Beyond the Erotic

Questions on the Eroticization of the Life-World
by Kathy Kundalini
August 17, 2007



Is it possible to imagine a way-of-life in which the power of Eros, the energy of erotics, the creative, embodied, sensual, subterranean force of life and cosmos — is not experienced through a funnel of repression, through an eye-dropper of limited and constrained consciousness, and is not locked-up inside the prison of repressed sexuality?

Our erotic energies are imprisoned inside the genital ghetto, and rendered safe and functional, sublimated, and commodified and manipulated in the service of the hierarchical domination. And as our bodies are imprisoned, so are our minds, and so are our relationships, our "work", our consumption, our engagement with the world. Our social relations continually express and reinforce a generalized sexual repression — which is also expressed as the pseudo-liberation of commodified manipulation of need and desire. Western commodified sexuality is just the flip side of religious sexual repression — both embody the constraint of Eros within hierarchical domination and alienation, both use repressed sexuality in the service of authoritarian control.

So how do we break free of this domination of mind and body? How can genuine erotic energy be liberated and expressed and experienced — as the life-world, as our field of being and acting?

How do we break out of this imprisonment — this repressed consciousness that continually reproduces human beings as internally split, repressed, damaged, and incapable of even imagining a different and liberatory way of life?

How do we unlock our life forces in a genuine transformation and transcendence of our current modes of living?

What would the eroticization of daily life look like, be felt, and lived?

How do we take ourselves beyond guilt and shame, and beyond the need for authority and domination, beyond the need for psycho-physical masochism, for character-armoring and alienated embodiment, and for aggression, repression, and quantitative, hierarchical valuation of human beings?

What forces are held in check, in me, in everyone, and turned against themselves, so as to repress, forget, and continue to engineer our personal and social amnesia? How do we reproduce our own oppression — every day?

Can authentic sexual liberation become a personally-experienced project of social liberation?

How can my need for orgasm become expanded and made effective so as to have social-historical consequences — so that erotic pleasure, transformation of consciousness, and social liberation become a single desire, and a shared project with other human beings?

How do we break free of our social conditioning and our social-historical determination — as repressed human beings — alienated from our world, from others, from our own selves and own energies?

How does the 'return of the repressed' become transformed into a movement of social liberation?

How far are we willing to go to open ourselves up, to authenticate our lives, to unify our life forces, to express our true potential?

The task, as I see it, is not about rearranging the order of domination and hierarchy, but about its dissolution. It is about creating in ourselves a new kind of human being — who is moving beyond the splits and separations of imposed authority, who is actively seeking a polymorphous expression that is nothing less than a lived eroticization — in which the liberation of erotic potential is also the liberation of the life-world, in which the human being is no longer the nexus of social repression — but understands that the liberation of the world, the psyche, and the body is a single project.

Release History

Release Date Released By Format and Features
v2.0 September 2007 Committee for Transcendence Compliant with XHTML 1.0 (strict) / CSS 1.0 standard.
v3.0 February 1, 2008 Committee for Transcendence Tied to site's uni-CSS file.





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