FKA Twigs’ creative project transcends the sonic—the body has always been the locus of performance for the dancer, stretching it like taffy as forms like wushu, tap dancing, pole work and voguing have been added to her repertoire with each subsequent album. In EUSEXUA, she tackles the bounds of language headfirst. In the backseat of an uber, on her way to the club with her girls, Twigs stated that she invented the word ‘Eusexua’ because there was nothing in the English language that captured how she felt—a brash claim to make. She goes on to describe it as “a moment of pure human experience, a moment of clarity, a moment before a great idea, the moment before orgasm.” The word to cathect onto is not pure nor clarity, not even orgasm. It is before, situating Eusexua at a distance, defining it not only as a force but also as a lack.
This distance is evident in two halves of the namesake, a portmanteau composed of the high-minded greek ideal Euphoria and the crudity of well, Sex. On the title track, Twigs oscillates between this tension: “And if they ask you, say you feel it / But don’t call it love.” But she knows better than to reconcile this distance. She knows that desire lies within the tension itself.
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan knew this better than anybody else. Lacan introduces the term jouissance, in place of pleasure, in order to designate the complexity of the phenomenon of sexual fulfillment and the enjoyment related to it, an enjoyment that involves, as Freud indicates, not only pleasure but also its “beyond.” The emergence of desire is accompanied by the appearance of a prohibition (Paola 267). Desire presupposes a lack, something missing to be desired. To profess desire is to profess your own vulnerability, to say something of what you think you are missing.
This irreconcilable distance of desire is encapsulated by the figure of the stranger. “I’d rather know nothing than all the lies / Just give me the person you are tonight,” Twigs concedes on ‘Perfect Stranger.’ They are perfect because they are defined by ecstatic contact, they are trapped within the trompe l’oeil of the encounter— their unknowability is their appeal, allowing them to take on any shape. Twigs is holding back, content keeping them this way (I don’t know and I don’t care) as she knows the distance is what keeps her desire alive…but others are more stubborn.
‘Big Time Sensuality‘ by Björk is a more straightforward love letter to the club encounter. While her refrain of the hardcore and the gentle could very well be EUSEXUA’s own manifesto, Björk gives into the grandness and possibility of the encounter, hoping not only for passion but also union. “We just met / And I know I’m a bit too intimate / But something huge is coming up / And we’re both included,” she cajoles. Her optimism betrays a defiance towards the ephemeral nature of such moments, hoping to obliterate the distance that defines it. Björk’s rebellion echoes throughout EUSEXUA, but especially on ‘Room of Fools,’ a dionysian ballad on which Twigs screams, thrashes and yelps. Here, she is at her most ecstatic, vulnerable and feminine.
“The Voice sings from a time before law, before the Symbolic took one’s breath away and reappropriated it into language under its authority of separation. The deepest, the oldest, the loveliest Visitation. Within each woman the first, nameless love is singing,”(93) says Helene Cixuous in The Newly Born Woman. Concept isn’t new to the women of pop, and there have always been those that revel in its artifice. “At the same time, she knew that concepts without sensual instantiation are as worthless in pop as they are in art,” says Mark Fisher about Grace Jones in his polemic on art pop.
After a Calvin Klein ad featuring her was banned by the Advertising Standards authority, Twigs took to instagram to slam the decision, invoking the likes of Jones, Kitt and Baker, situating herself within a lineage of women who use their body as a vessel for art. “I am proud of my physicality,” she declared unabashedly. The body is an extension of the singer’s voice, amplifying it and at times even distorting it. But there is an inherent conflict between the body and language, between Twigs’ softness and strength, between the symbolic and the real orders.
Lacan’s category of the Real, as distinguished from “reality,” is the domain of what exists but is outside symbolization and cannot be expressed through language (Paola 272). The Symbolic determines the body in a predictable way, such that the body is nothing more than an apparition, and is understood as a surface. The Real of the body, in contrast, is understood as the organic organism and its unencumbered drives. The symbolic and the real lend themselves to different forms of jouissance, that of the phallus (which is limited) and that of the body (which is expansive) (Verhaeghe 65). Lacanians believe that structurally, this divide is one only the feminine subject is in a position to resolve, a position EUSEXUA is a testament to. In the conflict between the symbolic realm of language and the real realm of the body, woman emerges as the victor.
