Lyotard imagines a process whereby the spinning band of the ephemeral skin slows and rotates around itself in space to form a sphere. The encounters between this ephemeral skin and our conscious bodies are what construct our lives. It is not a desire for something, it is only desire. As is the ephemeral skin, without intent only intensity. Lyotard says, ‘Imagine the universe in expansion: does it flee from terror or explode with joy? Undecidable.’ The universe is accelerating in expansion with energy and speed. Lying in bed, unbeknownst to you, somewhere below your subconscious, your ephemeral skin is writhing out in constant expansion. This photograph depicts an imagining of both an ephemeral skin and physical body. Unlike our physical flesh which is bounded by skin, it is a body of matter rather than form, a body without organs. Consciousness cannot grasp this infinitely undulating band. Without beginning, end or boundary, this band spins faster and faster with libidinal energy. Making his post-structuralist intent clear, Lyotard details a dissection of a human body and a stretching out of organs and skin into a Mobius band. The Ephemeral Skin is the opening chapter in The Libidinal Economy, and it is here through a montage of images we get a sense of what the ephemeral skin is. In terms of Lyotard’s own work, the ephemeral skin configured his preceding work on phenomenology, revolutionary politics and representation into this more developed postmodernist paradigm. Further, the post-structuralism that underpins concepts such as the ephemeral skin positioned The Libidinal Economy in critique of metanarratives, most explicitly Marxism. Lyotard was an early postmodernist and with the publication of The Libidinal Economy in the early 1970s he joined contemporaries, particularly Deleuze and Guattari, in critiquing the prescriptive narratives of psychoanalysis. An image of a morphing, boundaryless figure of libidinal energy beyond our corporal form, the Ephemeral Skin portrays both a metaphysical relationship to desire and a phenomenological experience of desire. Whilst this philosophy is used to explain broad political and social transformations, the Ephemeral Skin brings the concept to the human scale. In Lyotard’s The Libidinal Economy, he describes reality in terms of a libido that operates beyond consciousness and is signified in events through structures an economy formed by pulsion’s constantly spawned from an ether-region of desire. The Ephemeral Skin is French philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s, literal embodiment of a ‘libidinal economy’. What drives our desires, why do we want like we do? The ephemeral skin is a concept that offers a way to think about the workings of desire in our lives. But how often do we consider the source of desire itself, the mechanisms of desire, or the sensation of desire. Indeed, without wanting it hard to imagine we would get much done.
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