Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film

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MASCULINITY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, STRAIGHT QUEER THEORY

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MASCULINITY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, STRAIGHT QUEER THEORY ESSAYS ON ABJECTION IN LITERATURE, MASS CULTURE, AND FILM

Calvin Thomas

masculinity, psychoanalysis, straight queer theory Copyright © Calvin Thomas, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-10: 0–230–60008–5 ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60008–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas, Calvin, 1956– Masculinity, psychoanalysis, straight queer theory : essays on abjection in literature, mass culture, and fi lm / by Calvin Thomas. p. cm. ISBN 0-230-60008-5 1. Abjection in literature. 2. Abjection in motion pictures. 3. Masculinity in literature. 4. Masculinity in motion pictures. I. Title. PN56.A23T46 2008 809'.933521—dc22

2007041259

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Westchester Book Group First edition: May 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Amber and Jason, who help me keep my shoulders up. Long may they rule.


CONTENTS

Acknowledgments and Permissions

ix

Introduction: Abject (without) Apologies

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1 Beginning with a Bit of (Be)Hindsight . . . 2 Re-enfleshing the Bright Boys; or, How Male Bodies Might Matter to Feminist Theory 3 Must Desire Be Taken Literally? 4 Cultural Droppings: On Bersani and Beckett 5 Is What You Want Something You Can Discuss? 6 “It’s No Longer Your Film”: Abjection and (the) Mulholland (Death) Drive

1

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Notes

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Works Cited

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Index

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19 63 73 93


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PERMISSIONS

AND

A number of lovely and generous people helped to lubricate various parts of this project. The first essay, “Beginning with a Bit of (Be) Hindsight . . . ,” is a revised and expanded version of a piece that was written for keynote presentation at the conference on “Men’s Bodies” orga nized by Judith Still (who I thank for inviting me to come speak) at the University of Nottingham in 2001; it was published as “Racing Forms and the Exhibition(ist) (Mis)Match”in Men’s Bodies, edited by Judith Still (Edinburgh University Press, 2003) and appears here by kind permission of Edinburgh University Press. The second essay, “Reenfleshing the Bright Boys,” is a considerably revised and expanded version of a piece that was first presented as a keynote address at the conference on “Posting the Male: Representations of Masculinity in the Twentieth Century” at the Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University in 2000, and I thank Daniel Lea, Gill Plain, and Berthold Schoene-Harwood for their invitation. The piece was first published in a much shorter form in Judith Kegan Gardiner’s collection Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (Columbia University Press, 2002) and appears here by kind permission of Columbia University Press. The excerpt from “Holy Shit,” from Imperfect Thirst: Poems by Galway Kinnell (copyright © 1994 by Galway Kinnell) that appears in the second essay, is reprinted by permission of Houghton Miffl in Company (all rights reserved). The third essay, “Must Desire Be Taken Literally?” was written at the invitation of the editors of the journal Parallax: it appeared in the “Having Sex” issue of that journal (October–December 2002) and appears here in slightly different form with their permission (www.informaworld .com). The fourth essay, “Cultural Droppings,” was first published in Twentieth Century Literature 47, no. 2 (Summer 2001) and appears here in revised form by kind permission of TCL. The last essay, “It’s No

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Longer Your Film,” was originally written for presentation at Emory University’s Psychoanalytic Studies Program Colloquium, and I would like to thank Elisa Marder and Angela Hunter for inviting me to speak at this forum; I also thank Adrian Johnston, Robert Sinnerbrink, and Doris McIlwain for help and encouragement with this piece, an earlier version of which was published in Angelaki: The Theoretical Journal of the Humanities 11, no. 2 (August 2006). I thank the editors of Angelaki (www.informaworld.com) for permitting me to publish the piece in its present form here. I am grateful to the English Department and the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University for a professional development leave, which helped, in the fall of 2004. Thanks also to the English Department for picking up various permission fees, and for making it possible for John Lowther to write the index (abundant thanks to John as well). I would like to thank my friends in Dublin, Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke, as well as Lisa Downing at the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe (www.sall.ex. ac.uk/centres/cissge) at the University of Exeter, for their general support of my work. A special note of thanks goes to Peter Murphy, who knows why. I also offer thanks to Dr. John Buchanan for his moral and culinary support. Finally, all my thanks, and all my heart, go to Liz Stoehr, always.

INTRODUCTION: ABJECT (WITHOUT) APOLOGIES

Does one write under any condition other than being possessed by abjection? Kristeva, Powers of Horror Might not language itself arouse an anxiety which it must also try, through its other circuits, to assuage? Riley, The Words of Selves What happened to this discharge? What have we lost, and to what end, in the elimination of this fall of letters? Out of shit, a trea sure arose: the trea sure of language. Laporte, History of Shit

This book concerns the productions of masculinity; it draws heavily, perhaps lugubriously, on Lacanian psychoanalysis; and, despite the fact that its author participates in and benefits from the dominant social order as a privileged heterosexual male, the book nonetheless attempts to proliferate theoretically queer discourses that are inimical to that order, to its dominance, and to its privileges. And yet, for all of that, I did not really want to call this book Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory. I wanted instead to title it Adventures in Abjection, for even though the book certainly addresses all of the topics announced in its given title, it is much more thoroughly concerned, if not saturated, with abject matters. Abjection is its perverse core as well as its pervasive strategy. Its existing title notwithstanding, then, this book most fundamentally promises its reader only essays in abjection, or abject assays, adventures in abjective writing.1 But what is “abjection,” anyway? Why would a reader want to have adventures in it? What does abjection have to do with reading and writing about masculinity, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, or about literature,

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culture, and film? Some definitions would seem to be in order here, so let’s begin with a brief rounding up of the usual discursive suspects. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Judith Butler writes that the word “abjection (in latin, ab-jicere) literally means to cast off, away, or out and, hence, presupposes and produces a domain of agency from which it is differentiated.” For Butler, “the notion of abjection designates a degraded or cast out status within the terms of sociality” (243). In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva writes of abjection as that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect border, positions, rules” (4). She associates the abject with “what is jettisoned from the ‘symbolic system’ [ . . . ] what escapes that social rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate is based” (65). To the extent that what is jettisoned from any “symbolic system” or social field can be metaphorically related to what leaks or is expelled from the individual body and its various orifices, the abject is for Kristeva, and to some extent for Butler, always related to matters that traverse the body’s boundaries, “polluting objects” that “always relate to corporeal orifices as to so many landmarks parceling-constituting the body’s territory” (Powers 71): blood, pus, mucus, saliva, milk, urine, semen, feces, tears. Abjection thus involves the general realm of bodily production, expulsion, leakage, and defilement. For Butler, the question of abjection is more sociopolitical than corporeal or psychosexual: ethically and analytically, she is concerned with the way the dominant patriarchal-heteronormative social order maintains itself by “constituting zones of uninhabitability” (243) and unintelligibility, by constructing arenas of abject powerlessness, lifelessness, and meaninglessness to which it consigns its marginalized others. Abjection, for Butler, is the way the dominant order excrementalizes its dispossessed; it is, as she writes in Gender Trouble, the “mode by which others become shit” (134). For Kristeva, an individual subject’s shitty feeling of abjection relates to more primordial anxieties concerning the maternal body and subjective fantasies of cloacal birth therefrom. The abject, she writes, “is the translinguistic spoor of the most archaic boundaries of the self ’s clean and proper body [corps propre]. In that sense, if it is a jettisoned object, it is so from the mother” (73). Abjection as a disruption of these archaically constituted boundaries poses a threat of “engulfment” to the subject, the threat “of being swamped by the dual relationship, thereby risking the loss not of a part (castration) but of the totality of his living being,” the fantasmatic danger of “his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother” (64). Lacan, in Seminar X: On Anxiety, explains this sinking feeling of being swamped (or perhaps swiped) as follows:

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It is not nostalgia for what is called the maternal womb which engenders anxiety, it is its imminence, it is everything that announces to us something which will allow us to glimpse that we are going to re-enter it. [ . . . ] What is most anxiety-provoking for the child is when the relationship through which he comes to be—on the basis of lack which makes him desire—is most perturbed: when there is no possibility of lack, when his mother is constantly on his back, especially by wiping his bottom. (December 5, 1962)

At bottom, Kristeva writes, it is the “logic of prohibition,” “the simple logic of excluding filth,” that “founds the abject,” establishing “the ‘self and clean’ [corps propre] of each social group if not of each subject” (64, 65). She points to the “excremental philosopher” Georges Bataille as having “linked the production of the abject to the weakness of that prohibition, which, in other respects, necessarily constitutes each social order.” Bataille, writes Kristeva, is “the first to have specified that the plane of abjection is that of the subject/object relationship (and not subject/other subject) and that this archaism is rooted in anal eroticism” (64).2 Now, if the preceding gives an adequate whiff of what abjection is all about, the question still remains why any self-respecting reader would want to have an adventure in such matters—particularly since respect for “the self ” (or at least the “clean and proper” self ) is precisely what an interest in abjection would seem most to demolish. In my first book, Male Matters, I attempted to demonstrate the use-value for feminist and queer political projects of fully exploring the various planes of abjection, of understanding how and why abjectified subject/object relations can invade and infect not only those between the infant and the mother but also those between one subject and another (across the divides of gender and/ or sexual difference) and between the subject and the Big Other (i.e., the field of language as sociosymbolic order). The subject, as Lacan tells us, must constitute itself as a self by alienating itself, relating itself to itself, gaining and losing itself as an object in compulsively repetitive (or repulsively competitive) ways—in the game of fort- da, at the moment of mirror-stage recognition, in the “Oedipalizing” accession to the law of language, and so on. In Male Matters, and in this book as well (which I also briefly considered calling More Male Matters), I attempt to merge Lacan’s emphasis on imaginary, symbolic, and real self-alienation with the jettisoned matters of abjection and, most importantly, with what Leo Bersani calls “the destabilization of self initiated by the act of writing” (Culture 12). I relate what Roland Barthes calls “that faint uneasiness which seizes me when I look at ‘myself ’ on a piece of paper” (Camera Lucida 13) with the anxiety that Lacan says any writer experiences when

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faced with the blank white page. At my most wretchedly neologistic, I call this anxiety scatontological in order to suggest that the unease that seizes me when I see “myself ” reproduced/expelled/spelled out on paper resonates with the dread “memory” of having “originally” been “jettisoned from the mother” as kakon or bad object—“through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct” (Beckett, Three Novels 16). Moreover, I let this cloacal “memory,” which is no less determinate for being anatomically incorrect, or wholly false, serve as the fundament for the following bit of discursive excess from Lacan, which has served my own writing so often and so well: “This subject, who thinks that he can accede to himself by designating himself in the statement, is no more than such [a bad] object. Just ask the writer about the anxiety he experiences when he faces the blank sheet of paper, and he will tell you who is the turd of his phantasy” (Écrits: A Selection 315).3 But I also attempt, both in Male Matters and in this book, to give this condition of scatontological dysgraphic anxiety a politically salutary twist, a sort of ethical (ref )use-value, by connecting it to what Bersani calls ébranlement or “self-shattering,” to a “self-divestiture [that] is enacted as a willful pursuit of abjection, a casting away not only of possessions but also of all the attributes that constitute the self as a valuable property” (Homos 126). The ethical assumption underlying all my sorry assays is that a willful pursuit of abjection as self-divestiture in writing could delubricate, roughen, or impede the punitive abjection of the other that the dominant social order enacts and upon which it depends, could refuse that order or render useless to it at least one of the subjective pivots through which it stabilizes itself—namely, my “self,” my always ideological sense of identity with myself. Even if this refusal effectively fecalizes my understanding that “ ‘I’ is an other,” a positively self-shattering immersion in the profusely scatontological dysgraphia of which I write could allow abjective writing to become something other than the mode by which others become shit. So much, then, for self-respect, which is also always ideological, the basis of all identity politics, and pretty much what a reader should be prepared to relinquish in order to enter here. And yet, the reader should be entitled to know going in just how this book will differ from Male Matters even as it attempts to spread, to extend and refine, all that the first book uncovers. First, I would say that while Male Matters wallows in a number of bodily fluids and substances—urine in the “Piss Hegel” section, semen in the discussions of the pornographical money-shot, and so on—Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory (MPSQT) sticks pretty much with the anus and whatever figuratively falls in or out of it. One reason for this tighter focus is that while Male Matters attempts to engage with a number of different poststructuralist theorists of difference, MPSQT sticks pretty

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much with Lacan and the thoughts on abjection that fall in and out of his writing.4 Although I do not necessarily hold to what Fredric Jameson, in “Lacan and the Dialectic,” calls “the conviction that of all the writing called theoretical, Lacan’s is the richest” (365–66)—and I should say that the sentence in which this thesis appears is so dialectically constructed that I cannot tell if Jameson himself is affirming or negating it—I am fully persuaded by Tim Dean’s demonstration in Beyond Sexuality that “in its most fundamental formulations psychoanalysis is a queer theory” (268). Thus, while Male Matters attempts, in what now seems to me an overly apologetic manner, to establish its “male-feminist” bona fides by spending a lot of time ragging on psychoanalysis, MPSQT unapologetically refuses to follow suit. If while writing Male Matters and other material I was convinced that Judith Butler was “right” about Lacan, I discovered while writing this book that I no longer hold that view. And if my here announcing this change in perspective gives the impression that in this book my commitment to psychoanalysis as a queer theory trumps or supersedes my commitment to “male feminism,” I will offer only the hope—albeit, again, without apology—that your reading the book itself will correct that impression. Nor do I apologize for this book’s language, its gnarly epical sentences, its brazenly asinine puns, its obscene and unlovely diction—though I will allow that if Male Matters took a lot of crap for what those who carped called its “jargon” (and it did), MPSQT is somewhat less of a jargon-fest than Male Matters. Finally, I would say that while MPSQT continues Male Matters’ ethical or political argument about the (ref )use-value of abjective ébranlement, this book works harder to tie the question of abjection to aesthetic experience and to the fate of close reading. In this regard, particularly in the later essays on Hitchcock and Lynch, this book might even be considered a contribution of sorts to what is now being called “the new formalism.”5 As for the individual essays, the first takes up the question of “the production of men’s bodies” in relation to visual culture, revisits some of the still pertinent “theoretical scenes” from Male Matters, judges a few books by their covers, and, to address some of the “race matters” that Male Matters occluded, considers the prominent display of black male bodies in a Herb Ritts–directed Janet Jackson music video (“Love Will Never Do”) and an Oliver Stone football movie (Any Given Sunday). In the second essay, I posit abjective writing as one answer to the question of how male bodies might matter to feminist theory. This essay spells out my take on Lacan by examining the debate between Judith Butler and assorted Lacanians on the question of “gender vs. sexual difference.” It is here that I explain why, even if I am not completely taken with the certainty of certain Lacanians, I am no longer certain that Butler performatively does Lacan much justice. I close this essay by pitting Lee Edelman’s “homographesis”

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against Galway Kinnell’s “Holy Shit.” In the third essay, I take up (or in) the question of the literal and figurative senses in which an author can be said to be “having sex”—in the particular form of receptive anal eroticism, a.k.a. the ass-fuck—while engaged in the act of writing. In the fourth essay, I examine the relation between Bersanian homo-ness and Beckettian aesthetic failure. Essay 5 presents an analysis of three Alfred Hitchcock films—Spellbound, Rear Window, and Vertigo—in relation to the Lacanian slogan “There’s no such thing as a sexual relation.” Here I argue that in the first two films Hitchcock stages the failure of the sexual relation as queer comedy, while in the last he dramatizes that failure as straight tragedy, as the tragedy of straightness. The final essay mixes Freud, Bataille, and Lacan to explicate the intricately formal “gift” of David Lynch’s perfectly abject masterpiece, Mulholland Drive. Again, while all of these essays touch on the subjects announced in the book’s given title, it is the matter of abjection—as a problem of writing, as a disturbance in the relation between identity and its representation—that is the book’s core concern, its obsession, perhaps its fetish, certainly its fate. But maybe here, in the end, amor fati, as Nietzsche would have it, is bound to (a perverse sort of ) “triumph,” both politically and aesthetically.6 I have already alluded to the ethical or political possibilities that I think are inscribed in abjective writing, and I will of course elaborate on these in what follows. As should be evident at the outset, the book comes not to bury the abject but to distribute it more equitably so as to impede in whatever ways possible the punitive abjection of marginalized others: “Abjection for everybody!” would be its radically democratic slogan, its general economy, its only political raison d’etre. On the other hand, the book’s perversely unapologetic commitment to aesthetic experience (even if the experience is only that of abject failure) aligns it with Beckett’s aesthetic credo—“to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail” (Disjecta 145)—or perhaps with the recalcitrant and aggressively supine figures of his fiction, or perhaps even with the antidemocratic “reckless and amoral artist-god” that Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy’s “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” the Dionysian figure who in shattering the principium individuationis and fighting “at any risk whatever the moral interpretation and significance of existence” can only ever aesthetically free himself “from the distress of fullness and overfullness and from the affliction of the contradictions compressed in his soul” (22). I will say no more here about the nature of this book’s distress or the location of its contradictions’ compression, which, perhaps needless to say, isn’t exactly in its soul. Suffice it to say that I will not have resolved any tensions by venturing that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that the existence of abjective writing is politically justified.7

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BEGINNING WITH A BIT (BE)HINDSIGHT . . .

OF

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object. Lacan, Écrits I am one thing, my writing is another matter. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo The world has to be made to mean. Hall, “The Rediscovery of Ideology”

In my dreams, everybody who is anybody has read my first book, Male Matters, with overflowing pleasure. Since the reality is doubtless otherwise, I will open this book by casting a backward glance at Male Matters’ main arguments and revisiting a few of its still pertinent theoretical scenes. In Male Matters, I attempt to trace cultural anxieties about the productions of men’s bodies, anxieties that come into play whenever such productions exceed the heteromasculine economies of visibility that have historically worked to contain them. Taking the word “production” from pro-ducere—“to render visible, to cause to appear and be made to appear” (Baudrillard, Forget Foucault 21)—and taking the preposition “of ” in the phrase “productions of men’s bodies” as a double genitive, the book explores, on the one hand, anxieties about the ways male bodies are produced, visibly rendered, caused to appear, both physically and in representation, and, on the other, anxieties about the matters that male bodies themselves do produce, render visible, cause to appear, both physically and in representation.

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M A S C U L I N I T Y , P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S , Q U E E R T H E O R Y

Of course, although I write “both physically and in representation” here, one might question the extent to which the distinction between the physical and the representational can actually be maintained. Indeed, one might argue that the distinction has been effectively dissolved by politically inflected psychoanalytic and social theories of anthropogenesis, which tell us not only that the physical, the material, and the anatomical are, for us as specifically human beings, always complex matters of psychical representation but also that psychical representation is itself inextricable from (even if irreducible to) material, social, and cultural production and reproduction. In other words, whatever we are and however we started, we have never, strictly speaking, been purely natural beings: antiphusis is our lot; language and our specific prematurity at birth—a wordy excess over nature emerging from our original inadequacy to it, or “the psychical fecundity of all vital insufficiency” (Lacan, Écrits 72)—are the registers of our primordial dehiscence. As speaking subjects subjected to speech, as sorry “animal[s] at the mercy of language” (Écrits 525), we lose, are cut or sloughed off from, whatever pure, unmediated physicality we (only retroactively, mythically, and nostalgically) ever had. We are scooped out of any direct “lived experience” of the real from the imaginary and symbolic get-go, upon the alienating instant of Lacan’s mirror stage with all its “libidinal normalizing functions” (Écrits 76), and upon the scissoring accession to the network of the signifier, which is also implicitly the ideological moment par excellence of Louis Althusser’s policeman’s interpellating hail, or, if you prefer, the always already of what Michel Foucault calls “social orthopaedics” (“Truth” 57), of what Judith Butler refers to as “regulatory regimes” (“Imitation” 13). If, however, a strict distinction between the physical and the psychical cannot be humanly maintained, neither can it be utterly collapsed or dialectically sublated. Each is the other’s mutual, albeit always anguished, support, and we are left with what Butler aptly describes as “the permanent difficulty of determining where the biological, the psychic, the discursive, the social begin and end” (Undoing Gender 185). Moreover, the abject dimensions of these difficult beginnings and endings can be foregrounded in the phrase “productions of men’s bodies” taken as double genitive—taken, that is, as addressing the manner in which men’s bodies are produced and the matters that men’s bodies do produce, physically and in representation. Thus, exploring the productions of men’s bodies and related anxieties, as Male Matters attempts, leads us to four related and fertile—or at least amply fertilized—corporeo-discursive fields. First, and, in a sense, worst, is the field of the physical production of male bodies in, by, and through female bodies. Although the book has nothing to say about the political realities of childbearing per se, to

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which it remains indifferent, Male Matters does speculate on the psychical consequences of one particular (and particularly redolent) fantasy about the way female bodies “render” male bodies, visibly litter the world with little men—to wit, Freud’s notion of the child’s “cloacal” interpretation of its own body’s origin, a sexual theory that links childbirth to defecation and thus unavoidably ends up designating the child itself as voided, hapless turd.1 As Freud spells it out in “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” the cloacal theory involves “a universal conviction among children that babies are born from the bowel like a piece of faeces: defaecation is the model of the act of birth” (SE 22:100). We might hazard a guess that the child can sustain such an interpretative model, and retain itself as a valuable object therein, only for so long as its own excrement remains of potentially oblative value, or only for so long as it does not need to know exactly what to do and where to go with its shit. But this general economy of blissful infantile ignorance has a fairly short shelf life, and once the more restricted economy—the massive transvaluation of fecal values upon which humanization itself depends—kicks in, once the turd becomes “worthless, disgusting, abhorrent and abominable” (SE 21:100) for the child and “the ‘anal’ [becomes] the symbol of everything that is to be repudiated and excluded from [its] life” (SE 7:187), the cloacal theory of childbirth must itself be shown the door tout suite.2 Male Matters argues that this psychical exit strategy necessarily involves repressing or suppressing the fantasmatic figure of the actively cloacal mother, the abjecting mother who is prior to any abjected or castrated maternal object; who is thought to have rendered the child’s body rectally; and whose image, though repressed, continues to haunt or linger at the rim of all of the subject’s own “productions,” from the first fort-da to the last gasp or rattle. The book thus speculates about what it calls the male subject’s scatontological anxieties regarding its own construction of this pre-Oedipal, anally penised monster-mother whose body is never “lacking” but is always excessive, expressive, and productive: a Medusa standing on her head with the snakes pouring out of her ass, as it were.3 Facing this dark fountain of its youth, and grasping its own “being” as merely the bad (unwanted, expelled) object of the other’s overflow, the fledgling subject can scarcely begin (but may very well desire) to fantasize itself as “the phallus” that—if only it weren’t for the paternal prohibition erected by the father’s seeming to have it—would make good the mother’s “lack” and send all the bad objects packing. Rather than “being the phallus” of the mother’s desire—as per Lacan’s “If the mother’s desire is for the phallus, the child wants to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire” (Écrits 582)—the subject here remains the intolerable kakon of the Other’s unthinkable excess, something more

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along the lines of Lacan’s quip that “it is necessary to find the subject as a lost object. More precisely, this lost object is the support of the subject and in many cases is a more abject thing than you may care to consider” (“Of Structure” 189). In this fantasmatic scenario, the nom/non du père does not bar the subject’s access to the mother’s body but rather saves the subject from that body’s transvaluative expulsion and/or material reengulfment. The subject’s “anxiety of production” with respect to the abjecting mother is prior to any “castration anxiety,” and indeed, as Male Matters argues at length, the latter normatively functions as the former’s symbolic remedy.4 Second is the field of the representational production of men’s bodies in, by, and through the various apparatuses and technologies of culture—art, media, literature, and film; the way men’s bodies appear, are displayed, or, more significantly, do not appear, are not displayed, in the dominant economies of the visible. Male Matters explores the structural conditions of possibility for such economies, their role in the formation of heteromasculine subjectivity, and the privileges granted to that seemingly disembodied subject by virtue of its desired (and still largely granted) immunity from being “marked.” The book examines, and even hopes to intervene in, the asymmetrical power relations between that subject and its variously marked, embodied, or visibly represented “others.” Third is the field of the physical matters that men’s bodies produce, cause to appear, or, given the reigning specular economies, conceal from appearance: semen, urine, shit, snot, tears, words. Granted, only the first item on the list is specifically, physiologically “male.” And yet, drawing from Luce Irigaray’s “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids” chapter in This Sex, Linda Williams’s treatment of ejaculation scenes or pornographical “moneyshots” in Hard Core, and one exceedingly seminal moment in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (which is among the theoretical scenes to be briefly revisited here), Male Matters examines the way this essentially male matter appears to be feminine, is feminized upon appearance. Indeed, the book argues that if ejaculate appears at all it tends to show up, abjectly, on the “other side” of sexual difference, the exposed surface of the feminine “alter.”5 The book further suggests that anxieties about the gendered duplicity of the visibly disseminated trace may have played their part in the whole troubled history of the relation between idealized masculinity and the degraded realm of the visible, the whole metaphysical project of “overcoming ambivalence through the conjuring of an ideal” (Butler, Bodies 62). As for the last item on the list of bodily productions—words—its appearance there will seem less surprisingly out of place if one takes the phrase “the materiality of the signifier” (Écrits 16) as literally as I do.6 Or

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if one grants that at this very moment words are being produced through the openings of our bodies. Or, again, if one recognizes what is at stake, what gets put on the line, in the following well-worn but crucial quotations from Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and Lacan’s “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire.” As Kristeva holds forth, “I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself ” (5). And as Lacan spits it out, “This subject, who thinks that he can accede to himself by designating himself in the statement, is no more than such an object. Just ask the writer about the anxiety he experiences when he faces the blank sheet of paper, and he will tell you who is the turd of his phantasy” (Écrits: A Selection 315). If nothing else, these quotations provide a point of transition, if not of collapse, not only between the oral and the anal, or between the intimacy of speech and the extimacy of writing, but also between the third corporeo-discursive field (the physical matters that men’s bodies produce) and the fourth: To wit: the field of the repre sentational matters that men’s bodies produce in, by, and through the various apparatuses and technologies of culture—again, art, media, literature, and film. At the crux of Male Matters’ polemic is a conception of language, and particularly of writing, as a bodily function; the book’s main concern is with the gendered ambiguities and possibilities for abjection inscribed in the unavoidable self-alienations of language, what Lacan calls “the self ’s radical eccentricity with respect to itself ” (Écrits 435) in the insistence of the signifying chain. In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan asks: Is the place that I occupy as subject of the signifier concentric or eccentric [sic] in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified? That is the question. The point is not to know whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather to know whether, when I speak of myself, I am the same as the self of whom I speak. (Écrits 430)

Male Matters of course assumes that “eccentric”—or “ex-centric,” as the Sheridan translation better has it (165)—would be the desired answer to Lacan’s question and that, given the old Rimbaud slogan “Je est un autre” (304), “I” in fact never am (or is) the same as the self of whom I speak whenever I speak of myself (and do/does “I” ever speak of anything else?). But the book also assumes that if “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object” (Écrits 247), the object as which I lose myself in language is indeed a more abject thing than “I” may care to consider. The book insists on reading this literal

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self-alienation as a self-excorporation and a self-abjection that, given dominant culture’s still regnant abjection of the feminine and the queer, is potentially feminizing and queering for any heteromasculinized “I” that speaks or writes either in support or in critique of that culture. If, however, the book’s main focus is on language and writing, the underlying political problem it attempts to address involves productions of bodies, regimes of visibility, and relations of power. Although I have here designated four corporeo-discursive fields of inquiry, I should stress that—whatever signs of structuralist indifference to the political that appear to emerge from my seeming to cleave to a quasiLacanian line—feminist and queer politics remain for me the untranscendable horizon of those fields and of any inquiry into them. One cannot productively address the productions of men’s bodies (masculinized, empowered, and superordinated) without also addressing the production and the oppression of women’s bodies, feminized bodies, queered bodies, and raced bodies (disempowered or subordinated bodies all)—without, in other words, addressing the various mechanisms of displacement, projection, and abjection that govern and support the dominant regimes of the visible. To address those mechanisms here, I want to revisit, as I said, several pertinent theoretical scenes that Male Matters cites—formulations that pertinently theorize both sight and the scenic. First, from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, the pithy assertion that “men act and women appear” (47). Here one might elaborate (and de-essentialize) by saying that masculinity is conventionally constituted as and by action or activity, while femininity is conventionally constituted as and by the appearance of passivity and the passivity of appearance. One might give an example of the convention by pointing, as does Linda Williams in Hard Core, to the very origins of the motion picture: Edward Muybridge’s photographic motion studies, in which nude male figures are generally represented in vigorous athletic action whereas nude female figures (even though these are motion studies) are generally shown standing, sitting, or lying still, luxuriating in the aura of their “to-belooked-at-ness”—if not inviting erotic contemplation then at least “doing nothing” to dispel it. But one might also point out the fairly obvious ways in which this action/appearance binary is undone. Any represented action, for example, is rather inevitably an appearance. Moreover, some modes of appearance, particularly those staged for erotic contemplation, can be quite active, if not frenetic. Nude dancers and porn performers are often much more vigorously, exhibitionistically active than their passive, voyeuristic counterparts, whose movements are generally limited to those of the eye and the wrist.

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Of course, it could be argued that the underlying purpose of masculine activity-in-appearance is precisely to avoid giving the appearance of appearance, to dispel erotic contemplation, and to deflect the objectifying gaze. This is the point, to move to the second theoretical scene, that Laura Mulvey simultaneously gets and misses when, in the famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she writes, “According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like” (27–28). Reluctant, to be sure, but not absolutely unwilling; perhaps all of the following is implied in the phrase “the ruling ideology,” but Mulvey’s formulation does need amending so that it is more clearly the straight male figure, perhaps the straight white male figure, who cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification, the straight white man who is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Correspondingly, women would not be the only ones who are made to bear the burden of representation, embodiment, and sexual objectification. Obviously (or perhaps furtively), straight men do gaze at other men, their putative “likes,” but only under certain conditions of exhibition—generally, those that guarantee competitive violence or actively work to dispel erotic contemplation and deflect the gaze (or at least make a pretense of so working), such as contact sports, extreme fighting, and cinematic or videographic warfare. If the terms of these conditions are somehow broken, then there may indeed be exhibition, but there will be no identificatory match. In other words, the straight man’s exhibitionist “like,” by virtue of exhibition, becomes un-liked, dis-liked. The exhibited male body is almost the same, but not quite—or, in some cases, to quote from Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture, “almost the same, but not white” (89). As Sally Robinson puts it in her book Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis, because “male power is dependent on stalling the recognition of male embodiment, and particularly, white male embodiment, [ . . . ] nonwhite men have been forced to carry the symbolic burden of overembodiment” (43). I will turn shortly to some specifically racialized forms of this exhibition(ist) (mis)match. Here I want to touch on a third pertinent scenic formulation, of which Male Matters makes a big deal: Lacan’s assertion that the phallus “can play its role only when veiled” (Écrits 581) and that, consequently, any “virile display in human beings [will] seem feminine” (584). Never mind for the moment the opacities of Lacan’s argument that the phallus is not the penis but the signifier of the Other’s lack: quite clearly, any restrictions placed on the phallus in terms of its display would hold good for the penis and for seminal fluid alike. In the restricted visual economy of procreative heterosexual copulation (a.k.a. straight sex), the penis and its fluidic output, “the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted

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in generation” (581), can indeed play their proper roles only “while veiled”—or, to use a more unfortunate word, “sheathed”—but in any case occulted, contained, prevented from appearing, kept out of the picture.7 And if one has any doubt that this physical restriction affects psychical representation and larger specular economies, one might consider that moment in the Phenomenology of Spirit wherein Hegel likens the difference between properly conceptual thinking and representational or “picture-thinking” to that between two different forms of urethral discharge. Properly conceptual dialectical thought, says Hegel, must temporarily descend into and merge with mere picture-thinking, but, ideally, the concept, the Begriff, the infinite judgment, will sublate and work its way through Vorstellung, or picture-thinking, on its long march to the imageless truth of absolute knowing. The temporary conjunction of Begriff and Vorstellung in consciousness, Hegel asserts, is the same conjunction of the pure and the crude, the high and the low, that nature naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination. The infinite judgement qua infinite would be the fulfillment of life that comprehends itself; [but] the consciousness of the infinite judgement that remains on the level of picture-thinking behaves as urination. (210)

Examining this urethral passage in the Phenomenology at some length (in a chapter that I was pleased, if not relieved, to call “Piss Hegel”), Male Matters suggests that when Hegel compares the difference between pure concept and crude picture in the psychical organ to that between semen and urine in the physical organ, he may also have another difference somewhere in mind: namely, the difference between insemination and dissemination, between a veiled seminal production that remains proper to a heterosexual dialectical economy and an unveiled production that exceeds it—or, to put it in other words, between ejaculation as dialectical action and ejaculate as unsublatable appearance. Implied here is the classical deconstructionist argument that the putative difference between semen and urine can be read as a difference within seminal fluid; that the putative difference between the conceptual and the merely pictorial is internal to the conceptual; that the difference between action and appearance is comparably unstable and collapsible (as is that between other arguably related binaries, such as masculine and feminine, straight and queer, white and black). The fact that these differential relations are stabilized and maintained as oppositions has nothing to do with their “essential nature,” since they have none, and everything to do with ideological structures; with “order and norms instituted which tell the subject

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what a man or a woman must do” (Écrits 720); with social and psychic mechanisms of displacement, projection, and abjection; and with the various apparatuses and technologies of visual culture that depend upon and support those mechanisms. In any case, Hegel’s linking of picturation with micturition allows us to consider the ways heteromasculinity can become anxious, if not get completely pissed off, whenever it sees itself put “inappropriately” into the picture. Male Matters is concerned with the cultural mechanisms of displacement, projection, and abjection that work to arrange masculine icons, assuage masculine anxieties, and channel masculinist rage.8 Before turning to some specific iconography, however, I would like to linger over some duplicities or ambiguities inscribed in the cultural mechanisms of visual production. Ever since Freud elaborated on the fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the underlying principle of all homeostatic representational pleasure has been related to the movement from passivity to activity and ascribed to the desire for a symbolic mastery upon which nothing less is staked than the ego’s very coherence. Since the activity, the mastery, and the coherence are all conventionally registered to the masculine, correspondingly, the principal means or “tools” of representation or visual production—the brush, the pen, the camera, the controlling gaze itself—have been conventionally likened to the cock. Here one crows or carps about their shape, the way they are handled, their seeming capacity to “penetrate” into reality, and the more salient fact that historically it has been men who have possessed and controlled them. But there are problems with this conventional phallicizing of representational acts and means. Or, one might say, there are ways in which the means themselves can be said to demean the phallic claims that are sometimes made on them and through them. In Male Matters, the dominant strategy for demeaning or deflating the phallus is by way of an abjecting carnal irony, an aggressive analization or fecalization of phallic claims. Thus, in regard to the painter’s brush, a carnal ironist might repeat with a certain relish Lacan’s claim in Seminar XI that the authenticity of what emerges in painting is diminished [ . . . ] by the fact that we have to get our colours where they’re to be found, that is to say, in the shit. [ . . . ] The creator will never participate in anything other than the creation of a small dirty deposit, a succession of small dirty deposits juxtaposed. (117)

In regard to the writer’s pen (or keyboard), the carnal ironist might help breed the suspicion that we sometimes have to get our ink, and thus our

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letters, in the same way Lacan suggests we get our colors, the suspicion that our writings may be less monuments of unaging intellect than small dirty deposits juxtaposed, what Leo Bersani, writing about Jean Genet in his book Homos, refers to as “cultural droppings” (181). As for the camera, the sphincteral character of its shutter and lens complicates or “ambiguates” any notion of that apparatus as a mediator of the purely penetrating gaze, since the camera must in effect be penetrated by light to capture whatever the gaze “takes in.” In other words, to employ a phrase from D.A. Miller’s “Anal Rope,” the camera may not be “so total a prick” (139) after all, but may—rather like Freud’s “jaw-tooth’s aching hole”—constitute what Judith Butler, referring to this cavity, calls “a figure that stages a certain collision of figures, a punctured instrument of penetration, an inverted vagina dentata, anus, mouth, orifice in general, the spectre of the penetrating instrument penetrated” (Bodies 61). And the punctured camera’s obscurely aching, spectral duplicity extends to “the gaze” as well, for, as Slavoj Žižek contends, writing about Hitchcock in Looking Awry, there is an intimate connection between the gaze and the couple power / impotence. The gaze denotes at the same time power (it enables us to exert control over the situation, to occupy the position of the master) and impotence (as bearers of the gaze, we are reduced to the role of passive witnesses to the adversary’s action). (72)

Caught up, then, in the intimate duplicity of the gaze, the abject ambiguities and carnal ironies of visual production itself, we find that there is no symbolic power that cannot also be read as impotence, no top that cannot be bottomed, no act of seeing that does not also appear to be subject to what Lee Edelman nicely calls “(be)hindsight” (“Glasshole” 101). And unless these ambiguities are merely the obsessive or fetishistic concern of this particular carnal ironist (though I have trotted out all these famous names and citations to suggest otherwise), specters of abjection, powerlessness, and penetrability can be said to circle and haunt all scenes of heteromasculinist representation, any visible production of the male body whatsoever. Nevertheless, despite the increased proliferation of images of men’s bodies in the decade or so since Male Matters made its appearance, these ambiguities are for the most part still safely contained, the carnal ironies glossed over (in other words, failing the thesis on Marx’s tombstone yet again, my book’s analysis of the world did not exactly change it). The recognition of male embodiment, particularly white male embodiment, remains stalled, and masculinist power is thereby largely if not entirely recuperated.

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To get a sense of this stalling, consider the cover photographs of two books concerning “the male body” that were published in the United States in the mid-1990s. The first is of course Male Matters, the cover photograph of which I played no part in selecting. What I had wanted was a lovely segment from the abject hell of Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”9 In the scene of my desire we see a gigantic avian creature—a sort of oiseau ubu roi or bird-turd-king—sitting on a toilet-throne, devouring male bodies whole and excreting those bodies into a dark money-pit, into which other figures are vomiting or shitting coins. Note that the big bird is shitting men while the partially devoured male body jutting ass-first from its beak is itself shitting a little flock of birds. But as much as I wanted this imminently dialectical image (you have to agree that it fits), the publisher, unwilling to let the necessary coin drop, or fly, withheld. I should say, however, that I ended up quite satisfied with what the publisher did select, particularly with the quasi-pornographic luridness of the blue tint, and that I am certain this cover sold more copies of the book than Bosch would have. But let’s have a look.10 What might appear at first quick glance to be an image drawn from a 1980s Calvin Klein underwear advertisement is actually a photograph from the nineteenth century. Two shirtless men are locked in a twisted embrace. One’s biceps bulges into the other’s crotch. Their eyes are directed at each other’s behind. The man in the foreground can be called sexually attractive, or at least impressively torsoed, while the one in the background seems less so, or is at least, noticeably, inelegantly coiffured. These men are, of course, wrestling, or pretending to wrestle, and their athletic action is what both permits and represses the erotic contemplation of the foregrounded man’s appearance, both elicits and deflects what Diana Fuss calls the “homospectatorial look” (713). The photograph represents both the possibility of recognizing male embodiment and the possible stalling of that recognition. But onto what or whom is that look typically deflected? Where is that recognition generally stalled? Consider the cover of another book about “the male body”—Laurence Goldstein’s 1994 edited collection The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures—the cover of which exemplifies and perhaps even comments upon the “almost the same but not white” dynamic of the exhibition(ist) (mis)match.11 Here Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1983 rearview photograph of a nude Ken Moody serves to represent what purports to be a textual uncovering of “the male body.” The racial dynamics of this “ser vice,” however, can be noted with some irony. Most typically, when it desires to instantiate itself and universalize its interests, dominant white culture attempts to do so by coupling a generic definite article—the—with some general noun and with some image of itself in

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which and by which it recognizes itself. Think, for example, of phrases such as “the family” or even “the human” and of the blanched images they unfortunately but most likely conjure up, and not only in white minds. Here, however, when it is male embodiment that is to be recognized, when “male body” is the phrase to which the definite article is attached, a black man stands in, does representational ser vice. Because this “servant” is not engaged in any particular athletic activity, his image appears to be more open to erotic contemplation by other male spectators; moreover, that very appearance of openness works to “feminize” Moody’s image, despite his impressively defined musculature. But because straight white men are still reluctant to gaze upon their exhibitionist likes, Moody’s blackness provides the reluctant with a comforting and distantiating dissimilitude, an anxiety-assuaging opportunity for projection, displacement, and abjection, or, at the very least, the reassurance that nothing like one’s “own” white male body is on the line. If, however, Moody’s shoulders seem almost poised to accept what Sally Robinson calls “the symbolic burden of overembodiment” (43), we might instead read the raised right hand as a gesture of refusal. We might see Moody as not simply standing before our gaze in submission but walking away from it and us in defiance, letting us know that he is over it, over being overembodied, over “us” altogether. On the other hand, we have to ask which of our own anxieties might be assuaged by this interpretive translation of sexualized appearance into politicized gestural action. If, for whatever reason, we do read refusal in Moody’s raised hand—and there are good reasons for such a reading—we can certainly locate instances of visual culture in which black men are represented as accepting the burden of overembodiment quite happily. For an example, consider Herb Ritts’s 1990 Mapplethorpe-inspired video for the Janet Jackson tune “Love Will Never Do (without You).” At the beginning of this video we see, in black and white, six medium-close shots that alternate between two silhouetted, erotically moving bodies, one Janet Jackson’s, the other a shirtless black man’s. In the seventh shot, we see Janet’s body, still largely silhouetted, in profile, her hand making the standard soft-porn move from her breasts (about which I will have something to say in a moment) down to her crotch. At the very moment of crotch-caress, however, we cut to a fully lit long shot of a shirtless and very darkly black-skinned male figure running away from us across the white sands of a desert, and now we begin to alternate between long shots of this hyperblack male body receding into the distance, and medium-close shots of Janet coupled with and orbiting a stationary male body that turns out to be white.12 As, arguably, does Janet’s own body, for, when we cut to the brightly lit close-ups that alternate between her face and the profile of her grin-

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ning white admirer, we see that the black and white videography, which works to accentuate the difference between the white man’s skin and that of the receding runner, more effectively negates the difference between the white man’s skin and Janet’s. Moreover, if we compare this Janet Jackson video to earlier examples (such as “Nasty Boys,” “The Pleasure Principle,” and “What Have You Done for Me Lately?”), we see not only a noticeable lightening of her skin tone but also a politically readable transformation of the shape of her body. For “Love Will Never Do (without You)” is the first video to feature Janet’s newly enhanced breasts, and feature them it certainly does, while it also draws our attention to the notable diminishment of what had previously been a more generously proportioned behind.13 In this video, then, Janet Jackson is softened and whitened, reproportioned and realigned. Missing here is any of the abrasive “urban” edginess of the earlier videos—the staccato storm trooper dancing in “Rhythm Nation,” for example. Newly breasted, butt-shrunk, bleached, and blanched, Janet is now positioned as an idealized fantasy object of comfortable straight white male desire. However, I would argue, in order for the video thus to position her, the black male has to be, as it were, removed from the equation, which removal or driving out is implicitly and explicitly what the video thematizes. That is, the video labors to lift “blackness”—perhaps even “phallic blackness,” the aforementioned urban edginess—off of Janet, to place it onto the back of the running black man, and to neutralize it there. But “blackness” is not simply expelled from the picture; rather, it is retained as a comfortably distanced but necessary backdrop for this bleached-out sexual fantasy. The running black man, as we soon discover, is withdrawing from us neither to escape nor refuse our gaze, as might be Ken Moody in the Mapplethorpe photograph, but merely to be better positioned to receive it, and more. Distantiated object, this black man, and the nearly naked others whose bodies the video exhibits, will receive not only the “burden” of the blackness that has been withdrawn from Janet’s body and redoubled onto his own; he will also receive, has always already received, the burden of the white man’s embodiment as well. For, conspicuously enough, and unlike either Janet or the black men, the white man’s body is never shown by itself in its entirety (granted, there are some torso shots of what may be a white male body—it is difficult to tell—but the visual connection between that body and the grinning white male head is never established). He is not even required (or permitted) to take off his white shirt. Identificatory pivot for the white male spectator, the white man is shown as the exclusive subject of desire for Janet—gazing at her, holding her, rubbing up against her—while the black men are consigned to representational

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fates (distantiation, objectification, fetishization, decapitation) to which the white male hero’s body is never subjected. Unlike Whitey, none of the black men ever occupies the same frame as Janet. Moreover, there are a number of shots in this segregating video that work to “feminize” the appearance of the black male bodies, moments when the camera cuts from close-ups of Janet’s body parts to full-body shots or close-ups of (usually faceless or headless) black men. These cuts, I would argue, do not dramatize heterosexualized encounters among these part objects but rather attempt to establish an equivalence between Janet’s feminized body and black men’s bodies, which, by virtue of their very display, are thereby demasculinized, disempowered, and perhaps even “queered” to the extent that their utter unimportance to the heterosexual encounter between Janet and Whitey (and by extension the white male spectator) is stressed (although this stress may have the unintended effect of revealing the way straight “importance” utterly depends upon its own staging of queer “triviality”). In addition, the bodies themselves are positioned and posed in ways that suggest a willingness if not an abundant happiness to bear the symbolic burden of overembodiment. Arms are repeatedly raised and spread like those of an Atlas or a crucified Jesus. And when we do finally get close-up shots of the lip-synching, blissfully smiling black male face, the signal fact that his eyes remain closed during these shots works to assure us that the object of our gaze will not turn his on us. The carefully established aura of his visual objectification, his “to-be-looked-at-ness,” his castration, remains completely undisturbed—as, by extension, do “we.”14 All eyes are wide open, however, in the next visual sequence I want to consider, a scene from Oliver Stone’s 1999 football saga Any Given Sunday. Here the protagonist is an aging white professional football coach, played by Al Pacino, who struggles against a disempowerment that is represented by, on the one hand, the team’s new owner, a ruthless young white woman, played by Cameron Diaz, who has inherited the ownership of the franchise from her father, and, on the other, an upcoming (i.e., “uppity”) young black quarterback, played by Jamie Foxx. The narrative conflict is resolved when the coach subdues both threats: after defying the odds and putting together a winning season, the coach leaves Diaz’s team for another, taking the star black quarterback with him. Or, to put it in other words, the narrative conflict is resolved when the coach, facing his own castration, saves himself from that fate by recovering the phallus (here represented by the black quarterback), taking that phallus away from the woman who has attempted inappropriately to wield it, and restoring it to himself. Of course, that the narrative can employ a black man’s body in such a symbolic form—as a phallus ex-

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changed between a white man and a white woman—itself speaks volumes: the inverse (a white male body exchanged between a black man and a black woman) is practically unthinkable in dominant cultural terms. The sequence I want to examine begins when the white woman owner, as yet still “phallic,” penetrates the sweaty recesses of the racially mixed but all-male postvictory locker room to congratulate the team. She casually approaches a naked and (of course) awesomely hung black player, noticeably noticing his “glorious cock,” as Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat would call it (though I myself did not notice her notice the first half-dozen times I viewed the clip, since I was in fact busy noticing the same thing as she). Reaching out to shake his hand, she briefly gives the impression that she’s reaching down to grab his crank (not, of course, to caress it—she’s a castrator, after all—but rather to rip it off ). Now, perhaps it is needless to say that instances of full frontal male nudity in mainstream American cinema are infrequent—indeed, virtually nonexistent. And though Oliver Stone’s films are usually replete with female nudity (Any Given Sunday is no exception), and are always on some level about recuperating the phallus, this is, I am fairly sure, the first time he has ever shown us a dick. Of course, it isn’t his dick that we see (though he does appear in the film), and, significantly, it isn’t even a white dick that we see. More significantly, it also isn’t “the phallus” that we see. Even though both the black man’s body and his penis are impressively proportioned, the very virile display of that body has, as Lacan promised it would, the effect—I would say, the intentional effect—of feminizing or dephallicizing it. The very composition of the shot, which positions the black male body and the white female body alongside each other and at the same level, can be read as suggesting a sort of visual equivalence between them. As if this feminization of the black male body at the moment of its virile display needed underscoring, this scene, like Herb Ritts’s video, ends on a note of raced castration. A hulking white man (with eyes cosmetically blackened, accentuating their extreme openness) is dancing in the shower-room with a group of black players. Insulted by the black men’s assertion that he (being white) can’t dance, he leaves the shower with a Schwarzneggerish “I’ll be back.” When he does come back, he hurls an adolescent alligator into the shower-room where the black men who had dissed him are still bathing. Calling the naked black men “mother-fucking pussies,” the triumphant white hulk pumps his arms in the air—somehow, I guess, having proven that he can dance. One of the black men is shown cringing and apologizing, holding up his hands, not in refusal of our gaze, but to protect himself against the alligator’s gaping

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jaws. On one level, these jaws and their intrusion might be read as a metaphor for the vagina dentata of the phallic and hence castrating female owner. On another level, we might read this long phallic snout that opens to reveal a devouring orifice as a metaphor for the camera itself, particularly since here the alligator is threatening to “take” or even to “snap” exactly what Stone’s snapping apparatus has already taken. Since it is delivered by a white man, and posed as a threat against a black penis, the alligator may serve to further reassure white male viewers about the spectacle earlier taken in. In other words, although Stone’s camera, being a camera, raises “the spectre of the penetrating instrument penetrated” (Butler, Bodies 61), and thus inevitably opens us up to penetration, the alligator assures us that no black phallus will ever pierce the whites of our eyes, not to mention any of our less sparkling orifices. I will close this essay with an anecdote that features another (albeit ironically) raced “phallic” exchange. Most of the preceding material was written for presentation at a conference on “Men’s Bodies” organized by Judith Still at the University of Nottingham in 2001. Shortly before leaving Atlanta to attend this conference and present this material, I followed a friend’s recommendation and went to get my hair cut at what turned out to be a gay male bath and barbershop. The walls of the shop were decorated with, among other more or less pornographic images, framed covers of vintage male body-building magazines from the forties and fi fties. As I conversed with the barber, Randy, about these images, and about my job teaching theory and gender studies, I told him a little bit about the conference in the UK to which my haircut and I were soon to be heading and about the analysis of the Ritts video and the Stone fi lm that I intended to offer there. After being scissored, when it came time to pay my symbolic debt, I lacked a pen with which to write Randy a check. He first handed me your basic unadorned ballpoint but then suggested that, given the topic of my presentation, a different implement might be more appropriate, and so presented me with a pen that wore as its cap a miniature rubber penis and balls. They—the penis and balls—were what a white person would call “flesh-colored.” I was about to take hold of this item when, with the words “or perhaps even better,” Randy held up yet another pen, this one capped by what a black person would call a “flesh-colored” version of the apparatus (same size, by the way), and we shared a laugh as I wrote out the check. The points of this anecdote include the following: no man’s act of writing, identification, or representation is extricable from the material, sociocultural “productions of men’s bodies” and everything that phrase entails; complex issues of gender, sexuality, race, representation, and ultimately

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power are always in play in any scene where meaning of any sort is made; and although the meaning is rarely made so pen-fully apparent, the appearance of an “other”—of the other that “I” inevitably is—always caps off any self-identificatory act, even if it is only the signing of one’s own name.


Essay

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RE-ENFLESHING THE BRIGHT BOYS; OR, HOW MALE BODIES MIGHT MATTER TO FEMINIST THEORY It is in the signifier’s foundational duplicity that the subject first finds the hidden stream in which he flows before seeping out—we shall see through which crack. Lacan, Écrits The unconscious ruins everything. Heath, “Male Feminism”

To Stop Not Writing Masculinity

The proliferation of masculinity studies in the 1990s was viewed with understandable suspicion by some—probably most—feminist theorists. Such studies were seen as integral to, if not responsible for, a critical and institutional shift away from a specifically feminist project and toward what was considered a politically neutralized “gender studies.” On this view, the argument that men are no less gendered than women, that masculinity is no less a social construction or performative masquerade than is femininity, is complicit with the blithe assumption that men and women are equally installed into symmetrically “gendered” positions. This assumption of equal or symmetrical gendering, supposedly inscribed in the phrase “no less” above, would obviously evacuate the feminist argument that the social and symbolic processes of gendering

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sexed bodies, of sexuating human organisms, produce and maintain unequal and asymmetrical relations of power. Masculinity studies and the “turn to gender” were thus charged with perpetuating rather than interrogating the reproduction of systemic male dominance. In some cases, charges such as these are justified. Some rather bloated versions of “men’s studies”—particularly those influenced by the mythopoetic school of Robert Bly, who urged men to reconnect with their so-called Zeus energy, defined as “male authority accepted for the good of the community” (22)—were spectacularly uninformed by and/or hostile to feminism, while even those more well-intentioned interventions based on the argument that the confines of normative masculinity damage men’s lives can seem perilously close to a whiney “men have it bad too” line of defensive reaction against feminism. Such interventions can seem motivated by the desire to ameliorate the condition of men, while ignoring or minimizing the oppression of women. These sorts of masculinity studies can seem quite suspect, and their specific modes of reaction, appropriation, and celebration can seem to compromise the very possibility of pro-feminist masculinity studies by men. On the other hand, to leave masculinity unstudied, to proceed as if masculinity were somehow not a contingent form of gender/sexuation, would be to leave it naturalized, and thus to make it necessary, to reproduce contingency as necessity, to protect masculinity from change. Or, in Lacanian terms, to leave masculinity unstudied would be not to stop not writing it (Lacan’s formula for reproducing necessity), while opening masculinity to critical study could at least potentially mean to stop not writing it (Lacan’s formula for exposing “mere contingency” [94] in Seminar XX ). For feminist theorists who recognize the potential value of this rewriting, this putting a stop to not writing, a gender studies that focuses on and “contingenates” masculinity need not necessitate depoliticizing feminism. Quite to the contrary, it can also designate the critical process by which (some) men learn from feminism (and psychoanalysis, and queer theory) in order to stop not writing—stop not changing, stop not destabilizing—the reproduction of normative heteromasculinity itself. A number of reasons could motivate such rewriting, and certainly the strategic point that normative masculinity harms men, that it can be in men’s best interests, their most fully humanizing interests, to want to escape from or demolish masculine norms, can be politically salient. But from a specifically feminist perspective, interventions into masculinity—by feminist women and men—are desirable for one overarching reason: as Kaja Silverman puts it, “Masculinity impinges with such force upon femininity [that] to effect a large-scale reconfiguration of male identification and desire would, at the very least, permit female

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subjectivity to be lived differently than it is at present” (Male Subjectivity 2-3). The rewriting of masculinity that demonstrably “support[s] the feminist project,” writes Tania Modleski, is “the kind that analyzes male power, male hegemony, with a concern for the effect of this power on the female subject and with an awareness of how frequently male subjectivity works to appropriate ‘femininity’ while oppressing women” (Feminism without Women 6-7). For me, insofar as my abjective writing remains male-feminist and concerns masculinity, Silverman’s and Modleski’s points are still crucial: ultimately at issue in masculinity studies is, or ought to be, the effect of masculinity construction, of the gendering and/or sexuation of men, on women. In other words, for productively critical masculinity studies, the feminist project must remain what Fredric Jameson, in quite another context, calls “the absolute horizon of all thought and all interpretation” (Political Unconscious 17). Situated within this horizon, masculinity studies may yet become not the betrayal or appropriation of feminism but rather one of its valuable and necessary consequences. But how best to study, so as to transformatively rewrite, to stop not writing, the reproduction of the masculine in men?1 Perhaps this question, with its emphasis on competitively locating and inhabiting the superior mode of critique, is itself a bit too masculinist. My argument—which is not necessarily the best, and may well be the worst but remains in any case the one I find myself obsessively remaking, the one I cannot stop not not writing—is that one possibly productive way to analyze male power and hegemony, and to reconfigure male identification and desire, involves a specific sort of attention to the “matter” of the male body and to the abject materialization of that body in writing—in writing as extimate bodily function or effusion, as what Hélène Cixous calls “the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me” (“Sorties” 583). Referring to this essay’s title, then, I would say that male bodies do matter, or could matter—may yet matter, may in some political future anterior have ended up mattering—to feminist theory, and in two ways. First, in an overly simple and obvious sort of “warm bodies” appeal, I would argue for sheer numbers: the more pro-feminist men, straight and queer, the better for feminism. In this sense, male bodies matter to feminism because men can and sometimes do materialize feminist politics in their writing, their teaching, and their public and private lives. Second, and more to my concerns here, I suggest the political salience of the question of how the repression of the abject vulnerability of the male body—a repression necessary for the construction and maintenance of heteronormative masculinity—demands a displacement of that vulnerability, and all that it

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materially entails, onto the feminine. Of course, there is nothing particularly new in this suggestion, for Simone de Beauvoir first registered the displacement in The Second Sex, as Judith Butler notes: Women are “Other” according to Beauvoir in so far as they are defined by a masculine perspective that seeks to safeguard its own disembodied status through identifying women generally with the bodily sphere. Masculine disembodiment is only possible on the condition that women occupy their bodies as their essential and enslaving identities. [ . . . ] By defining women as “Other,” men are able [ . . . ] to dispose of their [own] bodies, to make themselves other than their bodies—a symbol potentially of human decay and transience, of limitation generally—and to make their bodies other than themselves. From this belief that the body is Other, it is not a far leap to the conclusion that others are their bodies, while the masculine “I” is a noncorporeal soul. (“Variations” 28)

Here, however, in the argument that I, upon my soul, cannot stop not not writing, the matter of writing can emerge (or perhaps fall out) as a “scene of visibility” in which male subjectivity can be led to confront its effaced embodiment, its constitutive otherness, the passivated femininity that has always functioned as “the bearer” of its “meaning,” as in Laura Mulvey’s formulation: “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (“Visual Pleasure” 586). Again, what is ultimately (but not always evidently) at issue in this confrontation—between “man” and his petit mort, his petit a, between man and his own “little pile”—is the effect of a specific sort of masculinity construction, a specific form of straight male anxiety-assuagement, on women.2 The question is not one of the way male authors represent themselves or women in their writing, but rather of writing itself as an extimate bodily function carrying the potential to alienate, to abject, to “feminize,” to “demean”—and even to “queer”—a heteromasculine subjectivity “caught in the act” of writing (to) itself. For writing “is in fact a gift of language, and language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is” (Écrits 248). Before saying anything else about this dirty business, however, I want to return to the institutional and methodological questions of feminism, gender, and masculinity studies with which I opened this essay. My context will be a set of discussions by Judith Butler: her introductory essay “Against Proper Objects” and her interviews with

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Rosi Braidotti and Gayle Rubin published in the 1994 “More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory” issue of the feminist journal differences; her dialogues with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000); and her comments on (and rather severe reductions of ) Lacan throughout Undoing Gender (2004). Butler’s immediate aim in “Against Proper Objects” is to counter the methodological and political boundary between feminism and gay/lesbian studies that she sees being erected by the editors of the Routledge Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, both in their introduction and in their placement of Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex”—which challenges feminism as “the ultimate and complete account” (34) of the oppression of sexual minorities—as the volume’s lead essay. In the course of this discussion, Butler begins to examine “the significant differences between feminists who make use of the category of gender, and those who work within the framework of sexual difference” (“Against” 17). Roughly, the difference in framework involves the split between social constructionist approaches to the question of sexual identity and those influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis. At issue is the question of the formation of the subject. Butler writes: Those who work within the framework of sexual difference argue against “gender” on the grounds that it presupposes a notion of cultural construction in which the subject is taken as a given, and gender then acquires a supplementary meaning or role. Some would argue that such a view can recognize neither the way in which the workings of sexual difference in language establish the subject nor the masculinity of that subject—and the exclusion of the feminine subject from subject formation that that subject requires. [ . . . ] Gender theory misunderstands the ways in which that asymmetrical relation between the sexes is installed through the primary workings of language, which presuppose the production of the unconscious. The turn to gender, for those who emerge from a Lacanian or post-Lacanian tradition, signals a papering over of this more fundamental structuring of language, intelligibility, and the production of the subject along the axis of a split which also produces the unconscious. (“Against” 16)

Butler situates Rosi Braidotti as representative of this particular argument against gender, writing that “according to Braidotti, some versions of the gender studies model consider the cultural construction of femininity and masculinity as homologous kinds of constructions, which suggests that the study of gender directly contradicts the political impetus of feminist analysis—to mark the constitutive asymmetry of sexed

