In theorizing the libido and its originary corporeal orderings and morphogenesis into articulated drives, from Freud to Anna Freud, through Lacan and Kristeva and Lyotard and Deleuze, the royal realms of orality, anality, scopicity, and invocatoriality have lived too near a fifth erotic origin: the forgotten skin; hapticity.
Familiar Strangers
Orality's real eating, sucking, biting become, in matricide, fantasies of incorporation, of swallowing an object whole. Castration introduces symbolics to contain objects by introjecting them through filters of signification and meaning, and owning through nomenclaturing and enunciating an object with its sign. The cephalic subject contains an object through dialogue and contracts.
Anality's shitting becomes fantasies of fecalization, of excorporation, of the omnipotence to shit objects into a position of impotence against your identifications. The phallic creates the properties of clean and proper objects, and their counter-non-object: the abject; pleasure is derived from rejection. The cephalic can transform his excess (his shit) into gifts and control abjection through exilation.
Scopicity and invocatoriality lose their distinction after castration: seeing and hearing, and their fantasies of unending lustful voyeurism and pan-audition, amalgamate into concerns of recognition, intelligibility, and responsibility. Hierophantic recognition has a subject seen by a one-way gaze and who obeys a unidirectional Voice from the Phallus, demanding absolute responsibility and engendering a secrecy kept secret by the subject even though not shared by the subject; or, he becomes a phallus himself and demands terror and trembling from all. Horizontal recognition develops a relative responsibility of negotiation, betraying gazes turned and voices unheard out of necessity. 'See' moves from 'I see' to 'I see myself/I am seen' to 'I see gazes/I see myself being seen/I make myself seen'.
Hapticity starts at the skin. At the transverbal/lektonic register, the pre-subject touches, explores, draws intensities out of topographies. The imaginary engenders fantasies of grasping, enveloping, surrounding, flanking, pinching, spanking. The phallic subject's hapticity is an eco-nomy of the domicile: oikography, enhoming, (in)habitation, annexation, drawing circles, setting boundaries of intrusion and interruption, a cancerous and imperial growth, and demarcating pelliculous violence. The cephalic subject is, at last, able to limit: graphing discrete lines (both: multiple and separate; privacy and secrecy), segmented territories, producing encampments with ephemeral fencings on a journey, fugacious and transitory.
Hapticity is closely linked to graphism. The skin is the place of (non-)contact, of inscription/exscription, of writing proper. In fact, scopicity, invocatoriality, and hapticity together form a conglomerate of libidinal economies' desire drives (just as anality/orality are demand drives). The desire drives configure D&G's magic triangle:
(The genital openings are not included because genitality appears to be the constriction of hapticity and the generation of symbolic satisfaction (i.e., pleasure) to the pubic, so-called private, parts as the only remaining erogenous zone of the skin from which to seek enjoyment. Do the genitals have other metaphors than orality (as a receptacle or cum dumpster) or hapticity (where genitality may be the phallic register of hapticity: ownership and partnering in a phallic domination, annexation, and inhabiting of the other's interior)?) 