Chaste Rape: - European Graduate School

Chaste Rape:
Sexual-Pedagogical Violence, Canon Formation,
and Rhetorical (Actual-Virtual) Cultures
A Dissertation Submitted to the Division of Media and Communications
of The European Graduate School in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
by Victor J . Vitanza
June 2003

Foreword
Chaste Rape
Remnants: Rape as the Exemplar of Negation. Chaste Thinking (Jed). Rape as Legitimization for The
History of Rhetoric. Isocrates • Grounding: Grund, Abgrund, Becoming-Bird. Contestation and Testing.
Topology as a Study of Doughnuts and Spheres • Style: Barthes's Obtuse Thinking-Reading-Writing. How
to Read Chaste Rape? Time and Significance (Durrell). Conduction (Ulmer) • The Lines of Flight Across
Three Paratopoi, Conductively Linked: Rape (Basement). Pedagogy (Pederasty, Sexual Violence). Canon
(Obsessive and Hysterical Thinking) • The Irreparable: What is Written (Secretly, Chastely) on the Back of
this Corpus of a Dissertation? • Dedication
Acknowledgements
The Basement
Photographic, Virtual Readings • Reportage, Court Records, and Meditations • The Product • Resistances to
a Pedagogy of the Oppressor • From the Attic to the Basement to the Madhouse
Part 1: Broaching the Abject
Chapter 1. How To Think, To Read, To Write Rape?
The Question of Revenge • The Question of Ethos • Thinking and Reading Rape: Warner (Brownmiller).
Warner (Castle and Eagleton on Clarrisa). Thornhill and Palmer (Brownmiller). Brownmiller Redux •
Reading and Writing Revenge Fantasies: Hesford (Strosser's Rape Stories). Viewings. A Nostalgic Near
Reading • Writing and Reading Autobiographical Rape: Dworkin ("They Took My Body from Me and
Used It") • "Rapist Ethics" • "The Test"
Chapter 2. Thinking, Reading, Writing Rape
Millet Redux: The Most Typical Rape • Meditations on a Human Sacrifice: The Sacrifice. "Within."
Photographs • Kristeva, Psychoanalysis, Abjection: Locating the Abject. Finding Resistance. Living in the
Double-Bind. Vomiting • Girard, Anthropology, Sacrifice: Mimetic Desire. Double Bind. Violent Unanimity.
Keeping Vengeance in Check • The Sacred, Sacrifice: Tracing the Victim. Dworkin ("I Want a Twenty-Four
Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape"). Girard's and Dworkin's Call for a Non-Sacrificial Reading •
The Basement Redux: The Game of the Double Bind. The Death of Sex and Potency
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Chapter 3. The Assessment-Test Event
Part 2: Oedipal Canonization
Chapter 4. Oedi-Pedagogy
Masson on Freud (Assault on Truth): Test Drive. Parabase. ReCapitulation. Freud and Fliess. Another
Parabase. Masson Returns. Assessment. Abraham Returns. Taking Leave Momentarily • Freud's Home
Schooling: Freud on Freud ("Some Reflections"). Jacob (Freud) and Two Cultures. Home Seminars.
Lessons. Pederasty. Infans • Anonymous ("My Mentor, My Rapist"): The Questions
Chapter 5. Canon, Obsessive/Hysteric
Freud Redux: The Tain in the Mirror. Preposition to Paraproposition. A Child Playing a Game. A Game
Playing a Child • Cummings on Canon ("Principled Pleasures"): Obsession and Its Other (Hysteria, first
try). Obsession and Its Other (Hysteria, second try) • Touchings: Kleist (Marquise, No Memory). Kipnis
(Marx, Hysterical Body of Knowledge). Eagleton Reduxed (Marx, No Laughter). Dworkin (Rape
Museums)
Part 3: Chaste Media
Chapter 6. Chaste Cinema I?
Quick Cuts: Cut to One. Cut to Two. Cut to Three • Scanning the Cuts: Installation. DVD One (Amadeus,
Canonization). Installation, DVD Two (Henry Fool, Pedagogy). Installation, DVD Three (Multiple
Maniacs, Chaste Rape in Divine Places) • Cut To Paste: Writing on "a Riemann surface"
Chapter 7. Chaste Cinema II?
Liberators Take Liberties: Research (Facts, Statistics, Testimony). Further Testimony (German and
Russian). The Master Narrative (A Pre-meditation). Resistance. Counter-Resistance. Meditations. Pagan
Meditations (Eros) • Aphrodite: The Shadow Narrative I • Baise-Moi: The Shadow Narrative II • Hiroshima
Mon Amour, The Mourning Narrative: Eros Redux, Exemplars of "A Life." Sensation. Unmourning.
Antimemory
Part 4: from the Attic and Basement to the Living Room
Chapter 8. Virtual Rape and Community
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A (virtual) Rape in Cyberspace: Baroque House. The Baroque House that is The Book. A Deleuze-Leibniz-Borges
Excursus. The Question of Justice. And Yet • A(nother) Caesura: On Our Way From Beyond Baroque MOO to
LibidinalMOO-WOOmb. New Ethoi. A New Geography. An Announcement. In the Meanwhile a Question • Our
Metaphor of BaroqueMOO Folding into BovineMOO into WOOmb—Or, Opening the Libidinal Surface
Rebeginnings, from Architecture to AnArchitexture
• Obsession and Its Other (Hysteria, third try): Wheres We have been, Wheres We will have been?. Derrida
(Archive Fever). Deleuze (Foucault, "A New Archivist"). Deleuze (Foucault, "Foldings") • Refusing To Be
Male, Refusing To Be Female: Dworkin (Woman Hating)-Stoltenberg (Refusing To Be a Man) • "the third-
instructed (one)": Serres (The Troubadour of Knowledge) • The Deleuzean Millennium: The New Earth:
Incompossible anarchitectures (Leibniz and folding, living spaces). Incompossible anarchitextures
(incompossible narratives). Incompossible anarchijects (incompossible superjects) • The Coming
(AnArchi) Community: Prescription-Inscription. Imminent Reversibility. Irreversibility. Multiply
Principles. Irreparable.
Endnotes
Bibliography
4

Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally.
Finally but why?
To learn to live: a strange watchword. Who would learn? From whom? To teach to live, but to
whom? Will we ever know? Will we ever know how to live and first of all what "to learn to live" means?
And why "finally"?
By itself, out of context—but a context, always, remains open, thus fallible and insufficient—this
watchword forms an almost unintelligible syntagm. Just how far can its idiom be translated moreover?
A magisterial locution, all the same—or for that very reason. For from the lips of a master this
watchword would always say something about violence. It vibrates like an arrow in the course of an
irreversible and asymmetrical address, the one that goes most often from father to son, master to disciple,
or master to slave ("I'm going to teach you to live"). Such an address hesitates, therefore: between address
as experience (is not learning to live experience itself?), address as education, and address as taming or
training [dressage].
But to learn to live, to learn it from oneself and by oneself, all alone, to teach oneself to live ("I
would like to learn to live finally"), is that not impossible for a living being? Is it not what logic itself
forbids? To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life,
taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life. At the
internal border or the external border, it is a heterodidactics between life and death.
And yet nothing is more necessary than this wisdom. It is ethics itself: to learn to live—alone,
from oneself, by oneself. Life does not know how to live otherwise.
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (xvii-xviii; Derrida's emphasis).
Then the young slave woman from the Greek camp came over to her, knelt down before her, and
laid Penthesilea's hands against her face. She said, "Penthesilea. Come join us." "Join you? What does that
mean?" "Come to the mountains. The forest. The caves along the Scamander. Between killing and dying
there is a third alternative: living."
die.
Christa Wolf, Cassandra (118).
A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to
Bernard Berenson as qtd. by Clarice Lespector, The Passion According to G.H. (vi).
My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense,
experience, and practice, let him order the architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but
according to his neighbor.
5

Foreword
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Practice" in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (274).
"Every thinker thinks one only thought. Here, too, thinking differs essentially from science. The
researcher needs constantly new discoveries and inspirations, else science will bog down and fall
into error. The thinker needs one thought only."
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (50).
" 'You just wait—I'll teach you what we call obedience!' a mother might say to her boy who won't
come home. Does she promise him a definition of obedience? No. Or is she going to give him a
lecture? No again, if she is a proper mother. Rather, she will convey to him what obedience is. Or
better, the other way around: she will bring him to obey. Her success will be more lasting the less
she scolds him; it will be easier, the more directly she can get him to listen—not just condescend
to listen, but listen in such a way that he can no longer stop wanting to do it. And why? Because
his ears have been opened and he now can hear what is in accord with his nature."
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (48; emphasis mine).
I have decided not to introduce this dissertation in some traditional manner (What is my Thesis?,
How do I support it chapter by chapter?, Why I am so Wise?, Why I am so Clever?, Why I Write Such
Good Books? 1 ); rather, I decided to write a foreword that simply puts on display some rubrics
(destinations) that might prepare readers to know something about Why I chose—or was called—to write
on this topic—Chaste Rape—and How it was and came to be written. 2 There is always this question of
Why? concerning this topic—which I unfold more fully in chapter 1—but I would prefer to say here and
now simply that I have accepted (to obey) the call (Heidegger, What 48). And yet, I have accepted nothing;
rather, I was sent on my way (46). On this trip.
Here are a select few rubrics (again, destinations) with para-conceptual starting places that may
provide some insights into my interests and how they are driven by tensors to dissimulate (decreate) and to
"render compatible a [radical] multitude of incompossible" connections, linkages (Lyotard, Libidinal 55).
Remnants
Rape as the Exemplar of Negation: When I was previously called, I wrote a book Negation,
Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric (SUNY 1997). It became rather unclearly clear to me, while
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writing Negation, that rape (sexual violence) was a, if not the, founding principle for what has gone and
continues to go for thinking, reading, and writing. Rape is the exemplar for negation (negativity), that is,
Hegel's determinate negation (Phenomenology 51) as well as DeSade's negation-abjection. As I began to
see in writing Negation, it is not bad enough that human beings are subjects (subjected to epistemic
violence), or objects (objectified) but it is even worse that human beings are abjects (ab-jected, made into
waste, flushed away or sent up the chimney). Zarathustra asks: "Don't you smell the slaughterhouse and
ovens of the spirit even now? Does not this town steam with the fumes of slaughtered spirit?" (Nietzsche,
Thus Spake 288).
It became equally unclearly clear to me that my interests were particularly and peculiarly driven
by tensors to dissimulate this chain of subject-object-abject, and to attach it, in a new assemblage, to all
un/kinds of incompossible phrases and statements. I desired to set it lose from a point-line relationship to a
line of flights:
Chaste Thinking (Jed): My additional impetus for writing this dissertation is Stephanie Jed's
Chaste Thinking. Jed links rape with the Humanist foundations of Western thought and education. While
she focuses on Florentine Humanist texts, I have opened up the theme of Chaste Thinking to Chaste Rape
most widely and across philosophical-literary genres (thinking in literacy and other electronic media such
as video and film), and still most widely in terms of actuality (what is called reality) and virtuality (what is
called sham or simulation). 4 There is no place where rape has not taken place.
My dissertation is less about the representation of rape and more inclusively about thinking,
reading, and writing rape. It is an examination of various non-semiotic processual ways of thinking and
reading while writing rape. Writing is not read (i.e., is not a product of representation); writing here is
writing as thinking and reading (processes of re-presencing). Writing is not a point with lines, but lines
without points, as I suggested above. I perpetually unfold one point.less after another point.less.
I am not thinking of rape as in the realm of Being, but in the relation of beings—though the rest of
the world thinks about rape in relation to Being, with myths, gods, immanence moving from the god-rapist
(the rapturer) to a mere mortal (say, Leda or Judge Schreber).
. 3
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But in providing this account, ever so briefly here, I encapsulate it, make it into a product. In this
summarized and commodified abstract of a dissertation. This is even a problem in the genre of a Foreword.
The point.less becoming the point after point after point. But I think, write, read moments after moments in
the various chapters. These are not chapters. They are at best blocs of words that go either their way or
quite other, peculiar wayves. I keep returning to the issue of style, specifically, a neo-mannerist style. (A
note: When I first typed the word.less wayves, I had no idea what it might mean for me, much less for a
reader. I just kept using it in contrast with ways. I will not explain it here, but only invite readers to follow
it and to see when it happens—actually, several times—to take on in/significance for me.)
Most of all, my attempt is at thinking rape without ressentiment, without reactionary thinking,
which fixes rape into a dyad of a victimizer and a victim and, consequently, which demands a redemption
of the past event. My attempt is to think—to dis/engage in thinking about—what remains unthought about
rape (sexual violence) between and among human beings. Rape is not merely a subject-object (or abject)
relation. When a person lies, there is more than one lying. When a person rapes another, there are more
than two involved. One of my specific concerns about rape is its thinking in relation to community. I query
that relation perpetually and in terms of the discussion about a community without a community, which is a
discussion engendered by wayves of the Nancy-Blanchot-Agamben-Ronell bloc. 5
Rape as Legitimization for The History of Rhetoric: What I had discovered in Negation was that
The History of Rhetoric, which is the History of cultures and how they establish interfaces among
themselves, is actually and virtually The History of Rape. (I accept Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will
as the history of rape, but I also accept simultaneously that The History of Rhetoric is also the History of
Rape.) The whole history of the West, as a history of the polis (of community as its various relations) and
how rhetoric (as judicial, deliberative, and epideictic speech acts) has invented the polis with its relations
and changed it as a life force, is predicated on rape narratives, or a death force. I am thinking of
The rape of Korê and the wandering of Demeter, leading to the founding of Athens (see Isocrates,
Panegyricus I: 135; II: 28-29);
The rape of Leda, which gives us Helen and Clytemnestra;
The rape of Helen, which gives us, so to speak, Aeneas and Livy's histories;
The rape of the Vestal, which gives history the twins, Romulus and Remus and gives us Rome;
The rape of the Sabine Women, which brings forth the Roman people;
The rape of Lucretia, which brings forth the Republic.
It is rapes all the way down, creating one new, yet the same, community after another. (Perhaps I
hysterically exaggerate about "the whole history," but if I do, then it needs to be characterized as such,
nonetheless.) This discovery of mine, of course, is not new. We know, but we do not question near enough,
rape as narrative foundation or grounding for community. 6 As Michel Foucault in the first volume of The
History of Sexuality thinks of sex and the social attitudes toward it as being neither visible nor hidden (20),
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I think, read, and write of Chaste Rape in a (near, adjacent) perspective and mannerism. I must say,
however, that I had perversely intended to write this dissertation without any mention of Foucault, and held
off for the most part until the closing section, "Rebeginnings."
There is much that is peculiar about this dissertation since I have attempted to accept the call to
enownment. By wayves of Er-Reignis (eignen, verbal form, "to appropriate"; and eigen, adjectival form,
"proper" or "own"). The mother calling the child to obey, as Heidegger says, expects the child, however, to
accept the call according to its own nature. Therefore, I write this topic, being appropriated, in its own and
my own peculiar wayves (see Agamben, Potentialities 117). In accepting this call, I must go about my
grand/mother's business. To be called to thinking is to become perpetually called to appropriation, and yet
to expropriation, to being exposed. To losing face. 7
Isocrates: The great historian of antiquity Werner Jaeger, who wrote the three volume work
Paideia: The Idea of Greek Culture, makes Isocrates the hero of the story, Isocrates, who has a fondness—a
certain penchant—for reestablishing the founding narratives. I say little else in this dissertation, after this
brief statement with its long endnote, about Isocrates. 8 This is a dissertation—if it focuses on persons as
exemplars, as conceptual personae—about Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin, about their thinking, reading,
writing rape. They, along with Virginia Woolf, show the way and the wayves. But of course, there are still
others.
Grounding
Grund Abgrund Becoming-Bird: Knowing that I would be called to give an account of my
grounding/s for thinking, I set to work, but never arrived, at such an account. All grounding is problematic.
There is no separating out the history of grounds (Grund) from its subsequent hystery of Abgrund (the
yawning abyss, the presence of absence). I write specifically about grounds-foundations all the way
through to the end, or "Rebeginnings." (After all, I say repeatedly that rape is the grounding of western
thinking, that Isocrates et al. ap/proved the narratives for that grounding and that Millett, Dworkin, and
Woolf et al. provided the counter-narratives and "unsubstantial territory." 9 I write about the earth (holes,
cellars, basements); I write about flesh and skin. I write about writing on the earth and on skin. I write
about architecture and anarchitec(h)ture. But with my interests lying-in-thirds, I also write up and a-wayves
from the earth and skin to the sky, where Becoming-Bird flies: Zarathustra teaches: "Behold, there is no
above, no below! Throw yourself around, out, back, you who are light! Sing! Speak no more! Are not all
words made for the grave and heavy? Are not all words lies to those who are light? Sing! Speak no more!"
(343). I take seriously, yet playfully, Zarathustra's call to escape the spirit of gravity. As the teacher (who
allows us to learn) tells us: "[SH]e who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and
run and climb and dance: one cannot fly into flying" (307). Learning to run and fly affords us the opportune
moment (kairos) to fall to the earth and to mark our flesh and skin with lessons. What I have learned is to
move through all the groundings; for any one grounding, at the expense of the others, is dangerous. For all
9

of us. My first teachers before Heidegger-Schirmacher were Charlie Parker ("Bird") and Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart (with his birds). I listened to them fly, like birds, when I was but an adolescent.
Contestation and Testing: Therefore, I say Yes to all three notions of grounds, while contesting
and testing them through an endless series of rebeginnings. Contestation is a paracept that I take from the
Blanchot-Bataille-Foucault-Ronell bloc. In Negation, I began with Georges Bataille, who had begun in his
Inner Experience with Maurice Blanchot, or what he could abstract from Blanchot's Thomas The Obscure.
Bataille writes:
I heard the author set out the foundation for all 'spiritual' life, which can only:
—have its principle and its end in the absence of salvation, in the renunciation of all hope,
—affirm of inner experience that it is authority (but all authority expiates itself),
—be contestation of itself and non-knowledge. (102)
In moving from Negation to Chaste Rape, I turned to Foucault, who had gathered this bloc of thinkers-
thinking and had written:
This philosophy of nonpositive affirmation is, I believe, what Blanchot was defining through his
principle of 'contestation.' Contestation does not imply a generalized negation, but an affirmation
that affirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity. Rather than being a process of thought for
denying existences or values, contestation is the act which carries them all to their limits and, from
there, to the Limit where an ontological decision achieves its end; to contest is to proceed until one
reaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being. There, at
the transgressed limit, the 'yes' of contestation reverberates, leaving without echo the hee haw of
Nietzsche's braying ass. (Language 36; emphasis mine)
To the notion of contestation in Chaste Rape, I added Avital Ronell's inventive thinkings on the test, on
testings, on testers, and experimentation. (Without Ronell's thinking the test, I could not have written this
dissertation.)
Topology as a Study of Doughnuts and Spheres: Sporadically, I turn to thinking, reading, and
writing rape in terms of topology with its configurations of doughnuts (do-nuts, do-nots, with their holes)
and spheres (with their smooth surfaces). Or to striated space and smooth space. I find it productive to
stretch words, figures, and images both contingently and casuistically. I am concerned with invention,
origination throughout, and topology has shown me the wayves of reconfiguring natural shapes (points and
lines) into, heretofore, unknown lines of flight. Exemplars would be the Moebius strip and the Klein jar,
among others. And let us not forget a Riemann surface.
Style
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Barthes's Obtuse Thinking-Reading-Writing: The whole time in writing this Foreword, I have
been writing about styles of thinking, reading, and writing. Rape. Unclearly clear, I am given to reading by
wayves of obtuse meanings. Roland Barthes, in his "The Third Meaning [Sense]," speaks of a meaning that
has been pushed to the background, has been redirected into an unthought, but which must be and wants to
be thought. The first meaning is informational; the second, symbolic—both of which are foregrounded and
favored, but leave unthought what is and would still today be seen as idiosyncratic and, therefore, illogical
and best left out. It is this third sense in thinking, reading, and writing that is my "one only thought"
(Heidegger, Called 50). It is thirds, which means everything excluded by way of the negative, or the
principles of logic (identification, non-contradiction, and excluded third). As Heidegger says, Nietzsche
thinks not only what is foregrounded but "what ever remains unspoken in it" (in the so-called background).
What remains? "The wasteland grows; woe to him who hides [i.e., makes Chaste] wastelands within!"
(Called 55).
How to Read Chaste Rape?: Is this a question that a Foreword should answer? If so, then, I will
give you a nyanza: Chaste Rape is not written as a product (i.e., point-line-point with a conclusion), though
it is ever falling into production; it is not written as a product that has strained-filtered out all thinking that
arrived at a product and that presents only the product itself. It is not working with a hermeneutics but a
euretics, not working with interpretations of exemplars of Chaste Rape, but with euretics that search for
third, not meanings, but senses (sens, directions), that is, with creating theories, theoeyezings, seeings,
senses of Chaste Rape. It is not a product that you will find within its covers, but it is a series without a
series of processes of th.inkings—What is called th.inkings—on events called Rape that remain Chaste. I
am concerned with the connections between Rape and how it remains Chaste because of incipient and
insidious chastisings. Without end. This is my only and every concern. This is what I care about and what I
ask you, Readers, to care about!
Time and Significance (Durrell): I am well aware that this Foreword—and soon in my thinkings in
chapters—may be very difficult for some readers to follow (poria, aporia), not because of any profundity,
but because like the narrator of Lawrence Durrell's Justine, "What I most need to do is to record
experiences, not in the order in which they took place—for that is history—but in the order in which they
first became significant for me" (100).
While the chapters in Chaste Rape may move in an order that might be anticipated—just look at
the blockings of the chapters and sections in the Table of Contents—what is within the chapters, however,
does not always follow as expected. The thinking, reading, and writing protocol is more novelistic than
academic. The purpose for this break in academic protocol is to dis/order, to allow to be said what wants to
be thought (thinking), read (reading), and written (writing). An academic protocol would only allow for
exclusion here. It is the case, however, that some of what comes to be said could be said in academic
discourse, but still so much would be left out—jettisoned to fall to earth—and besides, I would be charged
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with writing nothing but a performative contradiction! It would be this way, if I wrote about what was not
in terms of what is. (As you read through to the end, the "Rebeginnings," this will all become rather self-
evident.) And besides again, I wrote this dissertation less for an audience and more for what I wanted to
come to understand for myself. Simply put, I wanted to think thinking about Chaste Rape. Such thinking
requires patience; thinking itself is patient, for it waits on itself to make present what has been there but not,
heretofore, seen. Thinking is patient. Thinking has become my teacher, rather, "learner." If others find
value in what I have come to see, then good. If not, then good again.
Temporality is the issue here. I wrestle with the what was and the what was not, or rather the not
yet. Of prime importance to me are the paratopoi of the irrevocable, the imminently reversible, the
irreversible, the irreparable. Temporality is not just Chronos, but also Aeon (Aion). Temporality is not just
memory but also duration. Learning not just to endure but also to live in duration. This dissertation, if one
would insist on knowing, is about how to learn to live. A rather impossible topic. In dis/respect to rape. In
finitude.
Conduction (Ulmer): Normally, in academic protocols of thinking, reading, and writing the
point—there is always a point that will control the line of thinking—is to state a claim or proposition and
then to support, support, support it—P, S, S, S, S—until the principle of sufficient reason has been fed what
it needs and can sleep satisfied. What is said is always Psssst. What is said is intimate, deadly, the very
epitome of being a Chaste thinker. This is the sleep of Reason, demonstrative discourse (the discourse that
has the need to de-monster). There is more than enough—perhaps far too much—of this protocol informing
what follows within the chapters. But not at the most general levels. There is, instead, at those levels a
series of lines of flight in terms of a set without a set of three paratopoi—all of which are conductively
linked (this is the discourse that would invite the monsters to return, to reclaim their rightful, just place in
the world of the living, to make living more abundant). We must learn to live with monsters, big ones, little
ones. We must learn to live with the great excluded. (Repressed. Suppressed. Politically oppressed.) Along
with following Ulmer, I also follow the crazy wasp—zigzagging—flights of Gilles Deleuze and Michel
Serres. Have you ever chased after a crazy yellow and brown wasp, zigzagging? I have. In this dissertation.
The Lines of Flight Across Three Paratopoi, Conductively Linked
I am interested throughout in the relationships and proximities of rape, pedagogy, and
canon/ization. I will give only a few passing references, as if in a movie trailer, to suggest what the
relations might be among the three paracepts; for in the chapters themselves that compose Chaste Rape, I
think interminably about and chase after the possible but imcompossible linkages between and among such
proximities:
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Rape (Basement): Rape (sexual violence) is the basement, cellar, underground anywhere; it is the
topos, foundation Grund and then Abgrund. As Georges Bataille tells us: "The abyss Is the foundation of
the possible" (Guilty 109).
Pedagogy (Pederasty, Sexual Violence): Jane Gallop tells us: "Pederasty is undoubtedly a useful
paradigm for classic Western pedagogy. A great man penetrates a lesser man with his knowledge. The
student is empty, a receptacle for the phallus; the teacher is the phallic fullness of knowledge. . . . The fact
that teacher and student are of the same sex but of different ages contributes to the interpretation that the
student has no otherness, nothing different than the teacher, simply less" ("Immoral Teachers" 118).
Canon (Obsessive and Hysterical Thinking): In order for there to be a pedagogy of rape, there
must be a canon. Being raped, as Freud argues, leads to a subject's obsessive and hysterical thinking and
acting—and views of canon formation that shape pedagogy. Katherine Cummings writes, "Obsession is
one form of pedagogy, becoming a single discursive field and order of production in relation to hysteria as
(its) necessary other. The two neuroses produce two pleasures and two subjects, thus organizing two bodies
of knowledge and deployments of power" (90).
Rape takes everything away, and yet sets in e-motion a discursive production that sensationalizes
thought and talk about it, as we often find inscribed in movie trailers or book blurbs on the subject. But
inevitably the production moves from sensationalism to (a) banality (of evil). Yes, the wasp can turn on and
sting you. There is something of a sting (a con.game) in language itself. There also lies not just the studium
but the punctum. 10 But "we" cannot not chase after the little monster.
Foucault in his first volume of The History of Sexuality links sex with pedagogy. He writes:
"Through the political economy of population there was formed a whole grid of observations regarding sex.
. . . Between the state and the individual, sex became an issue, and a public issue no less; a whole web of
discourses, special knowledges, analyses, and injunctions settled upon it" (26). He continues: "Sex was
driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence. From the singular imperialism that
compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse, to the manifold mechanisms
which, in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice, incite, extract, distribute, and
institutionalize the sexual discourse, an immense verbosity is what our civilization has required and
organized" (33). In his closing sentence to his introduction, Foucault states: "What is peculiar to modern
societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to
speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" (35; Foucault's emphasis). Psssst. Hence,
another sense of the phrase Chaste Rape.
Foucault speaks of the Steven Marcus's notion of "those 'other Victorians' " (4). Expressions of
sexuality were repressed, yet transferred to other registers of thought and practice that included "the brothel
13

and the mental hospital . . . the prostitute, the client, and the pimp . . . the psychiatr[y]st and his hysteric . .
." (4) and to pornography. That is, to a scripting of rape.
Robin Morgan says, "Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice" (88). I agree and
complement her statement, in Chaste Rape terms, by adding that canonization is the theory; pedagogy, the
practice. But, of course, rape is the sub-stance (Grund and Abgrund).
What Foucault has to say about sensationalism of rape makes for thinking, reading, and writing
rape the most difficult—impossible—task. Perhaps we try and then just fall and skin ourselves (Taylor,
Hiding). And get up and try ever again. Until we can escape, even if only momentarily, the ground or
abyss, and fly. Awayves.
I am reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's writing of "Childhood scenes, children's games: the
starting point is a childlike refrain, but the child has wings already, he becomes celestial. The becoming-
child of the musician is coupled with a becoming-aerial of the child, in a nondecomposable block. The
memory of an angel, or rather the becoming of a cosmos. Crystal: the becoming-bird of Mozart is
inseparable from a becoming-initiate of the bird, and forms a block with it" (Thousand 350).
But then, reading this passage reminds me of another. Agamben at the close of his discussion of
the irrevocability of Troy (the irreparable, the irreversible) speaks of an angel with double wings: "A
Persian Neoplatonist once expressed the shadow that contingency casts on every creature in the image of
the dark wing of the archangel Gabriel" (270). The memory of an angel, the becoming of a new cosmos is
signified, as Agamben alludes to it, in Gabriel's dark wing, which turns toward the capacity to not-be.
While the white wing speaks of creation, the dark wing, decreation. Agamben explains—and this becomes
the very point.less of the "rebeginnings" toward the close of Chaste Rape—a forthcoming second creation
(or a third coming community), which is "a decreation in which what happened and what did not happen
are returned to their originary unity in the mind of God, while what could have not been but was becomes
indistinguishable from what could have been but was not" (270). This, perhaps, is one of the most
remarkable sentences that I have ever read.
Agamben continues: "Decreation is the immobile flight sustained by the black wing alone. At this
wing's every beating, the actual world is led back to its right not to be [founded on an act of rape, e.g.,
Sextus's rape of Lucretia]; all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence [incompossible worlds
in which Sextus does not rape, nor in which Lucretia suffers from rape, and in which "we" do not suffer this
heritage of a founding rape]. Sextus the ill-fated tyrant of Rome and Sextus the happy peasant of Corinth
blend together and can no longer be told apart. Gabriel's dark wing is the eternal scale keeping the best of
all possible worlds carefully balanced against the counterweight of all impossible [but incompossible]
worlds" (Potentialities 271). The possible out of the impossible, the potentiality out of impotentiality
14

(adynamis) to not be founded on rape! This, I think, as presumptuous as I may sound, allows for wayves to
learn how to live. Abundantly and with Abandonment.
In De Anima, Aristotle establishes the conditions for the possibilities of Avicenna's extending the
metaphor of the wax tablet (Bk. III, ch 4, 429b.30) from dynamis (potentiality) through energeia (actuality)
to adynamis (impotentiality). These parallel the potentiality to create, the actuality to create, and the
impotentiality to decreate. Agamben recalls Avicenna's writing of "the condition of a child who may
certainly one day learn to write but does not yet know anything about writing." The same can be said about
the condition, potentiality, of the child who someday may learn to fly. Aristotle-Avicenna-Agamben
continue to the second condition, which is the potentiality that "belongs to the child who has begun to write
with pen and ink; and the third, which is "a complete or perfect potentiality that belongs to the scribe who
is in full possession of the art of writing in the moment in which he does not write" (246-47; emphasis
mine).
This tripartite distinction in Aristotle-Avicenna reminds Agamben, that "in the Arabic tradition,
creation was thus likened to an act of writing; the agent or poetic intellect, which illuminates the [radically]
passive intellect and allows it to pass into actuality, is therefore identified with an angel, whose name is
'Pen' (Qalam)" (247). The child who would fly, not yet born into its impotentiality—Who is this child, this
infans, in all of "us"?—the child who would write the potentiality to not write . . . would dip his, her, its pen
in thought, in the shadow or dark ink of thought (or in Chora) (214-15, 243-44). And would decreate, like
the dark wing of Gabriel, multiple lines of incompossible flight. Out of here. Awayves.
The Irreparable
What is Written (Secretly, Chastely) on the Back of this Corpus of a dissertation?: Perhaps, I think,
it is Agamben's talking of "the impassibility of limbo with respect to divine justice." I think it goes
something like this:
Like the freed convict in Kafka's Penal Colony, who has survived the destruction of the machine
that was to have executed him, these beings have left the world of guilt and justice behind them:
The light that rains down on them is that irreparable light of the dawn following the novissima dies
of judgment. But the life that begins on [the new] earth after the last day is simply human life [but
beyond good and evil, this time, whatever singularities] (Coming 6-7)
In any case, it is abandonment, that is, the openness to the mystery of What learning to live?—living?—can
become when decreation takes place. 11
Dedication: This one is for my grandmother Mary. I recall for her endurance in living a passage
from Roland Barthes, which could serve as a Foreword to this dissertation in itself. He says:
15

I am increasingly convinced, both in writing and in teaching, that the fundamental operation of . . .
loosening method is, if one writes, fragmentation, and, if one teaches, digression, or, to put it in a
preciously ambiguous world, excursion. I should therefore like the speaking and the listening that
will be interwoven here to resemble the comings and going of a child playing beside his
[grand]mother, leaving her, returning to bring her a pebble, a piece of string, and thereby tracing
around a calm center a whole locus of play within which the pebble, the string come to matter less
than the enthusiastic giving of them. ("Inaugural Lecture, College de France" 476-77)
Acknowledgments
There is no writing that is not collaborative.
First, I have Wolfgang Schirmacher to thank for his many gifts. Wolfgang offered three places for
me. He offered The Communications and Media Program at The European Graduate School for me to think
in and to write this dissertation from my experiences at the School; he offered me the opportunity of learning
with him (he is a teacher, as Heidegger says, that lets "us" learn, who teaches us that what there is to learning
is learning itself; and he offered me an opportunity to be not only a student but also a colleague and a friend.
I will never forget, among so many encounters, Wolfgang interviewing me in NYC. We walked
around a circle in the park across from his apartment. The occasion was filled with a peripatetic series of
moments. Perhaps we circled three times—stopping a few times to emphasize a point—but I am sure he
would insist four times. Finally, after asking me a number of questions, we made it around to a bench, where
he said to me: "Okay, let us sit here. You are in the School." And there we talked some more about the
program in Communications, until we found ourselves talking about our two sons who were excited about
getting their new PlayStation 2 consoles and games. After a while, I remember looking up and seeing Diane
waiting her turn to talk to the Dean.
I have Diane Davis to thank for introducing me to the School and to a whole new community of
thinkers. Her work and laughter and our conversations and camaraderie have made the difference in my
intellectual health.
I want to thank my wife, Toni, who first introduced me—perhaps 12 years ago—to Kate Millett's
The Basement. She handed it to me as a photocopy (since long out of print). She told me to read it, for what
Millett had said was what I needed to read. I stayed up all-night long reading it and have reread the book
many times since then. I have Toni to thank for directing me to so many other articles and books, with
talking to me about this topic of Chaste Rape, and for affording me the time to attend the School and mostly
to write this dissertation. I of course have my 9-year old son Roman to thank for letting me write. Often, he
16

would enter my study and ask me, "Now, Dad, What are you writing about?" and I could only say, "I am not
sure, Roman, but have hope that I will understand."
I have a group of professors-colleagues to thank: Avital Ronell, who gave me (I should say "us")
Stupidity and the Test and so much more, including her friendship. Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou,
who served on my committee and asked provocative questions, which have contributed to a major revision
of this dissertation turn book for publication elsewhere; Jean-Luc Nancy, who also listened and responded in
seminar to my concerns about Bataille, community, and habitus; Gregory Ulmer, who introduced me to
conduction; and to others who have helped me directly or indirectly in thinking through virtually every step
of this dissertation: Yves-Alain Bois, Christopher Fynsk, Peter Greenaway, Claude Lanzmann, John Waters,
Samuel Weber, Slavoj Zizek.
I have my colleagues who were in rhetoric at UTA to thank: Most notably, Luanne Frank for
introducing me to the Freud-Fliess-Masson bloc, and the question of Freud's relationship with his father;
Hans Kellner for so many references and for support in completing this dissertation. And I have my
colleague elsewhere, Jane Love, who discussed many of the complications of this project with me.
And also I have to thank fellow students-colleagues at EGS, during the AY 2001-02, 2002-03, and
those in the class I taught with Agamben on "The Coming Community in Politics and Media" (August
2003). And I have my fellow students-colleagues at UTA to thank who have listened to me talk about Chaste
Rape in relation to seminars on The History of Rhetoric, on Millett and Andrea Dworkin, and on a variety of
other topics. Three are finishing their doctorates now while all others have graduated to take positions in
English and Rhetoric departments in the United States: Sarah Arroyo, Michelle Ballif, Jenny Bay, Collin
Brooke, Lisa (Hill) Coleman, Robert Cook, Jenny Edbauer, Lorie Goodman, Cynthia Haynes, Byron Hawk,
Ron Hugar, Robert Leston, Matthew Levy, Tom Rickert, David Rieder, Rebecca Sarboucchi, Margaret
(Ellis) Weaver, Cori Wells, and Lynn Worsham.
The Basement
"The scene of the piano lesson, moored in the customary regulations that have required the pupil to
leave home, amasses the sadomasochistic edges of learning. . . . There is the teacher with her
pointed pencil and the motionless pupil, petrified. Provisionally, the passively reassuring ear of the
mother triangulates the scene into which the resistance to reading is set. The immobility of the pupil
fixes that frozen moment which holds together what has been shattered, the rigidity of the breaking
point or interval."
Avital Ronell, "Introduction," Finitude's Score 8.
17

"After reading Kate Millett's wonderfully obsessive account of murder, The Basement, I became
fascinated with the main character, Gertrude Baniszewski, perhaps the nastiest woman who ever
lived. . . . When pressed for a motive, Gertie could only repeat, 'To teach her a lesson . . . to teach
her a lesson.' "
John Waters, Shock Value 122.
We will commence with Kate Millett's The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice. What
will follow in this opening discussion will not be chaste writing by Millett or by me and consequently not
chaste reading on your part by any means, but will relate the events of sexual violence precisely as Millett
wrote them. I do not either indirectly allude to or chastely paraphrase what she has written. But I quote her
extensively not only to avoid a performative contradiction but also because Millett's book has been out of
print, though issued twice (1979, 1991), 1 and generally not available to readers. Therefore, this discussion
contains explicit descriptions 2 of sexual violence.
I can think of no better introduction to Chaste Rape. Millett's The Basement is the exemplar of a
polydiscursive rape narrative in our contemporary world, and one concerned not only with rape but also
with pedagogy and canon/ization. But Millett's treatment of canon is of a different order and disorder:
Millett mixes notions of canon/ization in terms of both obsessive (ordered) and hysterical (disordered)
views of canon formation. (I will take up this difference in "neurotic" styles more fully in chapter 5.) She
achieves this effect and end, politically and ethically, through her paraorthodox writing styles, in
themselves obsessive with details and with the order of them (as John Waters as well as she herself
suggests) and hysterical within her meditations in which she invents and shifts points of view radically and
most productively (as Jeanne Perreault 3 has and Katherine Cummings might suggest). But what makes
Millett's The Basement the exemplar is not only the interrelationships among rape, pedagogy, and canon,
but also the additional relationships with the sacred, sacrifice, a sacrificial economy (as René Gerard and
Giorgio Agamben might suggest).
In The Basement, Millett gives a "series of meditations (a form personal, philosophical,
speculative) upon a crime" (7), specifically, on the torture, rape, mutilation, and murder of Sylvia Likens.
Millett summarizes:
On October twenty-sixth, 1965, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the starved body of a sixteen-year old
girl named Sylvia Likens was found in a back bedroom of Gertrude Baniszewski's house on New
York Street, the corpse covered with bruises and with the words 'I am a prostitute and proud of it,'
carved upon the abdomen. Sylvia's parents had boarded her and her younger sister, Jenny Likens,
with Gertrude in July. The beatings and abuse Sylvia suffered over the summer had increased so
by September that the last weeks of her life were spent as a captive in the basement of the house.
Gertrude Baniszewski was indicted for the murder, together with three of her teenage children and
18

two [of the twenty] neighborhood boys [and girls], Coy Hubbard and Richard Hobbs. (9; emphasis
mine)
Millett writes her meditations based on her readings of crime scene photographs (of the corpse,
basement, and house), trial transcripts, and newspaper articles. The major emphasis in the meditations is on
pedagogy: Gertrude's trying to teach that girl to be good, while Sylvia's trying to resist what is sick.
Inhumane. While Gertrude scolds, plans, and oversees Sylvia's rape, Sylvia's resists, for what Gertrude
wants from Sylvia is not "in accord with [Sylvia's] nature" (see Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? 50).
The question is, Why does Gertrude engage in and encourage children to participate in this sexual violence
against this child? Or Why is pedagogy—apparently, always at its edge—a dialectic of instruction and
resistance that is inextricably entwined with a sacred and sacrificial economy? When Gertrude calls Sylvia
to obey her, Sylvia can only resist.
In Millett's book, we have pedagogy and rape linked in obsessive, yet hysterical, accounts of the
crime. Millett interrogates the question of teaching and resisting and from various meditative points of view
(Gertrude's, Sylvia's, and others'). In chapter 9 of The Basement, in a long section on "teaching," for
example, Millett meditates on the crime from Gertrude's point of view: "Lookin at me still. Refusin even to
cry, way she's been all the time lately, not even a whimper out of her. I'll teach her. I'll break that cute little
face of hers, tear it in half, smash it to bits. 'Cry, I said cry' " (99; emphasis mine). For Millett, Sylvia is "a
human sacrifice" as the subtitle indicates. But for what good! when we are more likely to ask to what god
and for what evil! The theme of sacrifice in terms of a sacrificial economy raises questions about the nature
of violence, whether essential or cultural. What is done to Sylvia in the name of teaching but also
sacrificing her is unspeakable, yet it is of the utmost importance that "we" republish here what was done
and redone obsessively to Sylvia, as Millett variously speculates and meditates on it, though we ever run
the risk, in telling it, of trafficking in it. The publishing of it, however, will allow us perhaps to have a
better understanding of rape in the light (or darkness) of "mimetic desire" (Girard, Violence 143-68).
In what follows I will examine Millett's work in terms of the following rubrics: Photographic,
Virtual Readings; Reportage, Court Records, and Meditations; The (cultural) Product (of sexual violence);
and Resistances to a Pedagogy of the Oppressor. I will continue the discussion of this case in the next
chapter in terms of human sacrifice. In fact, I will intermittently continue the discussion throughout Chaste
Rape.
" 'Yes, and I myself saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a cage; and when the
children cried at her: "Sibyl, what do you want?" she used to reply: "I want [to live]." ' "
Petronius, Satyricon, ch. xlviii. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, epigraph. 4
Photographic, Virtual Readings
19

Millett was haunted by an article that she read about Sylvia Likens in Time magazine. It took her
fourteen years, however, to start writing The Basement, for mostly she deflected the call to write, yet
"writing . . . words on the wall as I lay back on some bed and stared at the painted plaster" (11). To explain
further, Millett turns away from her authorial point of view and, through an apostrophe, speaks to Sylvia
and says, "I will use the first person and speak to you directly [of] my fourteen-year obsession with you.
For fourteen years you have been a story I told to friends, even to strangers" (11); "you have invaded me,
changed my life. For ten years I sculpted cages because of you, the first series even done in a basement that
first summer I heard. Because I was a sculptor and not yet a writer . . . and anyway I didn't write" (12).
Finally, "all these years later reading a description of your funeral, going to Indianapolis, which is like
home because I'm a middle westerner too, and tracing you in the Indianapolis News, October 30, 1965"
(12; emphasis mine)—in all this, Millett sees what she takes to be the beginnings, as traced through the
archives, and begins herself studying the photographs in the paper and many more that she would
eventually dig up and be privy to. But, as Jacques Derrida might suggest, "the apostrophe is addressed [not
only] to a dead person [Sylvia], to the historian's object become spectral subject, [but also to] the virtual
addressee or interlocutor of a sort of open letter" (Archive Fever 40). But why have I written, "Millett was
haunted. . ."? It is not a matter of sticking with the convention of the historical present. It is, instead, a
matter of a hysterical presence in the form of an inverted reminiscence. I should write, more so, A specter
is haunting Kate Millett—the specter of Sylvia Likens.
In studying the history (initially newspaper articles with photographs), Millett experiences a fear
of what happened to Sylvia happening to her. She shifts from speaking directly to Sylvia to identifying, in
an inversion, wholly:
I was Sylvia Likens. She was me. She was sixteen. I had been. She was the terror at the back of
the cave, she was what 'happens' to girls. Or can. Or might. Or has from time to time, and you
carry that in your mind if you are sixteen or ever have been or female and the anger is round you.
Women, the corpses of women, surfacing in newsprint, in some hideously savaged state or another
in the trunk of a car. We all have a story like this, and I had found mine. The danger was made
apparent. . . . Even the danger of maybe. A basement and bondage and a long slow agonizing
death, the body mutilated even with writing. (14)
The question that additionally haunts reflexively is
Why the hell did they do this? And then you see the line about being a prostitute and you know,
though you can hardly think—in the sense of conceptualizing it—you know, it is for sex. That
they killed her for sex. Because she had it. She was it. Like a disease. Like some bizarre primitive
medicine. Because nubile and sixteen she is sex to the world around her and that is somehow a
crime. For which her killing is punishment. [. . .] It was not only the body that must have been
20

oken, but the spirit. And that is the whole meaning of shame. In Kafka's Penal Colony the
sentence is carried out upon the flesh, written thereon so that it will enter into the soul. Here too.
(14-15)
Millett is meditating—let us not forget—by way of photographs:
When I write I hold them before me. Them. Gertrude and her band; even the house on New York
Street, even its basement. Photographs only of course. All I can get. But with that nearly mystical
property of photography—its dimension in time, so that each harrowed face of Gertrude is then,
always then, a frozen space in time, an effective [affective] memory—with each return of the eye
to that imperfect newsprint, that arrangement of shadows—is a return to 1965, to the very moment
of her capture. Her realization, even; perhaps even her release. For they had stopped her. (16)
Millett studies the police crime scene photograph of the basement and like Gaston Bachelard
speculates on the poetics of space, but specifically how children experience intimate places:
. . . the games of children, all the endless rigmarole of ropes, knots, games of blindfolding or gags,
the pranks or punishments of being locked in closets.
Even the very habit of playing in basements, places of storage and darkness, cool and damp,
cavelike [sic] and hidden, safe from adults and interference. Places of sexual experiment, the first
exhibitionism, the showing of genitals, where the mystery of how boys pee or what girls look like
is revealed, the giggle and touching, the subtle baiting, picking on or teasing, the winning or losing
of games. . . . The place to smoke cigarettes. (19; cf. Bachelard 20)
This passage, presented as innocent, becomes nightmarish. Then with this innocence as background, Millett
connects architecture with acculturation and wonders: "The Middle West. One wonders what happens to
youngsters growing up in places like Florida where houses are built without basements. Or attics either"
(19; emphasis mine). 5 But then, she returns to
The basement . . . was boy's play; . . . directed by the boys, by that obsession with violence which
has come over them never to leave . . . the murder games in darkened houses, more sophisticated,
more cinematic [with] a waiting almost sexual, the moment of assault, the moment played out in a
hundred films where the heroine in her negligée, her hand upon the phone as the footsteps grow
closer, opens her mouth to scream. The phone is dead, the wires cut. A thousand women suck in
their breath and grab at the wrist of their escort. This is how we are trained. (19-20)
As she is thumbing through the photographs, she drops three. Of the police photographs. What she
had seen prior to these photographs—of the basement along with the rooms of the house, including the
21

edroom where the body of Sylvia was taken; of the neighborhood where Gertrude's house was located—
all compose what Roland Barthes would call the studium: "It is by studium that I am interested in so many
photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is
culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the
settings, the actions" (Camera Lucida 26). Now, however, looking at the police photographs, Millett sees
what would, in Barthes's words, "disturb the studium" (27). This disturbance Barthes calls the "punctum;
for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is
that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)" (27). The punctum never leaves us
unmoved or the same again. Millett sees Sylvia's mouth:
Every inch of [Sylvia's body] covered with mutilations and burns, blows, bruises. Naked it is, but
without any of the beauty of youth or the female or the human. There is something obscene in its
condition, one wants not to see. And this obscenity is their [Gertrude's and the children's] work,
their achievement. This object. That was once a sixteen-year-old girl, a living being now burned
and defaced until it is only a remnant of tissue.
But the mouth, oddly, is the most remarkable feature. One looks at the horrors of the skin. . . . But
it is still the mouth that does you in. I did not intend to see this picture. I had meant to avoid it. Or
at least never to seek it out. . . .
Then it hit me; before I had time to decide what it was or whether I wanted to see it, I had seen it. .
. . Something fell out on the floor. And I saw it as it fell and then it was too late. Finally there were
three photographs altogether. Eight by ten, glossy. I had seen other police photographs . . . but
never these. Never the body. nearly naked on a urine-soaked mattress. . . .
But still it was the mouth. The eye went there. The third photograph showed her mouth very
clearly. The head, of course, almost a close-up. But really the mouth. As if it made me see itself. . .
. Looking at this mouth would drive me mad, because both lips had been chewed almost in half.
Sylvia had done this herself in her final anguish. Self-inflicted. This was not done to her—but of
course it was. This was the last thing that was done to her. A grief so grievous it wounds itself.
You could see in those severed lips just what pain was. Despair. Agony, the whole physical
manifestation of suffering. In those lines of dark, torn flesh. The gashes the being's teeth made on
its own meat as it waited for death. I had seen evil." (24-25; emphasis mine. Cf. 42-43, 48)
I will return to this photographed grotesque mouth eventually in later chapters of Chaste Rape and in terms
of the philosophical discourse on faciality (Deleuze and Guattari) and community (Jean-Luc Nancy).
Millett paces the doses of this grotesque horror. Her book opens with snippets of information
varied across the genres of journalism (the Indianapolis Star-News), court records (the "State of Indiana v.
22

Gertrude Baniszewski), and eventually her meditations (interior monologues, in an apparent mixture of
omniscient author and indirect free style, creating the illusion of Sylvia, Gertrude, Jenny (Sylvia's sister),
and others' thinking aloud. The whole second half of the book is taken up with these meditations, which
appear to be hysterical reminiscences, but which are, more so, the result of Millett's having given an
enormous amount of time, as if she were sculpturing or developing an art installation, attempting to find the
right embodiment for her voices. Millett felt more comfortable sculpting rather than writing, but she
eventually began to work in both media. (Millett reworked many of her themes in terms of sculpture and art
installations. [See Millett, "From the Basement" in The First 38 Years 41.]) She developed an installation
titled The Trial of Sylvia Likens. (See "The Trial Scene" in The First 38 Years 59.) Millett not only had to
learn to write, instead of to sculpt, but she had also to unlearn all the academic writing that she had
previously mastered and partially demonstrated in Sexual Politics. (See her account of having to relearn to
write in a natural, female style in the "Introduction" and "Preface" to The Prostitution Papers.) Millett had
to learn to write a cage, Sylvia in a cage, and then had to learn how to set her free, posthumously-
incompossibly, from that cage. Millett had to turn the spirit of gravity into a line of flights. If for no other
person than her own self, for her own mind. How else go on, when haunted. Millett is mourning, yet
unmourning.
Reportage, Court Records, and Meditations
In what follows—for I have yet to report the level of sexual violence perpetrated on Sylvia
Likens—I will sample and mix passages, as Millett herself does, of some of the atrocities. One final
warning, the descriptions from both the state of Indiana's legal documents and Millett's meditations are
sickening but I must present them as they are portrayed in the language itself of The Basement. Gross
generalizations about what constituted the rape of Sylvia or sentimental renderings of the level of sexual
violence let loose on her would be gross negligence, would be a practice of chaste thinking itself, as Jed
(Chaste Thinking) writes of it.
Millett does not mince words. The forensic doctor, the coroner, Dr. Arthur Paul Kebel, did not
either, though the two attorneys for the defense ironically challenge Dr. Kebel when he speaks in
generalizations. Millett tells us that Dr. Kebel said,
The damage done to this body is, Kebel dropping his obligatory professional posture of
objectivity, "an incredible amount of trauma" Gertrude's attorney objects. . . . The court deletes the
word "incredible." "One would hardly know where to begin," Kebel demurs. The attorneys
register objections again. The judge directs Kebel: "Just describe the trauma. Doctor, if any." (36)
So let us stay with the facts [sic] of "the trauma" first and then move to the meditations. The balance of the
two will provide the necessary insight into un/just what sexual violence (rape) is. It is crucial that we keep
in mind while reading that the trauma to the body did not occur in one event but over a series of weeks. (As
23

Millett says: "It was not the moment of cruelty we have all known—it was weeks. And deliberate
[deliberative, premeditated]; no quick loss of temper or sudden blow" [42].) Moreover, it is crucial to
understand that the legal cause of death, though reported to be "traumatic shock secondary to subdural
hematoma" (35), is a full array of insults to the body, the mind, and the soul of Sylvia Likens. And finally,
it is crucial to realize that the sexual violence was perpetrated not just by Gertrude, but by her children, by
Sylvia's sister (Jenny), and by up to fifteen neighborhood children. (Millett says, "As many as twenty-five
neighborhood children had even seen Sylvia beaten" [106].) Most sadistic were Richard Hobbs and Coy
Hubbard, both 15 years old.
The Facts: Dr. Kebel describes,
"Over the area of both breasts there are marks both like cuts and burns. At the area between the
end of the sternum and the top of the umbilicus was a brand mark, a 3. . . . The area between the
top of the pubis and the umbilicus legible letters were cut . . . I am a prostitute and proud of it.
There was also a triangle cut immediately above the hairline on the left over the upper extremities.
There were numerous punctate lesions—round lesions—that looked like cigarette burns,
something a cigarette would do." Prosecutor Leroy New asks for the location of these. They are
both front and back, both arms and legs. How many? Kebel is not sure. "Approximately?" "I'd say
one hundred and fifty." (36; emphasis mine)
The Meditation: Millett writes, first from Jenny's (i.e., Sylvia's sister's) point of view and then
Stephanie (Coy's girlfriend):
So Rickie [Richard Hobbs] got all the letters cut out on her stomach that Gerty made up but she
had to write it out for him on a piece of paper cause Rickie can't spell prostitute. [. . .] Then they
started to get the idea of brandin her too. . . . Shirley still can't get the iron thing hot enough so
Paula burns the newspapers under it till it's red hot. . . . If they use it one way and then turn it
around the other way, they can get an S out of the two curlicues, it's got S for slave they say. [. . .]
I can hear her screamin but I don't look. . . . Beggin them not to do it, but they got the thing hot
now. Rickie's real excited today—it's like he was Gertrude today, all day he's been doing
everythin. Gerty just put on the first letter of the writin and then she let him take over. . . . every
time Sylvia moved or made a sound he's just crack her across the mouth and keep right on goin.
Gertrude even told him it was a good job afterward. Sylvia is cryin and squirmin now. Rickie's
tellin 'em to bring the iron thing over, careful cause it's so hot. Sylvia startin to go crazy cause
she's so scared. Johnny's holdin her down. Rickie's hand bangs on her front over and over, back of
his hand, hard as he can. Sylvia grits her teeth. "Lie still you shitty prostitute," he tells her. Hardly
opens his mouth when he talks. Nervous. I bet. Scared. But not even like a kid anymore, like some
real mean man. Somethin happened to him today.
24

Then her screamin and I know they done it. The first half. Rickie's sposed to do the first half then
Shirley does the other part, the bottom of the S. But they gotta turn the iron thing around,
otherwise it ain't an S, it's a 3. (283-84)
Rickie turns to Jenny and tells her she is going to do the second half. Jenny responds:
"No, I ain't gonna burn her." . . . Paul looks mad—"Goody goody"—snarlin, like she was gonna
slug me. Rickie don't even bother to say nothin. So I'm still scared he'll get me. But now he wants
Paul and Shirley to hurry up. "Come on, before it ain't hot no more and we hafta heat it up all over
again. Hurry. Okay. Now."
O my God. Rickie's voice all the time on top of Sylvia's groaning, her skin all red, squirmin on the
floor. Everybody yellin. "You done it wrong, dummy, you did it backward. That ain't no S it's a
3." I'm back by the sink again. But I didn't burn her. I didn't burn her. They didn't make me.
"It looks awful, it's all backward, Rickie."
"Come on, let's show her to Gertrude anyway. Get up." (285-86)
Rickie leaves. We are told, "Rickie goes home for dinner" (287). Coy Hubbard comes in and Rickie
leaves. Gertrude tells Coy:
"Take her downstairs again. Coy you go along with her and see that she gets what's coming to
her." Coy in charge. Coy, the director of this [second, yet continuing] episode, act, segment of
time or suffering or theater. Captain for the inning, a girl in his charge and surrounded by girls,
and Johnny his expected lieutenant. . . . It is he who will assist, receive orders, pass on lesser
commands to the girls. And one girl as victim, focus of contempt, lowest and most despised in the
chair of command, lest enviable. The others, the youngest ones, are the gallery, the watchers, the
learners. Those bidden and taught, intimidated by the example while feeling safer, thankful.
Johnny hauls Sylvia up the rope so that she is bound to the side of the basement staircase, hanging
by her wrists, hands tied together and to a board. The girls watch, edified by the example of a fate
so nearly missed. It would have been easy to be Sylvia. . . . For Stephanie [Coy's girlfriend], there
is the ambivalence of watching your picked man punish another woman—who not only might
have been yourself, but might still be someday. Should he change. And Stephanie can already see
his cruelty as he takes Sylvia's swaying body and swings it time and again against the stone wall
of the basement. . . . He was smiling that way now, throwing Sylvia, throwing her for Stephanie,
for her benefit. Stephanie isn't sure—everything going on about Sylvia is getting worse and worse.
That Coke-bottle thing was terrible—she'd come home just at the end of it and insisted they stop.
But if Coy throws Sylvia against a wall, that means he doesn't want Sylvia. He wants her, instead.
25

