A New Philosophical Interpretation of the Libido

Working with new concepts of impulsive intensity- libidinal space, libidinal time, libidinal identity, Jean-Fran?;ois Lyotard's Economie libidinale' sets out to interpret in a coherent discourse the essential data of psychoanalysis, which had been formulated in a fragmented- physicalist, mechanist, hydraulic and mythical--language, or, in the phenomenological reworking, in mentalist, intentional, language. But Lyotard's book does not only devise a philosophically more coherent language for the findings of psychyanalysis; it also elaborates an interpretation of the data themselves. Assembling literary and theological texts along with certain Freudian texts given a new importance, Lyotard's book shows how theoretical activity and political economy reverberate with libidinal processes, and how the primary process libido continues even in its matured and sublimated forms. This new conceptual elaboration is principally due to a divesting of the Freudian conceptual apparatus of its phallocentric and reproductive normativity, and even of the idea of organism as a norm. If wholeness, organism, is the general form of any norm, then we can say that this philosophy presents a libido without norms. Just what kind of theoretical work do we have here? It is not really an autonomous phenomenology of sexual experience, taken to be an exhibition of the pretheoretical, preconceptualized given experience. Phenomenology could pretend that it could, with its own vocabulary allegedly framed after immediate intuitions, elaborate a purely descriptive account of, among other things, sexual experience, which could then function as a criterion against which to judge the theoretical elaborations of science, because it thought it had found an autonomous locus of access to the primary and preconceptual experience itself. This locus was self-consciousness. It was originally all intuitive: an intuition of itself in its primary, that is, intuitive, acts or contacts with various zones of mundane reality. Lyotard's work is, to be sure, philosophical and not empirical. In what sense? Not in this phenomenological sense. The thing itself, the libidinal life, is not a succession of acts essentially intuitive. These sensuous sensations would not fit in, with minor adjustments, to the Husserlian concept of perceptions

Epistemology · Freudian slip · Interpretation (philosophy) · Libido · Linguistics · Norm (philosophy) · Phenomenology (philosophy) · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Sociology · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology