p165
Lydian Eulogy

Herodotus says: 'The Lydians were the first people we know of to use a gold
and silver coinage and to introduce retail trade.' In the previous line he
remarks that the only difference between the Greek and Lydian money-makers
and retailers, is that the latter delivered their daughters into
prostitution. This libidinal consistency must be admired. Payment money is
the zero installed es meson, centred, with the koinonia of men (merchants
this time), on this zero, and homosexual perversion established in the
market in the form of the homogeneous normality of exchanges and
exchangeable goods. This normality is perverse in the sense that it is
serile, all past exchanges achieving annulment.  Far from aiding
propagation, this normality inserts it into the impasse of an unproductive
algebras.
...
p179
   And the second argument: all the struggles we transexual libidinal
economists know and lead, in order that, as was said, women may have the
free use of their bodies, in particular the free decision to bear or not to
bear children, are Lydian consequences. How we love the Lydians and their
daughters! In reality, it cannot be a matter of free use, or any use, free
or not. What we (and capital) desire is that what is called a woman be made
genuinely able to benefit from commercial status, in its two aspects: every
erection and detumescence of whatever small area of the body-band that is
attributed to her, should first of all be possible, and could then be
marketed. Therefore the abolition of erotic prohibitions; and her release
from the automatic nature of propagation.

   At the same time the right to perversion and the right to trade. That is
to say the politeria. A child, yes, but then the object ofa  market, the
stake in an exchange which will in principle have to annul the charge that
the child represents, in libidinal terms the intensities of the affects
that is going to absorb. Therefore the abolition of mothers and wives who
have only ever been, since the warrior-pederasts, the mothers of the
children that were given them. This is not a free use, since use, the
category of a natural goal, would keep, even if 'freely', the woman under
the concept of this reproductive finality, her liberty restricted to
choosing the moment of and the partner in impregnation. This is the
extension of exchangeability onto the alleged feminine body, that is to say
the injection of unknown pieces of the band into the exchange cycle and
marginal calculations. Those we call women can only attain full civil
rights by attaining serility and polymorphous perversion, monetary
properties. It is the very figure of the circle in the process of extending
itself to all the fragments of the labyrinthine band which institutes
abortive measures, because it wants all eradications.

   If the woman's body ceases to be the earth or something like it, an
element, a receptacle, so correspondingly the partial prostitution of
penises would disappear. Masculinity must no longer be cleft as it is in
Greece, between its annulatory jouissance and its task of impregnating
wombs. The symmetry of the abortive measures, freeing the female body from
its reputedly natural destination, is for the man of the politeia (?),
contemporaneous with the institution of sperm banks:' The freezing
processes for human sperm in liquid nitrogen today allow the preservation,
for several years, of an important production of spermatozoa whose
impregnating capacity is normal.'  

p202
The great theses of Chinese eroticism, essentially Taoist, are found recorded in this
Yi-hsin-fang. And here a dispositif of commutation can be seen at work, a commutation
of influxes so different from those we have briefly cast our eyes over that it merits
a renewed attention. For, as opposed to the lay, the sacrifice and the performance,
all of which have the effect of gathering a portion of the energy expended in perverse
jouissance into an exchangeable form (money, goods into the salary of the priests,
language), leaving the remainder to exit, in some way, from the cycle of reproduction
and communication, as vain intensities, utterly lost and, so to speak, stolen by the
pervert from the social organization - here, in Taoist erotics, the arrangement is
such that it will operate in such a way as to arouse in the woman, by meticulous
analysis and consideration of the postures and procedures proper to the maximization
of jouissance, the intense excitement of her Yin energy, with a view to stealing it
from her. While the prostitute, the priest and the analyst were observing, in the face
of intolerable impulsions from their respective viewpoints, a strict rule of the
minimization of jouissance from these latter and the risks ....

