THREAD on Desire

“It is strange that the true source of cruelty should be desire” ––– Novalis

Desire unleashes chaos. Set free the passions scour everything like the winds of Aeolus. Passion like violence escalates on an uncontrollable scale.

“No more fatal curse exists than the pleasure of the body, through eagerness for which the passions [avidae libidines] are driven recklessly and uncontrollably to their gratification.”

––– Cicero quoting Archytas of Tarentum, De senectute 12.39-40.

“Nobody gets enough, never.”

––– Trimalchio in Petronius, Satyricon 76.3

Desire literally devoured too in the sense that Caligula – when faced with a shortage of criminals to be fed to the wild animals – requisitioned spectators to be thrown to them (Dio 59.10.3).

Ovid’s Erysichthon sold his daughter into slavery to fund his hunger. He is finally reduced to autocannibalism.

The avidae libidines can never be satisfied. The urbane gentleman (urbanus homo) becomes the vagrant dandy (scurra vagus).

Man is captured by a complex dynamic in which it is not really a fear of desire’s vortex but rather the death of that desire – the nauseous taedium vitae (end of wanting).

Seneca complained that the decadent sought dishes that stimulated rather than satisfied the appetite (Epistulae 95.15).

The French have a word for what drove these habits: aboulie, the state of being without desire i.e. being in the doldrums of despair (sans drive) rather than feeling content.

Just as the tyrant imagines the state must end with him, so one who is caught in the desire dynamic thinks if he falls the world must fall with him. This madness can infect an entire people – a people whose only cohesion is their dependence on their egoism.

NB To be enthralled is to be a thrall.

When an ideology entirely captures a world – when the Other can offer no resistance, then the Other ceases to have a reality. We live in the ideology’s shadow, its solipsistic universe, & can hear only its echoes.

Just as Camus (3.5) reckoned Caligula must have said “il y a de moins en moins de monde autour de moi” so we see fewer and fewer people: they have been collapsed into units of the ideology.

The ideology needs victims (historical oppressors both real and imagined) so that it can justify ideological cruelty. This cruelty is the message, the theatre. In a sense, we have not moved so very far from the Roman arena.

The ideology's summit is occupied by the gratuitous act: when power moves and scoffs at meaning.

The ideology is attritional in nature. We are wearied by the absence of catharsis. Just repeated avalanches of evidence, by month, day, hour, minute. The message is unchanging but the evidence is always in flux.

Reacting to living under this cloud of potential evidence against us, we enter the disorder of lost beings.

Point of no return is that that once we engage in resistance or correction of either the system or ourselves, we either get co-opted into the evil or go mad.

Art is given a compensatory and regulatory role. Beauty has been put on trial and found guilty of colluding with the older orders. Now Art’s role is guardian of the New Eden, one which has no place for beauty.

Desire drive closely connected to death drive. An ability to fulfil the former leads to a love of the latter. Death becomes a rather surreal boundary, an easy way out – a superior end to a life sans desire.

Romans enjoyed snuff plays such as Mucius Scaevola, Prometheus, Actaeon, Laureolus, Pasiphae and the Bull.

We tend to think of divine as solemn and the temporal as trivial. On contrary, Romans thought this world was full of gravity & meaning, mortality bestowed this upon Man.

The gods, Romans believed, were fickle and frivolous because they were not faced with suffering/death. The refined man, the soft man (vir mollis) was a foolish one as he imitated the gods and yet entered the death/desire spiral.

Yoking self to desire leads to total indifference: the decadent spirit invents difficulties and obstacles in order to restore some form of wholesome resistance that is capable of protecting life against ennui/atrophy. Lacking real problems, we take refuge in charade.

What is funny is that in the strong desire goes full circle. If death is avoided, self-denial becomes the culmination of desire.

Tertullian even felt compelled to explain that Christianity wasn't just the latest "taboo" faith to hit Rome. But the antidote to that dynamic. (Tertullian, Apologeticus 3.3).

In this strange world, one could even argue that living in luxury often had the effect of inuring oneself to the allure of luxury (Macrobius, Saturnalia, 2.8.7).

Let's add VIOLENCE to the mix.

Violence can be twofold too. Sadistic violence upholds the chaos of desire. Violence can be an austere order-restoring force, however. Curbing how tyrannical desire thinks it can mould reality.

Sometimes the desire dynamic cannot be curbed by violence, in fact it inflicts violence upon it.

Take for instance the camp prefect Aufidienus Rufus who tried to restore the discipline of the “old ways” to the idle camp in Pannonia under Tiberius. The result was mutiny.

Such a people are wrecked. They suffer a type of societal paralysis agitans; an excess of signification. To be stimulated they must play intellectual games with what is considered impropria, obscura, timida, humilia, sordida, lasiciva, effeminata etc.

It is their odd way of chasing AWE; an external that will shake them; something outside the ideology that violates it. Here we reach Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, the hyperconscious subject whose summit is self-alienation.

The perfect symbol of this People is the Sack of a City: that peculiar event in which the victors are in carnival mode as the losers inhabit hell.

This interplay is a potent one. Indeed many may rejoice in their own destruction.

In the end, the old societies could not hold without a centre. But today’s ideology/centre is anti-identity/community. Indeed, it is the sense of community/identity that plays sacrificial lamb for the ideology hence loneliness & anomie = the great social diseases of the Age.

To understand life is to know it is a mystery.

“We can conceive of eternity only by eliminating all the perishable, all that counts for us. Eternity is an absence, being that fills none of the functions of being; it is privation erected into… something or other” (Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, 152).

Civilisation makes an “idiot” (“mad man,” “feral”) of those who cannot or will not adjust to the strictures of society.

THE END