Forsaking all Others: Marriage, Monogamy and Contamination
And when I call you
my love, my love, is it you I am calling or my love? You, my love, it
is you I thereby name, is it to you that I address myself? I don’t
know if the question is well put, it frightens me. But I am sure that
the answer, if it gets to me one day, will have come to me from you.
You alone, my love, you alone will have known it. We have asked each
other the impossible, as the impossible, both of us.1
This essay will examine monogamy,
marriage and the third party as a deconstructive figure that disobeys
the opposition between inside and outside, presence and absence,
private and public. Its departure point will be a close reading of a
small section from a 2004 interview in which Derrida aligns
‘monogamy’ with the institution of “marriage,” and appears to
tacitly advocate a kind of ‘polyamory’ (love for many, as opposed
to ‘polygamy,’ which is marriage to many). The state of
subjectivity at the moment of an encounter with the other is bound up
in what preceded it, rendering its force cumulative, embroidered by
the collective thread of others: at the same time present and absent.
Through deconstructive analysis I will explicate the condition of the
one on one relation that bears the trace
of a third party, rendering every desiring relation contaminated.
The drive towards securing a
relation with the other is at the same time inherently insecure due
to constantly shifting borderlines that criss-cross the intimate
relation.
The move
between singularity and so-called union passes through the in-between
realm of dissimulation (concealment) and risk (of being unmasked).
‘Forcing himself to say who he is,’ writes Derrida, on the
subject of Nietzsche’s Ecce
Homo, ‘he goes
against his natural habitus that prompts him to dissimulate behind
masks…life is dissimulation.’2
In this essay the figure of the third party in its various guises
will haunt, spectate and frequently interject. The third party will
constantly speculate on the potentiality of ‘the couple,’ it will
penetrate more or less deeply the borders of their apparent security.
The drive towards the other will be analysed in view of the possible
formulation of a new relational construct that rejects the
baggage-laden concept of “marriage” and supplements
a type of
monogamy that has been renamed.
In the films Exhibition (Joanna
Hogg, 2013) and Possession (Andrezej Zulawski, 1981), architecture
makes legible the idea of the third party, interpolating on the one
on one relation and insinuating itself into the spaces between
bodies, externally, and between subjectivities, internally. Both
films reveal disobedient oppositions between internal and external
and public and private. Both films also examine the condition of
marriage and the situation of the triangle, a form that elucidates
the true nature of one on one relation – teasing the so-called
monogamous party, threatening their security as singularities both in
a condition of constant flux and also conjoined, each supplementing
the other. In this context, and via the prism of psychoanalysis and
Derridean analysis, I will problematise the concept of
two-becoming-one that underpins both the notion of any ‘monogamous’
relation and, crucially, the institution of “marriage.”
In Learning
to Live Finally,
an interview in which the issue of marriage is raised as regards the
constitutional omission of homosexual couples, Derrida defends this
group and, in doing so, indicates a position of a generalised concept
of inclusion, in spite of his ambivalence toward “marriage”
itself. His theoretical support is ambiguously negated by the more
radical viewpoint that follows it: ‘If I were a legislator, I would
propose simply getting rid of the word and concept of “marriage”
in our civil and secular code.’3
This statement, provisional and speculative in essence, reveals a the
multi-faceted arrow of his attack: the
legislative machinery of social control; the arbitrary articulation
of words and concepts (words, in an archaeological sense, bearing
multiple meanings; words ciphered according to the speaker’s own
intentions, whether conscious or unconscious); the situation of
secularity and the disintegration of a blanket faith-based system of
morality. To extend the reach of this dismantling process, one could
at this point
raise the issue sexual difference and a ‘civil code’ that is
supposed to afford equal rights to (marginalised) women; marriage is
a hangover from a patriarchal order that not only excluded women from
social life, rendering them second-class citizens, but also,
historically, used women and girls as currency (a practice that, of
course, continues to this day, but is prohibited in ‘our civil and
secular code’).
Provisionally, beginning at the
beginning, Derrida proposes ‘getting rid of the ‘word and concept
of “marriage,”’ which interpenetrate: the word entwined around
the concept. Derrida employs Saussurian linguistics to dislocate the
langue (Latin –
‘tongue’), which
is the abstract system of a particular speech act, from the parole
(Latin – derived from ‘discourse’; ‘parable’),
meaning the most
commonplace speech acts. Through utterance of the word, the
signifier, one
summons the concept, the signified.
Every utterance is marked, imprinted, connoted (from the Latin
connotare, ‘to
mark along with’). Every speech act is linked by an invisible
thread to its etymological origin, that is to say the concept in the
service of which it was originally appointed. In order to ‘get rid
of’ the concept, which is heavily loaded with historico-political
valences, one would have also to ‘get rid of’ the word and its
echoes that reverberate retroactively, with which it is burdened and
to which it is forever beholden.
‘“Marriage” as a religious,
sacred, heterosexual value – with a vow to procreate, to be
eternally faithful, and so on – is a concession made by the secular
state to the Christian church…’4
“Marriage” is a ritual
traditionally sanctioned by the church. Many of those who practice it
today (marriage both an event and a practice) do so with sincerity,
in the belief that it has been sufficiently ‘modernised’ through
cultural re-inscription over successive epochs: ‘modernisation’
being predicated on the values of the time with which it is
contemporaneous: ‘modernisation,’ ostensibly, echoing the times
in which one lives. The primary shift has been the transplanting of
the ceremony from the church (consonant with the religious code) to
the register office (consonant with the legislative code). For many
this shift seems significant enough to, essentially, extricate the
religious undertones
completely. But the
heavily connoted state of marriage, ‘as a religious, sacred,
heterosexual value,’ persists in many forms, from the exclusion of
homosexual marriage to the persistence of the idea of monogamy, or
‘marriage to one,’ which are foundational values. The ‘vow to
procreate, to be eternally faithful, and so on’ – I might add ‘to
co-habit,’ – are inseparable from the codes, practices and values
of the Christian church, from which Derrida seeks to conclusively
diverge, cleaving a clearly delimited alternative for those who would
choose to ‘marry,’ (that is, to ritualise their commitment to the
other through event and practice) without interception, and
infestation via trace, by the church and its values: even if only by
echo through the ages. Derrida argues that it is thus the
responsibility of the secular state to formulate a genuine
alternative that diverges at
root, at the
subterranean stems that define and maintain it, the profoundly
codified practice of “marriage.”
Discourse around ‘the scared’
is prominent in both in religious and more colloquial discourse, via
the mass absorption of ideology. The monistic tradition, reifies a
hallowed singularity – but secondarily this notion is transplanted
onto the common conception of ‘The One.’ One’s ‘other;’ the
other that would make one complete. To pursue one’s ‘other-half’
is an activity that is hugely over-determined in our culture via
culturally naturalised depictions of romantic endeavour, love songs
and anecdotally via the mass-internalisation of myth and a nostalgic
return to a past, in which couples married young and married forever:
divided only by death. Clearly this idea(l), illusion, or, indeed
fantasy is reproduced in the discourse that pervades “marriage.”
‘The sacred’ as a category with its intimations of privacy,
exclusivity and reverence – values which transcend the ordinary
expectations of human interactions – thus place the ‘sacred’
condition of monogamy on an ideological/idealistic metaphorical
pedestal.
As for heterosexuality, a value
that is intimately entwined with the ‘word and concept of
“marriage,”’ one is led to the contentious issue of
procreation, and the prescriptive, written, law of Christian (though
far from exclusively) ideology that renders sacred the union of one
man and one woman, irrespective of their desire or biological
capability to procreate. It is outside of the scope of this essay to
interrogate the particularities of this issue, but the current debate
explicitly illustrates a socio-political division between those who
wish to conserve (and simultaneously exclude marginalised couples)
from the institution of marriage, which in spite of gestures in the
direction of ‘modernisation,’ remains the last bastion of
homogenised political ideology.
‘[“Marriage”] is a
concession made by the secular state to the Christian church and
particularly with regard to monogamy.’ In proposing the elimination
of ‘the word and concept of “marriage,” and thus the ambiguity
or hypocrisy with regard to the religious or sacred – things that
have no place in a secular constitution,’ Derrida suggests a
startlingly radical option: an alternative that strikes at the very
source of pervasive common conceptions on the subject of fidelity,
love and the intimate relation. That he strikes at the root is of
utmost import when one considers the extent of what lies invisible,
subterranean, beneath the surface, threading around and binding the
visible shoots. In pinpointing “monogamy” –– ‘particularly
with regard to monogamy’ – Derrida’s position, unequivocally
anti-Christian church, implicates through opposition non-monogamy: a
condition that is more or less inevitable depending on the depth of
ones interrogation of the third party, which will be returned to
later. This being Derrida, however, one must approach oppositional
thinking with extreme caution and resist reifying the (nearest known)
binary opposition – ‘polyamory.’ The simple gesture of binary
reversal, says deconstruction, is merely a manipulation of terms and
fails to forge to a genuine break from the thinking that produced
both poles of the opposition. Again, circuitously, perhaps, but
necessarily: these issues will be returned to.
