Voids of Desire: Pansexual Identity Politics, Stumbling Blocks, Religion Skandalon

René Girard & the Jesus Principle in Theory & Practice, Part 5

Reading from René Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

(Audio version at end of piece)

(All art by Michelle Horsley)

“What is happening to my skin? Where is that protection I needed?” —Talking Heads, “Air”

The World’s Indifference

“[T]he subject will always manage to track down the obstacle that cannot be surmounted—which is perhaps nothing more than the world’s massive indifference to him, in the end—and he will destroy himself against it” (Girard, p. 285-6).

The world’s massive indifference! The obstacle that cannot be surmounted! The story of my life!?

But obstacle to what, exactly?

The world’s indifference is something we all know about.

It has become more and more palpably experiential, more and more pressing upon our awareness, in the electronic global village of parasocial media.

Back before globalism was even a twinkle in the social engineers’ eyes; before the printing press and the telegram; before ships and nations; back when humans were part of small local communities, with no sense of outside, there was no such thing as “the world’s indifference.”

We wouldn’t even be likely to experience the indifference of our tribe (not counting specific opposite sex members), because communal existence was all-too-intimate for indifference to be a problem.

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The idea of the world’s indifference has specifically to do with parasociality.

Parasociality is how we become more and more aware of existing inside a vast mass of individuals who are as indifferent to us as we are to them. The desire to overcome that indifference is the desire to have autonomy from the crowd—to individuate.

Yet when the mass consciousness holds sway of the individual, all attempts are doomed to fail. It is as if the only way not to be a follower is to become a leader; but to be a leader is to be secretly envied and despised by one’s followers: to become the obstacle to their desire.

If all desire, deep down, is the desire to be a model of desire to others, then what, finally, is being desired? We are trapped inside an empty circle of imitation and reciprocity—a void of desire that is the opposite of fulfilling.

The ultimate desire becomes the desire to have no desire. And so we struggle daily to become indifferent to the indifference of others.

The Radiating Certainty of Our Own Superiority

Girard describes mimetism as “the contagion which spreads throughout human relationships . . . in principle it spares no one.”

In rivalry, everyone occupies all the positions, one after another and then simultaneously, and there are no longer any distinct positions. . . . In the last analysis, there is nothing that can be said of any one partner that must not be said about all partners without exception. There is no longer any way of differentiating the partners from one another (Girard, p. 287).

Girard calls this the relationship of doubles. The paradox of doubles is that what unites them and makes them indistinguishable is a mutual desire to distinguish themselves from each other!

Rather like an insect that falls into the crumbling trap its rival has dug for it, with the grains of sand that it tries to grasp giving way as it tries to move its feet—desire counts on differences to get up the slope. But the differences are obliterated precisely because of its efforts, and it falls back once again on the doubles (p. 291).

Desire is a desire for differentiation, for uniqueness, autonomy, individual existence. But insofar as desire is imitative, it cancels itself out in the very first moment of its expression.

By desiring uniqueness, we are reinforcing our lack of difference. By desiring things we think will distinguish us from the herd, we join the herd.

Similarly, and symmetrically, to seek a state of indifference to others—supreme independence—is to reinforce one’s dependence and involvement with others.  

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In a society where the place of individuals is not determined in advance and hierarchies have been obliterated, people are endlessly preoccupied with making a destiny for themselves, with “imposing” themselves on others, “distinguishing” themselves from the common herd—in a word, with “making a career.” [Jean-Michel Oughourlian:] each person will try to prove to the other that he already possesses the stake, which in reality must be reconquered all the time by being snatched away from the other—this stake being the radiating certainty of one’s own superiority (p. 294).

The radiating certainty of one’s own superiority

Is something we are all possessed by.

Some more than others, admittedly.

And some more consciously than others.

But nonetheless, a sense of superiority is universal in parasocial post-modernity. It goes hand in hand with the assertion of individualism: the latter being largely indistinguishable from solipsism.

Our belief might not extend to feeling superior to everybody on the planet (a fairly rare case of ego inflation which psychedelics—or other “entheogenic” experiences—can help to generate).

But feeling superior to the people one interacts with is surely something that most people feel on a regular basis (even if they don’t admit it to themselves).

We believe our own opinions, after all. Our own perspective is the only one we know, the only one that really means anything to us. Everybody else’s opinions and perspectives, by definition, are inferior to our own.

This only appears to be contradicted by the ways we seek models to look up to and approval from others. All this is part of a single inferiority-superiority complex.

Dream Factory Workers (The Supreme Triumph of Idealism)

“[O]f all the manifestations of sexual psychology, normal and abnormal, [sexual deviations] are the most specifically human. More than any others they involve the potently plastic force of the imagination. They bring us the individual man, not only apart from his fellows, but in opposition, himself creating his own paradise. They constitute the supreme triumph of idealism.” —Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex v5: Human Sexuality (emphasis added)

The idea of pansexuality as the measure of individuality has come into its own in the past fifty years, with UNESCO and LGBTQ+++ as the visible vanguard. The idea—that everything is sexual and that human sexuality expresses though an endless variety of paraphilias—is sourced, not just in (a misunderstanding of) the ideas of Freud,¹ but those of founding Fabian Havelock Ellis, quoted above: sexual perversity is the sin qua non of human individuality.

