Artykuł stanowi  próbę odejścia od statycznego modelu ciała, które staje się „systemem energii”, „strukturą otwartą”.  Model  statyczny  i  dynamiczny  -   lub  inaczej  zachowawczy  i  ekspansywny  -  można także  przenieść  na  rozważania nad  seksualnością i  śmiercią.  W  świetle  tego  modelu  porno­grafia, jako kontrolowany,  niekreatywny  przepływ energii,  stanowi  zaprzeczenie  estetyki  i  erotyki, która  -   w  ujęciu  Bataille’a -  jest  „komunikacją,  otwarciem  poprzez  śmierć”

Zając, Marta

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Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Śląskiego RE-BUŚ

             Title: Eroticism as transgressive sexuality : some reflections on body, death and sex   Author: Marta Zając  Citation style: Zając Marta. (1996). Eroticism as transgressive sexuality : some reflections on body, death and sex. W: T. Rachwał, T. Sławek (red.). "Representations of the erotic" (S. 109-113). Katowice :Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego Marta ZającEroticism as Transgressive Sexuality: Some Reflections on Body, Death and Sex. . .the flesh and blood o f  dead m en are comm only eaten and drunk to inspire. . .qualities for w hich men them ­selves were rem arkable. . .. . .to lessen the dangers which are supposed to attend the operation. . .(t)he chief ofN am osi in Fiji always ate a man by way o f  precaution when he had his hair cut.J. G. F razer, The G olden  B o u g h 'An act o f cannibalism performed by primitive man opposes the reductionist view o f the body as defined through its physical tangibility. M an’s flesh and blood appear as mediating spiritual values or function as agents in spell-breaking procedures.When viewed as a sum total o f its parts, organs, tissues and cells, and as such subject to thorough scientific investigations, the body appears to be fully mastered. The knowledge o f it is predominantly of the encyclopaedic type, i.e. as a collection o f facts instead o f thought-provoking observations. However, despite its delusory concreteness, body still provokes reflections upon itself as “a continuous creation. . . energy system . . . never a complete structure. . . perpetual inner self­construction and self-destruction” .1 Body appears, then, as a sum o f energy, open through its inner dynamics to constant change.When viewed as an energy system, the body may be qualified through two conflicting tendencies: a tendency towards conservation o f energy, and as such it remains a sort o f “close-circuit system”, with a vicious circle as a possible met­aphor for it; and a tendency towards transgression, when the body persists due to continuous expansion. (The conservative and expansive tendencies can be rough­ly linked to the mentioned motives for cannibalism, i.e. precaution, and hope for"Jam es George Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Paperm ac, 1992).1 Norm an Brown, from “L ove’s Body”, in The N aked  I  (G reenw ich, Conn.: Faw cett Publica­tions, Inc., 1971), p. 346.110 M arta Zającspiritual enrichment respectively.) These two modes o f the body’s being can be extended into a more comprehensive pattern. We find it possible to view sexu­ality and death as displaying, in a similar way, the potential both for regression and transcendence. Openness and closure, transcendence and regression, get re­alised in an open human being, thought and experience, or in a form sterile in its completeness.Any controlled flow o f energy displays certain morbid quality. When D. H. Lawrence, in his article “Pornography and Obscenity”, opposes the practice of masturbation to sexual intercourse, he recognises a corpse-like quality induced in the body through the repeated acts o f self-abuse: “there is no change, only dead­ening. There is what we call dead loss.”2 Death as progressive deadening, exhaus­tion o f energy, may touch not only the body, but the mind as well. Certain mode o f sensibility deviates into excessive egocentrism; self-analysis turns finally into self-abuse: “there is no real object, there is only subject. The author never escapes from himself, he pads along the vicious circle o f  the self. It is self absorption made public. . .Enclosed within the vicious circle o f the self, with no vital contacts outside, the se lf becomes em ptier and emptier, till its ‘almost anullus, a nothingness’.’”The concept o f “the total universe” , introduced by Susan Sontag in her essay “Pornographic Im agination”, may be viewed as a variation o f “a close-circuit system”. A total universe has “the power to ingest and metamorphose and trans­late all concerns that are fed into it, reducing eveiything into the one negotiable currency . . .” .4 The functioning o f a total universe consists in a mere interchange­ability o f its elements, apparently endless passing from one form into another, limited, however, to strictly defined area o f transformation. Susan Sontag calls the way the total universe operates -  c a n n i b a l i s t i c .  