Every indignity against Sylvia is assurance. Temporary. Possibly trickery too, boys often try to
beat you up if they "like" you. (287-88)
As this scene comes to a close, we are told, "Mrs. Leper came over to fetch Randy home for
supper" (288) and "John Baniszewski, Senior, knocks on the door around nine in the evening to bring a
German shepherd dog for his children" (289). John, Senior, is a policeman and Gertrude's former husband.
How the adults walk near and around the sexual violence is amazing and reported with a depth of banality
and irony that verge on fatigue.
Facts: Dr. Kebel said, " 'The external vagina was swollen and ecchymotic as though it had been
kicked—it was extremely puffy, the labia.' Kebel defines ecchymotic as hemorrhaging into tissue,
internally" (36). And then the question:
And then,
"Was there any evidence, Doctor, of any sexual penetration or damage to the girl?" Girls are only
damaged in one way. Ellis understands: "The Vagina was examined quite closely and there was no
evidence of lacerations. Specimens were taken for sperm study and these were negative. It would
not indicate any entrance occurred." (50-51)
Meditations: Millett writes,
Gertrude, her kick coming like rape between Sylvia's legs, the tender flesh, the bone, the shock
like electrocution all through the body to the mind. . . . "A good swift kick between the legs"
would become one of Gertrude's phrases. The autopsy will show its frequence and violence.
Others will learn from now on to take aim and administer it. But Gertrude has found the perfectly
asexual assault on Sylvia's sex. In reaching toward the forbidden with a foot rather than a hand, in
kicking rather than touching, in striking rather than exploring or caressing—one ends by not
having touched the forbidden place at all. Except to impugn the visitation. (216)
A dry fuck indeed. A kick. But no entry by hand or mouth or tongue or penis. Sexuality without
sex. Pure ideology. Ideas about sex, notions, values, superstitions, feelings, hatreds, fears—
everything about sex but the thing itself, the act of it of such powerful taboo that one resorts to
violence, to sadism, to any and every brutality to avoid it. To stamp it out. (51; emphasis mine;
Foucault, History of Sexuality 151)
Facts: After a strategic digression that interrupted the reportage of testimony above, concerning
the "external vagina," Millett returns to reporting the court dialogue:
26

Prosecutor New: "Doctor, you stated you examined the labia and pubic area?"
"That is right."
"Did you find any evidence of sexual manipulation?"
"No sir, I did not, or molestation." (38)
Meditations:
It seems curious that the kick directed to the vagina which Kebel has already mentioned does not
qualify as molestation, but the meaning of this exchange is narrower: there was no doing to Sylvia
of a sexual nature, only of a hostile one. Just as the instrument of her rape was a Coca-Cola bottle,
self-imposed because Sylvia was forced to insert it in her vagina while the gang looked on and
laughed—an instrument which perhaps did not even break the hymen—sex was to hurt and
humiliate, but not to partake of. And so Sylvia Likens probably died a virgin to her tormentors.
And they avoided sin and contamination. Because they kicked rather than fucked her. (38;
emphasis mine)
Thus far, we have looked at Millett's account of the writing and branding of Sylvia's body and the
kicking directed toward Sylvia's vagina. In passing there were references to the coke bottle rape, self-
performed as a result of intimidation and force (235, 237, 242-43). Not yet reported was Sylvia's being
forced repeatedly into scalding hot baths of water (52, 172). The list of sexual violence and atrocities
continues, but Why continue! The level and intensity of sexual violence should now be apparent.
I want to turn now to Millett's concern for "What is the nature of pain, of cruelty—its meaning, its
essence? What does it become to the victim, to the one who inflicts it? What 'sense' does the one make to
the other? What product do they produce together?" (41; emphasis mine). In other words, in terms of a
"natural" (physis), not customary (nomos), communication, What is being exchanged in this sacrificial
economy? What value is being created? Marx makes it clear that human beings make value, though Marx
determines this "making" by way of culture (nomos) and not nature (physis). This distinction between
nature (essence) and culture (made according to local custom) will be important to our discussions
throughout, especially in chapter 1, just as it is important to the whole issue of sexual violence (rape). If
sexual violence is driven by nature and not custom, then How would we even begin to critique it to change
it! How would one do political work? And yet, culture as a compromise formation functions to conceal—
i.e., to make chaste—violence (McKenna 92-93; Girard, Violence). Hence, the apparent necessity for
cultural critique, which is not easy and which is open to so many different political interests, and which is
open to being as violent as the sexual violence it would critique. It is no longer simply a matter of asking,
Whose interests are being served by a particular predisposition to interpret?, for there are more than two (us
27

and them, women and men), but countless third positions and countless within each third, only one of
which I present by way of The Basement as exemplar for what I mean by sexual violence (rape).
Millett—very shrewd in her strategy and tactics—blends nature into culture, culture into nature,
without completely losing sight of their differences. The blending is her method of interrogation. Make no
mistake: Millett reads rape as cultural. As a learned practice. Again, in her interrogations, Millett raises the
question of What the victimizer and the victim are making together in terms of a "product." (This whole
issue of the dialectical exchange between victimizer and victim, master and slave, and a sacrificial
economy, given Millett's subtitle, are highly problematic in terms of political thinking and action. It can
suggest a level of complicity by the victim. At best, we might liken the dialectical relationship with the
dialectical struggle between lordship (master) and bondage (slave) as a requirement of the so-called truth of
self-certainty or of the necessity for recognition from the other [Hegel 111-19; Kojève 3-30].) After this
discussion of the product, I will take up Millett's discussion of pedagogy and resistance, which is
homologous with victimizer and victim, making a common communicative product. It may very well be
that resistance itself is double edged. In fact, I think it is. What is made can serve at least two purposes,
given the imminent reversibility 6 of any given—but especially Gertrude's and Sylvia's—product.
The Product
What pedagogy addresses is the process of production and exchange . . . the transformation of
consciousness that takes place in the interaction of three agencies—the teacher, the learner and the
knowledge they together produce.
David Lusted, "Why Pedagogy?" 3.
Millett's use of the word "product" takes on overtones of capitalism (a sacrificial economy itself),
not just symbolic capital in this quasi-journalistic-literary work, but also fungible capital (i.e., exchange
value). Let us not forget that Sylvia was "branded" (36). An "S" was to be made, Millett writes, "out of the
two curlicues, it's got S for slave they say. Or Sylvia, or Shirley or Stephanie or just any old something or
another" (283-84). The very idea of a "brand" name in this context adds to the string of "product" and, by
association, "capital." And that the brand name of "S" is fungible points to how that "S" can easily apply, as
we are told, to Shirley or Stephanie. Actually, to anyone who might fall in displeasure with Rickie and
Gertrude or in a later scene with Coy. Let us not forget the other brand that Sylvia is made to rape herself
with, un/namely, a "coke-bottle" and a "Pepsi" (235, 237, 242-43).
That the brand is not an "S" but a "3" (286) does not take away from the overtones of a product of
capitalism but adds to them. Brands can be, and most often are, double entendres, double articulations,
potential double binds, somewhat like a gestalt figure.
28

If we recall, Gertrude is teacher. She has to spell out what is to be written on Sylvia's body, for
Rickie does not know how to spell "prostitute" (283). That the kids make the mistake in writing a "3" for an
"S" (misconfiguring from the two curlicues) and that they get upset when they see the uneraseable mistake
is true to their in/capabilities:
"You done it wrong, dummy, you did it backward. That ain't no S it's a 3."
"It looks awful, it's all backward, Rickie."
"Come on, let's show her to Gertrude anyway. Get up." (286)
Rickie believes Gertrude, the teacher, will be nonetheless pleased, if not impressed, with their completion
of the assignment. And she is! Gertrude says to Sylvia: "No one will every marry you now. You can't take
off your clothes for no man now. No honeymoon. Sylvia, what do you think of that?" (287).
Basically, Gertrude in this thematic of capitalism tells Sylvia and the others that Sylvia has no
exchange (fungible, gift) value—perhaps, no value at all. (Cf. Mauss; Levi-Strauss; Irigaray, This Sex.)
Then, Millett tells us there is "Silence. And then the blows across the face" (287). After which, Millett
examines the teacher's response, as Shirley would:
Sylvia presented to Gertrude with their inarticulate S, their botched job on parade—that would
have been enough. But that Gertrude never even noticed the work, criticized, corrected—that she
seemed to ignore the brand in favor of Rickie's lettering, that she talked only to Sylvia, to Sylvia
who couldn't marry now, who was even proud of her scars, Gertrude absent mindedly boasting and
exulting over this messed-up letter S of theirs—was somehow dangerous, unpredictable. Odd with
an oddness Shirley can smell, can fear—on mere instinct. (287)
So far, we have a product that is branded "S" for Slave or for the three girls whose name begins
with "S." But actually it is a "3." A mistake. Perhaps a paraphraxis. An apparently unrecognized mistake.
(We could easily do a Lacanian analysis and interpretation of this signifier "S" that is a "3" and its
misrecognition, but we will leave such a reading to others.)
Continuing this theme of capital (brands and products) and exchange (fungible) value, Millett has
Gertrude continue her lecture but on a rather different economy, another way of interpreting Sylvia's
relationship with the coke bottle: Gertrude exclaims: " 'So look I got a great idea. Sylvia gonna marry her
soda pop. She's gonna show how Pepsi hits the spot. We're gonna break you in kid. . . . [Y]ou're gonna lose
your virginity to the Coca-Cola Company. . . . Yup, look at Sylvia holding her Coke bottle. Pepsi, whatever
it is. Soda pop girl. Could be an ad. Wouldn't she be a wonderful ad, you kids? Stark naked.' " (242-43;
emphasis mine)
29

In partial sum, the female as symbol of sacrifice is unstable, imminently reversible.
"Unpredictable," as Shirley instinctively knows. At least, this situation that Sylvia and then potentially
Shirley and Stephanie find themselves in, as Millett's meditates through or about them, has them locked
into this unpredictability. This double bind. Once sacrificed by way of the writing on the body and
branding, any of the three girls (or "3" "S"s) could, as was the case for Sylvia, lose all value, except, as we
will see in terms of the (sacrificial) product. In a Gift economy (Mauss), the girls would be married, that is,
exchanged in a form of communication between two groups of men and expected to produce children,
preferably boys. In a perverse Gift economy, they would be exchanged for commercial incest ("marry her
soda pop"). However, in a Sacrificial economy (Bataille; Girard), they would be made into a product of
horror (from a mad woman in the attic to a monstrous woman in the basement), visible or invisible, as we
will see Millett developing as both visible and invisible. However, either way—through marriage (legal
rape) or torture and sacrifice (legal-illegal rape, sexual violence)—the victims are wasted. Always already
wasted. Monsters. Both economies keep women in their place. As the grand teacher-inquisitor, Gertrude
fosters this de/basement, that is, makes this place (the basement, the cage) brutally clear to Sylvia and the
other children.
This theme of the business of torture, sexual violence, as pedagogical (educational) runs not only
through out The Basement but also to its conceptual conclusion in the extended attempt to interrogate and
variously answer the question, "What product do they [victimizer and victim] produce together?" (41)
Reading Millett, I locate six products, each scripted or chained to each until they all contribute to a culture
of sexual violence. Between and among these six products, Millett meditates on the scripted theme by way
of a literary example reflecting a political, global example, or vice versa. The product is made ready,
however, by additional people who help process that product. The Justice System demands that the product
be examined and processed in a precise manner according to scientific protocols. In her telling, Millett
inverts the whole script in terms of the requirements of the Justice System. First there is the medical-
scientific production of the body for the legal system (the evidentiary body); then there is the judiciary
discourse exchanged in the courtroom over this evidentiary body to determine an indictment and trial
(during which the alleged crime is discursively performed, supposedly re-lived or not). It is difficult to
determine precisely what Millett's tone (ironic, sarcastic, etc.) is up to this point. But Millett, in thinking
about this product, develops a third vision of a larger product of the victimizer and victim, a vision that is
invariably not reported or envisioned at all. In other words, it is a vision that is inadmissible in the
courtroom under the rules of judiciary discourse. This third claim is, as Jean-Paul Sartre would claim, the
production of another "race" (Preface 26), or as Page duBois argues, another "species that is rendered, by
the activity of the torturer, not-human" (Torture 153). While Millett would most likely agree with Sartre's
and duBois's characterization, she depicts her third vision as the mouth and the head, Sylvia's—yet every
tortured, sexually abused person's—mouth and head.
Let us turn to the six products, which Millett, in my estimation, scripts in three groups: The first
three together, the fourth alone, and the final two together.
30

The first three are the Autopsy as Product, the Photographs as Product, and the Documents of the
Supreme Court of Indiana as Product. Once a crime of murder has been committed, the court must order an
autopsy. A Doctor makes the autopsy report of Sylvia's corpse: "Over the forehead there were multiple
abrasions and yellow brown discolorations of the face, . ." (41). He does this in the presence of court
appointed police officers and a photographer. He measures and catalogues every abrasion and discoloration
and a whole host of insults to the body, and he "asses[es] that product with the methodology and
instruments of science, its predilection for exact description, coherent and precise measurement" (41;
emphasis mine). The photographer records the body on photosensitive paper, keeping photo-documents for
posterity. As Millett writes: "Finally, it is not even faces one studies, but artifacts. The pictures of things"
(54; emphasis Millett's). When finished, the Coroner's Office bundles up all of these data in the form of
documents for the court. They make up the (canonized) archives.
The second scripted group is the Defendants as Product. Millett writes: "There are the defendants.
One will have to try to understand these persons; they're human too" (42). In other words, the alleged
victimizers. She adds, "Surely anyone is capable of performing torture. . . . Haven't we all done it, at least
in childhood? . . . where so much is permitted. Where one first enacts all the dramas of later life . . . just
short of Kurtz's horror in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" (42).
The third scripted group includes the Mouth as Product and the Head as Product. Without skipping
a beat, Millett writes: "But the sight of this dead mouth was Kurtz's horror" (42). Now we are getting into
an area of discourse that would be inadmissible, but because it would be tossed out of court creating a
differend (Lyotard), Millett reincludes it in her attempt to get us to see what sexual violence is not only in
particular but also globally. She at this point begins, as Lyotard would say, to bear witness to new idioms
for judiciary discourse. She moves from Sylvia Likens to the thousands sexually abused and tortured. (All
of the slaves tortured and abused by a master!) She describes Sylvia's mouth and lips lacerated during the
final moments of torture, which I quoted previously. About this mouth and lips, she writes: "Like Kurtz's
skulls upon poles. Here was a product, an artifact, the making of which engenders a terrible awe" (42). She
switches now to Sylvia's head:
It was awesome, this disfigured head, a creation beyond reason or nature or fantasy. A diabolical
production that had been months in preparation. So that this sad head would exist forever, crime
like this being in a curious way the opposite of art, nadir to its apex on the wheel of life. And
Gertrude like the man of ambition who burned the Temple of Ephesus in order to become
immortal, because the author of this monstrosity?" (43; emphasis mine)
Gertrude, like the (school)master, has risked her life for immortality, as Kojève would put it, "to be
Master," while Sylvia, who is "S" configured, suggesting, nonetheless, "slave" (Basement 287), "did not
want to be a Slave" (Kojève 22). Sylvia resisted unto death. She did not want to bind herself to the
31

Ma(s)ter's condition (which is the negation of life, i.e., death itself), nor did she want to bind herself to
Gertrude's condition as a slave (again, the negation of life). Continuing to put it as Kojève would, I would
say that there is nothing fixed in Sylvia. She is ready for change; in her very being, she is change,
imminence, transformation, "education," a will to live (22) but not Gertrude's product of home (canny, yet
uncanny) schooling, which is but a will to death. There is nothing fixed in Sylvia. Not even her grotesquely
tortured body, nor her head, which "exists [i.e., lives] forever" (Basement 43), and which counter-educates,
for it can, as it does to Millett, confront us with its "two riddles," make us stop to ask, "Why did they do it,
why did she let them"? (70), and to never be able to walk away from the image of her mouth, the very site
of perpetual (and necessarily our perpetual) resistance to the so-called ma(s)ter.
Millett then turns to a global vision of sexual violence and torture:
But the thing so stupid too. So were Kurtz's skulls. That was the point of the story. That it was
entirely unnecessary, gratuitous; that for a European to turn cannibal and headhunter out of
curiosity and perverse experimentation constituted a crime, whereas in the tribesmen it was no
crime at all. And so murder, in civilization already a crime, becomes many thousands crimes when
it is a slow and deliberate torture unto death. The victims of our police states, of fascist
"interrogations methods," the figure screaming upon the grid fashioned by the SAVAK secret
police in Iran until his spinal cord melts, is to die in this way. And his torturer? Does he possess a
mental cast similar to that of Richard [Rickie] Hobbs? Or Gertrude? (43)
And then back pointedly to Gertrude, who "has in one huge gesture—though it was still long and
patient work—created this head with its frayed lips, this Pietà" (48). Synecdocially, from particular to
general. Zigzagging as if cutting across the map of violence! The Product! Forever presents itself to us
through Millett's readings. In all this, there is a great deal more to say about a sacrificial economy, which I
will eventually get to, but for now, let us turn to what I am calling, echoing Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the
Oppressed) and re-entitling his own, often unacknowledged ambiguities.
Resistances to a Pedagogy of the Oppressor
Perhaps the most difficult section of this discussion to bring to the surface—as if it is not already
at the surface in everyday life—is the possibility of how resistance to the pedagogy of the oppressor can
and often does act dialectically to strengthen the rage of the torturer and of the victim, who can but resist,
resist, resist. Death. Oedi-pedagogy. 7 Thanatos-pedagogy. But as Millett speculates, the dialectic is not
limited to rage on both sides; for the victim—in this case, Sylvia—can engage in yet another dialectic with
herself between rage for Gertrude and blame for herself. In attempting to follow these dialectic struggles,
we must remember that what Millett is reporting is not what took place in the minds of the two females—
which cannot be known—but for the most part what she speculates took place in terms of this ritualistic
sacrifice. She is speculating primarily because she is trying to understand the two riddles, in particular,
32

Why this violence and human sacrifice? I am not suggesting, therefore, that Millett is saying Sylvia is
complicit, as we normally use this term, with her victimizer. Nor am I suggesting such a possibility myself.
But I am pointing to what I see as Millett's speculation on a double articulation of mystification, double in
that both Gertrude and Sylvia engage in rationalizations that allow them to do what they are doing in the
performance of their give and take (away).
They do not see, as I think Millett is suggesting that "we," too, perhaps do not see—indirectly, in
relation to the theme of sacrifice—that they are caught up in an exchange that is driven by mimetic desire
(Girard, Violence 145; Things Hidden 283-98), which I will discuss in chapter 2. I do think, however, that
Millett in her meditations on the two riddles sees the conditions for the possibility of seeing through Sylvia
(her very resistance of her mouth to eating the toast, to the pain of multiple mutilations and beatings and
burnings) the will to live, which Millett expresses as a double articulation: that of the belief that if "I" only
humor my victimizers, they will let me live; or of the belief beyond life and death that no IFs or BUTs, "I"
will "exist forever" (43).
It is important to understand that at the most obvious level, Sylvia is caught in a double bind, and
understanding this situation, she does not (really cannot) resist; for her options, in the bind, are taken from
her. Her situation is, tails you win, heads I lose. In a meditative discussion with Jenny, Sylvia's sister,
Millett makes this bind clear:
'What did you [Jenny] see and what was said.'
'Well, Gertrude just doubled up her fist and kept hitting her and Sylvia would not fight back.'
'What did Mrs. Baniszewski say?'
'She just said, "Come on and fight." '
'Did she hit Sylvia then?'
'Yes, she just kept hitting her and Sylvia would not fight back.'
What saintly nonsense is this? Why not hit her back? Knock her block off? Or did you [Sylvia]
know better, know it was just another trap, a setup, that the moment you obeyed this order you
would be disobeying another. Did you sense in some way too, that it was not just the old timeworn
cruelty, the iron law of big and little whereby adult is entitled to strike child—though for child to
strike back is taboo. (101)
This exclamation of the double bind in terms of Why Sylvia did not resist? is easily understandable. But it
is more complex and subtle on the way to understanding the question concerning resistance. What is finally
necessary to understand is that "Sylvia" does resist, though as Millett says, it was action taken too late to
save her life (25). But even in death she resists, in body, and by way of extension.
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Let us turn now to how Sylvia does not and yet does resist. Millett renders this exchange—
communication—between the ma(s)ter and the slave in terms of a devolutionary (degenerative) dialectic of
pedagogy (of torture and rape) and resistance, which takes both women through a season of hell-making.
But nothing of course that Gertrude experienced, Millett would agree, was comparable to what Sylvia
experienced repeatedly—blow by blow—until her death.
To begin with, Millett suggests that Gertrude is in a cycle of violence, owing to men (109, 145),
but that she herself alone is nonetheless responsible for the sexual violence orchestrated and directed
against Sylvia. 8
When Gertrude towards the end begins worrying about being caught and brought to justice, she
comes up with "the solution of a note. Written in Sylvia's hand," saying that the girl had run away with "a
gang of boys" who had tortured and raped her and that she deserved all that happened to her (312). The
letter, however, fools no one, but Gertrude. Sylvia is willing to go along with the scheme when Gertrude
directs her to address the note to " 'Dear Mom and Dad, I'm just . . .' Nope. That ain't it. Startin it, you're
gonna say To Mr. and Mrs. Likens. That's what you're gonna say' " (312). Sylvia inwardly smiles at the
revision.
Millett writes:
The irony that [Gertrude's] only alibi, escape route, course of deception—is to blame the act upon
males. The horde. The gang of boys. The pack. There is a certain logic, credibility; such groups
have committed countless atrocities against women, they are patriarchal sentiment at its most
virulent, violent, callous. Rape, pillage, burn. The army rout, the motorcycle gang. But Gertrude's
certainty of them is still breathtaking, her assurance that this crime, her own, after all, is a male
crime, will be accepted as such. Done in the spirit of those to whom she attributes it. Here in this
house. (316-17)
A further irony is that Gertrude often, however, delegates the role of disciplinarian-torturer to her
daughter Paula or to one of the other children from the neighborhood who frequents her house or all of
them as a horde, a pack: "These kids gonna respect me. Even her highness, that little shit Sylvia. Her
especially, fact she's gona show the way. Got Paula to do the lickin for me. Don't need no damn man. I'm
on top now, nobody gonna order me around" (109). Paula is not only her mother's "mascot, her shadow, her
right hand" (310), but Gertrude also makes Paula the surrogate husband, the man, as she will do with
Rickie and Coy. Yet Gertrude still relentlessly sees herself "on top." After all, she is the teacher. She is
home schooling not only her own children but others' children. But there is one—"her highness"—that
gives her the most trouble.
34

The ultimate form of resistance is to attempt an escape. After the taunts and the threats, after the
beatings and the writing-branding on the body, Sylvia attempts to escape from the house—on several
occasions—but she is always caught. Millett says, "the account is unclear" about how many times and
when the escape attempts began, "about a week, two weeks, a couple of days before the end" (97).
Apparently, the night before Sylvia's death, she attempts an escape but is dragged back in by Gertrude, who
tries to force feed her two slices of "toasted American Wonderbread, the culture's staff of life" (98), for she
has been refusing food. Gertrude does not want her to go die on her! She plans to blindfold and dump her
somewhere. But Sylvia simply refuses to eat. (She is resisting. Her body is resisting.) She says that she
cannot swallow, having been hit in the face and throat so many times. Gertrude takes a curtain rod and
starts beating her on the face some more. Gertrude, the teacher with the rod, the draconian rod!
Millett speculates:
For Gertrude to make toast for Sylvia must have been nearly unprecedented largesse. And the little
beast refused to eat it. . . .
Yet there was still the reach after the motherly gesture—gestures of a whole lifetime reversed for
this one occasion—this one child rejected, the vessel of all rejections and refusals desired but
never dared. . . . Because Sylvia refuses to eat them. Or cannot. Simply cannot. It is the same
thing. Whether she balks in willfulness, conscious, even semiconscious, or whether under such
pressure of fear and despair, loathing . . . is all immaterial to Gertrude.
What matters is that the creature, even fed and propitiated, resists still. Her mouth will not receive
what it has been given. Her throat closes against it. She claims she cannot swallow. She has the
nerve to say that out of that mouth, the words like marching insults. . . . So inconceivable that the
little bitch could hold out still, hold out even against kindness. . . .
Lookin at me still. Refusin even to cry, way she's been all the time lately, not even a whimper out
of her. I'll teach her. I'll break that cute little face of hers, tear it in half, smash it to bits. "Cry, I
said cry." (98-99; emphasis mine)
Like a ghost, moving from one body to the next to the next, Millett enters Sylvia's body. She
makes the child speak with a wisdom that is intuitive to many abused children. Focusing on Sylvia's
attempt to make Gertrude "like"—that is, care for, her, to treat her as a mother should—Sylvia realizes that
her smile, her grin, is taken by Gertrude to be insolence. To be the very mask of resistance. But she cannot
help herself. She grins. She laughs. Knowing intuitively all along that she is in a double bind (cf. 297). 9
Millett thinks "Sylvia," while Sylvia attempts to get inside of and think "Gertrude":
35

I look at her and I wonder. Just wonder. What happens inside her head an[d] her stomach an[d]
there behind her blouse. Who am I in there? When a woman does it to you it's different. Been
scared a men far back as I remember. But not another woman. A mom. That how some Gertrude's
got me so I don't know what to do. Why I keep tryin. If I could just make her change.
. . . Time goin by she might change to me. And I'd grin at her. Dumb thing to do. The dumbest.
The very worst. But when you don't know what to do—and can't dare say nothin cause it might
come out wrong and she'd jump on me. The sound of her yellin—are you laughin at me, girl? . . .
And like an idiot I grinned. Like you squirm when you're embarrassed. Pure foolishness Always
you do the one thing you shouldn't. And maybe something else too—conceit. I usta be so
conceited I could always make people laugh or grin back or smile even if it was just that little
smile that's like a nod or a wink. And then they back down and if they do go on yellin they make it
like a joke almost till everybody's laughin and havin fun. Thing is, I just love that. So I kept tryin.
I just loved being able to do that with people. I was proud about that. That was my conceit. . . .
But with me it was tryin to change everythin. The whole house. Starin with Gertrude who is the
house. I was tryin to make it fun. . . . And all I did was make it worse. Louder and crazier and
more fightin. Till by now it's this hell with me as its center livin like the devil in the basement.
Gertrude's worse off now'n when I met her. . . . Gerty always thought my grin was just makin fun.
And somewhere maybe it was that too. That she could make such a fool of herself getting so mad.
A grown-up too. And a bully. What else can you do to a bully except laugh? Well, just remember
not to laugh in their face. (248-49)
Even Millett-Sylvia gives thought, in such an articulate manner, that she is resisting the pedagogy of a
bully.
And Millett now entering Gertrude's body entering Sylvia writes:
Show her who's boss. Thinks she can just stick up her nose, take her whippin and still get by
thinkin just what she damn pleases. Bend and not break. Wait me out. Contradict everything I say
in the privacy of her own little head and go on smirkin anyway. Grin that damn little grin of hers
down there in the dark [the basement]. That's no girl, that's a monster, that one. Girls learn—no
matter how long it takes 'em, they learn. Life learns 'em if they got no teacher. . . Now she's gonna
learn the hard way (257; Millett's emphasis)
Sylvia resists as long as her mind and body will allow her, which is to the very end of Millett's
telling, when Sylvia's body itself takes over, expressing the natural rage to live. Sylvia's body in the
36

asement shortly before it dies takes a shovel and starts beating it on the basement walls and floor. The
neighbors can hear it. Gertrude tries to bully Sylvia more to get her to stop. Millett-Gertrude says:
[T]his monster won't even listen. Isn't even scared. Just keeps poundin. It's never happened that
she wouldn't obey. I mean completely refuse to pay attention, not even look up. Gertrude has
slapped her and she pays no heed. . . .
"Now I said stop it. Sylvia. . . . I'm gonna get Johnny down here and we're gonna teach you a
lesson. Unless you stop. . . .
And they looked at each other but the girl had passed her. Gone beyond her. Gertrude knew it and
even went upstairs. The shovel started again. (335-36)
Sylvia resists. The body resists. The shovel resists. Until moments later in this scene, Sylvia dies.
The implications of this passage are numerous. For one, we can see in Millett's speculations and
meditations that while resistance is cultural, it is also natural. While Sylvia thinks resistance, her body and
even the shovel (apparently), carry on beyond Sylvia's will to resist by acting out resistance. The will of
life—to live—to continue to resist murder and death.
"In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1966, Martin Heidegger declared that
'only a god can save us,' but I live in a part of the country where new houses and buildings are
cropping up everywhere, expensive ones at that—and hardly a day goes by that I don't think to
myself, 'only an architect can save us.' "
Robert Pogue Harrison, "Hic Jacet" 393
From the Attic to the Basement to the Madhouse
If we follow Millett's speculations and meditations, we might say that a gestalt switch has been, or
wants to be, turned from the configuration of a mad woman in the attic (Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) to a
monstrous woman's body in the basement. And yet, given the telling, a return to a mad woman in the clinic
(the Madhouse, the Loony-Bin). The movement of the fictive, yet real, personages in Millett's The
Basement parallel the strange recoiling movements in yet other works and in Millett's life itself.
In "From the Basement to the Madhouse," Millett tell us of her capture and incarceration and
placement in a cage. She had spent so much time reading about "prisons official and clandestine—of
Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Iran, . . . South Africa . . . while researching the book against torture [i.e.,
The Politics of Cruelty]. But these were once 'other people's lives.' I was a free person, even with a free
37

person's joy and pride who had never lost that virginity of the animal who has never known capture. Then I
came to know" (46).
To introduce her Madhouse, Madhouse exhibition (1987), Millett wrote:
In 1972 through misguided family intervention I was caught and held in a California madhouse.
And again in 1980, this time in Ireland where my sympathy with the hunger strikers and my
'record' made it possible for the police to commit me indefinitely to a back ward asylum in County
Clare. I was fortunate that both imprisonments were brief. Few are so fortunate. But I have a
record now; it could happen again. Any time. ("From the Basement" 47)
Millett's experiences continue. There is a long list. But I will not go "there" to rehearse it here.
It is enough at this point in our unfolding the scene of the foundational (grounding, Grund) crime
against Sylvia and the other children to acknowledge Millett's lived experiences, and how they are
intimately linked archi-textually from attic through the basement to clinic, while we just wait—actively—
for these experiences to be lived—if that is possible, and I think it is possible—in the living room.
Today, I reopened The Loony-Bin Trip. I reread the opening section, in which Millett and Sophie
are, on the farm in Poughkeepsie (the colony), walking toward
the coop which Sophie has just fixed up as her studio. A barren New England shed, a chicken
coop—she has transformed it. It is the South now, nearly tropical, 'Like a New Orleans
whorehouse,' I say, and we laugh. 'But it's perfect.' I pace the room, admiring it, remembering how
they called them sporting houses, places of the afternoon. The last passionate fullness of day,
Sophie's straw mat and bamboo hangings filtering the light. 'How clever you are.' The look
between us grows into a suggestion. A quickie? (15)
A mise en abyme. Then the apprentices walk in on them. After exchanges of laughter and Millett's
thoughts of Sophie, she writes: "Life has never been so good. The apprentices, the farm, the summer still
ahead, only half over, spreading already to a richness, a perfection, like a peony in full bloom" (16)
Millett closes this opening scene with, "This is the happiest summer of my life" (17), and opens
the next with, "Another morning and I wake up uneasy beside her. Something is going wrong with us" (18).
Then after some disconcerting thoughts, Millett write:
The years I labored here alone are nothing to the dreams and fairy tales [that] Sophie and I have
built in bed: greenhouses, the conversation of the carriage house, the lavender barn, into an
exquisite house—when we're done, we'll put big tubs of lavender flowers in front under a
38

alcony—just so, she says. And we laugh and conspire and solve the insoluble problem of the
staircase. We can do anything, we are geniuses of architecture, plumbing, carpentry, electricity,
design and decoration. (20; emphasis mine)
Karsten Harries writes: "Any view that understands architecture as the art of establishing place by
the construction of boundaries in space is inevitably one-sided. While dwelling requires the establishment of
place, place must also be understood temporally" (223; qtd. in Harrison, 395). To this citation, Harrison
adds,
I would go even further and say that a place is where time, in its human mode, takes place. A place
cannot come into being without human time's intervention in nature's eternally self-renewing
cycles—the cycles of 'bird and bush,' as it were. What intervenes in natural time is human finitude,
which is unlike other finite things in that death claims our awareness before it claims our lives. We
dwell in space, to be sure, but we dwell first and foremost within the limits of our mortality. When
we build something in nature, be it a dwelling, a monument, or even a fire, we leave a sign there
[sign, sema = grave] of our being mortal sojourners on the earth. (395-96)
(I will return at the end—virtually, "Rebeginnings, from Architecture to AnArchitecture"—to pick up
where I leave off here in a discussion of The Loony-Bin Trip, for I see this book as putting forth a new
principle of architecture, or social space, for a non-reactionary communitarian society.)
In the opening sections of The Loony-Bin Trip, Millett pays homage to place temporally. And she
recognizes this finitude (her, our, community, here-being [Da-Sein] being-here) after the experience of
incarceration in the loony-bin places. The Cages. She recognizes:
How blessed I am to have a mate who loves this place [topos]. Not to carry the whole weight of it
alone any longer but to have a fellow conspirator in making it paradise to share with our friends,
with the apprentices, with the artists to come here someday when the cottages are built for them. . .
. Even when I die [this place will continue], for I will die first: she [Sophie] could steward it, make
it go on, run it as a farm that supported all the rest, the colony. (20)
And yet, it is not as sweet a prospect, in retrospect as she had dreamed earlier of it. She cannot help but link
the farm and death. Being able to pay for the farm (e.g., 254, 256). She finally makes the final payment on
the farm (305). It is hers and can be for others who would be apprentices and artists. But the issue of The
Loony-Bin and the long Trip, while finishing the book in Paris, is the building of madhouses! and the
incarceration and drugging of people in them. She writes:
A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the
general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through
39

every mind for the course of its lifetime. . . . It is death, but death in life, entombment, burial while
alive. Only the fortresses of the ancien régime rivaled the entirety of this capture. Or certain places
nowadays, private houses on certain streets in certain countries we know not of. But the madhouse
lives for us all. . . . Bring down the madhouse, build theaters with its bricks, or playgrounds. Let us
leave each other 'alone.' No longer meddled with, we can muddle through without interfering
relatives or state psychiatry. The human condition is helped best by being respected. (315)
From the basement to the madhouse! But rebeginningly from the madhouse to the original loft to
the second loft to the coop to the lavender barn, Millett, ever-changing the places (conceptual topoi) and the
architectural places, seeks for places outside of cages.
At the end of The Loony-Bin Trip, Millett sits in her room in Paris, looking out the window,
reminding herself and admonishing us,
Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and
simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery—more wonderful because it is not
machinery at all or predictable. As ingenious and surprising and uncertain of result as the first
stroke of a painting, as various in possibility. As full of ornament and invention as the spire of the
Sainte Chapelle outside my window, a really crazy steeple full of frills, and balls, and cuckoos.
(316)
Part 1: Broaching the Abject
Chapter 1: How to think, to read, to write rape?
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues
"Jug, Jug" to dirty ears [. . .]
40

'Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd
Tereu
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land 99-103, 203-206.
"[T]he wasteland grows: woe to him [sic] who hides wastelands within!"
Friedrich Nietzsche, qtd. by Heidegger, Thinking? 29, 30, 51, 52.
How to think, to read, to write rape?
I begin on the wrong foot. Why? Because it is inevitable that I—or "We"—begin on a swollen
foot, for we are about to broach the subject. This notion of broaching may be difficult to understand or
agree with. The concept and puncept of broaching are rife with misunderstandings, and when combined
with thinking, reading, writing rape—which are the sites of misunderstandings and misrecognitions—
broaching becomes the impossible. But misunderstandings can be productive, and the impossible can lead
to the possible. There is every good reason to hope for intermittent successes in understanding and
appreciating the differences among ways of interrogating the question of How to think, to read, to write
rape? Broaching is about thinking (what is called [to] thinking?), reading (interpreting, reading between the
lines, reading the riot act), and writing (to furrow the surface, to plumb the depths). And then, there is
Ichnography. But we have a ways to go before we can turn that far back to the re/beginnings.
Broaching as a (lexicographical) concept, the OED reports, is "to give vent or publicity to; to
begin conversation and discussion about, to introduce." Moreover, broaching as a concept is "to pierce, or
break into, in order to liberate or extract something."
Broaching as a (psychoanalytic) puncept can signify that not seeing is a way of seeing. Everything
is imminently reversible (therefore, a way of seeing is a way of not seeing; a way of not seeing is a way of
seeing). Oedipus thought that he had pierced the secret of the riddle, extracting its truth, and thereby had
slain the Sphinx (the monster) and had liberated Thebes from its pollution. Later he sees that he did not see
and broaches his eyes into darkness. Now, blind, he is a seer, or perhaps a self-parodic Tiresias. Oedipus is
caught in between. Caught in the middle voice, as I will speak of it later. And yet, perhaps, Oedipus is not
so much the seer of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex but Eliot's The Waste Land. But then again, it really does not
matter, Sophocles or Eliot, for both deal in waste, lives wasted, corpses. Both deal in abjection.
If an allusion to Oedipus, by way of a psychoanalytic puncept, does not seem appropriate, then we
can turn to and re-broach in detail the story of Philomela as portrayed by Ovid in Metamorphoses: The
characters are Tereus; Procne, the spouse of Tereus; and Philomela, the sister of Procne (cf. Brownmiller,
Against 283-84). Being sent to retrieve Philomea from her father and take her to Procne, Tereus "looked at
41

[Procne], and in that moment/Took fire, as ripe grain burns" (Bk 6, line 456-57) and eventually rapes
Philomela, and cuts out her tongue so that she cannot name her rapist. While locked away in the woods,
Philomela writes the event and sends it, by way of an old woman, to her sister. Upon reading the deed,
Procne wants "vengeance" (line 586) against her husband. She decides to kill their son, Itys, and offer him
as a meal to Tereus. When interpreting (seeing) Procne's deed, Tereus pulls his sword to kill the two sisters,
but the gods intervene and turn them all into birds, with Philomela becoming a nightingale.
While Ovid has his way of broaching the story, Eliot has his telling way of re-broaching the story
for his own interests. (Stories of rape—especially that of Helen of Troy—are common topoi, or conceptual
starting places, for discursive exchanges. As we can see, there is much trafficking in rape stories.)
According to Maud Ellman, Eliot renders the rape of Philomela by having her "secretly in league with the
degraded women of the text, who also empty language of its sense through darker means" (187). For Eliot,
Philomela can only sing "Jug, Jug" and "Tereu" (Waste Land, lines 103, 206). Ellman sees that Eliot, in
terms of his own interest, has re-broached Philomela's nightingale music as being in line with the neurotic
female (and I would add neurotic male and third sexual) voices of other characters in the wasted land (e.g.,
the Thames daughters, Madame Sosotris, the neurotic woman of lines 108-115, the young man carbuncular,
and finally the double, yet third sexed Tiresias). For Ellman, the wasted land (the desert) can admit
language that is but a sign of what Julia Kristeva calls abjection (see Powers of Horror), or the semiotic, as
opposed to and as neutralizing the symbolic (see Revolution in Poetic Language). According to Ellman, the
story re-broached about the rape, by its associations with fragments from other stories, "obliterate[s]
semantics with acoustics" (187). It is finally a tale of rape re-broached signifying nothing but waste. While
this retelling, refiguring, serves Eliot's and Ellman's purposes thematically, it can also tell, in part, a rather
telling story about thinking, reading, writing rape, which I will take up intermittently in this chapter and the
following ones. It can, as I will suggest, demonstrate what I would call traveling rape stories (cf. Edward
Said's "traveling theory," in The World, the Text and the Critic).
I want first, in what follows, to deal with two problems in thinking, reading, writing rape: Namely,
the problem of revenge (vengeance) and that of ethos (who can and cannot write about rape). Then, I will
go on to three sections: Thinking and Reading Rape; Writing (about) Revenge Fantasies; and finally
Reading Autobiographical Rape.
The Question of Revenge
I think still the best words on wanting to revenge (or redeem) the past (for a rape or from sexual
violence) are Nietzsche's.
To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all "it was" into a "thus I willed it"—that
alone should I call redemption. . . . Willing liberates; but what is it that puts even the liberator
himself in fetters? "It was"—that is the name of the will's gnashing of teeth and most secret
42

melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The
will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time's covetousness, that is the
will's loneliest melancholy.
. . . And so he moves stones out of wrath and displeasure, and he wreaks revenge on whatever
does not feel wrath and displeasure as he does. Thus the will, the liberator, took to hurting; and on
all who can suffer he wreaks revenge for his inability to go backwards. . . .
"The spirit of revenge, my friends, has so far been the subject of [wo/]man's best reflection; and
where there was suffering, one always wanted punishment too."
"For 'punishment' is what revenge calls itself; with a hypocritical lie it creates a good conscience
for itself." (Zarathustra 251-52; cf. the section "On the Tarantulas" 211-14)
Throughout the first half of his lectures on What is Called Thinking?, Heidegger recalls: "For
Nietzsche, revenge is the fundamental characteristic of all thought so far" (97). Often—and we must all
guard against this happening—thinking, reading, writing rape is an alibi for revenge, for punishment, and
wrecking pain on someone, anyone. (". . . the wasteland grows: woe to him [sic] who hides wastelands
within!") We must all guard—though guarding, like vigilance, might be a disregarding—against suffering
from slave morality (ressentiment), from a politics of revenge. But the crucial issue here is that, heretofore,
THINKING itself is reactionary. Must it remain "evertofore" reactionary? Nietzsche and Heidegger
together do not think so. But to this thought on revenge, we must include, as Susan Brownmiller points out,
constant reminders of the parable of the "vengeful woman myth" (Against 22-23), though at times this has
been no myth. Everything is imminently reversible. Vigilance against vengefulness is a necessity, but then,
as Jean François Lyotard says, "We are always within opinion, and there is no possible discourse because
one is caught up in a story, and one cannot get out of this story to take up a metalinguistic position from
which the whole could be dominated. We are always immanent to stories in the making, even when we are
the ones telling the story to the other" (Just Gaming 43). 1
The Question of Ethos
The bridge to the highest hope is the deliverance from revenge, Nietzsche tells us in Zarathustra
(211). Such a deliverance as a metamorphosis of a traumatized victim and its thinking is, not into a
nightingale, but into an Uber-wo/man, best put as a "self-overcoming" being (Nietzsche, Genealogy 160-
61; Zarathustra 225-28; Heidegger, Thinking 88-99).
Perhaps the most productive way to approach this concept of self-overcoming is by way of ethics
or ethos. Previously, I have discussed this problem of ethos at great length in relation to rethinking and
rewriting history, to a self-overcoming historiography (see Negation 271-305). I examined and combined
the work of Roland Barthes ("To Write: An Intransitive Verb?"), Charles Scott (The Question of Ethics 13-
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52), Eric Charles White (Kairomonia 24-90) and extended these discussions along with Mario Untersteiner
and Hélène Cixous's to show how the middle voice could be used for nonreactionary, militant, subversive
purposes in respect to issues on negation (abjection, sexual violence) and gender and sexual politics.
Simply re-put, the middle voice has a recoil, or self-reflexivity, built in that makes it a dynamic
voice for a thinker, reader, or writer's recreating the conditions of the possibilities for disallowing the basic
principles of the traditional Western discourse of metaphysics. Using the middle voice, for example,
disallows the principle of the excluded middle (along with identity and non-contradiction) to work in
purging all middle terms that would muddle so-called valued terms as "this" from "that," or "man" from
"woman." Scott writes: "When a word has several even countervailing, meanings, the middle voice can
give expression to the word's multiple values without indicating a common, harmonizing meaning" (21)
And again: "When a word has in its power several emphases and counterplays of meanings, such that none
of its meanings can adequately express the other meanings, the word is then able to bring to expression a
variety of registers, tones, experiences, and significatory chains as its play finds full voice" (21) Adding to
Scott, White writes: "The middle voice suggests not a fixed and abiding selfhood but a sequence of
discontinuous partial selves, or the self as a historical process." And: "[T]he middle voice would promote
an activity of endless desiring metamorphosis" (52; emphasis mine). And still again: "The 'middle voice'
[is] the will-to-invent" (63).
The middle voice also, as Scott puts it, returns the thinker, reader, or writer to the inside of the
text. He explains: "[O]ur dominant structures of language encourage the posture of standing outside of the
text, in an interpretive position that is actually quite different from the text, and understanding it from the
quasi-transcendent perspective. Such a perspective protects itself from the process of self-overcoming by
its seemingly neutral distance" (14; emphasis mine). What is needed, Scott suggests and I will strongly urge
us to see and adopt, is an entrance into the text: "In the shift from the interpreter's traditional quasi-
transcendence . . . to a movement of questioning and suspicion in which the quasi-transcendent position
moves away from itself in its relation to Nietzsche's writing, a way of thinking without grounds or
transcendence will develop" (14-15).
What I have in mind in terms of self-overcoming and the middle voice, and especially in terms of
a mis/appropriate ethos, as described above, is, for example, precisely what Kate Millett in The Basement
has in mind but acts on in her refusal to stand above (so-called objectively, outside, by way of a
transcendental cartesian voice) the various texts (the photographs, the newspaper articles, the court records,
etc.) she writes about, but enters into these texts and more specifically into the bodies and minds of the
people involved, speculating and meditating on Gertrude or Sylvia's motions, emotions, and motives, as
well as the children's. She brings "to expression a variety of registers, tones, experiences, and significatory
chains as its play finds full voice." With the principle of the excluded middle set aside, all the characters—
in a manner of speaking with Kristeva's terms—"pollute" Millett; and she, them. In dis/order to enter into
the text, Millett just/ly takes the point of view of first-person participant, not just quasi-transcendental first-
44

person observer. She is at her be(a)stest 2 when she slips into the point of view of free indirect style of
discourse, in which Millett, much like Gilles Deleuze, engages in a literary-philosophical ventriloquism. 3
As she says, she becomes the people involved in the acts of sexual violence. She undergoes a constant
metamorphosis and obsesses over every detail and from the point of view of the victim and the victimizers
(hence, a hysterical repositioning while simultaneously obsessive pondering of details). But besides this
internalizing, I expect to do a great deal more, which I will disclose as I move through the various
discussions. Millett, in wrestling with issues beyond the pleasure principle, embodies the drives to kill or to
die (thanatos), but more so to live (eros).
For many readers with similar, though different, political reasons for writing on sexual violence,
the excluded middle of the binaries M/F or F/M and the necessary interpretive distance must be maintained
in thinking about sexual violence. They would negotiate with traditional, metaphysical structures of
violence. And of course, they would read, thus far, what I have written as problematic for their political
projects. This I do understand and will respond to incrementally throughout this and the next chapter while
entering various discussions on sexual violence and intermittently throughout the rest.less.ness of Chaste
Rape. While most readers would err on the side of exclusion for the sake of identity, I would err on the side
of radical inclusion for the sake of post-identity. I see fixed identity itself as one of the problems, leading
but to reactionary, resentful, thinking. Identity is the problem!
Kristeva with her psychoanalytic understanding of the semiotic (with abjection as a more intense
sub-category) and the symbolic (as a thoroughly moderate category) would have to reject the position I am
re-beginning with here in terms of ethos and the middle voice. I understand, along with John Lechte, that
Kristeva wants equally to balance the semiotic with the symbolic. I must continue, however, to think of the
potentiality of the middle voice, as Scott sees it, as "not primarily a theory, but as a discursive movement"
(38), or as I myself would characterize it, as a thinking, reading, and writing tactic of the nonpositive
affirmative, that is, a movement to the third position. Kristeva, perhaps, would have to see the use of the
middle voice with its discursive tactic of moving out of the binary to a third, as I have characterized it here
and elsewhere ("An Open Letter"; "Concerning"; Negation), as a slippery-slope militant paralinguistics that
leads to neurosis and psychopathology (see Black Sun). But let us not lose sight of the fact that Kristeva
does find great value in the paralanguage of the semiotic, when she writes critically about "the Janus-like
behavior of a prominent modern grammarian; in his linguistic theories he sets forth a logical, normative
basis for the speaking subject, while in politics he claims to be an anarchist" ("The Ethics of Linguistics" in
Desire 23). Kristeva herself lives in her thinking in a bifurcated middle voice, but she (thinks she) separates
the two, as I have read her, and attempts to carefully balance them in terms of, on the one hand, psychiatry
and, on the other, militant poetics (aesthetics). Finally, I think that Kristeva can be rather nomadic in her
approaches, going with the transvaluation of desire in language as disrupting fascistic thinking (see Desire
31).
45

It may very well be that ethos is everything when it comes to thinking, reading, writing anything.
But I must insist, especially sexual violence. Let us move from this theoretical discussion of ethos and look
very briefly at Susan Brownmiller's confrontation with the question of ethos, and then my own
confrontation with this impossibility.
Brownmiller tells us:
The question most often asked of me while I was writing this book was short, direct and
irritating: "Have you ever been raped?"
My answer was equally direct: "No."
This exchange, repeated many times in many places, seemed to satisfy neither the questioner
nor me. When I thought about it, I decided that there were differing motivations on the part of my
interlocutors. For some, I concluded, the question was a double-edged credentials challenge: If
you're not a criminologist or a victim, then who are you? (Why wasn't it enough that I was a writer
onto an interesting subject, I wonder.) For others, I suspected, a curious twist of logic lay behind
the question. A woman who chooses to write about rape probably has a dark personal reason, a
lurid secret, a history of real or imagined abuse, a trauma back there somewhere, a fixation, a Bad
Experience that has permanently warped her or instilled in her the compulsion to
Tell the World.
I hate to disappoint, but the answer is still "No." (Against 7)
Now, if this is what "they" said and most likely still say about Brownmiller—who is a woman
having written about rape in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1976)—what would or will "they"
be inclined to say about me? A man. (The issue of authenticity and essence forever represses, suppresses,
oppresses!) Me. A man. Who is claiming that there is a strong connection among canon formation,
pedagogy, and sexual violence (rape)?—All of which make up rhetorical-cultures. I think without a doubt
that I do not have to speculate what, if not said, will be, at least, thought. In terms of motive. Secreted even
from me. Opening with The Basement as a spectacle of violence. My response to suspicious questions—all
suspicions questions!—like Brownmiller's, is "No." However, again, some—both female and male—will
insist that I really mean "Yes." (It is, after all, that way when dealing with, or reading and writing about,
rape [sexual violence]. Voices, by way of the negative, can get silenced. If so, then, "we" will have to think,
read, and write the silences as well.)
I have never been raped. But then, Why do I feel it necessary to make this opening statement! Is it,
or should it, be required? Am I supporting a pattern that Brownmiller herself supports by answering a real
46

or always already implied question? These questions of "our" countersuspicion go on and on. I can say,
however, like many of us, I have known people who have been raped. My paternal grandmother was raped,
when she was 82 years old. In her home, on Sabine Street, in Houston, Texas. Yes, echo of echoes, on
Sabine Street! Echoes down through the textual and pictorial narrative of history! But this was my
grandmother, not me. Hence, I have no special subject (object! abjected!) position from which to write
about rape. And if experientially I had, I would still not have! Why? For the simple reason that no man—
though there are a few who have—can speak of his body having been raped. This is still a taboo yet to be
transgressed in the police stations, in the courts, in the media. 4
(I was speaking with a female colleague now long ago about the war in Bosnia; I told her about
some of the news reports of rape being [again] used as a weapon, as a form of genocide, and that, this time,
the Serbians were even raping some of the men. Her response: "Good!" Much, of course, can be inferred—
abducted—from the nature of this single-word response.)
The negative ("the wasteland") permeates, to varying degrees, all of our thinking. Not just No, but
also Yes, and Good! Even before we are born (of rape), we are going to be objectified (narrativized,
canonized) by the thinking of rape. The lust for revenge born of rape.
That my grandmother was raped just about destroyed my extended family, my grandmother's
children, my aunts and uncles, and my father. Myself. The family quietly wanted JUSTICE! Or was it
REVENGE? The family never got it. As time passed ("It was") my grandmother finally healed physically,
so to speak, and died at a very, very elderly age. She eventually developed cancer of the bladder, which she
felt was, in her own mind, brought on by the rape itself. She felt some how or other that she had been
unfaithful to her deceased husband, my grandfather, who died way before I was born. The rest of the family
obsessed itself away with recriminations. (". . . the wasteland grows: woe to him [or her] who hides
wastelands within!") Born of rape? Death by prolonged, networks of extended rape?
But to question someone's writing about rape can only keep rape in silence. To chastise someone
for writing rape can only further make for Chaste Rape. On the contrary, my question to those who ask me
Why? is Why aren't you or all of us writing about rape? As Andrea Dworkin tells us: "Rape takes
everything away" (Scapegoat 58). This dissertation is an attempt to bring everything back and especially
What was not.
Thinking and Reading Rape
In this section I will discuss William Warner's thinking, reading, and writing about Brownmiller's
Against Our Will; and then Warner's discussion of Terry Castle and Terry Eagleton's reading of Clarissa.
The attitudes of essentialism and strategic essentialism and the real and the fictive. Thereafter, I will turn to
Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer's reading of and response to Brownmiller's book. The attitudes of nature
47

(physis) and cultures (nomoi). I will finally take up Brownmiller's own self-reflections in her recent In our
Time of how Against Our Will was variously received by feminists. The shock of imminently reversible
tables being turned. All of these interlocutors dis/engage in various travelling stories (theories) of rape.
I have selected Warner's review article, for it focuses entirely on what he characterizes as
"something new in the winds of criticism. It is a shift in theory and away from theory," in that it expresses
"a desire to take account of the concrete realities experienced by men and women inhabiting a particular
historical moment; a new concern accorded the fact of suffering" (12; emphasis mine). As I proceed, I will
agree or disagree with Warner, or just interject my responses and will even amend what I have said as I
proceed in thinking about rape.
Warner (Brownmiller): William Warner has a different take not just on but from Brownmiller and
her followers. Warner points out in "Reading Rape: Marxist-Feminist figurations of the Literal," that
Brownmiller reads rape as foundationalist and essentialist, or she reads rape as a "master metaphor" (15).
If Marxists claim blood and suffering as the foundation of, or warrant for, their historical thinking,
Brownmiller claims rape over all other forms of suffering. The search for the warrant for the master
metaphor, as I will have repeatedly claimed throughout, is highly problematic, even if, or especially if,
called a "strategic" or "provisional" master metaphor, or a "strategic" essentialism or grand narrative of
emancipation. (A word such as "strategic" or "provisional" will most likely lead to more reactionary
thinking and suffering.)
Brownmiller, in the first step of her metasociological argument, imagines, through her travelling
rape story, that in primitive times
Rape became not only a male prerogative, but man's basic weapon of force against woman, the
principal agent of his will and her fear. His forcible entry into her body, despite her physical
protestations and struggle, became the vehicle of his victorious conquest over her being, the
ultimate test of his superior strength, the triumph of his manhood.
Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the
most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone
axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is
nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in
a state of fear. (5; Brownmiller's emphasis)
About this position, Warner writes: "This relation [between male and female] is not an arbitrary
historical or cultural construct, but one shaped by biological necessity" (14; emphasis mine). Brownmiller
specifically writes: "By anatomical fiat—the inescapable construction of their genital organs—the human
48

male was a natural predator and the human female served as his natural prey" (1976, 6; emphasis mine).
Brownmiller, therefore, argues for a vision of herstory by way of physis and not nomos. Hence,
Brownmiller's negative foundationalism, or essentializing. 5
But we are just getting started, for to say that Brownmiller is a foundationalist, or essentialist, is
not to say, in particular, much with which to disagree; it is the further implications of her essentialist
position, however, that are apparently most problematic. Warner writes that male and female anatomy are
"so powerful a fact that it undergirds all apparently positive relationships between men and women" (14).
Biology! As a major case in point, Warner cites the second step (the consequence) of Brownmiller's
metasociological argument, which explains why males and females form relationships. Brownmiller posits:
Among those creatures [males] who were her predators, some might serve as her chosen
protectors. Perhaps it was thus that the risky bargain was struck. Female fear of an open season of
rape, and not a natural inclination toward monogamy, motherhood or love, was probably the single
causative factor in the original subjugation of woman by man, the most important key to her
historic dependence, her domestication by protective mating. (1976, 6)
Thus far, the argument is, first, rape (as natural, as physis) and, then, "marriage" (as custom,
nomos). This argument might gain credibility if we recall that this scenario of the institution of "marriage"
parallels in some ways Levi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, and Georges Bataille's discussions of gift exchanges
and parallels in most ways the exact same scenario for the development of protection against mass rape in
male prisons. (The choice there for many inmates is either rape by a gang of inmates or rape by a single,
stronger inmate who can both claim and protect his "partner" by the right of brute force.)
There is, according to Warner, a third step: "Through an ingenious movement of her analysis,
Brownmiller transports this primitive scene of intimidation into the present, by making the 'police-blotter
rapists' who commit most of the rapes in our society the agents who provide as insidious service for their
law-abiding brothers" (14; my emphasis; see Brownmiller 1976, 228-29). Hence, in the argument, all males
are directly or indirectly rapists.
It is this leap from primitive times to the present, this third step in the argument, that Warren finds
most problematic. Warren cites others—both Marxists and feminists—who argue from Brownmiller's
"scene of rape." Brownmiller's book and especially this posited scene of rape "first mobilized the
imaginative power of rape for a significant spectrum of feminism; and in doing so," Warren argues, "it
evidences a way of reading, an ethos of reading and a tone for reading which operates in the more nuanced
reading acts of [Marxists and feminists], and helps to give their reading formation its coherence." (15).
Warren continues: "If followed through the arch of its explicit claims, this little narrative gives the scene of
rape a certain trans-historic power as a template for reading" (15; emphasis mine). In other words, this little
narrative becomes a grand travelling rape story that, in turn, becomes the touchstone by which to measure,
49

value, human history. Brownmiller claims: "All men keep all women in a state of fear" of being raped (5;
Brownmiller's emphasis), and it is not only actual rape but the fear and suffering that give all women the
critical edge to write against all men's history.
Warren examines the consequences of this kind of thinking, and so as not to possibly misrepresent
him, I am going to quote his argument at length:
If rape defines the relationship between all men and women--not just rapist and victim, but
between any two intimate people of the opposite sex--if the intimacy between men and women is
really founded upon a forgotten but decisive moment of intimidation, where the only alternative to
rape was a woman's finding a man to give her body for protection, then this moment of the threat
of rape, upheld by men through the ages by their very solicitude for their women's "safety,"
becomes a very particular kind of master metaphor. . . . In this scene, nothing of significance is
happening but rape. As in all the monumental and tragic and melodramatic scenes of life, meaning
here comes to the surface to disclose itself with perfect lucidity. The scene of rape figures the
literal. Rape becomes a figure or metaphor that closes down the figural drift of words and
language and meaning, or seems to. (15; emphasis mine)
This argument, again, is filled with possibilities of counterproductive misunderstandings. That men rape
and that there are terrible consequences is not here questioned; that all men stand in relation to women only
by ill-virtue of rape, however, is questioned, especially for the claimed universal value that such a scene
allegedly has for critiquing and writing history. (Warren's argument is still more complicated; I will return
to it eventually.)
What I have tried to suggest earlier and to locate in Warren's argument against Brownmiller is that
her view of history and rape is foundational and essential. For Brownmiller, the political unconscious is
coded with rape, all men against all women, without exception. The argument—rather, universal claim—
parallels Fredric Jameson's totalizing view of history as "the unity of a single great collective story [of]
struggle" (19; see Warren 18). However, Brownmiller's argument in greater detail parallels Freud's in
Totem and Taboo, namely, the killing of the primal father, and Freud's arguments elsewhere, namely,
concerning the Oedipal complex and castration complex, and their implications for reading a universal
history. The parallel with Jameson, at a very general level, is compelling. The possible parallel with Freud,
however, can be equally, if not more, compelling and interesting, especially when Brownmiller takes the
argument based on anatomy—the sign of the penis, which Freud had universalized as the signifier of
value—and turns it against Freud and all men. Every traveling rape story is imminently reversible. It is not
a great distance from Brownmiller to (interpreters of) Leona Bobbitt! (see Davis, Breaking 148-49, 153-
55.)
50

