Alphonso Lingis - Beauty and Lust

16/11/2020 Beauty and lust: Discovery Service para UNAM
Título: Beauty and lust. De: Lingis, Alphonso, Journal of Phenomenological

Psychology, 00472662, Fall96, Vol. 27, Fascículo 2
Base de datos: Academic Search Ultimate
BEAUTY AND LUST
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ABSTRACT
Why does lust demand beauty ? How does it differ from functional beauty and from the beauty of what is
purposive without definable purpose? Does eroticism really aim at visions of immortality ? How does
erotic craving differ from the cognitive or practical intentions that aim at objects or objectives ? What is
the difference between sexual satisfaction and the erotic transport ? Is erotic passion really a craving for
the quiescence of the inert? What is erotic glamour in women and in men ? What kind of animality does
eroticism see and crave in human bodies? Why is it youth that inflames the extreme emotions of
eroticism?
When, in the course of our activities, we perceive someone, we do not see an expanse of colors
confined within borders. We do not see others by their outlines, but by the inner lines of their postures
and movements. We recognize our mother from a distance as she comes down the sidewalk, long
before we can recognize the distinctive hue of her complexion or the shape of her head. We recognize
her by the walk. We recognize our friends by their distinctive way of striding along, marching, parading,
flouncing, sashaying, gamboling, or cavorting. We move to take up positions before the persons we
encounter, interact with them. We rarely look to identify the precise color of the complexions of our
acquaintances or their comparative sizes and bulk; we pick up on the sprawling or the erect and agile
way they sit, we recognize the sweeping strokes of their moves or their small, precise, and intricate
gestures, the energy-charged way they lurch forward or the languid, composed way they address the
things they are doing, and we adjust to that in everything we do and say when we are with them. Even
the look that' idly gazes at people in the crowd, as so many drifting patterns in the twilight, shifts to the
inner diagrams that animate them.
The perception we have of others as we interact with, avoid, and communicate with them can be
troubled by a sexualized perception. We let loose our sense of the practical diagrams of someone's
posture and gestures and our attention to the coded and expressive patterns that her or his facial
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muscles and hands are making. We sense another diagram, which accentuates the erogenous zones,
lips, breasts, thighs, and genitals. Our eyes are not really undressing the other and visualizing this
diagram. Instead, the pattern of holes and orifices we sense in the other pulls at the layout of lips,
fingers, breasts, thighs, and genital zone in ourselves. We feel latent movements in our hands and
genitals that rise to make contact with the sexual physiognomy of the other, troubling the axes of our
posture. When they make contact, the caresses disconnect the hands, eyes, postures of the body from
the tasks and attractions in the outlaying practical environment. The objects and objectives of the
outlying field soften, turn into drifting patterns, dissolve into heavy and turgid atmosphere. Closed from
the outlying field of urgencies and demands, coupled up to a body corresponding to its own, the sexual
embrace and penetrations find contentment in the opaque flesh filling one's orifices and engulfing one's
probings. Each one feels the eddies and ripples of pleasure that intensify the sensual contentment, a
spiraling pleasure arousing and aroused by the pleasure of the other.
Eroticism is something else. Eroticism is not satisfied in contentment; it is the ecstasy of our passions. In
eroticism we, beings confined within our discontinuous identities, are hurled into extreme experiences,
extreme torments, and extreme pleasures, are expro-priated in uncharted abysses.
The erotic passion is not an initiative of what we call our per-son-our separate and discontinuous
existence, source of its own acts, responsible for what we ourselves say and do. The structures and
identities of our separate and discontinuous existence are forged in the world of work, where every now
anticipates an effect, a result, and subordinates itself to a now to come, where thought surveys,
calculates, and programs. The erotic passion begins with contact excitements, which do not appropriate
something outside and close back in upon themselves in contentment. Instead, they are mesmerized by
an alien body and are seized in a longing to pour all one has of kisses and caresses, the energies of
one's throbbing blood, the flash-fires of one's hyperexcited nervous tissues, the heat and
phosphorescence of one's carnal substance into the other. This longing invades the inner fortress of
one's person, and vacates it of the anticipations, initiatives, and identity with which it had maintained its
separateness. There is no longer anything within one that surveys, programs, and requires
compensations.
One's stand in one's field of operations is overcome with dizziness, one's posture held erect for tasks
collapses, one's parts and limbs are dismembered, one's hands and thighs roll about on their own, one's
fingers probe and penetrate blindly not knowing what they are looking for, one staggers about
possessed, no longer in control of one's own thoughts and values, no longer master of one's feelings,
invaded by violent emotions that sense the obscenity in anguish, that push on into it in a momentum that
can no longer derail or control itself, that sense also the exhilaration of risking oneself, of plunging into
the danger zone, of expenditure of all one's forces at a loss.
