the erotics of trust

It's inevitable. You dwell on and long for those things that are so pitifully missing here, amidst the general iciness and spiritlessness, along the barbed wire fences erected everywhere, everywhere.

And how to avoid yielding to anguish and disappointment?

By hoping there are better people and a better world out there, where the miracle of trust and courage may still happen.

There must be.

*       *       *

Once one determines to trust someone, there is not simply a calm that enters into one's soul; there is excitement and exhilaration. Trust is the most joyous kind of bond with another living being. But isn't it true that whenever we enjoy being with someone, there is a factor of risk there, and also a factor of trust, which gives our enjoyment an edge of rapture?

[...]

Courage and trust have this in common: they are not attitudes with regard to images and representations. Courage is a force that can arise and hold steadfast as one's projections, expectations, and hopes dissipate. Courage rises up and takes hold and builds on itself. Trust is a force that can arise and hold on to someone whose motivations are as unknown as those of death. It takes courage to trust someone you do not know. There is an exhilaration in trusting that builds on itself. One really cannot separate in this exhilaration the force of trust and the force of courage.

Sexual attraction [is] also [a force] that [breaks] through images and representations. [...] Erotic impulses are excited by all the artifices of adornment and masquerade. Sensuality is aroused by the intense colours of sumptuous garments and by jewellry whose metal and crystal glitter across naked flesh; it is ensnared by the suggestive shiftings of someone's eyes, his or her pirouetting fingers, provocative poses and gamy words. But the fascination with these seductive appearances and accoutrements unleashes lustful drives that crave to break through the images to take hold of and penetrate the anonymous animal body behind them. The sexual craving that torments us shuts us off to the projects and solicitations of the common and practical world, but it is also anonymous and spreads by contagion, making us transparent to one another.

[...]

In the way that sexual craving [breaks] through the images and representations and labelling of things and [makes] contact with the singular reality, [it has] a kinship with courage and with trust. Indeed, just as there is courage in trust, so there is pleasure and exhilaration in trust: trust laughs at dangers. And sexual attraction is so like trust: it careens toward sexual surrender to another as into an unconditional trust. Conversely, there is something erotic in trust, for trust is not a bare thrust of will holding on to the unintelligible core of another; it holds on to the sensibility and forces of another. There is something erotic in the trust that a skydiver extends to his buddy plummeting after him bringing him his parachute, as there is in the trust that an individual lost in the jungle extends to a native youth. Trust is courageous, giddy, and lustful.


--Alphonso Lingis, Trust, Theory Out of Bounds 25 (2004), pp. x-xii.