Orgasming into the Fire / Evacuating into the Abyss: A Pith Extraction on Listening to the Body as the World in Psychoanalysis
Summary:
Logic is a form of stupidity that separates each event from itself through the condition of opposites until everything is a living mirror.
Orgasming into the
fire[1]
the body as phallus
and as the ejaculation of the mind into the mouth of the animal[2]
from the perspective of the mind
it is a phallus
it comes and goes varying when we sleep
or wake
like an intumescence in the mind how form is a swelling of space
that swelling scintillates stretching it warms warming vibrates until it suddenly
dares to call out a name[3]
+
se(a)men
fireman-Father
(Shulamith[4])
–
This time this
hour for myself
of destroying
birthing, opening stuffed within
the birth that stuffs itself within
how out curves beyond
like a burnt black doll
is still pink underneath[5]
stone fucked dry hardened
strain fucked dead to stone
ice and needle:
like milk
suppository shitting
semen-needle
ice lead (dead?)
squirt
that pricks
the stone-pink-deadprick-wall-hole-(blackastered)-shut[6]
For it is birth
and it is birth
—-
To each
In non-separation and non-joining[7]
as praxis:
I am left only with
I want to see you
in ways that are impossible to keep
in unquenchable openness
of charred
the openness of flushed,
my symptom.
Bibliography:
Celan, P. (1952). Todesfuge [Death fugue]. In Mohn und Gedächtnis. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.
Costa, P. (2007). A closed door that leaves us guessing. Rouge, 10.
https://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html
Dudjom Rinpoche. (2014). The daily practice of the dakini heart essence. Dudjom Sung Bum, Vol. 16.
Howard, R. (1991). Backdraft [Film]. Imagine Films Entertainment.
Freud, S. (1932). The acquisition and control of fire. In The complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud Vol 22: New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis and other works.
Lispector, C. (2012). The passion according to G. H. (trans. I. Novey). New Directions. (Original work published 1964)
Norbu, T. (1985) The small golden key to the treasure of the various essential necessities of general and extraordinary Buddhist Dharma. Shambhala.
Schreber, D. (2000). Memoirs of my nervous illness (trans. I. Macalpine). NYRB Classics. (Original work published 1903)
Notes:
[1] Freud (1932) interprets the myth of Prometheus as a quasi-dream record of the renunciation by primitive man of the (largely homosexual) desire to extinguish a fire by pissing on it. This injunction is intrinsically secondary. The shadow of a more archaic interdiction haunts Freud’s text with its absence: namely that of orgasming into the fire. Freud notes that the impact of the proximity to fire produces the same sensations that accompany sexual desire. A more primal response to the pleasure generated by this penetration of the body by fire is excitement, enjoyment, release. Such a response is in fact recorded in the footnotes to this text, where Ocrisia (a slave in the household of a Roman King), after offering substances (cakes and libations) into a ritual fire, gets impregnated by a flame-phallus that erupts out of it. Like Schreber bedecked in silken ribbons gazing into his mirror (Schreber, 1903/2000), like G.H. seated before the dying cockroach pulsing ichor (Lispector, 1964/2012), Ocrisia making offerings into the fire becomes fertilized by something inhuman. What we are confronted with then in the figure of Prometheus opens as the possibility of a counterpart to the fantasy of anal-birth. Prometheus, who carries fire to man in his “hollow stick” (Freud, 1932, p. 188 ) – a detail that makes Freud hesitate to label this tool a penis-symbol – presents the logic of the phallus-as-womb, of phallic-impregnation, of phallic-birth/ing. I will conjecture further, Freud is absolutely right, reversal is the essence of this myth. Freud locates this mechanism in the representation of water (piss) by fire. I present the possibility of considering a reversal of a different order: by orgasming into the fire (offering substances) I (in the lineage of Ocrisia and Prometheus) become inseminated, fecundated. Unidirectionality is a lie.
[2] Howard, 1991
[3 ]Norbu, 1985
[4] Celan, 1952
[5] Howard, 1991
[6]
[7] Dudjom Rinpoche, 2014
[8]See Costa (2007), “A Closed Door that Leaves us Guessing” for a discussion on how exclusion of knowledge/seen provides entry into experience.
Bio:
Stephen Mosblech is the managing editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis; a member of the Foundation of California Psychoanalysis (FCP) and Instituto Elvio Fachinelli ISAP (Institute of Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis) in Rome. He is the recipient of an APA Division 39 Scholar Award (2022-23) for research into the fundamental axioms of Freudian psychoanalysis. His early performance works were staged in New York, Germany, Sweden and Japan.
Publication Date:
May 20, 2022