The tingling of a caress on one's spine turns bones into gum, and one's sheath of motor muscles shivers
with chaotic impulses like so much nervous fiber. The aimless stroking of a hand on one's abdomen
turns it into a gland, a heart palpating with blood and frenzy. The mouth loosens the chain of its
sentences, babbles, giggles, the tongue spreads its wet over the lips, the lips cease to shape words in
ordered sequences to turn into a wet and open orifice. The toes turned in the empty air no longer strain
to support the posture and probe along flesh and orifices like tongues. Glands stiffen and harden,
becoming bones and rods. The eyes cloud and become wet and spongy, hair is turning into webs and
gleam. Between the dismembered body parts released, proliferating nameless, countless tinglings,
spasms, fluids, microorganisms are teeming.
The hands that caress move aimlessly over flesh, no longer exploring or discovering, in random
unendingly repetitious movements that have no idea of what they are looking for or what they are doing.
The body tenses up, hardens, gropes and grapples, pistons and rods of a machine that has no idea of
what it is trying to achieve. Then it collapses, melts, gelatinizes, runs. There is left the coursing of the
trapped blood, the flush of heat, the spirit vaporizing in gasps and sighs.
In dissolute ecstasy the body's ligneous, ferric, coral state casts itself into a curdling, dissolving,
liquefying, vaporizing, radioactive, solar, and nocturnal state. Exstase materielle, transubstantiation.
The cadaverous bodies exuding smegmic and vaginal effluvia, musks and sighs contaminate, animate
the sheets, the furniture, the air with throbbings of eddies of life no longer one's own. The flames of
voluptuous pleasure ignite them as they careen and flare apart, in clothing and the wood of the furniture
collecting wetlands for lilliputian choruses of frogs and insects, in the air whose minute spheres of water
vapor teem with microorganisms, in the soil decomposing into unnameable organisms.
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. It is true that one tends to fall asleep after
orgasm, but the voluptuous pleasure is not in that. Does it not ignite instead in the passage into the
uncontainment and unrest of liquidity and vapor--pleasure in exudations, secretions, exhalations? In the
transubstantiations in the carnal substance, movements that do not terminate in quiescence or nirvana,
voluptuous pleasure hardens, solidifies, surges and rushes and vaporizes and vanishes without leaving
contentment or satisfaction. The body that sleeps is not inert, it is incandescent with the delirious aurora
borealis that streams in its blood, sweat, and discharges. The erotic rapture sweeps the flotsam and
jetsam of the impassioned flesh unto the tropical and arctic regions where tempestuous sirens and
demons chant and howl.
The erotic frenzy sweeps its vertiginous way over barriers, plunges toward nameless, proliferating
excesses of life teeming in the decomposition and contaminations. This zone of decomposition of the
world of work and reason, this zone of blood and semen and vaginal secretions, of excremental
discharges and corpses, this zone too of proliferating, uncontrollable, nameless eddies of alien life,
which fills us with exultant anguish and anguished exultation, is the zone of the sacred.
The sacred is not in another sphere, separated from the here-below of generation and corruption,
beckoning from beyond as the figure of holiness, wholeness, ideal integrity. From the beginning the
sacred is in decomposition, is separated from the world of work, reason, and discontinuous beings fixed
in their identity, by decomposition. The zone of the sacred is the zone of spilt blood, semen, discharges,
excretions, which excite the transgressive and ruinous passions.
The sphere of sexuality becomes the zone of the sacred, where the world of work enters into
decomposition, in the transports of eroticism. From the most ancient times, the sacred precincts were
places of orgy and prostitution. In our times, the erotic is a tabooed and prohibited sphere, repugnant
and exultant, a sphere of horror and anxiety and voluptuous oblivion, of extreme emotions, a sphere of
sacred eroticism separated from the work of sexual reproduction.
This dissolute ecstacy, this extase materielle (Le Clezio, 1967), is paradoxically excited by what
detaches itself from the continuity of nature and the instrumental connections of the world of work to
stand before us as an object.
An object is what makes the erotic yearnings extreme, excessive. The erotic object maintains itself at a
distance from contact, closed in itself and inviolate as an object, an idol. The idol is not a solidification of
the zone of the sacred that positions it in the world of anticipations, reason, and work, and puts it to use.
Instead, in channelling all one's energies across this distance, the erotic object functions as the open
gate toward which the shock waves of our energies rush, to be compressed and intensified and inflamed
there, and to break forth into the chaos and abysses beyond. Before the erotic object we seek not
possession but expropriation and self-loss.
We walk the streets, and pass through hundreds of people whose diagrams of lips, breasts, and genital
organs we divine, and which seem to us equivalent and interchangeable. Then something catches our
eye and holds it in thrall: a dimple speckled with freckles on the cheek of a woman. A steel choker
around the throat of a man. A tight leather miniskirt. A gold ring in the punctured nipple on the hard chest
of a laborer. A big raw fish in the delicate hand of a young woman. A live python coiled about the neck of
a lean lanky adolescent with coal-black skin. Naturally rusty-red hair on a schoolgirl. A crooked, sly grin
on an ungainly and skinny guy. Signs of a clandestine disorder in the uniformed and coded crowds.
They are very different from the suffused and anonymous diagram of the erogenous zones we divine
hidden under the clothing of passers-by. These stand out, blaze in the full public light of day. Objects of
black magic, they provoke effects from a distance, spreading disorder in the programme and urgent
world of work.
