October journal No.51 Winter (1989)

Art I Theory I Criticism I Politics

OCTOB

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Douglas Crimp Michael Moon Jacques Lacan Laurent Jenny The V-Girls

$8.00/Winter

1989

Mourning and Militancy Flaming Closets Kant with Sade From Breton to Dali: The Adventures of Automatism A Conversation with OCTOBER

Published by the MIT Press

OCTOBER

editors Joan Copjec Douglas Crimp Rosalind Krauss Annette Michelson

managing editor Terri L. Cafaro

advisory board Leo Bersani Yve-Alain Bois Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Rosalyn Deutsche Denis Hollier Fredric Jameson Laura Mulvey Allan Sekula

OCTOBER (ISSN 0162-2870) (ISBN 0-262-75201-8) is published quarterly (Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring) by the MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, and London, England. Subscriptions: individuals $25.00; institutions $60.00; students and retired $20.00. Foreign subscriptions outside USA and Canada add $12.00 for surface mail or $18.00 for air mail. Prices subject to change without notice. Address subscriptions to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142. Manuscripts, in duplicate and accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope, should be sent to OCTOBER, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003. No responsibility is assumed for loss or injury. Second class postage paid at Boston, MA, and at additional mailing offices. To be honored free of charge, claims for missing copies must be made immediately upon receipt of the next published issue. POSTMASTER: send address changes to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142. OCTOBER is distributed in the USA by B. Deboer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07110. Copyright ? 1990 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and October Magazine, Ltd. The editors of OCTOBER are wholly responsible for its contents.

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Douglas Crimp Michael Moon Jacques Lacan James B. Swenson, Jr. Laurent Jenny The V-Girls

Mourning and Militancy Flaming Closets Kant with Sade Annotations to Kant with Sade From Breton to Dali: The Adventures of Automatism A Conversation with OCTOBER

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LAURENT JENNY teaches French literature at the University of Geneva and is the author of La terreur et les signes (Gallimard, 1984) and La parole singuliere (Belin, 1990). JACQUES LACAN, the influential French psychoanalyst who initiated a "return to Freud" through linguistics, held a series of seminars on psychoanalysis from the 1950s until the end of the '70s. Three of them have been published in English: "Freud's Papers on Technique," "The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis," and "The Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis." Some of Lacan's essays collected in Ecrits have also been translated into English (Norton, 1977). MICHAEL MOON teaches in the English Department at Duke University. He is the author of Disseminating Whitman (forthcoming from Harvard University Press) and is currently at work on a book about gay male performance in modern and postmodern culture. JAMES B. SWENSON, JR., is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Yale University. THE V-GIRLS are an informal group of scholars and members who meet regularly in order to question themselves and others. They are dedicated to reading, writing, discussion, and ordering out.

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Mourning and Militancy

DOUGLAS

CRIMP

For Gregg Bordowitz, my AIDS activist mentor In a contribution to a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on "Displacing Homophobia," Lee Edelman applies the lessons of Derridian deconstruction to the AIDS activist movement slogan Silence=Death. Claiming that our slogan calls for a discourse of facts marshalled against a demagogic rhetoric, Edelman concludes that the equation unknowingly produces the literal as a figure, and thereby betrays its ideological entanglement in the binary logic of Western discourse. Precisely because the defensive appeal to literality in a slogan like Silence=Death must produce the literal as a figure of the need and desire for the shelter of certain knowledge, such a discourse is always necessarily a dangerously contaminated defense-contaminated by the Derridian logic of metaphor so that its attempt to achieve a natural or literal discourse beyond rhetoricity must reproduce the suspect ideology of reified (and threatened) identity marking the reactionary medical and political discourse it would counteract. The discursive logic of Silence=Death thus contributes to the ideologically motivated confusion of the literal and the figural, the proper and the improper, the inside and the outside, and in the process it recalls the biology of the human immunodeficiency virus as it attacks the mechanism whereby the body is able . . . to distinguish between "Self and Not-Self."1 I do not think Edelman's deconstruction of the "text" of Silence=Death is necessarily wrong, but he seems to have very little sense of how the emblem functions for the movement. First, it is precisely as a figure that it does its work: 1. Lee Edelman, "The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS," South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1 (Winter 1989), pp. 313-314.

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as a striking image appearing on posters, placards, buttons, stickers, and T-shirts, its appeal is primarily graphic, and hardly therefore to be assimilated to a privileging of the logos. Second, it desires not a discourse of facts but direct action, the organized, militant enunciation of demands within a discursive field of contestedfacts. And finally, a question of address: for whom is this application of literary theory intended other than those within the academy who will find it, simply, interesting?2 Silence=Death was produced and is employed for collective political struggle, and it entails altogether different problems for the community of AIDS activists. Taking our symbol literally holds for us a danger that goes unnoticed in Edelman's textual analysis: we ourselves are silent precisely on the subject of death, on how deeply it affects us. I, too, will have something to say about the distinction between self and not-self, about the confusion of the inside and the outside, but I am impelled to do thisfor us, for my community of AIDS activists. Writing about mourning and militancy is for me both necessary and difficult, for I have seen that mourning troubles us; by "us" I mean gay men confronting AIDS. It should go without saying that it is not only gay men who confront AIDS, but because we face specific and often unique difficulties, and because I have some familiarity with them, I address them here exclusively. This paper is written for my fellow activists and friends, who have also informed it with their actions, their suggestions and encouragement-and in this I include many women as well.3 The conflicts I address are also my own, which might account for certain of the paper's shortcomings. I will begin then with an anecdote about my own ambivalent mourning, though not of an AIDS death. In 1977, while I was visiting my family in Idaho, my father died unexpectedly. He and I had had a strained and increasingly distant relationship, and I was unable to feel or express my grief over his death. After the funeral I returned to New York for the opening of an exhibition I'd organized and resumed my usual life. But within a few weeks a symptom erupted which to this day leaves a scar near my nose: my left tear duct became badly infected, and the resulting abscess grew to a golf-ball sized swelling that closed my left eye and completely disfigured my face. When the abscess finally burst, the foul-smelling pus oozed down my cheek like poison tears. I have never since 2. For other analyses of the slogan Silence=Death, written from the perspective of people directly engaged in AIDS activist and service work, see Stuart Marshall, "The Contemporary Use of Gay History: The Third Reich," forthcoming in October;and Cindy Patton, "Power and the Conditions of Silence," Critical Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3 (Fall 1989). See also Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics, forthcoming from Bay Press, Spring 1990. 3. I want to thank those people who discussed this subject with me, including their personal experiences, and helped me through the task of writing the paper: in addition to Gregg BordowitzDavid Barr, Peter Bowen, Rosalyn Deutsche, Mitchell Karp, Don Moss, and Laura Pinsky. This paper was initially given at the 1989 English Institute at Harvard in the "Gay Men in Criticism" session organized by D. A. Miller. My thanks to David for resisting the "policing function of the literary" to invite an AIDS activist working outside the discipline to this forum.

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doubted the force of the unconscious. Nor can I doubt that mourning is a psychic process that must be honored. For many AIDS activists, however, mourning is not respected; it is suspect: I look at faces at countless memorial services and cannot comprehend why the connection isn't made between these deaths and going out to fight so that more of these deaths, including possibly one's own, can be staved off. Huge numbers regularly show up in cities for Candlelight Marches, all duly recorded for the television cameras. Where are these same numbers when it comes to joining political organizations . . . or plugging in to the incipient civil disobedience movement represented in ACT UP? These sentences are taken from a recent essay by Larry Kramer,4 against whose sense of the quietism represented by AIDS candlelight marches I want to juxtapose the words of the organizer of this year's candlelight vigil on Christopher Street, addressed from the speaker's platform to the assembled mourners: "Look around!" he said, "This is the gay community, not ACT UP!"5 The presumption in this exhortation that no AIDS activists would be found ritual expression of grief is at the same time taken among the mourners-whose to be truer to the needs of the gay community - confidently inverts Kramer's rhetorical incomprehension, an incomprehension also expressed as antipathy: "I do not mean to diminish these sad rituals," Kramer writes, "though indeed I personally find them slightly ghoulish."6 Public mourning rituals may of course have their own political force, but they nevertheless often seem, from an activist perspective, indulgent, sentimental, defeatist-a perspective only reinforced, as Kramer implies, by media constructions of us as hapless victims. "Don't mourn, organize!" -the last words of labor movement martyr Joe Hill -is still a rallying cry, at least in its New Age variant, "Turn your grief to anger," which assumes not so much that mourning can be foregone as that the psychic process can simply be converted.7 This move from prohibition to transformation only appears, however, to include a psychic component in activism's response, for ultimately both rallying cries depend on a 4. Larry Kramer, "Report from the Holocaust," in Reportsfrom the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1989, pp. 264-265. 5. The remark of Red Maloney was the subject of a letter written by Naphtali Offen to Outweek, no. 4 (July 17, 1989), p. 6. 6. Kramer, p. 264. 7. Joe Hill's statement is also quoted by Michael Bronski in an essay that takes up some of the issues discussed here; see his "Death and the Erotic Imagination," in Erica Carter and Simon Watney, eds., Taking Liberties:AIDS and Cultural Politics, London, Serpent's Tail in association with the ICA, 1989, pp. 219-228. The pop psychological/metaphysical notions of New Age "healers"-such as the particularly repulsive idea that people choose illness to give meaning to their lives-are considered by Allan Berube in "Caught in the Storm: AIDS and the Meaning of Natural Disaster," Outlook, vol. 1, no. 3 (Fall 1988), pp. 8-19.

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definite answer to the question posed by Reich to Freud: "Where does the misery come from?" Activist antagonism to mourning hinges, in part, on how AIDS is interpreted, or rather, where the emphasis is laid, on whether the crisis is seen to be a natural, accidental catastrophe-a disease syndrome that has simply struck as the result of gross political negligence or at this time and in this place-or was allowed to happen. that epidemic mendacity-an But leaving aside, only for the moment, the larger political question, I want to attend to the internal opposition of activism and mourning. That the two are incompatible is clear enough in Freud's description of the work of mourning, which he calls "absorbing." "Profound mourning," Freud writes in "Mourning and Melancholia," involves a "turning away from every active effort that is not connected with thoughts of the dead. It is easy to see that this inhibition and circumscription in the ego is the expression of an exclusive devotion to its mourning, which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests."8 Although Freud's account of this process is well-known, I want to repeat it here in order to underscore its exclusive character: The testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object. Against this demand a struggle of course arises -it may be universally observed that man never willingly abandons a libido-position, not even when a substitute is already beckoning to him. This struggle can be so intense that a turning away from reality ensues, the object being clung to through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis. The normal outcome is that deference for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its behest cannot be at once obeyed. The task is now carried through bit by bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy, while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind. Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it accomplished.9 In an important paper about mourning in the time of AIDS, which turns on a reading of Whitman's "Drum-Taps" poems, Michael Moon argues that Freud's view of mourning presents a difficulty for gay people, insofar as it promises a return to a normalcy that we were never granted in the first place: "As lesbians and gay men," Moon writes, most of us are familiar with the experience of having been categori-

8. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in John Rickman, ed., A General Selectionfrom the Worksof Sigmund Freud, New York, Anchor Books, 1989, pp. 125-126 (emphasis added). 9. Ibid., p. 126.

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cally excluded from "normalcy" at critical junctures in our lives. Having been through as much as most of us have in both our personal and collective struggles to get our own needs recognized, acknowledged, accepted, sometimes fulfilled, the Freudian model of mourning may well look fundamentally normalizing and consequently privative, diminishing the process and foreclosing its possible meaning rather than enriching it or making it more accessible to understanding.10 Probably no gay man or lesbian can have an untroubled response to Freud, but we must nevertheless take care to maintain a crucial distinction: the ambition to normalize, to adapt, belongs not to Freud but to his later "egocentric" revisionists, to whom gay people owe a good portion of our oppression. This is not to say that there is no vision of normalcy in Freud, only that there is also no such thing as ever fully achieving it,for anyone. Freud does refer to mourning as a "grave departure from the normal attitude to life,"" but what that normal attitude is in this context can be learned easily enough by reading his characterization of the state to which we return after the work of mourning is accomplished: very simply, "deference for reality gains the day," and "the ego becomes free and uninhibited again."12 So rather than looking beyond "Mourning and Melancholia" for other possibilities -Moon proposes fetishism, but a fetishism rescued from Freud's 1927 account by making it a conscious means of extending our homoerotic relations, even with the dead -I want to stay with Freud's earlier text, to read it in relation to the conflicts many of us now experience. First, two preliminary caveats: "Mourning and Melancholia" is not a theory of mourning as such, but of pathological mourning, that is, of melancholia. Moon is therefore right when he says that Freud's view of mourning only repeats conventional wisdom; it purports to do no more than describe mourning's dynamic process. Secondly, Freud can tell us very little about our grieving rituals, our memorial services and candlelight marches. Of our communal mourning, perhaps only the Names Project quilt displays something of the psychic work of mourning, insofar as each individual its incorporation of mementos associated with the panel symbolizes -through lost object -the activity of hypercathecting and detaching the hopes and memories associated with the loved one. But as against this often shared activity, mourning, for Freud, is a solitary undertaking. And our trouble begins here, for, from the outset, there is already a social interdiction of our private efforts. In the opening pages of Policing Desire, Simon Watney recounts a funeral service similar 10. Michael Moon, "Memorial Rags," paper presented in a session titled "AIDS and Our Profession" at the 1988 MLA convention, manuscript. I wish to thank Michael Moon for making this paper available to me. 11. Freud, p. 125. 12. Ibid., pp. 126, 127.

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to those many of us have experienced, an event that made him decide "then and there" that he would write his book on AIDS. [Bruno's] funeral took place in an ancient Norman church on the outskirts of London. No mention was made of AIDS. Bruno had died, bravely, of an unspecified disease. In the congregation of some forty people there were two other gay men besides myself, both of whom had been his lover. They had been far closer to Bruno than anyone else present, except his parents. Yet their grief had to be contained within the confines of manly acceptability. The irony of the difference between the suffocating life of the suburbs where we found ourselves, and the knowledge of the world in which Bruno had actually lived, as a magnificently affirmative and life-enhancing gay man, was all but unbearable. 13 Because Watney's anecdote is meant to explain his determination to write a polemic, it also suggests what has happened to mourning. It is not only that at this moment of society's demand for hypocrisy the three gay men had to conceal their grief, but also that their fond memories of Bruno as a gay man are thereby associated with the social opprobrium that attaches to them. When these memories are then recalled, hypercathexis may well be met with a defense, a need to preserve Bruno's world intact against the contempt in which it is commonly held. "My friend was not called Bruno," Watney adds. His father asked me not to use his real name. And so the anonymity is complete. The garrulous babble of commentary on AIDS constructs yet another "victim." It is this babble which is my subject matter, the cacophony of voices which sounds through every institution of our society on the subject of AIDS.14 Thus one of our foremost international AIDS activists became engaged in the struggle; no further memories of Bruno are invoked. It is probably no exaggeration to say that each of us has a story like this, that during the AIDS crisis there is an all but inevitable connection between the memories and hopes associated with our lost friends and the daily assaults on our consciousness. Seldom has a society so savaged people during their hour of loss. "We look upon any interference with [mourning] as inadvisable or even harmful," warns Freud.15 But for anyone living daily with the AIDS crisis, ruthless interference with our bereavement is as ordinary an occurrence as reading the New York Times.16The violence we en-

13. Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 7. 14. Ibid., p. 8. 15. Freud, p. 125. 16. The New YorkTimes reporting of AIDS issues-or rather its failure to report them accurately

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counter is relentless, the violence of silence and omission almost as impossible to endure as the violence of unleashed hatred and outright murder. Because this violence also desecrates the memories of our dead, we rise in anger to vindicate them. For many of us, mourning becomesmilitancy. Freud does not say what might happen if mourning is interfered with, but insofar as our conscious defenses direct us toward social action, they already show the deference to reality that Freud attributes to mourning's accomplishment. Nevertheless, we have to ask just how, against what odds, and with what unconscious effects this has been achieved. The activist impulse may be reinforced by a second conflict within the the process of mourning. "Reality," Freud explains, "passes its verdict-that object no longer exists - upon each single one of the memories and hopes through which the libido was attached to the lost object, and the ego, confronted as it were with the decision whether it will share this fate, is persuaded by the sum of its narcissistic satisfactions in being alive to sever its attachment to the nonexistent object." 7 But this confrontation with reality is especially fraught for gay men mourning now, since our decision whether we will share this fate is so unsure. For people with AIDS, the HIV-infected, and those at significant risk whose sero-status is unknown to them, narcissistic satisfactions in still being alive today can persuade us, will undoubtedly persuade us in our unconscious, to relinquish our attachments. But how are we to dissociate our narcissistic satisfactions in being alive from our fight to stay alive? And, insofar as we identify with those who have died, how can our satisfactions in being alive escape guilt at having survived?18 or at all -is one of the most persistent scandals of the AIDS epidemic. Larry Kramer gave a detailed, damning account of the scandal on a panel discussion of AIDS in the print media organized by the PEN American Center in New York City on May 11, 1989. In the summer of 1989, the Times ran an editorial that both typified its position throughout the history of the epidemic and reached new heights of callousness. Implicitly claiming once again that its presumed readers had little to worry about, since "the disease is still very largely confined to specific risk groups," the writer went on to say, cheerily, "Once all susceptible members [of these groups] are infected, the numbers of new victims will decline." The newspaper's simple writing off of the lives of gay men, IV drug users, their sex partners and children -a mere 200,000-400,000 people already estimated to be HIV-infected in New York City alone-triggered off an ACT UP demonstration, which was in turn thwarted by perhaps the largest police presence at any AIDS activist demonstration to date. ACT UP stickers saying "Buy Your Lies Here. The New YorkTimes Reports Half the Truth about AIDS" still adorn newsstands in New York City, while the coin slots of Times vending machines are covered with stickers that read "The New YorkTimesAIDS Reporting is OUT OF ORDER." The Timeseditorial is reproduced as part of a Gran Fury project titled "Control" in Artforum, vol. xxvii, no. 2 (October 1989), p. 167. 17. Freud, pp. 136-137. 18. The decision not to share the fate of the lost object, as well as guilt at having survived, are certainly problems of mourning for everyone. Clearly insofar as any death brings us face to face with our own mortality, identification with the lost object is something we all feel. Thus, this difficulty of mourning is certainly not gay men's alone. I only wish to emphasize its exacerbation for gay men to the extent that we are directly and immediately implicated in the particular cause of these deaths, and implicated, as well, through the specific nature of our deepest pleasures in life-our gay sexuality.

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Upholding the memories of our lost friends and lovers and resolving that we ourselves shall live would seem to impose the same demand: resist! Mourning feels too much like capitulation. But we must recognize that our memories and our resolve also entail the more painful feelings of survivor's guilt, often exacerbated by our secret wishes, during our lovers' and friends' protracted illnesses, that they would just die and let us get on with our lives. We can then partially revise our sense - and Freud's-of the incompatibilbetween ity mourning and activism and say that, for many gay men dealing with AIDS deaths, militancy might arise from conscious conflicts within mourning itself, the consequence, on the one hand, of "inadvisable and even harmful interference" with grief and, on the other, of the impossibility of deciding whether the mourner will share the fate of the mourned. But because mourning is a psychic process, conscious reactions to external interference cannot tell the whole story. What is far more difficult to determine is how these reactions are influenced by already-existing unconscious strife. Only by recognizing the role of the unconscious, however, will we be able to understand the relationship between the external obstacles to our grief and our own antagonism to mourning. But I want to be clear: It is because our impatience with mourning is burdensome for the movement that I am seeking to understand it. I have no interest in proposing a "psychogenesis" of AIDS activism. The social and political barbarism we daily encounter requires no explanation whatsoever for our militancy. On the contrary, what may require an explanation, as Larry Kramer's plaint suggested, is the quietism. At the weekly ACT UP meetings in New York, regularly attended by about 400 people, I am struck by the fact that only a handful are of my generation, the Stonewall generation. The vast majority are post-Stonewall, born hardly earlier than the gay liberation movement itself, and their losses differ in one significant respect from ours. Last year one of these young men said something to me that said it all. A group of us had seen an early '70s film at the Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film Festival and went out for drinks afterwards. The young man was very excited about what seemed to me a pretty ordinary sex scene in the film; but then he said, "I'd give anything to know what cum tastes like, somebody

Simon Watney has urged that this very implication be taken as the reason for forming consensus among gay men about AIDS activism: "I believe that the single, central factor of greatest significance for all gay men should be the recognition that the current HIV antibody status of everyone who had unprotected sex in the long years before the virus was discovered is a matter of sheer coincidence. . . Every gay man who had the good fortune to remain uninfected in the decade or so before the emergence of safer sex should meditate most profoundly on the whim of fate that spared him, but not others. Those of us who chance to be seronegative have an absolute and unconditional responsibility for the welfare of seropositive gay men" (Simon Watney, "'The Possibilities of Permutation': Pleasure, Proliferation, and the Politics of Gay Identity in the Age of AIDS," in James Miller, ed., AIDS: Crisis and Criticism, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 1990.

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else's that is." That broke my heart, for two different reasons: for him because he didn't know, for me because I do. Freud tells us that mourning is the reaction not only to the death of a loved person, but also "to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal. . . ."19 Can we be allowed to include, in this "civilized" list, the ideal of perverse sexual pleasure itself rather than one stemming from its sublimation? Alongside the dismal toll of death, what many of us have lost is a culture of sexual possibility: back rooms, tea rooms, bookstores, movie houses, and baths; the trucks, the pier, the ramble, the dunes. Sex was everywhere for us, and everything we wanted to venture: golden showers and water sports, cocksucking and rimming, fucking and fist fucking. Now our untamed impulses are either proscribed once again or shielded from us by latex. Even Crisco, the lube we used because it was edible, is now forbidden because it breaks down the rubber. Sex toys are no longer added enhancements; they're safer substitutes. For those who have obeyed civilization's law of compulsory genital heterosexuality, the options we've lost might seem abstract enough. Not widely acknowledged until the advent of the AIDS crisis, our sex lives are now publicly scrutinized with fascination and envy, only partially masked by feigned incredulity (William Dannemeyer, for example, entered into the Congressional Record of June 26, 1989 the list of pleasures I just enumerated). To say that we miss uninhibited and unprotected sex as we miss our lovers and friends will hardly solicit solidarity, even tolerance. But tolerance is, as Pasolini said, "always and purely nominal," merely "a more refined form of condemnation."20 AIDS has further proved his point. Our pleasures were never tolerated anyway; we took them. And now we must mourn them too. When, in mourning our ideal, we meet with the same opprobrium as when mourning our dead, we incur a different order of psychic distress, since the memories of our pleasures are already fraught with ambivalence. The abject repudiation of their sexual pasts by many gay men testifies to that ambivalence, even as the widespread adoption of safe sex practices vouches for our ability to work through it. Perhaps we may even think of safe sex as the substitute libidoposition that beckoned to us as we mourned our lost sexual ideal. But here, I think, the difference between generations of gay men makes itself felt most sharply. For men now in their twenties, our sexual ideal is mostly just that-an ideal, the cum never swallowed. Embracing safe sex is for them an act of defiance, and its promotion is perhaps the AIDS activist movement's least inhibited stance. But, for many men of the Stonewall generation, who have also been the gay population thus far hardest hit by AIDS, safe sex may seem less like defiance 19. Ibid., p. 125. Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Gennariello," in Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood, Manchester, 20. Carcanet New Press, 1983, pp. 21-22.

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than resignation, less like accomplished mourning than melancholia. I don't want to suggest that there is anything pathological about this disposition, but it does comprise many features of melancholia as Freud describes it, especially if considered in the context of its causes. "The occasions giving rise to melancholia," Freud writes, "for the most extend part beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and include all those situations of being wounded, hurt, neglected, out of favor, or disappointed, which can . . . reinforce an already existing ambivalence."21 Although Freud's theory concerns an object relationship, if we transpose these situations to the social sphere, they describe very perfectly the condition of gay men during the AIDS crisis, as regards both our rejection and our self-doubt. In Freud's analysis, melancholia differs from mourning in a single feature: "a fall in self-esteem":22 "In grief the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself [which becomes poor and empty]."23 And this lowering of self-esteem, Freud insists, is "predominantly moral";24 it is a "dissatisfaction with the self on moral grounds."25 "The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any effort, and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself, and expects to be cast out and chastised."26 "In his exacerbation of self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature . . ."27 Moreover, the melancholiac "does not realize that any change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past and declares that he was never any better."28 This moralizing self-abasement is only too familiar to us in the response of certain gay men to AIDS - too familiar especially because the media have been so happy to give them voice as our spokesmen. Randy Shilts comes readily to mind, and though I've done with him elsewhere,29 it is worth mentioning in this context that he was chosen as our representative to address the closing ceremonies of the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal, where he obliged his hosts with an attack on the militancy of international AIDS activists attending the conference. But there is a recent example that is even more groveling: the book After the Ball, an aptly titled sequel to Shilts's And the Band Played On, whose authority it cites approvingly, and whose "Patient Zero" continues here to play 21. Freud, p. 132. 22. Ibid., p. 125. 23. Ibid., p. 127. 24. Ibid., p. 128. 25. Ibid., p. 129. 26. Ibid., p. 127. 27. Ibid., p. 128. 28. Ibid., pp. 127-128. 29. Douglas Crimp, "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," October,no. 43 (Winter 1987) (reissued as Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1988), esp. pp. 238-246.

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his unhappy role. This flyleaf-described "gay manifesto for the nineties," published by Doubleday, is the dirty work of two Harvard-trained social scientists, one of whom now designs aptitude tests for people with high IQs, while the other is a Madison Avenue PR consultant whose specialty is creating "positive images" for what the two of them call "'silent majority' gays." Informed by the latest trends in sociobiology, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen have devised a program to eradicate homophobia -which they prefer to call homo-hatred so as to deny its unconscious force. Their proposal centers on a media campaign whose basis is the denial of the difference. "A good beginning would be to take a long look at Coors beer . . . commercials," they suggest.3?0But copying Coors ads does not stop with creating "positive" images. We have to "clean up our act," they say, and live up to those images.31 This means purging our community of "'fringe' gay groups" -drag queens, radical fairies, pederasts, bull dykes, and other assorted scum. Clearly we can take this book seriously only as a symptom of malaise -in its excoriation of gay culture, it bears every distinguishing characteristic of melancholia Freud specifies. Moreover, its accusations are also self-accusations: "We, the authors, are every bit as guilty of a lot of the nastiness we describe as are other gays," the Harvard boys confess. "This makes us not less qualified to inveigh against such evils but, if anything, even more so."32 The authors' indictments of gay men are utterly predictable: we lie, deny reality, have no moral standards; we are narcissistic, self-indulgent, self-destructive, unable to love or even form lasting friendships; we flaunt it in public, abuse alcohol and drugs; and our community leaders and intellectuals are fascists.33 Here are a few sample statements: - When we first delved into the gay urban demimonde, we assumed that they held, if not our values, at least some values. We were quickly disabused of this notion. -As the works of many students of sociopathic personality assert, a surprisingly high percentage of pathological liars are, in fact, gay. -The gay bar is the arena of sexual competition, and it brings out all that is most loathsome in human nature. Here, stripped of the facade

30. Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90s, New York, Doubleday, 1989, p. 154. 31. "Cleaning Up Our Act" is actually a subheading of the book's final chapter, which concludes with "A Self-Policing Code." Kirk and Madsen, p. 278. 32. 33. These accusations appear in Chapter 6: "The State of Our Community: Gay Pride Goeth before a Fall."

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of wit and cheer, gays stand nakedly revealed as single-minded, selfish sexual predators.34 Therefore, "straights hate gays not just for what their myths and lies say we are, but also for what we really are."35 This is the only line in the book with which I agree; and it is a statement which, if taken seriously, means that no sociological account of homophobia will explain or counteract it. Kirk and Madsen's reliance on homophobic myths to describe what we really are demonstrates, in any case, not their understanding of homophobia, but their complete identification with it. Although melancholia, too, depends on the psychic process of identification and introjection, I will not press the point. No matter how extreme the selfhatred, I am loath for obvious reasons to accuse gay men of any pathological condition. I only want to draw an analogy between pathological mourning and the sorry need of some gay men to look upon our imperfectly liberated past as immature and immoral. But I will not resist a final word from Freud on melancholia, taken this time from "The Ego and the Id": "What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death-instinct."36 ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, was founded in March of 1987 in response to a speech at New York's Gay and Lesbian Community Center by Larry Kramer. In his inimitable manner of combining incomprehension and harangue, Kramer chided: I sometimes think we have a death wish. I think we must want to die. I have never been able to understand why for six long years we have sat back and let ourselves literally be knocked off man by man -without fighting back. I have heard of denial, but this is more than denial; this is a death wish.37 Nearly two years later, in a mean-spirited, divisive attack on AIDS activism published by the Nation, Darrell Yates Rist accused ACT UP-entirely falsely -of ignoring any gay issue but AIDS. After recalling a visit to San Francisco's Tenderloin district, in which he encountered teen-age gay runaways and hustlers, Rist continued: I had just spent a night among those abandoned adolescents when, at a dinner in the Castro, I listened to the other guests talk about nothing but AIDS, the dead, the dying-which to their minds included every in man fashionable the city: hysteria. "This," one of them actually gay said, "is the only thing worth fighting for." Not long before, I'd heard Larry Kramer, playwright and AIDS activist, say something like that 34. 35. 36. 37.

Kirk and Madsen, pp. 292, 283, 313. Ibid., p. 276. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, New York, W. W. Norton, 1962, p. 43. Kramer, p. 128.

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too, and had felt, in that suffocating moment, that finally we'd all gone suicidal, that we'd die of our own death wish.38 It is between these two allegations of a death-wishone because we were not yet AIDS activists, the other because we now are-that I want to frame the remainder of my discussion. It might appear from what I've outlined so far that gay men's responses to the enormous losses suffered in the AIDS epidemic are predictable. This is far from the case, and is only the result of my schematic reading of "Mourning and Melancholia" against what I know of our experiences. I have accounted for neither the full depth and variety of our conflicts nor the multiplicity of their possible outcomes. What I offer to rectify this inadequacy is simply a list, to which anyone might add, of the problems we face. Most people dying of AIDS are very young, and those of us coping with these deaths, ourselves also young, have confronted great loss entirely unprepared. The numbers of deaths are unthinkable: lovers, friends, acquaintances, and community members have fallen ill and died. Many have lost upwards of a hundred people. Apart from the deaths, we contend with the gruesome illness itself, acting as caretakers, often for very extended periods, making innumerable hospital visits, providing emotional support, negotiating our wholly inadequate and inhuman health care and social welfare systems, keeping abreast of experimental treatment therapies. Some of us have learned as much or more than most doctors about the complex medicine of AIDS. Added to the caretaking and loss of others is often the need to monitor and make treatment decisions about our own HIV illness, or face anxiety about our own health status.39 Through the turmoil imposed by illness and death, the rest of society offers little support or even acknowledgment. On the contrary, we are blamed, belittled, excluded, derided. We are discriminated against, lose our housing and jobs, and are denied medical and life insurance. Every public agency whose job it is to combat the epidemic has been slow to act, failed entirely, or been deliberately counterproductive. We have therefore had to provide our own centers for support, care, and education and even to fund and conduct our own treatment research. We have had to rebuild our devastated community and culture, reconstruct our sexual relationships, reinvent our sexual pleasure. Despite great

38. Darrell Yates Rist, "The Deadly Costs of an Obsession," Nation, February 13, 1989, p. 181. For the responseof ACT UP, among others, see the issuesof March20 and May 1, 1989. For an impassioned discussion of the entire debate, see Simon Watney, "'The Possibilities of Permutation.' 39. It seems to me particularlytelling that throughout the epidemic the dominant media has routinelyfeaturedstoriesabout anxieties provokedby AIDS-the anxieties of health care workers and cops exposed to needle sticks, of parents whose children attend school with an HIV-infected child, of straightwomenwho once upon a time had a bisexuallover . . . But I have never once seen a story about the millionsof gay men who have lived with these anxieties constantlysince 1981.

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achievements in so short a time and under such adversity, the dominant media still pictures us only as wasting deathbed victims; we have therefore had to wage a war of representation, too. Frustration, anger, rage, and outrage, anxiety, fear, and terror, shame and guilt, sadness and despair -it is not surprising that we feel these things; what is surprising is that we often don't. For those who feel only a deadening numbness or constant depression, militant rage may well be unimaginable, as again it might be for those who are paralyzed with fear, filled with remorse, or overcome with own form of moralism -is to deny the guilt. To decry these responses-our extent of the violence we have all endured; even more importantly, it is to deny a fundamental fact of psychic life: violence is also self-inflicted. The most contested theoretical concept in the later work of Freud is the drive to death, the drive that competes with the life instincts and comprises both aggression and self-aggression. It was over this concept that Reich broke with Freud, insisting that with the death drive Freud definitively side-stepped the social causes of human misery. But, against Reich's objection, and that of other early proponents of a political psychoanalysis, Jacqueline Rose argues that it is only through the concept of the death drive that we can understand the relationship between psychic and social life, as we seek to determine "where to locate the violence."40 As opposed to Darrell Yates Rist's pop-psychology assertion that activists have a death wish, I want to suggest on the contrary that we do not acknowledge the death drive. That is, we disavow the knowledge that our misery comes from within as well as without, that it is the result of psychic as well as of social conflict -or rather, as Rose writes, our misery "is not something that can be located on the inside or the outside, in the psychic or the social . . . , but rather something that appears as the effect of the dichotomy itself."41 By making all violence external, pushing it to the outside and objectifying it in "enemy" institutions and individuals, we deny its psychic articulation, deny that we are effected, as well as affected, by it. Perhaps an example will clarify my point. The issue of HIV antibody testing has been a central concern for AIDS activists from the moment the movement was formed. We have insisted, against every attempt to implement mandatory or confidential testing, on the absolute right of voluntary anonymoustesting. At the International AIDS Conference in Montreal last June, Stephen Joseph, health commissioner of New York City, called for confidential testing with mandatory contact tracing, based on the fact that immune-system monitoring and early treatment intervention for those who are HIV-positive could now prolong and perhaps save their lives. We immediately raised all the proper objections to his cynical proposal: that only if anonymity is guaranteed will people get tested, that 40. Jacqueline Rose, "Where Does the Misery Come From?" in Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, p. 28. 41. Ibid.

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New York has too few testing sites to accommodate the people wishing to be tested as it is, and that the services necessary to care for people who test positive cannot even accommodate the current caseload. Agreeing that testing, counselling, monitoring, and early treatment intervention are indeed crucial, we demanded instead an increase in the number of anonymous testing sites and a system of neighborhood walk-in HIV clinics for monitoring and treatment. We were entirely confident of the validity our protests and demands. We know the history of Stephen Joseph's provocations, we know the city government's abysmal failure to provide health care for its huge infected population, and we know not only the advantages of early intervention but also exactly what the treatment options are. But with all this secure knowledge, we forget one thing: our own ambivalence about being tested, or, if seropositive, about making difficult treatment decisions. For all the hours of floor discussion about demanding wide availability of testing and treatment, we do not always avail ourselves of them, and we seldom discuss our anxiety and indecision.42 Very shortly after Joseph's announcement in Montreal and our successful mobilization against his plan,43 Mark Harrington, a member of ACT UP's Treatment and Data Committee, made an announcement at a Monday-night meeting: "I personally know three people in this group who recently came down with PCP," he said. "We have to realize that activism is not a prophylaxis against opportunistic infections; it may be synergistic with aerosolized pentamidine, but it won't on its own prevent you from getting AIDS." By referring to Freud's concept of the death drive, I am not saying anything so simple as that a drive to death directly prevents us from protecting ourselves against illness. Rather I am saying that by ignoring the death drive, that is, by making all violence external, we fail to confront ourselves, to acknowledge our ambivalence, to comprehend that our misery is also self-inflicted. To return to my example: it is not only New York City's collapsing health care system and its sinister health commissioner that affect our fate. Unconscious conflict can mean I do not wish to claim that the "right" decision is to be tested. AIDS activists insist quite 42. properly only on choice, and on making that choice viable through universally available health care. But problems of HIV testing are not only sociopolitical, they are also psychic. In "AIDS and Needless Deaths: How Early Treatment Is Ignored," Paul Harding Douglas and Laura Pinsky enumerate a number of barriers to early intervention in HIV disease, including lack of advocacy, lack of media coverage, lack of services, and, crucially, "The Symbolic Meaning of Early Intervention for the Individual." This final section of their paper provides a much-needed analysis of psychic resistance to taking the HIV antibody test. I wish to thank Paul Douglas and Laura Pinsky for making their paper available to me. 43. The successes of the AIDS activist movement are, unfortunately, never secure. In the late fall of 1989, during the transition from Ed Koch's mayoralty to that of David Dinkins, Stephen Joseph resigned his position as health commissioner. But not without a parting insult to those of us who had opposed his policies all along: once again, and now supposedly with the consensus of the New York City Board of Health, Joseph asked the state health department to collect the names of people who test HIV antibody positive and to trace and contact their sex partners and those with whom they shared needles.