The word and concept of
“monogamy,” the pulse that reverberates through of this essay,
should be studied under the lens of the deconstructive microscope.
“Monogamy,” the word itself, rooted in ecclesiastical Latin, is
not merely steeped in religiosity, with its attendant notions of the
sacred union and so on, but is constituted by and therefore
inseparable from the sanctified condition of marriage (‘gamos’).
When one claims to practice ‘monogamy’ one inadvertently
(perhaps) invokes a condition hugely codified, burdened by the ‘word
and concept of “marriage,”’ whether or not the couple is
“married” in the proper sense of the term (though the verb ‘to
marry,’ of course, signifies a more generalised conjoining). The
‘mono’ contained within the word ‘monogamy,’ describes an
exclusively one
on one relation, an exclusivity that is pronounced by ‘marrying
together’,
into a sacred unity, two, presumed, mutually
singular entities,
‘forsaking all
others,’ according
to the traditional vow: “marriage” exclusifies the one on one
relation. As a prerequisite for ‘marriage,’ the word and concept
of “monogamy,” is ‘over-determined by ethico-political norms.’5
The so-called ‘sacred union’
is permeable, rendering it inherently adaptive, from the inside, to
outside forces. The word and concept of “divorce,” is fully
naturalised into the collective consciousness: a clear and present
hypocrisy. If marriage is such a sacred state how can its severance
be possible? If its severance is possible then “divorce”
legitimises, reifies and makes provision for the interjection of the
third party, rendering “marriage” potentially temporal, divesting
it of all that sacred rhetoric, the backbone of which is the scared
union of one to the other, forever. The
word ‘divorce’
is derived from the Latin ‘divertere,’ meaning ‘to turn aside:’
‘di’ – apart, ‘vertere’ – to turn. The existence of
“divorce,” this turning against the other with whom one was once
“married” radically challenges the so-called sacred, profound
unification into one whole of two singularities, and, significantly,
extinguishes the core concept of ‘the one.’ That is to say, ‘the
one’ who would complete the other in a unity of faithfulness
(sexual fidelity, indubitably, but also emotional? experiential?),
‘forsaking all others.’
The notion of
the hermetically sealed, mutually self-sustaining – one could argue
mutually cannibalising
– couple is a
conceit that disavows and even proscribes the various and, greater or
lesser intense varieties of (sexual and/or non-sexual) encounter. The
subject is constantly being penetrated by multiples ‘others,’ who
affect (‘touch’), destabilise and mark, which brings us to the
precarious, shifting status of fidelity.
‘Fidelity’ is derived from
‘faith’,
which has wide-ranging connotations from the religious to the ‘leap
of faith’ that is the signifier of any encroachment into risk –
risk looming large in any one on one relation that is accompanied by
an erosion of physical and emotional borders. Fidelity has
transmogrified into a predominantly sexually proscriptive term in
modern usage. It has thus come to align itself with “monogamy,”
which is itself sufficiently removed from its etymological roots to
denote a sexual
as opposed to
matrimonial
relation.
Fidelity is multi-directional, functions simultaneously and has many
faces. There is fidelity to the cause,
in the case of
marriage, accompanied by notions of duty, role and position within a
relational unit (that I dispute as a foundation for the integrity of
the transformative relation.) This type of fidelity disavows fidelity
to oneself and to the other, by neutralising subjectivities into
positions: it problematises the condition of flux to which all
subjectivities are by their very nature prone. There is fidelity to
the other, which suggests a subjection of self, an obfuscation of
self behind or in opposition with the other. And there is fidelity to
the self, under which one could justify any action: a relativist
position, in which disparity is produced when one attempts a
connection with the other. Subjectivity congealing into a parallel
state of relation, with inevitable dissimulation, rendering one
obscure to the other: detached. Common conceptions of fidelity occupy
non-negotiable positions that are fixed and therefore at odds with
the state of union Derrida proposes.
‘Loyalty’ and ‘fidelity’
are intimately linked. My interest in loyalty is the way it winds its
way through multiple intimacies, usually both non-sexual and sexual.
Loyalty is bound to trust. One can trust many, and to those one
‘gives’ oneself via the shedding process of disclosure and
exposure of inner-selves: the private as opposed to the public self
or persona (which
means ‘mask’). That is, the ‘hidden’ selves that one reserves
for the trusted ‘other.’ Language, communication, handles
trust as
trusting communication relies on a shared language: a close proximity
to meaning that is ciphered specifically for the other. To speak
approximately the same language minimises, but by no means diminishes
the risk of mistranslation, misinterpretation, which in turn
minimises the speaker’s dissimulation or obfuscatory flights that
would alienate the other. To speak the same language is to be free to
spontaneously extemporise, that is, improvise one’s subjectivity in
speech without preparation, and for this there must be trust. To
trust is to allow the fragilisation
of ones borders so that the ‘inside’ comes ‘out’: the inside
that is masked by internal personas – the stripping of masks to
reveal more masks. This type of profound trust, this necessarily
partial disclosure, on the ellipse, can and does lie in multiple
persons.
In closely considering fidelity,
or loyalty to the other, the figure of the third party emerges;
protruding obscenely from the word itself that needn’t exist if it
wasn’t for its omnipresence. I shall alight from the passage in the
interview from Learning
to Live Finally in
which Derrida radically reformulates and expands the perimeters
around the notion of “marriage.”
‘By getting rid of the word and
concept of “marriage,” and thus this ambiguity or hypocrisy in
regard to the religious or the sacred – things that have no place
in a secular constitution – one could put in their place a
contractual “civil union,” a sort of generalised pacs,
one that has
been improved, refined and would remain flexible and adaptable to
partners whose sex and number would not be prescribed.’6
Here Derrida negotiates the
waste-land, or the wall, between “marriage” as it stands, opaque
and over-determined by prescribed conditions, and the endorsement of
mere
pleasure-seeking,
or hedonism. I use the word ‘opaque’ deliberately, to denote a
condition that obscures the smorgasbord of potential transparencies
that are marginalised by the marriage contract (which will be
returned to later). He reifies the momentousness of the intimate one
on one relation – the urge within each of us to fuse with the
other: to connect – but abhors the socio-cultural imposition of
boundaries with their attendant quasi-religious overtones – ‘things
that have no place in a secular constitution’ – and circumscribe
the full potential of inter-subjectivity. Derrida refers to the
French ‘pacte
civil de solidarite’ (PACS),
albeit with a radical twist that can be traced back to his previous
statement on monogamy – ‘[“Marriage”] is a concession made by
the secular state to the Christian church and particularly with
regard to monogamy.’ He advocates a version of PACS that has been
‘improved, refined and would remain flexible and adaptable to
partners whose sex and number would not be prescribed.’7
Derrida’s vision of PACS has
been transformed at root. He does away with monogamy, which is the
most insidious element, the most naturalised; like Western
Metaphysical binary thinking it is the impossible element, and that
is where he makes his move. He does away with circumscription, which
imposes conditions on subjectivity with which the willing participant
might very well concur, under culturally prescribed duress, one might
argue, but the deconstructive tendency abhors, replacing it with
‘flexibility.’ He emphasises ‘adaptability,’ that is, he
would embed the thing that is merely implied in the extant system of
‘marriage’ and ‘divorce’ – that the couple is not literally
sealed off from the world, that subjectivities in constant flux
require an adaptive structure in which they can flourish. He
advocates the de-tabooing
of same-sex couplings and, indeed, poly-sexualities.
And given its spatial and temporal
dimensions, its structure of relays and delays, no human being is
ever safe from AIDS. This possibility if thus installed at the heart
of the social bond as inter-subjectivity. And at the heart of that
which would preserve itself as a dual inter-subjectivity it inscribes
the mortal and indestructible trace of the third-party.8
Any desiring relation brings
infection; one is always (already) contaminated by the other. In
being ‘touched’ – a multi-sensorial event that can take place
in the absence of proximity – one is transformed. In the figure of
the third party one can decipher the one on one relation, integrating
multiple ‘others’ into the illusory sacred union and fully occupy
the situation of the social being in flux, continually marked and
transformed by multiple forces, whether human or object, without
mortally wounding the profundity of the encounter. In the language of
monogamy, such forces are a threat to the (constructed)
‘whole’ that
constitutes the couple; these forces gather against the ‘couple’
in their purportedly conjoined solidity as a single entity, seeking
fissures in their armoury; an armoury that is in fact a collection of
porous membranes. One bears (or is burdened by) traces of multiple
‘others,’ past and future, and these intrusions have many forms
and manifestations. As will be shown in the next section of this
essay, architecture is polyvalent; it is at once anchoring,
reassuring and imprisoning. Walls, in the films ‘Exhibition’
(Joanna Hogg, 2013) and ‘Possession’ (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981),
embody literal and metaphorical interlocutions into the more or less
sealed unit of the married couple. Walls also function as
deconstructive figures; they disobey the opposition between inside
and outside, public and private, whilst at the same time functioning
as symbolic and actual boundaries. Walls keep one in and,
correlatively, keep others out.