We find ourselves obsessed by the smell of a certain perfume, by the crooked grin. We find ourselves
disconnected from our role and our tasks, losing the train of our thoughts, pulled back to these
phenomena. Signals of extravagances and recklessness flash out of them. We suffer dizzy spells, feel
ourselves ready to drop everything and chase after them, to be lost or ruined.
It can happen that erotic excitement is fastened on a whole human body. Apart from the inner diagram of
lips, breasts, hands, and genital zone accentuated for sexual behavior, beauty organizes the body into
another pattern, linking up forms, colors, and movements into a snare for the eye. Someone's beauty
detaches from the behavioral diagrams that immediately induce the corresponding movements of
contact penetration, and makes the body an object to be contemplated, an idol or fetish.
There is beauty and beauty. There is the beauty of perfection, that of a body integrally adapted to the
purposes to which it is put. The beauty of a woman athlete or marine is like the beauty of a draft horse,
exhibiting the engineering of limbs and muscles triumphing over the hardest physical tasks. The salient
muscles of a ballerina are not erotic, even though the dance is, contrary to work, a sovereign activity
having no other meaning than beauty.
There is the beauty Kant defined as that of purposiveness without identifiable purpose, the statuesque
beauty of classicism, which is given to disinterested contemplation. The young woman is depicted
poised, self-composed, free, in a space emptied of any tasks or purposes for which her body would be
molded and her limbs organized. The man is shown strong, proportioned, with graceful lines and supple
and sensitive but inexpressive face, sovereign, ready for anything. Or with just a few props about them,
objects chosen for their own beauty: an elegant young woman is gazing into a crystal brandy glass, the
superb male is positioned on cliffs over the sparkling sea.
There is the beauty the Platonic eros seeks, that eros that seeks immortal forms. The statues of the age
of Pericles break totally with the distortions and grotesqueries of the art of Asia, India, Africa, and
Mycenaean Greece; they fix in marble perfectly proportioned bodies, whose symmetry excludes any
disequilibrium that would suggest that internal breakdown and collapse are possibilities. When they are
carved in motion, all their positions are so perfectly poised, everywhere showing a hand, an arm put in
accordance with the body's own inner laws of balance, that movement, change, for them never implies
the least lack of self-sufficiency. These bodies that look immortal, completely sovereign in Nature, are
raised on pedestals in empty space. The prime function of the artist was to glorify and immobilize the
triumphant bodies of Olympic athletes: bodies not fleeing dangers or hurling their force against the blind
inertia of Nature, running with no other purpose than to display their inner mastery, held eternally in their
eternally triumphant stride. The eros that chases after this kind of beauty is pursing visions of
immortality.
But what is erotic beauty? How does the beauty of a body detach that body from the contentment of our
practical, expressive, and sexual couplings, and make of that body an object of excessive passions?
How does beauty organize the body, linking up forms, colors, and movements into a snare for our lusts?
"Work is never favorable to [erotic] beauty," Georges Bataille writes, "the very meaning of which is to be
free of oppressive constraints. Women subjected to a factory job have a roughness, businesswomen
have a crispness that repel the sweaty hands and wet orifices of lust. Ugliness is often the mark of
fatigue and exhaustion. A beautiful body or a beautiful face convey beauty only if the utility they
represent has not altered them in any way, only if they cannot suggest the idea of an existence reduced
to serving and, for that reason, made ungainly" (1986, p. 145). And the intensity of work reduces the
physical contrast between the sexes, such that the working woman is not an object before the man, but
a collaborator alongside of him.
The temple prostitute, the geisha, presents the sovereignty of idle beauty, completely withdrawn from the
world of work. By living in idleness, she preserves that soft and fluid form of the voice, of the smile, of
the whole body, which captivate without breaking what it touches. Her beauty that does not triumph in
the endurance of stern physical tasks, that does not endure, is as ephemeral as the flowers that bloom
in the night and die when the sun rises (Bataille, 1986, p. 147). She makes herself an object by covering
herself with brilliant and fluid garments, jewels, and perfumes. The working man is stopped in his tracks,
contemplating a body set apart, remote from all his laborious concerns, ostentatious and alluring. Her
sumptuous dress, jewelry of precious stones, plumes of dead exotic birds, and perfumes made of fields
of rare flowers represent values, represent the dissipation of human labor in useless splendor. This
intense consumption exerts a dangerous fascination. She temps the worker to the follies and excesses
of passion and dispossession at the end of which death is already divined.
The erotic value of feminine forms seems to me to be bound up with the absence of the natural
heaviness that suggests the physical use of the limbs and the necessity for the framework of bone: the
more ethereal the shapes and the less clearly they depend on animal reality or on human physiological
reality, the better they respond to the fairly widespread image of the desirable woman. (Bataille, 1986, p.
143).
