Editorial Statement: The Subject of Desire (original) (raw)

2022, The Radical Notion Issue 7

Lorde's magnificent 'Uses of the Erotic,' desire-and women's capacity to embody and assume their desire-is a powerful 'assertion of life-force,' a crucial component of the creative becoming of ourselves and our ability to engage in the work that makes our lives meaningful (pp. 40-42). Desire, suggests Lorde-echoing several other reflections in this collection-is a force which flows. When allowed to move freely, it can bring us into the intense, creative unfolding we understand as 'flow states,' experiences in which we dissolve into the process of what we are making, and can feel, at the best of times, as if we are simply surrendering to the power of creative process as it comes through us. This coming of creation, which is also the becoming of ourselves, is powerfully, somatically linked to the 'coming' of sexual pleasure, and in particular, to the wave-like unfolding of jouissance, which, as I explore on page 48, distinguishes certain modes of female sexual experience from its more goal-orientated, expulsive, male counterpart. This potentially unending flow of creation, coming, and becoming all this is the work of the erotic, the power of our libidinal drives to enrich and enliven as they move and move through us. Desire, Blob tells us on page 53, is 'The Bassline of Life,' a "pulsing drive to extend ourselves towards the possibility of new horizons," the thrum of a groove that pushes us outside of ourselves, again and again, to seek connection to others, and to seek creation with them. It is, Allie Rogers reminds us, a "form of embodied energy that can inform many areas of our lives" (p. 40).