One could
even imagine denouement of the subject into
a wall:
sealed-off, sealed-up: sharing with the wall a condition of apparent
impenetrability.
‘Exhibition’ emphasises the
relative permanence of the architectural frame in relation to the
inherently destabilised humans that inhabit it. The film depicts the
anxious realisation of the instability of architectural annexation,
for the couple intend to abandon the house. D and H, both visual
artists, have inhabited their starkly contemporary home for eighteen
years, their marriage exhibited
within the
confines if its walls, which have absorbed the domestic
choreographies contained within them. In lieu of offspring –
conscious, reflective products of their relationship – the walls
are witnesses to the fluctuations and ruptures of love, mutual
dependencies and desire. In the absence of offspring the walls are a
constant, unchanging presence: their clean, ordered stillness
juxtapose sharply with the destabilising force that the presence of
children would impose.
D negotiates space as ‘other,’
with consideration and care, as if the architecture was receptive as
flesh is receptive: yielding. She manipulates the sliding doors to
her studio with particular reverence; her body articulates a synonymy
with the architecture. Internal
walls not only represent the third party interpolating on the
matrimonial dyad, but also impose themselves on D spacio-temporally,
articulating a frequent blurring of the boundary between self and
other, whilst at the same time supplementing and supporting her very
body. The walls are her confidante and her other secondary, intimate
‘other’ – the third party that deconstructs the opposition
between self and other; inside and outside. Her trust is invested in
the architecture of her surroundings, she is loyal, and the walls
that contain her also ‘hold’ her: their tactility is an embrace
that is returned. D’s singularity (which is of course divided) on
the domestic stage is frequently disturbed and she moves through
spaces with a nervous tension one recognises as a symptom of love –
preciousness, a fear of harming the other: a fear of loss.
If ‘Exhibition’ takes on the
third party architecturally, then ‘Possession’ (1981) digs into
it archaeologically, disobeying the comfortable opposition between
preservation and destruction. A disturbing depiction of one man,
Marc, his descent into madness and the psychotic disintegration of
his marriage, ‘Possession’ also makes use of the rich tapestry of
domestic unbliss,
internal walls pushing/punishing the inhabitants to the limits of
their sanity, domestic roles inculcated by marriage diminishing the
potential for inter-subjective development and the enslavement of one
to the other. Additionally, and crucially, the film is set (and
filmed) in West Berlin, the presence of the Berlin Wall producing a
meta-narrative intensity, not to mentions the armed sentinels (do
they protect or do they threaten?) who often come into focus,
witnessing both the film’s production and the involuted narrative
unfold. One has a sense of presence in absence and absence in
presence throughout, and a rapidly diminishing opposition between
inside and outside.
Most scenes take place in confined
interior spaces (rooms in an apartment, an underground station, an
office, a bar) and yet deconstruct the opposition between inside =
safety/outside = risk. Outside, in spite of the situation of
incarceration its inhabitants endure in a walled-off sector, seems
oftentimes preferable to the destabilised condition of bodies
negotiating domestic spaces. The opposition is deconstructed via the
mirroring of inside/outside in terms of their equivocal devastation.
A position is thus adopted by the director against the ‘family
unit,’ “marriage” and especially in regards to the inherent
porousness of these states that are ordinarily considered to form an
impenetrable whole, constituted and nourished by the circulatory
feeding system of its composite parts. The traditional ‘triangle’
formation that emerges in ‘Possession’ positions the character of
Anna’s lover as the third-party. Heinrich is the antithesis of
Marc. Where Marc’s libido is domesticated, Heinrich seems liberated
(indeed, he has abandoned his wife and child). He embodies the
panoply of attributes of which Marc is devoid – athletic,
open-minded, ‘sexually liberated,’ all of which are dismantled as
the narrative progresses, sexual liberation being a ‘modern
delusion.’9
Inter-subjectivity, whereby a
thing exists ‘between
conscious minds,’ that is, ‘shared
by more that one conscious mind,’ [OED, my italics] makes legible
the situation of fluidity in relational connections, abandoning the
possessive and sacred overtones of the extant discourse around
‘monogamy.’ In applying Derrida’s theory of the text to the
social being in flux, marked by traces of multiple forces, one can
recognise the inherently porous character of subjectivity, and thus
the fallacious nature of the one-that-is-two as an inter-subjective
construct, as opposed to the condition of the subjectivity itself,
‘the text produced only in the transformation of another text:’
[Whether in the order of spoken or
written discourse], no element can function as a sign without
referring to another element which
itself is not simply present...
This interweaving results in each ‘element’ – phoneme or
grapheme – being
constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements
of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text
produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing,
neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever
simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and
traces of traces…the gram as ‘differánce,’ then, is a
structure and a movement no longer conceivable on the basis of the
opposition between presence/absence. [My italics]10
This essay has considered the
affects of multiple, simultaneous ‘inter-subjectivities,’ how and
what type of negotiations are required in a more generalized
deconstruction, or dismantling, of terms such as ‘monogamy’ and
also the highly codified practice of “marriage.” My proposition
is that there is no such thing as a purely
one on one
relation and that there are necessarily more than two people present
(even through absence) in every desiring relation. The difficulty is
in definition, and the expectations that are bound up when one takes
on a particular ‘role’ in relation to the other. I have looked at
the hypocritical condition of “marriage” in our secular, civil
code through a close-reading of Derrida’s text. The next section
will analyse the condition of the one on one relation and the drive
toward the other as a complementary subjectivity: the intense one on
one relation whose connective tissue (be that intellectual and/or
sexual stimulation and gratification) binds self to other and has the
potential to re-orient the ‘couple’ onto a trajectory that is
marked by past experience. Of central importance to this
investigation are the risks inherent in a radical openness that will
be proposed, explored and explicated.
I follow Freud, Nietzche and Sade
in my view of the amorality of the instinctual life. At some level,
all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts. We are only for
something by
being against
something else.
People who believe they are having pleasant, casual, uncomplex sexual
encounters, whether with friend, spouse, or stranger, and blocking
from consciousness the tangle of psychodynamics at work, just as they
block the hostile clashings of their dream life.11
‘Polyamory,’ a preference for
multiple lovers that is spelled-out unambiguously in the word (a vast
improvement on ‘monogamy,’ which is infested with the word and
concept of “marriage”), in its equivocal tendency, describes the
condition of most relations, most accurately (albeit divested of the
implicit simultaneity). An unmarried state of connection to the other
with an active openness to outside influence and a flexibility, in
terms of others: their ‘number or sex,’ as Derrida remarked. In
the absence of equivocality, a potential so-called ‘primary’
relation could form an orbit around which others enter and exit, like
electrons, marked by fluidity and flux, coming in and out of orbit,
supplementing the ‘couple.’ Regarding the concept of monogamy and
its hypocrisies, ‘polyamory’ seems too simple a construct: too
oppositional, as if in its obvious radical criticality it doesn’t
go far enough beyond the binary.
Peggy Kamuf writes,
The idea will have to be
approached that even if it is essentially preservative, love (but
also deconstruction) is nevertheless no stranger to destruction to
loss and to ruin…we will be approaching the figure of love as
affirmation that deconstructs the opposition between preservation and
destruction, of love, therefore, as that which like deconstruction
takes place along the divided, ruined border of this alternative.12
Perhaps polyamory’s failing is
enshrined in its Utopian disavowal of ‘destruction,’ ‘loss’
and ‘ruin:’ equivalence creating libidinal plenitude and
resistance to crisis, which after all is a force of nature that is
creative. Perhaps, in the final analysis, what is cultivated is a
generalised, multiplied dampening-down of desire. A state of
relativism that avoids intensity and the risks associated with a
mutual exchange of strengths and weaknesses in a constellation of
mutually binding elements that overlap and construct
inter-dependencies out of which profound depths of trust and intimacy
are born. Loss, after all, is embedded not only on the marriage
contract, but any loving relation – if not by severance then by
death. I can imagine a socially acceptable practice in which, through
the supplementary application of ‘radical transparency,’ multiple
intimacies could flourish without the diminishment of each relation’s
unique (potential) intensity. I propose ‘radical transparency’ as
a solution to the problem of opacity that constitutes the ‘monogamy’
contract. ‘Radical transparency’ functions within the confines of
a never fully open openness: an external openness that always
recognises its internal closures, its multi-directional varieties of
accessibility. It emerges at the threshold, on the borders of the
visible or perceptible space available for translatability between
self and other. It recognises the fludity of borders, the necessity
of perpetual negotiation with the other (inclusive of all the other
‘others’) and the unresisting, yielding nature of productive
intimacy. The condition of possession, of central import in the
marriage contract, could thus be gotten rid of, in addition to the
mythical safety net that was never anyway existent.