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positions by which language and the unconscious emerge” (“Against” 17). For Braidotti, Butler writes, “the turn to gender is understood as an anti-feminist move and a deradicalization of the feminist political agenda” (17). Gender is thus “a sign of a politically defused feminism, a framework which assumes the symmetrical positioning of men and women along the homologous means of their construction” (17). In the subsequent interview with Braidotti, “Feminism by Any Other Name,” Butler draws Braidotti out on these points. Braidotti is indeed opposed not only to gender studies, basing her opposition on “the realization of its politically disastrous institutional consequences” (43), but to masculinity studies and gay male studies as well. Among the disasters Braidotti lists are “the take-over of the feminist agenda by studies on masculinity,” incidents of academic positions “advertised as ‘gender studies’ being given away to the ‘bright boys,’ ” and the “special significance” of “the role of the mainstream publisher Routledge” in “promoting gender as a way of de-radicalizing the feminist agenda, re-marketing masculinity and gay male identity instead” (“Feminism” 43–44). In the course of comments such as these, Braidotti offers the following analysis: The focus on gender rather than sexual difference presumes that men and women are constituted in symmetrical ways. But this misses the feminist point about masculine dominance. In such a system, the masculine and the feminine are in a structurally dissymmetrical position: men, as the empirical referent of the masculine, cannot be said to have a gender; rather, they are expected to carry the Phallus—which is something different. They are expected to exemplify abstract virility, which is hardly an easy task. Simone de Beauvoir observed fifty years ago that the price men pay for representing the universal is a loss of embodiment; the price women pay, on the other hand, is at once a loss of subjectivity and a confinement to the body. Men become disembodied and, through this process, gain entitlement to transcendence and subjectivity; women become over-embodied and thereby consigned to immanence. This results in two dissymmetrical positions and to opposing kind of problems. (“Feminism” 38)

Several questions emerge from Braidotti’s formulation. First of all, although it is a small concern, one might expect Braidotti to cite some particular examples of gender theorists who have missed the point about systemic male dominance. There are no specific citations other than the mention of Routledge, though I doubt that Braidotti would want to implicate everyone who has published in that “mainstream” as point missers, since the list would have to include Braidotti herself (see her Patterns of Dissonance). More importantly, however, one might ask how we are to

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understand all of the expectations, entitlements, confinements, and consignments that Braidotti mentions here as not involving “gender.” If we understand gendering not as a set of characteristics “added on” to a given, preexisting subjectivity but as constitutive of the very social formation of any subject, as “a social category imposed upon a sexed body” (Scott 32), as “the process of assuming, taking on, identifying with the positionalities and meaning effects specified by a particular society’s gender system” (De Lauretis 302), then it is difficult to understand the tropes Braidotti deploys as corresponding to or arising consequentially from anything other than a specifically and unavoidably sociohistorical sex/gender system.3 Particularly in regard to the “expectation” of phallus-carrying and abstract-virility-exemplification that Braidotti suggests exempts men from having a gender, it is difficult to understand where such expectations come from if not from society and culture. And if one responds, in supposedly good Lacanian fashion, that phallic expectations originate from “the primary workings of language, which presuppose the production of the unconscious” (Butler, “Against” 16), then, since “language” and “the unconscious” do not just grow on trees or fall out of the sky, one still has to account, as Butler rightly stresses, for the relationship between social production and linguistic production, between social structures and psychic structures, as well as for how their relationship might be reconfigured. Moreover, from a feminist perspective, given the way women are “consigned to immanence” whenever men sign up for a ride on the transcendent phallus, one might want to account for the possibility of conditions under which men might productively fail to sign up or “live up” to phallic expectations. In other words, if, with Braidotti, we recognize the feminist value of an Irigarayan “double syntax” that inscribes the “difference not only of Woman from man, but also of real-life women from the reified image of Woman-as-Other” (“Feminism” 39), can we not also ask about the feminist value of another syntactic doubling that opens up the difference between real-life men and the reified image (or abstract symbol) of Man-as-Same, of Man as bearer of the Phallus? A Little Pile of Jacques Lacan

To begin to answer the above question, I want to explore Butler’s assessment of the Lacanian take on linguistic difference as sexual difference, a take that supposedly supports the “sexual difference” framework from which Braidotti opposes the “turn to gender.” As Butler explains in her interview with Gayle Rubin, Lacan’s theory concerns “the structure of language” and “the emergence of the speaking subject through sexual

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differentiation.” There is, Butler writes, a Lacanian imperative “to understand sexual difference as coextensive with language itself,” so that “there is no possibility of speaking, of taking a position in language outside of differentiating moves,” the primary differentiating move supposedly being that “differentiation from the maternal which is said to install a speaker in language for the first time” (“Sexual Traffic” 69). But does this singular phrase—“differentiation from the maternal”—adequately account for what Lacan calls “the effects of symbolization in the child” (Écrits 202) if those effects can indeed be thought in the plural? Does this phrase, upon which the equation or coextension of sexual difference with linguistic difference would seem to depend, adequately answer the question of “what was excluded at the first moment of symbolization” (Écrits 320)? Does “differentiation from the maternal,” posited as the crux of “sexual difference qua linguistic difference,” really account for the question of subjectivization as sexuation, as “hominization” (Écrits 572)? Or the question of what is constitutively expelled from this hominized, sexuated subject, of every little thing that “constitutes the real insofar as it is the domain of that which subsists outside symbolization”? Or of “the primal expulsion, that is, the real as outside the subject”? Of “the real—as that which is excised from the primordial symbolization” (Écrits 324), and so on? These are the admittedly repetitive questions of “the real of sexual difference,” to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Žižek, and I will presently explore the relations among sexuation, symbolization, and the primordially expelled matters of the real. First, however, I would like to work through some of Žižek’s answers to Butler’s charge that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a static formalism that endorses and enforces heteronormativity, or to what he calls her “well-known objection that the Lacanian Real involves the opposition between the (hypostasized, proto-transcendental, prehistorical and presocial) ‘symbolic order,’ that is, the ‘big Other,’ and ‘society’ as the field of socio-symbolic struggles” (Interrogating 349). In one of his contributions to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Žižek writes: Lacan’s claim that sexual difference is “real-impossible” is strictly synonymous with his claim that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” For Lacan, sexual difference is not a firm set of “static” symbolic oppositions and inclusions/exclusions (heterosexual normativity which relegates homosexuality and other “perversions” to some secondary role), but the name of a deadlock, of a trauma, of an open question, of something that resists every attempt at its symbolization. Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail,

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and it is this very “impossibility” that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what “sexual difference” will mean. (“Class Struggle” 110-11)

In a footnote, Žižek links this translational “failure” to “perversity” by adding that “sexual difference qua real . . . means that there is always, for structural reasons, a surplus of ‘perverse’ excess over ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as two opposed symbolic identities” (132n32). And at another point in Contigency, Žižek writes that sexual difference is not a fact of biology, but neither is it a social construction—rather it designates a traumatic cut which disturbs that smooth functioning of the body. What makes it traumatic is not the violent imposition of the heterosexual norm, but the very violence of the cultural “transubstantiation” of the biological body through its sexuation. (“Da Capo” 258-59)

Now, a number of questions emerge, and can be partially answered, in regard to this last Žižekian bit. What, for example, distinguishes the “violent imposition of the heterosexual norm” from the “violence of the cultural ‘transubstantiation’ of the biological body through its sexuation”? A provisional answer would be that while the former can be considered a particular and contingent trauma—in that human reality may depend upon sexual reproduction but does not absolutely depend upon the imposition of heteronormativity; “families” can be and have been defined and organized in nonpatrilineal, nonnuclear terms; the structures of kinship may seem “elementarily” het but are actually more complicatedly queer, and so on—the latter trauma is (arguably) universal and necessary to the extent that there has never been a specifically human reality anywhere, at any historical juncture, that has not depended upon some symbolization of the real, that has not depended upon some more or less violent “cultural ‘transubstantiation’ of the biological body,” even if the kicker (“through its sexuation”) remains debatable (unless “sexuation” is simply overly fluent Lacanese for the symbolic’s failed expulsion or excision of the real, in which case the debate, the hegemonic struggle over what “sexual difference” will mean, would involve asking why “sexuation” is the most justified or least rotten term for failed symbolization, the traumatic cut, and so on—more on this question anon). But another question here: why is it that this violent cultural transubstantiation of the biological body, this “traumatic cut” that disturbs its “smooth functioning,” is universally necessary to initiate and sustain any specifically human reality? Partial (or partially birthed) answer: because

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for us as specifically human beings “the body” is necessarily always already disturbed from the get-go. Our “biological body” was never functioning smoothly to begin with, thanks mainly to the real “biological bedrock” of Lacanianism, the (to my mind inarguable) notion of our species’ specific prematurity at birth, which insures that our “relationship to nature is [always already] altered by a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of malaise and motor incoordination of the neonatal months” (Écrits 78). What this “vital misery” (70), this “vital insufficiency” (72), this “vital dehiscence constitutive of man” (94) universally necessitates is that what the traumatic cut disturbs is always already a miserable turbulence, so that, as Lacan puts it, the cut “simply makes a barred subject out of an almost natural barrier” (696). Here I take the phrase “almost natural barrier” to mean that our prematurity at birth is the very barrier that prevents us from ever being completely, successfully “natural”: we are at birth almost (but not quite) natural; hence antiphusis (the negating/ negativity of language) and not anatomy is our faltering destiny (some scrap of anatomy being the first “thing” to which language necessarily says “no”). The traumatic cut of language disturbs disturbance, making a barred subject out of an almost natural barrier, violently/culturally transubstantiating an already not quite sufficiently substantial organism (in this reading, “being human” is a sort of punitive consolation prize for not being successfully animal). If for Žižek something called “sexual difference” emerges from or as this failure, this cut, this violent cultural transubstantiation, we (or anyone who is not a complete baboon of biological determinism) can easily understand and endorse his assertion that “sexual difference is not a biological fact.” But we may also wonder why for Žižek sexual difference cannot be considered a “social construction.” If sexual difference emerges as a fundamental antagonism “in the cut” of cultural transubstantiation, why aren’t cultural transubstantiation and social construction different names for the same necessary/contingent process? It seems to me the answer is simply that for Žižek “social construction” seems to designate a process that actually, successfully works, that really does function smoothly, whereas cultural transubstantiation qua traumatic cut is more accurately described as an always radically failed process, a failure to process or to fully, primordially repress, which entails the very persistence or return of the real as the abject remainder, traumatic kernel, anamorphic stain, or clinging dingleberry of symbolization’s failure—the bone in the throat, the grit in the lubricant. As Žižek writes elsewhere, criticizing a “naïve Marxist approach” to ideology:

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The whole point of Lacan is that in order for social reality to establish itself—by social reality I mean social order, social symbolic reality—something must be primordially repressed. Something cannot be symbolized, and [some] spectral apparition emerges to fill up the gap of what cannot be symbolized. . . . The spectre conceals not social reality but what must be repressed for social reality to emerge. So I think the Lacanian notion of the Real as that rock which resists symbolization is extremely useful for a non-naïve notion of ideology. By non-naïve notion of ideology I mean a notion of ideology which avoids the usual traps of, if you say ideology, false consciousness, then you automatically imply some kind of natural direct approach to what reality truly is, etc. You don’t need this. What you need is precisely the notion that reality itself is never fully constituted, and that this is what ideological fantasies try to mask. Not some positive reality but precisely the fact that what we usually call in sociology the “social construction of reality” always fails. (Interrogating 85-86)

For Žižek, then, we could perhaps legitimately call “sexual difference” a “social construction” but only with the understanding, appropriate to psychoanalysis, that such “construction” is always doomed to fail. Tim Dean underscores this note of failure in the well-named “Nature/ Nurture—Neither” section of the “Lacan Meets Queer Theory” chapter of Beyond Sexuality, when he writes that for Lacan sexuality is explicable in terms of neither nature nor nurture, since the unconscious cannot be considered biological—it isn’t part of my body and yet it isn’t exactly culturally constructed either. Instead, the unconscious can be grasped as an index of how both biology and culture fail to determine subjectivity and sexual desire. (221)

Note, however, that to say sexuality “isn’t exactly culturally constructed” is not to proclaim that it is not culturally constructed at all, that “culture” plays no part whatsoever; it is, or rather should be, to say that sexuality is never successfully or fully culturally constructed, which is tantamount to saying that “primordial repression” qua “primary symbolization” or “primal expulsion” is never fully successful, that some symbol-contaminating trace of the never-fully-evacuated real remains, threatening to muck up the show. Of course, a Butlerian rejoinder might be that the show still goes on, despite the muck’s worst efforts; the forced reiterative performance of regulatory norms continues; the symbolic does not seem to fail quite well enough to prevent the punitive abjection and dehumanization of others who are actively engaged, whether they want to be or not, in this hegemonic

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struggle over what sexual difference means. After all, as Lacan himself points out in Seminar XX, “this relationship, this sexual relationship, insofar as it’s not working out, works out anyway [ . . . ] thanks to a certain number of conventions, prohibitions, and inhibitions that are the effect of language and can only be taken from that fabric and register” (33). Now, if these regulatory norms—which ensure that what is not working out works out anyway, fails to fail—can be taken only from the fabric of language, it is, conversely, only in that fabric, or through its rents, that those norms can be contested or reworked. Žižek maintains that the Lacanian Real is not “the firm referent of the symbolic process” but rather “its totally non-substantial inherent limit, point of failure, which maintains the very gap between reality and its symbolization, and thus sets in motion the contingent process of historicization-symbolization” (Contingency 9). He writes that Lacan’s “primordial repression” of das Ding (of the pre-symbolic incestuous Real Thing) is precisely that which creates universality as an empty place; and [what Butler calls] “the trace of the disavowed in the formal structure that emerges” is what Lacan calls objet petit a, the remainder of the jouissance within the symbolic order. This very necessity of the primordial repression shows clearly why one should distinguish between the exclusion of the Real that opens up the empty place of the universal and the subsequent hegemonic struggles of different particular contents to occupy this empty place. (“Da Capo” 257)

Given this way of framing the universal frame, foregrounding the dialectical oscillations between its opening up and its being occupied, its fillings and its voidings, Žižek maintains that the political question is always “how, through what violent operation of exclusion/repression, does this universal frame emerge?” (“Da Capo” 258). He claims that for Lacan—actually, for any human subject whatsoever—the “void itself ” emerges through the primordial loss of the aforementioned das Ding, but this loss is not that “of a determinate object (say, the renunciation of the same-sex libidinal partner [as per Butlerian gender melancholy]), but the loss which paradoxically precedes any lost object, so that each positive object that is elevated to the place of the Thing [ . . . ] in a way gives body to the loss” (258). For Žižek, the political salience and relevance of “Lacanian Real” emerges from the fact that the bar of impossibility it stands for does not primarily cross the subject, but the big Other itself, the socio-symbolic “substance” that confronts the subject and in which the subject is embedded. In other words, far from

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signaling any kind of closure which constrains the scope of the subject’s intervention in advance [as Butler charges], the bar of the Real is Lacan’s way of asserting the terrifying abyss of the subject’s ultimate and radical freedom, the freedom whose space is sustained by the Other’s inconsistency and lack. (“Da Capo” 258)

For her part, Butler, despite some qualified endorsements of psychoanalysis in general, does not seem to think that the performative subject can purchase any interventional freedom at the bar of the Lacanian Real (where there’s only one drink to be had, or symbolically ordered—it’s called an Oedipus—and there’s never a drag show to be found). For myself, I once thought, and in the first published version of this essay wrote, that Butler was pretty much right about Lacan, right to discount the use-value of the Lacanian Real for a contestatory rethinking “of the relationship between the psychic and the social” (“Competing” 141). At the moment I tend to think that she is “wrong,” or at least remarkably reductive, about Lacan but for all the “right” reasons (ethical, progressive, democratic, futural, personological, and so on), while Žižek and certain (all too certain) other Lacanistas get their Lacan “right” but for reasons that are not exactly feminist/queer-friendly (which to me indicates nothing about the feminist/queer potential of Lacan’s writing itself, particularly since some theorists, like Tim Dean, can get Lacan quite right for reasons that are indispensably queer). My disposition is to be worse than wrong or right about Lacan: I want to be downright shitty about him, and to do so in order to stop not writing abjection, because for my money Lacan remains one of abjective writing’s most intimate allies. To resignify a phrase for which Butler thanks Homi Bhabha, I want to use Lacan so as to stop not writing “the political potential of anxiety” (Undoing 180), the political potential of a scatontological anxiety for the first understandings of which I still have to thank or blame Lacan. Lacan tells us both that the symbolic fails and that it fails to fail, that the “sexual relationship” that is not working out works out anyway, thanks to the symbol’s failed failure. If our object (petit a or petit tas) is to resymbolize the sexual relationship between the psychic and the social, to “undo gender,” not only to analyze the world but also to change it by making it “queerer than ever” (Warner xxvii), perhaps our task is to somehow induce the symbolic to “fail better”—or at least differently—than it has heretofore failed. And, to that better end, for père or for pire, I can, following Beckett, only write—worstward ho.4 A little pile of Lacan, I think, can go a longer way toward helping us undo gender than Butler tends to allow, particularly in Undoing Gender. To demonstrate why, I need to return to the question of “the real of

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sexual difference” but also to step back from these fairly advanced Lacanian questions and into a more rudimentary exposition. For in my own rude and rudimentary understanding of Lacan, the realest question of “the real of sexual difference” is not “how are the sexes different?” or even “what is sex, anyway?” but rather what the fuck happened to the real? We might speculate that, initially, in the field of the first traumatic cut or primordial expulsion, this question has little enough to do with “sexual difference” qua the question of “man” or “woman,” or how they do or do not fuck with or without each other, or how fucking even matters to the question of the subject’s (ambivalently desired) recovery of the (banished/summoned) real. Initially, the question is not even exactly homologous with such readily Oedipalized inquiries as where’s mummy, where’s my or mummy’s dick, where am I or where should I be in relation to her lack, what does the Other want from me, what must I be (no) or have (sorry) or say (bingo!) to register in the locus of the big Other’s desire, and so on. To be sure, the initial question—what the fuck happened to the real?—will eventually or retroactively be caught up in, and is in a sense always already shot through with, these all too Oedipal questions, the questions of the signification of the phallus, of sexual difference, of man, woman, the fuck. For example, in “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan asserts that because those who will have ended up being “men” lose more of the real in the primordial repression than those who will have ended up being “women,” men are more dependent on fucking to get back in touch with the real than women are, and so a “man” suffers more deprivation from “impotence” than a “woman” does from “frigidity.”5 But just as in everyday discourse the question “what the fuck?” is rarely raised in regard to real fucking, and real fucking may have little to do with any (one’s) fucking ideal, so the initial traumatic cut of the question of primordial repression— the question of “the primal expulsion, that is, the real as outside the subject . . . as that which is excised from the primordial symbolization” (Écrits 324)—can, I think, be productively isolated from the question of sexual difference. Or, at least, we can question the different ways in which this difference might be sexualized. For even if the traumatic cut is the condition of possibility for sexual difference as empty signifier, this empty signifier is never completely empty, never aprioristically squeaky-clean. The abstract is—at least to my way of thinking—always already contaminated by the abject.6 If the initial question of the real of sexual difference is that of what the fuck happened to the real, then we might posit that this initial question almost immediately becomes diachronically split: not simply what happened (dropping the fuck for now) to the real at the expulsive moment

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of primordial symbolization, but what is happening to the real even now as the subject continues (having little choice, if it wants to keep living) to self-expulsively symbolize. We can understand the “before and after” of this diachronic split in terms of what Bruce Fink calls the “two different orders of the real”: (1) a real before the letter, that is, a presymbolic real, which, in the final analysis, is but our own hypothesis (R1), and (2) a real after the letter which is characterized by the impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among elements of the symbolic order itself (R 2), that is, which is generated by the symbolic. (Lacanian Subject 27)

But even if there are two orders of the real, the one before the letter and the one after, we still have to ask what really, fundamentally characterizes both the initial and the continuing symbolic expulsion; whether and how either necessarily relates to sexual difference qua man, woman, and the fuck; whether and how the “impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among elements of the symbolic order itself ” necessarily and eternally conflate with Oedipalizing prohibitions against incest; whether and how the rules of syntax that govern possible substitutions and combinations among phonemic and linguistic elements necessarily and eternally map seamlessly onto whatever heteronormative regulations may organize the elementary structures of kinship, and so on. As we know, the “structuralist Lacan” absolutely depends upon these relations, conflations, and mappings, as we can see from the following section of Anika Lemaire’s early but still quite helpful “Synthesis of Lacanian Thought”: Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is based upon the recent discoveries of structural anthropology and linguistics. [ . . . ] Lacan’s originality consists in having placed the Freudian theory of the unconscious on the order of the day, in having analyzed it, that is, in accordance with contemporary structuralist method and having brought the light of linguistics to bear upon it. Lacan will insist upon the fact that socio-cultural and linguistic symbolisms will impose themselves with their structures before the infans subject makes his entry into them. The young child’s entry into the symbolic order will fashion him in accordance with the structures proper to that order: the subject will be fashioned by the Oedipus and by the structures of language. (Jacques Lacan 6)

But we can also see beyond the structuralist and Oedipalist Lacan, the Lacan of the phallus and the symbolic order, in order to get a load of the Lacan of the real and the objet a, the Lacan whose “later teaching”

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makes possible the transformative study of “a whole range of effects on the structuration of the field of representation” (Laclau, “Identity” 72). Lacan’s later teachings might even make possible what Butler calls “a queer poststructuralism of the psyche” (Undoing 44)—though Butler, who throughout Undoing Gender consistently consigns Lacanian psychoanalysis to its “structuralist presuppositions” (44) and in effect reduces Lacan to Levi-Strauss, pretty much preempts such a possibility. What makes the teaching of this later Lacan, this (potentially) queer Lacan—this real Lacan, this petit tas of abject Lacan—possible, much less politically valuable? Here, I’m afraid, we have to go back to some basics and return to some beginnings. “The Explanatory Virtue of Turds”

As we have seen, the absolute beginning for Lacanian psychoanalysis is not exactly the maternal womb to which we can never return, but rather the fact that we always leave that place too soon. I refer again to our specific prematurity at birth, but since I have already made enough of that hash, let us go on, or back, to the real, to which we can also never return, and which is also a bit of a hash, but which, I am sorry to say, requires some further elaboration. Following Bruce Fink’s lead regarding the “two different registers of the real,” let’s say that the real is what both precedes and exceeds the primary differentiation that installs us into positions of speaking subjects. The real “before the letter” involves “the very young child’s experience of itself,” which “develops on the basis of a situation that is experienced as undifferentiated” (Écrits 91): it is that prelinguistic, undifferentiated realm of sensation and perception, without discernable subjective or corporeal locus, that characterizes our immediately postuterine, infantile existence and that, before and after the letter, will always resist or exceed symbolization. Roughly, the real can be related to the “oceanic feeling” (SE 21:65) that Freud describes at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents. If it can also be related to the “maternal body” as what Jacqueline Rose in her introduction to Feminine Sexuality calls “undifferentiated space” (54), the real cannot easily be reduced to an undifferentiated maternal space, for the very phrase is adjectivally self-contradictory: that is, the adjective maternal depends upon differentiating maternal from nonmaternal, so the space in question cannot exactly be both undifferentiated and maternal. By the same logic, which I take to be the logic of the signifier, we cannot exactly reduce “the preoedipal mess” (Écrits 339) of the real to what Žižek, in another adjectivally self-contradictory phrase, calls “the pre-symbolic incestuous Real Thing” (“Da Capo” 257, em-

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phasis added) because it is the symbol’s intrusion into the real that renders any Real Thing incestuous, retroactively “prohibiting” the “impossible” merger of symbol and thing, retro-determining any imagined collapse of signifier into signified as “incest.” Granted, the symbol does both scoop us out of the mess of the real and save or keep us from an incestuous merger with the maternal body. But while the scooping and the saving are related (next of kin, so to speak) and seem to make speaking itself not only possible but also necessary and imperative, these two functions of the bar between the signifier and the signified are not really or necessarily identical. The infant in the real “before the letter” may be feeling “oceanic” (or perhaps only seasick) but is no more incestuous than any other mammalian fetus in the womb; rather, it is only “after the letter”—après coup—that a desire to get back “before the letter” can become readable as an “incestuous” desire to be unreadable, to be (with the mother, in a closed circuit of imaginary exchange in which she is my everything and I am her only thing) rather than to mean (as per the nom/non du père, which draws me into the socially legible network of symbolic exchange). It is only retroactively, only after a scissoring accession to an Oedipalizing symbolic order, that the infant in the real can be posited as unspeakably immersed in a messily incestuous jouissance. But if we can provisionally distinguish one “barring” function from another (scooping us from the real vs. keeping us from the mother), we can ask whether the necessary distinction or “traumatic cut” between the symbolic and the real necessarily reduces to a “sexual difference” that must end up meaning man/woman/the fuck, whether the “fact of the signifier” (Morel 29) necessarily opens up a discontented emptiness that must be fi lled with the same fucking contents. To continue mucking up this fucking question, let me turn to another Lacanian’s espousal of “the real of sexual difference.” In a chapter of Sexuation, called “Psychoanalytical Anatomy,” Geneviève Morel writes: The psychoanalytic real of sex consists of the impasses created by the fact that [ . . . ] sex can only be approached through language. And language imposes one single signified on jouissance, namely the phallus. By speaking, the human being is transformed into the speaking being [parlêtre] and is no longer an animal like others. Sex ceases to be nature, phusis, and becomes sexus, which comes from the Latin secare, meaning “to cut,” the fact of the signifier. The psychoanalytic real of sex is summed up by the phrase “there is no relation between the sexes,” which is equivalent to the phrase “there is a phallic function,” a function in which each person can inscribe his or her jouissance or not and accept the consequences. (30)

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By this point my questions may be predictable, but I will pose them anyway: If we accept that sex can be approached only through language, that language necessarily “impacts the body” (Dean, Beyond 264) and imposes itself on jouissance, must we accept either the imposition/inscription of a single signified—“namely the phallus”— or the presumably disastrous psychic consequences of the “or not” (in other words, père ou pire)? If we accept that the only sexus we’ll ever have comes from the Latin secare, and thus involves a cut, that sexuation means sectionalization and that sectionalization means meaning, must we be scared or scarred into thinking that all sectionings of “the all”—any linguistic spatiotemporal segmenting of what Lacan calls “the hic et nunc of the all” (Écrits 228)—must be secured or sedimented as sexes, one or the other, in “the process of becoming” a parlêtre? If we accept that such processional becoming requires signification and that signification necessarily involves a cut, a primordially expulsive symbolization, must we accept the infi nitive “to cut” as the singular “fact of the signifier”? Must we accept that “the cut made by the signifying chain is the only cut that verifies the structure of the subject as a discontinuity in the real” (678)? Or, given what Lacan calls “the irremediable ludicrousness the unconscious owes to its roots in language” (687), could there be other linguistic cuts and facts that are too ludicrous to mention, too metonymically contiguous with what the symbolic expels for us to discuss without losing the clean contours of our metaphorical discontinuity? Is the phrase “there is no relation between the sexes” really and necessarily “equivalent” to the phrase “there is a phallic function,” or is that equivalence not fatally exposed as fraud, as imposture, upon Lacan’s own admission in Seminar XX that “the apparent necessity of the phallic function turns out to be mere contingency” (94), so that there might be more ways than one to stop not writing the ways in which the sexual relationship fails? And, fi nally, to pull out all the stops and put all my “calling cards” on the table, does not the fatally exposed phallus fi nd something other than its supposedly desired womby tomb—namely, its rectal grave—upon Tim Dean’s splendid argument in Beyond Sexuality that “the phallus is less a figure for the penis than, more fundamentally, a figure for the turd” (266)?7 Though “Lacanians,” as Dean points out, “have been remarkably reticent about this ineluctable implication” (266), I nonetheless ask you, between one turd and another, is there really a sexual difference? Or does Dean’s assertion that “Lacan locates his paradigm of the object a in scat” (264) not thoroughly sully, soil, and saturate that question?

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Dean’s elaboration on this theme warrants repeating here. He quite helpfully writes that Castration isn’t Lacan’s only rubric for loss. Or, to put it slightly differently, phallus isn’t his only term for describing what’s lost in symbolic castration. Indeed, as Žižek points out, object a is in the first instance the anal object [which means it is not exactly what Žižek elsewhere calls “the pre-symbolic incestuous Real Thing” (“Da Capo” 257)]. The explanatory virtue of turds over the phallus lies not only in the fact that everybody loses them, but also in the fact that their loss is repeated: it’s because loss from this part of the body is multiplied over and over that feces so aptly figures object a. Now this formulation confronts us with the disturbing implication that in fantasy (S⁄ ◊ a) we find the subject relating to its shit. Though in one sense this is true, we also must bear in mind that the Lacanian object isn’t, in fact, a material object; instead it designates an absence or loss for which material objects function as both the prototype and the imaginary fulfillment. (265)

If nothing else, Dean’s elaboration complicates Butler’s characterization of Lacan’s take on sexual difference as linguistic difference, in which it is simply “differentiation from the maternal which is said to install a speaker in language for the first time” (“Sexual Traffic” 69). To be sure, in the Lacanian view, a speaker cannot be installed in language without sacrificing being to meaning, without suffering a loss, without designating (itself as) a loss: “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object” (Écrits 247). But whenever we are “speaking of what happens to the human organism in the process of symbolization—when, that is, language impacts the body” (Dean, Beyond 264), whenever we are speaking of primordial symbolization, whenever we are speaking of “the effects of symbolization upon the child” (Écrits 202)—whenever we are speaking, period—we are sacrificial parlêtres, animals at the mercy of language, caught up in a conceptual/corporeal activity that involves and presupposes a complex network of cuts, articulations, alienations, separations, and expulsions, all of which no doubt can be related to the incest prohibition, to “differentiation from the maternal,” to “castration,” to “the phallus”—all of which can be related to the loss of “the hic et nunc of the all” (Écrits 228)—but “not all” of which are reducible to those heteronormativizing terms. The point here is not that there is no single das Ding, no “presymbolic incestuous Real Thing,” swimming in the yolky stew of the real “before the letter.” Neither is the point simply that there are other, alternative, dingier dinghies floating about in the infant’s oceanic

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jouissance. The point is that the infant does not know and cannot tell the differences among all these real things—that’s what makes them real—because for the infant-in-the-real-before-the-letter all things “at fi rst run together in the hic et nunc of the all in the process of becoming” (Écrits 228). Of course, one aspect of this running together of all things is that the infant does not know and cannot tell the difference between the “intimate lived experience” (Lemaire 6) of its own body-in-fragments and that/those of the maternal matrix, so that, after the letter, upon accession to the symbolic order, the subject must speak, must symbolize, must separate from, must mean “mother” rather than be merged with her (insert phallic function or paternal metaphor here); and so this ignorant inarticulation before the letter could be considered analogous to incest (after all, Oedipus didn’t know and couldn’t tell what he was doing when he wasted Laius and jumped Jocasta). But another aspect of the general runniness or polymorphous perversity or yolky enjoyment of all things before the letter is that the infant does not yet know what it is going to have to know, not what it has or does not have that corresponds to the mother’s putative desire, but rather the answer to the question of “what to do with its excrement” (Žižek, Metastases 179); and this blissful ignorance before the letter entails the “disturbing implication” that, after the letter, the subject’s relation to the letter, in addition to being a relation to “lack,” will also be a relation—perhaps melancholic, perhaps perversely s(c)atisfied—to shit, to its own shit, to its own being primordially disowned or expelled as shit, to its own symbolic self-expulsion as shit, and so on. To be sure, Lacan holds that “once the paternal metaphor is set in place, the phallus occurs in the position of signified: every utterance will have a phallic, sexual meaning” (Vanier 48). But this metaphorical “setting in place” only gives us an idea of the abject semantic fate from which the phallus can be said to save us.8 By radically situating “the object he naturally loses, excrement” among “the props he finds in the Other’s desire” (Écrits 720); by writing “The a, the object, falls. That fall is primal” (Television 85); by writing of “the primal expulsion, that is, the real as outside the subject” (Écrits 324); and by generally letting fall what amounts to no small pile of other abject clues throughout his poubellications, Lacan lets us know that his and our utterances can have a variety of sexual/sectional meanings, that the cadences of language can be every bit as fecal as they are phallic, that the symbolic’s failure is a real Durchfall, that animal/infantile refuse is really anonymous/anonymously real but that all properly hominized excrement drops from a parlêtre—ultimately, from an Author.9

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The End of the World

How queerable are these Lacanian “cultural droppings” (Bersani, Homos 181)? They would certainly seem to register as what Žižek calls “a surplus of ‘perverse’ excess over ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as two opposed symbolic identities” (“Class Struggle” 132n32). They would seem to relate to what Jane Gallop calls the “great malaise” provoked by Lacan’s style, “its capacity to make a reader feel non-identical with herself as reader” (Reading Lacan 117). And thus they would seem at least potentially align-able with Lee Edelman’s minimum requirement of “queerness”—to wit, that it “can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (No Future 17). But how do they relate to the “contingenating” task of stopping not writing masculinity and the abject ways in which male bodies might matter to feminism? Other than compelling us to watch our step, what are their possible political effects as they litter “the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what ‘sexual difference’ will mean” (“Class Struggle” 111)? Here, I am afraid, we have to continue to struggle with the questions of what and how Lacanian meaning means, of what Lacan does and does not stop not writing, of what is necessary and what is contingent in the materiality of his text. At one particular juncture in his text, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” also known as the Rome discourse, Lacan characterizes the word (and hence the world) as “a presence made of absence” (Écrits 228). In other words—or in all words, in language as total field—the presence of the signifier presupposes the absence not only of the referential object but also of all the other signifiers that lend any particular signifier its value (language being, in Saussure’s sense, a differential system without positive terms). Thus, alluding to the fort-da game that Freud describes at the beginning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan writes: In order for the symbolic object freed from its usage to become the word freed from the hic et nunc, the difference resides not in the sonorous quality of its matter, but in its vanishing being in which the symbol finds the permanence of the concept. Through the word—which is already a presence made of absence—absence itself comes to be named in an original moment whose perpetual recreation Freud’s genius detected in a child’s game. And from this articulated couple of presence and absence [ . . . ] a language’s world of meaning is born, in which the world of things will situate itself. (Écrits 228)

Lacan will also underscore the liberating insubstantiality of the symbolic object in another textual moment, the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined

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Letter,’ ” wherein he writes that “the signifier is a unique unit of being which, by its very nature, is the symbol of but an absence. This is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be somewhere but rather that, unlike them, it will be and not be where it is wherever it goes” (Écrits 17). Now, as we know all too well, Lacan will relate the spectral/dialectical “being-and-nonbeing” of the signifier as “presence made of absence” to the question of the phallus as signifier of lack, the question of being or having, the question of sexual difference. He will metaphorize the loss or sacrifice of the “all” of the real that every subject suffers upon entry into language in terms of the mother’s “lack” of the phallus and will thus insist that we are all “castrated”—deprived of our fantasy of “being all” that she wants, of being complete, of “being all” that we can be—in and by the symbolic order. He will figure the mother’s “lack,” and hence her putative desire for the phallus, as the essential metaphor of our general “lack of being” and hence of our desire to mean, to be recognized, to be legible, intelligible. For Lacan, the phallus, as “signifier of lack,” as “the privileged signifier of this mark in which the role of Logos is wedded to the advent of desire” (Écrits 581), will come to symbolize the essential compensatory metaphoricity of symbolization itself, inscribing and necessitating our differentiation from the real, compensating us (albeit always inadequately) for the very “Real Thing” of which it deprives us, allowing or compelling us to trade in or swap out our need to be for a desire to mean, to be recognized as having been meaningful, as having made meaning, as having had a meaningful (if not exactly wonderful) life. Assuming the place of “the (logical) copula”—the is—“in the literal (typographical) sense of the term,” and assuring the “vital flow” of meaning not only “as it is transmitted in generation” (Écrits 581) but also as it is passed from one typographical term to another in a sentence, the phallus thus becomes the privileged term of “union” by virtue of which our very desire to speak links up metaphorically and metonymically with or as whatever meaning we will have managed to generate. Thanks to the phallus, instead of oceanically being in a runny world of real feeling, instead of being in an imaginary closed circuit of exchange in which she is my everything and I am her only thing, instead of completing her by being what I imagine satisfies her desire, instead of fantasmatically strapping myself on at the place of her lack, I must rather register myself in a world of words and strut my stuff by forming complete sentences such as the one that—if you are still with me—you will have just completed (me by) reading. In other words, once again, “once the paternal metaphor is set in place, the phallus occurs in the position of signified [and] every utter-

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ance will have a phallic, sexual meaning” (Vanier 48). The Lacanian conflation of linguistic difference with sexual difference, working together with his linking of the symbolic and the social, will give birth to (or at least illuminate) a heteronormative fantasy that symbolically weds formal linguistic completion to a socially sanctioned form of sexual completion and thus rather firmly straps what Butler calls a “heterosexual pathos” (“Against” 19) onto the very process and possibility of “successfully” making normal grammatical sense, of becoming a legible member of the symbolic order, a viable participant in “our” sociosymbolic “human reality.”10 By marrying the irreducible and inevitable “fact of the signifier” to the nom/non du père, to incest prohibition, and to the elementary structures of kinship; by mapping a symbolically ordered passage through “the defiles of the signifier” (Écrits 525) that is necessary for every human subject onto a state-sanctioned march “down the aisle” that is available only to some, Lacan reproduces the historical contingencies of heterosexual family life as a single, universally necessary structure. Such ideological reproduction, as Butler charges, is the all too legitimate (and all too well-known) offspring of Lacan’s Rome discourse. And yet, for a little coitus interruptus—or perhaps a petit abortion—we might isolate and reappropriate the passage from the Rome discourse with which I began and note that in that passage the description of “the word freed from the hic et nunc”—the symbol set loose from and over against the pre-Oedipal mess of the real—is not yet mapped onto the question of sexual difference, incest prohibition, the phallus, man, woman, the fuck, and so on. To be sure, at this point in the Rome discourse, Lacan is just about to map psychoanalysis and structural linguistics rather decisively onto cultural anthropology: the whole Levi-Straussian business about the elementary structures of kinship, the “rules of matrimonial alliance,” the “exchange of women,” and the way the law of language makes it all possible—or inevitable—is lurking just around the corner. But here what is at issue is only the symbol’s “freedom” from a real that it primordially expels, a paradoxical freedom to live by virtue of sloughing off “life,” the here and now of “intimate lived experience” in which everything runs together. To live by dying, to appear by vanishing, to be only at the cost of being and not being in the same place (which cannot be here) at the same time (which cannot be now): that is what it means to mean, and perhaps at first that is all it means to mean, to start meaning—to lose “the all of becoming” in the inscription/ expulsion/articulation of the symbol. As Lacan writes: It is the world of words that creates the world of things—things which at first run together in the hic et nunc of the all in the process of

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becoming—by giving its concrete being to their essence, and its ubiquity to what has always been[ . . . ]. Man thus speaks, but it is because the symbol has made him man. (Écrits 229)

Now, let’s not make too much of this “man.” Or, rather, let’s not give Lacan too much grief (as I confess I did in the earlier version of this essay) for his vintage 1953 androcentric essentialism while ignoring such unmanly Lacanian assertions as “man is no longer so sure a reference point” (Écrits 3); “ ‘I’m a man’ [ . . . ] at most can mean no more than, ‘I’m like the person who, in recognizing him to be a man, I constitute as someone who can recognize me as a man’ ” (Écrits 96); “I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man” (Écrits 174), and so on—not to mention the “idiotic” way men come (off ) in the formulae of sexuation in the twentieth Seminar, or the frequency with which Lacan “remarks that there is always something ridiculous about masculine assurance, and that the stances of machismo, necessarily performative, are always threatened by the comic” (Jameson, “Lacan” 371). And even if we are committed to “always historicizing” the undoing of gender, we need not find Lacan’s reference to the ahistorical “ubiquity” of “what has always been” too bothersome, mainly because it is not exactly a particular gender formation that is being ubiquitized here but rather an irreducible fact of language, not yet “namely the phallus” but rather the as yet genderless fact that “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (Écrits 262).11 I will say more about “this death” in a moment; here I want to suggest that what the symbol “does” by killing the thing, and even by making the man, is not (yet) exactly “gender.” If “man”—by which Lacan means the human subject, the animal at the mercy of language—is made by the linguistic symbol, if the generic human subject is an effect of the signifier, then this subject is in a situation similar to that of the purloined letter, and we have seen Lacan say that “we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be somewhere but rather that, unlike them, it will be and not be where it is wherever it goes” (Écrits 17). This means that the human subject as parlêtre will be and not be, will be terminally and constitutively incomplete, spectral, a presence made of absence, that something will always be missing from any subject, wherever it goes, even if thanks to certain fairly ubiquitous “laws of urinary segregation” (Écrits 417) it must line up to go through one symbolically marked door or the other, Ladies or Gentlemen, whenever it really really has to go, and even if when once through those differentially marked (but fundamentally identical) doors the Ladies and the Gentle-

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men all end up “doing” pretty much the same thing (which may or may not be pretty—chacun á son goût—but is not, in any case, “gender”). To open the door on some questions: What might this “same thing” have to do with “this death,” with the symbol’s fundamental killing of the thing, the primordial expulsion of the real? Why is it that the subject of the signifier can be and not be wherever it goes, but a Lady or a Gentleman must go through one door or the other? What does the “fact of the signifier” really or necessarily have to do with what Lacan calls the “order and norms [that] must be instituted which tell the subject what a man or a woman must do” (Écrits 720)—what a man or a woman must do when they have to do, where a Lady or a Gentleman must go when they have to go? Why was it that in the United States in the 1970s the (ultimately defeated or shat-upon) idea of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution provoked anxieties among certain half-wits about the possible abolition of the “laws of urinary segregation”? And how do we account for the apparently continuing anxiety—on the part not of anxious American idiots but of advanced theorists and practitioners of psychoanalysis—that the eradication of the fictional or merely symbolic difference between the same two doors, or the actual surgical transformation of one sexed body into another, would result in real (psychic) death, if not the end of the world? How do we account for what might be considered the anxiously pathologizing sequence of equations according to which transsex = horsexe = silence = death? I refer here to Catherine Millot’s argument in Horsexe: Essay on Transexuality as well as to the endorsements her polemic receives in Dean’s Beyond Sexuality and Charles Shepherdson’s Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis.12 Millot holds that while some (but not all) of the “gender dysphoric” subjects who desire transsexual surgery may (consciously) think they want to change from one sex to another, what they really (unconsciously) desire is not to be “the other sex” but to be “other than sex” altogether, to be horsexe, outside sexuation. But if to be outside sexuation or sexual difference means to be outside linguistic difference, and linguistic difference is the difference (internal to the signifier) between being and nonbeing, between life and death, then the desire to be horsexe would amount to the desire to be outside speech and hence outside the vital/lethal distinction. The successfully horsexual subject would no longer be a presence made of absence—a hungry ghost gnawing its self-alienating way along the links of the signifying chain like every other sexuated animal at language’s mercy—but would be a euphorically self-identical subject fully satisfied in an absolutely pure presence or absence, outside of our normal suspension in “the discordance between the two deaths (Écrits 654), between “the one that life

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brings [and] the one that brings life” (686).13 If “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (262), then the gender dysphoric, who cannot accept that gender is dysphoria itself, wants to end the perpetuation of dysphoria/desire, restore the Real Thing, kill off the killing symbol. In other words, in Millot’s analysis, what the subject that desires to avail itself of surgery in order to directly embody the other sex is actually driving at (less erotically than thanatically) is the state other than sex, other than words, other than meaning. According to Millot, the subject who would be horsexual, who is “engaged in a fantasy of totalization regarding the ‘other sex’ ” (Shepherdson 113), is actually aspiring to expire, struggling, in Shepherdson’s words, to occupy “a position from which (if it could only be occupied) nothing more would need to be said,” the terminal position of “what Freud called ‘the silence’ of the death drive” (Shepherdson 112). How “literally” can we take this analysis? Not very, because I cannot imagine that Millot or Shepherdson really believe that the postoperative transsexual qua horsexual will have actually “lost” not only the unwanted genitals but also, along therewith, the desire (if not the actual capacity) to speak, to mean—that, having “overcome” the question of the real of sexual difference, having “nothing left” of the undesired dysphoria-genic genitals, the postoperative subject would have “nothing more” to say and would therefore simply roll over and die. And yet, metaphorically and politically, that is what subscribing to the “transsex = horsexe = silence = death” equivalence, and ascribing it to the would-be horsexual, would seem to entail. This ascription would of course have literal effects on actual subjects “who come to the clinic, hoping to be referred to a surgeon” (Shepherdson 112) to the extent that Millot, as a practicing clinician, can stand as a sort of clinical “Soup Nazi” á la Seinfeld and snap “no surgery for you!”—and then herself have “nothing more” diagnostically to say (except, perhaps, “Next!”). One might wonder which subject, after all, is more “engaged in a fantasy of totalization regarding the ‘other sex’ ” (Shepherdson 113) in this scenario: the one petitioning for surgery or the one who is supposed to know who would really benefit from it. But if certain analysts or theorists do not really take the transex = death equivalence literally, to the letter, what do we make of letters seeming to indicate that they do? Shepherdson, in making his case against transsexualizing technologies, which he reads as baleful symptoms of the “historicist” erasure of “sexual difference” via the humanist-voluntaristic appeal to performative (i.e., nonimperative) “gender,” cites this passage from Luce Irigaray:

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The human spirit already seems subjugated to the imperatives of technology to the point of believing it possible to deny the difference of the sexes. Anyone who stresses the importance of sexual difference is accused of living in the past, of being reactionary or naïve. . . . Some men and women really do live in the past. But as long as we are still living, we are sexually differentiated. Otherwise, we are dead. The question of whether language has a sex could be subtitled: Are we still alive? (Sexes 107; Shepherdson 92)

I have to say that I find this formulation and its final question less reactionary or naïve than both utterly bizarre and all too “normal” if taken literally. How do we account for this analysis of the difference between one sex and the other as the difference between being and nonbeing, between life and death? If I hold this account to the letter, and presume myself to be both living and sexually differentiated, would I then be entitled to view those who are sexually not the same as I am as not really living? What, then, would these (perhaps only apparently) vital, living, and breathing others really be? Zombies? Computer-generated digital projections á la The Matrix? And if I maintain this mortified and mortifying view of “my” sexual others, would I not be justified in my anxiety that their appearing to live “too much” would involve me in my own demise, the fear that my somehow becoming “the same” as “them” through some erasure of the “sexual difference” between us would fucking kill me? And if I believe that to live or speak according to terms other than those given by sexual difference is not to live or mean at all, would I not have to say that I would rather be dead than live in a world in which “my” others are allowed to live too much and to speak too freely? In short (and quite ironically, given her feminist bona fides), is not the ideological view that Irigaray’s formulation here indicates the very warrant and condition of possibility for the hysterical “I would rather die than do or be that!” which “a subject fantasizes” when it sees some excessively vital other “as threatening its own integrity with the prospect of a psychotic dissolution” (Butler, Bodies 243)? I take it as significant that Butler’s rendition of this hysterical disavowal—“I would rather die than do or be that!”—appears in one of her descriptions of the psychosocial operations of abjection, even though Irigaray’s formulation would seem to have little enough to do with such matters. I would also suggest the political salience of rereading blatant anxieties about the erasure of sexual difference in terms of latent scatontological anxieties about exactly such matters. To continue to approach that rereading, I will revisit the question, raised above, of how we should account for an account that “knots” the difference between one sex and

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the other to the difference between life and death. For that account, as I hope to have just demonstrated, is deeply problematic, a metaphorical warrant for literally lethal misogyny and homophobia, and I am afraid that at least one finger of blame for it must be pointed at a certain passage in the text of Jacques Lacan. It is interesting that Butler mentions the threat of “psychotic dissolution” here, for it is, in fact, in “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” that Lacan writes the following: It is an experiential truth for psychoanalysis that the question of the subject’s existence arises for him, not in the kind of anxiety it provokes at the level of the ego, which is only one element of his cortege, but as an articulated question—“What am I there?”—about his sex and his contingency in being: namely, that on the one hand he is a man or a woman, and on the other that he might not be, the two conjugating their mystery and knotting it in symbols of procreation and death. (Écrits 459)

Now, we know that in one form or another Lacan will never stop not not writing about this and other knots, loosening and tightening them, throughout his career. For “We know,” writes Lacan at the beginning of “The Signification of the Phallus,” “that the unconscious castration complex functions as a knot” (Écrits 685). We can see that this particularly knotty question “of the subject’s existence” and “about his sex and his contingency in being” ties sexual differentiation to a loss of “being” and a gain in “meaning.” But we can also see that the question binds the subject to the existential anxiety (as expressed by Irigaray above) that loss of sexual differentiation will mean loss of meaningful sociosymbolic “life” and a dark fall into really meaningless death. In other words, for Lacan, understanding “the unconscious castration complex” entails understanding that “castration” means both the vital gaining of sexual differentiation (in that the animal can become human only by accepting “symbolic castration” as the sacrifice of real life, the excision or expulsion of the real that symbolization produces and that produces symbolization, so as to achieve, however fragilely, sociosymbolic viability) and the lethal loss of sexual differentiation (in that if the male subject is “castrated” he loses what differentiates him from the other sex, becomes “no different” from a woman, drops out of sociosymbolic viability, loses his freedom from and so falls back into the pre-Oedipal mess of the pre-anthropogenetic real, the undifferentiated hic and nunc in which all things run together—and so might as well be dead). It would seem that for Lacan this paradox of castration—which knots the questions of sexuation (man or woman) and existence (being or nonbeing) together with

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the question of the phallus (being or having) and the fact of the signifier (a presence made of absence, the spectral ghost of the murdered thing)—would be the condition of possibility for the following bizarre but all too normal assertions of anthropogenetic desire: I would rather not be than be what the other is; I would rather not live than live as the other lives; I would rather lose life than live life as a loser, and so on. Here, however, I would rather reinsert Tim Dean’s assertion that “castration isn’t Lacan’s only rubric for loss” and stress again the salience of his observation: Lacan’s model for subjective loss is not the phallus but feces, an ungendered object. In the face of this object-cause of desire, the controversy over the concept of the phallus pales into insignificance, since whether or not we’re all—men as well as women—missing the phallus, certainly we’ve all lost objects from the anus. (Beyond 264)

I would add that, somewhere in the subject’s fundamental fantasy, the certainty that “we’ve all lost objects from the anus” could be mixed up with the not completely abandoned cloacal theory of birth, according to which we were all originally lost or launched into the world as anal objects, and that in this mixture scatontological anxieties could be added to anxieties about “gender” or “sexual difference.” Or, rather, I would say that examining this mixture could help expose anxieties about “gender” or “sexual difference”—take your pick—as displaced scatontological anxieties about primordial symbolization, so that matters of abjection may have as much political salience, may thicken the hegemonic gravy, as much as the congealed matters of performative “gender” or imperative “sexual difference.” For even though men and women have lost and, as long as we are still living, will continue to lose objects from the anus, thanks to the “order and norms [that] must be instituted which tell the subject what a man or a woman must do” (Écrits 720)—orders and norms that must turn a real mixture into a symbolic knot—we as Ladies and Gentlemen must not lose these objects at the same place, even if we all do lose them from the same place as the place from which we were all (at least theoretically) originally lost. If this is all Charles Shepherdson’s distinction between “the imperative of sex” (I must speak, I must mean, I must lose, I must make myself an hommelette by breaking myself as an egg, I must slough off my “lamella” and identify myself in language but only by losing myself in it like an object) and “the role of gender” (I must speak-mean-lose-make-break-exciseidentify myself as a Lady or a Gentleman) ends up meaning, I’m not just being an asshole to say so.14 Or perhaps Lacan is being more asshole than prick when, in an endnote to “On a Question,” he writes:

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It is not man’s rags, but his very being that takes up its position among the scraps in which his first frolics found their cortege—inasmuch as the law of symbolization, in which his desire must become engaged, catches him in its net by the position as part-object in which he offers himself up on coming into the world, into a world where the Other’s desire lays down the law. This relationship is, of course, clearly articulated by Schreber in what he relates—to put it in such a way as to leave no room for ambiguity—to the act of shitting. (Écrits 488)

I would insist, however, that the psychotic Judge Schreber is not alone in this articulation and that what he relates here can and should be more explicitly knotted to what we have seen Lacan call the subject’s “articulated question—‘What am I there?’—about his sex and his contingency in being” (Écrits 459), so that the question of what I am there would be shown to involve not only my sex or my contingency in being but also the anthropogenetic question of what I must do with my excrement, the question of the difference—call it “sexual” if/as you must—between me and my anal object. To foul all “four corners” of Lacan’s “L Schema” as it appears in “On a Question,” I would say that the excremental-existential question can emerge at corner S, in which we find my “ineffable and stupid existence”; at corner a, where we find my “objects”; at corner a’, where we find my “ego, that is, [my] form as reflected in [my] objects”; and at corner A, in which stands the big Other, “the locus from which the question of [my] existence may arise for [me]” (Écrits 459). But I would also submit that all these corners can be folded or collapsed upon each other in a sort of fecal origami by the “fact of signifier” if that fact entails the imperative that “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object” (Écrits 247); or the condition that the subject, “who thinks he can accede to himself by designating himself in the statement, is nothing but such an object” (Écrits 693); or the anxiety that a writer “experiences when he faces the blank sheet of paper” and which prods him to “tell you who is the turd of his phantasy” (Écrits: A Selection 315). Let me tell you my point, which is that turds really do have an explanatory virtue over the phallus here, not only as they fall in and out of Lacan’s (or any other writer’s) poubellications but also as they may be scattered across “the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what ‘sexual difference’ will mean” (“Class Struggle” 111). For they—turds—can tell us or help us grasp what may really be at stake, and what is generally occluded, in critical debates about the real of “sexual difference” versus the performativity of “gender.” A close reading of this petit tas of egotistical turds

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may help us understand not only the anxiety of the writer when faced with the blank sheet of paper but also that of any heteromasculinized subject who shudders to think that if “sexual difference” were erased and he were really “no different” from a woman or a queer he might as well be dead. In other words, the anxiety that emerges here makes more sense if it is read as scatontological rather than castratory. If I discover that register at which I am really no different from others who live differently than I, who enjoy life differently, perhaps more excessively, than I do (or who are barred from such full enjoyment in ways that are different from the ways that I am), then this discovery of fundamental sameness does not have to be deadly, the end of the world, or the cause of some psychotic meltdown: I do not have to fall out of the sociosymbolic order altogether but can simply learn to live differently myself, to live differently from myself, which is what I already do to the extent that I live in language and to the extent that in language “I is an other,” but to understand the truth of “I is an other” better, more ethically—that is, more abjectively—than I have heretofore understood it, so that I might end up treating these others differently, more ethically—that is, less abjectingly—than I have heretofore treated them. If, however, my understanding of my “sexual difference” from others is supported by a buried but unbearable suspicion that I am ultimately “no different” not only from them but also from the lifeless objects that fall out of my ass, if my understanding is sustained by the not completely evacuated theory that I originally fell into the world as just such a bad object, if it is precisely the kakon of my own being that I madly try to get at in the objects that I strike, then I can symbolically sustain myself only by having the complexly castratory questions of my existence—What am I there? Am I a man or a woman? Am I still living? What the fuck happened to the real?—answered in ways that not only satisfy me but also allow or compel me to continue treating “my” sexual others like shit.15 “To Set Down My Identity in Scat”

In the course of her discussion with Braidotti in “Feminism by Any Other Name,” Butler complains that “when sexual difference is understood as a linguistic and conceptual presupposition or, for that matter, an inevitable condition of writing, it falsely universalizes a social asymmetry, thereby reifying social relations of gender asymmetry in a linguistic or symbolic realm, maintained problematically at a distance from socio-historical practice” (“Feminism” 38). Sexual difference, Butler argues, reifies “a social asymmetry as an eternal necessity” (39). Braidotti’s response—that one “must not confuse the diagnostic function of sexual

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difference with its strategic or programmatic aims” (39)—is not particularly satisfying for Butler since she finds it difficult to understand what strategies for change can be possible given the “irreducible and irreversible” (39) nature of the diagnosis itself. She agrees with Gayle Rubin that the Lacanian symbolic sticks us with “a primary category of gender differences which might as well be inscribed in granite” (“Sexual Traffic” 70). Such inscription would indeed seem to be a primary effect of the Lacanian symbolic. On the other hand, as I have been attempting to show, even the Lacanian symbolic has more than one effect, and inscription, qua inscription, even if “in granite,” can be radically defaced or resignified, given the right tools. I have been arguing in this essay that the critical debate on “gender” versus “sexual difference” could be productively altered, and even that certain asymmetrical social relations could be metaphorically and literally dereified, through some close attention to abjection as an inevitable condition of writing. Butler, in “Against Proper Objects,” writes that “the hetero-pathos that pervades the legacy of Lacanian psychoanalysis [ . . . ] can be countered only by rendering the symbolic increasingly dynamic, that is, by considering the conditions and limits of representation and representability as open to significant rearticulations and transformations under the pressure of social practices of various kinds” (“Against” 20). But it is Braidotti, in “Feminism by Any Other Name,” who brings the matter of embodiment, of corporeal materialism or carnal irony, into this dynamization—or dynamiting—of the symbolic. She writes that “the best strategy for moving out of this contradiction [of asymmetrical sexual difference] is radical embodiment and strategic mimesis . . . a strategy of deconstruction that also allows for temporary redefinitions, combining the fluidity and dangers of a process of change with a minimum of stability or anchoring” (“Feminism” 43). In the context of “a psychic and social guerilla warfare against the kingdom of identity per se” (50), Braidotti calls “for the melt-down of the male symbolic in order to provide for the radical re-enfleshing of both men and women” (54). Braidotti advocates “a merrier brand of idiosyncratic and hybrid thinking, something that is neither conceptually pure nor politically correct: a joyful kind of feminist ‘dirty-minded’ thinking” (58). Now, because her main concern is “the political will to assert the specificity of the lived, female bodily experience” (“Feminism” 40), it is understandable that Braidotti has nothing to say about what a radical re-enfleshing of men would look like or how it might proceed. However, if we recall Kaja Silverman’s point about the way masculinity impinges upon femininity, if we consider the history of the specific effects of male disembodiment on lived female bodily experience, then the

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project of male re-enfleshment takes on a certain feminist urgency. This urgency, again, is what would justify critical masculinity studies, provided that the studies are truly critical, and even, perhaps, the institutional “give-away” of academic gender studies positions to “bright boys,” provided that the boys are not merely “bright” but radically, abjectively re-enfleshed. So how might a feminist re-enfleshment of male subjectivity proceed? And how might that proceeding relate to the possibility of a male-feminist “dirty-mindedness”? To my mind, one way of dirtying the mind of male subjectivity would be through a recognition of the way that mind is already sullied, contaminated, in and by the materiality of language itself, by abjection as the inevitable condition of all writing, by the written trace as the hybrid soil(ing) that pulls the kingdom of identity down into the realm of the body, by writing as what Lee Edelman calls “a category-subverting alterity within the conceptual framework of ‘the masculine’ itself ” (“Tearooms” 564), by writing as that which always already “set[s] down my identity scat” (Kinnell 65). To scat momentarily back to Lacan, let’s say that although there may be nothing inevitable, and everything quite arbitrary, about Lacan’s conflation of linguistic difference with sexual difference, language must be said to involve certain inevitable and irreducible differentiations without which it would cease either to be or to mean: the symbol must replace or displace the real; the word must be different from the thing; the signifier must be barred from merging with the signified; speech must be ar-tic-u-lat-ed; letters must be divided from each other and must not all run together or occupy the same space; even the briefest of sentences must unfold in time; the subject of the enunciation must be other than the subject of the enounced; the I that speaks must be other than the I that is spoken of; the answer to Lacan’s question—“Is the place that I occupy as subject of the signifier concentric or eccentric [sic] in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified?”(Écrits 430)—must be “eccentric” (or “ex-centric”); the point of asking not “whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather [ . . . ] whether, when I speak of myself, I am the same as the self of whom I speak” (430) must be that I am not the same, that I is an other. Let’s also say that Lacan, in charting the plural and various “effects of symbolization in the child” (202), is diagnostically correct to observe that these inevitable and irreducible linguistic differentiations have “enjoyed” a strong transhistorical (which is not to say “ahistorical”) relation with incest prohibition, with the heteronormative structures of kinship, and hence with the hegemonic struggle over what sexual difference means. Let’s even say that there is something inevitably sexual about the I/“I” split, about “the

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self ’s radical eccentricity with respect to itself ” (435) in language. But let’s also say that there is nothing inevitable about what we make of that ex-centricity, about how we rearticulate it, about how we sexualize, eroticize, fetishize, or even fecalize it both in the writing of our condition and in writing as our condition. There is nothing inevitable and there must be nothing inevitable about how we take up linguistic difference in writing, in the hegemonic struggle over what sexual difference (or anything else) will mean, or else the very phrase “hegemonic struggle” would be meaningless, could not be written. In other words, we could never stop not writing that writing is hegemonic struggle and that there is no hegemonic struggle that is not inevitably writing.16 I might agree, then, with Gayle Rubin when she writes, “There is something intrinsically problematic about any notion that somehow language itself or the capacity for acquiring it requires a sexual differentiation as a primary differentiation. If humans were hermaphroditic or reproduced asexually, I can imagine we would still be capable of speech” (“Sexual Traffic” 69). Indeed, I might go ludicrously further and say that even if kinship and nomination were radically restructured so that incest were not prohibited but universally enforced and everyone in the clan were named “Allstate,” the differentiations I rehearsed above would still be in effect; symbolization would still have inevitably ex-centricizing effects on the animal at language’s mercy; even “Allstate” would have to anthropogenetically learn both what to do with itself in language and what to do with its excrement, would have to learn how to speak of itself as an other and how to deal with the objects that fall out of its ass. My point is that we can diverge from Lacan on the question of linguistic difference as sexual difference while strategically holding on to the connection between linguistic differentiation and sexualized differences, not the “primary” genital difference between male and female (much less “phallic” and “castrated”) but a mobile constellation of differences involving various corporeal sites and openings; moreover, we can insist that such openings are themselves open to what Butler calls “significant rearticulations and transformations under the pressure of social practices of various kinds” (“Against” 20). If I have in this writing heretofore been dealing more with what falls out of the anus than with the anus itself, my present turn to that dark rim will precipitate my diverging or falling away from Lacan and lighting upon the work of Leo Bersani. But because I articulate my own relation to Bersani’s work more extensively elsewhere (in Straight with a Twist and in the third and fourth essays of this book), I will turn here to two other theorists who have employed Bersani’s insights to propose reconfigurations of the straight male body.