As a symbol of unattainable jouissance, the phallus indicates the relation between law and desire. Lacan calls ‘phallic jouissance’ the limited satisfaction sanctioned by the symbolic order, a jouissance that as it occurs evokes what is missing. The loss that phallic jouissance evokes is the loss of the body (Paola 269). On the other hand, women are exposed to sexuality and jouissance in a way that is structurally double, that is fundamentally ‘non-whole.’ While men sustain a direct relation to the phallus, women relate to the phallus as something exterior, which could be received from the outside world. This very relation of exteriority toward the phallic symbol creates a sense of exteriority toward the symbolic in general. Femininity indicates how a part of oneself can be experienced as escaping symbolization. It is precisely the jouissance that exists but cannot be spoken, that cannot be expressed through language, that Lacan calls “feminine jouissance” (Paolo 276).
Raw, unapologetic femininity has always possessed a transgressive power. For Lacan, being entirely under the regime of the phallic function is not desirable, as it leads to the institution of normality, universality, the bourgeoisie, and a lack of specificity. By situating him or herself on the woman’s side, the subject becomes more open, without being enclosed within the framework and institutional rules which block particularity (Goder 121).
Twigs wears her feminine influences on her sleeve. Björk, Kate Bush and Madonna all make their reprise on the album. She gestated the project in Prague, where she would sneak off the set of The Crow and let loose in the underground rave scene of the city. She admits that before this experience, she never understood the importance of dance music to culture. “Before, it was a place I always felt slightly unsafe in, dominated by a lot of masculine energy, that there wasn’t really a place for me. But in Prague I discovered something raw,” she says. This discovery, as opposed to any conscious effort, proved to be healing for the performer.
Cixous’ believes that in order to escape the masculine order, we must begin to write the body. She believes our sexuality and the language in which we communicate are inextricably linked. To free one means freedom for the other. To write from one’s body is to flee reality, and thereby come closer to a feminine jouissance, which she defines as “a virtually metaphysical fulfillment of desire that goes far beyond [mere] satisfaction… [It is a] fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political”(Jasken). On 24hr Dog, Twigs speaks to the palliative power of submission: “Your love chores distract me from my worst flaws / Setting free / The softest part of me.” Repeatedly, she speaks to the difficulty of letting go: “Opening me feels like a striptease.” The body acts as a portal to something deeper, to truer and more painful parts of our being.
“Her libido is cosmic… [She is] spacious singing Flesh… Her rising: is not erection. But diffusion. Not the shaft. The vessel”(88), says Cixous, alluding to the transformative nature of female jouissance that evades definition. Herein lies its power. While interviewing Twigs, a bewildered Imogen Heap describes her sound as possessing a “more human… soft, frayed edge’, which the musician giggles and calls The Pussy. “Especially when working with a lot of male producers, I always say it needs More Pussy… I think it’s the feminine touch and the feminine energy within my music that I’m always really fighting for,” she elaborates. Twigs is taking control of her vision in a masculine world. This, like everything, begins with the body.
In her widely acclaimed novel All Fours (what I’ve been jokingly referring to as the thinking woman’s Eat Pray Love…maybe this makes EUSEXUA the thinking woman’s Slut Pop? lol), Miranda July draws a distinction between ‘a body-rooted fucker’ and a ‘mind-rooted fucker’. She is swapping stories with her best friend Jordi, each envious of what the other possesses: Jordi envious of July’s boundless imagination and creativity, July envious of Jordi’s totally present animal sex. July is lamenting an embodied way of navigating the world that she was made to forsake, as many modern women who aim to take themselves seriously are.
