Phenomenology of Orgasm

The poem of Archilochus from the 7th Century B.C. known as the "Cologne Epode" begins with the poet speaking with a young woman and trying to attract her. It ends up as follows:

… and I, having taken the maiden. laid her down among the blooming flowers; and in my soft cloak I enveloped her, holding her neck in my arms; I grabbed her, having stopped at the marvel, just as a fawn. and I gently groped her breasts with my hands: she, then, was exposing her fresh skin, the approach of her young bloom; and I, feeling every bit of her excellent body. sent forth my strength, touching lightly her golden hair.,

"Let forth my strength" stays for λευκ]ὸν ἀφῆκα μένος, meaning literally "sent forth the white frenzy". White frenzy: the semen. The word μένος relates to the verb μαινομαι, meaning: being beside oneself. This is the original meaning of "ec-stasis": staying out of… It seems that ancient Greeks did not have a specific word for what we call "orgasm". The verb ὀργάω means getting ready to bear, growing ripe for something, bring to light - the tree getting ready to sprout, the infected wound about to discharge pus. But even vaginal secretion and man's semen gush forth like the flowers on the branches and the pus from the wound. Concerning specifically the human, ὀργάω means to be eager or ready, to be excited. Sappho:

for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me, no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead - or almost I seem to me …

"... thin fire is racing under skin…" sings Sappho. Ec-stasis. Like the house that is on fire and forces you to go out, you have to leave it, here you are on fire yourself, you have to leave the house of your self, it is, according to a word Plato's, the ερωτικον ομμα, the countenance of the beloved one that sets it on fire. It forces you to abandon the enclosure within the self and to ec-stasiate into the Other, the one and only who, if you give in to him and if he gives in to you, can extinguish the flame.

The orgasming one, staying out of himself, is being transformed. Orgasm occurs as a transformation, as a transition into another form. The french philosopher Alexandre Lacroix writes:

6 Before sex the face is being transformed... Notwithstanding how much confidence or pleasure between the partners may exist, the gazes are always pervaded by a fear or greed, a nervous twitch. Immediately before the penetration prevails tension, concentration of antagonistic forces. Love and seduction imprint on them a body tattoo of war. The hunter's vivacity and a secret predator instinct share in the sexual act.

The potential of man's nature lies in penetration. It is peculiar to man to put off to land and sea, to enter new fields of action, to explore the unknown, to conquer the woman, to risk even his life, to make love and war. Psarantonis, a cretan singer, I have a tiger inside me:

She forces me to cross mountains, valleys and chasms

in order to embrace her

in the wildest of dances,

And when, at cold nights, she remembers her cages

she lends me her pelt

to wear.

Woman's nature can be represented by an also cretan quatrain:

So much is the power of the maiden

beneath the navel

She puts in the snake alive

and she takes it out dead

The power of woman is the property of any new, "virgin" place, which man penetrates, to become familiar, so that the man becomes domesticated in there, becomes "dead". Archetypically woman's nature is represented by the figure of the Sirens who seduce the man, attract him to their heavenly place and into their arms and wipe him out.

Breathing. Lacroix again:

Obviously coitus is a grand opera of breathing. The breathing of the partners expands steadily, till it occupies the whole soundspace. It becomes lament, cry, weeping, reply - demonstration of the vocal chords, eruption of the thoracic cavities, lung parade. It is impossible to drive the partner to culmination, to find the right rhythm, if you do not follow carefully the change of his inhaling and exhaling, if you do not manage to nest in the modulations of his diaphragm.

In weeping we often say "he/she was in tears". Literally: he/she immersed in a sea of tears. Ec-stasis, where the self is translocated in an environment of tears. The self is distilled in the eyes, which do not see any more, but they drain the self to the outside in form of tears, and the self gets lost in them. Similarly during the orgasm the bodies ec-staciate in the genitals. Existence becomes penis, becomes vagina.

Spasms. In man they are accompanied regularly by the expulsion of semen. We could say it is exactly that, which the precedent retrograde movements by both partners call for and upon. The bodies orgasm, the existences ec-stasiate, now not into tears but in the juice of their erotic encounter.

Being ec-static, abiding in that juice, is hedone, pleasure. The german word for hedone, "Lust", relates to the privative particle los, partially analog to the english ending -less. Hedone is depletion, emptying, which does not abandon someone in the desert of nothingness, but completes ec-stasis by a final transformation, this time transformation into the formless: it depletes the house, the territory of the self, it deletes its impint and dismisses the self into a hedonic, a sweet nothing. Freud apprehends it vaguely by the clumsy, pseudo-scientific expression "drive discharge". The erotic encounter, if it were a discharge, discharges the burden of the self. I recall a woman in Zurich saying that she never felt so light as when a man was lying upon her.

Béla Bartók's balett The Miraculous Mandarin, composed in 1924, narrates following story:

In a poor suburbian room three tramps force a girl to stand by the window and attract passing men into the room. The first two are poor. The girl goes to the window again and begins her dance. The tramps and the girl see a bizarre figure in the street, soon heard coming up the stairs. The tramps hide, and the figure, a Mandarin (wealthy Chinese man), stands immobile in the doorway. The tramps urge the girl to lure him closer. She begins another saucy dance, the Mandarin's passions slowly rising. Suddenly, he leaps up and embraces the girl. They struggle and she escapes; he begins to chase her. The tramps leap on him, strip him of his valuables, and attempt to suffocate him under pillows and blankets. However, he continues to stare at the girl. They stab him three times with a rusty sword; he almost falls, but throws himself again at the girl. The tramps grab him again and hang him from a lamp hook. The lamp falls, plunging the room into darkness, and the Mandarin's body begins to glow with an eerie blue-green light. The tramps and girl are terrified. Suddenly, the girl knows what they must do. She tells the tramps to release the Mandarin; they do. He leaps at the girl again, and this time she does not resist and they embrace. With the Mandarin's longing fulfilled, his wounds begin to bleed and he dies.