Not a female body perfectly adapted to the function of childbearing, or nurturing, or winning the World
Tennis Cup. Not the woman who proves her flawless intelligence in pursuing a successful career, the
woman who demonstrates her integrated emotional composition, unblemished by erratic outbursts, in
attaining to high political responsibility. A woman not striding in sensible walking shoes, but pirouetting in
spike heels, or gliding in the water-buffalo sandals; not wearing laundromat-washed t-shirt and jeans, but
clad in the silk made by moths and with fine metal chains dangling in the way of her movements, or
dozens of grandmother's and Navajo necklaces and bangles on her arms. Not muscled arms and
bloated, milk-full breasts, but satiny breasts and a belly not destined for pregnancy and stretch-marks.
An abdomen not emitting the gurglings of digestion and a derriere not smelling of defecations, a woman
who survives on celery stalks and champagne, or brown rice and water. One does not see the female,
one sees the feminine, obeying nothing but aesthetic laws of her own making. "The further removed
from the animal is their appearance," Bataille writes, "the more beautiful they are reckoned" (1986, p.
143). An astral woman who appears in the crowd like a mirage, and who drifts effortlessly through doors
to wander in rose gardens and crystal pools that the moonbeams create wherever she turns.
"But the opposite, only secondarily obvious, also holds," Bataille continues. "The image of the desirable
woman as first imagined would be insipid and unprovocative if it did not at the same time also promise or
reveal a mysterious animal aspect, more momentously suggestive" (143). The consummately feminine
look, Baudelaire said, is "that blase look, that bored look, that vaporous look, that imprudent look, that
cold look, that look of looking inward, that dominating look, that voluptuous look, that wicked look, that
sick look, that catlike look, infantilism, nonchalance and malice compounded;" (Baudelaire, 1961, p.
1256). One divines the cat, the bitch, under the veils. "The beauty of the desirable woman suggests her
private parts, the hairy ones, to be precise, the animal ones," Bataille, says (143).
The paradox of ugliness and beauty in eroticism is strikingly expressed by Leonardo da Vinci in his
Notebooks: "The act of coi-tion and the members employed are so ugly that but for the beauty of the
faces, the adornments of their partners and the frantic urge, Nature would lose the human race."
Leonardo does not see that the charm of a fair face or fine clothes is effective in that that fair face
promises what clothes conceal. The face and its beauty must be profaned, first by uncovering the
woman's secret parts, and then by putting the male organ into them. No-one doubts the ugliness of the
sexual act. (Bataille, 1986, pp. 144-145).
This ethereal vision of the consummately feminine mesmerizes us because it breaks entirely free from
the world of work and reason, where everything gets its meaning from something further, is subordinated
to the future. It fevers us with the craving to break out ourselves, to break out of ourselves, to break free
from the chain mail of our professional and practical shape and lose ourselves in torrential rivers pouring
in the night skies.
To do so we crave to break down the self-contained form in which the feminine is so utterly removed, not
only from the world of work but also from us. What excites us is to break through this jeweled mirage,
though we sense that we will not thereby join in its radian epiphany but in its decomposition in blood,
secretions, and excretions. But this horror is a vertigo, and we plunge headlong toward the unknown
excesses that await us when the goddess has been violated.
Beauty has a cardinal importance, for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the essence of
eroticism. Humanity implies the taboos, and in eroticism it and they are transgressed. Humanity is
transgressed, profaned and besmirched. The greater the beauty, the more it is befouled.
If beauty so far removed from the animal is passionately desired, it is because to possess is to sully, to
reduce to the animal level. Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled, not for its own sake, but for
the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
We want to overstep [the limits], and the horror we feel shows to what excesses we shall be brought,
excesses which, without the initial horror, would be unthinkable. (Bataille, 1986, p. 144)
The nudity of the temple prostitute, the geisha, unlike the nudity of faces and of swimmers and dancers,
is obscene. In the curves of its idle muscles and the satiny softness of its skin shielded from the sun of
the working world, offered to being touched and seized, the lustful eyes feel already anguish and
repugnance. Not only a fear of the violence and befouling to which one feels the temptation arising in
oneself before this nudity that--Marguerite Duras writes--"invites strangling, rape, ill-treatment, insults,
cries of hatred, unleashing of whole, deadly, passions" (1982, p. 21). But also a vertiginous attraction for
the muck and stench of the disordered organs and suppurating orifices these soft forms and skin hold so
weakly. It is only their beauty that holds back the excesses of horror and nausea such that they draw us.
This beauty spread over the indeterminate zone of the excremental is itself indeterminable; each of us
constantly works to fix the image of the most beautiful woman in the world, who would also be the most
desirable, and then see, lit up under a street-lamp, another beauty that troubles us, and what is troubling
about it we cannot define. The same beautiful woman that fevers us one day leaves us indifferent the
next. This slippage, internal to the form of erotic beauty, that keeps our fevered eyes obsessed and
searching, kept Toulouse-Lautrec in the bordellos of Montmartre, painting and painting prostitutes to the
end of his days.
The ancient conceptual oppositions between matter and form, and between animal and man, structure
Bataille's text but are transgressed in it.