Though Twigs admits the corporeal is vulnerable, to this she never relents. Instead, she allows the blade of her body loose, slicing through the physical realm and grasping at a post-human flesh. Emergent linguist Twigs shares another word she invented—croning— to surmise a cyborgian addiction to technology, where “technology not only takes over your time and takes over your physical activity, but you don’t know where the algorithm begins and where you end.” This cyber fatigue is the static that animates ‘Wanderlust,’ on which she despondently crones: “I get violent in a rage when I’m sat alone / I can criticise the world when I’m sat at home in bed… I’ll be in my head if you need me.” And I’m right there with her. Her response to this anhedonia is a ‘presence wash,’ a grounding exercise she devised where she rubs herself for 11 minutes to stave off the urge to check instagram. Perhaps touch is the antidote to all our anomia.
EUSEXUA too is a grounding exercise, wholly concerned with the physical. Like female jouissance, it is rooted in the real, tired of the machinations of the symbolic realm. This goes beyond the erotic energy that careens through its beats, and manifests in Twigs’ desire to capture the feeling of being at a rave, the character of a physical space. The musician states that EUSEXUA is “a love letter to how dance music makes me feel,” rather than straight-up dance music. I cannot help but evoke BRAT, which is not dissimilar in its spatiotemporal ambitions. The clipped-to-death podcast where Charli XCX likens ‘365‘ to “the journey of a night out… imagining I’m in this super club and every door I go through is a different room in the club… each part of the song is a different room” especially comes to mind. The song is the club, there is an explicit aim to suffuse the beats with qualia, with the ephemera of a night out. They are romancing the dance floor. They are revelling in the accursed share. They are partying on your behalf.
This urge to capture the club, to fold in the spectator, feels like a distinctly postmodern one to me. ‘Girl Feels Good‘ is an homage to UK electronic music, reminiscent of the euphoria of Massive Attack laced with melancholic undercurrent of Burial. “The sound that I’m focused on is more, you know, when you come out of a club and there’s that echo in your head of the music you just heard…I love that music, but I can’t make that club sort of stuff…but I can try and make the afterglow of that music,” said the latter. It is music haunted by time and place.
The music critic, according to Fisher, is a prophetic figure whose task it is to divine the oneiric vision of music. The question we must ask then, is what is EUSEXUA haunted by? What lies just out of its reach? Does EUSEXUA ache for the past or yearn for the present, does it dare to imagine a future? Twigs wanders from trip-hop to eurodance, from garage to techno and house, making home in none, guided by the light of the omnipresent bass. Like pleasure, its strum proves to be timeless. This is EUSEXUA; “when you’re not human anymore, you’re just a feeling…when you’ve been kissing a lover for hours and turn into an amoeba with that person,” said Twigs to British Vogue.
But EUSEXUA is no mere celebration. Often, the pang in my chest feels less like desire, and more like loss. For one would never be driven to capture a physical space if it didn’t feel threatened in the first place, if all that was once solid didn’t seem to melt into thin air, if cybernetic pulsations hadn’t over-riden the corporeal ones, if rave hadn’t been declared dead, then undead, then dead again. If Charli was nostalgic for the trashy hedonism of the early aughts, Twigs is nostalgic for something more ancient and primordial, something pre-linguistic. Femininity shares in and animates the project of the poet, this “bearer” of the historical truth, in challenging the limit of language, she evokes through language what cannot be said (Paola 277).
The unrealized nature of such a truth is also what makes EUSEXUA a vision for the future. “Eusexua is a practice. Eusexua is a state of being. Eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience,” reads the title card at the end of her music videos.
Touch is the ferment of desire, and also its climax. On EUSEXUA, FKA Twigs is pleading us to return to it.
Works Cited
Cixous, Hélène and Clément, Catherine. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Jasken, Julie. “Introduction to Helene Cixous”. Northern Illinois University. Web. 24 Oct. 2011.
Goder, Liora. “What is a Woman and What is Feminine Jouissance in Lacan?” Translated by Mary Jane Cowles. (Re)-Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies, vol.5 2010.
Mieli, Paola. “Femininity and the Limits of Theory”. The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists. State University of New York Press, 1988.
Verhaeghe, Paul. (2001). “Subject and Body: Lacan’s Struggle with the Real”. Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive. New York: Other Press, pp. 65-97.