That would agree, however, only with one o f the forms o f cannibalism Frazer mentions, i.e. an act performed out o f precaution, and as such, oriented towards the maintenance of an existing state o f matter/s.Following Susan Sontag’s claim that “(t)he religious imagination survives for most people as not just the primary, but virtually the only credible instance o f an imagination working in a total way”,5 a set o f religious beliefs may be viewed as a model realisation o f the idea o f the total universe. The total vision o f the Universe advanced through religious interpretation aims at providing all observable phenom­2 D. H. Lawrence, “Pornography and O bscenity” , in O xford A nthology o f  English Literature , ed. Frank Kerm ode and John H ollander (London, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 455.’ Ibid., p. 456. (Lawrence advances one more image o f  m an’s mental and/or physical closure, taking into account the way man pictures h im self in the universe. As he envisages m ankind -  “we cannot b e a r  c o n n e c t i o n s ” . M an shuns all forms o f  the union with living, incarnate -  cosmos; defines h im self as a detached “ fragm ent” , not an organic “part” ; consequently, standing above the whole netw ork o f  relations, rem ains sterile in his disconnectedness.) (cf. D. H. Lawrence, “Apoca­lypse”, in Oxford A nthology. . . ., p. 461.)4 Susan Sontag, “ Pornographic Im agination”, in Styles o f  R adical Will (New York: Dell Pub­lishing Co., Inc., 1969), p. 66.s Ibid., p. 69.Eroticism  as Transgressive Sexuality 111ena with lucid eschatological significance. All stories o f  the world carry the potential for being re-translated into the biblical concepts, and then incorporated into the history o f Redemption.6A similar pattern o f effective translatability structures pornographic imagina­tion, yet it develops there on a level different from the level o f ideas. In porno­graphic literature “all action is conceived as a set o f sexual exchanges”,7 it tends “to make one person interchangeable with another, and all people interchangeable with things”.8 The programmatic de-humanisation o f characters is the condition for smooth transformative procedures. As all elements are in fact interchangeable, what really matters is the rhythm of their replacement. It may appear, then, that what is vile about pornography, the most intense evil it entails, does not consist in overt obscenity inherent to it, but in the dead-end progression.Death may be, however, conceived also in another dimension; progressive deadening out o f lack can be contrasted with the abrupt end which comes out of excess. Bataille claims that “human beings live only through excess” .9 It seems, however that, more specifically, while the vision o f excess conditions l i f e ,  the experience o f excess spells d e a t h .  Hence, the progressive deadening, the pro­cess o f dying extended over the whole life, let us call it “death-in-life”, can be opposed to “life-towards-death”, i.e. life motivated through the vision o f excess, which ultimately brings the lethal experience of it.Eroticism may be viewed as a sphere o f life touched most extensively with death. As Nick Land observes following B ataille’s thought: “(e)rotic love is unrestrained violence against every thing which stands against commu­nion. . .God, cosmos, one’s fellows and one’s se lf” .10 M odern psychology6 In Biblia tysiąclecia, in the preface to The Song o f  Solomon, one can read: “Jest to jedyna w całym Piśm ie Świętym księga, w której nie ma mowy ani o Bogu, ani o zbawieniu, ani o narodzie wybranym, i która nie zaw iera żadnej myśli religijnej. Rozum iana w znaczeniu dosłownym  jest ona po prostu poematem lirycznym o tematyce m iłosnej. . .Dziś, dzięki rozwojowi nauk biblijnych, coraz bardziej jasnym  się staje, że Pnp, mimo pewnego podobieństw a do utworów pozabiblijnych, korze­niami tkwi w Biblii, i jes t dojrzałym  owocem myśli teologicznej proroków Ozeasza, Jeremiasza, Ezechiela, oraz Deutero-lzajasza (rozdz. 40-66) o oblubieńczym stosunku Boga do narodu wybranego, a także o nawróceniu i powrocie narodu-oblubienicy po wielu niew iernościach do łaski. Powrót ten, dzięki bezgranicznem u m iłosierdziu Obrażonego, m a w sobie catą św ieżość pierwszej m iłości. . i ca łą  radość zaślubin” (p. 745). Consequently, the passage: “ for, lo, the w inter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time o f  the singing o f birds is come, and the voice o f  the turtle is heard in our land” ( The Song o f  Solomon: 2, 11-12) we are called to interpret as a symbol o f a new life in the regained Palestine; the words: “ (i)t was but a little that I passed from them, but 1 found him, whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him  into my m other’s house, and into the cham ber o f  her that conceived me” (The Song  o f  Solom on: 3, 4) are to evoke the image o f  the soul turning, fervently, to God again, ( c f . Biblia  tysiąclecia, p. 749).7 Susan Sontag, “Pornographic. . .” , p. 66.8 Ibid., p. 53.’ A fter Susan Sontag, “Pornographic. . .” , p. 61.'"N ick  Land, The Thirst fo r  Annihilation: Georges B ataille  and  Virulent N ihilism  (London and New  York: Routledge, 1992), p. 193.112 M arta Zającrecognizes sex and death as two biological aspects o f m i s t e r i u m  t r e m e n -  d u m . "  The veil is rent for an instant, and the mystery o f being approaches fulfillment through the moments o f sexual ecstasy as well as death spasms. An act o f  erotic communion, the moment the body transcends its boundaries, (the transcendence parallel to the mental transcendence o f the self), marks “the unity o f death, or o f the consciousness o f death and eroticism” .12Eroticism can be linked to death also as a fonn o f communication; commu­nication implies self-exposure to the impact o f the unpredictable, the rupture of the vicious circle o f the self, openness to the unknown. Therefore, “communica­tion is opened by death alone” .13 In the erotic act, body opens itself, abandons all protection, lets the integrity o f its functioning be endangered. Hence, “to love is to bleed” .14 The close-circuit o f  the blood flow opens, the rupture o f the blood vascular system results in excessive bleeding.15*It seems that pornography and eroticism may be conceived as two aspects of sexuality, the realisations o f the potential sexuality carries both for regression and transcendence.In pornography, even if  “transcendence o f personality as the highest good” 16 can be observed that transcendence is oriented towards “the perfection o f becom­ing a thing” .17 Human beings undergo progressive reduction to the purely instru­mental treatment. The body as a static container o f sexual organs remains an instrument in “sexual exchanges”. As psychology means “psychology o f lust”,18 the flow o f energy is not hindered by any extra-corporeal complexities.Eroticism, in turn, emerges as a sphere shaped by the transgressive aspects of the body and death. The body’s energy to transcend its limits points to an inner dynamics, which at the peak level constantly approaches death; death as the consummation o f life-processes.11 Cf. Rollo May, M iłość i wola  (Poznań: Dom W ydawniczy Rebis, 1993), p. 113.12 Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, Vol. X, p. 585, after N ick Land, The Thirst fo r .  . ., p. 191.” Nick Land, The Thirst fo r .  . ., p. 192.'“ Ibid., p. 192.15 Foucault puts sexuality and death into yet another relation. Death appears for him as an element in what he calls “the Faustian pact” o f  our century. Foucault finds m odem  society eager to “exchange life for sex i ts e lf ’; as it is “ through sex . . .tha t each individual has to pass in order to get access to his own in telligibility . . ., to the whole o f  his body. . .to his identity” ; sex is worth dying for. In this sense, exclusively “sex is imbued with death-instinct. Nowadays, it is sex, not love, that claims the equivalence o f  death” (cf. M ichel Foucault, The H istory o f  Sexuality. A n Introduction  (M iddle­sex, N ew  York: Penguin Books, 1978), pp. 155-156.) W hile various values supplant one another, death as a constant indicates the intensity o f  desire these values induce. Hence, even i f  death is not an object o f  desire, it accom panies it alm ost to the point o f  merging.16 Susan Sontag, “The P ornographic . . .” , p. 60.17 Ibid.18 Cf. ibid., p. 40.Eroticism  as Transgressive Sexuality. 113M arta ZającErotyzm  jako seksualność transgresywna: uwagi o ciele, śm ierci i płciS t r e s z c z e n i eArtykuł stanowi próbę odejścia od statycznego m odelu ciała, które staje się „systemem energii” , „strukturą otw artą” . Model statyczny i dynamiczny -  lub inaczej zachow aw czy i ekspansywny -  m ożna także przenieść na rozważania nad seksualnością i śmiercią. W świetle tego modelu porno­grafia, jako  kontrolowany, niekreatywny przepływ  energii, stanowi zaprzeczenie estetyki i erotyki, która -  w  ujęciu B ataille’a -  jest „komunikacją, otwarciem  poprzez śm ierć” .M arta ZającErotism e com me sexualité transgressive: rem arques sur le corps, la m ort et le sexR é s u m éL ’article  est une tentative d ’abandonner le m odèle statique du corps, celui-ci devenant un „système d ’énergie”, une „structure ouverte” . Le modèle statique et dynamique -  ou, autrem ent dit: conservateur et ex p an s if-  peut être également appliqué aux considérations sur la sexualité et la mort. A la lumière de ce modèle, la pornographie en tant que courant (passage) d ’énergie non contrôlé et non créatif constitue le contraire de esthétique et de l ’érotique qui, selon Bataille, est „commu­nication, ouverture par la m ort” .8 R ep re se n ta tio n s

Eroticism as transgressive sexuality : some reflections on body, death and sex

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Eroticism as transgressive sexuality : some reflections on body, death and sex

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