I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
how should I use them for your closer contact?
These with a thousand small deliberations
protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
excite the membrane, when the sense
has cooled.
(T. S. Eliot, ‘Gerontion’)
Enchanting is the scent of becoming forgetful.
Enigmatic the fading out of my mind.
Tiresia, who in their flesh
enjoyed as a woman and as a man
Now morbid and now soft, now turgid
and now dull
is attracting young bodies with the ambiguous portent
of the slow decomposition of the flesh.
(Istubalz, ‘Tiresias’)
THE DECAYING OF MY FLESH
I will shyly confess that it’s hard to speak about this inconvenient subject: the fading away of my body. I admit that I feel a sort of amazement and also consternation concerning my skin, my hair, my ears, my eyes, my sex, my soul.
It is even more difficult to speak about the fading away of my consciousness.
Amazement and consternation do not mean understanding: the island of senility is unknown to me as it is to everybody because no one has described its jungles, its beaches and its rocks. Nobody has done this job because when you get here it is too late, and you have no time to waste in making maps. However, I will try to draw a map of my personal process of becoming nothing. I’ll try, but I know that I will not succeed. I will not fully succeed, and you will not fully understand the core of this experience, because I myself do not discern things well enough. I discern things less and less, in my slow (although not so slow) descent into nothingness.
What is nothingness? No answer is possible, of course, because nothingness is nowhere to be seen. Nothingness is just the content of my consciousness when my consciousness vanishes and disappears. Nothingness is only the experience of a body that shuts down and then shuts up forever. Nobody can tell you about this experience. This experience is the content, the undisclosable secret indeed, of the process of senescence. Not a state, not a condition, but a process, whose meaning is contained in its end. This amazement is the enigma of the sensuousness of a vanishing body, its horrible beauty, its ambiguously charming scent.
Senescence is the process of becoming nothing. Senescence is generally considered to be a process of loss, a diminution, and, of course, this is a reasonable way to consider senescence. But it is not only this.
What is the other side of senescence, the sensuous side of it?
You may think that this is a relevant question only for me, but you would be wrong: this is a question that urgently concerns everybody, because in our time senility is spreading and spreading like a frightening tide threatening to submerge the planet.
Contemporary fascism has to be seen as a furious reaction to the impotence (political, cognitive, sexual) of the declining white race, which is unable to accept its own decline. White culture (yes, I know the white race does not exist, but the mythology of white supremacy is powerful) is based upon expansion and on the energy that makes such an expansion possible. Expansion is the all-encompassing myth of modernity, and we are unable to think outside of this.
But we have now entered into a process of exhaustion and therefore of contraction. This is why the experience of senescence is essential to understanding our present condition.
THE LEGEND OF EOS AND TITHONUS
It is unusual to talk about ageing in the framework of the public discourse. It is uncommon, and a little bit impolite to speak about other people’s senility, and, generally, old people do not like to speak about their own experience of growing old. Once upon a time, the elderly were respected as if they were the bearers of ancient wisdom. Reaching old age was so rare that oldness itself was seen as a value. Nowadays, techno-medical progress has improved health conditions and prolonged life expectancy so that in most areas of the world old people, once a small minority of the population, have now turned into a large portion of humanity, and their lot is only increasing in size. As we know, this is going to create many problems at the social and economic level. But this is not my point. What is interesting for me is the psycho-cultural dimension of this change.
From the point of view of the manly experience, the relationship between pleasure and desire changes when the individual gets old. Speaking about women’s senility is beyond my possibilities. I can guess something of the feminine perspective, of course, but I do not pretend to fully understand feminine senescence. What I know is that male senility is painfully linked with the loss of potency and power, and from this (limited) point of view I can feel that growing old is differently painful for women.
Let’s turn to the myth of Eos and Tithonus, a story that is both meaningful and heart wrenching.
Eos is a beautiful nymph that meets Ares, the god of war, while alone in the woods. They make love, but the goddess Aphrodite, the fiancé of Ares, becomes furious about this infidelity and punishes Eos by condemning her to fall in love with mortal beings alone. No more gods for the poor nymph, only mortals.