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For our purposes, let’s say that Bersani’s central insight involves proposing the rectum as a site of radical desubjectivization: receptive male anal eroticism, serving as a metaphor for “demeaning” sexuality per se, also metaphorizes the radical humiliation or exuberant discard of a hyperbolic ego that, for a number of reasons, is most closely associated with the swellings of conventional phallic masculinity.17 In her essay “Destruction: Boundary Erotics and the Refigurations of the Heterosexual Male Body,” Catherine Waldby tropes Bersanian desubjectivization as “erotic destruction,” as “the temporary ecstatic confusions wrought upon the everyday sense of self by sexual pleasure” (266). With reference to Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Waldby writes that while lesbian relationships seem to “offer the possibility of a reciprocity of destruction” (266), most heterosexual men are so concerned with the maintenance of their sovereign selfhood that they cannot tolerate its infringement by another. They seek instead to be always the destroyer, to refigure women in their own interests but to resist such refiguration themselves. In this case the transformational possibilities offered by the limited destructions of erotic intimacy are perverted into the very real destruction of one partner, the woman, whose sense of self is not merely refigured but systematically dissipated. (“Destruction” 267)

Waldby contends that “while the rituals of heterosexual sex can and often do enact the non-reciprocity of destruction that [Winterson] condemns, they can also play out disturbances and secret reciprocities in this erotic economy” (267). Because conventional heterosexual nonreciprocity depends upon a “hegemonic bodily imago of masculinity” (268) that conforms with the man’s status as sovereign ego and with an understanding of the male body as “phallic and impenetrable” (268), the male anus can become a site of significant disturbances in, and destructions of, the rituals of straight sex. As Waldby writes, Anal eroticism carries disturbingly feminizing connotations. Part of the significance of intercourse understood in its ideological aspect is its assertion not just of the woman’s penetrability but of the man’s impenetrability, the exclusive designation of his body by its seamless, phallic mastery. Intercourse can count as demonstration of the idea that women’s bodies lack the means to penetrate another body, and that male bodies are impenetrable. When a man puts his penis in a woman’s vagina he is saying, “look, it is she who is the permeable one, the one whose body accommodates, takes in and lets out, not I.” But the possibilities of anal erotics for the masculine body amount to an abandonment of this phallic claim.

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The ass is soft and sensitive, and associated with pollution and shame, like the vagina. It is non-specific with regard to genital difference in that everybody has one. It allows access into the body, when after all only women are supposed to have a vulnerable interior space. All this makes anal eroticism a suasive point for the displacement or erasure of purely phallic boundaries. In a sense then, anal eroticism is the sexual pleasure which conformation to a phallic imago most profoundly opposes. If the point of the phallic imago is to guard against confusion between the imaginary anatomies of masculine and feminine, and to shore up masculine power, then anal eroticism threatens to explode this ideological body. (“Destruction” 272)

Given this threat of anal explosion, Waldby suggests, the self-supporting masculine response is a projective violence against others who represent the dissolution, pollution, and shame of permeability. Not only does the maintenance of the sovereign male ego depend upon “projecting the permeable possibilities of the male body on to women,” but homophobia and homophobic violence “might also be ways of adjudicating the anxiety aroused in heterosexual men by their own penetrability” (“Destruction” 272). The denial of receptive anal eroticism “can be acted out as a violence against, or contempt for, those who are interpreted as wishing to . . . experience such pleasure themselves. . . . In this sense the repression or elision of anal eroticism in heterosexual men can be seen to work not only along the lines of the masculine/feminine division, but also along the homosexual/heterosexual divide” (272-73). Thus, as a strategy for combating both misogynist and homophobic violence, Waldby calls for “celebratory alliances between feminism and other groups with political/erotic interests in dephallicizing the straight male body” (27475). In line with Braidotti’s dirty-minded thinking, Waldby suggests that “feminism needs to develop something like a pornographic imagination in relation to masculine bodies, and bodies in general” (275). Maybe, Waldby writes, “what theoretical feminism needs now is a strap-on” (275). If a strap-on is what theoretical feminism needs, the aptly named Brian Pronger is happy to assist with the straps. In “On Your Knees: Carnal Knowledge, Masculine Dissolution, Doing Feminism,” Pronger suggests that the issue is less men “doing” feminism than feminism doing men or, rather, that the masculine aversion to being done, being penetrated, by the feminist strap-on or by other men is what specifically prevents men “from embodying feminist insights” (69). Defining “masculine desire” not as heterosexual attraction but as refused homosexuality, Pronger writes that “masculine desire is essentially homophobic” and

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that homophobia “is an obstacle to the embodiment of feminism” (74). The “point of masculinity,” Pronger suggests, is to become larger, to take up more space, and yield less of it. It is the opposite of feminine anorexic desire. The transformation of the limp penis into the large, hard phallus is the flowering of masculine desire. The expanding phallus is protected by the other side of this desire: the closed anus. Just as the phallus realizes its masculinity by taking space, so the tight anus protects masculine space by repelling invasion. Masculine desire protects its own phallic production by closing orifices, both anus and mouth, to the phallic expansion of others. Rendered impenetrable, the masculine body differentiates itself as distinct and unconnected. It is conquering and inviolable. . . . The discourse of gender territorializes men’s bodies by constructing this form of desire, simultaneously channeling it and damming it up . . . through metaphorically generalized or sexually specific phallic expansions and anal contractions. (“On Your Knees” 72–73)

Although I find Waldby’s and Pronger’s formulations tremendously attractive and productive, I do have some reservations about what might be taken as their apparent literalism. At the risk of sounding like just another anxious straight man who wants to keep his own ass covered, I would submit that Waldby’s and Pronger’s essays might leave the impression that only literally ass-fucked men could ever reconfigure heterosexuality and radically embody feminism.18 I stress “apparent” and “might” because Pronger in particular alludes to the possibilities of extraliteral forms of bodily deterritorialization, even if he tends to leave those possibilities undeveloped. For example, after elaborating homophobia as “the reluctance to give up masculine space” and “the fear men have of the inversion of the expanding phallus and closed anus into a deferential phallus and an open anus,” Pronger points out that “this fear is evident beyond the physical space of the body in the reluctance some men have to give way in sport, commerce, academic debate, or interpersonal relationships” (“On Your Knees” 76). To counter this reluctance, Pronger writes, “we need to extend the joy of the eroticization of opening spaces and deterritorializing masculine desire in the anus and mouth to the joy of erotically opening up such spaces in conversation, in interpersonal relations, in games, in academic discourse, in economics, etc.” (77). Although Pronger does not elaborate on exactly how we might open up such spaces in, say, academic discourse and debate, the important point to be retained is that if the phallic expansions and anal contractions that define heteromasculinity can be both “sexually specific” and “metaphorically general,” then so too must be the phallic deference

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and anal opening that dissolve it. Straight masculinity needs, in other words, to be confronted with its figural as well as literal penetration. Again, at the risk of seeming to let this recourse to the figural allow an anxious, ass-covering evasion of the very thinkability of the literal, one still might ask what metaphorical forms this deferential opening, this dissolution through penetration, might take. And, leaving aside for a moment the literal strap-on, one might ask if there is a feminist point to be taken in terms of this opening. I submit, again, that we (men) have always been in this opening—in it, near it, metonymically contiguous with it—to the extent that the symbol has always made us “men,” to the extent that our subjectivities have always been set down in writing as sexually specific and metaphorically general, as the physical, spatial, visible representation of the self ’s inevitable ex-centricity to itself in language, as the fault line (the very crack, if you will) of the masculine/feminine and the heterosexual/homosexual divides. I submit that if we (straight men) can recognize how our being writers/written abjects us, how our fantasmatic fears about our self-abjection in writing relate to the lived bodily experiences of those who are literally abjected in the social realm, how our fears fuel and provoke their punitive abjection, how both misogyny and homophobia can inhabit our anxiety about our ex-centricity to ourselves in the written trace, then we might begin to rewrite and re-enflesh ourselves, to reconfigure ourselves and de-abectify “our” others, by producing ourselves as writing that does something other than simply take up space. This deferentially expansive and dirty-minded writing would not necessarily depend literally upon, but would always figuratively refer us to, the possibility of our permeability and penetrability. It would entail the radical recognition that to the extent that we write and are written, to that extent are we also abjected, feminized, queered—which is to say, deeply and constitutively fucked. But it would also entail the recognition that, as Drucilla Cornell puts it, “ ‘to be fucked’ is not the end of the world” (154). Indeed, it might actually be the beginning of a new one. Homographesis versus “Holy Shit”

That, in so many words, was my story (and I’m sticking to it here) in Male Matters, wherein, for what I hoped would be feminist/queer purposes, I assayed to foreground the most abject features of the defiling signifier, the devalued graphic mark, the demeaning written trace. I will close—but not, I hope, contract—this assay by considering three things I wish I had known while writing that book.

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First, and rather incidentally, there is the transcultural information that, in traditional Indian society, there are four occurrences after which one is expected to wash one’s hands: (1) having sex, (2) urinating or defecating, (3) touching dead bodies, and (4) writing. Other than remark that it ties writing to abjection fairly neatly, I will let that information speak for itself.19 Second, and much more importantly, there is Lee Edelman’s concept of “homographesis,” a concept that I particularly regret not knowing while writing Male Matters and whose omission from that book rather damages its queer aspirations. As Edelman develops it, the term “refers to the disciplinary and projective fantasy that homosexuality is visibly, morphologically, or semiotically, written upon the flesh, so that homosexuality comes to occupy the stigmatized position of writing itself within the Western metaphysics of presence” (“Tearooms” 571).20 Homographesis involves “the process by which homosexuality is put into writing through a rhetorical or tropological articulation that raises the question of writing as difference by constituting the homosexual as text” (571). Thus while homographesis signifies the act of putting homosexuality into writing under the aegis of writing itself, it also suggests the putting into writing—and therefore the putting into the realm of difference—of the sameness, the similitude, or the metaphors of identity that the graphesis of homosexuality deconstructs. For the insistent tropology of the inscribed gay body testifies to a deep-seated heterosexual concern that a widely available conceptualization of homosexual personhood might subvert the cognitive security that the categories of sameness and difference serve to anchor; it indicates, by its defensive assertion of a visible marker of sexual otherness, a fear that the categorical institutionalization of homosexual difference may challenge the integrity and reliability of sameness as the guarantor of identity, that this hypostatized difference between socially constructed and biologically determined understandings of maleness can vitiate the certainty by which one’s own self-identity can be known. (“Tearooms” 572)

If homographesis signifies the act of putting homosexuality into writing, it also signifies the vitiations of certainty, and of heterosexual self-identity, that are inscribed in writing itself, in the very act of putting identity down in script. If “I—mark(s) the division,” as Derrida remarks in Glas (65), then any mark “I” make(s) divides me from myself and potentially disturbs the integrity and reliability of the very identity I am trying to guarantee. And in a culture in which division is lived (pervasively but not exclusively) along the lines of masculine/feminine and hetero/homo, the self-division of the straight male subject in writing is feminizing and queering. To meet this graphic challenge to straight

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self-identity, the heteromasculine subject must write out—cast out or abject—the internal markings of femininity and homosexuality. Edelman is clear enough about the terms of this project, which bespeaks a narcissistic anxiety about the definition of (sexual) identity that can only be stabilized and protected by a process of elimination or casting out. It betokens, that is, a cultural imperative to anal sadistic behavior that generates the homophobic definition of masculinity itself—that generates, we might say, masculinity as such for our culture through the anal sadistic projection or casting away that inheres in homophobia . . . [and through] the aggressive anality of a culture compelled to repudiate the homosexuality it projectively identifies, definitionally, with anality. That abjectifying—and therefore effeminizing—anality is a condition that homophobic masculinity repudiates by construing it as the distinguishing hallmark of a recognizable category of homosexual person. (“Tearooms” 568- 69)

That homophobic masculinity construes anality as the hallmark or calling card of the recognizably queer suggests that there may always potentially be something anally queer—abjectifying and therefore effeminizing—about any recognizable mark. If, again, “I—mark(s) the division” between, say, my self-presence and my self-alienation, between private self and public meaning, then I also furtively recognize, in the mark of otherness that “I” always is, the potential dissolution of whatever determinate entities are erected on either side of that division into an unstable, differential relation. One of Edelman’s contexts in “Tearooms and Sympathy” is the public restroom, “the threat to stability—that is, to the fi xity of (heterosexual) identity and to (heterosexual) mastery of the signifiers of difference—portended [ . . . ] by the men’s room itself ” (563). Edelman writes that this threat can be intuited more readily when the restroom is considered, not, as by Lacan, in terms of “urinary segregation”—a context that establishes the phallus from the outset as the token of anatomical difference—but instead as the site of a loosening or relaxation of sphincter control, with the subsequent evocation of an eroticism undifferentiated by gender, in Freudian etiology, because anterior to the genital tyranny that raises the phallus to its privileged position. Precisely because the phallus marks the putative stability of the divide between “Ladies” and “Gentlemen,” because it articulates the concept of sexual difference in terms of “visible perception,” the “urinary” function in the institutional men’s room customarily takes place within view of others—as if to indicate its status as an act of definitional display; but the private enclosure of the toilet stall

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signals the potential anxiety at issue in the West when the men’s room becomes the locus not of urinary but intestinal relief. For the satisfaction that such relief affords abuts dangerously onto homophobically abjectified desires. (“Tearooms” 563)

Citing several instances in 1960s’ journalistic and literary discourse of an anxious troping of the men’s room as a stinking, “cloacal” cavern, Edelman writes that “these displaced but insistent spatial tropes suggest the anxiety of an internal space of difference, an overdetermined opening or invagination within the male, of which the activity of defecation may constitute an unnerving reminder” (“Tearooms” 563). Following Edelman, I would reiterate that it is not only these particular spatial tropes, but writing itself—which is always, insistently, tropaically spatial and displaced—that provokes anxiety, that serves as the unnerving reminder not only of defecation but also, by ner vous extension, of the penetrable anus, that overdetermined opening or invagination within the straight male. Thus, to the extent that writing is an inevitable condition of identity formation within a dynamic symbolic order, writing always potentially undoes any identity that sequesters or “stalls” itself in terms of its very resistance to being done, to being fucked, to homophobically abjected “feminine” desires that are both sexually specific and metaphorically general. Edelman’s writing on the stalling and destalling of masculine subjectivity in terms of homographesis allows an interesting point of entry into the third thing I wish I had known while writing Male Matters: Galway Kinnell’s poem “Holy Shit.” Opening with a set of epigraphs spanning the history of idealism from Plato to Jung, all concerning the turd and its abject confederates (my favorite among the epigraphs being Valentinus’s “Jesus ate and drank but did not defecate” [61]), Kinnell’s poem laments the human hostility to shit and shitting, argues against the idealist desire to “sever the chain of linked turds/ tying us to some hole in the ground” (Imperfect 64). Most valuably, from my perspective, the poem concerns the political consequences of this hostile desire. In a sort of etymological/editorial aside, Kinnell blasts the absurdity of the fact that the American newspapers “that were so enamored/ of the smart weapons of the Gulf War” would never print that “indecent word” shit, “despite a lineage going back/ to the Indo-European, from skheid,/ to shed, to drop” (Imperfect 65). Kinnell also brilliantly depicts the violently imperialist projection of abject vulnerability onto the other, what Edelman calls “a cultural imperative to anal sadistic behavior” (“Tearooms” 568), when he writes of Americans “imagining we are a people who don’t die,/ who come out of the

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sky like gods and drop/ not shit but bombs on people who shit” (Imperfect 66- 67). Kinnell, however, has dropped a little bomb of his own here. In an earlier section of the poem, he describes Jean Genet in the following terms: For hours each day the child Genet roosted in the silken peace of the outhouse, a confessional where we bare our intimate parts, feeding his imagination on the odor and darkness.

Kinnell—or the poem’s speaker, whom I will call Kinnell—then confesses: For myself, it was many years before I could get near the poetry section in a bookstore or PS3521 in library stacks without a sudden urge to shit, I don’t know why, unless envy, or emulation, a need, like a coyote’s or hyena’s, to set down my identity in scat. (Imperfect 64–65)

Now, what interests me about this passage is the way Kinnell brings his most intimately confessional conflation of writing with defecation (none of the rest of the poem so explicitly concerns the act of writing or Kinnell’s own “urge”) into such close proximity with the homosexual writer Genet (none of the rest of the writers mentioned—Dante, Swift, for examples—are queer). One is tempted to call this proximity “homographiphobic” in that it seems to signify a recognition of the way Kinnell’s mixed urge to write/shit abuts with the adult Genet’s abjectified homosexual desire. But one might also discern here Kinnell’s own sense of the danger of that abutment, so that the line beginning “For myself . . .” may signal not an identification with, but rather a ner vous distantiation from, the roosting Genet. Indeed, Kinnell’s baring of his urges leads him, mysteriously (“I don’t know why”), not back into Genet’s outhouse but rather to the land of coyotes and hyenas, to “the white-tailed deer” and “the canary” (Imperfect 65), to the “wilder” but perhaps less dangerous realm of animals not at the mercy of language, a wild kingdom in which there is plenty of scat but, conspicuously, neither identity nor writing. This totemized animalization, this positively naturalized unhumanization of Kinnell’s desire can be read as an abjectifying and dehu-

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manizing flight from Genet’s. In Bodies That Matter, Butler writes that the notion of abjection designates a degraded or cast out status within the terms of sociality. Indeed, what is foreclosed or repudiated [ . . . ] is precisely what may not reenter the field of the social without threatening [ . . . ] the dissolution of the subject itself. I want to propose that certain abject zones within sociality also deliver this threat, constituting zones of uninhabitability which a subject fantasizes as threatening its own integrity with the prospect of a psychotic dissolution. (“I would rather die than do or be that!”) (243)

On the one hand, I do not see enough evidence in Kinnell’s poem to justify the claim that he finds Genet’s outhouse a zone of uninhabitability, entry into which would threaten him with psychotic dissolution. On the other, I do see unfortunate evidence, in a poem I otherwise admire, that, when it comes to facing up to what writing sets down, Kinnell would rather emulate a coyote or a canary than a queer; he would rather run with hyenas than with homos. Granted, this preference is not as extreme as Butler’s “I would rather die than do or be that,” since the animals in question are supposedly alive, but it still seems an abjectifying move that has the effect of consecrating “Holy Shit” by separating it from the wholly shit. This subtle but urgent move on Kinnell’s part leads me to suspect and reject the sanctimoniousness of the poem’s closing lines—“Let us sit bent forward slightly, and be opened a moment,/ as earth’s holy matter passes through us” (Imperfect 67)—lines that urge me to hope (but not pray) for openings of a considerably less reverential bent. In this essay, I have moved from a consideration of discussions among feminist women (Butler, Braidotti, Rubin) to an examination of matters that might seem strictly “between men” (Edelman, Genet, Kinnell). If the essay’s movement thus seems to be away from feminism and toward queer theory, its primary urge, to the contrary, has been in solidarity with Butler’s desire “not only to link feminism and queer theory [ . . . ] but to establish their constitutive relationship” (Bodies 240). Now, if that relationship were obviously established, there would perhaps be no such thing as misogyny among gay men or homophobia among feminist women, both of which of course continue to thrive. But my concern here has not been with these aspects of gay male or feminist female subjectivities, for which, respectively, misogyny and homophobia have complex valences and which, in any case, are not exactly identical with the reproduction of straight male hegemony

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(though they are not exactly removed from such reproduction either). My concern has been with straight male subjectivity and with the possibility of its productive dissolution, its dirty-minded failure to uphold the phallus. It is the constitutive relationship between misogyny and homophobia in the formation of properly phallic, straight male subjects that makes the link between feminism and queer theory crucial for those interested in deforming and transforming heteromasculinity. My par ticu lar take involves the ways misogyny and homophobia are inscribed in writing, as well as the possibilities of deformation and transformation that a radically re-enfleshed writing might open up. There are, of course, many ways of opening masculinity to change, but by recognizing what is actually on the line when straight male identity is taken to and by the letter, is set down in script (if not in scat), we may also see new ways, metaphorical and specific, of beginning to bring down—to fundamentally disturb—that identity’s disembodied kingdom.

Essay

3

MUST DESIRE LITERALLY?

BE

TAKEN

It is much harder for man to let the other come through him. Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me—the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live—that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who?—a feminine one, a masculine one, some? Cixous, “Sorties” My booty-hole got a sign say “exit only.” from conversation unavoidably overheard on a subway

The writer of these words is an academic man in his early fifties who has never been fucked in the ass. Indeed, for a number of reasons, this writer may very well go to his grave without ever having been fucked in the ass.1 Not utterly a stranger to some relatively thin and shallow forms of receptive anal eroticism, this writer has nonetheless never known what it feels like to be ass-fucked, has never fully experienced what Leo Bersani describes as “the seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (“Rectum” 212). That is to say, I have never negotiated with this “seductive and intolerable image” of being fucked in the ass as anything other than image, as anything more (or less) than metaphor. Of course, the extent to which I find this image seductive only as image may well indicate the extent to which I must find it intolerable as embodied fact, since I have never factually tolerated it. And yet, as my previous writings on masculinity and the male body lay bare, I have indeed been unable to refuse Bersani’s various elaborations of anal sex as metaphor—for ébranlement, for

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self-shattering, for the abdication of phallic power, for the exuberant discard of hyperbolic subjectivity, for a beneficent crisis in and of the masculinist self. I have allowed myself to be seduced by the thrust of Bersani’s arguments, by the cold intimacy—the anal battery, if you will—of his words. Ass safely covered, legs not raised high in the air but tucked demurely beneath a writer’s desk, I have nonetheless taken in those words, those letters (inevitably emblems of an other’s desire), even if, literally, physically, I have taken in, and apparently desire to take in, nothing (or little) else. And therein lies a question, as well as a tension, if not a tale: a tension between the ass-fuck taken literally and the ass-fuck taken as literature, a tension between anal sex as “intimate lived experience” (Lemaire 6) and anal sex as a metaphor both available and attractive to a writer who has never really had (much) anal sex but who discerns a beneficently anal and transformatively sexual relationship not only between himself and his own and other’s words, but also between himself and the social reality that he inhabits and that inhabits him, the world whose meanings he helps make and unmake, and by whose meanings he is made and unmade. It is this tension that I would like to explore briefly, but maintain indefinitely, here. What initially prompted the above disclosure about my signal lack of ass-fuck experience was an invitation from the British journal Parallax to produce some material for their 2002 special issue on “Having Sex.” As I understand, the invitation itself was issued as a consequence of a Parallax editor’s having heard my talk at a masculinity studies conference in the UK in 2000, a talk—actually, a much shorter version of the preceding essay in this book—in which I attempted to demonstrate the value of critical masculinity studies to both queer theory and the feminist political project.2 In the course of this attempt, I touched upon two pieces of theory—one by Catherine Waldby, the other by Brian Pronger—that both posit anal receptivity, rather than castration anxiety, as the more destabilizing specter threatening the ego coherence of the hyperbolically phallic subject. Both writers view psychic resistance to anal reception as part of the motivating force behind misogynist and homophobic projective violence, and, correspondingly, both see feminist and queer political potential in attempts to dephallicize the straight male body by openly celebrating, or celebratively opening, the heterosexual male’s anus. In my own little assay on “Re-enfleshing the Bright Boys,” I dwelt at great length on Waldby’s and Pronger’s interventions, which I find quite attractive and productive, but I also voiced reservations about what could be taken as their apparent literalism, about the impression they might leave that only literally ass-fucked men are in any position to

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reconfigure heterosexuality or embody feminist insights. The problem with this literalism would be not only that some men who lack the literal experience may yet be able somehow to enact the desired political agenda, but also that other men who have the experience on a regular basis may yet do little or nothing for that agenda and may otherwise actively work against it. If we do consider the ass-fuck as a form of so-called radical sex, then the problem, as Bersani puts it, is the “assumption that radical sex means or leads to radical politics” (“Rectum” 205) when in fact there is no necessary or clear connection or translation between one and the other. It is not that there is no conceivable connection, but that, in Bersani’s words, “the ways in which having sex politicizes are highly problematical” (206); the “process by which sexual pleasure generates politics” is “extremely obscure” (208). That this generative process is at best obscure means that, unless we are content to let it rest in obscurity as an unspoken article of faith, the process must be brought to meaning, must, as Stuart Hall puts it, be “made to mean” (“Rediscovery” 1050). Like everything else in the sociosymbolic reality that we call “the world,” it must be articulated if it is to be realized at all. In my talk, I ended up turning to articulation itself—to the metaphor of writing and the writing of metaphor—as a way of disturbing the literalism of Waldby’s and Pronger’s essays. More to the point, I turned to writing as a metaphorical means of self-shattering, of exploding the ideological body of straight masculinity itself. I turned to writing as what Hélène Cixous calls “the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me,” to writing as that which does not express, affirm, or convey “me” but which ceaselessly carries “me” away, disperses “me,” “tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me” (“Sorties” 583). Obviously, the “writing” in and of Cixous’s ecstatic writing is, for me, highly sexually charged. But in the turn to that writing, I seemingly charged away from the “sexually specific” in the literal sense and toward what Pronger calls the “metaphorically generalized” (73), the generation of metaphor. Having made that turn, however, I then focused on what might be called the antigenerative in writing, not on its expressivity, nor on any “creativity” traditionally linked to paternity, maternity, or any other imperative of the successful heterosexual reproduction of “life,” but rather on writing’s intimately sexual connection, its degeneratively metonymic connection, to murderous or suicidal ecstasy, to failure, to “death”—its connection, in other words, to the rectum, to “the grave in which the masculine ideal [ . . . ] of proud subjectivity is buried” (“Rectum” 222). I suggested writing as the general metaphorical-metonymical economy in which intellectual monuments (of any age) collapse into

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cultural droppings, in which what Pronger calls “phallic expansions” and “anal contractions” may be inverted into anal expansions and phallic contractions, and I offered this metaphorically generalized rectal expansiveness as a perverse sort of ethical method of preventing straight men from being enormous assholes, massive and yet clinched—or, worse, punitively abjecting—in relation to feminist and queer politics. In short, positing “successful” normative heteromasculinity as unconscionable, I submitted, and resubmit here, conscientiously failed writing as a model of conscientiously failed, self-abjective masculinity, antigenerative and thereby potentially politically productive. Before expanding this theme any further, however, I would like to comment briefly on what I took to be my audience’s response to these writerly elaborations. On the one hand, unless I only imagine, a palpable sense of unease seemed to hover over the fact that I was speaking so profusely about anal and fecal matters at all. Although abjective artists and corporeal theorists have been engaged in rudely performative discourse for some years now, that discourse can still provoke discomfort when it explicitly brings the private to a public. As Tim Dean puts it, “Excrement remains an extraordinarily difficult topic for sustained discourse” (Beyond 267). Coupled with the audience’s anxiety, however, unless my imagination runs wild, was a sense of relief that I was, in the end, engaged only at the level of discourse: I was, after all, “only talking.” I do not mean to suggest that anyone in the audience actually feared that I would be likely, in a moment of performative excess, to confront them with the real subject of my discourse by literally dropping my trousers, spreading my butt-cheeks, or doing anything unspeakably worse in the way of letting the solar anus shine. I do mean that I sensed a bit of anxiety-assuagement over the fact that, though I seemed to be talking in a discomforting way about anal sex and defecatory efflorescence, I was not “really” addressing these matters directly at all but merely employing them as metaphors for writing. On the other hand, I definitely sensed among some of the more praxis-oriented members of the audience a political unease, suspicion, or disappointment in regard to exactly what had relieved the others: the fact that I was merely speaking about merely writing. That is to say, some in the audience wondered (aloud, during Q&A) about what might be called the political use-value of the metaphor (as “mere” metaphor) of anal expansion. If the anus, or more specifically the ass-fuck, does entail some sort of transformative potential as an avenue for exploding the ideological body of straight masculinity, then what happens to that potential through the recourse to metaphor, the hasty retreat from the sexual specific back into the metaphorically general? If the ass-fuck as


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radical sex is thought of “merely” as metaphor, what then becomes of the possibility of “real” change—the point, as words inscribed in stone at London’s Highgate Cemetery have it, being not merely to interpret the world but to change it? As the old boy interred beneath those words might have put it, in order to abolish the idea of hegemonic masculinity, the idea of the ass-fuck is sufficient. It takes actual ass-fucking to abolish actual masculinist hegemony.3 Although I understand and even share both the imputed relief of the first group and the announced suspicions of the second, I believe that neither is ultimately warranted. To explain why, let me turn to Lacan’s Écrits, to section V of “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” which bears the title to which this essay’s title alludes: “Desire must be taken literally” (518). Of course, imperatives themselves are usually meant to be taken literally. For Lacan, however, the imperative to take desire literally neither means nor impels us to take it “literally” if we take the word to mean the directly physical, corporeal, instinctual, nonsymbolic, or nonsocial. Much rather, for Lacan, to take desire “quite simply, literally” (413) means to take it, not simply at all, to the letter, á la lettre: the literal in the letter-ly, metaphorical sense is what divides us from the “literal” in the physical, anatomical sense, and that very division is what endlessly opens up desire. “Desire,” Lacan insists, “not tendencies” (518), and his insistence here is nothing less than the insistence of the letter itself, its insistency rather than its consistency: Whence we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that meaning insists, but that none of the chain’s elements consists in the signification it can provide at that very moment. The notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier thus comes to the fore. (Écrits 419)

We can, if we desire, trace Lacan’s insistence on the letter’s insistence in its relation to desire to Alexandre Kojève’s description of desire itself as “the revelation of an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality” (5). In Lacan, as we know, this revelation of emptiness is coupled with an understanding of language in which the word, as Maurice Blanchot once put it, “is not the expression of a thing but rather the absence of this thing.” Blanchot writes that “the word makes the things disappear and imposes upon us the feeling of a universal want and even of its own want” (cited in Marcuse xi). Taken together, Kojève’s and Blanchot’s descriptions, which are practically identical, metaphorically let language and desire coalesce, so that both “language” and “desire” become the names of the same nonreality, the same nonthing, the same “no”

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to the real, the same “no” to the thing. As we know, Lacan will take this “no” and name or knot it in terms of the paternal metaphor, the name and the no of the father (nom/non du père). He will take this condensation of language with desire and compound (or perhaps confound) it with Saussure’s designation of language as an arbitrary, conventional, differential system without positive, self-consistent terms; with Levi-Strauss’s theories of incest prohibition, elementary kinship structures and nominations, and symbolic exchange (of women among men); and with Freud’s discoveries of the unconscious, of “our old friend fortda” (Jameson, “Lacan” 392), and of “sexual difference” understood in the “bedrock” terms of “castration.” In effect, as we know too well, Lacan lets the mother’s “castration,” her putative lack of/desire for the phallus (and our paternally prohibited but always already impossible desire to be the phallus for her) stand in as metaphors for the “universal want” that is inscribed in every speaking subject qua speaking subject. Her specifically sexual “lack” metaphorizes our generally linguistic dehiscence, our symbolic castration. Thus Lacan will speak of the jouissance of the real that is “prohibited to whoever speaks, as such” (Écrits 696). He will dictate that we speaking subjects are all “castrated” in language and by language, are all separated from the “literal” (the mother’s real body, the undifferentiated real itself ) by the literal (the symbolic order, nom/non du père, “the metaphor of the father considered as a principle of separation” [Écrits 720]), and so on. Lacan’s understanding of linguistic separation as both castration and “universal want” has the effect—as such critics of Lacan as Judith Butler point out—of universally phallicizing and hence heterosexualizing the desire for all meaning and the meaning of all desire. In the preceding essay in this book, I attempted to complicate this reproduction of phallogocentric Lacan, champion of the eternally heteronormative symbolic order. Here I would like not to rehearse those complications but to give them another name by pointing out that among Lacan’s influences we find not only Freud, Hegel, Kojève, Saussure, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, and (alas) Heidegger, but also Georges Bataille. I would even go so far as to say that Bataille is always strongly present/ absent whenever and wherever Lacan meets queer theory.4 For it is with Bataille that the “bedrock of castration” can be said to crumble. It is with Bataille that we get a revelation of language not as the singularity of symbolic castration but rather as one of the varieties of sacrificial experience: language not only as emptiness but also as excess, not as lack but as rampant (if not rancid) overflow, expenditure. If for Lacan “the symbol first manifests itself in the killing of the thing” (Écrits 262), for Bataille that symbolically murderous das Dingicide is never a transparently “clean


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kill” but rather a fundamentally messier affair. To rephrase Lacan and Blanchot by way of Bataille, one might say that the word—particularly as it always inevitably passes through a body—is not only “a presence made of absence” (Écrits 65) but also a presence made of abjection. The word neither fully expresses things nor makes them completely disappear but rather soils and saturates them, just as they contaminate it, and us, drawing it and us (down? back? out?) into a general feeling of abjection. Following Bataille, and Kristeva, one can say that to speak, to signify oneself, is not only to split oneself along the lines of enunciation/ enounced, or of subject/object: it is also to expel oneself, to spit oneself out, to abject oneself within the very motion that one claims to establish oneself. “Does one write,” writes Kristeva, “under any other condition than being possessed by abjection?” (Powers 208). Possessed or not, I myself am drawn (down? back? out?—in any case, repetitively) to the moments in Lacan that seem most heavily to bear the trace, the stain, of Bataillean expenditure, particularly as those moments always conspicuously pertain to the extimate movement of writing. For example, exhibiting what Elizabeth Roudinesco calls the “anxiety that afflicted [him] whenever the terrible question of publication arose,” Lacan refers to his own publications as “poubellications,” playing on the French word for garbage can and assigning his own writing the status of waste.5 He suggests in Seminar XI that “the creator will never participate in anything other than the creation of a small dirty deposit, a succession of small dirty deposits juxtaposed” (117). Also in Seminar XI, Lacan writes of “that vertigo [ . . . ] of the white page, which, for a particular character [ . . . ] is like the centre of the symptomatic barrage which blocks off for him every access to the Other. If, quite literally, he cannot touch this white page at which his ineffable intellectual effusions come to a stop, it is because he apprehends it only as a piece of lavatory paper” (268- 69). And although I am embarrassed to trot this one out yet again but apparently helpless not to, Lacan suggests that the subject, “who thinks that he can accede to himself by designating himself in the statement, is no more than such an object” and that we should “just ask the writer about the anxiety he experiences when he faces the blank sheet of paper, and he will tell you who is the turd of his phantasy” (Écrits: A Selection 315). What strikes me about these and other passages is how little they seem to concern castration or castration anxiety. Whether Lacan is writing of his own “poubellications,” the dirty deposits of “the creator,” the effusions of “a particular character,” or the vertiginous anxiety of “the writer” in general, these passages all suggest a more formless sort of anxiety of abjection—what I persist in calling scatontological anxiety—underlying

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and anteceding castration anxiety. Castration anxiety itself, as others and I have argued (the others better than I), can function to formalize and contain an earlier, more fundamental, more amorphous anxiety, paving the way, as it were, for the installation of its possessor on one side or the other of the binary of asymmetrical sexual difference.6 Abjection, on the other hand, like the Bataillean informé, is never so cleanly or decisively contained. If castration anxiety permits desire to be normatively organized in terms of either being or having, scatontological anxiety concerns the fear of being abjected, of being something not worth having. If Lacan tells us something inevitable about “symbolic castration” by taking desire to the letter, he also puts abjection into writing, for if a purloined letter “is precisely speech which flies” (198), as Lacan puts it in Seminar II, a poubellicated letter is speech which draws flies, not because it is sweet and sticky but precisely because it fucking stinks. Thus, to follow the arguably queerer, more Bataillean Lacan and bring abjection into play by foregrounding the corporeal in the production of language (my “project,” in a nutshell) is to cast the scene of writing otherwise than as an emptiness yearning to be literally filled (perhaps by the big dick of “real change”). Rather, the scene of writing—the blank page, the expectant silence of an audience waiting for a speaker to begin—is revealed as another sort of opening, a passageway, both an entrance and an exit, for the other(s) in me and for me in the other(s): an oracular orifice that is to be linguistically massaged and relaxed and lubricated in the interests of communication, to use no blander word, but “communication” in Bataille’s double sense of the restricted economic exchange of meanings between subjects and as another name for general economy, for that ecstatic space of impossible community in which solidified subjectivities dissolve and erected meaning collapses.7 Or, rather, in which such subjectivities are said to dissolve and such meaning is said to collapse. After all, even in Bataillean communication, the dissolution of linguistically constituted subjects takes place in language; the collapse of meaning is laid down in writing. Reportedly, Bataille in “real life” participated in all sorts of orgies, but he and his acephalic cohorts never actually brought off their plan for a literal human sacrifice: jouissance perhaps abounded, but no one ever really lost a head, and acephalia itself thus remains a metaphor.8 Or, to put it another way, if the corpse is “the utmost of abjection” (Kristeva 9), it is not that, or anything else, to the corpse itself. If, as Nietzsche tells us, “truths” are metaphors that have forgotten that they are metaphors, and the “will to truth” is a concealed “will to death,” then acephalia is a metaphor that, like any other, stays alive by forgetting to forget itself as metaphor.


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Thus also the ass-fuck, for what we are left with, even there, after Nietzsche and Freud, in the wake of Bataille and Lacan, is a social reality from which “reality” is terminally missing, a world in which interpretation “only” interprets interpretation, metaphor “merely” metaphorizes metaphor, and desire desires nothing but desire—a world, in other words, that, to the extent that we remain in it, must literally be “made to mean” (Hall 1050). It was with this fundamentally but nonfoundationally dirty business of wor(l)d making that I attempted to engage my audience (to return now to them) with my little acephalic tale of the ass-fuck as a metaphor for the collapse or discard of a certain sort of straight male subjectivity. What I will say here is that the particular form of subjectivity under question is, like all others, written: it is itself an assemblage of metaphors, is made out of words and images that are themselves made, socially and historically produced, however viscously they may circulate through that instance of materiality we call “the body.” Since the self to be transformed is itself a metaphor, the metaphor of the ass-fuck—pace our buried friend at Highgate—may be sufficient to do the trick. After all, what are “acephalia,” “ass-fuck,” “radical sex,” and “radical politics” if not metaphors for the possibility of being changed, of being carried away by change? And just as heteromasculine domination has always depended on the denial of receptive anal eroticism, has it not also always depended on being closed to the possibility of change, on metaphors that forget their metaphoricity, on the naturalization of history, on what Bourdieu in Masculine Domination has referred to as the eternalization of the arbitrary? For this heteromasculine subject, who apparently thinks that he can not only accede to himself but also keep his ass covered by designating himself in the statement, being open to change means the anxious recognition not only that the meaning of desire is the desire of meaning but also that the metaphor of the ass-fuck is the ass-fuck of metaphor, and that that recognition literally is the ass-fuck itself. Just ask the writer. What I would like to end up saying to my audience is that those members who relieve themselves by thinking that my talk is only talk are mistaken: to the extent that we communicate at all, we really are “having sex.” To those disappointed that my cock-assed metaphors remain merely metaphorical, I would offer the reminder that the historical struggles in which we are engaged, particularly what Slavoj Žižek calls “the hegemonic struggle for what ‘sexual difference’ will mean” (“Class Struggle” 111), will never cease to be struggles over meaning in a semiotically fabricated world. In the course of those struggles, some of us degenerates have discovered a strange strategic political value in metaphors of dissolution, failure, and collapse, more so than we have in those of agency, solidarity, and futural success. We like to linger insistently over, rather

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than to redeem or repair, the productive tears in the social, psychic, and corporeal fabric. Foucault once declared that he wrote “in order to have no face” (Archeology 17). Some, I have argued, write in order to have no feces. I write to tear myself a new asshole, to have myself torn a new asshole, though I fail, fail miserably, ecstatically, even at that. And if I close now by professing that abject/ecstatic failure to fail, it is only by way of reminding myself, and any audience I might have, that the writer of these words, by virtue of being “the writer,” by virtue of writing “these words,” has always literally been “fucked in the ass.”

Essay

4

CULTURAL DROPPINGS: ON BERSANI AND BECKETT Art never represents individuals. Bersani, The Culture of Redemption To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail. [ . . . ] [F]ailure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living. Beckett, Disjecta Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Beckett, Worstward Ho

How should we account for the relatively unexpected appearance of Samuel Beckett on the fi nal page of Leo Bersani’s Homos? By what abject logic can Beckett be linked with the three “Gay Outlaws”—Gide, Proust, and, most proximately, Genet—whose writing is the main subject of Bersani’s concluding chapter? For readers familiar with such examples of Bersani’s work as The Freudian Body, The Culture of Redemption, and Arts of Impoverishment, Beckett’s importance for Bersani’s “anti-redemptive” aesthetic theory will be familiar, and therefore his last-minute appearance in Homos perhaps less surprising than for those who know Bersani mainly through Homos or the famous essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?”1 But that appearance still requires careful explanation, as does, for that matter, my own appearance here as the one who presumes, carefully—no, recklessly—to explain it. For if Beckett was not exactly a “gay outlaw,” neither, I should say,

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am I exactly a queer theorist. However, if Beckett’s appearance in Homos marks a productive tension in Bersani’s argument, my “appearance” here—as the subject who presumes to explain—could mark a similarly productive tension, a constitutive subversion of exaction, in queer theory itself. If, that is, Beckett was not “literally” homosexual but nonetheless produced writing that could be considered a literary “vehicle” for Bersanian “homo-ness,” my explication of that vehicular homo-ness here carries me into my own questions: Is Beckett, am I, “homo”? Can or should Beckett or I be called straight queers? Near-queers? What purposes are served by such nominations? What are their implications for queer theory? How do they assist with Bersani’s stated project of “bringing out, and celebrating ‘the homo’ in all of us” (Homos 10)? What might they tell us about Beckett’s writing? I should point out that neither for Bersani nor for me does this celebration of universal homo-ness concern a desire for “assimilation into already constituted communities” (Homos 10). In playing the “homo” card, I am neither claiming an identity nor attempting to establish my own “critical authority” nor petitioning for inclusion or membership in any recognizable community, either for Beckett or for myself. Rather, I raise the question of “Beckett as homo” to join Bersani in the attempt to rethink “what we mean and what we expect from communication, and from community” (Homos 181). I want to examine how Beckett’s “determination to fail” or “cult of failure,” as well as his participation in “a radical modernity anxious to save art from the preemptive operations of institutionalized culture” (181), might align him with that “anticommunal mode of connectedness” (10) that Bersani designates as the antiessential essence of “homo-ness.” The contours of that alignment are what I will be examining throughout this essay. My examination will lead, finally, to an assertion of the politically salutary value of the way Beckett’s “determination to fail” not only resists literary or cultural “success” but also provides a possible point of resistance to the compulsorily heterosexual norms that subtend institutionalized culture’s very definitions of “the successful.” The term “straight queer” appears nowhere in Bersani’s work, but it does emerge either directly or by implication in some of the formulations of queer theory with which Bersani takes issue in Homos. In Bodies That Matter, for example, Judith Butler discusses how the word “queer” itself, once a slur, has lately become a “discursive rallying point” not only for some lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men, but also for “straights for whom the term expresses an affiliation with anti-homophobic politics” (230). In Making Things Perfectly Queer, Alexander Doty writes of “cases of straight queerness, and of other forms of queerness that might not be contained within existing categories or have reference to only one estab-

C U LT U R A L D R O P P I N G S

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lished category” (xvii-xix). Finally, Michael Warner, in his introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, writes: The preference for “queer” represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. [ . . . ] The insistence on “queer” [ . . . ] has the effect of pointing out a wide field of normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence. (xxvi)2

Though Bersani finds much to admire in queer commentaries such as these, in Homos he warns against what he considers the dangers of despecification and desexualization posed by the emergence of the term “queer.” Citing Warner’s appeal to queerness as “resistance to regimes of the normal,” Bersani writes, “This generous definition puts all resisters in the same queer bag—a universalizing move I appreciate but that fails to specify the sexual distinctiveness of the resistance” (Homos 71). Bersani himself, however, has already suggested the following about his preferred term, homo-ness: “If homosexuality is a privileged vehicle for homo-ness, the latter designates a mode of connectedness to the world that it would be absurd to reduce to sexual preference” (10). Thus an obvious problem arises here: if what Bersani calls “homo-ness” designates “a mode of connectedness” that can only absurdly be reduced to sexual preference, if homo-ness can even be said to be “relevant to love between the sexes” (147), involving a “mobility” that “should create a kind of community [ . . . ] that can never be settled, whose membership is always shifting [ . . . ] a community in which many straights should be able to find a place” (9), then what constitutes the sexual specificity of homo-ness? What distinguishes it—as a model for connection, community, and communication—from the overly generalized desexualizations of “queer”? And what kind of straight would find what kind of place within this unsettled community? Bersani asserts that it is ébranlement or “self-shattering” that is “intrinsic to the homo-ness in homosexuality.” Homo-ness, he says, is “an anti-identitarian identity” (Homos 101). Readers familiar with Bersani’s work will recognize his insistence on the intrinsic self-shattering of jouissance in general and on homosexuality in particular “as a beneficent crisis in selfhood” (Dean, “A Conversation” 3). In Homos, for example, Bersani writes that he calls “ jouissance ‘self-shattering’ in that it disrupts the ego’s coherence and dissolves its boundaries” (101) and in that it “works against the narcissism of a securely mapped ego” (125). Repeatedly figuring jouissance in terms of “self-loss” (96), “self-divestiture” (128),

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and “the joy of self-dissolution” (97), Bersani suggests that the “selfimpoverishing self-expansions” of jouissance “block the cultural discipline of identification” (125) and thus subvert the formation of the “self ” as “the precondition for registration and ser vice as a citizen” (125). Since citizenship is currently defined and produced not only heteronormatively but also within an ideologically naturalized system of private property relations, jouissance as self-shattering provides a model for an eroticized reconfiguration of the positive annulment of private property at the level of subjectivity itself, for “this self-divestiture is enacted as a willful pursuit of abjection, a casting away not only of possessions but also of all the attributes that constitute the self as a valuable property” (126). Thus, writes Bersani, “if a community were ever to exist in which it would no longer seem natural to define all relations as property relations (not only my money or my land, but also my country, my wife, my lover), we would first have to imagine a new erotics. Without that, all revolutionary activity will return, as we have seen it return over and over again, to relations of ownership and dominance” (128). Jouissance, then, becomes for Bersani both what Fredric Jameson calls “a figure for the transformation of social relations as a whole” (“Pleasure” 74) and an occasion for critiquing the antieroticizing tendencies in Marxist analysis itself, Jameson’s included.3 Given such a politically salutary edge, however, we might wonder why Bersani seems to connect the anti-identificatory self-shattering of jouissance with the homo-ness and not with the sex of homosexuality. Indeed, in his critique of the desexualized overgeneralizations of queer theory on the one hand, and his elaboration of homo-ness as “an impersonal sameness ontologically incompatible with analyzable egos” (Homos 125) on the other, the problem Bersani faces is, again, that of locating sexual specificity while at the same time avoiding an “absurd” reduction to sexual preference. That problem is at least partially resolved by the fact that for Bersani sexuality most specifically is self-shattering—or, rather, what Bersani values in sex, and in art, is the capacity of both to shatter the coherent self. Nothing is more crucial to Bersani’s project than his emphasis on the self-shattering capacities of both sexual and aesthetic experience. Tracing Bersani’s understanding of the self-shattering, antirelational, culturally nonviable propensities of sex and art, I turn to The Freudian Body. There Bersani joins an undomesticated or “collapsed” Freud in arguing that “the pleasurable unpleasurable tension of sexual excitement occurs when the body’s ‘normal’ range of sensation is exceeded, and when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow ‘beyond’ those compatible with psychic organi-


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zation” (38).4 This formulation allows Bersani to posit sexuality as “that which is intolerable to the structured self ” and to argue that “the distinguishing feature of infancy would be its susceptibility to the sexual. The polymorphously perverse nature of infantile sexuality would be a function of the child’s vulnerability to being shattered into sexuality” (38). Sexuality, then, is, as Bersani puts it, “a tautology for masochism” (39). Bersani even suggests that in its earliest incipience the self is called into being for the very purpose of its shattering, that the self is initially constituted so that sexuality would be given a structural coherence to dissolve. In Homos, however, Bersani is at pains to distinguish between the masochistic eroticizing of self-dissolution that he privileges and the complete erasure of the self that is literal death. For what Bersani’s inflections on psychoanalytic theory challenge us to imagine is “a nonsuicidal disappearance of the subject—or, in other terms, to dissociate masochism from the death drive” (Homos 99).5 As we shall see, this dissociation is crucial to what Bersani, in The Culture of Redemption, calls his “general ethical-erotic project” (3): the project of allowing sex to provide a site of resistance to “the tyranny of the self,” a provision that is made in the name of “non-violence” (4). Understand that the “redemption” in Bersani’s title is not what saves us from violence but what propels us toward it. For the culture of redemption, which depends on “fundamental assumptions about authoritative identities, about identity as authority” (3), is complicit if not identical with “the culture of death” (46). Its fundamental drive is toward power, not (precisely not) in Nietzsche’s transformational sense of the will to power, but in the sense—which Nietzsche himself was the first to expose—of a will toward mastery that negates or even destroys “life” in the name of “truth.” As Bersani writes: The culture of redemption might be thought of as the creation of what Nietzsche called the theoretical man—who Nietzsche claimed first appeared in the West in the person of Socrates—the man who attributes to thought the power to “correct” existence. [ . . . ] The redemptive aesthetic asks us to consider art as a corrective of life, but the corrective virtue of works of art depends on a misreading of art as philosophy. Art, as Plato rightly saw, cannot have the unity, the identity, the stability of truth; it does not belong to the world of perfectly intelligible ideas. A redemptive aesthetic based on the negation of life (in Nietzschean terms, on a nihilism that invents a “true world” as an alternative to an inferior and depreciated world of mere appearance) must also negate art. (Culture 2)

For Nietzsche, negating art amounts to negating life because life fundamentally is art.6 Thus a will to truth—as Bersani puts it, a “corrective

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will”—that devalues art or (much the same thing) attempts to enlist art in its ser vice is for Nietzsche motivated at its deepest level by what Freud will later call the death drive, but by what Nietzsche in The Gay Science was already calling “a principle hostile to life and destructive—‘a will to truth’—that might be a concealed will to death” (282).7 “Life is never identical to itself,” as Luce Irigaray observes in her book on Nietzsche, “but death is” (Marine 41), an observation that returns us to the question of identity, its authorization, and the ethical value for Bersani of its shattering or dissolution in sex. For if everywhere in his writing Bersani privileges a masochistic jouissance in which “the self is exuberantly discarded” (“Rectum” 218), then this “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self ” (“Rectum,” 217) has the value of potentially disrupting narratives of cultural authority that not only depend upon but also produce identities, narratives that depend upon the maintenance of “the person as an object of cultural surveillance” (Homos 145). Instances of jouissance provide “micro-dissonances, micro-points of resistance” (Homos 74), sites of unavailability to institutional culture’s “legitimizing plots” (Culture 4), and, crucially, such provision is inseparable from “the appeal of powerlessness” (Homos 95) that is inherent in jouissance. For “in this self-shattering, the ego renounces its power over the world” (Homos 94-95). As Bersani writes: Overwhelmed by stimuli in excess of the ego structures capable of resisting or binding them, the infant may survive that imbalance only by fi nding it exciting. So the masochistic thrill of being invaded by a world we have not yet learned to master might be an inherited disposition, the result of an evolutionary conquest. This, in any case, is what Freud appears to be moving toward as a defi nition of the sexual: an aptitude for the defeat of power by plea sure, the human subject’s potential for a jouissance in which the subject is momentarily undone. (Homos 100)

The ethical importance of jouissance, then, is its potential to defeat power by pleasure, to overthrow the thanatical formation of the hyperbolic self by means of an anti-identificatory eroticism. Clearly, however, the ethics in question here are not produced by virtue of an individual’s intentional conformity to a prescribed system of laws governing thoughts or behaviors: all that would be morality. Rather, Bersanian ethics are the secondary and largely unintentional result of an involuntary engagement with libidinal energies that have no teleologically narrativizable purpose whatsoever. And yet, happily, the ethical effect—nonviolence—is produced. Thus we are invited to exuberantly discard our identities and


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radically devalue ourselves both for no reason at all and for a very good (or perhaps, in the Nietzschean sense, noble) reason—because it is precisely “the sacrosanct value of selfhood [that] accounts for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements.” The self, writes Bersani, “is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence” (Culture 4, “Rectum” 222). Despite the generally somber quality of his writing, then, Bersani’s main object of ethical and political hostility is the deadly seriousness of identity, of sociality—indeed, of meaning itself. This demeaning, anticommunal, anti-identificatory hostility is what motivates Bersani’s valuation of sex as self-shattering. For if sex—specifically for Bersani a man’s participation in receptive anal eroticism—is demeaning (because from the perspective of the dominant culture it figures the participant in a position of abject powerlessness traditionally reserved for “the feminine”), then we should value sex all the more, says Bersani, precisely because “the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it” (“Rectum” 222). Moreover, Bersani’s valuation of the demeaning capacities of sex extends to art as well, or at least to those works of art that do not work, that refuse to work, that resist institutional culture’s imperative that they attempt to dominate life and redeem history. For Bersani, this imperative depends on a “tendency to think of cultural symbolizations as essentially reparative,” on “the notion of art as salvaging somehow damaged experience” (Culture 7). According to the corrective aesthetics of redemptive culture, “Experience destroys; art restores” (Culture 14). But Bersani reads this pastoral “salvaging” of what Adorno in Minima Moralia calls “damaged life” as a deeper savaging, a betrayal and a trivialization, rooted in a “deep horror of life,” or perhaps in what Nietzsche refers to as ressentiment—a “redemption” ultimately more damaging than damaged life itself. In a crucial passage in The Culture of Redemption, Bersani makes explicit the connection between a sexuality that is inimical to culturally produced personhood and an art that refuses the reparations of institutional morality and truth. Sex is self-inimical for Bersani because the very notion of the self as an autonomous unity is made possible only through antisexual sublimations and repressions. Thus sexuality is consecrated as violence by virtue of the very definition of culture as an unceasing effort to make life whole, to repair a world attacked by desire. A fundamentally meaningless culture thus ennobles gravely damaged experience. Or, to put this in other terms, art redeems

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the catastrophe of history. To play this role, art must preserve what might be called moral monumentality—a requirement that explains, I believe, much of the mistrust in the modern period of precisely those modern works that have more or less violently rejected any such edifying and petrifying functions. Claims for the high morality of art may conceal a deep horror of life. And yet nothing is perhaps more frivolous than that horror, since it carries within it the conviction that, because of the achievements of culture, the disasters of history somehow do not matter. Everything can be made up, can be made over again, and the absolute singularity of human experience—the source of both its tragedy and its beauty—is thus dissipated in the trivializing nobility of a redemption through art. (Culture 22)

As Yeats puts it in one of his more antimonumental moments, “Nothing has life except the incomplete.”8 In the name, then, of experiential singularity and life’s constitutive failure and incompletion, Bersani values those artists of damage, devaluation, and impoverishment who “defy us to take them seriously,” who “won’t let us believe that they have been successful artists or told us some important truths” (Homos 181). These quotations come from that fi nal page of Homos, and the references are, again, to Beckett and Genet, to Beckett’s aforementioned “cult of failure,” and Genet’s “scatological aesthetic” or “cult of waste.” One could argue that these “cults” of abject failure and scatological waste are equally valuable if not interchangeable for Bersani in terms of their potential for re sistance to regimes of aesthetic monumentality and hyperbolic personhood. One could, that is, at least note a connection between failure and waste that can be marked by my favorite German word, Durchfall, which to my knowledge Bersani nowhere employs but which signifies simultaneously failure, falling through or collapse, and “involuntarily emptying the bowels” (Theweleit 397). In a chapter of Homosexual Desire titled “Capitalism, the Anus, and the Family,” Guy Hocquenghem allows us to understand what is at stake in the fear of Durchfall-ing when he notes the way “personal hygiene” figures as the cultural foundation of “successful” (i.e., heterocapitalist) personhood. Hocquenghem writes: “Anal cleanliness” [is] the formation in the child of the small responsible person; and there is a relation between “private cleanliness” and “private ownership” [propreté privée and propriété privée] which is not merely an association of words but something inevitable. [ . . . ] Control of the anus is the precondition of taking responsibility for property. The ability to “hold back” or evacuate faeces is the necessary moment of the constitution


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of the self. “To forget oneself ” is the most ridiculous and distressing kind of social accident there is, the ultimate outrage to the human person. [ . . . ] “To forget oneself ” is to risk joining up, through the flux of excrement, with the non-differentiation of desire. (84-85)

With Hocquenghem’s comments in mind, we might note the way Beckett, in Malone Dies, displays a sense of impropriety that brings together—so as better to disperse, in a moment of analized forgetfulness—the terms of both personal possession and self-possession: In the meantime nothing is mine any more, according to my definition, if I remember rightly, except my exercise-book, my lead and the French pencil, assuming it really exists. I did well to stop my inventory, it was a happy thought. I feel less weak, perhaps they fed me while I slept. I see the pot, the one that is not full, it is lost to me too. I shall doubtless be obliged to forget myself in the bed, as when I was a boy. (Three Novels 255)

In terms of Bersani’s hostility to seriousness, success, and sociality itself, what links Beckett’s self-forgetful Durchfall, his “determination to fail,” with Genet’s invitation to view works of literature not as “epistemological and moral monuments” but rather as “cultural droppings” (Homos 181) is precisely the abject, marginal status of both Genet himself as “gay outlaw” and the Beckettian figure of the “hero” as the outcast, the self-forgetting, the expelled.9 And, again, this radical and rectally inflected embrace of self-abjection inscribes what might be called a profoundly superficial—in Nietzsche’s sense, profound because superficial—political value.10 As Bersani glosses Genet, “In a society where oppression is structural, constitutive of sociality itself, only what that society throws off—its mistakes or its pariahs—can serve the future” (Homos 180). Bersani’s emphasis on the intrinsic self-shattering of sex helps explain his repeated formulations of homo-ness as both “self-divestiture” (Homos 128) and, somewhat more disturbingly, a rejection of or indifference to the very personhood of the other (an indifference that, like the impropriety of self-forgetting, joins with what Hocquenghem calls “the non-differentiation of desire”). Similarly, Bersani’s notion that oppression is not only structural to society but also “constitutive of sociality itself ” helps explain his otherwise perplexing insistence on “the anti-relationality inherent in all homo-ness” (164), on homo-ness as “failure to accept relation with any given social arrangement” (171), as “a potentially revolutionary inaptitude—perhaps inherent in gay desire—for sociality as it is known” (76).