Could it be that here bleeding and ejaculating converge? Could it be that the Mandarin is invulnerable to the tramps' attacks exactly because, orgasming, he is beside himself? As shown by the eerie blue-green light that he glows? Could it be that in his orgasmic ec-stasis he is situated out of the one the tramps strike? Could it be that his death and the hedonic peace have a common origin? Could it be that hedone, that is the discharge of the self, has its archetypic figure in death? Could this be the reason why a french word for orgasm is petit mort?

But what for these pieces of art? Poets and painters and composers? And philosophers? Perhaps because what in the Symposium's title is referred to as "asexual", could refer not only to reproduction, but to any so-called "sexual act" that begins and ends in its process, where the woman is a "cunt" - Τhere exists a similar, even though not institutionalized expression for the man, too.

When the steps lead straightforward to fucking, soon this becomes boring. Quickie, fucking for fucking's sake, is often exactly an attempt to overcome that boredom, but in most cases it simply intensifies it, and just because of this it can become obsessive. Somehow it must have been this constellation that brought forth steps which lead to a mutual approach by way of a spaciousness, a wandering, they give birth to the erotic play, the rituals of the gazes and the touches, and sometimes even the goal becomes irrelevant. Such steps would then transform into dance. Astor Piazzolla, Oblivion.

I said before: sometimes even the goal becomes irrelevant. Because here there is one thing to be stressed. As is the case with art in general, the dance we attended is not, it can never be an erotic foreplay, it can never drift to coitus. It would be vulgar, it would be an assault to think that it ends up with the dancers in the bed. Their proximity, this pulsing and vigorous proximity, is not guided by the pressure of any desire seeking for its fullfillment. It gets along content in itself. That is which the french philosopher Jean Baudrillard calls "seduction":

The seduction of eyes. The most immediate, purest form of seduction, one that bypasses words. Where looks alone join in a sort of duel, an immediate intertwining, unbeknownst to others and their discourses: the discrete charm of a silent and immobile orgasm . Once the delightful tension of the gazes gives way to words or loving gestures, the intensity declines. A tactility of gazes that sums up the body's full potential (and that of its desires?) in a single, subtle instant, as in a stroke of wit. A duel that is simultaneouly sensual, even voluptuous, but disincarnated - a perfect foretaste of seduction's vertigo, which the more carnal pleasures that follow will not equal. That these eyes meet is accidental, but it is as though they had been fixed on each other forever. Devoid of meaning, what is exchanged are not the gazes. There is no desire here, for desire is not captivating, while eyes, like fortuitous appearances, cast a spell composed of pure, duel signs, with neither depth nor temporality

And long before I came to read Baudrillard, I said in a lecture:

Here ther may exist another gaze which does not belong to an Ego any more and does not appeal to a Thou. It is not me looking at her. There is no "relationship". That is why there is lacking any shyness and any boldness, there is lacking any desire and any fear, there is lacking any urge towards realization. This look is an open horizon extending amidst an open horizon.

So far about the disincarnated orgasm of seduction.

In Sappho's poem that we heard previously, the last phrase was:

cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead - or almost I seem to me …

The poem does not end here. There are some words further on:

ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον / But all is to be dared

What is Eros, so that it consists a daring? Eros, writes Ibykus, a poet from the 6th century B.C. on the island of Samos, is

... like the Thracian north wind, ablaze with lightning, rushing from Aphrodite with scorching fits of madness, dark and unrestrained, it forcibly convulses from their very roots my mind and heart.

Eros' daring is the convulsing from the very roots, the loss of the self, the reflexive opening up and the reflexive loss in the Other. This is so because the one sex is incompatible with the other and at the same time unavoidable. Their union is a leap in the void, a salto mortale. This splitting between man and woman is manifested, better, was manifested, in Eros' frenzy and drama.

Now the difference between man's and woman's nature is prone to sliding towards opposition and conflict, to the mutual fear, sometimes to the mutual hatred, sometimes to the resort of the same sex. Maybe it is fear in front of Eros' abyss that urged psychologists to try to explain it - that is, to bring it down to a familiar standard, to domesticate it.

Moreover it is perhaps fear in front of such abysses that drives words to become sort of pins over dead butterflies. It was mentioned that ancient Greeks had no definite word for what we call "orgasm". Perhaps as soon as we commit that step, as soon as we pin the butterfly on the vocabulary and render it an issue and a question, we enter the era of what a philosopher titles a book of him " Agony of Eros".

Nowadays, in an era where dominates the narcissistic fixation on the self, in our society of performance, we say "make" love. Allready in the 60s in the US, along with the so-called "sexual liberation", the question was not how to have sex, but how to have good sex. There evolved a huge literature and pseudo-literature about techniques for a good erection, as the male's performance, and for a good orgasm, as female's fullfillment. Relaxing sex became almost institutionalized, relaxing exactly because it has acquired the form of mutual masturbation, and also of the individual one in front of the pc-monitor. Moreover orgasm has become the paradigm for any pleasure. Even the pleasure of a piece of chocolate.

This love and this sex and this orgasm, in their currently dominant version, seem to be obsessively seeked for, have become something like the salt of life, that is of a life which, despite its hyperactivity, or just because of that, is terribly tasteless, odorless, boring. There is a greek saying: "The devil had nothing to do, so he fucked his children"....