowable, cold, calculating, instrumental, castrator/decapitator of the male, dissimulatress or fake, predatory, engulfing mother, preying on male weakness, are all consequences of the ways in which male orgasm has functioned as the measure and representative of all sexualities and all modes of erotic encounter. Lingis' project is of relevance to the disentangling of masculinist and Freudian conceptions of sexuality, pleasure and desire insofar as it provides an understanding of (male) subjectivity and desire beyond and in breach of the opposition between pleasure and death.¹⁹ He demonstrates that sexual passion is not reducible to the goal of sexual satiation, but lives and thrives on its own restless impetus. Orgasm need not be understood as the end of the sexual encounter, its final culmination and moment of conversion towards death or dissipation; instead it can be displaced to any and every region of the body, and, in addition, can be seen as a mode of transubstantiation, a conversion from solid to liquid:

The supreme pleasure we can know, Freud said, and the model for all pleasure, orgasmic pleasure, comes when an excess tension built up, confined, compacted is abruptly released; the pleasure consists in a passage into the contentment and quiescence of death. Is not orgasm instead the passage into the uncontainment and unrest of liquidity and vapor -- pleasure in exudations, secretions, exhalations? . . . Lust surges through a body in transubstantiation.

(Lingis 1991: 15)

Caillois also recognizes, but goes no further in analysing or transforming the binding of the death drive to the pleasure principle in the masculine projection of woman as cold, mechanical, inanimate, machine-like. If we recall, such conceptions derive from a particular way of envisioning the relation between love and death, and, more precisely, from an ambivalent premonition of finding the one within the other' (Caillois 1990: 82), a particular, presumably not a universal or inevitable, relation between love and death which in principle can be disentangled. Love, or rather, erotic desire, can be reconsidered in terms that do not see it entwined with death.

The fantasy that binds sex to death so intimately, is the fantasy of a hydraulic sexuality, sexuality as a biologically regulated need or instinct, a compulsion, urge or mode of bodily release (the sneeze provides a paradigm).The apparently urgent and compulsive nature of sexual drives is implicit in the claim made by many men who rape, those who frequent prostitutes and those prostitutes who describe themselves as 'health workers', insofar as they justify their roles in terms of maintaining the 'health' of their clients. It is a model of sexuality based upon the equation of sexual desire with orgasmic release, with instrumental or functional relief of the body. It is a model that men commonly transpose from their own lived experiences on to the experiences of women, and, moreover, it reappears in another guise in the current reclamation of female ejaculation by some feminists.²⁰ When eroticism is considered a programme, a means to an end ('foreplay'), a mode of conquest, a proof of virility or femininity, an inner drive that periodically erupts, or an impelling attraction to an object that exerts a 'magnetic' force (i.e., as actively compelling, or as passively seduced), it is reduced to versions of this hydraulic model.

The provocations and allure of the other can have no effect on the erotic receptivity of the subject without resonances with the intensities and surfaces of the subject's body. Indeed nothing seems sillier and less erotic than someone else's unreciprocated ardour or passion. The other cannot excite without the subject already being excited or excitable. The other cannot induce erotic impulses and caresses from the outside alone. I am not suggesting a necessary reciprocity here, but rather a co-implication. There is always equivocation and ambiguity in passion; on the one hand, the erotic is self-contained and self-absorbed -- lovers are closed off to the world, wrapped up in each other, disinterested in what is outside -- yet on the other hand, in a contrary movement, eroticism and sensuality tend to spread out over many things, infecting all sorts of other relations.²¹ Erotic desire is not simply a desire for recognition, the constitution of a message, an act of communication or exchange between subjects, a set of techniques for the transmission of intimacy; it is a mode of surface contact with things and substances, with a world, that engenders and induces transformations, intensifications, a becoming something other. Not simply a rise and fall, a waxing and waning, but movement, processes, transmutations. That is what constitutes the appeal and power of desire, its capacity to shake up, rearrange, reorganize the body's forms and sensations, to make the subject and body as such dissolve into something else, something other than what they are habitually. Sexual relations need not presume desire -- habitual orgasmic practice, the so-called '8 minute average' of sexual intercourse in married or long-term couples,²² is not the most conducive milieu for the ignition and exploration of desire; desire need not, indeed commonly does not, culminate in sexual intercourse but in production. Not the production of a child or a relationship, but the production of sensations never felt, alignments never thought, energies never tapped, regions never known.

1. I use the terms 'man' and 'men' advisedly here, for it is not clear to me that such a fascination is a universal human concern; I do not even want to suggest that most men find animal sex fascinating, but, rather, the more limited claim, that such a fascination is a masculine one, that for some men, animal sex and even insect sex hold immense fascination because they represent motifs, themes and fantasies that are close to what might be understood as a masculine imaginary, to a masculine mode of representation of self and other.
2. What seems rare is not the combination of scholarship and personal obsessional -- this could be said to characterize much if not all theoretical and scientific discourse -- but the open acknowledgement that the research is based on personal concerns.
3. For further details, and for reproductions and translations of some of his formative works on what might be understood as a sociology of the sacred, see Denis Hollier (1988).
4. See a quirkily personal book, written relatively late in his life, The Writing of Stones (1985).
5. The mantis species is probably among the earliest to appear on land:

   Mantidae were probably the first insects to appear on earth, given that the Mantis Protogea, whose fossil prints were found in the oeningen Myocena, belongs to the paleodictyoptera group as defined by Scudder, and whose traces are manifest from the Carboniferous Age on.