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Finally, this emphasis on inaptitude, on self-divestiture and antisociality, may also help position Beckett’s writing as a “vehicle” for “homo-ness”— perhaps not a “privileged vehicle,” or, given the steady and aggressive supination of Beckettian bodies, even a particularly mobile one, but vehicular, vehicular, nonetheless. For I can imagine no writing more indifferent to personhood—the author’s, the narrator’s, the narrated’s, or the reader’s—than Beckett’s. Nor can I imagine any “persons” more radically socially inept than Beckett’s abject, expelled figures. As “characters,” they arguably display a more profound, more constitutive inaptitude than the homosexual Nazi soldiers from Genet’s Funeral Rite, upon whom Bersani dwells and who have themselves accepted “given social arrangements” at least to the point of having become Nazi soldiers. It is difficult to imagine, say, Beckett’s Molloy ever taking identity seriously long enough to perform that particular feat of sociality. Bersani writes that Genet’s soldiers enact “a revolutionary destructiveness which would surely dissolve the rigidly defined sociality of Nazism itself ” (Homos 171). And yet that dissolution is achieved only after the fact of their already enacted inscription into and complicity with that particular form of social rigidity, whereas, again, it would be difficult to imagine Beckettian figures, who never experience any specific moment of ébranlement but are seemingly “shattered” from the get-go, ever being so inscribed. It could even be argued—and such, I believe, is the main thrust of Adorno’s privileging of Beckett’s negativity—that the value of Beckett’s writing lies in its development (through a degenerative minimalization) of a discursive unavailability to fascism. In any case, with the phrase “taking identity seriously” above, I am both referring to what Bersani says in Homos while discussing the contemporary question of gays in the military—to wit, “Nothing is more inimical to military life than [ . . . ] the invaluable lesson that identity is not serious” (Homos 18)—and, I hope, making an important political point about the (ref )usevalue of Beckett’s resistant writing: “the unnameable” is finally and thoroughly the unenlistable. Moreover, though Beckett may not consistently figure this socially inept and unenlistable self-divestiture in terms as conspicuously sexual as Genet’s in the descriptions of anal intercourse and rimming that Bersani cites, Beckett, as we have already begun to see, does often privilege the anus as a site of both self-shattering and indifference to personhood, thus making apparent the link between his cult of failure and what Bersani considers an ethically salient aesthetics of waste. Beckett, that is, in his determined Durchfall, serves the future by virtue of his very refusal to serve the future, by his defying us to take him seriously—a refusal and a defiance that he repeatedly figures rectally. Bersani himself marks Beckett’s anal emphasis in The Freudian Body, wherein he writes that


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thought in Beckett is irresistibly drawn to that part of the body which seems most accurately to reflect its own dilemma. I refer of course to the anus which, like the mind, expels from the body substances which the body both produces and treats like waste. Thought, far from providing a guarantee of being in this radically non-Cartesian world, is the excrement of being. Anonymous and limitless, it passes through a mind which, however, can resist the fluency of the thought which it receives, block its passage, by an almost pedagogical demonstration of mind’s affinity with the body. [ . . . ] [In Beckett’s writing] the forms of rationality are constantly being “dis-formulated” by the corruptive power of what might be called a carnal irony. (Freudian 9)

What strikes me about this passage is how closely the anonymity and infinity that Bersani ascribes to Beckett’s excrementalization of being answer some of his descriptions of homo-ness (and, more specifically, of cruising) in Homos; or, again, how closely the disformulating and corruptive power of Beckett’s carnal irony resembles the demeaning capacities of Bersanian sex. Indeed, as I think should be evident by now, Bersani values Beckett’s writing in much the same way and for much the same reason that he advocates we value sexuality: both demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem them. This demeaning carnal irony dispenses with or disformulates both the sanctity of personhood and the social imperatives of culturally viable art. It refuses to dominate life or redeem history and by that very refusal fails to provide any sanction for violence. Two passages from Molloy serve to exemplify this disser vice. In the first, the narrator, who thinks his name is Molloy, has been “hailed” by a policeman, who asks to see some identification papers. Your papers, he said, I knew it a moment later. Not at all I said, not at all. Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers. Now the only papers I carry with me are bits of newspaper to wipe myself, you understand, when I have a stool. Oh I don’t say I wipe myself every time I have a stool, no, but I like to be in a position to do so, if I have to. Nothing strange about that, it seems to me. In a panic I took this paper from my pocket and thrust it under his nose. (Three Novels 20)

Now, although there is no textual indication one way or the other, it has always been my pleasure when reading this passage to imagine that the paper Molloy thrusts under the policeman’s nose is soiled. It would, after all, be rather unlike Molloy to throw away such paper simply because he has used it to wipe his ass. In any case, if Genet in Bersani’s estimation “defiantly [ . . . ] addresses society’s interpellations of him”

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(Homos 161), Molloy’s defiance here is cast in terms highly redolent of the very theoretical “scene” from which the Althusserian word “interpellation” derives (so that one might half-seriously or half-assedly posit that Althusser “got” that scene from reading Beckett). But Molloy’s failure to produce on demand a clean and proper proof of identity, his refusal to establish personhood before the law, is rather a far cry from that 180-degree turn in affirmative and obedient response to a policeman’s hailing that Althusser describes as the most appropriate metaphor of successful ideological interpellation.11 Rather, Molloy carnally ironizes “the pleasure of the text” by showing his behind to the political father.12 He marks a Bataillean heterology, rather than Marxist science, as the “outside” of ideological subjection.13 Of course, what Molloy “shows” the policeman here is not his behind but rather (at least, in my desired reading) its product, which is itself smeared upon, to the point of being conflated with, a specific sort of social discourse: newspaper print. This conflation, however, is not a sign of some high cultural disdain for journalism that would equate mass cultural inscription with excrement; rather, Beckett is revealing one of the most important lessons he learned from Joyce: the way analized desublimations of language subvert the (predominantly phallic) monuments of intellect that language itself attempts to erect, thus facilitating what Bersani in another context calls “the destablization of self initiated by the act of writing” (Culture 12).14 If “thought in Beckett is irresistibly drawn to that part of the body which seems most accurately to reflect its own dilemma” (Freudian 9), then such irresistible attraction is that very dilemma: “thought” is drawn toward an abject corporeal opening, the repression or sublimation of which is the very condition of possibility for thought itself. Thus the self-sufficiency of “thought” is always threatened by the abject materiality of the very written trace that would inscribe it. When Beckett, in the passage cited above, juxtaposes the words “to wipe myself ” with “you understand,” he effectively foregrounds the constitutive tension between understanding and that which understanding must abject in order to be understanding, a juxtaposition echoed in Malone Dies by the name “Saposcat,” which joins the Latin sapere (to be wise) with the root of the word “scatology.” Setting down identity in scat, Beckett pushes the very structure of cognition toward the brink of its radical Durchfall. The second passage that interests me occurs later in the novel. Molloy is musing on a past sexual encounter with a woman named Lousse, and he begins to wonder whether she were, in fact, a woman at all: “Lousse was a woman of an extraordinary flatness, physically speaking of course, to such a point that I am still wondering this evening, in the compara-


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tive silence of my last abode, if she was not a man or at least an androgyne” (Three Novels 56). After considering for a moment all the evidence he can muster, which of course is neither abundant nor conclusive, Molloy grows impatient and exclaims, “Don’t be tormenting yourself, Molloy, man or woman, what does it matter?” (56). Molloy then recounts his first sexual encounter, with a woman named Ruth, or perhaps Edith: She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop. A mug’s game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so. She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from behind. It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago. It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently. I wonder what she meant exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn’t tell you. [ . . . ] Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it. (Three Novels 56–57)

One might well ask how this feeble encounter qualifies as jouissance. It certainly seems demeaning enough, but it falls noticeably short of any exuberantly sexual self-discard. Indeed, Molloy seems pretty much to have been divested of self well before having arrived at Ruth’s rectum. And this pre-self-divestiture may mark a tension between Bersanian and Beckettian self-shattering. For Bersani, ébranlement as beneficent crisis in selfhood may be said to depend upon a specific moment of sexual practice or erotic exuberance, whereas for Beckett, any sexual moment, such as the one with Edith, only underscores a dissolution of self that has always already taken place. Just as Molloy could not easily be imagined “getting himself together” enough to don a Nazi uniform, so we might have trouble imagining him gathering, conjuring, or “getting up” enough of a coherent ego to be able to discard or disperse that ego through sex. This tension between Bersanian and Beckettian self-shattering may trouble the concept of a homo-ness that, if it can only absurdly be reduced to sexual preference, would still seem indentured to a specific and specifically sexual moment. Foregrounded is the discrepancy between homo-ness as literal and homo-ness as literary or metaphorical, a discrepancy also brought into relief by Bersani’s use of the word “vehicle,” itself prominent in the technical description of metaphor. But perhaps it

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is with recourse to metaphor that the tension is provisionally resolved, for if the Bersanian tenor is antiredemptive, antimonumental selfdivestiture, then both literal and figurative homo-ness, both sex and art—as well as different versions of sex in art (Genet’s soldiers as opposed to Molloy’s toiling and moiling)—can serve as vehicles for that tenor. What matters is that Molloy’s indifference to sexual difference (note how he continues to use feminine pronouns even after providing Ruth/Edith with a set of balls) does effectively refuse to reproduce personhood or sociality—since in culture as presently institutionalized both personhood and sociality are predicated on sexual difference—and that it does so in terms relevant to, even if in the aforementioned tension with, Bersani’s ethical-erotic project. Moreover, this indifference leads us to one strain of Bersani’s argument in Homos that I have yet to discuss at any length: his suggestion that homo-ness is “relevant to love between the sexes,” that “a good degree of homo-ness in heterosexuality could go far to calm the fears that nourish misogyny” (Homos 147). Bersani proposes that “universal homo-ness can allay the terror of difference, which generally gives rise to a hopeless dream of eliminating difference entirely. A massively heteroized perception of the universe gives urgency to a narcissistic project that would reduce—radically, with no surplus of alterity—the other to the same” (146). Opposing this heteroized, hyperbolicized narcissism that attempts to abolish a traumatizing otherness, Bersani advocates a “self-effacing narcissism” that “tolerates [ . . . ] difference because of its very indifference to [ . . . ] difference” (150). He suggests that “new reflection on homo-ness could lead us to a salutary devalorizing of difference—or, more exactly, to a notion of difference not as a trauma to be overcome (a view that, among other things, nourishes antagonistic relations between the sexes), but rather as a nonthreatening supplement to sameness” (7). Granted, one could argue from a feminist perspective that Molloy’s indifference, and perhaps even Bersani’s, simply masks an unadmitted underlying traumatization at the very thought of feminine sexuality.15 Indeed, a point to stress concerning Bersani’s “anti-personalism” is that shatterings of personhood and abrogations of citizenship have a salutary political valence largely if not exclusively for those to whom the dominant culture has long afforded the rights of personhood and citizenship. Politically, the idea that the hyperbolically heteromasculine or phallocentric self can or should be exuberantly discarded in the name of an ethical-erotic project of nonviolence is very attractive. However, for those who have historically been denied or excluded from the position of autonomous subjectivity, there may be somewhat less cause for exuberance. Indiffer-


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ence to the personhood of women has long been integral to the way hyperbolically masculine straight men have sex. Bersani himself has remarked upon the tensions between theories of gay male desire, including his own speculations, and feminism, noting particularly the way such articulations sometimes necessarily leave women out. If, however, it is arguably “better” from a feminist perspective to be excluded or ignored than to be the subject of the aggressively heteroizing search-and-destroy campaign Bersani describes, perhaps he is correct to assert that a nonthreatened indifference to sexual difference is preferable to a fear-driven impulse to eradicate it, and thus that a degree of homo-ness could work to assuage the anxieties that nourish misogyny. In any case, the Beckettian voice, though in no discernable way feminist, does seem relatively unconcerned with, unthreatened by, and hence tolerant of, any number of possibilities: that Molloy had entered Ruth’s, or Edith’s, vagina, or that he had actually entered a man’s rectum, that Lousse had actually been a man, or even that Molloy himself might be a woman (for the last sentence can be inflected or repunctuated to suggest just that: “Don’t torment yourself—Molloy, man or woman, what does it matter?”). But another question might be posed here: Beckett, homo or no, straight or straight queer, what can that possibly matter? I can suggest only that the question matters to the extent that the question of the straight queer is itself important, and that for me at least it is. If Bersani is right in asserting that to “put into question sociality itself [ . . . ] may be the most radical political potential of queerness” (Homos 75), then it hardly seems irrelevant—indeed, it might even seem urgent—to ask in what ways otherwise heterosexual writers and critics can participate in queerness, can help “make the world queerer than ever” (Warner xxvii), can help “celebrate the ‘homo-ness’ in us all,” precisely by questioning sociality and its constitutive categorical unit, the person. If Beckett’s demeaning carnal ironies are valuable weapons in Bersani’s attack on institutional culture and its corrective will, Beckett’s self-forgetful Durchfalls are equally valuable if not indispensable tools in his dismantling of the value of personhood and of the violently heteronormative societal regime that personhood both leans upon and supports. For if “failure is the ideal of nearly all of Beckett’s characters” (Impoverishment 11), then failure to reproduce “the person” might be regarded as the underlying ideal of that ideal, or at least as one of the queerest elements of Beckett’s “impoverishing” art. He was, so to speak, a nonbreeder in more ways than one.16 As Beckett himself puts it, “To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail. [ . . . ] [F]ailure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living” (Disjecta 145).

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Actually, there are three connected areas of failure that are important both for Bersani’s valuation of Beckett’s writing and for his thematizations of homo-ness: failure to relate, failure to narrate, and failure to reproduce “the person.” I will end this essay by considering them in that order. The failure to relate: For Bersani, “successful” relations—between persons, between subjects and objects, perhaps even between words—are always at least implicitly successful sedimentations and recuperations of cultural narratives of monumental mastery and power. Thus one cannot resist power without questioning the very terms of relationality, community, and sociality that the culture of redemption ordains. As Kaja Silverman tells Bersani, “You valorize the moment of dissolution or ‘shattering’ because you cannot imagine anything on the other side of that shattering except a reversion to the same. And it is that reversion—that unavoidable recuperation—which you seek to inhibit” (Dean, “A Conversation” 4). Since Bersani agrees with Silverman’s assessment, it is worth noting how its last word connects to the title of his chapter on Beckett in Arts of Impoverishment: “Inhibited Reading.” It is, for Bersani, precisely the reversion, on the other side of shattering, to an oppressively heteroized sameness that reading Beckett can inhibit, particularly, it might be argued, because Beckettian self-dissolution does not depend upon any specifically sexual moment (what is at issue here is not sexual specificity, of which there is plenty in Beckett, but the temporal punctuality of the “moment” itself, which in Beckett is lacking). If antirelationality is inherent in all homo-ness, then Beckett’s “contagious destruction of relations” and “subversion of relationality” (Impoverishment 24, 25) figure productively in that inherent inaptitude. For Bersani, the inestimable value of the destruction and subversion (or, as I would prefer to call it, desedimentation) of relationality is that it offers us a representation of “the genesis of relations,” that it allows us to “imagine starting again,” that it alludes to the possibility of “permanently renewable projects” (Impoverishment 26, 27, 91). In a sort of “queer mind, beginner’s mind” formulation, Bersani writes: To recognize the original truth of this unrelated state, as well as its inescapable historical consequences, may be the precondition for any viable reconstruction of social relations. For such a reconstruction will have to take into account the persistence of unrelatedness, the priority of unrelatedness in the social itself, a priority that perhaps only an art removed from culturally inspired goals of relationality can remind us. (Impoverishment 27)

But failure to relate is itself related, intimately, to the failure to narrate; or, rather, the failure to inscribe oneself into a teleological narration subtended by “culturally inspired goals.” In The Freudian Body, Bersani


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writes of “a certain trend to expel or bypass sexuality in psychoanalytic thought unless it has been teleologically narrativized” (64). One could reverse this observation, and assert that teleological narrative itself depends upon the expulsion—or at least the repressive structuration—of sexuality, the defeat of pleasure by power, to reach its culturally inspired goals. That assertion would be supported by narratologists like Roland Barthes and Peter Brooks, who, in locating the figure of Oedipus lurking behind or intricated with the very structure of narrative, allow us to understand the analogy between, on the one hand, the repressive orga nization of the singular intensities of component instincts and of polymorphous perversity into a unimorphous, Oedipalized normality, and, on the other, the repressive organization of disparate textual elements into an anxiety-assuaging narrative or syntactical coherence. As Barthes writes, “It may be significant that it is at the same moment (around the age of three) that the little human ‘invents’ at once sentence, narrative, and the Oedipus” (Image 124).17 But given that Oedipus is precisely the figurehead of heteroized normativity, the analogy between sexual and textual repressive structurations allows us to posit a potentially queer “resistance to regimes of the normal” in what Lyotard calls the postmodern “incredulity towards metanarratives” (xxiv)—an incredulity, which is for Lyotard not unrelated to masochism18 —or in antinarrative or antisyntactical textual strategies per se. Such would seem to be the motivation behind Bersani’s language in those moments when he privileges Beckett’s antinarrative strategies. For example, Bersani writes that language falls into the “disrepute” necessary for a desirable failure of expression when verbal sequences can no longer be totalized. Continuity—the bridges among words that disguise the holes between them—depends on a narrative mode of reading or listening. Units move toward, work toward their unity, their indivisibility, and in a sense language is sanctified as expression only by a certain disregard for the particularity or discreteness of words. (Just enough “disregard” so that a unity is not menaced by the disproportionate intensity of its individual units.) (Impoverishment 23)

Or, again, The cultural prestige of art as a repository of wisdom [ . . . ] may depend both on the use of narrative art as the model for such claims and on the repression of other, nonrepresentational contacts, or frictions, between consciousness and the world. This repression enhances the availability of art to a cultural usefulness or domestication, an availability that all Beckett’s writing resists. (Impoverishment 89)

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There are abundant clues here that Bersani fi nds quite important the relation between narrative’s repression of other modes of contact between consciousness and the world and heteronormative culture’s repression of other modes of contact or friction between bodies than those its legitimating narratives serve to lubricate. Just as language— specifically, the sentence—is “sanctified as expression only by a certain disregard for the particularity or discreteness of words,” so sex is “sanctified” and “redeemed” only by that disregard for the “disproportionate intensity” of component drives that helps orga nize and compel libido toward the “goal” of genital fi nality. In other words, it is not only God that we are not getting rid of to the extent that we still believe in grammar.19 The culture of redemption would have us ignore the demeaning or dehiscent holes between words, as well as any unsupervised interest in our own and each other’s corporeal holes, in the various ways our bodies open to each other and to the world. And since the cultural goal of narrative supervision is to guide us toward reproductive sexual/textual relations, it is no accident that the failures of relation and narration dump us back into the third area of failure. The failure to reproduce “the person”: after all, one can scarcely fail to perceive how only a generalized, heteronormative, and deeply embedded conceptualization of “success” makes such a phrase even possible. Here we might imagine such commonplaces as what the straight world considers the “sterility” of gay and lesbian sex, its failure to reproduce biological life, or the tendency of some straight parents, on discovering that their kid is queer, to internalize anger and guilt in the form of wondering where they, the parents themselves, “failed” or “went wrong.” But we might also note, in a way that Beckett himself perhaps could not, the specter of heteronormativity lurking behind the “good housekeeping” and the “living” that he contemptuously posits as the result and goal of the “successful” art he derides. Given such a (dis)position, we might posit a valuably antirelational relation between Beckett’s unnameably daring failure and the love that dare not speak its name. We might find in Beckett’s writing a “resistance to regimes of the normal” that is, after all, sexually specific—sometimes absurdly so—without being absurdly reducible to sexual preference. If questioning “sociality itself ” can be considered “the most radical political potential of queerness” (Homos 75); if “queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant”; if it is “an identity without an essence” (Halperin 62); if “queerness can never define an identity [but] can only ever disturb one” (Edelman, No Future 17); and if, finally, Beckett’s writing questions or collapses or disturbs sociality, relationality, narratibility,


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and identity as relentlessly as that of any of the “really” gay “gay outlaws” that Bersani discusses, then Beckett, I would close by offering, is potentially just as radical, just as “queer,” just as much of a “homo,” as anyone or all of us. Personally speaking, what other artist dares to fail so well?


Essay

5

IS WHAT YOU WANT SOMETHING YOU CAN DISCUSS? Short of something which says no to the phallic function, man has no chance of enjoying the body of the woman, in other words, of making love. That is the conclusion of analytic experience. It does not stop him from desiring the woman in any number of ways, even when this condition is not fulfilled. Not only does he desire her but he does all kinds of things to her which bear a remarkable resemblance to love. Lacan, Seminar XX Scottie: I love you, Madeleine. Madeleine: I love you too . . . too late . . . too late. Scottie: No, no. We’re together. Madeleine: No. It’s too late. Hitchcock’s Vertigo Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn’t tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That’s what bothers me sometimes. Beckett, Molloy It all goes to show that with a little effort even the word “love” can be made to sound ominous. Hitchcock, to Truffaut

Spreading the Cheeks of Interpretation

Be forewarned. This is all going to end very badly, and with a horrible play on words, a play perhaps all the more horrible for being indebted to

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a few notorious Lacanian slogans but intended to reveal what Lacan considers horrible, even fatal, about words themselves: namely, the way they sustain themselves by murdering what they name (Lacan writes that the linguistic symbol “first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” [Écrits 262]), and, correspondingly, the way they endlessly perpetuate desire and impel us to play our parts (at least in part) by forbidding us “to play” (Lacan writes that “jouissance is prohibited to whoever speaks, as such” [Écrits 696]). The word jouissance (from the French jouir, which means “to play,”or “to come”) signifies in Lacanese no simple pleasure but rather an excessive “form of enjoyment so intense as to be barely distinguishable from suffering and pain” (Dean, Beyond Sexuality 271), a self-shattering sexual ecstasy cum trauma that signification itself both prohibits to the speaking subject and protects that subject from ever “really” experiencing, ever directly experiencing as (or in the) real. For Lacan, that is, the signifier “saves” the subject from encountering “the traumatic real of sex” (Beyond 109), but at the same time the very imperative to signify—emerging as language’s law, scissoring word from thing—cuts or tears whomever speaks as such out of the formless fabric of immediately lived experience and “verifies the structure of the subject as a discontinuity with the real” (Écrits 678). In this sense, making “symbolic” sense allows the subject to take its “meaningful” (i.e., properly sexuated) place in social “reality” but also makes making or being in “real” love impossible. What can we ask Alfred Hitchcock about this Lacanian impossibility?1 There are some choice bits of dialogue in the three films that I will consider here—Spellbound, Rear Window, and Vertigo—that nicely underscore Lacan’s arguments about the sacrifice of sex to sense, of the real to discursively mediated reality, of jouissance to the symbolic order. In the initial sequences of Spellbound, for example, we could read the barrage of texts and textual references that Mary Carmichael (Rhonda Fleming) and Dr. Fleurot (John Emory) aim at Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman)—Mary literally throws a book at Constance, while Fleurot merely says, “I’d like to throw a book at you,” and, after his hot kiss fails to thaw out her frozen puss, says, “It’s rather like embracing a textbook,” and so on—as thematizing what Thomas Hyde calls the film’s “classic opposition of book knowledge versus experiential knowledge” (154–55). But we could also follow Robert Samuels in taking these missives to the letter of the film’s title, which for him alludes less to the hypnosis that was one of Freud’s abandoned ur-methods of psychoanalysis than to the symbolic order itself as both an ordering of symbols and the order to symbolize: we are, that is, bound (like libidinal cathexes) to

IS WHAT YOU WANT . . .

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and by “spelling,” just as we are bound (and determined) to spell (if not spit) ourselves out. In other words, our most intimately personal and corporeal experiences, to the extent that they are indeed person-al or person-able (i.e., assimilable to personhood), have always already been put into extimate writing.2 In Rear Window, when Stella (Thelma Ritter) interrogates L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) about his desire (or apparent nondesire) for Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) she accuses him of “hormone deficiency,” proclaims his abnormality—when Jeff says he doesn’t want to marry Lisa, Stella flatly declares “that’s not normal”—and responds to his admission that Lisa is “everything but” what he wants with the question “Is what you want something you can discuss?” Though perhaps alluding to “the love that dare not speak its name,” Stella’s query also spells out what Lacan considers a more universally anthropogenetic problem, namely, that “the moment at which desire is humanized is also that at which the child is born into language” (Écrits 262).3 Though at some specific historical junctures some modalities of desire are surely more legitimately speakable than others, the condition of language as such is such that what any subject wants, desires, or lacks is brought into being as lost object/cause of desire by the very imperative to discuss. “It” (the Lacanian objet a) is “something” that the speaking subject as such can only ever discuss, or put into discourse, and, by discussing, never fully or “really” have. In other words (always ever in other words), “it” is the leftover, the remains of “what happens to the human organism in the process of subjectification—when, that is, language impacts the body” (Dean, Beyond 264).4 Finally—speaking of language’s impact on the body—the necessary substitution of only ever partial articulation for full enjoyment could not be more conspicuously troped than in the following portion from Vertigo: When Madeleine (Kim Novak) returns to Scottie’s (James Stewart’s) apartment to thank him for having fished her out of San Francisco Bay, she discreetly alludes to the fact that after the rescue he had stripped off all her wet clothes and underwear and put her naked body into his bed (with her feigning unconsciousness all the while), and offers that his seeing her so bare-assed “must have been very embarrassing.” Scottie starts to chirp that on the contrary he “enjoyed” the experience but then hangs fire, censors himself, denies enjoyment, breaks off in the middle the very word “enjoyed,” and, after a pause, settles for saying that he enjoyed . . . “talking” with Madeleine. These examples suggest that Hitchcock knew, if not too much, then at least a thing or two, not only about what Lee Edelman calls “the mutually substitutive relation between killing and fucking” (No Future

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176n23)—note Truffaut’s famous observation that Hitchcock filmed love scenes “like murder scenes” (345) and vice versa—but also about the inextricability and incommensurability between lethal speech and erotic enjoyment, textual and carnal knowledge, making sense and making love. Moreover, they suggest that what Hitchcock excessively understood is fundamentally compatible with Lacan’s most exorbitant lessons about sex and death, desire and excess, and all the intricately extimate ins and outs of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. To misappropriate Tim Dean’s words, Hitchcock’s “emphasis on the privative aspects of symbolic existence comports well with Lacan’s description of the signifier’s mortifying effects on human life” (Beyond 20).5 Actually, though I am not exactly mortified to say so, Dean is not addressing Hitchcock at all here, or anywhere else in the book Beyond Sexuality from which I quote. But then Robin Wood is probably not thinking about Lacan in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, when he comments on Hitchcock’s understanding of “the impossibility of successful human relations in an ideological system that constructs men and women in hopelessly incompatible roles” (378). But if Wood is hardly Lacanian in his treatment of Hitchcock, his observation nonetheless resonates with one of Lacan’s boldest assertions or “bombshell expressions” (Fink 104) about the (hetero)sexual relation itself: to wit, there isn’t one. I of course allude here to Lacan’s infamous announcement that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship” (Seminar XX 12), a claim I would like to unpack at some length before attempting to demonstrate the different ways Hitchcock’s films dramatize and support it. To begin with, we should understand Lacan’s claim in the context of the difference just discussed between, on the one hand, “the traumatic real of sex” and, on the other, “human reality” as what Lacan calls a “montage of the imaginary and the symbolic” (Seminar XIV November 16, 1966). If sex is located, so to speak, in the unspeakable real, speaking subjects as such are ensconced in the imaginary/symbolic montage called social reality; thus, barring some radical rupture or unsuturable cut in that montage, there is no sexual relation for or between speaking subjects, between persons. Dean explains that there is no sexual relation at the imaginary level “because persons connect with each other only by way of mediating images, illusions of gender” (Beyond 83), and he offers that “there is no sexual relation at the symbolic level because each subject couples with the signifier of the Other, rather than with another subject. In other words, at the symbolic level sexual relationality is linguistically mediated and subject to the displacements of language” (Beyond 85). Edelman elaborates by writing that what Lacan calls the “absence of a sexual relation” involves the absence “of a complementa-


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rity to naturalize relations between the sexes insofar as all sexuality suffers the mark of the signifier as lack” (No Future 39). Bruce Fink, in The Lacanian Subject, writes that in claiming there is no such thing as a sexual relationship “Lacan was not asserting that people are not having sex,” but that there is, according to Lacan, no direct relationship between men and women insofar as they are men and women. In other words, they do not “interact” with each other as man to woman and woman to man. Something gets in the way of their having any such relationship; something skews their interactions. [ . . . ] There is nothing complementary about their relationship, nor is there a simple inverse relationship or some kind of parallelism between them. Rather, each sex is defined separately with respect to a third term. There is only a nonrelationship, an absence of any conceivable direct relationship between the sexes. (104–5)

In Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, Elizabeth Grosz puts the problem as follows: For Lacan, love is an entanglement, a knot, of imaginary gratifications and symbolic desires. It is always structured with reference to the phallus, which in a sense is the third term coming between two lovers. The subject demands a wholeness, unity, and completion which it imagines the other can bestow on it. The symbolic, on the other hand, requires a subject irrevocably split, divided by language. [ . . . ] Love relations aspire to a union or unity that is strictly impossible. The two can never become One. [ . . . ] [Language] always intervenes between the subject and the other. There is no direct, unmediated relation between the sexes. The obstacle to love [ . . . ] is not external. It is the internal condition of human subjectivity and sexuality. (137)

Finally, in Read My Desire, Joan Copjec writes that “the meaning, when all is said and done, of Lacan’s notorious assertion that ‘there is no sexual relation’ [is that] sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation, to communication” (207). In the Lacanian view, then, the absence of sexual relation is a consequence of the structural incommensurability between “real” sex and imaginary/symbolic relation. For Lacan, “relations” obtain only between speaking subjects who as speaking subjects are constituted in and by the symbolic order of language, and are thus subjected to its laws, while sexuality as jouissance is located in the realm of the pre- or extralinguistic

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real, which “resists symbolization absolutely” (Seminar I 66).6 As Lacan puts it, “A subject, as such, doesn’t have much to do with jouissance” (Seminar XX 50). “There is no such thing as a sexual relationship” because it is only as a subject of discourse that one can discursively “relate” and because symbolic subjectivity itself entails that one is constitutively severed from the real (sex) (with which) one desires to be (in relation). As a subject, as a person, one can perhaps have sexually related relations but not directly sexual relations per se since relations, necessarily between singularized subjects, are possible only by virtue of one’s being installed in language and barred from the real of sex. One can only relate to the real, rather than “be” in it (since, given the division of l’ être by la lettre, one can never simultaneously “be” and “mean”), and one can relate (perhaps re-too-late) to the real only by virtue of that which bars the way to it: language as governed by the phallic function. Such barring is what guarantees that no “one” can really live, really be, really be in or make unmediated love. In Beyond Sexuality, Tim Dean writes that he thinks Judith Butler “is mistaken in her judgment that the failure of sexual relationality is ‘implicitly lamented as a source of heterosexual pathos’ in Lacan (Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” 31n14). Rather, the sexual nonrelation tends to offer an occasion for comedy, as Lacan’s remarks in Television make clear” (85-86n37). What I want to make clear in what follows is that while Vertigo does explicitly lament the failure of the sexual relation, presenting that flop or plop in all its tragic, mournful/melancholic heterosexual pathos, Rear Window and Spellbound more subtly refuse to play it straight, offering the same failure as occasions for queerly bathetic or sinthomosexual comedy.7 While all three films address a similar problem or tension in the narrative of heteromasculine subjectivity—namely, that of how a notably gynophobic male character negotiates his relationship to, and claims or accepts his proper place within, the symbolic order as heteronormative regime—Vertigo (ironically) stays pretty straight in its spiral down the mis-en-abyme, ending on a dark note of death (Judy’s) and ego-dissolution/restitution (Scottie’s), while Rear Window and Spellbound (with perhaps deeper irony) end by shedding light on, and making light of, “the grave in which the masculine ideal [ . . . ] of proud subjectivity is buried” (Bersani, “Rectum” 222). While the one straight tragedy, as a tragedy of the straight one, closes by offering up its ending in all its abyssal profundity, the two queer comedies end up opening onto what Edelman calls “the fundament at the foundation of the profound” (No Future 178n42). Of course, a reader may well think that after such dazzling critical emanations of solar anality as D.A. Miller’s “Anal Rope” and Edelman’s


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own “Rear Window’s Glasshole” there would not be much (much less anything profound) left to write about the “fundament-al” Hitchcock. And while the reader would be fundamentally correct, I would counter by asserting that there can never be a total eclipse or complete evacuation of the solar anus of écriture. Assuming that, as a Žižek chapter title puts it, “One Can Never Know Enough about Hitchcock” (Looking Awry 67–122), and given what would seem to be my guiding assumption that one can never write enough about abjection or about “the anus as the fantasmatic site of the unassimilable Real” (Edelman, “Glasshole” 95n25)—after all, it is endemic to the writing of abjection never to know when enough is enough, and contrary to the abjection of writing ever to think that enough can be written—this writing can only press out or shine on, as if involuntarily, if not turning the screw then at least spreading the cheeks of interpretation just a little bit further. “I Don’t Want Any Part of Her”—or, Reopening “Rear Window’s Glasshole”

I suggested earlier that each of the three Hitchcock films under consideration here addresses a similar tension or question in the narrative of heteromasculinist subjectivity: to wit, how to make a real man, a really heteronormative man—able to tackle the job, so to speak—out of an at best ambivalent gynophobe.8 With the phrase “tackle the job” I of course allude to a specific moment in Rear Window’s dialogue when Jeff, apropos of we are not yet completely certain what, says, “That would be a terrible job to tackle.” As we soon find out, he is referring to the “job” of cutting up a woman’s dead body, but because we have just been treated to a shot of the reclining Miss Torso, “that” seems for a moment to refer to her supine but still living body, and the “terrible job” seems to mean the phallic labor of trying to penetrate it. The ambiguity here both underscores the interpenetration of killing with fucking and insinuates that the invalid and allegedly hormonally deficient Jeff may not be man enough for at least one part of the occupation. As John Fawell comments, The montage here is clever in several ways. First, we are confused. What is [Jeff] talking about? Why would Miss Torso be a “terrible job to handle” [sic: it’s “tackle”]? Hitchcock seems to be lampooning yet again Jeff ’s recalcitrant sexuality. But, of course, Jeff is not talking about making love to Miss Torso, he is talking about dismembering her. “Just how would you go about cutting up a body?” [sic: the line is “Just how would you start to cut up a human body?”] is the next thing he says. So now we understand. Jeff was talking about murder not sex. Miss Torso’s body

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had triggered thoughts about how Lars Thorwald might have gone about cutting up Mrs. Thorwald’s body. But the joke about Jeff ’s weakened libido stands—only now maybe it is more a joke about a libido that is perverted as well as weak. Hitchcock draws a parallel, as he would often in his films, between sex and dismemberment, as if to suggest that sexual impulses are not far removed from violent ones. (64)

These fairly basic comments (and misquotations) can raise some more complicated queries. For example, in regard to the famous killing/fucking equation, even if we accept (as I do) the standard interpretation that Jeff identifies with the killer—“that Lars Thorwald’s murder of his wife enacts a wish on the part of Jeff to be rid of Lisa” (Modleski, Women 79)—must we also assume that he always fully identifies with the fucker? Do we really know the lay of the land when it comes to the identificatory projection at work in Jeff ’s yearning look at the closed curtain behind which he and we imagine that the newlyweds are fucking up a storm? Are we sure we know exactly what Jeff is not commenting on when he says “no comment” in response to Lisa’s suggestion that there may be something “more sinister” going on behind the newlywed’s curtain than behind the shades of the Thorwalds? Must we concur with the “number of critics” who “have pointed out that the film’s protagonist is fi xated at an infantile level of sexual development and must in the course of the narrative grow into ‘mature sexuality’ ” (Women 75)? Must we accept Stella’s interpretation that the immobile Jeff is hormonally deficient, that his libido is “weak” because it is not terminally bound for the Grand Central of normative heterogenital finality—as if the only conceivable sign on any libidinal luggage must read “ ‘Mature sexuality’ or bust!”? Now that is some heavy baggage. But even if we let “the joke about Jeff ’s weakened libido stand,” must we understand this stand-up comedy about Jeff ’s not being able to stand up in the most run-down or routine terms of perversion? Could we not say instead that here the joke is not on the perverse but rather on the normal? In other words, isn’t the thrust or punch line of Hitchcock’s (and Freud’s) suggestion that “sexual impulses are not far removed from violent ones” that the parallel between sex and dismemberment is itself not far removed from a phallic heteronormativity dependent upon a castration anxiety in which “man desperately tries to sustain a sense of himself that necessitates the end of woman” (Women 100)? And how might this “normal” necessity be disturbed or subverted except through its representational perversion? And how disrupt this desperately masculinist sustenance—which, appropriately enough, resembles or even performs the symbolic operation in which the phallic signifier sustains itself


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and its subject in all of its strict senses by murdering the thing it names—except through a renegotiation of the heteronormative form of the confluence of sex and death (a confluence that is perhaps necessary or inevitable in every respect except that of its conventionally gendered form), a formal reconfiguration, then, that might, as Catherine Waldby puts it, “offer the possibility of a reciprocity of [sexual] destruction” (266) between women and men? And who in Rear Window would be better suited or better seated to offer this possibility than “a couple of maladjusted misfits” (or, in other words, pervs): no, not Stella, who uses the quoted phrase to describe herself and her husband Miles, but Lisa—yes, Lisa—who wears the best suits, and of course Jeff, who has the best seat in the house? In other words, what if neither one of Rear Window’s protagonists actually manages to “grow” into the heteronormatively “mature sexuality” that Lisa’s desire (for, say, marriage) is usually taken to represent? What if, rather, at the film’s end, both Lisa and Jeff reciprocally “regress” or mutually dehisce into a queerly heterosexual or happily “ended” sinthomosexual couple? Of course, as a critical enterprise, it’s fairly old hat to excavate the “repressed homosexuality” of one L.B. Jefferies, even if some of the critics who have sported this hat have also missed some of the most prominent hooks on which to hang it. But a queer Lisa Fremont? Since I am not suggesting anything specifically lesbian about her desire as the film represents it—even if one could emphasize the first word in her line “When I want a man I want all of him” so as to let the line imply that there may be other times when she wants the “not all” of another woman—I obviously mean the word “queer” more broadly. So let’s back up a bit before attempting to carry either one of our heroes across this abject threshold. How and in what chiasmatically crisscrossed ways can Hitchcock be said to queer this het couple? To begin to address this question, it may be helpful to juxtapose Lee Edelman’s splendid line—“Queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (No Future 17)—with Thomas Leitch’s observations in Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games. Leitch writes that all of Hitchcock’s games [ . . . ] reveal a fundamental duality between a conservative piety that accepts its framing premises—a deep respect for homes, families, the police, the law and its institutions, genetic and social ideals of identity, the moral dichotomy between good and evil, the letter of the law or the original property—and a disruptive critique of those frames manifested most often in a tendency toward mischief, self-reflexiveness, self-advertising artifice, and the rejection of domestic

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and institutional pieties. This duality obviously takes different forms in different films. [ . . . ] In every film, however, Hitchcock is still playing, however pietistically or maliciously. Find the director, his most distinctive game, merely expresses with unusual economy the conflict that runs through all the others as well. (263–64)

Leitch goes on to say that Hitchcock’s films both “confirm and [ . . . ] attack social and institutional ideals of identity” and “alternately assault and affirm the idea of a self ” (264). In Leitch’s view “the ludic tendencies toward institutional recuperation and radical critique do not simply alternate in Hitchcock’s films; they reinforce each other dialectically. [ . . . ] It is precisely this refusal to subordinate either tendency to the other, in fact, that makes the films so successful as play” (264). If we play “find the director” with Rear Window, which Leitch tags as one of Hitchcock’s most “unusually challenging or rule-breaking films” (264), what are we to make of the fact that Hitchcock’s cameo—which like all such directorial appearances manifests a “tendency toward mischief, self-reflexiveness, [and] self-advertising artifice” but here particularly implies “the rejection of domestic and institutional pieties”—occurs in and as the fi lm’s singlemost blatant, even straightforward reference to male homosexuality? For when we are given the shot of Hitchcock standing up in the seated songwriter’s apartment, we hear Jeff remark that the songwriter “lives alone” but then see him give a sidelong and insinuating smirk as he adds—“but they [the standing and the seated, perhaps the top and the bottom] have a very unhappy marriage.”9 Bracketing for now the question of why the director would want to insert himself so conspicuously into this queering insinuation, we can note the way Jeff himself is retroactively caught up in his own remark. But to do so we have to engage in a little narrative Nachträglichkeit and return to the film’s densely packed opening sequence/sequence of openings. Here we are given, behind the opening credits, window shades that rise like theatrical curtains, then the first pan of the courtyard, the first head-shot of the sweating, sleeping L.B.J., and, to account for his sweat, a close-up of a thermometer nailed to the windowsill—an interestingly liminal placement, given that some thermometers are inserted rectally, though here I will insert only that if this swelling thermometer marks Jeff ’s window or glasshole as a “hot spot,” then, inversely, the foreign “hot spots” that comprise Jeff ’s usual photographic jobs or “big assignments” may be read as metaphorical versions of the glasshole as “regressive” site of rectal/ocular enjoyment if not volcanic Bataillean hot monkey-love.10 But even if we do not all get so carried away by the metaphorical implications of the thermometer’s placement, we can note that


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we do cut from it to a shot of the soon-to-be-queered songwriter. He is shown shaving and is annoyed to hear a radio spot addressed to men “over forty” who might feel “tired, run-down,” and “listless.” A series of cuts introduces the other residents and their relationships or nonrelationships, each, writes Leitch, “somehow deviant or deformed” (169), except for the one “normal family” of breeders in the topmost apartment whom Leitch does not even mention and who, as Wood and Fawell point out, do not particularly interest Jeff, or Hitchcock, or us for that matter (Fawell 76). Brought back into Jeff ’s apartment, we get the brilliant expository sequence that pans from the castrated Jeff ’s shattered leg to his ostensibly phallic but shattered camera to the explanatory photos on his wall, the first a too-close-up of the racetrack accident that took Jeff out, each succeeding image depicting dangerous and violent catastrophes, including a mushroom cloud, all leading to the negative/positive shot of the magazine cover model who looks like Grace Kelley but is not—Samuels slips when he says this “strange picture” (113) depicts Lisa—the whole sequence working metonymically to suggest that women pose some danger or uncontrollable threat (castration, domestication, obliteration) to Jeff. Then we cut back to Jeff—shaving. Not that he cuts himself while shaving (not that he could anyway with an electric razor), and not that there is anything “abnormal” about the activity (even if he does not really need to shave, since he is not going anywhere, and even if he does not normally shave much when does get to hit foreign “hot spots,” and even if he cannot see himself showing up at one of Lisa’s more domesticated downtown studios with a “three-day beard” that may or may not be as queer as a three-dollar bill), but the cut does visually align Jeff with the songwriter we just saw shaving, and thus cuts him in on the songwriter’s deal. Such cutting-in is no big deal, representing at this point in the exposition only Jeff ’s being coupled with the songwriter in the slow dance of “male menopause,” both men getting run down as tired targets of the radio advertisement. But when we arrive at the “self-advertising artifice” of Hitchcock’s cameo, accompanied by what will have recursively become Jeff ’s ultimately self-queering insinuation about the director’s relationship to the songwriter, we can retroactively read this new information about a “deformed and deviant” neighbor back through Stella’s comments about Jeff ’s “abnormal” nondesire to marry Lisa and return, though not exactly in the nick of time, to the queering cut or après coup of Jeff ’s electric shaving. I say “not exactly in the nick of time” because, as I have said, the “repressed homosexuality” of L.B. Jefferies is not exactly breaking news, any more than would be the observation that his “broken bones” suggest castration, that the telephoto lens is bit of a prick, that the film itself is

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about film itself, or any other of Rear Window’s prevailing critical truisms. I belabor the nonstartling revelation of Jeff as homo in order to make the case (and “I bet yours isn’t this small”) for Lisa as a queer Fremont. And I linger now with Jeff because, as I have also already said, some of the critics who have invested in his queerness have not fully appreciated all of its dividends. Robert Samuels, for example, in Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory, proposes that in general “Hitchcock’s films are extremely heterogeneous and present multiple forms of sexual identification and desire” (1), and “that Hitchcock’s subjects are inherently bisexual and that the director’s own identifications represent multiple forms of desire and identification” (4). In the specific chapter on Rear Window, Samuels writes that repressed infantile homoeroticism or polymorphous perversity “must affect all male subjects’ later heterosexual object choices” and that the “male viewer” as embodied by Jeff always “secretly wants both a man and a woman. In Rear Window,” says Samuels, “we can thus rethink the relationship between Jefferies, Lisa, and the spectacle outside of his window, as a complicated circulation of both homosexual and heterosexual desires” (115). In his own rethinking of this complicated circulation, Samuels brings in Lacan’s notion of the gaze (ostensibly as a corrective to Laura Mulvey’s) and quotes Lacan to the effect that “what the voyeur is looking for and finds is merely a shadow, a shadow behind a curtain. There he will fantasize any magic of presence, the most graceful of girls, for example, even if on the other side there is only a hairy athlete” (Seminar XI 182).11 Samuels comments that “in Hitchcock’s film, we actually do see ‘the most graceful of girls,’ Grace Kelly, so we may ask what is Jefferies really looking for? Could it be a hairy athlete?” (114). And at the end of the chapter, Samuels repeats the joke, writing, “Voyeurism is [ . . . ] indeed that theme of Rear Window, but what is given to be seen is not actually what most critics have been looking at. Fascinated by the presence of Grace, they have missed the hairy athlete who hides behind the curtain” (121). I would offer that even those critics who are not taken in by Grace, or who in their resistance to genital finality do not want to imagine Lisa taking in “all” of Jefferies, have nonetheless missed or lost sight of their man, not “the hairy athlete who hides behind the curtain,” but the ass-ugly detective whose face is arguably all too “given to be seen.” Is it because Wendell Corey is not (at least in my opinion) a particularly attractive actor that male viewers of Rear Window who recognize Jeff ’s homoeroticism nonetheless have a hard time imagining Tom Doyle as an object of Jeff ’s desire? Even though the only “happy” (or at least nondisastrous) photograph on Jeff ’s wall shows (presumably) the two men


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standing side by side in front of the plane they cohabitated for two years during the war? Even though the explicit question of how they stood each other for those two years allows the implicit one of whether one ever stood the other, or ever wanted to stand or be stood by the other, to a flying fuck? Even though this martial photo is itself often framed as standing or hanging in markedly ironic counterpoint to Lisa’s beseeching marital come-ons to Jeff? We may well agree with Laura Mulvey that Lisa eventually wins Jeff ’s adoring gaze and erotically “rebirths” their relationship by crossing “the barrier between his room and the block opposite” (31) and breaking into Thorwald’s apartment. But could we not part with Mulvey by noticing that Lisa thus excites Jeff not by making a spectacle—she has never not been that—but by making a detective of herself, doing what Doyle, out of concern for upholding the law, would not do, going where Doyle would not go, despite Jeff ’s entreaties? And could we not hear in these entreaties the faint echoes of Jeff ’s desire for Doyle to have broken and entered when he had the chance, to have done other illegal things and gone to other forbidden zones back during the war, so that we could alter one letter in Jeff ’s proud boast about Lisa—“Tom, you should have seen her!”—and transform it into an erotic reproach that marks the all-too-lawful Tom as being guilty of not being guilty enough: “Tom, you should have been her!”? Finally, if we at all accept the thesis that Jeff “secretly wants both a man and woman,” could we not note that at the film’s climax, when Jeff, in a conspicuously cloacal rebirth, is being pressed out of his own glasshole and left dangling like a dingleberry from its rim, he urgently calls out the names of both Lisa and Doyle in almost the same breath but in exactly the same tone and with exactly the same emphasis, leading us to lift Professor Brulov’s line from Spellbound and imagine that any husband of Lisa’s is also a husband of Doyle’s, so to speak? Of course, this phrase “exactly the same” is a bit of a problem for some feminist theorists, who critique both the film and the film’s queer male commentators insofar as they (both the arguably queer film and the avowedly gay commentators) are seen to endorse an erasure of sexual difference in which the specifically feminine gets—as Jack Nicholson’s Joker puts it in Tim Burton’s Batman—taken “out a whole new door.”12 Commenting on the film’s final “image of Lisa in masculine clothes, absorbed in ‘masculine’ interests,” Tania Modleski writes that as Rear Window’s “narrative proceeds, the sexuality of the woman, which is all along presented as threatening, is first combated by the fantasy of female dismemberment and then, finally, by a re-membering of the woman according to the little boy’s fantasy that the female is no different from himself ” (Women 76–77). Modleski both resists this re-membering and

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contests Laura Mulvey’s characterization of Lisa as “only a passive object of the male gaze” by stressing the film’s “emphasis on the woman’s mobility, freedom, and power” and pointing out that Lisa “is anything but helpless and incapable” (76, 77). And yet, for Modleski, Lisa’s capacity, mobility, freedom, and power do not absorb her into purely “masculine” interests: Lisa remains defiantly not “no different” from Jeff, and, at the end of a film that “gives her the last look,” “puts away his book and picks up her own magazine” (85), Harper’s Bazaar, which functions, though perhaps not quite as vulgarly as purses and jewels, as a metonym for her muff.13 Though Modleski wrote the first feminist book on Hitchcock before the rise of queer theory, Patricia White writes in its problematic wake. In “Hitchcock and Hom(m)osexuality,” White writes that “queer theory pre-empts what might crudely be understood as the ‘misogyny’ question in Hitchcock to take on homophobia” (211), and while she claims that “queer methodology parallels that of feminism, turning canonical works and exemplary geniuses inside out,” White also maintains that “in pursuing this parallel, it is important to point out that ‘Hitchcock and homosexuality’ might appear gender-inclusive while effectively marginalizing women” (212). For White, queer theory as applied to Hitchcock becomes, in the words of Luce Irigaray, just another “ ‘alibi for the smooth workings of man’s relations with himself ’ ” (This Sex 172; White 212). Implicating “avowedly gay (male) critics” in a hom(m)osexual “display of male authority” (213), and extensively critiquing Miller’s “Anal Rope” and Edelman’s “Rear Window’s Glasshole” as the work of two would-be ass-masters of reality, “two theorists [who] have found the ultimate master of ‘anality’ in Hitchcock himself ” (217), White writes: The male-associated desire to escape the phallic regime, associated with anality, is a potentially radical one. But it gains significance precisely through a specific kind of “male association.” Gay male Hitchcock criticism makes a bid, that is, for prestige, for authority, most directly through the author himself. Getting behind Hitchcock to deconstruct but also to display authority is an hom(m)osexual act. (“Hitchcock” 217)

As White points out, both Miller’s and Edelman’s essays take the filmic cut as “a figure for the anus” (214). But this “metaphor of the (male) anus as cut cuts feminist film theory and its considerable insights out of the picture as well” (215). Homosexuality is reserved for the same sex, the male. Implicitly the woman can represent only difference, that is, heterosexuality. The anus deconstructs sexual difference (the opposition phallus/lack), but access to


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this supplement is reserved for male members. The male anus is a sign of différance, Derrida’s term for the deferring power of difference. Femininity is definitively different from the phallic, the female anus at best redundant. (“Hitchcock” 215)

White’s critique is, I think, at least partially justified. After all, Edelman’s essay does begin by saying that we have “learned perhaps all too well, as a result of the feminist, psychoanalytically oriented theorization of narrative cinema, to observe the dynamics of power that inflect the masculinist desire to see” (“Glasshole” 72). The essay does end, in the penultimate endnote, by saying that while Lisa’s final setting aside of Jeff ’s adventure book for her own fashion-mag may suggest a feminist subversion of her apparent submission to masculinist demands, the structural logic of her final act invariably affirms the institutionalization [ . . . ] of the binary sexual difference on which the Symbolic order depends. And so, by immersing herself in Bazaar, she reassuringly essentializes her necessary difference from Jeff and interprets his desire for the dangerous “hot spots” beyond the Himalayas, his desire to follow a path that would lead, like the vision afforded by his capacious rear window, to places other than her own front door, as utterly unaccountable, which is also to say, “bizarre.” (96n25)

Moreover, Oreo-ed between what seems the darkly antifeminist beginning and ending of Edelman’s essay is only more dark filling, in which Edelman sees assholes, assholes, everywhere.14 He indeed follows Miller in reading the filmic cut as a figure for the anus but stretches his reading further to analize just about every conceivable (but not conceiving) aperture, opening, sheered or spinning wheel, circle, ring, “sting, speck, cut, little hole” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 27), lit cigarette tip, or blinding flash in Rear Window that he can lay his eye on. Edelman also aligns the symbolic order’s heteronormative occlusion of the anal eye with narrative cinema’s suturing of cuts and the use of montage to ensure visual (or even “human”) continuity, and, worse, seems to lay the full blame for all this closure directly on the opening called Lisa Fremont’s “front door.” In other words, Edelman aligns what he calls “Lisa Fre/montage” with what he will end up in No Future contemptuously but compellingly critiquing as “reproductive futurism.” Still in the “Glasshole” essay, however, he writes: If the infantile theory of anal birth [ . . . ] suggests that the signifying capacity of the female genitalia [ . . . ] derives in part from a substitutive relation to the anus they double and displace, then this vital substitution of suture for cut, of reproduction for meaningless waste, invariably repeats

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the imperative through which the Symbolic reproduces itself, cutting itself off from the mess and obscurity out of which it emerges by taking as its defining characteristic the clear-cut definition of sexed human characters invested with sexual identities through the logic, redemptive because also reproductive, of the castratory cut. (77)

Edelman, then, wants to “articulate cinema’s primal cut—the enabling fissure that holds us tight with the strength of a sphincteral grip—before its redemption through marriage to the order of visual productivity in the form of continuity editing and the hetero-genetic castration fetish: that is to say, in the form of what I call Lisa Fre/montage” (83). Finally, though Edelman has recourse on several occasions to speak of the messy or obscure question of Lisa Fremont’s anus (before or outside of the back-to-front displacement that secures its ostensible redemption through marriage), he demonstrates, as we will see, and as White charges, his indifference to whatever salutary indifference that redundancy may represent. But, ironically enough, the female butt in question seems no less redundant, no less of a nonstarter, for the feminist White than for the analist Edelman. For after inserting Miller and Edelman like butt-plugs back into the hom(m)osexually phallic regime that they had hoped to escape through the potentially radical avenue of anality, White lets go of Rope and closes Rear Window—a film that ends by giving a woman not only the last look but also the last line, even if that line is only Stella’s “I don’t want any part of her”—to move on to the more properly lesbian problematics of Stage Fright. Well, everyone’s got her own fish to fry. But even if Edelman seems for obvious reasons to share Stella’s sentiment, not wanting any part of her—or is too concerned with the larger picture of cinematic-visual-structural heterologics to linger on such a small detail as the “tight spot” of Lisa Fremont, much less the one that patriarchy puts her in—let’s at least note that Edelman is not the only one to send Lisa’s asshole packing.15 Whether or not this anus or any other can actually be redeemed through marriage or ever “saved” for feminism or queer theory, we are nonetheless here brought back—reading from front to back and back again, or perhaps from top to (power) bottom—to the situation of Lisa.16 She says that a woman’s hardest job is “juggling wolves,” but Lisa is at first presented as having tackled the job of taking the perhaps less than lupine Jefferies out of circulation, of straightening him out, bringing him back “home” from foreign “hot spots” with their attendant “bizarre” significations, and sending him through the proper defiles of the symbolic order to her “front door” and the altar (and not necessarily in reverse order). One of her first efforts in this regard involves her oblative


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attempt to get Jeff to relinquish his cracked and overly ornate cigarette box from Shanghai—a little fragment of Hollywood Orientalism that signifies the ass-crack of perversion, or what Edelman calls “the archaic remnants of repudiated libidinal systems” (95n25), just as surely as the Gardenia-ed gunsel Joel Cairo fellates the handle of his own walking stick in The Maltese Falcon and just as surely as the glass-eyed gay pornographer Arthur Gwynn Geiger has a fake bookstore full of Buddhas in The Big Sleep—and to accept in its place her gift of a sleek and simple case with just his symbolic and hence phallic initials (though Jeff lets her know that in trying to prod him to shit on Shang-hai Lisa is simply wasting her hard-earned money). Lisa also attempts to enlist Jeff in what might be called the cause of futurism—when Jeff suggests simply keeping their relationship “status quo” Lisa plaintively responds: “without any future?”—but, and I think quite significantly, there is no indication that the future in (her) question is necessarily reproductive in Edelman’s sense or that Lisa has any particular investment in the ideological figure that Edelman in No Future pro-abortively calls “the Child.”17 Indeed, though Lisa clearly wants to get engaged to Jeff, she seems no more engaged with the lifestyle of the breeders in the top-floor apartment than are any of the rest of us. I would submit not only that Lisa is, as Jeff charges, interested only in the latest fashion but also that this “flighty” interest may actually exclude her ideological investment in fecund futures and signal her own flight from that “mature” heteroreproductive norm of which her desire is conventionally thought emblematic. If Modleski is right to say that “fashion” in Rear Window “is far from representing woman’s unproblematic assimilation to the patriarchal system, but functions to some extent as a signifier of feminine desire and female sexual difference” (Women 78), then it may also be fair to say that Lisa’s preference for fashion over fecundity may function, just as it stereotypically does for the gay man, to signify something like queer indifference or sinthomosexually childfree desire. I would like to let this suggestion follow Lisa into Thorwald’s apartment and color our observation of the display of fashion accessories that she performs there. As we know, Lisa ventures through Thorwald’s window for reasons related to both the murder plot and the marriage plot: she wants to locate the wedding ring that will somehow prove that Thorwald murdered his wife and to show Jeff that, because she is in fact “willing to go anywhere and to do anything,” she is the girl of his dreams, to the extent that he dreams of girls. When she finds Mrs. Thorwald’s already vulgarly vaginalized purse, Lisa holds it up triumphantly for Jeff ’s speculation, but then opens its lips, turns it upside down to demonstrate its emptiness, and shakes her head in disappointment. Given, however,

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the relative emptiness of Lisa’s own handbag—when Stella rifles it for bail money she finds only a little spare change—we can take it that Lisa is in effect holding up a vulgar metonym for her own “front door.” What else, then, can we do with Lisa’s shaking head but take it as the sign of her getting Hegelian on her own “basic equipment,” negating the negation that it poses to Jeff, affirming the thesis that the antithesis that is her specifically feminine “inside stuff,” however valuable for her, holds no dialectical interest for him, affirming that she knows this to be the “case” and that she is willing to accede to this situation anyway (else she would not be risking her ass in Thorwald’s apartment but would, as Doyle says about Thorwald’s trunk, be on her “merry and legal way” out of there). In other words, Lisa’s performative negation of her own purse-snatch may indicate just how far she is willing to go or be gone into in order to snatch Jeff, and may let us read her earlier line “I guess I’m not the girl I thought I was” in a different light: demonstrably able to “do anything” or assume any position to appeal to Jeff ’s desire, Lisa is even willing “not to be the girl” she, and Jeff, and we, thought she was. This negative reading of Lisa’s fetching but snatch-negating performance allows us to read the seemingly more positive or propositional “fellowship of the ring” sequence—when Lisa points behind herself to the wedding ring into which she has inserted her finger—more negatively, more queerly, or at least more redundantly. Indeed, after Edelman’s extensive treatment, it would seem quite redundant to go back and explore the anal implications of this ring, but since the redundancy of the female anus is ostensibly what’s at issue, such a return is exactly what I propose. Truffaut, of course, speaks of the ring in terms of proposal, in terms of “a double victory: not only is it the evidence she was looking for, but who knows, it may inspire Stewart to propose to her. After all, she’s already got the ring!” And Hitchcock accepts Truffaut’s proposal: “Exactly,” he says. “That was an ironic touch” (223). But even though Edelman ironizes this ironic touch by taking the ring as yet another figure for yet another anus, he too reads the sequence in terms of heteronormative victory. Speaking of “the romantic plot that construes the ring as the token of Lisa’s desire,” and saying that “the ring as symbol leads us conveniently back [ . . . ] to woman as site of castration, to woman as bearer of the cut,” Edelman writes that in leading us back, the ring as sexual symbol takes us up front and [ . . . ] leaves the back behind: leaving behind, in the process, the fact that Lisa’s finger, as it points to the ring, points also to her behind, allowing us to recall what Lacan points out [ . . . ]: “If something in nature is designed to suggest certain properties of a ring to us, it is restricted to what


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language has dedicated the term anus to, . . . and which in their modesty the ancient dictionaries designated as the ring that can be found behind” [Seminar III 317]. It is just such a ring that Hitchcock shows us in this moment that vividly renders what putting your ass on the line really means; significantly, however, the ass on the line in this shot is less Lisa’s than Jeff ’s. (85)

Edelman asserts that Jeff ’s ass is more “on the line” than Lisa’s because he follows the camera, which in fact does take us up and away from the ring to Thorwald’s menacing gaze and thereby back to Jeff ’s eye. And this, in turn, takes us to one of the best money-shots in Edelman’s essay: The glance of recognition with which Thorwald then turns his own gaze from Lisa [ . . . ] to the camera, at which, with an icy gaze, he finally stares full-front, puts Jefferies himself in the place of what Lisa, unwittingly, has pointed out. And if, in the process, her ass substitutively doubles for his eye, then it is also fair to note that his eye, at least as evoked metonymically by the diegetic mark of his camera’s lens, participates in the visual logic that would return us to the ass. Hitchcock, after all, in offering this rebus of the ring that is found behind, frames the images of that ring in another ring, one meant to signify the lens through which Jefferies views this entire scene, as if, with this framing, Hitchcock gives us to see, in the glasshole of every window, of every photographic lens, the articulating mark of the asshole made visible not as the other of vision but as the determining otherness within it—an otherness that, once made visible, threatens to make us thereafter see double, and thus by disturbing the either/or of a castratory clarity, has the additional effect, as Hitchcock suggests, of making us also see red. (86)

What I really love about Edelman’s vision here is that, in implicating “every photographic lens” in the “articulating mark of the asshole” that is the “determining otherness within” vision itself, Edelman makes visible the anal mark of any articulation whatsoever, not only photographic or cinematic cuts but linguistic division as well. Such a vision allows us to see the camera—which not only penetrates space but must after all be penetrated, must take it up the shutter, in order to do its job—as something more and other than a total prick, and allows us to see and even to use language in ways that exceed or disturb “the either/ or of a castratory clarity.” If “the Photograph is the advent of myself as other,” if it reminds me of “that faint uneasiness which seizes me when I look at ‘myself ’ on a piece of paper” (Camera Lucida 12–13), or if “I identify myself in language but only by losing myself in it like an object” (Écrits 247) and this object is “a more abject thing than [any of

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us] may care to consider” (Lacan, “Of Structure” 189)—if it is in fact nothing other than the excremental object per se, as per Tim Dean’s observations that Lacan’s “prototype for object a is the turd” and that “Lacan locates his paradigm of the object a in scat” (Beyond 264)—then what can we issue forth about those cameonic moments of “selfadvertising artifice” when Hitchcock frames or articulates himself in his own anal lens except that they are analogous to Lacanian moments or movements of linguistic self-abjection in which the director situates himself and those of us who see with him and through him “in the picture as stain” (Seminar XI 98)? All of which, of course, takes us, just as it took Edelman, away from the specific situation upon which I wanted to linger: to wit, the way Lisa points one finger at while thrusting another through a ring that persists in signifying her own asshole as well as Jeff ’s. For even if we agree that, at least in terms of the murder plot and the Thorwaldian menace, Jeff ’s ass ends up being the one more on the line, that does not mean that in terms of the romance plot we must hang up on Lisa’s or, as it were, plug up our ears to keep from hearing its ringing. The irony of Edelman’s reading is that it is Edelman’s reading, and not necessarily the fi lm itself, that “invariably” sends Lisa’s bottom to the front and traps her ass in the either/or logic of castratory clarity, whereas clearly—or obscurely and messily and queerly—the fi lm itself suggests a greater variation than the invariably straight and reproductively futuristic invagination that Edelman envisions. If Lisa can be read as sending Jeff a double message when she shakes Anna Thorwald’s empty purse as a metonym for her own nonmoney maker—both “there’s nothing here” and “there’s nothing here to interest you”—then could she not also be sending multiple signals to Jeff—not simply evidentiary, and not merely matrimonial—when she points so significantly to the ring? Could her pointing not continue her earlier argument that “surely people aren’t all that different,” or at least indicate that in this one regard she may, in a way that might please Jeff, be not all that different from Doyle or from Jeff himself? In other words, could Lisa’s pointing not be construed not only as a proposal for a proposal but also as an invitation to an ass-fuck? Or, to follow a perhaps more radical avenue (and since it really would be a difficult trick to save the female-passive ass-fuck for feminism), given that Lisa is said to be “loaded to her fingertips with love” for Jeff, and has one of her loaded fingers thrust into that ring up to the knuckle, could the pointing gesture not bear the promise, here putting Jeff ’s ass back on the line, of her digital penetration of his inside stuff? Or both? Or more, since though Lisa might not be able to find a raincoat in Rio even when it’s


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not raining she might very well be able to locate a strap-on in the West Village when it is. And even though Lisa would probably still make a fist like a girl . . . If these points are sufficiently taken, if they allow us to hear differently Lisa’s earlier complaints against Jeff ’s restrictive ideas of who (or maybe what) “can’t fit in here” or “can’t fit in there,” then perhaps we can find the fi lm’s finale a little less heteronormatively victorious, and Lisa’s “final act” a little less reassuringly essentialist, than Edelman’s reading would allow. Recall that Edelman slights the idea that Lisa’s turn to the fashion-mag constitutes “feminist subversion” and reads it instead as an act that “invariably affirms the institutionalization [ . . . ] of the binary sexual difference on which the Symbolic order depends [ . . . ] [and] reassuringly essentializes her necessary difference from Jeff.” For Edelman Lisa’s “immersion” in Bazaar punitively abjects Jeff ’s “desire to follow a path that would lead [ . . . ] to places other than her own front door” and in effect construes that desire “as utterly unaccountable, which is also to say, ‘bizarre’ ” (96n25). In the reading offered here, however, Lisa’s immersion is not essentializing but antiessentially autoerotic, every bit as masturbatory as Jeff ’s flick-of-the-wrist escapade with the backscratcher is coded to be at the fi lm’s beginning, and, more importantly, just as open to Leo Bersani’s anti-identificatory question about going solo in Homos: to wit, “Who are you when you masturbate?” (103). I would offer that whoever and whatever Lisa is here, she is not, strictly speaking, a representative of reproductive futurism, a castratory agent of the symbolic order, the heroine of heteronormative regimentation, or the mother of all montage. For in my reading Lisa does not find Jeff ’s desire “utterly unaccountable,” as “something too horrible to utter,” but has indeed taken that desire into account as fully as she can, is willing to take it fully into her can and maybe even take some of her own into his, and love it, for when can-do Lisa wants a man she wants (to do) all of him, even his can, and even if, when it comes to the coming of the “not-all,” she must, when his canny eyes are closed, cunningly open her own purse or finger the pages of her own magazine or ring the bell at her own front door. Ending, then, on a note of what I will call comedically queer compromise, acknowledging that no “one person” can answer all of the other’s desires, the fi lm manages to underscore the absence of the sexual relation while giving its maladjusted misfits, and its viewers, a couple of relatively happy endings. Rear Window, that is, invites us to relax all of our glassholes enough to enjoy imagining Jeff and Lisa as fundamentally happy, not despite but exactly because they are a couple without any future.