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results may be that we may make decisions - or fail to make them -whose deadly too. And the rage we direct against Stephen Joseph, justified as it is, may function as the very mechanism of our disavowal, whereby we convince ourselves that we are making all the decisions we need to make. Again I want to be very clear: The fact that our militancy may be a means of dangerous denial in no way suggests that activism is unwarranted. There is no question but that we must fight the unspeakable violence we incur from the society in which we find ourselves. But if we understand that violence is able to reap its horrible rewards through the very psychic mechanisms that make us part with our rageof this society, then we may also be able to recognize -along our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness. Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.

Flaming Closets

MICHAEL MOON

In memoryof Jack Smith Lost in the woods around Cummington,Massachusetts,one summerafternoon in 1981, my friend Mark and I walked in endless circles and talked desultorily,exchangingfragmentsof our life stories.He told me the following anecdote by way of partiallyexplainingwhyhe had become sexuallyactive only late in youth. When he was twelve,he said, his motherwent out shoppingone Saturdayafternoonand lefthim and his two older brothers,who were thirteen and fourteen,at home by themselves.The oldest boy proposed theyhave what he called a Scheherazade party in their mother's absence, and the other two readilyfellin withthe plan. He had recentlybeen talkingabout whatsounded to each of themlikea funnyand possiblyexcitinggame of "playingharem,"and the boys decided to seize the opportunityto try it out. Giggling, they put on a Scheherazadeand launched intosimulphonographrecordof Rimsky-Korsakoff's taneous and uproariousstripteasesto the music. Once theywere undressed,one of the boys ran into their parents' room and returned with three of their mother's scarves, which they tied around their by now erect penises as they resumed theirhilarious"harem girl" dances. At thispoint theirmother,having realized she had forgottenher wallet,unexpectedlyreturnedhome. The three "dancing girls" found themselvessurprisedby a parental whirlingdervishwho shoutedand cursed at them,threwthe phonographrecord offthe turntable,and then, her furystill unvented, hurled a chair through one of the living-room windows.Mark said yearslaterthathe was so embarrassedand frightenedby the episode that he didn't again indulge in any formof sexual experimentation even solo masturbation- for nine years afterwards. To the question of why Mark's motherwas so upset and angrythere is of course no shortageof answersor explanations:a parent'sviolentresponsesto her pubescentsons' enactmentof theirsexuality;a woman's-a mother's-rage at a scene of the male sexualityby whichshe had long felt(if only unconsciouslyor inarticulately)oppressed; the blind homophobic furyof an at least nominally heterosexualwoman at the (to her) astonishinglycasual homosexual play of her

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three sons. It would have been littlecomfortto Mark and his brothers,and perhaps even less to theirmother,to have been told that theirbehavior in this situationparalleled in some strikingwaysthe plot of the most celebrated Scheherazade partyof themall, the 1910 Diaghilev-BalletsRusses production,but I thinkit is of considerableinterestto the studentof the dynamicsof homoeroticism and homophobia as constitutiveelementsof modern cultureto notice how aspects of the scenario of Diaghilev's influentialpseudo-orientalextravaganzain some ways correspond to Mark's story.In the Ballets Russes Scheherazade,the shah is told by his brotherthat he (the shah) is being duped by his wives,thatall to him.The shah,in a pet, pretendsto go offhunting,and of themare unfaithful leaves his chief wife,the sultana Zobeida, and the rest of the harem to themselves. As soon as he is gone, his wives receive their various "slave" lovers, Zobeida's being the so-called Golden Slave (one of Nijinsky'smost celebrated roles). The shah returnsunexpectedly,surprisinghis wiveswiththeirlovers,and, in a rage, orders hisjanissaries to slaughterthe whole group. In a scene awhirl withflashingscimitarsand fallingbodies, Zobeida holds herselfmotionless,until, seeing her lover killed,she stabsherselfto death. Her astonishedhusband bursts into tears,and the curtainfalls.' Diaghilev's Scheherazade, starring Nijinksy and the legendary Ida Rubinstein(as the "unfaithfulwife" Zobeida) and choreographedby Fokine,was one of the most famous premieresin an age of opening-nightcoups de theatre. Marcel Proust,who attended withthe composer and conductorReynaldo Hahn, his erstwhilelover,wroteafterwardsthatthe spectaclewas the mostbeautifulhe had ever seen.2 Peter Wollen, drawingon Edward Said's Orientalism and related workof PerryAndersonand Arno Mayer,has deftlyanalyzed the implicationsof culturalproductionssuch as Scheherazade,the fashions early twentieth-century and the social and political attitudesthey underwrote,and the they inspired fantasiesthatwere disseminatedthroughthem.3These latterincluded racistand 1. My discussionof the Ballets Russes Scheherazadeis indebtedto RichardBuckle's account of the planningand performanceof the ballet in his biographyNijinsky,New York, Simon and Schuster, 1971, especiallypp. 137-142. I wish to thankJonathanGoldberg and Eve KosofskySedgwick for theirencouragementand valuable suggestionsfor improvingearlier versionsof thisarticle,and the conveners of the conferenceon "The Closet" at Scripps College (December 1988) for the initial impetusfor undertakingthe project of whichthisarticle is a part. 2. PhilipKolb, ed., Lettres&ReynaldoHahn, Paris, 1956, p. 188; quoted in Buckle,pp. 141 - 142. 3. Wollen's articlehas been of crucial importanceto me in thinkingabout the kindsof continuities in gay male performancein the twentiethcenturythat I am consideringin thisproject; see his "Fashion/Orientalism/The Body," New Formations,no. 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 5-33. Dale Harris takes a more conventionallyconnoisseurialapproach to the subject of the culturalimpactof Ballets Russes orientalismin his "Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and the Vogue for Orientalism,"in The Artof Enchantment: Diaghilev'sBalletsRusses,1909-1929, compiledby Nancy Van Norman Baer, catalogue of an exhibitionheld at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1988, pp. 84-95. For accounts of the institutionof the harem thattend to deconstructWesternorientalizingfantasiesof it,see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis,Universityof MinnesotaPress, 1986; and Huda Shaarawi,Harem Years:TheMemoirsofan EgyptianFeminist, trans. and ed. Margot Badran, London, Virago Press, 1986.

GeorgesBarbier.Ida Rubinsteinand Vaslav Nijinskyin

Scheherazade.1912.

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imperialistfantasiesof whitebourgeois global dominationof "oriental" peoples, and depended, for the glamorous and erotic aura theyexuded for many white Europeans and Americans, on other fantasies,imbricated with them, about inhabitingenvironmentsof extremeopulence in whichthe membersof "master races" could enact withimpunity"forbidden" sexual impulseson the dominated bodies of others. Wollen focuseshis analysisof Scheherazadeon Leon Bakst'ssetand costume designs,which,historiansof fashionagree, revolutionizedconsumerperceptions throughoutthe bourgeois world. Bakst's use of brillianthues of blue and green and red and orange side by side was immediatelyimitatedin culturalproductions of all kinds,in painting,jewelry design, and interiordecoration. Cecil Beaton, then an acute young observerof the hautemonde,wroteof the Paris of 1910 in the aftermathof Scheherazadethat "a fashionworld thathad been dominatedby corsets, lace, feathersand pastel shades soon found itselfa seraglio of vivid colours, harem skirts,beads, fringesand voluptuousness."4"Fringes and voluptuousness"is suggestive:in the new seraglio"look" derivedfromBakst'sdesigns, signifiersof the ostensiblytrivialorder of bright-coloredshawls, beads, and "fringe"suddenlybecame ubiquitous,and includedwithintheirsemioticrangea "voluptuous fringe"thatlay,in a mannerof speaking,just the other side of the looking glass from their wearers' ordinarylives, a phantasmagoric"oriental" marginpopulated by lasciviousodalisques and theirslave lovers,jealous masters and theirterriblehousehold executioners.When the fashionableworld of 1910 donned turbans,"harem pants," orientalshawls,and beads in "shocking" quantitiesand color combinations,theycan be seen to have been participatingin a massfantasyofjoining a "voluptuousfringe"whereordinarysocial lifetook on a "barbaric splendor" and sexualityimaginarilyescaped the constraintsof bourgeois domesticlife and took on a "savage" and many-huedintensity. Riots did not break out at the premiere of Scheherazade -that famously happened to the Ballets Russes threeseasons later,at the firstnightof Le sacredu Violence was apparentlylargelyconfinedto the stage in Scheherazade, printemps. in the general slaughterthatfollowedthe shah's vengefulentryinto the scene of orgyin hisown harem. In his analysisof the potentimplicitpoliticaleffectsof the fashions-and not least of all the fashionsin fantasy- a spectacle like Scheherazade fostered,Wollen emphasizes the enormous impact of Bakst's designs on popular perceptions and attitudes in this century. Interested as I am in the in the modernepoch, I wantto consideranother historyof gay male subjectivity of of the fantasies" that "riot aspect convergedon Scheherazadeand thatit in turn reproduced and disseminated.Besides its fosterageof colonialistracistattitudes of the kind Wollen reads out of it, there are other significantwaysin whichthe repressiveviolence I have spoken of as being in one sense limitedto the space of the stage in Scheherazadeextended farbeyond it. The ones I want to emphasize 4.

Quoted in Wollen, p. 21.

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here are the misogynistand homophobic implicationsof the murderous disciplinaryviolence the piece symbolicallycarriedout on its "stars," Rubinsteinand Nijinsky,in theirrespectivecharactersof Zobeida and the Golden Slave. In a seriesof performancesaround the timeof Scheherazade,rangingfrom Saint Sebastian to Salome, Ida Rubinsteinpowerfullyenacted a series of finde sikclefantasiesabout the ostensibly"evil" potentialof variousmodes of behavior attributedto women in some of the dominantrepresentationalregimensof the turnof the century.These ranged fromphallic femininity (woman as castrator, femmefatale)to anorexic withdrawal(woman as victim,wraith).Self-styled high priestessof decadent performancein the earlyyearsof thiscentury,Rubinstein offeredto audiences sensationalspecularizationsof some of theirmost resonant fantasiesof genderconflict,includingsuch complex ones as her impersonationof a "feminized" (i.e., castrated)male in her role as the protagonistof d'Annunzio and Debussy's TheMartyrdom ofSaintSebastian(1911). SaintSebastianboasted,as had Scheherazadethe year before, not only Rubinstein'spresence but also the choreographyof Fokine and the set and costume designsof Bakst.5In his study Idols of Perversity Bram Dijkstra speaks of Rubinsteinas having served as "an ambulantfetishexpressiveof the ideologicallymanipulateddesiresof [her] sociof her poses on ety." He emphasizestwoof the possiblebases forthisfetishization the part of male viewers: Clearly,the fetishizedemaciationof iconic figuressuch as Rubinstein made it possible for males to respond to them in either a sadisticor masochisticfashion,depending on whethertheywere seen as subjects in controlof theirown destinies(and hence a threatto the aggressive of the men observingthem) or as ultrapassiveobjects of self-identity desire.6 aggressive Althoughhe analyzes lesbian artistRomaine Brooks's paintingof Rubinsteinat some length,Dijkstra limitshis considerationof the possible meanings of her career almost entirely to male-centered ones. The crucial element of Rubinstein'spublic persona that Dijkstra fails to consider is her position as a powerfulemblem forsome of her lesbian admirers(these appear in his textonly under the ratherbland designation"her women friends")of a willto exhaustthe was conceived in the entirerepertoryof binaryroles throughwhich femininity The 1911 avant-garde'ssubversionof prevailingreligious and sexual certaintieswas regis5. tered in, among other ways,the ban thatthe thenarchbishopof Paris placed on the performanceof The Martyrdom ofSaint Sebastian.Of the many reasons he mighthave put forwardfor thisban, he of the saintwiththe pagan god Adonis,and 2) the fact announced two: 1) d'Annunzio's identification that a male Christiansaint was to be played by a Jewishwoman. Despite the officialcondemnation, "the show wenton," to an only middlingsuccess; see AlfredFrankenstein'slinernotes for Leonard Bernstein'srecordingof the Martyrdom on Columbia Masterworksdiscs M2L 353/M2S 753. FantasiesofFeminineEvil in Fin-de-Sikcle 6. Culture,New York, Bram Dijkstra,Idols ofPerversity: Oxford UniversityPress, 1988, p. 53.

Ida Rubinsteinas St. Sebastian,1911. (Photo:Bert.)

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West. Placing predictable heterosexual male projections turn-of-the-century onto her performancesto one side, one can readilyimagine at least some of the ways that the more or less open secret of the lesbian sexualityshe figuredfor some membersof her audience (especially,we may assume, for lesbians themselves and forsome gay male admirers)contributedto the highlycharged atmosphereof her public appearances. For example, besides thoseaspectsof her work described by Dijkstra as being in some ways compatible with contemporary fantasiesof both extreme(phallic) femininepotencyand no less male-identified and exhibitionisticaspects of her extreme femininepassivity,the self-assertive workalso permittedher to presentherself,at least liminally,as botha subjectand an object of lesbian desire rendered visible to an extraordinarydegree. In her role as Zobeida in ScheherazadeRubinsteininitiallyfunctionsas a "threatening"embodimentof transgressivefemale heterosexual desire. But in the work's famousending, which manymembersof its firstaudience, including Fokine,seem to have founditsmostoverwhelminggesture,Rubinstein'smotionless stanceamidstthe scene of massacrearound her seems to have representedan almost unbearablyambiguouslycharged moment.For the duration of thatprolonged moment Zobeida resistsenacting either her rage at her husband and masteror her griefover the slaughterof her lover and her other companions, and instead gathers to herself the storm of energy swirlingaround her by temporarilybut nonethelessforcefullyadopting the positionand appearance of being its stillcenter. Only a modicum of these tensionsare resolved by the abrupt gesturewith which Zobeida shattersher powerfulbut unsustainablepose: stabbingherselfto death. The performativeenergiesof Rubinstein'srepertoryof symbolicrolesthe male-identifiedpotent castrator(Judith) and violated suicide (Lucrece) as well as those of possible subject and object of lesbian desire-collapse incoherentlyas Zobeida, the temporaryimaginaryembodimentof all these roles, falls dead. Similarly,the positions-of being tremendouslyempowered and being oppressed literallyto death- betweenwhichRubinsteinrapidlyoscillatedin the climacticmomentsof Scheherazadeare leftunresolvedin the case of her gay male counterpart,Nijinsky,when, after an extraordinaryenactment of flightand defiance, his "slave" character is seized and executed. "How odd it is that Nijinskyshould always be the slave in your ballets," Diaghilev's friend and musical adviser Walter Nouvel quipped to the impresarioat the time Scheherazade was being planned. "I hope one day you'll emancipate him."'7Of course, Diaghilev never did, and Nijinsky'sstruggleto emancipate himselfwas to all appearances an excruciatingfailure. He was to break offhis relationshipwith Diaghilev in 1913 and to stop dancing publiclyaltogetherby 1919, thereafterto live on in confinement,diagnosed as schizophrenic,until 1950. At the time of Scheherazade,however,he was stillsuccessfullynegotiating 7.

Quoted in Buckle, p. 124.

Ida Rubinsteinas Zobeidain Scheherazade, 1910. (Photo:Bert.)

Nijinskyas the Golden Slave in Scheherazade, 1911. (Photo:Baron Aldolphede Meyer.)

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the powerfulprojectionsof sexual contradictiononto his performancesthatare set of theseare of his as notablean aspect of the recordof his career as a different colleague Rubinstein's.8Fokine, for example, praised the way the dancer's "peculiar" "lack of masculinity"made him the perfectinterpreterof the role of the Golden Slave. "Now he was a half-human,half-feline animal,softlyleaping great distances,now a stallion,"Fokine writesin a characteristicevocationof Nijinsky's supposed resolutionof highlycharged contradictionsin his performances,in his body, and his dancing.9Both subhuman and superhuman,he is simultaneously perceivedas an effeminatecat and a tremendousstud,but not as "masculine" in any ordinarysense. Fokine presentshis decisionto eliminateordinary"masculinity" fromthe expressiverange of Nijinsky'sdancing in Scheherazadeas an inevitable consequence of what he saw as the peculiar strengthsof Rubinstein'simperious appearance, and he does so witha stunningnon sequitur. "Next to the very tall Rubinstein,"he writes,"I feltthat [Nijinsky]would have looked ridiculous had he acted in a masculinemanner." The astonishingsuccessof Scheherazadeno doubt had more than a littleto do withthe extraordinaryenergywithwhichit found terms for specularizing- rendering both visible and spectacular- the "scandals" of the sexualities of its two stars and of their respective ways of revealing and concealing these in performance.Fokine to the contrary,much more complicatedrelationshad to be "adjusted" between the two principalsin Scheherazadethan Rubinstein's height in comparison with Nijinsky'srelative shortness:the whole array of conflictingsexual projectionsthat could be made onto them and theirperformanceshad to be broughtinto effectiverelation to each other. The main outline at least of the Scheherazadescenario as it was eventually performed by the Ballets Russes had been the idea of artist and theatrical designerAlexandre Benois, and he afterwardwroteof Nijinsky'sperformancein termsremarkablysimilarto Fokine's "half-this,half-that"ones: impersonating the Golden Slave, Benois said, Nijinskyhad become in rapid turns "half-cat, half-snake,fiendishlyagile, feminine and yet wholly terrifying."'0As with Rubinstein'sperformance,but in ratherdifferent terms,Nijinsky'swas perceived as being both intenselyphallic and no less intensely"feminine." The most significantdifferencebetween the affectiverangesof Rubinstein'sand Nijinsky's performancesis thatwhile her role permittedher to enact a fairlywide range of positions,includingcertainones thatwere deemed "masculine," it was precisely these "ordinary" masculine positionsthat were excluded from Nijinsky'srole. 8. Besides markinghis performancein Scheherazade,the year 1910 also marksthe beginningof Nijinsky'smost productiveperiod as a choreographer;it was then that he began to formulatethe projects which would issue in 1912-13 in his three great inaugural modernistballets,L'apres-midi d'un faune,Jeux,and Le sacre du printemps. For a recentassessmentof Nijinsky'sachievementsas a choreographer,see Lynn Garafola, "Vaslav Nijinsky,"Raritan, vol. 8, no. 1 (Summer 1988), pp. 1-27. 9. Quoted in Buckle, p. 141. 10. Ibid.

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What Fokine calls Nijinsky's"peculiar" "lack of masculinity"- the constant interplayin his most characteristicperformancesof flashesof hypervirileand hyperfeminineeffects,which make sensational impressionsbut can never be gottento "add up" to "ordinary" masculinity- representsthe piece's powerful negativeelectricalcharge,at itsopposite pole fromthe positivecharge the piece locates in Rubinstein'spower to enact "masculinity,"at least liminally,alongside other performativemodes. Judgingfromavailable contemporarydescriptionsof the performance,one does not get the sense that there was any momentin Nijinsky'sperformancein which he was permittedto signal anythinglike Rubinstein's "majestic" and overwhelminggesture of prolonged motionless resistance to the murderous violence that furiouslymanifestsitselfin the piece's last scene. The strain of being a visibleand intenselymystifiedembodimentof the open secret of male homosexualityin Paris and London in the decade or two after the epochal downfalland death of Oscar Wilde no doubt playeda significant partin whatwas diagnosed as Nijinsky'sschizophrenicdisintegrationin his late twenties,at the end of World War I." Rubinstein,as the daughter and heiress of a rich St. Petersburg family,was able to use her successes with the Ballets Russes as Cleopatra and Zobeida to launch herselfas a starin subsequentproductionsthat she herself financed; as I have said, Nijinsky'sattemptsto become similarly autonomous were a disastrousfailure for a varietyof reasons, not the least of which, I suspect, was the relation of his fame to the specularization of the imputed "lack of masculinity"thatrestrictedhim to the marginsof identitiesof which "ordinarymasculinity"was an indispensablecomponent. Between Diaghilev's, Nijinsky's,Rubinstein's,and Bakst's "Scheherezade party"of 1910 and Mark's and his brothers'of the early 1960s lies a half-century in which the constructionof gay male subjectivityon a number of frontshas - and sometimesterrible- consistencies.2Some of the exhibitedsome striking mosteffectiveformsof resistanceto homophobicoppressionthat gay men have developed and practiced during the same period have shown a similarkind of consistency.One of these has been the sometimeselaboratelyplanned, sometimes spontaneouslyperformed "Scheherazade party," staged over and over again in thiscenturyin locationsrangingfromthe theaterof the belle epoque to, 11. Joan Acocella writesbrieflybut perceptivelyof the way Nijinskywas cast throughouthis career in roles in which he was either "somethingother than human: a puppet, a god, a faun, the specter of a rose," or, if human, not so in any ordinarysense, but always in either a reduced or excessive way: "a slave, an androgyne,or some other object of sexual connoisseurship."See her article "Vaslav Nijinsky,"in The ArtofEnchantment, p. 110. For a historyof gay and lesbianpoliticalorganizingand resistancein the threedecades before 12. Stonewall, see John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics,Sexual Communities:The Making of a Homosexual in theUnitedStates,1940-1970, Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press, 1983. Eve Kosofsky Minority oftheCloset(forthcomingfromthe Universityof CaliforniaPress) providesa Sedgwick'sEpistemology searching theoreticalexploration of the ways in which an endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definitionhas structured/fractured Westernculture in the twentiethcentury.

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in hisMonteCarlohotelroom.c. 1913. Nijinsky (Photo:IgorStravinsky.) fifty yearslater,a suburbanAmericanlivingroom. Rather than dismissingit as trivial,I want to insiston its having been an importantaspect of the widely variousrepertoryof politicalacts gay men have practicedand by means of which we have resistedthiscentury'sdepradationsagainstus. I take the "Scheherazade party"--the conspicuousenergieswithwhichit is enacted as well as the phobic violence withwhichit is repressed,violence of eitherthe explosivevarietythat Mark experiencedor the corrosivekindthatgraduallydisabled Nijinsky-as an emblematicexpressionof a perilouslyhighlycharged compromise,the energies of whichboth "sides" in the ongoing war for and against gay visibility, homoexploitingformostof thiscentury. phobic and homophile,have been effectively

JackSmith,who died of AIDS on September 18, 1989, was one of the most accomplishedand influentialbut leastknownproducersof theextremelytheatricalized, denselymaterialistversionof urban gay male social and artisticpractice whichhas to thispointbeen recognized,studied,and theorizedchieflyunder the

31

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(Photo:Frederick Eberstadt.) JackSmith. extremelyreductiverubricof "camp."'3 In 1962 JackSmiththrewa "Scheherazade party"thathas probablyhad more politicaland artisticimpact,at least in the English-and French-speakingworlds,than any since the Ballets Russes's of yearsbefore.Filmingforseven consecutiveweekendson the roofof an old fifty movie theater,since demolished,on the Lower East Side of Manhattan,Smith 13. EveryoneinterestedinJackSmith'sworkin filmand performanceis indebtedto StefanBrecht and J. Hoberman for theireffortsin preservingat least some aspects of Smith'sextremelyfugitive accountsof Smith'sworkfrom1961 to 1977 performanceart. Brechtgivesa numberof informative in his valuable studyQueer Theatre,Frankfurt,Suhrkamp,1978, pp. 10-27 and 157-177. Hoberman surveysSmith's performancesduring the same period in his article "The Theatre of Jack Smith," The Drama Review,vol. 23, no. 1 (March 1979), pp. 3-12. For furtherinformationabout Smithand his performances,see Jonas Mekas's July 1970 VillageVoicearticle,"JackSmith,or the End of Civilization," reprintedin Mekas's MovieJournal: The Rise of a New AmericanCinema, 1959-1971, New York, Collier Books, 1972, pp. 388-397. Film scholar Karel Rowe, who worked brieflyas Smith'sassistantduring the summerof 1972, providesusefulinformationabout Smith's in hisbook TheBaudelaireanCinema:A Trendwithin filmperformancesas wellas a Smithfilmography theAmericanAvant-Garde,Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1982. Joan Adler, in a piece entitled "On Location," gives an impressionistic account of the makingof NormalLove,the unfinishedfilm in StephenDwoskin'sFilmIs: TheInternational Free projectSmithundertookafterFlamingCreatures, Cinema,Woodstock,New York, Overlook Press, 1975, pp. 11-21.

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1962(through FlamingCreatures. page35). JackSmith. and a group of friends,apparelledin variouskindsof drag- "harem," vampire, MarilynMonroe-enacted forthe camera a seriesof scenes froman imaginary transvestite orgy.They swayedto unheardmusic,"vamped" each other,casually and unhurriedlyexposed partsof theirbodies--here a femalebreast,therethe limp penis of one revelercasuallydraped over the shoulder of another seated beforehim. Smithedited the results,added a soundtrackof old 78s of German tango bands and Latin Americanpop songs,and screenedthe filmin the spring of 1963 under the titleFlamingCreatures."4 It provoked a violentresponse. A 14. For mostof the timethe filmhas existed,it has been even moredifficult to see Flaming Creatures work.Neveravailableforscreening thanis usualforan "underground" beyonda very fromcirculation ofalternative smallcircuit venues,thefilmseemsto havebeenwithdrawn bySmith on thepartofeveryone itsmisreception bytheearly1970sinangryreactionto whathe considered of fromtheNewYorkPoliceDepartment toSusanSontag.Smithwasantagonistic towritten analyses andtheyarehostile hiswork;hismostfrequently hasbeen,"Filmcritics arewriters quotedutterance and uneasyin thepresenceofa visualphenomenon" (quoted,forexample,in Rowe,Baudelairean commitment tohisfilm's Cinema, beingseenratherthanbeingmade p. xiii).GivenSmith'spassionate itis morethanironic,itisdeeply to serveas gristforthemillofwhathe sawas pseudo-controversy,

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small coterie of admirers,includingJonas Mekas and Susan Sontag, praised radical filmpractice Smithforhelpinginauguratea new sexuallyand artistically film's in this country.Other viewers enjoyed the dreamy insouciance about but attackedit. Theaters that and hated and mattersof sexuality gender, many filmwere seized by the Creatures were and of the showed Flaming raided, prints New York police. A few favorablepublishedresponsesaside, the historyof the receptionof the filmhas amounted in large part to a historyof the effortto suppressit,both here and abroad. A printof the filmwas seized by U.S. customs unfortunatethatFlamingCreatureshas, owing to its general unavailability,"lived on" to the extent thatit has largelyin the formof writtendescriptionsof it. On the subjectof the generalsuppression of many of the most radical examples of "underground" filmof the 1960s, see David E. James's eloquent prefatorystatementto his recenthistoryof noncommercialAmericanfilmof thatdecade, AllegoriesofCinema:AmericanFilm in theSixties,Princeton,PrincetonUniversityPress, 1979, p. ix. Among publisheddescriptionsof FlamingCreatures,the followingare particularlyuseful:P. Adams Sitney,VisionaryFilm: The AmericanAvant-Garde1943-1978, second edition, New York, Oxford UniversityPress, 1979, pp. 354-357; Rowe, Baudelairean Cinema,pp. 49-50.

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as it was being returnedfroma screeningin Vancouver, and showingsin Ann Arbor and Austin were "busted" by local police in the late '60s. Film scholar Karel Rowe screenedthe filmat Northwesternin 1972 and unexpectedlyfound himselfthe object of a mini-riotas infuriated"jock" students,disappointedin theirexpectationsof seeing an ordinaryporn film,pounded on the projection booth and demanded refunds.'5 Smith stopped releasing filmsonly a few years after Flaming Creatures, professingdisgustthat,as he put it, his wittyand beautiful"comedy" had been reduced to a banal "sex issue of the CocktailWorld."16Ironically,Susan Sontag about whichshe wrotea became in a sense more "famous" forFlamingCreatures, Rowe describeshis travailsin attemptingto show FlamingCreaturesin BaudelaireanCinema, 15. pp. xi- xii; Hoberman discussesthe prosecutionof FlamingCreaturesand otherundergroundfilmsof the period (chieflyJean Genet's Un chantd'amourand Kenneth Anger's ScorpioRising)in his and JonathanRosenbaum's MidnightMovies,New York, Harper and Row, 1983, pp. 59-61. 16. Smithmade thischargeagainsthiscriticsin his 1973 VillageVoicereviewofJohnWaters'sPink Flamingos.Brechtquotes it in Queer Theatre,p. 26n.

35

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laudatoryand defensivereviewin the Nation in 1964, than did its maker,Jack Smith.For everypersonwho actuallysaw Smith'sfilm,perhapsa hundredknow it only from Sontag's descriptionof it. Sontag's often cited essay "Notes on Camp" appeared (in Partisan Review)the same year as the FlamingCreatures review;and fromthe vantage point of twenty-five yearsaftertheirfirstappearance, one may well be struckrereading her essays by the extreme degree to which theydepoliticizethe sexual and artisticpracticesthat are theirsubjects. For example, Sontag praises Flaming Creaturesfor its "joy and innocence" ("Flaming Creaturesis that rare modern work of art: it is about joy and innocence"), and while I can see speakingof it as a joyousfilm,the otherhalfof the formulationmakesone wantto paraphraseMae West: "innocencehad nothingto do with it.""7 Flaming Creaturesnot only exemplifiesa remarkablerange of 17. Sontag saysFlamingCreatures"is aboutjoy and innocence" in her essay"JackSmith'sFlaming New York, Farrar,Straus,and Giroux, 1966, p. 229. Creatures,"reprintedin AgainstInterpretation, account Possiblepoliticalmeaningsand consequencesget thoroughlyelided fromSontag's influential of Smith's film,which,according to her, simplyeschews moralizingin order to occupy a purely

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experience and sophisticationabout the wayspeople inhabitgender and sexuality,it also manifestsan acutely intelligentpoliticalawareness and engagement. The makerof FlamingCreaturesknew how to make a culturalproduct "guaranteed" to explode closets, he knew where and how to detonate it, and he was aware thatsettingpeople's closetson fireis not simplya liberatoryact: inevitably, some people would get burned, including,quite possibly,the incendiariesthemselves. Settingclosetson firein the way thata numberof writersand filmmakers includingSmith did throughoutthe decade leading up to the Stonewall rebellion, not for the homophobic purpose of intentionallyinjuringor destroying theirinhabitantsbut in order to bring more people out, to tryto put an end to the institutionof the closet itself,was a serious and dangerous politicalproject. Exploding the closet by making"outrageous" foraysagainstthe heterosexual monopoly on filmicrepresentationwas in Smith's work not unrelated to otherpoliticalactivitieshe advocated and practiced,such as his resistanceto what he called "landlordism,"the ruinousremakingof Manhattanin the image of real estate interestsin the 1970s and '80s, and his commitmentto tending and arrangingthe large collectionof "trash" thathe assembled and used as his basic performancematerial.Smithtriedto get theateraudiences to put themselvesin the place of New York City's homeless twentyyears before others did: for his CapitalismofAtlantis(1965), he wantedspectatorsbroughtin blindfoldedwhilea loud recorded voice exhorted them to imagine themselvespassed out from exhaustion on a hot sidewalk and being assaulted by cops and dragged into custody.'" Smithalso had utopian ideas about the "trash" culture he saw us as interviewthat "in the inhabiting;he told Sylvere Lotringer in a Semiotext(e) middle of the city should be a repositoryof objects that people don't want anymore,which they should take to this giant junkyard. . . . This center of unused objectswould become a centerof intellectualactivity.Things would grow up around it."'9 Smith's firstperformancepiece, a "nightclubact" he did in aesthetic "space": "The space in which Flaming Creaturesmoves is not the space of moral ideas, whichis where Americancriticshave traditionallylocated art. What I am urgingis thatthere is not only moral space, by whose laws Flaming Creatureswould indeed come off badly; there is also aestheticspace, the space of pleasure. Here Smith's filmmoves and has its being" ("Jack Smith's FlamingCreatures,"p. 231). Sontag similarlywritesin "Notes on Camp": "Jewspinned theirhopes for integratinginto modern societyon promotingthe moral sense. Homosexuals have pinned their integrationintosocietyon promotingthe aestheticsense. Camp is a solventof morality.It neutralizes moral indignation,sponsorsplayfulness"("Notes on Camp," in AgainstInterpretation, p. 290). The problem with such extreme and extremelyreductive hypostatizationsis that moral and aesthetic practicescannot be rendered stable,plainlydisjunct"spaces" or "senses"; categoriesand categorical dyads such as Jewishmoral seriousnessversusgay "playfulness"fall explanatorilyflat,especiallyin viewof the subsequenthistoryof these two groupsin the quarter-century since Sontag's essay,during whichtime manyof her New York Jewishliberal intellectualconfreresof the mid-to late '60s have turnedneoconservativeand gayshave been engaged in a seriesof politicalstrugglesthathave forthe most part been anythingbut "playful." 18. Hoberman, "The Theatre of Jack Smith," p. 4. 19. Quoted in Ibid., p. 6.

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37

collaboration with filmmakerKen Jacobs in Provincetownin 1961, was called The Human WreckageReview.20For the almost thirtyremaining years of his career, Smithwas involved in a fiercelyunsentimentalproject of reclaiminghis own and other queer people's energies(all kindsof queer people, includinggay ones) from the myriadformsof human wreckage into which our society has tended to channel it. In 1967, near what was to be the end of the period of his most intense involvementwith film,not only as a filmmakerbut also as perhaps the most frequentlyfeatured performerin underground filmduring that movement's mostproductivedecade, Smithwas asked in an interviewwhat pleasure he had taken in his filmperformances."I never could affordpsychoanalysis,"he answered,and wenton to say, ". .. it was verybrave of me to take psychoanalysis in thatform.'"21The replyis in one sense instantlyrecognizableas a bit of period humor, but I propose to take it as more than that; I wish to affirmSmith's judgment that he "was verybrave" to attemptto carryout a self-analysis-one fromwhichI believe manyother people in comparablymarginalsituationswho have seen his work, or that of his imitators,have benefited- in a public and highlyimprovisatorymanner, rather than the private and privileged circumstances under which analysisis normallycarried out. As he treatsall his other performancesas opportunitiesfor "acting out," so does Smith treat the filmjournal interviewas yetanothervenue forboth enactingand examiningcommon anxieties-common, at least,to people like him,thenand since, experimenting with renegotiating their wholly or partially closeted artistic and political existences. To a question in the same interviewabout his plans for the immediate future,Smithrepliesnot withthe statementabout new projectsin the offingthat the interviewerexpects,but withthe wistful,pseudo-personalutterance,"Well, I have got to tryto pull myselftogether.'"22 The comedy of the director/filmstar who is so neurotic,so hysterically self-absorbed,thathe compulsivelyrespondsto answersfitsthe alter"public" interviewingwith "private" psychotherapy-style nately glacially ironic and self-distancingbut also aggressively"deviant" and exhibitionisticmilieu of New York pop culture of the '60s, a culture that first centered around Smith but soon shiftedto Warhol. It maybe usefulto interrogatethe kindsof attributionsthathave generally been made to Smith and his work- "playfulness"and "innocence" as well as -in order better to understand how his simple "irony" and "self-mockery" and after the period in which he made and/or career, performance during starredin numerousfilms,representsan alternativeto psychoanalytic theoryand therapy-in some ways consonantand in other ways in strongconflictwithit. 20. 21. 22.

Ibid., p. 4. Gerard Malanga, "InterviewwithJack Smith," Film Culture,no. 45 (1967), p. 15. Ibid., p. 14.