And this contact without contact,
this barely touching touch is unlike any other, in the very place
where all it touches is the other.13
The Japanese dance theatre ‘Butoh’
is motivated by the play of inter-subjectivities on the bodies of the
performers, though a conscious and deliberate deferment of contact.
“We dance completely separately,” utters choreographer Tatsumi
Hijikata’s translator in the documentary, ‘BUTOH: Body on the
Edge of Crisis,’ (1990), “yet our hearts are dancing in unison.”
Isolation from the other, for Hijikata, creates a greater depth of
feeling, so his dancers “work in isolation” His hypothesis
stretches beyond performance and categorisation, into the more
generalised relational scene, jarring with the familiar “marriage”
contract that contaminates most loving relations: “This kind of
independence between dancers should exist between [married] partners
as well,” he proclaims. Intimacy has many facets, and not least
presence in absence – one only has to look at the word itself;
intimate is
derived from Latin ‘intimare’ – to bring into, to impress, to
make familiar – and ‘intimus’ – innermost. So the word is
closely acquainted with a co-existence of interiority. Derrida writes
in ‘Envois’: ‘It is curious to see that generally I do not
answer your letters, nor you mine or are we delirious, each alone,
for
ourselves? Are we waiting for an
answer or something else?’14
Sharing and disclosure come into play, but physical proximity is not
a prerequisite, and after all one is isolated inside one’s body and
the other is always outside of oneself, but never simply.
When one speaks of the other
having been ‘made’ for us, a common idiomatic expression, my
contention is not with the utterance itself, but the archaeology of
the word ‘made’ and its mistranslation in terms of the production
of the self. The conceit is produced from the fully naturalised idea
that people are born and then ‘find’ each other on a fateful
parallel trajectory that converges, finally. However, this narrative
disavows the affects of the third party in producing the self,
invoked by the word ‘made’ (or might the word ‘constructed’
be more useful?) It also disavows the extent to which singularity is
translatable,
meaning being
ciphered, always, and, like Derrida’s approach to the ‘text,’
singularity coming apart during translation. We
invoke the spectre,
the echo and the
imprint of multiple others when we admit we have been ‘made,’
since one can only hypothesise ones needs through experience,
failure, negation; multiple others leave their imprint on the subject
through inclusion and exclusion: their vestigial presence is in
absentia. Hence the third party, its trace, alongside the other,
(equivocally) – a presence ‘conspicuous by its absence,’
performs, defines, refines – co-exists.
To conclude, I cite a passage from
one of Derrida’s performative love letters from the book within a
book, ‘Envois,’ in which the third party weaves its way around
the desperate mutual desire of the couple, who must negotiate daily
with the ‘truth’ of their situation, beyond which lies the
possibility of monogamy supplemented by ‘radical transparency.’
And these inexhaustible words,
these days and nights of explication will not make us change places
or exchange places, even though we ceaselessly try to do so, to got
to the other side, to swallow the other’s place, to move our bodies
like the other’s body, even to swallow it while drinking its words,
mixing the salivas little by little, wearing down the borders…but
there are others, the others within us I grant you, and we can do
nothing about it, that is the limit. There is a crowd, right, such is
the truth.15
Bibliography
Derrida, J, Learning
to Live, Finally: The Last Interview, (Hampshire,
Palgrave, 2007).
Derrida, J, On
Touching – Jean Luc Nancy, (California:
Stanford UP, 2005).
Derrida, J,
Positions,
(London:
Continuum, 2004).
Derrida, J, ‘Envois’, in The
Post Card,
(Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987).
Derrida, J, ‘The Rhetoric of
Drugs,’ in Points…Interviews
1974 – 1994, (California,
Stanford UP, 1995).
Kamuf, P, Book
of Addresses, (California:
Stanford UP, 2005).
Paglia, C, Sex
and Violence, or Nature and Art, (London:
Penguin Books, 2006).
BUTOH: Body in Crisis, (dir.
Michael Blackwood), 1990.
Exhibition, (dir. Joanna Hogg),
2013.
Possession (dir. Andrezej
Zulawski), 1981.
9
Camille Paglia, ‘Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art,’
11
Paglia, Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art, pp. 20 – 21.
15 Ibid,
p. 44.
Articulating Sexual Subjectivity:
A consideration of desire, power and the paradoxical nature of
so-called ‘sexual liberation.’ How does female sexual desire
(being
predicated on lack)
function in the world of objects, and bodies, on the market?
The very uncertainties which
sexuality creates for subjectivity magnify the importance of the
experience: that is to say, as sexuality becomes more problematical
it becomes more important to us in defining ourselves…sexuality has
become too important…it has become charged with tasks of
self-definition and self-knowledge that it can’t and shouldn’t
perform.1
This essay will consider two female
character’s psychosexual
trajectories as depicted in [two scenes from] the films ‘I
am Curious (Yellow)’ (1967),
and ‘Intimacy’ (2001).
It will examine
how desire, through tacit agreements between subject and object,
creates conditions of entrapment for sexual subjectivity that render
paradoxical so-called sexual
liberation. The
essay will consider how social conditions, resulting in the
naturalisation of gender roles, power and resistance collaborate in
the disavowal of desire being deployed in the spirit of labour
freely given. The
problematic at the centre of the essay is the way that sexual
subjects negotiate with a strict adherence to fixed roles and the
attempt at a more free-flowing exchange of submissive and dominant
roles (each inscribed, dialectically, with advantages and
disadvantages). As such sexuality in this essay is viewed as a
performance of
self, with power-struggle
at its core.
The scenes depict confrontations in
illicit
relationships with a particular emotional charge: producing a
friction that precipitates rupture. Lena and Claire navigate their
erotic subjectivity in these relationships and as social subjects, in
addition to experiencing to a greater and lesser extent the effects
of objectification
(however, it will be seen in the close-reading of ‘Intimacy,’ a
reversal of objectification takes place). Both women attempt to play
out a transformative sexuality; to achieve through the other, the
object of their desire, a greater sense of their sexuality. Their
quest to emerge
as sexual subjects in this way is overdetermined,
intimating the truism that beings are indeed socially determined,
whether through passivity
or resistance.
As such, the
vicissitudes and contradictions that constitute the articulation
of their desire
will be probed.
The two scenes
will be
close-textually analysed using the concept of the commodity as
described in chapter
one of Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Marx’s theory of alienation,
produced by the
division of labour: which has wide-reaching implications for the
social subject. Freudian psychoanalytical theory will provide a
conceptual framework for the analysis. Also, the scenes will be read
through Michel Foucault’s theory of repression, power and
sexuality, with particular emphasis on part four (‘The Deployment
of Sexuality’), from volume one of ‘The History of Sexuality.’
Helene Cixous’ utopian deconstruction will be deployed, in addition
to French filmmaker and author Catherine Breillat, whose theories of
female sexuality will constitute a textual ‘thread’ that will
perforate and weave through the entire essay.
I am Curious (Yellow), dir.
by Vilgot Sjöman (Second Sight, 1967)
The over-determination of intellect
by corporeality is of course expressed in the vocabulary of
curiosity, which like hunger and lust is not governed by the mind,
but is 'aroused' 'gratified' and so on.2
Lena Nyman is a politically engaged
young radical inhabiting liberal Stockholm in the late-sixties. Lena
and Börje
are lovers for some time before it is reported that he is co-habiting
with Marie, the mother of his child. In the wake of this discovery
Lena initiates her bid for freedom. Fleeing to the countryside in an
attempt to absolve herself of the scourge of Börje,
she pursues spiritual rebirth through new-age technologies - a
particular brand of sixties hippydom. Also, in a mid-twentieth
century re-imagining of Virginia Woolf’s entreaty that a woman
should have a ‘room of her own,’ Lena designates a zone for
intellectual growth within her typical Swedish country-house retreat
that incorporates books, a typewriter and a shotgun.
Börje
Ahlstedt ploughs into Lena's retreat in a new MG sports car that
symbolises his success as a suave car salesman in the world of
commodities, out of which he leaps with an urgently aroused sort of
instantaneity. He enters the wood-built house with an air of
arrogance that reveals his sense of absolute entitlement to Lena, as
an object of his desire. Characteristic of a man at ease with himself
and the phallocentric order that sustains him, and inflated by
avarice, he infiltrates Lena's self-imposed exile: his assailment of
her both an extension and re-assertion of his power.