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The Ass of Dr. Edwardes; or, the Anal Universe of Spellbound18

It is easy enough to read Spellbound as a “bad primer on psychoanalysis” (Samuels 39) replete with the standard images and tropes of castration, penisneid, and so on. Consider the opening sequence, in which the classically “castrating” mental patient Mary Carmichael, called away from a card game for a therapy session, leaves the table bragging about her “perfect hand” (which “would have beaten the pants off you”), seductively smiles up at the male orderly who escorts her, showing her teeth while digging her nails into the back of his hand, and, in her session with Dr. Constance Petersen, announces that she loathes men, wants to “sink her teeth” into their groping hands, blithely relating the surreal memory of having bitten off the “moustache” of a man who had tried to seduce her: “I bit it clean off,” she says with great relish. Or take the first shot of the “frozen pussed” and phallus-laden Constance Petersen (not only wearing the eyeglasses that always signify phallic-female-self-possession in Hitchcock but holding a writing pen in one hand and a cigarette-holder in the other) and compare it with her later declared intention to wear more “feminine clothes” in order to please the Gregory Peck character, John Ballantine (her intention declared over dinner while slicing into a piece of meat, a cutting that does not please J.B.—who had earlier proffered Constance his “liverwurst”—at all). Or think of the ambivalently belittling clitoral resonances in the Bergman character’s very name, the last inscribing a diminutive “peter,” the first perhaps compensating, trumping size with consistency, by referring to a source of pleasure more “constant” than what the only intermittently erect, frequently collapsing body of John Ballantine can provide. Note too how the deliciously castratory joke inscribed in Ballantine’s own name—balls on a tine—points to the very point of the fork with which Constance traces the conspicuously vaginal contours of a swimming pool on the tablecloth in the dining hall at Green Manors. Or, finally, remember what is probably the film’s most classically Oedipal image of utter dismemberment: in the Salvador Dali dream sequence, the shot of a faceless man with a huge pair of scissors cutting through a brittle curtain on which is painted an enormous enucleated eye. It is also fairly easy to give these “bad” Freudian motifs an even worse (and so, to my taste, better) Lacanian inflection by noting the links between castration and “no-tation,” or symbolic negation, rewriting “utter dismemberment” as uttered dismemberment, revealing “castration” as the very condition of speech. In his chapter on Spellbound in Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality, for example, Samuels notes that


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the fi lm’s main male character “displays a certain horror for both the presence of feminine sexuality [i.e., “castration”] and the emergence of writing [i.e., again, “castration”]” (27). Samuels quotes Kaja Silverman, who in The Acoustic Mirror writes that with Lacan “there is a castration which precedes the recognition of anatomical difference—a castration to which all cultural subjects must submit, since it coincides with separation from the world of objects, and the entry into language” (1). Samuels then asserts that “the fi rst murder of the Thing thus represents the original separation between the Real world of things and the Symbolic world of language and not primarily the separation between mother and child, nor the separation between the sexes” (27). I have already noted how the fi lm’s early moments of literal and figurative book-tossing thematize the sex/text division, the primordial split or primal repression by which the symbolic world of hurled words separates from and substitutes for the traumatically real whirl of sexual feelings and things. We encounter this theme again when Constance scientifically spiels on how the poets lie about love, and again when, still taken in by the amnesiac Ballantine’s impersonation of Dr. Anthony Edwardes, she ventures into his bedchambers and stands before him, noticeably holding what she mistakenly thinks is his book at the very level of her nook. This proximity of her real sex to the book as material object, as prosaically real thing, allows it (the book) to function in terms of contiguity, as a metonym for her swimming pool, while the idea that the book is not merely a physical object but the representative of a (w)hole symbolic network—signifier of lack in the Other, not simply some book but his book, bearing his signature—allows it to function in terms of substitution, as a poetic or paternal metaphor for Peck’s pecker. Indeed, the book’s situation allows it to appear as a textbook example of Lacan’s formula for the paternal metaphor, in which the Name of the Father substitutes for the Desire of the Mother. And when Peck himself rises from his chair, setting aside the book that had been in his lap, and moves toward Constance, he attempts to substitute his being for his meaning, swap l’ être for la lettre, to stand up and stand in for the text, erecting his real body in the place where the book had been. And he actually seems to succeed, for it is only when the book is closed and cast aside that the doors begin to open, one upon another; repression eases; oceanic music wells up; the frozen puss begins to thaw. Real (1940s’ Hollywood) sex, or something like it, seems to transpire. But the poets of cinema really are lying about love here, insofar as “love” seems to be what “makes up for the [failure of the] sexual relationship” (Seminar XX 45). For although this love scene seems to succeed, to

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represent success, perhaps it only “succeeds in making the sexual relationship fail [ fair rater—botch, screw up, or mess up] in the male manner” (56). For there is something unmannerly about the whole thing. The messed up male in Constance’s arms is not the man she—or even he—thought he was. The “Anthony Edwardes” autograph in the book does not match the signature on the note Constance received from “him” concerning the patient Garmes (Norman Lloyd) earlier in the day. She discovers as much after his hysterical collapse in the operating room, a collapse precipitated by his sight of the self-inflicted gash in Garmes’s throat. We are not shown this gaping wound, but we have seen or will see other images of other-inflicted cuts that correspond to it well enough for us to grasp that it too speaks castration and nothing else: Constance slicing open a letter, Constance vaginally forking the tablecloth while speaking of (bloodred) ketchup, Constance sawing into a piece of meat—we do get the picture. And when Constance confronts “Edwardes” as he comes out of his fainting spell with the question “who are you?” the amnesiac hears his own message coming back to him from the Other in an inverted form, begins to recognize his mésconnaissance, realizes that he is not Anthony Edwardes, and declares that, whoever he is, he has—rather like the symbol itself—murdered the real thing and taken its place. As Samuels describes the narrative situation, John Ballantine is a man who has lost his memory and believes that he has murdered his own doctor and then assumed the doctor’s identity. Since he does not know who he is, he can be compared to the subject of the unconscious that Lacan defines as being a “hole” or a “lack” in the Symbolic structure of the Other. The subject has no signifier or place in the Other, because on the level of one’s unconscious, one clings to the Real, which by definition is impossible to Symbolize. Lacan thus posits a fundamental rejection (foreclosure) of the Symbolic order for every subject of the unconscious. [ . . . ] John Ballantine will say himself that when he looks in the mirror he sees nothing, not even a reflection. He has no identity, no memory and no image—he is reduced to being a letter that others will attempt to read. For the only thing that he knows about himself is that his initials are J.B. When he escapes to New York, he takes on the name John Brown, which once again indicates his need to find a signifier in the Other and to replace a pair of letters with a spoken name. (33)

Samuels’s description serves us well enough, but I would submit that J.B.’s assumption of the name “John Brown” may indicate something more and other than a “need to find a signifier in the Other and to re-


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place a pair of letters with a spoken name.” When the obtuse house-dick at the Empire State Hotel sees the name “John Brown” inscribed in the registry, he comments that the signer lacks imagination. But perhaps the inscription indicates less a lack of imagination than an alternative imagination of lack, an alternative to desire organized in terms of lack—namely, what Tim Dean calls “the alternative view [which] involves situating desire in relation to excess rather than lack” (Beyond 248–49), a situation in which, as Serge André puts it, “excess takes the place of lack” (121). To quote Dean more generously, The crucial issues here concern which master term—“lack,” “loss,” “castration,” “death,” “sexual difference,” and so on—we employ to theorize desire: whether that master-term carries positive or negative connotations; and how those connotation imply invidious distinctions or otherwise embed normative ideologies of gender and sexuality. Although [ . . . ] it is hard to conceive of desire in other than negative terms, the alternative view, which queer theory has found more congenial, involves situating desire in relation to excess rather than lack. (Beyond 248–49)

In Spellbound, the signature-less signer of the hotel registry knows only that his initials are J.B. and that he is compelled to spell out a name, bound to fill in the blank. But having been faced with what Constance’s cunning fork play has shown him—his balls on her tine—he retreats from the castratory cut of his own (oxymoronically) “real name” and regressively or recalcitrantly “clings to the Real” by signing in as “John Brown,” thereby situating himself, in the picture and on the page, as remainder, excess, brown stain: he signs in by browning out. This excessively extimate self-situation avoids, rejects, or forecloses “lack” but nonetheless still involves a certain dehiscent “hole,” a “formidable crack [that] goes right to very depths of his being” (Écrits 101). Peering into this crack, we might behold that Spellbound ’s universe is ultimately more “anal” than “moral.” In other words, given Dean’s view that this “alternative view” of desire-as-excess is excessively congenial to queer theory, we may take an alternative view of J.B.’s amnesia and say that the problem is less that he cannot remember who he is and more that he cannot remember what (a queer) he is.19 Our alternative remembering will inevitably take us away from Constance’s constantly opening front doors and back around to the ass of Dr. Edwardes, thereby reminding us of what a queer film Spellbound can be: a very bad primer indeed—or perhaps a very good primer on the worst psychoanalysis we can imagine, the one that “in its most fundamental formulations [ . . . ] is a queer theory” (Beyond 307).

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Let’s consider the following moments as pages in this primer. Starting with page one, the opening sequence, we can ask why the film begins with Mary Carmichael, whose nymphomaniacal facade masks an erotic hatred of “men” so extreme that she fantasizes cutting them down to size, biting off their signifiers of sexual difference (their “moustaches”), and thus in a sense turning them into “women”—or at least into subjects no different from and no better than herself. M.C.’s fantasy could be correlated with Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel’s interpretation of “perversion” as “a mechanism for denying, sometimes even violently obliterating, the psychic reality of difference” (Pajaczkowska 168). According to Claire Pajaczkowska, Chasseguet- Smirgel emphasized the strength of the denial of difference as a defence against symbolic castration, the loss of infantile omnipotence, a denial that is based on the denial of the knowledge of the absence of the maternal penis. Differences she identifies are the sexual difference of adult genitality, the difference between adult and infantile realities, the difference between subject and object, and the differences between individual objects, which are denied through fantasy of undifferentiated infantile sameness. [ . . . ] This fantasy, which Chasseguet- Smirgel calls the perverse “universe,” is also characterized as an “anal universe” in which infantile fantasies of control, possession, contemptuous denigration of difference, and even torture are enacted as triumphant assertions of the omnipotence of the preoedipal. (169)

What interests me here is less the way this description fits M.C. (or even the way it frames “perversion”) than the way it lets us see how Spellbound diegetically positions M.C. as a sort of inverse prototype for J.B. and for the “anal universe” to which, I would venture, he would like nothing better than to return. Our clues that M.C. adumbrates J.B. include the correspondence between her “perfect hand” and his burned one, the similarity between his hostile lines slamming psychoanalysis (and Constance as its subject-supposed-to-know) and hers (M.C. refers hatefully to Constance’s “smug frozen face” while J.B. declares that if there’s anything he hates it’s “a smug woman”), and so on. The point to be taken from these and other inverse adumbrations is that just as M.C.’s nympho facade masks murderous man-hating, so J.B.’s hyperhetero come-ons cloak gynophobic aversion. But while M.C. may want to level the playing field by dentally depilating the Other, J.B., as we will see, does not desire to equalize Constance by pricking her out, adding one thing to his purpose nothing. Not that he is not finally invested in a certain anything-but-abstract equivalence, but he has not yet realized or


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remembered its universal form, nor do we yet find ourselves upon the slippery slope that will lead him and us to its recovery. Where we find ourselves now is at Grand Central Station. J.B. and Constance, in flight from the police, are set to embark to Rochester to find sanctuary in the home of Dr. Alexander Brulov (Michael Chekhov), who had been Constance’s own analyst. But a funny thing happens on the way to the tracks. It is a particularly funny thing if, “in Hitchcock’s imagery, it is indeed the train track that often appears as the symbol of connections and traces—a visual representation of the memory system of writing” (Samuels 36), and funnier still if we follow Lacan’s own little story about trains and tracks, about “Ladies” and “Gentlemen,” in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud.” As Lacan tells the story, A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated across from each other in a compartment next to the outside window that provides a view of the station platform buildings going by as the train comes to a stop. “Look,” says the brother, “we’re at Ladies!” “Imbecile!” replies his sister, “Don’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.” (Écrits 417)

Lacan insists here that “the rails in this story materialize the bar in the Saussurian algorithm” (Écrits 417)—that is, the bar of prohibition separating the signifier from the signified—and elsewhere spells out that “the function of the bar is not unrelated to the phallus” (Seminar XX 39); in other words, Lacan insists that sexual difference as governed by the phallic function is what makes signification possible, and that the train tracks in this story materialize this inevitable condition of speech and writing—inevitable at least insofar as trains always arrive at their stations and letters at their destinations. But, despite appearances, this “always” is always questionable in Lacan—mainly because “the apparent necessity of the phallic function turns out to be mere contingency” (Seminar XX 94)—just as it always is in Hitchcock, the famous final shot of North by Northwest (a train penetrates a parenthetical tunnel) notwithstanding. But back to Grand Central: J.B. asks Constance if she will love him “just as much” as she does now later when he is “normal”—by which we are given to understand, when he is “cured.” She replies that she will be “insane” about him. He then proclaims “I am normal” and takes Constance in his arms. Interestingly, however, he insists upon his normality in the immediate context of neither insanity nor amnesia but of everyday heterosexuality, surrounded as he is by a host of straight, kissing couples

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with whom he seems quite eager to be identified. Indeed, he seems bent on staging conspicuousness as transparency, for when Constance at first demurs from J.B.’s embrace for fear of attracting attention (they are, after all, fugitives from the law), he assures her that “everybody’s doing it,” and hence that nobody will notice them. But the couple then noticeably undermine the very convention they have just brought to the platform. They squeeze each other tight before the watchful eyes of a smiling ticket-taker, who stands as a sort of guardian regulating access to the tracks. But while an ordinary couple would at this point of departure kiss and then separate, each going a different way—“each of their souls [taking] flight on divergent wings” (Écrits 417), as Lacan says of his little Lady and Gentleman—our lovebirds do not fly apart but fork over their pair of tickets and proceed, unsplit, arm-in-arm, past the befuddled gateman, who is consternated to see a Lady and a Gentleman “going” in the same place. “You’re going together?” he asks, quite taken aback, as if the two had not simply been a little quirky in their public kissing but had broken the very “laws of urinary segregation” to which all “public life” (Écrits 417) is subjected. It’s a mind-fuck for him, a real pisser, and he quizzically casts his eyes up and down, left and right, lets his gaze go all over the place, in every direction but one: he does not look directly at us, into the hole of the camera.20 Or “at least, not yet”: that fundamental look, as we will see in the end, comes at, as, and literally through “The End.” Meanwhile, chez Brulov, Constance and J.B. find lying in wait a law too stupid to see them for what they are (the law represented here by two detectives who can recognize Constance only later, when one of them draws eyeglasses on her photograph). Evading these dumb-ass legal guardians, the couple end up again going unlawfully to the same place: passing themselves off as newlyweds, they are allowed to share the same upstairs bedroom, though they deferringly deny themselves the same bed. J.B., unable to sleep, finally gets up from the floor and goes into the bathroom to take a shave. But the sight of dark bristles swishing around in a creamy cup of white lather, along with an eyeful of other assorted porcelain orifices (including, presumably, the toilet that Hitchcock will not show us until Psycho), precipitate yet another of J.B.’s dangerous spells. Emerging from the W.C. with open razor in hand, J.B. glares down at the dark lines on the white bedspread and follows these tracks up to their destination, Constance’s unfrozen but sweetly sleeping puss. J.B. contemplates this image for a moment but then, apparently uninterested, either erotically or aggressively, passes on the puss, leaves the bedroom, and begins to descend the stairs, entranced but visibly aroused, at least insofar as the razor, held at crotch


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level, stands in—or up, or out, metaphorically and metonymically—for a malicious erection. It turns out that Dr. Brulov—who has already delivered the interesting line “Any husband of Constance’s is a husband of mine, so to speak”—is himself still up, and he invites J.B. to join him in some “milk and crackers.” J.B. accepts the glass of milk, holds it briefly at the erectile plateau, just long enough for us to get the picture, then lifts it up to drink. The ensuing point-of-view shot, in which J.B. and we see Brulov through the bottom of the upheld glass, is remarkable on a number of counts: (1) for the way it collapses the oral and the ocular (the influx of milk both comes into J.B.’s mouth and “fills” the camera’s hole, eventually blotting out our vision); (2) for the way it adumbrates a later bit of pyrotechnics that merges not only the camera-shot with a fatally self-inflicted pistol-wound but also the figure of the “director” of Green Manors with that of the film itself (this of course is the shot that blows us all away in/at the end—but more on it anon); and (3) for the way, speaking of being blown, the obviously seminal residues of this homogenized money-shot of a scene do the job of both blinding and making fellow fellators of us all. However we take it, the milk (never mind the crackers) is laced with bromide: under its spell, the knocked-out J.B. has his “cockeyed” dream (the details of which Brulov will later encourage him to recount fully: “the more cockeyed, the better for the scientific side of it”). Lacan writes that “a dream does not introduce us to any kind of unfathomable experience or mystery—it is read in what is said about it” (Seminar XX 96). Here we have to read the dream not only in terms of what J.B., Constance, and Brulov say but also in terms of what the film shows, and in terms of the tension between the said and the shown. No doubt the dream, like the film, is cockeyed, overtly hitches the cock with the ocular, and, given the aforementioned surrealist scissoring of the eye, clearly manifests the cut of castration. There is, however, as you might imagine, a latent alternative view that situates the dream’s desire on the side of excess, though not much has been “said about it” in what I have read. I should note that, visually, the dream is given out in segments, with J.B.’s voice-over narration interspersed with shots of him speaking and with dialogue/commentary/questions/note-taking on the parts of Constance and Brulov. What is interesting is the way J.B. seems to incorporate some of the linguistic and imagistic elements of Constance’s and Brulov’s interspersions into his secondary revisions in the very midst of his narration. He has already situated Constance in the dream by admitting, somewhat apologetically, that the scantily clad “kissing bird” in the dream’s gambling hall bears a certain resemblance to his lover/doctor. In

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other words, as at Grand Central, J.B. here again insists upon his heterosexual normality, a view of himself that Brulov ratifies by saying that J.B.’s denuding of Constance is “plain, ordinary wishful dreaming.” But as J.B. himself admits, “there’s a lot more to it.” Constance says that she is happy J.B. did not dream of her as an eggbeater, as did one of her patients. When he asks what such a metaphor would mean, she tells him to “never mind.” But he does seem to mind, or at least to psychically incorporate the image, for he brings his dream-spiel to its end with the following revelation: “Suddenly I was running. I heard something beating over my head. It was a great pair of wings. The wings chased me and almost caught up to me until I came to the bottom of the hill.” These beaters are of course the scissoring wings of castration, upon which, Ladies and Gentlemen, divergent souls take flight. Constance later accurately identifies the wings with figures of threatening femininity, “a witch or a harpy.” Brulov, having correctly observed that J.B.’s dream has him “escaping from a valley,” nonetheless lets the invaginations of this valley escape him; he also misses the fact that the beating wings are horrifically menacing to J.B., and so offers the idealizing interpretation that the flappers pertain to Constance because if she grew them she would be “an angel.” Of course, Brulov’s lame interpretive errors have the overriding narrative purpose of getting the words “angel” and “valley” on the table, so that we might eventually end up at the supposedly real scene of trauma, the ski resort named Gabriel Valley. But arguably the “beating wings” take us back to earlier tables and tableaux. To put my cards on the table, I would say that J.B. has rapidly incorporated the images of Constance as “eggbeater” and “kissing bird” (Brulov’s term) into his secondary revision, letting his anxiety about this big bird’s beating his “eggs” return him, après coup, just in the nick of tine— yes, tine, for the action of eggbeating is sometimes executed with a fork—back to the inscribed edge of her tabletop swimming pool. Refusing to fall in (line), he turns and runs from the eggbeating wings, running somehow even from the card table at which Mary Carmichael’s “perfect hand” would have “beaten the pants off ” him. The beating wings, the upper hand, and (why not thrown them in as well?) the biting teeth, the c(h)oppers, all chase him, and almost ketchup with him (sorry), until he comes (no apologies)—“to the bottom.” If we linger with/at/in this “bottom” for a moment, we might see a thing or two. Note that in the visual representation of the dream’s content we never directly behold the beating wings but, in the first shot, see only their enormous shadow cast on the surrealist slope and the minuscule male figure running away from them down its side. But in the second shot the camera tightens in, so that the outer tips of the wings are


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clipped, and, just as J.B. verbally announces that he “came to the bottom,” the wings themselves are reduced to what look like a huge pair of cheeks, assume the gluteal contours of a maximal behind, a great dark ass pressing down on the fleeing figure. At the end of the dream, then, J.B. is situated between the visual and the verbal, caught not “between two deaths” but between two bottoms: an ominous, castratory bottom—the “front bottom,” of course, writ large—from which he flees, and another, alternative or sheltering (crack in the inverted) sky, the universal “back bottom” to which he dreams of coming. And perhaps into which he has already come, and not only in his dreams, though, still suffering amnesia, he does not quite remember his train’s earlier destination or the possibility that he may have already been in love with his analyst. After all, the wing portion of the dream can be torn off and read as replaying the day’s residues, or what happened to J.B. just before he was knocked out by Brulov’s bromide: “chased” out of the bedroom by a harpy, a pussy putting up a front, its best face forward, J.B. descends the stairs, perhaps hoping to re-find a willing bottom (“The finding of an object is in fact the re-finding of it” [SE 7:222], says Freud; “Any husband of Constance’s is a husband of mine,” spake Brulov) only to find himself going down, topped or toppled by an overpowering glass of milk. The word “toppled” tips us back into the dream’s imagery and directs us to another toppling, descending male figure, this time the little doll of a man, representing the real Dr. Edwardes, that we see falling off the snow-covered roof, ostensibly having in narrative reality been shot in the back by his rival, Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll). But J.B.’s language here—he says he saw a man who “went over” and who then had “his feet in the air”—might tip us off about something other than literal murder going on behind Edwardes’s back or in back of his behind. At least, for me, the words “went over” slide easily into “bent over,” while the words “his feet in the air” resonate with what Leo Bersani in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” has called “the seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (212). In other words, given the way Hitchcock’s Rope and D.A. Miller’s “Anal Rope” demonstrate that the director is not above giving us “murder” as a substitute for a cut that cannot be shown and a love that dare not speak its name, we might say that, metaphorically, the “two deaths”—Edwardes as shot in the back (by Murchison) and fucked in the ass (by Ballantine)—are not exactly mutually exclusive. Of course, we cannot “know” what “really happened” between J.B. and Edwardes at the ski resort called Gabriel Valley (mainly because nothing ever “really happens” anywhere in the imaginary/symbolic montage called human reality). But resorting to the anything-but-angelic

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image of the ass-fuck allows us an alternative view (albeit not exactly bird’s-eye) both of what happens when J.B. and Constance end up there and of the memory that they there unearth. The therapeutic/narrative conceit is that by reexperiencing a slide down a slope J.B. is bound to recover an explanatory memory. And recover a big one he does, from childhood no less. But here we might remember Freud’s suggestion, in “Screen Memories,” that what we recover mnemonically are never memories from childhood but only memories related to childhood, that memories do not simply emerge but are rather complicatedly formed. How, then, does J.B.’s realization take shape? Or, to put it another way, how does knowing that Hitchcock filmed murder scenes like love scenes and vice versa allow us to look (awry) at the upcoming scene of downhill skiing? We know that the purpose of the expedition involves uncovering murder; we know, because J.B. is getting progressively weirder and more hostile and pretty much seems to want to kill Constance, that the scene’s narrative suspense will depend upon the question of whether or not J.B. is actually going to bump her off; but we also know, because we know Hitchcock, that a scene of possibly impending murder will in some way or another allude to love. But how so? And of what sort?21 The two begin by “going together” down the slope. But, gradually, as the narrative tension (not to mention the ludicrous rear projection) mounts, Constance pulls out ahead, slightly bent over, with J.B. coming up from behind. So positioned, the couple now skiing a tergo, J.B. is afforded the sight of Constance’s back bottom, and this lubricious—if a bit chilly—(be)hindsight is what seems to prod him to pull out his big memory. We see J.B. as a boy with his ass on some sort of tray sliding down a stone banister, yelling at the back of another boy, his brother, sitting at the banister’s bottom. The other boy does not hear or get out of harm’s way, and so the slider’s feet hit him in the back and knock him forward onto the impaling spikes of an iron gate. Having recovered this painful but exculpatory memory, J.B. is instantly “cured”: he realizes not only that he did not murder Edwardes but also that his more deeply buried guilt feelings can now be safely expelled, presto chango, because he sees that the spearing of his brother was nothing other than “an accident.” Of course, there is a certain happy resolution here, not only of the film’s manifest or stated conflict, but also of the more interesting tension that I highlighted in regard to Rear Window—namely, the problem of how to lead the gynophobic central male character to the upbeat, heterosexually happy ending that mainstream narrative’s comedic structures typically demand. What is queerly comedic about Spellbound ’s resolution is not just that the recovered “childhood” memory plainly alludes to the ass-fuck (a male body comes at another male body from above and


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behind; the other male body is penetrated ) and so, perhaps, allows J.B. to absolve himself at least of the charge of murder (not simply “I didn’t intentionally kill my brother; it was an accident,” but “I didn’t really ‘murder’ Edwardes; I only fucked him”). What is comedically queer is that we can speculatively read his realization back into his perception of bentover Constance’s upturned behind and his dawning understanding that “coming to the bottom” can entail more than he had ever imagined, remembered, or dreamed. The jubilant and astounded expression, the Aha-Erlibnis look that comes across his face, registers (for me, at least, quite comically) his fundamental discovery: that he can escape from the valley of the shadow of castration, can evade the teeth and tines of outrageous eggbeating, can cling tenaciously to the Real, and still come across to all the world as heterosexual, proudly pass for normal while remaining anything but. While a certain front door may now be safely closed—however Constance might feel about it—a whole new universe has opened up for our funny Ballantine. For us there remains only to tidy up the narrative and dispose of the real killer, or bear witness to his own self-disposal, which itself turns out to be a bit of a mess, if not quite a dump. Murchison forgets himself, ends up giving himself away with a verbal slip, telling Constance that he knew Edwardes “only slightly” when he is not supposed to have known him at all. Surmising that it was Murchison who murdered Edwardes, Constance confronts the director in his office, and he responds by pulling out his revolver. As Constance slowly turns away and begins to leave the office, calmly reciting all the excellent reasons why Murchison should not shoot her, we are installed into Murchison’s point of view as he follows her movement with the pistol. Gazing at Constance’s back over the barrel of Murchison’s gun, we see—in what I consider a fairly significant detail—that the round figure of his revolver’s cylinder is positioned to conform exactly to the contours of her behind, visually merging with and blotting it out, as she departs. We might note that insofar as the cylinder remains in visual contiguity with the ass it functions metonymically, while to the degree that the cylinder blots out and hence substitutes for the ass it functions metaphorically. We might also note that this whole mis-en-scene reverses the earlier sequence in which Constance stood in what she took to be the director’s chambers holding “his book” at her genital level: while before the director’s book functioned as both metonym and metaphor for Constance’s front bottom, now the director’s pistol’s cylinder functions as both metonym and metaphor for the back.22 Finally, we might pause here and let this asinine condensation remind us that we have seen this cylinder, or at least a metonym/ meta phor for it, before: displaced back into J.B.’s dream-work, we see

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a sort of distorted wheel let drop and left lying behind, and though Constance correctly associates this warped wheel with a revolver, we can now give it an alternative spin and recognize that this surreal little circle has not only a certain ring in it but a certain insistent (and insistently brown) ring-tone to it as well, ever reminding us that “if something in nature is designed to suggest certain properties of a ring to us, it is restricted to what language has dedicated the term anus to [ . . . ] and which in their modesty the ancient dictionaries designated as the ring that can be found behind” (Seminar III 317). Back in the director’s office, finding ourselves left behind after Constance’s exit, still situated in Murchison’s point of view, we now see the revolver, with its butt-load of bullets, held by a huge artificial hand, turn mechanically toward us and Murchison shoot himself—and us—in the eye. The pistol’s significant discharge collapses the phallic, the ocular, and the anal in a violent explosion, represented by a flash, a blinding burst of reddish brown, a startling and conspicuous swatch of color in a film that is otherwise utterly black and white. Indeed, this bleeding asshole of a shot is so exuberantly pyrotechnical, so full of “mischief, self-reflexiveness, [and] self-advertising artifice” (Leitch 263), so full of itself even as it empties itself out in a self-shattering kenosis, that, even though we have already seen the rotund figure of Alfred Hitchcock emerging from the chute of an elevator at the Empire State Hotel, we might take this last bit of razzle-dazzle as another, more abject cameo appearance in which the director once again flashily situates himself in the picture as stain, kakon, bad object. The director, in other words, is really messing with himself, and us, here. He implicates himself, his spectators, his camera, and its hole in a penetrating/penetrated story of the eye. Conflating the figure of Murchison, as director of Green Manors, with Hitchcock, as director of the film, Samuels writes that “the male director can only shoot himself at the end” and reads “this aspect of the film as an allegory of feminine power” (39). Not that I do not want to see feminine power allegorized, but I would say that we miss a central aspect of the film if we do not focus on the fact that the male director shoots himself not only in the eye at the end, but also in the eye as the end, or, in other words, that the film’s ending shot conflates the eye with the rear window and thus takes the ocular cut as a figure not only for castration but also for the universal anus.23 This assy-eyed conflation is underscored by Spellbound ’s approximately final words and its absolutely ending image. We are back at Grand Central. Constance and Ballantine approach the tracks, this time in the company of Dr. Brulov. He says: “And remember what I said: any husband of Constance’s is a husband of mine, so to speak.” Aside from Ballantine’s smiling “All right, goodbye,”


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Brulov’s “so to speak” are the film’s ultimate spoken words. And as he exits to the right, we see that Brulov’s oddly bitextual line has been overheard by the gateman, the same one as before, who stares curiously after the foreign doctor for a moment before turning to recognize the familiar but now even more foreign couple. Recognizing him in return, they restage their earlier, straight-with-a-twist embrace and then move on, once again going together, leaving the ticket-taker, with a provocative backward glance from Ballantine, holding their torn stubs. As before, the guardian of the tracks lets his eyes confusedly wander a bit but this time finally settles down and stares directly into the camera’s hole, which freezes just as a conventional pair of words, signifying finale, make their terminal appearance. The eyes are made to stare out at us through the spaces of the superimposed and spellbound letters, through the very fissures and cracks of “The End.”24 Thus, though the film’s final words are, more or less, “so to speak,” and so say something about desire as lack, about the jouissance denied to the speaking subject as such, and about the way conventional meaning as such is upheld, the closing ocular/anal image ends up opening onto the possibility of another, excessive satisfaction, taking us to the wrong side of the materializing tracks, to the fortunate Durchfall of the sexual relation, and thus to the abject place where conventional meaning queerly and comedically collapses. Who Loves/What Killed the Real/Judy?—or, Why There Is No Sexual Relation in Vertigo

I have argued that Rear Window and Spellbound both effect a kind of queer compromise, comedically compensating for the failure of the sexual relation by directing the leading men along the avenue of analism to an alternative altar and a different sort of heterosexual success, a success that exceeds normative heterosexuality while remaining, albeit queerly, heterosexual. Vertigo, by contrast, is uncompromisingly tragic, relentlessly melancholic, and seems to take its failures straight. Unlike with Jefferies/Doyle in Rear Window and Ballantine/Edwardes in Spellbound, there is in Vertigo apparently no other male character with whom Scottie Ferguson might have covertly been “in love” (Gavin Elster? I think not). And though there are in Vertigo downward spirals, ocular abysses, and figural “coils” galore, this film, when compared to the other two, does not point so conspicuously behind its back to a “ring” or seem as specifically concerned with the anus as a site of real penetration or “as the fantasmatic site of the unassimilable Real” (Edelman, “Glasshole” 95n25).25 Rather, I would venture, the film is haunted by the abject specter of what

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falls out or away from that site and into the real’s unassimilability, threatening to carry the subject with it; it is concerned less with what Lacan calls “the locus where the unspeakable object was rejected into the real” (Écrits 448) than with the unspeakable object itself, the subject’s identification with this object, and the cost of its rejection. I would also submit that these two aspects of Vertigo—the lack of evidence of repressed homosexual attachment for Scottie, and the interest less in amusing assholes than in the unspeakable, unassimilable objects that fall tragically out of them—could be used to complicate, perhaps to sully, Judith Butler’s findings in the “Melancholy Gender/ Refused Identification” and “Melancholy, Ambivalence, Rage” chapters of The Psychic Life of Power. To be sure, Hitchcock’s film, no doubt cinema’s greatest, saddest object lesson in heterosexual pathos, is nothing less than a sustained critical meditation on each of the terms in Butler’s chapter titles; moreover, there are sections in her first chapter, such as the following long quotation, that seem to speak quite directly to the (fragile and faltering) constitution of Scottie as paradigmatically heteromasculine subject: Becoming a “man” within this logic requires repudiating femininity as a precondition for the heterosexualization of sexual desire and its fundamental ambivalence. If a man becomes heterosexual by repudiating the feminine, where could that repudiation live except in an identification which his heterosexual career seeks to deny. Indeed, the desire for the feminine is marked by that repudiation: he wants the woman he would never be. He wouldn’t be caught dead being her: therefore he wants her. She is his repudiated identification (a repudiation he sustains as at once identification and the object of his desire). One of the most anxious aims of his desire will be to elaborate the difference between him and her, and he will seek to discover and install proof of that difference. His wanting will be haunted by a dread of being what he wants, so that his wanting will also always be a kind of dread. Precisely because what is repudiated and hence lost is preserved as a repudiated identification, this desire will attempt to overcome an identification which can never be complete. (137)

And yet, as readily and as clearly as we can apply this description of “becoming a ‘man’ ” to Scottie (not to mention to ourselves, if we happen to be straight men), as well as to certain gendered aspects of Scottie’s “vertigo” (the dizzy anxiety of dreading what one wants and wanting what one dreads to be), the picture gets murky if we attempt to map Scottie’s “melancholy”—or Freudian melancholia itself—seamlessly onto “gender.” Butler reads “melancholy” in Freud’s “Mourning and


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Melancholia” as the sign of “Freud’s thinking on ungrieved and ungrievable loss” and connects this ungrievability to “the predicament of living in a culture which can mourn the loss of homosexual attachment only with great difficulty.” She writes that this problem makes itself felt in the uncertainty with which homosexual love and loss is regarded: is it regarded as a “true” love, a “true” loss, a love and loss worthy and capable of being grieved, and thus worthy and capable of being lived? Or is it a love and loss haunted by the specter of a certain unreality, a certain unthinkability, the double disavowal of the “I never loved her, and I never lost her,” uttered by the woman, the “I never loved him, I never lost him,” uttered by a man? Is this the “never-never” that supports the naturalized surface of heterosexual life as well as its pervasive melancholia? (138)

I should say that what prevents my answering Butler’s last question with an unqualified “yes” is not simply (I hope) my own complicity in the “never-never” of heteronormativity’s naturalized surface, but rather my doubts about Butler’s assumption that melancholia’s ungrievably lost object is originally and inevitably a gendered person. Although Freud himself generally employs the words “object” (particularly “sexual object”) and “person” interchangeably, and in “Mourning and Melancholia” primarily casts the abandoned object in recognizably “personological” (Écrits 611) terms, he also intimates (or perhaps extimates) that primordially the lost object is not even human, much less gendered. As Tim Dean writes, “Freud reminds us that originally the object of desire is not another person, much less a member of the opposite sex but something rather more abject. Thinking of sexual object choice in terms of persons entails a kind of sublimation, an idealizing consolidation of the object, rather than the idealization of the instinct manifested in Freud’s examples of necrophilia and coprophagy” (Beyond 268). Now, the anything but ideal examples Dean mentions here (in a section of Beyond Sexuality called “The Triumph of Love”) are from Freud’s discussion of the sexual aberrations in the Three Essays, but in fact “necrophilia” and, particularly, “coprophagy” (or “licking excrement,” as Freud puts it) are perversely relevant to his thoughts on melancholia as well. For the truly unthinkable in what Freud’s thinking intimates in “Mourning and Melancholia”—so unthinkable that Butler nowhere registers it in her writings on Freud’s essay in The Psychic Life of Power—is less the deathly than the fecal penumbra of “the shadow of the object” that falls upon the ego in melancholy’s sunken, fallen state.26 What makes this penumbral fecality unthinkable, unbearable—what makes melancholia so

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melancholic, so mortifying, so “dark”—is Freud’s bright idea that in melancholia the ego introjects, recovers, retains, sustains, and thereby partially becomes the lost, dead, once beloved now punitively abjected thing it can never completely, evacuatively mourn. Indeed, as Dean points out, Freud characterizes melancholia as failed mourning, as mourning’s painfully overassimilated “excess”: The Freudian theory of mourning revises [ . . . ] Freud’s theory of identification, insofar as the defining characteristic of melancholia [ . . . ] as pathological mourning is its proclivity to replace an object cathexis (love for the lost object) by an identification with that object. [ . . . ] This is dangerous because the ego takes the object with which a part of it is identified and chastises it with the viciousness of a hatred that is the underside of any love relationship having the status of ambivalence. (Beyond 188)

Of course, it’s bad enough for the ego if the psychically introjected object of loss and love had been an actual person, once a living presence, now a cadaverous absence (cadaver: from cadere, to fall), but it is worse still, a real psychic Durchfall, if the object had never been anything but a little piece of shit, originally an infantile gift of love but now merely kakon, forsaken object, accursed share. The phrase “accursed share” is of course redolent of Georges Bataille, whose observation that “the horror we feel at the thought of a corpse is akin to the feeling we have at human excreta” (Erotism 57) helps us understand how “necrophilia and coprophagy” may haunt melancholia’s psychic introjection and its “narcissistic identification with the object” (SE 14:249) more primordially than any lost homosexual attachment—emphasis upon which, again, presupposes the abandoned object’s having been gendered.27 In other words, what is at issue in “melancholy” is not only “gender” as “refused identification” but also the scatontological anxiety that may emerge from a disinterred identification with refuse. If pervasive “gender melancholy” entails that I as a straight man can skate, smoothly but sadly, across the naturalized surface of heterosexual life only by virtue of a double disavowal, a certain repressed “never-never”—“I never loved him, I never lost him”—then I may very well stumble in shame upon realizing that I actually did love some lost “him,” but I would fall through the crack of some really black ice if I were to lose the support of a more primordial “nevernever-never” that originally had nothing to do with the him/her of gender but involved my pre-anthropogenetic immersion in the primary narcissism of the unassimilable real. My refusing my ever having been identified with refuse involves less a gendered dread about “being vs. having” than a scatontological anxiety about my being a being not worth having, about


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being unbearably and unthinkably unhaveable. In other words, I myself may have lost any number of loathsome turds—and good riddance too!—but I never loved a turd, never was a turd, never loved or lost myself as turd. To further explicate these bizarre disavowals, I fall back on Lacan, for here any number of his poubellicated words come bobbing to the surface (at least of my thinking), including the following: “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object” (Écrits 247); “More precisely this lost object is the support of the subject and in many cases is a more abject thing than you may care to consider” (“Of Structure” 189); “The a, the object, falls. That fall is primal” (Television 85); “The object petit a is what falls from the subject in anxiety” (Television 82); not to mention those fallen, floating words pertaining to the anxiety of the writer who, when facing the blank white page, “will tell you who the turd is in his fantasy” (Écrits 693), and so on. But in terms of this scatontological identification with refuse (as opposed or at least prior to gendered “refused identification”), what is notable (though perhaps unthinkable) is Lacan’s emphasis on the copula, the linking verb “to be,” the is, both in his description of the writer’s anxious fantasy and in the following bit from “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”: For these objects, whether part-objects or not, but certainly signifying objects—the breast, excrement, and the phallus—are no doubt won or lost by the subject; he is destroyed by them or preserves them, but above all he is these objects, according to the place where they function in his fundamental fantasy. This form of identification merely demonstrates the pathology of the path down which the subject is pushed in a world where his needs are reduced to exchange values—this path itself finding its radical possibility only in the mortification the signifier imposes on his life by numbering it. (Écrits 513)28

What is interesting here is that even though Lacan obviously “thinks” this emphasized copula and the subjective identification with the excremental object it asserts, he also thinks about its unthinkability, for when in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire” he discusses “the object described by analytic theory” in terms of “the mamilla, the feces, the phallus (as an imaginary object), and the urinary flow,” he immediately calls this corporeal lineup “an unthinkable list” (Écrits 693), thus perhaps commenting on the way clear thinking constitutes and sustains itself in a world in which needs are reduced to exchange values and unspeakable objects are rejected into the real. Rest assured, I am not

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suggesting that Judith Butler participates in this reduction/rejection, only that, given the very unthinkability of Lacan’s a-list, it is understandable that the turd as prototype for the lost object didn’t exactly show up on hers. I am also suggesting that by assuming the gendered personhood of melancholia’s forsaken object, by making a “him” out of what the sad-assed straight man insists he never, never lost or loved, Butler herself engages in a sort of “idealizing consolidation of the object” (Dean, Beyond 268). And though Dean is critiquing orthodox Lacanistas rather than Judith Butler in the lines I am about to quote, I think his words here are apropos to my problems with her, for, like him, “I can’t help thinking that this failure of articulation may be explained in part by reference to the fact that excrement remains an extraordinarily difficult topic for sustained discourse: the anal object tests the limits of sexual tolerance far more stringently than mere homosexuality or other manifestations of queerness” (267). If, however, this admittedly odd charge against Butler’s sustained discourse—that it stays too impeccably “personological” (Écrits 611) to allow itself to be sufficiently stained—is itself sufficiently made, I will hasten to point out that there is a strong psychic relation between the refused identification with ungendered refuse that Butler ignores and the required masculine repudiation of abjected femininity “as a precondition for the heterosexualization of sexual desire” (137) that she foregrounds. And pointing out this strong psychic relation allows me to return to the matter of Hitchcock’s treatment of the failed sexual relation in Vertigo. Needless to say, no few bottles of Lacanian ink have been spilled over this film. For example, in an essay called “Hitchcock’s Organs without Bodies” (first published in the journal Lacanian Ink, later worked into the “Hitchcock as Anti-Plato” section of his book Organs without Bodies), Slavoj Žižek spills out the following: Vertigo is a movie in three parts (plus a prologue), each part lasting almost exactly 40 minutes, and with the closure marked by the suicidal jump of the heroine (fi rst in the San Francisco bay, then twice from the tower at the San Juan Bautista mission). While each part focuses on the figure of Judy-Madeleine, it obeys an economy of its own; in each of them, Judy-Madeleine occupies a specific place. In part one, she is ϕ, an imaginary presence at the site of the Real; in part two, she is S(A⁄ ), the signifier of the barred Other (i.e., the signifier of a certain mystery); in part three, she is a, the excremental abject-remainder. All of these three figures are, of course, forms of defense against the central abyss threatening to swallow Scottie. Vertigo makes it clear that the phobia of heights is actually the phobia of depths; It is the abyss, like das Ding, that is calling. The


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subject who suffers from vertigo perceives a call which he or she is about to answer, throwing him or herself into the void.[sic] . . . Vertigo is not simply the movie about a contemporary case of courtly love, but the movie that renders palpable the deadlock of courtly love, the terrible price that both parties have to pay for it. (137–38)29

Now, as you might imagine, what catches my eye in Žižek’s spillage is the designation of Judy-Madeleine as “excremental abject-remainder.” Also eye-catching is the fact that she appears later in the essay as “the pathological stain, the remainder of the Real” (138), while in the book version of the piece she shows up in and as this bit of surplus enjoyment: To grasp properly the fatal attraction of the lady [of courtly love] qua abyssal Thing, it is crucual [sic] to approach it through the topic of the gaze. The gaze is not simply transfi xed by the emergence of the excessive-unbearable Thing. Rather, it is, that the Thing (what we perceive as the traumatic-elusive point of attraction in the space of reality) is the very point at which the gaze inscribes itself into reality, the point at which the subject encounters itself as gaze. (Organs 163)

Of course, when Žižek writes that we must approach the fatal attraction of “the lady qua abyssal Thing” through the topic of “the gaze,” the gaze he means is not the “controlling male gaze” of post–Laura Mulvey feminist film theory but the gaze as explicated by Lacan in Seminar XI, the gaze in and through which the subject loses control, excessively-unbearably sees itself situated “in the picture as stain” (Seminar XI 98; my emphasis). A melancholy, ambivalent mix of fatal attraction and fecal repulsion, the gaze is here the very call of the void, a call to the subject to void itself, to watch itself fall and to follow its own downcast eyes out of their holes into an abject, swirling abyss (an ontic/ocular “coil” that a camera might vertiginously capture/lose in, for example, a “zoom forward/track backwards” shot into an alley’s crack or down a spiral staircase). In other words, the Lacanian gaze, unlike the controlling male gaze, is ultimately less caught up in castration and the male anxiety to visually “discover and install proof ” of sexual difference than it is inscribed in what Roberto Harari helpfully calls “the phantasy of being shit” (253).30 But what does this assertion about the gaze’s real (fantasmatic) content entail about the failed sexual relation between Scottie as the subject who encounters himself in/as this gaze and Judy defensively and defenestratively figured as “excremental abject-remainder”? In Seminar XX (which could be read as an extended footnote to Vertigo) Lacan writes

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that “in the case of man,” phallic jouissance is only ever masturbatory, “the jouissance of the idiot” (81). He also asserts that while it is “the phallic function that helps [men] situate themselves as men and approach woman,” nonetheless there is no chance for a man to have jouissance of a woman’s body, otherwise stated, for him to make love, without [ . . . ] something that says no to the phallic function. [ . . . ] That doesn’t stop him from desiring woman in every way, even when that condition does not obtain. He not only desires her, but does all kinds of things to her that bear an astonishing resemblance to love. (72)

Describing Vertigo along these lines, Žižek situates Scottie’s desire within the “phallic masturbatory domain” of “idiotic jouissance” and claims that “Scottie does not really want to make love to Judy-Madeleine; he literally wants to masturbate with the aid of her real body” (Organs 161). In other words, Scottie may do all kinds of things to or with Judy-Madeleine that, perhaps to an idiot (and, believe me, it takes one to know one), bear an astonishing resemblance to love, but Scottie stands no chance of actually making love to or with her “real body” because, since he cannot say no to the phallic function—mainly because inscribing the “no” that makes all saying or being-said possible is the phallic function—he can only ever play his own organ. As previously stated, “A subject, as such, doesn’t have much to do with jouissance” (Seminar XX 50). How, though, do we reconcile Scottie’s idiotic autoaffection, which supposedly desires at least to make use of a woman’s “real body,” with what Žižek rightly calls “Scottie’s disgust at Judy’s body, at her physical proximity (in contrast to the ethereal presence of Madeleine),” with the idea that “Scottie finds her bodily proximity repellent,” the idea that “Judy, in her bodily presence, can only be an object of disgust for Scottie [ . . . ] an incomplete, formless slime” (161)? In other words, who is it that loves the Real/Judy?31 It may not be a “who” at all, but it surely is not Scottie—at least, not as long as he remains personologically caught up in his own “phallic masturbatory domain,” this “phallic dimension” that supports his personhood and which, says Žižek, enables us to defi ne, in a precise way, sexual possession. Its ultimate formula is not the exploitation of the partner as a sexual object but the renunciation of such use, the attitude of “I do not want anything from you, no sexual favors . . . on the condition that you also do not have any sex with other!” This refusal to share sexual jouissance is absolute possession. (161)


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Clearly, Scottie is all about absolute possession, is far more interested in having the ethereal Madeleine (as imaginary phallus) than being (with) Judy (as excremental abject-remainder). But this clear preference, or preference for clarity, complicates Žižek’s assertion that Scottie wants to masturbate with the aid of Judy-Madeleine’s “real body.” For if Scottie, a subject as such, has little to do with jouissance, he wants nothing (or fuck-all) to do with the real.32 Moreover, to my mind, Scottie’s “refusal to share sexual jouissance,” his refusal to be (with) the Real/Judy, speaks not only of his gendered refused identification but also of his refused identification with refuse. Žižek correctly observes that “Vertigo is, in a sense, the ultimate anti-Platonic film, a systematic materialist undermining of the Platonic project,” and that the murderous fury that seizes Scottie when he finally discovers that Judy, whom he tried to make into Madeleine, is (the woman he knew as) Madeleine is the fury of the deceived Platonist when he perceives that the original he wants to remake in a perfect copy is already, in itself a copy. (157)

But I would give these comments a different sort of materialist spin and suggest that Vertigo is the ultimate antiphallic film, a systematic undermining of the phallic project, and that “vertigo” itself is what happens when the subject who thinks he has gained the equilibrium of phallic self-possession sees the rock of castration crumble, sees the phallus turn to shit in his hands, perceives “that the phallus is less a figure for the penis than, more fundamentally, a figure for the turd,” perceives “that the phallus is simply a turd in disguise” (Dean, Beyond 266), and, having traumatically seen through the turd’s phallic imposture, is tempted to follow that falling figure and do a full-gainer into the void’s perverse core. The result of this vertiginous abjection, “in its most extreme form,” writes Harari, “is none other than the defenestration of the subject identified absolutely with the a. The subject, being a, falls, hurls itself down” (266). But the less extreme, more typical or “normal” solution, the “symbolic” solution as such—as Vertigo also makes clear, though without clearly endorsing it—is the defenestration not of the speaking subject but of the unspeakable object, the final rejection of that object into the real. In other words, in the end, it is the Real/Judy that/who ends up taking the fall. We can learn something about this final rejection, about the way it ideally consolidates/defenestrates the object and thus verifies the symbol’s murder of the thing, by considering its initiating moment, by which I mean the film’s anamorphic opening. There, at the very tail end of the

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Saul Bass title sequence, we see the name “Alfred Hitchcock” come floating up out of the abyss of an eye. We then cut to the first shot of the film proper, an establishing shot that, surprisingly, establishes very little. Having seen Vertigo a hundred times, we can only imagine how disorienting this abstract, anamorphic gray bar stretched across the murky screen must have been for the film’s first spectators in 1957. And we ourselves, in beholding this bar yet again, can never recover whatever delicious/traumatic feeling of defamiliarization we may have first briefly experienced in not knowing what we were looking at while seeing it. Indeed, we now “know” what we are looking at all too well, for, if we really want to get Lacanian on Vertigo’s ass, we know, even if we wish we did not, that this bar relates to the bar of prohibition that separates the signifier from the signified, that “the function of the bar is not unrelated to the phallus” (Seminar XX 39).33 We know that this bar is situated horizontally, and so relates to the syntagmatic axis of language, and hence metonymy, but we also know that in the visual sequence we have just seen the abstract bar takes the place of the specific name “Alfred Hitchcock,” and that this substitution aligns the bar with the paradigmatic axis of language, and hence metaphor—indeed, paternal metaphor, for we know that “Alfred Hitchcock” is the name not only of the director but also of the father because we know, damn it, that the eye from which that name emerged belonged to none other than his own daughter, Patricia. And our “phallic” knowledge is confirmed, whether we want it to be or not, when we see a hand reach up and grab the bar, for with that grasp the anamorphic becomes phallomorphic; the signifiable becomes the signified; suture prevails; and the handy fugitive employs the now fully defined bar not to jerk himself off but to raise himself up and pull himself out of the alley’s dark crack, attempting to leave it behind—albeit with the law, emerging from the same crevice, still very much on his tail.34 Perhaps we know a bit too much here, but our excessive understanding of Vertigo’s phallic setup should not keep us from seeing how the film is setting the phallus up for a fall into excess. For is not the nearest visual analog for the firm horizontal bar that, to the best of our knowledge, represents the phallus nothing other than that crumpling metal gutter to which Scottie clings when, having failed to leap over the abyss, he hangs suspended above it? And if, keeping our minds in the gutter, we resituate Scottie’s suspension in the context of what Edelman calls “cinema’s primal cut—the enabling fissure that holds us tight with the strength of a sphincteral grip” (“Glasshole” 83; my emphasis), do we not see what is most primoridally at stake in the question of Scottie’s letting go? If we imagine that the phallus enables us to symbolize ourselves, to pull ourselves up out of the “formless slime” of the real (though not without a


