Jonathan Kemp - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This thesis argues that representation is the embodiment of erotic thought. It does this by focus... more This thesis argues that representation is the embodiment of erotic thought. It does this by focusing on literary representations of the penetrated male body and challenging the standard approaches to masculine embodiment as a form of denial or absence: the male bodyin its always already _penetrated stateas a presence, though one which lurks behind representation. It argues that the (penetrated) male body is often characterised as a taboo the breaching of which is traditionally named 'feminine' or 'psychotic'. The dominant representation of this body links it with a chain of equivalences that binds it to a culturally abjected 'feminine paradigm'. Works by Huysmans, Baudelaire, Wilde, will demonstrate how the limits of the male body are mapped within a boundary that both excludes and necessitates an act of penetratioa But it also demonstrates the ways in which this taboo has been challenged. Schreber, Genet and Joyce jplay with that boundary, push those limits, suggesting that penetrability becomes a condition of the emergence of modern male subjectivity within the rubric of its own logic. For as much as the penetrated male body is marked by 'femininity' and 'psychosis', it in turn marks a discursive 'blind spot' which the thesis terms the 'behind', in order to highlight its links to the anusa site of anxiety for masculinity. This articulation of a discursive aporia and corporeal liminality is shown to generate a specifically modern 'poetics'. This poetics will help to restate a logic of the neither/nor as expressed by Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Kristeva, in particular. One major consequence of such conditionality is that thought must be seen as in a very real sense 'embodied', and that this process of embodying thought is predicated upon an eroticism that is subsequently denied. The 'behind' names that denial. This thesis examines literary representations of the male body in what is perhaps its most estranged form: in the process of being penetrated. It does this both in order to suggest that penetration is a condition of modern masculine subjectivity^ and to reclaim the male body as a penetrative body. It will argue that the submission by which 'masculinity' registers within the socio-symbolic order is effected by a process of penetration that remainders the male body, marking it as 'waste' and associating it with a pejorative femininity. Taboos not only against analiry and anal intercourse^ but, by extension, against so-called passivity and powerlessness, come into play in our traditional understanding of the penetrated male body. Through the traditional cultural associations that exist between the concept 'body' and the concept 'woman', the name 'feminine' is given to any breach of the taboo against jpenetrating the male body. As will be shown, the chain of equivalences which binds these two abject bodies significantly includes the notion of 'psychosis' and 'waste'. The abjection or taboo 1700, as Randolph Trumbach's work on eighteenth century sexuality clearly shows. The only remotely acceptable form of male-male sodomy became that performed by an adult male upon an adolescent boy, who was seen to exist "in a transitional state between man and woman" (Trumbach 1993, 255), and therefore neither fully male nor fully human. Trumbach's research reveals a consolidation offender difference taking place in the 1700s by which effeminacy became associated with anal passivity: "Adult men were deemed effeminate only when they allowed themselves to be sexually penetrated" (Trumbach 1995, 255). To analyse, to think, in other words, is always already to insist that in doing so thought invites an act of penetration which occurs behind the thinker. Amongst other things,, this thesis wants to stress the anal in analysis. As such, it is concerned with the claim that thought is embodied, and that, moreover, such embodiment is first and foremost erotic-first and foremost concerned with the body and its sensations. Given that concepts are often seen somewhat simplistically as belonging in discrete pairs, belonging on either side of a boundary or division which poses them as not only opposites but also as fundamentally oppositional-what this thesis calls the logic of the either/or-then the challenge that such division is neither possible nor adequate gestures to another form of logic altogether: a logic of the neither/nor, a point I will develop throughout this thesis. The 'behind', registering as both discursive aporia and corporeal liminality, enables a thinking that moves beyond the 'either/or' of traditional logic. Moving beyond the 'either/or' What does it mean to move beyond the strictures of the 'either/or' logic that often obstructs critical thinking? How is such a move achieved? This concern is expressed by thinkers such as Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva who have begun this exploration of a logic that does not reduce to a position of either/or. The thesis 13 well as with God, both cultural signifiers of the giving of life. Schreber's submission to God's will, and his subsequent transformation into a woman, are in order to create a new world, linking the penetrated male body to a Utopian dream. In Wilde's Dorian Gray, the male anus equates with the ear and flowers, delineating a process of crossfertilization centred upon the production or dissemination of discourse. For Wilde, 'world-view', so that "to juxtapose two or more free-standing discourses is to juxtapose disparate worlds, different reality templates"(McHale 1992, 54). Furthermore, as might be expected, none of these reality templates is ever in a state of stability; each of them will impact upon the others. Nothing about them is absolutely discrete or motionless. As such, there is always a surplus or excess to both discourse and language, with the consequence that all claims to an absolute 'truth' are seriously undermined. Things get 'said' or 'written' that either do not conform to the dominant fiction, or produce meanings that exceed its maintenance: this is what I am calling 'poetics'-that which can't be named but which still has a logic to it. It is a conceptual excess that cannot be 'gram'; "a kind of general strategy of deconstruction"(DQmda, 1981, 41, original emphasis). Sue Golding also calls this unsayable something a poetics, "a kind of dirty, bloody poetics, one which insists on, say, bodies and skin and smells and imagination in the face of it all"(Golding 2000, 286). For Golding, it is always dynamic, always political, always a risky and violent place to inhabit (Golding 2001, 52). It insists on a multiplicity or multi-dimensionality irreducible to the consolations of identity thinking and dialectical analysis. This poetics, then, exposes the conditions of its own emergence at the risk of being rendered meaningless. It takes the substance of discourse (language) and uses itnot always knowingly or deliberatelyto scramble discourse's code, rearranging it into other patterns, other codes. It differs both from Aristotle's use of the term as form of textual analysis, and from Todorov's use of it to name a form of structuration within textual practices. These uses of the term poetics seek to unveil or expose something considered hitherto hidden. They work with metaphors of the visible. The poetics I am attempting to articulate focuses more on how what is known is contoured by what is not. Significantly, both the ear and the anus are bodily orifices that cannot be seen directly by the subject. In Chapter Two, Wilde's use of the ear as a site of penetration upon the male body by which masculine subjectivity takes control, and the further understanding of how this ear functions as a displaced anus, will work with this kind of This sodomitical founding6 moment of Western thought is something of which Derrida states "I do not know or do not yet want to see"(Derrida 1987, 18), placing this penetrated male body under erasure, characterising it as a blind spot at the precise moment it comes to view. It is, for Derrida, "a catastrophe, right near the beginning, this overturning that I still cannot succeed in thinking"(Derrida 1987, 19); an "overturning and inversion of relations"(Derrida 1987, 22, emphasis adding), moreover, which could be said to be characteristic of his own deconstructive project. Twice Derrida refuses or is incapable of thinking such a thought (perhaps because it 5 On this point, see Chapter Three of this thesis. 6 Lee Edelman calls this phenomenon of a posteriori thought '(be)hindsighf, "in order to figure its complicitous involvement in the sodomitical encounter". Homographesis (London & New York, 1994, 176). 7 "It has become a commonplace of criticism to argue that modernist literature is about language itself... behind the fa9ade of utility we find another language, which is the real realm of modernity",