What I am suggesting by way of this parallel with Freud, then, is that perhaps Brownmiller is
simply negatively deconstructing (reversing) this Freudian universalization. "If Freud is going to privilege
the penis as the signifier," Brownmiller might be thinking, "I will then continue its favor but turn it into a
master trope signifying the violence toward women that it not only signifies in Freud's metapsychology but
also the violence of rape that it, in fact, brings to bear on women." This, my reading of Brownmiller, would
change her intentions in being an essentialists or possibly would change her from a naive essentialist to a
strategic essentialist (or hyperbolic essentialist).
But does Brownmiller intend either this deconstruction or possible "parody"? If so, it is hard to
find a scrap of "evidence" in her book. If so-called evidence exists, however, it is to be located in the way
that Brownmiller constructs her argument to correct a wrong. (Or better put, perhaps, it is to be located in
the way that a reader reads Brownmiller, depending on his or her motives, or interests.) What I have stated
here is perhaps a mere supposition on my part, which I brought about by rereading Brownmiller
semiotically across another genre of reading, namely, that of negative deconstruction. Such a
deconstructing of the text would be a saying Yes to it twice, if not thrice. (Which is what I have been
attempting here, thus far, throughout.) Again, it is not an uncommon practice of feminist rereadings and,
therefore, not too savage, wild a speculation on my part. However, any feminist or other party can equally
argue that my reading of Brownmiller in this deconstructive way should be held in high suspicion, for this
reading would neutralize the full, serious meaning and otherwise possible impact of Brownmiller's
argument. Reading, no doubt, is not just an ethical but also a political act. It is, is it not, always a matter of
whose interests are being served? And so let us continue to examine the various interests being served up in
travelling rape stories. (There is a great deal more to say about Brownmiller and I will return to her work
later.)
Warner (Castle and Eagleton): Now I want to return to Warren, whose article, I can now divulge,
is a review-article of Terry Castle's Clarissa's Ciphers (1982) and Terry Eagleton's The Rape of Clarissa
(1982). (Both authors have written books about Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, in which rape plays a
prominent part in the narrative of this canonized novel.) Let us recall now that Warren states,
"Brownmiller's book first mobilized the imaginative power of rape for a significant spectrum of feminism;
and in doing so it evidences a way of reading, an ethos of reading and a tone for reading" (15; my
emphasis). With this recollection, we can now turn to and see exactly what that "ethos of reading" can
become when others engage in it.
Warren points out specifically how both Castle and Eagleton speak by way of Brownmiller's
foundationalist view of rape. In dis/respect to Eagleton, Warren writes that this Marxist and would-be
feminist critic's motives are not merely a defense of Clarissa and other women but more so an attack on
poststructuralist and postmodernist critics and a defense of his own method of criticism (17). In other
words, Eagleton's defense of Clarissa is only a pretext. (". . . the wasteland grows: woe to him [sic] who
hides wastelands within!") For example, Eagleton writes: "[Lovelace, the rapist] is this pathetic character
51

who has been celebrated by the critics as Byronic hero, Satanic vitalist or post-modernist artist" (qtd. in
Warren 21; Castle 63; emphasis mine). In many ways, we can read Warren's characterization of Eagleton as
merely foul play, even though Eagleton's own words evidence him as engaging in demagoguery. An attack
on another critic's position is always a defense of one's own. However, Warren's full argument against and
analysis of Eagleton's position is compelling. And besides, it is the case that the feigned defense of a raped
woman (e.g., Helen), so as to display one's own virtue and virtuosity, is a commonplace in Western
literature. Eagleton is definitely not immune from such a display, and it may very well be that no male or
female is immune from being reactionary. (". . . the wasteland grows: woe to him [sic] who hides
wastelands within!") Nonetheless, there are differences in attitude that can be detected, which are what
Warren develops in his argument.
If Brownmiller has had a powerful influence on the ethos of "the univocal reading rape" (Warren
25), there have been others who have challenged such a "univocal reading of rape," including feminists
themselves. Warren cites and discusses Diana George, Helen Hazen, and Nina Auerbach, and says,
If Brownmiller assimilates all representations of rape, and a good deal more, to a homogeneous
scene of rape that is morally equivalent to the crime of rape, then George and Hazen get us
wondering about the difference between fantasies of rape, and rape as a social fact. It is the
intended effect of Brownmiller's analysis, and Castle and Eagleton's readings of Clarissa, to make
the marking of such a difference a moral scandal. Any equivocation on the nature of rape, any
marking of the differences between actual rapes and rapes in fiction, or between an indisputable
rape and some more complex boundary situation, leads to headshaking and finger-wagging. If the
word "misogynist" is not dropped, then there are grave suggestions that the critic in question is
entering into complicity with the agents of victimization. (25)
In contrast to Brownmiller's univocal reading of rape and its sympathizers, Warren says, "George
and Hazen and Auerbach are united in the insistence that art and 'reality' cannot be simply conflated on the
matter of rape. For this reason there is for them not one scene of rape, but many" (25; my emphasis). Many
travelling stories.
Throughout Chase Rape, I will have argued against (not just contra to but also alongside) the
traditional, foundationalist, essentialist—whether naive or strategic—philosophy of reducing all to one, and
I will have done so not only on aesthetic grounds but also on ethical and political grounds. It is how we
account for human thinking and acting (revengeful) that is most crucial to and for us. Quite ironically, those
who would argue for univocality only end up apparently arguing for the silencing of others and the control
of language, neither of which can ever be realized (see Warren 27). Speech and language (logos), language
and speech, are irrepressible. Eternally re/turning. At some level of the registers, tones, experiences, and
significatory chains. Moreover, as Warren suggests, if anyone disagrees with these critics, then, that person
can be cast as complicit in the very act—every reenactment—of rape itself. The strategy of the party of
52

one is vengeful; a call for justice is an alibi to dole out punishment (see Nietzsche, Genealogy). Such a
strategy is trafficking in guilt that can only lead to greater levels of violence.
Biology is not enough to give an answer to the question that is before us: why is woman the
Other? Our task is to discover how the nature of woman has been affected throughout the course
of history; we are concerned to find out what humanity has made [emphasis mine] of the human
female.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (41).
Thornhill and Palmer (Brownmiller): Let us stir and turn things around now to and focus on the
"real" foundationalists and essentialist. Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer are real (or what is sometime
called) naïve essentialists. Theirs is a natural history, not a cultural history. In A Natural History of Rape:
Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, they argue specifically against Brownmiller and others in such a way
as to rule out of court their so-called "social science explanation of rape" (6). Given Thornhill and Palmer's
scientific bias—which they do not acknowledge as a bias, or as even being a radical of presentation—their
presupposition is that nature (physis) determines men to engage in sexual coercion and rape, not culture
(nomos). Men as potential rapists are born, given evolutionary theory by natural selection, and not made,
given cultural, economic forces. (This statement, of course, can sound as if paralleling Brownmiller's
argument based on anatomy, but it does not have to, given her strategies of thinking, reading, and writing
rape, which I do not find present in Thornhill and Palmer's thinking.)
But to get at the difference between Brownmiller and Thornhill-Palmer's predispositions and
arguments, I am going to take Millett's paradigm of writing in The Basement and separate Thornhill and
Palmer's reported facts from their meditations and speculative travelling stories:
Facts: Thornhill and Palmer make their distinctions much more specific than simple ones between
nature (gene) and culture (scene), for they point repeatedly to what they see as the mistakes made by "social
science thinkers" (e.g., feminists, Marxists, such as Brownmiller). They claim that these so-called
ideologues engage in "the naturalistic fallacy" (instead of saying what something is, they say what it ought
to be) (5-6; cf. 121) and in an ideological confusion of not understanding the importance of and distinction
between "adaptation" (or ultimate causation: "traits formed directly by selective pressures") and "the effects
of adaptations," or proximate causation, also called "byproducts" (or that which is learned as a spin-off:
traits formed indirectly by selective pressures") (11).
Traits formed directly as adaptation, in terms of rape, have to do with "increased male
reproductive success by way of increasing mate number. That is, there may be psychological mechanisms
designed specifically to influence males to rape in ways that would have produced a net reproductive
benefit in the past" (59; emphasis mine). Traits as proximate or by-products—without reproductive
success—can range from sexual abuse of children to masturbation (60).
53