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touch of retro-projected nostalgia for its “oceanic feeling”), then would letting go of the phallus not inevitably entail a fall back from “meaning” into “being,” entail that “the subject, being a, falls” (Harari 266), entail, in other words—or in our very loss of words—the downcast resurrection of the defenestrative “phantasy of being shit” (Harari 253)? Would letting go of the phallus not in a sense involve our forgetting ourselves, voiding ourselves, letting ourselves go in a voluptuously fecal swoon over the void? And is “vertigo” not the fear neither of heights nor of depths but of the very real attractiveness of the void’s perverse core, its thanatically “oceanic” call for us to utterly enjoy? Why don’t you? It’s easy. Just ask your super-ego—or, for that matter, Rebecca’s Mrs. Danvers. Or just ask Beyond the Pleasure Principle’s little Ernst, for if Scottie is in the position to open his hands, let himself go, hurl himself down, then we can apprehend that he is in a situation analogous to Freud’s grandson’s “reel” relation to himself, at least in Lacan’s rereading of what Freud grasps in relation to “our old friend fort-da” (Jameson, “Lacan” 392): When Freud grasps the repetition involved in the game played by his grandson, in the reiterated fort-da, he may indeed point out that the child makes up for the effect of his mother’s disappearance by making himself the agent of it—but, this phenomenon is of secondary importance. [ . . . ] The ever-open gap introduced by the absence indicated remains the cause of a centrifugal tracing in which that which falls is not the other qua face in which the subject is projected, but that cotton-reel linked to itself by the thread that it holds—in which is expressed that which, of itself, detaches itself in this trial, self-mutilation on the basis of which the order of significance will be put in perspective. For the game of the cotton-reel is the subject’s answer to what the mother’s absence has created on the frontier of his domain [ . . . ] namely, a ditch, around which one can only play at jumping. [ . . . ] This reel is not the mother reduced to a little ball [ . . . ]—it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his, still retained. . . . [I]t is in the object to which the opposition is applied in act, the reel, that we must designate the subject. To this object we will later give the name it bears in the Lacanian algebra—the petit a. (Seminar XI 62)

Although some of Lacan’s language here suggests castration, he lets drop a sufficient number of clues for us to suspect an operation “more abject” at work in the way he describes the fort-da (particularly, given the way Tim Dean has forever reconfigured the Lacanian algebra, in regard to the adumbration of the petit a). In any case, not to leave Scottie hanging (even though the film surely does, leaving open the question

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of exactly how he ever gets himself safely down), let us simply note the way the shadow of his own object-relation to himself (as “that which falls” into the ditch he can only play at jumping over) falls upon his relationship to the Real/Judy as ditched excremental abject-remainder. Let’s at least note the fecal penumbra cast over the two scenes in which Scottie saves, recovers, or “brings back” the ethereal Madeleine (and thereby seems to become “master”—to mix Lacan’s language with Larry David’s—of “the frontier of his [own] domain”): (1) when he fishes her out of San Francisco Bay, into the murky waters of which she had plunged and in which he finds her floating inertly, rather “like the turd waiting for the flush” (Beckett, Three Novels 162); and (2) when he has at last successfully re-made Judy into Madeleine, erased or rinsed away all the tawdry Judy traces, and stands gazing in erotic wonder as the perfected image—last “coil” of hair finally in its proper place—comes floating toward him, emerging not only from the portals of the past but also from the doorway (and, behind it, the cloacal plumbing coils) of the sal du bain. If these scenes mean anything about the way being is sacrificed to meaning in the ideal consolidation of the object, it is that Scottie’s Platonic, masturbative “project” involves not simply raising the dead or repossessing the phallus but—perhaps our project’s covert essence—the impossible effort to polish a turd. What remains for this reading is to establish the relation between the impossibility of this clean-up effort and the Durchfall of the sexual relation, and to suggest what Scottie might have otherwise done—short not of castration but of the anguished ecstasy of coprophagy—to have stood a turd’s chance of overcoming that failure in a final “triumph of love.” As you will recall, in Read My Desire, Joan Copjec writes that “the meaning, when all is said and done, of Lacan’s notorious assertion that ‘there is no sexual relation’ [is that] sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation, to communication” (207). If the unassimilable, unsymbolizable, or impersonable real of sex is opposed to relation and communication, if the impossibility of “real love” is the condition of human subjectivity as constituted in and by language, and if “ jouissance may be understood as ‘self-destructive’ insofar as it overwhelms the ego or coherent self ” (Dean, Beyond 164), then it is only by way of a radical desubjectification, and hence a sort of antirelationality, that jouissance as ecstatic contact with the real qua “triumph of love” is possible. And yet, as I have been suggesting, it is just this self-shattering, this falling away from a specifically heteromasculine or hyperbolically phallic form of subjectivity, that constitutes Scottie’s most vertiginous fear in Vertigo. This fear indicates why “Scottie” as such cannot possibly love the Real/Judy. “He” cannot love “her” because no “one man” can,


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and Hitchcock demonstrates an understanding of the impossibility not only of successful relations between Scottie and Judy but also of successful heterosexual relations as such within the ideological system that Lacan calls the symbolic order. Real love between Scottie and the Real/ Judy is impossible not only because even a merely sexualized relation between them depends for Judy on “forgetting the other” (Madeleine) while it depends for Scottie on “bringing her back.” It is impossible not only because it is “too late” either to forget the other or to bring her back. Real love is impossible because the phallic function, the symbolic conditions of subjectivity as such, render it impossible. In this sense, the moment in the fi lm that I will end up focusing on here—when the nun’s emergence in the tower interrupts the couple’s final kiss—dramatizes not only the symbolic order’s intrusion into the real, and the symbol’s murder of the thing (whatever else she can be said to symbolize, the nun primarily symbolizes symbolization itself ), but also the question of to what extent the kiss we are watching is “really” happening at all. In the ideological system that Vertigo so meticulously lays bare, there is no kiss that is not subject to interruption: it is always already “too late” for “real love.” Or is it? Is it possible to be, to love, to be in love, outside of that system, beyond the reach of the symbolic law? I have cited Lacan to the effect that “there is no chance for a man to have jouissance of a woman’s body, otherwise stated, for him to make love, without castration, in other words, without something that says no to the phallic function” (Seminar XX 72). Vertigo of course falls short of this castration, this saying no, but steadily if anxiously gestures toward it. Taking the policeman in the film’s opening as emblematic of the symbolic law, we can read Scottie’s inability to take the cop’s hand as a refusal of the phallic function: Scottie cannot let the law save him, not from falling but from his own vertiginous desire to fall, to let himself go. As a result, the law itself collapses, and the cop falls screaming into the first of many dark cracks. The film then wastes no time establishing the correspondence between Scottie’s vertigo and a feminization understood as disempowerment and restraint—wrapping him in a corset, qualifying his independence (“I’m a man of independent means,” he tells Midge, “fairly independent”), and so on—a feminization, in other words, understood as the opposite of a masculine “power and freedom” that is itself defined repeatedly as the ability and the prerogative to throw a woman away, to ditch her, to murder her. Nor does the film waste time establishing a narrative structure in which overcoming vertigo entails a remasculinization that will itself depend upon containing and repossessing a woman’s body (since you can’t throw away what you don’t already have). This structure is set up nicely by the fact that the

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designer of the wonder-bra that Midge is sketching is an Air Force engineer who has designed this supportive apparatus, the very function of which is to contain, on the model of a cantilever bridge (no fear of falling here, either into cleavage or into any deeper crevice that a bridge might span); it is underscored by Judy’s apparent bralessness, duly noted by Truffaut, in her room at the Empire Hotel (perhaps Lacan’s list of part objects—the breast, the feces, the phallus—apprises us of what’s at stake in “keeping up appearances” and what’s potentially abject in Judy’s evident protuberances); and it is capped off most chillingly with the shot of Judy’s seeming lifeless legs disappearing up through the hatch in the bell tower at the Mission San Juan Bautista as Scottie jerks her “real body” off to its doom.35 That Judy’s real body is doomed—both to literal death and to the negating masquerade that precedes it—spells out the phallic dimension of the narrative structure that Vertigo both exemplifies and undermines. In “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan writes that “one can indicate the structures that govern the relations between the sexes by referring simply to the phallus’ function. These relations revolve around a being and a having . . .” (Écrits 582). Judy’s forced remasquerade as Madeleine clearly marks her alienated desire “to be” the phallus for Scottie (and we could make this mark even clearer if we substituted “be” for “do” in the line by which Judy signals her acquiescence to Scottie’s design: “All right, I’ll be what you want—it doesn’t matter about me anymore”); while Scottie’s possession of Madeleine’s body stands in for his possession of the phallus and indicates his desire “to have” what Elster has had. Scottie’s vertigo, however, marks his possession of a contradictory body, an abject, feminized body that can fall, that desires to fall. His final repossession of Madeleine’s body at the summit of the bell tower would have signaled the conquest of his vertiginous abjection and guaranteed his identification with Elster’s “power and freedom”—an identification that of course lays bare the inherent murderousness of phallic self-possession. Scottie’s final successful ascension of the bell tower’s staircase marks his movement from being a “made to order witness” to being in a position to say “I made it. I made it.” It is a conspicuous coincidence that the word “made” is itself made out of the first four letters of the name “Madeleine,” and Scottie’s ascent here, again, seems to signal his vertigo-overcoming remasculinization: he moves from being to having, rises from passivity to activity, from being made to making it; he goes from being made like Madeleine, being made like Madeleine was made, to being like the freely powerful one, Elster, who made her (“He made you over just like I made you over, only better”). Tumescent with accom-


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plishment, all ambivalence given over to rage, Scottie towers and glowers, pulls and pushes Judy’s body, throws her against the wall. At one point in this rigid fort-da, however, he seems to melt, to give up the ghost: “Oh Maddy, I loved you so,” he says, the collapse of the names Madeleine and Judy into Maddy occurring only this once in the film and indicating some possible transition, the faint possibility of Scottie’s relinquishing Madeleine and opening up to Judy, despite the past tense “loved.” Sensing the opening, Judy moves toward Scottie, saying, “I let you change me because I loved you and wanted you. Oh please, Scottie. You love me now.” Now, however, it’s Scottie’s time to say “No, it’s too late,” followed by “there’s no bringing her back.” And then, despite the fact that there is no bringing “her” back, they kiss, a kiss that provokes the questions of just who or what Scottie thinks he’s kissing, of whether he’s kissing the Real/Judy or not, whether Scottie and Judy, the man and the woman, are for the first time in the film “really” kissing, of whether there can really be a relation between them. What seems to precipitate the meltdown that leads Scottie to this possibly real kiss is his mention of Madeleine’s (actually Carlotta’s) necklace, which Judy has kept and with which she has (idiotically? intentionally?) adorned herself on this fatal evening. Scottie tells her that she shouldn’t have “kept a souvenir of a killing,” that she “shouldn’t have been so sentimental.” He then begins to melt and to murmur, “Maddy.” But what does this necklace really mean to him? As Žižek puts the question, and answers it, When Scottie sees Madeleine’s necklace on Judy, this object is a sign of what? If Scottie were to be minimally open to Judy, he could have read it as the sign of Judy’s love for him; she loved him so much that she wanted to keep a souvenir of her relationship with him. Instead, he opts for the Platonic reading: to put it abruptly, the necklace demonstrates that Madeleine does not exist. (Organs 158)

I would submit that the necklace not only demonstrates that Madeleine does not exist but also makes palpable the fact that Judy really does; she insistently ex-sists, in all her vulgar, disgusting bodily proximity, even as what Žižek says she really is to Scottie’s complete idiocy—to wit, “incomplete, formless slime” (161). Moreover, the Real/Judy’s pressing ex-sistence, as brought out into the open by her display of the necklace, opens the question of what Scottie’s being “minimally open to Judy” might really entail. For though we may want to save ourselves from a fall by latching onto this necklace in terms of the “signifying chain” and linking it to those “links by which a necklace firmly hooks onto a link of

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another necklace made of links” (Écrits 418), let us recall that the necklace is nothing other than a string of jewels, and that “in the unconscious, jewels, like excrement, are cursed matter that flows from a wound; they are a part of oneself destined for open sacrifice (they serve, in fact, as sumptuous gifts charged with sexual love)” (Bataille, Visions 119). This little excre-memento from Bataille serves to remind us of just what the “forsaken object” of Scottie’s sentimental melancholy really consists; it signifies exactly what it is in and of himself that he has to overcome and to sacrifice in order to open himself to Judy’s Real kiss. He has to give up the pathetic ghost of ethereal het melancholy and give himself over to the perverse core of palpable s(c)atisfaction. In other words, pucker up: if Scottie isn’t “licking excrement” here, then I don’t know what else he thinks he’s doing. Of course, we can never know what he thinks he’s doing or to what yolky extent he’s enjoying it, mainly because of what Žižek calls “the perfect timing of the interrupting intrusion of the third agency” (Organs 168)—the insertion of the nun.36 All of the film’s previous kissing scenes have led us to this moment of dreadful enjoyment and its interruption, for they all allude, however tenuously, to the Real, even as that Real is being Symbolically intruded upon. There is, for example, a certain “oceanic feeling” to the first major kiss—at least, the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean provide its rearly projected backdrop. But this oceanic crashing crashes the party to the extent that we recognize the backdrop itself as conventional romantic Hollywood cliché. The second kiss occurs in the livery stable at the Mission San Juan Bautista. Scottie has taken Madeleine there to “destroy” the dream she has been narrating about it. “It’s all real,” he insists, an insistence somewhat qualified by his then turning to a phony horse to support his argument. Madeleine underscores the motif of symbolic intrusion in significantly adumbrating terms when, in a Carlotta Valdez trance, she intones: “This was our favorite place. But we were forbidden to play here. Sister Teresa would scold us.” Then they kiss, but the “too late, too late” dialogue ensues, and Madeleine heads for the bell tower. During the third big kiss, in Judy’s apartment, after she has been transformed back into Madeleine, Scottie finds himself surrounded by the revolving set of the livery stable, a haunting, hallucinatory sequence that has among other effects that of conjuring by association the phony symbolic horse and the scolding, play-forbidding Sister Teresa. The stage is quite well set, then, for the nun’s intrusion into the play-scene, the scene of possible jouissance, in the bell tower. The previous scenes of jouissance have been not Real but Symbolic, phony, phallic, referencing only what Lacan calls “the jouissance of the idiot,” or at least, in Scottie’s case, of the dupe. This kiss stands some chance, however


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faint, of being overwhelmingly Real, which is one of the reasons why it appears so anguished, for it involves on Scottie’s side not the idiotic jouissance of a melancholy baby’s phallic self-possession but a perversely self-shattering desubjectification, the absolute coprophagy short of which Real love can never triumph. But up pops the nun, saving the phallic Scottie from ecstatic oral contact with the abject-remainder, saving him from the traumatic encounter with the excessively assimilable excremental lick, and effecting the Real/Judy’s final, fatal rejection. This intrusive figure can be said to symbolize effusively: she’s the return of the repressed; she’s the return of the repressor; she’s Sister Teresa come again to forbid play; she’s Carlotta Valdez; she’s the ghost of the real Madeleine Elster; she’s Catholicism; she’s guilt; she’s patriarchy; she’s the law; she’s the phallus; she’s the fallen cop come back in drag; she’s the final vertical reiteration of the film’s initial anamorphic horizontal bar. But before she can symbolize anything in particular, before we can see that she’s just a damned nun, she appears as the very possibility of symbolization itself. She is at first not a symbol but a signifier unconnected to any signified, a pure acoustic image, a penumbral image that is not fecal but phonic, even telephonic, that appears only to say, “I heard voices.” Her appearance terrifies the Real/Judy, who cries, “Oh no, oh no,” who resists symbolization absolutely, says no to the phallic function, which itself is already a function of the no, of the name, and pays for that refusal with her real life. And if we conflate Judy’s no with the name of what appears before her as the phallic negation of her real life and her real love—if we mix, in other words, the no with the nun—we arrive at that ghastly play on words about which you can’t say I didn’t warn you, and we see that it is the very possibility of the noun that assures that the symbol really is the murder of the thing and that there really is no such thing as a sexual relation.


Essay

6

“IT’S NO LONGER YOUR FILM”: ABJECTION AND (THE) MULHOLLAND (DEATH) DRIVE Reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite, is one of the means of repre sentation most favoured by the dream-work and one which is capable of employment in the most diverse directions. It serves in the first place to give expression to the fulfi lment of a wish in reference to some par ticu lar element of the dream-thoughts. “If only it had been the other way round!” This is often the best way of expressing the ego’s reaction to a disagreeable fragment of memory. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams Sexual activity, whether perverted or not; [ . . . ] defecation; urination; death and the cult of cadavers (above all, insofar as it involves the stinking decomposition of bodies); [ . . . ] the laughter of exclusion; sobbing (which in general has death as its object); [ . . . ] the identical attitude toward shit, gods, and cadavers; the terror that so often accompanies involuntary defecation; the custom of making women both brilliant and lubricious with makeup, gems, and gleaming jewels; [ . . . ] heedless expenditure and certain fanciful uses of money, etc., together [all] present a common character in that the object of the activity [ . . . ] is found each time treated as a foreign body. [ . . . ] The notion of the (heterogeneous) foreign body permits one to note the elementary subjective identity between types of excrement [ . . . ] and everything that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvelous: a half- decomposed cadaver fleeing through the night in a luminous shroud can be seen as characteristic of this unity. Bataille, Visions of Excess

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I give myself to you, but this gift of my person—Oh mystery!—is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit. Lacan, Seminar XI

Very early in david lynch’s mulholland drive, the film provides attentive viewers with sufficient clues that what we are watching is the dream-work at work. Indeed, I would hazard a guess that anyone who has made much sense of the film has most likely accomplished this feat by recognizing that the first two hours or so of Mulholland Drive represent an extended dream on the part of the central character, Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts), while the last segment narrates the “actual” historical circumstances that have informed the dream’s patterns of imagery and that culminate in Diane’s hallucinatory psychotic breakdown (if that’s what we should call it) as well as her final hysterical suicide (if, indeed, that’s what occurs).1 Of course, there would be nothing particularly remarkable about a self-referential “dream-film” satirizing “Hollywood—the Dream Factory” (Love 121), even if that were all Mulholland Drive aspired to be. The depiction of dream in cinema, the representation of cinema-as-dream, is not exactly fresh news, and I doubt I am alone in being interpretatively unsatisfied by the “it-was-all-a-dream” resolution of a film’s complexities or absurdities. But I would argue that very few “dream-films” demonstrably respect the fundamental tenets of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, much less Lacan’s Écrits (not to mention the excessive visions of Georges Bataille), and that in doing so Mulholland Drive is extraordinary. In its intricate, bewildering, and literally “preposterous” narrative structure, Lynch’s film dramatizes Freudian Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, what Lacan calls the après coup, by giving us the historical context of Diane’s dream after the presentation of the dream itself, thus compelling us to actively and repeatedly study the film backward and forward. Moreover, just as Freud acknowledged but downplayed “universal” dream symbolism and instead stressed the need to analyze a dream’s images in the specific context of the dreamer’s life history, so the puzzling pictures that appear in Mulholland Drive must be mapped onto the trajectory of Diane’s actual life story (a dismal spiral down the tubes) if they are to yield their riches to a strong interpretation. Finally, and most important, Lynch’s film is faithful to Freud’s most fundamental assertion about the dream-work’s function of representing the fulfillment of a wish, the negation of a reality. For in reality (that is, in the nondream portion of the film’s narrative that I will here simply call “reality”) Diane Selwyn is a mediocre, failed, morbidly depressed, and drug-eating actress who is guilty of having hired a hit man to murder her former lover

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Camilla Rhodes (Laura Elena Harring), a rising star who has jilted and betrayed Diane not only by getting engaged to the hot film director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) but by finding another lesbian lover to replace Diane to boot. It’s a dirty business. But in the cleansing operations of the dream, this reality is negated, reversed: Diane appears as the radiantly perky Betty Elms, a very talented but utterly innocent actress who would have succeeded in Hollywood if it had not been for the behind-the-scenes machinations of evil mobsters who force Adam Kesher to cast some other “girl,” while Camilla herself is cast as the amnesiac (hence also innocent) car-crash survivor “Rita” with whom Betty falls sweetly in love while trying to help “Rita” solve the mystery of her lost identity. Diane’s dream thus expresses both the fulfillment of a wish—“If only it had been the other way round!”—and her ego’s reaction to some particularly disagreeable fragments of memory. As I hope to show here, Mulholland Drive also demonstrates a keen understanding, or at least a very effective aesthetic deployment, not only of the psychic mechanisms of condensation and displacement, which Freud considered the dream-work’s most basic devices, but also of that mechanism or mode that Freud himself never named but the critical analysis of which his discoveries made possible: to wit, abjection, from the Latin ab-jicere, “to cast off, away, or out” (Butler, Bodies 243). Condensation, for Freud, involves compressing multiple words or images from the dream-thoughts into a singular trope or figure in the dream-work, while displacement involves detaching and reattaching affect or significance from one trope or figure in the dream-work to another. Abjection, on the other hand, in effect excrementalizes the other: it is, as Judith Butler puts it so well, the “mode by which others become shit” (Gender 134). Abjection thus reverses and displaces that inexplicable mystery Lacan describes, in which the sacred gift of one’s own person to the other becomes merely a profane token of excretion. Abjection assuages, discharges, or “gets rid” of a subject’s own “god-awful feeling” of scatontological anxiety by punitively projecting that affect onto a degraded “other” who is forced to assume the fecal position. I will of course be elaborating on these three terms, and bestowing no few gifts of my own in the form of examples, most centrally that of a mysterious or at least perplexing image involving expelled espresso that nicely mixes condensation, displacement, and abjection. I will consider this purgative image much later in this discussion. Here, to account for the bit of dialogue that appears in this essay’s title, I call your attention to one instance of displacement in the film. In “reality,” as I am calling it, Diane Selwyn is guilty of murder, of having turned a living body into a corpse (and “the corpse,” says Kristeva in Powers of Horror, “is the

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utmost of abjection” [4]). But in the dream Diane’s powerful feelings of guilt have been displaced onto other horrible, criminal, or excremental figures that embody obscene or repulsive enjoyment, such as the eyebrowless cowboy or the “blackened derelict” (Rodley 277) in the alley behind the Winkie’s. Most conspicuous among these figures are the Castigliane brothers, two comically awesome mobsters who take control of the casting of Adam Kesher’s project and who tell the director “It’s no longer your film”—a line that foregrounds the essential capacity of dreams to escape directorial control and, ultimately, I think, of art to reveal and revel in the ego’s alienation from itself in the very imaginary and symbolic montage of which it is made, the self-dispossession at the extimate heart of the self ’s very constitution. In other words, “it’s no longer your film” is no throw-away line, is not simply a threatening message to the “director” (the controlling ego) from the “criminal” (the excessive id): it is an utterance through which our own egos (usually supported and sustained by conventional narrative cinema’s visual pleasure principle) are dispossessed or thrown out in the worst half of an abject, self-shattering fort-da. Early in the film, that is, we are told that Mulholland Drive is no longer “our” film, your ego’s or mine, that it is not going to be a representation in which the ego coherence indicated by the possessive pronoun will be propped up, stabilized, or made to feel at home. Not promising to transport the ideal ego to anywhere it thinks it wants to be, Mulholland Drive is not only a brilliant exemplification of psychoanalytic theories of the dream-work, of self-alienation, and of self-nihilation; it is also a very dark morsel of cinematic art.2 I began by suggesting that the film offers early clues that we are watching the unfolding of a dream. Here I will pursue four clues that appear in the film’s first 30 minutes. We open with an abstract jitterbug sequence in which images of three dancing couples are multiplied and layered on top of each other against a violet background. Upon this cheesily Dionysian frenzy of endlessly replicated (and hence potentially lost or fused) identities there is imposed a jittery, flickering blob of white light. This anamorphic brilliance eventually resolves into the singular figure not of Apollo as principium individuationis but of Diane Selwyn, at first framed by an adoring elderly couple who seem to represent parents or grandparents (benign superego figures, in any case); then alone, smiling and waving to acknowledge cheers and applause; then framed once again by the beaming elders. Diane herself appears both beaming and beamed: not her name but her body is “up in lights,” an illumination that articulates what Lacan calls the constitutively human desire for the other’s recognition.3 It represents both a specific wish fulfillment (Diane as star) and a particularly agreea-

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ble fragment of memory, for we later discover that Diane in fact won a jitterbug contest and that such victory is what initially propelled her to acting and to Hollywood. But we will also discover, much later in the film, that this blob of brilliance, which here resolves pleasingly into a cluster of stars, is in fact the dream-work’s reactive reversal of a quite disagreeable fragment of memory. For in reality, Diane, in a wrenching and anguished moment of autoerotic frustration, has looked up to see a similar blob of brilliance sharpen into the unpleasurable sight of a cluster of stones. Here I am referring to the scene of the abandoned and perhaps drug-addled Diane, sobbing and masturbating on the couch in her crummy apartment, looking up through her tears at the stone chimney through which everything—her troubled soul included—has gone, or will go, up in smoke. But let’s return to the opening sequence. To underscore its dreaminess, the camera dissolves from the blur of bright light to a jerky and lugubrious panning shot of an unidentifiable blur of dark color. This pan is briefly punctuated by the light cluster from the preceding jitterbug sequence, a point of punctuation that effectively gathers or quilts a visual remnant of that sequence into this new physical location. “Quilt” is the appropriate word here, not only because it allows us to allude to the Lacanian point du capiton or “quilting point” but also because the shot eventually comes into sharp focus as an extreme close-up of an unmade bed with pillows, a blanket, and rumpled, rose-colored sheets. To sounds of heavy breathing suggesting deep sleep, the camera then zooms even closer into one of the ironically rosy pillows, in effect pushing our face into it, thus letting the pillow serve as a metonym for the presumably adjacent but as yet still anonymous head whose breathing we hear, whose dreaming we have just entered, and to whose perceptions our own have just been sutured. The metonymic pillow, then, is our first (fairly conspicuous) clue. The second, however, is more subtle, and more metaphorical. After the camera pushes our face into the pillow, suturing us to the dream, the screen goes dark. Then we see a street sign, illumined in headlights, that reads “Mulholland Drive.” As creepy as this sign appears to be, it nonetheless can serve to assuage us of the vague anxiety that usually accompanies the first viewing of any new Lynch film: OK, we think, this is nothing disturbing, only the film’s title. And as we watch the black limousine snaking its way up through the Hollywood Hills at night, a conventional title sequence, with its string of proper names, seems to assure us of the capacity of the symbolic function, of naming itself, to rescue us from the preceding disordered and disorienting play of anonymous images: We have seen lots of people, or lots of images of a few people, but who

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are they? We have seen a bed, but to whom does it belong? The opening sequence provokes such questions, which, left untended, may begin to provoke further unsettling questions of who we are and where we belong—dislocating questions that conventional Hollywood films, using the star system to stabilize identification and desire in advance, rarely move us to ask. But while the title sequence in Mulholland Drive may seem to reassure us by replacing a perplexing flux of images with a stabilizing string of proper names and functions, the fact that few if any of the actor’s names mean anything to us as they appear may qualify that assurance.4 Of course, Lynch’s relatively anonymous or astellar casting for Mulholland Drive may have been the function of economic rather than artistic strategy; after all, the film was originally developed as a pilot for a television series pitched unsuccessfully (thank God) to ABC. But if we do read the astellar casting as an artistic strategy, we can submit that it facilitates the film’s thematic concern with shifting if not shattering identity just as it impedes the conventional Hollywood film’s drive to stabilize in advance the play of identification and desire. Indeed, the drive to stabilize identity is anything but the drive of Mulholland Drive. And yet, the impediment to identificatory stability that may be inscribed in the astellar credit sequence is not our aforementioned second clue. The second clue that we are watching the dream-work at work is the “Mulholland Drive” street-sign itself, which functions as a metaphor for dreaming just as the pillow serves as its metonym. Metonymy is the representational figure that functions through association or contiguity (and is the trope that Roman Jakobson fastened to Freudian displacement), while metaphor is the representational figure that works through similarity (and is the trope that Jakobson likened to condensation). So a pillow can serve as a metonym for dreaming not because a pillow is “like a dream” but because we can associate pillows with the actual physical location of dreaming, because pillows can be literally, materially contiguous with dreaming heads. As the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky pointed out long ago, metonymy is literal, realistic, and prosaic when compared to metaphor, which always involves a more poetical imaginative leap or negation of the real. But by what leap can the “Mulholland Drive” street-sign be read as a metaphor for the dream-work? If we take “drive” as another word for “road,” we can make an admittedly corny allusion to Freud’s own famous metaphor in which he calls dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.” If we remember that roads are generally two-way streets connecting with other two-way streets, we can recall the trope of reversibility that Freud designates as “one of the means of representation most favoured by the

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dream-work and one which is capable of employment in the most diverse directions” (SE 4:327). If we get off the “road” and back onto the “drive,” we recognize the Freudian Trieb, problematically rendered as “instinct” by Strachey but insistently translated as “drive” by Lacan and others.5 And if we stop to ask directions about what it means when a proper name like “Mulholland” prefixes a “drive,” we may well be driven to the Lacanian premises regarding the way the proper name, the symbolic function, redirects the drives as needs or demands and transforms them into desire—that is, into language itself, the very condition of possibility for the unconscious and hence for any roads thereunto. In other words, what the sign “Mulholland Drive” can be said to signify is the way the drives themselves must pass through the defile of the signifier and are thereby cut off from direct access to the other, to the thing, to the concrete totality of the real. For however we are driven in the unconscious, whatever gifts we give or are given in dreams, in our limited, conscious, symbolically regulated world of bound cathexes and properly social interaction we largely exchange words rather than fluids or caresses, phrases rather than cuts or blows, complete sentences for the concrete totality of the real. For an example of just such an exchange, I give you the following overly complex, overly complete sentence (with which I want to caress you, though it may simply leave you feeling worked over): If we recall that what prompts Lacan to conclude that “the dream has the structure of a sentence” (Écrits 221) and the unconscious and the symptom are “structured like a language” (223) is the aforementioned connection that Roman Jakobson establishes between the linguistic tropes of metaphor and metonymy and the psychic functions of condensation and displacement upon which Freud says the dream-work depends, we can suggest that Lynch would have been alluding to the dream-work in Mulholland Drive simply by giving us a metonymy and a metaphor even if the specific metonymy and metaphor had not themselves been conspicuous clues about work of the dream-work in Mulholland Drive, which, I submit, they are. But there are other dream-clues to consider. I have just referred to the drives. There are, for Freud, most basically, two: Eros and Thanatos, sex and death, connection and destruction, as well as the disturbing inextricability of the former from the latter that is the core theme, whether we want it to be or not—and not even Freud wanted it to be6 —of everyone who speaks, writes, films, or dreams but is the particular preoccupation of David Lynch (because he does want it to be). In fact, the first narrative sequence of the film to appear after Lynch’s name fades from the screen effectively conflates the erotic with the destructive. We see a beautiful woman—“brilliant and lubricious with makeup, gems, and gleaming

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jewels” (Bataille, Visions 94)—in the back of the snaking limousine. A car phone positioned near her head suggests that she may be an expensive call girl, an object of erotic desire upon which one might lavish “heedless expenditure and certain fanciful uses of money” (Visions 94). Again, Lynch’s astellar casting prevents us from knowing her importance to the plot. We do not know who she is (and soon neither will she): all that matters here, visually and narratively, is her rich, dazzling, lubricious eroticism. But the car stops; the driver turns and points a pistol with a silencer; the eroticized woman is apparently about to be silenced but is saved when two racing cars full of crazed and causeless rebels crash into the limo, killing everyone but the woman, who stumbles down out of the hills and into a stranger’s apartment. Hiding under a table, she lays her head on the floor and falls asleep. Cut to our third major dream-clue: The screen is again fi lled with a sign, this one reading “Winkie’s, Sunset Blvd.” Before entering this Winkie’s, we can note the ways this sign addresses the complex relations between the film’s intradiegetic imaginary and its extradiegetic real. We know, for example, that outside of the film (extradiegetically) there is a real Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, even if many of us probably owe this knowledge to the famous Billy Wilder movie by that name. We also know that within the film (intradiegetically) the sleeping woman is in close proximity to Sunset Boulevard because we have already seen her pass its street-sign in her postcrash wanderings. We suspect that there is no real dining establishment called Winkie’s, though we do recognize that the logo for Winkie’s alludes to that of the actual diner called Denny’s (and it is Denny’s in the television pilot screenplay).7 We know that David Lynch likes to hang out and write in Denny’s (he likes a clean, well-lighted place), and we also know that Winkie’s is just the quirky-cutesy sort of name that Lynch would bestow upon a diner in one of his films. The immediate juxtaposition of the name “Winkie’s” with the preceding shot of the dark-haired woman laying herself down to sleep may suggest the correspondence between sleeping and winking or blinking or even the rapid eye movement that accompanies dreaming, and at this point the film invites us to speculate that the upcoming scene in the Winkie’s may be the dark-haired woman’s (after all, we return to a shot of her still in sleep once our business at Winkie’s is concluded, so that visually it is her sleeping head that frames the entire sequence). Moreover, the word “sunset” itself foreshadows a bit of dialogue in the upcoming scene, which not only directly concerns dreaming but also obviously suggests a displaced analytic setting in which an analysand (named Dan) brings his analyst (named Herb) to a Winkie’s, to this Winkie’s, to tell the analyst the dreams he’s been having about himself

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and his analyst in this Winkie’s, on Sunset Blvd. Now if we recall that Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard opens with the image of a corpse floating in a pool and with a voice-over speaking to us from the dead, we shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that “this Winkie’s” is on a “Sunset Blvd” that intersects with the death drive, even if Dan, the analysand, is shocked to death by what he discovers behind it (or perhaps in its behind). Here is the Winkie’s dialogue: Dan: I just wanted to come here. Herb: To Winkie’s? Dan: This Winkie’s. Herb: OK, why this Winkie’s? Dan: It’s kind of embarrassing. Herb: Go ahead. Dan: I had a dream about this place. Herb: Oh boy. Dan: You see what I mean . . . Herb: OK, you had a dream about this place. Tell me. Dan: Well . . . it’s the second one I’ve had, but they’re both the same. They start out that I’m here, but it’s not day or night. It’s kind of half night, you know? But it looks just the like this . . . except for the light. And I’m scared like I can’t tell you. Of all people, you’re standing right over there by that counter. You’re in both dreams. And you’re scared. I get even more frightened when I see how afraid you are. Then I realize what it is. There’s a man . . . in back of this place. He’s the one who’s doing it. I can see him through the wall. I can see his face. I hope I never see that face ever outside of the dream. That’s it. Herb: So, you came to see if he’s out there? Dan: To get rid of this god-awful feeling. In this Chinese box of a sequence—which relates one dream (Dan’s) inside another dream (speculatively the dark-haired woman’s) that is interior to yet another dream (actually Diane’s)—we are given an analysand who hopes to “get rid” of a negative affect, a “god-awful feeling,” by actually confronting the reality “outside the dream,” facing his fear, the “man” who is “in back” of the Winkie’s, visible behind the walls, vaguely but ominously “doing it.” Freud tells us that the function of the “dream within the dream” is a certain psychic distantiation or emotional protection through layering distortion. Here, by letting the dark-haired woman dream of Dan’s dying to see the reality behind his dream, the dreaming Diane protects herself from facing the fact that she can get rid of her

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god-awful feeling of guilt for having in fact gotten rid of Camilla only through getting rid of herself, a “good riddance” that constitutes a major facet of the “fundamental fantasy” of her dream.8 For Dan, however, this glimpse of the real is not abreactive but fatal: the “man” in “back” comes horribly to the “front,” causing Dan to hit bottom; he collapses and (as the screenplay stipulates) dies at the sudden but dreaded sight of this obscene and filth-caked face. But what are we to make of this lethal reality lurking back behind the Winkie’s? To whom does this mucky and malign face belong? Literally, or extradiegetically, the face belongs to a woman, or at least a woman’s name, Bonnie Aarons, is given in the film’s credits, and Robert Sinnerbrink has suggested that the purpose of this cross-gender casting is to underscore the intradiegetic fact that in reality it is not a man but a woman who is “doing it,” that Diane herself is “behind” the murderous plot.9 Metaphorically, however, and even more extradiegetically, the face belongs—to Hegel. Or at least the face may bring to mind the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, wherein Hegel writes that “death is the most horrible thing, and to hold fast to the work of death requires the greatest strength” (19, translation modified). Dan the analysand apparently lacks the strength to “tarry with the negative,” to look death in the face, and so this glimpse of the real, the sudden sight of “the most horrible thing,” of the other who is really “doing it,” doing the work of death, does him in, sends him into fatal cardiac arrest.10 More seriously (or perhaps less seriously, since you can’t be more serious than heart attacks and Hegel), to what or whom does this living-death-face intradiegetically belong? There are some intriguing, and narratively crucial, visual parallels and inversions. Note how the alley figure’s filthy, long dark hair contrasts with Dan’s clean dark crew cut but alludes proleptically to the flowing black tresses of another man, named Ed, who we will soon see having his brains blown out by a rather inept assassin using a pistol with a silencer. In this upcoming scene, the camera calls characteristically Lynchian attention to a bloody strand of Ed’s hair, suspended in a horizontal line drawn straight out from the exit wound. Both the silent means of Ed’s execution and the pointed strand of his black hair point us back in the direction of the dark-haired woman who escaped being shot with an identically silenced handgun, and we of course get the final point when we discover at the end of the film that Ed’s assassin is in reality the hit man Diane hired (in this Winkie’s) to waste—I use that word intentionally—Camilla Rhodes, also known as “Rita,” the dark-haired woman. Moving from hair to skin, we can note how the conspicuously fecalized flesh of the figure that was up Dan’s alley lightly corresponds to that

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of the “dirty” dark-haired woman (who has yet to shower off the grime from the car crash and from the time spent sleeping facedown in soil under lawn shrubs). But it more darkly resembles the epidermis of the stinking, bloated, female corpse that “Betty” and “Rita” find decomposing on the bed in Diane Selwyn’s apartment. Note also how the corpse’s dress resembles the black spaghetti-strap number that the dark-haired woman was wearing in the limousine when she was nearly wasted. The alley figure appears as living waste, animate death, blackened dereliction, human refuse: visually connected to multiple corpses (Dan’s, Ed’s, Camilla’s, ultimately Diane’s), the figure forces us to face up to Bataille’s observation that “the horror we feel at the thought of a corpse is akin to the feeling we have at human excreta” (Erotism 57). Corpses may be “the utmost of abjection,” but here the alley figure’s homelessness signals not only the uncanny but also the unheimlich maneuver of socioeconomic as well as psychic and corporeal expulsion: humans treated as excreta.11 The screenplay calls this figure “the bum,” which is of course another word for ass, and it’s no bad coincidence that the dream-work inserts this figure in the backside of the Winkie’s, for, as I never tire of pointing out (and here’s mud in your eye!), the muscle that controls winking or ocular movements in general is actually called a sphincter.12 In this “(be)hindsight,” the fecal merges with the fatal; “the terror that so often accompanies involuntary defecation” (Visions 94) links up with the fear of being penetrated by a suddenly killing sight; the anxiety of being wasted dissolves into the powerful horror of becoming powerless waste. Dan shudders as he passes the sign with the arrow pointing toward the front of the Winkie’s, its incorporating entrance, because he knows he is moving, however lugubriously, in the opposite direction, slowly approaching its horribly excorporating exit, the rectum that will be his grave, to face a radically heterogeneous foreign body, some really scary shit.13 Real shit, however, will soon make its appearance in Mulholland Drive. When Betty Elms, fresh off the plane, arrives at her aunt Ruth’s apartment complex, she is guided across the courtyard by Mrs. Lanois (Ann Miller), whom everyone calls Coco. But the two soon encounter kakon, a petit tas of fresh dog-poop in the courtyard, upon which the camera lingers. An annoyed Coco yells threats up at the dog-owner’s apartment and tells an embarrassed Betty about a previous tenant’s “prizefighting kangaroo,” a story that can only evoke the dread image of even larger piles of excrement. “You wouldn’t believe what that Kangaroo did to this courtyard,” says Coco. I believe that this conjured image of kangaroo crap serves a transitional purpose, for in fact Betty is about to see a larger pile, only this time the pile comprises the soiled and bloody black clothes, purse, and shoes that the dark-haired woman has shed and

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let fall on the floor in Aunt Ruth’s apartment on her way to a ritually cleansing shower. Interestingly enough, the camera frames both sets of disagreeable memory fragments, the dog turds and the strewn clothes, in a similar fashion, thus suggesting the abject connection between them that we ourselves cannot possibly make until we learn that the dark-haired woman in fact did not escape being wasted but is already waste, is no longer a lubricious and desirable body but well on her way to being a stinking and repulsive corpse. Visually connected not only to a slew of rotting bodies but to a clump of actual excrement as well, the dark-haired woman is not sleeping but dead; she is not the dream’s sweet, clean Rita but really a pretty shitty person named Camilla, not a beautiful survivor stumbling away from a car crash in a blackout and a black dress but something more like the “half-decomposed cadaver fleeing through the night in a luminous shroud” that Georges Bataille describes. Bataille uses this last image to characterize a specifically heterological unity, “the elementary subjective identity between types of excrement [ . . . ] and everything that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvelous” (Visions 94). Lynch depicts a similar unity in the film’s penultimate image cluster: we see the luminous and marvelous image of a reunited Betty and Rita—innocence and amnesia, purity without danger. They are laughing and happy, like angels up in lights, hovering above the city of angels, the city of lights. But this divine image has already been punctuated by the sight of the abject alley figure whose shitface emerges from fiery miasma like a turd floating in a hellish toilet, and, before that, by the cadaverous image of the self-destructed Diane in her darkly smoking bed. This catastrophic sequence—the stars are already fallen; the stellar, the fatal, and the fecal are merged; all points of this trinity are either dead or signify death—can be read as an instance of what Slavoj Žižek calls the Lynchian “art of the ridiculous sublime.”14 But it is also a heterological sequence that offers a final compression of the basic carnal irony of Diane’s dream. For the innocent or purged laughter of the reunited Betty and Rita may look like what Bataille calls “the laughter of exclusion”—and may be read as a compensatory inversion of the more cruelly excluding laughter that Adam and Camilla share when they announce their engagement at the dinner party—but the insistent identification of these goddesses with shit and cadavers cannot finally be kept at bay. The dream, that is, may attempt to clean up all the waste, but its god-awful traces remain, persist, keep relentlessly appearing. The dream would reverse Diane’s destructive desire, reappropriate the expelled, bless the accursed share, get rid of the getting rid, bring the real Camilla (and even the actually deceased Aunt Ruth) back to life. The dream would restore Diane’s own “heedless expenditure” of cash, her murderous out-

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lay of filthy lucre, for the crumpled inheritance money that Diane squanders to waste Camilla is returned to her in Rita’s purse, neatly bundled and apparently bearing abundant interest. The dream would reverse time itself, sending us back to the supposedly innocent fifties from which the wide-eyed Betty Elms seems to emerge. Ultimately, the dream enacts the very paradox of the death drive, negating the real while at the same time attempting to restore an earlier state, doing while trying to undo the work of death itself. Thus the dream also evokes the paradox of language, of a signifying process that initiates and sustains itself through symbolic nihilation, through the symbol’s murder of the thing, the murder of which every speaking subject, as speaking subject, is guilty. But the work of death, like the work of language, is inexorable. The symbolic order may be transgressed, but it cannot be rescinded. As the hit man tells Diane in the Winkie’s, “once you’ve handed that [money] over, this is a done deal.” The dream, then, attempts to undo the deal, and there is a great deal to be undone. In fact, the dream is almost completely structurated by and as reversals and inversions. In reality, Diane reads the name “Betty” on the Winkie’s waitress’s name-tag; in the dream, Betty reads the name Diane. In the dream, Coco is welcoming, encouraging, and maternal, though not apparently anyone’s mother; in reality, Coco is Adam Kesher’s mother, but is hostile and impatient about Diane’s late arrival at the dinner party, only fatalistically understanding if not sadistically sympathetic, giving Diane a coldly condescending pat on the hand and a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun. In the dream, the son, Adam Kesher, is more abjected than abjecting: he has fallen into the scatontological realm of the involuntary, has lost control of his project, of his casting, of his money, if not of his sphincter; he is screwed by the Castigliane brothers, terrorized by the cowboy, betrayed by his wife, cast out of his own house, spattered with blood and the lugubrious hot pink paint that he has poured on jewels that can themselves be linked to excrement.15 But the dream also presents Adam as fundamentally sympathetic and good, a smart-ass but a nice guy, resistant to temptation, turning down his assistant Cynthia’s sexual offer, even after she tells him that he doesn’t know what he’s missing. In reality, of course, he’s a major asshole who misses nothing, a prick who fucks his actresses and flaunts his absolutely abjecting and phallic control, bellowing orders to “kill the lights” and “clear the set” (note, though, how Adam’s own orders come back to him in an inverted form in the dream’s spooky “meet the cowboy” sequence, for here it’s the cowboy who emerges into or unclears “the set,” the coral, of his own volition, while the electric light on the arch of the coral gate flickers ominously, seemingly killing itself, outside of Adam’s control).16

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In the dream, the sex between Betty and Rita is sweet and tender; in reality, it is rough and sordid.17 In the dream, the hit man is a klutz and a bungler; in reality, we have no evidence to suggest that he is anything but effective. For in reality the blue key represents an ugly certainty—neither we nor Diane will ever know what it opens, but we do know what it signifies (that the hit man has been successful and that Camilla Rhodes is dead)—while in the dream the key is transformed into a beautiful mystery—we see exactly what it opens (whatever that blue box is) but we will never really know what it means.18 The dream evokes the sweet mystery of (same-sex) love, the intimate merger of the desire to have with the desire to be, but in reality the mystery is that bitter one of faire l’amourir in which the desire to have and be turns into the desire to have killed and be dead, in which beautiful bodies become abject cadavers and sacred gifts of persons turn into god-awful gifts of shit.19 All of these reversals and inversions help us understand Mulholland Drive’s fourth and most blatant clue about the dream-work. Still fairly early in the film, in Aunt Ruth’s apartment, Betty says to Rita: “You see, I’ve just come here from Deep River, Ontario, and now I’m in this . . . dream place! You can imagine how I feel.” The point, of course, is that no one in the dream place, the dream factory, gives an industrial shit about how Diane feels, and, expelled as she has been from Hollywood’s digestive system, she does feel quite shitty. But there is another, more explicit image of antidigestive expulsion to consider. In the early scene in which Adam Kesher is confronted by the Castigliane brothers in the studio conference room, one of the mobsters (played by Lynch’s composer Angelo Badalamenti) requests and is served, albeit with great trepidation, a cup of what one of the studio suits calls “the finest espresso in the world.” Everyone in the room seems apprehensive, even terrified, about whether or not the mobster will like the pull. In fact, he not only dislikes it but lugubriously spits it out into a napkin and then bellows, “Is shit!” To emphasize the note of excorporation, his brother (Dan Hedaya) simultaneously blows his nose into a handkerchief. There are a few more verbal exchanges, and then the nose-blower gives Adam the alienating message: “It’s no longer your film.” With its mix of rectal, nasal, buccal, verbal, and filmic dispossession, this sequence alludes hugely, I would say, to abjection. But it also effects displacement, as I promised, as well as condensation. To appreciate how beautifully Lynch’s treatment of this portion of the dream-work ultimately works, we have to follow the torsion of some twisted and inverted telephone (as well as narrative) lines. Back at the end of the Winkie’s sequence, just after Dan succumbs to his Hegelian heart attack and we return to the shot of the sleeping dark-haired woman, we cut to an ex-

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treme close-up of an ear. It’s hard not to think of Blue Velvet here, but the ear belongs to a wheelchaired Mr. Roque (played by Michael J. Anderson, the familiar dancing “dream dwarf ” from Twin Peaks), who is wearing a telephone headset and making a call. A heavy-set man answers. We see only the back of his head. “The girl is still missing,” says Roque. The heavy-set man relays this information, or rather the words “the same,” to someone in a horrible apartment—we see only the arm that picks up the dirty yellow receiver—and he in turn performs a weird dialing maneuver that connects him to a phone on a table next to a lamp with a red shade and an ashtray full of dead butts. Note how this montage moves from the hypervisibility of an (relatively) identifiable face, through a sequence of isolated body fragments (the back of a head, an arm) unconnected to any identity, to a space of utterly disembodied anonymity. For we do not see anyone answer this last ringing telephone, do not see to whom it belongs, don’t know if there’s anyone at home, though we do cut to a shot of Betty Elms arriving at LAX. It’s not a bad coincidence that this cut connects the sinister phone to the innocent Betty—its ringing even momentarily bleeds into the airport sequence—for we later see that the phone in reality belongs to Diane Selwyn. While the dream montage relays the image of the missing girl, the sleeping Rita, through convoluted telephone lines all the way to the innocent Betty, in reality, as we later discover, the telephone directly connects Diane Selwyn to Camilla Rhodes, who calls to tell Diane that a car is waiting to take her to an address on—Mulholland Drive. Now we see Diane in the back of the snaking black limousine and hear her unpleasantly snapping, “What are you doing? We don’t stop here!” The driver turns in his seat, but there’s no thrill in his hand. Diane is not going to be wasted, but she is going to be majorly shat upon. The door opens; a smiling Camilla appears, takes Diane’s hand, and leads her to a “short-cut.” As the two walk up through the woods to Adam Kesher’s party (an ascension that the dream inverses in Rita’s stumbling postcrash descent), Diane of course gets her hopes up: Camilla has come back, the girl is no longer missing, the one and the other may still become “the same,” the two costars are rising together to the very summit of the Hollywood Hills. In sad fact, however, Camilla has lured Diane to this dinner party to show her, in the cruelest possible ways, that, as Lacan puts it, there really is no sexual relation. Or, rather, on this level, there are erotic relations, and, more importantly, relations of shared wealth and power, but they no longer obtain between Diane and Camilla. They do obtain between Camilla and Adam Kesher, and between Camilla and the “this is the girl” girl (Melissa George) who appears in the dream as Camilla but who in reality is Camilla’s new side-squeeze, who

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ostentatiously kisses Camilla while looking pointedly at Diane across the dinner table, the two of them really rubbing Diane’s face in it. Just after this cruel kiss, we see, of all people, the cowboy.20 But we also see Diane’s face, her eyes tearing in murderous rage. This sobbing, like all the other sobbing in the fi lm, indeed has death or destruction as its object, for we now cut to the scene of Diane, in the Winkie’s, shoving a photo of Camilla Rhodes across the table at the hit man (a character named Joe Messing) and telling him that “this is the girl” she wants wasted. But what do we see—or, more importantly, what does Diane see—just before this enraging kiss? We get a point-of-view shot in which Diane stares down into her cup of espresso and then looks up to see the Angelo Badalamenti figure, he who appears in the dream as the vomiting gangster, staring implacably at her from across the table. If we take this visual information back to the dream’s conference room, we can finally appreciate what the dream-work has done, what Lynch has so brilliantly represented the dream-work as doing: for in this condensation, Diane’s own anger and disgust and nausea are linked with the image of a cup of espresso and a glaring, hostile face, and all of this is compressed into the single overdetermined figure of a raging, coffee-spewing gangster. In reality, it is Diane who wants to puke her espresso; in the dream the gangster spits it up. In reality, Diane says, “This is the girl,” while in the dream the Castigliane brothers repeat it. In reality, Diane is the thanatical force “behind” the missing girl’s murder, the asshole doing the dirty work of death; in the dream, the mob and the alley figure are assigned responsibility. In the dream, everyone in the conference room is afraid of Castigliane and anxious about whether or not he will approve of the espresso. In reality, no one at the dinner party cares about Diane or imagines how she feels or gives a shit whether she likes (or is like) her espresso or not. No one cares whether Hollywood directors like Diane or not, for she, like the espresso, came “highly recommended,” but the director, as Diane puts it at the dinner table, “didn’t care” for her. In other words, and like other words, and like countless other turds, Diane, like the espresso, is disliked, dispossessed, abjected, cast out.21 The word “espresso” itself even means “to press out,” but since it also resonates with “quick” and “quick” means “alive,” as in the opposition between the “quick and the dead,” we can press this interpretation and say that no one gives a shit about Diane’s living or dying. And this quick observation can press or drive us toward the question of Diane’s suicide, which I do want to approach as question rather than as foregone conclusion, even though it would seem to be the end of the road. But before we arrive at that destination, we have to make a quick stop, perhaps even a rest stop (the rest being silence) at the Club Silencio.

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How do we end up there? How do Betty and Rita get there? After their tender, quasi-virginal sexual encounter—Betty seems never to have done it with a woman before, and Rita doesn’t know if she has—we cut to a shot of two hands clasped together. The camera pans up to reveal the merger of the sleeping women’s faces, Rita’s in profile and Betty’s full on, positioned (á la Bergman’s Persona) so that their lips appear joined together as a single closed opening. Here, with apologies to Luce Irigaray, we might say that if these joined lips allude to the sexual contact between Betty and Rita that we just didn’t see, then they also allude to a sex which is not one but is nonetheless fantasized as being one. But these lips do not speak together.22 Their unity is disrupted, significantly enough, by a single signifier, an individual and individuating utterance. The silence is broken by the word “silence” itself, “silencio,” which Rita begins to repeat in a “foreign” language, in a voice that seems to belong to some other. As if in a troubled trance, eyes wide shut and staring at the ceiling, Rita then repeats the words “no hay banda”—there is no band, there is no orchestra. We may be forgiven for assuming that these words have something to do with the sound of music. After all, when we get seated at the Club Silencio we do hear music, and the devilish master of ceremonies (as I will call him) repeats the same words, in Spanish and in French—there is no band, there is no orchestra—with reference to tape recordings of trumpets and clarinets. Then not the fat lady but Rebekah Del Rio, the real Rebekah Del Rio, sings—or, really, as it turns out, lip-synchs—not “It’s Over” but Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” Again, we may be forgiven for thinking that any of this concerns music. And despite the number of times in Mulholland Drive that we have seen aerial panning shots of the giant hillside “Hollywood” letters and heard the line “It’s just like in the movies,” we may have to be forgiven for thinking that the lines “It’s all recorded, it’s all a tape” should point us to an interpretation of the very tape we are watching as yet another self-referential critique of Hollywood as a malignant, soul-murdering dream factory populated by fakey back-stabbing ghouls, á la Kaufman’s Adaptation or Altman’s The Player. There is something more crucial, or at least more Lacanian, at stake here—namely, the “jouissance [that] is prohibited to whomever speaks, as such” (Écrits 696), or, again, the very “nature of the symbol,” the essence of which we approach, says Lacan, “by locating its genesis at the same point as that of the death drive” (Seminar III 215). The problem is not that we have lost reality to the movies, that, as Baudrillard complains about the postmodern age of the simulacrum, images have suddenly or finally become murderers of the real. The problem—for Lacan, and perhaps for Lynch—is that human “reality is at the outset marked by

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symbolic nihilation” (Seminar III 148), that “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (Écrits 262).23 The problem is not that we have lost real human life to the cinematic apparatus and all the world has become a screenplay, but that “reality, the whole of human reality, is nothing other than a montage of the symbolic and the imaginary, that the desire, at the centre of this apparatus, of this frame, that we call reality, is . . . what covers [that which] must be distinguished from human reality, and which properly speaking is the real, which is never more than glimpsed” (Seminar XIV November16, 1966). For Lacan, this distinction—between, on the one hand, an always already symbolic and imaginary human reality and, on the other, a real that “resists symbolization absolutely” (Seminar I 66) and is never more than glimpsed—is crucial. What it means for Lacan is that “desire is the essence of reality” (Seminar XIV November 16,1966), that language is hence the essence of reality, that something called the real is constitutively missing from human reality, and that the realest desire of human reality is to “restore the primal non-separation between reality and desire” (Seminar XIV November 16, 1966), to restore the silence before speech, the very silence that is broken, the very labial nonseparation that is torn apart, when Rita parts her lips to render the word “silencio.” This parturition is what gets us to the Club Silencio in the first place. And if what Diane, Betty, Rita, and we all face there is the reality of desire, the reality of the separation of reality and desire, then it is not difficult to translate the Spanish no hay banda into its properly Lacanian idiom and trumpet that what it most strongly means is that in reality there is never nonseparation; there is no banding, no bonding, no merging: there is, as Lacan puts it, no sexual relation.24 Although Lacan’s formulation pertains most obviously to heterosexuality, Lynch’s film dramatizes the lack of a direct, unmediated relation between “the sexes” even when “the sexes” are ostensibly “the same.” In other words, Diane and Camilla may be “the same” sex, but, all the same, from the sex that they have, something is still missing: the two can never become One but remain defined separately in respect to a third term. As much as I hate to support Lacan in calling this third term “the phallus,” I have to admit that in the kiss-off scene in Diane’s apartment, when Camilla says “we should stop” and Diane says “it’s him, isn’t it?”—the answer is, yes, it’s him, it’s Adam. And since this is the right answer, let’s say that if Diane wants to be the phallus for Camilla, wants to be and give to Camilla that gift of her own person that would complete her and unite them, it all turns to shit because it is Adam who possesses Camilla and who displays her as his phallus, as the very sign and

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emblem of his phallically complete and completely phallic control. Now since the dream casts Adam as castrated, his phallic authority must be displaced onto another figure: namely, the master of ceremonies in the Club Silencio. Adam and the master are visually connected by the figure of “Cookie,” who is cut out to appear as both the concierge at Adam’s seedy hotel and the master’s attendant at the Club Silencio. But the symbolic or symbolizing connection between them is more important, for both Adam and the master instantiate the symbolic order, the order to symbolize, the Law of the Father, the nom/non du pére, the paternal prohibition against incest that compels the subject to get over the (m)other and into the Other, into language, and to assume, through the function of speech, the perpetual separation of reality and desire. The dream is at pains to separate Adam and Camilla, and join Betty and Rita, at the level of image: Adam and Rita, that is, never appear in the same scene, while Betty and Rita appear as the same scene. But even in the dream it is the symbolic connection between Adam and Camilla that trumps the imaginary and physical merger of Betty and Rita, for in the dream labial union is torn by lexical articulation when Rita starts mouthing the words of the master. It’s no bad coincidence that these words are the law—the name and the no—of the father: no hay banda! Nor is it a bad coincidence that “Adam” is not only the director’s name but also the mythical name of the very first term-inator, the original namer, in Genesis. In the beginning of this essay, I raised the questions of whether or not Diane’s final breakdown should be called “psychotic” and whether or not she has in reality committed suicide. Lacan asks, “What is the original and initiatory function, in human life, of the existence of the symbol qua pure signifier?” and then says, “This question takes us back to [the] study of the psychoses” (Seminar III 215). For Lacan, psychosis results from a foreclosure of the phallus as primary signifier or paternal function, a sort of refusal to follow the symbolic order that situates normal neurotics in language, desire, the chain of signification, the perpetual murder of the thing, that grammatically “correct distance that is called human reality” (Seminar III 249). The refusal to enter human reality through symbolic nihilation of the thing can lead to real murder as well as a negation of the real through overt hallucination. Diane has, in reality, murdered, but I think she has only one bona fide hallucination. Here, though, believe it or not, I do not mean the tiny, obscene ferocious grandparents who crawl under Diane’s door and hound her to screaming hysterical death. Rather, I think the only vision that should properly be called hallucination occurs when Diane turns from the sink in her dismal kitchen and has a momentarily convincing glimpse of the glittering Camilla, which just as quickly fades. In other words, she has a brief hallucination but can

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sustain neither it nor the elation it provokes. Other than this glimpse of the other, everything else that Diane sees and that we see at the end of the film is not psychotic hallucination but either flashback or a continuation of the dream-work—even, forgive me, the firearm fellatio that seems to spell out Diane’s actual death. I say “seems” because I think that just as Diane has in reality failed to become a fully blown psychotic she has also in reality not fully blown out the candle of her own brain. For since everything else in the film has been intradiegetic to Diane’s own consciousness, the end of that consciousness should properly be the end of Mulholland Drive. For comparison, I would say this is exactly what happens at the end of Lynch’s Lost Highway. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is not really speeding down the highway being chased by the cops. This visual image is only the product of his own psychogenic fugue. In reality, he is still where he has been since the first shot of the movie, sitting in prison waiting to be executed. And I would submit that when, in the final image, Fred appears to convulse and change shapes and faces behind the wheel of his large automobile, he is in reality in the shuddering throes of death by electrocution. The termination of his consciousness is the end of the film’s road. But Mulholland Drive persists beyond the scene of Diane’s suicide, which is not only conspicuously unrealistic but also continues the dream’s pattern of linked images: the smoke billowing somehow from and around Diane’s deathbed mirrors the smoke that rises from Rita’s redemptive car crash, connects with the fire we glimpse behind the bum’s final abject appearance, rises up into the luminous “Betty loves Rita” heavens, and even invisibly, metaphorically filters into the balcony of the Club Silencio, where a woman with blue hair shooting out of the top of her head like a flame utters that final, fatal word, again. The rest is silence, to be sure, but even if those are Hamlet’s last words, they are not the last line of Hamlet, which actually ends with Fortinbras saying, “Go, bid the soldiers shoot.” And what is this fiery-haired woman if not a pictorial rebus, a last condensation, a final metaphor for a real finalizer, a handgun with a silencer, who by whispering the word “silence” shoots or shouts out Diane’s deliteralizing wish, her retractive “bid” to have “the soldier” (the hitman) not really shoot, as if to say, “If only it had been the other way around! If only it had been only a word, symbolic rather than real nihilation, a love letter, and not really a bullet from a fucking gun!”25 And what, finally, is this whispered word “silencio” if not, as Bataille suggests, a perverse and poetic metaphor for symbolic self-nihilation, for suicide itself? Bataille writes that “the word silence” is “the abolition of the sound which the word is; among all words it is the most perverse, or the most poetic: it is the token of its own death” (Inner Experience 16). If,

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then, we take “the word silence” as a metaphor for self-nihilation, we can say that in the film’s finale, Diane, unlike the dark-haired woman who was not really sleeping but already dead, is not really dead but still merely sleeping, is not even psychotically hallucinating but still in a horrible but ultimately wish-fulfilling dream.26 She may be fundamentally fantasizing suicide, but those who have really committed suicide cannot continue to make metaphors for suicide. The death drive, whose very genesis is coterminous with the initiation of metaphor, the birth of the murderous symbol, is not itself fatal but “results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (Écrits 262). The death drive, that is, can never die, though it can in its vital perversity run itself off the road—even though it is the road—and carry us along for the exorbitant ride. And even if we ourselves lose control of our vehicles of meaning, our metaphors and metonyms, even if (the) Mulholland (death) Drive is no longer “our fi lm,” desire itself is endlessly, impersonally rerunning, in an extended engagement, in the revival house of language. For “the word silence is still a sound ” (Inner Experience 13), as Bataille insistently puts it. And as long as we are still dreaming of that self-nihilating word, we “ourselves” will have not gone silent.