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However "playful"one maychoose to take Smith'sundeniablyironicrelationto hisown performancesto be, I thinkit is also undeniablethathiscareer represents a highlyserious,perhaps in some waysa painfullyoverserious,attemptto work out an exemplaryrole for himselfand otherson the sexual and artisticfringes. Asked in the interviewjust quoted what kind of filmroles he mightlike to play that he had not yet done, Smith replied, "Well, I think I would like to play . . . Christ.But . . . maybe I never will-maybe the interesthas all gone out of that,or maybe it would be too repetitiousof Dracula" (in Andy Warhol's filmversion of which he had recentlystarredas "Batman-Dracula").23Smith's fleetingequation of the role of Christwiththatof Dracula is an interestingone, but more interestingformypresentpurposes is a shiftin tone atjust thispointin his remarks:"But anywaythe world could use a new idea-a new Christimage, and it would be funto sortof workthatout." This pronouncementwas no doubt made at least partlytongue in cheek, but,just kiddingor not, the remarkhas a magniloquence of a kind that has oftenbeen associated withdelusion--in the offhandmanner in which Smith speaks of giving"the world . . . a new Christ image" as a secondarycareer goal, as somethingthat "would be fun to sort of work . . . out," ifand when he getsaround to it. The extremelycasual, possibly facetious,messianicintentionsSmithexpresseshere maywell remindthe student of gay male subjectivityin this centuryof other, more fatefulengagements and self-representabetween the "image" of Christand gay self-identifications tions. (Nijinsky,for example, engaged in extensive debate with himselfas to whether he was or was not Christ in the diary he kept at the time of his breakdown,the crisisthatmarkedthe end of hisperformingcareer and theonset when he of his ostensiblemadness.)24Far fromabandoninghispublic self-analysis ceased to make films,Smithcontinuedin his subsequentworkas a performance artistto "act out" fantasiesof his imaginaryidentitiesas well as critiquesof these fantasies. One should not conclude a discussionof the imaginaryidentitiesthat are most importantto the performancesin FlamingCreatures,as well as to Smith's performancesin such other filmsas Warhol's Batman-Dracula,withoutconsidering the figureof the vamp and the practice of vamping.The very termvamp, which came into wide circulationaround the beginningof World War I, proclaims its derivationfromvampire,a word and a mythwhich circulated wildly throughmass culture in the aftermathof the success of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and its numerous stage and filmversions.The reasons for the possibly strongresonanceof the figureof the vampireforthe youngperson who comes to self-awarenessin the closet (as almostall young gay people probablystilldo) are obvious: like Dracula, gay youngstersare driven by desires they may at least 23. Ibid., p. 15. Romola Nijinsky,ed., The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky,Berkeley,Universityof CaliforniaPress, 24. 1968. See, for example, pp. 29, 51, 120, 175.

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39

it.. . ........ T ,i::-:i::::A V -1:::: tic I ..... .... O

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initiallyperceiveas secret,forbidden,and even monstrousin theeyesof others.25 Reasons for the persistenceof the figureof the vamp in gay subcultureslong afterits generaldisappearancefrommainstreammass cultureare also not farto seek. The vamp, a figureof which Theda Bara was in her brief career the film prototypicalperformer(she enacted the vamp in some fortyfeature-length vehicles between 1915 and 1919), was an exotic woman who preyed on and Norine Dresser discussesthe reasons for the general appeal of the figureof the vampireto 25. adolescents: "Teenagers findthe vampire fascinatingbecause the vampireis usuallyan unwilling new desires and victimof a bodily change he cannot control,a change that bringson frightening cravings,a change that sets him apart fromthe societyhe has knownand makes him an outsider" New York, Norton, 1989, p. 146). "Normal" (AmericanVampires:Fans, Victimsand Practitioners, adolescentanxietiesof the kindDresserdescribesare of course compounded whenthe youngperson in question is gay. Surely some of the power of the vamp/vampirecomedy aspect of Flaming Creaturesderivesfromthe intensityof these anxietiesin what may seem like the archaic past in the livesof gay viewersof the film.Smithhad "rehearsed" forFlamingCreaturesby playing"The Fairy Vampire" in a brief 1961 filmcollaborationwithKen Jacobs called The Death ofP'town.

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ruinedmen.26The sociallyand sexuallymarginalmilieuthatgave rise to Smith's withthe vamp film,from filmpracticeand otherslike it givesit markedaffinities A Fool ThereWas (1915), which starredBara and inauguratedthe subgenre,to Blood and Sand (1922), starringNita Naldi and Rudolph Valentino. Thierryde Duve has noted thisof Warhol's early films,whichin thisrespectderive directly from Smith's filmsand from Warhol's formativeinterestand participationin them. De Duve writes,"Warhol didn't evolve in the plasticworld of stars,but in the demimonde of vamps. His cinema plays out the bland dreams of 1950s Hollywood only to materialize the terror that the Hollywood of the '20s still knew how to signal.""27Part of the "terror" that Smith's and Warhol's films revive is the widespread fear, in a misogynisticand homophobic culture, of recognizingsome women's and gay men's high level of success at the exemplary modernurban practiceof "cruising,"of attractingsexual attentionand response frompossiblepartnersthrougha command of body language, especiallythrough the directionof a powerful,desirous-lookinggaze. Judgingfromthe intensely negativereactionsof manyviewersof FlamingCreatures,images of Smith'sface, or that of his sometime star Mario Montez, gazing out at the viewer through layers of mascara and eyeshadow, scarves and veils, elicited somethingof the same fascinated but phobic response that Bara's and Naldi's had fiftyyears before,when theyfirstsignaledfora massaudience the possibilityof therebeing sexuallycommandingwomen. That there could be sexuallyconfidentand commanding gay men, ratherthan only disfiguredand abject victimsof the closet, was powerfullymanifestedin Smith'sand Warhol's films,and the strikingenactmentof thispossibilityin some of thesefilmsmaywell have renewedthe "terror" of vamps-this time of openly gay male ones-that had disturbed and enthralledmanyviewersearlierin the century,whenthe "ravenous" and supposedly irresistiblegaze of the vamp was firstbroughtin offthe street,so to speak, and developed into a classic cinematiccode. Smith's performancepractice derives in obvious ways from some of the most excessive momentsof early film- the screen personalitiesof Bara, Naldi, and Valentino and the (to our eyes) deliciouslyand absurdly overstaged and overacted "orgy scenes" of whichthe "Babylonian" sequence of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance(1916) is perhaps the mostnotable example. Part of the success of the assaulton the closetSmith'sworkmakes is a consequence of the virtuosicfluency withwhichhe negotiatesthe undulatingwaves of images not onlyacross genders but also across "perversions."Successfullynegotiatingjust such perilous performative modes-as Rubinsteinin her time seems to have found ways of doing See Chapter III, "The Vampire," in Sumiko Higashi, Virgins,Vamps,and Flappers: The 26. AmericanSilentMovieHeroine,Montreal,Eden Press, 1978, fora compactand informativeaccount of the cult of the filmvamp ca. 1915-22. 27. Thierryde Duve, "Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected,"October,no. 48 (Spring 1989), p. 13.

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NormalLove, 1963. MarioMontezinJackSmith's Eberstadt.) (Photo:Frederick while Nijinskydid not-Smith and other featuredperformersin FlamingCreaaround and througha whole repertory turesmove insouciantlyand triumphantly of proscribedbehaviors--transgressionswhichit would be reductiveto describe as simply"transvestite,"since a man's wearingfemininegarb is onlyone of the numerous culturallyenforced "police lines" Smith's performancesfrequently cross.Smithseemsto have performedthe rolesof the "sheik" or the(presumably male) "vampire" at least as frequentlyas he did those of the "vamp" or "harem girl" in '60s films.He playedall theseroles,and directedothersto play them,in their relationsto the heterosexualizedrepresentational ways that short-circuit from which regimes they derive. What is compelling about these figuresin Smith's filmsis not the sheik's enactment of virilityor the harem girl's of nor is it simplythe reversalof these roles, as it mightbe if Smith's femininity; were simplyanother version of traditionaltransvestitecomedy. To underestimateor dismissthe real eroticappeal Smith's"comedies" have had formanygay viewersis to ignore the primarysource of theirpower: his filmsare incitements

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to his audience not onlyto play fastand loose withgender roles but also to push harder against prevailingconstraintson sexuality.It thereforeseems wrong to say, as Stefan Brecht does, that "Smith does not confrontheterosexualitywith any other kind of sexuality:sexualityis identifiedas heterosexuality. . . . Homosexualityis a substitute,and Smith'sart is not homosexual but transvestite."28 The problemwithBrecht'sformulationlies in itsreductiverepresentationof the sexual-politicallandscape fromthe '60s forward;in thislandscape, the development of behavioral and representationalcodes for being gay or queer in ways other than those derived fromheterosexualmodes of behavior and representation has been an ongoing project on a number of fronts.When commentators assertof the transgressiveperformancepracticesof the '60s, as Brechtdoes, that "the queerness of queerness is that it is asexual,"29 they fail to recognize that eroticcharges in a work like FlamingCreaturesdo not followhard-wiredgender lines, but move powerfullyacross circuitsof gender and sexual identityin not altogetherpredictablefashions.30

From its inceptionSmith'sfilmpracticeseems to have derived much of its energy from his identificationwith the movie star and belated vamp Maria Montez, and fromwhat he saw as her identificationwiththe definitivelykitsch epics she acted in during her briefbut stellar ten-yearfilmcareer--the same lengthas Smith'sof two decades later,as it turned out. Smith,like manyother gay men of his generation, was particularlyfascinatedby the five Universal Studios vehicles in which Montez starredwiththe athleticbut wooden leading manJon Hall: ArabianNights,WhiteSavage,Ali Baba and theFortyThieves,Sudan, and, above all, Cobra Woman,where Montez played twin"queens of thejungle," one good, one evil."3Smithbegan his career collaboratingwithKen Jacobs,and theirearliestjoint effortappears to have been a filmcalled LittleCobraDance (the third part of SaturdayAfternoon Blood Sacrifice:TV Plug: Little Cobra Dance, in which dressed as an "exotic" Spanish lady,launches into a wild Smith, 1957), dance, falls down, and is questioned by the police-"the last being an actual event incorporatedinto the film.'"32So earlyin Smith'scareer did the acting-out 28. Brecht,Queer Theatre,p. 177n. Ibid. 29. 30. To be fairto Brecht,one should notice thatwhilehis attemptsto theorizeSmith'spracticecan be crude (as when he collapses homosexualityinto heterosexualityand consignsSmith'sart simplyto his descriptionsand observationsof Smith'sworkand thatof other "queer artists"are transvestism), more precise than anyone else's; forexample, he is the only commentatorI have read who remarks focus,the mock-rapeof a female charactercarried out in that for all its apparent male-transvestite one episode of FlamingCreaturesculminatesin a scene of lesbian affectionand consolation(Brecht, Queer Theatre,p. 25n.). 31. Maria Montez's other greatestadmireris Myra Breckinridge,who comes to inhabitMontez's body in the penultimatechaptersof Gore Vidal's Myron,New York, Random House, 1974. 32. Quoted in Rowe's filmographyof Ken Jacobs in Baudelairean Cinema,pp. 125- 126.

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of a pseudo-exotictransvestism, combined witha manic performanceof celebrationand a no less manicperformanceof failure("launches intoa wilddance" and "falls down"), and culminatingin ritual encounters with the police, establish themselvesas the central "business" of Smith'sperformances. The small body of writingSmith published is, however transgressiveits content,usuallygrammaticallyand syntactically conventional,so it may well be worthnotingthe occasional sentencewhichdoes not conformto standard,as in the followingpassage fromhis 1962 - 63 essay "The PerfectFilmicAppositeness of Maria Montez": ". .. (Beforea mirroris a place) is a place whereit is possible to clown, to pose, to act out fantasies,to not be seen while one gives (Movie sets are sheltered,exclusiveplaces where nobody who doesn't belong can go) . . ."3S The repetitionhere, and the sentence's incoherent-looking movementinto and out of parentheses,may seem meaningless--may, even if noticed, be easily erroror at best a compositional ignored,subliminallyregisteredas a typesetting complexitynot worth puzzling out. Consider, however, that somethingworth noticingmay be going on. This sentence, convoluted and incomplete as it in some waysis, may be taken to be a particularlycompellingstatementof Smith's idea, the subject of the essay,of the "perfectappositeness"of performanceslike Maria Montez's and his own to what he sees as the most powerfulartisticand politicalpotentialsof film.The "place" being somewhatobscurelysituatedin this difficultsentence is one "before a mirror,"where one can see oneself without being seen by anyone else-a place somehow analogous with (or "perfectly apposite" to) the "sheltered,exclusive" movie set of Smith's fantasies,"where nobody who doesn't belong can go." One way of reading thisis to imagine that thesetwo "apposite" spaces, the one as smallas a mirrorand the otheras large as a movieset,definethe liminalhorizonsof the closetas Smithsees them.("What's largerthana mirrorbut smallerthana movieset?The closet.") A betterquestion may be: Is a closet as big as UniversalStudios in the '40s (home of the closed set of Smith's Montez fantasies)stilla closet? Can the closet be made to cease being one if/whenits bounds are extended beyond a certainpoint? If so, what is that point?If the closetis the place one visitsor inhabitsin order not "to . . . be seen while one gives," as Smith puts it, how can what is, in the space of the closet, intransitivized into objectless "giving" be retransitivized-into givingwhat?in? out? "head"? "the finger"?pleasure? performances?For Smith,the camera is only a more complex kind of mirror,and if the mirroris sometimesthe only can functionas an piece of furniturein a closet,the mirror-extended-as-camera onto onto of all kinds of streets, discouropening two-way transitivity officially or or varieties. aged prohibited persecuted The apparent wide-opennessof the circuitsof pleasure which energized Maria Montez's performancesfor herselfas well as for her fans made her an 33. JackSmith,"The PerfectFilmicAppositenessof Maria Montez," FilmCulture,no. 27 (Winter 1962-63). p. 30.

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exemplaryfigurefor Smithand other gay filmmakersand filmgoersof the '60s. Ever her own greatest fan, Montez's most oft-quotedutterance,made to an interviewerin the late '40s, goes, "When I see myselfon the screen, I look so beautifulI wantto screamwithjoy." For me, as I suspectformanyothergay men who have relished it, the charm of that remark lies not just in what a naive interpretermightcall the "childlike" openness of Montez's admirationof her screen image, but in its intensity--signaledby the inflection larger-than-life into the hystericalregisterat the sentence'send: "I want to scream with upward And one may at least partiallyattributethe remark's longtimecurrency joy." the among many gay men for whom American popular filmof the '40s and '50s-especially throughits female stars--had been formativeto the succinct way it brings "screen" and "scream" together. In her adoring self-critique, Montez demonstrateswhat Smith mightcall the relation of "perfectappositeness," the lexical as well as psychological near-mirroring,of "screen" and "scream." Smith discovers something similar in his discussion of the related political spaces of "mirror" and "movie set"; his own politicsof performance exploits the appositeness of "self-indulgent"fantasy("screen," mirror) and disruptivepublic enactment("scream," movie set). Not the least of the cultural constructsshatteredby the impulse to "scream withjoy" at the sight of the adorable (self-)image on the movie screen on the part of male fansof Montez or Lana Turner or Jayne Mansfieldis their masculine gender identity.For how manygay men of myown and the previousgenerationwere our earliestintimations that there mightbe a gap between our received gender identityand our subjectiveor "felt" one the consequence not of noticingour own erotic attracwith tion to another boy or man but of enthusiastically enjoyingand identifying the performativeexcessesof Maria Montez ratherthanJon Hall, or Lana Turner ratherthan Burt Lancaster, or Jayne Mansfieldratherthan Mickey Hargitay? Smith,workingin conjunctionwithJacobs, had by 1963 articulateda full range of tentativecinematicalter egos for exploring the positions one might occupyin relationto the closet,the mirror,and the movie screen.Besides Smith's own FlamingCreatures,Smithand Jacobs's two most compellingcollaborations, BlondeCobraand LittleStabsat Happiness,also premieredthatyear. In the firstof these, Smith, the "Blonde Cobra" of the title (a gesture of homage to the BrunetteCobra, Montez, as well as to the Blonde Venus of Dietrichand Sternberg) playsa charactercalled "JackSmith" as wellas an imperiouswoman named Madame Nescience. In the film'scentralepisode, the latterdreams thatshe is a Sadean "Mother Superior" puttingdown an outbreak of mass lesbian sexual activityin the girls' dormitory. Elsewherein the film,besides lamentinghis generallydegenerescentcondition("Leprosy is eatinga hole in me, myteethare fallingout, myhair has turned to sauerkraut"),Smith narratesa storyapparentlyabout his childhood: There was once a little boy, a little tweensy, microscopic little

Maria Montezin a publicity shotfor Cobra Woman.

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boy .... [. .. .] And . . . the littleboy would . . . look for his Mother,but she was never there,and so he would finallypass out and just fall onto the floor and fall asleep just weary with lonelinessand and frustratedlongings,until,untilwhen the longingand frustration shadows were lengtheningand the sun was drooping he would hear the frontdoor open and, and he would rush out into the hallwayand there,and there was his Mother . . . and she always had littlewhite bags from the ten-centstore and they always had certain kinds of chocolates in them, the brown, the droplet kind . . . and he would eat it and she would give him some but not much,just a littlebecause she would save most of it for herselfand ah so ah well ah and then, she'd go away again. Mother Mother Mother Mother Mother Mother and then,and therewas a littleboy thatlived upstairsyou see it was a two familyapartmentand ah and-a two familyhouse! and thenone day the little boy found the other littleboy that lived upstairsthe familywho lived upstairsin the upstairsfloorand the littleboy who was less than seven, the lonely littleboy, the lonelylittleboy was less than seven, I know thatbecause we didn't leave Columbus untilI was seven,I knowit,I was under seven and I took a matchand I lititand I pulled out the other little boy's penis and burnt his penis with a match!s4 Reversingthe narrativelogic of the two "Scheherazade" storiesrecounted earlier, in which "orgy" is interruptedby "slaughter" and sexual "games" are violentlybroken up by an angryand vengefulparent or spouse, the motherof Smith's "lonely littleboy" is representedas absent and withholding.This alternativeversionof the storyculminatesin an act thatfusesthe two principalroles and the two halvesof the "Scheherazade-party"story,the "littleboy" being both sexual game and the figurewho putsan end (in this the initiatorof a transgressive case an immediateend) to the game-with an act of violenceagainst(in thiscase one of) its players. The whole storyof "the lonely littleboy" organizes itself along the manic lines of wild activityeventuatingin failure (i.e., falling)and arrestthat,as I have discussed,are the design of Smithand Jacobs's briefearly collaboration, Little Cobra Dance. The little boy is said to be accustomed to "scamper[ing]" fromroom to room of the emptyhouse looking forhis mother, untilhe "would finallypass out and just fallonto the floor." There he sleeps until he is in turn awakened by the sound of his mother's arrivinghome, when he "rush[es] out and dart[s]out" to greet her. What is "arrested" at the end of this episode is both childhood sexualityand male-male sexual play, and what the subject, "the lonely littleboy," is shown substitutingfor it is sadisticviolence. 34. Jack Smith and Ken Jacobs, "Soundtrack of Blonde Cobra," Film Culture,no. 29 (Summer 1963), p. 2.

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As an isolated anecdote, as a familiarkind of "confessional"storyof childhood crueltymade "funny" by distance and by its belated avowal of antisocial behavior,as a shaggy-dogstorywiththe unprepared-forpunchline"and I pulled out the other littleboy's penis and burnt [it] with a match"-as all of these formulations,the "lonely littleboy" episode of Blonde Cobra may seem to conformin several waysto common conventionsof largelystraightmale-identified stylesof humor("I was a wildand mean littleboy,and here's a storyto prove it"). But it figuresas more than thatin Smith'sperformance,and it does so by means of itsengagementwithother aspects of his work-and of thisfilmperformance in particular--that are differentfromand in some ways radicallyopposed to commonconventionsof straightmale comic performance- whetherwe thinkof theseperformancesas being carriedout by professionalsin clubs or on television or in films,or by nonprofessionalsin the course of ordinarysocial life. The Madame Nescience episode thatimmediatelyfollowsthe "lonely little boy" part of Blonde Cobra is similarlypotentiallyrepugnant to many viewers, enactmentof hostilitytowardwomen, insofaras it fitsinto a familiartransvestite toward women in positionsof authorityparticularly,and toward lesbians and lesbian sexuality.Considered as an isolatedepisode, afterall, Madame Nescience presents the viewer with a familiarbutt of sexist comedy, the repressed and lasciviousnun, here shown indulgingin sadistic(homo)sexualityas she, in conformitywith the "despotic" and homophobic "Scheherazade-party"scenario, acts out a repressive"slaughter"of her lesbian "daughters." The restof the film, however, provides a context in which one can think "otherwise" of Smith's Madame Nescience performance. For example, followingas it does on the "lonely little boy" narrative,Madame Nescience's imaginaryappearance and behaviormaybe read as the returnof the repressedmotherin thatepisode. And if she still seems a figureof hostile male projection when seen as a displaced versionof the rejectingand withholdingmotherof the "lonely littleboy," she may seem considerablyless so if her dream of disciplinarybehavior toward her "daughters"--lining them up and paddling their bare bottomswith a "silver cross"--is related to the film'sultimateimage. As Smith intones a line from Baudelaire-"Life swarmswithinnocentmonsters"- the filmshowshimbending forward to expose his own bared buttocks with a butcher knife thrust between them, actually held high up between his thighsbut placed to look as thoughpenetratinghis anus. "Ooooooooh," Smithcries in voice-over,"Sex is a pain in the ass. Sex IS a pain in the ass." The image has somethingof the violentshock value of the foundingimage of surrealistfilm,thatof the bisectedeye in Un chienandalou. The butcherknife driven"up theass" of the wailingperformeris the veryimage of the sadisticrape of one male byanother,just as it is the image of the violentsexual assault that,in homophobic fantasy,gay men both desire and "deserve." Among its other possible meanings for gay male viewers,the image, in combination with the verbal utterance that accompanies it, forcefullyand comically literalizesthe

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experience of pain in anal penetrationcommonlyfeltby inexperiencedmen, or by men who engage in being penetratedanallywho have feelingsof consciousor unconscious unwillingnessor anxietytoward their partner and/or toward the idea or the realityof being penetrated. The image of the butcherknifethrust"up the ass" of the mock-lamenting "Blonde Cobra" is onlysecondarilyan image of male-malerape or of homophobic and sadisticcontemptfor gay male desire for anal connection. In the economy of the filmas a whole it is primarilya comic undoing of the "lonely little boy's" burningthe penis of the "other littleboy" in the film'sfirstepisode and of Madame Nescience's spanking her lesbian "daughters'" bottoms with a silver crossin itscentralepisode. Horrible as it maysound, the film'sclimacticimage of the Cobra figure'sstabbed anus is, as it actually appears in the film,more an emblematicor visual metaphysicalconceit than any kind of reallygraphicrepresentationof physicalviolation.This ostensiblewound sheds no blood, nor does the viewer see the knifeinserted;it will be obvious to all but the most gullible viewerfromthe momentof the image's appearance thatwhatone is seeing is in a significantsense not at all a realisticallysimulated stabbing--no fancyspecial effectshere- but a child's trickof concealinga knifeblade in a foldof the body, combined withperhaps the clown's oldest trickformildlyshockingand amusing his audience, exposing his bottom. The titularLittle Stabs at Happiness of Smith and Jacobs's other 1963 collaborationare some of them,too, literal,albeit recognizablytheatrical,stabs. In the firstepisode of thatfilm,Smithsitsin an emptybathtub,his head covered withtinfoiland his nose painted blue, hecticallyalternatingbetween smokinga cigaretteand gnawingthe crotchof a babydoll. When he subsequentlygraspsthe doll by the head and stubs out a cigarettein its eyes, an unsympatheticviewer may respond by thinkingthatSmithis simply"sick," or thathis particularbrand of "cinema of cruelty" is puerile in the extreme. When, in the film's final sequence, he emerges onto the roof of a building, dressed in a homemade harlequin costume looking freshfromthe thriftshop, to performa ratherwan balloon dance to a recordingof a '40s pop tune called "Happy Bird," it is as iffor once his ritualisticallyalternatingperformancesof manic energy and sodden failurehave met in the hithertounavailable psychicmiddle to produce simple depression. In the film,the segmentis entitled"The Spiritof Listlessness." Depression, outburstsof mania, fitsof hystericalanxiety,of antisocialbehavior,hostility,thoughtsand memoriesof sadisticand masochisticdesires and behavior, and fantasiesof the same, moods of intenselynarcissisticself-indulgence (not unrelatedto what Leo Bersani has called the "grave doubt resulting fromhomosexual desire: thedoubtabout whichselfto adore")35alternatingwith moods of bitterdespair and self-destructive impulses:the emotional weatherof 35. Leo Bersani,A Futurefor Astyanax:Characterand Desirein Literature,Boston, Little, Brown, 1976, pp. 306 - 307.

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:-::~::::::::::j::,M7,:

.....;

:........... '::'::?ii::'~l:'::::.::: :iiAll: :.

..... .

:?:: :?:??:?:::::::U . i-;: ii''i: i-~l~:-;;~iiis:i ::-:::i ........... Ii9-! ....~iiii

in KenJacobs'sLittleStabsat Happiness, JackSmith 1963. Smith'sperformancesis the emotionalweatherof the closet. This is not to say thatgay men have any kind of monopolyon these statesof mindand behavior. To do so would simplybe to reinscribethe homophobicdiscourseswhichfora long time deemed (in some quartersstilldeem) gays "disturbed" or psychically and emotionallyinadequate or damaged, and blamed our sexual and social existencesas gay people forthe alleged damage ratherthan lookingto the twin of homophobiaand the closet,which"disturb" and damage gay and institutions degrees. straightpeople both, in differentwaysand in differing

What Jack Smith did in his filmperformancesand "live" performance crucialyearswas to keep projectinggay subjecpieces duringtwentyhistorically tive awareness of the politicaland psychologicalrealitiesof the closet onto the "screen" of fantasyfor collective,ratherthan private,recognition,inspection, and analysis.He continuedto do so throughoutthe '70s-after Stonewallhad occurredand afterhe himselflargelystopped makingand appearingin films-

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in a seriesof pieces performedin smalldowntowntheatersor, more often,in his own loft. In sharp contrastwith the spiraling trajectoryof the career of his former filmmakingassociate and fellow scandalmaster Andy Warhol, Smith continuedto seem to court and to findfailureand oblivionin his post-Stonewall, postfilmcareer. Incapacityand breakdownceased to be alternativeperformative modes (the ritualistic"fallings"and failuresof his previouswork)forhim,and he made the endless deferralof performancethe hallmarkof his work in the '70s. Audiences arrivingat his loftfor a midnightperformancewould regularlywitness his fumblingswithslidesand slide projectorfortwo and a halfhours. Smith would then announce that owing to technical problems there would be no (further)performancethat night. Hamlet, that most emblematicallyincapacitated and "blocked" of early modern young male inhabitantsof the closet, became one of the predictable foci of an apparentlyendless series of Smith's performancesof announcing-and-deferring-performance. Around 1977 Smitheffectedwhatwas perhaps his mostsuccessfulcompromise between performancein any ordinarysense and the kind of deferralthat had largely replaced ordinaryperformancefor him. He did this in his highly revisionaryversion of Ibsen's Ghosts,which Smith variouslytitled The Secretof RentedIsland and OrchidRot ofRentedLagoon.36The small group of devotees who attendedthe firstperformancewere unsurprisedwhen Smith,pleading that some of his actors had failed to appear by curtaintime,invitedmembersof the audience to "help out," and "filledin" major roles withstuffedanimals fromhis collection.Smithplayed the role of Oswald, and (in the firstperformance)a male friend,in drag and shrouded with veils,played his mother,Mrs. Alving.Smith integratedinto the productionthe apparentlyinevitablejudgment that it would be an unmitigateddisaster,and behaved as if he, as well as the characterhe was playing,was in a state of imminentmental and emotional collapse. He read his lines fromthe scriptand frequentlyrequested help findinghis place in the play fromfellowcast members,who were of course most of the time as "lost" as he was. In the closing lines of the play, young Oswald's dementia, induced by a syphiliticinfectioninheritedthroughhis mother fromhis philanderingbut ultrarespectablefather,finallymanifestsitself:he asks his motherto "give him the sun," and she gazes at him with the horrifiedrealization that he has become psychotic.In Smith'sproduction,Oswald and Mrs. Alvingcontinuedsittingside by side in silence after this climacticmoment,under an intense pinlight.Mrs. Alvingslowlylowered her veil, revealinga leprous face, and Oswald opened his legs, showeringa heap of brilliantglitteronto the floor from his "decaying" groin. All thiswas performedto the sound of Doris Day's recordingof "Once I Had a Secret Love." 36. My discussionof Smith's adaptation of Ghostsis indebted to Brecht's descriptionof several quite different performancesof it he saw (QueerTheatre,pp. 157-177), and to Hoberman's remarks on the piece ("The Theatre of Jack Smith," pp. 8-9).

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JackSmith.Untitledcollage.JackSmithArchives.

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JackSmith.Untitledcollage.JackSmithArchives.

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The camp excesses of thisending, like those of Smith's earlier filmwork, are palpable. What is not so readilyevidentin thisscene are the waysin whichit is consistentand continuouswiththe politicaland psychologicalexplorationsof the closetI have describedSmithmakingin his earlierwork.Young men in extremis; Doris Day's songsand screenpersonality;the glitterthatemblematizedforSmith the kind of tackyglamour Maria Montez had shored up against her ruin,secret the dramatispersonae and conventionalapparatus sexual desiresand afflictions; of camp; the props and furnitureof the closet- all are the figuresand materials Smith's work tirelesslydeconstructed. afterthe late '70s. When I belatedlysaw him Smithperformedinfrequently in performancein a festivalof Punk art in the early'80s in a storefrontoffTimes appeared late, tinkeredfor a long time withprops Square, he characteristically and a slide projector that was never activated,and then reclined on a couch to smoke a hookah. All the whilean attractiveyoungman and woman,both garbed in "harem pajamas," read aloud in its entiretya biographyof Yvonne de Carlo (star of Song of Scheherazade,1947). Beyond his silent but eloquent presence onstage,Smithrestrictedhis contributionsto the restof the performanceto a few momentaryinterruptionsof the boy and girlodalisques, to make minuteadjustments to theircostumes or poses, or to correct their occasional mispronunciations of words. Later that year I saw yet another big filmic"Scheherazade party," PasoArabian lini's Nights,one of his three late productionsof classic literaryclusternarratives:Scheherazade's, the CanterburyTales, and The Decameron.Pasolini subsequentlyrepudiated the trilogyfor its "liberal," optimistic"sexual pluralism," puttingin itsplace his lastcompletedproject,the harrowingfilmfantasyof sexual captivityand tortureunder fascismcalled Salb. AlthoughI admiresome of Pasolini's films,his "Scheherazade party,"the ArabianNights,rehearsesmanyof the same repugnantclichesthatunderlayDiaghilev's. In Pasolini's "Araby," as in so manyearlier orientalizingversionsof it, sex ratherthan survivalseems to be the firstpriorityof its denizens,and everyoneexcept the few requisitewise old men is young, extraordinarilysexually attractive,and always available. Falling chronologicallybetween Diaghilev's and Pasolini's de luxe productions,Smith's variousversionsof "Scheherazade" seem by contrastwiththeseothersto harbor real deconstructivepotential in relation to the underlyingsexual-politicaland nationalist-politicalagendas of almost all his big-budget predecessors and successors. In the numerous political fables of the "harem" Smith directed and/or performedin, he privilegesfantasiesneitherof Westernnor male supremacy-as so manyother orientalistfantasiesdo- but of what he calls "moldiness." As Madame Nescience lies on her couch, she is said to be "dreaming of old musty memories,memoriesthatshe thoughtthatshe had forgot[ten]or so she thought but you see they came up in a funkymass of ah exuding effluviumsfromthe

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mustypast . . . covered withmoss and funk.""7Smithcalls her dream, and by extension the whole episode in which she figures,"La rave de la purite de Madame Nescience." The manifestcontentof this"dream of purity,"as we have seen, was one of the vigorous suppression of lesbianism in a convent by a "mothersuperior" who bringsa suspiciousdegree of enthusiasmto the task.But it is not withher repressiveand luridlycharged "purity"thatI wantto close this discussionof Smith'sperformances,withwhichpurityhas indeed had littleto do, but ratherwithan insistenceon the paradoxically"moldy," "swampy"(to use his terms)claritywithwhichhis workpungentlyrepresentsthe kind of unconscious processes that have, over the past couple of decades, fueled innumerablesmallof the closet. and large-scaleeruptionsof queer rebellionagainstthe institutions On these conditions,Smith's flamingperformancesand others like them have had wonderfullyincendiaryeffects.

37.

"Soundtrack of Blonde Cobra," p. 2.

Kant with Sade

JACQUES TRANSLATED

LACAN BY JAMES

B. SWENSON,

JR.

This textshould have served as a preface to Philosophy in the Bedroom. It appeared in thejournal Critique (no. 191, April 1963) as a review of the edition of the works of Sade for which it was destined.* That the work of Sade anticipates Freud, be it in respect of the catalogue of perversions, is a stupid thing to say, which gets repeated endlessly among literary types; the fault, as always, belongs to the specialists. Against this we hold that the Sadian bedroom is equal to those places from which the schools of ancient philosophy took their name: Academy, Lyceum, Stoa. Here as there, the way for science is prepared by rectifying the position of ethics. In this, yes, a ground-clearing occurs which will have to make its way through the depths of taste for a hundred years for Freud's path to be passable. Count sixty more for someone to say the reason for all of that. If Freud was able to enunciate his pleasure principle without even having to worry about marking what distinguishes it from its function in traditional ethics, even without risking that it should be heard as an echo of the uncontested prejudice of two millenia, to recall the attraction which preordains the creature to its good, along with the psychology inscribed in various myths of goodwill, we can only credit this to the insinuating rise across the nineteenth century of the theme of "happiness in evil." Here Sade is the inaugural step of a subversion, of which, however amusing it might seem with respect to the coldness of the man, Kant is the turning point, and never noted, to our knowledge, as such. Philosophy in the Bedroom comes eight years after the Critique of Practical Reason. If, after having seen that the one accords with the other, we show that it completes it, we will say that it gives the truth of the Critique. For this reason, the postulates in which the latter culminates: the alibi of

* For which it was destined on commission. I add here, because it's droll, that they put themselves in the position of having to re-commission it from me when the success of Ecrits rendered it plausible ( . . . to the person who replaced me?)

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immortality where it represses progress, holiness, and even love, anything satisfying which might come of the law, the guarantee which it requires from a will for which the object to which the law refers would be intelligible, losing even the flat prop of the function of utility to which Kant had confined them, restore the work to its diamondlike subversion. Which explains the unbelievable exaltation which any reader not forewarned by academic piety receives from it. Nothing which might have been explained about it will ruin this effect. That one is well in evil, or if one prefers, that the eternal feminine does not draw one upward, one could say that this turn was taken upon a philological remark: namely that what had theretofore been admitted, that one is well in the good [qu'on est bien dans le bien], rests on a homonym which the German lansich wohl im Guten. This is how Kant introduces guage does not allow: Man fuhiihlt us to his Practical Reason. The pleasure principle is the law of the good which is the wohl, let us say well-being [bien-etre]. In practice, it would submit the subject to the same phenomenal succession which determines its objects. The objection that Kant poses to it is, true to his rigorous style, intrinsic. No phenomenon can claim for itself a constant relation to pleasure. Thus no law of such a good can be enunciated which would define as will the subject who would introduce it into his practice. The pursuit of the good would thus be an impasse if it were not reborn as das Gute, the good which is the object of the moral law. It is indicated to us by our experience of listening within ourselves to commandments, whose imperative presents itself as categorical, that is, unconditional. Let us note that this good is only supposed as the Good by proposing itself, as has just been said, over and against any object which would set a condition to it, by opposing itself to whatever uncertain good these objects might provide, in an a priori equivalence, in order to impose itself as superior by virtue of its universal value. Thus its weight only appears by excluding anything-drive or sentiment-which the subject might suffer in his interest for an object, what Kant therefore qualifies as "pathological." It would thus be by induction from this effect that one would recover the Sovereign Good of the Ancients, if Kant, as is his custom, did not further specify that this Good acts not as a counterweight, but, so to speak, as an antiweight, that is to say by the subtraction of weight which it produces in the effect of self-love (Selbstsucht)which the subject feels as contentment (arrogantia) of his pleasures, insofar as a glance at this Good renders these pleasures less respectable. His very words, as much as they are suggestive. Let us retain the paradox that it should be at the moment when the subject is no longer faced with any object that he encounters a law, one which has no other phenomenon than something already significant, which is obtained from a 1. We refer to the quite acceptable translation by Barni, which dates to 1848, here pp. 247ff., and to Vorlander's edition (published by Meiner) for the German text, here p. 86.