   (Caillois 1990: 69)

6. See here Caillois (1984): 1 have discussed this analysis at some length in Grosz(1994b).
7. Lingis, in his dazzling evocative account of deep-sea diving in 'The Rapture of the Deep' (in Lingis 1983), provides something of an indirect confirmation of both the superabundance or excessiveness of camouflage and display and the irrelevance of an audience, an eye observing the spectacle:

   Before the plumage and display behaviors of the bird-of-paradise, before the coiled horns of the mountain sheep, one has to admit a specific development of the organism to capture another eye . . . there is a logic of ostentation over and beyond camouflage and semantic functions. The color-blind octopus vulgaris controls with twenty nervous systems the 2-3 million chromatophores, iridophores and leucophores fitted in its skin; only fifteen of these have been correlated with camouflage or emotional states. At rest in its lair, its skin invents continuous light shows. The sparked and streaked coral fish school and scatter as a surge of life dominated by a compulsion for exhibition, spectacle, parade.
   The most ornate skins are on nudibranchia, blind sea slugs. In the marine abysses, five or six miles below the last blue rays of the light, the fish and the crabs, almost all of them blind, illuminate their lustrous colors with their own bioluminescence, for no witness.

   (Lingis 1983: 9-10)

8. Caillois outlines a whole series of cultural associations regarding the mantis, which seem to place it in a privileged, if somewhat ambivalent social and theological position:

   sometimes the mantis is called an 'Italian girl' or a 'phantom', and less explicably a 'strawberry' or a 'madeleine'. More generally, an ambivalent attitude emerges: on the one hand the insect is regarded as sacred, whence its usual name of prégo-Diéou ('pray- to- God'), with its variants and corresponding expressions . . . on the other hand the insect is considered diabolic, as testified by the symmetrical name of prégo-Diablé ('pray-to-the-Devil').
   If we look now at the sayings used by children with respect to the mantis, we find two main themes: first, it is said to be a Prophetess who knows everything, and especially the whereabouts of the wolf, and secondly, it is assumed that it is praying because its mother died or drowned. On this last point the testimony is unanimous. . . .
   [For the Hottentots and Bushmen] the supreme deity and creator of the world is precisely the mantis, whose loves are, it seems, 'pleasing' and it is especially attached to the moon. . . . Note that its main function seems to be to obtain food for those who beg for it, and that in addition it was devoured and vomited alive by Kwa<-Hemm, the devouring god. So the accent seems definitely to be on digestion, which is hardly surprising when one knows about the incredible voracity of the insect, which is a prototype god. . . .

   (1990:69-72)

9. Caillois will cite a series of remarkable case-studies from the annals of psychoanalysis, particularly examples of oral persecution mania, to make more explicit this link between the mantis, the vagina dentata and the femme fatale :

   Bychowski analyses a case of a victim who is convinced that he will be devoured by a prostitute before he has even approached her. I would be inclined more generally to link these fantasies with the development of most castration complexes that . . . commonly originate in the terror of the toothed vagina, given the assimilation of the entire body to the male member and likewise that of the mouth to the vagina are . . . classics of psychoanalysis.

   (1990:78-9)

10. Rather ironically, Caillois' analysis at this point finds a linkage with Deleuze's early analysis of the structure of masochism in his analysis of Sacher von Masoch: he claims that masochism is not, as Freud suggests, an inverted homosexual desire for the father, who is disguised by the figure of the punishing mother, but rather, an attempt to psychically kill the father, insofar as it is the father that induces male and filial identifications in the son (see Deleuze 1989). Caillois explicitly connects the appeal of the praying mantis to the sado-masochistic complex.
11. Callois quotes Paul Eluard, who

    admits to seeing the ideal sexual relationship in their love-making habits; the act of love, he says, diminishes the male and aggrandises the female, so it is natural that she should use her ephemeral superiority to devour him, or at least to kill him.

    (Caillois 1990: 79)

    Freud makes a similar claim in his analyses of love relations and the 'tendency to debasement in the sphere of love'.
12. Lingis explicitly acknowledges the debt that such a conception of the body-image owes to the pioneering efforts of Schilder, Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty and others. I discuss this notion of the body-image in reference to the work of neuro-physiologists in Grosz (1994b).
13. While remaining critical of the Sartrean analysis of sexual desire as fundamentally appropriative, sadistic, the imposition on to the other which confirms one's consciousness and sense of self, Lingis nonetheless affirms Sartre's refusal to reduce sexuality and sexual pleasure to functional or pragmatic projects or goals:

    The movements of lust are incantations rather than techniques. . . . it is not the dexterity of the hands that is most captivating but a hand trailing over the other with trembling and indecisive movements. . . . A sex organ is not a tool; it is essential that penis and clitoris in erection, the vagina lubricating, not be activated voluntarily used by a reflective consciousness. No fine, prehensile organ assembled with striated muscles can be a sex organ, Sartre says; a sex organ can only be part of a vegetative system.

