CONCEIT

asofterworld

PLEASURE SURFACES

"Now the organs figure no longer as orifices leading into the inner functional body, but as productive apparatuses attached to the surfaces of the closed plenum of the body, functioning polymorphously perversely to extend pleasure surfaces. The pleasure surfaces thus extended are surfaces of contact, where infant face and maternal breast, infant cheeks and blanket take form together as the convex reveals the concave face of an object. They are surfaces of sensuality—not of contentment, but of what Freud called excitations, freely mobile excitations. Excitations are not properly “sensations,” that is, sense data, givens of meaning and orientation, information bits that would be fed into the inner functional body. They are flows of energy that ripple, irradiate, intersect, and condense. The infant intensifies its surplus energies in extending surfaces; discovers the pleasures of surfaces; and discovers the pleasures of having surfaces, of being outside, being born. This extension of pleasure surfaces to which life attaches blocks the compulsion to return to the womb, the primary death drive. These freely mobile excitations converge, affect themselves with their own intensities, and discharge in eddies of egoism. Nomadic, multiple, ephemeral surface egos form where surplus energies are consumed in pleasure—eddies of egoism that consume themselves. This is a third production." (Alphonso Lingis Body Transformations, 61)