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voice in the conscience, and which, in articulating itself as a maxim, proposes the order of a purely practical reason or of a will. For this maxim to become law, it is necessary and it is sufficient that, when tested by such a reason, it can be retained as universal by right of logic. Let us recall that this does not mean that this right imposes itself upon everyone, but that it is valid for all cases, or better, that it is not valid in any case [en aucun cas], if it is not valid in every case [en tout cas]. But this test, which must be one of reason, pure even if practical, can only succeed for maxims of a type which offers its deduction an analytic grasp. This type is illustrated by the trust that is imposed in the restitution of a deposit:2 the practice of a deposit being based on the two ears which, in order to constitute the depositary, must be plugged up against any condition that could be opposed to this trust. In other words, no deposit without a depositary equal to his charge. The need for a more synthetic foundation will be felt, even in this obvious case. Let us illustrate in our turn its default, be it at the price of an irreverence, with a retouched maxim of pere Ubu: "Long live Poland, for if there were no Poland, there would be no Poles." Let no one by some slowness or even emotivity doubt our attachment here to a liberty without which the nations are in mourning. But its analytic motivation, while irrefutable, here allows the indefectible to be tempered with the observation that the Poles have always distinguished themselves by a remarkable resistance to the eclipses of Poland, and even to the deploration which followed. One rediscovers what founds Kant's expression of the regret that, in the experience of the moral law, no intuition offers a phenomenal object. We would agree that, throughout the Critique, this object slips away. But it can be divined by the trace which is left by the implacable pursuit which Kant brings to demonstrating its elusiveness and out of which the work draws this eroticism, doubtless innocent, but perceptible, whose well-foundedness we will show in the nature of the said object. This is why we request that those of our readers who are still in a virginal relation to the Critique, not having read it, stop at this very point of our lines, to take them up again afterwards. They should check whether it indeed has the effect that we say it has; we promise them, in any case, the pleasure that the exploit communicates. The others will now follow us into Philosophyin the Bedroom,into its reading at the very least. It turns out to be a pamphlet, but a dramatic one in which a stage lighting permits both the dialogue and the action to continue to the limits of the imaginable: this lighting dims a moment to give way, pamphlet within the pamphlet, 2. Cf. the Remark to Theorem III of the first chapter of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason, Barni, p. 163; Vorlander, p. 31.

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to a diatribe entitled: "Frenchmen, yet another effort if you want to be republicans ..." What is enunciated there is usually understood, if not appreciated, as a mystification. There is no need to be alerted by the recognized import of the dream within the dream, that of pointing to a closer relation to the real, in order to see in this derision of historical actuality an indication of the same sort. It is patent, and one would do better to look at it twice. Let us say that the nerve of the diatribe is given in the maxim which proposes a rule for jouissance, bizarre in that it makes itself a right in the Kantian fashion, that of posing itself as a universal rule. Let us enunciate the maxim: "I have the right of enjoyment over [le droit dejouir de] your body, anyone can say to me, and I will exercise this right, without any limit stopping me in the capriciousness of the exactions that I might have the taste to satiate." Such is the rule to which it is claimed that the will of all could be submitted, if only a society's constraint were to make it effective. Black humor at best, for any reasonable being, to be distributed between the maxim and the consent which it is presumed to have. But beyond the fact that, if there is something to which the deduction of the Critique has accustomed us, it is to distinguish the rational from the sort of reasonable which is only a confuised recourse to the pathological, we now know that humor is the betrayer [transfuge] in the comic of the very function of the "super-ego." Which, insofar as it animates this psychoanalytic instance with an avatar and uproots it from the return of obscurantism in which it is employed by our contemporaries, can also spice up the Kantian test of the universal rule with the grain of salt which it lacks. Thenceforth are we not incited to take more seriously what presents itself to us as being not quite serious? We will not ask, to be sure, if it is necessary nor if it is sufficient that a society sanction a right to jouissance by permitting all to invoke it, for its maxim thenceforth to claim the authority of the imperative of the moral law. No positive legality can decide if this maxim can assume the rank of a universal rule, since this rank can eventually just as well oppose it to all positive legalities. This is not a question which can be settled just by imagining it, and the extension to everyone of the right invoked by the maxim is not the issue here. One would at best demonstrate merely a possibility of generality, which is not universality; the latter takes things as they are founded and not as they work out. And one would not want to miss this opportunity to denounce the exorbitance of the role which is conferred to the moment of reciprocity in structures, notably subjective ones, to which it is intrinsically repugnant. Reciprocity, a reversible relation because it establishes itself upon a simple line uniting two subjects who, from their "reciprocal" position, hold this relation

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to be equivalent, can only situate itself with difficulty as the logical time of any crossing-over of the subject in his relation to the signifier, and still less as a stage of any development, whether or not it is admissible as psychic (where it is always easy to pass the buck to the child when the pedagogical intention misses the mark). Whatever it may be, it is already a point in favor of our maxim that it can serve as the paradigm of a statement which excludes as such reciprocity (reciprocity and not trading places). Any judgment about the infamous order that would enthrone our maxim is thus indifferent to the matter, which is to recognize or refuse it the character of a rule admissible as universal in ethics, the ethics which since Kant is recognized as an unconditional practice of reason. It is obviously necessary to recognize in it this character for the simple reason that its very proclamation (its kerygma) has the virtue of instituting at once -both this radical rejection of the pathological, of any concern for a good, for a passion, even for a compassion, that is, the rejection by which Kant liberates the field of the moral law -and the form of this law which is also its only substance, inasmuch as the will is only obligated to dismiss from its practice any reason which is not that of its maxim itself. Certainly these two imperatives, between which moral experience can be stretched, to the breaking-point of life, are, in the Sadian paradox, imposed on us as upon the Other, and not as upon ourselves. But this distance only exists at first sight, for the moral imperative does no less in a latent fashion, since it is from the Other that its commandment makes its demand on us. One perceives here the naked revelation of what the parody made above of the obvious universality of the duty of the depositary would lead us to, namely that the bipolarity by which the moral Law institutes itself is nothing other than this splitting of the subject which occurs in any intervention of the signifier: namely that of the subject of the enunciation from the subject of the statement. The moral Law has no other principle. Still it is necessary that it be patent, lest it lend itself to the mystification felt in the gag of "Long live PolandI" In which the Sadian maxim, by pronouncing itself from the mouth of the Other, is more honest than appealing to the voice within, since it unmasks the splitting, usually conjured away, of the subject. The subject of the enunciation detaches itself here just as clearly as from "Long live Poland!" where only thatfiun which is always evoked by its manifestation is isolated. In order to confirm this perspective one need only refer back to the doctrine upon which Sade himself founds the reign of his principle. It is that of the rights of man. It is because no man can be the property of another man, nor in any way be his privilege, that he cannot make this the pretext to suspend the right of all to enjoyment over him [droit de tous a jouir de lui], each according to

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his taste.3 The constraint he would undergo would not be so much one of violence as one of principle, the difficulty for whoever makes it a judgment, being not so much to make him consent to it, as to pronounce it in his place. It is thus indeed the Other as free, it is the freedom of the Other, which the discourse of the right to jouissance poses as the subject of its enunciation, and not in a manner which differs from the You are [Tu es] which is evoked in the murderous capital [fonds tuant] of any imperative. But this discourse is no less determining for the subject of the statement, in that each address suscitates him through its equivocal content: sincejouissance, by shamelessly confessing itself even as it speaks, makes itself one pole of a couple of which the other is in the hollow which it is already drilling in the place of the Other in order to erect the cross of Sadian experience there. Let us suspend saying what makes it work, in order to recall that pain, which here projects its promise of ignominy, only confirms the express mention that Kant makes of it among the connotations of moral experience. What it is worth for Sadian experience will be better seen by approaching it through what, in the artifice of the Stoics, would dismantle this experience: contempt. Imagine a revival of Epictetus in Sadian experience: "See, you broke it," he says, pointing to his leg. Lowering jouissance to the destitution of such an effect where its pursuit stumbles, isn't this to turn it into disgust? In which it appears that it is jouissance by which Sadian experience is modified. For it forms the project of monopolizing a will only after having already traversed this will in order to install itself in the most intimate part of the subject which it provokes beyond, by touching its modesty. For modesty is amboceptive of the conjunctures of being: between two, the immodesty of the one being by itself the rape of the modesty of the other. A channel which would justify, were it necessary, what we first produced by the assertion, in the place of the Other, of the subject. Let us interrogate this jouissance, precarious in that it hangs, in the Other, on an echo which it only suscitates as it abolishes it, by joining the intolerable to it. Doesn't it at last appear to us to exalt only in itself, in the manner of another, horrible freedom? We will even see the uncovering of this third term which, according to Kant, would be in default in moral experience. It is namely the object, which, in order to assure it to the will in the fulfillment of the Law, he is constrained to send off into the unthinkability of the Thing-in-itself. This object, isn't it there in Sadian experience, descended from its inaccessibility, and unveiled as Dasein of the agent of torment? Not without retaining the opacity of the transcendent. For this object is strangely separated from the subject. Let us observe that the herald of the maxim does not need to be anything more than a point of emission. It can be a voice on 3.

Cf. the edition of Sade under review, vol. III, pp. 501-502.

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the radio, recalling the right promoted by the supplemental effort to which, at Sade's call, the French would have consented, and the maxim become, for their regenerated Republic, organic Law. Such vocal phenomena, notably those of psychosis, indeed have this aspect of the object. And psychoanalysis was not far in its dawn from referring the voice of conscience to them. One sees what motivates Kant to hold this object as having eluded any determination by the transcendental aesthetic, even if it does not fail to appear in some protruberance of the phenomenal veil, lacking neither hearth nor home, nor time in intuition, lacking neither a mode which is situated in the unreal, nor effect in reality: it is not only that Kant's phenomenology is in default here, but that the voice, however mad, imposes the idea of the subject, and that the object of the law must not suggest a malignity of the real God. Assuredly Christianity has educated men to pay little attention to the jouissance of God, and that is how Kant slips by his voluntarism of the Law-for-theLaw, which really piles it on, so to speak, with respect to the ataraxia of Stoic experience. One might think that Kant is under pressure from what he hears too closely, not from Sade, but from some mystic nearer to home, in the sigh which stifles what he glimpses beyond having seen that his God is faceless: Grimmigkeit? Sade says: Being-Supreme-in-Wickedness. Pshaw! Schwdrmereien,black swarms, we expel you in order to return to the function of presence in the Sadian fantasy. This fantasy has a structure that one will find further along and in which the object is only one of the terms in which the quest which it figures can die out. When jouissance is petrified in it, it becomes the black fetish in which the form -most definitely offered in such a place and time, and still today, for one be recognized. to adore the god-can It is this which befalls the executor in sadistic experience when, at its most extreme, his presence is reduced to being no more than its instrument. But that his jouissance congeals there, does not withdraw it from the humilof ity an act to which he cannot but come as a being of flesh and, to the bones, the serf of pleasure. This duplication does not reflect, nor reciprocate (why wouldn't it mutualone which occurs in the Other of the two alterities of the subject. the ate?) Desire, which is the henchman [suppot] of this splitting of the subject, would doubtless put up with being called will-to-jouissance. But this appellation would not render desire more worthy of the will which it invokes within the Other, in tempting this will to the extremity of its division from its pathos; for to do this, desire sets forth beaten, promised to impotence. Because it sets forth submitted to pleasure, whose law is to turn it always too short in its aim. A homeostasis which is always too quickly recovered by the living being at the lowest threshold of the tension upon which it subsists. Always precocious is the fall of the wing, with which he is given to sign the reproduction

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of his form. Nevertheless this wing here has the task of raising itself to the function of figuring the link of sex to death. Let us leave it to rest behind its Eleusinian veil. Thus pleasure, down there the stimulating rival of will, is here no more than a faltering accomplice. In jouissance's own time, it would be simply out of play, if fantasy did not intervene to sustain it by the very discord to which it succumbs. To put it another way, fantasy constitutes the pleasure proper to desire. And let us come back to the fact that desire is not subject, in that it cannot be indicated anywhere in a signifier of any demand whatsoever, since it is not articulatable there even though it is articulated in it. The taking of pleasure in fantasy is here easy to grasp. Physiological experience demonstrates that the cycle of pain is longer in every respect than that of pleasure, since a stimulation provokes it at the point where pleasure ends. However prolonged one supposes it to be, it nevertheless has, like pleasure, its term: the fainting of the subject. Such is the vital given from which fantasy will profit in order to fix, in the sensible of Sadian experience, the desire which appears in its agent. Fantasy is defined by the most general form which it receives from an algebra which we have constructed to this end, that is the formula (%gOa),in which the stamp is read "desire of," to be read identically in the retrograde direction, introducing an identity which is founded upon an absolute nonreciprocity. (A relation which is coextensive with the formations of the subject.) Be that as it may, this form turns out to be particularly easy to animate in the present case. It articulates, in fact, the pleasure for which an instrument (objet a of the formula) has been substituted, with the sort of sustained division of the subject that the experience ordains. Which is only obtained inasmuch as its apparent agent congeals in the rigidity of the object, in the aim that his subjective division be entirely sent back to him from the Other. A quadripartite structure, given the unconscious, is always to be required in the construction of a subjective ordinance. Our didactic schemas satisfy this requirement. Let us modulate the Sadian fantasy with a new one of these schemas: V

SCHEMA 1:

^AS

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The bottom line satisfies the order of the fantasy inasmuch as it supports the utopia of desire. The sinuous line inscribes the chain which permits a calculus of the subject. It is directed, and its direction constitutes an order in which the appearance of the objeta in the place of the cause is made clear by the universality of its relation to the category of causality, which, in forcing the threshold of Kant's transcendental deduction, would inaugurate a new Critique of Reason hinging upon the impure. There remains the V which, in this place, holding the high ground, appears to impose the will [volontel dominating the whole affair, but whose form also evokes the union of what it divides while holding it together with a vel, that is to say in posing the choice which will make the $ (barred S) of practical reason, out of the S, raw subject of pleasure ("pathological" subject). It is thus indeed the will of Kant which is encountered in the place of this will which can be called-to-jouissance only to explain that it is the subject reconstituted from alienation at the price of being no more than the instrument of jouissance. Thus Kant, in being tortured [mis a la question] "with Sade," that is to say with Sade filling the office, for our thought as in his sadism, of an instrument, confesses to what is plain to see about the "What does it want?" which henceforth is not missing for anyone. The graph may now be used in its succinct form, in order to find the way through the forest of the fantasy, which Sade in his work develops on the level of a system. One will see that there is a statics of the fantasy, by which the point of aphanisis, supposed in $, should be indefinitely recessed in the imagination. Whence the hardly believable survival that Sade grants the victims of the trials and tribulations which he inflicts upon them in his fable. The moment of their death seems to be motivated only by the need to replace them in a combinatory, which alone requires their multiplicity. Unique (Justine) or multiple, the victim has the monotony of the relation of the subject to the signifier, in which, to trust our graph, she consists. Being the objeta of the fantasy, situating itself in the real, the troupe of tormenters (see Juliette) can have more variety. The requirement, in the figure of the victims, for a beauty always classed as incomparable (as well as inalterable, as we have just said) is another affair, which cannot be taken care of with some banal postulates, quickly fabricated, on sexual attraction. One will rather see in it the grimace of what we have demonstrated, in tragedy, about the function of beauty: a barrier so extreme as to forbid access to a fundamental horror. Dream of the Antigone of Sophocles and of the moment when the 'EpwcoQ; vCXae #iXav4 explodes. This excursion would not be appropriate here, if it did not introduce what could be called the discordance of two deaths, introduced by the existence of 4.

Antigone, verse 781.

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condemnation. The between-two-deaths of this side [l'en-deca] is essential to show us that it is none other than the one by which the beyond [l'au-dela] sustains itself. It can be clearly seen in the paradox which Sade's position with respect to hell constitutes. The idea of hell, a hundred times refuted by him and damned as the means of subjection used by religious tyranny, curiously returns to motivate the actions of one of his heroes, nevertheless among those most enamoured with libertine subversion in its reasonable form, namely the hideous Saint-Fond.5 The practices whose utmost tortures he imposes upon his victims are founded on the belief that he can render the torment they cause eternal for them in the beyond. A conduct and a belief whose authenticity the character underlines by his concealment of the former from the gaze of his accomplices, and by his difficulty in explaining the latter. Thus we hear him a few pages later attempt to render them plausible in his discourse by the myth of an attraction tending to bring together the "particles of evil." This incoherence in Sade, neglected by Sadian specialists, who are sort of hagiographers themselves, would be clarified by noting the term, formally expressed in his writing, of the second death. The assurance which he expects from it against the horrific routine of nature (the one which, to listen to him elsewhere, crime has the function of breaking) would require it to be pushed to an extremity where the fainting of the subject would be doubled: with which he symbolizes in the wish that the decomposed elements of our body, in order not to reassemble, be themselves annihilated. That Freud should nevertheless recognize the dynamism of this wish6 in certain cases of his practice, that he should clearly, perhaps too clearly, reduce its function to an analogy with the pleasure principle, regulating it upon a "death" "drive" (demand), this is what will not be consented to, especially by someone who has not even been able to learn in the technique which he owes to Freud, any more than in his schooling, that language has an effect which is not utilitarian, or ornamental at the very most. For him, Freud is useful in congresses. Doubtless, in the eyes of such puppets, the millions of men for whom the pain of existing is the original evidence for the practices of salvation which they establish in their faith in Buddha, must be underdeveloped; or rather, as for Buloz, director of La revue des deux mondes, who puts it quite clearly to Renan7 when refusing his article on Buddhism, this after Burnouf, or some time in the '50s (of the last century), for them it is "impossible that there are people that dumb." Have they not, if they think they have a better ear than the rest of psychiatrists, heard this pain in the pure state mould the song of some patients, who are called melancholics? 5. 6. 7.

Cf. Histoire de Juliette, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, vol. II, pp. 196ff. Subjective dynamism: physical death gives its object to the wish of the second death. Cf. Renan's preface to his Nouvelles etudes d'histoire religieuse of 1884.

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Nor gathered one of those dreams after which the dreamer remains overwhelmed, from having, in a condition which is felt as an inexhaustible rebirth, been in the depths of the pain of existing? Or to put back in their place these torments of hell, which have never been imagined beyond those of which the traditional maintenance is assured in this world by men, would we beseech them to think of our daily life as something which ought to be eternal? There is nothing to be hoped for, even from despair, against a stupidity, finally sociological, and which we only mention in order that no one on the outside expect much, concerning Sade, from the circles where there is a more assured experience of the forms of sadism. Notably about the equivocality of what circulates concerning the relation of reversion which would unite sadism to an idea of masochism of which it is hard to imagine from the outside the pell-mell it supports. It would be better to find in it the worth of a little story, a famous one, about the exploitation of man by man: the definition of capitalism as one knows. And socialism? It's the opposite. Involuntary humor, this is the tone from which a certain diffusion of psychoanalysis takes effect. It fascinates by being also unperceived. There are still some scribblers who strive for a more fashionable look. They go in for existentialist custom tailoring, or more soberly, personalist ready-made. This leads to the statement that the sadist "denies the existence of the Other." This is precisely, it will be admitted, what has just appeared in our analysis. To follow it, isn't it rather that sadism rejects the pain of existing into the Other, but without seeing that by this slant he himself changes into an "eternal object," if Mr. Whitehead is willing to give us back this term? But why couldn't we hold it as a common good? Isn't that, redemption, immortal soul, the status of the Christian? Not so fast, so as not to go too far. Let us rather perceive that Sade is not duped by his fantasy, to the extent that the rigor of his thought passes into the logic of his life. For here we propose a duty to our readers. The delegation which Sade makes to all, in his Republic, of the right to jouissance, is not translated on our graph by a symmetrical reversion upon any axis or center, but merely by a rotation of a quarter of a circle, that is: a >

%$ g SCHEMA 2:

d

V

> S

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V, the will-to-jouissance, no longer permits the contestation of its nature, for it has passed into the moral constraint here implacably exercised by the Presidente de Montreuil upon the subject of whom it is evident that his division does not require being joined in a single body. (Let us remark that only the First Consul8 seals this division with his administratively confirmed effect of alienation.) This division here reunites, as S, the raw subject incarnating the heroism proper to the pathological, in the species of the fidelity to Sade which those who were at first complacent toward his excesses will demonstrate, his wife, his sister-in-law -his valet, why not? -other devotions effaced from his history. For Sade, the $ (barred S), we see at last that, as subject, it is in his disappearance that he signs, things having reached their term. Unbelievably, Sade disappears without anything, even less than in the case of Shakespeare, remaining of his image, after in his will he had ordered that a thicket efface even the trace upon the stone of a name that would seal his destiny. Mt (povat,9not to be born, his malediction, less holy than that of Oedipus, does not bear him among the Gods, but is eternalized: a) in the work of which, dismissing it with the back of his hand, Jules Janin shows us the unsinkable survival, having it saluted by the books which mask it, if we believe him, in every respectable library, Saint John Chrysostom or the Pensees. Sade's work is boring, you agree in saying, yes, as thick as thieves, Mister Judge and Mister Academician, but still able to make you one by the other, one and the other, one in the other, get upset.10 For a fantasy is indeed quite upsetting since one does not know where to set it, because it is there, wholly in its nature as fantasy which only has reality as discourse and which expects nothing from your powers, but which demands that you set yourself straight with respect to your desires. Let the reader now approach with reverence these exemplary figures which, in the Sadian bedroom, arrange and undo themselves in a fairground rite. "The posture breaks up." Ceremonial pause, sacred scansion. Salute the objects of the law, of which you know nothing, for lack of knowing how to find your way among the desires of which they are the cause. It's good to be charitable But with whom? That's the point. It should not be understood by this that we are crediting the legend according to which he 8. personally intervened in Sade's detention. Cf. Gilbert L61y, Vie du Marquis de Sade, vol. II, Paris, Gallimard, 1957, pp. 577-580, and footnote 1 of p. 580. Choir of Oedipus at Colonus, verse 1225. 9. 10. Cf. Maurice Garnon, L'affaire Sade, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1957. He cites J. Janin in La revue de Paris of 1834 in his plea, pp. 84-90. Second reference: Jean Cocteau, as cited witness, writes that Sade is boring, not without having recognized in him the philosopher and the moralizer.

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A certain M. Verdoux resolves it every day by putting women in the oven until he himself ends up in the electric chair. He thought that his dear ones wanted to live comfortably. More enlightened, the Buddha allowed those who did not know the road to devour him. Despite this eminent patronage, which could very well only be based on a misunderstanding (it is by no means sure that the tigress likes to eat Buddha), M. Verdoux's abnegation derives from an error which merits severity since a small grain of Critique, it's not expensive, would have allowed him to avoid it. No one doubts that the practice of Reason would have been more economical as well as more legal, should his dear ones have had to go without. "But what," will you ask, "are all these metaphors and why...." Molecules, monstruously assembling here for a spintrianjouissance, awaken us to the existence of others, more commonly encountered in life, whose equivocalities we have just evoked. Suddenly they are more respectable than the latter, appearing purer in their valencies. Desires . . . here alone to bind them, and exalted by making manifest that desire is the desire of the Other. Whoever has read us this far knows that desire, more exactly, is supported by a fantasy which has at least one foot in the Other, and precisely the one that counts, even and particularly if it happens to limp. The object, as we have shown in Freudian experience, the object of desire where it proposes itself in its nakedness, is only the slag of a fantasy in which the subject does not return from his syncope. It's a case of necrophilia. Its vacillation complements that of the subject, in the general case. It is in this that it is just as ungraspable as the object of the Law is according to Kant. But here the suspicion imposed by this connection begins to appear. Doesn't the moral law represent desire in the case where it is not the subject but the object which is in default? The subject, by being the sole party to remain, in the form of the voice, within, with neither head nor tail to what it most often says, doesn't he seem to signify himself enough by the bar with which he is bastardized by the signifier %, dropped from the fantasy (tOa) from which it both derives and drifts away [dont il derive, dans les deux sens de ce terme]? If this symbol returns to its place the inner commandment at which Kant marvels, it opens our eyes to the encounter which, from the Law to desire, goes further than the elusion of their object, for the one as for the other. It is in this encounter that the equivocality of the word freedom plays: upon which, laying a heavy hand, the moralist always appears even more impudent than imprudent. Let us rather listen to Kant himself illustrate it one more time:' "Suppose," 11. Barni, p. 173. It is the Remark to Problem II (Aufgabe) of Theorem III of the first chapter of the Analytic, Vorlander edition, p. 25.

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he says, "that someone says his lust is irresistible when the desired object and opportunity are present. Ask him whether he would not control his passion if, in front of the house where he has this opportunity, a gallows were erected on which he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his lust. We do not have to guess very long what his answer would be. But ask him whether he thinks it would be possible for him to overcome his love of life, however great it may be, if his sovereign threatened him with the same sudden death12 unless he made a false deposition against an honorable man whom the ruler wished to destroy under a plausible pretext. Whether he would or not he perhaps will not venture to say; but that it should be possible for him he would certainly admit without hesitation. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he knows he fact which, without the moral law, ought, and he recognizes that he is free-a would have remained unknown to him." The first response here supposed of a subject about whom we are first warned that for him much happens in words, makes us think that we have not been given it to the letter, even though that's the whole point. It's that, in order to compose it, one would rather rely on a personage whose scruples we would be bound [en tout cas] to offend, for he would never [en aucun] stoop to eating that kind of bread. He is namely that ideal bourgeois before whom elsewhere, doubtless in order to check Fontenelle, the overly gallant centenarian, Kant declares that he tips his hat.13 We will thus exempt the naughty boy from testifying under oath. But it might happen that a supporter of passion, and one who would be blind enough to mix a point of honor in with it, could give Kant problems, forcing him to recognize that no occasion will more certainly precipitate some men toward their end, than to see it offered as a challenge to, or even in contempt of, the gallows. For the gallows is not the Law, it can't even be driven around by it. The only bus is the paddy wagon, and the police might well be the state, as is said among the followers of Hegel. But the Law is something else, as has been known since Antigone. Kant's apologue doesn't even contradict this: the gallows only comes into it in order for him to tie up on it, along with the subject, his love of life. And it is this to which desire in the maxim Et non propter vitam vivendi perdere causas can pass in a moral being, and, precisely because he is moral, pass to the rank of a categorical imperative, however little he may be up against the wall. Which is precisely where he is now being pushed. Desire, what is called desire suffices to make life have no sense in playing a coward. And when the law is truly there, desire doesn't hold, but that's because the law and repressed desire are one and the same thing; this is even Freud's discovery. We score a point at halftime, professor. 12. 13.

The text reads: with a death without delay. Cf. p. 253 of Barni's translation with p. 90 in Vorlander's edition.

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Let us place the credit for our success in the ranks of the pawns, queen of the game as we know. For we have brought into play neither our Knight, with which we could have easily won the game, for it would have been Sade, whom we our Bishop [Fou], nor our Rook believe to be well-qualified in this matter-nor of freedom of the man, [Tour], rights thought, your body is your own, nor even our Queen [Dame], an appropriate figure to designate the prowesses of courtly love. This would have meant moving too many people, for a less certain result. For if I argue that Sade, for a few jokes, ran the risk, in full knowledge (see what he makes of his "escapades," legal or not), of being imprisoned during a third of his life, jokes which doubtless were a little too much in earnest, but all the more demonstrative with respect to their recompense, I draw upon myself Pinel and his pinellry which comes up again. Moral insanity, it opines. A lovely business, in any case. I am here recalled to reverence for Pinel, to whom we owe one of the most noble steps of humanity. -Thirteen years of Charenton for Sade, in fact, come from this step. -But it wasn't his place. -That's just it. It is this very step which leads him there. For as to his place, everything which thinks agrees about this, it was elsewhere. But see: those who think well, think it was outside, and the well-thinkers, since Royer-Collard, who demanded it at the time, saw it in jail, even on the scaffold. It is precisely in this that Pinel is a moment of thought. Willingly or unwillingly, he is the guarantee for the prostration to which, to the left and to the right, thought submits the liberties which the Revolution had promulgated in its name. For in considering the rights of man from the point of view of philosophy, we see the appearance of what in any case everyone now knows of their truth. They are reducible to the freedom to desire in vain. A fine triumph indeed, but an opportunity to recognize in it our reckless freedom of a moment ago, and to confirm that it is indeed the freedom to die. But also to draw upon ourselves the frowns of those who don't find it very nourishing. They are numerous these days. A renewal of the conflict between needs and desires, where as if by chance it is the Law which empties the shell. For the move which would check the Kantian apologue, courtly love offers no less tempting a path, but one which requires being erudite. Being erudite by position, one draws the erudite upon oneself, and as for the erudite in this field, bring on the clowns. Already Kant would for next to nothing make us lose our seriousness, for lack of the least sense of the comic (the proof is what he says of it in its place). But someone who lacks it, himself, totally and absolutely, if you've remarked, is Sade. This threshold would perhaps be fatal to him and a preface is not made for disservices.14 Thus let us pass to the second moment of Kant's apologue. It is no more 14.

What would I have written for a postface?

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conclusive to his ends. For supposing that his helot has the least idea of what's happening, he will ask him [i.e., Kant] if by chance it would be his duty to bear true witness, in case this were the means by which the tyrant could satisfy his wishes. Should he say that the innocent is a Jew for example, if he truly is, before a tribunal, such as has been seen, which would find in this something to condemn -or yet that he is an atheist, just when it is possible that he himself is a man who would better understand the weight of the accusation than a consistory, which only wants a dossier -and the deviation from the "line," will he plead it not guilty in a place and time when the rule of the game is self-criticism - and then what? after all, is an innocent ever spotless, will he say what he knows? One can erect as a duty the maxim of countering the desire of the tyrant, if the tyrant is the one who arrogates to himself the power to enslave the desire of the Other. Thus upon the two lengths (and the precarious mediation), from which Kant makes himself a lever in order to show that the Law puts into balance not just pleasure, but also pain, happiness, or even the pressure of poverty, even love of life, everything pathological, it turns out that desire can not only have the same success, but can obtain it with greater legitimacy. But if the advantage which we have allowed the Critique to take from the alacrity of its argumentation owed something to our desire to know what it wanted to get at, could not the ambiguity of this success turn back its movement toward a revision of the extorted concessions? Such as, for example, the disgrace which, somewhat hastily, was brought upon all objects that propose themselves as goods, as being incapable of causing the harmony of wills: simply by introducing competition. Thus Milan, in which Charles V and Francois I knew what it cost them both to see the same good. This is indeed to misrecognize the nature of the object of desire. Which we can only introduce here by recalling what we teach about desire, to be formulated as desire of the Other, since it is originally desire of its desire. Which makes the harmony of desires conceivable, but not without danger. For the reason that in linking up in a chain which resembles Breughel's procession of the blind, they may indeed all be holding hands, but none knows where all are going. In reversing direction they will all gain the experience of a universal rule, but will know no more about it. Would the solution consonant with practical Reason then be that they all go round in circles? Even lacking, the gaze is there indeed an object which presents each desire with its universal rule by materializing its cause, by binding it to the division "between center and absence" of the subject. Let us thenceforth limit ourselves to saying that a practice such as psycho-

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analysis, which recognizes in desire the truth of the subject, cannot misrecognize what follows without demonstrating what it represses. Displeasure is recognized by psychoanalytic experience as giving a pretext to the repression of desire, in that it is produced on the path of its satisfaction: but also as giving the form this satisfaction itself takes in the return of the repressed. Similarly pleasure's aversion to recognize the law is doubled, by supporting that desire to satisfy it which is defense. If happiness is the uninterrupted agreeableness, for the subject, of his life, as the Critique'5 quite classically defines it, it is clear that it is refused to whomever does not renounce the path of desire. This renunciation can be willed, but at the price of the truth of man, which is made clear enough by the reprobation incurred before the common ideal by the Epicureans, and even by the Stoics. Their ataraxia destitutes their wisdom. They are given no credit for lowering desire, for not only is the Law not held to be raised accordingly; but it is thus, whether one knows it or not, that it is felt to be thrown down. Sade, ex-noble, takes up Saint-Just where one should. That happiness has become a factor in politics is an improper proposition. It has always been one and will bring back the scepter and the censer which get along with it very well. It is the freedom to desire which is a new factor, not because it inspires a revolution -it is always for a desire that one struggles and that one dies -but because this revolution wills that its struggle be for the freedom of desire. The result is that it also wills that the law be free, so free that it must be a widow, the Widow par excellence, the one who sends your head into the basket however little it faltered in the affair. Had Saint-Just's head remained inhabited by the fantasies of Organt, he would perhaps have made of Thermidor his triumph. The right to jouissance, were it recognized, would relegate the domination of the pleasure principle to a forevermore outdated era. In enunciating it, Sade causes the ancient axis of ethics to slip, by an imperceptible fracture, for everyone: this axis is nothing other than the egoism of happiness. It cannot be said that all reference to it is extinguished in Kant, in the very familiarity with which it keeps him company, and even more in its offspring, which one seizes in the requirements from which he deduces as much a retribution in the beyond as a progress here below. Let another happiness be glimpsed, whose name we first said, and the status of desire changes, imposing its reexamination. But it is here that there is something to be judged. To what point does Sade lead us in the experience of this jouissance, or at least its truth? 15. Theorem II of the first chapter of the Analytic, in Vorlander's edition, p. 25, completely mistranslated by Barni, p. 159.

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For these human pyramids, fabulously demonstrating jouissance in its cascading nature, these tiered fountains of desire built for jouissance to cast upon the d'Este gardens the iridescence of a baroque voluptousness, the higher they make it gush into the sky, the closer we are drawn by the question of what is dripping there. Of the unpredicatable quanta with which the love-hate atom shimmers near the Thing whence man emerges with a cry, what is felt, beyond certain limits, has nothing to do with what supports desire in fantasy, which is precisely constituted by these limits. These limits, we know that in his life Sade went beyond them. And doubtless he would otherwise not have given us this blueprint of his fantasy in his work. Perhaps we should be astonished by putting into question what, of this real experience, the work would also translate. To limit ourselves to the bedroom, for a sharp enough glimpse of the sentiments of a girl toward her mother, the fact remains that wickedness, so justly situated by Sade in its transcendence, teaches us nothing very new about the modulations of her heart. A work which wills itself to be wicked [mechante]could not permit itself to be a mediocre [mechante]work, and it must be said that the Philosophy,by a whole side of good work, lends itself to this witticism. There's a little too much preaching in there. Doubtless it is a treatise on the education of girls16and as such submitted to the laws of the genre. Despite the advantage it gains by exposing the anal-sadistic which clouded over the subject in its obsessional insistence in the two preceding centuries, it remains a treatise on education. The sermon is excruciating for the victim, self-infatuated on the part of the instructor. The historical, or rather, erudite information is grey and makes one regret a La Mothe le Vayer. The physiology is composed of old wives' tales. As far as the sexual education is concerned, it sounds like a contemporary medical pamphlet; no more need be said. Stronger commitment to scandal would mean going on to recognize in the impotence in which the educative intention is commonly deployed, the very one against which the fantasy makes all its efforts here: whence is born the obstacle to any valid account of the effects of education, since the part of the intention which caused the results cannot be avowed. This trait could have been priceless, one of the laudable effects of sadistic impotence. That Sade missed it means that something remains to be thought. His failing is confirmed by another no less remarkable: the work never presents us with the success of a seduction in which the fantasy would nevertheless be crowned: that by which the victim, be it in her final spasm, would come to 16.

Sade expressly indicates it in his complete title.