Having registered violation,
she is war-like in preparation for the confrontation. Bare-breasted
and sheathed from the waist down in a wrap-around floor-length skirt,
she adopts the symbolic code of a tribal warrior defending her
property and by extension her self,
though at the same time, breasts exposed, constructs a sexually
appealing image of
herself for Börje’s
consumption that recalls Mulvey’s (psychological term) ‘female
figure.’3
She appeals to the male need for ‘re-enactment of the original
trauma [investigating the woman, demystifying her], counterbalanced
by devaluation, punishment or saving of object [woman].’4
Lena wields the shotgun that, previously displayed in her room as a
representation of non-violence, now – a protrusion from her, a
phallus that she pushes into Börje’s
back - signifies power. He flees from the porch on which she stands
regally, triumphantly possessive of her gun and her breasts.
Territorially, protecting her own
domain, forcing the retreat of the assailant who has penetrated it;
looking down on the feeble man who himself has been assailed she
screams “Get Lost” from her elevated position and shoots her gun
at him. Dominant and submissive positions thus reversed: the ground
is cleared for a continuation of their psychosexual drama under the
very same constellation of oppositions. Her dominance is short-lived;
her capitulation to him is part of the game. In ‘The History of
Sexuality’, Foucault spoke of ‘the general form of [powers]
acceptability’ in our society, as ‘a pure limit set on freedom.’5
The love scene with
consequences that
follows (the consequences revealed later to be a dose of scabies)
depicts sexual liberation as a myth and freedom’s limits. ‘Where
there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently,
this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to
power.’6
The act of resistance manifests power’s presence and power-struggle
is produced.
Later, Lena wakes from a post-coital
slumber beside Börje,
who remains asleep on the wooden floor-boards of her sanctuary – it
and her penetrated. She takes his car keys and, in much the same way
that he invaded her, she invades him. Inside the boot of his MG she
finds (and steals) gifts not only for his wife, Marie, but a mystery
woman, Madeline. Suppressing anger (for he has committed a double
infidelity), she returns to him, repositions herself parallel to his
chest, their bodies curled together and sex organs aligned, and he
wakes and penetrates her (again). A consensual ambiguity is
established (this time) and there is a re-assertion of the
Foucauldian idea that ‘sexual relations are not reciprocal: in
sexual relations you can penetrate or are penetrated.’7
Lena consents passively, magnifying for the viewer (the voyeur)
a sense of her
ambivalence
towards Börje,
colluding with him in a debasement described by Linda Williams (with
reference to the films of Catherine Breillat), ‘[she] is willing to
show the sexual degradations women often endure in a quest for
pleasure and intimacy.’8
Lena’s dissociated
state is manifested
by their body language. They are connected at the genitals and
alienated from the waist up in an appropriate visual rendering of
their psychologically convergent states, a corporeal replication of
the wedge that has been driven between them. Sex, echoing Lena’s
sated curiosity, becomes an arena for power to play itself out and a
kind of desperate self-flagellation
via the other.
Muteness acts as a support for her state of subjection and also the
obfuscation of her knowledge, so she opens up a dialogue that, in
piquing the paradoxically sexually aroused Börje
(arousal manifesting virility and fragilisation), colludes with and
at the same time produces a conclusive undoing
of that self-same desire. She initiates the display of ‘primitive
passion’, in which a ‘violence of one goes out to meet the
violence of the other.’9
Lena begins by asking, “Is Madeline
dark or blonde?” and Börje,
nonchalantly penetrating her, pauses, as if asking himself if and to
what extent this line of questioning will inflict on, or increase his
pleasure. “Dark”, he replies. As Lena is blonde, and by taking
pleasure in highlighting this difference, he makes a tacit
agreement with the
climate of hostility in which this sexual act will be articulated and
invokes the Madonna/Whore complex, the Freudian condition that
explains a type of male impotence (‘they seek objects which they do
not need to love, in order to keep their sensuality away from the
objects they love’10).
In Freud’s theory the man is rendered impotent with his wife, to
whom he ascribes unrealistically virginal attributes, and lustfulness
is reserved for the lover(s) (in this case Lena, for sure, and
Madeline, perhaps), who are sexually objectified by him. ‘The whole
sphere of love in such people remains divided in the two directions
personified in art as sacred and profane (or animal) love. Where they
love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love’,
wrote Freud in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.11
Their dialogue goes on:
Lena – “Social class?” Börje
– “Upper,” “Fat or slim?” “Very slim,” “Like a
model?” “Better than that.”
Her questions are far from arbitrary.
The illicit search that revealed gifts reminded Lena of her status,
which is constituted by its location on the hierarchy of his lovers
(and she internalises). Börje
sadistically taps into her this internalisation by subjecting her, a
working class female of meagre means who doesn’t conform to the
standard body-image, to this thinly veiled abuse. Unavoidably, and
in spite of gestures to the contrary, she manifests the power of mass
culture’s oppressive discourses and colludes with him in
reproducing them. She seems to spur on his desire while at the same
time destroying both her pleasure and her brittle self-image. Lena
continues:
“Single?” Börje
– “Engaged. But she’ll leave him for me” L – “Are her
orgasms better than mine?” B – “No idea” L – “Haven’t
you slept with her yet?”
She automatically situates herself
and Madeline as rivals. This exposes her own binary thinking - a
logic that is difficult to avoid, especially when heightened by envy
that can also heighten desire
– desire for something being predicated on lack and, crucially, a
lack that is emphasised by the presence of a rival. It is grotesque
that in the circumstances she asks for her orgasms to be assessed, as
if they are objects: commodities with equivalent value. ‘Voyeurism
has associations with sadism:’ states Mulvey,
‘pleasure lies in ascertaining
guilt, asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through
punishment or forgiveness…sadism demands a story, depends on making
something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of
will and strength, victory and defeat…’12
Lena’s masochistic collusion is an
example of how ‘the subject who is constituted as subject – who
is ‘subjected’ – is he who obeys.’13
She thrashes about on the floor demonstrating the madness of their
deteriorating ‘love’, uttering frantically, “Why haven’t you
shagged her? Why haven’t you? Why the hell haven’t you?” (as if
knowing would somehow release her from the trap she is in).
Börje’s
aggressive thrusting finally divested of all pleasurable
accumulation, and with a force of revulsion that signifies the
diminishment of his virility (or an indentation on his position of
domination), he pushes Lena away, uttering: “You and your bloody
curiosity.” Framed by a doorway, he stands and she is sprawled on
the floor, the camera shows the emotional architecture of their
cleavage. The two lovers inhabit a sphere of erotic tension, and are
somehow, by a logic of contradiction that infuses their desire,
united by the violence they have produced. Lena retreats though the
doorway into her carefully constructed study, crying convulsively
pursued by Börje.
He picks up her doll (that, for him seems to signify her naivety
versus his conclusive passage into adulthood) and throws it at her
before marching across the threshold into her hitherto utopian
safe-haven. This act is another crossing of borders, another
penetration into her; war-like he forcibly situates himself right at
the centre of the sacred core of her subjectivity with impunity.
Linda Williams describes
sadomasochistic power struggle as a ‘complex emotional relation of
ecstasy, alienation and humiliation enacted in the performance of the
sex act itself.’14
Performing
patriarchy at its
most oppressive, patronisingly looking down onto her meticulously
arranged new-age, political and feminist texts, he circles the room
as if circling prey. Either enraged by the evidence of the inner-life
of his sex-object, or, as a socialist at the dawning of the age of
rampant consumer culture, her political naivety: the acquisition of
money and power being the mainsprings of his
desire, he spits,
“Lend me The
Passive Female Ideal”,
to which Lena replies, with a hunted demeanour, destroyed by
violation, her borders in tatters, “that’s what you have – a
passive female.” Her admission slips neatly into the category of
victim:
that is her lot, and as Foucault wrote, ‘all the modes of
domination, submission, and subjugation are ultimately reduced to an
effect of obedience.’15
Once cavalier in her attitude to sex,
she is now enfeebled. Her body stooped and hair bedraggled, falling
limply around her ashen face (that ordinarily beams); her nudity
seems shameful in comparison to his, which radiates imperiousness.