Notes Introduction 1. “To essay” and “to assay” both mean “to attempt,” but of course assay allows me to draw out the connection between these essays and what the ass says, so to speak. As for “abjective” writing, it can be distinguished from (while not being entirely unrelated to) “creative” writing (though it is, if anything, de-creative, antigenerative, at once prolific and abortive) and “objective” writing in the scholarly, argumentative sense (though the writing collected here is not exactly without scholarship or argument). 2. It was not Kristeva but André Breton who referred to Bataille as an excremental philosopher. For another brief history of abjection that considers Kristeva, Bataille, and Lacan, as well as the proto-abjectionist Marcel Jouhandeau, see the opening chapters of Keith Reader’s The Abject Object: Avatars of the Phallus in Contemporary French Theory, Literature, and Film. 3. In citing Lacan’s Écrits throughout this book I will almost always be using Bruce Fink’s 2006 translation of the complete edition. With regard to this particular passage, however, I prefer the Sheridan translation to what we find in Fink—“ask someone with writer’s block about the anxiety he experiences and he will tell you who the turd is in his fantasy” (693)—mainly because I like to think that Lacan is addressing a dysgraphic, scatontological anxiety that obtains for the subject who speaks and writes as such rather than merely describing a blocked writer on a bad day. So when this quotation or some variant appears—and I think I trot it out about a half-dozen times in this book—it will be in the Sheridan translation. 4. In The Abject Object, Keith Reader writes that the concept of abjection “does not figure explicitly in Lacan, though it is constantly inferable in his work” (44). In this work, I will be attempting to make the inferences explicit. 5. See Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” 6. Amor fati means “love of fate,” a very important trope for Nietzsche. With the word “triumph,” however, I am adumbratively alluding to a portion, “The Triumph of Love,” of the “Lacan Meets Queer Theory” chapter of Tim Dean’s Beyond Sexuality. You will have to read the essay in this book titled “Is What You Want Something You Can Discuss?” to discover what is odd, perverse, and unspeakable about this “triumph.”

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N O T E S / E S S AY 1

7. Cf. Nietzsche’s repeated assertion in Birth of Tragedy that “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified ” (52).

Essay 1 1. Here is a true story, a little pile of autobiography to go along with the scene of schoolyard defecation with which I opened Male Matters. My full name is Homer Calvin Thomas III. This is ludicrous enough, but when I was a child, certain members of my family, such as my mother and older sister, took some delight in pointing out the obvious rhyme for the tertiary number, so that I became not “the Third” but of course “the Turd.” No doubt this early experience of having both the sign of my identity and the name of the/my father designated as shit by family females helped shape the theoretical concerns that cling to me and my writing to this day. 2. When I say that humanization depends upon a transvaluation of fecal values, I have in mind what Žižek calls “Lacan’s thesis that animal became human the moment it confronted the problem of what to do with its excrement” (Metastases 179). I would, however, compare this thetic moment with another, better-known Lacanian thesis about humanization—“the moment at which desire is humanized is also that at which the child is born into language” (Écrits 262)—and I would suggest that scatontological anxiety emerges upon the suspicion that these two anthropogenetic “moments” are disturbingly equiprimordial. The little subject’s problems—what to do with its words, what to do with its turds, what to do with itself—are all the same, or at least remain indistinguishable until mapped over with the formulae of sexuation, until “order and norms [are] instituted which tell the subject what a man or a woman must do” (Écrits 720) with words, turds, selves, bodies, pleasures, and so on. 3. Male Matters also posits that the specter of the actively abjecting mother in the heteromasculine imaginary might help explain masculinist resistance to the idea of maternal and/or feminine agency: feminism, which promotes and enacts women’s agency and choice, is a bad idea for some men not merely because it seems to disempower or castrate them but because it turns them back into bad objects, kakon. The actively abjecting Medusa turns men into stool, not stone. 4. In Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive, Paul Verhaeghe writes that “the idea of castration is in the first place a defence against anxiety, and in that sense it is a secondary formation” (10); that castration “is nothing but a secondary elaboration of a more primary anxiety,” and that “the interpretation of the lack of the Other in terms of a lack of the phallus—i.e., castration—is the reassuring interpretation” (15). In Verhaeghe’s nonreassuring interpretation, The fundamental anxiety or primary anxiety concerns the threatening first Other who becomes incarnated in woman and her enigma. Its fundamental character is such that it can be constantly found, transculturally as well as transhistorically, in either its positive aspect (reverence for the


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woman) or its negative expression (misogyny). This fundamental anxiety is experienced as life threatening, and it is only in retrospect that it is linked to sexuality and anxiety in sexual matters. This link is installed precisely by the interpretation of the lack of the Other in terms of castration, and in turn this determines the gender-specific forms it takes. (15) Following from Verhaeghe, we can say that the interpretation of the Other’s lack in terms of castration is “reassuring” precisely because it defends against a more anxiogenic interpretation of the Other’s excess in terms of abjection. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, “Abjection is the precondition of castration; castration is an attempt to cover over and expel it” (“The Body” 92). But what is specifically “life threatening” about the Other incarnated as cloacal, abjecting mother (though Verhaeghe does not address the “enematic” element of this woman’s enigma) is that such a figure threatens to turn the subject into lifeless excrement, provokes what Roberto Harari calls “the phantasy of being shit” (253). If we imagine the Other’s excess in terms of an archaic “situation in which lack is lacking,” as Bruce Fink puts it in The Lacanian Subject (53), then we might get a sense of what is at stake, and what is repressed, in this anxious fantasy. After alluding to such a situation, Fink cites Lacan’s Seminar X: On Anxiety, in which Lacan states, “What is most anxiety-provoking for the child is when the relationship through which he comes to be—on the basis of lack which makes him desire—is most perturbed: when there is no possibility of lack, when his mother is constantly on his back” (Seminar X, December 5, 1962; cited in Fink 53). But here Fink cuts Lacan off in an interesting way, for he leaves out what Lacan adds immediately after the line “when his mother is constantly on his back”—to wit, “especially by wiping his bottom” (Seminar X, December 5, 1962). Even though Lacan has earlier suggested that “it is not nostalgia for what is called the maternal womb which engenders anxiety, it is everything that announces to us something which will allow us to glimpse that we are going to re-enter it,” his later reference to constant maternal ass-wiping allows us to imagine that it is the cloacal womb that engenders the most primordial anxiety (prior, that is, to castration): the perturbed “vision of excess” that has the mother constantly intruding up my shitty ass gives me my own message back in an inverted form and reveals my abject emergence from hers. It is from this scatontological fate, and not from an incestuous reentry into the maternal womb, that the phallus as nom/non du père saves me. So when Lacan writes of the phallus that “whether male or female, man must accept to have it and not have it, on the basis of the discovery that he isn’t it” (Écrits 537), one might note the way this forced acceptance, based upon the discovery that one “isn’t it,” may be motivated by the anxious hope that one isn’t shit. 5. Aside from the abundant instances of the money-shot from the world of porn, consider, for example, the Farrelley Brothers’ 1998 film There’s Something about Mary, in which the postmasturbatory cum that we first see hanging lugubriously from Ben Stiller’s ear is eventually distributed into Cameron Diaz’s hair (she mistakes it for styling gel); or Todd Solondz’s 1998 film Happiness, in

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which a young boy, standing on the balcony of his apartment building, jerks off while watching two women sunbathing in the courtyard below. His semen, which lands on a guardrail and is lapped up by the family dog, is transferred to his own mother’s mouth when, in the very next scene, she kisses the dog at the dinner table. For further analysis of these films, see Greg Tuck, “Mainstreaming the Money Shot: Reflections on the Representation of Ejaculation in Contemporary American Cinema.” For much more on ejaculation in general, see also Murat Aydemir, Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning. 6. Excursus on the problem of taking “the materiality of the signifier” literally: In “Identity and Hegemony,” Ernesto Laclau writes that we should “understand by ‘materiality of the signifier’ not the phonic substance as such but the inability of any linguistic element—whether phonic or conceptual—to refer directly to a signified. This means the priority of value over signification, and what Lacan called the permanent sliding of signified under the signifier” (71). Given the absence of direct reference to which Laclau refers, we might say that it is impossible to take the materiality of the signifier literally if by “taking literally” we mean assuming a direct reference or a “real” conflation of a signifier’s material being or substance with its meaning. Thus one can only ever take the materiality of the signifier metaphorically. But what I mean to metaphorize by “taking the ‘materiality of the signifier’ literally” is a sort of contamination of the abstract by the abject, even if this “will to contaminate” can only ever be effected metaphorically. To clarify: In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler writes, “I confess [ . . . ] that I am not a very good materialist. Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language. This is not because I think that the body is reducible to language; it is not. Language emerges from the body, constituting an emission of sorts” (198). I would say that for my money Butler’s self-confessed bad materialism is not bad enough, that even though she writes, “Language emerges from the body, constituting an emission of sorts,” she never writes as if language so emerges. I, on the other hand, am on a(n) (e)mission of sorts to be an even worse materialist than Butler and to write as if language really were what it really is, as if language really did emerge from corporeal orifices, which it really does, though I can only write as if it does. In other words, no writer can ever fully or directly be a materialist but must always only be (or mean as) a symbolist. If I were to attempt to render my writings as literal poubellications or (apologies to Mary Kelly) cloacal “post-partum documents,” I would have to make sure that each one of my texts was festooned with personally deposited boogers, fecal smears, seminal splashes, and other assorted anamorphic stains that would not show up “as such” on a Google word search. These would be limited editions, indeed. 7. Excursus on the fate of “the phallus”: In the chapter “In Defense of the Phallus” of his book White Men Aren’t, Thomas DiPiero maintains that feminist critics of the Lacanian phallus who “get it wrong” by clinging to the argument that the phallus cannot fully be disintricated from the penis end up reinscribing the very “phallic posturing” they mean to undermine. In


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other words, they unwittingly defend the phallus by attacking it. DiPiero wants to “get the phallus right” (152) and to defend it by, well, defending it. Elaborating on Lacan’s notion of the phallus as the primary signifier of lack that makes signification itself possible, DiPiero writes that the essence of a signifier is to delineate an epistemological dimension from an ontological one (or, in the formulation Lacan often used, to cause people to exchange la lettre for l’etre); the phallus thus denotes—or more properly arises as—the condition or the possibility of that separation. It stands in for the gesture of demarcating the continuous realms of absolute being into relational units that evoke one another because of symbolic taxonomic operations arising through the work of politics, history, and culture. That the function denoted by the signifier “phallus” must exist seems to me beyond doubt; why the signifier in question is called phallus is another matter. (152). Why or whether the signifier in question must be called phallus is indeed a crucial matter, but it is one that DiPiero never adequately addresses in his phallic defense. Perhaps I myself am being phallic in even expecting an adequate or “complete” address, rather than fully accepting the lack thereof, but I still wonder why signifying or identificatory “phallic functions unrelated to gender or sexual difference” (167) can or must be called “phallic” if they actually are “unrelated to gender or sexual difference.” Nor do I understand how DiPiero’s defensive insistence on “the phallus as a fundamental signifier that marks the inception of difference and orders and regulates all other difference” (167) squares with his complaint against psychoanalysis for making sexual difference the fundamental organizing principle of differential human subjectivity. On the one hand, if the fundamental signifier that provokes signification itself through its prohibitory function (the subject must mean rather than be; we are ordered to symbolize, to exchange la lettre for l’ être) is or arises as a phallic function (because the “order” emerges as the father’s “no,” the prohibition against incest taking the structural form of his prior possession of what the subject wants fantasmatically to be in order to complete the mother’s desire), then sexual difference is fundamental. If, on the other hand, there are other signifying functions that are equally important or more fundamental in shaping human identities but are “unrelated to gender or sexual difference,” then nothing would seem to warrant calling them “phallic.” For myself, I agree with DiPiero, and Lacan, that the function designated by the word “phallus” must exist or designation itself would not. Moreover, given the long history of the ideological reproduction of patriarchal relations and the concomitant Oedipalization of heteromasculine subjectivity, I can see why that function has indeed been phallic and has been needed to be called phallic. But if we are interested in disrupting that reproduction, or if we are interested in dethroning sexual difference as the fundamental organizing principle of human subjectivity, then we might want to come up with other names than the nom/non du père. Perhaps, following a certain Artist Formerly Known

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as Prince, we might for a while think in terms of a fundamental signifier formerly known as the phallus. As Tim Dean writes in Beyond Sexuality, “Since ‘the phallus’ names various functions and structural elements that may be substituted with alternative conceptual terms, it may be time to retire the phallus” (83). Lacan himself, moreover, gives us permission to stop defending and start retiring the phallus when he writes in Seminar XX that the phallus—as analysis takes it up as the pivotal or extreme point of what is enunciated as the cause of desire—analytic experience stops not writing it. It is in this “stops not being written” (cesse de ne pas s’ écrire) that resides the apex of what I have called contingency. [ . . . ] Because of this, the apparent necessity of the phallic function turns out to be mere contingency. It is as a mode of contingency that the phallic function stops not being written. (94) If I am getting Lacan right here in understanding the difference between necessity and contingency in terms of the difference between what does not stop not being written (necessity) and what does (contingency), then the mere contingency of the phallic function is exposed, made apparent, whenever we stop not writing it, for what remains unwritten, immune or removed from writing, ends up being allowed to masquerade as the necessary, the eternal, the transcendent, the immutable, and so on. Ultimately, defending the phallus means not to stop not writing it. To write the phallus, or stop not writing it, is to demean it, to abject it, to queer it. Tim Dean’s writing is of course exemplary here, but see also Keith Reader, The Abject Object: Avatars of the Phallus in Contemporary French Theory, Literature and Film. One further point on necessity and contingency in regard to the phallic function. Here are two of Lacan’s explicit formulations: “If the mother’s desire is for the phallus, the child wants to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire” (Écrits 582); and The whole problem of the perversions consists in conceiving how the child, in its relationship with its mother—a relationship that is constituted in analysis not by the child’s biological dependence, but by its dependence on her love, that is by its desire for her desire—identifies with the imaginary object of her desire insofar as the mother herself symbolizes it in the phallus. (Écrits 463) In the preceding I have emphasized two conditionals—if and insofar as—both of which indicate that Lacan is here suggesting the contingency of the phallic function, the possibility that the mother’s desire might not be for the phallus and that she might symbolize (or at least express, press out) her desire otherwise. Many critical descriptions of Lacan’s phallocentrism fail to note or make much of these conditionals. 8. In The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek performs a sort of “dialectical” reading of various sexual activities in order to “short circuit” the perceived incompatibility between the lowest levels of bodily practice and the highest strata of


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philosophical speculation. Two particular moments in this “weird” exercise seem to relate to what “Piss Hegel” attempts to demonstrate: In masculine masturbation, the vagina, the ultimate passive organ, is substituted by the hand, the ultimate active organ which passivizes the phallus itself. Furthermore, when the phallus penetrates the anus, we obtain the correct insight into the speculative identity of excrementation and insemination, the highest and the lowest. (Parallax View 13) We note a nice Žižekian move in the last phrase as Žižek inverts the normal expectations of respective parallelism and, in a sort of dialectical topsy-turdy, appears to couple “excrementation” with “the highest” and “insemination” with “the lowest.” What my “Piss Hegel” argues is that when Hegel recurs to the urethra in an attempt to distinguish Begriff from Vorstellung, he unwittingly— or perhaps, given the cunning of reason, all too knowingly—offers an abject insight into the speculative identity of ejaculation and excrementation, and he does so without even having to trot out the image of the ass-fuck (for the excremental dimension of semen is inscribed in its general visibility, not in any specifically rectal destination). As for Žižek’s “perverse” dialectical demonstration, and what he takes to be its point, what accounts for the weird (if not—for some, at least—tasteless) character of this exercise is not the reference to sexual practices as such, but the short circuit between two spheres which are usually perceived as incompatible, as moving at ontologically different levels: that of sublime philosophical speculation and that of the details of sexual practices. [ . . . ] The unpleasant, weird effect of such short circuits is that they play a symptomal role in our symbolic universes: they bring home the implicit, tacit prohibitions on which these universes rely. (Parallax View 13) 9. See www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bosch/delight/delightd.jpg. Cf. Lacan’s comments on Bosch in “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis”: One must leaf through a book of Hieronymus Bosch’s work, including views of whole works as well as details, to see an atlas of all the aggressive images that torment mankind. The prevalence that psychoanalysis has discovered among them of images based on a primitive autoscopy of the oral organs and organs derived from the cloaca is what gives rise to the shapes of the demons in Bosch’s work. (Écrits 85) 10. See www.press.uillinois.edu/s98/jpg/thomas.jpg. 11. See www.press.umich.edu/coverImages/0472095978.gif. 12. Because this body belongs to an “ethnic” Antonio Sabado, Jr., one could say that it does not turn out to be exactly white, that it is almost the same but not quite, and so on. But the point is that Sabado’s body functions in the video as a signifier of what Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks calls “desiring whiteness.” See her Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. 13. And if we are familiar with the video for Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby’s Got Back,” we know what he would have to say about the racial politics of this

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shrinkage. For the unfamiliar, “Baby’s Got Back” registers a protest against the imposition onto black women of white male standards of female booty size. 14. At the time of the video’s production and release, this black male face was anonymous, and the fact that the video could count on the face’s namelessness underscores its castration of its bearer: the black man can be safely seen but has no vision, can be symbolized but cannot signify himself through his name. The fact that the face now recognizably belongs to Djimon Hounsou, who went on to appear in Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), ironizes the video’s strategy but does not fatally compromise my reading of it.

Essay 2 1. The question of Female Masculinity, to use the title of Judith Halberstam’s book, is important and interesting but pretty much out of my ballpark, so to speak. Let’s just say that I am opposed to any “masculinity,” female or male, that sustains itself through the punitive abjection of the other, or that I am opposed to any subject-formation that sustains itself through the punitive abjection of the other, whether it calls itself “masculine” or not. 2. At the very beginning of the Écrits, Lacan writes of “the division in which the subject is verified in the fact that an object traverses him without them interpenetrating in any respect, this division being at the crux of what emerges at the end of this collection that goes by the name object a (to be read: little a)” (4). What strikes my interest, however, is the little bit of crucial information that we find in Bruce Fink’s translator’s notes: “Petit a [ . . . ] also sounds like petit tas, little pile” (766). 3. The term “sex/gender system” comes from Gayle Rubin’s essay “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Perhaps the following from that essay—particularly the phrase “oppresses everyone”—could be cited as evidence for Braidotti’s claim that gender theorists miss the point about the asymmetries of sexual difference: Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes. It is the product of the social relations of sexuality. [ . . . ] Far from being the expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities. It requires repression: in men, of whatever is the local version of “feminine” traits; in women, of the local definition of “masculine” traits. The division of the sexes has the effect of repressing some of the personality characteristics of virtually everyone, men and women. The same social system which oppresses women in its relations of exchange, oppresses everyone in its insistence upon a rigid division of personality. (546) Also potentially problematic from a feminist perspective would be Rubin’s later essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In it, Rubin writes that “feminist thought simply lacks angles of vision which can fully encompass the social organization of sexuality. The criteria of


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relevance in feminist thought do not allow it to see or assess critical power relations in the area of sexuality. [ . . . ] Feminism is no more capable than Marxism of being the ultimate and complete account of all social inequality” (34). For discussion of both essays, see Gayle Rubin, with Judith Butler, “Sexual Traffic.” 4. I allude here to both the title of Lacan’s seminar, ou pire—“or worse”—and the opening lines of Beckett’s Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (7). 5. This is what I understand Lacan to mean when he writes that “one may fi nd that a lack of satisfaction of sexual needs, in other words, frigidity, is relatively well tolerated by women, whereas the Verdrängung [repression] inherent in desire is less in them than in men” and speaks of “a centrifugal tendency of the genital drive in the sphere of love, which makes impotence much harder for [the man] to bear, while the Verdrängung inherent in his desire is greater” (Écrits 583). 6. Actually, what I have in mind here is what Ernesto Laclau calls “a process of mutual contamination.” Laclau writes: What is crucial is not to conceive the hegemonic process as one in which empty places in the structure would be simply filled by preconstituted hegemonic forces. There is a process of contamination of the empty signifiers by the particularities that carry out the hegemonic structures, but this is a process of mutual contamination; it does operate in both directions. (“Identity” 70) My assertion that the abstract is always already contaminated by the abject is analogous to Žižek’s claim that the Symbolic is always contaminated by the Real that it would exclude, the Real that is only the Real by virtue of the attempted expulsion: “In other words, the paradox is that the Real as external, excluded from the Symbolic, is in fact a symbolic determination—what eludes symbolization is precisely the Real as the inherent point of failure of symbolization” (“Class Struggle” 121). To contaminate this paradox with some particularity, and to suggest that the “inherent point” is not merely failure but Durchfall, I would put the matter like this: the abstract is contaminated by the abject but the abject must be contaminated by the abstract to be abject and not merely excremental. In other words, there is a profound difference between animal and human excrement, mainly because the animal does not become animal by having to learn what to do with its shit. Here again I have in mind what Žižek calls “Lacan’s thesis that animal became human the moment it confronted the problem of what to do with its excrement” (Metastases 179). But I would stress that while it is true that “for this unpleasant surplus to pose a problem, the body must already have been caught up in the symbolic network” (Metastases 179), the symbolic network itself remains caught up in an excremental unpleasantness from which it never fails to fail to extricate itself. 7. “Anal identifications, which analysis has discovered at the origins of the ego, give meaning to what forensic medicine designates in police jargon by the name of ‘calling card’ ” (Écrits 117).

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8. See note 4, Essay 1. 9. Note the relish with which Lacan quotes the Jonathan Swift line on “the Author of the Excrement” (Écrits 389) and its relative proximity to Lacan’s reference to himself as “the author of these lines: the Gongora of psychoanalysis, as people call him, at your ser vice” (391). Poubellication is a Lacanian pun mixing publication with garbage disposal. Durchfall is my favorite German word and it refers to failure, falling through, or taking an involuntary dump. 10. Note, however, that this “strapping” of linguistic or grammatical normality onto psychosexual heteronormativity has the effect of queering syntactical or stylistic deviation or deformation—has the effect, that is, of making Lacan’s writing queerer than ever. 11. I once walked into a seminar room in which a creative writing workshop had just been held. An instructional imperative or symbolic order from that workshop remained unerased on the board. Creative writing students were told to “choose words that are close to life!” I let the order remain there for my seminar and appropriated it to explain that from a Lacanian perspective no word is closer or further from life than any other because what any word must do in order to be a word is nothing other than to separate or distantiate itself from life: any and every word—even “word”—words only by virtue of its sacrifice of life, for “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing” (Écrits 262). Words that appear to be lively are actually, functionally, quite mortifying—“lethal symbols” (249)—and so they must be or they will fail to be words. So the imperative “Choose words that are close enough to life to kill it!” would have been more in keeping with the actual operations of the symbolic order, though whether or not such instruction would facilitate good “creative writing” is quite another question. 12. Both Dean and Shepherdson use Millot to score Lacanian and Copjecian points “against the historicists” in general and against Butler in particular. 13. If I understand Lacan on the two deaths, then the first death, “the one that life brings,” involves the “vital misery” of species prematurity and “the fact that man’s death, long before it is reflected [ . . . ] in his thinking, is experienced by him in the earliest phase of misery that he goes through from the trauma of birth until the end of the first six months of physiological prematurity, and that echoes later in the trauma of weaning” (Écrits 152); while the second death, “the one that brings life,” involves the subject’s “essentially suicidal” (152) sacrifice to human reality’s “lethal symbols” (249), “the sacrifice of his [inadequately animal] life that he agrees to for the reasons that give human life its measure” (263), “the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to problems of speech” (260), and pretty much all of the following: Death brings the question of what negates discourse, but also the question whether or not it is death that introduces negation into discourse. For the negativity of discourse, insofar as it brings into being that which is not, refers us to the question of what nonbeing, which manifests itself in the symbolic order, owes to the reality of death. (316)


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14. (Note to the reader about this note: it is very long, and contains two excurses, one on Shepherdson’s imperative/role distinction, the other on Lacan’s myth of the lamella.) Excursus 1: On Imperatives and Roles In Vital Signs, Shepherdson urges us to distinguish between “the historicist construction of subjectivity and the psychoanalytic constitution of the subject, by reference to the terms ‘role’ and ‘imperative’ ” (93). He warns us against “confirming an opposition” between historicism and psychoanalysis “at the cost of recognizing the real complexity of the relation” (93) but at the same time, or on the same page, complains that “in much of our current literature, there is no clear distinction between the constitution of the subject in psychoanalysis, and the social construction of subjectivity.” But perhaps one of the reasons for this lack of “clear distinction” between “constitution” and “construction” or “imperative” and “role” in “our current literature” is that there is no clear distinction among these formations in our ongoing sociosymbolic reality—or at least that no “clear distinction” can really be made except at “the cost of recognizing the real complexity of the relation.” To follow Shepherdson’s distinctions, we might say that at the level of representational “role” or “construction” there will always be cultural and historical variations in what it might “mean” for a man or a woman to act or appear (in cuneiform or hieroglyphics or on the silver screen or in cyberspace) as a “sex symbol,” but at the level of linguistic “imperative” or “constitution” there will always be, transhistorically and transculturally, an invariably profound and constitutive relation between sexuation (from secare, “to cut”) and symbolization. OK, fair enough. And yet, the question of the complexity of the relation between role and imperative remains. Indeed, we see it emerge in the dialogue between Shepherdson and Jessica Miller that constitutes the final chapter of Vital Signs. At a certain point in this dialogue, Shepherdson is attempting to explain why anorexia is neither genetic nor “merely a general ‘social’ phenomenon” but rather a matter of “symbolic inheritance—a nonbiological transmission of anorexia. It isn’t just a question of the particular woman, in relation to cultural ideals of femininity. It’s an inheritance that passes symbolically from mother to daughter, around the question of femininity” (191). But we might ask how “the question of femininity” can be clearly distinguished from “cultural ideals of femininity” simply through recourse to the symbolic. Indeed, Miller asks Shepherdson, “Why can’t language and symbolic transmission be subsumed by theories of social construction?” (191). Shepherdson responds: “Partly because accounts of the general social milieu can’t explain why one subject rather than another becomes anorexic. Many women are exposed to the cultural representations, but they aren’t all anorexic. It’s a question of the particularity of the subject” (191–92). Shepherdson goes on to say: It’s the same with reproduction: the sexual drive is not governed by the instinct to reproduce. Freud’s discovery was to show that sexuality in the human is denatured, it doesn’t follow a developmental path directed

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toward procreation. It shows up through the transformed reality that representations make possible, which is why “sexuality” in Freud’s sense is a uniquely human problem, distinct from biological sex. (192) Again, of course, OK, fair enough. But one might still ask how we can really clearly distinguish the anthropogenetic denaturing of sex or “the transformed reality that representations make possible” from any “general social milieu” except at the cost of recognizing the real complexity of the relation. In other words, where do representations come from? Since they neither grow on trees nor fall out of the sky, can their origin, reproduction, distribution, transmission, or reception have any other source than culture or history as the untranscendable horizon of all (imperatively sociosymbolic) thought and interpretation? Excursus 2: On Lacan’s Myth of the Lamella Toward the end of “Position of the Unconscious,” Lacan begins to construct his “myth” of the lamella. He begins by stressing the need to counter any characterization of human sexuality as biologically determined with a mythological (i.e., fictional, metaphorical, and conjectural) account: As for sexuality, which people would like to remind me is the force we [analysts] deal with and that it is biological, I retort that analysts perhaps have not shed as much light as people at one time hoped on sexuality’s mainsprings, recommending only that we be natural, repeatedly trotting out the same themes of billing and cooing. I will try to contribute something newer by resorting to a genre that Freud himself never claimed to have superseded in this area: myth. (Écrits 716) What Lacan has in mind here is of course the Aristophanic myth from Plato’s Symposium to which Freud turns at the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the myth of “primitive double-backed creatures” originally “fused together” but “separated later by a surgical operation arising from Zeus’s jealousy,” the scissored or sexuated “beings we have become in love, starving for our unfindable complement” (Écrits 716–17). Lacan lets this mythical “sphericity of primordial Man” bring to his mind an egg, and he asks that we consider the egg in a viviparous womb where it has no need for a shell, and recall that, whenever the membranes burst, a part of the egg is harmed, for the membranes of the fertilized egg are offspring [ filles] just as much as the living being brought into the world through their perforation. Consequently, upon the cutting the cord, what the newborn loses is not, as analysts think, its mother, but rather its anatomical complement. Midwives call it the “afterbirth” [délivre]. (Écrits 717) Then, in a rather impressive move from yolky anatomy to creepy poetry—or, in a sense, from the raw to the cooked—Lacan writes: Now imagine that every time the membranes burst, a phantom—an infinitely more primal form of life [ . . . ]—takes flight through the same passage.


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Man [l’Homme] is made by breaking an egg, but so is the “Manlet” [l’Hommelette]. Let us assume the latter to be a large crêpe that moves like an amoeba, so utterly flat that it can slip under doors, omniscient as it is guided by the pure life instinct, and immortal as it is fissiparous. It is certainly something that would not be good to feel dripping down your face, noiselessly, in order to seal it. (Écrits 717). And if, Lacan writes, this yolky remainder of the “pure real” were to seep out of its own sphere into that of human reality, “even the bravest person would be justified in thinking twice before touching it in order to shove a negligible overflowing amount [un rien] back in, for fear that it would slip between his fingers and take up its abode who knows where?” (Écrits 718). At this point in his mythmaking, Lacan changes the nom du l’Hommelette to “lamella,” and then to “libido,” and writes that the lamella libidinally represents “the part of living being that is lost when that being is produced through the straits of sex,” that “it marks the relationship—in which the subject plays a part—between sexuality, specified in the individual, and his death” (Écrits 718). Now, obviously, with Lacan’s “lamellian” mythopoetic marking of the relationship between the individual’s specified sexuality (man or woman) and his death, we find ourselves back in the general vicinity of the subject’s “articulated question—’What am I there?’—about his sex and his contingency in being” (459). For what Lacan here attempts to make obvious—or perhaps obscenely evident—through the figure of the lamella is the relationship between the straits of sex, the defiles of the signifier, and the trajectory of the death drive: Speaking subjects have the privilege of revealing the deadly meaning of this organ [the lamella], and thereby its relation to sexuality. This is because the signifier as such, whose first purpose is to bar the subject, has brought into him the meaning of death. (The letter kills, but we learn this from the letter itself.) This is why every drive is virtually a death drive. (Écrits 719) Since the lamella is “the organ of what is incorporeal in the sexed being” and “the aspect of the organism that the subject manages to invest when his separation occurs,” Lacan writes, “It is through this organ that he can really make his death the object of the Other’s desire” (Écrits 720). But since, as we all know, “man’s desire is the Other’s desire” (525), the lamella must be the organ or aspect through which the subject can make his death the object of his own desire. But this idea of owning or desiring to own one’s death as one’s “own-most” object is complicated, or at least given a certain color, by Lacan’s very next set of assertions; to wit: In this way, the object he naturally loses, excrement, and the props he finds in the Other’s desire—the Other’s gaze or voice—come to this place. The activity in the subject I call “drive” (Trieb) consists in dealing

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with these objects in such a way as to recover from them, to restore to himself, his earliest loss. (Écrits 720) The quite complicated remainder of “Position of the Unconscious” concerns what Lacan calls “the impact of sexuality” as it is “manifested in the subject,” “the absence of anything that could represent in the subject the mode of what is male or female in his being,” and “the fact that there is nothing in his dialectic that represents the bipolarity of sex” (Écrits 720). The “true basis of that polarity,” Lacan writes, is that sexuality is distributed on one side or the other of our rim as a threshold of the unconscious in the following manner: On the side of the living being as a being that will be taken up in speech—never able in the end to come to be altogether in speech, remaining shy of the threshold which, notwithstanding, is neither inside nor out—there is no access to the opposite sex as Other except via the so-called partial drives wherein the subject seeks an object to take the place of the loss of life he has sustained due to the fact that he is sexed. On the side of the Other—the locus in which speech is verified as it encounters the exchange of signifiers, the ideals they prop up, the elementary structures of kinship, the metaphor of the father considered as a principle of separation, and the ever reopened division in the subject owing to his initial alienation—on this side alone and by the pathways I have just enumerated, order and norms must be instituted which tell the subject what a man or a woman must do. (Écrits 720) Now, having looked at love from both sides—having examined “the beings we have become in love” and “in speech” from both sides, so to speak, of what Lacan calls “our rim”—what we might say about Lacan’s myth of the lamella is that it is not not half-bad. For the myth does suggest something pretty bad about the “pure life” that I lose upon being halved, upon being “sexed,” upon being a living being that will be taken up in speech. If nothing else, the myth suggests greater complications in the relation between the “fact of the signifier” and the “fact” that I am “sexed” than the simple conflation of “linguistic difference” with “sexual difference” as “differentiation from the maternal” would allow. Complicating the Oedipal myth, the “exchange of signifiers,” and “the elementary structures of kinship,” the lamellian myth suggests that what I am most fundamentally separated from when the cord is cut, even if it is scissored by “the metaphor of the father considered as a principle of separation,” is not the mother, “as analysts think,” but a more sinister, yolky, excessive, excremental, obscene overflow of the “pure real.” If I am reading Lacan’s myth correctly here, then, at least on “the side of the living being,” as opposed to “the side of the Other,” this loss of really excremental life is what the “fact” of being “sexed”—that is, separated from myself, from my worst half, from my unfindable and unspeakable anatomical complement—really amounts to. This reading would involve me in some very complex relations among the following: (1) my


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possible (but regulated) desire in relation to sex, which is presumably “in the end to come”; (2) my impossible desire in relation to words, which is “in the end to come to be altogether in speech” (impossible because I cannot be but can only come to mean—that is, be and not be—in speech); (3) my drive in relation to objects, which is to deal with them “in such a way as to recover from them,” to restore to myself, my “earliest loss”; and (4) my drive in relation to my death, since “every drive is virtually a death drive” and since my final objective is to make my death “the object of the Other’s desire.” But to the extent that my buried memories of my “earliest loss” involve the object I “naturally” lose, excrement, my desire to make my death the object of the Other’s desire must relate to my drive to recover myself, to restore myself to myself, to re-find my unspeakable complement, to lose my loss of excremental life and regain a purely thanatical identity with the excremental real, or a purely excremental identity with the thanatical real. In any case, this mythical relation could help explain why some people read the erasure of “sexual difference” as the Durchfall of the distinction between life and death: if I am no longer “sexed,” if I am no longer symbolically separated, I am thus “no different” from a really shitty death, a fatally fecal real. The myth also helps explain the tension between desire, which is understandably metonymically always “for something else” (Écrits 431), not that, and drive, which is always unreasonably literally for exactly that and nothing else. Finally, the myth explains why Lacan insists that desire desires to sustain itself as desire by always circling around the objet a but never finally “grasping” it: it allows us to rewrite the Lacanian slogan of subjectivity, “Don’t give me what I desire because that’s not it,” so that it more fundamentally reads, “Don’t give me what I desire because it’s really (to be) shit.” 15. In “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan writes that “it is precisely the kakon of his own being that the madman tries to get at in the object he strikes” (Écrits 143). 16. I like Denise Riley’s formulation in The Words of Selves: While the Lacanian psychoanalytic subject is indeed constituted “in division,” what one might want to see admitted is a yet more ubiquitous division. Not only that formulaic division through language operating at the level of the unconscious, but division made convex, as it were, folded upwards and outwards to the surface, in a far more prolific but a stolid and quotidian scission, to be tolerantly grasped as everywhere in play. This isn’t to advance an aesthetic and perverse longing for fragmentation, but only a sanguine acknowledgement of how things do seem to be. (14–15) 17. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Bersani posits sexuality as self-shattering, and the “self-shattering into the sexual as a kind of nonanecodotal self-debasement [ . . . ] in which, so to speak, the self is exuberantly discarded” (217–18). Bersani writes that the self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power. It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely,

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moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self. But sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of sex as self-abolition. It inaccurately replicates self-shattering as self-swelling, as psychic tumescence. If, as these words suggest, men are especially apt to “choose” this version of sexual plea sure, because their sexual equipment appears to invite by analogy, or at least to facilitate the phallicizing of the ego, neither sex has exclusive rights to the practice of sex as self-hyperbole. (218) On Bersani’s analysis, the hyperbolic self or phallicized ego cannot experience sexuality as anything but power, cannot give itself over to the “strong appeal of powerlessness, of the loss of control” (217). It cannot exuberantly discard and shatter itself into sexuality, and so can have contact with sexuality only as the shattering discard of the devalued other. Phallocentrism, therefore, is according to Bersani “not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has obviously also led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women. I don’t mean the value of gentleness, or nonaggressiveness, or even of passivity, but rather of a more radical disintegration and humiliation of the self ” (217). But this subversion of phallocentrism through radical self-disintegration is, for Bersani, not only sexual but also ethical, for it is, he says, “the sacrosanct value of selfhood [that] accounts for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements. The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence” (222). 18. Pronger explicitly refutes the suggestion that “men need to take on homosexual identities in order to be feminist. Indeed homosexual identity is no guarantor of feminist insight” (“On Your Knees” 77). Nor, it should be pointed out, are celebrations of male anal effusiveness per se any guarantor of feminism. In this regard, see Judith K. Gardiner’s essay “ ‘South Park,’ Blue Men, Anality, and Market Masculinity.” 19. The source of this information was a lecture by Professor Jan Nattier, of the Department of Religion at Indiana University, delivered at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center, Jemez Springs, New Mexico, June 1997. The information is, as I say, transcultural, but not universal, for as Nattier pointed out, in traditional Chinese culture writing is highly valued and carries no such abject associations or proscriptions. 20. I am working here from Edelman’s “Tearooms and Sympathy” essay as it appeared in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. The language about homographesis in Edelman’s Homographesis is slightly different.

Essay 3 1. Among the reasons I flatter myself by not including is the condition of the ass itself, which—despite my advancing age, and because of the ridiculous


2.

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amount of time I spend working out in the gym (when I could be out working for real social change)—I like to think of as still fuck-worthy, even if I do not like to think of its being fucked. The conference on “Posting the Male: Repre sentations of Masculinity in the Twentieth Century,” orga nized by Daniel Lea and Berthold SchoeneHarwood, was held at the Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University in August of 2000, and I will here again thank the organizers for inviting me to speak at that event. My allusion here is to Marx’s insistence on praxis in the 1844 manuscripts: “In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property” (99). For Lacan’s relationship and indebtedness to Bataille, see Roudinesco, Carolyn Dean, and Botting and Wilson. For Lacan and queer theory, see both Tim Dean’s “Lacan Meets Queer Theory” chapter in Beyond Sexuality and his “Lacan and Queer Theory” chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. In her biography Jacques Lacan, Roudinesco writes of the “anxiety that afflicted Lacan whenever the terrible question of publication arose. ‘Poubellication,’ he was to call it later, a pun on ‘poubelle’ (trash can), perhaps referring to the residue or waste that might in his view be the object of his dearest desire” (319). Lacan himself refers to the word poubellication as “a pun of my own making” (Écrits 304) in “On a Purpose.” Cf. D.A. Miller in “Anal Rope”: Aligned with [the] subject’s heterosexualization (as what most brutally enforces it), castration anxiety may not finally be all that anxiogenic. For while such anxiety no doubt occasions considerable psychic distress, neither in the long run can it fail to be determined by the knowledge that it enjoys the highest social utility in tending to confirm heterosexual male identity in a world where, if this precious, but precarious identity is not exactly rewarded, the failure to assume it is less ambiguously punished. At the point where castration anxiety is taught to anticipate its redeeming social value, it immediately carries ultimate reassurance; its normaliz ing function allows it to be not just thought, but even lived, as normal itself. (135–36)

7. Cf. Bataille, “Two Fragments on Laughter,” in Guilty: We have to distinguish: —Communication linking up two beings (laughter of a child to its mother, tickling, etc.) —Communication, through death, with our beyond (essentially in sacrifice)—not with nothingness, still less with a supernatural being, but with a indefinite reality (which I sometimes call the impossible, that is: what can’t be grasped (begreift) in any way, what we can’t reach without dissolving ourselves, what’s slavishly called God). If we need to we can define this reality (provisionally associating it with a finite element) at a

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higher (higher than the individual on a scale of composition of beings) social level as the sacred, God or created reality. Or else it can remain in an undefined state (in ordinary laughter, infinite laughter, or ecstasy in which the divine form melts like sugar in water). (139) 8. For biographical details, see Alan Stoekel’s introduction to Bataille, Visions of Excess.

Essay 4 1. Bersani’s most extensive treatments of gay male sexuality are in Homos and “Is the Rectum a Grave?” He mentions Beckett only on the last page of Homos and not at all in “Rectum.” Though he glances at Beckett in The Culture of Redemption and The Freudian Body, his most extensive treatment is in the chapter “Beckett: Inhibited Reading” in Arts of Impoverishment, in which he does not mention homosexuality at all. This essay is an attempt to investigate connections that are suggested but nowhere made explicit in Bersani’s work. 2. I have attempted to discuss the problems and possibilities of “straight” negotiations with queer theory in the following: “Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality”; “Is Straight Self-Understanding Possible?”; “Men and Feminist Literary Criticism”; “On Being Post-Normal: Heterosexuality after Queer Theory”; and “Crossing the Streets, Queering the Sheets; or, ‘Do You Want to Save the Changes to Queer Heterosexuality?’ ” In the last two of these I respond to Annette Schichtler’s critique of my attempts, “Queer at Last? Straight Intellectuals and the Desire for Transgression.” 3. The relevant passage from Jameson is given below: The thematizing of a particular pleasure as a political issue [ . . . ] must always involve a dual focus, in which the local issue is meaningful and desirable in itself, but is also at one and the same time taken as the figure for Utopia in general, and for the systemic revolutionary transformation of society as a whole. [ . . . ] So finally the right to a specific plea sure, to a specific enjoyment of the potentialities of the material body—if it is not to remain only that, if it is to become genuinely political [ . . . ]—must always in one way or another also be able to stand as a figure for the transformation of social relations as a whole. (“Pleasure” 73–74) 4. At first glance, Bersani’s deployment of Freud would seem to depend upon his separating Freud’s radical discoveries of and about sexuality from his tendency to domesticate those very discoveries by subsuming them into the theoretical edifice (or monument) called psychoanalysis. Bersani certainly makes that separation, but goes further and insists that it is the very collapse or failure of the theoretical edifice that produces the radical discoveries as such. See The Freudian Body and the chapter called “Erotic Assumptions” in The Culture of Redemption. 5. In an interview published in October, Bersani also distinguishes between a masochism that he considers “not as pleasure in pain so much as the pleasure


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of at once losing the self and discovering it elsewhere, inaccurately replicated,” or again as “a certain pleasurable renunciation of one’s own ego boundaries, the pleasure of a kind of self-obliteration,” and castration. The terms of this distinction are somewhat confusing in that Bersani does occasionally use the phrase “self-divestiture” positively, whereas here he distances himself from it, but nonetheless: It’s important to me to talk about it precisely as masochism and narcissism and not as self-divestiture because self-divestiture approaches what I have tried to avoid, and that is any connection of these ideas to castration. This is a major point of difference between us [Bersani and Kaja Silverman]: I am interested in a pleasure in losing or dissolving the self that is in no way equated with loss, but comes rather through rediscovering the self outside the self. It is a kind of spatial, anonymous narcissism. (Dean, “A Conversation” 6) 6. For an elaboration of this point, see Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. 7. As Nietzsche continues: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world”—look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world? (Gay Science 282–83) And Nietzsche has already suggested what “our world” consists of and what “life” aims at: “semblance, meaning error, deception, simulation, delusion, self-delusion. [ . . . ] [T]he great sweep of life has actually always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi” (282). 8. From a 1925 letter, cited in Vendler, xi. I cannot read Bersani’s references to “monumental” aesthetics without thinking (and thinking that Bersani was thinking) of Nietzsche’s critique of “monumental history” in “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life” in Untimely Meditations, and also of Yeats’s lines from “Sailing to Byzantium”: “Caught in that sensual music all neglect/ Monuments of unageing intellect,” and “Nor is there singing school but studying/ Monuments of its own magnificence” (193). 9. For an early valorization of Beckett’s deployment of expulsion or abjection, see Georges Bataille’s 1951 essay “Molloy’s Silence.” In it Bataille writes that Beckett’s writing represents “repellent splendor incarnate” (131) and that Beckett confronts us with “the fundamental reality, which is always in front of us but which fear always separates us from, which we refuse to see and which we always strive to avoid being engulfed by” (131). This “fundamental reality” is for Bataille related to both “creative convulsions of language” and the “incontinent flux of language” (132), and hence to what he calls “the intrinsic debility of literature” (136), all of which Beckett’s writing reveals. Bataille himself is of course an important figure, not only in the history of theories of abjection (see Kristeva, Powers of Horror and Reader,

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The Abject Object), but also for Bersani’s antiredemptive aesthetics (see Bersani’s chapter on Bataille in The Culture of Redemption). Moreover, Bataille is a compelling figure in the argument for “straight queerness” or universal homo-ness. In fact, the title for my first essay on this subject (“Straight with a Twist”) comes from Carolyn Dean’s description of Bataille in The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentred Subject. Dean writes that “Bataille remains, to be sure, a man, but a different sort of man; he remains heterosexual, but he is a straight man with a twist” (240). 10. In his preface to the second edition of The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes: “Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity” (38). 11. Cf. Althusser: I shall then suggest that ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by the very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was “really” addressed to him, and that “it was really him who was hailed” (and not someone else). (174) 12. My reference here is to Barthes’s assertion that “the text is (should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father” (Pleasure 53). 13. In Heterology and the Postmodern, Julian Pefanis uses the word “heterology” to refer to a “thought of nonidentity” that aims “to preserve the difference of otherness, resisting the totalizing and totally compromised tendency of civilization” (5). For Bataille, however, the word “heterology” refers not only to “the science of the completely other” but also to “scatology” (Visions 102). 14. Though I write that Beckett learned this lesson from Joyce (for an examination of Joycean applications, see the chapter “Not a Nice Production: Anal Joyce” in Male Matters), I should point out that Bersani is curiously unappreciative of Joyce’s anal tropings and tends to read Joyce more as a producer than as a subverter of cultural monumentalization. See the chapter “Against Ulysses” in The Culture of Redemption. Tim Dean, however, in “Paring His Fingernails,” demurs from Bersani’s positioning of Ulysses within the redemptive aesthetic, and reads Joyce’s novel “as one of Bersani’s best allies” (245). 15. For a feminist objection to Bersani, see Modleski, Feminism without Women. 16. In “Straight with a Twist,” I suggest that “perhaps people who fuck in the name of identity, who make an identity out of whom they fuck, who fuck


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to reproduce ‘the person,’ are fucking heteronormatively—are, in a sense, ‘breeders’—even if ‘the person’ or ‘identity’ thereby reproduced is ‘homosexual’ ” (33). One could rewrite that passage, substituting “write” for “fuck,” and get a sense of what I mean when I write that Beckett was not a breeder. 17. See Barthes, “The Structural Analysis of Narrative,” in Image-Music-Text, and Brooks, “Freud’s Master Plot,” in Reading for the Plot. 18. See The Postmodern Condition for Lyotard’s discussion of relations among postmodernism as the “shattering of belief,” Nietzschean perspectivism, masochism, and the Kantian sublime, which “carries with it both plea sure and pain. Better still, in it plea sure derives from pain” (77). 19. My reference here is to Nietzsche’s “I am afraid we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar” (Twilight 48). Perhaps it was this perceived connection between sexual and syntactical normality that led Bertha Harris to suggest that “if in a woman writer’s work a sentence refuses to do what it is supposed to do [ . . . ] the result is innately lesbian literature” (cited in Smith 1416).

Essay 5 1. I of course allude here to the title of Slavoj Žižek’s edited collection Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). But I also provoke the question of why we should even ask the Lacan/ Hitchcock question at all when so much Lacanian-influenced work has been done on Hitchcock in the last 30 years (dating from the 1975 publication of Mulvey’s “Visual Plea sure and Narrative Cinema”). My answer is the revitalization of Lacan studies by queer theory, particularly by Tim Dean, whose Beyond Sexuality convincingly argues that “psychoanalysis is a queer theory” (215), and by Lee Edelman, whose No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive not only blends Lacan and queer theory with the figure of the “sinthomosexual ” (described below, note 7) but also applies its considerable interpretative force to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and The Birds. I rely rather heavily on Dean’s and Edelman’s explications of Lacan in what follows here. 2. In his chapter on Spellbound in Hitchock’s Bi-Textuality, Samuels writes, “What most commentators of this movie have missed is the most obvious and repetitive symbolism of the fi lm. Black lines on a white surface refers [sic] to writing, just as the title Spellbound can refer to both a trance and the act of spelling out something in language” (30). Samuels himself misses the pun about being bound to spelling that I was bound to spell out, but I thank him for leading me to it. As for the matter of our corporeal experience’s being always already put in writing, I specifically have in mind Lacan’s observation that “the instinctual stages are already organized in subjectivity [i.e., written] as they are being lived” and his reference to

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the subjectivity of the child who registers as victories and defeats the epic of the training of his sphincters—enjoying in the process the imaginary sexualization of his cloacal orifices, turning his excremental expulsions into aggressions, his retentions into seductions, and his movements of release into symbols. [ . . . ] In other words, the anal stage is no less purely historical when it is actually experienced than when it is reconceptualized, nor is it less purely grounded in intersubjectivity. (Écrits 217) 3. I remind the reader that for Lacan the anthropogenetic moment of accession to language is inextricably linked to what Slavoj Žižek calls “Lacan’s thesis that animal became human the moment it confronted the problem of what to do with its excrement [ . . . and that] in order for the unpleasant surplus to pose a problem, the body must already have been caught up in the symbolic network” (Metastases 179). Cf. Lacan’s comments in note 2 above. 4. “Another way of putting this,” writes Dean, is to point out how linguistic duplicity—the very possibility that language can deceive—produces the perpetual illusion of a secret located beyond language, and it is this enigma that elicits desire. Hence, for Lacan, the subject and desire come into being at the same moment; and he names this constitutive division that founds the subject “object a,” a term intended to designate the remainder or excess that keeps self-identity forever out of reach, thus maintaining desire. (Dean, Beyond 250) 5. Regarding the lethality of the linguistic symbol, Bruce Fink, in The Lacanian Subject, writes: In Lacan’s work, the sacrifice of jouissance [ . . . ] is necessitated by the Other’s demand that we speak. [ . . . ] That demand is obviously tied to all culture, all bodies of knowledge, for without language we could have no access to any of them. [ . . . ] The symbolic order kills the living being or organism in us, rewriting it or overwriting it with signifiers, such that being dies (“the letter kills”) and only the signifier lives on. (100–101) Regarding the sacrifice of jouissance and the loss of the real as constitutive for the subject, Dean writes: At the level of the real the phallus stands for castration as loss of jouissance. Symbolic castration . . . should not be located in the real, because the real lacks nothing (it is devoid of signifiers). This is why Lacan characterizes the real as always returning to the same place, for the signifier as a principle of substitutability remains foreign to the real. Hence the real can be defined only negatively, as a zone of impossibility. Yet far from its negativity rendering it conceptually redundant, the real’s impossibility is what renders it constitutive. That is, the real represents the condition of possibility for both the subject and discourse, insofar as the real is what must be excluded for the subject as a speaking being to constitute itself. (Beyond 88)


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6. Dean writes that “although the real has no positive content, it has more to do with sex and death than does the imaginary or the symbolic” (Beyond 230) and, again, that “though the real has no predetermined content, Lacan associates it with the traumatic, unassimilable dimension of sex” (245). 7. I do not mean to trivialize queer by aligning it with comedy, or to make light of the serious, futureless business of Lee Edelman’s sinthomosexuality. However, as I take it, what actually constitutes the seriousness of sinthomosexuality is the way it fatally ironizes the seriousness of “meaning” itself and figures a queer refusal to take identity seriously. Thus Edelman conflates the Lacanian sinthome with Bersanian (preferably anal) sex, the value of which is “to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it” (“Rectum” 222). Or, again, Edelman conflates the sinthome, which “functions as the necessary condition for the subject’s engagement of Symbolic reality [but] refuses the Symbolic logic that determines the exchange of signifiers [ . . . ] admit[ting] no translation of its singularity and therefore carr[ying] nothing of meaning, recalling in this the letter as the site at which meaning comes undone” (No Future 35), with queerness as what “figure[s] an unregenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality, whose singular insistence on jouissance, rejecting every constraint posed by sentimental [heteronormative] futurism, exposes aesthetic culture—the culture of forms and their reproduction, the culture of Imaginary lures—as always already a ‘culture of death’ intent on abjecting the force of a death drive that shatters the tomb we call life” (No Future 48). Edelman goes on to write that the sinthomosexual who stops the world, who exposes the Real in reality and shatters the totalized significations, all the meanings that metaphor generates, into the shards of material signifiers only metonymically linked, destroys, by revealing the promiscuous conjunctions of signifiers without benefit of marriage, all faith in the redemptive possibility of their meaning-producing rapport. The thematic extension of the wound thus inflicted on the viability of any thematics is the sinthomosexual’s insistence on the lack of a sexual rapport, on the absence of any natural or instinctive relation between the sexes, of any complementarity, any access to meaning between them. [ . . . ] The sinthomosexual, like jouissance, makes the sexual relation impossible, obtruding with the force of the Real on the fantasy of the reciprocal fulfillment of male and female in the One of the Symbolic couple. (180n42) To return all this destruction to the question of the comedic, I will simply let the anal thematic of these passages resonate and suggest that, at least for some of us, it is always devastatingly funny to find “the fundament at the foundation of the profound” (No Future 178n2). Just as the value of anal sex is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it, so at least part of “the explanatory virtue of turds” (Dean 265) is that they have no future. Our laughter is Bataillean. 8. Of course, to phrase the problem this way is to suggest that gynophobia and misogyny are problems in normative heteromasculinity rather than the

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latter’s very condition of possibility. On the contrary, we should understand that successful masculinist heteronormativity depends less (or even not at all) upon “liking” women or “being into” female genitalia and more (or even completely) upon establishing control or ownership of the vagina and everything it represents and everything that represents it, including the problematic of representation itself. And everything it represents: most notably—that is, most obviously aligned with notation, with repre sentation, with the cut of language—symbolic castration. And everything that represents it: less obviously, but more problematically, or archaically, the “bottom” in Freud’s Wolfman’s “front-bottom,” the rectum from which, says Freud, borrowing an “apt phrase from Lou-Andreas Salomé,” the vagina is only “ ‘taken on lease’ ”(SE 22:101). Including the problematic of representation itself: if the crucial problem of representation is how to gain and maintain control of it, and if the proof of heteronormative masculinity is less liking than controlling feminine sexuality, then successful heteronormativity can be said to depend upon controlling repre sentation, while its failure can be signaled by a loss of representational control. These considerations, which link normative heteromasculine success with the proper control of words, images, women, and one’s own sphincter, would seem to have a direct bearing on a repre sentational space as tightly controlled as Hitchcock’s cinema seems to be—particularly if we agree with Robert Samuels that Hitchcock actually “radically fails at his control of the visual world” (111), and particularly if we think, with Samuels, that this failure can be a productive site of queer interpretation. 9. Lisa does not see the smirk and either misses or ignores the insinuation. What is remarkable, though, is that some of the critics of the fi lm who are engaged with the question of Jeff ’s “repressed homosexuality” or general emasculation—Samuels, even Edelman—similarly miss, ignore, or completely misconstrue the line. Most egregious in this regard is John Fawell, who not only gets the line completely wrong (as I have already shown, Fawell tends to misquote) but also incorporates the misreading into his own heteronormative projections about Jeff ’s projections and hence Hitchcock’s. Fawell writes that “Jeff interprets the Composer’s window as he does all the windows, projecting his own ideas and biases upon the Composer. When Lisa, moved by the music, inquires about the Composer, Jeff says, ‘he lives alone, probably an unhappy marriage’ ” (98). Of course, what Jeff clearly says is “but they have a very unhappy marriage.” If he says what Fawell hears, then what’s up with the smirk? In any case, Fawell goes on to say that Jeff “sees in the Composer a reflection of his own situation, another man harried by the institution of marriage. But a closer examination of the Composer’s window suggests a man who is unhappy not because he has been married but because he misses or needs a woman” (98). Armed with these misreadings, Fawell interprets Hitchcock’s cameo in terms of the director’s desire to participate in the composition of the songwriter’s tune “Lisa.”