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consent to the intention of her tormentor, or would even enroll herself on his side by the verve of her consent. This demonstrates from another point of view that desire is the other side of the law. In the Sadian fantasy, one sees how they sustain each other. For Sade, one is always on the same side, either the good or the bad; no affront can change anything. It is thus the triumph of virtue: this paradox only recovers the derision proper to the edifying book, which Justine aims at too much not to espouse it. Apart from the lengthening nose which gives away the lie, found at the end of the posthumous Dialogue Betweena Priest and a Dying Man (admit that here is an unpropitious subject for other graces than divine grace), one sometimes feels the lack in the work of a mot d'esprit, and more largely of the wit whose necessity Pope had spoken of almost a century before. Evidently, all this is forgotten by the invasion of pedantry which weighs upon French literature since WWII. But if you need a strong stomach to follow Sade when he extols calumny, the first article of morality to be instituted in his Republic, one might prefer that he put something of the spiciness of a Renan into it. "Let us congratulate ourselves in like manner," the latter writes, "that Jesus encountered no law which punished the invectives uttered against one class of citizens. Had such a law existed, the Pharisees would have been inviolate." 17And he continues: "His exquisite irony, his arch and provoking remarks, always struck home. The Nessus-shirt of ridicule which the Jew, son of the Pharisees, has dragged in tatters after him during eighteen centuries, was woven by Jesus with a divine skill. Masterpieces of fine raillery, their features are written in lines of fire upon the flesh of the hypocrite and the false devotee. Incomparable traits, worthy of a son of God. A god alone knows how to kill after this fashion. Socrates and Moliere only touched the skin. He carried fire and rage to the marrow." 18 For these remarks take their value from the well-known result, we mean the vocation of the Apostle to the rank of the Pharisees and the triumph, universal, of Pharisaic virtues. Which, one will agree, leads to a more pertinent argument than the rather paltry excuse with which Sade is content in his apology for calumny: that the honest man will always triumph over it. This platitude does not prevent a somber beauty from emanating from this monument of defiance. This beauty bears witness for us to the experience for which we search behind the fabulation of the fantasy. A tragic experience, for it projects its condition in a lighting beyond all fear and pity. Bewilderment and shadows, such is, contrary to the joke [mot d'esprit],19the conjunction whose carbon brillance fascinates us in these scenes. This tragic is of the type which will sharpen its image later in the century in 17. 18. 19.

Cf. Vie de Jisus, 17th edition, p. 339. Ibid., p. 346. One knows how Freud takes off from the "bewilderment and illumination" of Heymans.

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more than one work, erotic novel or religious drama. We would call it the senile tragic, of which it was not known before us, except in schoolboys' jokes, that it was within a stone's-throw of the noble tragic. One should refer, to understand us, to Claudel's trilogy of the Pere humilie. (To understand us, one should also know that we have shown in this work the traits of the most authentic tragedy. It is Melpomene who is age-ridden, with Clio, without anyone seeing which one will bury the other.) Thus we are in a position to interrogate the Sade, mon prochain whose invocation we owe to the perspicacity of Pierre Klossowski. Extreme, it dispenses him from having to play the wit [des recours du bel esprit].20 Doubtless it is his discretion which leads him to shelter his formula behind a reference to Saint Labre. We do not find this reason compelling enough to give him the same shelter. That the Sadian fantasy situates itself better in the bearers of Christian ethics than elsewhere is what our structural landmarks allow us to grasp easily. But that Sade, himself, refuses to be my neighbor, is what needs to be recalled, not in order to refuse it to him in return, but in order to recognize the meaning of this refusal. We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment. For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity. Sade thus stopped, at the point where desire is knotted together with the law. If something in him held to the law, in order there to find the opportunity Saint Paul speaks of, to be sinful beyond measure, who would throw the first stone? But he went no further. It is not only that for him as for the rest of us the flesh is weak, it is that the spirit is too prompt not to be lured. The apology for crime only pushes him to the indirect avowal of the Law. The supreme Being is restored in Maleficence. Listen to him bragging of his technique, of immediately putting everything which occurs to him into operation, thinking moreover, by replacing repentance with reiteration, to have done with the law within. He finds nothing better to encourage us to follow him than the promise that nature, woman that she is, will magically always yield to us more. It would be a mistake to trust this typical dream of potency. It sufficiently indicates, in any case, that it would not be possible for Sade, as

This phrase was addressed to a future academician, himself an expert in maliciousnesses, 20. whom I have perceived to recognize himself in the one which opens this article.

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is suggested by P. Klossowski even as he notes that he does not believe it, to have attained the sort of apathy which would be "to have reentered the bosom of nature, in a waking state, in our world,"21 inhabited by language. Of what Sade is lacking here, we have forbidden ourselves to say a word. One may sense it in the gradation of the Philosopy toward the fact that it is the curved needle, dear to Bufiuel's heroes, which is finally called upon to resolve a girl's penisneid, and quite a big one. Be that as it may, it appears that there is nothing to be gained by replacing Diotima with Dolmance, someone whom the ordinary path seems to frighten more than is fitting, and who-did Sade see it?-closes the affair with a Noli V . . matrem. . ed and sewn up, the mother remains forbidden. Our tangere verdict upon the submission of Sade to the Law is confirmed. Of a treatise truly about desire, there is thus little here, even nothing. What of it is announced in this crossing taken from an encounter, is at most a tone of reason. R. G. September 1962

The editors would like to thankJacques-Alain Miller for the permission to publish this text.

21.

Cf. the footnote on p. 94, Sade, mon prochain.

Annotations to "Kant with Sade" JAMES B. SWENSON, JR. The preceding translation is based on the version of "Kant avec Sade" published in the paperback "Points" edition of Ecrits II, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1971, pp. 119-148. This was the third of three publications, and it corrects a number of errors which occur in the earlier versions. The following annotations to the text began as part of my own effort to understand the text, one of the most difficult of the Ecrits. In particular, the essay demands a great deal of knowledge from the reader, both textual and historical. It has always been my feeling that a great deal of Lacan's legendary difficulty lay in these demands, and these annotations are an attempt to provide a partial response to them. It is my hope that they will render the text at least more approachable. I have attempted, to as great an extent as possible, to avoid providing an interpretation of the text, to limit myself to the realm of information, and to restrict my focus to what needs to be known to understand a given paragraph. It is my hope that these strictures will spare the reader hours of research while allowing him or her to formulate his or her own interpretation of the text. Some readers may find the information presented here redundant; others may find it insufficient. If each bit of information is useful to someone, that is sufficient for me. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the many people who helped me with this project. I am particularly grateful to Michael Syrotinski, who took the time to review the translation line by line with me while it was still in its early stages, and to Haun Saussy and Debra Keates. At later stages I benefited from the knowledge and attention of Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Jacques-Alain Miller. I hope that the many others who chipped in will be able to recognize their contributions. In order that this information not interfere with the direct reading of the text, I have chosen to key the annotations to page and paragraph number in the translation. No marking has been made in the text. A paragraph continuing from a previous page is designated ? 0 in these notes, while ? 1 designates the first full paragraph on a page. The following short title forms and abbreviations have been used throughout: SA: Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, edited by Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, James Strachey, Frankfurt a.M., Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1970, 11 vols. SE: Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the CompletePsychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey, London, The Hogarth Press, 1956, 24 vols. WA:Immanuel Kant, Werkein zwolfBanden, Werkausgabe,edited by Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974, 12 vols. Smith: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1965. Beck: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1957. Meredith: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952. Ecrits:Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1966.

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EAS: Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, Norton, 1977. L'ethique:Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire Livre VII: L'ethiquede la psychanalyse,Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1987. Les quatre concepts:Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire Livre XI: Les quatre conceptsfondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1973. FFC: Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, Norton, 1981. OC: D.A.F. de Sade, Oeuvres completes, Paris, Cercle du livre precieux, 1962-1964, 15 vols. Philosophy: D.A.F. de Sade, The CompleteJustine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, compiled and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, New York, Grove Press, 1965. Juliette: D.A.F. de Sade, Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, New York, Grove Press, 1968.

p. 55, ?1: "literary." Lacan's use of "les lettres" here would seem to refer to the realm of "belles lettres" or even literary criticism. One of the main targets here would likely be Jean Paulhan (a frequent user of the phrase), who writes:

Sade was led . . . to hold that man was wicked, and to show in detail, in all fashions, this wickedness which he was the first to found upon sexuality; this is a thesis which Groddeck, Freud, and a hundred others took up later. . . . The writers of the nineteenth century, beginning with Lamartine and continuing, if you wish, with Freud and Nietzsche, vulgarized the work of the Marquis de Sade.

Reiterating them through ten volumes and supporting them with a thousand examples, a Krafft-Ebing was to consecrate the categories and distinctions the Divine Marquis traced. Later, a Freud was to adopt Sade's very method and principle. There has not, I think, been any other example, in our letters, of a few novels providing the basis, fifty years after their publication, for a whole science of man.

("Deposition de Jean Paulhan," L'affaire Sade, Compte-rendu exact du proces intente par le Ministere Public aux Editions Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1957, pp. 48-49.) The comparison is further taken up by the judgment ("Jugement," L'affaire Sade, p. 122):

(Jean Paulhan, "Le Marquis de Sade et sa complice," Oeuvres completes, Paris, Cercle du livre precieux, 1969, vol. 4, pp. 22-23; translated as a Preface to Philosophy,p. 18.) Further, in his deposition in the 1957 trial of Jean-Jacques Pauvert for publishing Sade (the account of which Lacan refers to [cf. footnote 10 and annotation below]), Paulhan in fact makes this connection:

If it is excessive to admit, as some have upheld, that this work has dominated the twentieth century, one nevertheless cannot contest its originality, nor the importance of the field of studies which it offers to all those who are interested in the new field of psychotherapy of which Sade is a precursor before Krafft-Ebing,

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Havelock Ellis, before the discoveries of Freud.... See also note 21 and annotation below. p. 55, ?3: "happiness in evil." The most likely source for this phrase is the short story by Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly, "Happiness in Crime," a story of great conjugal bliss founded upon a murder. ("Le bonheur dans le crime," in J.-H. Bornecque, ed., Les diaboliques, Paris, Garnier freres, 1963, pp. 103-163.) p. 56, ?1: "the eternal feminine." Cf. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Goethes Faust II, verses 12104-12111, Werke, Hamburg, Christian Wegner Verlag, 1949, vol. 3, p. 364: "Alles Vergingliche I Ist nur ein Gleichnis; I Das Unzuliingliche, I Hier wird's Ereignis; I Das Unbeschreibliche, I Hier ist's getan; I Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan (Everything transitory is only a parable; the inadequate, here becomes event; the undescribable, here is accomplished; the eternal feminine draws us upward)." p. 56, ?1: "Man fiihlt sich wohl im Guten." Cf. WA, vol. 7, p. 193; Beck, pp. 61-62: There is an old formula of the schools: Nihil appetimus, nisi sub ratione boni; nihil aversamur, nisi sub ratione mali. It is often used correctly, but often in a manner very injurious to philosophy, since the expressions boni and mali contain an ambiguity due to the poverty of the language. . . . The German language has the good fortune to possess expressions which do not permit this difference to be overlooked. It has two very different concepts and equally different expressions for what the Latins named with the single word bonum.

For bonum it has das Gute (the good) and das Wohl (well-being) .... p. 56, 112: "phenomenal succession [enchainement phenomenal]." I have translated enchainement"succession" due to the "enchaining"-as emphasis Kant places on time as the location of the causality within which the phenomenal subject is caught. Cf. WA, vol. 7, pp. 219-220; Beck, pp. 97-98: The concept of causality as natural necessity, unlike the concept of causality as freedom, concerns only the existence of things as far as it is determinable in time, and consequently as appearances in contrast to their causality as things-in-themselves. If one takes the attributes of things in time for things-in-themselves, which is the usual way of thinking, the necessity in the causal relation can in no way be united with freedom. They are contradictory to each other, for the former implies that every event, and consequently every action which occurs at a certain point of time is necessary under the condition of what preceded it. Since the past is no longer in my power, every action which I perform is necessary because of determining grounds which are not in my power. That means that at the time I act I am never free .... At every point in time I still stand under the necessity of being determined to act by what is not in my power, and the a parte priori infinite series of events which I can continue only by an already predetermined order would never commence of itself. It would be a continuous natural chain [eine stetigeNaturkette],and thus my causality would never be freedom.

Annotations to "Kant with Sade"

p. 56, ?5: In this paragraph Lacan presents several pages of Kant's argument in an extremely compressed form. We will present here only those passages from which he draws directly. The first, the one to which he himself refers (WA, vol. 7, p. 193; Beck, pp. 75-76), reads as follows: All inclinations taken together (which can be brought into a fairly tolerable system, whereupon their satisfaction is called happiness) constitute self-regard (solipsismus). This consists either of self-love, which is a predominant benevolence towards one's self (philautia) or of self-satisfaction (arrogantia). The former is called, more particularly, selfishness; the latter, self-conceit. Several pages later, in the course of describing the origin of the feeling of respect for the moral law, Kant writes (WA, vol. 7, p. 196; Beck, p. 78): Since the idea of the moral law deprives self-love of its influence and self-conceit of its delusion, it lessens the obstacle to pure practical reason and produces the idea of the superiority of its objective law to the impulses of sensibility; it increases the weight of the moral law by removing, in the judgement of reason, the counterweight to the moral law [mithin das Gewicht des ersteren relativ . . . durch die Wegschaffung des Gegengewichts. . . hervorgebracht wird] which bears on a will affected by sensibility. Thus respect for the law is not the incentive to morality; it is morality itself, regarded subjectively as an incentive .... p. 57, ?3 and footnote 2: Cf. WA, vol. 7, p. 136; Beck, pp. 26-27:

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I have, for example, made it my maxim to increase my property by every safe means. Now I have in my possession a deposit, the owner of which has died without leaving any record of it. Naturally, this case falls under my maxim. Now I want to know whether this maxim can hold as a universal practical law. I apply it therefore to the present case and ask if it could take the form of a law, and consequently whether I could, by the maxim, make the law that every man is allowed to deny that a deposit has been made when no one can prove the contrary. I immediately realize that taking such a principle as a law would annihilate itself, because its result would be that no one would make a deposit [weil es machen wiirde, dab es gar kein Depositum gdbe]. A practical law which I acknowledge as such must qualify for being universal law; this is an identical and therefore self-evident proposition. Now, if I say that my will is subject to a practical law, I cannot put forward my inclination (in this case, my avarice) as fit to be a determining ground of a universal practical law. It is so far from being worthy of universal legislation that in the form of a universal law it must destroy itself. p. 57, T4: On the distinction between analytic and synthetic, cf. the Introduction to Kant's first Critique (WA, vol. 3, p. 52; Smith, p. 48 [A 7/B 10-11]): Analytic judgements (affirmative) are therefore those in which the connection of the predicate with the subject is thought through identity; those in which this connection is thought without identity should be entitled synthetic. The former, as adding

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nothing through the predicate to the concept of the subject, but merely breaking it up into those constituent concepts that have all along been thought in it, although confusedly, can also be entitled expliative. The latter, on the other hand, add to the concept of the subject a predicate which has not been in any wise thought in it, and which no analysis could possibly extract from it; and they may therefore be entitled ampliative. Kant goes on to posit three propositions about synthetic judgments (WA, vol. 3, pp. 55-58; Smith, pp. 52-54 [B 14-17]): 1. All mathematicaljudgements, without exception, are synthetic .... 2. Natural science (physics) contains a priori synthetic judgements as principles . . . 3. Metaphysics,even if we look upon it as having hitherto failed in all its endeavours, is yet, owing to the nature of human reason, a quite indispensable science, and ought to contain a priori syntheticknowledge. We should further note that analytic judgments all depend upon a prior synthesis, and that synthetic judgments cannot be made on the basis of concepts alone, but require an intuition (whether sensuous as in experiential judgments or a priori as in mathematical judgments). p. 57, ?4: "Long live Poland! . . ." Before retouching, the text reads: "Beautiful though it may be, it's not a patch on Poland. Ah gentlemen, there'll always be a Poland. Otherwise there wouldn't be any Poles! [Ah! messieurs! si beau qu'il soit il ne vaut pas la Pologne. S'il n'y availt pas de Pologne il n'y aurait pas de polonais.q" (Alfred Jarry, Ubu roi, Acte V, Scene IV, Oeuvres completes, textes etablis,

presentes, et annotes par Michel Arrive, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1972, vol. 1, p. 398; Ubu Rex, trans. Cyril Connolly and Simon Taylor Watson, in The Ubu Plays, New York, Grove Press, 1969, p. 73). p. 58, ?2: "jouissance." I have followed the now classic approach of leaving jouissance untranslated. See Sheridan's note in FFC, p. 281; see also Stuart Schneiderman's Preface to Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, ed. and trans., Stuart Schneiderman, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980, p. vii. Although it is not a strict equivalent, I have translated droit de (or a)jouir de as "right of enjoyment over," in order to emphasize the legal meaning which is so important in this context (see particularly the citation from Sade in the annotation to p. 60, 1?0 and footnote 3, below, where he differentiates between the right of property and the right of jouissance). As an element of the French legal vocabulary, jouissance designates the benefit gained from the possession or use of a thing; it refers to a relation to these benefits and not to the ownership of the thing itself. Thus someone who has a droit de jouissance can, for example, alienate (rent) the benefits he gains from an object, but he cannot alienate (sell) the object. p. 58, 113: On the Sadian maxim, cf. the formulation first given in L'ethique, p. 96: "Let us take as a universal maxim for our action the right to enjoyment [droit de jouir] over an other whomever he may be, as an instrument of our pleasure." Cf. also p. 237, where Lacan cites the following passage from Juliette (OC, vol. 8, p. 71; Juliette, pp. 63-64): "Pray avail me of that part of your body which is capable of giving me a moment's satisfaction, and, if you are so inclined, amuse yourself [jouissez] with

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whatever part of mine may be agreeable to you."

p. 58, 116: "humor is the betrayer [transfuge] in the comic of the very function of the 'super-ego.'" Cf. Freud, "Humour," SA, vol. 4, p. 281; SE, vol. 21, p. 165: As regards the origin of jokes, I was led [in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious] to assume that a preconscious thought is given over to the unconscious for momentary revision. A joke is thus the contribution made to the comic by the unconscious. In just the same way, humour would be the contribution [Beitrag] made to the comic through the agency of the superego [Freud's emphasis]. Given the use of a number of thematically related examples below (Saint-Just and the Terror, Kant's "apologue"), it is worth noting that Freud's primary example, both here and in the section of Jokes . . . on humor, is that of gallows humor (Galgenhumor): "A rogue who was being led out to execution on a Monday remarked: 'Well, this week's beginning nicely'" (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, SA, vol. 4, p. 213; SE, vol. 8, p. 229). p. 58, 112: On the concept of logical time, cf. "Le temps logique et l'assertion de certitude anticipee: Un nouveau sophisme," Ecrits, pp. 197-213. p. 59, ?6: On the distinction between enunciation and statement, cf. Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generale, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard, 1966, particularly the section entitled "L'hommedans la langue," pp. 223-285; Problems of General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Coral Gables, University of Miami Press, 1971,

pp. 193-246. Cf. also Roman Jakobson, "Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb," in Selected Writings, The Hague, Mouton, 1971, vol. 2, p. 134, where he translates "procesde l'inonciation" and "proces de l'inonce," respectively, as "speech event" and "narrated event." p. 59, ?9: 'fun." In English in the original. Cf. the question Lacan poses to Roman Jakobson in a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, December 2, 1975: D'eux comes from de illis. Deux from duo. Is the phoneme destined to seize upon equivocality, or is it a happenstance for French ears? Is it not this equivocality (which is what interpretation plays upon) which is what makes a circle of the symptom with the symbolic? Since, intervening in a certain manner upon the symptom, one finds oneself equivocating. Is there a side of linguistics which is treatable as such? It would be the side which is always the one to which the analyst must be sensitive: fun. (Jacques Lacan, "Conferences et entretiens dans des universites nord-americaines," Scilicet, nos. 6/7 [1976], p. 59; translation, slightly altered, from Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1983, p. 104.) p. 59, ?10 and note 3: Philosophy, pp. 318-319: Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of

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slaves; all men are born free, all have equal rights: never should we lose sight of these principles; according to which never may there be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of the sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other. Similarly, a woman existing in the purity of Nature's laws cannot allege, as justification for refusing herself to someone who desires her, the love she bears another, because such a response is based on exclusion, and no man may be excluded from the having of a woman as of the moment it is clear she definitely belongs to all men. The act of possession can only be exercised upon a chattel or an animal, never upon an individual who resembles us, and all the ties which can bind a woman to a man are quite as unjust as they are illusory. If it then becomes incontestable that we have received from Nature the right to express our wishes to all women, it likewise becomes incontestable that we have the right to compel their submission, not exclusively, for then I should be contradicting myself, but temporarily. Sade here inserts a note: Let it not be said that I contradict myself here, and that after having established, at some point further above, that we have no right to bind a woman to ourselves, I destroy those principles when I declare we now have the right to constrain her; I repeat, it is a question of enjoyment [jouissance] only, not of property: I have no right of possession upon the fountain I find by the road, but I have certain rights to its use [jouissance]; I have the right to avail myself

of the limpid water it offers my thirst; similarly, I have no real right of possession over such-and-such a woman, but I have incontestable rights to the enjoyment of her; I have the right to force from her this enjoyment, if she refuses me it for whatever the cause may be. p. 60, ?6: "amboceptive." "Amboceptor" is a term introduced by the German hematologist and immunologist Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) to describe his concept, no longer in use, of the structure of complement-fixation (an important process in immunology). Etymologically, the word means "taking from both." Lacan uses the term in a discussion of the effect of separation produced by the objet a in a passage from the seminar on anxiety (L'angoisse, Seminar 10, 1962-63, unpublished, session of March 6, 1963): It is not so much the child which pumps the mother's milk as the breast . . . I want to place the ac-

cent upon the privilege, at a certain level, of elements that can be qualified as amboceptors. Which side is the breast on? On the side of what sucks or on the side of what is sucked? . . . Is it enough

to qualify

the breast as a partial object? When I say amboceptor, I emphasize that it is just as necessary to articulate the relation of the maternal subject to the breast as that of the baby to it. The cut is not made at the same place for both; there are two cuts, so far apart that they even leave two totally different waste-products [dechets]. p. 60, ?8: Lacan's text reads, actually ". .. unveiled as Etre-la, Dasein, of the agent

. . . ," that is, giving the standard

French translation of Heidegger's Dasein.

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Because English translations of Heidegger usually leave Dasein untranslated, I have here allowed it to stand alone.

Cf. Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," SA, vol. 3, pp. 61-62; SE, vol. 14, pp. 94-96: Idealization is a process that concerns the object; by it that object, without any alteration in its nature, is aggrandized and exalted in the subject's mind. Idealization is possible in the sphere of ego-libido as well as in that of object-libido. .... It would not surprise us if we were to find a special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego-ideal is ensured and which, with this end in mind, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal. . . . We may reflect that what we call our "conscience" has the required characteristics. Recognition of this agency enables us to understand the socalled "delusions of being noticed" or more correctly, of being watched, which are such striking symptoms in the paranoid diseases. . . . Patients of this sort complain that all their thoughts are known and their actions are watched and supervised; they are informed of the functioning of this agency by voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person ("Now she's thinking of that again," "now he's going out"). This complaint is justified; it describes the truth. . .. What prompted the subject to form an ego-ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as a watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice) ....

p. 61, ?3: "Grimmigkeit." Grimmigkeitmeans wrathfulness; the reference is to Jacob B6hme (1575-1624), a German shoemaker and mystic, author of The Aurora and numerous other mystical tracts. Cf. Lacan's comments in L'ethique, p. 255): There were already at the time of courtly love people called Cathars, to whom I made a passing allusion and for whom there was no doubt that the Prince of this world was something comparable enough to this supremely wicked being. The Grimmigkeit of the Bohmian God, a fundamental wickedness as one of the dimensions of supreme life, proves to you that it is not only a libertine and anti-religious thought which can evoke this dimension. It is probably Bohme to whom Kant refers in the following passage from the "Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason" (WA, vol. 7, pp. 251-253; Beck, pp. 125-127): So long as practical reason is pathologically conditioned, i.e., as merely regulating the interest of the inclinations by the sensuous principle of happiness, this demand [that theoretical reason should yield primacy to practical reason] could not be made the reason. upon speculative Mohammed's paradise or the fusion with the deity of the theosophists and mystics, according to the taste of each, would press their monstrosities on reason, and it would be as well to have no reason at all as to surrender it in such a manner to all sorts of dreams [Trdumereien]. . . . Without [the thesis of the moral destiny of our nature] either the moral law is completely degraded from holiness, by being made out as lenient (indulgent)

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and thus compliant to our convenience, or its call and its demands are strained to an unattainable destination, i.e., a hoped-for attainment of holiness of will, and are lost in fanatical theosophical dreams [schwdrmende. . . theosophische Traume] which completely contradict our knowledge of ourselves. p. 61, ?3: "Being-Supreme-in-Wickedness." OC, vol. 8, p. 386; Juliette, p. 399. This term immediately precedes the passage cited in the second annotation to p. 64, ?1 below. p. 61, ?4: "Schwirmereien." Schwdrmereienis a distinctively Kantian term which means fanaticisms or mysticisms; Schwirme, from which the former is derived, means swarms (black is schwarz). Cf. WA, vol. 7, p. 208; Beck, p. 88: If fanaticism [Schwdrmerei]in its most general sense is a deliberate overstepping of the limits of human reason, moral fanaticism is this overstepping of limits which pure practical reason sets to mankind. Pure practical reason thereby forbids us to place the subjective determining ground of dutiful actions, i.e., their moral incentive, anywhere else than in the law itself. . . . Kant had previously given a slightly more technical definition of the term (WA, vol. 7, p. 190; Beck, p. 73): The mysticism [Mystizism:at the end of the paragraph Kant speaks of Schwdrmerei in such a way as to equate the terms] of practical reason . . . makes into a schema that which should only serve as a symbol, i.e., proposes to supply real yet non-

sensuous intuitions (of an invisible kingdom of God) for the application of the moral law, and thus plunges into the transcendent. The explanation of this distinction between symbol and schema is to be found in ? 59 of the third Critique (WA, vol. 10, pp. 295297; Meredith, pp. 221-223): All hypotyposis(presentation, subjectio sub adspectum) as a rendering in terms of sense, is twofold. Either it is schematic, as where the intuition corresponding to a concept is given a priori, or else it is symbolic,as where the concept is one which only reason can think, and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate. In the latter case the concept is supplied with an intuition such that the procedure of judgement in dealing with it is merely analogous to that which it observes in schematism. In other words, what agrees with the concept is merely the rule of this procedure, and not the intuition itself. Hence the agreement is merely in the form of the reflection, and not in the content. . . . All our knowledge of God is merely symbolic; and one who takes it, with the properties of understanding, will, and so forth, which only evidence their objective reality in beings of this world, to be schematic, falls into anthropomorphism, just as, if he abandons every intuitive element, he falls into Deism which furnishes no knowledge whatsoever -not even from a practical point of view. p. 61, ?8: "henchman [suppOt]." The most common current use of this word is in the phrase "suppbt du demon," meaning someone who furthers the devil's aims. Formerly, it had a philosophical sense of support, in the sense in

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which a subject or a substance is the support of its predicates or attributes (the obsolete word "supposite" is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary in this sense).

operations of union (U, the vel of alienation [see annotation to p. 63, T3 below] and intersection (n, separation). Finally, in a passage of "Subversion of the Subject

p. 62, ?2: "since it is not articulatable there even though it is articulated in it [pour n'y etre pas articulable encore qu'il y soit articule]." Cf., on this somewhat gnomic formulation, a favorite of Lacan's, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," where a causal relation between the two clauses is established (Ecrits, p. 804; EAS, p. 302): "To put it elliptically: it is precisely because desire is articulated that it is not articulatable [que le disir soit articule, c'estjustement par lh qu'il n'est pas articulable], I mean in the discourse best suited to it, an ethical, not a psychological discourse." p. 62, ?6: "(kOa)." The formula for the fantasy was first introduced in the seminar on unconscious formations (Les formations de l'inconscient, Seminar 5, 1957-1958, unpublished), and was constantly reinterpreted by Lacan. To trace the history of these reinterpretations is well beyond our scope here. We can, however, provide a brief note on the stamp ("poincon"; Sheridan, in FFC and EAS, translates this as "punch"). When first introduced, Lacan says simply that its "quadratic" form reproduces that of the "Schema L" (see annotation to "Schema 2" below). In a note to "The Direction of the Cure and the Principles of Its Power" (Ecrits, p. 634; EAS, p. 280), he writes, "The sign registers the relations envelopment- development-conjunction-disjunction." This interpretation of the stamp as a set of logical operations is continued in The Four Fundamental Concepts(Les quatre concepts, p. 190; FFC, p. 209), where Lacan breaks it into vectorialised upper and lower halves, respectively representing the logical

. . ." which obviously

refers back to

the present context, Lacan writes (Ecrits, p. 816; EAS, p. 313): This is what is symbolised by the acronym (gOa) which I have introduced, in the form of an algorithm of which it is not an accident that it breaks the phonemic element constituted by the signifying unity right down to its literal atom. For it is created to allow a hundred and one [vingt et cent] different readings, a multiplicity which is admissible just as long as it remains caught in its algebra. p. 63, ?3: "vel." Cf. "Position Ecrits, pp. 841-842:

de

l'inconscient,"

Alienation resides in the division of the subject which we have just designated in its cause. Let us advance in its logical structure. This structure is that of a vel, new in this production of its originality. This requires its being derived from what is called, in so-called mathematical logic, union (already recognized as defining a certain vel). This union is such that the vel which we call the vel of alienation imposes a choice between its terms only in order to eliminate one of them, always the same one whatever the choice may be. Its stake is thus limited, apparently, to the conservation or not of the other term, in the case of a binary union. This disjunction

is incarnated

in a fashion which is highly illustratable, if not dramatic, as soon as the signifier is incarnated at a more per-

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sonalised level in a demand or in an offer: in "your money or your life" or in "freedom or death." The only question is that of knowing whether or not (sic aut non) you want to conserve life or refuse death, for as far as the other term of the alternative: your money or freedom, is concerned, your choice will be disappointing in any case. It is necessary to take heed of the fact that what remains is truncated in any case: it will be a life without money, -and it will also be, for having refused death, a life slightly impoverished at the price of freedom. These are the stigmata which the vel which here functions dialectically inflicts upon the vel of logical union, which, as is known, is equivalent to an and (sic et non). As is illustrated by the fact that in the long run it will be necessary to let go of life after one's money and that in the end only the freedom to die will remain. In the same way our subject is confronted with the vel between a certain sense to be received and petrification. But if he keeps the sense, it is this field (that of sense) out of which the nonsense produced by its changing into a signifier will take a bite. Cf. also Les quatre concepts, pp. 190193, p. 200; FFC, pp. 209-213, pp. 219-220. p. 63, 14: "What does it want? [Que veut-il?]" Cf. on this phrase, the following passage from "Subversion of the Subject," as well as Graph 3, which it describes (Ecrits, pp. 814-815; EAS, p. 312): For it is clear that the state of nescience in which man remains in rela-

tion to this desire is not so much a nescience of what he demands, which after all may be circumscribed, as a nescience as to whence he desires. And it is to this that we respond by the formula that the unconscious is discourse of the Other, in which the of must be understood in the sense of the Latin de (objective determination): de Alio in oratione (completed by: tua res agitur). But also in adding that man's desire is the desire of the Other, in which the of provides the determination which the grammarians call subjective, namely that it is qua Other that he desires (which is what provides the true import of human passion). This is why the question of the Other, which comes back to the subject from the place from which he expects an oracle, phrased as a Che vuoi?, What do you want?, is the one which best leads to the path of his own desire - if he sets out, thanks to the skills of a partner by the name of a psychoanalyst, to reformulate it, be it without knowing it, as "What does it want of me [Que me veut-il]?" p. 63, 16: "aphanisis." The term aphanisis was first introduced by Ernest Jones in "The Early Development of Female Sexuality," Papers in Psycho-analysis, 5th edition, London, Tindall and Cox, Bailliere, 1950, pp. 439-440: The all-important part played in male sexuality by the genital organs naturally tends to make us equate castration with the abolition of sexuality altogether. This fallacy often creeps into our arguments even though we know that many men wish to be castrated for, among others, erotic reasons, so that their sexuality

Annotations to "Kant with Sade"

does not disappear with the surrender of the penis. With women, where the whole penis idea is always partial and mostly secondary in nature, this should be still more evident. In other words, the prominence of castration fears among men tends sometimes to make us forget that in both sexes castration is only a partial threat, however important a one, against sexual capacity and enjoyment as a whole. For the main blow of total extinction we might do well to use a separate term, such as the Greek word "aphanisis." The passage upon which Lacan relies in his reinterpretation of this term reads as follows (pp. 444-445): The girl must choose, broadly speaking, between sacrificing her erotic attachment to her father and sacrificher anal ing her femininity-i.e., identification with the mother. Either the object must be exchanged for another or the wish must be; it is impossible to retain both. Either the father or the vagina (including pregenital vaginas) must be renounced. . . . The boy is also threatened with aphanisis, the familiar castration fear, by the inevitable privation of his incest wishes. He also has to make the choice between changing the wish and changing the object, between renouncing the mother and renouncing his mascuhis penis. We have thus linity-i.e., obtained a generalisation which applies in a unitary manner to boy and girl alike: faced with aphanisis as a result of inevitable privation, they must renounce either their sex or their incest . . . Cf. Les quatre concepts, pp. 189, 191; FFC, pp. 207-208, 210:

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One analyst felt this, at another level, and tried to signify it in a term which was new, and which has never since been exploited in the field of analysis -aphanisis, disappearance. Jones, who invented it, took it for something rather absurd, the fear of seeing desire disappear. Now, aphanisis is to be situated in a more radical way at the level where the subject manifests itself in this movement of disappearance which I have qualified as lethal. In still another way, I have called this movement the fading of the subject. . . . Alienation consists in this vel, which -if you do not object to the word condemned, I will use itcondemns the subject to appear only in this division which, it seems to me, I have just sufficiently articulated by saying that, if it appears on one side as sense, produced by the signifier, it appears on the other as aphanisis. Cf. annotations to p. 62, ?6 and p. 63, ?3 above. p. 63, ?7 and footnote 4: "Love unconquered in fight." Antigone, in Sophocles I: Three Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1954, p. 186. The chorus utters this line immediately following Creon's announcement (verses 773780) that he has condemned Antigone to be buried alive. On this passage, cf. L'ethique, p. 256, and pp. 326-327: The true barrier which stops the subject before the unnameable field of radical desire inasmuch as it is the field of absolute destruction, of destruction beyond putrefaction, is properly speaking the aesthetic phenomenon inasmuch as it is identifiable with the experience of the

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beautiful - the beautiful in its bursting radiance, the beautiful which is said to be the splendor of the true. It is obviously because the true is not such a pretty sight that the beautiful is, if not its splendor, at least its cover. .... It stops us, but it also indicates to us the direction in which the field of destruction is found (p. 256). When does this plaint begin? At the moment at which she crosses the entry of the zone between life and death, where what she said she already was takes on exterior form. Indeed she had long told us that she was already in the kingdom of the dead, but this time it is consecrated in the facts. Her torture will consist in being closed up, suspended, in the zone between life and death. Without yet being dead, she is already stricken from the world of the living. ... The violent illumination, the sheen of beauty, coincides with the moment of crossing over, of realization of Antigone's Ate. . . . The effect of beauty is an effect of blinding. Something is still happening beyond, which cannot be looked at. Indeed, Antigone has herself declared, the whole time - I am dead and I want death. When Antigone portrays herself as Niobe being petrified, with what does she identify?- if not this inanimate in which Freud teaches us to recognize the form in which the death instinct is manifested. It is indeed a question of an illustration of the death instinct (pp. 326-327). p. 64, ?1 and footnote 5: OC, vol. 8, pp. 356-357; pp. 369-370:

Juliette,

Fierce and long has been my struggle

against the shameful yoke of religion, my friends; and I must confess to you that I am yet its captive insofar as I still have hopes of a life after this. If it is true, I say to myself, that there are punishments and rewards in the next world, the victims of my wickedness will triumph, they will know bliss. This idea hurls me into deepest despond, owing to my extreme barbarity this idea is a very torture to me. Whenever I immolate an object, whether to my ambition or to my lubricity, my desire is to make its suffering last beyond the unending immensity of ages; such has been my desire, and had been for a long time when I broached it to a famous libertine whom I was greatly attached to in days gone by, and whose tastes were the same as mine. He was a man of vast knowledge, his attainments in alchemy and astrology were especially noteworthy; he assured me that I was correct in my suspicion that there were punishments and rewards to come; and that, in order to bar the victim from celestial joys, it is necessary to have him sign a pact, writ in his heart's blood, whereby he contracts his soul to the devil; next to insert this paper in his asshole and to tamp it home with one's prick; and while doing so to cause him to suffer the greatest pain in one's power to inflict. Observe these measures, my friend assured me, and no individual you destroy will enter into heaven. His agonies, in kind identical to those you will make him endure while burying the pact, shall be everlasting; and yours will be the unspeakable delight of prolonging them beyond the limits of eternity, if eternity could have limits.