    (Lingis 1985a: 25)

14. It is not clear that this Levinasian conception of alterity is not implicitly dependent on a certain feminization of the other, the Other as Femininity, as Woman. This is precisely the issue addressed by Derrida in his second paper on Levinas, and by Irigaray in her two papers on Levinas, 'The Fecundity of the Caress' (in Irigaray1993) and 'Questions to Levinas' (in Irigaray 1991).
15. In Lyotard's text (1993), the organic body does function as something of a pure plenitude, a prelapsarian given (which, if it is produced, is the effect of physiology, anatomy, neurology and biochemistry) or presence which is deflected by a, secondary intervention, a structure not unlike that which is the object of Derrida's continuous criticisms.
16. The Moebius strip, incidentally, also a pervasive metaphor in some of Lacan's writings on the subject, is the driving model behind my own understanding of the mind/body relation in Grosz (1994b).
17. I have discussed some of the effects of severing the notion of sexual desire from the predominance of genitality, and the corresponding expansion of conceptions of desire and sexual pleasure into areas commonly assumed to be somehow outside the erotic, functioning in the desexualized and sublimated realm of 'public life' -- the quasi-fetishistic attachment of the writer to the tools of writing, the bureaucrat to numbers, statistics, rules, in Grosz (1994a).
18. It is significant that in gay community responses to the AIDS crisis and the advocacy of 'safe sex' sexual practices, there has been considerable effort devoted to publicizing the fact that 'safe sex' does not necessarily imply more boring sex; that one need not court danger and possible death in the search for an ultimate sexual high: or rather, there are many bodily ways in which sexual and erotic relations remain intense and exciting without necessarily being life-imperilling.
19. It is not clear to me to what degree Lingis is prepared to limit the relevance and scope of his analysis of libido: while certainly much of what he says about the formlessness of sexual pleasure, the indeterminacy of the objectives of desire seems to me directly relevant to women and female sexuality, nonetheless it is also likely that much of his account, as (quasi-)autobiographical, is specifically limited to masculine experience.
20. See, for example, Shannon Bell (1991), who claims that women too can, with the right information and practice, achieve ejaculatory orgasms. While I do not doubt that some women, and perhaps, under certain circumstances, all women, are capable of orgasmic ejaculations, it is not clear why this should be regarded an improvement on or progression from non-ejaculatory orgasms.
21. In his paper, 'Khajuraho' (1983), Lingis makes a similar point:

    It turns the most unlikely things into analogies or figures of lust so as to be able to excite itself anywhere; it even, in the case of fetishes, can displace itself entirely onto things remote from any possibility of interaction. It is as though the libidinous impulse is an exorbitant energy that tends not to satisfy itself and subside, like other desires and appetites, but to excite itself with its own function; everything gets infected with its trouble, even practical associations to work with tools, political relationships within institutions, pedagogical relationships over ideas, military alliances before the imminence of disaster and in the thirst for conquestion. Not only can the pursuit of riches or the investiture with political authority function as a means to obtain partners of flesh and blood, but cupidity and calculation themselves become lascivious.

    (1983: 50)

22. This statistic is cited in Marilyn Frye's analysis of the ways in which lesbian sexual relations do not count as proper or real 'sex' according to the implicit values and models of heterosexual intercourse (see Frye 1990).

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------ (1985) The Writing of Stones , translated by B. Bray. Charlottesville, Va.:University of Virginia Press.

------ (1990) The Necessity of Mind. An Analytic Study of Mechanisms of Overdetermination in Automatic and Lyrical Thinking and of the Development of Affective Themes in the Individual Consciousness , translated by M. Syrotinski. Venice,Calif.: The Lapis Press.

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Grosz, E. (1994a) 'Refiguring Lesbian Desire', in L. Doan (ed.) The Lesbian Postmodern . New York: Columbia University Press.

------ (1994b) Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, Ind.:Indiana University Press, and Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Hollier, D. (1984) 'How to not take Pleasure in Talking about Sex', enclitic Vol VIII, Nos. 1-2: 84-93.

------ (ed.)(1988) The College of Sociology 1937-39 , translated by B. Wing. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press.

Irigaray, Luce (1991) 'Questions to Levinas', in M. Whitford (ed.) Irigaray Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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------ (1985a) Libido. The French Existential Theories. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.

------ (1985b) 'The Libidinal Origin of Meaning and the Value of the I, enclitic, IX,1-2: 80-94.

------ (1989) Deathbound Subjectivity. Bloomington Ind.: Indiana University Press.

------ (1991) 'Lust', unpublished manuscript.

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Elizabeth Grosz, Chapter 15, "Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death" in Sexy bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 278-299.

Copyright © 1995 by Elizabeth Grosz, all rights reserved. Reprinted with kind permission from the copyright holder. No part of this text may be reprinted or disseminated beyond personal use without permission from the copyright holder.