Desire is based on questions of origin and the libidinal economy cannot be explained ontologically.

Stiegler’s theory of libidinal economy rests on the claim that it is the question of the origin that leads to the emergence of desire. Without the desire to ask questions about the origin, there would be no human individuation. This point is made clear in Acting Out: “The question of the origin is what constitutes the whole of human individuation, that is, the whole of desire: the whole of human being insofar as it is essentially desiring” (Stiegler 2009a, 7). Because desire is formed by questions about the origin, it is also constituted by the empirical history that facilitates access to it. This condition of default means that it should be presumed within accounts of desire that “the ‘structural’ is elementarily ‘historical’ and as such ‘accidental,’ and is neither guided nor contained by any ontology that would make it possible to define the constitutive elements of the process” (Stiegler 2011b, 161). Ontology cannot explain desire precisely because it is constituted by the condition of ontological incompleteness represented by the default of origin. This point can be seen clearly in Stiegler’s reading of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. Stiegler praises Marcuse for attempting to present a genealogical understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis (Stiegler 2014b, 2). In Marcuse’s account, Freudianism is taken to task for its neglect of how the reality principle—which aligns human instincts with the needs of a particular group, society, or culture—is modified alongside the historical variation of needs (Marcuse 1955, 37). Marcuse demonstrates how Freudian theory “treats as natural a situation that is in fact historical, and therefore contingent” (Stiegler 2014b, 43). The reality principle is not an a-historical component of psychanalysis, but a historical relationship to wider social conditions. Despite his historicism, Marcuse perceived the mid-twentieth century as a potential turning point in the history of desire. While historically desire has been subject to repressive variants of the reality principle that redirect sexual energy toward work and production, Marcuse argued that the productive capacities of capitalism provided an opportunity for the construction of an alternate reality principle based on the fulfilment of pleasure. He claimed that the “historical possibility of a gradual decontrolling of the instinctual development must be taken seriously . . . if civilization is to progress to a higher stage of freedom” (Marcuse 1955, 134). Stiegler claims that this gradual decontrolling of instincts presupposes that the pleasure principle “precedes its domination by the reality principle” (Stiegler 2014b, 45). Marcuse contradicts his own rejection of a-historicism, as he claims that pleasure precedes and is imposed on by the reality principle and can be distinguished from the historical permutations of desire’s constraints. The critique of Freudian ontology resolves into the positing of an equally a-historical foundation for desire. Stiegler’s criticism of Marcuse here rests on his organological method. As a component of the biological dimension of organology, pleasure is formed in tandem with the expectations and constraints placed on it by a particular process of collective individuation. Pleasure and reality principles co-compose one another (Stiegler 2014b, 56). In contrast, Marcuse claims that animal drives are “inhibited” by their transformation into human desire (Marcuse 1955, 11–12). A transductive libidinal economy that rejects ontology cannot conceive of pleasure as “inhibited,” as this claim necessitates an a-historical gesture. By failing to recognize this, Marcuse does not go far enough in rejecting ontology within psychoanalysis, as his understanding of pleasure exists outside the a-transcendental relationship to technics. Two consequences that exist in tension with each other arise from the claim that ontology cannot account for the technical condition of desire. If any conception of desire is historical, for Stiegler it must be situated within a totalizing technical context. However, desire is irreducible to its technical context because it is formed within responses to the question of the default of origin that exceeds any local ontology. Desire follows a quasi-causal logic: it emerges from the reality principle of a particular locality but “exceeds all calculation” insofar as it aims at consistences (Stiegler 2020a, 14). The consistences that desire pursues engender provisional totalization, or a “télos,” which guides psychic and collective individuation (Stiegler 2009c, 35). As Robert Hughes summarizes, these objects of desire transform becoming into a future: “For Stiegler, it is helpful to distinguish the future (l’avenir) from the actual to-come (le devenir). What will actually come to be is, of course, something that one’s fantasies of the future must ‘negotiate’ with, but philosophically one must not confound the fantasized future with this actual to-come” (Hughes 2014, 48). Here the recursive structure of individuation returns within desire. Desire provides answers to the question of the origin, but these answers will never come to pass in reality as we expect. They are perpetually transformed by attempts to realize consistences. As Hughes continues, desire “sustains an openness as a pure future, even while it poses itself in thought as the anticipation of narrative completion” (Hughes 2014, 49). The impossibility of fulfilling these desires means that the “ideal beings of ontology must be replaced by infinite motives” that inform individuation (Stiegler 2013f, 34). Openness and totalization intermingle in this account of desire, as positing either pure totalization or pure openness would fall into the trap of ontology. That is, an a-historical and totalizing account of the psyche represented by Freudianism or an ontological account of liberated pleasure represented by Marcuse. I now turn to Stiegler’s own theory of libidinal economy to explore how it balances both totalization and non-totalization.