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Hitchcock wanted to be seen as, in a sense, the author of the song that is the source of the strong feeling of love for Lisa that permeates the film, and this is further evidenced by the fact that he seems to be giving the composer instruction on how to write the music. Hitchcock’s words are not audible in this cameo, but the act of his speaking is clearly recorded, and the lip-readers I have asked to look at this scene have agreed that what he is saying is “B, B flat.” (101) Could this reading be any flatter? I don’t want to pick on Fawell any further because I think that his full-length book on Rear Window is in ways quite valuable. But if one is going to write a whole book about a single film, and even call in lip-readers, one could at least quote accurately the lines that are quite audible. 10. Although the phrase “volcanic Bataillean hot monkey-love” calls out for explanation, I turn first to the phrase “hot spot,” which does not occur in Jeff ’s phone conversation with Gunneson, though Gunneson does say that Kashmir is “about to go up in smoke” and Jeff says, “Didn’t I tell you that was the place to watch?” Rather, the phrase appears in a long footnote in Edelman’s “Rear Window’s Glasshole,” in which Edelman points out the Western association of non-Western territories (like Kashmir or Shanghai) with “the archaic remnants of repudiated libidinal systems” and with “pregenital pleasures and libidinal pathways that must culturally evoke associations like those assigned to the repudiated racial and ethnic other: associations with dirt and uncleanliness, with foul smells and inappropriate desires.” Edelman writes that these associations find a thematic home in Rear Window’s anatomy of Jeff ’s regressive investment in postcolonial adventure. The fi lm, after all, immobilizes Jeff the better to mobilize a narrative in which his nominal susceptibility to the hetero-genitalizing charms of Miss Fremont must struggle against the much greater appeal of “hot spots” far from Western eyes, places distinguished, in the lurid descriptions he offers to explain why Lisa could never hope to accompany him there, primarily by their capacity to compel an immersive experience in filth and disgust. (95n25) I follow Edelman here but will eventually diverge from him to argue that Miss Fremont, overcoming or at least setting aside like a book or magazine her own susceptibility to heterogenitalizing charms, actually does more than hope to accompany Jeff to the archaic and repudiated “there.” Returning to the Bataille reference, however, and speaking of filth and disgust, I meant to allude not only to the defecation/enucleation parallels in Story of the Eye but also to such simian moments in Visions of Excess as Bataille’s evolutionary alignment of human facial expressiveness with “the shit-smeared and obscene anuses of certain apes” (75); his assertion that “the blossoming of the human face [ . . . ] is like a conflagration, having the possibility of unleashing immense quantities of energy in the form

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11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.


of bursts of laughter, tear, or sobs; it succeeded the explosiveness that up to that point had made the anal orifice bud and flame” (77); and his description in “The Sacrifice of the Gibbon” of an interspecial analingual orgy, a truly vile ritual or immersive experience in which an ape’s ass becomes an excremental volcano and the most active human participant is an “Englishwoman” who, come to think of it, may bear a certain resemblance to the Hitchcockian ice-hot blonde embodied in Rear Window by Grace Kelly. Samuels elaborates on Lacan’s treatment of the gaze in the eleventh seminar in order to correct what he sees as Laura Mulvey’s “confusion” about the “controlling male gaze” (for Lacan, the “gaze” involves exactly what exceeds the ego’s intentional control). But while Mulvey does employ Lacan in the essay “Visual Pleasure,” she never claims that her use of the term “gaze” conforms to or stems from Lacan’s discussions in Seminar XI. Even if Lacan’s treatment of the gaze complicates the notion of the “controlling male gaze” as deployed in feminist film theory from Mulvey on, I do not think Mulvey or feminist film theory is “confused” about the ideological function of the controlling male gaze. See my “Last Laughs: Batman, Masculinity, and the Technology of Abjection,” which I had originally planned to situate as an essay in this book between this essay on Hitchcock and the following one on Lynch. Modleski writes that “in Hitchcock’s films, women’s purses (and their jewelry) take on a vulgar Freudian significance relating to female sexuality and to men’s attempts to investigate it” (Women 78). Perhaps the magazine is less vulgar for being textual rather than imaginary; or perhaps it is only that the vulgarity is more Lacanian than Freudian. Cf. Casablanca: “Vultures, vultures everywhere.” Readers who want a more historicizing account of the sexual and gender dynamics in Rear Window would do well to consider Robert Corber’s In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America or Amy Lawrence’s “American Shame: Rope, James Stewart, and the Postwar Crisis in American Masculinity,” both fine works. As for myself, I give up the ghost of pretending to be interested in or even capable of always historicizing—the best I can put out is the occasional, meager historicization—and plan to continue here to proceed as vulgarly as I can. The salvational rhetoric alludes to the discussion between Robin Wood and Tania Modleski about the question of whether or not Hitchcock can be “saved for feminism.” Edelman writes that “the Child [ . . . ] marks the fetishistic fi xation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism” (No Future 21). This section’s title debases the title of the novel on which Spellbound is based, The House of Dr. Edwardes, written by John Palmer and Hilary St. George Sanders under the name Francis Beeding, and the title of the Thomas Hyde essay “The Moral Universe of Hitchcock’s Spellbound.”


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19. At one point J.B. tells Constance that he does not remember ever kissing a woman before—and there may be a good reason for this. 20. In Sheridan’s translation of the railway story, we find Lacan saying that “only someone who didn’t have his eyes in front of the holes (it’s the appropriate image here) could possibly confuse the place of the signifier and the signified in this story” (Écrits: A Selection 152). Fink gives us the inappropriate and completely unillustrative “one would have to be half-blind” (Écrits 417) for Il faudrait n’avoir pas les yeux en face des trous and relegates the literal translation, involving eyeholes, to the endnotes (807). Lacan, favoring holes over halves, clearly means to mess with us here, and one wonders why in this instance Fink chooses not to take Lacan to the letter. 21. If we approach the skiing scene with sexual expectations, then Constance and J.B.’s preparations take on certain comically sinister dimensions, particularly when Constance, kneeling to buckle herself into her skis, looks up at J.B., who has not yet donned his, and sternly commands him to “put them on”—as if the skis were some strange erotic/prosthetic/prophylactic devices. 22. Hitchcock sets this all up nicely by repeating the point-of-view shot of Constance’s ascending approach to Murchison’s door; in the earlier sequence she had approached the same door, seeing the same light showing through the same lower crack, but expecting a very different man behind it. 23. I am sure that Freud somewhere explicitly links blinding with castration, but this bit from Lacan, who speaks of “that eye which, in the myth of Oedipus, fulfills so well the role of equivalent for the organ to be castrated” (Television 86), was closer to hand. 24. Hence my earlier allusion to Bataille, which was intentional but perhaps involuntary. At least, I cannot seem to help allowing this last look, Spellbound ’s parting shot of ocular anality, in which an eye stares at us through an end, remind me of the disastrous ending of Story of the Eye. Bataille’s novel ends with a trio of debauchees murdering a priest, pulling out his eye and using it as a sex toy. The eye ends up lodged in Simone’s end, among other places, though it finally stares out at the narrator from her hirsute fissure: Now I stood up and, while Simone lay on her side, I drew her thighs apart, and found myself facing something I imagine I had been waiting for in the same way that a guillotine waits for a neck to slice. I even felt as if my eyes were bulging from my head, erectile with horror; in Simone’s hairy vagina, I saw the wan blue eye [ . . . ] gazing at me through tears of urine. Streaks of come in the steaming hair helped give that dreamy vision a disastrous sadness. I held the thighs open while Simone was convulsed by the urinary spasm, and the burning urine streamed out from under the eye down to the thighs below. (84) 25. In “The Insistence of the Image: Hitchcock’s Vertigo,” Mark Cousins insistently and repeatedly uses the word “coil,” rather than the more common “curl,” to figure the curve of Judy-Madeleine’s hair and its function in the

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narrative. I find this usage interesting because while I for one cannot see the word “coil” without thinking of excrement, Cousins, whose brilliant essay is all over the subject of lost objects and melancholic remainders in Vertigo, does not register the way Judy-Madeleine figures in the film as “excremental abject-remainder” (Žižek, “Hitchcock’s Organs” 137) or consider how this “coiling figure” figures into Scottie’s melancholic loss. 26. As Freud reconstructs the melancholic process, An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different. . . . [The] libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell up on the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss. (SE 14:248–49) Though Freud here obviously libidinally attaches object-choice to “a particular person,” he elsewhere in the essay drops clues as to the impersonal and abject redolence of “the forsaken object.” Toward the beginning of the piece, for example, he writes that “the melancholic displays [ . . . ] an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished” (SE 14:246). Not only do these descriptions of the ego’s transvaluation remind us of what Freud says about anality and the fecal object elsewhere—“the ‘anal’ remains the symbol of everything that is to be repudiated and excluded from life” (7:187); the feces represents everything “worthless, disgusting, abhorrent and abominable” (21:100)—but toward the end of “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud explicitly connects melancholic ego-impoverishment to anal leakage: “As regards one particular striking feature of melancholia that we have mentioned, the prominence of the fear of becoming poor, it seems plausible to propose that it is derived from anal erotism which has been torn out of its context and altered in a regressive sense” (14:252). I am sure there is other evidence that what is at issue here is melanc(ass)holia, but I consider these unwithheld portions sufficient to the day. 27. In “The Démontage of the Drive,” Maire Jaanus writes that when a drive object is approached in an instinctual way, as in anorexia, something merely psychic and absent is “eaten” as if it were present and filling. Conversely, in perversion, an uneatable, instinctual object may literally be consumed, with erotic pleasure, as if it were the object a of the


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drive. [ . . . ] Coprophagy is a drastic example of the transgression of drive back into instinct. [ . . . ] One way to be sure one has the lost feces back is to ingest them. (123–24) I cite these unsavory lines to underscore the correspondence between coprophagy as literal ingestion of lost feces and melancholia as ego-identification with the forsaken object a. To put this another way, melancholy as neurosis is the negative of coprophagy as perversion: what the melancholist displays as metaphorical symptom the coprophagist positively enjoys/assimilates as metonymy, if not as “fact.” 28. In Lacan’s Seminar on “Anxiety”: An Introduction, Roberto Harari helps us understand what justifies my calling Lacan’s emphasis on the copula scatontological. According to Harari, Lacan teaches that the object is constituted specifically at the moment at which it is lost; that is when it is cut off as fallen, separated. This is radically different from the belief that, in the first place, there is an object and, second the object departs. [ . . . ] Lacan maintains the inverse of this: the outline of the object can only be delineated and obtain quiddity at the moment of the loss. In this regard, the classical example of feces is the most transparent and even obvious. (112, emphasis Harari’s) Later in the book, in a detailed and charted analysis, with tables and graphs, of various “phantemes” and objects, Harari writes: “It should be observed that the a’s are not objects located in front of the divided subject but rather, first, the subject is its object in the phantasy. Therefore, this is about something of the order of being (‘is’)” (253, emphasis Harari’s). There are several “phantemes” and “phantasy axioms” on the tables here, including “the phantasy of being swallowed, ingurgitated again by the primoridal Other in a helpless reabsorption by the maternal womb” (253, emphasis Harari’s), but there is also what Harari calls the decisive phantasy through which the subject locates itself in the place of the anal object a. To be colloquial and blunt, we define it as the phantasy of being shit. [ . . . ] This is one of the habitual ways that a subject can achieve—through putting this phantasy into act—that the Other demand that it place itself in the place of stool in order to be ejected, humiliated, won over, thrown away as waste. [ . . . ] The subject over and over finds itself involuntarily implied in situations where it comes to occupy the place of feces, which corresponds to the loss (of the love) of the object. (253–54) Of course, what “remains to be seen” in my commentary is the way this fantasy of being shit pertains to Scottie’s “situations” in Vertigo. 29. I situate a sic after the bit about “It is the abyss. . . . the void” because in the Lacanian Ink version of Žižek’s essay the lines appear thus, without quote marks, while in the Organs without Bodies rendition there are quote marks and an attribution: the sentence comes from Harari, Lacan’s Seminar on

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“Anxiety” (74). Harari, I should point out, is discussing vertigo in general, not Vertigo specifically. 30. See notes 11 and 28 above. We might say that in the gaze certain analogies obtain, that thing is to void as stain is to picture, as word is to page, as image is to screen, as turd is to toilet. Indeed, in a 2007 fi lm called The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Žižek reportedly “compares the experience of looking up at a blank screen to that of staring into a toilet bowl” (The New York Times, April 15, 2007, 2:19). Here are the lines from The Pervert’s Guide: In our most elementary experience, when we flush the toilet, excrements simply disappear out of our reality into another space, which we phenomenologically perceive as a kind of netherworld, another reality, a chaotic primordial reality. And the ultimate horror, of course, is if the flushing doesn’t work, if objects return, if remainders, excremental remainders, return from that dimension. . . . When we spectators are sitting in a movie theatre looking at the screen . . . at the very beginning, before the picture is on, it’s a black dark screen, and then the light is thrown on. Are we not basically staring into a toilet bowl and waiting for things to reappear out of the toilet? And is the entire magic of a spectacle shown on the screen not a kind of deceptive lure, trying to conceal the fact that we are basically watching shit, as it were? 31. On “The Real/Judy”: the slanted bar here suggests simultaneously Judy’s separation from and metonymic contiguity with the real—not that Judy as “real woman” as opposed to fantasy object can or should be identified with the real, identity and the real being mutually exclusive, but that she is in a sense closer to it than either the symbolic Scottie or the imaginary Madeleine, even if the “sense” in which she can be said to be “closer” to the real is exactly what closes her off from it, even if we ourselves can only ever really think of “Judy Barton” in terms of jouissance barred. 32. With regard to an idiotic male masturbatory mechanics of fluids, what Scottie wants is not exactly “to masturbate with the aid of Judy-Madeleine’s real body.” Rather, he employs the ethereal presence of Madeleine as mental “image of bliss” to inscribe his own “pathological stain” across the surface of Judy’s body as remainder of the real. Or, to make a blunt analogy, Madeleine is the petit mort of orgasm, Judy the petit objet a of squalid ejaculation. If we could translate Scottie’s idiotic jouissance into the visual language or mis-en-scene of contemporary pornography’s money-shot, we might imagine Scottie popping onto Judy’s face while watching Madeleine on a video. With the phrase “image of bliss” I allude to Murat Aydemir’s splendid book Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning. 33. A joke that has to be explained has failed, but my joke here depends upon your recognizing the allusion to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and knowing at least the title (which is all I know of it) of Erin Felicia Labbie’s Lacan’s Medievalism.


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34. In “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan writes that in phallic signification “the signifier plays an active role in determining the effects by which the signifiable appears to succumb to its mark, becoming, through that passion, the signified” (Écrits 578). 35. In regard to the bell tower, here is an interesting coincidence: In “In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism,” Lacan comments on Jones’s “fallacious” but “fascinating” remark that “while a church bell tower can symbolize the phallus, the phallus will never symbolize a bell tower” (Écrits 594). 36. Quoting Charles Barr’s Vertigo in regard to the nun’s intrusion, Žižek writes: “At the film’s end, the nun appears in the tower at the very moment Scottie and Judy embrace in a reconciliation, with Scottie content to accept the reality of Judy: ‘What if the nun had not appeared, at the moment when, for the first time, they are being completely open and honest with each other?’ [Barr 59] Would they live happily ever after?” (Organs 168). I would submit (1) that, mainly thanks to the nun’s intrusion, it is not at all clear that Scottie is “content to accept the reality of Judy” and that, for all we know, his own disgust may have prevailed over love’s triumph without the nun’s assistance: in any case, he looks much more anguished than content, mainly because (2) if this embrace really does signify the triumph of love then it is not that “they” are “being completely open and honest with each other”(honesty depending, after all, upon articulation) so much as they are being mutually dehiscently real together, one formless slime with another, so that (3) if these two slime balls really did live happily ever after, and Vertigo were reimagined as a queer comedy rather than as the straight tragedy it is, then they could only do so as perverts, who, as Dany Nobus points out, are “generally happy, satisfied people” (Perversion 14)—or, as I have put it in an essay title, “Happy S(c)atisfied People,” s(c)atisfaction being perhaps the perverse negative of normal scatontological anxiety.

Essay 6 1. I do not mean to suggest that reading Mulholland Drive in terms of the dream-work is the only way to make sense of it, though in what follows I hope to demonstrate that such a reading provides the best possibility for producing a coherent interpretation of the film’s hermeneutics, its suggested meanings, as well as its poetics, or the way it achieves its formal effects. As for other readings: Martha P. Nochimson dismisses the dream angle altogether as a “misunderstanding” (180) and instead takes the film for a fable about the way the film industry putrefies the creative spirit. Todd McGowan reads the two parts of the film in terms of a split between “the general structure of fantasy” and “reality” as the “general structure of desire” (86) but never mentions the dream-work specifically. Heather Love’s “Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in Mulholland Drive” does occasionally mention dream, but like McGowan dwells more frequently on fantasy. McGowan and Love both

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demonstrate that there is much to be gained from reading the film as an “exploration of fantasy” (McGowan 68) and of “the experience of the fantasizing subject” (Love 122). But while fantasy and dream can share common psychical purposes—wish fulfillment, compensation, analgesia, escape, encounter with trauma, the negation of an unacceptable reality—the two do not always work in the same manner or, more importantly, employ the same representational techniques. Thus, considering the film as specifically treating the dream-work yields different (and I think stronger) interpretive results than reading it primarily or exclusively in terms of fantasy. In fact, the fantasy focus fails to account for some of the film’s key images and sometimes prompts (or at least accompanies) notable misreadings of the film’s formal and narrative innovations (see note 17 below). N. Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler do recognize the function of dream in relation to narrative in the film and meticulously chart the film’s time sequencing in a reading that is fundamentally congruent with what I offer here, but because they are not as concerned as I am with the specific play of condensation and displacement in the film they do not account, hermeneutically or poetically, for some of its most perplexing and crucial images: for example, that of the gangster figure spitting out his espresso, which I here address at some length. 2. Discussing the aesthetic/erotic experience of ébranlement or self-shattering in relation to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Leo Bersani writes: Art plays with [ . . . ] boundaries—to the point even of reflecting upon that play in its moves along the boundaries between the bounded and the unbounded. It is, then these risks of disappearance and of appearance—the risk of a dying at once more insignificant and infinitely more consequential than our personal death—that we accept when we “enter” art. (Culture 101) 3. Lacan says: “Man’s desire finds its meaning in the other’s desire, not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, as because his first object(ive) is to be recognized by the other” (Écrits 222). 4. Naomi Watts is a star now but, except for fans of a film called Tank Girl, was unknown in 2001, which means that if Lynch were making Mulholland Drive today he could not cast Naomi Watts. 5. Though Lacan sometimes translates Trieb as “pulsion,” in Seminar XX he states that he prefers “la dérive to translate Trieb, the drift of jouissance” (112). The translator, Bruce Fink, comments in a note that “dérive literally means ‘drift,’ but is very close in spelling to the English term for Trieb, ‘drive’ ” (112). 6. In The Ego and the Id, Freud admits that Eros and the death drive are “fused, blended, and alloyed with each other . . . regularly and very extensively” (SE 19:41). However, in his introduction to the new English translation of Civilization and Its Discontents, Leo Bersani writes: It should at once be said that his blurring of distinctions [between sex and aggression] is by no means what Freud the rational thinker wants.


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Indeed the opposition advanced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle between Eros and Thanatos (between, on the one hand, sexuality, and on the other, aggression and a death drive)—an opposition that Freud unreservedly reasserts in Civilization and Its Discontents—might even be thought of as an anticipatory theoretical defence against the collapse of that very dualism into a nearly inconceivable sameness. (xx) For an extensive treatment of both Freud’s and Lacan’s take on this “collapse,” see Boothby, Death and Desire. See also note 13 below. 7. See www.lynchnet.com/mdrive/mdscript.html. 8. Slavoj Žižek’s discussions of “fundamental fantasies” are pertinent to the question of Diane’s fantasized suicide, particularly since the “temporal loop which defines the structure of a fantasy” (Indivisible Remainder 19) also defines the structure of Lynch’s film. Žižek writes that the fundamental fantasies always involve the subject’s preposterous ability to witness moments before or beyond its own temporal finitude, that is, moments of preorigin or of postdemise. Thus, in the fundamental fantasy, “the subject is miraculously present as a pure gaze observing his [sic] own non-existence” (19). Žižek writes that “when one indulges in fantasies about one’s own death, one always imagines oneself as miraculously surviving it and being present at one’s own funeral in the guise of a pure gaze which observes the universe from which one is already absent, relishing the imagined pathetic reactions of relatives, and so on. We are thereby again at the fundamental time-loop of the fantasy” (22). In the loopy representation of Diane’s dream-fantasy, we see the fantasized result of her suicide—the rotting corpse that Betty and Rita discover on the bed in Diane Selwyn’s apartment—before we see the fantasized event of her shooting herself on that same bed (I argue at the end of this essay that Diane’s suicide takes place in dream-fantasy rather than in reality). But note also the aggression against Camilla that is enacted in this fantasy, for while what we see in the corpse-discovery sequence is Betty comforting a horrified Rita, what is actually happening, the actual payoff for the dreamer, is Diane’s aggressive relishing of Camilla’s “imagined pathetic reaction” to the sight of her (Diane’s) dead body. Here one is reminded of the lyrics of the old Police suicide anthem “I Can’t Stand Losing You”: “You’ll be sorry when I’m dead/ All this guilt will be on your head.” But there is more aggression, for what the corpse-discovery sequence precipitates is a return to Aunt Ruth’s apartment and a Vertigo-ish transformation of the dark-haired Rita into a more Betty-resembling blonde. I call this transformation aggressive because it effectively destroys something specifically other about the other by turning it into a more properly narcissistic version of the same. Here one is reminded of the Lacanian lyrics: “I love you, but because I love in you something more than you . . . I mutilate you” (Seminar XI 268). My thanks to Adrian Johnston for helpful insights and leads on these matters. 9. Sinnerbrink makes this point in an unpublished essay called “Silencio,” but see his “Cinematic Ideas.” Bonnie Aarons, by the way, cleans up nicely: http://ia.ec.imdb.com/media/imdb/01/I/33/04/92/10m.jpg.

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10. Bear in mind that the dreaming Diane has reason to want Dan dead, to get rid of him and the god-awful feeling he represents. In the dream’s Winkie sequence, when Dan is relating his dreams to Herb, he says: “Of all people, you’re standing right over there by that counter. You’re in both dreams. And you’re scared. I get even more frightened when I see how afraid you are.” Then, when Herb is paying the check at the counter and looks back at Dan, Dan’s face does register fear, and we know that he is now seeing Herb just as he appeared in the dream. But much later in the film we find out what really went down in this Winkie’s: we see Diane sitting in Dan’s seat while hiring the hit man to murder Camilla. And then we see Dan, of all people, standing at the counter, looking back at Diane; he is scared, and Diane is even more frightened when she sees how afraid Dan is. We might conjecture that Dan is afraid because he has overheard Diane’s conversation, or at least that Diane is afraid that he has, which would make him a material witness to her homicide conspiracy. Thus we can imagine how Diane feels. 11. Lynch makes more explicit his concerns with homelessness as the abject and anonymous underside of the Hollywood dream factory/star system in the 2006 film Inland Empire. In a key scene, one that seems to depict a traumatic rupture in the “wall” between the two realms, Nikki Grace/Susan Blue (Laura Dern) gets stabbed in the stomach and staggers down Hollywood Boulevard, spilling blood onto the “stars” on the sidewalk. She stumbles into an alley or side street off the corner of Hollywood and Vine and collapses into the cardboard encampment of three “street persons” (as they are designated in the credits): an African American woman, an Asian American woman, and her companion, an African American man. Street Person #1, the African American woman—played by Helena Chase, who, I would hazard to say, seems to be a “real” street person and not an actress playing one (she in any case has no other screen credits listed on www.imdb .com)—says to Nikki, “Lady, you’re dying,” and then continues her conversation with the other two abjects about whether or not there is a bus to Pomona from Hollywood and Vine. Street Person #2, the Asian American woman (listed in the credits as Nae, who does have multiple credits on imdb.com) begins to talk about her beautiful friend Niko, who lives in Pomona, who is “on hard drugs and turning tricks” but who looks “just like a movie star” when she wears her “blonde star wig.” Niko, as we are told in halting, broken, subtitled English, has “got a hole in her vagina wall,” has “torn a hole into her intestine from her vagina,” and is consequently dying. This “hole” would seem to correspond not only to Nikki’s wound but also to the above-mentioned traumatic rupture in the wall separating the symbolic world of fantasy (represented here by Niko’s vagina) and the real world of abjection (represented by her intestine). In any case, the Asian woman’s companion, Street Person #3 (played by Terry Crews, numerous credits on imdb, including How to Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass), says, “Shit, baby, don’t be telling us that shit,” and so she changes the subject


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(sort of ) to Niko’s pet monkey: “This monkey shit everywhere” and “scream like in a horror movie.” Nikki then gets up on all fours, vomits blood for a while, and settles down to die. The camera lingers on her fresh corpse for a while, and then, in one of the great moments of cinematic mise en abyme, pulls up and back far enough to reveal another camera also pulling up and back. We hear the film-within-the-film’s director (Jeremy Irons) say “cut . . . and print it!” and see the three street persons get up and leave the set. Nikki stays still long enough for us to begin to suspect that, even though “it’s only a movie,” she may “really” be dead, but then seems so comatose and unresponsive when she finally does get up and move around that we are not completely convinced that she is “really” alive, either. Indeed, the whole sequence leaves us in a profoundly disturbing state of undecidability in which it is impossible to say, for example, whether Street Person #1 is a “real” street person or “merely” an actor, whether Nikki is “really” alive or dead, and, finally, whether the mise en abyme trick, which reveals that “it’s only a movie,” symbolically sutures or really leaves open the traumatic rupture in the wall between the symbolic and the real. 12. I provide this information in case you were wondering why the fake tear leaking from Rebekah Del Rio’s right ocular orifice in the Club Silencio sequence looks so solid and brown. Tears are after all a form of abjection (even if usually one of the most transparent). In this lachrymal regard it is interesting that Bataille, in a book titled, appropriately enough, Guilty, writes of “tears in my eyes at this idea of being waste” (69). 13. Compare Žižek’s comments from The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema in note 30 to Essay 5 above. In regard to incorporation and excorporation, note that when Dan and Herb leave the Winkie’s table, the camera (which, as Chris Rodley observes, “seems to be floating ever so slightly up and down” and “makes you feel seasick” [277]) makes a point of showing us that Herb has eaten all of his breakfast while the anxious Dan has left his bacon and eggs untouched. Compare the brief essay “On Negation,” in which Freud groups together incorporation, affirmation, and erotic union in opposition to excorporation, negation, and thanatical destruction: Expressed in the language of the oldest—the oral—instinctual impulses, the judgement is: “I should like to eat his,” or “I should like to spit it out”; and, put more generally “I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.” That is to say “It shall be inside me” or “it shall be outside me.” As I have shown elsewhere, the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad. What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical. (SE 19:238) Moreover, Freud writes: Judging is a continuation [ . . . ] of the original process by which the ego took things into itself or expelled them from itself, according to the

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plea sure principle. The polarity of judgement appears to correspond to the opposition of the two groups of instincts which we have supposed to exist. Affirmation—as a substitute for uniting—belongs to Eros; negation—the successor to expulsion—belongs to the instinct of destruction. (SE 19:239)

14.

15.

16.

17.

What we find in this formulation is not only one of the thicker Freudian roots of contemporary theories of abjection but also a clue about what Leo Bersani calls the collapse of the dualism of Eros and Thanatos into “a nearly inconceivable sameness” (see note 6 above). For if by erotically affirming or loving an object we express the desire to consume it, consumption itself is certainly a form of destruction or waste; and if by destructively negating an object we express the desire to expel it, our earliest expulsions—our infantile turds—were originally nothing other than “sumptuous gifts charged with sexual love” (Bataille, Visions 119). Rather than quoting here from Žižek’s Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway, I would prefer, in relation to the final, ridiculously sublime image cluster in Mulholland Drive, to compare Bataille in Story of the Eye: “Is it not astonishing that the bleakest and most leprous aspects of a dream are merely an urging in [the] direction [of an outburst of superhuman happiness], an obstinate waiting for total joy” (31). Bataille notes that “in the unconscious, jewels, like excrement, are cursed matter that flows from a wound; they are a part of oneself destined for open sacrifice (they serve, in fact, as sumptuous gifts charged with sexual love)” (Visions 119). Nobody really appreciates hearing about this destiny, least of all those dreaming youth destined to give or be given diamonds. But somebody in the advertising business surely understands the archaic jewel-turd connection: the old DeBeers television commercial that features a male fist excreting a string of diamonds into a woman’s waiting hand must be seen to be believed. Once I was discussing these matters with students in a seminar devoted to Bataille, and the very next day (December 3, 2003) there appeared in the New York Times a full-page ad (Section A, page 25) featuring a brilliant and lubricious woman heavily made up and laden with gems next to the caption “Mounds of diamonds and gobs of jewels”! In other words, the flickering light is not just a trademark piece of creepy Lynchiana: like all the other eerie or outré shots in the film, it actually serves a functional role in the film’s formal narrative design. Paradoxically, for a film so concerned with waste, and in which sometimes apparently “anything goes,” Mulholland Drive actually wastes very little. See Heather Love for an extensive treatment of the difference between the two sex scenes, and for an interesting reply to those “disturbed by Lynch’s representation of lesbians as objects of ‘male fantasy’ ” (121). But note also what I take as Love’s misreading of the narrative sequencing of the scenes. After describing what she calls the “very breasty, very kissy” Betty/Rita scene, Love writes, “The later scene between Diane and Camilla works according to a much different logic. It occurs in the morning, just after Diane has been awoken from a deep


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depressive sleep” (127). Whoa! Certainly it is after the film presents Diane dragging her half-dead body out of bed that it reveals her and Camilla topless and frisky on the couch. But the actual (and actually missed) sexual encounter occurs before the rude awakening. And this temporal reversal is important, for unless we see the Betty/Rita scene as occurring (in dream) after the Diane/ Camilla event, we will not see the former (Betty/Rita) as the dream’s compensatory reversal of the latter (Diane/Camilla). McGowan is also a bit flummoxed by Lynch’s play with fabula and syuzhet in this sequence. He writes: The world of desire in the second part of Mulholland Drive lacks even a sense of causal temporality. Events occur in random order, without a clear narrative logic. At the beginning of this part of the fi lm, Diane’s former roommate (and, it seems, lover) retrieves her belongings, including an ashtray shaped like a miniature piano, from Diane’s apartment. But in a subsequent scene, the same ashtray is on Diane’s coffee table, as if the roommate had not yet removed it even though we know she did. The same sequence occurs with a blue key. It is lying on the coffee table as the second part of the fi lm begins, and then it’s gone until the end of the fi lm, when Diane again sees it on the coffee table. The disappearance and reappearance of the ashtray and the blue key do not indicate anything magical at work. It is just that this part of the fi lm operates according to the atemporal logic of desire. There is no chronology in the world of pure desire because desire does not move forward: instead, it circulates around the objet petit a. . . . As a world of desire, the second part of the fi lm moves according to the compulsion to repeat rather than according to the dictates of time. (73) In my reading, the key and ashtray disappear and reappear not because of any narrative incoherence or atemporal logic of desire but simply because we are quick-cutting between scenes of Diane’s present and flashbacks of her recent past, with the distance between the two temporalities being bridged by the entire dream sequence that constitutes the first two hours of the film. The flickering objects, then, are signs not of causal or narrative illogicality but of Lynch’s bewildering but brilliant formal design. The narrative is complicated, to be sure, but it is anything but incoherent. And yet the film’s actually quite impressive coherence is clearly missed if we read its first two hours as general fantasy world rather than as representing the dream-work. 18. The mysterious blue key fits into the general Saussurian description of the signifier: it is not a positive term, means nothing in or by itself, but means only in terms of its differential relation to another signifier, the ugly blue key. As for the blue box, I feel content rather to let it stand as an instance of what Freud refers to as a dream’s inexplicable “navel,” its point of utter defiance to interpretation. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes: There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the

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work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. (SE 5:525)

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

Perhaps it is also worth noting that in discussing Mulholland Drive in his book Catching the Big Fish, Lynch writes the following under the heading “The Box and the Key”: “I don’t have clue what those are.” Faire l’amourir is “a Lacanianism derived from the combination of faire l’amour (to make love) and fair mourir (to make die)” (Harari 209n1). This is the third time we have seen the cowboy but the first time for Diane. In the dream, the cowboy tells Adam that he, Adam, will see the cowboy only once again if he, Adam, does good and twice if he does bad. Diane, who has done bad, does see the cowboy twice again in the dream: once when he appears smiling at her bedroom door, saying, “Time to get up, pretty girl,” and a second time immediately thereafter when he withdraws from that same door, his face gone blank and stony. For another few layers of condensation and reversal, note that when we cut from the dinner party to the diner scene, we see the waitress offer coffee refills to Diane and the hit man. Diane accepts, but the hit man refuses the refill with a subtle wave of the hand. The real hit man, a slacker slob, contrasts nicely with his natty dream-gangster analog, just as his subtle refusal reverses the gangster’s extreme expulsion, and just as the (presumably) shitty Winkie’s java converts into the dream’s “finest espresso in the world.” I refer here to Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One, which contains a chapter called “When These Lips Speak Together.” In this regard let me note that Lynch himself says that “Mulholland Drive is about more than Hollywood” (Rodley 274). If this excessive “more” at all concerns symbolic nihilation, “the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech” (Écrits 260), or the idea that “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing” (Écrits 262), as I am arguing here that it does, then when Chris Rodley gives the following as part of the historical context of Lynch’s fi lm—“It seems like only yesterday (1932) that bit-part actress Peg Entwistle hanged herself from the Hollywood sign when she failed to get a studio contract” (268)—we can respond that perhaps it seems like only yesterday because this self-sacrifice on and to a symbol is constitutive of everybody’s history: every speaking subject has hanged itself from “the sign.” For an extensive unpacking of Lacan’s “there is no sexual relation” see the discussion in the first section of Essay 5, particularly the commentary by Fink and Grosz. Here I allude to a line from Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) in Blue Velvet: “Do you know what a love letter is, fucker? It’s a bullet from a fucking gun!” Nochimson, McGowan, Love, Hayles, and Gessler all take Diane’s suicide as given. But I base my conjecture that Diane is still sleeping, and her nightmare still wish-fulfilling, on two additional pieces of evidence, the first


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visual, the second thematic and intertextual. Visual: In the film’s final sequence, just before the tiny old folks crawl under her door, Diane is sitting on her couch staring at the blue key. There is a pulsating light, and a heavy knocking at the door. We start to hear tin(n)y obscene elderly cackling, but we also see that Diane’s eyelids are getting conspicuously and narcoleptically heavy. We do not see the eyes fully close, but the suggestion is that they do, and the fact that we hear Diane screaming before we see her jump up and bolt away from the couch screaming suggests that she has actually lapsed back into sleep on the couch and is merely dreaming of jumping, bolting, screaming, and so on. Thematic and intertextual: Toward the end of the Twin Peaks television series, in episode 16, the following dialogue about the uncanny and supernatural aspects of Leland Palmer’s rape and murder of his daughter Laura occurs between Sheriff Truman and Agent Cooper: Truman: I’ve lived in these woods all my life. I’ve heard some strange things. Seen some too. But this is way off the map. I’m having a hard time believing. Cooper: Is it easier to believe a man would rape and murder his own daughter? Is that any more comforting? Truman: (pause, horrified) No. Now, by the end of Mulholland Drive, Diane has heard and seen some strange things, as have we. But the horrible little grandparents are, shall we say, way off the map. In what way can they possibly represent the fulfillment of a wish? For Freud, the dream-wish always involves the negation of an unpleasurable reality. So what is Diane’s specifically painful reality at this moment? What is the actual source of the pulsing light? Who’s that knocking at her door? Quite banally, it’s just the cops, who we know have been looking for Diane and who have finally shown up to arrest her for murder, and she is actually more horrified by the banal, merely factual reality of her guilt and its impending punishment (a reality all the more painful for being so banal) than she is by the hysterical and uncanny but ultimately more comforting return of the repressed. It is easier for her to believe in these horrible, off-the-map old folks even as—or, precisely, because—they chase her to her fantasized, desired, but literally unaccomplished death.


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Index Aarons, Bonnie 154, 199n9 abjection xi–xvi, 3–6, 9–12, 45, 47, 58–61, 66, 69–70, 72, 76, 127, 129–30, 135, 140, 147–48, 154–58, 160, 164–65, 167n2, 168n4, 194n26, 195n28 as abstract 32, 175n6 aesthetics and xv, xvi, 66, 79–82 ethics and politics of xiv, xvi, 47, 49, 61–62 as real 28, 99 abjective writing xi, xiv–xvi, 4–5, 9–10, 16–17, 21–22, 31, 38, 50, 51, 56–57, 60–62, 65–66, 72, 84, 95, 99, 111, 167n1, 170n6 The Acoustic Mirror [Silverman] 115 Adaptation [C. Kaufman] 161 Adorno, Theodor 79, 82 “Against Proper Objects” [Butler] 22, 23, 25, 52 Althusser, Louis 2, 84, 186n11 Altman, Robert 161 anal receptivity (eroticism) xvi, 53–54, 63–64, 71, 79 “Anal Rope” [Miller] 10, 98, 106, 123 Anderson, Michael J. 159 André, Serge 117 anthropogenesis 2, 46–48, 52, 95, 130, 168n2, 177n14, 188n3 antiphusis (prematurity at birth) 2, 28, 34, 176n13 anxiety i–xiv, 1, 31, 43, 45–46, 131, 155, 68n4 castration anxiety (see castration) of production 4 scatontological anxiety 2, 31, 45,

47, 49, 69–70, 130, 147, 167n3, 168n2, 168n4, 197n36 “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” [Freud] 3 Any Given Sunday [O. Stone] xv, 14–16 The Archeology of Knowledge [Foucault] 72 Arts of Impoverishment [Bersani] 73, 87–89 Aydemir, Murat 169n5, 196n32 bad object (kakon) xiv, 3, 49, 126, 130, 168n3 Lacan on xiv, 181n15 Badalamenti, Angelo 158, 160 Barr, Charles 197n36 Barthes, Roland xiii, 89, 107, 111, 186n12, 187n17 Bass, Saul 136 Bataille, Georges xiii, xvi, 68–71, 130, 142, 145, 146, 151–52, 155–56, 164–65, 167n2, 183n7, 185n9, 186n13, 191n10, 193n24, 201n12, 201n13, 202n14, 202n15 Batman [T. Burton] 105 Baudrillard, Jean 1, 161 de Beauvoir, Simone 22, 24 Beckett, Samuel xiv, xvi, 31, 73–74, 80–91, 93, 138, 175n4, 184n1, 185n8, 185n9, 186n14, 186n16 Beeding, Francis (pseudonym) 192n18 Begriff 8, 172n8 Berger, John 6 Bergman, Ingmar 161 Bergman, Ingrid 94, 114

218

INDEX

Bersani, Leo xiii–xiv, 10, 39, 52–53, 63–65, 73–91, 98, 113, 123, 181n17, 184n1, 184n4, 184n5, 185n8, 186n14, 198n2, 198n6, 201n13 Beyond Sexuality [Dean] xv, 29, 43, 66, 94–96, 98, 112, 117, 129–30, 132, 135 Beyond the Pleasure Principle [Freud] 9, 39, 137 Bhabha, Homi 7, 31 Big Other (symbolic network) xiii, 26, 30–32, 48, 115–16 The Big Sleep 109 the biological body 27–28 The Birth of Tragedy [Neitzsche] xvi blackness 12–13 Blanchot, Maurice 67, 69 Blue Velvet [D. Lynch] 159 Bly, Robert 20 Bodies That Matter [Butler] xii, 4, 10, 16, 45, 61, 74, 147 Boothby, Richard 198n6 Bosch, Hieronymus 11, 173n9 Bourdieu, Pierre 71 Braidotti, Rosi 23–25, 49–50, 54, 61, 174n3 on gender vs. sexual difference 24 Breton, André 167n2 Brooks, Peter 89, 187n17 Burton, Tim 105 Butler, Judith xii, xv, 2, 4, 10, 16, 22–26, 30–31, 34, 37, 41, 45–46, 49–50, 52, 61, 68, 74, 98, 128–29, 132, 147, 170n6, 174n3, 176n12 and abjection xii, 45, 61, 147 on de Beauvoir 22 on Lacanian linguistic/sexual difference 25–26 on Lacanian psychoanalysis as heteronormative 26, 68 Camera Lucida [Barthes] xiii, 107, 111 “Capitalism, the Anus and the Family” [Hocquenghem] 80 castration xii, 14, 15, 37, 40, 46–47, 64, 68, 69, 103, 108, 110, 114–16, 118, 121–22, 125, 126, 133, 135,

137, 139, 168n4, 174n14, 184n5, 188n5 castration anxiety 4, 64, 69–70, 100, 168n4, 183n6 Chase, Helena 200n11 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 118 Chekhov, Michael 119 Civilization and Its Discontents [Freud] 34 Cixous, Hélène 21, 63, 65 “Class Struggle” [Zˇizˇek] 26–27, 39, 48, 71 cloacal theory xii, xiv, 3, 47, 59, 105, 107–8 Contingency, Hegemony, Universality [Butler, Laclau, and Zˇizˇek] 23, 26–27, 30 Copjec, Joan 97, 138 Corber, Robert 192n15 Corey, Wendell 104 Cornell, Drucilla 56 Cousins, Mark 193n25 Crews, Terry 200n11 “Crying” [Orbison] 161 The Culture of Redemption [Bersani] xiii, 73, 77–79, 80, 84 “Da Capo” [Zˇizˇek] 27, 30–31, 34, 37 Dali, Salvador 114 Dante 60 David, Larry 138 De Lauretis, Teresa 25 Dean, Carolyn 185n9 Dean, Tim xv, 29, 31, 36–37, 43, 47, 66, 94–96, 98, 112, 117, 129, 130, 132, 135, 137–38, 167n6, 170n7, 186n14, 187n1, 188n4, 189n6, 189n7 on Judith Butler 98, 176n12 death drive 44, 77, 78, 153, 157, 165, 177n14, 189n7, 198n6 Del Rio, Rebekah 161, 201n12 Derrida, Jacques 57, 107 desire 3, 9, 40, 42, 29, 32, 35, 38, 40, 42–44, 47–48, 67–68, 70–71, 94, 95, 117, 127, 129, 140, 148, 150–52, 158, 162–63, 165, 168n2,

INDEX

168n4, 170n7, 175n5, 177n14, 188n4, 198n3, 201n13, 202n17 “Destruction” [Waldby] 53–54 Diaz, Cameron 14, 169n5 difference (poststructuralist theories of) xiv differences [ journal] 23 DiPiero, Thomas 170n7 “The Direction of the Treatment” [Lacan] 67, 131 Disjecta [Beckett] xvi, 73, 87 Doty, Alexander 74 Durchfall 80–82, 84, 87, 127, 130, 138, 175n6, 176n9, 177n14 Ébranlement. See self-shattering Écrits: A Selection [Lacan, Sheridan trans.] xiv Edelman, Lee xv, 10, 39, 51, 57–59, 61, 90, 95, 96, 98–99, 101, 106–13, 127, 136, 182n20, 187n1, 189n7, 190n9, 191n10, 192n17 ejaculate/ejaculation (money-shot) xiv, 4, 8, 121, 172n8, 196n34 femininization of 4 Emory, John 94 Entwistle, Peg 204n23 Equal Rights Amendment 43 eros 151, 198n6, 201n13 Eroticism [Bataille] 130, 155 Fawell, John 99–100, 103, 190n9 Fear of a Queer Planet [Warner] 75 feminine sexuality 86, 115, 189n8 Feminine Sexuality [eds. Mitchell and Rose] 34 femininity 6, 19, 20, 21, 50, 58, 122, 128, 132, 177 feminism (including “male feminism”) xv, 19–24, 54–55, 61–62, 64, 87, 106, 108, 112, 168n3, 174n3, 182n18 “Feminism by Any Other Name” [Braidotti and Butler] 24, 25, 49 Feminism without Women [Modleski] 21, 100, 105, 109

219

feminization of black male body 15 of ejaculate 4 of heteromasculine subjects 22, 53, 57, 58, 139 Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games [Leitch] 101–2 Fink, Bruce 33, 34, 96, 97, 167n3, 168n4, 174n2, 188n5, 193n20, 198n5 Fleming, Rhonda 94 Forget Foucault [Baudrillard] 1 fort/da xiii, 3, 9, 39, 68, 137, 141, 148 Foucault, Michel 2, 72 Foxx, Jamie 14 Freud, Sigmund xvi, 3, 9, 10, 34, 39, 44, 68, 71, 76, 78, 94, 100, 123, 124, 128–30, 137, 145, 146–47, 150–51, 177n14, 184n4, 189n8, 193n23, 194n26, 198n6, 201n13, 203n18 The Freudian Body [Bersani] 73, 76, 82, 84, 88 “The Function and Field of Speech . . .” [Lacan] 39 Fuss, Diana 11 Gallop, Jane 39 “Garden of Earthly Delights” [Bosch] 11 Gardiner, Judith K. 182n18 The Gay Science [Nietz sche] 78 the gaze 7, 9, 10, 12–14, 15, 104, 106, 111, 120, 133, 179, 192n11, 196n30, 199n8 gender 16, 19–25, 31, 42–44, 47–51, 55, 96, 101, 117, 128–30, 174n3 gender studies 19–20, 23–24, 51 Gender Trouble [Butler] xii, 147 Genet, Jean 10, 60, 61, 73, 80–82, 83, 86 George, Melissa 159 Gessler, Nicholas 197n1, 204n26 Gide, André 73 Glas [Derrida] 57 Goldstein, Laurence 11 Grosz, Elizabeth 97, 168n4 the gulf war 59

220

INDEX

Halberstam, Judith 174n1 Hall, Stuart 1, 65 Halperin, David 90 Harari, Roberto 133, 135, 137, 168n4, 195n28, 195n29 Hard Core [Williams] 4, 6 Harper’s Bazaar 106–7, 113 Harring, Laura Elena 147 Harris, Bertha 187n19 Hayles, N. Katherine 197n1, 204n26 Heath, Stephen 19 Hedaya, Dan 158 Hegel, G.W.F. 4, 8–9, 68, 154, 172n8 Heidegger, Martin 68 heteromasculinity anxiety of 9, 12, 22, 56, 58, 59 hetero(masculine) normativity xii, 20, 26–27, 33, 37, 41, 51, 66, 71, 74, 76, 87, 89, 90, 100–101, 107, 109–10, 127, 129, 176n10 heteromasculine desire 13, 20–21, 54–55, 104, 107, 128, 132 heteromasculine imaginary 1, 4, 7–8, 10, 14, 53, 55–56, 86, 168n2 heteromasculine subjects/subjectivity 4, 6, 21–22, 49, 57–58, 61–62, 71, 76, 80, 86, 98–99, 128, 138, 170n7 its others 4, 189n8 queering (reconfiguration) of 22, 56, 62, 65, 86, 176n10 Hitchcock, Alfred xv, 10, 93–96, 99–104, 106, 110–12, 114, 119, 124, 126, 136, 139, 187n1, 189n8, 190n9, 193n22 Hitchcock, Patricia 136 “Hitchcock and Hom(m)osexuality” [White] 106 “Hitchcock as Anti-Plato” [Zˇizˇek] 132 Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality [Samuels] 104, 114–15 Hitchcock’s Films Revisited [Wood] 96 “Hitchcock’s Organs without Bodies” [Zˇizˇek] 132 Hocquenghem, Guy 80–81 “Holy Shit” [Kinnell] xvi, 59–61 homographesis xv, 56–59

homo-ness (Bersani’s notion of) xvi, 74–76, 81–83, 85–88, 185n9 Homos [Bersani] xiv, 10, 39, 73–78, 80–84, 86–87, 90, 113 Homosexual Desire [Hocquenghem] 80 Hopper, Dennis 204n25 Horsexe: Essay on Transexuality [Millot] 43 Hounsou, Djimon 174n14 Hyde, Thomas 94, 192n18 “Identity” [Laclau] 34 identity politics xiv Image, Music, Text [Barthes] 89 “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” [Butler] 2, 98 Imperfect Thirst [Kinnell] 59–61 Inner Experience [Bataille] 164 “The Instance of the Letter” [Lacan] 5, 119 The Interpretation of Dreams [Freud] 145, 146 Irigaray, Luce 4, 44–45, 46, 78, 106, 161, 204n22 Irons, Jeremy 200n11 “Is the Rectum a Grave” [Bersani] 65, 75, 78, 98, 123 “It’s Over” [R. Orbison] 161 Jaanus, Maire 194n27 Jackson, Janet xv, 12–14 Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction [Grosz] 97 Jakobson, Roman 68, 150, 151 Jameson, Fredric xv, 21, 42, 68, 75, 137, 184n3 Johnston, Adrian 199n8 Jones, Ernst 197n35 jouissance 30, 35, 37–38, 68, 70, 75–76, 78, 85, 94, 97, 127, 134–35, 138, 139, 142, 188n5, 189n7, 196n31, 196n32, 198n5 Joyce, James 84, 186n14 Jung, Carl 59 Kakon. See bad object Kaufman, Charlie 161 Kelly, Grace 95, 104

INDEX

Kelly, Mary 170n6 Kinnell, Galway xvi, 51, 59–61 Kojève, Alexandre 67, 68 Kristeva, Julia xi–xiii, 4, 69, 70, 167n1, 185n9 on abjection xii, 147–48 on Bataille xiii L Schema 48 Labbie, Erin Felicia 196n33 Lacan, Jacques xii–xiii, xv, xvi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7–9, 10, 15, 19, 20, 22, 28, 31, 32, 36, 37–43, 46–48, 51–52, 67–68, 71, 93, 104, 115–16, 119–21, 126, 128, 132, 134, 136, 138, 141–42, 146, 148, 151, 159, 167n1, 170n6, 170n7, 175n4, 175n5, 175n7, 176n9, 197n34, 198n3, 198n5 and abjection xv, 34, 38, 111–12, 131, 137, 168n2, 187n1, 187n2, 192n11, 193n20, 193n23 on anxiety xiii, 46, 48 on bad object xiv on being a “man” 42 on Bosch 173n9 on desire xii, 3, 67, 94, 95 indebtedness to Bataille 183n4 on jouissance 94, 134, 139, 161 on lack xii, 117 on the abject 4 on the Lamella 177n14 on the maternal xiii on the mother xii on the nonexistence of sexual relationships 96, 98 on object a 38, 174n2 on the phallus 3, 7–8, 38 and Queer Theory 183n4 on the real 38, 98, 162 Lacan and the Dialectic [Jameson] xv, 42, 68, 137 Lacanian Ink [ journal] 132 The Lacanian Subject [Fink] 33, 97 Laclau, Ernesto 23, 34, 170n6, 175n6 language 51–52, 67–68, 70, 157, 168n2

221

Laporte, Dominque xi Lawrence, Amy 192n15 Lea, Daniel 183n2 Leitch, Thomas 101–3, 126 Lemaire, Anika 33, 38, 64 Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader [eds. Abelove, et al.] 23 Levi-Strauss, Claude 34, 41, 68 Levinson, Marjorie 167n5 Lloyd, Norman 116 The Location of Culture [Bhabha] 7 Looking Awry [Zˇizˇek] 10 Lost Highway [D. Lynch] 164 Love, Heather 197n1, 202n17, 204n26 “Love Will Never Do” [J. Jackson/ H. Ritts] xv, 12–14 Lynch, David xv, 146, 150, 151, 158, 160, 164, 200n11, 203n18, 204n23 Lyotard, Jean-François 89, 187n18 Making Things Perfectly Queer [Doty] 74 male bodies 1, 52 effects on female bodies 50–51 pertinence to feminist theory 21 productions of 2, 3, 4, 6, 16, 61–62 The Male Body [Goldstein] 11 Male Matters [Thomas] xiii, xiv–xv, 1–16, 56 Male Subjectivity at the Margins [Silverman] 20–21 Malone Dies [Beckett] 81 The Maltese Falcon 109 Mapplethorpe, Robert 11, 13 Marine Lover [Irigaray] 78 Marked Men [Robinson] 7 Marx, Karl 10, 183n3 Masculine Domination [Bourdieu] 71 masculinity xi, 6 effect on women 21 masculinity studies 19–21, 51 feminist response to 19–21 as “men’s studies” 20 maternal body xii, 4, 34–35, 38, 68. See also the mother The Matrix [Wachowski brothers] 45

222

INDEX

McGowan, Todd 197n1, 204n26 meaning 39–40, 71 vs. being 40 “Melancholy, Ambivalence, Rage” [Butler] 128 “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification” [Butler] 128 Metastases of Enjoyment [Zˇizˇek] 38 Miller, Ann 155 Miller, D. A. 10, 98, 106–7, 123, 183n6 Miller, Jessica 177n14 Millot, Catherine 43, 44, 176n12 Minima Moralia [Adorno] 79 mirror-stage xiii, 2 Modleski, Tania 21, 100, 105, 106, 109, 186n15, 192n13, 192n16 Molloy [Beckett] 83, 93 Moody, Ken 11–12, 13 “More Gender Trouble” [Butler] 23 Morel, Geneviève 35 the mother xii–xiv, 38, 115, 137, 170n7 abject mother 3, 168n4 her lack 40, 68 See also maternal body “Mourning and Melacholia” [Freud] 128–29 Mulholland Drive [D. Lynch] xvi, 146–65 Mulvey, Laura 7, 22, 104–6, 133, 187n1, 192n11 Muybridge, Edward 6 Nae 200n11 “Nasty Boys” [J. Jackson] 13 Nattier, Jan 182n19 Nehamas, Alexander 185n6 Nicholson, Jack 105 Nietzsche, Friedrich xvi, 1, 70, 71, 77–79, 81, 167n6, 168n7, 185n7, 185n9, 187n19, 198n2 No Future [Edelman] 39, 90, 95, 97, 98, 101, 107, 109 Nobus, Dany 197n36 Nochimson, Martha P. 197n1, 204n26 nom/non du père 4, 35, 41, 68, 163, 168n4, 170n7

North by Northwest [A. Hitchcock] 119 Novak, Kim 95 object a 1, 33, 34, 36, 38, 48, 112, 131, 135, 137, 174n2, 177n14, 194n27, 195n28, 196n32, 202n14 oedipalization xiii, 32, 33, 35, 38, 89, 170n7 “Of Structure as an Inmixing . . .” [Lacan] 4, 112, 131 “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” [Lacan] 46, 47–48 “On Your Knees” [Pronger] 54–55 “One Can Never Know Enough about Hitchcock” [Zˇizˇek] 99 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit [Winterson] 53 Orbison, Roy 161 Organs without Bodies [Zˇizˇek] 132 Pacino, Al 14 Pajaczkowska, Claire 118 Palmer, John 192n18 Parallax [Journal] 64 part objects 14, 48 Patterns of Dissonance [Braidotti] 24 Peck, Gregory 114 Pefanis, Julian 186n13 Persona [I. Bergman] 161 perversity 27, 38, 89, 104 phallicization 9 of black male body 14–15 phallocentrism 86, 170n7, 181n17 phallus 3, 7, 9, 14–16, 24–25, 32–33, 35–38, 40–42, 45–48, 55, 58, 62, 68, 97, 98, 103, 106, 119, 135–38, 162, 163, 168n4, 170n7, 172n8, 188n5, 197n34, 197n35 The Phenomenology of Spirit [Hegel] 4, 8, 154 Plato 59, 77, 177n14 The Player [R. Altman] 161 “Plea sure: A Political Issue” [Jameson] 76 “The Plea sure Principle” [J. Jackson] 13 point du caption 149

INDEX

The Political Unconscious [Jameson] 21 Powers of Horror [Kristeva] xii, 4, 69, 147–48 Prince (the artist formerly known as) 170n7 principium individuationis xi, xvii, 147–48 Pronger, Brian 54–55, 64–66, 182n18 property relations 76, 80 The Psychic Life of Power [Butler] 128–29 Psycho [A. Hitchcock] 120 psychoanalysis 20 as queer theory xv Pullman, Bill 164 queer theory xv, 20, 61–62, 64, 74, 106, 108, 117 Read My Desire [Copjec] 97, 138 Reader, Keith 167n1, 167n4, 170n7, 185n9 Reading Lacan [Gallop] 39 the real 26, 28–33, 34–35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 94 different from maternal space 34 the two orders of 33 Rear Window [A. Hitchcock] xvi, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101–13, 124, 127 “Rear Window’s Glasshole” [Edelman] 10, 99, 106, 110–11, 127, 136 Rebecca [A. Hitchcock] 137 “Rediscovery of Ideology” [Hall] 65 Riley, Denise xi, 181n16 Rimbaud, Artur 5 Ritter, Thelma 95 Ritts, Herb xv, 12–14, 15 Robinson, Sally 7, 12 Rodley, Chris 201n13 Rope [A. Hitchcock] 108, 123 Rose, Jacqueline 34 Roudinesco, Elizabeth 69, 183n5 Rubin, Gayle 23, 25, 50, 52, 174n3 Sabado Jr., Antonio 173n12 Salomé, Lou-Andreas 189n8 Samuels, Robert 94, 104, 114–16, 119, 187n2, 189n8, 190n9, 192n11

223

Sanders, Hilary St. George 192n18 de Saussure, Ferdinand 39, 68 the scatontological 69, 157, 195n28. See also anxiety Schichtler, Annette 184n2 Schoene-Harwood, Berthold 183n2 Schreber, Judge 48 Scott, Joan 25 Scott, Ridley 174n14 “Screen Memories” [Freud] 124 The Second Sex [de Beauvoir] 22 Seinfeld 44 self-shattering xiv–xv, 63–65, 75–79, 81–82, 85–86, 88, 94, 126, 138, 142–43, 148, 181n17, 198n2 “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ ” [Lacan] 39–40 Seminar I [Lacan] 98, 162 Seminar III [Lacan] 111, 126, 161–63 Seminar X [Lacan] xii, 168n4 Seminar XI [Lacan] 69, 104, 133, 137, 146, 199n8 Seminar XIV [Lacan] 96, 162 Seminar XX [Lacan] 20, 30, 36, 93, 96, 98, 115, 119, 121, 133, 134, 136, 139, 170n7, 198n5 Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana 173n12 sexual difference xiii, xv, 4, 8, 23–30, 32–33, 35–37, 39–52, 57–58, 68, 70–71, 86–87, 106–7, 109, 117–19, 133, 170n7, 174n3, 177n14 the real of 26, 32, 43 “Sexual Traffic” [Butler] 26, 37 sexuation 20–21, 26–28, 42–43, 46, 168n2, 177n14 Sexuation [ed. Salecl] 35 Sheperdson, Charles 43, 44, 45, 47, 176n12, 177n14 Sheridan, Alan 5, 167n3, 193n20 Shklovsky, Victor 150 “The Signification of the Phallus” [Lacan] 32, 46, 140, 197n34 Silverman, Kaja 20–21, 50, 88, 115, 184n5 Sinnerbrink, Robert 154, 199n9 Sir Mix-a-Lot 173n13 Solondz, Todd 169n5

224

INDEX

Sorties [Cixous] 21, 63 Spellbound [A. Hitchcock] xvi, 94, 98, 105, 114–27 Spielberg, Stephen 174n14 Stage Fright [A. Hitchcock] 108 Stewart, James 95, 110, 192n15 Stiller, Ben 169n5 Stoekel, Alan 184n8 Stone, Oliver xv, 14–16 Strachey, James 151 straight queer 74, 87, 185n9 Straight with a Twist [Thomas] 52 the subject xiii, 42–43 “The Subversion of the Subject” [Lacan] 5, 131 Sunset Boulevard [B. Wilder] 152–53 Swift, Jonathan 60, 176n9 “Synthesis of Lacanian Thought” [Lemaire] 33, 38, 64 “Tearooms and Sympathy” [Edelman] 51, 57–59 Television [Lacan] 98, 131, 193n23 thanatos 44, 78, 137, 151, 160, 177n14 Theroux, Justin 147 “Thinking Sex” [Rubin] 23 This Sex Which Is Not One [Irigaray] 4, 106 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [Freud] 129 Three Novels [Beckett] xiv, 81, 83, 85 Truffaut, François 93, 96, 110, 140 Tuck, Greg 169n5 Twin Peaks [D. Lynch] 159 Undoing Gender [Butler] 34, 170n6 Valentinus 59 Vanier, Alain 38, 40–41

2, 23, 31,

“Variations on Sex and Gender” [Butler] 22 Vendler, Helen 185n8 Verhaeghe, Paul 168n4 Vertigo [A. Hitchcock] xvi, 93, 94–95, 98, 127–28, 132–43 Visions of Excess [Bataille] 145, 151–52, 155 “Visual Plea sure and Narrative Cinema” [Mulvey] 7, 22, 187n1 Vital Signs [Sheperdson] 43, 177n14 Vorstellung 8, 172n8 Waldby, Catherine 53, 54, 55, 64, 65, 101 Warner, Michael 31, 75, 87 Watts, Naomi 146, 198n4 Ways of Seeing [Berger] 6 “What Have You Done for Me Lately?” [J. Jackson] 13 White, Patricia 106, 108 Wilder, Billy 152–53 Williams, Linda 4, 6 Winterson, Jeanette 53 Wood, Robin 96, 103, 192n16 Worstward Ho [Beckett] 73 writing 52, 70, 114–15, 119 Yeats, William Butler

80, 185n8

Zˇizˇek 10, 23, 31, 34–35, 37, 38, 39, 48, 99, 134, 135, 156, 168n2, 172n8, 187n1, 188n3, 193n25, 195n29, 196n30, 197n36, 199n8, 201n13, 202n14 on ideology 29 on sexual difference 26–27, 71 on the big Other 30–31 on the real 29, 30 on Vertigo 132–33, 141–42

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