The Importance of Libido

All human interactions represent symbolic metaphors of sexual impossibility

Tonight the Philosophy Portal Live Event Space launched The Month of Libido (or the month of “psychic sexual energy”). Couples are encouraged and get a 2 for 1 on all memberships for the Live Event Space. Find out more at Philosophy Portal.

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The idea that Freud reduces everything to sexuality is a common misconception. It is not that Freud reduces everything to sexuality, it is that the non-sexual dimensions of our everyday life or psychic reality, are for Freud, metaphors of sexual impossibility.

What does that mean?

Lacan suggested that Freud’s discoveries, often framed using metaphors derived from the physics and biology of his time, need to be retranslated using metaphors from modern developments in structural linguistics. One of those retranslations involves emphasising that the way Freud thinks of libido or psychic sexual energy is not literally a reduction of all of our speech to sex, but that our speech itself is a sexual metaphor, in the precise sense of a substitution (i.e. speech substituting for sex). Consider Lacan’s infamous (extended) reflection from Seminar XI:¹

“Freud tells us repeatedly that sublimation is […] satisfaction of the drive, without repression.

In other words — for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking.”

Lacan could not be clearer here:

1. Neurotics struggle with repression of the sexual drive

2. Sublimation is satisfaction of the sexual drive without repression

3. The result is enjoyment in speech that is exactly equal to sexual satisfaction

Thus it is not that we speak because we are not having sex, i.e. like unreflective pick up artists that structure all of their speech around the conditions of possibility of having sex. It is rather that we speak because we get as much or more enjoyment than in actually having sex.

Indeed, for Freud, and for Lacan, against the commonplace misconception that Freudians reduce everything to sex, it is even questionable that we ever actually have sex. Consider philosopher Alenka Zupančič on this point:²

“To the Victorians screaming “Sex is dirty,” Freud did not answer something like “No it is not dirty, it is only natural,” but rather something like: “What is this ‘sex’ that you are talking about?”

As is consistent with Zupančič’s Freudo-Lacanian disorienting ontology, it may be better to think of sex as something which is impossible, something originally lost, something that means we constitutively lack. Consider Lacan’s weird cryptic myth of libido in the figure of lamella:³

“‘Lamella’ […], this image and this myth seem to me apt for both illustrating and situating what I call ‘libido’. This image shows ‘libido’ to be what it is — namely, an organ, to which its habits make it far more akin than to a force field. […] My lamella represents here the part of a living being that is lost when that being is produced through the straits of sex.”

We see here:

1. Libido is an organ (phallus) organising a force field (but is not itself a force field)

2. Libido does not represent sex itself but what is lost in being produced by sex

3. Thus, libido/phallus is the loss/lack itself (the effect of sexual impossibility)

We can even say that the cause of neurotics is the sexual impossibility and the consequent struggle to come to terms with libido or phallic energy as psychical in the sublimation from its somatic bodily source to the level of the signifier, that is: to the level of speech. Lacan himself insists that his myth of lamella qua libido is meant to situate a battle:⁴

“It goes without saying that a struggle would soon ensue with such a fearsome being, and that the struggle would be fierce.”

Most perspectives on discourse, or dialogue, or rhetoric, or whatever fail to situate their perspective on or relation to any of these terms in relation to the libidinal struggle that they necessarily entail.

Thus, if sex is something which is impossible (as unity), and finds only its results through libido in either the discovery of the split/antagonism of the two,⁵ or the production of the three through the two (the child), then the fierce struggle is most fundamentally on the level of the self-repelling unity (the one and its lack/death drive) to enjoy speech itself.

To say it clearer: the stakes of lack/death drive is the enjoyment of speech which is not only a substitute for sexuality but in fact an enjoyment equal to or surpassing sexuality.

Here we must bring reflection to, not the reduction of everything to sex, but rather the sexual non-relation on the level of an intimate partner as:

1. one’s own otherness,

2. an actual partner, or even

3. its sublimation to friendship and beyond

What is great about the sexual (non) relation with an intimate partner as either your own otherness or an actual partner is not that you get to jerk off by yourself or have sex at the end of a first date. What is great about a sexual (non) relation as intimate partner is that you never actually do have a fully consummated sexual relation as governed by your fundamental fantasy.⁶ Instead the impossibility of this sexual relation means that the mystery of your dialogue can go on and on and on and on and on.⁷ This drive reveals ever new mysteries about both your self and the other, that you totally miss if you repress, foreclose, or disavow the centrality of the sexual (non) relation.⁸

To really understand this on the level of one’s own self-repelling unity is one of, if not the most important thing, for the future of human society.

Not only is it that your speech with an intimate other is the thing-in-itself, but the sublimation of that energy in speech relation to all others, is also an echo (or perhaps scaling) of the thing-in-itself, a metaphor for the sexual (non) relation.

This is not a utopian vision, and let’s be clear: we live in extremely dark times. But why do we live in extremely dark times when the externalised scientific universe has opened up so many possibilities via technics that many in the 20th century desired? We live in extremely dark times only because people are not accepting what the scientific universe cannot deliver to us through technics: the fully realised sexual relationship.⁹

Instead, the realisation of the scientific universe presents us with something else: the capacity to reflexively recognise that the condition of possibility for a civilisation at all is being brave enough to confront the mystery that is right at the core of the sexual (non) relation itself (first in relation to one’s own otherness, second in relation to an actual partner, and third in its extended sublimation to a network of friends and beyond).

When people do not accept this (denial in its various forms, clinically speaking: repression, foreclosure, disavowal), that energy spills out into all other relations, distorting and disabling everyone. Instead of living in a society of a giving nature, we live in a society where everyone is trying to take (and no one even sees it). The reason is that people are trying to find a substitute for what is constitutively lost at the core of our sexual being as impossible, what destines us to confront our lack and recognise it as the condition of possibility for the enjoyment of speech that is potentially a gift for the other.

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Tonight the Philosophy Portal Live Event Space launched The Month of Libido (or the month of “psychic sexual energy”). Couples are encouraged and get a 2 for 1 on all memberships for the Live Event Space. Find out more at Philosophy Portal.

1. Lacan, J. 1998. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Book XI). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 165-6.

2. Zupančič, A. 2017. What IS Sex? MIT Press. p. 7.

3. Lacan, J. 2005. Position of the Unconscious. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 718.

4. Ibid. p. 717.

5. Zupančič notes this well, see: What IS Sex? MIT Press. p. 100.

6. Perhaps no better way to capture Lacan’s formula: S<>a (barred subject and the objet cause of desire, or the fundamental fantasy).

7. Perhaps not better way to capture Lacan’s formula for drive: S<>D.

8. The major clinical structures that are described in the analytic clinic.

9. This is a point well made and situated by Isabel Millar in her thesis, see: Millar, I. 2020. The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence. Palgrave Macmillan.