Annotations to "Kant with Sade"

p. 64, ?1: "particles of evil." Cf. OC, vol. 8, pp. 386-387;Juliette, pp. 399-400: I see eternal and universal evil as absolutely indispensable in the world. The author of the universe is the most wicked, the most ferocious, the most horrifying of all beings. His works cannot be anything but the result or the incarnation of his criminality. Without his wickedness raised to its extremest pitch, nothing would be sustained in the universe; evil is, however, a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was able to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world; it is unto evil that they will all enter again, in order to re-create others perhaps more wicked yet, and that is why they say all is degraded, all is corrupted in old age; that stems from the perpetual re-entry and emergence of wicked elements into and out of the matrix of maleficient molecules. p. 64, ?2: "the second death." Cf. L'ithique, pp. 248-250, where Lacan cites the following passage from the "System of Pope Pius VI" (OC, vol. 9, pp. 175-177;Juliette, pp. 771-772): No destruction, no fodder for the earth, and consequently man deprived of the possibility to reproduce man. Fatal truth, this, since it contains inescapable proof that the virtues and vices of our social system are nought, and that what we characterize as vices are more beneficial, more necessary than our virtues, since

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these vices are creative and these virtues merely created; or, if you prefer, these vices are causes, these virtues merely effects; proof too that a perfect harmony would have more disadvantages than has disorder; and proof that if war, discord, and crime were suddenly to be banished from the world, the three kingdoms, all checks on them removed, would flourish so as to unsettle and soon destroy all the other laws of Nature. Celestial bodies would come to a halt, their influences would be suspended because of the overly great empire of one of their number; gravitation would be no more, and motion none. It is then the crimes of man which, stemming the rise of the three kingdoms, counteracting their tendency to preponderate, prevent their importance from becoming such as must disrupt all else, and maintains in universal affairs that perfect equilibrium Horace called rerum concordia discors. Therefore is crime necessary in the world. But the most useful crimes are without doubt those which most disrupt, such as refusal to propagate and destruction;all the others are petty mischief, they are even less than that, or rather only those two merit the name of crime: and thus you see these crimes essential to the laws of the kingdoms, and essential to the laws of Nature. An ancient philosopher called war the mother of all things. The existence of murderers is as necessary as that bane; but for them, all would be disturbed in the order of things. . . . This dissolution benefits Nature, since 'tis these disassembled parts she recomposes. Thus does all change effected by man upon organized matter far more serve Nature than it displeases her. What is

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this I say? Alas! to render her true service would require destructions more thorough, vaster than it is in our power to operate; 'tis atrocity, 'tis scope she wants in crimes; the more our destroying is of a broad and atrocious kind, the more agreeable it is to her. To serve her better yet, one would have to be able to prevent the regeneration resultant from the corpses we bury. Only of his first life does murder deprive the individual we smite; one would have to be able to wrest away his second, if one were to be more useful to Nature; for 'tis annihilation she seeks, by less she is not fully satisfied, it is not within our power to extend our murders to the point she desires. Lacan explicitly constructs an analogy between the "second death" and the Freudian death drive: ". . . the death drive . . . is of the same order as the System of

Pope Pius VI. As in Sade, the death drive is a creationist

sublimation

. . ." (p. 251).

p. 64, ?2: "with which he symbolizes in the wish that . . . [avec lequel il symbolise dans le

voeu que . . .]." Lacan here uses "symboliser" without a direct object. One would expect something to be symbolized "in the wish. . . ," for example, or to be symbolized "with (the vanishing or fainting of the subject)." This usage would seem to accord with the following passage from "D'un syllabaire apres coup," attached to "Sur la theorie du symbolisme d'Ernest Jones," Ecrits, p. 719: Jones advances here expressly in order to enunciate the principle by which Jung excludes himself from psychoanalysis. It is resumed in a word which

pertinently recalls that the thing is always there, wherever it may take its label from. What Jones intends to parry is the hermeneuticization of psychoanalysis. The symbol which he calls true, designating the one isolated by Freudian experience, does not "symbolize" in the sense in which the figures of the Old Testament do of that whose advent comes in the New, and which remains the common sense in which symbolism is understood. We might also note that Littre lists the first meaning of "symboliser" (one "little used today," he says) as "to have conformity," and the second as "to speak in symbols." The more usual sense, "to represent by a symbol," he describes as a neologism. One of his historical examples (from Ambroise Pare, a sixteenth-century surgeon) has a marked resemblance to Lacan's construction: "Si l'air est semblable a la maladie, il symboliseen indications avec la maladie" (my emphasis). p. 64, ?4 and footnote 7: The text referred to reads as follows: My work on Buddhism was composed in the latter months of the life of Eugene Burnouf. It was intended for the Revue des deux mondes, and was indeed the first contribution I sent to that review. M. Buloz, of all men the least Buddhistic, praised me regarding some accessories; but, respecting the body of the work, declined to believe the truth of the assertions it contained. To him, a real Buddhist in flesh and blood appeared quite inadmissible. In the face of all the proofs I adduced in support of my thesis, he obstinately replied: "It is impossible that there are people

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that dumb." Burnouf died, and my essay remained in my desk. I now bring it to light because I consider that the absence of Buddhism left a gap in my studies of religious history.

Free Press, 1978). "Any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world is called an 'eternal object'" (p. 44).

(Ernest Renan, Studies in Religious History, New York, Scribner and Welford, 1887, pp. 1 - 2.) Burnouf, professor of Sanskrit at the College de France and the author of an Introduction a l'histoire du buddhismeindien, died in May of 1852.

SCHEMA 2: The two graphs, and particularly this one, bear a morphological resemblance to the "Schema L" (see Ecrits, pp. 53, 548; EAS, p. 193):

p. 65, ?6: "ready-made." In English in the original.

S

a

p. 65, 16: "denies the existence of the Other." The generality of this phrase makes its source hazardous to identify. The closest I have been able to find to the phrasing is the title of an essay by Pierre Klossowski, "Le mal et la negation d'autrui dans la phia' losophie de D.A.F. de Sade," Recherches philosophiques vol. 4 (1934-35), pp. 268There is, however, no way to reduce the 293. [This essay is an early version of the second chapter of Sade, mon prochain, one to the other. In the "Table commentee quoted below by Lacan p. 74, ?sl - 12.] It is des representations graphiques" in Ecrits, also quite close to the interpretation ad- Jacques-Alain Miller, after paraphrasing vanced by Maurice Blanchot ("La raison de the definitions of the terms, notes (p. 907): "The transformation from the first to the Sade," Lautreamont et Sade, Paris, Editions de minuit, 1963 [first published 1949], second schema, which "is not translated . . . by a symmetrical reversion pp. 31-37; translated in Philosophy, pp. 53-59), as taken up and expanded upon by upon any axis or center," only expresses the displacement of the function of the Georges Bataille (L'erotisme, Paris, Editions de minuit, 1957, pp. 183-218; Erotism: cause, following the temporality of the SaDeath and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, dian fantasy." The only variant of the parSan Francisco, City Lights Books, 1986, ticular schema given here that I have been pp. 164-196). Lacan briefly refers to the able to find in the Lacanian corpus is one latter two books in L'ethique, pp. 236-237. inscribed in the transcript of the seminar on anxiety (January 16, 1963). The text p. 65, ?7: "eternal object." would seem to call for such a schema, but it Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, Process is not sufficiently explained there either to and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corshed light on these schemas nor to vouch rected edition edited by David Ray Griffin for the authenticity of the details. This varand Donald W. Sherburne (New York, The iant has the following appearance:

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AS

d

a

//

XO.

p. 66, 11: The Presidente de Montreuil was Sade's mother-in-law, who repeatedly had him placed in prison. p. 66, '12 and footnote 8: Lely's book is reprinted as the first two volumes of Sade's Oeuvres completes. The passage reads as follows (vol. 2, pp. 538-541, footnote 1, p. 541): All Sade's biographers have made the same grave error regarding the reason for the Marquis's arrest on 15th Ventose, Year IX. Without due checking they have adopted the view that it was Zoloe et ses deux acolytes, and anonymous pamphlet pillorying Josephine Buonaparte, Mme Tallien, Mme Visconti, Tallien, Barras, and Napoleon himself, that was the reason for the arrest. It has been assumed that this pamphlet, which appeared in July, 1800, was Sade's work, and that to arrest him as the author of Juliette and Justine was merely a convenient cover for the vengeance of the First Consul, who found his marital honor deeply wounded by the pamphlet. But the available sources in no way justify this view.

. . . The whole story, as hith-

erto presented by Sade's biographers, depends on his having been the author of this lampoon. There is,

however, not the slightest proof of this. In the absence of proofs, internal evidence might count for something. But however hard one strains one cannot trace any hint of Sade's But style in the pamphlet. . . . though it was not on any personal order of the First Consul's that Sade underwent the horrors of a renewed imprisonment which was to last till his death, it remains none the less true that this arbitrary detention was the work of a regime in which one could already feel the growing tyranny of Napoleon, and it was by decisions signed personally by him in privy council on July 9 and 10, 1811 and April 19 and again March 3, 1812 that Sade remained in prison. (The Marquis de Sade: A Biography, trans. Alec Brown, New York, Grove Press, 1962, pp. 415-416.) The note to which Lacan refers, not translated by Brown, reads as follows: On the manifestations of this tyranny in the realm of the Interior, it might be useful to consult [Henri] Forneron [Histoire generale des emigres pendant la Revolution fran;aise, 3rd edition (Paris, Plon, 1884)], vol. II, p. 358: "It is not widely known that the state prisons of Napoleon were as full of suspects as those of some were Robespierre . . . ; chained to iron rings; prisoners were killed after a mockery of judgment, like Frotte and his officers, like the duc d'Enghien, like General Prevost de Boissy and the young Vittel; at other times the death remained enshrouded in mystery, like the cases of Pichegru and Captain Wright. Deportations to the islands continued under the Consulate."

Annotations to "Kant with Sade"

Note 2 on the same page, however, which occurs at the very end of the paragraph cited above, seems more relevant to the problem in question: What is more, in leafing, with great distaste, through this nauseating rhapsody called Le Memorial de Sainte-Helene, we found, relative to the author of Justine, the following passage . . . : "[Napoleon] said that while emperor he had had described to him and had glanced at the most abominable book to which the most depraved imagination had ever given birth: a novel which, even under the Convention, had revolted, he said, public morality, to the point where its author was imprisoned, and had remained so ever since and, he believed, was still alive." p. 66, ?3: "that a thicket [fourrel efface even the trace upon the stone of a name that would seal his destiny." Cf. the famous fifth clause of Sade's will (Lely, vol. 2, pp. 658-659; OC, vol. 2, pp. 631-632; English translation in Philosophy, p. 157): Finally, I absolutely forbid that my body be opened on any pretext whatsoever. I urgently insist that it be kept a full forty-eight hours in the chamber where I shall have died, placed in a wooden coffin which shall not be nailed shut until the prescribed forty-eight hours have elapsed, at the end of which period the said coffin shall be nailed shut; during this interval a message shall be sent express to M. Le Normand, wood seller in Versailles, living at number 101, boulevard de 1' Egalite, requesting him to come in his own person, with a cart, to fetch my body away and to convey it under his own

93

escort and in said cart to the wood upon my property at Malmaison near Epernon, in the commune of Emance where I would have it lain to rest, without ceremony of any kind, in the first copse [taillis fourre] standing to the right as the said wood is entered from the side of the old chateau by way of the broad lane dividing it. The ditch opened in this copse shall be dug by the tenant farmer of Malmaison under M. Le Normand's supervision, who shall not leave my body until after he has placed it in said ditch; upon this occasion he may, if he so wishes, be accompanied by those among my kinsmen or friends who without display or pomp of any sort whatsoever shall have been kind enough to give me this last proof of their attachment. The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn, in order that the spot become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it [et le taillis se trouvant fourri comme auparavant], the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of men save nevertheless for those few who in their goodness have loved me until the last and of whom I carry away a sweet remembrance with me to the grave. p. 66, ?4 and footnote 9: "Not to be born . . ." (SophoclesI, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, p. 134.) p. 66, ?s 5-6 and footnote 10: Cf. Jules Janin, "Le Marquis de Sade," La revue de Paris no. 11 (November (with passages not 1834), pp. 337-338 cited by Garcon in L'affaire Sade, p. 90, given within parentheses):

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(Gentlemenl it is precisely because you have read him, that I speak to you about him; it is precisely because we have all been cowardly enough to peruse these fatal lines, that we should forewarn the honest and happy ones who still do not know about these books. For,) do not fool yourselves, the Marquis de Sade is everywhere; he is in all the libraries on a certain mysterious and hidden row which one always finds; it's one of those books which is usually placed behind St. John Chrysostom, (or Nicole's Traite de morale,) or Pascal's Pensees. Ask those Commissaries who take lots of inventories after deaths where the Marquis de Sade is not to be found. (And, as that is one of those books which the law does not recognize as personal property, it always happens that a businessman's clerks, or his boss, grab it first, and thus [Garcon gives: Even the police]) turn it over to public consumption . . . Cocteau's written deposition is presented in the following fashion (L'affaire Sade, p. 62): Garcon: Here is the letter from M. Jean Cocteau, which had been cited: "Mon cher Maitre, Sade is a philosopher, and after his fashion a moralizer . . " The President of the Court: Jean Cocteau says that? Garcon: Yes, Monsieur le president. "To attack him would be to attack the Jean-Jacques of the Confessions. He is boring, his style is weak, and his only worth comes from the reproaches directed towards him. The least American detective novel is more pernicious than the most audacious of Sade's pages. In condemning him, France would default on its holy duty."

The President: I'm in agreement on one point: that he's boring. Garcon: On that point we all agree. p. 66, ?7: "The posture breaks up." OC, vol. 3, p. 475; Philosophy, p. 293. p. 66: indented citation. "II est bon d'etre charitable / Mais avec qui? Voild le point." Cf. Jean de la Fontaine, "Le serpent et le villageois," Fables, Livre sixieme, vol. XIII, in Oeuvres completes, texte etabli et annote par Rene Groos et Jacques Schiffrin, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1954, vol. 1, pp. 142-143: "Il est bon d'etre charitable; / Mais envers qui, c'est Id le point. / Quant aux ingrats, il n'en est point / Qui ne meure enfin miserable." (It is good to be charitable; but towards whom, that is the point. As for ingrates, there isn't one who doesn't die miserably in the end.) p. 67, 11: The reference is to Charles Chaplin's 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux, in which a former bank-teller (played by Chaplin) supports his paraplegic wife and child in provincial comfort through marrying a series of other women, murdering them for their money, and disposing of their bodies by incinerating them. The Buddha story is likely based on "The Hare-Mark in the Moon," a fable drawn from the Jataka Book, in which stories of the past lives of the Buddha are recounted. The future Buddha, in a past life as a hare, offered himself as dinner to Sakka, disguised as a mendiant Brahmin, in order to keep the precepts. The story is translated in Lucien Stryk, ed., World of the Buddha: A Reader, Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Co., 1968, pp. 5-10. p. 67, ?2: "'But what,' you will ask, 'are all these metaphors

and why. .. .'"

Cf. Raymond Queneau, "L'explica-

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Annotations to "Kant with Sade"

tion des metaphores," in Les Ziaux (1943), in L'instantfatal, precede de Les Ziaux, Paris, Gallimard, 1966, pp. 75-77: "Mais quelle est, dira-t-on,/La signification de cette metaphore" (repeated three times as part of the refrain). p. 67, ?3: "spintrian [spinthrienne] jouissance." "Spintrian" is the adjective form of "spintry," etymologically related to both "sphinx" and "sphincter," and defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a species of male prostitute." The entry under the adjective form gives a generalization: "pertaining to those that seek out, or invent new and monstrous forms of lust." p. 67, ?9: "bastardized." The heraldic mark connoting bastardy is known in French as "barre sinistre." (The correct English term is "bend sinister," although "bar sinister" is often used.) p. 67, ?1 2 and footnote 11: WA, vol. 7, p. 140; Beck, p. 30. The correct page for the citation in the Vorlander edition is p. 35. On this passage, cf. Lacan's comments in L'ethique, pp. 129131, 222: I have thus brought together for you two cases which Kant does not envisage, two forms of transgression beyond the limits normally assigned to the pleasure principle opposed to the reality principle considered as a criterion, namely, the excessive sublimation of the object, and what is commonly called perversion. Sublimation and perversion are both a certain relation of desire which draws our attention upon the possibility of formulating, in the form of a question, another principle of another (or of the same) morality, opposed to the reality principle. For there is a regis-

ter of morality which is directed from the side of what there is at the level of das Ding [the Thing], namely the register which makes the subject hesitate at the moment of bearing false witness against das Ding, that is, the site of his desire, be it perverse or sublimated (p. 131). The striking import of the first example rests on the fact that the night spent with the lady is paradoxically presented to us as a pleasure, weighed against the pain to be undergone, in an opposition which homogenizes them. . . . But note this -it is sufficient for us, by some effort of conception, to shift the night spent with the lady from the rubric of pleasure to that of jouissance, inasmuch as jouissance- no need of sublimation for this- implies precisely the acceptance of death, in order for the example to be annihilated. To put it another way, it is sufficient that jouissance be an evil . . . (p. 222). p. 68, ?0 and footnote 12: The French translation cited by Lacan translates "unter Androhung derselben unverzogertenTodesstrafe"as "sous peine de mort," corrected here by Lacan. We have simply followed Beck's translation. p. 68, ?1 and footnote 13: "Fontenelle." The reference occurs in the chapter of the Critique on "The Incentives of Practical Reason," in a discussion of the feeling of respect (WA, vol. 7, p. 197; Beck, p. 79): Fontenelle says, "I bow to a great man, but my mind does not bow." I can add: to a humble plain man, in whom I perceive righteousness in a higher degree than I am conscious of in myself, my mind bows whether I choose or not, however high I carry my head that he may not forget my

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superior position. Bernard le Bovier, seiur de Fontenelle, was born in 1657. He was a member of the Academie francaise and Secretary of the Academie des sciences from 1697 until 1740. The author of the Dialogues des morts, the Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes, and the Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, Fontenelle died at the age of 100 in 1757, some thirty years before the publication of the second Critique. p. 68, ?5: "Et non propter vitam vivendi perdere causas." Cf. Juvenal, Satire VII, verses, pp. 79-84: Esto bonus miles, tutor bonus, arbiter idem / integer; ambiguae si quando citabere testis / incertaeque rei, Phalaris licet imperet ut sis / falsum et admoto dictet periuria tauro, / summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori, / et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. (Be a stout soldier, a faithful guardian, and an incorruptible judge; if summoned to bear witness in some dubious and uncertain cause, though Phalaris himself should bring up his bull and dictate to you a perjury, count it the greatest of all sins to prefer life to honor, and to lose, for the sake of living, all that makes life worth having.) (Juvenal and Persius, trans. G. G. Ramsay, New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, Loeb Classical Library, 1928, p. 165.) Ramsay glosses Phalaris with the note: "The famous tyrant of Agrigentium, who slowly roasted his victims in a brazen bull." Lacan's insertion of the "non" seems to be faithful to Juvenal's sense, giving a maxim of the form: "And lose not the cause of living for the sake of life." Kant cites this

entire passage near the end of the Critique (WA, vol. 7, p. 296; Beck, pp. 162-163). p. 69, ?3: was Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) named director of the chief physician at the hospital/prison of Bicetre in 1793, and took up a similar position at the Salpetriere in 1795. The reforms made by Pinel in the treatment of inmates (releasing many from chains and, generally, changing a prison into an asylum) are generally credited with beginning both the humanitarian and the strictly medical treatment of the insane. In the version of this essay published in Critique, Lacan refers, for this whole section, to the third part of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la folie. See particularly the chapter "Naissance de l'asile," 2nd ed., Paris, Gallimard, 1972, pp. 483-530 (Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, New York, Vintage, 1973, pp. 241-278. On "moral insanity," see pp. 543-544 [not translated by Howard]). The hospital of Charenton-SaintMaurice was founded in 1670 to care for indigent patients, under the direction of the order of the Petits Peres. It was closed in 1795 and reopened by the Directory in 1797, under the Ministry of the Interior, to treat the insane. Sade spent nine months there in 1789, and was confined there from 1803 until his death in 1814. See Lely, vol. 2, pp. 347-348, 585-586; OC, vol. 2, pp. 275-276, 546-547. On August 2, 1808, AntoineAthanase Royer-Collard, head doctor at Charenton, wrote to the minister of the police to demand that Sade be removed from the asylum (Lely, vol. 2, pp. 595597; OC, vol. 2, pp. 557-559): There exists at Charenton a man whose audacious immorality has, unhappily, made him too famous, and whose presence in this asylum entails grave improprieties: I mean the au-

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thor of the infamous novel Justine. This man is not mad. His delirium is that of vice, and it is by no means in an institution dedicated to the medical treatment of insanity that this sort of delirium should be repressed. It is necessary that the individual infected by it be submitted to the severest sequestration, whether to shelter others from his furors or to isolate him from all objects which might exalt or sustain his hideous passion . . . I hope that your Excellency will find these reasons sufficiently powerful to order that M. de Sade be assigned another place of reclusion than the asylum of Charenton. It would be vain to renew the prohibition of any type of communication between him and the other inmates; this prohibition would be no better executed than it has been in the past, and the same abuses would still occur. I do not ask that he be sent to Bicetre, where he has previously been placed, but I cannot prevent myself from suggesting to your Excellency that a jail or a dungeon would be much more appropriate for him than an institution dedicated to the treatment of the sick, which requires the most assiduous surveillance and the most delicate moral precautions. p. 69, ?8: Cf. WA, vol. 10, pp. 270-277; Meredith, pp. 196-203 (?54). Kant classifies both jest and humor as agreeable rather than fine arts, because of their relation to bodily well-being, mediated through the affect of laughter. "Laughter is an affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing" (WA, vol. 10, p. 273; Meredith, p. 199). Cf. also the reference made by Freud, cited in the an-

notation to p. 73, ?7 and footnote below.

19

p. 70, 1?0:"helot." The conjunction of "helot" with "Kant" can also be found in Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique, Paris, JeanJacques Pauvert, 1982, pp. 10-12, 327329 (Impressions of Africa, trans. Lindy Foord and Rayner Heppenstall, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967, pp. 10-11, 296-298. See also on this passage Roussel's Commentj'ai ecrit certains de mes livres, Paris, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963, pp. 14-15 (How I Wrote Certain of My Books, trans. Trevor Winkfield, New York, SUN, 1977, p. 5). p. 70, 15: "Thus Milan ..." Cf. WA, vol. 7, p. pp. 27-28:

137;

Beck,

It is therefore astonishing how intelligent men have thought of proclaiming as a universal practical law the desire for happiness, and therewith to make this desire the ground of the will merely because this desire is universal. Though elsewhere natural laws make everything harmonious, if one here attributed the universality of law to this maxim, there would be the most complete opposite of harmony [Einstimmung], the most arrant conflict, and the complete annihilation of the maxim itself and its purpose. For the wills of all do not have one and the same object, but each person has his own (his own welfare), which, to be sure, can accidentally agree with the purposes of others who are pursuing there own, though this agreement is far from sufficing for a law because the occasional exceptions which one is permitted to make are endless and cannot be definitely comprehended in a universal

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rule. In this way a harmony [Harmonie] may result resembling that depicted in a certain satirical poem as existing between a couple bent on going to ruin, "Oh, marvelous harmony, what he wants is what she wants"; or like the pledge which is said to have been given by Francis I to the Emperor Charles V, "What my brother wants (Milan), that I want too." Empirical grounds of determination are not fit for any universal external legislation, and they are just as little suited to an internal, for each man makes his own subject the foundation of his inclination, and in each person it is now the one and now the other which has preponderance. To discover a law which would govern them all by bringing them into unison [allerseitiger Einstimmung] is absolutely impossible. p. 70, ?110:"between center and absence." "Entre centre et absence" is the title of the first section, as well as of the final prose poem of that section, of Henri Michaux's Lointain interieur, in Plume, precede de Lointain interieur, Paris, Gallimard, 1985, pp. 37-38. Lacan also uses the phrase in "Lituraterre," Ornicar?, no. 41 (1987), p. 10. p. 71, ?3 and footnote 15: WA, vol. 7, p. 129; Beck, p. 20: Now a rational being's consciousness of the agreeableness of life which without interruption accompanies his whole existence [das Bewufltseineines verniinftigen Wesens von der Annehmlichkeit des Lebens, die ununterbrochen sein ganzes Dasein begleitet] is happiness, and to make this the supreme ground for the determination of choice constitutes the principle of self-love.

p. 71, ?14: Leon Louis-Antoine Saint-Just (1767-1794) was elected to the Convention Nationale in 1792 (at the age of 25, he was its youngest member). He first came to prominence with his speech of November 13, 1792 demanding the unconditional execution of Louis XVI. He became a member of the Committee of Public Safety in May of 1793 and was one of the leading figures in the Terror. He was guillotined along with Robespierre on 10 thermidor an II (July 28, 1794). Lacan here refers to a passage

from

his

"Rapport

. . . sur

le

mode d'execution du decret contre les ennemis de la Revolution (13 ventose an II)": "Let Europe learn that you want neither an unhappy man nor an oppressor upon French territory; let this example bear fruit upon the earth; let it propagate the love of virtues and happinessl Happiness is a new idea in Europe [Le bonheurest une idee neuve en Europe]." (Oeuvres completes, edition etablie par Michele Duval, Paris, Editions Gerard Lebovici, 1984, p. 715.) Lacan makes a reference to this same passage in the essay "The Direction of the Cure" (Ecrits, pp. 614-615; EAS, p. 252): This is why people imagine that a psychoanalyst should be a happy man. Indeed, is it not happiness that one is asking of him, and how could he give it, common sense asks, if he did not have it to some extent himself? It is a fact that we do not disclaim our competence to promise happiness in a period in which the question of its extent has become so complicated: principally because happiness, as Saint-Just said, has become a political factor [le bonheur, comme l'a dit Saint-Just, est devenu unfacteur de la politique]. To be fair, the progress of humanism from Aristotle to St. Francis

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(of Sales) did not fulfull the aporias of happiness either. Cf. also L'ethique, p. 338, where Lacan discusses the composition of this essay. The comparison between Sade and Saint-Just is not uncommon; see Bertrand d'Astorg, Introduction au monde de la terreur, Paris, Editions du seuil, 1945; Gilles Deleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch, Paris, Editions de minuit, 1967, pp. 68-71; Alain Lienard, "Introduction," Saint-Just: Theorie politique, Paris, Editions du seuil, 1976, note 18; and particularly Maurice Blanchot, "L'insurrection, la folie d'ecrire," L'entretien infini, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, pp. 333-340, whose considered rapprochement of citations from the two is very instructive.

avowal of being nothing more than what turns to dust, he says, "and which speaks to you,"-the inspiration came to me that, seeing in Freud's path an allegorical figure strangely coming to life and the nudity worn by her who rises from the well shivering with a new skin, I would lend her my voice. "I, the truth, I speak . . ." and the prosopopeia continues. Think of the unnameable thing which, able to pronounce these words, would go to the being of language, in order to hear them as they should be pronounced, in horror. The passage Lacan refers to, from the posthumously published manuscript known as the Fragments d'institutions republicaines, reads as follows (Oeuvres completes,p. 986): "I despise the dust of which I am made and which speaks to you [Je mdprisela poussiere qui me compose et qui vous parle]; this dust may be persecuted and killed! But I defy anyone to take away the independent life that I have given myself in the centuries and in the heavens.

p. 71, ?5: "The widow" is slang for the guillotine. Organt is Saint-Just's first work, a long, fantastic, and slightly licentious poem, published in 1789 (Oeuvres completes, pp. 50-238). One might wonder, regardless of whether he left "the fantasies of Organt" behind him, if Saint-Just did not "make Thermidor his triumph." There is a veritable myth of Saint-Just, which seems to be largely due to Michelet, p. 72, ?1: "d'Este gardens." The gardens at the Villa d'Este in who called him the "archangel of the Ternear Rome, were built between Tivoli, ror," centering around his appearance (and 1560 and 1575 by Cardinal Ippolito II silence) upon the tribunal of the Convention on the penultimate day of his life. (Cf. d'Este. They are primarily famous for the Serena Torjussen, "Saint-Just et ses bio- variety, number, and complexity of their graphes," Annales historiques de la Revolu- waterworks. tion franfaise, vol. 51, no. 236 [April-June 1979], pp. 234-249.) Lacan himself will p. 72, ?9 and footnote 16: The complete title is Philosophyin the later refer to Saint-Just in "La science et la verite," a transcription of the opening sem- Bedroom, or the Immoral Teachers, Dialogues inar of the year 1965-66 (L'objet de la psy- Intended for the Education of Young Ladies [La philosophie dans le boudoir, ou Les instichanalyse) (Ecrits, p. 866): tuteurs immoraux, Dialogues destines a l'eduThus in a movement, perhaps playful cation des jeunes demoiselles]. in echoing the defiance of Saint-Just, raising his voice to the heavens to p. 72, 1110: "La Mothe le Vayer." enshrine in the assembled public, the Francois de la Mothe le Vayer

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(1588-1672) was the preceptor of Louis XIV from 1652-1660. His primary educational works are De l'instruction de M. le Dauphin (1640), and Geographie, Rhetorique, Morale, Economique,Logique et Physique du Prince (1651-1656). p. 73, 12: Cf. Dialogue entre un pretre et un moribond, first published by Maurice Heine in 1926 (OC, vol. 14, pp. 53-64; Philosophy, pp. 165-175). The dialogue ends with an authorial "Note" (OC, vol. 14, p. 64; Philosophy,p. 175): "The dying man rang; the women entered; and after he had been a little while in their arms the preacher became one whom Nature has corrupted, all because he had not succeeded in explaining what a corrupt nature is." p. 73, 112:"wit." In English in the original. p. 73, 114:"calumny." Cf. Sade, OC, vol. 3, pp. 494-495; Philosophy, pp. 311-312: It is with utmost candor that I confess that I have never considered calumny an evil, and especially in a government like our own, under which all of us, bound closer together, nearer one another, obviously have a greater interest in becoming acquainted with one another. Either one or the other: calumny attaches to a truly evil man, or it falls upon a virtuous creature. It will be agreed that, in the first case, it makes little difference if one imputes a little more evil to a man known for already having done a great deal of it; perhaps indeed the evil which does not exist will bring to light the evil which does. . . . If, on the contrary, a virtuous man is calumniated, let him not be alarmed; he need but exhibit himself, and all the calumnia-

tor's venom will be turned back upon the latter. For such a person, calumny is merely a test of purity whence his virtue emerges more resplendent than ever. p. 73, 14 and footnote 17: English translation by John Haynes Holmes in The Life of Jesus, New York, Modern Library, 1927, p. 299. p. 73, ?4 and footnote 18: Holmes, p. 304. p. 73, 16: "fear and pity." Cf. Aristotle, Poetics, verse 1449b, pp. 27-28: "with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions." (In Jonathan Barnes, ed., The CompleteWorksof Aristotle, trans., I. Bywater, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984, vol. 2, p. 2320.) Cf. Lacan's discussion in L'ethique, pp. 286-292, 372: It is on the side of this attraction that we should search the true meaning, the true mystery, the true import of the side of the agitation tragedy-on which it brings with it, on the side of the passions, doubtless, but of the singular passions which are fear and pity, since through their agency, di eleou kai phobou, through the agency of pity and fear, we are purged, purified of everything of that order. That order, we can already recognize it -it is, properly speaking, the series of the imaginary. And we are purged of it through the agency of an image among others (p. 290). Catharsis has the meaning of purification of desire. This purification can only be accomplished, as is clear just from reading Aristotle's sentence, insofar as one has at the very least situated the crossing of its

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limits, which are called fear and pity (p. 372).

is the muse of tragedy, and Clio (Reknown) that of history.

p. 73, ?7 and footnote 19: Cf. Jokes . . . , SA, vol. 4, pp. 1617; SE, vol. 8, pp. 12-13:

p. 74, ?11and footnote 20: In the footnote to the versions in Critique and Ecrits and subsequently, Lacan refers to the first edition of Sade, mon prochain, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1947. A second edition ("precede de Le philosophe scelerat") was published by Editions du Seuil in 1967. A text written about the same time as the revision of this footnote allows us to almost positively identify the academician referred to in the note as Jean Paulhan, who was elected to the Academie francaise in 1964 ("Presentation" to Ecrits, Paris, Editions du Seuil, collection "Points," 1970, vol. I, p. 10):

The factor of "bewilderment and illumination" [Verbluffung und Erleuchtung], too, leads us deep into the problem of the relation of the joke to the comic. Kant says of the comic in general that it has the remarkable characteristic of being able to deceive us only for a moment. Heymans explains how the effect of a joke comes about through bewilderment being succeeded by illumination. He illustrates his meaning by a brilliant joke of Heine's, who makes one of his the characters, Hirsch-Hyacinth, poor lottery-agent, boast that the great Baron Rothschild treated him "famillionquite as his equal-quite airely." Here the word that is the vehicle of the joke appears at first simply to be a wrongly constructed word, something unintelligible, incomprehensible, puzzling. It acordingly bewilders. The comic effect is produced by the solution of this bewilderment, by the understanding of the word. p. 74, ?0: Cf. Paul Claudel, L'otage, Le pain dur, Le pere humilie, in The'atreII, edition revue et augmentee, textes et notices etablis par Jacques Madaule et Jacques Petit, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1965. Lacan's analysis of the trilogy took place in May of 1961, during his seminar on transference (Le transfert dans sa disparite subjective, sa pretendue situation, ses excursions techniques, Seminar 8, 1960-61, unpublished). Melpomene (the Songstress)

I would want to be credited with having been forced, by this delay which was imposed upon me, of eight years [i.e., not being allowed to teach between the end of the occupation and 1953, date of the Rome discourse], to bray, the length of this report, nonsense [pousser ( . . . ) d'aneries], let us be exact: de paulhaneries, which I can only hee-haw for the ears which hear me. Even dear Paulhan didn't in the least hold a grudge against me, he who knew just how much "Kant with Sade" would explode in his bestiary. [A footnote attached here reads:] The N.R.F., were an n. doubled in its acronym [sigle]. The Nouvelle revue francaise, the leading literary magazine of France between the two world wars and edited by Paulhan since 1925, was taken over by Drieu la Rochelle during the occupation, and ceased publication in 1943. The journal reappeared in 1953 under the title of La nouvelle Nouvelle revuefranfaise, only reverting to the original title in February of 1959. We can fur-

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ther note that when Lacan first announced to the seminar his plans to write "Kant avec Sade," (L'identification, Seminar 9, 196162, session of March 28, 1962, unpublished), he did so with a complimentary and detailed discussion of Paulhan's "Le marquis de Sade et sa complice." See also annotation to p. 55, ?1 above. p. 74, ?2: The epigraph to Sade mon prochain reads, "If some freethinker [espritfort] had taken it upon himself to ask Saint Benoit Labre what he thought of his contemporary the Marquis de Sade, the Saint would have answered without hesitation: 'He is my neighbor [mon prochain],'" 1947 edition, p. 9. This text is dropped from the 1967 edition. Benoit-Joseph Labre, 17481783, famous for his rigorous observance of poverty, was canonized in 1881. p. 74, 15: Cf. Freud's comments on the commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Civilization and Its Discontents, SA, vol. 9, pp. 239-240; SE, vol. 21, pp. 110-111): What is the point of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity if its fulfillment cannot be recommended as reasonable? . . . Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems to show not the slightest trace of love for me and shows me not the least consideration. If it will do him any good he has no hesitation injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me. . . . Indeed, if this grandiose commandment had run "Love thy neighbor as thy neighbor loves

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thee," I should not take exception to it. And there is a second commandment, which seems to me even more incomprehensible and arouses still stronger opposition in me. It is "Love thine enemies." If I think it over, however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition. At bottom it is the same thing. [Freud here attaches a footnote relating a Heine anecdote which concludes: "One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies-but not before they have been hanged."] I think I can now hear a dignified voice admonishing me, "It is precisely because your neighbor is not worthy of love, and is on the contrary your enemy, that you must love him as yourself." I understand then that the case is one like that of Credo quia absurdum. For Lacan's reading of the relation between Freud and Sade on this point, cf. the following passages from L'ethique, pp. 92, 219, 229, and 233: If something, at the summit of the ethical commandment, ends up, in a way which is so strange, so scandalous for the sentiment of some, by being articulated in the form of Youwill love your neighbor as yourself, it is that the law of the relation of the human subject to himself is that he make himself, in his relation to his desire, his own neighbor (p. 92). Each time that Freud stops, as if horrified, before the consequence of the commandment to love one's neighbor, what arises is the presence of the innate wickedness which inhabits this neighbor. But then it also inhabits myself. And what is more a neighbor to me than this heart within myself, that of my jouissance, which I dare not approach? For as soon as I

Kant with Sade

approach it -this is the sense of Civilization and Its Discontents- this bottomless aggressiveness arises, from which I recoil, which I turn back against myself, and which, in the very place of the vanished law, comes to give its weight to that which prevents me from crossing a certain border at the limit of the Thing (p. 219). It is thus not an original proposition to say that the recoil from the Youwill love your neighboras yourself is the same thing as the barrier before jouissance, and not its opposite (p. 229). [My] neighbor doubtless has all this wickedness of which Freud speaks, but it is none other than that from which I recoil in myself. To love him, to love him as myself, is at the same time to necessarily advance in some cruelty. His or mine? you will I have just exobject to me-but plained to you that nothing says that they are distinct (p. 233). p. 74, ?8: See Romans 7:7-13: What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin. I should not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." (8) But sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, wrought in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead. (9) I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died; (10) the very commandment which promised life proved to be death to me. (11) For sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and by it killed me. (12) So the law is holy, and the command-

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ment is holy and just and good. (13) Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment become sinful beyond measure. Cf. Lacan's comments in L'ethique, pp. 101, 208, and 223. p. 74, ?12 and footnote 21: The text reads: "Comparing himself to others, the philosopher of apathy strengthens his conviction that he is alone; or rather, he ceases to belong to the unique world of all men, and that he has attained, in a waking state, in his own world, the state of nature." The footnote reads: "Such seems to be the necessary culmination of sadist thought. This is not to say that Sade's characters attain it, nor perhaps even Sade." This entire passage also does not appear in the 1967 edition. p. 75, ?1 "the curved needle, dear to Buffuel's heroes." The reference is to Luis Bufiuel's 1952 film El, made in Mexico, in which a jealous husband enters his wife's bedroom armed with rope, needle and thread, scissors, cotton wool, and antiseptic. She awakes and flees before anything can happen. In an interview with Andre Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Bufiuel commented on the reference to Philosophyin the Bedroom (Cahiers du cinema, no. 36 [June 1954], p. 8; translated in Andre Bazin, Francois Truffaut, ed., The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bufiuel to Hitchcock,trans. Sabine d'Estree, New York, Seaver Books, 1982, p. 92): When choosing certain elements I did not really think of imitating Sade, but it's possible I did so uncon-

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sciously. I'm more naturally inclined to view and conceive a situation from a Sadian or sadistic point of view rather than, say, a neorealistic or mystical one. I said to myself: What should the character use-a gun? a knife? a chair? I ended up choosing more disturbing objects, that's all. Bufiuel also provides us with some information on Lacan's appreciation of the film. In his autobiography (My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983, pp. 203-204), he writes: "In general, [El] wasn't very well received. . . . My only consolation came from Jacques Lacan, who saw the film at a special screening for psychiatrists at the Cinematheque in Paris and praised certain of its psychological truths." p. 75, ? 1: "penisneid." "Penis-envy." p. 75, ?2: Diotima. The Maninean woman "who taught [Socrates] the philosophy of love." Cf.