Every day, Eos goes walking in the woods wearing a long saffron-coloured robe, looking for handsome hunters to seduce. There she meets Tithonus, a young man of extraordinary beauty and noble origins who wanders on the outskirts of the city of Troy.
Eos is so charmed by Tithonus, so captured by his beauty and erotic wherewithal, that she goes to talk to Zeus, and asks him to grant immortality to her lover. Zeus says yes, and Tithonus is allowed to enjoy forever the love of the nymph. Forever? Not really, because in her naïve infatuation Eos has forgotten that humans, unlike gods, have the unfortunate habit of growing old.
Eos and Tithonus live together in love for years, maybe decades. As time passes, however, Eos begins to feel sad as she notices that her beloved man is drying out. He is shrinking, losing his vigour, and his voice is flagging. Tithonus is no longer the joyous companion, the impassioned lover he used to be. His hesitant erection sparks only a tender-heartened smile of kind comprehension on the lips of the forever-young nymph. She gazes at him with affection and tries to revive his strength with her hands, with her lips, with her mouth. She looks at him with a smile of loving ferocity, the smile of a tiger that tenderly approaches, baring her fangs at the flesh of the defenceless, cherished prey. Her fingers gently squeeze the hesitant erection, and her tongue caresses the tremor of his flesh.
Where is the beginning of love, where is the end? Does really love exist? Is tenderness love or is it just a sad compensation for the lack of passion?
Tithonus gets up in the morning. He feels tired and sad. Eos realises that she cannot sleep with Tithonus anymore, so she leads her senescent lover to a room of her house, as if he were a sick child. Then she almost forgets all about him, because every day she goes looking for fresh young men. Time passes.
Then, one night she hears a distant voice, like a lament, a shriek. She opens the door of Tithonus’ room, but he is not there. Looking downward, she sees an insect, a cicada maybe, and recognises that this small being is her former lover. She puts him in a cage and sets it down close to the bed where she receives her lovers. Each morning she feeds Tithonus leaves of grass and ambrosia. During the night, the chirps of the beloved cicada accompany her dreams.
This story is about the dark side of love: about senescence and about the melancholia that fills the soul when pleasure becomes unattainable because of the decreasing sensitivity of the skin, of the fingertips, and because of the drying out of the mucosa membranes.
DESIRE AND PLEASURE
Generally speaking, desire is creative tension, while pleasure is the release of that tension, and thus a moment of harmony between the body and its environment. The object of desire does not precede desire, but is a projection of desire itself. Of course, the bodies we long for live their lives independently before we start to wish for them, but what one desires is not their separateness, but the situation that the imagination creates of your relation with them. Therefore, we can say that desire is a force of creation, while pleasure is the relaxation of that tension.
Far from being the fulfilment of a need, or the remedy of a lack, desire is the creation of the other as attractor and myth. Desire belongs to the sphere of imagination, while pleasure belongs to the real. Pleasure is the certification of the existence of your object of desire, and the proof of the existence of yourself, as the subject of desire that becomes truly real when desire is fulfilled in pleasure.
Senility does not eliminate desire – far from it. It makes pleasure unattainable. This is the main trap of senility, and this is the reason why getting old suspends our relationship with reality.
Growing old means losing the ability to access certain spheres of pleasure. Meanwhile, desire continues undisturbed to torment the ageing person in his or her body and mind. This relationship – between the permanent burning of desire and the unattainable pleasure – is the key to understanding the bitter irony of senescent sensuousness.
The neurologic fabric loses its consistency and definition: the information processing gets slower and becomes blurred. This entails a loss of subtlety, a reduction of one’s ability to distinguish nuances. Eroticism is all about distinguishing nuances; in the temperature of the body of the other, in the intensity of the gaze, in the tremor of the voice, and in the proximity of orgasm. This is why, when the sensuous neurones lose their sharpness, eroticism gets tenuous, and turns into a revisitation of memories.