It is the feminine form that Bataille defines in his account of the erotic object par excellence. It is "bound
up with the absence of the natural heaviness .... "Kant separated color from form in his analysis of
beauty: color belongs to hedonistic pleasure in physical reactions; aesthetic taste is a disinterested
pleasure in form. Bataille wrote at a time when forms had been broken down in impression-ism and
cubism, when in abstract expressionism the outlines are purely accidental and the painting is a hedonist
monstrance of streaming, bleeding, and radiating colors. It is not only the form of the hair which
unleashes the movement that transgresses the astral form of the feminine apparition. One does have to
sense the substance of flesh, and not only the lines. The blood, secretions, and excretions are seen
already in the milky complexion, the rose blush, and dark and sultry orifices of the eyes. The candlelight
on the blush of its complexion, the hex signs painted on it in black and scarlet make the poised form of a
face an erotic object. In her transgressive, tom-boyish shape, there is that midnight skin and eyes of
Grace Jones, on which sweat gleams rainbows as on an oil slick.
Bataille makes great use of the radical distinction between human and animal. "The further removed
from the animal is their appearance, the more beautiful they are reckoned." The feminine form which
lacks the sense of heaviness that suggests the physical use of the limbs and the necessity for the
framework of bone, whose ethereal shape is disconnected from physiological functions, is a vision of the
woman disconnected from the biological female, that human animal there. But in this she is precisely
most similar to the peacock with extravagantly arrayed, glittering plumage that serves no utilitarian
function, the coralfish whose fauvist colors have no physical use and whose Escher designs do not
outline the functional parts and organs of their bodies. A carnival sambista and a fashion model are
more like birds-of-paradise or triton conch shells or orchids than Mujeres sapientes.
Humans have from earliest times made themselves erotically alluring by grafting upon themselves the
erotic splendors of animals, the glittering plumes of quetzal-birds and the filmy plumes of ostriches, the
secret inner splendors of mother-of-pearl oysters, the springtime gleam of fox fur. Until Versailles,
perfumes were made not with the nectar of flowers but with the musks of rodents.
And today, in our Internet world where everything is reduced to digitally coded messages, images, and
simulacra instantaneously transmitted from one human to another, it is in our passions for animals that
we learn all the rites and sorceries of eroticism. Far from eroticism being naturally destined for a member
of one's own species and age and of the opposite sex, one does not know erotic passion for one of
one's own species unless one is excited by the purr of cats and the flanks of horses, aroused by the
powdery feathers of cockatoos and the ardent chants of insects in the summer night. The dance floors
cleared of vegetation and decorated with shells and flowers that birds-of-paradise make for their
intoxicated dances, or a cockfight, exhibit the extravagant and extreme elaborations far beyond
reproductive copulation into the eroticism that humans have derived from animals.
"The image of the desirable woman as first imagined would be insipid and unprovocative," Bataille
wrote, "if it did not at the same time also promise or reveal a mysterious animal aspect, more
momentously suggestive." (1986, p. 143) This lies especially in the hair, right over the brain but not one
strand of which can will and decision move a millimeter, the pelt in the armpits, the five million strands of
down of the body, each of which has only to be moved four ten-thousandths of an inch to make a nerve
fire. This animality, which Bataille invokes when we see the hairy orofices and push through to uncover
the lynx or bitch in the woman, is not our animal nature as biology talks about it. It is that other animality,
the animals seen by hunting-and-gathering cultures, for whom the animals, living lives of spontaneous
violence and unchained by taboos, are sacred and demonic. It is not the fox as biologists describe it, but
the fox of the mescaline visions of the Hopi Indian legends. The tigress that lustful eyes see under the
beauty of a woman is the tigress of myths, supernatural, casting strange spells, with wild powers, when
the stars throw down their spears and water heaven with their tears.
The prostitute is the only human being who logically should be idle, being what she is. A man who does
nothing does not seem manly; the characteristics that distinguish him are thereby degraded. If he is not
a soldier or a member of the underworld, our first thought is to suspect him of effeminacy. (Bataille,
1991, p. 146)
But it is soldiers and bandidos who are effeminate--who become erotic objects by materializing all the
consummate femininity Bataille finds in temple prostitutes and geishas.
Males in the Middle Ages became erotic objects in the ostentatious garb of knights and in tournaments
taking place in an enchanted world of sorcerers, dragons, and rescues, and in the siren songs of outlaw
gypsies, predators on the organized feudal world. The male erotic objects on the silver screen are 18th-
century cavalry or naval officers who gamble away fortunes, duel and dance, and bandidos, or 20th-
century outlaws and high-society con-men.
The starched white uniforms of naval officers, with their gold epaulets and the hats, capes, and mirror-
polished boots of cavalry officers, with never the least trace of the muck of the barracks and the gore of
the battlefield, make them seem astral men who appear from outer space beyond society, like mirages.
Their gleaming weapons represent the dissipation of human labor in useless splendor. This intense
consumption exerts a dangerous fascination and tempts career women and dockworkers to the follies
and excesses of passion and dispossession.