However, exercising disgust and revulsion only reveals, confirms,
concretes his
position in the social strata – that of a conservative Christian
democrat invested in the state apparatus, class-system and position
of women in society (though, expediently, he reveals support for
women having the same ‘sexual freedom’ as men).16
Freud said that some men need a ‘debased sexual partner’, that
‘as soon as the condition of debasement is fulfilled, sensuality
can be freely expressed.’ Börje’s
own sexuality reveals itself to be predicated on this trope, his
pleasure being reliant on the presence of ‘a debased and despised
sexual object.’17
In The History of Sexuality Foucault
wrote that sexuality was seen (from the fourth-century onwards) as
a sign of weakness,
a passivity,
and that early
Christian hermeneutics elaborated a pursuit of mastery over the self,
and its’ appetites. The erection, being involuntary was seen as a
punishment for sin, whereas the Greeks considered it a ‘sign of
activity.’18
In a precise rendering of Laplanche and Pontalis’ definition of
projection – ‘an
operation whereby qualities, feelings, wishes, or even objects, which
the subject refuses to recognise or rejects in himself, are expelled
from the self and located in another person or thing’19
Börje
projects onto
Lena all the misery of his internalised psychosexual bondage. Both
harbour simultaneously conflicting feelings towards the other; he
considers her both desirable (in her willing sexual availability) and
repugnant (politically, emotionally). Similar sensations are most
certainly reciprocated by her towards him, albeit with less phallic
distinction, less
well-defined. “Are you going to sit in my MG with those tits?”
he
boorishly states, toying with her ‘unstandard’ breasts. The
doorway framing them again, he throws her onto the floor of the other
room and, the lovers having achieved mutual degradation, penetrates
her again without gaining her consent. ‘For Catherine Breillat, the
visual display of sex is inseparable from the representation of the
consciousness of her female characters,’20
and, similarly this rape sequence is essential in depicting the
relational ambiguity between Lena and Borje, specifically their
collusion. As such, the explicitness of this and previous scenes of
sex cannot offer up the ‘visual pleasure’ for the voyeuristic
viewer as suggested
by Laura Mulvey,21
and provides instead a lacerating psychosexual intensity for the
viewer to consider, intellectually.
‘This social structure negates our
beings,’ Kathy Acker pronounced in her early novel Algeria,
it supports the
‘maintenance of a subjective attitude in organized contradiction
with reality.’22
This resonates with the power-struggle between Lena and Borje that
replicates the tension between Lena and the socio-political
situation, reproducing the conservatism of a super-structural mass
culture and political system that maintain oppressive apparatus. Lena
sees that subjects are socially determined and because the
personal is the political
she subjects the material of society to questions and becomes
destabilised: anchorless in a world of myths that create for human
subjects a diminished experience. As such she is trapped in a force
field of oppositions and must confront and negotiate with
contingencies on a daily basis. The double-bind of her situation
seems related to praxis,
the dialectical
necessity of theory and practice to one another. Society’s
hypocrisies, the apparatus of limitation and naturalisation
through power and
myth, are described by Roland Barthes, ‘bourgeois norms are
experienced as the evident laws of a natural order – the further
the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more
naturalised they become.’23
Lena is conflicted by the emergence
of a desire for Börje
that is ambivalent,
a ‘powerful attraction, but [it is] also a source of shame and
compromise.’24
Perhaps her shame was incubated by the experience of the first 19 of
her previous 23 lovers, who were, she states, “no fun.” Lena and
those lovers collaboratively closed the circle of desire – pleasure
– [and] gratification through a phallic
logic. She explains, “I slept with them because they wanted to
sleep with me, to satisfy them.” Even as a proponent of so-called
liberated sexuality, she is trapped in a permanent state of
subservience and objectification. Feminist activist Barbara
Ehrenreich shed light on how 1960s sexual liberation movements fed
right into the hands of the bourgeoning consumer society, accepting
women into the ‘man’s world’ at the same time as marginalising
them, in the Sweetening
the Pill. ‘Socially
supported traits of selfishness and individualism’25
frequently masqueraded as sexual
freedom. As if sex
itself leads to
emancipation.
Echoing Foucault’s
assertion that in modern culture the disconnection of desire and
pleasure has led to the former taking precedence over the latter;26
Lena’s sexual experimentation has been constructed out of lack,
and has functioned
as an extension of power, manifesting it. Being entirely at the
service of the other,
investing her
labour in his
pleasure, she has wilfully divested her own pleasure of importance.
Thus, she shows the paradoxical nature of so-called liberation.
Intimacy, dir.
by Patrice Chéreau, (Empire Pictures, 2001)
Desire describes a state of
attachment to something or someone, and the cloud of possibility that
is generated in the gap between an object’s specificity and the
needs and promised projected onto it. Desire visits you as an impact
from the outside, and yet, inducing an encounter with your affects,
makes you feel as though it comes from within you; this means that
your objects are not objective, but things and scenes that you have
converted into propping up your world, and so what seems objective
and autonomous in them is partly what your desire has created and
therefore is a mirage, a shaky anchor.27
Claire, a discontented
thirty-something married mother, lives in New Labour’s
late-nineties London. Claire meets Jay for weekly casual
sex, never disclosing her marital status. It is passionate, frenzied
sex that pulsates with vulnerability – as if the state of
vulnerability was one they sought purposely, their sexual intercourse
incubating it. ‘Intimacy’
situates graphic,
un-simulated sex at the centre of a narrative that is perforated with
the ambiguous and shifting nature of subject-object relations and,
more broadly, the inevitable curiosity
into and pursuit
of
the other, in the
midst of casual
sexual encounters. Moreover, the risks that arise from increased
promiscuity, or revelation of self
to other
(exemplified in both ‘Intimacy’
and ‘I am
Curious’), are
multiplied by the loosening of fixed roles and, as responsibility to
the other combines
with ambiguity,
one potentially becomes alienated
from self and
other. The frail foundations that support social constructs (from
friendships to the nuclear family) are brought to bear on both Claire
and Jay as their affair goes on. Stumbling through their first
non-sexual confrontation, words having largely been withheld up to
that point, they reveal to each other (through language, identity
being constituted within it), what the silence of their bodies had
formerly been aching to express.
Jay’s curiosity leads him to follow
Claire after their Wednesday trysts, and he discovers she works at an
amateur-dramatics theatre, where he insinuates himself on performance
nights and cynically befriends her husband, Andy. Jay is ushered into
the dressing room one night to meet Claire, a pause impregnating the
room with a verging-on-fearful sexual tension. As it empties and
Claire shuffles about in the process of dressing, Jay looms, seeming
debilitated. He launches into speech at the first opportunity, after
the last chirpy member of the cast has vacated,
“I mean at one point the fact that
you never said anything I wondered…a woman who keeps her trap shut
so much…”, “Yeah” Claire interrupts, “all those things I
was hiding…scary isn’t it.”
Claire is shocked and perturbed by
the emergence of a voice from her sexual object, empowerment
accompanying the emergence of subjectivity through utterances:
“At one point, just to make it very
clear where I’m coming from, at one point I thought that if what we
did together was all that you wanted, it was because you knew more
than me… I thought you’d found something, I thought you were
ahead of me and that in the end you would tell me what you knew…”
She is disconcerted by his intrusion,
an intrusion that exposes in sharp relief a situation she saw as a
purely sexual interaction, orchestrated, and performed,
apart-from her
life. Forced to acknowledge that she has been marked by the silence
between them, she attempts to resist this force by forcing her way
past him and out of the room.
Pursued by Jay into the bar, Claire
sits across from her husband and their son, the bar between them and
noise all around, close yet far enough away for this confrontation to
unravel. Jay stands beside her. “What the fuck are you doing with
him?” he asks, barely concealing his disgust. “He’s my
husband”, she matter-of-factly replies, clearly warming to the
subject, perhaps even aroused
by the close proximity of the trio. Her face turned upwards to him,
supplicatory. “You wanted to talk”, she continues, staring into
the middle distance, “well then here we are, talking…” She
rises to her feet combatively, as he stares down on her, clearly
stunned by her hardness, the contradictions of his expectations
causing suffering. Pursued out of the bar, down the stairs into the
subterranean theatre in which she professionally performs multiple
selves, she disavows his attentiveness to her state of mind, (“back
then you looked really sad”), instead needing to contain her desire
for him, which has been displaced.28
In the empty theatre their disjointed
conversation seems to reproduce the state of being Freud described –
that of the divided
self (the ‘I’
that speaks consciously also speaks unconsciously, these narratives
running alongside each other, overlapping)29
“Everyone listens to you…here I am listening to you, interested
in you,” Jay’s monologues are charged with condensed
expectations, presumptions and fantasies of who Claire is. Claire
lowers herself into a seat; a captive audience of one, witnessing his
performance (the performance of his self)
with a minor horror that lacerates. The unravelling of their
relation, hitherto purely a bodily exchange, mirrors the unravelling
of themselves. “It’s all your game, isn’t it?” he pronounces,
and she responds, shaking her head slightly, steadying herself prior
to standing in flight from him: “I didn’t picture you like this.”
But the ‘game’ was theirs.
The dissolution of
their contract, their tacit
agreement, has been
instigated through the wounding impact of curiosity, pursuit and
probing, a process in which both have shown themselves to be
complicit. And from this point on the game, as they played it, is
over. The unspoken yet for some time mutually understood rules have
changed and there is nothing left at stake.
Adulterous, illicit
sex requires for its existence the condition of marriage, a certain
commitment to a different
state, a licit
state.
Consequently,
provided the marriage is sustained, the other
has the condition
of a sexual object,
or, in the context
of a rampant consumer culture, something approaching a commodity.
