[Jason DeBoer writes the Fierce Language column for The Absinthe Literary Review. He is the managing editor of Eighteenth–Century Studies, an academic journal based at Northwestern University. His fiction has recently appeared in numerous journals, including The Barcelona Review, Libido, The Wisconsin Review, Eclectica, Exquisite Corpse, CrossConnect, and Linnaean Street. At the moment he is working on Stupor, his debut novel].[Montreal Serai takes the position that the subject of orgasm is very much worthy of philosophical inquiry because men in Western industrialized society tend to be obsessed with ‘performance’ and ‘achievement’ when the very paradox of sex holds that the more you pursue it the more it eludes or self-exterminates (la petite mort). The article is written from an exclusively male point of view that neither apologizes for nor justifies its narrow focus. -Ed.]
Orgasm, much like the actual moment of death, inhabits a strange place in the history of human enquiry in that it is often alluded to but rarely addressed directly. I propose that both sexual climax and the act of dying cast an eschatological shadow over the human mind, which mires us in feelings of fear and loss. While it is certainly understandable that humans fear death, it is less clear why a moment of physical joy like orgasm also carries with it certain psychological associations of anxiety or sorrow. Is there a correlation between the finality of orgasm in the sexual act and the finality of death in the life cycle? I would like to examine this question through the writings of those courageous few that have braved the subject.
Michel Foucault, in The Use of Pleasure, examined the framework through which ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, and Galen viewed the significance of the sexual act. It was determined rather early in human history that there was a decidedly negative side to the pleasure of sex. For the Greeks, “[sexual] anxiety revolved around three focal points: the very form of the act, the cost it entailed, and the death to which it was linked. It would be a mistake to see in Greek thought only a positive valuation of the sexual act. Medical and philosophical reflection describes it as posing a threat, through its violence, to the control and mastery that one ought to exercise over oneself; as sapping the strength the individual should conserve and maintain, through the exhaustion it caused; and as prefiguring the death of the individual while assuring the survival of the species.”
The ancients regarded the act of ejaculation as highly revelatory of the sexual act. “By focusing entirely on this moment of emission -- of foamy excretion, seen as the essential part of the act -- one placed at the core of sexual activity a process that was characterized by its violence, an all but irrepressible mechanics, and a force that escaped control. But one also raised -- as an important problem in the use of pleasures -- a question of economy and expenditure.” Indeed, even the term ‘orgasm’ implies maleness and has evolved directly from the Greek, meaning “to foam or boil over in ecstasy.” Because the Greeks had no real understanding of where semen originated in the body, they guessed it must come from deep inside the chest, abdomen, or marrow. Thus, sperm had an exaggerated physiological importance and the loss of semen during male orgasm was tantamount to significant constitutional depletion. Foucault explained: “Whether the semen is drawn from the whole organism, or originates where the body and the soul are joined to one another, or is formed at the end of a lengthy internal processing of food, the sexual act that expels it constitutes a costly expenditure for the human being. Pleasure may well accompany it, as nature intended, so that men would think of providing themselves with descendants; it nonetheless constitutes a hard jolt for the being itself, involving as it does the relinquishing of a whole portion of that which contains a ‘being itself’ . . . . . One sees how in certain instances . . . the misuse of sexual pleasure might lead to death.” Foucault continued: “It was not just the fear of excessive expenditure that caused medical and philosophical reflection to associate sexual activity with death. This reflection also linked them together in the very principle of reproduction, by holding that the purpose of reproduction was to compensate for the passing away of living beings and to provide the species as a whole with the eternity that could not be given to each individual. . . . This was its way of cheating death . . . For Aristotle and Plato alike, the sexual act was at the point of junction of an individual life that was bound to perish -- and from which, moreover, it drew off a portion of its most precious resources -- and an immortality that assumed the concrete form of a survival of the species.”
So the act of orgasm becomes highly charged with physical, social, and eschatological consequences. As Foucault stated: “The sexual act ‘which was always perceived in terms of a male, ejaculatory, ‘paroxystic’ schema’ did not occasion anxiety because it was associated with evil but because it disturbed and threatened the individual’s relationship with himself and his integrity as an ethical subject in the making; if it was not properly measured and distributed, it carried the threat of a breaking forth of involuntary forces, a lessening of energy, and death without honorable descendants.” Thus, the ecstatic moment of orgasm is a disturbance from which the person may not recover, whether physically, psychologically, or even ethically. A “jolt” of erotic ecstasy may serve as a sort of portal through which one may want to exit the everyday world, to never again return. Much like drunkenness or hallucinogenic tripping, orgasm carries with it the germ of transcendence, which could induce one to opt out of social responsibility. Simply put, one might not want to go back. Every significant world culture features cults which are centered around orgasm, appealing to persons for whom periodic and festival eroticism is insufficient. The cult justifies it obsession by likening sexual climax to a religious moment. The ancient Greeks deemed most events religious in which a person lost control of his or her senses. Democritus declared that “coition is a brief epilepsy.” Thus, the Greeks held that all moments of ecstasy (whether orgasm, epilepsy, or drunkenness) somehow risk death, while at the same time acting as points of departure for the furthering and imparting of knowledge.