BITTERNESS, CYNICISM, IRONY
Literature is also reluctant: the way writers speak of the elderly’s sensibility and sexuality is rather unsympathetic.
In general, writers, movie-makers and artists have been wary of the old: they are not a glamorous subject, as it’s hard to decipher the erotic side of decaying flesh. Some writers, however, have tried to narrate old people’s stories, and also to express the ambiguous charm of decline. Some movie directors have dared to portray old people’s erotic lives. I remember Cloud 9 (2008), a film by the German director Andreas Dresen, a lyrical story about a 67-year-old married woman who rediscovers passion and sexuality as she embarks on an affair and falls in love with a 76-year-old man.
When literature features the elderly, and particularly old people’s sexuality, the intention is to bemoan the fragility and precariousness, or the agony of late-modern social life. In the case of Cloud 9 the director dares to do something more interesting. He shows the physical reality of wrinkled, naked bodies as they embrace, kiss, caress one another and share bursts of laughter …
Arthur Schnitzler was a doctor and a friend of Sigmund Freud; he wrote many short novels that in my opinion seize the malignant side of senility, but also the intimate feeling of melancholy that the senescent soul perceives when confronted with the beauty of the other’s body. Schnitzler deals with the unspeakable subject that Freud neglected: old people’s desire, and the shameful expression of it.
In the beautiful but painful Casanova’s Homecoming (1917), our protagonist Giacomo Casanova is approaching the brink of old age. No longer driven by the lust for travel that once enlivened him, the famous seducer longs to spend his last days in Venice. During his journey to the city, he meets a couple of friends on the outskirts of Mantua, and at their house he is introduced to the 19-year-old Marcolina and to Lorenzi, a young officer that Casanova smells to be Marcolina’s secret lover. The old Casanova is taken by his desire for the young woman and by the envy he feels towards the young man whose youth, beauty and arrogance are so similar to his own past qualities.
In Schnitzler’s text, we discover the devilish and sordid face of masculine decline and the malicious workings of senescent desire. Casanova is tired of his own adventurous life, and of his never-ending wanderings. In order to be accepted in his hometown he agrees to be a spy for the Venetian police. What is left of him is only the ability to intrigue, to cheat, to plot. And a melancholic sense of nostalgia. The vivacious flavour that permeated his younger years is gone, that nocturnal lightness is gone forever, and can only be recalled in sorrow, and from this impotent sorrow resentment stems.
Re-sentiment: a painful coming back of sentiment, the sensing again of what did exist but does not exist anymore. The comeback of perceptual fragments that the senile nervous system is unable to authentically feel.
If Schnitzler depicts senescence as an abyss of bitterness and cynicism, then the Italian novelist Italo Svevo, a contemporary of Schnitzler, describes senility as a guilty and apprehensive meekness, a selfish withdrawal from the relation with the other.
Svevo is the author of Senilità (1898), the story of a man who refuses to enjoy himself: Emilio Brentani is not officially old, but he is a symbol of senility because of his hesitancy to discover the pleasures of life and his refusal to accept the love of a young lady. A failed writer, Emilio works as a clerk in an insurance company, living modestly with his sister Amalia, a spinster who spends most of her time looking after her bachelor brother. When he meets Angiolina, a poor but beautiful woman, he tells her that his other duties will take precedence over their relationship. He wants their association kept unofficial, and for them both not to be too committed.
In the postmodern century, senility is no longer at the margins as it was in futurist times, at the beginning of the 20th century. On the contrary, old people have taken centre stage for demographical reasons: they are everywhere, and they weigh down the atmosphere of everyday life with their sadness. So, senility has come to define the social landscape in a way that is unprecedented.
This is the subject of Anéantir, a novel published in 2022 by Michel Houellebecq. This most provocative and daring of the contemporary writers depicts the decline of Western society from the point of view of a French family. A hopeless and irate representation of the decline of the white race and of its supremacy, the book is also about the agony of a family that gathers around the 80-year-old father who has suffered a stroke.