The erotic charge of their uniforms is bound up with the impeccable whiteness and geometry of starched
creases that efface limbs made of muscle put to laborious use. The meandering hands and flaccid
circulatory glands of their bodies have vanished under the stiff erection of their whole bodies and their
shaven phallic heads.
Nineteenth-century bandidos and 20th-century outlaws and high-society con-men stud their black
uniforms with silver and their bloody hands with precious jewels.
Their own business is with corpses, the corpses they wallow in, the corpses they risk becoming. Over
this vertiginous abyss of the excremental, they look with a look that is not surveying tasks and
enterprises; in their eyes is "that blase look, that bored look, that vaporous look, that impudent look, that
cold look, that look of looking inward, that dominating look, that voluptuous look, that wicked look, that
sick look, that catlike look, infantilism, nonchalance and malice compounded."
In ancient times knights and janissaries participated in the nimbus of the sacred sovereign. The Jesuits
have made of religion the mirror image of the conquistador armies. In our days of the conscript army,
archbishops and ayatollahs bless their weapons and priests accompany them on the battlefield to
sacralize their missions. The dress uniforms of conscripts on parade make them objects ostentatiously
set apart from the civilian world of work. The conscript army is the religious order of the secular state.
Bandidos prowl in the outer region of sorcery and necromancy, consecrated in that other religion of
amulets, talismans, luck, fate, omens, curses, and spells.
The impeccable dress military uniform of soldiers or black and silver costume of bandidos reveals their
unblemished boyish nudity, vibrant with abundance, ease, and the inexhaustible effusion of energy. In
their hirsute faces or skulls shaven, their hairy hands, we sense the animal; the wolf seen in the aurora
borealis, visiting hibernating Arctic dwellers; the lascivious jaguar of the sacred and demonic jungle.
What excites us is to tear through this cosmonaut mirage and find the hairy animal hollows with their
disorder of blood, secretions, and discharges.
The nudity of the naval or cavalry officer, of the bandido or con-man, unlike the nudity of athletes in the
locker room, is obscene. In the hard rigor of their limbs unsullied by labor and the exposed vulnerability
of their abdomens, offered to being touched and seized, the lustful eyes see in anguish and repugnance
animal bodies of savage predators destined to tear one another apart on wastelands by night.
It is these men who are erotic objects--obsessive objects for those who long for expropriation,
dispossession, release of all one's energies, ecstatic discharge of all one's passions, freedom from one's
own identity, decomposition, and death.
If, unlike the beauty of seashells, coralfish, or flowers, there is an ideal of beauty for human bodies, this
is, Kant said, because in the human being beauty of form is expressive of character. The beautiful form
that we find in the ideal for human beauty expresses purity, fortitude, serenity--ethical concepts. But
eroticism is abandon of the inner carapace of character and transgression. There is then no one ideal of
beauty for the bodies that eroticism lusts after.
The erotic feminine beauty that Bataille describes is to be found in officer's clubs, the lairs of bandits,
and clubs frequented by fashion models. But there are so many other hot zones in the city, and other
kinds of erotic attractions. There are all the offices, factories, hospitals, and construction sites. Our lusts
are aroused at the sight of the laborious bodies of secretaries perched on stools in front of computers,
and linemen suspended on telephone poles. The lust that wrenches these bodies from the machinery of
the laborious world may well be more violent than that which grapples for the ethereal and artful bodies
of disco apparitions and military balls, those sanctuaries of extraterritoriality from the world of work. To
pull the nurse into your bed, to undress this construction worker in the toolshed, would be so much more
scandalous a violation of the taboos that regulate the daylight world. One is trembling with a fevered
vision of the fox under the starched white nurse's uniform, the wolf chained in the servile and
machinelike labor of the construction worker.
Certainly we, and not only Jean Genet, cannot think of gangsters who prowl the underworld and
murderers locked in cages without thinking of them as erotic objects. They spend their time on death
row, reading piles of delirious letters from strangers who beg to marry them the day before they are
executed. Marguerite Duras's most passionate writings were such fevered love letters--Moderate
Cantabile, Ten Thirty on a Sunday Night, and India Song.
In The Crying Game, the IRA guerrilla falls in love with the sophisticated feminine beauty of the lover of
the man he killed. When she comes to him and opens her gown, and he sees a penis and the hairy
testicles, he wretches and vomits in the toilet. The transgres-sion-taking to his bed the widow of the man
he killed--is abruptly revealed to be the most extreme erotic transgression. But he then murders the
woman who had been his comrade-in-arms, and will certainly convulsively rush to the transvestite when
the prison gates are opened, like a moth to the flames.
People do not really go to the beach to swim laps, or to "work," as they put it, on their tan. One looks
upon the human bodies lying or strolling barefooted in the sands like one looks at the carnal bodies of
zebras in the savannah or seals on drifting icebergs in the Antarctic summer. All that masochistic talk
about the naked ape .... Here one thinks that, really, Homo sapiens is a beautiful species of animal too.
