Pornographic Faith: Two Sources of Naked Sense at the Limits of Belief and Humiliation (original) (raw)
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There are many ways to approach the complex entity we call "the body." Today I want to look at the body as the point of intersection of the social with the subjective; by that I mean that the body is the site where subjectivity is formed in subjection to sociality, a site at once virtual and concrete, both theoretical and material. I will propose the following thesis: if we become social subjects, it is because we have bodies -or better, because we are bodies; and conversely, it is only insofar as we become subjects, that we acquire a sexed and raced body. To develop this thesis, I will consider the work of three major figures in twentieth century cultural theory, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, and Frantz Fanon, three thinkers who, each in his own way, have changed the terms in which we can think about the body, sexuality, and the social.
Theology and the Pornographic Imagination: Metaphysics, Modernity, and the Miseducation of Desire
JOGTS, 2022
A large portion of the criticism of pornographic production is often polarised towards the ethical dimensions of such critique. While not negating this approach, this essay aims to delineate some ontological tendencies of the pornographic imagination, offering both a critique and therapy from the vantage of a theological metaphysic. Beginning with a critical examination of an influential essay, namely Susan Sontag’s The Pornographic Imagination I suggest that the aesthetic vision of pornography is predicated on a denial of difference and anticipates no gratuitous reciprocity, but rather a return of the same, and that the ultimate drift of pornographic excessiveness is towards a deadening solipsism. Within this totalized imagination, the consumption of pornography fabricates an affective relation to material bodies within a radical narrowing of vision and sensory possibility. This is manifested at several levels, in both its form and content, from its very medium to its deployment of language. I further contend that this is not necessarily a unique phenomenon, but a by-product of certain tendencies within modern technology and capitalist production. I argue that it is difficult to understand the advent of pornography without a simultaneous description of the modernist cartography of being and its regime of representation. This concerns the way bodies are spatialised and mechanised into a manageable plane of immanence susceptible to modernist ideals of panoptic observation and technological “standing reserve.” At the end of the essay, an alternative metaphysic of desire and the image is put forward, with the assistance of Rowan Williams; it is argued that a broadly Augustinian and patristic vision of Trinitarian desire andliturgical incorporation provides an affective and ontological restoration of selfhood; it suggests a sacramental mediation of the real, in contrast to the simulation of pornography.
The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism and the Politics of (Dis)Embodiment
Signs, 1998
We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack. The Women's Liberation movements are correct in saying: We are not castrated, so you get fucked. -Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1984, 61.
Monograph: Eroticism of More- and Other-than-Human Bodies
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
Abstracts Introduction/Chapter 1. : The Dynamics of Affects and Experiences of the More- and Other-than-Human Bodies When eroticism and sex are discussed, the attention most often focuses on what takes place between people. In this work, the erotic spectacle is more comprehensive and features non-human actors: things, stuff, objects. I set out from the assumption that objects, such as clothing, undergarments, footwear, and jewellery play an important role in stimulating erotic imagination, becoming participants in that process. The theoretical foundation for acknowledging things as active contributors to social relationships (as one should approach amorous-erotic-sexual relationships) derives from the anthropology of things. This perspective is also tangibly present in my analyses, since I seek to show the (post)human, transversal, liminal bodies as they become fused with other—animate and inanimate—bodies and objects. The attribute of “more- and other-than-human” in the title refers to the human, but a human construed in accordance with the concepts posited by the posthuman, new materialism and anthropology of things; an entity functioning in complex networks that link them inseparably with other beings: things, objects, animals, plants, sand, or water. Chapter 2. More-than-human Network of Relationality In this chapter I present theoretical and methodological issues. I show that research, generally referred as study of things, functions in different contexts. The baseline standpoint adopted by Daniel Miller, Peter Pells, Ikuya Tokoro and Kari Kawai is that of social sciences and anthropology, whereas Donna J. Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Rosi Braidotti take into account the outcomes of advances in science, biomedical ones in particular, as well as examine languages and images we employ to convey them. Natural sciences, medicine and biotechnology have long questioned the traditional conceptions of the human as a being apart with respect to other forms of life. Although the main research perspective in this chapter is anthropology of things, I also present here the issues developed in the framework of new materialism, posthumanism and transhumanism. Chapter 3. Nature as a Phantasm of Culture In this chapter I focus on the ambivalence of the duality ‘animal sex – human erotica’. I depart from such clear-cut oppositions which juxtapose the animal against the human, nature against culture, and the normative against the non-normative. This owes to reflection inspired by the ideas of the posthuman, new materialism and the concept of posthuman sexuality which grew out of that intellectual background. In the perspective I have adopted, the dichotomy of “animal sex” versus “human eroticism” is hardly tenable. One can still track down and deconstruct such notions as well as suggest new ways of conceiving and presenting the complex relationships between the human and the non-human, or else still—to portray the sphere of eroticism within a nexus of manifold, non-binary but yet mutable, networked relations. What does not reveal directly returns in secret form: in costumes, utility items, design and eaten products. Chapter 4. The Obsession of Artificial Bodies The heroes and heroines of this chapter are: mannequins, dolls, androids, cyborgs from literature and science fiction. I showed the gender context of those phenomena, as I am convinced that the aesthetic paragons of male and female physiques with their erotic overtones enact certain models of social relationships, and thus impose roles to be performed due to gender. Stories, novels, films – these are the areas of analysis of this chapter. Analyzing various literary, film, art works, I ask about the attitude of people to technology: its potential, limitations, entanglement in new forms of discrimination and oppression. Chapter 5. The “Beloved” Objects This chapter looks at things closest to one’s body (in the literal sense): clothes, underwear, footwear and considers the affects engendered by those objects. These roles are perpetuated (and much less often undermined) not only by dedicated systems of laws, morality, and customs, but also by a plethora of items, things, and objects by means of which we assume certain roles. The main category organizing the analysis of eroticism and sexuality in this approach is “obscenity”. I show ambivalent and related this term in the contemporary culture. Conclusion/ Chapter 6. This work is concerned with bodies, items, and substances in the material sense, as well as in the relationships between humans and nonhumans, other-than-humans, more-than-humans. The ties and associations with the things we produce, use, watch, and touch are by no means straightforward and limited to mere functionality. I perceive them rather as complex relationships of interwoven ingenuity, impulses, and affects. The goal I strove to accomplish was to show that in the erotic sphere the relationships are multilayered and exceedingly intricate. The eroticism of arch-non-human bodies spans affects and conscious modes of (self)creation, while things, objects do take part in these “dealings”. In the afterword, I showed that thinking about our-human, relationships with stuff, objects, and no human, more-than-human, finding non-human in ourselves, opens up new cognitive, emotional and social/community perspectives.
Researching Sex and Sexualities: methodological reflections, ed. Edited by Charlotte Morris, Paul Boyce, Andrea Cornwall, Hannah Frith, Laura Harvey and Yingying Huang, Afterword by Ken Plummer, Zed Books, 2018
The Insinuating Body investigates how pornography, sex work, and aberrant sexualities in the United States constitute an uncanny epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic condition of the in-between—an oscillation between the private and the public. My theoretical-visual work emerges from the intimacy of the “I” as profoundly collaborative. Sexual justice actively seeks connections that may be saturated with irreducible differences. My choice to unapologetically implicate the “I” is not a reaction to reductive vernacular, but a vital commitment to embodied thinking—an explicit integration of the private into the public. Protean sexualities, ranging from sex activism to female ejaculation, deconstruct patriarchal inscriptions on our bodies. In cultural production as in its reception, vulnerability becomes a vital intervention in public-private discourse. Since the private is construed as vulnerable and ambiguous, it “requires” unquestioned taxonomies of regulation and normalization. The sanctity of normalcy constitutes a hegemony of representation that colonizes our relationships with our own bodies. In contrast, an uncanny erotic politics reorients our cultural notions of pleasure and vulnerability, and ultimately who has power, imagination, and sovereignty over our bodies. Merging the private with the public—the ob-scene (off-stage) with the explicit—we can generate ethical individual and collective sexual justice.
To Suffer Pleasure: The Shattering of the Ego as the Psychic Labor of Perverse Sexuality
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2014
In this article I advance an alternative exegesis of perverse sexuality that permits an analyst to regard it not from within a state of alarm but with the capacity to recognize perversity's generative potential. Pleasure and pain are often approached as independent experiences that become soldered together under the aegis of trauma or pathology. In this essay, I argue that pleasure and pain are developmentally coextensive phenomena. I rely on Laplanche's theory of infantile sexuality to suggest that the sexualization of suffering is developmentally installed in sexuality's very ontology. Although frequently and reflexively conceptualized in psychoanalysis as a demise of the sexual function, perversity can be, I propose, oftentimes sexuality's aspiration. Through its interembodied transgressiveness, perversion recruits the body's materiality to perform meaningful psychic labor: to facilitate the transformation of intergenerational debts we have inherited from others in the form of enigmatic parental and cultural implants into a relationship to oneself.
