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PARTISAN REVIEW
sexuality in our lives. Indeed, all power tends to gravitate toward it.
We have come to feel that sex alone gives intelligibility to the self,
that it is the "hidden aspect and generative principle of meaning."
The irony is that we self-delusively think of this tyranny as libera–
tion. Foucault's reaction against the tyranny of sexuality can be read
as movement toward asceticism or as a utopian envisaging of "a dif–
ferent economy of bodies and pleasures" in which sex has its place,
but is no longer the essence, the "hidden" principle of man: Foucault
has in effect elicited the essentialist character of the sexual revolu–
tion.
Desire is normally linked to indeterminacy, contradiction ,
chaos, inconsistency.
It
defies definition, it is existence in con–
tradistinction to essence. This is the theme of Dostoevsky's
Notes from
Underground:
"Desire is the manifestation of life - of all of life - and it
encompasses everything from reason down to scratching oneself.
And although, when we're guided by our desires life may often turn
into a messy affair, it's still life and not a series of extractions of
square roots." What I am arguing is that desire has come to function
as an essentialist trope - which means that it has become controlling,
coercive, a form of self-destructive tyranny .
It
is no longer simply
the host of desires that make us living beings, but desire in its
hegemonic version - as ruler of life . In his study
Erotisme,
Georges
Batailles constantly stresses the essential extravagance of an un–
checked desire that transgresses all limits and seeks an absolute
fulfillment. The underground man might have written the following
words: "Life is essentially extravagant , drawing on its forces and its
reserves; unchecked it annihilates what it has created .. .. the thing
we desire most ardently is the most likely to drag us into wild ex–
travagance and to ruin us." Zuckerman, the novelist character in
Philip Roth's recent novel
The Counterlife,
vividly captures the tyr–
anny of desire : "the terrible unruliness spawned by unconstrainable
desire - the plotting, the longing, the crazily impetuous act, the
dreaming relentlessly of the other." The concentration of power in
any single human energy or faculty, what we might call its ideologi–
cal formulation of necessity, becomes a tyranny over other energies,
if it doesn't completely repress them. The Foucauldian solution is to
try to defuse or diffuse power. Of course, power cannot be absolutely
destroyed. All mediations or particular expressions of human
energies may grant power to one or more of them (reason, morality,
freedom, sexuality). The diffusion of power is no more and no less
than the provisionality and delimitation of each and every energy.