Thornhill and Palmer are reading Brownmiller and company and are reading rape, but they do not
read themselves—they do not read suspiciously themselves—reading rape to formulate their natural
history. That "good" scientists are to follow the rules and regimens of their universe of discourse is to be
expected. No moral, or value-judgments, are acceptable. And they expect their readers—reading rape—to
follow the regimens. Thornhill and Palmer quote, after their Acknowledgements, this warning: "Everyone
(except those who cannot distinguish a diagnosis of adaptation from a moral exhortation) could read it with
interest" (qtd. from the dust jacket of Donald Symons's book The Evolution of Human Sexuality). They are
taught and they are attempting to teach the reader of rape un/just to describe accurately what—and I will
put this statement in the passive voice—is seen.
But there is more. At the beginning of chapter 1, Thornhill and Palmer quote a rape victim: "Not
enough people understand what rape is, and, until they do . . . not enough will be done to stop it" (1). A
few paragraphs into this chapter, they position the question of Why Rape? and How to solve it? again from
the point of view of a woman, a friend of theirs, who has been raped. Being concerned, they give her their
answer of the difference between ultimate and proximate causes (3-4). But while giving an explanation of
this objective, scientific difference, they turn this time directly to the reader ("you") and write:
[I]f, when reading our friend's question concerning the cause of the man's behavior, you said to
yourself it was because he hated women, felt the need to dominate someone, had been abused as a
child, had drunk too much, had too much testosterone circulating in his body, was compensating
from feelings of inadequacy, had been raised in a patriarchal culture, had watched too much
violence on television, was addicted to violent pornography, was sexually aroused, hated his
mother, hated his father, and/or had a rare violence-inducing gene, you proposed a proximate
cause of his behavior. You probably didn't ask why your proposed proximate cause existed in the
first place. That is, you probably didn't concern yourself with the ultimate cause of the behavior.
(4)
But this attempt to demonstrate twice their concern for women in order to develop their own ethos (both
personal and professional) in the eyes of the reader is un/just a pedagogical mechanism that allows them to
re-inscribe the very horrors that they are attempting to understand and end. And to take the full Freudian
twist, their very attempt to be objective itself only re-inscribes the horrors that so-called objectivity is trying
to repress (or turn into abjectivity) (see Freud SE, XII: 50). Much, too much, is hidden from Thornhill and
Palmer's sight. For example:
Meditations: The scientists write fantastically, though as they say anecdotally, about "Rape
Victimization in Evolutionary Context":
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On evolutionary theoretical grounds, men's concerns about the rape of their mates is expected to
be specific to rape by other humans. That men's concern about rape's lowering their confidence of
paternity has this specificity is suggested, albeit anecdotally, by an instance in which a woman was
raped by a male orangutan. Male orangutans often rape female orangutans in the wild. . . . The
orangutan involved in this particular rape had been born in the wild and captured for research
purposes. He was relatively tame around the humans at the jungle camp of the research group.
However, one day he attacked and raped a cook at the camp despite attempts by the veteran
orangutan research Biruté Galdikas to stop him. Wrangham and Peterson . . . summarize
Galdikas's comments on what transpired after the rape: 'Fortunately, the victim was neither
seriously injured nor stigmatized. Her friends remained tolerant and supportive. Her husband
reasoned that since the rapist was not human, the rape should not provoke shame or rage.'
Galdikas . . . recalls the husband saying: 'Why should my wife or I be concerned? It was not a
man.' Neither the husband nor the victim seemed to suffer greatly.
We feel that the woman's perspective on rape can be best understood by considering the negative
influences of rape on female reproductive success. . . . (87-88)
What is remarkable about this anecdote is that it does, in fact, allow Thornhill and Palmer to enjoy their
symptoms while, hiding from their own sight, their wrong-headedness on the matter of rape. The whole
focus of this travelling story on rape—as it is handed down from one good scientist to another—is
exclusively from the male point of view, as Frans B. M. de Waal points out (24). Moreover, the issue here,
as it is so indelicately—rather, violently—put, is the exchange value of the female to the men and her
friends, who, we are told, remain "tolerant." Worse, the husband is allowed to speak for the victim, who
"seemed [not] to suffer greatly." The man stands to his wife as husband to victim (not husband/wife, but
husband/victim). And the male biologists stand to the female victim as, "We feel that the woman's
perspective on rape can be best understood. . . ." What "women's perspective"! When it is never asked for!
(Perhaps the woman, unlike the "rhetorical" women that they construct in their text, was too emotionally
involved in her rape while the husband and the scientists are emotionally detached.) Thornhill and Palmer,
unlike Millett, stand above (as in transcendence) not within (not as becoming-woman) the woman raped.
And what about Brownmiller's views on rape victimization in evolutionary context? Brownmiller's
view, which incorporates a "violent landscape inhabited by primitive woman and man, some woman
somewhere had a prescient vision of her right to her own physical integrity, and in my mind's eyes I can
picture her fighting like hell to preserve it" (Against 14). Brownmiller's view? Why bother, for as Thornhill
and Palmer repeatedly state, Brownmiller et al. are feminist, Marxist ideologues (123).
The fatal error in thinking that Thornhill and Palmer make is not only that they are engaging in
reactionary thinking but also that they are engaging in begging a question. (But this is typical of many
thinkers in the scientific community.) After stating what they see to be the basic differences between
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scientific thinking (on the natural stories of rape) and cultural thinking (on cultural stories of rape), they
outline what they consider to be the "Flaws in the Social Science Explanation of Rape." The first is "The
assumptions [social science] makes about human nature are not compatible with current knowledge about
evolution" (128). Yes, this is the case, but only because scientists and so-called social scientists do not
share the same universe of discourse, the same rules and regimens of thinking. Therefore, to some how or
other assume, as Thornhill and Palmer do, that the discourse of science is the unquestionable baseline for
thinking and that social-science thinking does not measure up to it, is fundamentally fallacious, even under
the rules and regimens of scientific discourse itself. Thou shalt not beg a question. But Thornhill and
Palmer do this without knowing that they do it. They are ideologues, suffering from blindness without any
insight. When scientists think that they have the answer and have cornered the market on What is called
thinking?, especially in relation to ultimate causes, they but create what Lyotard has called a differend. For
Lyotard, a differend, as opposed to a litigation,
would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for
lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. One side's legitimacy does not imply the
other's lack of legitimacy. However, applying a single rule of judgment to both in order to settle
their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them. (xi)
Brownmiller Redux: There are far too many wrongs in our world. Perhaps the biggest is how a
few early thinkers—rotten with perfection—decided that it would be best to reduce the abundance of reality
and deal with it "scientifically" in terms of reduction (see Feyerabend, Abundance 13). Which is what
Thornhill and Palmer practice:
Although 'reductionism' is seen as a vulgar word in some areas of the academy, reductionism is
actually an essential aspect of all science. All scientific hypotheses attempt to elucidate nature by
simplifying its complexity and its diversity into empirically manageable parts. . . . That such a
procedure generates discoveries is demonstrated by the vast amount of knowledge produced by
scientific disciplines. (115)
But what is lost in the ever-so-proper phrase the production of knowledge? What has been excluded? when
Thornhill and Palmer ask, "Why have attempts to explain rape by means of the only scientific ultimate
explanation of living things been greeted with charges of racism and sexism?" (105; emphasis mine). The
answers that come to mind are Everything that Millett sees. Griffin sees. Greer sees. Brownmiller sees. And
Others see!
Thornhill and Miller give their chapter 5 the title "Why Have Social Scientists Failed to
Darwinize?" I can only counter-ask, Why have Biologists failed to Millettize, Griffinize, Greerize,
Brownmillerize? (Everything is imminently reversible.) Perhaps it is because, in the words of Nietzsche,
Thornhill and Palmer "would rather will nothingness, than not will" (163). That is, will to truth. Which is
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an impulse to will a single, dogmatic truth (death). And thereby to act against our will. As Brownmiller
makes clear in her(/his)story of rape.
Under the sign of Brownmiller Redux, I am trying to point to un/just how particular discourse
practices attempt to silence "Brownmiller." (It may very well be that all discourse practices attempt to put
an end to counter-practices.) But such practices can but fail. In this light, I want briefly to return to
Thornhill and Palmer's first objection, concerning the "naturalistic fallacy," the difference between is and
ought. And in doing so, I want to emphasize the ethical as well as political value and importance of
thinking excess or abundance over lack or reduction as a basis for thinking, reading, and writing rape, and
the importance of what Nietzsche refers to as "lying in the extra moral sense" (see Portable 42-46). But I
will let Paul Feyerabend in "Ethics as a Measure of Scientific Truth" and Aristotle in the Nicomachean
Ethics speak this point.
There is a rather perverse movement in science itself to take the principle of decenteredness in the
universe and, working from it, claim that all rights, henceforth, should be respected equally. It is argued
that this claim should lead to this choice. To at least a Liberal. this proposition with its incipient choice
should sound reasonable upon first glance. Feyerabend, responding to Fang Lizhi, the Chinese
astrophysicist and dissident, and his position on this matter, however, carefully thinks counter-examples,
and points out that the statement has a contradiction hidden in it and that it contains a "totalitarian element"
(243). What Lizhi still begins with is "monster 'science' " (243) as unique in its universality toward the real
and the truth. It is important to understand that this is not a statement that argues in favoring ethical
particularities, but for the uniqueness of the universality of science over all other fields and disciplines and
their ways of thinking, reading, and writing. It is easy to lose sight of this beginning point.
Let us proceed with this distinction in mind, while we examine the value of ethical particularities,
even peculiar, counter-exemplary ones, such as Feyerabend gives in terms of a choice: "Is it inhumane to
save the life of an enemy? Yes, if it means that he will soon be able to do what he does best—rape women
and kill children" (243; my emphasis).
Feyerabend points out first that Lizhi assumes that his view of the universe is commonly accepted
by virtually all scientists. It is not. Often, scientists spit out the party line about what the methodology of
science is, but they do not always in their practice follow it (see Feyerabend, Against Method, 1st, 2nd, and
3rd editions). Feyerabend, giving examples of the lack of universality in science, writes:
For Fang [Lizhi], the universality of science is closely connected with its uniqueness, i.e., with the
claim that there is only one science and only one type of genuine knowledge. But the fact that a
discipline contains unrestricted principles does not exclude other disciplines with other and
equally unrestricted principles in their repertory. Arithmetic does not exclude geometry, and
phenomenological thermodynamics for a long time developed side by side with mechanical
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principles. True, alternatives may merge or be reduced by elimination: science occasionally
(though hardly ever) speaks with a single voice. Permanent uniqueness, however, is not a fact. It is
an ideal, or a metaphysical hypothesis.
Now I have no objection to metaphysical hypotheses. On the contrary, I would say that science is
impossible without them. (Abundance 244; emphasis Feyerabend's)
Again: Lizhi invites people "to 'absorb' an allegedly unique Western science and to abolish other
forms of knowledge" (245). Such a reductionism within science (accepting only one view of Western
science and excluding others) or outside it (accepting only one view of science and excluding all other so-
called metaphysical, ideological, or superstitious worldviews) would not be life-enhancing. One more
example: Feyerabend points to Aristotle's criticisms of Parmenides and Plato. Aristotle argues, far from
being limited to "a logical criticism," that Parmenides's logical "result would inhibit practical life and
political action." And he adds, again with counter-exemplary thinking, "a way of life is made the measure of
reality" (248). But again, Aristotle, "commenting on Platonists who tried to justify good behavior by
reference to a supreme and unchanging Good," argues:
Even if there existed a Good that is one and can be predicated generally or that exists separately
and in and for itself, it would be clear that such a Good can neither be produced nor acquired by
human beings. However, it is just such a good we are looking for. . . . It seems that the physician
does not try to find health in itself, but the health of human beings or perhaps even the health of an
individual person. For he heals the individual." (Abundance 248-49; Feyerabend's emphasis and
bracketed interpolation. qt. from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1096b33 ff.)
What is dangerous about Parmenidean and traditional Platonic views of thinking, as they are
practiced, perhaps unwittingly in modernist science, is that they lead to excluding. The very dialectical
principles of species-genus analytics (diaeresis) make meaning by way of exclusion and reduction.
But there is an alternative to such thinking. In the best way he puts it, Feyerabend give us this
explicit counterexample:
According to Fang we argue from scientific reality to ethics and human rights. This is a dangerous
movement. . . . I suggest that we argue the other way around, from the 'subjective,' 'irrational,'
idiosyncratic kind of life we are in sympathy with, to what is to be regarded as real [i.e., from
ethics and human rights to scientific reality]. The inversion has many advantages. It is in
agreement with human rights. It sensitizes us to the fact that Fang's 'reality' is the result of a choice
and can be modified: we are not stuck with 'progress' and 'universality'." (251; emphasis mine)
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It is life itself (living), not absolute reality, that is the measure (valuing) of reality. Hence, Feyerabend
invites us to move, as any good Sophist would using dissoi-logoi, from reality/life to life/reality.
Therefore, efforts to silence or to exclude Susan Brownmiller by Thornhill and Palmer in the name
of the one true, universal science are counter-productive to life itself. Instead, we should—ought—to
choose life, living, as the measure of the real or reality. Reductionism, Ackham's razor, or any variation
thereof, but impoverishes life! One exclusive view leads only to killing life, leads to death. Brownmiller
and company are—and I say this without any sense of sentimentality—our "midwives," that is, source of
life, when it comes to issues of living. If there is an ethical choice between the two groups, we should—
ought—to agree with Brownmiller while continuing to read Thornhill, Palmer, and company. If there is a
choice between Gertrude Baniszewski (the rapist and torturer) and Brownmiller, then using the ethical logic
of Aristotle and Feyerabend, we ought exclusively to favor Brownmiller, and yet listen to Millett's
becoming-Gertrude. But lest we misunderstand, it is not a matter of favoring Brownmiller exclusively
either. For she, too, has her Feminist critics, whom we ought to listen to.
. . . Seven years have passed since I wrote the section above on Warner and Brownmiller. I have
not edited my interpolations as they appear here. Since then and since the appearance of Brownmiller's In
Our Time (1999), I am not inclined any longer to say that Brownmiller's master metaphor of all men are
(potentially) rapists is unacceptable. (I leave it as said in that section on Warren, leave it unedited, for I
believe that "thinking, reading, and writing," especially writing should leave its traces, should place into
"presence" itself as an [ever] unfolding process.) Reading In Our Time has helped me, in great part, to
revise my view on this matter. The middle of the book is the most powerful part for me, placing the whole
strategy of the master metaphor into a necessary context. Mostly it is the chapter "Feminist Author" that
most helped me to re-see and understand. In it Brownmiller gives an account of how Against Our Will was
variously received by Feminist readers. The ethical principle in relation to practical life and political
action—the question of ethos—is now easy to see, though the question concerning revenge can still cloud
it. That is, the question of resentful thinking. Which can be found anywhere. In thinking. In mine, too. And
yes, in Brownmiller's. And most assuredly, in how Against Our Will was received by its readers. Here are
some blurbs (perhaps barbs). Think of them as on the dust jacket of the audiences' mind:
"Author Says She Is Obsessed by Rape." Denver Post
". . . a tract celebrating lesbianism and/or masturbation." Commentary
". . . dangerous law and order book which, unless repudiated, will fan the fires of racism." Rape,
Racism, and the White Women's Movement
"Have you been raped? What makes you an expert?" The Donahue Show
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(In Our Time 246, 248, 248-49, 252)
Let us return now, more directly, to the questions of revenge and ethos.
Reading and Writing Revenge Fantasies
Nothing is ever to be posited that is not also reversed and caught up again in the supplementarity
of this reversal [reversement]. To put it another way: there would no longer be either a right side
or a wrong side of discourse, or even of texts, but each passing from one to the other would make
audible and comprehensible even what resists the recto-verso structure that shores up common
sense. If this is to be practiced for every meaning posited—for every word, utterance, sentence,
but also of course for every phoneme, every letter—we need to proceed in such a way that linear
reading is no longer possible.
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One 79-80; cf. 221 (Irigaray's emphasis)
Yes, rape has a history. And so does revenge. Perhaps rape and revenge began at the same time
and have exhibited parallel complementary traces. Rape and then revenge; or, Revenge and then rape; or
still, Rape as revenge, etc. But Revenge for What? Perhaps rape and revenge make up and drive by
(shooting) with the narrative structure of violence called history (as one long drive by shooting). As Laura
Mulvey says—and let me be one of the many who have quoted her in agreement—"sadism demands a
story" (14). We could equally say that a story demands sadism. Indeed, either may be in the other.
Hesford (Strosser's Rape Stories): I have stated that all is imminently reversible. 6 Wendy Hesford,
however, provisionally works contrary to this statement in her critique of Margie Strosser's video Rape
Stories (1989). Hesford, starts from Teresa de Lauretis' discussion (Technologies 31-50) on the violence of
rhetoric in relation to the rhetoric of violence. Lauretis contends, "the representation of violence is
inseparable from the notion of gender, even when the latter is explicitly 'deconstructed' or, more exactly,
indicted as 'ideology.' I contend, in short, that violence is engendered in representation" (33). The violence
of rhetoric drifts, as Paul deMan would say, into "a reading, not a decodage," with readings unto readings
unto a pure rhetoric (Allegories 9), displacing in the rhetoric of violence the fact that violence is
engendered, that sex is forced on women and some men, making them sexually normed as "women," as
objects to be used in certain life-denying ways (Lauretis 37). 7
To combat this drift of reversibility, Hesford has one over-riding goal and primary application in
respect to the fantasy of revenge in the video. The "goal," as Hesford says,
is not to look at survivors' representations as mirrors of historical or psychic realities but to
consider how realist strategies authenticate survivors' representations. I use the terms realist in this
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context to refer to conventions and strategies of representation that signify that which is deemed
'true' and presume a measure of objectivity. Thus, the 'textual 'anxiety' that sustains this project is
the desire to rescue the concept of agency from the anti-humanist assaults of poststructuralism in
ways that do not configure agency outside of culture and its discourses but reconfigure personal
and political agency as embodied negotiations and material enactments of cultural scripts and
ideologies. For example, in order to account for the pain that women endure to claim agency in the
context of sexual violence, we need to understand rape as both a material and a discursive site of
struggle of cultural power. (197; Hesford's emphasis)
Hesford is "consider[ing] how ["realist"] strategies of appropriation can subvert dominant rape scripts even
as they establish complicity with them" (197). (In The Basement Sylvia feels her attempts to subvert
Gertrude's script for the most part only make her complicit in the script. Her smile or laughter as resistance
purchases her only more pain and humiliation and the feeling of guilt and being complicit. 8 ) Hesford is
responding, of course, to what she sees as the political weaknesses of poststructuralist reading practices for
feminism and women. 9
Hesford's application centers on a series of readings of Rape Stories done with great care, asking,
What is gained finally by Strosser's calling on a particular strategy of reversal? Hesford writes: "The victim
rewrites the rape narrative of male power by constructing herself [through a reversal] as [the] one who
inflicts pain and violation; the survivor maims and disarms the phallus and then distributes the fragments
among other female rape survivors" (207). (I will later give an account of this final fantasy in the video.)
Hesford's argument is quite compelling in its specific terms of dealing with the binary opposition male-
power/female-powerlessness. The problem—if presumed a problem—of imminent reversibility can be
reversed to be a solution in itself to any presumed problem. The choices between to die in reality and to kill
in fantasy (or for real) are understandable, but there is a third alternative. To live. And it is this value of
living that I read as the incipient strength of Hesford's planned set of reversals in her reading strategies
against rape scripts (e.g., women are complicit in being raped) and Strosser's video (women should revenge
themselves).
To add to Hesford's critique, what I find highly problematic and ethico-politically counter-
productive in Strosser's video is that it is a ritual of sacrifice demanding a narrative of sacrificial and
resurrective reading. Either way, someone is sacrificed, the woman who is raped or the man who is killed,
mutilated, and cut into slivers and distributed to other women who have been raped. Either way, both found
a community at the expense of the other. In chapter 2, I will discuss the problems of a sacrificial reading in
greater detail; for now, however, I want to examine my own responses to Strosser's video, for there is
something rather peculiar about my responses to the video and to what I took the various narrators, seen
directly or only as stand-ins or shadows, to be. I do not have available to me other viewers' responses. My
first and then later responses opened up something about the video and Strosser's purpose for making it that
complicated issues greatly. I will try to rehearse my responses and then finally comment on them and how I
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see the video as an experiment against canonized ways of reading rape and as an experiment for a
pedagogy of reading rape stories. (Much of what I see and re-see, however, will be informed by
poststructuralist theoreyeings.)
At first viewings, I received the video as being composed of, edited with, more than Strosser's
telling (of) her story; I received the video as having several narrators and potentially composed of a
multitude of narrators (i.e., of "Rape Stories"). And then, upon additional viewings, I reversed my original
position of seeing others besides Strosser's telling stories and begin to see that it was only Strosser's telling
but with the implication that this telling was one of many "Rape Stories." Therefore, basically, I moved
from the idea of many narrators to one (with the potentiality of many).
Either way, with many or one narrator, what I think that the video does is to interrogate me. I am
variously put into many different subject or mute interlocutor positions such as a police detective listening
to a report made by a woman who has been raped; but in a later scene that woman, or one like her, is that
very detective watching and interrogating me, the viewer. There are all kinds of such productive-cum-
paradoxical reversals in the video that test me—test us—as viewers (spectators), male or female. And yet,
as I will also argue, the paradoxical rhetorics are not that easily used in terms of pedagogically
recanonizing rape stories, for there is yet the paradox of the differing media of video and film, which means
comparably film can slide into video, as well as the reverse. Genre or the loss of genre not only positions
the subject-object matter but also the reader and viewer.
This video is many things, but it is, to borrow a critical phrase, a "test drive" (Ronell, Stupidity;
Test Drive) as well, which I will eventually expand upon. So while I agree with Lauretis and Hesford that
the reversibility displaces the literate "fact" that violence is en-gendered and that rape scripts go
unchallenged, I still see that, because of reversibility, I can be taught, as other male and female viewers can
be taught, what it may be like to be interrogated by the law, or as often claimed, raped again. (To be sure,
this teaching, or pedagogical move by Strosser, is a mere simulation of what it must be like to be raped
again.) I as well as other human beings can be taught how to hear rape stories when told, and "we" will be
told such stories, if not already told. (I am referring to Strosser's telling the viewers that, when she tells men
that she has been raped, she tries to situate the stories to make them tell-able. She says as an example that
she would remark to a man, "I hate parking garages because I was raped. And invariably, the man would
say, I never knew anyone who was raped before. And I would say, that's what you think; they just never tell
you.")
So the thought that I would end this opening discussion with, to restart it, is that imminent
reversibility is, yes, pharmakonic. 10 Part of which can be life-enhancing. And yet, any such part, or
counterpart, can put out a call for a script of transgression. Revenge. Which after all is said and undone is
what Rape Stories attempts to do, to transgress, and to accomplish transgression by way of mirror images,
which are plentiful at all levels in the video. And as Hesford argues and reminds us these strategies based
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on mirroring (a woman is raped; therefore, a woman should fantasize revenge against the rapist) are
counter-productive (206-12). As long as we are in the Symbolic, however, we are left with the question of
Where do women go for a life-enhancing scripted response that does not send her looping back to
fantasizing about "empowerment" by way of revenge. The Symbolic has its pedagogical mirroring stage.
But it is not near enough to avoid the psychoanalytic Symbolic and Real and take up with the so-called
materialist real to find the scripts. After all, the two, as Slavoj Zizek argues, homologically uphold each
other: The Freudian-Lacanian and the Marxian views are both concerned with "the secret" of the dream and
of the commodity (Sublime 11-16). Scripts as texts for life or filmic action are potentially Ovidean texts. 11
Viewings: I viewed the video numerous times the first day that I received it and then a few times
as I was hurriedly writing this section prior to returning the video. 12 I stopped and restarted it.
Forward/backwards. Backwards/forward. Repeatedly. Studying the scenes. Taking notes. Erasing the notes.
Making more notes, while recalling how I was hailed to view the video by Hesford's readings.
Let us stop and take notice of the fact that I have been calling Strosser's work a "video" and not a
film or movie. Hesford calls it a "film" (200). The organization—Women Make Movies—that distributes
Rape Stories calls it a videotape, which distinguishes it from other offerings that the organization calls
films. (The works come in two basic formats of either 16mm, with a few in 35mm, film or in generic
analog video. These expressions of difference are more in terms of length and format and do not allude to a
theory/genre specifying particular conventions of film vs. video making.) Why am I calling the work a
video? And Is there a difference between a film and a video? The latter question is generally answered Yes
(see Jameson "Reading without Interpretation"; Ulmer "One Video Theory"; Ronell "Trauma TV" in
Finitude's Score). The former question is best answered, I think, by saying I am insisting on calling the
work a video for the simple reason that it allows me to use the term, genre or paragenre, heuristically in
rethinking Rape Stories.
My calling Rape Stories a video radically changes the conditions for the possibilities of reading
any rape stories as Lauretis would and Hesford does. I am less disagreeing with Hesford's reading, which is
informed by the cultural and academic scripts of reading films; I am more so attempting, instead, to account
for Hesford's reading of rape scripts, real/ism, and how "realist strategies can authenticate survivors'
representations" (197) in Rape Stories. This approach that would avoid, or work around, the violence of
rhetoric is important to both Lauretis and Hesford and to us all, for the notion of a liberating subject
(bourgeois or not) is necessary to do political work, at least, as many of us over the years have come to
view work as political. But my concern about the conditions that make such a (feminist, cultural studies)
reading possible is that they are changing. These conditions are not as reliable as before, and because they
are changing (i.e., are dis/engaging by way of architectonic drifts in the conditions of what is called
thinking), we are all going to be confronted, as never before, with the problem of not only being able to
hear or read rape stories but also of being able to remember the stories. If we cannot remember rape
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(stories), we cannot be subjects who would resist rape or its various cultural scripts. (The incipient problem
can be seen as that of memento mori.)
Therefore, again, Why video instead of film? As we move from film (modernism) to video (let us
say, postmodernism or late capitalism and beyond), or as we move from orality and literacy (which informs
film) to electracy (which informs very differently the coming videos), the closer we get to losing the
conditions of subjectivity (agency), narrative representation, and memory and the closer we get to the
crackup of subjectivity unto singularities, the breakup of narrative into continuous flows, and the
replacement of memory with, at first, backward amnesia and, then, no memory except as it is "represented"
in discrete, disconnected tic-tocs—all of which is to say, the closer we get to the conditions of having no
canon of rape narratives themselves. We have not yet arrived at this pointless, but all signs indicate we are
drifting—for good or bad or in-difference—in this direction. Just as we drifted from orality to literacy, we
are now drifting from literacy (print culture) to electracy (electronic culture). 13 And finally to imminence
(the coming politics and community). After the hangover comes the overhang. We move hence (but will
not be able to recall a before to move to where we are that has become whereless) from imminent
reversibility to imminence (always already on the verge of happening, of potentiality). But obviously all of
this sketch needs to be a full argument, or a more forceful post-annunciation, than I can give here. 14
At least, this sketch can suggest, however, "where" I am coming from in this test drive and going
towardless. If there is an exemplar for this imminence it is to be found performed in Johnathan Nolan's
story "Memento Mori" 15 (which was made into the film Memento). But it is the story, not the film, that I
refer to as an exemplar of what is coming to our community. In the story, Earl (who is Leonard Shelby in
the film), the man who suffers from a blow to the head as he attempted to save his wife from getting raped
and murdered, tries to remember but cannot. He perpetually attempts, nonetheless, to remember, to return
himself back to that event of real violence, but he perpetually and circularly fails, even with the prothesis of
writing notes all around him (on the walls, mirrors, on front and back of photographs, on the ceiling and
even more so on his body). As he reads these notes, he can remember them for about ten minutes and then
he slips back into a total state of confusion, starting over again reading.
He writes to the point of having messages to himself tatooed-written in reverse on his body so that
he can read them in a mirror: On his arm, he reads, "I RAPED AND KILLED YOUR WIFE." And on his
chest he sees a tatooed sketch of a man, like a "police sketch." Earl perpetually yet only momentarily asks,
Who is the "I" of "I RAPED AND KILLED YOUR WIFE." Earl wants to track down this sketch of a man
and get revenge for his wife's death and pain. But the voice in Earl, the remaining thread of what was, but
which is constantly undercut in ten or so minutes by oblivion, and then the whole scenario is relooped, says
So the question is not 'to be or not to be,' because you aren't. The question is whether you want to
do something about it. Whether revenge matters to you.
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It does to most people. For a few weeks, they plot, they scheme, they take measures to get
even. But the passage of time is all it takes to erode that initial impulse. Time is theft. . . . And
time eventually convinces most of us that forgiveness is a virtue. Conveniently, cowardice and
forgiveness look identical at a certain distance. Time steals your nerve.
If time and fear aren't enough to dissuade people from their revenge, then there's always
authority, softly shaking its head and saying, We understand, but you're the better man for letting
it go. . . .
And as for the passage of time, well, that doesn't really apply to you anymore, does it? Just
the same ten minutes, over and over again. So how can you forgive if you can't remember to
forget?
This voice that speaks and taunts Earl (about revenge) will also disappear if it has not already. At best, for
us it is an oral or literate residue of a convention of narration and point of view, a nostalgia that will
eventually withdraw from us altogether. As guilt or conscience itself will have withdrawn. With the
conditions of the possibilities of revenge gone, which means the subject (agent), so then goes ethos. Which
is place, topos. Home. Which is diminishing, going, going, gone. Without any takers or buyers. The
problem is not just the violence of rhetoric as portrayed and explained by Lauretis and supported and
reinformed in terms of rape scripts by Hesford. The problem is not just owing to the use of poststructuralist
reading habits; the problem, instead, is the on-going result of cultural drift, which poststructuralism and
literacy-cum-electracy studies have disclosed to us. We are moving toward the posthuman periodless.
Quite allegorically (literally), Earl is dead ("the question is not 'to be or not to be,' because you
aren't"). The question is whether or not Earl wants to kill or not kill the man who raped and killed his wife
and killed him. Or put similarly, wants revenge. And yet, existentially, there is the question of living. On in
his death. Posthumanly. Let the dead bury the living.
"The abyssal inclusion of video as call of conscience offers no easy transparency but requires a
reading; it calls for a discourse. As we have been shown with singular clarity in the Rodney King
case and, in particular, with the trial, what is called for when video acts as the call of conscience is
not so much a viewing of a spectacle, but a reading, and, instead of voyeurism, an exegesis."
Avital Ronell, "Trauma TV," Finitude's Score (312).
A Nostalgic Near Reading: Before this interruption on explaining Why I called Rape Stories a
video, Why I wanted to disclose the conditions for different readings, and then the eventual loss of reading
as an ethico-political problem, I began with what I referred to as a "peculiar" reading, which I will continue
(to continue) now. I initially viewed the film as a number of women telling their rape stories, though of
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course I made the assumption that the primary story was that of Strosser's telling. Hence, while the story
was one, it was also many stories of women raped and forced (obsessively, like the ancient mariner [Is this
Why Strosser wears the Greek navy shirt while telling her stories?]) to tell their stories. (I have analyzed
the video and accounted for 9 sections. 16 I can only invite my readers to view this video in order to follow
my discussion here just as I would invite them to read the printed matter that I refer to throughout Chaste
Rape.) I read the concluding section of revenge as a suggestion to all the other tellers of rape stories how
they might each deal with the pain and sense of helplessness. In part, what led me to many instead of one
storyteller was the woman telling her story in what I have labelled as Section 3 ("Two Saturdays ago"). The
person in Section 2 ("Now ten years later"), which is right after the title shot, I took to be Strosser herself.
The contrast between the women in Sections 2 and 3 is so distinctive in the way the two women look that I
simply did not see them as the same woman. It was more than the fact that one section is in color and the
other is in black and white (Is this why Strosser's shirt is stripped in black and white horizontally?); it is a
whole host of differences that I will return to. Later, however, when rereading Hesford, I discovered that
she says, "Two Satrudays ago" (or Section 3) is "spliced into" the whole 1989 narrative of the video (200).
This was puzzling for me. In looking for some support for Hesford's interpretation, I returned to the
Women Make Movies Online Catalog and read the following statement:
In October 1979, Margie Strosser was raped in the elevator of her apartment building. Two weeks
later, she asked a friend to interview her about the incident [emphasis mine]. Ten years later, she
remembers and recounts the rape, revealing the emotional texture of the experience and the
reshaping of the event through memory. Between these two distant and disparate versions of the
same story, slips a third, that of the video narration, which integrates the experience over time,
revealing the process of recovery. Candid and intimate, Rape Stories speaks to women's common
fears and the importance of telling our stories, however painful. 17
I still found it difficult to see Section 3 as real, and yet I continued to ask myself What is a "real" response
to a camera and reporting to spectators after having been raped? (My confusion was placing me into the
position of interrogating my "reading" of Rape Stories.)
My reading of the scene of representation as a disclosure and in the form of literacy on film—and
not electracy on video—was making me and still makes me see so much that is going on in terms of literate
props to be read as "props" (e.g., the microphone and the self-conscious comment in the middle of the
discussion about it [Oh, "I'm on microphone," so I should speak directly into it!]; the reaching for the
cigarette and the holding it in hand [the planned filming of the cigarette episode, zooming away in such
way and with perfect timing and then, when the cigarette script is accomplished, zooming back to the
original subject-camera distance]; the fixing of hair; the phrasing and delivery of some comments and
asides such as telling why she is amending her earlier versions of the story for the sake of truthfulness,
etc.—all appear to be rehearsed, or premeditated, choreographed and, therefore, as (self-)conscious cues
sent to the viewer-reader to see the "actor's" and filmographer's tone (i.e., their very attitude toward what
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they are saying and doing). In a single word, I really felt that the whole scene was staged. Not real. And
yet, I feel rather stupid, or a deep stupidity (Ronell, Stupidity), when confronted with the question of real in
this instance. I hear an ethical scream coming from within me. I want to believe that this scene is real, but I
feel stupidly pressured into having to accept this scene as real, when it is telling me, again by way of film-
literary conventions, that it is apparently not real.
My reading of the scene of representation, however, as a disclosure and in the form of electracy on
video makes me not ask the ever-nagging question owing to literacy of whether or not the woman in this
scene is, in fact, Strosser in 1979, giving her statement of having been raped. I am not confronted with this
dilemma even if I think it is a bad performance, or that there is a high level of confusion between the
constative and the performative. As I recall viewing the film or video, I was aware that this video is
comparable to George Holliday's video tape of Rodney King's being beaten and shown on TV. In that
instance, I can see now in retrospect that the video is undercut by the TV presentation (the cutting short and
the framing of the video on TV by the talking heads) and see also now that the video needed a reading in
the larger context of the full video and a rereading frame by frame of its TV form by the defense attorney in
court (cf. Ronell, Finitude 312-24). In other words, the Holliday-King video has two showings and two
primary outcomes among others. Video is portable and more malleable than film once it is released and
placed in public places. Video is just cut and recut and shown on TV or whatever genre in any variety of
ways, while film is cut in copyrighted trailers. TV would never show a scene from a film unjust anyway it
wished. When film is recut, it is later a Director's cut. A play or residue of authority follows film.
I am presuming, therefore, not just a difference between film and video or TV and video, with
video watching TV and vice versa—Ronell has discussed this part of the relationship brilliantly—but I am
pointing to a difference of a spliced video within a full, narrated video called Rape Stories, with the former,
in a sense, re-cutting the latter perpetually not just in reversals but in imminent transversals. We expect
this—or we should come to understand that we best expect this—outcome from video. It is perhaps
impossible to control its various passages from hand to hand and eye to eye. It becomes wafers being
distributed!
My additional reading in electracy allows me to see the woman as telling her story along with a
whole host of women telling their rape stories in this video. Moreover the multitude of women telling rape
stories suggests to me, by way of the "textual anxiety" (Hesford 193) that wakes us and calls us to rescue
subjectivity, agency itself, as it is read in a literate film-text, or to rescue Earl, as he awakes and reads his
notes that are good for another five or so minutes and then disappear from memory . . . suggests to me in a
video-text the breaking up of traditional subjectivity into singularities and not simply as a Lacan might talk
of it, or as a Jameson might critique it, but as a Havelock might give an account of it, or an Ulmer might
write it, vanishing altogether. The body of Strosser is becoming analogically sliced into thin singularities
and distributed to a (coming) community of sorts. It is as if the film by way of video is becoming "filmic."
The entire film! Which, according to Barthes, would mean—in terms of third senses (directions)—the film
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in its entirety is becoming beyond description, completely obtuse, slipping into the third senses themselves
(Image Music Text 64-65).
It is not that I feel less stupid when viewing Rape Stories as a video. I am aware that I am
answering by way of a misnaming (a mistake/nness) and then by way of a parabasis (an interruption), both
of which are stupidities of other kinds. I become forgetful.
What I have tried to illustrate here, as I reflect on it, is that both film and video give new, yet
diminish the older, conditions of possibilities: Film, by way of breaking up literary conventions, becoming
"filmic"; video, by way of breaking up the subject as well as memory and of endlessly flowing, becoming
the "third meaning [sense]." 18 Both film and video have the capacity to make Rape Chaste. And yet, both
also, when becoming "filmic," exemplify what Barthes suggests when he says film—i.e., a certain
uncertain obtuse element in film (in his suggestion, Eisensteinian film)—"outplays meaning—subverts not
the content but the whole practice of meaning [into the third meaning, sense]" (62; cf. Agamben, Man
Without Content; Vitanza, "Threes" and "Two Gestures").
What this drifting out of a binary, which is imminently reversible cum transversal anyway, leads
to is a third figure of sense, a third figure that challenges, if not erases, what has gone for content
altogether. Barthes continues: "A new—rare—practice affirmed against a majority practice (that of
signification), obtuse meaning appears necessarily as a luxury, an expenditure with no exchange [as in
Bataille's accursed share]. This luxury does not yet belong to today's politics but nevertheless already to
tomorrow's" (62-63; Barthes's emphasis). Barthes's allusion to tomorrow's politics, I take, to be in an
obtuse, future anterior, yet metaleptic allusion to respectively Jean-Luc Nancy's, Maurice Blanchot's, and
Giorgio Agamben's inoperative, unavowable, coming community. But in thinking along these lines, I am
getting way aheadless of myself with the contentless of later chapters in Chaste Rape. But it is ever
important to see that this forthcoming community, which Strosser's video awaits a viewing, is one without
revenge, one that, as Agamben writes, "can have hope only in what is without remedy" (Coming 102; cf.
Nietzsche, Zarathustra 249-54).
Having illustrated this test that gives no politically correct results, apparently, I have left much
unsaid that wants to be said, that wants to be ethically screamed. Therefore, let me rebegin and try again by
thinking, reading, writing my continuing notes.
Writing and Reading Autobiographical Rape
The philosophical problem is one of will. Is will gendered? Clearly Nietzsche's comprehension of
will never took into account that he could be raped. Sade postulated that a woman had a strong
will—to be raped and otherwise hurt. It is the governing pornographic conceit, indistinguishable
from a will to have sex. The problem of female freedom is the problem of female will. Can a
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woman have freedom of will if her will exists outside the whole rape system: if she will not be
raped or potentially raped or, to cover Sade's odd women, if she will not rape. Assuming that the
rapist qua rapist imposes his will, can any woman be free abjuring rape, her will repudiating it, or
is any such will vestigial, utterly useless on the plane of human reality. Rape is, in that sense, more
like housework than it is like intercourse. He wants the house clean. She does not want to clean it.
Heterosexual imperatives demand that she bend her will to his.
Andrea Dworkin, "Not Andrea: Epilogue" in Mercy 339-40.
There are three voices in Mercy. First there is the voice of the novel's prologue, a parody of the
well-to-do self-described 'liberal feminist' in whom Dworkin no longer believes. Next there is the
so-called 'pro-pornography feminist' of the epilogue. . . . These two voices serve as a framing
device. Between them, in precise contrast, the third of the novel's voices rings true and clear: 'My
name is Andrea. . . .' Mercy belongs to this Andrea as no other modern novel has belonged to its
protagonist since Flaubert imagined Emma Bovary.
Anonymous, The inner dust jacket, Mercy.
Dworkin: Strosser's Rape Stories is about reading and writing autobiographical rape. But it is
apparently so much about a series of revenge fantasies that it is best described as such and in complicated
terms of fantasies. (The closing scene of revenge weighs heavy.) Not that the reported rape was a fantasy!
On June 2, 2000, Andrea Dworkin published a story of her own rape, "They Took My Body From
Me and Used It," in The Guardian, and on June 5, 2000, by another title, "The Day I was Drugged and
Raped," in the New Statesman magazine, both on the World Wide Web. She subsequently posted the story
on her own Web site. 19 In "They Took My Body," she tells us:
I was in Europe [Paris]. I was 52. It was 1999. I was in a garden in a hotel. I was reading a book.
French Literary Fascism. I was drinking kir royale. I had two. The second one didn't taste right. I
didn't finish it. Then I became sort of sickish or weakish or something, and all I could think about
was getting to my bed and not making a fool of myself in public view. I prayed: 'Let me get to my
room, please let me get to my room.' I had ordered dinner from room service and the waiter, who
had also made the drinks, had said: 'It will be my great pleasure to serve you your dinner tonight.' I
conked out. (para. 1)
The staccato, declarative one-liners underline the facts of the case as Dworkin represents them.
(Dworkin, as Catherine Bennett writes, is very much concerned with facts, for men often distort the facts of
the many rapes perpetrated on women. Dworkin is careful to point out on her Web site what is factual and
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not factual. In fact, she has what she calls a "Lie Detector," which is a section of the site, where she fights
distortions and misrepresentations with facts). After the Initial paragraph and without skipping a beat,
Dworkin continues with her account:
Then a boy was in the room with dinner. He had served me the second drink. I tried to get up and I
fell against the far wall because I couldn't stand. I signed the cheque, but could barely balance
myself. I fell back on to the bed. I didn't lock the door. I came to four or five hours later. I didn't
now where I was. The curtains hadn't been drawn. Now it was dark; before it had been light, long
before dusk.
I had internal pain. I hurt deep inside my vagina. I said to myself. 'Well, it's cancer, and there's
nothing you can do about it now so worry about it when you get home.' I went to the toilet and
found blood on my right hand, fresh, bright red, not menstrual blood, not clotted blood. I'm past
bleeding. I tried to find the source of the blood. My hand got covered in it again. I found huge,
deep gashes on my right leg from the middle of the back of the leg to the middle of the front. I
couldn't stop the bleeding of the gashes so I tried to keep them clean.
A few hours later I took a shower. . . . I thought that I had been drugged and raped, but I felt
confused. (paras. 2-4)
The continuing description is a thick one, moving in different, often peculiar directions. What Dworkin
says is important, but especially for an audience who would receive what this canonized thinker, reader,
writer of rape would have to say. Therefore, I am at first going to focus on what her predominately female
readers say in response to her autobiographical account of being raped. Then I will focus on Dworkin's
statement and what I take that she is attempting.
As one might expect, there were many puzzled females readers on the World Wide Web—which
has become the virtual discussion site for Dworkin's story—responding to their rather confused receptions
of what Dworkin might be saying, for there appears to be more than an account of rape in Dworkin's story.
Reading the readers, like reading the writing of the account, is like experiencing vertigo. In some cases, the
readers do not believe that Dworkin was raped as reported. (All the readers know that Dworkin had been
raped and physically abused by her former husband, and had worked as a prostitute for a while. She makes
these events well known.) In other cases, the readers believe that she was raped in this incident but that in
giving her account she is saying something in addition. Still other readers believe that Dworkin is simply
slipping more and more into madness and feel sorry for her.
The issue behind the various receptions of her account of having been raped is one of ethos, as it
always is a question of ethos and credibility, which in itself is a double-edged sword. (Women who have
been raped are seldom believed and, consequently, left with feelings of being "raped" again.) In comparison
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to other Feminists writing on rape, virtually all the readers see Dworkin's radical of presentation to be the
most radically slanted. In the quotations above from Mercy, it is possible to see that Dworkin is an
exceptional writer of caustic, Juvenalian satire. The novel Mercy has two voices (in the prologue and
epilogue) that are "Not Andrea" but two specific Feminists, whom Dworkin is satirizing. The middle, main
section, which makes up the novel itself, has one voice, though fractured throughout, that is from the point
of view of an "Andrea," who is and is not the author Andrea Dworkin. In other works—non-fictional such
as the recent book Scapegoat—Dworkin can easily be read—and is by the female writers responding to her
account of rape—as hyperbolic, perhaps strategically and tactically so, but can be read, nonetheless, as a
gross stretching of facts and interpretations. There is, however, a tradition and, hence, convention of more
than one authorial voice in a text and one of hyperbole in writing going back as far as we care to read. The
conclusion, therefore, often reached by readers is that though Dworkin values facts, she can casuistically
stretch them to fit whatever satirical, pedagogical purposes she might want. Here are a few things that the
selected readers say about Dworkin's account of recently being raped, which I have quoted at length since
on the Web and less likely to remain available:
Catherine Bennett, a Guardian Columnist: "In The New Statesman [version], she was precise
about the town, a European city [Paris], and the date. . . . All the police need, then is the name of the hotel
and the men can be questioned. But Dworkin has not been to the police." Bennett continues: "She came
round from the assault to find a 'big, strange bruise' on one breast and 'huge deep gashes' on one leg which
would not stop bleeding. For some reason she did not call a doctor to staunch the bleeding; neither did she
call hotel security nor the police. The reluctance of a rape victim to be further violated by examination and
questioning is understood, but if this is what prevented Dworkin from seeking help it does not seem
consistent with her current decision to relive the ordeal, in vivid detail, for readers of The New Statesman"
(paras. 6-7). And Bennett asks, "Is the bartender, with his accomplice, to be allowed to continue drugging
and raping female guests?" (para. 8). The year of the rape had many, other bad events for Dworkin. At the
end of the account she, for example, speaks of her father's death. Bennett concludes: "Maybe, at this grim
stage in her life, we should just leave her alone. But her rape claim, like any other, seems to deserve
scrutiny before it takes its place in the archive against intercourse. It is Dworkin, after all, who, consistent
with her vow, chooses to use this experience for 'women's liberation,' depicting it as part of a wave of
'foolproof rape.' Offered like this, as evidence, the article contains so many opacities, begs so many
questions, that it reads almost as if Dworkin wants to be doubted" (para. 10).
Susie Bright: "By the time you finish reading it, you know she has finally completely lost her
mind" (paras. 3-4). She continues: "This is a woman who called for my 'assassination' on previous
occasions—because of my association with what she regards as the grrl-cabal [sic] of neo-femme-
pornographers. But my personal image in her eyes is insignificant. She's had a much bigger effect on me,
and on my generation of women, than I've ever had on her" (para. 5). As Bright continues through the next
ten or so paragraphs, she gives the impression of writing a funeral eulogy, mostly praising the contributions
that Dworkin has made to women. She focuses on the fact, however, that Dworkin has "refused ever to talk
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to a therapist, or even entertain a discussion of psychological motivation. . . . In all her morality plays, she
has studiously avoided the unconscious" (para. 18; emphasis mine). Let me interject that I can understand
why Dworkin would stay away from the.rapists. And anyway, how could Dworkin see psychoanalysis as
friendly toward any woman, since colonized by Freud et al., wittingly or not, to oppress women. But I have
to wonder how she might surpass a Dora in a discursive battle with a Freud.
Bright continues: "I find Dworkin's description of her rape incredible. It would be too cruel to tear
it apart point by point, but suffice it to say there are too many odd bits and contradictions to fit any rape
pattern [script] that I've ever known. Andrea Dworkin has made so many aware of how rape happens, and
what its detailed circumstances are, that now when she cries 'wolf,' all her students such as myself are
bound to look askance at her account" (para. 22). The so-called metascript of rape fails! And finally Bright
says: "I could easily believe [Dworkin] had a black-out, and nasty injuries, from an unexpected dose of
alcohol and sunburn. I would rather have sympathy for that version of events than to believe she is
maliciously making the whole thing up—as some Guardian readers have charged in . . . letters to the
Editor. But as anyone can tell from the second half of her story, the rape episode is just the lead to a series
of assertions that everyone from her gynecologist to her dearest companion have betrayed her" (para. 23).
In Dworkin's account of the aftermath of the rape, her "gynaecologist of more than a decade" rejected and
was annoyed by her ("the call from me convinced her that she should have an unlisted phone number") and
her "mate," John Stoltenberg, did not believe her ("He abandoned me emotionally").
Julia Gracen, a columnist at Salon: Perhaps the best "reporter" of the discussion on the Web,
Gracen summarizes a number of different virtual discussants, ranging from columns to discussions online
in Web (bulletin board) archives. Some discussants, she says, "ranged from sorrowful head shakings to
bizarre speculations about her sex life" (para. 8). And many posters are rather critical and judgmental:
Gracen reports one writing, "I guess I feel worse for those who Dworkin has hurt than for her." Another:
"Cases like this do more to damage every credible case out there than anything else. It's horribly
irresponsible, and a disservice to woman everywhere" (para. 9).
After summarizing a variety of discussants, Gracen turns to the then recent publication of
Dworkin's Scapegoat and focuses on the contradictions between the book and her subsequent published
account of being raped. Grace writes: "It is easy—perhaps too easy—to see the symbolic connections
between the subject of Dworkin's book and the way she herself has been publicly vilified—and pitied—for
her rape story. A common charge is that her essay was just a publicity stunt" (para. 15). Gracen interviewed
Michael Lamport Commons, "a researcher with Harvard Medical School's Program in Psychiatry and Law"
who "sound[ed] a note of caution: 'Lying is a concept of free will,' he told me. People have to know that
they are telling untruths in order to be justifiably called liars. He's not sure that is the case with Dworkin:
'While rare, people have dreams of being raped, which appear real to them. . . . Many character disorders,
including borderline personality, involve "lying" and not knowing one lies.' Dworkin's bleak personal
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history also raises the specter of post-traumatic stress disorder, with its all-too-common dissociative fugues
and fragmented flashback to earlier scenes of violence" (para. 17).
Gracen argues: "the real bottom line . . . is that Andrea Dworkin—that ugly, lunatic, 'man-hating'
feminist—has publicly cried rape without offering sufficient evidence. . . . [W]omen have been forced to
concede—on perfectly logical grounds, of course—that women do not always tell the truth about rape. So
over time the default response to the charge has changed. Now, instead of a tendency toward belief and
sympathy when a woman claims she has been raped, there is considerably more caution and doubt" (para.
22). And then concluding: "[T]here is an ugly lesson [concerning ethos] in Dworkin's story that all women
should heed. It says that if you aren't considered a reliable witness to begin with, or if you are already
considered a social outrage, the proof that you offer to overcome that tendency toward doubt had better be
utterly unassailable in every respect, for the real gangbanging [the second rape] will begin" (para. 23).
"[T]he twin tenets of rapist ethics: It is right to rape; it is wrong to be raped. . . . It is right to be
male; it is wrong to be female; therefore anything done against a woman to the purpose of one's
passion—realizing male sexual identity—is justifiable and good within the frame of rapist ethics."
John Stoltenberg, Refusing To Be A Man 20-21
"Rapist Ethics": To say the least, Dworkin does not fare very well in these accounts, but in order
to move from a disjunctive either/or determination, I would point us to a third alternative. I will take two
more steps to get to this third. First, I want to point to a very interesting and valuable discussion on "rapist
ethics" by Stoltenberg, who Dworkin alleges did not believe her rape story. And then I want to combine
that discussion with a notion of "The Test."
Stoltenberg, in attempting to answer the question Why do men rape?, examines the ethos-ethics of
the male rapist. In a rather ingenious way, he attempts to answer the question with "an analogy to the craft
of acting in the theater" (15). Calling on a contemporary theory of acting that finds its basis in Aristotle's
Poetics (see 1454a), Stoltenberg writes, "the actor must believe at all times [as Aristotle strongly suggests]
that what the character is doing is right, no matter what the audience or the other characters onstage may
think of the goodness or badness of that character's actions. . . . [T]he actor playing the character must have
prepared for the role by adopting a belief system in which it makes moral sense to do those acts" (15-16).
With an analogical-heuristic connection to Aristotle's four necessities for the character in tragedy,
Stoltenberg finds three necessary ways "to act out convincingly a male sexual identity":
an unfailing belief in one's own goodness and the moral rightness of one's purposes, regardless of
how others may value what one does;
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a rigorous adherence to the set of behaviors, characteristics, and idiosyncrasies that are
appropriately male (and therefore inappropriate for a female);
an unquestioning belief in one's own consistency, notwithstanding any evidence to the contrary—a
consistency rooted, for all practical purposes, in the relentlessness of one's will and in the fact that,
being superior by social definition, one can want whatever one wants and one can expect to get it.
(16-17)
Permit me a digression. In order to answer the question, Why do men rape?, Stoltenberg must first
deal with the question, What is a man? performatively (i.e., to act out convincingly a male sexual identity)?
The answer to the question concerning man—as Aristotle himself would say—is the potential answer to the
question, Why do men rape? I say potential as in potentiality (potentia, dynamis) or as in capacity (capable,
can). This is to say that man is not actually a rapist, but a potential rapist, which can be acted out
(dissembled) or actually done. Man can dis/engage by way of a "radical evil" that is the "potentiality for
darkness" (see Agamben, Potentialities 181).
Stoltenberg continues: "This much, we can assume, Aristotle meant by 'true to life,' for in fact in
life this is how male sexual identity [over time] is acted out, and this is how 'maleness' is inferred and
assessed—as fundamentally, a characterological phenomenon" (17; emphasis mine). Or as an ethos.
Permit another digression. Ethos, I can now disclose, has a rather complicated etymology.
Historically, it is composed of éthos, éthea, nomós, and nómos. Generally, an animal's or person's éthos,
according to Charles Scott, was "often hidden from view. One was wise to be cautious in relating to the
éthos-reality that could be hidden by appearances, language, and behavior. . . . [I]t showed itself through
time as something that lay behind or within what appeared" (144). The éthos-reality is not an animal's or
person's essence, but its capacity (potentia) and likelihood to act in peculiar ways. Scott continues, "To
know a creature's éthos, one had to see where the animal went to be at home, as it were, or where it went
when threatened, or where it went to die." (The animal had a life before domestication and has never
forgotten its peculiarity.) "One needed to experience a person in good times and bad to discover where he
or she really lived" (144). (Éthos is linked to habitus, signaling a person's life styles at home or as an
extension of home [see Bourdieu 169ff.]).
But complicating the matter of éthos is éthea, which is linked with nomós (pasture) and nómos
(law, custom). Éthea, in the overall meaning of éthos, signals "specific environments," Scott explains, "that
are associated with patterns of actions peculiar to the animal" (143; emphasis mine). Éthea, therefore, are
"places and regions," conceptual starting places (topoi), for identity and, therefore, resistance to any law
that would deny peculiar identity. As Scott puts it, "the specificity of éthea . . . allow[s] the word to give
emphasis to differences and to resistance respecting claims and laws [nómos] that sought to overrule the
specific places and ways of belonging [nomós, as in pasture, but more so as in nomadic wandering in
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search for whatever and wherever pastures]" (144). Animals and barbarians were resistant "to
expropriation by a different éthos or by the authority of laws and principles that would blur its difference
and it arbitrariness, its ownness" (145). Éthoi are, from within each, places (regional nomói) that establish
what are good and evil. In other words, tragedy is not the result of good confronting evil, but the result of
two peculiar goods clashing. And yet, this is no relativistic position: There is an acceptable difference,
given our specific discussion on sexual violence, in favor of the necessity of nomós over a sex-specific
rapist éthea.
Sylvia Likens resisted Gertrude Baniszewski's attempts to teach her to do as Gertrude demanded
in her pasture of terror. Sylvia is a barbarian from Gertrude's point of view, but Gertrude is a barbarian,
surrogate male from Millett's and, I will presume, our point of view. We all believe in our Goodness in
thinking and counter-thinking. (We will return to Sylvia, Gertrude, Millett, and ourselves intermittently.)
Stoltenberg makes it clear that the acting of identity by way of the strictures of "rapists ethics" is
not life furthering, life enhancing. (The boy that has become a so-called man had a life—or anti-life—
before domestication, and society allows him, in attitude and action, to continue to express its anti-social,
woman-hating peculiarity.) Stoltenberg writes: "When men are held to account for what they do in their
lives to women . . . their tunnel vision, their obliviousness to consequences, their egotism, their willfulness,
all tend to excuse, rather than compound, their most horrific interpersonal offenses" (17). But more
specifically, when men are held to account, the separation between nómos (respecting claims and laws) and
éthea (resistance to laws protecting women from rape) collapse in an anti-social dissembling that favors the
rapist.
and Used It"?:
And "someone female"? How is she to give an account of how "They Took My Body from Me
What is expected of her is hesitancy, qualms, uncertainty that what she is doing is right—even
while doing something right. She should, as Aristotle might have put it, play her part as if in
perpetual stage fright, a comely quality befitting one as inferior as she. And when she is called to
account . . . not only is there never an excuse, but her lack of appropriate faintheartedness may be
grounds for yet more blame. (17)
Which, I will insist, is precisely what Dworkin did and what she was blamed for.
Stoltenberg writes:
There is . . . in rapist ethics a structural view of personal responsibility for acts, but it views the
one to whom the act is done as being responsible for the act. It is a little like the driver of a car
believing that the tree beside the road caused the car to collide with it. For example, one victim of
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ape told an interviewer: 'There he was a man who had the physical power to lock me up and rape
me, without any real threat of societal punishment, telling me that I was oppressive because I was
a woman! Then he started telling me he could understand how men sometimes go out and rape
women. . . . He looked at me and said, 'Don't make me hurt you,' as though I was, by not giving in
to him, forcing him to rape me.' (19; Stoltenberg's emphasis)
As I have said, everything is imminently reversible. Good to Bad; Bad to Good. (This is how the pot is
stirred to keep the motion of the whole afloat.) Stoltenberg uses the phrase "reversal of moral
accountability" (19). Everything goes that way, however, when we think, read, write in disjunctive
(either/or) ways. It does not have to go that way. As Stoltenberg makes clear, men learn (are acculturated
to) blaming the female victim. There is hope, for men can unlearn and boys can not be taught such a
reversal. There are times, however, when imminent reversibility is helpful, for it can get us unstuck in a
binary. In itself reversibility is not necessarily a problem. When it gets fixed, as in essentially fixed, or even
provisionally fixed, there are serious, life-threatening problems. For example, Freud's discussion that Dora's
giving the answer "No" in a repeated or protesting manner (might) mean "Yes" is paradigmatically not life-
furthering, life-enhancing at all, most especially in the particular case of sexual coercion and violence (see
Freud, SE, VII: 57). But Kenneth Burke would call the argument that the rapist is okay and the person
raped is not, the "heads I win, tails you lose" problem. (No pun intended in this context. Unless someone
wants to argue that my "No" means "Yes"!) Burke writes:
When we first came upon this formula, we thought we had found a way of discrediting an
argument. . . . But as we grew older, we began to ask ourselves whether there is any other possible
way of thinking. And we now absolutely doubt that there is. Hence, we should propose to control
the matter [emphasis mine] not by elimination, but by channelization. That is, we merely ask that
the thinker co-operate with us [KB's emphasis] in the attempt to track down his variant of the
'heads I win, tails you lose' strategy." (Attitudes 260; Burke's emphasis)
Burke's motive, moving from a boy's attitude to that of an older man, is to cooperate and negotiate the
possible differences in meaning. He says that any one thing, organic or inorganic, "has many aspects, good,
bad, indifferent. You 'transcend' this confusion when, by secular prayer, you 'vote' that one of these aspects
is the essence of the lot," while the others are the "accident" (260-61). The re-cooperation and re-voting
continues, given the individual case, until all have been essence at one time. But while Freud insists on a
fixed negative deconstruction (reversal) and while Burke suggests fluid negative deconstructions, I will
have to insist on a third (nonpositive, affirmative deconstructive) alternative, which can be seen as a
condition of possibility in Burke's thinking itself, as well as others. He writes, "good, bad, indifferent"
(above) but has also written, "Yes, No, and the intermediate realm of Maybe" ("Introduction," Attitudes,
n.p.) in search of a comic frame, within to think, read, and write. It is the Indifferent (as in differance or in
differend) or the Maybe (contingency) that returns us to potentiality (potentia, dynamis), so as to re-
consider, re-choose. And my choice in relation to Dworkin's readers of "They Took My Body from Me and
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Used It," as I have suggested, is that they chose by way of being true to death and killing by acting out, as
Stoltenberg characterizes it, a male sexual identity when interpreting Dworkin's rape story. In other words,
they read out of a rapist ethics. There is every good reason to think that Dworkin was raped in Paris, if for
no other reason than she said that she was. But I can also, given a different standpoint, say that Dworkin
was beyond a reasonable doubt raped a second time by the readers. Why? Because they failed "The Test"
that Dworkin gave them. An alternative third reading, I hope, is that there is something very Kafkaean, and
yet Dworkean, about her rape story.
'Why do you want to run away? Sit down and have a drink! I'll pay.' So I sat down. He asked me
several questions. So I said: 'Perhaps you are sorry now that you invited me, so I'd better go,' and I
was about to get up. . . . 'Stay,' he said, 'that was only a test. He who does not answer the questions
[the call] has passed the test.'
Franz Kafka, "The Test" 442. 20
"The Test": Dworkin has called us to read that she was raped. She knew that the rape story would
be placed on the Web (and on her own site) and she knew that the conversation that would ensue would
most likely find her at fault (either crazy, lying, or promoting her new book, Scapegoat).
The Test Questions:
Is Andrea Dworkin lying?
Is she capable of knowing she is lying?
Is she suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder?
Is she crazy, really crazy now?
Is she sorry for all the people she has hurt?
Is she aware that she and John are in a BDSM relationship?
Is she merely promoting her new book?
Is she unwittingly into necrophilia? (after all, the body snatching theme is there in the title and
para. 8!)
My sense is that "They Took My Body from Me and Used It" is scripted as a test with typical
implicit questions embodied in Dworkin's reportage for us to take. Dworkin has turned tables on us.
(Everything is imminently reversible.) The test, for all readers, is that Dworkin is tactically reporting her
rape story to the authorities (the police, her attorney, and then later in court); her friends, enemies,
gynecologist, and "mate"; and to all of us. She has been in this situation before. Telling us. She has worked
with many women who have.
Therefore, with her Rape Story Test published on the Web, she is now sitting somewhere and
waiting (in silence, 21 not responding). We are all, unbeknownst to ourselves, waiting on ourselves to
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econsider our readings, to co-operate in such a manner that we will come to see—in Brownmiller's
phrase—that we are all potentially like "police-blotter rapists" (the first rapists) and like the police
themselves with the juridical system (the second rapists) only further humiliating and denigrating the
victim. In this capacity, we "serve in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the
longest sustained battle the world has ever known" (Against 209; cf. 364ff). Keeping women guilty of not
being credible. We fail this test. We seem to always fail it. We have yet to learn how to open the test to
contestations.
But the test is pedagogical and we can re-take it as many times as we need in order to understand
its significance. (While women are waiting.) There is hope. But Dworkin makes it all very clear that
women cannot wait any longer:
[W]e do not have time. We women. We don't have forever. Some of us don't have another week or
another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those
streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to
rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there
is no escape for us. (War Zone 163)
Part 1: Broaching the Abject
Chapter 2: Thinking, Reading, Writing Rape
Millett Redux
I chose Millett's The Basement as my introduction to Chaste Rape for a number of reasons. One is that
what we know about the sexual violence perpetrated against Sylvia Likens is by way of Millett's juxtaposition
of and meditations on reported facts. The rape-murder of Sylvia at a factual level (from photographs and court
proceedings) must be interpreted to tell the story in the court of public opinion and by way of social criticism;
the mental attitude of the people involved in the story—Sylvia, Gertrude Baniszewski, Jenny Likens, Paula
Baniszewski, Richard Hobbs, and others—must be inferred and imagined to tell of the rape, torture, and
sacrifice of Sylvia.
I chose Millett, who as far as I know has never been raped, for her capabilities of not only inferring and
representing rape in the most powerful ways I have ever read, but also for her abilities to identify and empathize
with the victim as well as the victimizers and others who played a part in the brief life of Sylvia Likens. Millett
thinks in writing rape without any need or desire to call for resentful responses, which is an issue of ethical
thinking of the utmost importance. I do not limit my judgment on only my predispositions but take up others' in
terms of ethics, for example, Andrea Dworkin, John Stoltenberg, Julia Kristeva, and René Girard.
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While it might be easy to argue that because Millett has never been raped, she can without much effort
remain neutral in her account of Sylvia's rape. But she is not neutral. This is the ethical issue: She is not neutral.
She is more involved within each character than any thinker and writer on rape could ever be expected to be.
But in the depth of her involvement—and perhaps this is the most remarkable characteristic of her thinking in
writing rape and, therefore, I want to repeat it here—Millett shows no signs of being reactionary in her thinking
of rape, sexual violence, torture, or humiliation of a human being, either herself or another. Her thinking,
writing, and reading rape is, given the subtitle of The Basement, non-sacrificial. To understand how the sacred
and sacrifice function is one thing; to practice them in thinking and writing is yet another.
I think that Millett is an exemplary thinker in writing rape (exampl[e]ary para-deigma, alongside) who,
in the midst of relating a bare, animalistic, life in the state of nature (zoe), is also capable of relating by way of
life in an ethical-political state of culture (bios) (cf. Agamben, Means 3-14; Homo Sacer 1-12). But this is yet to
make clear that she is a thinker in writing rape that is concerned neither fully with nature nor culture but with
becoming between the two without taking on the properties of either or both. In many ways, as a thinker in
writing rape, Millett is one of those "pure singularities," as Giorgio Agamben would say, that "communicates
only in the empty space of the example [of Sylvia Likens], without being tied by any common property, by any
identity" (Coming 10-11; emphasis mine). It is not merely enough to say that Millett identifies with Sylvia. It is
approaching perhaps enough to say that Millett becomes Sylvia and becomes Gertrude (Basement 63, 290) and
that this becoming is no mere projected imitation of Sylvia nor any act of mimesis. 1 Millett is, as Deleuze and
Guattari would say, in a statelessness of "involution." She attempts "to involve" herself in a becoming between