Eroticism of More-and Other-than-Human Bodies A Study of the Anthropology of Things
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
Introduction/Chapter 1. : The Dynamics of Affects and Experiences of the More- and Other-than-Human Bodies When eroticism and sex are discussed, the attention most often focuses on what takes place between people. In this work, the erotic spectacle is more comprehensive and features non-human actors: things, stuff, objects. I set out from the assumption that objects, such as clothing, undergarments, footwear, and jewellery play an important role in stimulating erotic imagination, becoming participants in that process. The theoretical foundation for acknowledging things as active contributors to social relationships (as one should approach amorous-erotic-sexual relationships) derives from the anthropology of things. This perspective is also tangibly present in my analyses, since I seek to show the (post)human, transversal, liminal bodies as they become fused with other—animate and inanimate—bodies and objects. The attribute of “more- and other-than-human” in the title refers to the human, but a human construed in accordance with the concepts posited by the posthuman, new materialism and anthropology of things; an entity functioning in complex networks that link them inseparably with other beings: things, objects, animals, plants, sand, or water. Chapter 2. More-than-human Network of Relationality In this chapter I present theoretical and methodological issues. I show that research, generally referred as study of things, functions in different contexts. The baseline standpoint adopted by Daniel Miller, Peter Pells, Ikuya Tokoro and Kari Kawai is that of social sciences and anthropology, whereas Donna J. Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Rosi Braidotti take into account the outcomes of advances in science, biomedical ones in particular, as well as examine languages and images we employ to convey them. Natural sciences, medicine and biotechnology have long questioned the traditional conceptions of the human as a being apart with respect to other forms of life. Although the main research perspective in this chapter is anthropology of things, I also present here the issues developed in the framework of new materialism, posthumanism and transhumanism. Chapter 3. Nature as a Phantasm of Culture In this chapter I focus on the ambivalence of the duality ‘animal sex – human erotica’. I depart from such clear-cut oppositions which juxtapose the animal against the human, nature against culture, and the normative against the non-normative. This owes to reflection inspired by the ideas of the posthuman, new materialism and the concept of posthuman sexuality which grew out of that intellectual background. In the perspective I have adopted, the dichotomy of “animal sex” versus “human eroticism” is hardly tenable. One can still track down and deconstruct such notions as well as suggest new ways of conceiving and presenting the complex relationships between the human and the non-human, or else still—to portray the sphere of eroticism within a nexus of manifold, non-binary but yet mutable, networked relations. What does not reveal directly returns in secret form: in costumes, utility items, design and eaten products. Chapter 4. The Obsession of Artificial Bodies The heroes and heroines of this chapter are: mannequins, dolls, androids, cyborgs from literature and science fiction. I showed the gender context of those phenomena, as I am convinced that the aesthetic paragons of male and female physiques with their erotic overtones enact certain models of social relationships, and thus impose roles to be performed due to gender. Stories, novels, films – these are the areas of analysis of this chapter. Analyzing various literary, film, art works, I ask about the attitude of people to technology: its potential, limitations, entanglement in new forms of discrimination and oppression. Chapter 5. The “Beloved” Objects This chapter looks at things closest to one’s body (in the literal sense): clothes, underwear, footwear and considers the affects engendered by those objects. These roles are perpetuated (and much less often undermined) not only by dedicated systems of laws, morality, and customs, but also by a plethora of items, things, and objects by means of which we assume certain roles. The main category organizing the analysis of eroticism and sexuality in this approach is “obscenity”. I show ambivalent and related this term in the contemporary culture. Conclusion/ Chapter 6. This work is concerned with bodies, items, and substances in the material sense, as well as in the relationships between humans and nonhumans, other-than-humans, more-than-humans. The ties and associations with the things we produce, use, watch, and touch are by no means straightforward and limited to mere functionality. I perceive them rather as complex relationships of interwoven ingenuity, impulses, and affects. The goal I strove to accomplish was to show that in the erotic sphere the relationships are multilayered and exceedingly intricate. The eroticism of arch-non-human bodies spans affects and conscious modes of (self)creation, while things, objects do take part in these “dealings”. In the afterword, I showed that thinking about our-human, relationships with stuff, objects, and no human, more-than-human, finding non-human in ourselves, opens up new cognitive, emotional and social/community perspectives.