Jay, all too aware of his condition as a sexual labourer, therefore
fulfills the requirements of a commodity – ‘an external object, a
thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever
kind.’30
Though his curiosity is sated through the pursuit of Claire, it isn’t
enough to watch her from a distance and know her in a fragmentary way
by proxy through her husband, which highlights a deconstructive
dissolving of borders that constitutes their relationship and
troubles Jay deeply. Claire and Jay are at the same time close (their
naked bodies locked together in the simultaneity of penetration and
engulfment, mouths open, corporeally
capitulating to the
other) and distant. They are, at the very least via the resistance to
words, far apart. They know nothing of each other. And neither did
they ask.
Claire and Jay’s sense of
subjectivity seem unstable, through the fixed roles which they have
each been expected to perform, and the alienating consequences of the
performance of roles that seem to diminish rather than fulfil. Their
‘concrete individuality does not exist [in the current conditions
of alienation] but rather is smothered beneath the weight of those
real conditions…”31
The emotional content of their relationship is inseparable from prior
and current conditions of their intimate lives, and a more
generalised fading of subjectivity within the social and political
context of high capitalism has occurred, which leads both Claire and
Jay to collude in a performance of sex and silence, an ‘acting out
of existential despair.’32
An increasingly volatile Jay, whose
appearance has transformed in the scene from maimed to maniacal,
produces from within repressed expressions, occasionally spiked with
violence, that frequently overlap. Claire is compelled by him as a
speaking subject, and jolted into speaking too, disambiguates
herself, revealing to the viewer the conception of an affair that she
initiated, “that first day you must’ve been really surprised by
everything, that I should want you, that I didn’t seem to make a
big deal out of it, that it didn’t seem to hurt me that much, you
not saying anything….I didn’t give your not saying anything a
second thought.” Little by little this encounter disintegrates into
disorder, with each locked into their innerness,
striking out at the other.
Claire’s son interrupts Jay’s final eruption, a cacophonous
monologue of phallic
posturing around
‘finality’, as if he is capable of shouting Claire out of his
unconscious and therefore ridding himself to any extent of the ghost
of her presence. Former lovers, former articulations of intimacy,
congeal into a haunting
of the self.
And the mastery
of desire
is a fallacy.
Catherine Breillat’s theory of
female sexuality protrudes from desire’s taboos, the suppression of
pleasure, and shame. Far from relying on fixed male
and female
roles she suggests
there is a ‘reciprocal exchange of weaknesses and strengths in the
act of love.’33
However, Claire has allocated herself a condition of power through
sex, and by withholding language (for the most part) she also
withholds discourse
and with it, her
self, and
so is armoured. For Jay, on the other hand, regular sexual encounters
with Claire have committed him to a gradual dissolving of self,
because unbeknownst to him; theirs is in some way, though not
entirely, a perfunctory transaction,
elaborated by her. Claire, with Jay, performs a state of being both
‘there’ and ‘not there.’ The critical distance that cleaves
their intimacy deconstructs sex, and seems to seek something beyond
language or gesture. This recalls the film-work of Breillat, in whose
vision ‘the construction of female identity through sexuality
begins with the deconstruction of any givens and is followed by the
subversion of existing codes of interpretation.’34
One way that Claire ensures that she
remains in control is by remaining impenetrable,
in spite of being penetrated
by Jay. The paradox
of penetrability
(and a concomitant deconstruction
of the phallic
binary code) is elaborated by Breillat:
But one doesn’t take a woman. One
is taken by her. Look at it. All one has to do is make a sketch. The
man is surrounded, seized, can no longer be seen. It’s the woman
who takes him…from that moment on he is no longer himself. He
belongs to the breathing body he has entered. He is the penetrating
body, but not for long.35
Refusing infiltration and positioning
herself in a permanent state of detachment, she ‘remain[s] a closed
entity’36
putting herself outside
pleasure, not
entering into an
exchange with him.
When Claire performs fellatio on Jay he orgasms and thus, according
to Catherine Breillat, ‘transcend[s] material.37
However, when he attempts to reverse the submissive/dominant roles
and subject her
to cunnilingus, she refuses. Unlike Bataille, for whom ‘the aim of
sexual pleasure [was] not the gaining but the losing of control,’38
Claire understands that to be the active
participant is to
maintain the occlusion
of her self.
If she were to desire pleasure, a loss
of self would be
necessary for its fulfilment;
a fragilisation of
her borders that would signal she had relinquished power. This is
desire that isn’t at the service of pleasure, but power as a method
of self-determination and resistance to the limits of the social
order - ‘More than for desire, she is looking for her sexual
identity, for her self.’39
The pursuit of sexual identity, or
self
unbound to other,
ends up for Claire congealing into a certain myth of sexual
liberation. ‘To masquerade,’ wrote Mary Ann Doane ‘is to
manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between
oneself.’40
Claire’s masquerade
is the performance
of a dislocated part of herself. After the theatre sequence that
afforded Jay a voice and produced a dialogue that revealed her
motives, Claire realises the full extent of their mutually emotional
entanglement. By
resisting this eventuality she manifests it. There therefore exists a
double-bind – an erotic attachment to Jay that sustains her at the
same time as it threatens her, via the slippage from concupiscence
into emotionality, producing questions she didn’t intend to
address. Lauren Berlant summarises this conflict succinctly, ‘it’s
not the object that’s the problem, but how we learn to be in
relation.41
Their final encounter at Jay’s
house takes place in the stripped-down room in which they, in various
ways, contracted
one another (contracted
in the sense of
becoming ill, or catching
something
contagious; and a binding agreement). Jay crippled by vulnerability
and Claire visibly frustrated, they calmly outline their convergent
perspectives in relation to the other. Having already left his wife,
Jay manifests a mode of availability that couches his appeal as an
object. He is on the
market, and like a
commodity, for Claire, he has no ‘intrinsic value.’42
“What was I meant to feel,” asks Jay after describing Claire as
someone who “fucks and goes, just for the thrill of it”, to which
she replies, “what was I supposed to be like, who should I have
been to keep everyone satisfied, just to come and see a man and bury
myself in his arms because I wanted to.” As she stands over him,
he almost cowering with vulnerability and the weight of melancholy
caused by loss, which is in some sense imaginary and tied up with
projection, Jay
articulates his predicament with something of the logic of
victimisation:
“So, I am a divorced man, I have
two children, who are getting used to me not being around, friends
with a certain number of people, I suppose I am their best friend:
that’s something, and also I am this…Wednesday
man to a woman that
I have never asked anything of, and she’s happy with that it’s no
problem to her, but it really fucks me up…..I didn’t know it
would be like this…..I didn’t know I would become so closely tied
to you.”
The locus of
Claire’s courage
is in her ability to mange the casual link between her own personal
ethics and her external conditions (the Innenwelt
and Umwelt),
through a version
of projection
described by
Laplanche and Pontalis: ‘The subject perceives [her] surroundings
and responds according to [her] own interests, habits, long-standing
or transient emotional states, expectations, wishes etc.’43
Both Lena and Claire seem to occupy
dialectical positions between the concepts of female
libidinal economy (that
is, the desire for sex as labour
freely given and as
such unbound from wider economic relations), and a phallic model that
demands a reversal of accepted gender roles, within current
conditions. In masculine
libidinal economy,
male subjects are burdened with the threat of castration and
therefore their sexuality must be protected, which leads to the
necessarily restrictive phallic
mode of relations.
Sexual subjectivity is reduced to ‘having’ or ‘not having’;
the ‘other’ is feared as a threat to the ‘self’; ‘mastery’
of the other (as opposed to knowledge
of the other)
is the primary goal. This binary logic whether manifested this way or
that, only limits free expression and perpetuates fixed gender roles,
so a deconstructive
approach to the
whole constellation of language, gesture and sexual activity seems
the logical one. Gilles Deleuze describes the difficulty of resisting
these boundaries and the depressingly constrained condition of the
social being in an increasingly mechanised culture:
‘There is always a binary machine
which governs the distribution of roles and which means that all the
answers must go through preformed questions, since the questions are
already worked out on the basis of the answer assumed to be probable
according to the dominant meanings…so many dichotomies will be
established that there will be enough for everyone to be pinned to
the wall, sunk in a hole…’44
Helene HeleneHCixous
deconstructs the notion of mastery, and reframes identity and
sexuality as something that is constantly in flux, overflowing,
intertwining with ‘self’ and ‘other’. Her theory of so-called
‘liberated’ female sexuality, a process of undoing,
informs Lena’s
idea of social and personal liberation from hypocritical society –
and finds her at the conjuncture between intellectual engagement with
the desire to displace
the system and
psychosexual attachments that inevitably lead to the
subjugation of (her) pleasure. For
after all, a phallic, binary system can be, and often is, reversed
and as such has the potential for the construction of equality within
sexual relations.
In other words, female ‘sexual
liberation’ in capitalist society translates as defining oneself
through sexuality and exhibiting more
sexual
availability, taking little account of wider implications for the
individual. The construction is socially determined and conformist.