Sylvia and others, where "to involve is to form a block that runs its own line 'between' the terms in play and
beneath assignable relations" (Thousand 238; cf. 305). In becoming between (or alongside) all the real, yet
imagined, people of the Likens story (herstory), Millett is no one, but potentially all. She takes on the middle
voice of the excluded middle, hence, between. She is, as Agamben would say, "expropriated of all identity, so
as to appropriate belonging itself" (Coming 11). She is, in her own words, a "fraud" in telling herstory
(Basement 104-05, 290; cf. Coming 11). A very passionate fraud for justice, indeed. She becomes like Gustav
Flaubert becomes ("Madame Bovary, c'est moi"); becomes like Emily Brontë becomes ("I am Heathcliff");
becomes like Hélène Cixous becomes ("I inhabited Jean Genet"); she becomes, as Deleuze would say, a
"hysterical trickster" (Dialogues 43). 2 In this mannerism of the fraudulent writer, Millett, who thinks in eutopian
ways (a woman's art colony at the farm in Poughkeepsie), is a singularity in what Agamben refers to as the
coming community (to which we will ever return in our discussions of anarchitecture, toward the end, or
rebeginnings, of Chaste Rape).
The Most Typical Rape: Another reason for choosing The Basement is because the rape of Sylvia is
not a typical rape, though I would insist that, as told, this atypical rape is the most typical. In its particularity it
is not peculiar. It is all of rape—in Millett's meditation—perpetrated on a single child by many, yet on all
children by children, but especially by the surrogate mother-teacher of the children. Though Sylvia is not
penetrated, except for her being coerced to perform a "self-imposed" rape, using a Coke bottle (Basement 38),
she is still raped, in the most typical, humiliating ways, under sadistic coercion; for what the rapist wants,
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according to Millett's telling and rapists interviewed, is both resistance and complicity from the victim (see
Kellet).
Millett, in her ironic social criticisms, understands Sylvia's rape as a typical one with a common cause:
As the sardonic argument unfolds, Gertrude has the right, under social mores and norms, to discipline and
punish this child. She has the right-of-way sadistically to pummel, scald, burn, and rape this child's body.
Millett writes, Gertrude
is performing a sexual act under the pretext of something permissible. Even prescribed, regarded
as parental duty. Thoroughly respectable. This rape, thus performed in brutality and pain, and
arguably more extreme than the simplest forms of rape (at least those unaccompanied by blows),
is also guiltless. As seduction would never be. No matter how eager the child, no matter how
tender and loving, how passionate or kindly or subtle the seducer. For such is sin. To stroke is to
molest. Whereas to beat is not. . . . The hand must not teach pleasure, only suffering. (292-93;
emphasis mine. Cf. 206-10.)
As told through Millett's meditations, Sylvia is raped—both actually and figuratively—according to
virtually all of Susan Brownmiller's typology: Abduction, bride capture, celebrity capture, child molestation,
child rape, gang rape, incest rape, married rape, mob rape, statutory rape (Against 465). I take those in italics as
figurative. There is by association the cluster of bride capture and incest-married rape: After the children brand
the word "prostitute" on Sylvia's abdomen, Gertrude taunts Sylvia by telling her, "No one will ever marry you
now" (287), and then in the Coke-bottle episode, by saying, "Sylvia gonna marry her soda pop" (Basement 242;
emphasis mine). Moreover, there is the inclination of Gertrude to feel intimidated by Sylvia, who is a potential
celebrity among her peers. In Gertrude's eyes, Sylvia is not—must not be—one of them. Gertrude schemes to
bring Sylvia down, turning her into a typical "scapegoat" (197-98, 267).
For yet another reason, this rape—the rape of Sylvia Likens—is the most typical, for it includes, in a
meditative, pedagogical spectacle, all that rape can be, besides penetration. It includes not a man performing the
rape, which is more often the case, but a woman, who happens to be a mother, directing the repeated acts of
sexual violence, the torture and cruelty, the mutilation of the body and the humiliation of the spirit of Sylvia. It
includes sexual violence perpetrated by children on a child. This mother teaches the children—her four children
and the neighbors' children—to torture and rape the child, perpetually putting the female children in the position
of torturing so that they themselves will not be raped and tortured. Hence, rape, potential rape, complicity. This
most typical rape includes victimage, abjection, sacr(e)ifice, cruelty, and pedagogical spectacle, which is what
rape is all about. And if this is not enough, Millett portrays this rape as "Sexuality without sex" (51), this rape as
"Pure ideology" (51). Explaining, Millett writes: "Ideas about sex, notions, values, superstitions, feelings,
hatreds, fears—everything about sex but the thing itself, the act of it of such powerful taboo that one resorts to
violence, to sadism, to any and every brutality to avoid it. To stamp it out" (51; cf. 38, 66). Sylvia experiences
Chaste Rape.
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This is how I am thinking about rape (sexless sexual [chaste] violence), though many of the writers I
have read or spoken with think of rape in not only other terms—removing "sexual" altogether from the
description—but also in narrower, focused terms. 3 As stated in the Foreword to Chaste Rape, I am taking this
approach for parahistorical purposes of linking sexual violence (rape, child abuse) with canon formation
(canonization of knowledge) and pedagogy (teaching canonized ways of thinking, reading, and writing,
pederasty). Robin Morgan says, "Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice" (88). I agree and would
complement her statement, in Chaste Rape terms, by saying that canonization is the theory; pedagogy, the
practice. (When we begin to link rape with Oedi-pedagogy and canonization in Part 2, this addendum to
Morgan's statement should become clearer.)
Meditations on a Human Sacrifice
"The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred [wo/]man), who may be
killed and yet not sacrificed."
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer 8.
Sacrifice: While prominently referring to a "human sacrifice" in the subtitle, Millett implicitly
develops the theme of sacrifice in The Basement. She approaches the two riddles (68, 70) of Why this rape? and
Why did Sylvia let the perpetrators do it to her? by way of a synecdoche that Kenneth Burke would refer to as
"scope and reduction" (Grammar of Motives 59-126). Millett searches for motives: Why big people sexually
abuse little people ranges, in Millett's speculations, from parent-child relations to master-slave and State-serf
relations, with passing references to sacrificial victims? Millett, however, writes little about sacrifice itself in
The Basement. 4 While she addresses the subtitle, concerning sacrifice, by way of a panoramic scope, she
represents the events and lurid details of Sylvia's rape in not only a wide scope (during a period of almost four
months, from early July to October 26, 1965, the day that Sylvia died) but also and more so with greater
detailed reductions of scope, until we can ourselves at least begin to imagine what it must have been like to
suffer in such a way.
In terms of "a Human Sacrifice," Millett first establishes a large historical context in passing by
alluding to drama, the play, the theatre itself, from ancient totem and taboo through characters wearing tragic
masks to modern children playacting in the basement: Torturing Sylvia, Millett writes, was
entertainment. Because it must have been fun. . . . [T[here must have been pleasure. More than
pleasure. Excitement, the special excitement of group sport. Even its sense of play, of game, of
improvised theater.
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Not surprisingly, for it is sex and sexual role (along with the other historical categories of domination
and subjection, master and slave, noble and serf, captor and captive) that give the driving energy to the
play of the basement, the basement game, the basement theater Fantasy enacted. Playacted. But how
much greater the thrill of acting for real, action with real consequences. The scream is real. (20-21. Cf.
265)
All are preparation for the dramas and plays of actual rape to come in the narrative. Millett never loses sight of
the material conditions of this rape, this most atypical, typical rape.
At times, Millett will reverse the large historical context and focus on a narrower one in terms of
Gertrude's meting out punishment (torture, sexual violence) as part and parcel of a sacrificial act. But Millett, in
a detailed meditation on Gertrude's rationalizations, can easily shift back to the wider, sweeping historical
context. Millett zigzags her imagined, yet nonetheless, real reporting of (the) sacrifice. Millett writes:
It was not just the old time worn cruelty, the iron law of big and little whereby adult is entitled to
strike child—though for child to strike back is taboo.
No, a stronger order, a greater interdiction is in Gertrude's eyes. Not only the great and small,
armed and unarmed of parent and child . . . but that pattern also carries over into the more romantic forms of
the same hierarchy: bond-age, imprisonment, sacrificial victim and high priest celebrant, victim and
executioner, recreant and judge, all the roles of antiquity, of slave state and serf state, of feudal vassal and
seigneur. The very stuff of cult sadomasochistic formulae, paraphernalia, fantasy, being a revisit to the past,
a flight from democracy. . . . (101) 5
Deeply into her meditations, Millett makes the strongest statement yet concerning sacrifices and points
directly to the problematic of female against female. She is thinking about the house and the basement and
associating it with "witches" and "hags" (316):
Witches, how many of them, European tales of imprisoning maidens, immuring them in castles,
visiting them by night. Sapphic, possessive. A warning, a notification to females. . . . [T]he older
female now a threat to the younger, the great goddess no longer protects us, we must fear one another.
As all must fear the female. . . . Gertrude, this late in time, enacting—becoming, literally the hag. Now
in the very evening of patriarchy, sacrificing the maiden with whose murder this age dawned long ago.
Cycle giving way to cycle. The age of the others, of human sacrifice, the sacrifice of the maiden, the
sacred one. (316)
At this point, Millett touches on some controversial faucets of a sacrificial economy that would be best thought
through in a fuller discussion of the sacred and sacrifice. I will take up these faucets below in terms of Réne
Girard. For now, however, I want to look more closely at Millett's ability to empathize and to be within Sylvia
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and others. While rape implies penetration and violence, within implies identification and empathy, while it also
implies becoming as in folding (an involvement, involution). The difference here is not fixed, for both are
imminently reversible. But it is empathy, identifying with someone's suffering, otherness—if this is at all
possible—and becoming Sylvia and Gertrude that Millett is most interested in.
"The French, who have a word for this kind of writing, call it témoignage, the literature of the witness;
the one who has been there, seen it, knows. It crosses genres, can be autobiography, reportage, even
narrative fiction. But its basis is factual, fact passionately lived and put into writing by a moral
imperative rooted like a flower amid carnage with an imperishable optimism, a hope that these who
hear will care, will even take action."
Kate Millett, The Politics of Cruelty 15.
"within": To identify with everyone involved in the sacrifice—especially Sylvia and Gertrude—Millett
enters into the middle voice: She enters the ego or "I" of the characters to know, based on the court records
available, what they are thinking, what their motions, emotions, commotions are and might mean. It is as if
these characters who tortured and murdered Sylvia are this time, in the telling, re-testifying in a courtroom
against themselves. Millett enters, becomes, Sylvia, who never had her day in court, and speaks within and
through Sylvia. It is as if Millett resurrects her, 6 has her come back to relive what went through her mind, the
struggles to survive, the attempts—some failed—at refusing to be occupied by and being forced to collaborate
with Gertrude's turning her into an object (see Dworkin, Intercourse 121-43).
Millett does not justify—though she speaks from a learned necessity of justifications—but verifies her
break in performance with so-called objectivity and conventional regimens for discursive points of view and her
taking up with what Louis Althusser might call, a wild practice 7 :
How many months now I have hesitated even to write the smallest passage in your voice, to 'put
down' your thoughts—as if I knew what they were or had any insight into your particular
language. Fraud. The tricks of book-writers. The glory of Faulkner's Benjy. Was that he was
Faulkner's Benjy. But you are Sylvia. I did not make you up, you happened. And what you
experienced, therefore, would be of a particular validity—if we knew it.
I wonder if it's a relief, finally, or is it merely disconcerting, to come upon an author confessing to
have no real hold over what a character 'thinks' (which will not prevent me from trying it anyway)—is it not
some necessary kind of caveat emptor? These are not characters but inarticulate historical persons. So I dare
then, to break the rule of suspension of disbelief. After the transcript runs out, thought, dialogue, even
action, I 'make it up' and admit that I make it up. To sin against the right order of telling a story, the loved
and sacred lie. To cheat the great baby in all of us, centuries crying, always crying for a story, crying
particularly that it be 'true'. . . .
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At the same time I go further into fantasy, as far as delusion, even full-fledged possession,
becoming Sylvia or Gertrude as day becomes the next day, always at this table, surrounded by the
confusions of your printed relics, the transcript of the trial of your killers . . . the sheaf of
photographs [emphasis mine]. . . . Out of all these I go on imagining your knowledge.
And their sensations [Millett's emphasis]. Staring at the photos, the people, the places, reading.
Rereading. Until I believe I hear you think. Hear them threaten. Exercise of the imagination, the
memory: time spent around children, time spent as a child, the way one badgers a child, or is a
child hearing the voice of the bully. Make contact with the bully in oneself. (104-05)
These are some of the most life-furthering, life-sustaining, life-enhancing words, as justifications, that I have
read. But I want to interrupt them with this parenthesis. (When Freud, while writing "Dora: An Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria," is confronted with Dora's having cut short her visits with him, he is aware of the extra
difficulty of writing this case history. Consequently, he invents the missing parts of Dora's reportage [Dora was
eighteen, while Sylvia was sixteen]. In his "Prefatory Remarks," Freud tells his readers that because of "the
incompleteness of my analytic results, I had no choice but to follow the example of those discoverers whose
good fortune it is to bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of
antiquity. I have restored what is missing" [SE, VII: 12]. He discloses, "I can present only a fragment of an
analysis" [12]. Freud earlier, when writing about hysteria, had written: "I was trained to employ local diagnoses
and electro-prognosis, and it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like
short stories and that . . . they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that
the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own" [SE, II: 160].
He learns to live with a contra-diction by way of a secondary revision. At least, he was aware in another place
of his own hysteria. In a letter to Fliess, he writes: "[I]f I succeed in resolving my own hysteria. . ." [Complete
Letters 269; SE, I: 262]. Freud lived in the excluded middle of the middle voice. But there is a great deal more
to say about Freud in this instance and I will return to him in chapter 4, to discuss not only the differences
between Millett and him but also their fundamental different relations respectively with Sylvia and Dora, but
mostly with Emma Eckstein.) 8
What intensifies the dramatic exchange between Sylvia and Gertrude is the fact that Millett, in her
meditations, embodies the dialectic of pedagogy and resistance by virtually becoming both Sylvia and
Gertrude in conflict with each other. Millett tells us, "I was Sylvia Likens. She was me" (63) and "I become
Gertrude. I invent her, conceive her, enter into her . . . habit of torture, its urgency, its privacy, the same
obsession growing in me like cancer. Like a pregnancy. I am pregnant with Gertrude—and I am a fraud"
(290). Continuing, Millett makes it clear that Gertrude could, yet could not, know herself, nor could Millett
herself:
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My Gertrude never the real one, if there was one. For it was all secret. And remains so. Nothing in
the courtroom or the light of day, the tedious forms of respectability, humdrum rhetoric,
formalized behavior and its assumptions—nothing there ever explains. Because it was so secret.
The urge and lust, the compulsion and the relish so subterranean it could never be displayed there.
And too intimate unto herself for Gertrude ever to speak it even in the privacy of her own mind. It
is all hidden, unspoken even to the self. (290; emphasis mine)
Like Freud, but more acceptable than Freud, Millett does not necessarily restore what is secreted away, but
empathizes with Gertrude et al. in such a way that we can come to know (have something like knowledge of)
Gertrude, who is one of us. This is the power (potentiality, potentia, dynamis) from which Millett thinks, reads,
and writes. From within. Rape. Yet Chaste Rape.
Millett has several techniques that she calls on to get at her story (herstory, ourstory). One is the
informal inter/view (being within a person's view). In The Basement, she talks of finding the "key" (68) to
getting within Sylvia and others as a result of a chance meeting with "someone real and alive who went to
school with Sylvia, knew her or knew her a little, knew her as real and not the figure in my tale, my tabloid
world of press cuttings and news photos and transcripts" (67). Millett's telling, unfolding, of the event is paced
slowly with her interrupting side comments. I will try to capture the effect of suspension in my account of it.
Changing scope and reduction—moving from one (the discovery quoted above) to many (the women
in town) back to one—Millett recalls viewing the women in court and town in photographs in the newspaper,
"averting their eyes" (67), being ashamed. She recalls early looking at the photograph of Sylvia's funeral and the
lack of faces showing. What Millett makes passionately evident in her shifts from one to many, is that there is a
secret and a shame. She makes it evident that the rule of thought was—as it was for Jenny (Sylvia's sister) and
the other girls who were involved in the torturing of Sylvia—Comply or Die by Chaste Rape. the further
implication here is that though exposed, the secret remains.
Recalling first seeing the woman who went to school with Sylvia, Millett writes:
. . . it was there, that shame, a shame that could not even be angry. It was there in the town and in the
girls of Sylvia's age. Her generation. I met one who explained it to me. The thing an accident, meeting
her at all. She'd been at a press conference at the University of South Florida on a day when I'd been
asked what book I might be doing next, and I said a sentence or two about [Sylvia's] case. She'd come
up afterward and told me she'd grown up with Sylvia Likens, had lived through the effect of her death
on her schoolmates and her neighborhood. And that night, the girl appeared again as I entered the
auditorium to make a speech. She was there in the aisle and handed me a rose as I walked to the
podium, 'This from Sylvia.' Strangest and loveliest gift, the girl herself vanishing like an apparition.
(67)
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Shortly later, Millett finds the woman at a reception and begins interviewing her about Sylvia:
She was Sylvia or someone from that place and time who'd made it through. Twenty-Six. . . . As if
Sylvia were alive. . . .
[W]hen I asked what it was like, to be a girl that age there and Sylvia's classmate when the thing came
to light, she said it was to be ashamed.
But why not angry? . . . 'Yes, but it made us ashamed. . . . Maybe, finally, cause it was sexual, or sort
of sexual, the words on her stomach, I mean.' [. . .]
'If we identified with her, it would only be as victims too.' [. . .]
'. . . something had spoken to us through all of this, that we were pretty easy to get. Weak, vulnerable,
maybe even guilty somewhere or dirty or whatever—it was out there, we better watch it.'
It's the impotence we feel, reading how Richard Speck, alone and unaided and without a weapon,
murdered eight student nurses, one by one, going form room to room, tying and strangling them, the
one next to die hearing the dying scream. And it never seemed to occur to them, so great perhaps was
their mythic powerlessness (impotence) before the mythically powerful (potent) male, that eight
against one might be easy. Though even two or three could offset his superior physical strength. And
even one very angry woman can defend herself against a man, put him off, escape, get help, run. . . .
To mimic every gesture of submission even as in animals, the dog rolling on its back. Even as in
women. To be 'feminine.'
To be feminine, then is to die. (69-70)
If to be feminine is to be silent or to die and if to be masculine is to be silent or to kill, then, what is it to live?
We will ever return to this predicament, but now I want to turn to Millett's attitude toward photography
and how she uses photographs as a means of entering within a subject that is also an object or abject. Let us
recall Millett's looking at the photograph of Sylvia's corpse, with the mouth open (42-43), at the very site of
resistance, that haunts Millett, that makes her sculpture her cages and design her installation art and then finally
makes her turn to writing The Basement.
"Finally, it is not even faces one studies, but artifacts. The pictures of things. Of place and milieu and
object. The house at 3850 E. New York Street. I have seen both the house itself and its photograph;
they are different. The house today. . . . But photographs give me these rooms. . . . The stark black-
and-white photographs of each room are my touchstone and my dramatic tableau." (The Basement 54)
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Photography: Roland Barthes suggests that photographs of people are photographs of incipient
corpses, things that have become objects fixed and not yet turned into abjects (waste, offal). Barthes writes:
In photography, the presence of a thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric; and in the case
of animated beings, their life as well, except in the case of photographing corpses; and even so: if the
photography then becomes horrible, it is because it certified, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as
corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing. For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of
a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been
real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes
us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the
past ('this-has-been'), the photography suggests that it is already dead. (Camera Lucida 78-79; Barthes's
emphasis)
Millett tells us that it all began with a photograph: "I saw a photograph of a dead girl named Sylvia
Likens. . . . At first the event could only torment me until shock could be absorbed, become outrage, and finally
take action in writing. The Basement was not written until a decade after Sexual Politics, but it preceded it in
inspiration, even made it possible" (Cruelty 154-55). The photograph of the corpse lives on to transform Millett
from feelings of torment, then shock, outrage, and then activist sculpture and later writing. (The details of this
experience are sketched out by Millett in "From the Basement to the Madhouse.")
Millett in "Photography: The Experience of Shock" in The Politics of Cruelty gives us an additional
insight into how she gets within photographs of people tortured. (For Millett, torture and physical abuse are
linked with sex and hence with rape as nonsexual sex. She refuses to see anything erotic in torture.) Millett
writes: "Torture, even conveyed from 'inside' the experience, the point of view of the victim, might still remain
an impersonal political and historical event taking place in the past or far away. Yet it impinges on all of us. If
not in fact then in potentiality, since the practice is expanding and may reach those presently immune" (137).
This idea that we are immune or desensitized to torture and that we have excuses or rationalizations for not
looking at and examining the spectacle of it in photographs or documents of some sort are what Millett believes
must be overcome. Millett argues that we must learn to identify and empathize with the tortured, the sexually
abused, and not turn away. And we must reexamine our motives as well as others'.
Using her slow-paced discovery technique of getting inside of a conversation with someone—as she
did with the woman who had gone to school with Sylvia (Basement 69-70)—Millett begins to explain her
responses to and thoughts about a photograph that her friend Catherine Alport had taken of victims during the
struggle for freedom in South Africa:
I saw [the photographs] first in . . . in a small screening of slides. . . . One of them deeply upset me: a
photograph of a man burning alive. Catherine explained the image. . . . The creature in the fire was no
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longer an astonishment of human suffering but a political event, for the victim was actually a native
policeman upon whom the crowd had taken vengeance. He was a black man set on fire by other blacks
who, because of his office, viewed him as a traitor and stood about watching him die, surrounded by a
crowd of men, women, and children. Catherine photographed the event. (139)
Millett makes much of the fact that Catherine was a friend, not some anonymous photographer, and that this
friendship adds "a personal element in how I respond, how I even question, am able to question the
photographer, inquire after her motives" (139; emphasis mine). Millett wants to know from Catherine how it
felt photographing the event. Why? Because, in a pedagogical mood, she wants Catherine "to face the fact in the
image, appalled as I always am that people take pictures of things one wishes they could stop: one wants the
photographer to intervene on behalf of the starving child. . . . But of course they do not; will not or, sometimes,
cannot. . . . Clearly Catherine could do nothing" (139-40). Millett says that she feels "alienated" from her
friend's attitude and the event itself and a "moral disorientation" (140). Finally, her
feeling of being at odds is stronger against Catherine than against the hostel figures in her photograph;
the motivations of black South Africans are easy to understand, would be difficult not to share were
one to live their lives. . . . Catherine's apparently calm acceptance of what is . . . strikes me as
thoughtless and partisan, uncharacteristic of the feminism and pacifism we share; it smacks of leftist
orthodoxy. . . . I try to put it down to the depth of her identification with the struggle, the strength and
freshness of her experience. But I am still uneasy, profoundly disturbed. With a disturbance I do not
entirely understand and can hardly control.
I call it shock: I am trying to understand. . . . This response of shock is something I have never seen
investigated or explained. Instead, it seems that this is an emotion we experience but do not examine.
As if it were too obvious to merit explanation: we are appalled by cruelty; what else is there to say?
But surely there is more. (140; emphasis mine)
The experience of "shock" for Millett is similar but not entirely the same experience as the punctum for Barthes.
The punctum is what "will disturb the studium" (Camera Lucida 27). The studium is the photograph as seen
from an anticipated cultural perspective. The studium deals with superficial taste, the order of "liking" (27). The
punctum, however, in its disturbing manner, is a "sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A
photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)" (27). And
"shock"? For Barthes, shock is the very reason that a photographer ("operator") takes a photograph. He writes:
I imagine (this is all I can do, since I am not a photographer) that the essential gesture of the Operator
is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole of the camera), and that this gesture is
therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. From this
gesture derive all photographs whose principle (or better, whose alibi) is 'shock'; for the photographic
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'shock' (quite different from the punctum) consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so
well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it. Hence a whole gamut of
'surprises' (as they are for me, the Spectator; but for the Photographer, there are so many
'performances.' (32; Barthes's emphasis)
Here Barthes focuses on the person being photographed as gesturing unwittingly and the photographer catching
that opportune moment of the gesture on film. This would be the surprise that leads to the shock. (Barthes
describes five different examples of "surprises" that contribute to what he calls "shock" [32-33].) But though
this notion of the surprise is limited to the subject in the photograph, we can easily casuistically stretch Barthes's
view by saying that the photographer can shoot a photograph for reasons also unknown to her, but later revealed
and experienced as a surprise, leading to her own sense of shock and perhaps punctum, which would be a
trauma experienced perhaps by her own complicity in the event.
To arrive at this point of comparison, let us first begin with Millett's progressively unfolding questions
that move her toward shock. When Millett asks about the black man burning, Catherine explains the image as a
"political event," which is understood by Millett in terms of the studium. When Millett, however, begins to ask
questions about why the man does not take the burning tire from around his body, she is told by a South African
friend later that sometimes the victims cannot because their hands have been "chopped off" (Cruelty 142).
Hearing this and having the additional insight to cruelty and helplessness in the facelessness of it, Millett can
but experience what she calls shock. She is surprised, when this fact is disclosed, and she is traumatized when
she realizes the depth of cruelty being practiced. "The horror of the case bears in as one considers it. It becomes
real to you. You become him" (142; emphasis mine). But when she begins to ask Catherine what her motives
were for taking the photograph, we can begin to see how not only the subject in the photograph can be surprised
and in shock, ironically, to find himself in this situation, having been abandoned by his white counterparts and
set on fire with the "necklace" of a tire around him by his own people, whom he had betrayed (141). But we can
also begin to see how Catherine can perhaps experience shock. She is surprised when Millett asks about her
motive for taking the photograph and shocked and perhaps traumatized when she sees, ironically, that having
acted out of the impulse of a professional photographer in shooting the scene, she may have been complicit in
the act of torture and murder (140).
The ethical-political purpose for Millett is best summed up when she writes, "If one refuses to feel
fear, one denies that meaning of the spectacle. And if one is unable to feel such fear, one has lost a connection
with other beings in time and place, history and locale. When that is the case, one cannot be roused easily on
behalf of others, perhaps cannot be roused at all, has lost thereby a vital kind of imagination upon which our
humanity depends" (144; emphasis mine).
I want to turn to a second example of how Millett empathizes with photographs, for I want to use it in a
cross-comparison later. This example may be more potentially horrifying than the one just discussed, for the
simple reason that Millett finds it, when she was a child, in the comics section of the Sunday paper. It was a
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Ripley's "Believe It or Not comic." Millett tells us that it was a "brutal account of the martyrdom of a female
saint, her name like mine Catherine—a detail which made her a patron and myself particularly susceptible:
according to Ripley, she was stripped of her clothing, dragged through the streets behind a chariot, the crowd
screaming out for her death. Rudimentary as it was, this was an account situated outside the victim and by no
means oriented to her point of view" (150; emphasis mine). Let us not forget also that her friend the
photographer's name in the first example is also Catherine, which would especially explain how Millett is
playing off of herself in terms of self-criticism, wittingly or not. Criticisms of others can often be criticism of
one's self. Surprise. Shock. Catherine is one of us. All the Catherines. (And you, my readers?)
About the Ripley piece on St. Catherine, Millett reminds us that she was educated in a Catholic school
and had been exposed to many similar stories but "never experienced the slightest humiliation" (150), in great
part because the narrative of martyrdom leads to canonization and sainthood, to transcendence (a myth of
presence). There is no reason to believe that the black man who was set on fire will become a martyr for either
side of the political spectrum he either betrayed or was complicit with. But the question arises, What makes St.
Catherine different from all the other canonized saints? Millett explains:
Reading Ripley one did not see a martyrdom, one saw an execution. The difference was one of faith;
Ripley saw the event not only with the eyes of protestant rationalism, but through secularism. He saw a
woman dragged naked through the streets and then put to death. It was even seen from the outside,
bizarre, grotesque, demeaning. No longer mythical, but real. I experienced her shame, the screams of
the masses. The sacred was torn away; this was a mere civil event, a real town, real streets, real
roughnecks. . . .
. . . To read [about] this terrified me. . . . It was my encounter with the sexual excitement attached to
and associated with the shaming of women, that cultural masochism intended for all of us.
But something else accompanied it: anger. The absurd colored illustrations, the naïve historical data
and drawings infuriated me. I may have been liberated by something as ephemeral as the failings of
Ripley's style. . . . After a moment, the shaming inherent in this exemplary tale failed to intimidate. . . .
. . . Something had gone wrong with my habitual defenses against heroic pain; the familiar fairy tales
of my people and religion did not, in the one case, hold up: one was not canonized at the end of the
ordeal, one was only dead. (152-53)
Millett's vision at the end of Ripley is not life but death (killing and dying). This is not to say at all that
canonization would have been better; for canonization, as we will come to see in this discussion and in Part 2, is
life in death itself, which still leaves the question, What is it To Live? unanswered.
Kristeva, Psychoanalysis, and Abjection
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"From its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign
(for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out. To each ego its object, to each
superego its abject."
Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror (2).
I must take a brief side trip now to a discussion of Kristeva and abjection, which I will have to do later
with René Girard and violence/sacred. The side trip is crucial, for without its being attached to a discussion on
sacrifice, especially in respect to The Basement, we would be but left cut short of what wants to be more fully
said and experienced both about the sacred and sacrifice (their at times dubious connections) and about
identifying and empathizing with the Master and the Slave relationships. But what wants fully to be said and
experienced are of little emotional consequence if not also fully felt. Hence, in this discussion of abjection—and
perhaps here throughout my thinking, writing, and reading—I am going to con-fuse and co-lapse the academic
distinctions (conventions) not only between direct and indirect discourse but also between the object and the
expression of elucidation. I commence remaking these academic distinctions in the next paragraph (signaled,
gently at first, by bracketed statements that establish a symbiotic—sympathetic, symptomatic—relationship
with Kristeva's text) and continue two paragraphs later (signaled by the diacritical mark ℵ that establishes a
space of exposition for critical understandings of the next block of commentary and bracketed statements,
etceteras). Often a side trip away from a proper destination is the most fortunate way of going toward what a
writer and reader—most assuredly a thinker—would seek as a destination (destiny). What is hoped for,
however, is a thinking misruled by a nonpositive, affirmative deconstruction of subject-object relations, which
will allow us to glimpse abjection, the abject. Hence, an oscillation between the Subject-Object of a binary and
the Abject of a third (turd, waste).
It is important that we imagine Sylvia not only as being an object for her tormentors but also as a
"jettisoned object [cum abject] radically excluded and [mis-placed] where meaning collapses. A certain 'ego'
[Gertrude and society] that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven [Sylvia] away. [She] lies
outside, beyond the set [in the basement], and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet,
from [her] place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master" (Horror 2). Call it the revenge
of the abject! Once again, it is not enough to understand (identify and empathize with) only Sylvia but with
Gertrude as well. Their object-relationship and the eventual loss of the relationship prepare us better to
understand resistance. But more importantly and problematically, to understand the secretedness of Chaste
Rape. (The double articulation of secret and chaste looks forward to the logic of the double bind, which both
Kristeva and Girard make much of.) And so, it is not even artifacts of victimage one studies such as
photographs, nor just objects, but most unsuspectingly, un/just abjects. The former testifies to a material
condition (emplying a material rhetoric), while the latter empathizes with the object's decomposition, and what
brought it to abjection itself (employing an imaginative or meditative rhetoric). Millet employs both.
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I will only touch upon what Kristeva has to say in her writings, especially in Powers of Horror—and
then very reductively—on abjection (along with the symbolic and semiotic as part of the Lacanian Symbolic),
for I want to borrow the term abjection only partially to apply it to Sylvia and Gertrude. For me, it is important
to remember that as Kristeva discusses abjection, she links it to the sacred (Horror, e.g., 6, 17-18, 26, 65). She,
however, has little to say directly about sacrifice. For with the loss of object relations, the subject-object
dialectic dissolves into abjection, making the sacred-sacrifice connection impossible. It may be that while
Sylvia is sacred, she is not a sacrifice (not sacrificed). But it is too early to say.
ℵ Locating the Abject: To understand what the abject and abjection are, we will need to enter into
their relation with other terms in a larger context. For Kristeva, the abject (abjection) is understood in two
triads: In one sense of subject, object, abject, yet in another sense as Lacan's Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real.
These two sets are not analogous and should not be understood by superimposition. To somewhat confuse
matters, as Kelly Oliver writes (101), the Symbolic for Kristeva has two subsets of the symbolic and semiotic.
Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between the two S/symbolics with upper and lower case "S/s." In
addition, the semiotic should not be confused with the relatively new logic of semiotics, for Kristeva sees the
semiotic as what is leftover from the imposition of the principles of logic on the mother's body to create the
S/symbolic. Unlike the Real, however, the semiotic can be represented in the form of bodily rhythm and tone in
poetry (see Desire 28-34).
The subject-object formation is produced when the Imaginary crosses the threshold and enters the
Symbolic, that is, crosses into the conditions of the possibilities for nómoi and cultures. (This production is the
result of what Lacan calls the mirror stage. [See Ecrits 1-7.]) In crossing the threshold, the child becomes a
subjectivty in relation to objects. Besides the subject-object formation, Kristeva adds the symbolic-semiotic
formation.
The third terms of these two triads are respectively the abject and the Real. The abject, put in verb
form, is to abject (to cast out) oneself (one's self) from the mother and father. The abject is signified only in its
exclusion, its absence. Though the abject cannot be signified, Kristeva writes: "What is abject [as "the jettisoned
object"] is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. . . . It lies outside,
beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the [ego's] rules of the game. And yet, from its place of
banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master" (Horror 2; Kristeva's emphasis). The abject is
comparable to the excluded middle, along with the principles of identification and non-contradiction, that
allows for stasis. Often, the abject is compared to waste as a by product of the production of the S/symbolic, a
waste that challenges, as contrapower, the S/symbolic. Specifically, the abject is associated with the excluded
substances of excrement and menstrual blood (65, 71). Kristeva, calling on the work of Mary Douglas, writes
that in primitive societies "secular 'filth,' which has become sacred 'defilement,' is the excluded on the basis of
which religious prohibition is made up" (65; Kristeva's emphasis). The object of filth becomes an abject of the
sacred. Kristeva says, "Because [the object of filth] is excluded as a possible object, asserted to be a non-object
of desire, abominated as ab-ject, as abjection, filth becomes defilement and founds on the henceforth released
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side of the 'self and clean' the order that is thus only (and therefore, always already) sacred" (65). Building by
modifying Douglas's insights, Kristeva writes: "It is . . . not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection
but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the
ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the
killer who claims he is a savior [causes abjection]." (4; emphasis mine). Following this line of reason and
associations, we should be able to see—I will only suggest at this point—how Gertrude (the surrogate mother)
breaks down the subject-object of desire relation, as a rapist, making possible the conditions for Sylvia's
abjection. Gertrude casts Sylvia into de/basement and teaches the other children, even Sylvia's sister, Jenny, to
break the object relationship with her, casting her altogether out of the family circle of identification.
The Real is that, too, which resists representation in the Symbolic and is strongly connotative of death
(biological or figurative in terms of délire [delirium] or psychosis). The Real is everything that the Symbolic
excluded so as to create something called the social and society, congregation and community. Hence, inclusion
by way of exclusion, or congregation by way of segregation. The Symbolic is paternal (patriarchal), but
repressive. It is a repression that makes for culture. It is a compromise formation. The Real is what is left—
perhaps far left of what it means to be humanisticly possible—to haunt the Symbolic and all of us in it.
The corpse . . . is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile
and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus . . . does not signify death. In the presence of
signified death . . . I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater [emphasis mine], without
makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside [ab-ject] in order to
live.
Kristeva, Horror (3; Kristeva's emphasis).
Finding Resistance: The theatre and drama begin. The mother stands at the threshold between the
Symbolic (paternal) and the Real (what the Symbolic has deemed as death, corpse, waste, the unclean).
According to Lacan and Kristeva, children break with the maternal for their independence but by moving from
the Imaginary toward and into the Symbolic. While this break with the mother can be productive, the break can
also be problematic for the child and civilization, especially for the female child. The Symbolic, paternal and
repressive in its own way, can cause its inhabitants (in this Symbolic habitus, this éthos in a nómos) to resist and
to play out this resistance against law and custom, in a taking place of dramatic tension between the symbolic
and semiotic.
The symbolic, within and like the Symbolic, is that function that allows for discursive discourse,
argumentation, making a claim with support. It is associated with the grammatical. It is the point of status-actus
(see Burke, Grammar 41-42). It is paternal. But the semiotic, equally in the Symbolic but not exactly like the
Real, is the function that resists the S/symbolic by way of bodily expressions, including the flow of bodily
rhythms and death, driven by energy drives, and sublimated as poetic—hence, deviating from strict grammatical
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and logical—discourse. It is the chora, maternal. (See Kristeva Revolution 25-28; Desire 23-35.) The semiotic,
however, unlike the Real, can be more easily controlled by constraints and restraints of syntax (Revolution 29).
For Kristeva, the symbolic-semiotic must stay in balance. If one wins out over the other, there is only a death in
life, either a stillness of total stasis or a chaos of total ekstasis, an intractable delirium that is a denial of life. 9
Living the Double bind: Having to enter the Symbolic only to have to resist both the mother and the
Symbolic (father) and the symbolic (within the Symbolic itself) can only set up a classic double bind for the
child. Actually, for all of us (who art in the Symbolic). The child in us all, Kristeva writes, "strays on the
territories of the animal" (Horror 12; Kristeva's emphasis), strays from the domestic pasture (nómos) into chaos.
But what we can hope for, as Kristeva sees hope, is sublimation and the triumph of life in art over death. 10 The
double bind again is to be in the S/symbolic in dis/order to reject it and, therefore, to be not only a subject that
becomes an object but more, without the subject-object relation, an abject. It would therefore be comparable to
finding one's self in a metamorphsis without an Ovid to represent what has been, not exiled, but cast out of
symbolicity. (To repeat: According to Kristeva, if a balance is not maintained between the symbolic and the
semiotic, there can be only trouble—abjection—for the child in us all. Or if the semiotic is disallowed to resist
the symbolic, there can be only fascism [see Desire 31]. Often, the double bind is inevitable and plays a major
role in the formation of the sacred, which I will eventually return to when discussing Girard and sacrifice.)
Vomiting: While in this double bind, the child (in us all: Sylvia, Gertrude, and You and I) can reject
the situation we might find ourselves in. Kristeva describes such a child's resistance. I am going to quote at
length, yet as I promised by interpolating by interloping, con-fusing by co-lapsing, the famous passage of the
child purging—vomiting—what the parents (as the mother at the threshold to the S/symbolic) have given her
(Horror 5-6). Though the passage is thick in description and requires a lengthy interpretation, I will focus only
on a few key terms in relation to Sylvia and Gertrude and the consequences for Sylvia and all of us.
Kristeva characterizes the child's resistance of both the mother and the father by imagining "a child
who has swallowed up his parents too soon, who frightens himself on that account, 'all by himself,' and, to save
himself, rejects and throws up everything that is given to [her]—all gifts, all objects" (5-6). 11 I can easily
imagine seeing Sylvia rejecting the toast that Gertrude had made for her, especially rejecting it when forced
down her mouth: Millett writes of the bread, "toasted American Wonderbread, the culture's staff of life"
(Basement 98). Gertrude wants Sylvia to eat so that she will not die before she can expel—it is all about
expulsion, isn't it!—Sylvia from the house and dump her elsewhere. Sylvia—let us say, caught between the
S/symbolic and leaning toward the semiotic, caught between the subject and reaching for an object—resists,
rejects, vomits up, "the culture's [i.e., nómos's] staff of life," which she can only interpret as the culture's
imposition of death on her. Sylvia is forbidden to purge. She is not allowed to pee, yet live in her own pee
(Basement 251, 254-55); is not allowed to eat out of a plate, but out of "Denny's diaper" (298); is not allowed to
live in a room with others but in the basement, her "tomb" (88, 323). She, therefore, is situated in places
(atopoi) that deny her subject and object identification. (She is denied her éthos, her eigen.) Except with waste.
What remains for her is abjection, which Sylvia S/symbolizes eventually as a corpse with her resistance (24-25).
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Kristeva continues: "[Sylvia] has, [she] could have, sense of the abject. Even before things for [her]
are [Kristeva's emphasis]—hence before they are signifiable—[she] drives them out, dominated by drive as
[she] is, and constitutes [her] own territory, edged by the abject" (Horror 5). Sylvia has hope that Gertrude and
the children will not kill her. And yet, she does have knowledge at some tacit level—knowledge "before . . .
signifiable"—of the abject, that is, of herself abjected, doomed to be excluded finally in death. Yes, she knows
all this before represented most clearly in the symbolic. She knows, therefore, that she must drive out the
objects (the toast, the staff of the culture's life). She knows at some level, for she is dominated by the semiotic
("the drive" that compels her to resist) and consequently helps her "constitute [her] own territory." Sylvia
reconstitutes her own éthea, the peculiar ethos (not éthos, but éthea) that makes her reject the dominant culture's
éthos of death, represented and wielded by Gertrude, the mother who is masculine, hence, the surrogate father.
It is, after all is said and undone, failed surrogates all the way down for Sylvia. She can have no object relation,
no stable life. She is abject. She can be in no community; she can, instead, found community. She has become,
as Kristeva would and Millett does imagine, A sacred configuration. Yes, Sylvia is doomed to die, which is the
meaning of the word sacred (Agamben, Homo Sacer 71-74; Means 22). But is Sylvia sacrificed, as Millett
claims in the subtitle? Kristeva continues: "Fear cements [Sylvia's] compound, conjoined to another world,
thrown up, driven out, forfeited. What [she] has swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or
rather a maternal hatred without a word for the words of the father; that is what [she] tried to cleanse [her]self
of, tirelessly" (5). Sylvia rejects her surrogate mother and father. The situation that Sylvia finds herself in is an
exaggerated example of the child in Kristeva's passage.
What solace does [Sylvia] come upon within such loathing? Perhaps a father, existing but unsettled,
loving but unsteady, merely an apparition but an apparition that remains. Without him the holy brat
would probably have no sense of the sacred; a blank subject, [she] would remain, discomfited, at the
dump for non-objects that are always forfeited, from which, on the contrary, fortified by abjection,
[she] tries to extricate [her]self. For [she] is not mad, [she] through whom the abject exists. Out of the
daze that has petrified [her] before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that
has cut off [her] impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations, out of such daze [she]
causes, along with loathing, one word to crop up—fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject.
(Kristeva, Horror 5-6; emphasis mine)
Sylvia's real parents are absent (the father a mere "apparition" in himself and as parodied through Gertrude's
apparition of what a man-father-mother, she thinks, is supposed to be and do), having gift-exchanged Sylvia
with Gertrude, who herself has no will to life, only to death, to abjection. (It is as if the father has sold Sylvia to
manly Gertrude for fear that Sylvia be stolen while simultaneously it is as if Gertrude has stolen Sylvia. As
Dworkin reminds us, "the Latin rapere . . . means to steal, seize, or carry away" [War Zone 229].) Gertrude can
only perform her S/symbolic role in this drama as an overbearing superego of a parodic performance of a manly
mother. With the ethics of a rapist.
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It is the absence of the father and the displacement of this absence in Gertrude that give Sylvia a "sense
of the sacred." (And yet, for what god would she be a sacrifice to and for what purpose! What community?
Does her death, haunting as it is [the spectre that haunts Millett, The Basement, and readers], purport to teach
Millett and us something that we need to learn? Is Sylvia sacrificed in this narrative of pedagogical violence so
that we can learn? But what?)
Sylvia and Gertrude, as well as the parents themselves, are all cut off from their relations with objects.
Hence, they have no other object, since in constant fear—we can only imagine Sylvia's parents in fear, whether
or not they, in real life or in Millett's imaginings of them, acknowledge fear— . . . they have no other object, in
fear, than the abject. The singular, distancing object in The Basement—and at a time in the narrative when it is
still possible for Sylvia to leave the impending horror—is the Coke bottle! Which is used, in fear, by Gertrude,
to ab-ject (to cast out) Sylvia, and by Sylvia, to challenge and ironically resist, Gertrude's ab-jecting her, but
which gets used only to increase the level of fear for both Gertrude and Sylvia and the abjection and death of
Sylvia.
René Girard, Anthropology, Sacrifice
"I suggest that the symbolic order is born of the scapegoat mechanism, that is, of a collective violence
that is always at the mercy of reciprocal violence."
Girard, To Double Business Bound (111).
Girard has mapped out a grammar of mimetic desire in Violence and the Sacred that explains violence
and the sacrifice of the sacred (s/he who is doomed to die). But so has Kenneth Burke. 12 Girard has favorable
words for Burke and says that it is a "scandal" that Burke has not been translated into French (To Double 221).
And yet, to avoid rivalry, Girard points to a difference between Burke and himself: "Burke sees victimage as a
product of language rather than language as a product of victimage (indirectly at least, through the mediation of
ritual and prohibitions)" (220; emphasis mine). Girard argues that victimage begins with the negative desire of
mimesis. (I insert negative here, for this desire is for a real object, not desire for desire itself.) Girard differs not
only from Burke but also from Freud, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard, and Kristeva, in that
he locates the aetiology of violence in the real world, not in the S/symbolic, or in language (See Violence 63-64;
To Double 111).
The location of (sexual) violence is crucial, as we will see in terms of Freud's attempt to understand the
aetiology of hysteria, either by way of the seduction theory (actual physical sexual abuse, rape) or seduction
fantasy (an effect of the symbolic, or language, or a mere invention or lie of rape). But I am not suggesting here
even an initial homology between Girard and Freud—before Freud opts for the Oedipus complex—for as I have
pointed out nothing could be more violent in terms of the complexity of differences between Girard and Freud
as well others than to see them as the same in relation to answering the question of violence (cf. McKenna 57).
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What follows is a side trip on Girard. We will eventually complicate his views of sacrifice and
violence, as he himself does. And eventually we will have to deal with his, along with others', possible—even if
only provisionary—solutions to the perpetual return of violence, which Girard espouses in Things Hidden Since
the Foundation of the World.
Mimetic Desire: Girard argues that with a desire for a similar and real object comes rivalry. The agents
themselves desire this same object that precipitates what Girard calls, in Violence and the Sacred, "the
sacrificial crisis" (39-67). But it is more than simply a desire for the same object, for someone has to give initial
value to the object. Girard explains: "Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two
desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it. In desiring an object
the rival alerts the subject to the desirability of the object. The rival, then, serves as a model for the subject . . .
in regard to desires" (145; Girard's emphasis). Hence, the grammar: If the subject desires the object because the
rival subject first desired it, then violence; and if violence, then sacrificial crisis; and if crisis, then scapegoat
(Violence 46-48). Girard writes: "Wherever differences are lacking, violence threatens" (57). 13 Most interesting
is that the model-subject (e.g., teacher) and the rival (student) will generally not acknowledge their "inevitable
rivalry" (146) for the same desired object. Girard writes: "The model, even when he has openly encouraged
imitation, is surprised to find himself engaged in competition. He concludes that the disciple has betrayed his
confidence by following in his footsteps. As for the disciple, he feels both rejected and humiliated, judged
unworthy by his model of participating in the superior existence the model himself enjoys" (146).
Double bind: Girard further explains: "Man cannot respond to that universal human injunction 'Imitate
me!' without almost immediately encountering an inexplicable counterorder: 'Don't imitate me!' (which really
means, 'Do not appropriate my object')." This is the condition, Girard points out, for "the double bind" (147). In
no time at all—for we human beings (in the S/symbolic)—"violence and desire will be linked in [our] mind, and
the presence of violence will invariably awaken desire" (148; emphasis mine). The agents that desire the same
object—besides model-subject and student—may be twins born of the clan, who themselves contribute to a
confusion of categories, specifically a confusion of difference. Or the agents may be father and son, with the
son challenging the father's position to the death, hence, patrimony; or the agents might be too similar to engage
in sexual intercourse, hence, incest (Violence 74-75). Or still, the agents may cross gender and species
boundaries, hence, destroying differences (127-28).
Violent Unanimity: First, it is necessary to understand—this is Girard's daring claim—that all human
beings share "violent unanimity"; that is, all are subject to "the mechanism of reciprocal violence" (81; Girard's
emphasis). This mechanism allows violence to be unleashed on all members in the group directly or indirectly
involved. (Girard does not limit violence to men alone, but to women as well, to the entire species.) This
violence, however, can get out of control and potentially continue until all are dead. Hence, the necessity for
someone to be the stand-in for all violence. It is also important to understand that this mechanism of reciprocal
violence figures in on the selection of a scapegoat, whose punishment or death would put an end to a cycle of
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"vengeance and reprisals" (81). Given the logic of the mechanism of unanimity, the person selected to be a
scapegoat can be any person as long as the group believes the person is the cause of the turmoil (83). When
"we" in the community select a scapegoat, we do not see our share of responsibility, for we are caught in self-
mystification. Perhaps, as Girard suggests, such a mystification is necessary to hold off our sameness, which is
the condition for our being toward violence.
To be brief here—and yet political, as a way of looking forward to my discussions in Part II—I would
point to Girard's claim that Oedipus (as the prime exemplar of the slayer of distinctions, agent of patricide and
incest) is not alone the violent one, but Creon and Tiresias and others are as well. Girard writes: "everybody
shares equal responsibility, because everybody participates in the destruction of a cultural order." And "each
sees in the other the usurper of a legitimacy that he thinks he is defending but that he is in fact undermining"
(71). It is this potentiality for perpetual vengeance and reprisals that must be brought to an end by assigning
Oedipus as the scapegoat.
Keeping Vengeance in Check: Finally, Girard reads the drama as a judiciary-courtroom scene, which
"seems" to have in it "nothing more than the camouflaged victory of one version of the story over the other, the
polemical version over its rival—the community's formal acceptance of Tiresias's and Creon's version of the
story, thereafter held to be the true and universal version, the verity behind the myth itself" (73; cf. 16-19, 22).
With a means of founding the differences among the participants—the means being the scapegoat mechanism—
the citizens of Thebes can withdraw into the security of self-mystification and be done with violence. Lest there
be a misunderstanding, Girard says that this mystification is a necessity. For if not, then, similarity returns and
yet another sacrificial crisis, and next time a more catastrophic one. (The necessity to expend this accursed
share of someone who must be a scapegoat for stability is comparable to Bataille's economy of sacrifice. See
The Accursed Share.)
But this exposition is only the misleading beginning of Girard's view of sacrifice and violence. For I
want to complicate the question of Girard's view of violence by looking at the Derridean question of tracing the
victim. But why complicate the question when Girard—as I have disclosed in his self-comparison with Burke as
well as Derrida and others—cares little for linking language as the aetiology of mimetic violence? After all,
Girard traces culture to the material conditions of the scapegoat mechanism. The answer is that "we" must
complicate the question because Girard does not. "We" must do this imminently reversible thinking, however,
without forgetting Girard's insistence on reality as material conditions. It is not, therefore, to say disjunctively
that either language constitutes reality or that reality constitutes language. But it is a matter of insisting on both.
There is, as Girard and Derrida are well aware, coherence in this contradiction. (See Derrida, Writing 279;
McKenna 71.) It is easy to see how similarity—mimetic desire—can be the cause of violence, but it is also easy
to see how difference—différance—can also be the cause of violence among real people in cultures-languages.
Any critique cannot but look both ways. 14 In dis/order to think through them. On the way to thinking any third
possibilities.
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But more importantly, I am also driven by Millett's obsession with "tracing" (Basement 12) Sylvia in
texts—which is all that Millett could possibly have as a means and as access to—so as to imagine the reality of
rape and torture as a sacrifice. Millett is concerned with the two riddles (68, 70) of Why this rape? and Why did
Sylvia let the perpetrators do it to her? (An Oedipal confrontation with the riddles seems unavoidable.) In
understanding the role of sacrifice in Millett's The Basement, we will need a Derridean perspective along with a
Girardian one. So yes, I am thinking both the violence of rhetoric, the rhetoric of violence (see De Lauretis 31-
50). After all, Girard's explanation of the mechanism of "violent unanimity" and how it figures in with the
selection of a scapegoat (a stand-in, original cause) is in itself a tracing of the victim in the cultural text. What I
would want to avoid is the ever—not inevitable—return of the Oedipal (hermeneutical) mistake of thinking that
one answer to the riddle would ever do. Or thinking that one possible emotional response should or would ever
do. Such as anthropos, oh, woe is "us."
Perhaps I am returning us to a double place, "to double business bound," as Girard would phrase it:
Not only acting, suffering, learning (the dialectic of tragedy [see Burke, Motives 38-41]) would return us to the
shortcomings of our single, arrogant answer to the riddle with perhaps a new understanding of our blindness,
but also comic frames or correctives (Burke, Attitudes 20, 166-75) would teach us upon returning how to
multiply our assumptions about answering the riddle, would provide us with "equipments for living"
(Philosophy 262; Burke's emphasis). But it is not a matter of being returned to double business—for this is
where we human beings (apparently always) already dwell in the sacred (both a taboo and desirable)—but it is a
matter of searching along side this double business for third ways of responding to vocations and avocations in
hopes of vacations. In hopes of living ways. As I attach (by way of Gregory Ulmer's paralogic of conduction)
these sayings on rape and the sacred and sacrifice to Oedi-pedagogy and canonization in Part II, what I am
alluding to will become more unclearly clear in its coming inventiveness.
The Sacred, Sacrifice, and the Double Bind?
"As Abjection—so the Sacred"
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror 17
". . . the sacred is but the name that people give to their own violence; indeed, it is the name by which
people misrepresent their own violence."
Andrew J. McKenna, Violence and Difference 67.
To emphasize, it is never enough to examine only Girard and Derrida on this idea and matter of the
sacred, sacrifice, and origin of violence. In retelling this story of origins, I will look eventually at two very
different vocations and avocations—both as callings—for alternative responses than that of searching for an
origin of violence. I will examine Dworkin's calling and then return to Girard's yet new one of non-sacrificial
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eadings. Once we understand the logic of origin (and of the supplement) as paradigmatic of the double bind,
doubleness, we will need alternatives; for to understand origin's violence, violence's orgins—whether in reality
or in language—is not necessarily to be free of the conditions of violence (cf. Siebers 126). Things are much
more complicated than a modernist, socialist critique might argue: Stripping away mystification does not
necessarily liberate (cf. Sloterdijk, Critique). For Girard, such a demystification would, on the contrary, only
return us to an all against all of violence in need of a new mystification that would allow for a scapegoat to put
an end to the violence. Moreover, any attempt to resolve the contradiction of the double (the sacred, sacrifice)
would also only return us to a statelessness of epistemic violence and an emotional and physical violence.
"All these years later reading a description of your funeral, going to Indianapolis, which is like home
because I'm a middle westerner too, and tracing you in the Indianapolis News, October 30, 1965."
Millett, The Basement (12; emphasis mine).
Tracing the Victim: What I am going to be most concerned with in tracing is the very mechanism that
contributes to Chaste Rape, as I see it performed in The Basement as well as performed through out the in-
between of nature (physis) and cultures (nomoi), especially the dominant Greco-Roman-Christian rhetorical
cultures, cultural rhetorics. If I have not suggestively made it abundantly clear yet, that mechanism is the
Girardian double bind itself along with the Derridean différance (the mark, the trace, the logic of the
supplement, the double session, the phramakon, etc.). Différance is a cliché by now, and yet it has always
already been a cliché. Différance, between two consonants, remains im/purely graphic: It is thought, written,
and read, but it cannot be heard. It cannot be apprehended in justice, and we will see why it also bypasses the
order of political action in general. It is not only offered by a mute mark but also by Philomela (having been
raped and her tongue cut out, she cannot tell her story). Différance, in part, is the economy of the corpse, the
tomb, and cage—comparable to Millett's installation art cages—in which the Sylvias-Sibyls of the world live.
Caged and mute, riven and rendered, but in Chaste Rape. (Cf. Derrida, "Différance," Margins 3-4.)
I am going to call on a third party to open up this discussion of the logic of the double bind and
différance so that we might misthink of ways of vacating it. But let us not forget that vacating the double bind
requires that we re(mis)think and change the condition for the possibilities of doubleness, which is in itself a
condition. How else would a double—if a double could—structure itself, like a virus, in a circle eating its tale!
(Reading Girard, as well as Burke and Derrida, makes me think that it is doubles all the way down to infinity
until we reach our end, realizing our natural finitude.) It is crucial to understand—and this, too, bears
repeating—that understanding (seeing) in itself how this mechanism of the double bind masks—that is, makes
Chaste—Rape is not near enough to put an end to the mechanism. Or perhaps even to forgive it. We will have
to casuistically stretch or fold the conditions for the possibilities of a double into radicals of thirds (as still a
radical finitude), so that we might misthink our way to even newer rebeginnings. But with this caveat, I jump
too quickly to the promises of the last, yet rebeginning/s of Chaste Rape. And really, I am just taking us through
various ways of thinking, reading, writing rape.
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Obsessively, throughout this chapter—and yet, with occasional hysterical breakouts—I have been
discussing in passing a series of double binds; now it is time to superimpose them before thinking about third
ways of opposing them (which I will begin toward the latter part of this chapter, in which I demonstrate
textually un/just how the logic of the double bind [sadistically] informs and [death] drives the narrative, but will
develop more fully in Part 4 in terms of anarchitexture). The superimposition should allow us to see the logic
that makes for Chaste Rape.
The third party that I call on for this task is Andrew McKenna in his Violence and Difference,
specifically his discussion on "Tracing the Victim" and thereafter to and through "State Agents" (69-115, 154-
72). His rendering of Girard in the light of Derrida, and vice versa, is helpful to my misthinkings. (It is
necessary and desirous to misthink in dis/order to reach a third way.)
About the trace of violence, McKenna writes:
What first takes place, according to Girard, is violence, and what then takes its place is the sacred.
Both require a victim. The victim is the issue of violence and the origin of the sacred; it comes after
nature and before culture, which originates in the sacred, that is, in the deference paid to the victim.
The victim in this conception serves to bridge the gap between nature and culture and to mark their
definitive rupture. And the difference between nature and culture issues from the primordial difference
between the human and the sacred, which is inhabited from the beginning by what Derrida neologizes
anarcheologically as différance. (69)
That in the beginning there was violence (the logos with polemos) is not that unusual a statement, even
coming from both males and females on the question of beginnings. (As far as I know, we have yet to hear from
hermaphordites, mermes, fermes, and other minoratarian genders on this matter of the origin of violence.) Freud
in his Totem and Taboo extends Charles Darwin's hypothesis of the "primal horde" in The Descent of Man with
his representative anecdote of "the brothers [who] killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the
patriarchal horde" (SE, XIII: 141; cf. Girard, Things Hidden 24-25, 158-79; Brown 3-31). The brothers felt
guilty but adapted by way of what Freud called " 'deferred obedience' " (143; cf. Derrida's "deffered presence"
in "Différance," Margins 9). Elaine Morgan in The Descent of Woman extends Darwin and Freud's hypothesis
with her representative anecdote of the evolutionary development of aggression and rape (65-72; Girard 220-
21). The same brothers of Freud's anecdote (or the similar brothers of Brownmiller's "police-blotter rapists"
[Against 228-29]) have in the descent of human kind kept and continue to keep all women in perpetual fear of
rape. These rapists felt and still feel no guilt nor responsibility for having raped; they live by the rapist's ethics,
presuming the victim at fault (see Stoltenberg, Refusing 20-21).
The issue of guilt felt—referred or deferred—is of the utmost importance. Pausing, let us recall
Stoltenberg's discussion of Aristotle's having accurately described in the Poetics that the human species must
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think, as Antigone and Creon did, that they are morally correct in their actions while the other is not (1454a).
This is the contributing cause of tragedy (not good versus evil, but good clashing with good), but it is also by
extension, given the way men are aculturated, the contributing rationalization for the rapist's ethics. Not having
dealt with this problem in the Nicomachean Ethics—except through the principle of moderation (1106b)—
Aristotle has left it for all male-students of ethics such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Girard, Scott, Siebers,
as well as others, to deal with. (Stoltenberg has shown a way. And yet, going back to Morgan's attempt to
imagine a parallel descent of woman, let us not forget that Kristeva in "herethics" has similarly shown a way. 15
The superimposition of double binds and juxtaposition of ways will have been my way of meditating on the
scene of the crime of sexual violence.)
The Aristotelian principle of moderation may work well within the realm of logic, reason (identity), or
will, but it does not within the realm of desire, i.e., mimetic desire. (I insist that violence—sexual violence—is
an ethical as well as a political issue. But pushing more toward the apparent impossible and beyond, I must
additionally insist that violence—sexual violence—is a libidinal-sacrificial economic issue, which I believe
explains its being-hidden. Or its resistance to rational study and resolution. The problem perhaps—I will say at
this moment—can best be dealt with by psychoanalytic readings since the problem of desire hides in the form of
libidinal attachments in relations to desired, real and fantasized objects and others [Cf. Siebers 127; McKenna
71.]) To these issues, I will return. But for now,
McKenna continues:
In the beginning is imitation, not an origin. In the beginning are violent doubles, mult[i]doubles. When
the violence of all against all [i.e., violent unanimity] becomes the violence of all against one a victim
[a homo sacer or scapegoat] is produced, which is likely to happen when a difference, a weakness,
marks out a single member of the mêlée for destruction. So in a sense we can say with Derrida that in
the beginning was the mark, the trace of a violence that has no origin except in another's violence, a
trace of nonorigin or an arche-trace. I will say just that when I have traced the cultural destiny of the
victim, for the victim is the trace of a violence that has no origin except in 'itself,' that is, in another's
violence. (69)
What this "nonorigin or an arche-trace" can mean is that the source of violence that establishes community is
hidden. Or that it is, if at all intellectually recognizable, best explained as a phenomenon of being (hidden) "in
'itself'." This is one of the things hidden since the foundation of the world, to use Girard's book title.
Often violence, or sexual violence, is traced back to men perpetrating violence pedagogically on other
men who, somewhere in the depths of the pecking order, perpetrate it, again pedagogically, on women such as
Gertrude, who—if she, in turn, revisits this violence on others—can be seen as furthering sexual violence on
Sylvia and other children who stand subject(ed) to violent unanimity. The violence, as hypothesized by Darwin
and Freud, re/begins with the father excluding, not sharing, his women with his sons, who in eventual anger kill
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and consume the father (they eat the corpse of the father) and then the women (they rape the women, their
father's property, and thereby appropriate these objects of desire for themselves and begin a new cycle of
violence). The sons do this in remembrance of the father. (The sons find themselves in the double bind of
mimetic desire: Do this, don't do this. Against Our (women's as well as men's) Will. While there is supposedly
an "assent" of man in this hypothetical, metabiological-psychological explanation, there is also a "descent" of
women, and all in the name of founding cultures, civilizations.
But while this archi-event (and its cycle of violent relations) is known and understood, it is not. Acted
on. Will (against our will, whoever's will) cannot stop Desire (for our desire, whoever's desire). Mimetic desire.
Contributing to the problem of recognition and action is a mechanism—not unlike that one called on in Poe's
"The Purloined Letter"—that allows human beings to see, yet not see what is most obvious. It is a mechanism
that defers seeing and refers it elsewhere. The mechanism, as McKenna sees it, is simultaneously that of the
economy of sacrifice and that of the supplement (78). Reminding us of Derrida's discussion of Rousseau's
"sexual auto-affection" as a supplement, or proxy, for "sexual possession," McKenna—and I will repeat without
euphemisms here—"masturbation for Rousseau is the representation of the satisfaction of desire, its ostensibly
immediate satisfaction as rape" (78; emphasis mine). More to the point concerning the double bind, McKenna
writes: "the economy of sacrifice simultaneously exposes and protects the community" (78). The sacrifice in
this instance is achieved by way of a negative deconstruction (a simple switching of the binary) from
rape/masturbation to masturbation/rape. The logic, when transferred (referred) to the overall context of my
discussion of sexual violence (rape) as founding principle, does analogically in ratios illustrate the economy of
sacrifice: masturbation: scapegoat :: rape: reciprocal violence, with the scapegoat deferring reciprocal violence.
(We must be careful with this analogy, for if commonsense does not tell us, then studies of rapists do tell us that
masturbation is not a substitute for raping. Rape is not entirely about sex; it is about sexual-empirical violence
toward another.) But what the analogy does illustrate for us in this economy of the supplement and sacrifice is
how this economy of representation both writes the violence, while it simultaneously "erases the traces of
human [sexual] violence" (84). Derrida explains in greater detail:
The value of the transcendental arche [archie] must make its necessity felt before letting itself be
erased. The concept of arche-trace must comply with both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact
contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of
origin—within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the
origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the
trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace
from the classical [rhetorical, cultural] scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an
originary nontrace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an
originary trace of arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys its name and that, if all begins
with the trace, there is above all no originary trace. (Grammatology 61; qtd. in McKenna 84)
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With an understanding of this presence, yet absence, this arche-writing, yet erasure, of originary
(sexual) violence, we can have a reciprocal understanding of the contradiction—yet coherent contradiction—of
Chaste Rape: How it can be Chaste (erased) while it can be Rape (exposed as written); and Why it is so
apparently intractable. (I say "apparently" for the simple reason that I must ethically, categorically do so. If not,