p204.
But all this, no matter how we understand and practise it, initially counts, 
in total contrast to the pagan function of the Hellenic civic husband, only on
condition that the Jade Shaft remains erect in its tumescence and that
ejaculation has not taken place. Thus, on the one hand, liquids spill from
cavities and corners of the pulsional body-band in the eruption called woman,
and on the other is a hard penis, drinking open-mouthed these excitatory
liquids and conserving them: coitus reservatus.
   What is this remarkable dispositif? To the Chosen Girl, astonished that the
man can take any pleasure in restraining himself from ejaculation, P'ong-tsou
responds that doubtless the emission of semen gives a moment of pleasure, but
not a sensation of voluptuousness: 'If, instead, the man practices the sexual
act without ejaculation, his vital essence will be strengthened, his body will
be wholly at ease, his hearing will be refined and his eyes perceptive; even if
the man has repressed his passion, his love for the woman will be increased. It
is as if he could never sufficiently possess her.' From this ambiguous
response, there are two lines to follow: first of all a point of departure for
the themes of platonic, courtly, impossible and romantic love inasmuch as
instead of plugging libidinal energies into organs, into pieces of the
labyrinthine body, the retention of sperm will sanction a different plugging
in, this time into persons, and love for these persons will be substituted for
discharge into anonymous regions. Such a displacement requires the production,
on the woman's part as on the man's, of subjects, that is to say of unitary and
empty instances, which, by definition, will in fact never be sufficiently
'owned', since they are only an instantiating zero of the pulsions. Continuing
in this direction, one soon discovers so-called 'modern' problematics, such as
are found in Lacan, which highlight notions of the lack of jouissance [ manque
a jouir] and the elusiveness of the libidinal object. Let's observe, however,
that these problematics are in fact dominated by precisely that which does not,
in any way, hang over Taoist thought, even less its erotics; the category of
the subject. For if the Tao is importatnt to us libidinal economists, it is not
because of its nihilism, but because of its refinement in the search for and
the affirmation of mutability, and thereby the non-existence in it of the
question of subject.

   Such, precisely, is the other line to follow from P'ong-tsou's response, and
it is this that in other respects all of Van Gulik's texts substantiate: the
fortification of the man's body, the refinement of his hearing, his vision, his
alertness, this something which, after Zen, as Cage says, leaves everything
just as it was before, except that one is three inches above the ground - all
that, obtained by means of the retention of semen and the constaint imposed
upon it, by means of techniques, whether mental or physical (like the pressure
of the middle and index fingers on the seminal duct before emission), to turn
back towards the head - all that comes not from nihilism but from
intensification. This man couldn't care less about the woman he is sleeping
with. The Great Chinese have gynaecea of a thousand woman: hence anonymity.
Perhaps, however, the same goes for him. What must he do? Multiply the
circulations, the connections, excite the water with the fire burning in his
loins,  travel [voyager] with extreme reserve, within the tiny margin given by
the rules of the books of the Ars amatoria. These rules in their minute detail
must be understood and practised as those that govern the gestural code, the
song, the dance and the music of a Noh spectacle: they perform the function of
a guide only for apprentices for whom they delimit a contrario the field of
things not to do. But the great art, as in Taoist erotics, the doubtless as in
madness also, consists in turning the whole field they delimit on its head,
making it into a sort of non-place which they sweep over rather than
circumscribe, and where no-one will never know whether this inclination of the
torso, this beat of the tambourine, this gesture of the arm, inclines a little
to this side or that side of the rule. In completely reversing the relation of
the act, theatrical for the Noh, sexual for the Manual of Love, to its
measurement, to the point that it is the first which alone determines its
immeasurable intensity, one enters at last into the incomparable and
undecidable singularity. The rule is no longer a line passing around the field
where what must happen indeed takes place, while excluding what must not take
place, but like a turning on itself (and its axial point of rotation displacing
itself on the segment to the right which is the rule), like an oscillating
rotation rendering what happens elusive and immemorable (whether it be
movements of the head, songs, in the Noh, thrusts of the penis, undulations of
the buttocks, in coitus), it serves to do nothing more than to engender, by the
impossiblity of situating the act in relation to it, this non-place or this
unthinkable place which is precisely the passage of intensity. A line
engendering an evanescent region where emotion flares up, that region is par
excellence an incompossible fragment of the labyrinthine band.