The denial of death is deeply inscribed in the modern mind. The senescence of the white population looks like a social psychosis: a rejection of the young people of the South of the world, fear of migration, identified with a sort of Great Substitution, and aggressive identarian assertion of the values of a civilisation that claims its superiority but is sinking in cynicism and despair.
At the end of his beautiful book The Order of Time (2017), Carlo Rovelli writes that the fear of death is a mistake of evolution. It is an error provoked by the inability to think of the world without one’s own presence within it, an inability to think of the world without ‘me.’ Modern culture emphasises the individual in continuous competition with other individuals, and consequently makes fragile any sense of community among people. Thus, it has turned death into something that cannot be thought, said or psychically elaborated. In the framework of Western culture, death is systematically denied, and this denial in turn leaves the individual alone in an infinite desert of sadness because we are unable to see the continuity between the individual and the community, the erotic contiguity of every conscious organism with all other conscious organisms.
Senescence looks horrible in the novels I have quoted above. But we should look at the other side: irony, lightness. The Spanish writer Sara Mesa (a woman, at last) has published some novels that treat love and affection in a more relaxed way. In Cara de Pan (2018) she recounts the story of the friendship between a 13-year-old girl called Casi, who dislikes the company of her peers and prefers to stay alone in a park rather than go to school, and an old man, who little by little becomes her confidant. They do not have anything in common, except their lack of sociability, and their taste for loneliness.
Every morning the old man comes to visit Casi, and they spend time speaking about sparrows, the psychotic mother of the man, and the mental clinic where he spent part of his life. Little by little, they begin to feel affection for one another, even as their friendship is the cause of suspicion and worry. In the end, the old man is jailed and accused of sins he did not commit. Sara Mesa has found a different style of narration based on irony and tenderness. In her novels, she stages stories of companionship and affection, and also of erotic love among people who do not look like traditional lovers: mad people, old people, reckless children and disgruntled women. Old age is but one of the many oddities of the affective condition of humans.
DENIAL OF EXHAUSTION/ EPIDEMICS OF DEPRESSION
The agony of Western civilisation is the backdrop of contemporary subjectivity, and also of contemporary sexuality. Many signs seem to reveal that sexuality is disappearing from the history of the world, at least in the North. The ‘demographic winter’ that is tormenting the white race (which does not exist but torments itself because it is persuaded of its own existence and is frightened by its own disappearance) is the effect of senescence but also the effect of widespread depression among the generation that has learned more words from a machine than from the voice of the (m)other.
Senility is no more a marginal dimension of the overall landscape: it is the predominant feature of the landscape.
Modern capitalism is based on an idolatry of energy. It is based on an obsession with growth, expansion, productivity, acceleration – futurist obsessions that have made senility unthinkable. While senescence is the (unseen or unfathomed) key to understanding the present historical conundrum, it is also the unspeakable subject, the denied subject. The question that we are facing now is the following: is there a way to happily live through the process of becoming nothing?
A wave of depression is spreading everywhere in the post-pandemic age. A sort of worldwide epidemic of depression fuelling war and nationalist aggressiveness.
There are many explanations for this wave of depression, and I’m not in the mood here to talk about all the causes. However, I think that one of the many reasons why people are depressed is the increasing ageing of the average population. In past centuries, old people were a tiny minority of the overall population, they were viewed with a certain respect, as the bearers of wisdom. Thanks to medical progress old people are now a considerable part of the population. As they linger at the margins of the daily business of life, they look like symbols of an impending social catastrophe: the end of energy. The exhaustion of water, air and fossil fuels is only one side of the story. The other side is the exhaustion of human energy. This exhaustion deserves to be analysed as a subject of psycho-political elaboration.
I think we have entered an age of post-anthropic mutation: human domination upon the physical and social planet is disintegrating, while the human mind tends to move into the (techno)-immersive sphere.
Humans are like aliens stepping onto an unknown planet whose dynamics they don’t fully understand and cannot predict: climate cataclysm, increasing ocean levels, water shortages, devastating wars with a psychotic background.