then Why write this book and hope for ethical-political change! I am not merely rewriting William Gibson's
Agrippa: The Book of the Dead. 16 ) I do not want, however, to sound too loudly my hope over doubts with
simple bravado and muffle arguments against hope. Derrida has said what he has said, but let us not forget or
omit what Girard has equally said: "Western thought continues to function as the effacement of traces. But the
traces of founding violence are no longer the ones being expelled; rather, the traces of a first or second
expulsion, or even of a third or fourth. In other words, we are dealing with traces of traces of traces, etc."
(Things Hidden 65; emphasis mine; qtd in McKenna 84). As the apparent cause disappears in the
perspectiveless sky, violence (the source of violence as such) grows grossly larger, grotesquely so, in the reality
of rape camps in the Balkins (Allen, Rape Warfare; MacKinnon, "Turning Rape") and nuclear terrorism around
the world (see Derrida, "No Apocalypse"; McKenna 124-35).
While this understanding of arche-writing, yet erasure, of originary (sexual violence) allows us to
understand the hiddenness, the Chasteness, of Rape in rhetorical cultures, cultural rhetorics, it also makes
Chaste Violence by inviting us, at some level of cognition, to see sexual violence as exclusively a linguistic-
semiological phenomenon. Hence, we return to the problem identified by De Lauretis in again imminently
reversible terms of the violence of rhetoric, the rhetoric of violence. The difference for De Lauretis is not
merely, or I would add singularly, "différance but gender" (32). Paralleling the reciprocal relation above, we can
explain what De Lauretis is understandingly objecting to in this manner: Différance: gender :: Chaste: rape,
with Différance (doubly) deferring gender. But it is not just Derrida but also Girard himself that De Lauretis
points to as either forgetting gender directly or neutralizing its conditions indirectly. She points to the Girardian
principle of violent reciprocity of rivalry and violence between subject and objects (between brothers or
between father and sons) as being shared commonly between men, and not between man and woman or woman
and women (43). 17
I want to turn now to Andrea Dworkin's calling and thereafter return to Girard's and again Dworkin's
notion of non-sacrificial readings. I see both as possible alternative—among other alternative—ways of tracing
(actually and virtually, rethinking) sexual violence and Chaste Rape. Dworkin in "I Want A Twenty-Four-Hour
Truce During Which There Is No Rape" gets down to a just no-nonsense basic call for men to put an end to all
rape, while Girard questions his whole reading of violence and sacrifice and in Things Hidden since the
Foundation of the World calls for a non-sacrificial reading of violence. Both thinkers (Girard and Dworkin),
talking about things hidden, in fact, make rape more accessible as a problem by setting aside sacred and
sacrificial readings with non-sacrificial ones. Both focus on Biblical stories to explain what is hidden (since the
foundation of the world) and how it is to be not just understood but also dealt with.
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"If you have a conception of freedom that includes the existence of rape, you are wrong. You cannot
change what you say you want to change. For myself, I want to experience just one day of real
freedom before I die. I leave you here to do that for me and for the women whom you say you love."
Andrea Dworkin, War Zone (171).
Dworkin ("I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape"): Dworkin's call for a
twenty-four hour truce against rape was a speech from notes given on the occasion of the Midwest Regional
Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men (1983). She is vivid and lucid in pointing to the
aetiology of rape, why and for what purpose men rape. Evidently, the audience's reception was positive, except
for one male out of 500 who, she writes, "threatened me physically. He was stopped by a woman bodyguard
(and friend) who had accompanied me" (War Zone 162).
My paraphrasing what Dworkin says will diminish the impact that her words have, just as, I am sure,
the printed version must diminish Dworkin's speaking it on that occasion. I will try, therefore, to select her
words. Very directly, Dworkin asks why men in their movement "are so slow to understand the simplest things;
not the complicated ideological things. You understand those [such as the double bind and différance]" (163).
But "The simple things. . . . Simply that women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you [men]
are" (163; Dworkin's emphasis). The simple things. "We don't have time. . . . We don't have forever. . . . Every
three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing
abstract about it" (163). The simple things. "men are doing it [raping], because of the kind of power that men
have over women" (163).
Men's power to rape is "institutionalized. [Rape] is protected by law. It is protected by religion and
religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a
police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world': the
poets, the artists." Men believe, "they have the right to rape. Men may not believe it when asked. Everybody
raise your hand who believes you have the right to rape. Not too many hands will go up. It's in life that men
believe that they have the right to hit and to hurt. And it is an equally extraordinary thing to try to understand
that men really believe that they have the right to buy a woman's body for the purpose of having sex: that that is
a right" (164), just as they have the right to speech; and living, breathing, eating, defecating.
Offering the men something, yet taking it back—a rhetorical strategy perfect for an audience that,
though attentive, remains asleep to the simplest things being said—Dworkin tells the men that their so-called
political "movement suggests that men don't want the kind of power I have just described" (164). What is said,
however, does not match what is (not) done. Men hide "behind guilt, that's my favorite," she writes. "You have
the time to feel guilty. We don't have the time for you to feel guilty. Your guilt is a form of acquiescence in
what continues to occur" (164-65). Un/namely, the rape of women. With sarcasm, she says: "I'm sorry that you
feel so bad—so uselessly and stupidly bad—because there is a way in which this really is your tragedy. And I
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don't mean because you can't cry" or "because there is no real intimacy in your lives" or "because the armor that
you have to live with as men is stultifying" (165; emphasis mine).
Dworkin then points to a connection between rape and war—a most counterpowerful, compelling
"relationship between the way that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that
grinds [men] up . . . just like that woman [who] went through Larry Flynt's meat grinder on the cover of Hustler.
" (165; emphasis mine). With this connection of rape and war, Dworkin gets to the very foundation of rape
culture. Along with this connection is Dworkin's calling on the triad of killing, dying, and living. To live, for
men, as they are acculturated, is to rape (164-65). This problem of rape-war is not outside men, but deeply
within them: Rape: war :: living: men. "It's in you," Dworkin says.
The pimps and the warmongers [the pedagogues] speak for you. Rape and war are not so different.
[Therefore, a variation such as Rape: living :: war: men.] And what the pimps and the warmongers do
[in their pedagogy of preparing you for living and waging war as raping] is that they make you so
proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard. And they take that acculturated sexuality and
they put you in little uniforms and they send you out to kill and to die. (165-66; emphasis mine)
Whence life? Hence, death. A love of death. As Dworkins says, as many other feminists, including Freud, have
said, "men love death" (214). One way of killing is raping. A double way of killing is killing a man and raping
his property. But let us not displace, for we are talking about the rape of women here. When Dworkin makes the
connection between "the sexual politics of aggression; [and] the sexual politics of militarism" (166), she adds an
additional connection: "I think that men are very afraid of other men." She points to "homophobia" (166). Men
intuitively understand that their "sexuality has to do with aggression and [their] sense of entitlement to
humanity has to do with being superior to other people" (166). She continues:
In my opinion, the prohibitions against male homosexuality exist in order to protect male power. Do it
to her. That is to say: as long as men rape, it is very important that men be directed to rape women. As
long as sex is full of hostility and expresses both power over and contempt for the other person, it is
very important that men not be declassed, stigmatized as female, used similarly. The power of men as a
class depends on keeping men sexually inviolate and women sexually used by men. Homophobia helps
maintain that class power: it also helps keep you as individuals safe from each other, safe from rape.
(166; cf. Stoltenberg, Refusing)
And then she concludes: "If you want to do something about homophobia, [which you in the men's movement
claim you want to do,] you are going to have to do something about the fact that men rape, and that forced sex
is not incidental to male sexuality but is in practice paradigmatic" (166; emphasis mine).
Now what this all means, as Elaine Morgan has suggested (72), is that rape creates the founding
conditions for the impossibility of intimacy, tenderness, cooperation, emotional life; for the impossibility of life
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itself. Living. Therefore, end rape. Now. So that we all can begin living together (169). What is crucial to hear
in Dworkin's speech is that rape is not natural, but cultural (it is learned from the pedagogues, the cultural
pederasts) and, therefore, can be changed. So stop thinking and start acting to change the institutionalized
practice of war, rape, and homophobia. Stop rape for the sake of life.
"The Gospels only speak of sacrifices in order to reject them and deny them any validity. Jesus
counters the ritualism of the Pharisees with an anti-sacrificial quotation from Hosea: 'Go and learn
what this means, "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice" ' (Matthew 9, 13)."
Girard, Things Hidden 180
Girard and Dworkin's Call for a Non-Sacrificial Reading: To put it mildly, perhaps these two—Girard
and Dworkin—do not and should not be coupled together. I would insist, however, that they should and for the
sake of "perspectives by incongruity" (Burke, Attitudes 308-14). I offer them together as a heuristic toward
thinking about non-sacrificial reading. 18 This "offer" need not be read as a sacrificing of a critical understanding
of sexual violence (rape) in itself, anymore than my reading of Millett's reading should be read as a sacrificing
of critical understandings. (But each reader will have to decide for hirself and, hence, will be afforded an
opportunity at the end of this chapter in the form of a test.) In relation to Dworkin, what I have stated so far is
that she argues (prompts) the men's movement that she addresses to end war, homophobia, and rape, all of
which establish the conditions for living-death. (Or as Lawrence Kramer might say, "lovedeath" [134-40].) The
choice is simple: to kill, to die, or to live. Any argument about or exasperation over the complexity of these
three infinitives leads but to an infinity of counterarguments against life and contrapower moves toward death.
An ethics (herethics, or whatever)—against all so-called good reasons of evidence to the contrary—must be
followed. Dworkin writes: "Have you [men] ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you?
It's not because there's a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity,
against all the evidence" (War Zone 170). The setting aside of the knives signals, in my reading of Dworkin
with Girard, a setting aside of the Abraham's sacrificial knife to be used on Isaac in sacrifice, with or without
the substituted goat. This juxtaposition of references from Dworkin and Genesis, 22: 9-10, may read like a
forced and stretched one, but perhaps it will read less so and productively more so as we proceed. It is necessary
to set aside whatever experiential evidence one might have to the contrary. It is necessary, Girard argues, to turn
to the "the language of the Bible [which] combat[s] sacrifice more effectively than does the language of modern
philosophy and criticism" (Things Hidden 237). It is necessary to be a little, if not a great, fool (cf. Ronell,
Stupidity). I find that quality in both Girard and Dworkin's as well as Millett's attempts to work with the
problem of sexual violence. Both go directly to the Old Testament for their counter-cultural evidence, though
many academics would never. 19
Girard tells us, "There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that the death of Jesus is a sacrifice,
whatever definition (expiation, substitution, etc.) we may give for that sacrifice. At no point in the Gospels is
the death of Jesus defined as a sacrifice" (Things Hidden 180). In a section titled "The Impossibility of
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Sacrificial Readings," Girard continues: "It must be admitted that nothing in what the Gospels tell us directly
about God justifies the inevitable conclusion of a sacrificial reading of the Epistle to the Hebrews. This
conclusion was most completely formulated to the medieval theologians, and it amounts to the statement that
the Father himself insisted upon the sacrifice. Efforts to explain this sacrificial pact only result in absurdities"
(182). Finally, he writes, in terms of the Death-of-God philosophy, "What is . . . finally dying is the sacrificial
concept of divinity preserved by medieval and modern theology—not the father of Jesus, not the divinity of the
Gospels, which have been hindered—and still are hindered—from approaching, precisely by the stumbling
block [the scandalon] of sacrifice. In effect, this sacrificial concept of divinity must 'die' " (235; cf. 416). In the
light of all that Girard has written about the economy of sacrifice (the sacred, beings doomed to death), he is
saying that death, the scandal of mimetic rivalry, itself must die. In a similar manner to Dworkin, Girard argues
(prompts) men whom he addresses and who read texts as sacred, as sacrificial, to end their love of death, which
establish the conditions for living-death (cf. Dworkin, War Zone 214).
Girard turns to a reading of the judgment of Solomon for his life-furthering, non-sacrificial reading of
the Gospels. This is the story of the "two harlots" presenting King Solomon with the problem of deciding on
who is the real mother and, therefore, keeper of the child. One woman had accidentally rolled over and killed
her child in sleep, while the other had not. But upon awakening, both women claim the living child. The two
women mirror each other in their pleas: "No, the living child is mine, and the dead child is yours." And "No, the
dead child is yours, and the living child is mine." Solomon furthers the mirroring:
The one says, 'This is my son that is alive, and your son is dead'; and the other says, 'No; but your son
is dead, and my son is the living one.' And the king said, 'Bring me a sword.' So a sword was brought
before the king. And the king said, 'Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to
the other.' Then the woman whose son was alive said to the king, because her heart yearned for her
son, 'Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means slay it.' But the other said, 'It shall be
neither mind nor yours; divide it.' Then the king answered and said, 'Give the living child to the first
woman, and by no means slay it; she is its mother.' (Things Hidden 237)
The mirroring device of the story speaks of mimetic rivalry and sacrifice. The king, Girard writes, "decides to
divide the object of the litigation. The Latin word decidere means etymologically to divide by the sacrificial
knife, to cut the throat of a victim" (238). But as Girard explains, when "mimetic desire impels [the woman who
would, nonetheless, have the child divided] to speak and act," when the woman becomes so caught up in "her
fascination with the hated model and rival—her feeling of resentment that impels her to involve this model in
her own downfall, if it proves impossible to achieve any other triumph over it," then the king knows who is and
is not the true mother and puts an end not only to the rivalry but also to the sacrificial model (239). "All Israel
heard of the judgement which the king had rendered; and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived
that the wisdom of God was in him, to render justice (I Kings 3, 16-28)" (337-38). The king's wisdom is his
ability to put an end to the sacred model, sacrifice. (This is the whole point of the story, as Girard prompts us to
read it.) The real mother's wisdom is to sacrifice herself (in a manner of speaking, give up her own life, her
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happiness) so that her child might live. The false mother's wrongfulness is to be caught up in resentment,
wanting nothing in the end but killing-to-death (241-42). 20 Girard sees "the Judgment of Solomon as [an
exemplary] prefiguration of the mission of Christ" (242). 21
I want now to return to Dworkin, who also figures in on reading Biblical exemplars. Dworkin connects
together two Biblical stories with Vietnam War protestors, with pornography, and with the rape and murder of
women. It is an ingenious series of connections, a compelling argument, and an exemplary discussion for non-
sacrificial readings. Basically, what I see in these connections—in contraparallel, yet supportive of, Girard's
non-sacrificial readings—is that the Men's Bible with its tradition of sacrificial readings is to the murder of sons
as pornography is to the sexual abuse and murder of women. (Or in the language of ratios, The Bible: the
murder of sons :: pornography: the rape of women.)
The two Biblical stories are Abraham-Isaac and Noah-Ham: The first with the father's potential-killing
(sacrificing) of the son; the second with the son raping (sacrificing) the father and, in turn, with the father
responding by accursing and banishing (sacrificing) the rapist-incestuous son. With the first story, Dworkin
establishes "men love death" (214); fathers will kill their sons for power. 22 With the second, Dworkin
establishes that sons will rebel against their fathers (rape and sacrifice them for their father's power) and that
fathers will banish (disown, disempower) them. (The latter reading is reminiscent of Freud's notion of the
descent of man in Totem and Taboo.) But this story of rebellion of sons against the fathers is updated by
Dworkin in an important way. So as to form an alliance with the sons, the fathers will tell their sons to rape
women instead. (This rereading is reminiscent of Elaine Morgan's revision of the descent of man in The
Descent of Woman.) The fathers with the sons will create, in the name of their masculine free speech,
pornography as the textbooks and pedagogy for rape. (This reading is reminiscent of Robin Morgan's
"pornography is the theory, and rape the practice" [88].)
This all needs, especially the ratios, careful explaining and, therefore, let us look at these connections
in greater detail. But one thing must be kept in mind, and that is I see—and insist against the language and
ideology of the sacred and sacrifice—that Dworkin is working by way of her conductive arguments to get men
to cease and desist sacrificial (pornographic, rapist) readings, which lead to sexual violence against women. In
these readings men form an alliance against women to forestall generational violence waged between fathers
and sons. These sacrificial-pornographic readings are cononized (ways of interacting with women) and their
pedagogy (again, aimed at women) is rape. A closer reading:
Dworkin's argument in "Why So-Called Radical Men Love and Need Pornography" (collected in
Letters From a War Zone)—in reference to sacrifice and in narrative form, splicing and mixing together the
Abraham and Isaac story and the Vietnam war reality—is that
the fathers are the divine architects of war and business; the sons are a sacrifice of flesh, bodies
slaughtered to redeem the diminishing virility of the aging owners of the earth.
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In Amerika, the most recent sacrifice of the sons was called Vietnam. As Abraham obeyed the God
created to serve his own deepest psychosexual needs, raised the knife to kill Isaac with his own hand,
so the fathers of Amerika, in obedience to the State created to serve them, sated themselves on a blood
feast of male young.
The sons who went were obedient apprentices to the fathers. . . . They would appease their terrible
fathers by substituting the dead bodies of other sons for their own. Each son of another race that they
killed would strengthen their alliance with the fathers of their own. . . .
The sons who did not go declared outright a war of rebellion. They would rout the father, vanquish
him, humiliate him, destroy him. Over the grave of the fresh killed father, feeding on the new cadaver,
would flower a brotherhood of young virility, sensual, without constraint, and there would be war no
more.
Still, this innocence knew terror. These rebels had terror marked indelibly in their flesh—terror at the
treachery of the father, who had had them sanctified, adored, and fattened [made sacred], not to crown
them king of the world, but instead to make them ripe for slaughter [sacrifice]. (215; emphasis mine)
Dworkin replays this descent of man, echoing Freud's Totem and Taboo; she replays the subsequent
rivalry between the father and sons and the murder-sacrifice of the sons but the eventual murder-sacrifice of the
father (the sons against the father). Dworkin, however, updates this descent by adding to the Abraham-Isaac
story, the story of Noah-Ham (counter-mirrored) and from it she extrapolates, as Elaine Morgan had counter-
developed, the descent of woman (father and son against women). The counter-threatening act (and the
consequences of it in the modern struggle between father and sons, which Dworkin locates during and after the
Vietnam War) in the relationship between Noah and Ham is incest-rape. Dworkin recalls the story:
Noah, a tiller of the soil, was the first to plant the vine. He drank some of the wine, and while he was
drunk he uncovered himself inside his tent. Ham, Canaan's ancestor, saw his father's nakedness, and
told his two brothers outside. Shem and Japheth took a cloak and they both put it over their shoulders,
and walking backwards, covered their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his stupor he
learned what his youngest son had done to him. And he said 'Accursed be Canaan. He shall be his
brothers' meanest slave.' (War Zone 216; Genesis, 9: 20-25)
Working with her textual analogy, Dworkin focuses on the phrase "uncovered . . . nakedness," which according
to The Jerusalem Bible is a "pejorative phrase for sexual intercourse" (War Zone 218). (Another example of
Chaste [in language] Rape!) Instead of the father attempting to kill the son on an altar with a knife, the son
penetrates-sodomizes the father, attempting to kill him in a tent with his penis. The father disowns and banishes
the son with a curse. This is the war of all against all, at least, as the fathers see it.
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But this is a story about power, Dworkin says, with the son taking that power-phallus from the father.
The fathers during the Vietnam War, as in all wars, wanted to "keep [the phallus] covered, hidden; shroud it in
religious taboo; use it in secret; on it build an empire, but never expose it to the powerless, those who do not
have it, those who would, if they could but see its true, naked, unarmed dimensions, have contempt for it. . . .
The fathers wanted to maintain the sacred character of the phallus" (217; Dworkin's emphasis). "The rebel sons"
of the 60s and 70s with their so-called sexual revolution, however, "wanted phallic power to be secular and
'democratic' in the male sense of the word; that is, they wanted to fuck at will, as a birthright. . . . [T]hey wanted
to wield penises, not guns, as emblems of manhood. They did not repudiate the illegitimate power of the
phallus: they repudiated the authority of the father that put limits of law and convention on their lust" (217).
Therefore, as the fathers feared, when the phallus was uncovered, the sons had contempt—willful disobedience
of the authority—for it. Like the fathers, the sons (after all, like father, like son) would sacrifice their fathers for
power-phallus.
In an attempt to stop this reversal of power, the fathers, Dworkin maintains, tell the sons, "Do it to her"
(War Zone 219). Rape her. Planning for the future of power relations to be partially shared with the sons, the
fathers introduced and reeducated the sons—by way of pornography—to rape her. Make "her" sacred (i.e.,
doomed to die); sacrifice "her" for our group's solidarity without rivalry. This set of relationships between
fathers-sons and women, as congregation by segregation, based on death ("men love death," 214), on killing-
sacrificing women, is canonized and turned into a pedagogy by way of pornography. "The perfect vehicle,"
Dworkin argues, "for forging this alliance [between fathers and sons against women] was [and still is]
pornography" (220). Dworkin adds, "Proclaiming the necessity and dignity of freedom, the sons made and sold
images of women humiliated and mutilated. Proclaiming the urgent honor of free speech, the sons used images
of rape and torture to terrorize women into silence. Proclaiming the absolute integrity of the First Amendment,
the sons used it to browbeat women into silence" (220). Women, sacrificed.
I began the sections a call for a truce and calls for non-sacrificial readings with Dworkin saying end
rape, for it is RAPE that establishes the conditions for the possibilities of what we see as death (to die, to kill). I
then returned to Girard who calls for an end to sacrificial readings, interpretations, as productions of death. To
negate this negation of sacrificing others to put an end to mimetic rivalry is to live. Is to take on Solomon's and
Christ's willing of life. Returning to Dworkin and, as I claimed, her calling for similar non-sacrificial reading
productions, I equated her arguments for the negation of pornography with the negation of sacrifice itself.
This sacrificial (cultural) script, this sacrificial reading and production of the relations among fathers,
sons, and women must be stopped. From the Bible and the killing-sacrifice of sons (or fathers) to pornography
and the rape of women, this historical-cultural parallel must stop. Its cultural production must stop. The textual
Christ says, as Girard points out, " 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice' (Matthew 9, 13)" (Things Hidden 180). A
non-sacrificial reading of the Bible and women (as well as fathers and sons) would be a step toward repudiating
and putting an end to pornography. To love's prostituted body. That is, to its production. To the long-time ago
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canonization of the pedagogy known as PornoGraphy (always already Rated PG!) To the sacrifice of women.
To the envisioning of women as Porne, "whores," as Dworkin tells us, "specifically and exclusively the lowest
class of whore, which in ancient Greece was the brothel slut available to all male citizens. The porne was the
cheapest (in the literal sense), least regarded, least protected of all women, including slaves. She was, simply
and clearly and absolutely, a sexual slave." (Pornography 199-200). To write Porn(e) is to advocate through
consumption the further production of porn(e). To advocate and teach the benefits of the social relations of
porn(e). To offer these so-called benefits as a common good—a set of goods—for a community based on this
commodity. To offer death (killing and dying). As that very commodity. But who among us reads the Bible! (I
think that the wrong people, the PornoGraphers, read the Bible. Producing only more and more death.) Who
among us would be the fool! The joker in the pack! The dummy in the bridge game! Who would find the way to
non-sacrificial readings of the Book? Any book? Any text? Any sex? Any story, with or without a narrative?
To call for an end to something that produces death (or realizes either an onto-genetic or cultural
death-wish) is easy to do. It is itself a simple call for a reversal. Just saying NO, when NO is seldom heard, and
when heard and responded to in the affirmative, seldom, if ever, works. N/ever puts an end to the drive toward
death. But absence of proof that we can hear and respond successfully to this call is not proof of absence.
Chiasmus has a way of turning things—which are imminently reversible—perpetually around. Chiasmus has a
pharmakonic quality to it. But what is wanted, as Christa Wolf suggests, is "a third alternative: living" (118).
The differences are not between to die or to live; the binary differences, subject to cultural emphases, is to kill
or to die. (Recall this canonized disjunctive question as asked in terms of to harm or to suffer harm by Plato in
Gorgias.) Hence, the third, living. 23 Which would be a living without resentful thinking and sacrificial thinking
and acting. Which would be the same, for resentful thinking is sacrificial and vice versa.
In the beginning, middle, and at the end of Dworkin's novel Mercy—which has a different Biblical
quote from the one above with Christ desiring mercy, a quote that dis/entitles the novel itself and is apparently
more or less promising—the character "Dworkin" in the closing lines of the novel tells us:
I was born in 1946 [after a war previous to Korea and Vietnam], after Auschwitz, after the bomb, I
never wanted to kill, I had an abhorrence for killing but it was raped from me, raped from my brain;
obliterated, like freedom. . . . I was born in Camden, on Mickle Street, down from where Walt
Whitman loved, according to his poems. I was poor, I never shied away from life, and I loved. I had a
vision too, like his, but I will never write a poem like his, a song of myself, I count the multitudes and
so on, the multitudes passed on top of me, sticking it in, I lost count. For the record, Walt was wrong;
only a girl had a chance in hell of being right. A lot of men on the Bowery resemble Walt; huge, hairy
types; I visit him often. It was the end of April, still cold, a brilliant, lucid cold. You cold feel summer
edging its way north. You could smell spring coming. You would sing; if you throat wasn't ripped.
Your heart would rise, happy; if you wasn't raped; in perpetuity. I went out; at night; to smash a man's
face in; I declared war. My nom de guerre is Andrea One; I am reliably told there are many more; girls
named courage who are ready to kill. (333)
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Everything is imminently reversible! (And let's get out of t.here!) Especially the word "mercy" and the novel
Mercy, which as I suggested in the previous chapter, is framed (parergonally) with bitter-sweet (romantic?)
ironies, in an age that so suffers from irony-confusion and -fatigue itself (for, have you not heard, the ergon is
dead!) and but drifts with pastiches. What would remain, therefore, in something called a General reading and
writing with the logic of conduction and assemblages, which allowing for the return of the excluded middle,
disperse the conditions for the possibility of the double bind. It cannot be only a partial General reading and
writing of negative deconstruction alone. Which is a writing of sacrifice/doubling/auto-mutilation, as so many
have, heretofore, pointed out (see, e.g., Stoekl). The rancid, overly-dead, once-upon-a-time position of
sacrificed and sacrificer is a doubling of auto-mutilation that we must get over. The di(e)alectic of M/F. F/M.
M/F. F/M is exceptionally violent. As Christa Wolf characterizes: "femininity mania[/]masculinity mania"
(260). Or the reverse of the vice, still vice. At one moment, male mothers; then another, vaginal fathers. At all
moments, incipiently, phallic mothers and phallic fathers. If the would-be parents would only make up their
minds! In writing this book, contrary to anything that I have said in it—if it's not unclearly clear yet—I am not
about my Mother's or my Father's business! I am about avoiding the double-business bound! I am about wayves
of affirmative deconstructions. To third alternatives. (I am about nobody's, and yet Love's Body's business.
About Third Body's weaving.) And yet, I am about . . . trying to learn about . . . How to conduct my
grand/mother's business, after all is said and undone. 24 I still go with the re:turn of writing that re-rebegins with
"And yet"! 25
And yet, in the mean time, everything can be read (the glass can be stirred) as a calling (as a means of
keeping everything in com/motion) for non-sacrificial terms and readings followed by General readings—and
writings followed by General writings. And it is this General reading and writing that are anarchitexturally
assembleged conductions themselves of more life-enhancing material conditions for the possibilities of living.
And yes, I say this in the doublefacelessness of the sacrificial writing of the word "prostitute" (porne, whore) on
Sylvia's body. I cannot not. Write to put an end to such a supreme form of a business that demands a Restricted
writing on the body. To put an end by wayves of a third alternative. And you?
The Basement Redux
"I will say here what I have never said before: my pacifism was not challenged by the beating and
torture I experienced in marriage some thirty years ago; I finally got away not because I knew that he
would kill me but because I thought I would kill him. Understand: this is true generally of women—his
life meant more to me than my own; but also I was not willing to kill, even to escape beating and his
own promise, which I believed, that he would kill me."
Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat ix-x (emphasis mine).
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"The woman raped 'is left with a burden of unexpressed rage against all those who remained
indifferent to her fate and who failed to help her' [J. L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery 95]. This is a
rage too big for any little girl of whatever age; this is a rage from which rapists and their accomplices
should die. Therapy is a poor excuse for justice."
Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat 46 (emphasis mine).
In a strange series of loops, we return to a house (home, domos), whose archi-textural feature is
(called) The Basement. Whether "we" are wiser than before, I will leave to you, the reader, and your
productions. I have desired to work my way back to this point (perhaps, for some of you, pointless) to determine
if we might close (re-reopen) The Basement in terms of a merciful reading of the body that is called Sylvia,
"prostitute." It would not serve us—those of us, that is, who would re-reopen and enter the de/basement of
Sylvia—to merely express rage toward those who cannot experience any empathy for what was done to Sylvia.
And it would not serve us—and the wider world—to think of Sylvia synecdochicly, as part of a whole, as a
stand-in, a representative, "for any little girl of whatever age." She is someone specific, in a particular time and
place. Let us not canonize her. Universalize her. Nominate her for Ripley's "Believe It or Not Cartoon." Call
her—even Chastely—St. Sylvia. Let us not read what we produce in a sacrificial manner. Let us not write a
hagiography, which could only be yet another pornography. Let us not create slogans such as Remember Sylvia
as a means of forgetting her. (It is the case, sadly and regretfully, that what we write can be received in this
sacrificial manner. We can write in a General economy but can be, nonetheless, reinscribed in a Restricted way
of thinking. What is wanted is a counterpedagogy to thinking, reading, writing rape that is not a pedagogy.)
What I will redo then in re-reopening The Basement, the case of Sylvia, is to focus quickly, and yet not
finally, on the game of the double bind and the apparent death of sex and potency. And then, offer you, the
reader, an opportunity to assess what has been, thus far, variously presented in the dis/order of its having
become significant to me. But as is more often the case than not, your assessment of me will be a test of your
reading yourself.
Then, we will continue with Sylvia in Part 2 in terms of Oedi-Pedagogy and Canonization. This
writing-Sylvia can never ever be done with, nor do I believe it can be done directly but only by searching in a
triangular manner with the three nodes established not by deduction, induction, or abduction (or any
combinations of these), but by conduction. In this way, obsessively. I am going to rely on something similar, as
I have up to this point in thinking-Sylvia and writing-Sylvia, connecting sentences and paragraphs in skewed
(bad) mannerisms, to what Edgar Allan Poe and Fred Jameson have said about thinking to make this all more
unclearly clear. Poe tells us that to see a star in the heavens, we should never look at it directly but off to the
side. 26 Jameson says, "we can't manage to think about things simply by deciding to[, for] the mind's deeper
currents often need to be surprised by indirection, sometimes, indeed, by treachery and ruse, as when you steer
away from a goal in order to reach it more directly, or look away from an object in order to register it more
exactly" (202). Thinking anything adequate about sexual violence and rape (against and to Sylvia) may well
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involve looking elsewhere for violence and rape and thinking about something else: In this instance, Oedi-
pedagogy and canonization. 27
As Girard pointed out, the two harlots in their pleas mirrored each other while Solomon's declamations
repeated what each said and eventually uncovered justice and mercy in this manner of repetition. I will skew the
connections of my readings and my thinkings in a setless of writings—nonetheless, con-fused together—that, I
can only hope, will also have uncovered justice and mercy. In non-sacrificial readings.
The Game of the Double bind: What I have written about obsessively, and yet hysterically at times, in
this chapter is the sacred and sacrifice (I have insisted on keeping them separate, though etymologically they are
one and the same) and the double bind. What we are looking for, as Gregory Bateson would say, is a balanced
ecology of mind, unless we would see schizophrenia, possibly resulting from having been perpetually placed in
the double bind, as providing a process of resistance itself to being double business bound. 28 A process that
would not opt for perhaps an Aristotelian balanced ecology but for a Deleuzean and Guattarian chaosmosis ("a
composed chaos" [What is Philosophy? 204]). In opposition to an Aristotelain logic (with its three principles of
identification, non-contradiction, and excluded middle), Deleuze and Guattari write of a "pathic logic," where
"there is," as Guattari writes of it, "no extrinsic global reference that can be circumscribed. The object relation is
destablised, and the functions of subjectivation are put into question" (Chaosmosis 28). Pathic logic would
provide a new ethics, contrary to the Nichomachean Ethics, that, again as Guattari describes it, would be "in
favour of the richness of the possible, an ethics and politics of the virtual that decorporealises and
deterritorialises contingency, linear causality and the pressure of circumstances and significations which besiege
us [double binds]. It is a[n ethical] choice for processuality, irreversibility [therefore, pro affirmative
deconstruction, a movement towards thirds] and resingularisation" (29; cf. Nancy, Inoperative Community;
Experience of Freedom; and Sense of the World). This pathic logic and chaosmosis are similar to Christa Wolf's
"the third alternative" and its negating of binary logic (negation itself); pathic logic, as Wolf would describe it,
is "the smiling vital force" itself (106).
One very troubling double bind is that of the two harlots, whose plea Solomon confronts. We could
read this story as an allegory—and perhaps we eventually will—but for this moment we must ask, so as to
acknowledge the obvious, Why are the women harlots (whores, prostitutes, or whatever) and Why is Solomon
the wise adjudicator here? But we know the answer to this one, for it is simply more repetition of the traditional
representation of women as whores (with the good one having a heart of gold). And yet, let us not forget that
the competing women in The Basement are also called whores. Millett tells us that Sylvia called Stephanie and
Paula "whores" (77, 117). For revenge, Gertrude has the word "prostitute" burned-written on Sylvia's abdomen.
So the comparison between the two harlots and the females in The Basement is not stretched by any means.
But if this Biblical story, which Girard says should prompt us to read in a non-sacrificial, merciful
manner, is brought to bear more fully on The Basement, with its subtitle concerning sacrifice, and its story of
Gertrude and Sylvia, as told and mediated on by Millett, What might we learn, then, about reading The
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Basement in a non-sacrificial manner? Or might it be the case, as I have not stressed but implied by way of my
evolving (virtually, involving) readings of Millett's writing (starting with the section The Basement and then in
chapter 1 and this present chapter), that the question centers more on Millett's writing itself and therefore the
question becomes, What have we learned about writing and reading in non-sacrificial ways from Millett's
writing The Basement, from Millett's becoming Gertrude, becoming Sylvia, as well as becoming others? 29
My sense is that, therefore, we have already—before the questions became significant to us—have
been answering these questions. Or other similar, reformulated questions such as What if Kate Millett herself, a
wise woman, replaced Solomon? Or What if (separately or simultaneously), Millett replaced and functioned as
the king and the good harlot (Kristevean madonna) in the allegory, while Gertrude replayed the role of the bad
harlot (phallic mother)? We have laid the grounds, by way of metalepsis, for these questions to be already, but
pararhetorically. These question arose out of our first having begun to answer them. What remains now is for
the reader to interrogate the questions in assessing the various, tentative answers. Let us not forget, however,
that we are dis/engaging our way through a processuality and eventual irreversibility toward a resingularization.
In hopes of producing social relations not founded on Rape, whether Chaste or not.
I want to rebegin to continue this first section of the last part of this chapter with a look at one possible
suggestive metaphor of the double bind in The Basement. And then I want to go on to the specific answer to the
question, Why did Gertrude and others rape Sylvia? And What might be the consequences of this rape and
murder for us, the readers? I am referring not only to the death of Sylvia the person but also to the death of sex
and potency (life). The death of the thing Christa Wolf calls the shining vital force.
If we have forgotten the long list of double binds that we have examined and processually
superimposed by non-linear linear juxtaposition, let me recall some of them quickly: The logic of the sacred
(Girard and Agamben), the logic of S/symbolic and semiotic (Kristeva), the logic of sacrifice and mimetic
desire (Girard), the logic of the two harlots and of the Madonna and whore, the logic of the supplement and
différance (the mark, the trace, the double session, the phramakon), and the logic of Chaste Rape itself. What is
wanted is a new logic of being, whatever that might be or rather become.
The suggestive metaphor of the double bind in The Basement is a game initiated by Coy (appropriately
named) and played out against Sylvia by many of her peers. Meditating in the voice of Sylvia, Millett writes:
Funny how sometimes they're almost lovin to me. Voices real soft, hands keep touchin my face,
patting my shoulder. Then suddenly Rickie or Paula slap me. Then it goes back to bein quiet. They talk
real soft and I start believin in that again, instead of the slap. Strokin me. So I get hypnotized kinda by
their voices. Croonin at me. I stare at 'em and I love 'em. I forget everything. Even my own sins. Then
Johnny kicks me real quick, like a stab. I don't even know it's a kick. For just a second. They all
laughin in my face. Then someone hums a note. And they all go back to pattin me, smilin. Over and
over again. They call it Fickle. It's a game Coy made up. Rickie called it On Again, Off Again. 'On
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again off again, gone again Finnegan.' And when he says Finnegan, somebody'd hit me. The cornerin
business that Johnny always wanted. (297)
This is the classic double bind: A touch signifying love; a slap signifying hate, disgust (see Bateson, Steps 201-
27). Rickie or Paula and others repeat the vicious circle (on again off again, gone and again, fickle, fin and
again), and perhaps they analogically repeat Freud's grandson's fort/da game, obsessively performed and driven
by anxiety in the absence of the mother. The manifestation of the death-wish itself. The game of the double bind
then perhaps is played by Gertrude's children and partners-in-crime in an unconscious attempt to deal with
death; perhaps they sacrifice Sylvia in hopes of not being cornered themselves in this game of death. But like
parents (in particular, Gertrude), they perhaps also unwittingly do this to Sylvia, as the alibi goes, for her own
good. They do this, Sylvia thinks momentarily, because they "almost" (297) love her. They hit me because they
"almost" love me. Being hit helps her forget, yet remember, her sins. This thought of sin (crime and
punishment) suggests a tad of complicity. This scene of the game is all very bewildering to Sylvia. The game
continues:
Let's corner her, let's get her and corner her. She'll be the pickle. Like Frying Pan, when they'd write on
my back words and if I didn't guess right, trying to understand it backward, just feelin it through my
dress, they'd punch me for mistakes. Their finger goin light and quick like a mosquito and already
they'd be yellin. 'Say what, hurry up, what'd we write?' the punch comin faster and faster, till even
before their finger stopped, the first came right with the laughter. Johnny wanted to write in punches
but nobody else could read it and after a couple times it wasn't funny much either so they started the
cornerin business. And then Finnegan. But you always know with Finnegan so Coy thought up Fickle.
Where you never know. Not even themselves. (297; cf. 101)
Millett's allusion to writing on the back is to Kafka's "In the Penal Colony":
"Our sentence does not sound severe. Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written
upon his body by the Harrow. This prisoner, for instance . . . will have written on his body: Honor Thy
Superiors!" . . . "Does he know his sentence?" "No," said the officer, eager to go on with his
exposition, but the explorer interrupted him: "He doesn't know the sentence that has been passed on
him?" "NO," said the officer again. . . . "There would be no point in telling him. He'll learn it on his
body." (144-45)
But the writing on Sylvia's back is incomprehensible just as her supposed crime or transgression is. Little by
little, the writing and the blow to the back ("Johnny wanted to write in punches") and all over the body are so
indistinguishable that the writing is unreadable by everyone, just as the reasons for the hitting (the sexual abuse)
by the children is unknown to them. They do these things and do not know they do them (see Marx, Capital I
166-67). Everything is displaced into the game. But why did they play this game with, or on, Sylvia and not
another?
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The Death of Sex and Potency: The answer to this question Why? is best suggested by Millett in her
meditation on the question. She writes,
Why the hell did they do this? And then you see the line about being a prostitute and you know, though
you can hardly think—in the sense of conceptualizing it—you know, it is for sex. That they killed her
for sex. Because she had it. She was it. Like a disease. Like some bizarre primitive medicine. Because
nubile and sixteen she is sex to the world around her and that is somehow a crime. For which her
killing is punishment. [. . .] It was not only the body that must have been broken, but the spirit. And
that is the whole meaning of shame. In Kafka's Penal Colony the sentence is carried out upon the flesh,
written thereon so that it will enter into the soul. Here too." (14-15)
Beyond the Pleasure Principle lies an answer. Death. Which may or may not be what only men are in love with.
(Recall Dworkin's statement concerning men love death.) Or through the act of impotentiality lies the
answering. (I have said nothing up to this point that should be recalled to explain this word impotentiality. 30 But
to unfold it would require as much time and space as we have already used. Therefore, I will defer and refer
obediently to it later, though intermittently in Part 2 and eventually in Part 4.)
Now to the Assessment-Test Event.
Part 1: Broaching the Abject
Chapter 3 The Assessment-Test Event
"This little [chapter] is a grand declaration of war; and as regards the sounding-out of idols, this
time they are not idols of the age but eternal idols which are here touched [tapped] with the
hammer as with a tuning fork."
Friedrich Nietzwsche, Twilight of the Idols (22; Nietzsche's emphasis).
"No 'answer' can offer man [sic] a possibility of autonomy. An 'answer' subordinates human
existence. The autonomy—sovereignty—of man is linked to the fact of his being a question with
no answer."
Georges Bataille, Guilty (135).
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"An event is an occurrence, as such. 'Not a thing, but at least a caesura in space-time.' . . . That is
to say, the event is the fact or case that something happens, after which nothing will ever be the
same again. The event disrupts any pre-existing referential frame within which it might be
represented or understood."
Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard (xxxi).
• Why does Vitanza open his discussion with a reading of Kate Millett's The Basement?
• If Sylvia Likens would have survived the sexual violence, how would she be similar or different from
"Andrea one" (Dworkin, Mercy 318). Would she become "Andrea two, three" (318), "ready to kill" (333)?
• How is it that Millett and Vitanza avoid—if you think they do—trafficking in sexual violence by
merely relating "the story" of Sylvia? What is the difference between Millett and Vitanza's tellings? (This
question, of course, assumes that you have read The Basement. If not, then read it.)
• In Ch. 1, when Vitanza introduces the notion of the test drive, or the test, do you get the impression
that he is dis/engaging in a poststructuralist or deconstructive reading that only and wrongly defers the question
of rape? Is he being and inviting others to be irresponsible in thinking, reading, writing rape? Or Is he
responsible in wayves that heretofore have gone generally unpracticed, opening up the question of rape to
questioning itself? Ask someone such as your friends, or mate, or your professor (or father or mother) if s/he
thinks Vitanza is being irresponsible. Then ask yourself once again.
• In Ch. 1, Vitanza relates how Andrea Dworkin's "They Took My Body From Me and Used It" has
been received by various women writers online and then suggests how readers might otherwise receive her
account of having been drugged and raped. Following his account and suggestion, he offers another test for the
reader to take. What did you think, read, and write in response to his test?
As yet, another follow up test to this test, you might want to read Cookie Mueller's account of her
"rape" in "Abduction and Rape—Highway 31, Elton, Maryland, 1969," in Ask 102-13. (Mueller was a close
friend of John Waters and "acted" in Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingo.) Mueller's account is whimsical. How
do you receive such whimsy? Why do you think Mueller strikes this tone? Do you think that because she is not
actually raped, she can be light hearted about the whole event that occurred? And if she had, in fact, been raped,
would or could she have written in this light-hearted manner? Is it necessary to have been raped in order to
write about rape successfully? But what might it mean to write rape successfully?
• How would you describe Vitanza's notion of "imminent reversibility"? When he introduces it in Ch. 1
and thereafter, do you take it to be just one more reading tactic that leads us away from thinking, reading, and
writing rape? First, you might want to read what Vitanza says in the overall context of reusing the statement
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throughout the book and closing with it in "Rebeginnings." What does he see as the value of such a tactic and
how is it related, as a practice, to negative and then affirmative deconstructions? and beyond? What does he
suggest by redeveloping imminent reversibility into imminent transversability?
• Is there a pedagogical practice informing Vitanza's thinking, reading, writing rape? If so, How would
you characterize and describe it?
• In Ch. 2 and then again in Ch. 4 and throughout to the very end that is no end to Chaste Rape,
Vitanza introduces the paralogies of conduction and proximity. Do you take this tactic of thinking to be a form
of magical thinking that is contrary to the basic principles of "good" critical thinking or critique itself? What
does this way of thinking promise in the context of Chaste Rape?
• In Ch. 2, there is discussion of Millett's writings on photography in The Politics of Cruelty. In this
book Millett says that she refuses to see anything erotic in torture and specifically refers to Georges Bataille's
writings on torture as a form of communicative ecstasy. There is a photograph of a man that haunts Bataille in
Guilty that is strikingly similar to the photograph of Sylvia that haunts Millett. Bataille writes: "The Chinese
executioner of my photo haunts me: there he is busily cutting off his victim's leg at the knee. The victim is
bound to a stake, eyes turned up, head thrown back, and through a grimacing mouth you see teeth" (38-39).
Study the accounts of these two photos and attempt to think of such a similar photograph that haunts you. What
differences can you locate? or What différances can you not locate? Bataille has included the photograph in his
Tears of Eros (204-05). To further complicate this whole matter of the body, mouth, and teeth, you might want
to read what Milan Kundera has to say about laughter, open mouths, and teeth in Immortality (314, 322-24,
328).
• In Ch. 2, section "René Girard, Anthropology, Sacrifice," Vitanza apparently takes up with
Girard's statement that there is no sacrifice in the New Testament. Is Vitanza not aware that Jean-Luc
Nancy has written: "All sacrifice is a traffic in victims and indulgences. Christ's sacrifice sums it all up:
with mankind redeemed as if it were a band of slaves, at the cost of the most precious blood. (How can
anyone have sought to argue that Christianity was a nonsacrificial religion? Because it is a religion, it is
sacrificial. And because it represents faith in a god, it is a religion)"? (Inoperative 135-36; cf. Girard,
Things Hidden 180-280).
• Why is this Ch 3 filled with assessment-test questions that should conventionally go at the end of
the book, if they should even be included in the book at all? Should not this chapter have the word
"Evaluation" or "Contestation" in its title? Why does Vitanza keep referring to himself in the third person?
• Why the unfolding discussion on thirds or third figures throughout the book? What does three or
thirds allude to? What are the consequences of thirds?
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• What is Vitanza suggesting in Ch. 4 in terms of Sigmund Freud's home schooling and the effect
it might have had on the invention of psychoanalysis?
• What is at stake in Ch. 4? Vitanza does appear to be concerned at all with interpreting Freud's
texts, as other Anti-Freudians or Freudians themselves are. Vitanza says that he is not interested in
interpreting but in experimenting with texts. If you find this to be the case, How then does Vitanza
experiment with Freud's various texts?
• After reading from the beginning, The Basement, through Ch. 5, do you have some notion of the
connections among rape, pedagogy, and canonization? Jot down what you think some of the connections
might be.
• Vitanza calls on architecture (anarchitecture) , among other parathemes, throughout Chaste
Rape. In fact, architecture informs the book. Why architecture?
• In Ch. 6, Vitanza discusses Deleuze's notion of "conversation." Try to explain to someone
precisely what this notion of conversation might mean and how it might change how we listen to ourselves
with others? How does "conversation" advance an understanding of pedagogy and canonization? Is there an
analog between the middle voice as Vitanza says Millett practices it and "conversation" as Vitanza attempts
to practice it in the three polylogues with the characters, authors, directors, etc.?
• In Ch. 6, Milan Kundera and his character discuss childish, prank occurrences and how they
change the world. Kundera's novel Immortality is filled with test drives. Read the novel and locate each test
(Agnes's, Rueben's, etc.) and compare them to the tests that you are being asked to engage in during
reading Chaste Rape. (A clue: Agnes's goes on a test drive, by leaving a main highway and taking a
"quieter route." What happens to Agnes when she takes this detour? Why is it significant to the narrative?
What does all of this have to do not only with test drives but also with the discussions in Chaste Rape? You
might start in Immortality on page 257.)
• By way of preparation for Ch. 6, you should read and study Georges Bataille's Guilty, but
especially the section titled "The Divinity of Laughter" (87-119). Once you are in that chapter, locate the
test and, instead of attempting to answer or to interpret the question, make an experiment with it.
• In Ch. 7, Vitanza opens the second section by quoting from Helke Sander's The Three Women
K. Previously Vitanza had reviewed Sander's beginning discussions in the film Liberators Take Liberties
with statistics of mass rape in Berlin at the close of WWII and inferences drawn from the numbers. Does
Vitanza intend by quoting from Sander's book to undercut her discussion of statistics? Or is he suggesting
something else about Sander's thinking, writing, reading rape, mass rape? In order to even begin to consider
this query, you will have to read The Three Women K.
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• How have you experienced Vitanza's use of quotations leading into each chapter and introducing
each section? Normally, lead quotations introduce or orient the reader and eventually become relevant to
the author's argument. Do you find that some of the quotations are otherwise in as much as they can
disorient the reader? Why would Vitanza want to disorient the reader?
• In Chs. 1 and 7, Vitanza suggests that he is against master or grand narratives, and yet, Does he
not throughout Chaste Rape put forth a master narrative? What might be his explanation for this alleged
performative contradiction?
• In Ch. 7 and earlier, when Vitanza discusses filmic as opposed to film and specifically when he
refers to the tug-of-war between the Russian soldier and the German woman over the bicycle is he merely
engaging in a private, esoteric viewing of the filmic? He does not answer the implied question, Why this
image of all the images in the film? Why does this image disperse the contextualization and framing of the
scenes, keeping the film from functioning as a master narrative? Again, What does the bicycle have to do
with or undo anything?
• How many references to photographs do you find in Chaste Rape? Where are they and what are
they of? What is Vitanza making of these photographs? What can you make of them?
• In Ch. 7, Vitanza strongly suggests that Norman O. Brown can offer us more hope in
understanding the problem of Eros-Thanatos than can Ginette Paris. You might just want to read Brown's
trilogy of Life Against Death, Love's Body, and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis to determine whether
or not Brown's readings provide hope for dealing with death (to kill or to be killed), whether or not Brown
provides us with answering Derrida's concern, "I would like to learn how to live." If not Brown, yet with
Brown, try Michel Serres's writings such as Rome: The Book of Foundations, Genesis, The Natural
Contract, and for pedagogy try The Troubadour of Knowledge.
• At the close of Ch. 7, Vitanza calls on the peculiar paratopoi of unmourning and antimemory.
Assuming that you find Vitanza's reading of Hiroshima Mon Amour, across these two paratopoi,
compelling, you might attempt to rethink Dworkin's proposal for Rape Museums as Vitanza discusses the
proposal in Ch. 5. Do you think that such museums, as with most museums, if not all, would also end up
being sites for tourists? (Have the Holocaust museums in great part become sites for tourism? But what is
wrong with being a tourist of the Holocaust?) Would not Dworkin, like the Japanese man in Hiroshima,
finally have to say to tourists, "you have seen nothing. Nothing. Of rape." Perhaps you would like to contest
this test question! The assumption here about Dworkin's proposal, of course, is that she is literally serious
about Rape Museums. Is she? If she is, Has she left this problem unthought through?
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• Again, at the close of Ch. 7, Vitanza discusses, just in passing, Deleuze and Guattari's
paraconcept of antimemory. They write: "Memory, I hate you" (What is Philosophy? 168). Do you think
that Deleuze and Guattari are being irresponsible in saying such things? Are they turning their backs on the
ethical necessity, the obligation, to remember the atrocities of Auschwitz as well as any other atrocities?
Whatever you think, be careful, doubly careful. You might want to spend some time researching and
reading Lyotard's paraconcept of "immemorial" (see Readings's Introducing Lyotard xxxii. Moreover, you
might want to read Nietzsche, "Redemption" in Zarathustra, and Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience.)
• In Ch. 8, Vitanza discusses rape in cyberspace. How is it possible that there can be rape in
cyberspace? Do some research into the laws against rape in your state and try to determine is the definition
of what legally constitutes rape and then try to determine, given the law, if a person can be charged with the
crime of rape in cyberspace. Be sure to read back over the discussion in this chapter on the State vs.
Maxwell and attempt to use it as a paradigm to think through the question of rape in your own state.
• In Ch. 8, toward the closing section, Vitanza takes the genitalia of a cow and surgically flattens
them to all surface. What in the world does such a textual rendering suggest? How does Vitanza prepare the
reader for this textual rendering of a flat surface without the negative? Do you see any conductive
connections between cyberspace (the matrix) and this textual procedure? If not—in any case—you might
read what Michel Serres, in his book Parasite, has to say about cows in terms of communications. (Read
section 3, "Fat Cows and Lean Cows.")
• What is the significance of the last section's being called "Rebeginnings"?
• In the subsection "Derrida (Archive Fever)" in "Rebeginnings," Vitanza once again apparently
takes up with sacrifice. What is the sense (direction) of his thinking? Is he simply saying no but then yes to
a sacrificial economy? Or is he using the term "sacrifice" in such a way that he is rethinking it? He quotes
Michel Serres as saying that sacrifice is etymologically connected to vicar-ous, vicarious. What might
Vitanza's insertion of this quotation at this point of various rebeginnings possibly mean? If not mean, then
how might Vitanza be calling on the word "sacrifice" in an experimental way of thinking?
• What is the difference in attitude toward archives between Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault?
• What is again the difference in "Rebeginnings" between Jensen's-Freud's Hanold (in Gradiva)
and Michel Serres's followings of footsteps (in Rome)?
• Do you see any possible conductive parallels between the character Henry Fool, as discussed in
Ch. 6, and the Emperor, Harlequin in "Rebeginnings"?
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• In "Rebeginnings" Vitanza speaks of the coming community and sets up a series of principles:
imminent reversibility, irreversibility, multiply principles, and the irreparable. What is the logic that
informs these principles and how is each principle interconnected?
• In as much as you might have read and studied Chaste Rape, How would you summarize it, if
you think, indeed, that it can be summarized? If not, then How would you begin—rebegin—to explain this
book to someone?
• Though Vitanza says he is against interpreting and is in favor of experimenting with thinking the
unthought, Don't you think that he does a lot of interpreting in Chaste Rape? If so, then, ask yourself How
is it that he interprets? What guides his manner of interpreting? What are his ends in dis/respect to
interpretations-meanings?
• Vitanza appears to leave us, or finally rebegin, with a paradox in terms of the major paracept
Chaste Rape, when he is speaking of "prescription" as developed in law and remembered by Serres. (See
the closing section of CR with its discussion of the legal term prescription.) Is this paradox the eternal
return of the same or is it a line of flight in duration away from the logic of revenge? What do you make of
the closing lines?
• Write your own book on thinking, reading, and writing rape.
Part 2: Oedipal Canonization
Chapter 4: Oedi-Pedagogy
"In Lacanian theory . . . reminiscences undergoes a reconceptualization. Reminiscences [which, as
Breuer and Freud stated, hysterics mostly suffer from] are not proximate to conscious thought and
memory. They are, indeed, radically repressed in the real and can only be re-remembered in the
enigmatic displacement of symptoms—physical or psychological. That is, they will not usually be
found in the conscious memories of childhood events that make up an imaginary narrative."
Ellie Ragland, "The Physical Nature of Trauma" (emphasis mine).
"Let us assume now that a fine-pointed stylus digs a point in this square here, follows it in its
stretching out, its folding over, follows it like this ten or twenty times, through thirty stages of
aging; it will write a little history, a monument or a local remainder, of this always-disappearing
involution. We could attempt to read its trajectory or the trace it has left. But it is illegible. . . . [I]t
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is the flight of a fly or a crazy wasp. Each leap is clear and determined, yet the whole path seems
problematic. . . . We have never looked at this trajectory and tried to read it."
Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations (82).
This second part of Chaste Rape puts forth, by way of conduction, the first connections of rape
with pedagogy (pederasty, pedophilia) and canon (kanon [reed, rod], lists, canon formation, canonization).
The approach is by wayves of the proximity of one word to another, on lexicographic grounds as
determining the placement of words in a dictionary and on psychoanalytic-hermeneutic grounds as
overdetermining the displacement of words in the unconscious. (The dictionary—any dictionary—has as
much an unconscious as any human being.) I have been making these connections, weaving and wiring
them, throughout my discussion of The Basement. I have reported my connections as they became
significant to me, which no doubt has contributed to difficulties in reading. (I am the exemplar of Roland
Barthes's one who makes his presence obtuse, obtuse presence.) 1 Absence. The trauma of fort und da.
Bringing back what has been abjected, broaching what has been wasted, cast out, is often difficult if not
impossible. But out of that impossibility can come possibilities (compossibility, incompossibilities), which
is where we are drifting but which has no single destination on a map of desire. The drifting eventually
makes the map of destiny. Appear. Compear.
Pedagogy/canon? Canon/pedagogy? For now, I have little interest in whether canon is a function
of pedagogy; or pedagogy, canon. Surely, they must glut or starve each other. Rather, I am interested in
whether Freud's theory of seduction (sexual abuse, rape) determines hysterical and obsessive symptoms; or
the theory of infantile sexuality and the Oedipal complex determine these symptoms (cf. Forrester 62-89). I
am not interested in adding to the attempts to resolve this issue that Jeffery Masson with his time in the
archives and his subsequent charge of an assault on (the) truth (of sexual abuse) has contributed to, but of
how the issue itself has fed (or glutted or purged, depending on y/our dis-ease) an already enforced Oedipal
pedagogy and canon. After all is said and undone, what I am after, as a "tryangler" here, are the
connections among rape (hysteria and obsession), pedagogy (pederasty), and canon (amnesia)—all of
which contribute to Chaste Rape.
Sexual abuse comes in many complementary forms. I wrote: "Robin Morgan says, 'Pornography is
the theory, and rape the practice.' I agree and would complement her statement, in Chaste Rape terms, by
saying that canonization is the theory; pedagogy, the practice." Perhaps I had unintentionally answered the
question of whether canon is a function of pedagogy or vice versa. In any case, I am taking pedagogy first.
We practice first; we rationalize (theorize) second. But this statement, too, is imminently reversible. But
never mind.
Therefore, I am going to continue with a focus on sexual violence, in particular, childhood rape.
(Sylvia Likens is never left far behind us. Never forgotten.) My interest takes me to discussions of Freud's
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etraction of what he called the seduction theory and his invention of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus
complex; takes me to the controversy on various levels, but most importantly takes me to Freud himself
and his sexual education. So many have already written on and expressed in detail their interests in Freud's
home schooling or have alluded to it through innuendo and discussed the actual-possible outcomes. I will
suggest what has been said and what remains, heretofore, fully unsaid. (What we can think about rape has
been overdetermined by Freudian thinkings.) I will touch on a general libidinal education. Leaving much
unsaid so that it can be resaid and revised as I move toward Part 4 of Chaste Rape. But throughout my
discussion and by wayves of the tactic of proximity—so as to give my discussion a heightened intensity— .
. .
"I would like to call attention to the semantic aura that dictionaries construct around each of the
terms they list. In the case of pedagogue, the presence or the absence of words like peculate,
peculiar, and pecuniary in the spaces above pedagogue, and pedant, pedate, pederast, and
pedophile in the spaces below, must somehow affect the meaning that a reader constructs as she
focuses on the terms in question. (Gallop . . . acknowledges the links between pedagogy,
pedophilia, and pederasty.) When one scans a dictionary page for a definition, the proximity of
one term to another, the highlighted characters, and the discernible grouping of words by first
syllables can make it difficult to block peripheral words out of one's vision and mind."
Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori, Pedagogy (349, n. 13).
"Pederasty is undoubtedly a useful paradigm for classic Western pedagogy. A great man
penetrates a lesser man with his knowledge. The student is empty, a receptacle for the phallus; the
teacher is the phallic fullness of knowledge. In the classroom the students are many; the teacher
unique. Unicity is a primary phallic attribute. The fact that teacher and student are of the same sex
but of different ages contributes to the interpretation that the student has no otherness, nothing
different than the teacher, simply less."
Jane Gallop, "Immoral Teachers" (118).
At a very strategic location in The Basement, Millett quotes a rather lengthy passage from Mary S.
Hartman's Victorian Murderesses, which, she tells us, "provid[es] a remarkable parallel, even insight, into
our own case" (46). The passage is an account of a former French governess by the name of Mlle. Doudet,
a proprietor of a "day-school," who is on trial for, Hartman writes, "the physical abuse of four of her pupils
and the death of a fifth" (qtd. in The Basement 46). The children, all girls, had been placed into the care of
Doudet by their father, an English homeopathic doctor, who was newly married and, consequently, had not
seen his daughters for a long periods of time.
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Upon being arrested, Doudet requests that the authorities ask a "female operator of a health
establishment" (qtd. 46) about the doctor-father's telling her about his daughters' "secret vice" (the daughter
masturbates) and asking for ways of treating it. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was believed that auto-
eroticism by females caused such ailments as "hysteria, asthma, epilepsy, melancholia, paralysis, and
insanity." During mid-century, the cure was surgery (e.g., clitoridectomy). 2 But since the homeopathic
doctor "did not believe in any kind of surgery," he decided on the operator's suggestion of suppressing the
girls, which was to be accomplished with a "preservative belt" as well as by other mental and physical
means (i.e., abuses). Hartman reports that the children were made to feel guilty and were apparently beaten
and starved. Like Sylvia, the girls were forced by Doudet to write letters home, saying "that far from
improving, they were actually getting worse" and that Doudet "was making heroic efforts to cure them, but
the habits were spreading and becoming uncontrollable" (qtd. 47).
The Victorian period—like all difficult periods in history—is replete with examples of such
thinking and acting against girls and women. 3 Doudet and Gertrude, the girls' "mentor[s]" (47), call on a
canonized pedagogy of mutilating and killing their charges. But men are the widespread culprits. Fathers.
Or, Are they? Let us turn, in any case, to the Father of psychoanalysis. And in taking the Freudian re/turn,
we will be concerned less with the "assault on truth," as I have said, than on finally studying and
interrogating the semantic aura that Freud's thinking contributes to the relationship and proximity among
rape, pedagogy, and canon/ization.
Masson (Assault on Truth)
". . . Freud was analyzing and curing young persons with sexual disorders on order and payment
from their parents. Freud often dealt with children, especially females, who had been sexually
abused; he resolved the entire problem by deciding that it was an Oedipal fantasy on their part. So
female children were not only sexually abused, they had to assent that they imagined it. This
process undermines sanity, since if what takes place isn't real but imaginary, then you are at fault:
you are illogical, as well as naughty, to have imagined an unimaginable act: incest. You ascribed
guilt to your father, and you are also a very guilty, sexy little creature yourself. So much for you."
Kate Millett, "Beyond Politics? Children and Sexuality" (222).
Masson in The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1985) reviews
Freud's early understanding of rape as the cause (aetiology) of hysteria and critiques Freud's turning away
from that conclusion—a turning specifically from the "seduction theory" to a theory of infantile sexuality
and the "Oedipus Complex" and the birth (and eventual canonization) of Psychoanalysis—as a means of
not thinking about rape and not reading rape. The canonization of thinking (Freudian psycho-analysis) by
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western culture and academics makes "thinking," "reading," and actually "writing rape" near impossible to
perceive when, in fact, thought, read, and written.
Masson—who has been criticized in reviews of the first edition of his book (see second edition,
xvii-xxii) for failing to represent the "truth" accurately—states that Freud had more than enough evidence
that would support the claim that many of his patients had been raped or sexually abused as children.
Masson writes:
Freud's female patients had the courage to face what had happened to them in childhood—often
this included violent scenes of rape by a father—and to communicate their traumas to Freud, no
doubt hesitating to believe their own memories and reluctant to remember the deep shame and hurt
they had felt. Freud listened and understood and gave them permission to remember and speak of
these terrible events. Freud did not think they were fantasies. (9)
As a result of sexual abuse, Freud says that his patients were suffering from "hysteria": "In all eighteen
cases (cases of pure hysteria and of hysteria combined with obsessions, and comprising six men and twelve
women) I have . . . come to learn of sexual experiences of this kind [i.e., of rape or sexual abuse] in
childhood" (SE, III: 207-08). The proximate causal link, then, is between rape and hysteria. Freud's
"evidence" allows him to claim that both women and men suffer from rape (sexual abuse) and,
consequentially, hysteria, though mostly women are raped and suffer and, in Freud's judgment, mostly
women suffer from hysteria and men from obsession (see SE, III: 220).
Freud called his account of rape and hysteria (or obsession) his "seduction theory," which he
develops in "The Aetiology of Hysteria" and which he delivered to the Society for Psychiatry and
Neurology in Vienna on April 21, 1896, to his colleagues (see appendix B in Masson, or in SE, III:191-
221). Masson writes:
The paper—Freud's most brilliant, in my opinion—met with total silence. Afterwards, [Freud] was
urged never to publish it, lest his reputation be damaged beyond repair. The silence around him
deepened, as did his loneliness. But he defied his colleagues and published "The Aetiology of
Hysteria," an act of great courage. Eventually, however, for reasons which I will attempt to
elucidate in this book Freud decided that he had made a mistake in believing his women patients.
This, Freud later claimed, marked the beginning of psychoanalysis as a science, a therapy, and a
profession.
It has never seemed right to me, even as a student, that Freud would not believe his patients. I did
not agree that the seduction scenes represented as memories were only fantasies, or memories of
fantasies. But I had not thought to doubt Freud's historical account . . . of his motives for changing
his mind. Yet, when I read the Fliess letters without the omissions (of which Freud, by the way,
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would undoubtedly have approved), they told a very different, agonizing story. Moreover,
wherever I turned, even in Freud's later writing, I encountered cases in which seduction or abuse
of children played a role. [. . .]
In my search for . . . data, I tried to learn more about Freud's trip to Paris in 1885-1886. I visited
the library of his early teacher, Charcot, in the Salpêtrière, and that led me to the Paris morgue, for
I knew that Freud had attended autopsies performed there by a friend and collaborator of
Charcot's, Paul Brouardel. hints dropped by Freud indicate that he had seen something at the
morgue 'of which medical science preferred to take no notice.' At the morgue, I learned that a
whole literature of legal medicine existed in French devoted to the topic of child abuse (especially
rape), and Freud had this material in his personal library, though he did not refer to it in his
writings. I discovered, moreover, that some of the autopsies attended by Freud may have been
autopsies done on children who had been raped and murdered.
I found myself in a strange position. . . . (Assault xxvi-xxviii)
And so do many people who read Masson's Assault on Truth. But the grammar of chastising (committed by
Freud's peers) and the rhetoric of Chaste Thinking (recommitted by Freud himself) informs Masson's
extended meta-representative anecdote above. Could anyone—anyone of us, who reads these events—not
find hirselves in the most uncanny of positions! Let us search by way of what follows anecdotally below.
(The above-below should suggest a relation of being.)
Masson's detractors (chastisers) rely on the question of fact as to whether or not Freud at all
rejected the seduction theory in total favor of the infantile sexuality theory and the Oedipus complex (e.g.,
Esterson; Eisler; Nägele 216, n.16). It appears to be the case, given Janet Malcolm's account, that Freudians
are true believers when it come to the notion that Freud must be protected against the charge that he turned
his back on the rape of children. (After all, protecting Freud is protecting Freudians. Perhaps, it is all a
"deferred obedience" [SE, XIII: 143]! In any case, there is in the story against Masson a potential call for
Chaste Thinking and Chaste Rape itself.) But let us not lose sight of the fact that Malcolm attacks the
defenders of Freud as well as the attacker of Freud, namely, Masson. It is much to do about "nothing" in