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in Edith Plato, Symposium, 201d-212b, Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Michael Joyce, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1961, pp. 553-563. p. 75, 12: "Noli tangere matrem." "Touch not the mother." The reference is to the Vulgate version of John 20:17, "Noli me tangere." The entire verse in the King James version reads, "Jesus saith unto her [Mary Magdalen], Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my father: but go unto my brethren, and say to them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God." p. 75, ?2: "V . . . ed and sewn up." Eugenie's mother, Mme. de Misteval, is indeed raped and sewn up at the end of Philosophy in the Bedroom (pp. 362-367), making "violated" [raped, viole'e]the obvious choice here to complete "V .. . e'e." But "veiled" [voilie] is equally possible; perhaps more important still would be "submitted to the operation of the V (in the graph)," as will [volontel and as vel.

From Breton to Dali: The Adventures of Automatism

LAURENT TRANSLATED

JENNY BY THOMAS

TREZISE

When reconsidering automatic writing, one cannot fail to touch upon a blind spot whose ultimate effects its practitioners could neither foresee nor control. Indeed, during its history, the instrument of discovery, with which Breton so often identified all of surrealism, proved to be subject to changes both theoretical and thematic that were as radical as they were unexpected. The basic causes of this inconstancy must be drawn from the debates that occupied surrealism in the '30s. It is during this period that the adventurous turn of surrealist automatism is most apparent -in the change of direction proposed by Salvador Dali. As early as 1930, Dali established the first rudiments of the paranoiaccritical method.' But the article "Nouvelles considerations generales sur le meca-nisme du phenomene paranoiaque du point de vue surrealiste," in the first issue of Minotaure, goes even further. Dali there announces nothing less than an astounding depassement of surrealist practice. With supreme dialectical virtuosity, he pays hypocritical homage to automatic writing while discreetly denouncing its "passivity," its "seeds" of stereotype, its detachment from reality. He intends to remedy this infantile sickness of surrealism through a conversion from the passive to the active, from the unorganized to the systematic, from the abstract to the concrete. Dreams, like all states of passivity and automatism, deserve to be saved, sublated, provided they are turned to account "on the very level of action," made to intervene "interpretively in reality, in life." With this, the whole face of surrealism and its entire field of action are transformed. Soon there will circulate, "in reality," dream objects or objects that are functionally symbolic, of which Giacometti furnished the model in 1931.2 As of 1932, even Breton's writing appears subtly altered. At the same time that the automatic voice in it is muted, one perceives its first paranoiac-critical intonations. Thus, in Les vases communicants, which claims to compete with the Interpretationof Dreams, the automatism is from 1. Salvador Dali "L'ane pourri," Le surrealisme au service de la revolution [S.A.S.D.L.R.], no. 1 (July 1930). 2. "Objets mobiles et muets," S.A.S.D.L.R., no. 3 (December 1931).

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the outset of an interpretive nature, and the delirious systematization makes its way among events, in perfect Dalian orthodoxy. This method will show through even better in 1935 in L'amourfou, where the craziest thing is less the encounter with Jacqueline Lamba than its foretelling retrospectively discovered in the poem "Tournesol" of May-June 1923. Dali therefore transforms surrealist automatism in depth, and, at the same time, he reveals its constitutive weaknesses.3 These weaknesses are essentially rhetorical in nature. Indeed, automatic writing immediately locked itself into a myth of expression that ultimately rendered its practice untenable. This expressive myth had repercussions on sexual and political images, so that changes of political or phantasmatic atmosphere in surrealism also had effects, in return, on the theory of automatism. In this respect, the year 1935 seems to me to be very symptomatic of a reversal.

Let us begin with the question of expression. As spontaneous as it may wish to be from the start, automatic writing does not escape a certain rhetorical existence, in the double sense in which a rhetoric programs not only the production but also the reception of discursive events. When, in 1922, Andre Breton reveals in "Entree des mediums" that Les champs magnetiques was written in a subliminal state, he makes it necessary to reread the text and to reevaluate its form. Edmond Jaloux, in L'eclair of September 11, 1920, saw in it only "charming phrases, obscure, beautiful, and sweet," hardly different at bottom from a good many postsymbolist reveries. But the revelation of the automatic method transforms the significance of these texts: one must henceforth see in them the disruptive traces of a "magical dictation." Suspicion is cast upon the whole literary production of the future surrealists. Prior to existing forms, an initial event must be postulated, at once deliberate and involuntary, which tears discourse from its transparency and gives it all its value. It is in this same way that rhetoric troubles the reception of discourse by posing the problem of figurality, that is, of the event that inaugurates a given discourse. As soon as the rhetorical dimension is acknowledged, a sentence is no longer only a sentence, with its clear or obscure meaning; it is also virtually the trace of a figural intention. Similarly, once the good news of automatism has been announced, all future poetry becomes subject to the question of its surrealist authenticity. The revelation of automatic writing is also rhetorical in its productive aspect. The recipe of automatism, presented in the Manifesto under the title "Secrets of Surrealist Magical Art," functions in fact as a series of precepts of In this respect, one must not be deluded about the sense of Breton's article published in 3. Minotaure, nos. 3-4 (May 1934), under the title "Le message automatique." In the guise of a return to basics, it really is a question of saying farewell to automatic writing. The homage to the spiritists gives leave to the last phantoms to have moved surrealist pens . . .

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invention, in the rhetorical sense of the term. Anyone can apply the technique: passivity, speed, tips to avoid stalling . . . So that this "magical art" of discourse is also the most profane, the most shareable, the most reproducible -in short the most rhetorical. If it is true that it constitutes a model of discursive production and reception, the rhetoric of automatism nevertheless does not resemble any known rhetoric. This is because it inaugurates what one might call a negative rhetoric. Indeed, because it confines itself to inventio, and only to inventio, the rhetoric of automatism denies itself any control over the forms of discourse. It codifies a moment that precedes them, a point one could name, as it does, that of "pure expression," a point whose formal consequences it claims to leave to chance. Let us recall what Breton wrote in the first Manifesto: "Soupault and I designated by the name SURREALISM the new mode of pure expression which we had at our The "purity" to which automatic technique affords access is disposal. . .4 paradoxical. For the "purest" expression aimed at by surrealism proves in fact to be purified of all language. It is a point of emergence of live speech, before it is compromised by any real form, a "spoken thought" prior to speech . . . One can then understand where the weakness of automatic writing is located, namely, in its unverifiability. As an instrument of discovery, it is itself undiscoverable. For it is real forms of language, that is, received forms, that will be asked to bear witness to a "pure expression" -pure in the sense of resisting all tradition, all heritage, and finally all language. The words of automatism are therefore called upon to account for an aspect of the mind that denies them. There is by definition no common measure between the "purity" of expression and the very diverse but uniformly impure verbal forms that supposedly refer to it. The most banal of commonplaces and the most astonishing poetic form have as much or as little claim to bear witness to "pure expression." Moreover, they cannot be distinguished, for the rhetoric of automatism, by confining itself to codifying inventio, condemns itself to being a rhetoricwithoutfigures. It does not allow the recognition of any form, but only of a practice of writing which is, in fact, unverifiable. Thus, every judgment concerning the products of automatic writing is necessarily suspended. It follows as well, however, that automatic writing is defenseless against the impurities that pepper its discourse. And from impurity to impurity, it finds itself open to all the slags of speech: commonplaces, tricks, pastiches . . . Purporting to submerge the world, it finds itself in the position of being ceaselessly protected against itself, revived, replenished at the level of its principles. And each time, surrealism in its entirety is shaken. It goes without saying that such a rhetorical position (a position of absolute terrorism, as Paulhan would have said) was untenable and was not upheld. Two practical avenues of escape offered themselves, both successively explored: du-

4.

Andre Breton, Manifestes du surrialisme, Paris, Pauvert, 1962, p. 34.

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plicity and abandonment. By duplicity, I mean the "doubling" of the explicit rhetoric of automatism (the rhetoric of inventio) by an implicit rhetoric that factually recognizes forms of discourse (a rhetoric offigures therefore) and even carries out a preferential selection among them. The conciliation of these two rhetorics gave rise to some theoretical acrobatics of which I would like to cite two examples. The first Manifesto, while establishing the principle of "pure expression," describes certain "figures" of poetic value. Thus, following Pierre Reverdy, Breton privileges a particular type of analogical relation. As we may recall, it is the initial distancing of the representations brought into play which is supposed to produce the greatest effect of imagination: "The value of the image depends on the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference in potential between the two conductors. When this difference barely exists, as in comparison, the spark is not produced."5 This is not self-evident. To what extent is this consideration of the technique of the image compatible with the spontaneity of automatism? Do we not fall back into the rut of intentional literature with its arsenal of received figures? Breton forestalls such objections by consigning to automatism the very operation of the imagination. He continues: "Now it is not, to my mind, within man's power to effect the juxtaposition of two such distant realities. . . . We are therefore obliged to admit that the two terms of the image are not deduced one from the other by the mind in order to produce the spark, but that they are the simultaneous products of the activity I call surrealist, where reason is limited to observation and to the appreciation of the luminous phenomenon." In other words, the rhetoric of the image is only legitimate because it is derived from and founded on an absolutely nonrhetorical point ("surreality," "pure expression"); nothing in these forms, however, distinguishes it from an ordinary, instrumental, and deliberate rhetoric, if it is not this (psychological) petitio principii according to which its operations escape man's power. The stereotyping of the surrealist image will undertake to refute this point. But in the meantime, a double discourse develops: surreality escapes all figures / certain figures are indications of surreality. Similarly, Aragon's Traitd du style assigns itself the task of saving both automatic writing and style, and this at a moment (1928) when surrealist forms appear clearly threatened with banalization. Though Aragon prefers to speak of "inspiration" (rather than "expression"), we nevertheless encounter again the theme of an originary "purity" that must be constantly defended against the forms that purportedly account for it: "The purity of dreams, the unserviceability, the uselessness of dreams, is what must be defended against a new rage of clerks about to be unleashed."6 How does one go about justifying style without 5. Ibid., p. 46. 6. Louis Aragon, Traitd du style, (Paris, Gallimard, 1928; Paris, Gallimard, "Imaginaire," 1980), p. 186.

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relinquishing anything of automatism? Aragon's argument proceeds as follows: 1) Automatic inspiration is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, which does not yet say anything about its value. In fact, the passivity required for its exercise entails - for better or for worse - an "objectification" of the personality of him who writes. Everything, even shortcomings, assumes therein the documentary value of revealing "mental facts." But the text will be worth no more than its author. 2) The result is that one can apply aesthetic judgments to automatic productions: "There is a way, however shocking it may seem, to distinguish between surrealist texts. By their strength. By their novelty. And it is with them as with dreams: they have to be well written. . . . Thus surrealism is not a refuge against style."7 It is clear that automatism is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of surreality. It must be seconded by style. But what is style? 3) Style consists first of all in writing "good French." It is also something akin to "walking straight." But it is above all and decisively "that which cannot be reduced to recipes" and "that which is not redundant." Through this sinuous series of definitions, we are imperceptibly brought back to "pure expression." Indeed, style according to Aragon repeats all the definitional characteristics of pure expression: escaping all codification, it is antirhetorical; but it is also foreign to all language, since it is a rigorously singular, unconventional, unrepeatable form, in brief, an absolute idiom. The ploy will therefore have amounted, yet again, to displacing the point of pure expression from inspiration to the forms that result from it. Yet nothing has been resolved. Style, because it is incommensurate with any form of recognizable discourse, will be subject to the same vicissitudes as "pure expression": any form can lay claim to it, since nothing in discourse is ever "redundant" and everything therein can always be reduced to a "recipe." The terrorist position is renewed, but it is also a weak position, for it can do nothing against the banalization of automatic production.

So it is that Dali finds extremely fertile ground when, at the beginning of the '30s, he undertakes to reconquer an automatism threatened with exhaustion by its very premises. The key words of surrealism will change at the same time as its program. Automatism remains a key term, but the semantic network with which it is associated is quite perceptibly transformed. In the area of automatism, less will be said of "poetry" and more of "lyricism." And "lyricism" no longer refers either to a subjective outpouring or to any specific literary form. As early as 1929,8 Dali redefined it as "one of man's most violent [aspirations]," which can be approached only by "instinct" and "the 7. Ibid., p. 189. 8. "Documentaire, Paris, 1929, I," La Publicitat, Barcelona, reissued in Oui I (Paris, DenoelGonthier, "Mediations," 1971).

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most irrational faculties of the mind." This renewed acceptation of the word lyricism is made still more precise by Roger Caillois, who, since 1933, had been working on an essay on "mental necessity." For him, the epithet lyrical designates representations susceptible of accumulating within themselves "a considerable affective force" and of absorbing consciousness with "a relentless proliferation." One of these representations of collective value, the praying mantis, is analyzed at length by Caillois in Minotaure 5 (May 1934). Through this example, we understand how much lyricism has changed: it no longer has the character of a personal effusion, always liable to exhaustion or alteration; it has become a collective process, cumulative and violent, the very control of which is problematic. Other terms appear which reevaluate the notion of automatism. The paranoiac-critical "method" is thus substituted for surrealist "spontaneity"; the products of automatism are understood as "delirious interpretations" (Dali) and not as objective "mental facts" (Aragon); it is preferable to see in automatism "the functional form of thought," a logic of the image animated by desire (Dali), rather than the "real functioning of thought" (Breton). Whence the fact that "passive" automatism was still, despite itself, a form of realism, while "active" automatism aims at derealization. Finally, certain words subsist, but their meaning changes completely from one author to the next. This is the case with the word style. In Aragon, as we have seen, style was a subsidiary quality of automatism, a fundamentally antirhetorical kind of je-ne-sais-quoi that restored to automatic writings their true poetic quality. But the article by Lacan that appeared in the first issue of Minotaure ("Le probleme du style et les formes paranoiaques de l'experience"), from which Dali largely derives the definition of his "paranoiaccritical" method, replaces style at the very heart of the automatic process. As opposed to Aragon, Lacan understands style as an iterative form, a process of "typification"; he sees in it not the mark of a unique expression but on the contrary the mainspring of all the "virtues of conviction and human communion." Thus, through this semantic revolution, automatism becomes aware of its rhetorical dimension. Far from repressing it, it takes it a step further and aims at its "maddening" ["affolement"], in the most literal sense of the term. "Active" automatism emerges therefore from solipsism, recognizing itself as a symbolic manipulation, engaging collective values, and hence it can lay claim much more convincingly than "passive" automatism to effects of social confusion. At the same time, the phantasmatics of automatism are also transformed. For from its earliest stages automatism is heavily laden with sexual representations. In L'amourfou, Breton acknowledges having censored the automatic answer he had given in 1934 to the question "What is automatism?"9 We thus learn somewhat belatedly that, for Breton, automatism is "big spoons, monster colocynths, soap bubble reflections." And of this picturesque symbolization, Breton 9.

Andre Breton, L'amourfou, Paris, Gallimard, 1937, p. 43.

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offers us an unequivocal translation: it indicates a sexual apparatus. In truth, we should have been put on our guard for quite some time already by insistent images of liquidity in the description of the automatic process. At the time of "Entree des mediums," Breton is still only concerned with making it "well up." In the first Manifesto, automatism appears as a "flow," unfortunately interrupted. In "Le message automatique," Breton admits, not without bragging, having wanted to use his "torrential delivery" to clean once and for all the literary pigsty. We are forced to conclude that the submersion did not take place. Perhaps simply because only a solitary activity was involved, practiced far from the world, and which, as Dali remarked, tended to become "a goal in itself, immobile, feeding on its own ashes." There is no doubt that Dali too considers automatism as a sexual apparatus, but there is clearly a divergence concerning its mode of use. To private onanism, Dali prefers public erection. Let us recall, in the October 1930 issue of Le surrealisme au service de la revolution, his vigorous defense of an exhibitionist caught in the Paris metro on the Cambronne-Glaciere line. According to Dali, this exhibition had driven a young girl "into an enormous and delicious confusion," and one could see in it "one of the purest and most disinterested acts that a man can carry out." It is in this light, so to speak, that we must reread the apologia of the paranoiac-critical method as a "force and power";10 the praise of its "homogeneous," "total," "suffered" character; of its qualities of "permanence," "growth," productivity;" of its ability especially to "systematize confusion." With Dali, automatism becomes extroverted and goes down into the metro, where, inspired by the art nouveau entrances, it exhibits solidified desires. Politically as well, it is a time of hardening. Surrealist representations change their style. The first surrealism had announced: "We must end up with a new declaration of the rights of man."" Ten years later, we understand better that one of these new rights is none other than the right to automatism. In fact, in "Le message automatique," which appeared in issue 3-4 of Minotaure, we read this: "What distinguishes surrealism is its having proclaimed the equality of all beings before the subliminal message, its having constantly maintained that this message constitutes a common heritage of which each has only to claim his share and which must at any cost cease to be considered the privilege of a few." It is easy to recognize in Breton's vocabulary the traces of his support for historical materialism. We are, however, far removed from any Marxist orthodoxy: the subliminal has replaced the means of production, and as for the propertied class, it appears suddenly to coincide with the metapsychic category of mediums. But the most serious deviation concerns the strategy proposed. Clearly, "passive" automatism lends itself poorly to organized struggle. Indeed, the appropriation 10. Salvador Dali, "Nouvelles considerations generales sur le mecanisme du phenomene paranoiaque du point de vue surrealiste," Minotaure, no. 1, 1933. 11. Epigraph to La revolution surrialiste, no. 1 (December 1, 1924).

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Brassai. Mange-moil (Detail of Paris metro).Ill. for Dali's article in Minotaure, nos. 3-4, 1934.

of the subliminal assumes a double attitude of solipsism ("bracket the outside world") and submission (obey "magical dictation"). Moreover, Breton recommends individual initiative to each and all ("each has only to claim his share"). If, therefore, the connotations of this discourse are Marxist, its denotation is fundamentally legalistic and republican (the Communist Party understood this, having just expelled Breton). Nevertheless, for this very reason, the fate of "passive" automatism appears directly linked to the weakness of democracies: its claim on existence is "soft" (as Dali would say), unorganized, indecisive. To change one's

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Brassai.II s'agit encore d'une atavismemetallique de L'angelus de Millet. (Detail of Paris metro entrance.) Ill. for Dali's article in Minotaure, nos. 3-4, 1934.

automatism will amount, for a while, to changing one's political imagination. The year 1935 witnesses this metamorphosis. In a lecture given in Prague in April to the "Left Front" group,12 Breton minimizes the role of psychic automatism, which, he says, "has never constituted for surrealism an end in itself." On the other hand, he declares himself in favor of a "single front for poetry and art," regrouping all those involved in a process of mythical "symbolization"and elabo12.

Andre Breton, "Position politique de l'art d'aujourd'hui," in Manifestes, Paris, Pauvert, 1962.

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ration. It is clearly a question of uniting the methods of the "lyrics" and of the paranoiac-critics. The same year, Breton joins the "Contre-Attaque" group led by Georges Bataille. Confronted with the rise of fascism, "Contre-Attaque" preaches a hard-core strategy. It seeks to break with the "amorphous insurrection" and to effect "the organic creation of a vast composition of forces." All at once, in Breton, rhetorical inconsistency gives way to symbolic overdetermination, solitary delight to virile provocation, "legitimate defense" to "Contre-Attaque." The program of "irremediable lyrical contagion" and of the conversion of dream states to "the level of action" extends well beyond the perspectives opened by Dali. The stretch traveled by Breton with the "lyrics" or the "sorcerer's apprentices" was, however, to be quite short. The adventure of "ContreAttaque" came to a sudden end. And as of 1939 the break with Dali is consummated. For Breton, no doubt, this took place because automatism could not relinquish all passivity. Precisely because automatism is unthought (un impense). Breton would have recourse to it as to the immobile prime mover of the surrealist movement. Not completely blindly, however. Here, the theory of automatism must be distinguished from its practice. Everything about the theory suggests a visual navigation, inspired by circumstances. It is subject to the most flagrant contradictions and changes of direction. Automatic practice, however, is infinitely more synthetic. It makes use of all the outside contributions-spiritist, Freudian, or paranoiac-critical. The review Minotaure testifies admirably to this "composition." Not only because the most disparate theses on automatism are found side by side there, but because the very principles of the review's composition play their part in each issue, to its advantage or disadvantage. It fell to issue 3-4, which investigated the question of the "encounter," to orchestrate the subtlest dosage of deliberate and contingent relations between all the assembled forms. The graffiti photographed by Brassai on factory walls are brought into contact with the "emancipated paintings" of Derain, Matisse, or Braque. The automatons of Benjamin Peret dialogue with the spiritists of Breton, who don't miss a thing when it comes to the edible architecture of the art nouveau. Involuntary sculptures answer the sexual provocations of fashion highlighted by Tristan Tzara. Automatism can very well give itself free rein here: its totalitarianism has nothing but an aesthetic rationale. Therein lies the secret of its pacification . . .

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THE V-GIRLS

Martha Baer: I'm sorry. Before we begin, if we could just sit . . . Erin Cramer: Oh yes, like this . . . Baer: Yes, longways. That's much better. I'm sorry, you see, we prefer to sit longways. Over the years, having participated in, or shall we say, frankly, simulated, or more frankly really, concocted, trumped up, a number of panel discussions, we've found that the panel format, as you see here, as you trace the sweeping, authoritative gesture of my hand with your eyes -the panel format is an ideal one for our speech as a group. October:' As a group you've done considerable research and writing about the academic panel discussion. Baer: Marianne, for one, has written extensively on the history and uses of the me if I'm wrongpanel format. I believe it was she who wrote-correct that "the term panel discussion first appeared in 1938, only one year after the development of the panel truck but lagging ten years behind the invention of panel heating."2 Jessica? Andrea? Are you comfortable down there? Jessica Chalmers: Yes. Andrea Fraser: Lovely. Baer: I myself, incidently, have written on the subject of the structure and value of the panel. In a paper entitled "Missing Floorboards: Surfacing Panels in Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature," I called the panel discussion, if 1. The interviewers were not present at this interview. 2. From "Academia in the Alps: In Search of the Swiss Mis(s)," developed for "The Politics of Comparison" conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1987.

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I remember correctly, "the scene in which dialogue and pedagogue are one." I think that's quite apt, don't you? October:That was in your panel on Johanna Spyri's Heidi, "Academia in the Alps: In Search of the Swiss Mis(s)." Baer: Right. Later, in our panel "The Question of Manet's Olympia:Posed and Skirted," I wrote, "The panel is an ideal pedagogical vehicle, which effectively counters the usual signifiers of individual expertise and demands a long table. Marianne Weems:You see, we're most comfortable along this side of the table, comfortable theoretically that is, or comfortable with theory, talking about it. Positioned here, we are at once commissioned to speak, to be heard, we are specifiedas speakers, and yet we are generalized as a group, a group of speakers all with the same status, the same location, the same orientations or frontage, if you will, the same color hair . . . Chalmers: Right, Marianne, although I might point out at this point, this juncture, we are not at present sitting on a panel, but rather being interviewed. All: Ahaaa.

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Baer: And why not then consider for a moment, not the panel, which takes place elsewhere, but this interview itself- its precedents, for example, its expectations or requirements, its, can we say, more directly, desire, its historicity, and perhaps, to begin with its existence or ontology, or better, its taxonomy, that is to say its positivity, its mutability (?), in short, its legibility or legibilities, that which despite all its invisibility, makes it possible. All: Yes. October:Right. Baer: Historically, we have been interviewed quite regularly over the years. In the '70s, for example, we were interviewed twice by a remarkable little New York journal, Too Many Paroles, which has since folded. That was a biannual, I believe, modeled after the famous German review of the 1950s, Culture, Knowledge, Capitalism, Order, Art, and Spontaneity. That magazine, if I am not becoming confused, had, instead of page numbers, different words in the upper right-hand corner of each page, yes. A few years back, we were interviewed in a magazine that had a similar format. Fraser: In fact it was called Format. Or was it Schema? Chalmers: Topos? Baer: In any case, in any case, I think what we've come to here, after rethinking our history as subjects of such a range of interviews, is that we like the format of October,the odd size, the breadth, the clarity. In general, I think I speak for all of us when I say that we feel, we feel, we feel . . . Weems: . . . pleased . . . Baer: . . . yes, we feel pleased to be here. Now, as you were saying. October:We were talking about your research on the panel discussion. You have also done original work on the holiday season. Cramer: He must be referring to my paper "Why Mrs. Claus Stays Home" for our first panel, "Sex and Your Holiday Season," in which I discussed a question that has been raised in recent years about the status of Mrs. Claus and why, in the twentieth century, we have seen the eclipse of Mrs. Claus as a figure of value by her husband Santa. A distinct shift in Mrs. Claus's status can be seen in the North Pole at the end of the nineteenth century, one that corresponds to the shift in the locus of production from the home to the

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factory. In that paper I argued that to evaluate why Mrs. Claus stays home, we must examine this historical shift and ask why Mrs. Claus did not accompany production in its move out of the home and into the private sector, as Santa did. It seems inevitable that, as the wife of the Western world's largest producer of consumer goods, Mrs. Claus should have been subject to this shift in status. Indeed, Engles argues that the shift in the locus of production and the status of women occurred first in the North Pole and was only later felt in the European and North American communities. Feminist historians argue that while Mrs. Claus has diminished as a figure of value in the public eye, she, like other women in the home, has channeled her energies into the development of a complex cosmology for the home, rich in symbolism. Fraser: Fascinating. Weems: Wasn't that the panel in which Martha3 examined the early feminist response to Christmas? Baer:4 Yes. That was my paper about Phyllis Weiner, one of the first of a number of early Feminists, a little-known fringe of the suffrage movement, to address the question of Christmas. It was called, "The Santa Does Not Exist." "I shun the bearded, the jolly, the masculine figure disguised as my patron, as I shun, from this day on, any man," wrote Phyllis. Later, however, in the last years of her life at Emery Lord's Women's Prison at Brighton, she reneged on these statements. In a confessional letter to an aunt on the Renfield side whom she had long held in contempt, Phyllis wrote, "Yes, I too have loved him, always, waited up half the night, listening for bells. I too have envisioned, bleary-eyed, each December, the great sacks and packages of the burly phantom I adored." It was due to the exposure of this note that in her last months Phyllis was renounced publicly in London Womenfor the Vote, one of the most respected mouthpieces of the movement at that time. October:Feminism has been of critical importance in all of your panel discussions. Chalmers:5You must be referring to my paper from "The Question of Manet's Olympia:Posed and Skirted." The argument: that in 1865, prostitutes were, 3. 4. 5.

Yes, that's what they call me, that's really what they call me. No, not againl Leave my father out of this. It's Martha, please, it's Martha. Oh, please feel free to call me Jessica.

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as it were, absolutely everywhere. Well, let's say that a man might know his wife, certainly, but the pedigree of Madame or Mademoiselle Quelquechose would always remain in question. Therefore, for the nineteenth-century viewer, it was unclear whether Olympia was a nude or a prude, a femme honnete or afille publique, a consort or a courtesan, a Madonna or an Olivia Newton-John. Now obviously the problematic here turns on, we may say, revolves around or palpitates upon the problem of "the nude": my problem with appearing nude at that panel, and the epistemological distinctions between the state of being nude, and the states of being unclothed, stripped, or in the raw . . . Fraser:6 That paper, as I recall, also appeared in The Women'sReview of Books. Jessica: Vol. VI, nos. 10-11

(July 1989), p. 13.

October:All three panel discussions you've done thus far have used parody to challenge the pretensions of academic discourse and form. But, at the same time, you parody theoretical insights coming from feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, etc., that have been very useful to women and that have occasionally completely transformed the field in which they first made their entrances. Isn't there a danger of leveling, or of simply making everything an old joke that is most generally told at the the butt of a joke? -and expense of women? Marianne: When people go to a panel, nothing they hear in one hour will make them reconsider what they fundamentally believe. But we do hope to cut through the sometimes unnecessarily exclusive and pretentious discourses that have come to surround the very necessary politics inherent in those theoretical concerns. Allow me to quote myself. "Manet's Best Friend, The Paw Print Unseen": "I would like briefly to address a subject that has hounded the psychoanalytic institution, namely, the gaze that is trained upon us as we roam the fields and streets, the one that ubiquitously follows. Yes, the gaze of the dog is one of devotion, of dedication. "But let us not shy away from the question of desire. Just as the man, strolling through the nineteenth-century Salon seize(s) the form of Olympia, so the canine subject at his heels casts his desiring gaze toward the cat. They look the picture of contentment; indeed, knowing that they look and 6. Well, yes. But on the other hand, my mother's name is de Monteflores. That wasn't her maiden name though. It was my mother's psychotic older brother who came up with that name. He thought he was the Count de Monteflores. That's where they were born. Sometimes I like to call myself Jane, Jane Castleton - it's a village in England, north of Derbyshire. Of course, I wasn't born in England, but, this is getting complicated . . . Maybe we can just leave it at Andrea.

&

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11

V

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that they are looked at is to say that they are, in fact, a picture (perhaps a hunting scene). "Dog or man is no longer at the level of demand, but of desire, of the desire of the Other. He lays down his gaze, like a bone, before the painting, a painting dompte-regardebefore the lure which is given to his mute, sorrowful, doggy eyes. "This lure, the lure of the cat, is the dialectic between carnivorous eye and hungry gaze; the embodiment of dogged desire, drooling yet dissatisare pictured fied, fur yet paint, the promise of chase and conquest-all here." Andrea: But this is our fundamental questiona question that I posed again and again in "Academia in the Alps . . .": What is the place of pedagogy? the landscape, or rather, the locus, in the Lacanian sense, of learning? What is the terrain of teaching, the topology or topos, as we can say, after Aristotle, of the transference of the techne or even of theoria? What is the chora, as Kristeva writes, of the college? What, as Foucault has asked, is the field of deployment, of the distributions, of dianoia? What is the mise-en-sceneof savoir? the cartouches,for Derrida, the cartouchesof conaissance?What is the, what is the urszene, urszene, writes Freud, what is the urszene of understanding: Wo Es war soil Ich werden . . . but where? Wherel? Where will I be, where . . . What is the . . . Martha: There are several points to be made here in answer to your question about the critical approach we take to theories and positions that one would, for many reasons, want to protect. Firstly, it's important to notice that we use many styles of presentation in our panels, parody being only one function, one echo, in some papers, Marianne's paper, for example, on her mother and Chardin, "Paucity and Plentitude in the French Still Life," or Erin's paper on Olympia as the phallus, which investigates horizontality and prostitution. The jokes in our panels are really produced in lots of different ways, and they in turn produce lots of different kinds of laughter. There is the joke/hysteria of Andrea's paper on Olympia the model, and there's the joke/anxiety of much of the material on race. And, you're absolutely right, there is the real overturning or disturbance of certain notions, Marianne's paper about the gaze of the dog, for instance. Finally, there are many instances in our panels when we simply don't make jokes at all. You see, even while you can hear people laughing at what we say, you can't necessarily hear the kind of laughing they're doing, and you definitely can't hear the laughing they're not doing when certain feminist, deconones we cherish, the ones that structionist, or psychoanalytic ideas-the take our breath away-are raised. Secondly, I think this simultaneity, this polyphony, if you will . . .

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Jessica: Yes, that's really interesting, Martha. Pardon me, just for one second, just one second . . . Martha: Yes? Jessica: There's something . . . Martha: Yes? Jessica: Your tag . . . in the back here . . . it's sticking out . . . okay, go on . . .