One's eyes are drawn to the women whose bodies are full, mature, healthy, whose legs are strong,
whose torso is flexible, whose mane of hair without permanent waves and lacquers is coarse and free
like the manes of illlies. Women whose movements are not trained into artificially elegant gestures,
whose hands are rubbing their strong bellies or waving off the flies. One's eyes are drawn to males
whose bodies are not built by Cyborg machines but naturally, genetically strong, harmoniously muscled,
walking completely unselfconsciously, not in any way parading to be admired, completely at ease in raw
nature like a herd of buck deer. As they stroll by, not interacting with you at all, lost in the pleasure of
being on the warm sands and in the sea breeze, they no longer take pains to individualize themselves
with eccentric facial expressions or affected gestures. They have the anonymity of animal bodies. You
do not see them dance buoyantly; you see all the heaviness of these carnal bodies, but it is a sovereign
density, not a mass compacted for laborious tasks or athletic competitions: here it is sovereign and
unoccupied in a benevolent seascape. Like deer who have strength and speed to pass through any
obstacles in the forest, but who now are at ease in the forest clearing, occasionally prancing about or
challenging one another to mock contests. You see all the physiological reality of the mammalian
breasts of females, the cushion to sit on this kind of animal carries with itself in the shape of its buttocks,
the penis, that urinary and seminal duct, in relief behind the Speedo trunks, the chest rhytmically
heaving with breaths, the sweat. Eating not cuisine but simple snacks of fruit brought in brown paper
bags, and beach food--snacking frequently, like animals. There is a specific enthrallment with the animal
splendor of a female body opulent and exposing a sensuality without body armor, of a male body turning
compact and fluid power in all directions, in the hyperactive energies of adolescents. In our obsessed
senses and our thought subjugated to the tides of our instincts, the superbly bared animal body
becomes an idol, like the lions of Assyria and the cobras of India. It mesmerizes the imagination and
engenders private myths and pagan religions.
In finding oneself drawn to such bodies, the erotic craving has the form of an envy of such bodies, a
desire to be in the pack and to find oneself growing into that kind of undisciplined animal beauty. One
longs to surf the waves as they do. All the artifice with which one has tried to make oneself beautiful,
with cosmetics, with stylish costume, with elegant and mannered gestures, with coy and telling looks,
one longs to shed, to be a beach bum, an animal making love with them on the night sands.
But what kind of animal? Not the animal people mean when they speak of "animal sex," that is, random
and mindless copulations like that of domestic dogs. The kind of animal Bataille speaks of when he
writes:
Sexuality, thought of as filthy or beastly, is still the greatest barrier to the reduction of man to the level of
the thing. A man's innermost pride is bound up with his virility. The connection is not with the animal
denied but with the deep and incommensurable element of animal nature.
Animal nature, or sexual exuberance, is that which prevents us from being reduced to mere things.
Human nature, on the contrary, geared to specific ends in work, tends to make things of us at the
expense of our sexual exuberance. (158)
Our animal nature ha[s] its divine aspect and human nature its servile one. [159]
The animals we lust after are the animals seen by hunting-and-gathering societies, creatures not subject
to the dictates of taboos, more sacred, more godlike than laborious humans. When we fantasize making
love with them, this lovemaking is a transgression that hurls itself beyond the network of rules that
organizes the city spread behind us, where they will lead us, as Friday led Robinson Crusoe in Michel
Tournier's novel, to an elemental world made of sands, sun, and sea. And that, like Boddhi in the film
Point Break, will go ever further from the world where grim androids locked in metal prisons drive the
freeways of Los Angeles, hunted from continent to continent by the FBI, to disappear into the hurricane
of the century.
The flash-fires of erotic excitement are kindled by the frail and fleeting epiphanies. You, the compleat
suburbanite, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, whom abruptly an African woman pushes against the wall
and kisses in the mouth in a corridor in the airport between plane changes--you will be electrified for
days like nothing your ever-available and compliant wife could ever do to you. The recent Oliver Stone
movie Doors depicts Jim Morrison as burnt out, alcoholic, and obese by the time of his death at the age
of 27. Yet what woman who, suddenly embraced by him while walking in the alley after the concert and
made love to by It's him! as wildly as the movie does show, would not have a fire in her heart that would
sizzle for years, long after she had married some fraternity jock who now has a successful real estate
business?
Why it is youth that inflames the extreme emotions of eroticism? Why are we all, and not only Michael
Jackson, pedophiles? Unmarked by traces of childhood scratches and adolescent acne, and unmarked
yet by the abrasions and scars that aging will inscribe on it, it is the complexion of a Lolita that fevers our
eyes. Is that not because it is so indecisive, unidentifiable, shading so imperceptibly from the brow to the
neck and the untanned breasts? It is a transitional state from the milky cheeks of childhood, which will
soon settle into strong and opaque colors. It is this ephemeral glow, so precious and vulnerable, that
touches us so tenderly.
As a youth continues to mature, she or he will solidify into the maternal pelvis ready for pregnancy, into
the muscled body built by labor and sports. The youthful form is beguiling, not because it is symmetrical
and harmonious and thus gives that impression of self-contained equilibrium, but because we sense that
this form is undecided, open to many possible shapes. Plato is surely wrong: the beauty we love
erotically is not at all a vision of the forms that look eternal in which one can find satisfaction,
contentment, and rest, but of the most frail, transient, vulnerable forms and colors. Every surge of
passion is a transitory conflagration.