terms of How to read the archives. It is all about archive fever. With its various symptoms. Call it sibling
rivalry for the object. Malcolm's melodrama includes Masson in his relations with and among Anna Freud
(daughter-protector of father Freud), K. R. Eissler (Secretary of the Sigmund Freud Archives and potential
father figure for Masson), and Peter Swales (former personal assistant to The Rolling Stones who now
claims to be "the punk historian of psychoanalysis" 4 ). There are others involved (see Rand and Torok).
This melodrama cum docutrauma ends up in two major lawsuits, one of which made its way to the
Supreme Court. 5
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My interest is not to determine, but to overdetermine in my present discussion, whether or not
Masson is correct about Freud in kind or by degree. I am of the persuasion, in this individual case, that it is
not possible nor is it desirable to know definitively as others have attempted. I can but at best recognize, as
Avital Ronell might put it, that "I am stupid before the other" object of psychoanalysis, the most stupid of
social sciences (Stupidity 60).
Jacqueline Rose makes an interesting observation in respect to knowing about this particular and
peculiar case. She writes,
I think it has been clear for some time that the controversy which has broken out over Jeffrey
Masson and the Freud Archives is a controversy in which the issue of representation, or the truth
values of the utterance, is centrally at stake. Not just because the categories of truth and
suppression—in a confusion of psychoanalytic and juridical terminology—are the terms of
Masson's own polemic, but because language and representation, or the question of the subject's
relation to her or his spoken truth is at the heart of the polemic itself. ("Jeffrey Masson" 185)
Rose points to one of Masson's examples in The Assault on Truth. She writes of
the case of a twenty-nine-year-old woman who desires her three-year-old nephew to the point
where she hallucinates the sexual act and seeks constant and obsessive reassurance from her
friends and other relatives that it has not in fact taken place. This example in which desire passes
from the woman to the male infant, where an act does not happen but is hallucinated as if it had, is
presented by Jeffrey Masson [28-29], without a trace of irony, as proof (legal term again) that
adult sexual impulses (which, he qualifies in a parenthesis, often lead to acts) are real. For
feminism this example is a problem because the actor in this troubled and twilight scene is a
woman who, if simply accused of her desires, is then denied that so much more painful reality
which leaves her suspended—as desire always does—between fantasy and the reality of the event.
On the edge of the question of language, or of a language queried in its truth value by the fact of
the unconscious, we find therefore an even more extreme challenge to the normality of its register,
that is, hallucination. Hallucination presents itself here as the point of most visible colliding with
the concept of the subject's access to plain, unadulterated and innocent speech. (183; Rose's
emphasis) 6
I am, so to speak, suspended. My interest are to go on a test drive (Ronell) of the issues, instead of buying
into one or the other side of them (either legal term or psychoanalytic terministic screen). I provisionally
accept for heuristic, heretical, and heuretic purposes, therefore, Freud's claim in "The Aetiology of
Hysteria" and I accept Masson's claim that Freud had every good reason to believe that the victims were
suffering from the material real assaults of sexual violence and that Freud's thinking and acting by way of
his writings were, in fact and in deed, an assault on the "truth" of the matter. (And yet, if we go—and we
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eventually will—with other connections between Freud and some other historians, such as Marianne Krüll
and Marie Balmary, we might not claim that Freud's thinking through writing was an assault but a
chastisement of his own unknown and perhaps unknowable truth. Freud, too, lies stupid/ly before the
other.) There is nothing undesirable about my or our becoming caught in overdetermination.
Determination—the will to determination—can lead but to its complete spilling over into hysterical
(overdetermined) prose itself (Freud, SE, IV: 283-84). The writer and the reader can be caught
approximately in these overdeterminations (or a general economy instead of a restricted one). Freud is the
clearest of writers, even when he is ma(i)nly hysterical, caught in a double bind of differing, ever-deferring,
writing protocols, caught in a "factory of thoughts." (The most notable case, as I mentioned previously, is
Freud's writing on Dora.) Freud's disciples, even his perverse ones, such as Masson himself, are the clearest
of writers, caught, however, in a factory of hysterical love-hate relationships with the master. The disciples
can but mirror Freud. Though the image that the disciples would cast is reversed (is perverse), it is,
nonetheless, a copy of a copy. Like ap.parent father, like sons and daughters. The worst that I could
imagine that would go by the myth of the Freudian community would be this group's writing for its
sameness and not for the other. The totally other. The worst that I could imagine would be that the
community remains itself—still to this day—a myth. A fiction. With a community of sameness that can but
resist itself. As Nancy says, "the community resists: in a sense . . . it is resistance itself" (Inoperative 58).
And yet, the Freudian community has not begun to resist. 7 Let us go on a test drive of possible,
unbeknownst nascent sites of resistances.
Test Drives: Masson takes his reader through three (conductive) connections to attempt to argue
that Freud most likely had enough evidence to stay with the seduction theory. First, Masson asserts that
when Freud at age 29 worked with Jean Martin Charcot in Paris, he had to be "exposed to the literature
attesting to the reality and indeed the frequency of sexual abuse in early childhood (often occurring within
the family)" and he must have "witnessed autopsies at the Paris morgue performed on the young victims of
such abuse" (15). Masson claims that Freud must have read a number of French authors such as Ambroise
Auguste Tardieu, Paul Brouardel, Valentin Magnan, and George Giles de la Tourette—all of whom wrote
about the rape of children. Freud had books by all of these men in his library (15-24, 30, 37-40).
Second, Masson discusses Freud; Wilhelm Fliess, who was Freud's friend and a medical doctor;
and Emma Eckstein, who was Freud's patient and who was suffering from stomach and menstrual problems
(57). Freud had Fliess, who was in town visiting Freud, examine Eckstein and eventually Fliess performed
surgery on her nose, which he believed would correct her problems. (Freud and Fliess were in agreement
concerning the cause of Eckstein's problems—commonly believed to be masturbation—but their
approaches to treating the problem were quite different. 8 ) For some reason, Freud allowed Fliess to perform
the operation and he (both Freud and Fliess) "bungle[d]" it (67; cf. Eissler, Freud 346-72). Freud wrote
Fliess (March 8, 1895) about the complications of the surgery. In a lengthy letter about how he grew weak
and faint observing all the blood from Eckstein's wound (nose), Freud writes:
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[W]e had done her an injustice; she was not at all abnormal, rather, a piece of iodoform gauze had
gotten torn off as you were removing it and stayed in for 14 days, preventing healing; at the end it
tore off and provoked the bleeding. That this mishap would have happened to you; how you will
react to it when you hear about it; what others could make of it; how wrong I was to urge you to
operate in a foreign city where you could not follow through on the case; how my intention to do
the best for this poor girl was insidiously thwarted and resulted in endangering her life—all this
came over me simultaneously. . . . Of course, no one is blaming you, nor would I know why they
should. (64, 66; Complete Letters 117, 118) 9
Freud, towards the end of the letter, writes: "now I am writing page after page of 'The Therapy of Hysteria'
" (Complete Letters 118). (Freud had yet developed his understanding of the seduction theory but was
working on it prior to and during this episode. It was about a year later to the month, April 21, 1896, that
Freud delivered his paper "The Aetiology of Hysteria.") 10 Concerning Freud's writing at this time about
hysteria, Masson says:
Freud has already begun to represent to Fliess and to himself that Emma Eckstein's problems
originated with her [in her psyche], and not in the external world (in this case with two
overzealous doctors). The powerful tool that Freud was discovering, the psychological explanation
of physical illness, was being pressed into service to exculpate his own dubious behavior and the
even more dubious behavior of his closest friend. Freud has begun to explain away his own bad
conscience. (68)
In addition, Masson interprets:
On April 26 [Freud] writes that 'she [Emma], too, my tormentor and yours, now appears to be
doing well.' And on April 27, 'Eckstein once again is in pain; will she be bleeding next?' The
question is not quite as rhetorical as it seems, for Freud is preparing the ground for a diagnosis of
hysterical bleeding, as if to say: her pains are unreal, and the hemorrhages which may have
appeared to come from your operation were in fact psychologically caused—they were hysterical
in origin, deriving from repressed wishes, not unskilled surgeons. (72; Complete Letters 127,128;
Freud's emphasis)
As Masson continues with his discussion on Freud's associations with Fliess, Masson directs his readers to
Freud's "Project for Scientific Psychology" (SE, I: 283-387), in which Freud claims that Emma Eckstein
had two repressed, yet eventually remembered, memories of having been seduced, first by a "shop-
assistant" who "had pleased her sexually" when twelve years old and a second deeper memory of a
"shopkeeper [who] had grabbed at her genitals through her clothes" when she was eight (Assault 88; see
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SE, I: sec. 4, 352-56). Eckstein not only provides Freud with the discovery of the seduction theory, as
Masson argues (87), but also a theory of repressed memory, or "deferred action" (Assault 89; SE, I: 356). 11
Still in his discussions in the section on the relationship between Freud and Fliess, Masson notes
that Freud began publicly in print (March 30, 1896) by "return[ing] to his Paris days" to denounce and "to
address his late teacher J-M. Charcot" for having excluded the fact that in the cases of hysteria there was
evidence of sexual abuse. Moreover, Masson cites passages of Freud in the same publication reproaching
Fournier for saying that the children were simply inventing these stories of abuse. And finally, picking his
quotes carefully, Masson cites an article submitted for publication the same day that "The Aetiology of
Hysteria" appeared, though not published until May 15, 1896. In this article, Freud begins to back off from
the connection between masturbation as the cause of hysteria. Freud, in Masson's view, is distancing
himself from his teachers (or a pedagogy of displacement) and his friend Fliess (another pedagogue of
displacement) and was making way for his new theory-pedagogy of seduction, with the father as generally
the seducer, which would not supposedly be retracted until September 21, 1897, in a letter to Fliess (90-91;
Complete Letters 264-66). In this letter, Freud mentions his own father in such a way that many
commentators, digging for skeletons buried in the family closet, have made much of. Freud's announcement
of the theory, his isolation, and then his eventual retraction is covered completely by Masson (107-38).
Quite interestingly, however, towards the end of this history-hystery of the announcement and
apparent retraction, Masson discloses, "I have found evidence . . . not previously suspected, that Robert
Fliess (1895-1970), Wilhelm Fliess's son, believed that his father had sexually molested him, and this at
precisely the time Freud was writing to Fliess about seduction. If true, it casts an entirely new light on the
relationship between the two men" (138). Well, yes, to say the least. About a budding mythic community of
the same. (I have not lost sight of the fact that I have discussed on two of the promised three conductive
connections.)
"Myth is interrupted. It is interrupted by its myth."
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community 55.
Parabase: We are stalking the mythos of rape as, possibly, a founding fiction for psychoanalysis,
which itself as psycho.the.rapy (the.rapist) is a mythos, or fiction, of presence, of immanence. (We are
stalking Masson's stalking Freud's stalking. Stalking the artificial immanence!) And yet, there is a certain
uncertain series of interruptions in the stalkings—including my own. There are Freud's interruptions in the
letters to Fliess, his hesitancies, his double articulations, his yes but no, in his relation with Fliess. The
letters at times read as if they are to himself, his hysterical selves, and not to the historical Fliess. Freud
hesitates every where as Masson presents him and as Freud presents himself as to whether or not he will go
(wills to go) with the myth (founding fiction) of the presence of seduction (actual rape) or infantile
sexuality (in/fantasized rape).
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Within this double articulation that is read as disjunctive thinking (either/or) by Masson—who
himself would go for the immanence of the truth—we get the battle and perpetual interruptions—the
necessary signs of resistance that make up a community itself—between the Freudians who love Freud and
the Freudians who hate the false Freud, who assaulted the truth of the matter. To listen to Eissler, all
Freudians must at some level hate Freud. Malcolm reports Eissler as having said, "The people who write
against Freud are motivated by a desire for revenge. [Ressentiment.] Freud hurt us—he hurt all of us deeply
by his findings—and now there is an attempt to get back at him through denigration of his character" (114).
It appears, yet this appearance is as dangerous as a statement that would read it is certain, that the Freudian
mythos of presence can but wreck itself while it reckons with its master, that it can only turn on itself,
eating its own tail-tale, and never approaching itself, through some collective will of a subjectivity that
presents itself, as Nancy would characterize it, "as a remainderless totality" (Inoperative 57), as having
grasped the truth of neuroses. Reaching high for "infinite immanence" (58). Grasping "it."
I think that Freud, at some level of knowing, even if at only the most tacit level, knew of the
predicament. An "I"—any "I"—as a member of the community of Freudians (all are brothers with sisters
[not unlike Robert Crumb and his sibling]), would will to slay the father and consume him, becoming him,
and would will to master the father's hysterical, wonderful neurotic women, and in slaying the father would
will to remake the community in "his" own image, yet in the name of immanent "truth." (Recall Girard's
exemplar of the teacher-"model" and student-"disciple" double bind [see Violence 146-47].) Freud himself
presented it all as such, archaic or modern, in Totem and Taboo. (See Lacan, Ethics 308-09.) But there is
hope in that Freudian-cum-Lacanian-cum-Zizekean psychoanalyses, henceforth, must forever realize—but
will they!—that they can but stalk the wild remainders that will always remain as such. That cannot be
grafted onto a tree of associations but realized only as represented in a rhizome or on the plane of
imminence (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 18, 20). 12
ReCapitulation: Let us not forget—obsessively—where I am in this Byzantine (yes, zigzagging,
oscillating, flight of a crazy wasp) novelistic exposition of what Masson says in Assault. I started out here
saying, "Masson takes his reader through basically three (near conductive) connections to attempt to argue
that Freud most likely had more than enough evidence to stay with the seduction theory." Then, I
explained, up to this point in the discussion of the first two connections—namely, Freud's years in Paris
and Freud's relationship with Fliess—that everything we know about the seduction theory itself, we know
by way of Freud's one-way ambivalent letters to Fliess. 13 Let us not forget that Masson is basing his
arguments on previously unpublished letters, which he himself would edit and republish in the Complete
Letters. But even published, these letters would only function, at best, as half a dialectic (or dissoi logoi)
without Fliess's other half. (But it is this half along with other halves as well as ha[l]ve-nots [dissoi
polylogoi] that function as remainders. So be it!)
It is this second (conductive) connection concerning Freud's relationship with Fliess and Eckstein,
I believe, that is written in the most novelistic manner. How else plot the story? Masson mirrors Freud!
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Masson, after all, had written, "Freud used the gifts of a novelist to say something that neither Fliess nor
any of his medical colleagues, not even the French authors, had suspected. For there is no case history in
the preceding medical literature which describes the consequences of a paternal seduction on the emotional
life of a child" (82). 14 Masson often, as is done by way of inference, plays the role of a ventriloquist, with
the fragments of evidence as the dummies speaking his (Masson's) own apparently justified true beliefs of
what, in the vernacular we might say, came down. Suffering from hysteria, Freud believes (as Masson does
himself), is a suffering with "phantasies" that are found fragments, having to be reconstructed, and that
form a mis en abyme, having to be filled in, to form a whole, or nearly whole, story of the presumed
trauma. 15 Not only the patient (Eckstein and others) is suffering from the loss of memory that makes its
Chaste presence known in the innards and all along the surface of the body, but also the analyst and the
whole body of what goes for the growth of knowledge in psychoanalysis are suffering within and along its
corpus of so-called knowledge. It is the remainders that speak. It is the remainders along a plane of
imminence, and not the truth (actuality) or myth (Oedipus, fantasy) along a line of immanence, that speak.
But What do they speak of—the entity as such as "it is"—is the question that resists a definitive answer.
Nyanza. So as to remain in a statelessness of im/potentialities.
The story that Masson constructs, like any novelistic de/constructor, is plotted in such a way that
the argument is in the (near conductive) connections, or juxtapositions, or proximities (the para-argument
grows between) and not in the individual pieces of (so-called) evidence. 16 It is in the connections that
Masson argues more for a reversal of the infantile sexuality (and Oedipus complex) in favor of the
seduction theory. I do not see (theoreyze) the connections, necessarily and exclusively, as Masson's getting
to some politically or self-serving displaced meanings or truths, but, to borrow a phrase from Gregory
Ulmer, I see the connections as "guiding [the conditions for the possibility of] a generative experiment"
(Heuretics 5), or an invention of a new ethico-politics of thinking, reading, writing sexual abuse. It is not
singly a matter of thinking that Masson is dis/engaging in a simple negative deconstruction (of reversing
the binary back to where it ought to have stayed and must remain) but of thinking, reading, and writing an
affirmative (third dis/order) deconstruction, or chorography, generating other possibilities. I am not saying,
however, that Masson is em/plotting all of the episodes consciously or even unconsciously, which really
does not interest me here. I am saying that the conditions in the connections of the episodes are ripe for this
un/kind of third-order reading. 17 I am guided toward third-order readings by the word "proximity" (but
never as legal proximate cause), which in the dictionary, any dictionary, tells me of its potentially
unconscious intuitions about the spatial company it keeps: Spaced above the word is "provoke," "prowess,"
"prowl"; spaced below, "proxy," "prude," "prudence." These words in part make up the lexicon of
conceptual starting places (topoi) of the Chaste hystery of psychoanalysis, which perhaps can only be told
in the other restarting places (chora). I have seen the "will" stalk ("prowl") with them, searching for a stand-
in ("proxy") for the remainders that would remain, nonetheless, as such.
My e/com/motives, as I understand and intuit them here, in reading these connections as I will and
desire in a third dis/order mannerism, are to get to what I see as a set of sacrificial readings that both Freud
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and Masson are engaging in. (I previously discussed the problem of sacrificial readings in chapter 2.) But
my peculiar and later motives in reading are to invent within these sacrificial readings alternative ones
formed by nonsacrificial, or asacrificial, connections. My intentions and motives are the same as I see as
Millett's throughout her writings, but especially in The Basement. In many ways, I can see that these were
perhaps Freud's motives as well, but even toward the end, when rewriting, re-envisioning, Moses and
Monotheism, he could only still call on sacrificial narratives to realize his vision. Freud—perhaps all of
us—remain buried with the dead. Perhaps the grave is the only ethical site for us to dwell in. Life on the
gravest terms. But I can, nonetheless, sympathize with us—all of us—as we examine not only the spirit of
what it means to be human beings but also, as Freud said, the instinct for being human. In a remarkable
letter to Lionel Binswanger, one that so wonderously connects with Millett's The Basement, Freud writes:
I have always lived on the ground floor and in the basement of the building—you [Binswanger]
maintain that on changing one's viewpoint one can also see an upper floor housing such
distinguished guests as religion, art, and others. You are not the only one; most cultivated
specimens of homo natura think likewise. In this respect you are the conservative, I the
revolutionary. If I had another life of work ahead of me, I would dare to offer even those high-
born people a home in my lowly hut. I already found one for religion when I stumbled on the
category 'neurosis of mankind.' But we are probably talking at cross purposes and it will be
centuries before our dispute is settled. (qtd. in Robert 140)
How we bury the dead—how the dead bury the living—determines who we are and where we are going.
Our efforts are nothing more than archi-tectural. We live our lives encrypted (in crypts) and it is the
encryptions that determine our lives (see Abraham and Torok). Freud was called to understand all this so
that we could come to understand it as well. (As I progress toward the asacrificial at the end of this chapter
and more fully in later chapters, I will return in a more forthright manner and deal with the basement and
the lowly hut in anarchitecture. And yet, I have been dealing with the basement from the very rebeginnings.
I can only respond to the call myself by continuing. Dealing with what I have called the asacrificial,
however, should not be taken to mean that sacrifice can be done away with. Nothing could be more foolish
and dangerous than such a thought acted on. As Avital Ronell has strongly suggested, there is inevitably a
substitute for the sacrifice that is a sacrifice itself [see Stupidity 310]. What is wanted in a community
founded on asacrifice, as Maurice Blanchot has said [Unavowable 11].)
There is much talk among Freudians about what precisely is psychoanalysis and how easy it is for
the lay person not to understand. Such talk leaves Freudian psychoanalysis open to, or makes it ripe for,
generative experiments (though critics will continue to see them as degenerative experiments). As many
have argued already, psychoanalysis for Freud was the experiment of Freudo-analysis (see, e.g., Krüll;
Robert; Balmary; Ulmer, Teletheory 43). Freud was working on himself as much as on so-called patients.
Freud invented the then "false" analysis called "psychoanalysis," for the benefit of his suffering patients but
also for his own suffering. The near motto for his psychoanalysis was "What has been done to you, you
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poor [sexually abused] child"? (Complete Letters 289). The invention was a masterful-masterless
displacement with the psychopathological joke being, at times, more so than not, on Freud himself. But
"invented" would be read in this fashion only if we presume, in reading Freud's "phantisies" that he wanted,
in spite of the times, not only to cure himself but to raise himself immanently to be FREUD, the master and
century-maker. The myth-maker without remainders. Freud, perhaps, wanted to realize immanence. Freud
can be seen as wanting sovereignty. Part of his neurosis was to be famous. All the so-called evidence
argues in favor of this view (see, e.g., some of his letters to Fliess, especially, 264-66; Roustang's
commentary in Dire Mastery; and Robert's discussions on Freud's careerism and his obsessive
ambitiousness, 63-81). It is as if Freud is competing with his famous patients (Emma, Dora, et al.) to be the
number one star-patient. Freud was rotten with perfection (the dream cum nightmare of immanence).
But the issue here comes down to just ignoring the evidence for or against the Massonic question,
say, of whether or not Freud assaulted truth, or the other form of immanence; for the issue is not solely to
discover the so-called meaning or the truth (immanence), which does not set us free anyway, but to make or
generate something new in hopes of getting out of here (to imminence). Out of resentful-mythic thinking
that goes under the name Freudian psychoanalysis. Yes, getting out of Oedi-pedagogy! (At least, in part,
that is what motivates my writing, which is not without my ethico-political concerns about sexual violence
as founding principle and actuality.) What motivates my writing is what, in part, has motivated Serge
Leclaire, Deleuze and Guattari's and Balmary's writings against Oedipus (Anti-Oedipus.) 18
What is being fought over obsessively is not What is Freudian psychoanalysis? But How was
Freudian psychoanalysis variously made? If we keep our eyes on the so-called evidence and facts (hoping
to verify them as true or false in terms of the ontological question What is? or in terms of the pragmatic
question How was the seduction theory avoided?), we cannot see How Freudian psychoanalysis was
variously and ambivalently and polyvalently and still is being made to be something else. My sense is that
psychoanalysis wants to become something else, something without ontological guilt at its center (Krüll
204-05). Something without sovereignty. To become a whole set that is not a set of "false" criticisms and
dreams. Standing at their very limits, of actually and virtually "exposing the limit" (Nancy, Inoperative
67). 19
So that we can get out of this hysterical interruption in the middle of the second point and this at
times disjunctivitis, as above, and on to the third (conductive) connection and on down to the road.less. as
below, let us see how and what Masson has made by linking, near-conductively, the series of episodes
comprising chapters 3-4 in Assault. (What Masson could have made without his own Oedipal yet
Narcissistic near-sightedness, we will hold for later.) Masson prepares the way for his readers and his
emplotment 20 of the episodes, with some emplotments on the surface while others are buried in notes. (As
Freud keeps reminding us, there are deeper levels of repression. See his "architecture of hysteria"
[Complete Letters 246-47; see McGrath 152-96]. 21 On the surface, Masson tells us:
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The story of Freud's seduction theory, its relation to Fliess's operation on Emma Eckstein, and the
eventual renunciation of the theory by Freud, is intertwined with the story of Freud's relationship
with Fliess. Freud met Fliess in 1887; he was to play the major role in Freud's intellectual,
emotional, and scientific life over the next fifteen years, and possibly beyond" (72-73; emphasis
mine).
And so, we are left with the question, What was Freud and Fliess's relationship? What were they making?
What product? According to Masson's findings, rather bindings, the answers (such as answers are), I
believe, lie (encrypted) in the emplotments of Masson's chapters 3 and 4, which I will run side by side, in
the most obsessive, yet near paranoid, fashion for easy commentary and reference to. (We are still in
Masson's second [conductive] connection.)
Freud and Fliess:
Ch. 3: Freud, Fliess, and Emma Eckstein Ch. 4: Freud's Renunciation of the Theory of
1. The Story of an Operation
2. Freud and Fliess
3. Freud's View on Seduction
4. The Seduction of Emma Eckstein
5. The Father as Seducer
6. The Theory of Periodicity
7. The Witch must Die
Seduction
1. Letters to Fliess
2. Public Renunciation of the Seduction Theory
3. Freud's Isolation
4. The Seduction of Robert Fliess
What the emplotment tells me as a reader—especially the title of section 1 in chapter 3 ("The Story of an
Operation")—is that the relationship was a trafficking in Emma Eckstein, in women and girls and a few
men and boys (cf. Rubin, "Traffic"; Irigaray, This Sex 170-91). Everything in chapter 3, not just in section
1, is about the disastrous operation on the nose that Freud allows Fliess to perform on Eckstein and
thereafter continues to rationalize beyond reason. (After all, we are in dealings with psycho-analysis here.)
The operation becomes, however, a means by which the two men can carry on a communicative exchange
of letters—as accounted for in section 2 and sporadically throughout—with Freud playing the primary
protector and consoler of Fliess, whose quackery could be stopped by medical authorities (cf. Eissler, Freud
and the Seduction Theory 346-72). Therefore, Freud's relationship, as Masson connects the three, is not
with Eckstein, but with Fliess. At some level of strangeness, the relationship may have been figuratively
and neurotically a manage à trois, but Masson quotes James Strachey as rendering the connection as "a
complete instance of folie à deux, with Freud in the unexpected role of hysterical partner to a paranoiac"
(216, note 17). 22
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Masson's emplotment is a combination of a trois and deux with each making a zigzag, or
dialectical, or hysterical (?), connective set of arguments in the various couplings in chapters 3-4. Eckstein
is only present as a pretext; hence, there is really only folie à deux. This movement from three to two, a
three that was only a two, should signal to us something along the lines of the domination of the Same and
the One (see Levinas, Totality and Infinity; Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics"). 23
deux:
At the level of the connections (apparent cause/effect), we can get the following zigzagging folie à
Masson begins his "telling" (section 1) with the operation, which occurred in "early autumn,"
toward the end of February, 1895. Then, he rebegins temporally, as in a flashback, prior to the operation on
Eckstein. (A reminder: It is more Masson's connections, emplotment, and less the points in time in the
narrative, though of course time unfolding has its place in determining the power of the juxtapositions, that
I am interested in pointing out.) In
• ch.3.sec.2, there is an apparent agreement between Freud and Fliess on actual, or nasal reflex,
neurosis. E.g., Hemorrhaging from the nose is caused by masturbation. And yet, in
• ch. 3.secs.3: Freud is gathering more and more evidence in support of his seduction theory. He
begins to speak less of masturbation as a cause. (Freud reports his findings to Fliess.) Apparently,
Freud is breaking away from Fliess, which is given greater credibility in
• ch. 3.sec.4, where Masson tells us Freud discovers that Ekstein had been seduced, at least two
times, as a child. However, the article in which he reports this discovery is "written for [dedicated
to] Fliess" (88). But then. Masson says that the article proves that "Freud was concerned with
actual early events and traumas and their effects on the later emotional life of the victim" (89).
Freud is getting closer to a proximate cause in terms of the seduction theory.
• Freud speaks and acts at cross purposes (or does he?) in terms of his relationship with Fliess.
• In addition, building momentum, in
• ch. 3.sec.5, Freud attacks in print his former teachers (Charcot et al.) for misrepresenting the
proximate cause of hysterical neurosis, namely, that fathers seduce children (both the father-
mentors who seduced their students by suppressing the truth of assault but also biological fathers
by perpetrating sexual assault against (their) children. But most outlandishly, in
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• ch.3.sec.6, Fliess advances his theory of periodicity, which accounts for illnesses and deaths of
women (based on the female period of 28 day) and men (on the "male period" of 23).
• Fliess rationalizes the cause of Ekstein's hemorrhaging with numbers; Freud, with his budding
seduction theory. (Though Fliess and Freud are speaking from very different notions of neurosis
[biological and then "periodical," on the one hand, and then actual and hysterical, on the other],
they arrive at the same effect.)
• Freud, using his new seduction theory, tells Fliess that it was not his having left the gauze in
Ekstein's surgical wound, but Ekstein's having been sexually traumatized as a child, that led to the
hysterical bleeding. Freud, In addition, gives Fliess dates-numbers in Eckstein's life to play with
and thereby to console and comfort himself.
• And then, to end the differences between Freud and Fliess, yet somehow strangely keeping them
alive, in
• ch. 3.sec.7, Freud, writing Fliess, reports strange, neurotic linkages: "Emma has a scene where the
Diabolus sticks pins into her finger and puts a piece of candy on each drop of blood. As far as the
blood [from Eckstein's nose] is concerned, you are completely without blame" (103; Complete
Letters 224-25; cf. 226-28).
• Freud studied witchcraft and writes that witches had known of the seduction theory hundreds of
years before him. (The title of this section, "The Witches Must Die," sounds as if Ekstein must die.
Or be sacrificed for the community of the two men, who continue to speak, at one level, at cross
purposes, and yet at another with delusional purposes. (See Swales, "Fascination.")
Quite miraculously, there is something that manifests the return of the same old same throughout
these sections: As Masson plots it, Freud stands by his man while he, nonetheless, walks away—these
boots are made for walking—pursuing another path. From the seduction theory. To the infantile sexuality
theory and Oedipus Complex. (And around and around the two go, for they have lost sight of their third.)
But before we further characterize what is happening by way of the emplotment—this plot is made for
burying 24 —let us examine how the e/com/motions continue well into chapter 4, "Freud's Renunciation of
the Theory of Seduction." Specifically, how they continue by a close proximity of Masson's positioning
them.
Another Parabase: But we have to ask—obsessively—about this chapter, "Freud's Renunciation,"
What is being renounced? Or announced? Or nounced? Let us see or smell—why bother to choose between
the organs?—through the questioning. Or rather the answering without answering (hence, "Nyanza" [Joyce,
Finnegans Wake 558]). These cryptic asides may become more unclearly clear as we progress into the
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emplotment. Let us allow Freud's sense of hearing and smelling—he is a hound dog, operating by way of
his intuitive (hysterical) nose (nosology, nosography)—lead us through the reading of Masson's chapter 4.
After all, Freud, in filling in the missing gaps of a patient's fantasy, writes to Fliess: "[I could] hear again
the words that were exchanged between two adults at that time! It is as though it comes from a
phonograph" (Complete Letters 226). Modern technology (phono-graph) here awakes potentiality
(dynamis). And Freud "imagine[s]," and tells Fliess, "Details [of what I see and hear] are beginning to
abound" and "Connecting links abound" (227). The binding rebegins.
Only connect, but how? Just connect. By proximity. Not by immanence but imminence. What
Masson does in constructing chapters 3 and 4 is but to mirror Freud's own conductive style of linking.
Taking us—this is Freud's show—into an infinite finitude of mirrors within mirrors within mirrors. With
the two primary players being fathers and sons (or daughters) and mentors-models (pedagogues) and
students-disciples (neophytes).
I know that I am casuistically stretching what matters here, but what does matter is listening to our
master's (Freud's) voice calling us to see connecting links abound. "We are warranted in believing" (to
quote from K. R. Eissler [Freud v]) that this is what goes for thinking hermeneutically when it comes to
hysterical or actual neuroses. Not only does Freud follow this scheme of thinking but so do his disciples,
even his anti-disciples, those who would destroy Freud.ianism, which would include Masson's working in
the name of reconstructing Freud.ianism. Masson is clear about his motives. (As Masson allegedly said to
Janet Malcolm, "There is no possible refutation of this book. It's going to cause a revolution in
psychoanalysis. Analysis stands or falls with me now"! [162].) I agree, however, that until we can
understand Why Freud abandoned the seduction theory, "we [can have only] an account of the origins of
psychoanalysis, but no real history" (13). But perhaps we have yet to understand what the word
"abandonment" might also mean! What we have at present, though never acknowledged, is a hystery, given
the repressed and suppressed history. But what could or would possibly come to stand as the history of
psychoanalysis is rather puzzling. Must this history have foundation in actuality or in fantasy, or some
irresolvable combination of both? Would this history require a myth of presence? What would hystery
become as history when the assault on the truth of the matter is disclosed? (Or left unresolved?) But not by
way of yet another myth of presence. Called the history! Why would "we" want to repeat that cycle of
history! Why? when the circle-cum-bloody cycle would only sacrifice yet another series of generations to
the name of the master. Freud. Abraham. God. It all seems rather unthinkable and unreadable! But we must
forge on, searching for a plane of imminence, and set aside this mini-excursus, in hope of yet others.
Masson returns:
• . . . in ch.4.sec1, "Letters to Fliess," to a discussion of the letters, specifically to the infamous letter
of September 21, 1897, in which Freud privately denounces "my neurotica [theory of the
neuroses]" (Complete Letters 264; Freud's emphasis).
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• The issue still for Masson is whether or not Freud should have given up on the seduction theory.
But more forcefully put, Masson's issue is now that Marie Bonaparte et al. should have not
misrepresented in degree Freud's renunciation in the September 21 letter. 25
• We move now from an account of Freud's apparent private to his public renunciation
• in ch.4.sec2. Freud says, given Masson's report, "I cannot admit that in my paper 'The Aetiology
of Hysteria' . . . I exaggerated the frequency or importance of that influence [seduction], though I
did not then know that persons who remain normal may have had the same experiences in their
childhood, and though I consequently overrated the importance of seduction in comparison with
the facts of sexual constitution and development" (123; Three Essays, in SE, VII: 190; emphasis
mine. Cf. 191).
• The whole question of overestimating frequency or not is an ambivalent one for Freud, since one
moment he says no and at another he says yes (cf. Masson 130). 26
• The next section,
• ch.4.sec.3, "Freud's Isolation," is puzzling especially since Masson had already written of Freud's
isolation throughout chapter 1 (3-23). Perhaps this section is added so as to look back and then to
spring forward to a surprising truth of seduction in the "family." Freud had hinted that the fathers,
even his own, "had to be accused of being perverse" (see qtd. in Masson 108; Complete Letters
264). Now in
• ch.4.sec.4, Masson writes, "Freud believed, for many years, that he had found at least one person
who would support him in his views when everybody else in the scientific community shunned
him, and that was Wilhelm Fliess" (138), and then announces, "I have found evidence . . . that
Robert Fliess, . . . Wilhelm Fliess's son, believed that his father had sexually molested him, and
this at precisely the time Freud was writing to Fliess about seduction" (138). Masson adds:
"[Robert Fliess] explains that he did not fantasize these seductions or beatings" (141). So yes, the
"irony" (139) is that "Freud . . . like a dogged detective," is "communicating his hunches and
approximations [by proximities to] the criminal" (142). There is something additionally rather
Oedipal here. Which carries over and mixes in
• ch.4.sec.5, "conclusion," with a fine level of narcissism. Building on Frank Sulloway's discussion
of Fliess [in Freud: Biologist of the Mind], Masson concludes that Freud and Fliess "curiously
were never closer in their views [of seduction than] when their friendship finally collapsed.
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Sulloway is correct: Freud became more like Fliess than he was prepared to admit" (143; emphasis
mine). Or also more like Robert, but Why wildly speculate? even if Masson's textual connections
begin to abound with possible perverse, provoking linkages?
Perhaps I should stop at this point with some sense of having suggested the zigzag (or obsessively
hysterical) characteristic of Masson's emplotments of Freud and Fliess et al. and their proximities and then
the breaking awayves while remaining entangled homologously. Which is precisely what Masson wants us
to do, to stop, and let the undercurrent to his representation of an assault on truth continue on its own,
working its ways in subterranean strange mannerism throughout our readings. But there is more, much
more. To disclose!
In chapter 5 of the Assault on Truth, we, indeed, get "The Strange Case of Ferenczi's Last Paper."
Which picks up on and continues the emplotment of entanglements of the family romance. Immediately, in
the first paragraph, for the sake again of a clear-in-y/our-face announcement, Masson writes: "After Fliess,
Sándor Ferenczi . . . was for more than twenty years Freud's closest analytic friend (Freud often addressed
him as 'dear son')" (145). This is all about fathers and sons, although there is much room for sons replaying
mothers as well. Masson quotes a letter from Freud to Ernest Jones: "At the center was the conviction that I
did not love him [Ferenczi] enough, that I did not want to recognize his works, and also that I had badly
analyzed him." Freud continues by saying, Ferenczi's "chief pain . . . was the [alleged] fact that his mother
had not loved him . . . passionately or exclusively enough. He would himself become a better mother, and
in fact found the children he needed. Among them was . . . (Mrs. Severn?)" (181; brackets in Masson and
parentheses with question mark in original).
But if we go back to the first paragraph of chapter 5, we read Masson writing that Ferenczi's
"paper, 'Confusion of Tongues,' his last, . . . was, in many respects, the twin to Freud's 'The Aetiology of
Hysteria' " (145). 27 The words that most jump out—one phrase in quotes and the second, a single word,
toward the emphatic position in the paragraph—are "dear son" and "twin." Now what is rather interesting is
that right after emploting the previous chapter on Robert Fliess and after having made the fantastic
disclosure of a probable rape and incest in that chapter alleged by the son against the father, Masson tells
his reader through a statement and a proximity of terms that homologously Wilhelm Fliess is to Robert as
Freud is to Ferenczi and as we might be able to gather from François Roustang (Dire Mastery) Freud is to
other of his disciple-children. Tu quoque! Perhaps Freud's chief pain was the fact that his father had not
loved him enough and, therefore, he would himself become a better father, and in fact found the Freud that
he would be with his children (those who had been allegedly raped and those who would help take care of
these victimized children). His family (his mystery, mystory, as Ulmer explains [Teletheory 82-114])
would become the field of psychoanalysis. His myth that would make for presence ("Das Ding") would be
psychoanalysis and its scandalous paramethodology. Most of what Freud remembers, constructs, is by way
of a mise en abyme. "[W]hat cannot be stated directly in propositions" (Ulmer, Heuretics 148), or case
histories, is put into the receptacle, or chora, or into the device of a play within a play. All is constructed by
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the paramethod of chorography, which Freud invented to express intuitions. (But we are always in advance
of ourselves here.)
Assessment: We have been on test drives. Let us assess the tests. We can make just so much from
the topos of proximity as Masson might seduce us to make. In this homology and ratio, Masson is able to
represent the hermeneutical validity of both the seduction and infantile sexuality theories. We cannot tell
whether Wilhelm Fliess seduced his son. (Was it Wilhelm in actuality who was sexually molesting his son
or was it Robert in fantasy who was lying about or mistakenly believing in the molestation?) We are left
pondering. The possibilities are rich given Masson's placement of thematic key words as dots that he wants
the readers to connect.
Masson's book reads like a documentary about the seduction theory while it also reads like a
docudrama about the seduction of Freud. (And Masson's book is his mystory.) Masson's chapters 3 and 4
abound in connections by seductions: Chapter 3.sec.4 (The seduction of Emma Eckstein) parallels with
chapter 4.sec4 (the seduction of Robert Fliess). And then chapter 4.sec.5 (the Father as seducer). Freud and
Fliess, perhaps unknown to them—as Masson potentially represents them as literal and figurative fathers—
are ostensibly trafficking in both patient(s) and son(s). (Masson potentially includes the father-son relations
between Freud and Ferenczi, who was, as Masson insists, second to Fliess, "Freud's closest analytic friend"
[145].) And Masson has Ferencizi say—here we go with the ventriloquism—"It was as if Ferenczi were
telling Freud: 'You lacked the courage to stay with the truth and defend it. The movement that grew up
around you is a product of this cowardice. I will not be part of it. I will not break faith with what I know to
be true [which is the seduction theory].' And that is what happened; Ferenczi died, but he did not recant" as
Freud, his father had (186).
Masson buries—emplotment is for burials—what is communicated between Freud and Fliess
additionally in the so-called scholarly notes (or the mise en abyme). There he tells us, who would of course
read the notes, about Freud's letters to Ferenczi, in which he speaks of "the Fliess affair" and writes, "you
probably imagine that I have secrets quite other than those I have reserved for myself, or you believe that
[my secret] is connected with a special sorrow, whereas I feel myself capable of handling everything and
am pleased with the resultant greater independence that comes from having overcome my homosexuality"
(qtd. in Masson 215-16). 28
What I have stressed in this reading of Masson's emplotments is the sacrificial economy that holds
The Assault on Truth together. This economy makes for a myth of presence (immanence). But there are
irresolvable questions, which keep the question of the Truth open. I want now to focus on a single letter by
Freud to Fliess, December 22, 1987. In it Freud relates, like a good student to an elder, his latest
discoveries, one of which remains haunting in the corpus of Freud's works. It is, for me, a signature letter of
Freud's views of psychoanalysis in its infancy and it best illustrates the sacrificial economy of his thinking.
It is of the family romance, in its most violent scenario, reminiscent of the stories and anecdotes that Kate
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Millett presents in The Basement and that Andrea Dworkin in Letters from a War Zone. It is
paradigmatically, I insist for heuristic purposes, an Abraham-Isaac story. What follows implicitly
summarizes by bringing into proximity all that has been said up to this point in our discussion of the sexual
abuse of children, but now in terms of a sacrificial economy.
"There is something about the old story that cannot be put to rest; it calls us, repeating itself ever
as an old story whose recurrence marks it as a founding story, the story of Abraham [and Isaac],
the one who received the call."
Avital Ronell, Stupidity 289.
Abraham Returns: Freud writes of the infantile trauma of a three-year-old child who recalls, as an
adult, going "into a dark room where her mother is carrying on and eavesdrops. She has good reasons for
identifying herself with this mother. The father belongs to the category of men who stab women, for whom
bloody injuries are an erotic need" (Complete Letters 288). Her father had raped her when she was two
years old and infected her with a venereal disease. The mother is in a screaming exchange with the father.
And then, the mother, Freud continues, "tears the clothes from her body with one hand, while with the other
hand she presses them against it, which creates a very peculiar impression." The mother is struggling with a
phantom reality: "[S]he raises both hands, claws at the air and bites it. Shouting and cursing, she bends over
far backward, again covers her genitals with her hand, whereupon she falls over forward, so that her head
almost touches the floor; finally, she quietly falls over backward onto the floor" (288-89). 29 Next Freud
recalls a series of related events expressed by the patient:
When the girl was six to seven months (!!) old, her mother was lying in bed, bleeding nearly to
death from an injury inflicted by the father. At the age of sixteen years she again saw her mother
bleeding from the uterus (carcinoma), which brought on the beginning of her neurosis. The latter
breaks out a year later when she hears about a hemorrhoid operation. Can one doubt that the father
forces the mother to submit to anal intercourse? Can not one recognize in the mother's attack the
separate phrases of this assault: first the attempt to get at her from the front; then pressing her
down from the back and penetrating between her legs, which forced her to turn her feet inward.
Finally, how does the patient know that in attacks one usually enacts both persons (self-injury,
self-murder), as occurred here in that the woman tears off her clothes with one hand, like the
assailant, and with the other holds onto them, as she herself did at the time?
Have you ever seen a foreign newspaper which passed Russian censorship at the frontier? Words,
whole clauses and sentences are blacked out so that the rest becomes unintelligible. A Russian
censorship of that kind comes about in psychoses and produces the apparently meaningless deliria.
A new motto:
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'What has been done to you, you poor child?'
Enough of my smut.
See you soon.
Yours truly, Sigm.
I shall leave Saturday at eight o'clock as planned. (289; Freud's exclamations and emphasis)
About this letter and the closing passage, Masson tells us: "Freud seems to be moved by the suffering of his
patient. . . . The sympathy Freud shows for the suffering of this patient was not permitted to stand. This
passage was omitted from the published letters [i.e., from The Origins of Psycho-Analysis], and Freud's
motto, along with it, was removed from the record" (Assault 117, 119; emphasis mine. Cf. Abraham and
Torok 226-48).
All of this concern for sympathy (perhaps sympathetic symptoms) is rather curious (in proximity
with curiosa and "smut"). Masson suggests the editors of the letter censored the so-called sympathetic
passage, for it could only suggest that Freud still believed in the seduction theory (his "neurotica," which
had been denounced on September 21, 1897 in a letter to Fliess [Complete Letters 264]). The editors were
themselves consciously engaging in a repetition of "Russian censorship." But my sense is that now that the
letter has been permitted to stand, the passage does not just give sympathy but also takes away what
sympathy Freud shows as having been possibly feigned. What we have in the reinstated letter to Fliess is
yet another example of Freud's zigzagging approach. The so-called new motto about the care for children
who have been sexually abused is summarily tossed aside as "enough of my smut. See you soon"! The
postscript only makes the turnaround worse ("I shall leave Saturday at eight o'clock as planned").
But why would Freud undercut what he reports to Fliess in such a manner! I can only suggest that
there is, nonetheless, a coherent, approximate relation between Freud's "neurotica" (Complete Letters 264)
and his "smut." (The letters are distanced in time by three months, September 21 and December 22, 1897.)
A response to my exclamation does not lie in saying that Freud is ambivalent. Instead, my sense, as per my
discussion in Chapter 2, is that Freud is caught in the game of the double bind. The children as victims
(actual neurotics) are experienced simultaneously, for Freud, as a taboo and yet desirable. The children are
sacred (see McKenna 71-72; Agamben, Homo Sacer 71-74). The neurotica, therefore, are desirous stories
that Freud cannot not relate to Fliess. The economy of thinking-writing is one of opposite, yet
complementary values (a pharmakonic economy, Freud's sacred share). His communicative offering to
Fliess. While apparently Fliess is sexually molesting his son, Robert, Freud is relating to Fliess
complementary (also complimentary?) stories (smut). This trafficking in children is a further trafficking in
victims (first there was Eckstein, then Robert, and now the unnamed female child who witnessed her
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mother's antics and bleeding). Am I saying that these exchanges are known to all characters? Of course not:
What I am saying is that by associations Masson is, as he has been throughout his discussion—again
wittingly or not—emplotting (encrypting) his book along these lines of associations.
Therefore, this conclusion to the letter as it is plotted into Masson's discussion is not as mysterious
as we might assume and begins to take on a reality of its own now, without Masson's help. As Derrida
would say, this conclusion "is contradictorily coherent. And as always, coherence in contradiction
expresses the force of a desire" (Writing 279). But in saying all this, let us not forget that the meaning of
this passage (written by Freud, censored by Marie Bonaparte, and then reincluded by our hero Masson)
must be seen as overdetermined, that is, open to other competing interpretations (polylogoi). Derrida might
further help us to see (theoreyeze) that this zigzagging, this movement and counter-movement to reinstate
the letter as originally written, is "a double origin plus its repetition. [With] Three [as] the first figure of
repetition" (299). But as the sacred and sacrifice require, there has to be a "sacrificed mediator without
which triplicity would not be, and without which meaning would not be what it is, that is to say, different
from itself: in play, at stake" (299-300; emphasis mine). What a predicament! (As Avital Ronell says the
old story of Abraham keeps recalling us.) With such an insight by way of the accidental, we are back to the
explanation point that I began with.
But this insight allows us to return again to Freud's neurotica and smut as very pointed Abraham
stories, but remade, as I discussed by way of Dworkin in chapter 2, in terms of women being substituted for
the male son, Isaac. And yet again, the son always remains in the background of the letters, as Robert Fliess
himself does. The son is being feminized, as Dworkin would say, by the father and Freud. But calling us to
remember Isaac-Robert is not simultaneously a call to forget that Abraham's sacrificial knife continues to
be used on women. Dworkin has argued that the knife has been used more so on women! Let us recall that
for Dworkin the Abraham story and the Totem and Taboo story have become rewritten as smut stories,
snuffing out women. (But is this, then, a snuffing out of the other?) As she says in her own Letters from the
War Zone to us, "men love death" (214; cf. Kramer, After the Lovedeath). Contrary to the call of Abraham,
Dworkin's call is to men to cease and desist sacrificial (smut, pornographic, rapist) readings, which lead to
sexual violence against women. (Would Dworkin be saying, in an unwitting Levinasian way, to put an end
to the primacy of ontology or of the dominance of the same [Totality 43]?) In these readings men form an
alliance (homosocial or "homoerotic sadomasochism" [War Zone 218]) against women, an alliance of the
same against the other, not unlike Freud's with Fliess (?!) against Ekstein, to forestall generational violence
waged between fathers and sons after the Viet-Nam War. 30 These sacrificial-pornographic readings are
cononized (ways of interacting with and trafficking in women) and their pedagogy (again, aimed at
women) is rape (often symbolized by the rapier but always actualized by the stabbing penetration of the
female body). Recall the young girl's mother (in Freud to Fliess) being stabbed in the back, the front, and
then again in the back.
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If we accept the call toward a paralogic of associations (the false criticism 31 ) that Freud taught us
to imitate and to follow (connections abound), we must now return, ever briefly, to the discussions in
Masson on Emma Eckstein and the section "the witch must die" (103-06). (The other must die.) Let us take
notice of Masson's writing,
Unpleasant chains of associations are set off: if Fliess is the judge, and Emma is the witch, then
Freud, as observer, suddenly understands why Fliess had to be so harsh in his punishment of her—
she was, during the operation, secretly enacting her own ritual, using Fliess's operation as a kind of
somatic compliance—she bled, not in response to Fliess, but in response to her own private,
internal theater of fantasy. So if she nearly bled to death, it was not because of Fliess but because
of her own perverse imagination. (105-6)
Unpleasant, indeed. Eckstein is at fault! Freud, perhaps to flatter Fliess, followed these unpleasant chains of
associations, which we have already examined in the letters of January 17, 1897, in which the rapier is
reduced to "the diabolus stick[ing] needles into [Eckstein's] fingers and then plac[ing] a candy on each drop
of blood" (Complete Letters 225; cf. 227). How the sadomasochistic ironies abound! Freud continues: "As
far as the blood is concerned, you [Fliess] are completely without blame!" And then as an aside, he writes,
"A counterpart to this: fear of needles and pointed objects from the second psychic period. In regard to
cruelty in general: fear of injuring someone with a knife or otherwise" (225). Therefore, there is a category
of women who fear, yet relish the idea of being stabbed or stabbing! What associations are we to make
now? Recall the young girl's father as belonging "to the category of men who stab women, for whom
bloody injuries are an erotic need" (288; Freud's emphasis). And Fliess's operation, cutting, on Ekstein?
Trying to remove the nasal genital spots! Freud's statements now speak more directly to rape and sacrifice.
Men and women penetrate and draw blood for some erotic desire as well as need. But perhaps I am being
as unfair to Freud as he is to Ekstein and women, and as unfair to his method of associations as he himself
could be. Enough of my smut!
Taking Leave, Momentarily: The issue in my discussion has never been exclusively one of
whether we are to choose between the seduction theory or the infantile fantasy theory (Oedipal complex).
For the issue has also been one of refusing to think, read, and write sacrificial narratives of explanation for
pain people suffer and endure. Even if for the establishment of community! The whole workings of Freud's
thinking and then Masson's attempts to catch and fix Freud's thinking are deeply invested in sacrifice.
Making for Chaste Rape, but additional for the conditions of reactionary thinking—more rape. It is
difficult, perhaps not possible at present in my writing, to think of how Freudian psychoanalysis cannot but
be a myth, by which I mean a sacrificial fiction founded on a story of rape whose reason for being is to
establish community (see Nancy, Inoperative 43-70; my insertion). Making something clear and open—no
longer Chaste, as, say, Masson would want, in terms of putting an end to the assault on Truth, which is yet
another myth, presuming to be "a remainderless totality"—does not put an end to rape (Nancy 57). It is its
forever rebeginning. The eternal return of the same. If the founding principle of psycho-analysis is the
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mythos of rape (of children)—which it is—psychoanalysis can but pedagogically reproduce more sexual
violence (rape). With its perverse sovereigns such as de Sade (see Blanchot Unavowable 3, 11). And with
its chaste, proximate anagrams of a community of the.rapists. (The founding signifying practice is
everywhere!) Trafficking in communications of (y/our) smut. This has become a paranoiac view! Enough.
But again, we are left, far left, with just writing. As Jean-Luc Nancy tells us, giving us a clue:
"writing is the act that obeys the sole necessity of exposing the limit: not the limit of communication, but
the limit upon which communication takes place" (67; Nancy's emphasis). But is the limit rape? It could be,
yet it would be a myth of presence again, of essence, of transcendence. Or always on the verge of becoming
so! We are left with writing: "Face to face, but without seeing each other from now on, the gods and men
[sic] are abandoned to writing. This abandonment is the sign given to us for our history yet to come. It has
only just begun. My god! We are only just beginning to write" (135).
I will have to take leave—dissatisfactorily—but I am not writing to satisfy anyone—much
suspended in thin air to return to it later and rethink how to resolve the problem of sacrifice (Freud-
[Eckstein-Robert]-Fliess) with asacrifice. So much always remains bracketed. Out. And yet, it is there ([ ])
within the hard superficial kernel within the shell, but near impossible to "prove" except by even more
"false" criticisms. Writing. To get to the kernel, we must ever go to whatever remains and make of what
remains a yet newer false criticism. 32 But not to establish presence. Kafka had his ways of proliferating the
versions of the Abraham story (Parables 37-42; Ronell, Stupidity 287-94, 306-10); and Woody Allen has
his comic ways (26-27). All are peculiar, scandalous ways of attempting to avoid a sacrificial economy, and
yet, all might very well be, at some level of thinking, a making of yet more Chaste Rape.
To interrupt so as to rebegin, reading Freud's brilliant and compelling analyses often at times
reminds me of carnies with their shell games, 33 and, yes, equally reminds me that carnies can pull the wool
over the eyes of another carny (which I take to be one of the potential infinitely finite cyptographical
meanings of Genesis, chs. 25-37). . . . The level of encryption (as is problematizing) has become so intense
and intolerable in my writing at this near point.less that we must begin yet again.
Freud's Home Schooling
"It gives you a queer feeling if, late in life, you are ordered once again to write a school essay. But
you obey automatically, like the old soldier who, at the word 'Attention!', cannot help dropping
whatever he may have in his hands and who finds his little fingers pressed along the seams of his
trousers. It is strange how readily you obey the orders, as though nothing in particular had
happened in the last half-century."
Sigmund Freud, "Some Reflections on Schoolboy Psychology" SE, VIII: 241.
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Freud on Freud ("Some Reflections"): Perhaps the best, clearest, sanest way—if there is a
legitimately sane way to anything in psychoanalytic connections—to rebegin this essay, and get in line and
regain the good attention of my readers, is by relay with Freud's reflections on his school days. School
days. I will begin, therefore, with Freud's post-graduation essay and then take a closer look at what I am
calling Freud's home schooling—that which preceded his matriculation in the Gymnasium.
Strachey writes that Freud wrote "Some Reflections" "for a collective volume in celebration of the
50th anniversary of the school's [Gymnasium's] foundation" (SE, XII: 240; emphasis mine). Freud recalls
his father-teachers (mentors), specifically his readjustments to an Oedipal situation. Like father, like
teachers. Like teachers, like students. Freud's reflections take on, in an uncanny manner, a latter-day
reliving through the mirror stage. Walking in Vienna, he sees someone who appears to be his "former
schoolmaster" (241). Passing the man (it came to pass), Freud "stop[s] and reflect[s]": " 'Was that really he?
or only someone deceptively like him. How youthful he looks! And how old [I myself] have grown! How
old can he be to-day? Can it be possible that the men who used to stand for us as types of adulthood were
really so little older than we were?' " (241). Further pondering, he writes:
My emotion at meeting my old schoolmaster warns me to make a first admission: it is hard to
decide whether what affected us more and was of greater importance to us was our concern with
the sciences that we were taught or with the personalities of our teachers. . . .
We courted them or turned our backs on them, we imagined sympathies and antipathies in them
which probably had no existence, we studied their characters and on theirs we formed or
misformed our own. They called up our fiercest opposition and forced us to complete submission;
we peered into their little weaknesses, and took pride in their excellences. . . . We were from the
very first equally inclined to love and to hate them, to criticize and respect them. Psychoanalysis
has given the name of 'ambivalence' to this readiness to contradictory attitudes. (242)
From this point on in his remembrances of a "Schoolboy Psychology," Freud recollects through relays of
the lexicon of psychoanalysis. He has to invent psychoanalysis, a false criticism, to understand his
relationships with his pedagogues (those who guided him). In his recollection, he moves from "imagos" of
his parents, sibling, and teachers to the ambivalence often expressed in Oedipal relationships. "Of all the
imagos of a childhood," Freud writes,
which, as a rule, is no longer remembered, none is more important for a youth or a man than that
of his father. Organic necessity introduces into a man's relation to his father an emotional
ambivalence which we have found most strikingly expressed in the Greek myth of King Oedipus.
A little boy is bound to love and admire his father. . . . But soon the other side of this emotional
relationship emerges. One's father is recognized as the paramount disturber of one's instinctual
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life; he becomes a model not only to imitate but also to get rid of, in order to take his place. (243;
emphasis mine)
Moving full circle, Freud says, "It is in this phase of a youth's development that he comes into contact with
his teachers. So that we can now understand our relation to our schoolmasters. These men . . . became our
substitute fathers" (244; emphasis mine).
It is this false criticism that Freud invents about Oedi-pedagogy that we, too, will have to use—
and that has been used—to discuss his child-rearing by the pedagogues, first his father, Jacob, and then his
teachers, and yet, eventually the reverse. But it is Freud's home schooling that I want to focus on, though, it,
too, has been studied (Krüll; Robert). We will pass through this section, but with an interruption and false
speculation on Jacob's "perversity" (Complete Letters 264) toward his own children, so as to get on to the
third and rebeginning section of this chapter, to a general libidinal education, which I can merely allude to.
But not before we pass through it all again, in terms of a "Schoolboy Psychology" and examine, even if
only in passing, Freud, not just in relation to his father as seminal teacher, but also in relations to Freud
himself as substitute father-teacher for his own students and patients. But to take full advantage of the
mirror image in "Schoolboy Psychology," we must not forget Freud in relation to himself as inverted
substitute father-teacher, in his own self-analyses. Freud was also like Abraham. 34 He had many children
who begat and begat and begat. With their sibling rivalry in tow. As Robert says: "It was doubtless in the
very nature of the psychoanalytic movement to be constantly shaken by quarrels and dissension. Freud was
the 'father,' and since few of his early pupils had been properly analyzed, if at all, he became the victim of
the father complexes which they accused one another of not having been able to resolve" (136).
Ap.parently, two nations are in every womb! From Abraham to Isaac to Esau and Jacob. The
impure twins (Genesis, ch. 25.24; Girard, Violence 58). This is Freud's pedigree. The peculiar birth of Esau
and Jacob is reported in Genesis: "And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called
his name Esau. And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold of Esau's heel; and his name
was called Jacob" (ch. 25.25-26; emphasis mine). We will begin with Jacob Freud, the Abraham-Isaac-
Jacob line of the father-teacher of Sigismund, Sigi. Sigmund, who is the father of psychoanalysis. And of
the Oedipean conflict and the Mosean novel. The mirror image teacher-student, student-teacher, becomes
strange, and yet stranger, in this processual rendition of school days: For Sigmund resists his father-teacher,
by creating various fantasized and novelistic avatars of Jacob, while remaining, ever remaining the son of
Jacob. With this strategy of rejection, Freud does run the risk of creating myths.
"Ba! It is because it is. Women's reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the
highest form of life. Ba!"
James Joyce, Ulysses 411; qtd. by Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics" 152.
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Jacob (Freud) and Two Cultures: It is fashionable, though potentially contradictory, to say that
Freud was caught between two cultures, namely, Jewish and Greek. Marthe Robert writes that Jacob Freud
"left the most gifted of his sons in an ambiguous position, halfway between the complete break with
Judaism, [which] would have been logical[,] and the full allegiance[, which] was no longer possible" (21).
Jacob himself was, as Robert further explains, the "transitional man" (21), caught in between (cf. Musil,
The Man Without Qualities; Agamben, The Man Without Content). Sigmund makes it clear that his father
did not raise him in the Jewish religious tradition nor require that he learn Hebrew (see Robert 20; Krüll
160-61). And yet, though Jacob resisted his Chassidic background, resisted or was indifferent toward
religion, "the Bible [nonetheless] remained for him," as Robert suggests, "the embodiment of all culture"
(21). Jacob taught Sigmund enough about the biblical Jacob when Sigmund was a child to lead him to
continue to read and study on his own about his fathers. (Jacob presented the dutiful son Sigmund, when
Sigmund was 35, with his own family Bible and a lengthy dedication in it to "Spring Up, O Well! Sing ye
unto it!" [See Krüll 108-09]). Sigmund Freud was eternally returning to his father's Bible.
And each time, the well does spring up in terms of a network of fragments and associations, or
what Freud referred to as "screen memories" (see SE, III: 303-22). But the singing, Freud, unto it, is done
by way of links between this Bible and Sigmund's father's stories. (It is important to note—though
awkward, given the double possessive—that it is Freud's father's Bible and Jacob's dedication in that Bible
that calls the well to become a geyser and calls Freud to sing unto it. The mysterious well of life (see
Genesis, e.g., ch. 29). As G-d called Abraham; Abraham, Issac; Issac, Esau, but had the wool pulled over
his eyes by Jacob; so Jacob calls his son, who, in a manner of reciprocity pulls the wool over his father's
eyes, if not his own Oedipal eyes.) It is the displacements, the condensations, the representations, and
secondary revisions of both sources of the Bible and the dedicatory call and Freud's own unconscious
intertwining of the two that make for what Gregory Ulmer would call Freud's "Mystory" (see Teletheory;
Heuretics 139).
Freud, at times, is in a mental fugue, in a dream state. But the difficulty was How to put all these
oneiric processes expressed by his patients and by his own mental faculties into an exposition that would be
scientific? Not only was Freud caught in two cultures, Jew-Greek, but was also caught between two states
of mental processes and their reportage, oneiric and expository states and how to reproduce them in his
writing. While Freud and Fliess played respectively the hysteric and the paranoiac together, Freud taken
alone found himself caught between being a medical doctor and a psychoanalytic doctor. He is caught
between the web, as Julia Kristeva claims, of "substantialism, medicine, and catharis," on the one hand, and
"the field of signifying articulations," on the other (Desire 273). Patrick Mahony, who has examined
Freud's writing styles, recalls Freud's having "acknowledged that he was following 'a crooked way in the
order of my works . . . but it is the order of unconscious connections' " (6). Moreover, Mahony again
recalls, in writing
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the Dora case, Freud selected as an organizational principle two dreams; but even then, for
purposes of coherence, his exposition occasionally altered the order of interpretation (SE, VII: 10;
see also XVIII: 160). Besides, to have presented not only the results of interpretations but also the
process would have created utter confusion (SE, VII: 12-13), and the results would be equally
unreadable if a case history attempted a full account not only of the structure of a neurosis but also
of the management of analytic technique (SE, VII: 112; X: 156; XVII: 7-8; 44, fn., 104). (7)
Again, Mahony quotes Freud saying, " 'How bungled our reproductions are, how wretchedly we dissect the
great works of psychic nature' " (8).
For the most part, Freud writes in the clearest of expository styles. But at times, though rare and
not always noticeable, except to be criticized by ideologues, Freud writes what Ulmer calls "intuitions" by
following a paralogic of "conduction," which signals a "change in thinking from linear indexical to network
associational" (Heuretics 36). 35 In contrast, argumentative writing results in the reporting of logical
conclusions (deduction, induction, abduction), while what Ulmer calls chorography (choral writing)
rebegins continuously by way of unfolding the full process of writing, instead of the final product, and by
way of writing "intuitions" of the complete set of the paradigm, instead of exclusive arguments.
Chorography rebegins by experimenting, offering not "proof or assertion of truth but . . . a trial or test"
(Heuretics 37-38). Yes, a test drive. (Freud over time developed this writing style, which Ulmer has
abstracted; Freud developed it in his letters to Fliess as well as to others, and of course in The Interpretation
of Dreams.)
But what remains to be said about a style of presentation is that even in the most perspicuous
(obsessively clear) style, there remain rhetorical, subtle associations waiting to be discovered, as I have
tried to point out in Masson's representation of Freud and Fliess (The Assault on Truth). If ever I have
come across a mixture of obsessive clear and hysterical rambling styles, it is in Masson's argumentative and
conductive discussions. But I have been there and done that. Myself. Mystory. Now let us cut to the quick
of Freud's home schooling.
Home Seminar: The home seminar that Freud took from his father was one that sent Freud down
an an/alogical path on a map of destiny that required him to write and perpetually revise (or re-envision)
the
• Issac-Rebecca (Esau-Jacob) story in "Genesis" in terms of a full Mystorical set of its paradigm,
namely,
• Issac-Jacob (the father-son relationship) and his own emotional struggles with his own father in
terms of
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• Jacob-Sigmund by re-fantasizing and linking with
• Hamilcar Barcas-Hannibal,
• Laius-Oedipus, and eventually
• [G-d]-Moses.
As Sigmund had written years later in his school days essay, "One's father is recognized as the paramount
disturber of one's instinctual life; he becomes a model not only to imitate but also to get rid of, in order to
take his place" (243). In the primal scene. What we refer to metaleptically in Freudian terms, as the search
for the father in modernism (e.g., Bloom-Steven, Ulysses), is once again becoming, as I have applied it to
summarize Freud's archeological-genealogical investigations here, a metalepsis (Sigmund-Jacob) within a
metalepsis Jacob-(Sigmund-[Jacob-Sigmund]-Jacob)-Sigmund. The reversed-perversed logic is that of the
child (Sigmund) becoming father of the man (Jacob). 36 Let us take a brief look at the (selected) home
schooling (exemplary) lessons that sent Freud down this path (both poria and aporia, but mostly the latter).
Heidegger tells us, "When thinking attempts to pursue something that has claimed its attention, it
may happen that on the way it undergoes a change. Thus it is advisable in what follows to pay attention to
the path of thought rather than to its content" (Identity 1). It will be important not to follow the content as it
is (not) developed here—after all, Freud is a man without content—but to follow the path.
Lessons: Krüll tells us that Jacob would go walking with his son Sigmund. The approach to
informal seminars was peripatetic. (Proximity and the unconscious mind of the Dictionary: Semen,
Seminar, Seminarium; and then, there are Seed plot and Dissemination.) An event in the young Sigmund's
life that becomes a much scholarly, "Dear-Sigi" repeated anecdote and reinvestigated by Sigmund himself
in The Interpretation of Dreams, is the seminal incident of the cap. Jacob Freud relates the story to his son:
"When I was a young man . . . I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well
dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off
my cap into the mud and shouted: 'Jew! get off the pavement!' " The young Freud asks, "And what did you
do?" His father replies: "I went into the roadway and picked up my cap." The young Freud recounts:
This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little
boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene
in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barcas, made his boy swear before the household altar to
take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies.
(Krüll 20; Freud, Interpretation 230)
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While the Christian throws Jacob off the path, Jacob throws his young son onto another path, one that leads
him to seeking revenge for the father by the taking of Rome (Christianity, the Pope). But it is on this path
toward Rome and then Athens (Oedipus) and Egypt (Moses) that Sigmund loses, yet retains his father (by a
sublimation), for himself and for the rest of us, on his wayves to creating the novelistic, "false" (Ulmer 11)
and "scandalous" (Robert 21) science of psychoanalysis.
This path also led to feelings of guilt; for, as Robert points out, in the Freud family, 'the Book' was
a connecting link between the generations, whereas 'books' in general were a source of conflict
and aroused a strong sense of guilt in the future conqueror of the unconscious.
Freud felt guilty toward his father because his father, versed in Scripture but ignorant from the
standpoint of Gentile society, remained far behind him, living in a narrow spiritual world where
his son's bold aspirations and insatiable need for knowledge had neither place nor meaning. (23)
What Sigmund learned from his father's readings of the Bible and telling of personal anecdotes and from
his own reading of other books was a way of seeing his father as unschooled and unheroic, as lacking any
ambition, as having to scrounge for a living to support his family, as basically a failure. Jacob Freud
became the lesson of the biblical Jacob in Sigmund's eyes, relying on his son, as Krüll puts it,
to be a second Joseph: upright, clever, the support of his father in old age, and . . . a son who
[would] not enquire [sic] into his father's past, let alone reproach him for it. For the biblical Jacob
had committed several sins. He had brought his birthright from his brother Esau and obtained the
father's blessing by deceit; he had outwitted his father-in-law Laban; and one can even say that he
was not entirely innocent of Joseph's betrayal by his brothers. . . . Joseph ignored all these lapses,
did not criticize his father but loved him unconditionally—and that was precisely how Jacob Freud
wanted to be loved by his son. (161-62)
