Libido Livestream
Reflections on the first month at The Portal
On January 29th 2024, I hosted the first official livestream inspired by the first month at The Portal, a live event space designed for learning core concepts, exploring ideas with great thinkers, and opening new discursive spaces. To find out more, or to get involved, visit: The Portal.
Libido Livestream ft. Owen Cox
, Filip Lundström, Raven Connolly, , Daniel L. Garner , Davide Pasti, Sahil Sasidharan, , Thomas Hamelryck, Carl Hayden Smith, .The first month at The Portal was a great success. Special thanks to everyone who made it a very special and memorable month of experimentation with creative thinking and dialogue. Each event offered a different window into the concept of Libido:
Concept Cave focused on the foundational principles of the concept of libido, as mythology as well as scientific principle. We explored the process of sublimation as a concept opening the conditions of possibility for the satisfaction of the drive without repression (bringing us to an interesting post-clinical territory, perhaps opening to artistic creativity, philosophical reflection, and religious worship). What is most interesting in the concept of libidinal sublimation is the idea that we can derive the same satisfaction from our intellectual activities as we derive from the direct sexual act itself. We also opened up problems related to libido and civilisation itself, namely the way civilisation always produces new tensions for the libido which must be re-sublated for a higher order enjoyment in order to continue justifying sacrifice. Finally, we entertained Lacan’s infamous myth of lamella, as his story of separation and alienation which starts, not in relation to the Mother, but in relation to placenta or after-birth.
The Edge led by
primarily focused on experimenting with our discourse around the occult (mystical-magical powers and practices). Pascal argued that modernity is dominated by a left-brain rationalistic and reductionist mindset which a priori excludes and demonises the mystical-magical as ineffable non-sense. He counters this narrative with reference the idea of a “shamanoid” class, a subset of the human population that are closer to shamans and seers who can open up avenues of exploration and inner transformation which are totally alien to those who only rely on left-brain rationalistic and reductionist mindsets. At the same time, because the occult does not necessarily lend itself to the rationalistic and reductionist mindsets, it also becomes alienated from our collective discourse. Consequently, powerful alternative states like psychedelics, fantasies, dreams, pathologies, motivation and direction, unknown knowns, tend to get overlooked and undervalued in our more philosophical or scientific discussions. If this continues we might close the door on a sense of wonder and enchantment which was essential for ancestral meaning making.Thought Lab led by Alenka Zupančič presented the challenge that sex should not be thought of as an intrinsically meaningful event, the ultimate level of relation, but rather as a real that constitutes everything that is spread around it (the event of sex). Sex and sexuality functions as a kind of extension beyond the interior world to other environments beyond the direct encounter or event itself. Thus, sex does not function as a core vital substance, but rather functions as a type of ontological negativity which extends and touches all kinds of non-sexual things. From this perspective, she proposes that when we think of sex and sexuality we focus on the odd within the ordinary, about how odd disturbing things in a relationship can come to matter the most, it is the point where we really recognise the otherness of the other, and perhaps most noticeable: the inconvenience of other people. However, and at the same time, we cannot get rid of this oddness and inconvenience, it is not that we can just get rid of it for personal fulfilment, rather, our personal fulfilment depends this element of otherness. The miracle of love in sexuality is when what is odd and inconvenient in the other, becomes the glue that binds the relation itself.
Real Talk with Eliot Rosenstock
opened our space for free association and full speech with a reflection inspired by his book The Ego and Its Hyperstate (2021). He emphasised that sex as psyche substance, from birth to death, gets elevated to sex as logic of society and the totality of human social relationships. This is the only way to understand the emergence of political categories like incels, feminists, or even the “sports team/gym bro” as determining cultural war dynamics; or also sex magicians like Aleister Crowley who have sex with the culture itself and start sex-cults. In this context, he suggests that the resulting axiom of therapy is “to each their own” (from the incels to the feminists to the sports bros to the sex-cultists). “To each their own” is an individualist axiom that affirms self-interest. The therapist relates to this principle as a negative of the patient (i.e. like a multiplicity orbiting a black hole) in order to help the patient work through their own narcissistic social dramas, i.e. the perfect image that is constructed and maintained due to an inability to accept the real of the social.
These materials motivated and inspired by the “Thing-In-Itself” section of the Libido Livestream, where a few core members — Alex Ebert, Daniel L. Garner, Davide Pasti, Sahil Sasidharan, and Jurij Jukic — reflected on our first month in The Portal.
I highly recommend checking out the livestream if you’re interested, but from my point of view, some of the highlights included:
The weird coincidence and unity between life/death drives. -Alex Ebert (reminds me of Lacan’s axiom “every (life) drive is a death drive”, that life is in death and death is in life, and we should not conceive of them as separate from each other.