Many, indeed most, old people are not beautiful: bodies coars-ened, potbellied and bent-over comfort
and security, eyes leaden with prudence, lips shriveled with maxims of good sense.
Is your grandfather one of the beautiful ones? You visit him now, and, a grown woman with a fiance, you
finally dare to embrace and kiss and caress him in the way you have so long no longer dared to do.
As a child you felt more sensual and languid in your grandmother's bosom than in your mother's. And
now that you are grown up, you visit her lying on her bed, unemployed, unoccupied, nothing but a
woman, and those sensual memories come back to you so strongly that you find yourself getting a hard-
on, driving you scandalously into the gates of death.
It is true that their faces no longer have the geometrical symmetry of classical models. But the geometry
of shapes determines the cold beauty of buildings and champagne glasses, not the torrid beauty of
erotic objects. Dame Edith Sitwell's and W.H. Auden's faces all in wrinkles are marvelously sensual.
Both of them had in old age an erotic appeal they never had when they were young. Their sly smiles,
their surprise, their pleasure reverberate in all their wrinkles like sunlight spread in waves across a lake.
It was the ephemeral character of these dancing pleasures in so thin and so frail carnality that was so
enchanting and touching, you wanted so much to cover them with kisses and caresses, forcing your
springtime lust into them, transgressing the taboos of incest and those put immemorially on corpses.
What unavowable and extreme emotions are aroused by an old Maasai woman you pick up in your
rented car in Tanzania while looking for the lions of the Serengetti; by a naked old crow Indian with
whom you share a naked February night in a sweat lodge in Montana; by the street kid gobbling half
your dish of spaghetti one night in a sidewalk restaurant in Brazil!
The sacred is not only what sovereignly places itself outside the world of work in sumptuous splendor; it
is what the work of work and reason relentlessly drives out, torments, and crushes. The America
enamored of family values massively supported President Bush's and President Clinton's determination
to keep out of Florida that flotsam and jetsam fleeing Haiti. California voted overwhelmingly to send the
police to drive undocumented immigrants out of the schools and hospitals. This human waste, more
difficult to dispose of than the ever reduced industrial waste of high-tech, America, excites the most
vehement repugnances. Repugnances that convulse in our very core, for we feel before them the
nauseous vertigo that gives in to the decomposition. It is nowise the ethics that decrees that we must
treat each human as an end and never as a means only, nowise the religion that decrees that we must
do to others as we would have the'm do unto us that restrains this repugnance--to the contrary, it is the
rising forces of religion that have raised the funds and organized the campaigns that have elected every
candidate who pledged to make room in the prisons by executions and make room in the schools and
hospitals by massive deportations.
And then, one day, something catches one's eye and holds it in thrall--the California sunlight nestling in
the hair of an old Indian woman who walked from the killing fields of Guatemala. The purple lips soft as
the petals of an orchid on the face of a Black child sick with AIDS. A photograph in a newspaper of the
black waves rising like seasnakes about the coal-black torso of a Haitian man in a raft. A photograph of
the noble contours of the face of a young Peruvian peasant who buried himself up to the neck in the plot
of clay on a hillside outside Lima when the city fathers sent the police to clear garbles squatters and the
bulldozers to clear their huts.
The very frailty, the very impossibility of such apparitions of beauty churns such strange storms in our
loins. Beauties more strange, more uncanny, more obsessive than the radiant specters of death seen in
battlefields, than the wings of dragonflies glinting in piles of sewerage! We feel ourselves sinking into
obsessive dreams of dropping everything, violating the police lines and the laws, to be lost or ruined in
order to cover them with all we have of kisses and caresses, blood, heart, fire, pleasure, agony,
conscience, fate, and catastrophe.
REFERENCES
Bataille, G. (1991). The accursed share, Volume II. New York: Zone Books.
Bataille. G. (1986). Erotism: Death and sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Baudelaire, C. (1961). Oeuvres completes, Claude Pichois (ed.). Paris: Gallimard.
Duras, M. (1982). La maladie de la mort. Paris: Ed. de Minuit.
Le Clezio, J.M.G. (1967). L'extase materielle. Paris: Gallimard.
~~~~~~~~
By ALPHONSO LINGIS, Pennsylvania State University
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16/11/2020 Beauty and lust: Discovery Service para UNAM

Título: Beauty and lust. De: Lingis, Alphonso, Journal of Phenomenological

Base de datos: Academic Search Ultimate

BEAUTY AND LUST

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Baudelaire, C. (1961). Oeuvres completes, Claude Pichois (ed.). Paris: Gallimard.

Duras, M. (1982). La maladie de la mort. Paris: Ed. de Minuit.

Le Clezio, J.M.G. (1967). L'extase materielle. Paris: Gallimard.

By ALPHONSO LINGIS, Pennsylvania State University

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© 2020 EBSCO Industries, Inc. Todos los derechos reservados.

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