Embodiment and the Body - Journal Issue ( Editor)
Cinema - Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2012
The third issue of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image takes up the theme of embodiment and the body, its relationship to Cinema's history (theory and practice), and its reawakening in a recent body of research which is attentive, not only to film, but also to new media practices. It encompasses the dismantling of one of the foundational theoretical perspectives of film studies for over a century-the metaphor of the disembodied eye-and focuses on a groundbreaking field which as been attempting to integrate the body in conceptual models for understanding art and cinematic spectatorship. It aims to be a contribution to the approaches which have been recently trying to show the fallacy of the distinction between the physical and the mental, focusing on the concept of embodiment taken, either as phenomenological encounter immersed in everyday practices, or as a material and physical process made of fluids, energies and forces. In both cases, the quest for understanding Cinema entails acknowledging its inherent sensuous qualities and recognizing that the intellectual, mental and cognitive activities must be reinterpreted as embodied and carnal. This new understanding of cinema's spectatorship, which integrates the spectator's body in the process of his/her emotional and mental encounter with images, has been accompanied by an ongoing development of the moving image's sensuous and haptic qualities in contemporary world, media practices and artistic scene. Two directions form the pivotal points of two vastly different paradigms for the sensuous qualities of images, which underpin understandings of cinema based Cinema 3 EDITORIAL 2 on divergent concepts of visual excess, the body and the senses. On one hand, we find the commercial uses of this visual excess, attached to logics of pure commodity consumption of images. On the other, we have a purely disruptive use of this visual excess, in practices that aim to explore the role of the senses and of the body, not as a place for amusement and diversion, but quite on the contrary: as a place of resistance to the dominance of rational/verbal based social order and scientific and capitalistic ordering of the self. It is an erotics of the image, an "acinema" (Lyotard), a "cinema of the body'" (Deleuze), a dilation of the senses, an ecstasy (Eisenstein), a "vertigo" (Picabia), a nervous excitation, but more than that, it is an opening of perception. Their understanding of the body as an excess relates closely to Walter Benjamin's material rehabilitation of "reception in distraction," which is narrowly connected to his understanding of the term aesthetics. This idea of sensuous experience primarily associated with aesthesis, is fully present in the logic of "pure sensation," one of the pivotal aims of the first artistic avant-gardes of European cinema, supported by some of the most influential filmmakers at the height of artistic modernism in the twentieth century, like Epsein, Artaud, Delluc, or even Gance, not to mention the soviet montage theorists like Eisenstein. For all of them, the "sensations" produced by films depend upon the physical domain, upon the spectator body, acting directly on the senses, taking the field of aesthetics, in its original use in the Greek aesthesis, and the body in its corporeal material nature. How do we understand this aesthesis in cinema and its relationship to the spectator body taken as an excess based on its corporeal material nature? The understanding of this relationship arises from how the body or embodiment is conceptualized as the existential or/and material ground of perception, and bridges different traditions of thought. It stems mainly from two backgrounds: a phenomenological and a materialistic one, that have recently came Cinema 3 EDITORIAL 3 together in post-cognitivist approaches to film. Despite their mutual differences, there is an undeniable congruence between the phenomenological approaches to film, the concept of embodiment and the idea of the body as a corporeal material nature capable of creating meaning that are responsible for the proximity of these approaches in post-cognitivist views. They share the very same notion of physical sensation as a creative and productive excess and they both ascribe the same understanding of "sensation," "ecstasy" and "embodied affect" but, most importantly, they both assign a formulation of a non-dichotomous concept of mind and body that we discover in the idea of "sensory understanding," of a "flesh ontology" (Merleau-Ponty) or of "carnal thoughts" (Sobchack), and a challenge to cognitivist disembodied understandings of film's spectatorship, as well as an attempt to conceptualize embodied vision and spectatorship as an inherently tactile and affective process. How can we integrate this movement of the image towards the body and embodied perception, in its corporeal material nature, into the contemporary discussion of cinema and the moving images? Currently leading in new digital media and fully present in the concepts of interactivity and immersion, haptical visuality looks for a palpable sensuous connection between the body of the viewer and the body of the image, a correlation between the physical perception, its affective dimension, and its resonance in the image. The aim is to achieve a new understanding of cinema's spectatorship based, not on an idea of mimesis, but exploring the far more complicated notion of contact. And contact here is conceived as a complex visceral and perceptive experience of "porosity between the body of the image and the perceiver's body." Shape, texture, colour, protuberances and curls, all touch the perceiver and involve her/him in a sensuous and affective continuous resonance. They are not simple features of the image, but "energetic impulses," which vibrate through a tactile, palpable cinematic