THE JOY OF LIFE
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confront them. It is that, of the five moments of desire described previously,
these two imply greater degrees of subjectivity and consciousness than do the
others. To attribute these qualities to species in general in the natural world
would run a greater risk of anthropomorphizing.
I have chosen to focus on the three ecological principles of mutualism,
differentiation, and development, because they are general and meaningful
enough to help illustrate moments of continuity between natural and social
expressions of what I am calling the erotic. What I seek here is to establish
ecological
principles
of mutualism,
differentiation,
and development as
prototypical of social expression of desire. I will attempt to show that, while
social desire is not reducible to principles that inform natural processes, there
does in fact, exist an evolutionary continuity between the sodo- and the
eco-erotic. Such a discussion hopefully leads the way for a greater appreciation
of the ‘naturalness’ of sodal desire, that as we shall see, has its roots within a
wider natural history.
TIhe EcoErotIc PRiNdplE Of MutuaIIsm
Mutualism is the first prindple of the eco-erotic. At the end of the 19th century,
sodal anarchists began to identify mutualistic tendendes in the natural world,
tendencies that may be framed in ‘erotic’ terms. As early as 1891, sodal
anarchist Errico Maletesta challenged sodal Darwinian and Malthusian theories
that portrayed nature as an inevitably competitive struggle for scarce resources,
asserting instead that “cooperation has played, and continues to play, a most
important role in the development of the organic world.”1 Similarly, Peter
Kropotkin began writing about mutual aid in 1890. In his book Mutual Aid’ A
Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin criticized bourgeois theorists for downplaying
Darwin’s emphasis on the cooperative as well as competitive nature of
evolution.2 Kropotkin challenged this interpretation by presenting a series of
zoological studies demonstrating examples of inter-species mutual aid as a
major factor in spedes survival:
...mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but
that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater
importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits
and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of
the species,
together with the greatest amount of welfare and
enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy. 3
In addition, Kropotkin regarded the latent sodability of animals as being more
than a survival strategy. According to Kropotkin, animals assodate with one
another because they experience pleasure in so doing, not just because they
are obliged to for physical need or survival. Identifying a nascent expression of