Terry Eagleton pitches this idea alongside dominant ideology to
surmise, ‘my sense of self is not mine but the ideal image of
myself that ideology (language and social gesture) has manoeuvred me
to accept as myself.’45
The dominant ideology demands that women aspire to a state of
desiredness,
mechanically sating desire that is at the service of the pleasure of
the other, and manifest permanent concupiscence. Catherine Breillat
explains this condition of female sexuality with reference to the
proliferation of certain types of objects, and that
‘Sexuality, the sexual act, cannot
be what we are shown complacently. We are shown things that are
allowed in porn movies and we’re told that that’s the way we
ought to behave. Girls are raised for that purpose, which induces a
behaviour where you can find pleasure in shame…the words used to
describe women’s sexuality, the censorship and shame that society
inflicts on women, creates a very schizophrenic condition.’ 46
The Utopian ideation of this essay
comes from the perspective of the emergence of ‘ethical’
individuals who create their own life as one would a work of art,
without recourse to dominant discourses, re-inventing modes of
self-constitution. Foucault asked, ‘Are we able to have an ethics
of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account
the pleasures of the other? Is the pleasure of the other something
which can be integrated in our pleasure?’47
Similarly, ‘feminine libidinal economy,’
which renders
advantageous the Freudian disadvantage inherent in being biologically
female, re-imagines exchanges between self
and other.
A mode of giving (or
equilibrium without balance)
that would produce,
especially for women a satisfying sexuality would require a radical
transformation of society, which uses an economic logic as a conduit
for all social relations. Cixous, who’s inquiries into subject /
object relations pitch her feminine
libidinal economy to
the dominant phallic
mode, asks for a
deconstructive blurring of fixed subject-object positions, she
‘look[s] for a scene in which a type of exchange would be produced
that would be different…’
I look for a scene in which a type of
exchange would be produced that would be different…This desire
would invent Love, it alone would not use the word love to cover up
its opposite: one would not land back in a dialectical destiny, still
unsatisfied by the debasement of one by the other. On the contrary,
there would have to be a recognition of each other, and this grateful
acknowledgment would come about thanks to the intense and passionate
work of knowing. Finally, each would take the risk of other,
of difference,
without feeling threatened by the existence of an otherness, rather,
delighting to increase through the unknown that is there to discover,
to respect, to favour, to cherish.48
The unravelling of self alongside
subject/object relations, the messy entanglement of emotion and
language have been demonstrated by these articulations
of desire. Vulnerability
is manifested through the overdetermination
of Lena and Jay’s attachment: they have been engulfed
by Börje and
Claire. The latter, the penetrators,
seem to dispossess themselves of affects, apparently returning to
their lives, but in fact they too must live with the transformation,
or haunting
aftermath, of the
affair. For Claire, being sexually desired by Jay gives her a window
of opportunity for a sort of dissociated sexual performance conducted
under the constellation of freedom
(from the stricture of her gender roles) that asks nothing of him or
her, laying waste to the idea that sex and emotion should always
entwine (which of course they shouldn’t). Her achievement is
temporally limited, which recalls a scene in which Andy tells Jay,
“When you are with someone, there is only a short time that you can
give each other things for free.”
As the scenes that have been
close-textually analysed in this essay show, it is clear that some
movement towards women ‘leaving behind their conditions as
commodities – subject to being produced, consumed, valorised,
circulated, and so on, by men alone,’49
has occurred, but that ultimately the ‘Hefnerian’ version of
female sexual freedom persists, in an internalised way and externally
through culturally endorsed expectations. That is to say, so-called
liberation manifests yet more servitude to patriarchy. By taking part
in ‘elaborating and carrying out exchanges,’50
a reversal of binary roles has taken place; one where women may
exhibit confidence in the production of themselves as sexual subjects
but are still duped by the idea that this masquerade
will empower them.
Through language and gesture, revelation and negation, the affects of
each affair spill out, as violent eruptions of innerness protruding
outwards upon the other.
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Breillat,
C, Pornocracy, (LA:
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1
Richard Sennett, ‘Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett: Sexuality
and Solitude,’
London
Review of Books, vol 3, 9, (1981),
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v03/n09/michel-foucault/sexuality-and-solitude>
[accessed 13 Nov. 2013]
2
Nicholas Thomas, ‘Licensed
Curiosity’, in Cultures
of Collecting, ed.
By Elsner, J; Cardinal, R, (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), p. 125.
3
Laura Mulvey, Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,
<http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf>[accessed
26 Dec 2013].
5
Michel Foucault, The
History of Sexuality, (NY:
Vintage, 1990), p. 85.
7
Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy
of Ethics’, in The
Foucault Reader, ed.
by Rabinow, P, (London: Penguin Books, 1991) p. 345.
8
Linda Williams, Screening
Sex, (NC: Duke UP,
2008), p. 115.
9
Bataille, pp. 103 – 104.
10
Sigmund Freud, Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, (London:
Penguin Books, 1991), p. 251.
11
Ibid, p. 251.
13
Foucault, History
of Sexuality, p.
85.
14
Ibid, p. 117.
15
Foucault, The
History of Sexuality,
p. 85.
16
Unsurprisingly, Hugh Hefner, editor of Playboy, also supported this
idea. With reference to the emergence of the birth control pill in
the 1960s, Hefner hoped women would become more ‘openly sexy’,
if they could prevent pregnancy. ‘Although men have a continuous
sense of masculinity, women are not thought to need a sense of
femaleness any more complex than a physical, performed sexiness that
is attractive to men. Hefner decided that if a woman looks sexy and
is having sex then she must be experiencing a liberated sexuality’.
Holly
Grigg-Spall, Sweetening
the Pill, (London,
Zero Books, 2013), p. 90.
17
Freud, Three Essays, p. 252.
18
Foucault, p. 347.
19
The Language of
Psychotherapy, (London:
Karnac Books, 1998), p. 349
20
Brian Price, ‘Catherine Breillat,’ Senses
of Cinema, 23,
(Dec 2002)
<http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/breillat/>[accessed
13 Dec 2013].
21
Mulvey, L, Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,
<http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf>[accessed
26 Dec 2013].
22
Kathy Acker, Algeria,
(London: Aloes
Books, 1984), p. 4.
23
Roland Barthes, Mythologies,
(NY: Noonday
Press), p. 140.
24
Williams, p. 275.
25
Grigg-Spall, pp. 142 –
143.
26
Foucault, On
the Genealogy of Ethics,
p. 347.
27
Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love,
(NY: Punctum
Books), p. 6.
28
A parapraxis
occurs early in the dressing room scene when Claire sneezes
signifies, revealing a psychological slippage into the realms of
their passionate sex-life – sexually
induced sneezing is
a phenomenon that can occur during foreplay, sexual intercourse or
sexual thoughts.
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19092028>[accessed
23 Dec 2013].
29
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Unconscious’, in On
Metapsychology, (London:
Penguin Books, 1991), pp 167 – 173.
30
Karl Marx, Capital,
(London: Penguin
Books, 1990), p. 125.
31
Karl Marx, Grundrisse,
(London: Penguin
Books), p. 265.
32
Williams, p.
117.
33
Catherine Breillat,
Pornocracy, (LA:
Semiotext(e), 2005), p. 115.
34
Laura Malacart, Catherine Breillat – Interview, Filmwaves,
<http://filmwaves.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18:catherine-breillat-interview&catid=27:filmwaves-16&Itemid=2>[accessed
29 Dec 2013].
35
Breillat, p. 114.
36
Acker, p. 3.
37
‘I don’t believe the aim of sexuality is pleasure, but rather
the transmutation into an abstract principle’
Laura
Malacart, Catherine Breillat – Interview, Filmwaves.
38
Bataille, p. XIII
39
Brian Price
<http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/breillat/>
40
Mary Ann Doane, Film
and the Masquerade,<http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/>[accessed
13 Dec 2013].
41
David Seitz, Interview with Lauren
Berlant, Society
and Space, (March
22 2013)
(http://societyandspace.com/2013/03/22/interview-with-lauren-berlant/)
[accessed December 26 2013].
42
Marx, Capital,
p. 126.
43
The Language of
Psychoanalysis, p.
350.
44
Dialogues II, (London:
Continuum IPG, 2006), pp 19 – 21.
46
Robert Sklar, A
Woman’s Vision of Shame and Desire: An Interview with Catherine
Breillat, (Cineaste,
25, Dec 1999), pp. 24 – 26, p.
25<http://lalev.co/Romance.pdf>[accessed
29 Dec 2013].
47
On The Genealogy of Ethics, p.
346.
48
Helene Cixous, ‘Sorties,’ in The
Newly Born Woman, (Minneapolis:
Minnesota UP, 1986), p. 78.
49
Luce Irigaray, This
Sex Which is Not One, (NY:
Cornell UP, 1985), p. 191.
50
Ibid.
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