Young people, those who, with bitter self-irony, label themselves as the ‘last generation,’ have cognitively formed inside a connective environment. Growing inside the networked sphere has reshaped the dimension of desire: the tension towards the physical world is weakening, while the integration with the online flows intensifies. Perception enunciation interactions are reformatting on a cognitive level, entering a techno-immersive type of dimension.
The online dimension is expanding, becoming more pervasive, while access to reality thins out. The changing mind loses interaction skills with the physical world while acquiring interaction skills with the virtual world.
Here emerges a theme that needs to be explored: how is this cognitive reframing influencing the psychic sphere? In what sense does the libido change, and what intensity level is the investment in desire moving towards?
We are groping in the dark, looking for clues about a mutation that is still in progress, in fragile balance with a physical substrate that cannot be ignored: deserts spread, ice melts, even if kids are navigating the metaverse, watching synthetic panoramas, exploring the countless virtual worlds of the rotbox.
I see in this de-realisation of desire an effect of senilisation of the mutant emerging generation. A sort of senescence of humanity as a whole.
A strange kind of subjectivity is emerging, for which the diagnostic picture inherited from Freud does not work, nor does the way of subjectivation of the political history of the 20th century work, since the substance (physical, psychic, cognitive, linguistic) of the human animal is transformed in a way that is not reducible to the known anthropological models.
As the singularity of the mother’s talking body has been replaced by a showing and telling machine, experience shifts into the connective sphere, with the result of being configured as a hyper-semiotic experience. Semiosis, emission, exchange, reception and interpretation of info-neural stimuli mediated by the machine pervade the experience, reformatting it down to its psycho-sexual dimensions. In this sense, I would speak of pervasive hyper-semiosis and of the de-sexualisation of desire.
POST-SEXUAL HUMANITY
In the book Il declino del desiderio (2022), the Italian psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja writes that ‘sexuality, protagonist of the 20th century’s cultural stage, seems to be stepping into a dissolving, as a practice and also as a drive of the unconscious.’
In 2005, one-third of the adult population of Japan was a virgin, and the figure rose to 43% in the year 2015. In China, the Ministry of Education has launched an appeal aimed to lift up the virility of young males, even if in the China Daily newspaper some psychologists have criticised the ministry’s message for implying gender stereotypes. Groups of the involuntary celibate proliferate worldwide.
David Spiegelhalter, a professor at Columbia University, published the book Sex by Numbers (2015), reporting an impressive reduction in the frequency of sexual intercourse over the past three decades. In the years following its publication, the trend must have become accentuated because of the catastrophic effect of the pandemic: fear of approaching the body, the skin, the lips of the other.
How can we interpret this mutation from a psychic point of view, and also from a cultural point of view? How does the socio-neuro-physical mutation of which we now have a relatively clear picture affect the affective sphere, the symbolic one, and ultimately the political one?
I see a process of de-sexualisation underway, concerning young people: the whole of mankind is growing old.
How can this mutation be happily assimilated?
There is a Freudian concept that perhaps can help us in this regard: the concept of sublimation, which Freud defined as a displacement of the libidinal drive from the immediacy of sexual pleasure (understood as a discharge of energy that has physical origin) towards intellectual, spiritual or aesthetic activities.
In the midst of a deep psycho-sexual mutation, we are witnessing a sort of evacuation of sexuality from the sphere of human experience. The contemporary lessening of the sexual drive – induced by psychological and physical causes – leads to a systematic sublimation that moves the drive from the sphere of physical contact to the sphere of hyper-semiotic exchange.
Attenuation of the drive, reformatting of pleasure in the form of a game of language, ironic multiplication of identity, masking – these are trends that we can already see at work in the sexual (or post-sexual) culture of our time, in the hyper-definition (sometimes pedantically moralistic, sometimes ironic) of sexual desire.
A new ethical dimension emerges at this point: an ethics without a body and without an Earth, an ethics of the vanishing simulacrum. An ethics that deserts reality, as reality has turned into hell.