The struggle to conceive libido as a flowing river with individual and collective consequences for regulation, meaning, and enjoyment. -Sahil Sasidharan (we thus need collective spaces to think through/process our e-motions)
The phenomenological process with sex substance starts with an individual but collapses via working contradiction to Spirit as a collective thing where I = Other. - Davide Pasti (hence the importance of tarrying with the negative on an embodied/libidinal level)
There are paradoxes of sex positivisation as bad, and sex negativisation as good, which means we must cultivate an art of relating to sex, or see sex relation as art. - Daniel L. Garner (the power of thinking sex as an artful process seems very important)
Things tend towards stasis/equilibrium (entropy/death drive) so we must manage/navigate openness of our system and introduce negentropy (dynamism and difference) -Alex Ebert (there is a real fruit in thinking through systems language with psychoanalytic language)
Žižekians correctly criticise Freud’s notion of death drive as being “too Buddhist”, and instead point towards the importance of higher order tension. -Davide Pasti (following the long-thread of though on death drive from Freud through Lacan to Žižek/Zupančič is very helpful for thought)
We must handle tension without cheap moralisation so that we can maintain the possibility of surprise, to be the type of subject that can handle/meet surprise without being overwhelmed. -Daniel L. Garner (we should also see our constraints as designed to increase the possibility of a good surprise)
To make a certain process automatic through repetition in our being/psyche is a type of fundamentalism where we ultimately remove the need for our subjectivity. -Alex Ebert (we should distinguish this type of fundamentalism from that of a conscious propositional identity)
In unifying with the automatism of the death drive we are moved by a magical/miraculous invisible hand where we can constantly be surprised by our own drive. -Davide Pasti (eppur si muove)
The dialectic of (1) common life, (2) leaving common life, (3) returning to common life involves avoiding the banality of evil (1), the tyranny of philosophy (2), and affirming an artful principle (3). -Daniel L. Garner (Hume +/to Hegel)
Fundamentalist groups may stay together because repetition is the condition for real difference, paradox of difference/big surprises out of sustained sameness. -Alex Ebert (this is the fundamental hole in modern progressivist notions of affirming difference)
Fundamentalism is often a reactionary response to aspects of modernity, but traditionalism is more the art of libido in the form of daily consistencies (the being of becoming). -Daniel L. Garner (a distinction with the potential to move past certain polarisations)
The garden is a useful metaphor for mastering your life in a way that brings you back to heaven, make your life your own masterpiece, but it requires facing libido as a force to master. -Davide Pasti (interesting way to think about psychoanalysis and religion)
We can think of libido in an expanded sense as an artful positive instrument for directing one’s repetition for radical difference, and to think it in a communal sense as “proletarianising the mind”. -Sahil Sasidharan (a potentially important connecting for next months theme at The Portal)
There is an importance in thinking modes of exchange over modes of production for communism, because if we overthrow production without knowing how to relate there is a huge problem of regressing to a reductionist relationality. -Daniel L. Garner (another important connecting to next months theme at The Portal)
How do you make a child in this kind of world that is truly an act of love, and to teach a new social bond to the child that breaks out of old familial patterns. -Davide Pasti (in the end perhaps the most important idea for reflection)
The Libido Livestream also hosted “Drinks Before” and “Cigarette After” sessions which were dedicated to an upcoming physical live event in Gothenburg Sweden titled “More Than Machine / Less Than Human”, where I and others will be presenting on themes related to the tension of Humanity and Technology. In the “Drinks Before” the primary organisers of Dark Renaissance Productions, Owen Cox, Filip Lundström, Raven Connolly and I discussed the various dimensions of our upcoming event, including the relations between (broadly speaking):
Symposium (Philosophy)
Cabaret (Art)
Church (Religion)
And the way these three elements will be operating for both the creation of great thinking (philosophy), the creation of performative dimensions of thinking (art), and a style of thinking that connects on an embodied level (religion).
During the “Cigarette After” my fellow presenters, Thomas Hamelryck, Carl Hayden Smith, and Daniel Fraga focused on the importance of staying with thinking the “Human Side” of the “Human/Technology” divide today. There is too much of an emphasis on technology today and not enough focus on the way the human being is being thrown into this new technological arena, and the consequences for our being. In our discussion, there was an also emphasis that we should stay away from “techno-apocalypse porn” and instead try to look for and enact the emancipatory possibilities that are being presented by our current moment (while at the same time not being naive about the challenges that we are facing, both individually and collectively).
To find out more about the event, or to attend, see again: More Than Machine / Less Than Human. You can also watch a recent livestream we hosted dedicated to the event below with Owen Cox, Filip Lundström, David Högberg and
:The next month at The Portal, February, will focus on “The Month of Communism”. We will host a The Edge session with Carl Hayden Smith on Hyperhumanism, a Thought Lab with David McKerracher of
on Timenergy, as well as a Real Talk session with Alex Ebert on the concept of Status Anxiety. To find out more or to get involved, see: The Portal (Enter).Thanks again to everyone who made the first month at The Portal such a great experience. Here is to much more to come in 2024!