  That this is the function of the scrupulous erotic prescriptions is
undeniable. They do not all the same justify the exclusive privilege accorded
to coitus reservatus. All the passions would seem to be equally capable here of
creating the new space of immeasurable singularities. If then the Tao and the
whole Chinese tradition restrict throughout intensification, there continues to
appear what Klossowski called an intention, and it is not by accident that
semen is required to retrace its path back to the brain. The intention is
doubtless not, as one might think, essentially misogynistic; it is said
elsewhere that the woman is also, for her part, able to practise an economy of
her vaginal secretions, and of absorbing the Yang principle at work in her
partner. The Yu-fang-pi-kiue gives advice on this, enabling women not to expend
their entire Yin essence in coitus and to postpone orgasm. The Treatise goes so
far as to say: "if a woman knows the way to nourish her force and the way to
realize the harmony of the two essences (Yin and Yang), she can transform
herself into a man. If, during coitus, she can prevent the secretions from her
vagina being absorbed by the man, they will flow back into the organism of her
own body, and so her Yin essence will be nourished by the man's Yang. We cannot
affirm too strongly that there is no insurmountable sexual difference, that
each one potentially contains the other's correlate, and so there is the
possibility of its crossing over to the 'enemy'. No, the question is not one of
feminism, the intention to reserve may occupy a woman's head just as much as a
man's; the Art of Loving draws no distinction on this point. Ultimately,
however, a head is necessary, to which something flows back and is reserved. An
instance of collection and relief, coupled with the intention to reach one or
even several goals. At first, what offers the most mystical and alos the most
popular goals is immortality, the return of mutability to the void, and the
loss of alse subjectivity in weakness, which is true strength. 'The multitude
has more than enough./ I alone seem to want. / My mind is that of a fool - how
blank! / Vulgar people are clear. / I alone am drowsy./ Vulgar people are
alert./ I alone am muddled./ Calm like the sea; /Like a high wind that never
ceases./ The multitude have a purpose. / I alone am foolish and uncouth./ I
alone am different from others/ And value being fed by the mother.' The mother
is the water, woman, the Yin; the wind is the man, the Yang: this confusion
belongs to coitus as much as to the Tao, and when one is 'there' (there where I
do not hink, as Lacan says), then it is indeed intensity, without intention,
without a precise goal, which arises. 

   But the intention is only slightly displaced or put aside: the intention to
'be fed by the mother' remains. This Mother, the Mother of the Unvierse, is the
Tao; this what is said of it: 'I give it the makeshift name of 'the great'.
/Being great, it is further described as receding,/ Receding, it is described
as far away,/ Being far away, it is described as turning back.' To be fed by
the Mother is to pump up the Yin or the Yang, it doesn't matter which, to
gather together as much energy as possible in order that the endless fluidity
of the wave which spreads out and returns to its supreme emptiness be
inscribed. Therefore, while you copulate as intensely as possible, you do not
forget this slight pressure of the fingers of the left hand between the scrotum
and the anus, this suspension of the to-and-fro of the stomach, which, while
vying with your partner, will ahve you take what he-she is giving you (without
counting?), and stealing his-her surplus force which has consequently passed
into you; just try to capitalize it all in the fluid inanity which is the Tao:
'Thirty spokes/ Share on hub./ Adapt the nothing therein [ Fr: le vide median]
to the purpose in hand, and / you will have the use of the cart.': which, in
the cosmological order, is the same dispositif as the mercantile Greek and
Lydian central zero. You were on the circumference, and, using an extreme
intensity, you calculate to get yourself kicked out of or be injected into the
central void, beyond life and death. You trade. Is this coitus a war? This is
not important. What is important is that one says: all right, let's be
strategic about this. For strategy is the market, death included amongst the
possible outcomes. And what just a moment ago passed for the refinement of
precepts allowing the non-place of the libidinal band to be singled out, now
appears, by the moralization of the affair and the nihilism which restricts its
range to the central void, to be the simple maximization of energetic profit.
It is not because this latter is allegedly cosmological or ontological that it
is less intersting or incredible. There is Taoist trade. This can be clearly
seen in the alchemical interpretation that can be given of erotic tests.
Nothing is more commercial than alchemy: a trade of the simulacra of
affects, a quantification of the pulsions of death and life, a weighing-up of
the sexes, for purposes of enrichment, and even for absolute wealth, i.e. gold.
It is no surprise that this dispositif is equilibrium for exchange of
body-weights, in industry. Taoist erotics, strategy, alchemy, ethics, with
their central nihilism, these are so many concentrations, profoundly analogous
to what presides over generalized mercantilism.