Pleasure Ψ

I can scarcely tolerate the word pleasure.

—Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure”

Pleasure is, perhaps, a love child of the s. Wafting lavenderesque from
cracks in the cosmic egg, pleasure recalls indulgence, mild intoxication,
a polymorphous romp well shy of the imperatives of desire. Pleasure
comes and goes; it manifests in the grain, the bubbling up, the tingle,
the fractional slip. Compared to desire, pleasure is hedonistic, rambling,
familiar, and, according to some, subject to manipulation by various
Copyright © 2004. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.

economic and political regimes. Freud tells us that pleasure must be over-
ridden in the name of a survivalism that always asks us to delay, delay,
delay. Desire, on the other hand, must be crushed and cannot be delayed
as its very structure is delay, and delay only intensifies desire. Desire
drags and feeds on its own deferrals. It is a condition of excitation that
seeks more excitation. Desire insists, and the one who contains the in-
sistence of desire commands. Desire initiates power struggles. Mostly,
desire wins.
This victory constitutes desire’s purchase in contemporary critical
and literary theory. Desire is what cannot be calculated, attained, fixed, or
stabilized. Whether it is calibrated to a constitutive lack, as in the writ-
ings of Jacques Lacan, or promoted as a salutary, autonomous movement
anterior to arrangements of power, as for Gilles Deleuze, desire is called
upon to do the antihumanist, anticolonialist, anti-Enlightenment work
of disrupting the sovereign self and oppressive organizations such as the

1
Weinstone, Ann. Avatar Bodies : A Tantra for Posthumanism, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uartes-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310658.
Created from uartes-ebooks on 2018-10-11 15:58:41.
 2 Pleasure

normative body and the state. Desire promulgates a necessary and

ongoing failure of the agency of the Western privileged subject. It func-
tions as a line of movement that disrupts and redirects. While less
imperious than desire, pleasure, as satisfaction, as resolution, as a lowering
of thermodynamic tension, is nevertheless dangerous. It connotes the
cessation of anxiety, a cessation of the vigilance deemed necessary to ward
off a future of genocide, murder, assimilation, colonialism, projection,
and introjection. We are lulled by pleasure into literal self-satisfaction;
we are driven by desire into recognitions of that which we cannot main-
tain or definitively obtain. Pleasure gratifies; desire becomes.
In March of this year, my Guru, Dharmanidhi Sarasvati, wrote to me:
Be with yourself like the sweet anticipation of peeling the pomegranate on
a hot summer day in the desert, almost tasting the sweet, juicy fulfillment
and rasa pouring down your fingers . . . soon to be taken in and become a
part of you.
Within the Tantric tradition of which I am an initiate, both desire
and pleasure are the engines of creation. Nothing is rejected. Nothing
is renounced. A self-aware energy, pulsing with spontaneous desire, em-
anates the manifest universe and then experiences pleasure upon encoun-
tering itself in all its multiplicity. I desire. I anticipate. The other appears.
We recognize each other. I taste her sweetness. We are distinct; we are one
body. An identity inside a difference; a difference inside an identity. An
expression, an emanation. Beyond resolution. Paradoxical. Trembling. The
Copyright © 2004. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.

Tantras or written scriptures most often describe this trembling, this

creation inside the edge of the multiplicity and oneness, as delight.
Delight taken in the act of assimilation, in the act of eating, may be
the paradigmatic transgression for post–World War II ethical theory
and its heir, posthumanism. In an interview with Jean Luc Nancy that
will figure heavily here, Derrida writes that we will eat, we cannot help
but eat. The ethical question is: How may we eat well? (, ). Certainly
the colonialisms, genocides, and violent appropriations associated with
Western humanism are cases of eating badly. For Derrida, eating well
consists of respect, caution, a feeling for or of justice, and a hospitality
that welcomes unconditionally while preserving the strangeness of the
meal, the otherness of the other. Resonating with much postwar Conti-
nental philosophy, and particularly in his later work, there is little room
for gustatory pleasure.

Weinstone, Ann. Avatar Bodies : A Tantra for Posthumanism, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uartes-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310658.
Created from uartes-ebooks on 2018-10-11 15:58:41.