Is it possible to localise sexuality, to assign it to a part that can be named? For Lawrence, “head” and “loins” are distinguishable organs: each names, metaphorically as may be, the place of a particular organic function. “Sex in the head” is the name for sexuality out of its place, for the domination of one function (sexuality, the index of the “natural” being) by another (intellectuality, the distinguishing mark of the “civilised” individual), and the reciprocal subversion of the dominating force by the dominated. Lawrence’s mystical vitalism certainly extends as far as a “cosmic” or global sexuality, a sexuality of nature in which man qua natural being participates. But man does not participate in this global sexuality wholly, or without mediation: part of him (“the head”) is separated, kept in reserve. “The loins” exist as a determinate region, a neighbourhood of sexuality, precisely to the extent that “the head” exists and does not itself wholly and immediately participate in the sexual dance of the All. Man is the animal that imagines he has sexual parts, that names and covers them and declares their names to be unspeakable.
“The loins” is then a name-above-all-names for Lawrence, since it names firstly that which man alone names, by virtue of his intellectual separation from nature, and secondly that which, in man, testifies to the existence of the nature from which he has become estranged. It is within the loins that the upsurge of nature within man commences, spreading out (in orgasm) until it fills the body and obliterates the separate “I”, knocking his majesty the ego temporarily off his throne. Lawrence’s fictional treatment of sex (and especially of orgasm) poetically describes sexual pleasure as diffusing from a point of singular intensity, spreading out in waves and overflowing the entire body. What begins in an “erogenous zone”, a localisation of eros, rises in intensity until it becomes nameless, placeless, unassignable: flooding the senses, annihilating all boundaries and shattering the separate self.
(In this way, Lawrence rather straddles the opposition between "genital" and "diffuse" sexuality, since sexual pleasure for him is always the diffusion of sensation from a point, or several points, of concentration. The distinction between single or multiple "erogenous zones" is perhaps of less interest here than the question of whether eroticism in general requires a topology, a sense - be it "mono-" or "poly-" morphic - of place)
It's important to note here is that Lawrence doesn’t regard the annihilation of the self and the overcoming of human separation from nature as a final goal. Sex humbles the self, reveals its fragility and plasticity, and enables us to see that our intellectual separation occurs within nature, as a kind of fold or cyst within the dance of the All; but while sex causes the boundaries of this intellectual enclosure to tremble, only madness or death will finally unloop it. Lawrence has a certain respect for intellect in its right place. But “sex in the head” is the attempt of the intellect to master sex, to contain it within an ideational simulacrum and make it subservient to the rational imperatives of knowledge and control. It’s an attempt to tame experience, to withdraw from the life of the passions, to turn sensation into a form of intellectual property. Where one ought to act and suffer, “sex in the head” provides a palliating substitute, a pharmakon. Where one ought to reflect on experience and rationally synthesize it, “sex in the head” produces disorientation and self-obsession. In his own way, Lawrence continues the crusade of the Victorians against “self-pollution”, overturning their obsession with “impurity” but retaining (and even radicalising) their horror of the devitalising effects of fantasy and solitary sexual amusement.