It is the thing that makes human beings unique.

The idea of the demon who bears light is more far-reaching than any notion in psychoanalysis. Desire bears light, but puts that light in the service of its own darkness. The role played by desire in all the great creations of modern culture—in art and literature—is explained by this feature, which it shares with Lucifer (Girard, p. 292).

Herein lies a fearful symmetry of pathology: the burning desire to be a unique, discreet, wonderful and powerful snowflake is fueled by the indulgence and assertion of sexual drives (with special emphasis on “kinks”). At the same time, sexual drives are inflamed by the neurotic need to be different, to be special, and to be “celebrated” for our uniqueness.

Yet ironically, there can be no desire more universal and unvarying than the biological drive to procreate. It is quite literally one size fits all, because all penises are built (roughly) to fit all vaginas.

Uncoupling the sex drive from the “mere” act of procreation, therefore, is essential to hitching it to the wagon of identity-assertion.

That sexual identity politics have reached their apotheosis with the corporate construction of artificial penises and vaginas—devoid of the capacity not only for procreation but for genuine pleasure or desire—is the self-explanatory exclamation point on this grim sentence/prognosis.

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The sexual revolution went hand in hand with the counterculture and what eventually became identity politics: the sacrosanctity of the individual and of individual choice. Human rights morphed into the right to make any kind of choice, no matter how unnatural or deviant, to have any sort of preference, including the (impossible) preference of identity.

To get to choose who or what we are is to implicitly acknowledge a void of desire: that we are nothing and no one, an abyss, waiting to be filled by the best advertising strategies.

Don Draper is the “Mad Man” forged in this cauldron of childhood trauma, whose lack of a core identity makes him the perfect vessel for corporate marketing goals.

He symbolizes the living (dis)embodiment of a self-invented dream factory worker.

Freud’s Crucial Fiction

Satan is not only the prince and the principle of every worldly order, he is also the principle of all disorder—the very principle of scandal, in other words. He is always placing himself in our path as an obstacle, in the mimetic and the gospel senses of the term (Girard, p. 398).²

Freud’s basis for psychoanalytical theory—which took over the western world in the 20th century—brought the sexualization of the psyche, and of children, front and center. Girard’s view was that most, if not all, of Freud’s theories were based in a fallacy: the centering of something that, while central to human biology, is not (necessarily) central to our psychological or spiritual well-being:

Sex.

If the modern family in the West and the patriarchal system that preceded it are at the origin of the said difficulties, this is not because they have been as repressive and constraining as people make out. On the contrary, it is because they have been considerably less repressive than most human cultural institutions, and so they are as direct predecessors of the increasingly aggravated state of undifferentiation that marks our present situation (p. 343).

Girard’s view was that, because Freud was unable or unwilling to see the functions of mimetic rivalry and mimetic desire, he (as well as Jung at a “higher” level) reverted to an “archetypal vision,” via myths like Oedipus. Freud had thus to affirm Oedipus’ guilt, since this is how the myth was written.

In a similar, more obviously pernicious way, Freud asserted the guilt of children in sexual abuse cases, by chalking the abuse down to the child’s own fantasies: either they imagined it, or they asked for it.

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Girard’s take on Freud was that the Oedipus myth, like all myths, is a cover up for scapegoating rituals. Since Freud failed to understand this, he ended up reinforcing the lie and creating a modern myth called “the Oedipus complex” (as well as “polymorphous perversity” and infant sexuality).

“Freud’s disciples will not admit this. Rather, they discreetly slide under the carpet everything that embarrasses them in Freud’s thoughts, or, if they are real fanatics, they latch on to the unbelievable aspects of his theory all the more obstinately, precisely because they are unbelievable” (p. 348).

In Girard’s view, Freud came so close to revealing the mimetic mechanism that he appears to have discovered it, but then he continues looking for alternate explanations for the phenomena he is describing. And when he cannot find them, he invents them.

Freud thus became a fiction-writer as a way to avoid the truth of his own discoveries. 

Girard implies not just that Freud was inventing stories to fill in the gaps in his understanding, but that those stories were inherently “scandalous.” Since psychoanalysis embraced the scandal, “Freudianity” and its many offshoots was inherently anti-Christian.

Yet ironically—symmetrically—Freud also concealed and denied the scandal of child sexual abuse, and he did so by inventing a more sophisticated sort of scandal: that of infant sexuality and the Oedipus complex. Polymorphous perversity and infant sexuality, then—rather like the original “sacred” as a cover for murder—was, at least partially, a cover for infant rape.

Freud’s theories thereby were congruent with—both arose out of and facilitated—an embracing of amorality, taboo, and transgression.  And this is the trajectory we’ve been on for the past hundred and fifty years or more.

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Beyond the Paywall (it just gets deeper): Patriarchy >> Progressivism>>Pansexualism >>Pansexuality>>Paraphilia>>Pathology>>>Patriarchy; Transhumanism: Desire as Rejection of Life; The Cross that Marks the Spot: Religion/Skandalon)