Psychoanalysis confirmed in a clinical setting some of the Greek theories of sexual anxiety. Wilhelm Reich, in his groundbreaking book, The Function of the Orgasm, wrote that “fear of death and dying is identical with unconscious orgasm anxiety, and the alleged death instinct, the longing for disintegration, for nothingness, is the unconscious longing for the orgasmic resolution of tension.” Based on studies of patients who participated in “orgasm therapy,” Reich felt he had proved that a healthy sex life plays a major role in the general mental health of an individual.” He furthermore believed that orgasm for women was even more traumatic than for men, since ejaculation was easier to bear than the more all-encompassing intensity of the clitoral or vaginal orgasm. Women seemed to experience a greater loss of control physically: many of Reich’s female subjects expressed a fear of shitting themselves or even dying during orgasm. Such anxiety could often eclipse the pleasure of the sexual act: “Orgasm anxiety is often experienced as a fear of death or fear of dying. . . . The loss of consciousness in the sexual experience, instead of being pleasurable, is fraught with anxiety.”
For Reich, orgasm anxiety and the related fear of death were obstacles that could (and should) be overcome through therapy. Georges Bataille, on the other hand, believed that death was inevitably linked to the sexual act, that sexual climax was a severe moment of crisis. In Eroticism, Bataille wrote: “As a general rule, the sexual individual survives the super-abundance and even the excesses into which it leads him. Death is the result of the sexual crisis only in exceptional cases, but the significance of these [rare instances] is admittedly striking, so much so that the exhaustion following the final paroxysm is thought of as a ‘little death.’”
Bataille distinguished eroticism from sexuality: the latter he likened to animal reproduction, the former as useless, uniquely human, non-reproductive pleasure. Sexual or orgasm anxiety, for Bataille, was connected to the reproductive nature of animal sexuality, rather than the distinctly human pleasures of eroticism. Such ties to animal sexuality were seen as something that should be transcended through new forms of eroticism. Bataille believed that one of the unique traits of erotic pleasure was that it ignored the life-giving aspects of sexuality and consequently the death-giving aspects: “Particularly, in eroticism, our feeling . . . is not connected with the consciousness of engendering life. One might even say that the fuller the erotic pleasure, the less conscious we are of the children who may result from it [note: this fits with Reich’s and to a lesser extent Freud’s tenet that procreation is part of erotic sexuality, rather than vice versa]. On the other hand, the depression following upon the final spasm may give a foretaste of death, but the anguish of death and death itself are at the antipodes of pleasure.”
Another set in Bataille’s erotic terminology was “continuity/ discontinuity,” a strange ontological distinction only understandable within the context of sex and death. Bataille believed that all beings were somehow discontinuous, meaning that they experience an incompleteness, a set of limits, which separates them from other beings. For a being to have continuity, it would have to be dead, when it is in an unchangeable state of sameness. Nevertheless, Bataille contended that all discontinuous beings strove to be in a continuous state. And although this achievement was only possible in death, sexual climax provided a temporary moment of apparent continuity. “There is a meeting between two beings projected beyond their limits by the sexual orgasm . . . At the moment of conjunction the animal couple is not made up of two discontinuous beings drawing close together uniting in a current of momentary continuity: there is no real union; two individuals in the grip of violence brought together by the preordained reflexes of sexual intercourse share in a state of crisis in which both are beside themselves. Both creatures are simultaneously open to continuity. But nothing persists in their imperfect awareness. The crisis over, the discontinuity is intact. This crisis is simultaneously the most intense and the least significant.” The human desire to experience a taste of continuity without death is by necessity doomed to failure: the ephemeral union soon dissolves back again into two beings marooned in their own discontinuity. Still, couples will invariably strive again for the finality of the impossible: that is the movement of erotic desire.
“Erotic conduct is the opposite of normal conduct as spending is the opposite of getting. If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to increase the sum of our possessions or of our knowledge, we use all means to get richer and to possess more. Our status in the social order is based on this sort of behavior. But when the fever of sex seizes us we behave in the opposite way. We recklessly draw on our strength and sometimes in the violence of passion we squander considerable resources to no real purpose. Pleasure is so close to ruinous waste that we refer to the moment of climax as a ‘little death.’ Consequently anything that suggests erotic excess always implies disorder.” Bataille believed the modern world was dangerously obsessed with production and accumulation, and that eroticism (the squandering of seed) was one of the few recourses left with which to combat it. For Bataille, orgasm served the paradoxical function of being important precisely because of its very uselessness and waste. “Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can. . . . we want a world turned upside down and inside out. The truth of eroticism is treason.”
In Foucault, Reich, and Bataille, we have three esteemed thinkers who, each in his own manner, believe the sexual act mirrors the end of life. Their ground-breaking work contains both disturbing as well as liberating possibilities for us all, and is an invitation for other thinkers to further explore this still very taboo subject.