Martha: What was I saying? October:Well, we were inquiring about the risks involved in targeting certain very useful theoretical insights. Isn't there a danger of making everything the butt of a joke - and an old joke that is most generally told at the expense of women? Marianne: Expense? Expense of women? Look, I don't think this is the appropriate time to discuss our fee. Suffice it to say that it's gone up. Martha: Which brings me directly to my third point. If you're concerned about appropriate parody, about the butt of our jokes, remember, we are women, five women, five feminists, interested in psychoanalysis, informed about deconstruction, and we are seated behind that table. Just look for us at the head of the room. You'll see. You can't miss us. We'll be the ones everyone is listening to. Any joke you hear in our panels will be contingent upon this fundamental, concrete, and not-especially-funny arrangement. Andrea: When we convene at a university, in our suits, in front of a large audience, we become at that moment by proxy the university's very visible representatives. Our bodies are the proxies -and no less because they are female. With our position in the room we invest in and are invested by the authority of the university. We have all been on the other side of that table, straining to hear every word, interpreting; bursting into peremptory laughter at every sign of a joke, identifying; making ourselves their ideal audience. Such identification is always at the expense of one's particular history, experiences, wants, interests, etc. Erin: Oh, that reminds me of a joke that's been going around the department. O.K., there's this professor who's really prolific and he's been asked to sit

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on a panel. So, he gets there, sits down, and when it's time for him to deliver his paper, he stands up and pulls out his dick.7 Well, it's not very big. In fact, it's very, very small, and as soon as he takes it out, everyone starts laughing. So, he says . . . Oh, wait a second. I can't tell this joke. Some of the men in your audience might get offended, you know, the real serious ones who don't have a sense of humor. This is a great joke, though. If any of you gals want to hear it, drop me a line. I promise you, you'll piss yourselves laughing. Oh, and if any of you guys out there think you can take it, feel free to write, too. Like I said, if you can take it, it's a great joke. Trust me. Andrea: Right, Erin. Even when jokes accomplish the identification of teller and listener at the expense of women as their common object, it remains the entire structure that needs to be problematized, not just the particular second term. Within a traditional joke structure, the object of the jokes on our panels would be "the other academic." In laughing at our jokes, the audience would be identifying with us at the expense of another academic, like Stanley Fish in Martha's paper "Is There a Panel in This Text," in "Academia in the Alps." Martha and the audience would be laughing together at the expense of Stanley Fish. But it doesn't work so simply, because Martha is not laughing. She's impersonating Stanley Fish, and it's a particularly extreme impersonation that is nevertheless concretized by her position on the panel. The ambivalence at work there makes it less a joke in the traditional sense than a grotesque representation that provokes instead a crisis of identification. Martha: Instead of the first person and the third person, it's the teller and the object who are identified, albeit formally. That immediately problematizes the position of the listener. Erin: The dick joke from the Olympia panel functions in a similar way. It's supposed to be a corollary to the jokes a male professor might tell about his female colleagues, but the reversal of gender doesn't function. In order to make any sense of the joke I'm telling, the listener must evoke the joke I'm not telling, a joke in which I would be the object. I think the audience doesn't know whether to identify with me as the teller of this joke or as the object of the joke that's not being told. Jessica: But there's a real charge here that we are making everything the butt of a joke. I think that we really have to address that directly, and not just as a formal problem. 7.

I know, just like a guy.

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Martha: Well, are there specific things we can think of that we do on the panels that aim at feminism, or psychoanalysis and deconstruction, or Marxism? Jessica: If there are, I think we should apologize. Andrea: There's Marianne's "Relations of Production and the Goat Taboo" from "Academia in the Alps." Erin: I feel guilty about my paper "Why Heidi Can't Read," where I argue that it is in Heidi that we find a precursor to the question that presses us today, namely, Why Female Academics Can't Read Well Enough to Get Tenure. Marianne: Well, if I were going to feel guilty about anything in relation to this question it would be that paper that makes fun of French feminism - which I tried to cut many times, I want you to know. Martha: You mean, "She is she and no one else and yet no one to herself as well as to everybody around her, always Other yet (M)other, always fluid yet . . ." Marianne: That's the one. Andrea: Well what about, in our Manet panel, Jessica's paper "Man A, Woman B"? Erin: And what about Jessica's "The Femmy Ninny: My Mommy"? Marianne: What about the Gay and Lesbian community? How do you think people feel about papers like "Myth and Merrymaking: The Lesbian Elf Community and the Social Text"? Erin: And what about psychoanalytic theory? What about "Elf/Self"? Marianne: "The Polyphonic (S)Elf." Jessica: Andrea, remember that paper of yours called "What I Want for Christmas"? Andrea: You mean, "Dear Santa, I want some shit for Christmas, I want some money, I want a penis and a baby." Martha: "All the Others Called Him Names: Rudolph, a Case Study." Marianne: And "The Reindeer Man."

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Andrea: "The Goat Man in the Freudian Field." Jessica: "The Subordinate Claus(e)." Martha: "My Man Manet." October:It seems that the disruptions you introduce into many of the discourses you challenge arise from the fact that you have occupied or can occupy these various theoretical positions as speaking subjects. But what happens when you pose questions about "others"? For example, in the Manet panel, you ask disingenuously, "Is there a black person on this panel?" Or when you make the comment "Early studies have shown that Laura was, in fact, part of the wallpaper." Jessica: The implication of your question, I believe, is that it is somehow dangerous to speak about race and racism. There is a lot of fear these days in the Left intellectual community about offending or appearing incorrect politically. We were hesitant for just this reason to broach the question, until we realized that, since we were doing a panel on Edouard Manet's Olympia, a painting that contains two figures, a black woman and a white woman, it would be even more problematic if we ignored race as a subject. Out of fear of doing the wrong thing, we would be replicating the very same "racism" that Martha satirizes in her paper. Marianne: You mean when she says that it was only in 1983 that an art historian -M. R. Frank- first discovered that there actually was a black person in the painting?8 Jessica: Anyway, we're not posing questions about "others," really. We're staying at home and scrutinizing the people we live with, as well as those parts of ourselves that are white, middle-class, and liable to be politically incorrect. That's what I'm trying to do when I pose as the free-and-easy downtown artist type who really wishes that she could be black. Race is a complicated issue; it's not a matter of good guys versus the bad guys. October:But the above question is further complicated when the identity discussed is one that could be "true," that might or might not be a role, as when, for example, Martha "comes out" as a lesbian. Marianne: Pardon me, I just want to say that I don't think this is very funny at all. M. R. Frank, "Hidden Elements," in E. F. Park, ed., New Directions for Art History, New 8. Haven, Oeuvres Press, 1983, pp. 189-214.

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Jessica: What's not funny, Marianne? Marianne: You know what I mean . . . I want to get my role clear here. Is this

question directed at me? I mean, do you expect me to answer this question? Or am I just supposed to sit here and listen while everyone calmly alludes to me? Is this some kind of one-way mirror treatment? If you want me to answer, I'll answer. If you don't, then just leave me out of it. Erin: Calm down, calm down. I don't think they want anything from you in particular. Marianne: Yes they do, I think they do. Otherwise they wouldn't have mentioned me like that. Martha: Can we please answer the question? Marianne: Well, they're just not being straightforward about it. I mean, if they . . .

Andrea: Did someone say straight? Did I hear the word straight? Did someone say they're straight? Martha: Can we please answer the question? Andrea: All right. As I will discuss later, on page 132, the positions we occupy on the panel are not "theoretical" but structural and historical. The "identities" we speak are neither true nor false but operative, signifying in the particular moments of their articulation. When Martha comes out as a lesbian in Olympia, the meaning of the statement, its significance, is determined by the fact that it is being made on a panel, that is, at a particular location within a particular institutional framework that has a definite relation to an audience and a format with a history. Is the question whether Martha really sleeps with women? How would the answer change the way the statement "I am a lesbian" functions on the panel? Martha: Andrea, maybe I can help you out here. You're absolutely right that it's the statement "I am a lesbian" that functions on the panel and not my sleeping with women. That, the latter, would make for a different kind of show altogether, as we know. The question would then be whether that's the kind of show our audience wants and, if so, whether we should continue to perform at universities.

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Jessica: I think a lot of these issues have been addressed in Octoberbefore.9 Erin: Well, I don't think we can fully address these questions until we first establish our relationship to the base/superstructure model. And, speaking of hysterical materialism, I'd like to get a plug in for our merchandizing line now. Marianne: Erin, I hardly think this is the forum. Erin: Think of it as a discursive strategy, if that will help. Martha: Like the new V-Girls Glasses to Read Theory By. Can you tell us a little about that, Andrea? Andrea: Well, readers, these glasses-imported rooms in Paris-magnify the type.

straight from fashion show-

Martha: It's amazing. You can actually read the text better. Erin: And, our perfume, "V," is about to hit the stores. Jessica: Tell Octoberreaders about the benefits of this new fragrance. Erin: We get a big percentage. Also, it's a fragrance with a message. Jessica: Would you say it has a kind of political message? Erin: Definitely. We think it smells like a Public Service Announcement. Andrea: We're all wearing it now. Different, isn't it? Erin: We're also thinking of bringing out a V-Girls Text Highlighter. Martha: In pink and blue. October:Do those colors correspond to narrative codes? Martha: They're supposed to highlight them, yes. Do you think there's a market? Our product director told us it was premature. Jessica: I think she said obscure. 9.

See, for example, October 11, 1987, the "March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights."

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October:In your panels you assume a series of guises-personal, professional, hysterical, compassionate, sometimes even inaudible. Are you thereby asserting that women must use a fundamentally different language and logic to oppose authority, which, even in its analysis of knowledge/power, appears to assume only one guise within the academy? Martha: Guys within the academy? We really have nothing against guys within the academy themselves, and we certainly aren't interested in using our practice to support a simple guys/gals opposition whereby women are barred from legitimately sounding a single, consolidated voice of authority or deploying a particular form of expertise. We're more interested in exposing, simply, that we, we as panelists, and we as gals, don't occupy any unified position. We don't, even though this is sometimes distressing. But to answer your question a little more directly, I have to confess that, yes, there are some guys within the academy whose faces I'd like to bury in a bucket of rotten meat. You're absolutely right knowledge/power, law/ doesn't matter what they talk about, these guys desire, subject/other-it are unbearable. A guy can be the most progressive, insightful theorist in the world, but if all he can talk about when you meet him in the mail room is the cut of your blouse or the color of your hose, who needs him? That's a language and logic I've had it up to here with. Andrea: I think that there may be a misunderstanding here. I don't think the question was about guys and gals. I think it was about Guysand Dolls, wasn't it? Isn't this a film journal? Jessica: No, Andrea, the question was about whether women have to oppose authority with "a fundamentally different language and logic." Marianne: I think this question can be neatly disposed of through the application of a simple citation from Michelle Montrelay: "The fact that phallocentrism and concentricity may be equally constitutive of feminine sexuality does not prove that they make up a harmonious unit. It is my contention that on the contrary, they do exist as incompatible and that it is this incompatibility which is specific to the feminine unconscious ...."10 Andrea: Yes, we read that together. Jessica: Unfortunately, Montrelay goes on to conclude that "the penis, its throbbing, its cadence and the movements of lovemaking could be said to produce the purest and most elementary form of signifying articulation." 10.

Michelle Montrelay, "Inquiry into Feminity," mf, trans. Parveen Adams.

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Martha: She does clean up that mess in the end. Marianne: That reminds me of another series of readings that we did. I would like to remind us all of James "Jimmy" Page's proposition: "Way down inside, woman, you need . . . gonna give you every inch of my love . . . gonna give you my love. Wanna whole lotta love. Wanna whole lotta love.""I Erin: I'd just like to break in here and say that I really like it that you're thinking about us. Posing us questions, posing us as questions. We've always been ciphers. We're just coming into our own, really. Young girls, on the brink of something, maybe . . . It's lovely to be posed as a question, especially if there's a world to cradle you as an answer, envelope you in its arms, knowing at last who you are, finally, knowing, who. Maybe we'll displease you, and say the wrong thing, something ambiguous that will give you pause. You will wonder if we mean what we say, you will ask other people for their opinions of us. "What do they mean? Who are they, really? What's their take? Why are they laughing? Are they just mean girls? Can't they analyze the effects of speech?" October:Practically speaking, how are your panels assembled? Do each of you write your own presentations? or are they written collectively? for example, Johanna Marianne: We decide on a specific focus all together Spyri's children's classic Heidi, and then we go off on our own to write the individual papers we read on the panel. For instance, I researched and wrote entirely on my own my paper, of which I'm very proud, entitled "Derrida and Dairy: Recovering the Balanced Meal in Heidi." If I may quote: "Many members of both the Hasidic and macrobiotic communities have objected to the insistent and, some would say, ideologically motivated presence of dairy products throughout the novel. Grandfather's unhealthy preoccupation with milk, milk, milk, as the main staple of their diet, accompanied almost exclusively by thick slices of cheese, has disturbed health officials and may have contributed to Heidi's unhealthy glow and dangerously high cholesterol level, not to mention the lugubrious, oversaturated tone of the writing itself. We may, however, see in Heidi something more than a merely uninformed nutritional community. Spyri here addresses the impossibility of experiencing the Other, the nondairy, the salad, the fiber, the broccoli."

11.

Jimmy Page, "Whole Lotta Love," Led Zeppelin II, Atlantic Records, 1969.

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Jessica: Thank you, Marianne. Working on our own is the most difficult part. Sometimes I am overcome with doubt when I'm home alone, trying to write papers for a panel. I doubt my ability to write, so I can't write. And sometimes I feel like all the other V-Girls are smarter than I am, like they are lovely, precocious maidens on a glorious voyage, and I am just a fish at the bottom of the boat. Erin: Our use of the Insecure12 has always been one of our most important creative tools. For example, Jessica's work on uncertainty and child development. Jessica? Jessica: "My Most Embarrassing Moment": My most embarrassing moment took place in my kindergarten class. We were all sitting quietly coloring when the teacher pulled down his pants in front of the whole class! No, I mean, I mean, what really happened was that by mistake I drew a huge breast on the blackboard; I don't know why I did it. I can't tell you what really happened. All right, something came out of my mouth, no, you're right, it was from farther down. Don't make me tell, I . . .,s13

Erin: After we've finished writing on our own, we come together and edit the pieces collectively, trying to fit what we have into some kind of sequential order, an overall shape. Marianne: Then each of us basically presents her own material. Martha: Yes, but I think it is only fair to point out that what I am saying right now was scripted by someone else. Andrea: Actually, I think that we're finally beginning to move away from such fetishism of authorship and the proper name entirely. We're really beginning to develop our critique of presence, of logocentrism, into a practiceas this conversation demonstrates. For example, the interviewers are not in fact present. Further, as "Martha" has just pointed out, we are not actually speaking. Rather than perpetuate the originary myth of the self-same, we are abandoning ourselves to the graphein (of which our V is the cipher), to the essential and irremediable impropriety produced in the very moment of being named (that is, "girls"). In our consciousness or exhibition of this impropername we have already placed our individual proper names -those

12. 13.

Cf. Freud, Unheimlich, Standard Edition. "Academia in the Alps . . .," see footnote 2.

A Conversation with OCTOBER

131

unique appellations reserved for the presences of unique beings - under erasure. And I for one think it's time to dispense with them altogether . . . Herb Rorhback:Oh, that feels much better. Werner Sanchez: I think you've made a very good point there, Gwen. Pip Winthrop:But I think in fact that we've gone too far, we've skipped over the more immediate, the more concrete, functions of the name to designate the subject of speech as not just the author but also the owner of her individual articulations. In that sense the originary expropriation at issue here is not our inscription within a system of liguistico-social difference, but our inscription within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ? MIT Press: Exactly. ? MIT Press: In order effectively to conceal the reduction of qualitative differences to ... ? MIT Press: Give yourself or a colleague the gift of critical insight -subscribe to October.A serious journal of theoretical inquiry, Octoberbrings you a full year of innovative and provocative articles on the arts. For the next four issues of the best contemporary aesthetic criticism -send in your subscription today!! ? MIT Press: Some of you appear to adopt fairly consistent characters, while others shift from one character to another -on the Manet panel Jessica is presented as French professor, as museum educator, as disarmingly herself,14 as opera buff, etc. .... Martha: It's funny you should say that because we've noticed the same thing about you too. I don't know. It's weird. Jessica was sure you were a product of the '60s . . . I guess people can be pretty confusing. Andrea: Consistent or shifting characters? Oh, you must be referring to our use of Lacan's algorithms for metaphor and metonymy:

14. I would just like to go on record with the fact that I take issue with the assumption that I am ever myself. I may be many things, but please, let's just leave me out of this. -JC.

OCTOBER

132

f(S ......S')S.

f(S)S S'

We V-Girls have integrated the two models in our diagram illustrating the panel discussion:

S1......S5 7)s

f( I

S'

Here you see that while the sequence of characters S1 through S5 functions in the diachronic dimension of metonymic consistency and continuity, the position of the characters behind the table separating signifier and signified introduces the synchronic dimension and allows for the emergence of meaning in the audience through the mechanism of substitution and metaphor. Of course, as our second diagram illustrates, this synchronic dimension disappears when we perform with a courtesy cloth:15

f(

Si ......S5

)S

Erin: Andrea, I think the question was about theatrical characters, you know, playing roles, acting . . . Andrea: Oh. I thought Octoberhad put the idea of that kind of character to rest. After Yvonne Rainer's "Looking Myself in the Mouth . . ." The concept of character only proposes and protects a conception of the subject as fixed and autonomous, evoking, in opposition to the artifice of the constructed character, the authenticity of a nonconstructed individual on which it leans. The artifice of our performances instead consists in our attempts to commandeer our own construction in the positions of panelists -a construction that finally is not artistic but institutional. Funny noses and French accents not withstanding, we V-Girls are not characters on our panels. Nor are we individuals being interviewed here off-stage where . . .

15. A courtesy cloth is a pleated cloth, usually cotton, customarily hung from the panel table in order to shield the panelists' lower halves from view. E.g., Early that morning the Marriott attendants draped the courtesycloths in preparation for the day's events.

A Conversation with OCTOBER

133

Martha: Hold on, hold on a minute, Andrea. I mean, how do you know the rest of us aren't characters? Look, look over there at Jessica. Andrea: Where? Martha: There by the bonfire. How can you say she's not a gypsy, with that shawl and those hoop earrings? You think those men with the guitars just wandered in here by accident? You think they're not her real brothers? Jessica: Raul, your "C" is flat. October:There's no smoking in here, please. Raul: Sorry. October: Within all of your panel discussions you interject the "private"personal memories, thoughts, fantasies . . . Jessica: Yes, I agree, I think we all agree, and speaking of agreement and disagreement, I think it might be useful here to take a look at our February 1989 tour of California, where we did experience a fair amount of, well . . . Andrea: Differance? Jessica: As I recall, it happened in a parking lot in Los Angeles. Marianne, who is the author of several books, including her most recent one, spoke in tones that were far from compassionate or inaudible. Marianne: Excuse me, Jessica, but I'd just like to stop you for a minute in order to interrogate the transparency of your apparent . . . discourse. I'd like to suggest that a) the unconscious is structured like a language, b) what we are speaking here is language, and 3) I'd like to knock you unconscious. Erin: V-Girls, V-Girls!

Visual Literacy Test from "Manet's Olympia:Posed and Skirted"

Jessica: Ladies and gentlemen, this evening I am going to be administering the Visual Literacy Test. Although I know many of you here did not expect to be tested this evening, this simple exam should not be cause for any . . . undue alarm. Indeed, before we start, I'd like to reassure you that the museum has been administering this test, in conjunction with several eminent mental health institutions, since the early 1960s, when it received a sizable grant from the RJR Nabisco Corporation. The grant, targeted at xeroxing expenditures, was established with the intention of finding out who really knows what about great art. All right. Now, if you don't have a number two pencil, or a number three pencil or a number four pencil, you can just go ahead and use your hands. During the exam it is especially important that everybody remain in their seats. We also ask you please not to bend, fold, or mutilate your neighbor. Here at the museum we discourage all forms of behavior, and though we don't have the power to actually punish you, there will be embarrassing kinds of social control awaiting the offender. All right, everyone. I'll distribute the exams now, and when you receive yours, please put your name in the upper right-hand corner where it's marked "Name." . . . You'll see what I mean in a moment. Does everybody have one? How about you in the back? Good. Now, as you can see from this sample test, you are to try to draw Olympia-All of you, I know, are familiar with the painting. Don't worry about accuracy. After you have done this, there are two questions to answer here below. And remember, don't hold back. We require your sincerity so that we can correctly evaluate the exams. All right. Let's begin. Slide please. (Olympia slide) You may now begin. (Ten seconds.) Thank you. Please discard your papers.

VISUAL

A.

TEST

LITERACY TEST

YOUR AESTHETIC

RESPONSE!

the pait.intinl, Olympia

1. Observe

D2. i)raw whalt

youl see1. to t,he IN,'t

b1y Edonard ,If

Manet,!

o,fr' ailiti.'.

ill t.hel box p)rovi[ded< below!

IB. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS! (Puit t.he! letter of tlhe correc.t. answer in thei space provided)

1. Another paint,ing by Manet, is called: a. tuerni:

(_

a

b). Madami e Bovary

c. Sympathy

I was drawing.

2. While a ) out.:

for the Delvil Olympia,

._

at. se'x

1). Harry

::. Ot].her:/'t,? 0fftf'1Vy

I was tlhinkin
Visual Literacy Test: Part Two

Jessica: Okay, everybody, I want to announce that the results of the Visual Literacy Test are back, and I want to thank you all for your participation in the study. First I'd like to say that here at the museum we are proud of the Visual Literacy Test, and we are proud that our test has several times helped and is still helping the police to detect the criminally uncultivated, purveyors of aesthetic scandal, and nerds. Of course, for our purposes here at the museum, it has been more useful to view the results as indications of a more general sickness that is sweeping the nation, or more general sicknesses. But before we draw conclusions, let us review a sampling of the results of the test taken just a short while ago here in this room. All right. Pictures of Olympia drawn by heterosexual white men from the ages of 3 to 85 typically neglected to include the head in the picture.

In this example, drawn by a mail-order tycoon of considerable social standing, one notes the exacting attention paid to the detail of the hand, the traditional loss of the head, as well as several other creative dismemberments. Interestingly, he neglects to include the black woman in the picture. The next test group was comprised of artists of middle-class origins who attend B.F.A. or M.F.A. programs at various colleges and universities around the country.

We received this sample from a 35-year-old artist attending the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

And this from a 19-year-old taking drawing classes at Andover prep.

And this from a 50-year-old who is now finishing her M.F.A. at Indiana State. Evidently only one of these people managed to include the black woman in the picture.

__

Now, it was found that, when asked to draw Olympia, young Caucasian girls from middle-class families between the ages of 4 and 7 tended to overemphasize Olympia's head.

Let's take a look at this example, which shows the drawing of a 6-year-old child. As you can see, this girl exhibits a curious lack of attention to detail; she has, for example, omitted the nose entirely, and the black woman is completely out of the picture. Also notable is the elongation of the cat-form and the interesting way the shoes are at one with the feet.

Young boys of the same age and background, however, were quite a different story.

Although a minority of them appeared to be preoccupied with the sexual characteristics of Olympia, as you can see in this picture, they tended to ignore the assigned subject matter altogether. Children who have been given an overabundance of tests that involved drawing in some way tended to believe that they recognized children who have our test. These overtested children-usually children often assigned come from broken homes-these personalities to each figure in the painting.

This boy, for example, has here depicted the state of affairs at home, imagining a scene in which his mother, standing in for the black woman in the background, attends his sick bed while his father, as cat, pukes on the floor. Thank you. Now, these people, ladies and gentlemen, as you may have already guessed, are Visual Illiterates to one degree or another. But they are not alone in their plight. Here at the museum we have come to the conclusion that visual illiteracy is . . . a problem. And that it's a big problem. But what is a museum to do? Ladies and gentlemen, we have questions to which we need to know answers. What is art? Who are you? Are you sick? Answer and serve.

140

OCTOBER

October:We understand that your work together as panelists had its genesis in a reading group devoted largely to the writings of Jacques Lacan. Could you tell us how you decided to become a performance group and why you chose the name V-Girls. Erin: To answer your question I feel compelled to say that this particular group of women has always had a problem with acting out. Andrea: I'd like to strike that from the record. I do not have a problem with acting out. Martha: You do so. Andrea: Do not. Erin: We can barely read a line of Lacan without somebody playing the split subject. Marianne: I remember the time we read Moustafa Safouan aloud -I hope your tape recorder captures the quality of my voice: haunting, piercing- I looked up from the page and the V-Girls were a bunch of symptoms on the carpet. Jessica: Are you saying that the text has bodily effects for us? Martha: Listen, the text does nothing for me. It leaves me cold. Marianne: I seem to remember your enacting some impossible, unspeakable moments as l'objet a . . . Martha: Andrea: I think she's enacting one now. Martha: Marianne: I didn't know this text would have that effect on her. Jessica: Snap out of it! It's this very interstice of reading and playing, word and symptom, where we bicker about interpretation. Martha: For instance, why the subject of the enunciation and the enunciation of

A Conversation with OCTOBER

141

the subject cannot both be played by Martha! See? Philosophically, it's no problem! Erin: But technically, it's a stretch. Jessica: I guess that's a role we all dream of playing some day. October:And the name the V-Girls? Martha: It's an inverted Lacan citation: The Phallus Girls of Venusburg. We were giving a New Year's Eve party together, and we thought it would be funny for the invitation. We've always had a sense of fun. Erin: Then we got embarrassed about being the Venus Girls, so . . . we chopped off the "enus"-if you know what I mean. Jessica: Don't say that. People will get the wrong idea. Marianne: Today, V-Girls stands for five girls, but we still privilege a phonic rather than a numeric reading, foregrounding the mutability of the signifier, and revealing that something cryptic may actually be quite simple, that things are not always what they seem. Jessica: Like the phallus. Martha: Sure, Jessica. Jessica: You know, I thought the "V" stood for Vaginal. Martha: Jessica, was that why you wanted to join? Erin: We called ourselves the Venus Girls first, but then we were told that there was already a "Venus Girls" group in existence-a small but powerful group of New Critics living on farmland somewhere in the midwest. You know: no personal possessions allowed, up at 6 AM, well-wrought urns. Always the text. Nothing but. We couldn't live that way. For me, a V-Girl has something special, a shine, something that says, "Hi, I laugh at professors." You know, like, "Hi, I'm a theory clown." Martha: A V-Girl is a woman of the '90s. She's a brunette with brains, beauty, and the metabolism of a hummingbird. Any young woman now in college, thinking of making her career as a V-Girl, should look at herself hard in the

OCTOBER

142

mirror, and if she likes what she sees, if she finds that certain gleam in her eye, she should feel free to call us to find out what classes we'd recommend she enroll in. Erin: Actually, what comes after the "V" is our mantra, and we're not allowed to say it. Martha: We found a line in Lacan about not saying our mantra to anybody, so now we don't. October:Where does he say that? Jessica: Well, he infers it really. It's in The Four Fundamental . . . Erin: Excuse me, I know I agreed to be interviewed, but I hate this sort of thing. I'm actually an intensely private person. I don't play publicity games. My private life is my own, and who I share it with is . . . Well, you've read what they say about me at the check-out counter. That I slept with professors. It isn't true. It's made me very bitter, and it's hurt the woman I'm with. She's stood by me though. And a lot of the songs on the album are dedicated to her. Oh, would you be sure to mention that? Martha: Erin, this is for October. Erin: Oh, God. I'm sorry. What week is this? I came all prepared to talk about my lifestyle. Listen, find a way to talk'about the loft, O.K.? Artie needs some work.

V-Girls ad photo by Benoit Cortet.

..... . p7

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (Required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) 1. A. Title of Publication: October B. Publication No.: 01622870 2. Date of Filing: 9/20/89 3. Frequency of Issue: Quarterly A. No. of issues published annually: Four B. Annual subscription price: $25/Ind $60/Inst 4. Location of known office of publication (not printer): MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Middlesex, MA 02142-1399 5. Location of Headquarters of General Business office of the publisher (not printer): same as item 4 6. Names and Complete Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher: MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1399 Editor: Joan Copjec, Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss & Annette Michelson, October, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003. Managing Editor: None 7. Owner (if owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual, must be given. If the publication is published by a nonprofit organization, its name and address must be stated.): MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142 and October Magazine Limited, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003 8. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None 9. For completion by nonprofit organizations authorized to mail at special rates: Has not changed during preceding 12 months. 10. Extent and nature of circulation: A. Total number of copies printed (not press run): Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 5115 Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 4712 B. Paid and/or requested circulation: 1. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 1924 Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 1654 2. Mail Subscriptions: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 1983 Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 2113 C. Total paid circulation: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 3907 Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 3767 D. Free distribution by mail, carrier or other means-samples, complimentary and other free copies: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 146 Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 129 E. Total distribution (Sum of C and D): Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 4053 Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 3896 F. Copies not distributed: 1. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 702 Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 816 2. Returns from news agents: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 360 Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0 G. Total (Sum of E and F-should equal net press run shown in A): Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 5115 Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 4712 I certify that the statements made above by me are correct and complete. Dorothy Devereaux Circulation Manager

*ms^wla^ Temple University Seminars in Art and Culture The 1990 Temple Seminar in Art and Culture will focus upon "RepresentingPersons:Figuration and Identity in Art and Politics"at Temple'sRome campus, the Villa Caproni,from June 4-29. For students in philosophy,art history, social theory, literary and film studies, this programin critical theory offers a six-credit graduate course of unusual interdisciplinaryscope. This year's seminar will consider the problem of representing the person in art and politics: the physical person, the personality,the intersubjective and universalizedself will be studied against a backdropof theories of institutions and the state, concepts of the divine, and accounts of history and historical agency. Guest lectures on art and film theory and courseworkon the history of the concept of representation will be supplemented by three tours of the art and architecture of Rome: "Figurationand Public Space," "The Uses of ClassicalForm,"and "Caravaggioand the

Notion of Incarnation."The final week will feature a screening of "The Chronicleof Anna MagdalenaBach" and discussion with filmmakers Jean-MarieStraub and Daniele Huillet. FACULTY Alan Singer Susan Stewart

GUESTLECTURERS MathiasWinner Jean-MarieStraub Daniele Huillet Peter Rockwell

Tuition and ProgramFee for 6 graduate credits (56 hours of instruction): In-State (PA): $1640; Out-of-State:$1934. Housing can be arrangedthrough Temple University. For informationand application, contact: Lois Mahan, Director of Overseas Study 201 Mitten Hall Temple University Philadelphia, PA 19122 215-787-4684

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IUIPlrrllll MERET OPPENHEIM Defiance in the Face of Freedom

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Dejeuneren Fourrure,the famous fur-linedcup and saucerthat Meret Oppenheimproducedduringher student yearsin Paris, broughther international renownand precociouslylabeledher as a Surrealistduringthe 1930s.This first comprehensivestudy of Oppenheim unites biographicaldetail, criticalinterpretation,and catalogueraisonn6to illuminatethe enigmaticcharacterand formidableachievementsof a clairvoyant and radicalartist. The catalogueraisonnecontains more than 1,000 images, documenting the enormousbreadthand imagination of Oppenheim'soeuvrethat includednot only painting, drawing,and sculpture, butjewelry and clothingdesign as well. Copublishedwith PARKETTPublishers. Distributedby The MIT Press. 275 pp., 1,455illus., 55 in color $50.00

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OCTOBER/Back

Issues

OCTOBER 6

OCTOBER 26

Beckett's ... but the clouds ..., Kristeva, Pleynet, and Sollers on the US, and texts by Michael Brown, Tom Bishop, Octavio Armand, others

Louise Lawler's photographs, Pierre Rosenstiehl and Yve-Alain Bois on Barthes, ChristopherPhillips on calotype aesthetics

OCTOBER 27 OCTOBER 10 HerbertDamisch on Duchamp, Lyotardon Daniel Buren, interviews with Trisha Brown and Richard Serra, texts on Dan Graham and Robert Smithson

OCTOBER 14 Maya Deren's 1947 notebook, Eisentein's letters from Mexico, interview with Pierre Boulez, Jean-JacquesNattiez and Annette Michelson on the centennial Ring at Bayreuth

JeanClay on Manet, Nancy Troyon Mondrian, Gilles Deleuze on the simulacrum, poetry by Velimir Khlebnikov

OCTOBER 28 Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis Texts by Laplanche, Roustang, Bersani, Homi Bhabha, Joan Copjec, JenniferStone, Perry Meisel

OCTOBER 29 OCTOBER 15 Film reviews by Borges, film script by Joseph Cornell, Hubert Damisch on Delacroix's Journal, Crimp and Krauss on photography,and texts by Serge Guilbaut, Joel Fineman, others

Michelson on the Eve of the Future, Yve-Alain Bois on Serra, Georges DidiHuberman on the Shroud of Turin, interview with Jonas Mekas, texts by George Melies and Joseph Rykwert

OCTOBER 17

OCTOBER 30

The New Talkies:A Special Issue Jameson on Syberberg, Copjec on Duras, Frampton, Wollen, Rosler on filmmaking, and texts by Philip Rosen and Mary Ann Doane

Walter Grasskamp on Hans Haacke, Haacke interview, Crimp on the art of exhibition, Buchloh on Productivism, Bois on late Picabia

OCTOBER 31 OCTOBER 23 Film Books: A Special Issue ArthurDanto, Joan Copjec, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Liebman, Nick Browne, Noel Carroll on new film books

Roger Caillois on mimicry, Denis Hollier on Caillois, Caillebotte dossier, Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Ryan on East Village gentrification

OCTOBER 32 OCTOBER 24 John Rajchman and Jean-Marie Alliaume on Foucault, Marc Chenetier on Debray, interview with Beth and Scott B, poetry by Marinetti

Hollis Frampton:A Special Issue Texts by Annette Michelson, Barry Goldensohn, Hollis Frampton, Christopher Phillips, Bruce Jenkins, Peter Gidal, Allen S. Weiss, Brian Henderson

OCTOBER 34

OCTOBER 45

Shklovskyon trans-senselanguage, HalFoster Malevich'sautobiography, andHomiK. Bhabhaon colonialism

StefanGermerandEricMichaudon Beuys, ShoshanaFelmanon Lacan,JonathanCrary on the makingof the observer

OCTOBER 36

OCTOBER 46

Georges Bataille: Writingson Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing

Alexander Kluge: Theoretical Writings, Stories, and an Interview

Essaysby Krauss,Michelson,Weiss

Essaysby MiriamHansen,AndreasHuyssen, FredericJameson,StuartLiebman,andHeidi Schlupmann

OCTOBER 37 Symposiumon originalityas repetitionwith Buchloh,Fried,Krauss,Nochlin;recentart historybooksreviewedby Bois, Herding, Marin;tributeto Leroi-Gourhan

OCTOBER 39

OCTOBER 47 RosalynDeutscheon publicart, DavidLurie andKrzysztofWodiczkoon the Homeless VehicleProject,WalterBenjaminon art history,ThomasY. Levinon Benjamin

AllanSekulaon criminologicalphotography, OCTOBER 48 on the legs of the AbigailSolomon-Godeau CountessCastiglione,Borch-Jacobsen on the AndreasHuyssenon Kiefer,Benjamin Freudiansubject,Bois on Haacke Buchlohon Richter,GertrudKochon Shoah, EricRentschleron Riefenstahl,HansHaacke andWernerFenzon the StyrianAutumn OCTOBER 41 Milleron the Panopticon, Jacques-Alain FriedrichKittleron writingmachines,Ann Smockon Duras,PatriciaMainardion the Museed'Orsay,interviewwithSteveFagin

OCTOBER 42 Broodthaers: Writings,Interviews, Photographs

Essaysby RainerBorgemeister,Benjamin Buchloh,Yves Gevaert,MichaelOppitz, BirgitPelzer,AnneRorimer,DieterSchwarz, DirkSnauwaert

OCTOBER 44 Leo Steinbergon Picasso'sLes Demoiselles, DenisHollierandJohnRajchman on Foucault

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1 A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice

Edited by Wayne Rothschild, Ohio University,Athens In-depth critical analyses ... challenging and controversial theories ... provocative interviews with filmmakers ... reviews of the newest film books . . . examination of every genre and historical period . . . coverage of all national cinemas . . . WIDE ANGLE brings you film from every point of view. Each issue is devoted to a single topic. Upcoming issues will focus on topics such as Film, Music, and Video and The Fantastic.

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The editors of OCTOBER wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Pinewood Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and the New York State Council on the Arts. Patron Subscribers: Phoebe Cohen Sam Francis Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf Robert Shapazian Mr. and Mrs. Walter Thayer Councilman Joel Wachs Bagley and Virginia Wright

OCTOBER 52 & 53 the Crisis in the

Stuart Hall

Cultural Studies and Humanities

Barbara Harlow

Countering the University

Denis Hollier

On Equivocation

Rosalind Krauss

Bachelors

George Marcus

The Production of High Culture in Los Angeles

Stephen Melville

The Temptationof New Perspectives

Annette Michelson

The Kinetic Icon in the Workof Mourning

Catharine Stimpson

Federal Papers

Cornel West

The New Cultural Politics of Difference