Desires Seeking Satisfactions

Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation. Increasingly all seduction, all manner of enticement—which is always a highly ritualized process—is effaced behind a naturalized sexual imperative, behind the immediate and imperative realization of desire. Our center of gravity has been displaced towards a libidinal economy concerned with only the naturalization of desire, a desire dedicated to drives, or to a machine-like functioning, but above all, to the imaginary of repression and liberation. Henceforth one no longer says: "You have a soul and it must be saved," but: "You have a sex, and you must put it to good use." "You have an unconscious, and you must let the id speak." "You have a body, and you must derive pleasure from it." "You have a libido, and you must expend it," etc. This pressure towards liquidity, flux and the accelerated articulation of the sexual, psychic and physical body is an exact replica of that which regulates exchange value: capital must circulate, there must no longer be any fixed point, investments must be ceaselessly renewed, value must radiate without respite—this is the form of value's present realization, and sexuality, the sexual model, is simply its mode of appearance at the level of the body.

(Jean Baudrillard, 1979. Seduction, New World Perspectives, Montreal, 1990, p. 38)