What the soul wants

Excerpt - Stanton Marlan

What the soul wants Hillman, concludes, is a re-thinking of it with the body and the world, which produces “a resurrection in beauty and pleasure,” a return to the world “beautiful and glad,” that heralds the alchemical rubedo, a vital reddening of life beyond abstract psychological life. For Hillman, the beauty of the imagination only makes sense if its desirousness is felt as a libidinal and Aphroditic reality, a “touch of Venus,” and, like Voluptas, the goddess of sensual pleasure and delight.

Once one goes beyond the limits of intellect alone, negates it, and turns to a deeper experience, it opens the potential for an abundant vitality which Lacan noted, “[b]egins with a tickle and ends with blaze of petrol.” Lacan’s passionate metaphor speaks to the heat necessary for the transformation process, but for Hillman even Lacan’s idea of jouissance falls short of describing the libidinal erotics of fire. For Hillman, “the libido [is] a cosmic erotic dynamic that permeates the world because it loves the world of matter,