But loving a parent can be a complicated issue and interaction, as we come to see in Freud's vision
of Oedipus. While Jacob is Laius, Freud in his attempt to cast light on the father-son relationship, and yet
distance himself, becomes Oedipus. The attraction-repulsion scenario becomes less subtle and begins to
dominate all the Freudian family romance of signifiers that continue to teach Sigmund. Jew(Jacob)-
Greek(Oedipus) begin to intertwine. In the family line this relationship grows geometrically, for Issac and
Rebecca had given birth to Esau-Jacob who had become the biblical Oedipus. (Jacob at birth had hold of
Esau's heel, and henceforth they were and remain to this day to double business bound [see Girard, To
Double].) Therefore, from Genesis to the Freud family to the new testament (i.e., the infant science of
psychoanalysis) that Freud was rewriting, there is a proliferation of second and third Oedipi. Freud writes
Fliess: "I have found in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous
of my father, and now I consider it a universal event in early childhood, even if not so early as in children
who have been made hysterical" (Complete Letters 272; Masson's brackets).
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While the family line grows geometrically in an Euclidean linear manner, it also simultaneously
grows in a nonEuclidean network of associations, or grows simultaneously like a tree becoming rhizomatic.
Like the Biblical Jacob, Jacob Freud had multiple wives: Sally Kanner, Rebekka (barren), and Amalie. The
parallels are carefully identified by Krüll (160-63) and Marie Balmary (52-54). But while this sequence of
three wives is easy to see in a linear and indexical manner, the mystery of Rebekka remains in, yet out, of
the linear sequence, generating questions up and down the signifying family tree about place and
connections. (Was Rebekka really married to Jacob? And why was there no talk of her in the Freud family?
Is it because any talk would bring to the surface the biblical connection between Issac's Rebecca [who was
barren except for the intervention of G-d] and Jacob Freud's Rebekka [who was barren with no exception]?
Would the disclosure bring to the surface, though it would remain still not understood consciously, the
incestuous, Oedipal relationship Jacob Freud had with his mother in marrying Rebekka? Did Jacob divorce
her because she was barren? Or because she was his symbolic mother? And what about all of those
incredible possibilities that Balmary has unearthed in Freud's fateful letter to Fliess renouncing his
"neurotica"! Freud had written of himself: "Rebecca, you can take off your wedding-gown, you're not a
bride any longer!" [Balmary 63-81; Freud, Complete Letters 266]. How to find a place for Rebekka, the
alleged wife of Jacob Freud, becomes highly problematic, at the conscious and the unconscious levels,
when all these questions arise in the family because of the various displacements of Rebekka. She
constantly returns in a plethora of secondary and revisionary questions. She becomes a floating signifier.
The question of Rebekka as a bride and the necessity for her to cast off her wedding-gown figures in this
infamous letter, with Freud having to reject the fault of the father [in rejecting the seduction theory] but
then, having still to reject the father [in favoring infantile sexuality and the Oedipal theory.]) In countless
ways, the biblical Jacob-Rebecca and the Freudian Jacob become a series of floating signifiers instructing
Sigmund.
The complications and complexities in the father-teacher and son-student relationship continue to
grow. Like Issac, Jacob favored Sigmund over his other children and called him to be someone. Sigmund
could but act doubly in terms of living up to his father's wish that he excel him, for Sigmund could not but
also reject the father. In a parallel, extensive fashion, he could not but reject, but sublimate, his father (in
Totem and Taboo) and Jewish culture (in Moses and Monotheism). And yet, as Balmary methodically
points out, Freud becomes Joseph, the interpreter of dreams, rejecting but taking on the faults of the father,
Jacob (103-05). Again in this scheme of doubling, we see as we saw in Masson's account of (father)
Sigmund Freud, a hysterical (conflict of pleasure along with displeasure), yet obsessive responses (self-
reproaches [see Complete Letters 154]) by Masson to Freud, by Freud to Fliess, and now in Balmary's
account, a similar zigzagging, or double (attraction-repulsion), response by Sigmund to Jacob. It is a full
circle of fathers. Or is it a fuller, more originary circle of sons?
Balmary's insight into Jacob and Sigmund's teachings—both teacher and taught—is that Freud,
while mourning the death of his father, renounces the seduction theory for the infantile sexuality theory and
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Oedipus Complex. Balmary sees this renunciation and annunciation as a repressive function of some
psychoanalytic truth of the father. Perhaps in denying the validity and truth of Freud's patient's claims about
their father's having seduced them, Freud is similarly denying any role his father had played in seducing.
Freud had written Fliess:
[T]he old man [his father] plays no active part in my case, but that no doubt I drew an inference by
analogy from myself unto him; that in my case the 'prime originator' was an ugly, elderly, but
clever woman [either Resi Wittek or Monika Zajíc], who told me a great deal about God Almighty
and hell and who instilled in me a high opinion of my own capacities; that later (between two and
two and a half years) my libido toward matrem was awakened, namely, on the occasion of a
journey with her from Leipzig to Vienna, during which we must have spent the night together and
there must have been an opportunity of seeing her nudam (you inferred the consequences of this
for your son long ago, as a remark revealed to me; that I greeted my one-year-younger brother
(who died after a few months) with adverse wishes and genuine childhood jealousy; and that his
death left the germ of [self-] reproaches in me. (Complete Letters 268; brackets mine. Cf. Krüll
119-22) 37
The following day, Freud writes Fliess again:
Today's dream has, under the strangest disguises, produced the following: she [Wittek] was my
teacher in sexual matters and complained because I was clumsy and unable to do anything.
(Neurotic impotence always comes about in this way. The fear of not being able to do anything at
all in school thus obtains its sexual substratum.) (269)
If not the father, then the nursemaid is the seducer and cause of Sigmund's neuroses. The postmortem
"reflections on school days" is still metaleptically informing his thinking, reading, and writing seduction, as
teaching, and its affect on the student, in self-esteem and learning.
Let us open the question that has, heretofore, only been alluded to, and take it for a test drive.
Without so-called evidence to help us answer a question, we can always draw inferences as Freud himself
did. But again, I have no interest in the answer, but in the ever-potentiality of the neuroses of the Freudian
texts.
"It is to be supposed that the element essentially responsible for repression is always what is
feminine. This is confirmed by the fact that women as well as men admit more readily to
experiences with women than with men. What men essentially repress is the pederastic element."
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Freud, Complete Letters (246).
Pederasty: What we find in Freud's reference to Resi Wittek as his seducer is another scenario of a
woman being sacrificed, as we saw in the Freud-Eckstein-Fliess affair. But now it could be the Sigmund-
Wittek-Jacob affair. (Krüll says that Wittek was arrested, indicted, and sent to jail for having stolen from
Sigmund's brother Philipp [121; see Complete Letters 271]. Krüll sees this event and the subsequent
absence of Wittek as traumatic for Sigmund and claims, "I would not hesitate to trace Freud's cardiac
neurosis back to this incident" [121-22].)
Writers about Freud who have touched on other aspects of Freud's neurosis have, indeed, pointed
to Jacob as the source for Freud's neuroses. Krüll infers by way of what she calls "open questions"
concerning whether or not Jacob Freud
was also a threatening figure in his son's eyes; there are a number of indications that he enjoined
little Sigmund not to play with his genitals, and even threatened him with castration if he did. This
is borne out first of all by the fact that, in his discussion of child masturbation, Freud seems to take
such parental threats for granted [SE, XIX: 207]. Moreover, several of Freud's dreams [SE, IV-V:
210ff, 452ff.] contain associations that point to fear of being castrated by father figures. (110)
And yet, Krüll adds a mirror-image inference concerning "The 'Old Man's' Secret." Like son, like
father? Krüll writes:
[E]ven if [Jacob] withstood this temptation [to break the seventh commandment], it must have
been very difficult for him on his journeys to observe the biblical injunction against masturbation.
It is conceivable that Jacob's 'perversion,' to which Freud, when he still upheld the seduction
theory, tried to trace his own neurotic problems[,] was nothing other than masturbation. (101)
Therefore now, another of these "open questions" remains, namely, Did Sigmund at an early age actually
witness his father's masturbating and then repress it, leaving himself only with screen memories? Who
knows! Nothing yet has been discovered to have been said about such a quasi-primal scene. But as Krüll
suggests, the act is not necessary to see for the son to sense it by way of the father's guilt or by way of
mirror-reversal appropriations of the guilt. (Hence, my mirror-image inference above. [Recall "Memento
Mori."]) At least, this is the case that I take Krüll herself to be attempting to make.
But Sigmund does talk about his father's perversity in his letters to Fliess, and what is said is
infamous, though generally resolved in some way and then displaced. But like that which is repressed, the
letters of the unconscious keep returning. To be known in some way other than they have been known.
Something within them wants to speak. Something within them wants pedagogy to become pederasty. Here
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are the passages from the three letters that are often cited: In the first (February 11, 1897), Freud addresses
Fliess on the topic of hysterical symptoms:
seduction theory:
Hysterical cold shivers = being taken out of a warm bed. Hysterical headache with sensations of
pressure on the top of the head, temples, and so forth, is characteristic of the scenes where the
head is held still for the purpose of actions in the mouth. (Later reluctance at photographer's, who
holds head in a clamp.)
Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of
my brother (all of whose symptoms are identifications) and those of several younger sisters. The
frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder. (230-21; emphasis mine)
A second letter (September 21, 1897), in which Freud is enumerating the reasons for renouncing his
Then the surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being
perverse—the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, with precisely the same
conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not
very probable. The [incidence] of perversion would have to be immeasurably more frequent than
the [resulting] hysteria because the illness, after all, occurs only where there has been an
accumulation of events and there is contributory factor that weakens the defense. (264; emphasis
mine)
And a third letter (October 3, 1897), in which Freud removes the cause for his neuroses from being
his father to his nurse, which prefaces the section on the nurse that we have already discussed. I quote the
passage in overall context:
There is still very little happening to me externally, but internally something very interesting. For
the last four days my self-analysis, which I consider indispensable for the clarification of the
whole problem, has continued in dreams and has presented me with the feeling of being at the end,
and so far I have always known where the next dream-night would continue. To put it in writing is
more difficult than anything else for me; it also would take me too far afield. I can only indicate
that the old man plays no active part in my case, but that no doubt I drew an inference by analogy
from myself onto him; that in my case the 'prime originator' was an ugly, elderly, but clever
woman. . . . (268)
Normally, these three letters are not referred to in terms of the surrounding statements.
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The first letter suggests that Jacob seduced one son, if not several of his children, Sigmund's
sibling. (Proximity and the unconscious mind of the Dictionary: shyster, Siamese twin, sib, sibilant, sibling,
sibyl, sic, sick.) Freud is vague. Potentially overdetermined. What we can infer from the juxtaposition of
the two paragraphs along with the parenthetical statement in between, however, is that Freud suspected that
Jacob forced the children to perform fellatio. Freud says that he cannot be sure, for there is the question of
frequency.
In the second letter Freud absolves his father from having been "one of these perverts," but this
absolution is the result of Freud's apparent retraction of the whole of the Seduction theory. Again frequency
is the issue: If fathers were perverse with their children, Freud reasons, they, including his own father,
would have had "immeasurably" to force the children to perform this, or other, sexual acts in order for the
effects or hysterical symptoms to show. Repetition is always key in Freud, pedagogy and pederasty, but so
is probability. Freud, like his fellow physicians, cannot believe that this perverseness could be frequent
enough to contribute to hysteria. (Freud comes to mirror his colleagues' incredulity in April 21, 1896.)
But what is more interesting in the third letter is Freud's statement, "To put it in writing is more
difficult than anything else for me; it also would take me too far afield." Why? "I can only indicate that the
old man plays no active part in my case, but that no doubt I drew an inference by analogy from myself onto
him" (emphasis mine). Why? Father-son. Son-father. Having made this teasing, enigmatic statement, Freud
dismisses the statement and points to his nurse. With this in/action, Freud is resisting his self-analysis. Or
as Derrida would and has said: "Right here, at this point, it would not be impossible to speak of resistance
to analysis" (Resistances 6). Freud moves from the possible monstrous—or the impossible unspoken—to
the conventional, available explanation. His nurse did it! She, this witch (?), seduced him!
We cannot not ask, however, What is this "inference by analogy"? By mirroring? By transferring?
Is Freud saying that his having accused his father was a simple projection of his own desire, as he says,
"onto him." If so, Why? Does the mirroring have something to do with his ambivalence toward his father,
his feelings of love for, and yet his need for revenge on, his father? (See Masson, Assault 12-13; n.11, 202-
02.) This is certainly one possible answer to our test question concerning pederasty and pedagogy. Or is
Freud the perverse one, calling his own father perverse is calling himself perverse with his daughter
Mathilde.
But let us not forget that we are on a test drive (Ronell) of possible drives (ego against id; id, ego)
protesting reality. There is something going on in this passage about being taken "too far afield" and about
inferring by analogy. The passage seduces me! I can only think that the seduction—never mind the nurse—
between father and son, son and father, at least at a psychic-level was a mutual seduction, an unconscious
one. At this pointless, I can only think of Jean Baudrillard's discussion of seduction—and the diary of the
seducer—but to recapture it all in writing is more difficult than anything else for me and yet for you, who
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would have to use y/our already overused transfer ticket to yet another connection of digressions, would
have to follow yet another avenue of interruptions away from the path; it also would take us too far afield.
(Q: I have been waiting to ask, Why would we want to protest the reality of rape in a book titled
Chaste Rape? A: But we are not protesting the reality of rape; we are advocates for the realities of rape.
After all, we are still dealing with the problem of realities without ap.parent referents. Q: Is this not then the
violence of rhetoric [De Lauretis]? A: No, it is not the case of matter over rhetoric. or homo seriosus over
homo rhetoricus [see Lanham, Motives ch. 1]. The whole history of medicine vs. psychiatry in terms of
cause/effect on the matter of rape has dealt with this dizzy, because imminently reversible, need to make
the infants [i.e., infans] speak the truth of what happened to them, when they cannot speak, but mirror back
what is asked. Simply repeating, as a mirror would reflect back, what it has heard or reflected without
reflection. What has become im/possibly clear is that the infant [or that within, which has not yet spoken]
remains in the adult, the father and the mother. The parent is the child; the child, the parent. Freud is acting
out hysterically this mirroring in his letter to Fliess. The incest lies in that acting out hysterically, though it
is but an allusion to an illusion. Freud's is an auto-seduction.)
In the third letter, Freud is pulled from what he thought was the path to the capstone of something
quite other, onto a path that is without content to utter. Giving us his perhaps most impossible insight.
Gesturing himself. But how are we to read what is written, yet not? How, to read pure gestures? Was there,
along the path of the letters, an all but excluded mediating sign that deferred us from the father to the
nurse? Was the wool pulled over our eyes so that we would not consider Freud's alibi of having drawn "an
inference by analogy"? (Let us return to the primal scene.) Perhaps there was an X, a Chi, at the point of
Freud's "I can only indicate
that the old man plays no active part in my case, but
that no doubt I drew an inference by analogy from myself onto him;
that in my case the 'prime originator' was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman."
At the point of Freud's semicolon, we are directed away from Jacob [it was not the father's fault, for I was
mistaken] to the "clever woman." It is the clause lying in the middle that is a remainder. It is this
eXclusionary gesture, that, as Ulmer says, is a "call for the invention process to continue" [Heuretics 90].)
Hence, Freud must have thought at some level of reflection without reflection: It was me. It will become
my mystery cum mystory. And yet, remain Unbeknowst! Remain with remainders.
"There is for everyone, always, a child to kill."
Serge Leclaire, A Child is Being Killed (3).
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"To sit behind the couch and listen to analysands brings into play and puts to the test one's own
relationship to the primary narcissistic representation I have so far been calling the wonderful
child. It brings into play, without ever making a show of it, the strangely familiar representation
that makes us up—the infans in us. It puts to the test the constancy of the power of death that
keeps us open to the voice of desire."
Leclaire (5; Leclaire's emphasis).
Infans: It is not an inventive reading to say that Freud had ambivalent feelings towards his father
and teacher. It can be inventive, however, to reexamine the three letters to Fliess, along with yet one other
letter, the way that Julia Kristeva does in terms of her questioning infantile language (see Desire 271-94).
The inclusion of this fourth letter greatly complicates the signifying chain in terms of what I will call,
according to Maurice Blanchot, writing the disaster of the child (Writing 72). In this light or darkness the
issue quickly becomes the loss of innocence and the origin of history, or hystery. (Sexual violence again
becomes a quasi-, yet perpetual re-founding of history, hystery, with a suffering mostly of reminiscences.
[See SE, II: 7.] Freud says: "The childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge;
they were formed [Freud's emphasis] at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical
accuracy [emphasis mine], had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories
themselves" [SE, III: 332]. For this disaster leaves the child with a memory without memory. And yet, out
of this impossibility comes possibilities.) But this loss and origin can be—and it is just this possibility that
expands the issue—again doubly-cum-triply gesticulated: As not only the child's having been sexually
abused (which we understand easily as a loss of innocence and a savage passage into hystery), or as not
only the child's having undergone the Oedipal struggle (which we understand not as easily, since rather
monomythic), but also as the child's having lost its position in the Imaginary (its primary narcissistic
representation) and found its place in the Symbolic (also, a loss of innocence and an originary moment for
the child, but more so a moment of having to sacrifice the infans within). But this latter alternative is by far
more complicated than this Lacanian-Kristeven description of moving psychically from the Imaginary to
the Symbolic. 38
I will focus on only one aspect of Kristeva's elaborate discussion, with Sigmund Freud as both
father and yet child (infans). It is crucial to understand, as I indicate in the double-cum-triple articulation
above, that it is not necessary to have been raped, or sexually abused, to be in the impossible statelessness
of infans, who is not one that cannot speak because it has been sexually abused. It is not a matter of
understanding this inability to speak in terms of the seduction theory, for there is little difference between
the seduction theory and the infantile fantasy theory (Oedipal complex) in respect to the inability to speak.
To put it simply, there is infans. Then there is whatever happens or does not happen as history or hystery.
(One's family moving hurriedly from Freiberg to Vienna is enough to cause a mourning and melancholia of
what was, theretofore, thought precious but lost, and to affect perhaps a gain if sublimated into a mystery
cum Mystory, which apparently Freud accomplishes but not without much pain. 39 I am also referring to
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Freud's mourning the death of his father, who was himself in a state of mourning, and the retraction of the
seduction theory and the protraction of the infantile sexuality theory into the Oedipus complex.) But there
is the possibility in what does not happen for a silence of what appears to have happened. The cause is not
necessarily sexual abuse or sexual fantasies. Hence, the child, infant, in psychoanalysis is, as Kristeva says,
"the place of an 'error' " (Desire 272). An error that has contributed to more Chaste Rape. 40 And yet, an
error that has saved us from, in this individual case, the mythos of presence. I think that Kristeva makes this
unfortunate fortunate error unclearly clear.
Kristeva writes:
We shall not try to read [the error] more closely. Such an error cannot be righted when the mind
allows itself to be taken in by the inextricable alternative of 'cause' and 'effect,' as Freud rarely did;
compared with which Freud's 'errors' have the advantage of showing his thought to be rooted in
the eternal return of parent/child: 'Am I parent or child, cause or effect, chicken or egg?' So that
one might observe, perhaps, that the child is a myth (Oedipal) told by parents to their parents,
without which there would be nothing but children, that is Oedipi unbeknownst to themselves.
Were the Greeks, who talked among themselves of having been children, the most lucid parents of
history? (272-73)
Kristeva points directly to the metaleptic turns, with cause always verging on and passing over to become
effect; effect, cause. Parent, child; child, parent, Jacob, Sigmund; Sigmund, Jacob. It is for Kristeva,
reading Freud, Oedipi all the way down, or semiotically across.
As Kristeva continues, she brings in the daughter Mathilde—she who perhaps was displaced by
the nurse in the third letter. Kristeva, in a test drive of her own, writes:
FIRST ASSUMPTION: hysteria is set off by parental seduction during childhood. Freud promoted
that theory until 1896, the year of his father's death, suggesting that Jacob Freud must have
seduced him . . . and recognizing that his eldest daughter, Mathilde, was possibly the object of his
own attempts at seduction [Complete Letters 249], several months before his father's death. . . .
SECOND ASSUMPTION: that seduction was only a hysterical fantasy merging with a paranoid
attitude, and thus serving as a screen for his childhood autoeroticism. Thus the conception of an
essentially autoerotic childhood sexuality emerged. THIRD ASSUMPTION: Freud also allowed
for the child's genital desires and proceeded towards the conception of the Oedipus complex. (272)
What does Kristeva make of her (Freud's) three assumptions? She points to, by way of positioning
between the first two assumptions, the fact that Freud's father died and Freud stopped having children. There
is a kind of alpha-omega experience, with Freud remaining in the middle, though not excluded, but always
already potentially expropriated. As a corollary to these facts, centering on the death of the father, Kristeva
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points to what she calls "[t]he reversal of [Freud's] position with respect to the parent-child relationship (the
child becoming the agent of seduction)" (274). This reversal acknowledges that "parental seduction [was] an
'erroneous idea' that could have been 'fatal to the young science' " (274). So the reversals in Freud's life
contributing to reversals in thinking move in a parallel way
• from Jacob-Sigmund to Sigmund-children,
• from Jacob-Sigmund to Freud-Mathilde,
and in the corollary parallel form
• from seduction to infantile sexuality theory (Oedipus complex).
But the whole thing, put together, is the Jacob-Freud-Mathilde affair. And yet, the new difference is that
Sigmund, once a son to his father, is now a father to Mathilde. While both of these relationships (Freud as
both son and father) were the case in biological fact, they were not in terms of Freud's musings on the
aetiology of hysteria. If Sigmund's thinking was determined in great part by parental-pedagogical-
(pederastic) relationships, then his thinking could only change when the determinants become not just
perverted but inverted.
Kristeva asks:
Could the discovery of the Oedipus complex, and thereby of infantile sexuality, and thus the
beginning of the modern conception of the child, have been produced through an inverted Oedipal
complex? Could the 'Oedipal complex' be the discourse of mourning for his father's death? [Cf.
Ballmary. But who is the father? Is this mourning, too, a double gesture?] As neurosis is the
negative [i.e., a reversal] of perversion, could that discourse represent, in like manner, the negative
of the guilt experienced by a son who is forced by the signifier to take his father's place?" (274;
emphasis mine)
The reversals and connections become hazardously dizzying. Kristeva sums up her view of them:
So after fathering six children in eight years, loving them as a devoted father . . . having admitted
to being the possible seducer of his daughter but also the victim of his father's seduction, 'one can
no longer begin again.' In addition to this recognition of closure, of disillusionment with respect to
the hysterical body, the libido as substance, and 'seductive eroticism'—is it the recognition of a
sexual dead end?—there came his father's death and Freud's feelings of guilt toward him (no, the
seducer cannot be my father, the seducer is me, the child of this father; now I am also the father
[of Mathilde]; therefore the seducer can only be the child) [emphasis mine]; this is accompanied at
once by the desire to take his place, to assume the moral, paternal function. . . . The father is dead,
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long live the father that I am: there where it (id) was shall I (ego) come to be [Kristeva's
emphasis]. (275)
The map of destiny—and what drives Freud and us semiotically across it—as signifiers—writ across the
surface of our bodies—can be rather strange. Uncanny. Without any destination except looping back
around. Perpetually. We die in dis/order to be reborn.
But something remains, as is always and all ways the case. If we follow up Kristeva's thinking
with Leclaire's, Blanchot's, and Fynsk's Infant Figures, we can begin perhaps to see that it is Freud, as
primary narcissistic child, who is dying in "that [semicolon] that," and being reborn, ex-posed, in that
middle clause that he cannot speak—"To put it in writing is more difficult than anything else for me; it also
would take me too far afield" (Complete Letters 268)—but can only express as an interruption. Which will
take him to a far, far away field. This suspension of time, in this allusion to an unaffordable interruption, is
enough of a pause to mark the limit, to signify a figuration of a rebirth, even though it is presented in this
interruption as a much deferred action (Freud is 41 years old). All that Jacob had taught Sigi, making Sigi
who he was, has to die. A child named Sigi is being killed. Has died. But, Maurice Blanchot asks,
Where is this child? According to psychoanalytic vocabulary (which, I believe, only those who
practice psychoanalysis can use—only those, that is, for whom analysis is a risk, and extreme
danger, a daily test—for otherwise it is only the convenient language of an established culture),
according, then, to psychoanalytic vocabulary, one might identify the child with 'primary
narcissistic representation,' which is to say that this representation has the status of an ever-
unconscious, and consequently, forever indelible, representation. Whence the literally 'maddening'
difficulty: in order not to remain in the limbo of the infans, on the near side of desire, one must
destroy the indestructible and even finish off (not at one blow, but constantly) that to which one
has not now, nor has one ever had, nor will one ever have, access: impossible, necessary death.
And once again, we live and speak (but with what sort of speech?) only because death has already
taken place: an unsituated, unsituatable event which, lest we become mute in very speech, we
entrust to the work of the concept (negativity), or again to the psychoanalytic work which cannot
but lift and relieve us of 'the ordinary confusion' between this first death which would be an
interminable accomplishment and the second death which is called, in a facile simplification,
'organic' (as if the first were not). (Writing 67)
What has been done to you, you poor child? Fynsk writes: "No one can say fully, intelligibly, what
the death of the child is, for all saying proceeds from such a death. But all saying is also haunted by it" (50;
emphasis mine). Only with the perpetual death of Sigi can Freud move on, graduate, and yet spend his post-
school days, writing the paradigm, continuing the test drive, the drive/s of and to his ID. Which is to say
that Freud is haunted. He returns to his old haunts, to the land of infans, in his explorations and inventions
of psychoanalysis; he returns to his éthos, that place, as Charles Scott characterizes it, which is "hidden
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from view" (144). Freud had to be "cautious in relating to the éthos-reality," Scott might say about Freud's
adventure, "that could be hidden by appearances, language, and behavior. To know a creature's éthos,
[Freud] had to see where the animal went to be at home, as it were, or where it went when threatened, or
where it went to die" (144). Freud understood that to know Infans-child-fathers, he would have to
experience his self and other in the good times and bad times, their limits, not only where (human) beings
lived, but also how they lived, against their limits, by way of their instincts. Out of the impossible would
have to come the possible. Hence, given Freud's ethics, he (Ego) goes where it (ID) is (cf. Kate Millett's
ethics, The Basement, as I have developed them in all previous chapters.)
And given the predisposition of psychoanalysis itself, given its penchant of being de/centered in a
field (a "too far a field") of signifying articulations, the history of psychoanalysis is the history of an error.
But I take the error to be inevitable and, if not, then a fortunate error. The error of going to the child is the
error of the limit. That would protect us against the myth of presence, of immanence. The error establishes,
as Freud and then Lacan (Book VII, The Ethics) have indicated, the conditions for the possibility of an
ethics of psychoanalysis that confronts the ID. This ethics must search, however, for ways of reestablishing
a general libidinal economy (Bataille) in terms of sexuality. And community (Bataille, Nancy, Blanchot,
Agamben, Ronell). It must set aside the restricted, Oedipal one. It must acknowledge, instead, a
Nicomachean Erotics (e.g., see Lyotard, Libidinal Economy 155-73). It must acknowledge a libidinal
education (e.g., Cixous, "Libidinal Education According to Clarice Lispector" in Coming to Writing 155-
181). I will continue this necessity in Part 4, chapter 8 and Rebeginnings.
(Q: Have we forgotten Sylvia? A: No, for Sylvia is very much involved in and is a product of
Oedi-pedagogy. But so is Gertrude. Both Sylvia and Gertrude, student and teacher, are the topos of the
impossible. Both are the infans. Gertrude, in the language of psychoanalysis, is an example par excellence
of primary narcissism, through which works the death drive. Gertrude never gave up nor attempted to
domesticate the tyrant within her. In killing Sylvia she parodically attempts to kill the tyrant within. Sylvia
is her mirror image. But there is more to say in terms of sacrifice, but perhaps at this point in the discussion
we cannot but [not] laugh. Give the gift of laughter. I do remember, however, how Millett had laughter
function for Sylvia and how Gertrude responded to it. I have since read how Kafka, according to Ronell,
had laughter function for Sarah in relation to the various Abrahams who received the call to answer but
were not yet prepared to give the answer, had not yet put their house in order. [See Ronell, Stupidity 287-
94; 306-10.] Q: Well, yes, but why are we still talking about sacrificial readings? How do we get out of
here to non-sacrificial readings? A: This book is not in order, for as I keep saying, I follow the disorder in
which things become significant to me. And I have yet a long ways to go to make an end that would be a
setless of rebeginnings without the conditions for the possibility of sacrificial readings. So in the face of
your question, I remain haunted by the call of the test [G-d called Abraham to a test] and can only remain
in my predisposed haunt [to engage in test drives].)
Anonymous ("My Mentor, My Rapist")
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"The exhibition greets us with a row of anonymous faces and speaks of memory. For whom are
these faces recorded? The question would press if we knew nothing of the artist, for these figures
require something of us."
Christopher Fynsk, "Anonymous Figures," Infant Figures (165; Fynsk's emphasis).
On April, 2000, someone published in GQ (a.k.a, gentleman's quarterly) an article about how his
mentor raped him. For a while, the article was the rage of Manhattan and bulletin boards on the Web with
people trying to identify both the author (the student) and "the tall man" (mentor-rapist). The article-story is
slick, very literate, and written in a style of an un/believable authorless. The article parallels in theme and
circumstances both Johnathan Nolan's story "Memento Mori" and Andrea Dworkin's article "They Took
My Body from Me and Used It," both of which I discussed in chapter 1.
"Anonymous" is drugged, four times, and apparently raped, or possibly sexually abused by "the
tall man," whom he viewed to be his mentor. The writings of these events by Anonymous are in "four
incidents" in the same article. Your assignment is to locate and read this story. Once you have read it, then
you must, in order to complete this chapter, take the following test. If you have problems with any of the
questions of this test, you might want to reread this chapter on Oedi-pedagogy. The questions:
1. Do you believe this story as it is told? Or do you think it is a hoax? What do you think is the
author's attitude toward what he is writing? How would you interrogate the author, Anonymous, about his
story—assuming it is a man's story? 41
2. Why does Anonymous query the readers: "Is it important now to say that ["the tall man"] was
my first wholly adult, openly gay friend? . . . Or is it more important, perhaps, to say that my dad killed
himself when I was 19? That he killed himself with my car, in my mother's garage, without a note of
explanation? That my mother and I, despite our shared grief, had not then and have not still found enough
patience to get along?" (208).
3. Is this a story about the absent father? And the mourning of the loss by a son and mother who
are at odds with each other? Is this an Oedipal story? Or is this a story about primary narcissistic
representation and its death? Or could this possibly be, as one Letter to the Editor suggests, a story in which
the author "outs" himself? Or all of the above?
4. Why does Anonymous describe "the tall man" and himself by mirroring their ages, interactions,
and roles? For examples, the ages 23 and 32, the "funny voices game," the mentor-intern modeling (207)—
all are mirroring devices.
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5. What associations in the story are made to date rape? How do you respond to them?
6. Why does Anonymous keep blaming himself rather than "the tall man"? How far does he
eventually go to hold the man responsible? What is the significance of the closing scene, encounter, when
in a bar Anonymous sends "the tall man" a drink, which is a gift he characterizes as "the perfect ironic
gesture to let him know I'm onto his methodology, and maybe he doesn't, it's hard to say, because what he
does, when the bartender points me out, is he glides over to greet me, his face a mask of innocence and
surprise until . . . I'm telling him that he's a rapist, and he's pivoting, without a flicker of response, to rejoin
his crowd. . ." (255)?
7. What do you make of the many references to tests (urine and blood tests) and testing
(establishing trust)?
8. Finally, what function do the photographs have accompanying the story? How do they invite
you to read the story?
Part 2: Oedipal Canonization
Chapter 5: Canon, Obsessive/Hysteric
Freud Redux
"I've told you this before, haven't I?"
Leonard Shelby in Memento (Film).
"Let me try to recoup. We've covered a lot of ground, and I'm not fully sure where we stand now."
Christopher Fynsk, Infant Figures (77).
The Tain in the Mirror: Pedagogy/canon? Canon/pedagogy? Or is it some third figure? Again we
are concerned with the two, yet differently. And possibly a third (anonymous) figure. There is no escape
from how one mirrors the other. Examine one; you are examining the other one. But reflection, thought
about thought, does not guarantee self-knowledge. To think so, to suppose to know so, is un/founded on
forgetfulness, on repression, itself. To think so is to forget the tain (the silver backing) in the mirror that
makes reflection possible in the first place (see Gasché; cf. Rorty). This forgetting is a narcissistic lapse.
(Though "we" know all this, we nonetheless are ingenious in finding ways to forget it.)
We started in the previous chapter with this same reflection. I repeat it again here, and cannot but
re-repeat it with differences from beginning to re-beginnings. I know that all this repetition and difference
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(différance) can be troubling for a reader who has a taste for clear demarcations in terms of parts and
chapters; instead, I have also called on the inventive possibilities of the caesura (interruptions, finitude, or
what I referred to earlier in chapter 4 as parabase) and will now call on the possibilities of enjambment
(spillovers). Such a mis/approach changes the conditions for the possibilities of theme and variations, or for
test drives. So again, the anarchitechtonics of writing interruptions and spillovers:
1__________________, caesura, n __________________,
2__________________, caesura, n __________________,
3__, c a e s u r a, n __.
4__________________, caesura, n _________ (enjambment n )
5__________________________ n…..1
If we recall chapter 3 is "The Test," a major caesurastic-interruption, an act of finitude.
(Proximity and the unconscious mind of the Dictionary: engross, engulf, enhance, enharmonic,
enigma, enjambment, enjoin, enjoy.)
The question is one of "where we stand," a question concerning homeostasis. 2 But the question
concerning homeostasis can also become one of "how we get out of here to see the other sides," the other
surfaces; can also become a question of topology, folding as preparing for unfolding. In other words, the
question is one that can be seen as not just a question of our natural instincts, but can also be seen as one of
discovering the conditions for the possibilities of what does not yet exist in nature except as a potentiality.
Or as we will begin to say later an impotentiality (adynamis). What we see by way of the tain is a distortion
among other possible distortions. Topologists are concerned with re(con)figuring the shape of natural
objects, bringing into existence what, heretofore, has not been in nature, except by mistake, or adaptation,
mutation, due to coding errors. Topologists twist or bend natural figures to make cultural, virtual figures.
Topologists hack nature by introducing errors into shapes, for example, the half twist as an error introduced
into a strip of paper in dis/order to make the Moebius strip. Or molten glass in dis/order to make a Klein jar.
The common tain sustains what we see. Change the tain typologically, change everything psychologically.
But in hacking nature, topologists are rehacking culture. Topologist do cultural work by playing with
shapes, making what might appear to be useless. Topologists are bricoleurs, hoping to make something that
the social engineer cannot find a practical use for. If topologists play with mythomorphic discourse,
engineers work with epistemic discourse (cf. Derrida, Writing 278-93). If topologists take something and
turn it into nothing, social engineers take nothing and turn it into something. The two, as Derrida would
say, are "contradictorily coherent" (279).
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Sigmund Freud was initially an engineer (a medical doctor) and then a topologist (psychoanalyst).
Perhaps if we but reflect on this comparison we might come to a different insight into the zigzagging, the
differances, between the seduction theory and infantile sexuality (Oedipus complex), which as I have
maintained in chapter 4 against Masson's thinking, are contradictorily coherent. It is not a matter of what
Freud was first and then became, for he is, more so than not, both, and yet, in between the difference, or in
the différance. To think otherwise, I would argue, is to create a differend. Once Freud deflected being a
doctor—ap.parently dropping interest in the seduction theory—and then invented the topological features
of psychoanalysis, he but re-deflected back to being a medical doctor, searching for some application based
on depth psychology. Looking for a cure. (This analogy is unstable, reflecting on the instability of Freud's
reflections. But as I have strongly suggested—contrary to Masson, and yet very much in the mad text of
Masson's account—Freud did not choose finally between being either a topologist or an engineer. Often the
two possibilities become confused in his thinking. He lived, therefore, as I insist, in the confusion,
confederation, between the two, on the verge of a third place. I have always thought it possible to see
Jacques Lacan, who had little interest in the so-called cure, as a practicing Freudian topologist, playing with
his borromenean knots, attempting to refold Freud back into a topologist. Lacan's predisposition, his
pedagogy, was not to presume to know. He moved beyond a certain Oedipus, ever examining the riddle of
the text. (Let us not forget the two riddles that Millett is confronted with in The Basement and how she
herself mediated on and dealt with them.)
Freud, as a topologist, half-twisted the tain of the medical doctor's mirror of reflection so as to talk
about what could not be seen in the doctor's mirror. For Freud, slips of the tongue—parapraxes—were less
errors and more so symptoms of either a physical or mental trauma (SE: XV, 15-79). They were the psyche
topologically refiguring the tain of thought to hide psychic reflection, but to call attention to itself
eventually. Lacan half-twisted Freud's das Ding (the thing) and linked his knots in such a way as to make
visible the Real, nothing (see Feminine Sexuality 162-71). Freud and his parafollowers were cultural
workers-at-play, or to round off this discussion, bricoleurs.
But given my radical of presentation here, topologists are situated, as reshapers, between nature
(physis) and culture (nomos). They are, as Giorgio Agmaben might say, in "the differential margin"
(History and Infancy 78). Freud et al. can be seen as zigzagging between the two poles of this tired, feudal
and futile binary. Topologists such as Freud reflect on matter, or thoughts, and bend them, just as reflection
itself always already bends images of thought. To reflect is to throw or bend back (e.g., light,
enlightenment) from a surface. To reflect, the OED tells us, is variously to turn or direct in a certain course,
to divert; to turn away or aside, to deflect. It is to bend, turn, or fold back; give a backward bend or curve;
to recurve. To bring back from anger or estrangement; to appease. To turn, cast (the eye or thought) on. To
impute, an imputation. To meditate, to take into deep or serious consideration. I would add, to casuistically
stretch, not just to make new, but with the purpose of uncovering singularities. Freud, at one time or
another, performed all these tasks. While negation (repression) would bend light, much as we might find in
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funhouse-grotesque mirrors, and call attention to being-bent, Freud would attempt to unbend and to explain
what being-bent (out of shape) was about.
It can be that way with reflections, and What is psychoanalysis all about but reflections on
repressed memories, while running the risk of forgetting the tain that makes it all possible? Perhaps
psychoanalysis ethically seeks to pass to the other side of the mirror altogether, in hopes of returning lost
souls to this side (?) of the tain (see Millett, Loony-Bin 95, 241; cf. Lecercle). But parapsychoanalysis—
that which would be a nondisciplinary psychoanalysis set alongside, or resituated at the threshold of,
psychoanalysis—would uncover the conditions for the possibilities of singularities. In other words, would
move beyond, at the threshold, subject-object relations and bring to the forefront radical, finite
singularities. This would be, therefore, the Deleuzean and Guattarian Anti-Oedipal approach, which is
ap.parently for Deleuzeans beyond both Freud and Lacan. 3
But a practical question remains: Is there any order to all this? Yes, whatever dis/order is imposed!
From the tain itself. Or from the twist itself. From moving towards singularities themselves. For a possible
paraconceptual starting place, let us recall paradigmatically the character Earl in "Memento Mori," who
looks into the mirror each morning to read the notes to himself tatooed on his body in dis/order to
rediscover who and where he is and what his purpose in life is. Without the mirror, with its tain, he would
but fall into oblivion, since he can make no new memories beyond the moment of his trauma (the blow to
the head). And yet, all the surface of his body—his skin—is a mirror, mirroring the mirror around him.
Imminently reversible, it all is! I often think of Earl in the story version or Leonard in the film Memento as
a walking flayed self of a previous embodiment. A flayed skin walking-un/consciousness, as Freud might
put it (see The Ego and the Id, SE, XIX: 19-27; cf. Taylor, Hiding). What remains of his past before the
trauma to his head, he can remember; but what remains of the now after the trauma, he cannot remember
but must write or depict as pictures on the surface of his skin so as to read in the mirror and be re-minded.
(His skin, in more ways than one, is a record of his consciousness.) Like St. Batholomae carrying his flayed
skin in (at) the Last Judgment in Michaelangelo's depiction of him, Earl-Leonard carries his own skin
around with an image of the rapist-killer on it. 4 Skin and photographs. He is forever suspended in a Kafkan
state of judgment before a hall of not justice but mirrors. Finally through an act of cynicism, Earl-Leonard
takes one of the photographs and turns the image of a man and the words he wrote about the man on the
image into a memory-truth and acts on it. But even that attempt to satisfy a sense of an ending to reflection,
he will not remember; even that act of revenge, he will not gain satisfaction from in remembrance. It is a
sacrifice to the mirror that continues into infinity. (God is dead; we are left with a "desert of mirrors" [Abe,
Face of Another 232]. So What's the difference? The rage for immanence is nonetheless satisfied! But does
it have to be! Jean-Luc Nancy writes: "The growing of the desert could indeed unveil for us an unknown
space, an unknown, excessive aridity of the sources of sense" [Sense 24]. 5 )
Other exemplars for paraconceptual starting places might be Fort/Da, Jack-in-the-box, a funhouse,
playland, or receptacle (reception, mise en abyme, the g/Gap[tm] for children). In the midst of the most
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seriously intended philosophical, psychoanalytic thinking, there is the ludic, the inescapable ludic.
Reflection shifts from seriousness (recall the OED on reflection, "meditation, deep or serious
consideration") to ludic (cf. Lanham 1-35). We can see Earl-Leonard as a comic character. We can but
laugh, as Jean-François Lyotard suggests the ancients did at Oedipus (see Just Gaming 42). There is no
final repressing of the ludic, but proportionally the ever returning of it. 6 This is the dis/order to all of this.
Celia Lury makes a powerful case for what she calls "prosthetic culture." The role of photography
in its impact on our identities and memories is by now well known and documented. Lury, however,
breathes new life into photographic images of and reflections on ourselves and/as others. Prosthetic culture
would (could) be our dis/ordering "this." She turns to Ian Hacking who tells us: "Photography was part of
the initial rhetoric of multiplicity" (qtd. by Lury 122; Hacking 5). Lury calls on Hacking to rethink the
problem of recovering memory, due to physical or mental trauma (whether seduction or fantasy). Hacking
tells us: "There is no canonical way to think of our own past. In the endless quest for order and structure,
we grasp at whatever picture is floating by and put our past into its frame" (qtd. by Lury 123; Hacking 89;
emphasis mine). The techne at work, once photography, becomes the video camera (Lury 123-24). (Recall
Millett and the coroner's photographs of Sylvia, with gaping mouth. Recall my counter-reading of Strosser's
video of Rape Stories. Recall Earl in "Memento Mori" and his photographs as prosthetic memory. Recall
Freud's "screen memories." Recall these pictures that I throw, floating by you.) Lury finally and quite
powerfully recalls, yet makes possible, for us Ernst Jünger's notion of the "great mirror" of "technological
order" (114), in which we all find ourselves a reflection. 7 As Milan Kundera tells us: "God's eye has been
replaced by a camera" (Immortality 31). As Avital Ronell tells us: "The death of God has left us with a lot
of appliances" (Finitude's Score 308). Simply put, though God is dead, there is, nonetheless, a great (digital
video) camera in the open sky (Divine places), which produces and orders (prosthetic) culture. 8 Or yet
otherwise normally put, though God is dead, there is the real-reel. Today, we hack culture, as if we human
beings had not always hacked it.
"Somewhere in the mind a lunatic shuffled a pack of snapshots and dealt them out at random,
shuffled once more and dealt them out in different order, again and again, indefinitely. There was
no chronology. The idiot remembered no distinction between before and after. . . . [W]ho decided
which snapshots were to be kept, which thrown away? A frightened or libidinous animal,
according to the Freudians. But the Freudians were victims of the pathetic fallacy, incorrigible
rationalizers always in search of sufficient reasons, of comprehensible motives."
Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (15).
Let us orderly, and yet eventually and traumatically, examine, in re-reflection what is (a)
happening in chapter 4, the grammar and rhetoric of that dis/order. And perhaps the S/symbolic-semiotic
(Lacan, Kristeva) of it all as well. (I want to re-survey what has happened, heretofore, before we move on
to canon im/proper, as if we have not been discussing canon and its dis/contents!) The grammar, or
paragrammar, of chastising (committed by Freud's peers [It is their imposition!]) is straight forward,
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finding fault with Freud's ap.parent decision to renounce the seduction theory. But my pointless has been
that the chastising is not all that straight forward; for it is not without, in the midst of its self-interested
conductive-connections (say, in an architecture of hysteria), a not-so-deeply-repressed hysterical feature.
Moreover, the rhetoric of chaste thinking (recommitted by Freud himself) that I have variously referred to
in my discussions of Masson's Freud (recommitted by Masson himself [and no doubt by myself in my
identifying the crime]) is that of a zigzagging, dialectical movement as expressed in Freud's attitudes
toward the seduction theory and the infantile sexuality theory. I am persuaded that Freud is, or can be seen
as, dis/engaging in a heuristic balancing act so as to work toward a solution that would be a dis-solution.
But what do I mean, in this summary, by a solution-dis-solution? We must not forget that Freud is working
on his own neurotic problems ("Screen Memories" [SE, III: 301-322]) as much as he is working on his
patients' ("Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," on Dora [SE, VII: 3-124]). In fact, when
working on his patients, he works on himself. Hence, the mirror image, or level of narcissism that informs
much of Freud's work. Psychoanalysis is, as Ronell might (not) put it, TraumaTV. It is the event of
surveillance. It is difficult knowing whether the viewer watches TV; the TV, the viewer. The analyst, the
analysand; the analysand, the analyst. Freud's narcissism—name your poison—I am suggesting, allows
him—after all, he is standing before a pedagogical mirror that instructs him—but the great technological
mirror—eventually to find the rhetorical ruse of imminent reversibility. Which is a life-sustaining tactic.
(Or I will continue to claim as much on "our" perpetual way to a third figure.)
Imminent reversibility is another name for "the fragility of finitude" (see Ronell Finitude's Score
4-5), is another name for "nonunderstanding" or "stupidity" (Stupidity 144), is another name for "the irony
of irony" (117-46; cf. de Man, Blindness 218-19; "The Concept of Irony" in Aesthetic Ideology 163-85).
The tactic allows Freud a way of avoiding the ultimate trap of narcissistic immanence, or the myth of
presence, while in it. That is, of thinking he knows. Has knowledge. But I emphasize: This tactic is not one
that is employed or marshaled by Freud or anyone else; this tactic is deployed by the object's causing the
subject to read not universals or even so-called provisionary universals, but imminent reversals.
Bewilderment. Befuddlement. On the wayves to transversals. At best, knowing is a negative knowledge, or
one of not knowing: Paul DeMan explains, "Knowledge of the impossibility of knowing precedes the act of
consciousness that tries to reach it. This structure is a circular one" (Blindness 75; cf. Ronell Stupidity 104-
109). But readers, certain readers, will insist on knowing. Which they will call provisional knowing and
acting! Turning and fixing, attempting to re-fix, imminent into immanent reversibility, or dialectic itself, as
the only materialism. But a preposition in search of an object relation (even an uncertain certain
attachment) that would be a proposition proved is a dangerous presupposition, predisposition. This is a
preposition best abandoned 9 for "our" calling, as Ronell puts it, "a community without communion, having
relinquished the basic claim to a totality of meaning" (Ronell 149; cf. Blanchot, The Unavowable
Community). The ethic of reading the world that I am alluding to again is Ronell's: "I am stupid before the
other" (60). At least, that is how I would see not seeing, yet seeing "it"! 10 Hence, the long way around to
explain what dis-solution—not disillusionment—might mean.
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Freud is reinventing himself (by way of autopoesis) and, thereby, attempting to rend himself of his
father, Jacob. (Proximity and the unconscious mind of the American Heritage Dictionary: renascence,
renascent, rencounter, rend, rendezvous, rendition, renegade, renege, renegotiate.) Freud begins to identify
with other objects such as Hamilcar Barcas-Hannibal, Laius-Oedipus, [G-d]-Moses. And of course with
Fliess. But Freud—in fending off these acquired, mirrored objects, which are but temporary sublimations
(dis-solutions)—remains potentially in between. (Moving toward the virtual.) In our discussions, in terms
of primary narcissism, we arrived at the following relay of amourous perversity: Jacob-Sigmund-Mathilde.
Freud is both son and father, father and son. Freud is, in another mirror effect, initially in favor of the
seduction theory (fathers as perpetrators); then, the infantile sexuality theory (children as perpetrators).
Freud is father of the man. He is a child playing a game, to which I will return; for this game played is in
the tain, which allows us to reflect, and yet only reflect on reflections.
"[I]f what children play with is history, and if play is a relationship with objects and human
behaviour that draws from them a pure historical-temporal aspect—it does not then seem
irrelevant that in a fragment of Heraclitus—that is to say, at the origins of European thought—
aion, time in its original sense, should figure as a 'child playing with dice,' and that 'domain of the
baby' should define the scope of this play."
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History 72-73.
"From photographic events and seeing photographically thus emerges a self-identity that is no
longer simply defined by the edict 'I think therefore I am' but by an extended agency of the body
in prostheses both mechanical and perceptual. In this technological enhancement of 'potential,' the
self is defined by the relation 'I can therefore I am.' "
Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture Inside Flyleaf (emphasis mine).
Preposition to Paraproposition: Freud is that preposition (presupposition) that wants, given its
grammatical functions, to take an object. Relation. But not his father's object (not an abject). He hopes for a
typological twist. (Here the irony of irony, as I have rehashed it, is a precursor of topology, the whirl of
half-twists.) Freud, as Serge Leclare would put it, is trying to kill the child (which is the representative
child given by Jacob to him) within—that is, the narcissistic representative within himself—so that not the
second, but the third, child might be born and live and play life abundantly. This is what Freudian
psychoanalysis is all about. This is the Freudian preposition cum paraproposition, whether it be for the
analysand or the analyst hirself. The paracure—a second-cum-third birth—if that is even an acceptable
word and gloss anymore, lies in between the analysand and the analyst. This notion perhaps can come to be
understood in terms of transference and counter-transference, but not necessarily so. It could come to be
understood, in postmodern technology as Tweening. But Freud ap.parently does not want to get from A to
Z. He ap.parently desires A and Z together (a topological mirroring, but not forming a hybrid). We are not
dealing with dialectic here (i.e., with a realm of Being), but with reversibility and the in between and then
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the outside, or rather threshold (i.e., a relation of beings). So yes, I would insist that Freud is searching
(while at times searching) for a third figure? 11 Or an improper proper éthea for his éthos.
The grammar and rhetoric, if not the S/symbolic altogether, is that of mirrors in front of mirrors.
Caught in reminiscences. Everything is canonized in mirrors. We, hysterics! Obsessively hysterical!
Perpetually stirred in between reflections. But therein lies also the problem that refuses to be solved, only
dis-solved. Freud, understandably so, situates everything within the child. (The very topos of mimesis,
simulation, potentiality! Rivalry!) Which Julia Kristeva sees as Freud's mistake. To recapitulate, she sees
the child as "the place [either topos or chora?] of an 'error' " (Desire 272). But is this, too, a critique of
Freud? I do not (will not to) think so. How to explain? Perhaps, this time, by way of Martin Heidegger,
who writes:
Being sets being adrift in errancy. Beings come to pass in that errancy by which they circumvent
Being and establish the realm of error. . . . Error is the space in which history unfolds. In error
what happens in history bypasses what is like Being. Therefore, whatever unfolds historically is
necessarily misinterpreted. During the course of this misinterpretation destiny awaits what will
become of its seed. It brings those whom it concerns to the possibilities of the fateful and fatal. . . .
Man's destiny gropes toward its fate. . . . Without errancy there would be no connecting from
destiny to destiny: there would be no history. (Early Greek Thinking 26; cf. Lacan, Television
xxvii-xxviii, 3; de Man, Blindness 103, 163-65, 185, 238)
As I said, Freud cannot but be the child or old man stupid (What is the différance?) before the other
(Ronell). Connecting, connecting, but connecting conductively. He receives the call (the onto-theological
vocation) but can only write the paradigm, by way of conduction, to its incompletion, zigzagging. He can
but mimic thanatos and eros, homeostasis and discharge-union. The flip sides of reflection. But Freud
can—and does—live in be tween. (A virtual space.) In momentary stays of execution, ex-position, ex-
propriation. Attempting autopoesis. In that radical finitude 12 :
And so he would go on, and she would listen to every word; interpreting them rightly, so as to see,
that is to say, without his having to tell her, the phosphorescence on the waves; the icicles clanking
in the shrouds; how he went to the top of the mast in a gale; there reflected on the destiny of man;
came down again; had a whisky and soda; went on shore; was trapped by a black woman;
repented; reasoned it out; read Pascal; determined to write philosophy; bought a monkey; debated
on the true end of life; decided in favor of Cape Horn, and so on. All this and a thousand other
things she understood him to say. (Virginia Woolf, Orlando 127) 13
All the wayves. Freud lives in this mannerism, not solely by his choices, but by his destinies, making
zigzags: \/\/\/\/\/\/\/. . . . (Or as I will say later, folds.) Paradesigning, ap.parently, an anarchitexture of
hysteria that refuses to become an architexture of paranoia (or obsession). It is not architectonics but folds
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that he is working and playing with. (Again, see Complete Letters 246-47 for Freud's sketch. Notice the
zigzagging subject effect in Freud's diagram, not unlike a mirror effect, or a graphic representation of the
ways of light waves. Notice the word "Work," written large next to the sketch, to which we will return.
While Freud writes to Fliess in zigzags: \/\/\/\/\/\/\/, I can imagine that Fliess writes in parallel cursive lines
as such: ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||. I am thinking of the psychotic serial killer in the film Seven, who has a large
library of volumes fi||||||||ed. Additionally, I have in mind Robert Crumb's brother Charles who in drawing
and writing comics finally got around to writing-drawing cursive |||||||||||||||||||| page after page after page. This
whole notion, to anticipate myself, in the difference between \/\/\/\/\/\/\/ and ||||||||||||| will become rather
obvious when I discuss canon formations in terms of hysteric and obsessive, or paranoid, styles of thinking.
After all, this chapter is about canon in the light or darkness of Oedi-pedagogy.) 14 But ever again, this
whole book.less is about thinking, reading, writing rape.
What I said in chapter 4 is that Freud was playing the hysteric (with a destiny-destination
overdetermined) to Fliess's paranoid (determined). Freud stares into the sun (the homophone, son-child),
stares into a general, exuberant perverse economy and it (ap.parently) b(l)inds him; it was always the black
sun for him, always the lost object, mourning and melancholia (see Kristeva Black Sun; cf. Agamben,
Stanzas 19-21). And yet, it was at times, at potential moments, haecceities, "always [all ways] in the
middle" (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 263; cf. 264-65), which is the very condition for the possibilities
of compossibilities. Most of the time Chronos; some of the time Aion.
Time is a child playing a game of draughts;
the kingship is in the hands of a child.
Heraclitus, Fr. 51. Trans. Kathleen Freeman.
A Child Playing a Game: What I have tried to offer as a communicative exchange (with my
readers) is that Freud is a child playing a game, to which I now return but with a difference. The question of
the child playing the game is forever open. And should remain as such. Work or play? Play or work?
(Vocation or avocation [yet vacation]?) Or some in be tween?
I will approach the question of the child playing by way of four commentaries in two parts:
Kristeva, Deleuze, Derrida, and Agamben. The first part that I will discuss is elusive, frightening, uncanny,
haunting. The second, familiar to work with, for it invites a divided, yet balanced difference between canny
and uncanny. (This difference appears to be a dividing practice [diaeresis] to cordon off the threatening
part.) The first can take us away from our common sense understandings of reality. The second, return us
home. To investigate the difference, however, we must leave home. . . . "Life! A Lover?" (Orlando 120). . .
.
Kristeva makes this comparison:
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The child-parent or the parent-child, thus presented to analytical practice, joins cause and effect,
origin and becoming, space and time, to produce that specific twist of psychoanalytic discourse
that brings to mind the Heraclitan [Aion]: cyclical time and also space where the Greek thinker
happened to see the poet at play—the poet who alone maintains the discourse of a child giving
birth (to a father?). (Desire 275; emphasis mine)
But what is this twist to cause-effect, time, and this reshaping of space? It is to be found, though to remain
elusive, in Aion, which introduces, say, the topological half twist. Basically, what we are dealing with here
is in old formalist terms a paradox. When I say "half-twist," however, I am again referring to the
topological figure of a Moebius Strip, which is made of a strip of paper given a half-twist and then taped
together. The half-twist changes the properties of the circled paper, taking away the property of one side, or
edge. Therefore, when cut in two, it does not fall in two but into one larger circle that now has two sides.
The half-twist places the circle into the time of Aion, but the cutting returns it to Chronos (to be cut in two,
tic and toc). Here we have a joining of Aion 15 (Time as a child, an indefinite moment, a time of play, as
Deleuze and Guattari point out, in Thousand 262) and Chronos (Time as a god, a time of measure, of work,
with the god eating its children). What is being alluded to here in the improper proper name of Aion, what
is so elusive, is a time of indifferentiation. Not a time of tic-toc, but a time that exists between –toc and tic-.
But this is not a time that gets its orientation in an evenly measured return of tic-toc . . . tic-toc. In this time
of ellipses and for haecceity (again, of indifferentiation, or radical sigularity [Cf. Nancy, Inoperative;
Agamben, Coming), the child makes, creates, the father (of psychoanalysis) by way of play. (The child is
the pedagogue, guide, of the man who would be a father. A thinker. A bearer of a false and scandalous, yet
new science.) As the child makes the father in Aion, the father falls, however, into the definite time of
Chronos, a child-father who eats the father. Patricide. 16 (In our little allegory in chapter 4, it is the father
Jacob consuming Sigmund.) What one would want, hope for, is an increase in toc and tic in the midst of
tic-toc. 17
But the distinction between Aion and Chronos is more interesting, as Deleuze tells us in The Logic
of Sense (165), because this distinction can be read as the space or place "between the Aion of surfaces
[emphasis mine] and the whole of Chronos together with the becoming-mad of the depths," to which we
will eventually return full throttle in Part 4 of Chaste Rape. (The becoming-mad of the depths is the other
side of the tain, to which we are not aiming. It is the third of the in between, a superficial, or surface,
madness, that will have been our purposeful destination.) But this Aion and Chronos is no simple binary; in
fact, it is not a binary at all.
To explain further and yet quite differently, inventively, for as Deleuze again tells us, "there is a third,
there must be a third, pertaining to the Aion" (168). It is easy to see that this dyad between Chronos and
Aion is potentially not a dyad (binary) at all, but a triadic configuration, with Chronos signifying tic and toc
(on its possible way to immanent dialectical stasis, or heaven cum hell), as I suggested, and Aion signifying
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the superficial madness of the in between time of toc … tic (on its way to imminent reversibility, or
helhaven, or limbo). Hence:
tic,
toc,
toc . . . tic (the conditions for the return of the repressed in a space of the ellipses, a mise en
abyme, a hole, which is also a space that disperses any movement toward a dialectical
synthesis, immanence, a myth of presence [cf. Derrida, "Ellipsis" in Writing and Difference
298-99.]).
Again, there is much to say here in terms of Aion as, for example, being an ironic interjection or as Paul de
Man says of Schlegel's definition of irony in "The Rhetoric of Temporality" as a "permanent parabasis"
(228), in other words, as an irony of irony that never stops becoming ironic. Never stops imminent
interruptions. Never stops calling us to the realization of radical finitude. But for now, let us remind
ourselves that we have been discussing time exclusively.
What about space? Which I have hinted at in discussing time, middle times? What is parallel with
Aion is Chora, or Khora. (Recall Ulmer and chorography, writing the paradigm.) Here is the time-space
relationship: Khora is to Aion as Topos is to Chronos. Derrida, in his homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant, tells
us that Khora is logically along side logos/mythos. 18 It is, more clearly here than Aion, a third genus of
discourse "beyond categorical oppositions" (On the Name 90). Hence, it is not a species or a genus. It, too,
like Aion, is an indifferentiation. A space, yet time, of indifference, that is, outside of species-genus
thinking. The two together make the exclusionary logic of neither-nor and the participatory logic of both-
and (89).
(For many who would be materialist rhetoricians and readers, Aion and Khora as mis/conceptual
perpetual re/starting places are highly problematic. Language itself, given the kind of relationship that such
rhetoricians and readers would have with the logos—a nondisfigurative relationship—is problematic. But
to think that a rhetor and reader can simply choose a relationship with logos is itself problematic. Logos is
not a mere tool that we would distinguish among other tools and decide on which to purchase, unless we
welcome the notion that we ourselves are mere tools of the logos. Dissoi logoi, or imminent reversibility,
while it poses problems, also poses solutions, dis-solutions, for those thinkers who suffer from
disillusionment, needing and desiring the subject-object reflected in the mirror to be, even if only
provisionally, the old thing in itself. And we have yet to talk about dissoi-paralogoi.)
Derrida explains that, in the Timaeus, Plato works with a double motif: First, "myth derives from
play. Hence, it will not be taken seriously" (112). The articulation is "the opposition play/seriousness
(paidia/spoude), in the name of philosophical seriousness." Second, "in the order of [B]ecoming, when one
cannot lay claim to a firm and stable logos [Being], when one must make do with the probable, then myth
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is the done thing" (112). Here we see Becoming/Being and the appropriation of mythos, Becoming, into
logos, Being. "These two motifs are necessarily interwoven, which gives the game its seriousness and the
seriousness its play. It's not forbidden" (112). As Derrida continues, he explains that, by way of Plato,
Aristotle, and Hegel, myth(os) is for children, just as games are, while logos is for adults, just as epistemic
discourse is. It must be understood, however, that the inclusion, or participatory coupling, of mythos with
logos is, nonetheless, purchased by the exclusion of Khora. And the exclusion of logos itself with its
uncanniness. (There is, in other words, a sacrificial, sacred, economy at work here. Again, the issue is What
un/kind of relationship do "we" want with the logos? Often we try to get the old politics to work with a
newer view of logos and they appear to be incompatible and "we" hope to drop the newer view of logos and
return to the former. It all becomes the return of the same on same. What is wanted is a new politics, as
both Barthes and Agamben allude to [see respectively "A Third Meaning," in Image Music Text 62-63; and
Coming Community 85-87.] Their politics is of a third, singularities, not of a binary, subjects-objects, nor
of a unitary, all subjectivity, for it is subjectivity itself that "thwarts" community (see Nancy, Inoperative
23; cf. Being Singular Plural). In its place, it is singularities, or whatever beings, that compose community
(Nancy, Inoperative; Experience of Freedom; Sense of the World; and Agamben, Coming Community; cf.
Blanchot, Unavowable Community).
But Derrida turns this exposition of philosophical presuppositions (propositions) and exclusion-
conclusions around—he applies the tactic of imminent reversibility or the topological half twist—and
suggests that what is in question (Khora) and what has no answer, but is referred to and named by Plato as
a receptacle (also, "mother," "nurse," "imprint-bearer"), is indeed not fatherly-adult thinking, but the very
conditions for the possibilities of fatherly thinking (116-17). Hence, Khora (the unnamable pre-imminent,
infans) participates in, yet at the threshold of, the history of philosophy; it participates in that it is the very
sourceless of both play/seriousness. 19 Again, with this twist in thinking, we can see that the child is the
father of the man. And yet, ever in contrary fashion, ever zigzagging, Derrida writes: "[K]hora does not
couple with the father, in other words, with the paradigmatic model. She is a third gender/genus ([Timaeus]
48e); she does not belong to an oppositional couple, for example, to that which the intelligible paradigm
forms with the sensible becoming and which looks rather like a father/son couple [i.e., spoude/paidia]"
(124). The Khora is the seed plot for—it breeds—singularities.
Khora is not a part of the binary. Without its place in a genus, Khora is not a species, but a
monstrous third gender, or figure (monstrous in that it is a gender that is not a gender; it is a memory
without memory). In the Timaeus, therefore, Plato speaks of the first sex and the third sex (or gender).
Ironically enough, the excluded middle (the in between), the third sex, the sex that can have no proper
name, nonetheless, has a stand-in name, while the second sex of the binary is totally displaced and replaced
with the father-son lineage. But where is the second sex, or the mother? Derrida answers: "Philosophy
cannot speak philosophically of that which looks like its 'mother'. . . . As such, it speaks only of the father
and the son [or the daughter, Malthilde], as if the father engendered it all on his own" (126; cf. de Beauvoir,
Second Sex 41; Wiseman).
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But given the logic of exclusion that yields partially to the logic of participation, the second sex—
it is necessary to repeat and give warning—is displaced in the third sex, the Khora. Hence, the confusion in
the word "woman," which, according to Jacqueline Rose and Gayatri Spivak, is a catachresis, a metaphor
for which there is no literal referent (Spivak 211). Hence, as Spivak reminds us, "[w]e must remember that
this particular name, the name of 'woman,' misfires for feminism [as well as for philosophy]. Yet, a
feminism that takes the traditionalist line against deconstruction falls into a historical determinism where
'history' becomes a gender-fetish" (217; Spivak's emphasis). Hence, the necessity to negotiate with this
structure of violence (212), which some materialist rhetoricians and readers refuse to do. As we proceed,
however, we will take up with the mother, the womb-hystera, in terms of Luce Irigaray's reading of Plato's
cave.
A Game Playing a Child: The first examplar, in terms of time (Aion and Chronos), and place
(Topos and Khora), is uncanny, which is what I have discussed above. Let us return home if that is still
possible. Or at least nearer in proximity to home, to the canny, which is what I will discuss now. Let us not
lose sight that we are re/(p)laying the groundwork for a better understanding of Freud's being/becoming in
between Jacob-Sigmund-Mathilde. A better understanding of his (productive) error. Productive in that it
shows us the conditions for the possibilities of third sexes, or radical singularities. The (productive) error of
psychoanalysis shows us not subject-object relations and how to have a good relationship, but shows us
singularities. (We are forever getting ahead of ourselves in the discussion.) To further elucidate and
complicate this grammatical-cum-rhetorical preposition (predisposition) of between—a preposition that is
perpetually, mournfully, melancholically searching for an object relation, if not a bygone object relation—
we will turn to Giorgio Agamben and his Infancy and History. But so as to orient the reader as well as
myselphs, I will interject Freud's various discussions of identity and identification, which, if not included
here, would appear to be omissions. It is not that I am interested in maintaining these discussions; it is that I
want to orient so that I can dis/orient and move on to re/seeing neurotic attachments and identities as
conditions for the possibilities of third figures, which I have, after all, been working and playing toward
from the various rebeginnings launched t.here. (As we move into this long process, the more accretions of
this and that, scraps of this and that, we bring with us to build an anarchitexture.)
Agamben immediately connects with the child and rethinks—while justifying the error of—the
translation. He writes: "When Heraclitus tells us that aion is a child playing, he thereby depicts as play the
temporalizing essence of the living being—his or her 'historicity,' we could say (even if the translation
'history is a child playing' would certainly be a doubtful one)" (73; emphasis mine). It is the potentiality of
"we [can or] could say," rather than "would certainly be," that advances the discussion toward a dis-
solution of the so-called error of Freud's having introduced the child into his discussions of psychoanalysis.
(Can or potentiality in its non-negative form is the temporalizing essence. The Aion, as Agamben explains
from etymologists, "means 'vital force' " [73].) What Hegel attempted to negate or pass beyond—
un/namely, the child, history-as-a-child-playing—the potentiality of can/could but returns the child to us. 20
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The child eternally returns to be (the pedagogue, guide of) the father. The child in play is Aion; Aion, the
child in play: What is the difference, différance, differend? The child plays the game; the game, the child.
Casting a shadow of a third not yet seen figure. ("Who is that third who walks always beside you?" [Eliot,
The Waste Land, line 360].)
But in terms of the child, play, and Aion, Agamben first identifies, in Levi-Strauss, "a single
machine, a single binary system, which is articulated across [not one but] two categories which cannot be
isolated [separated]" (74). (The child playing is never alone as we have seen in the exemplar of Jacob-
Sigmund + Sigmund-Mathilde = Jacob-Sigmund-Mathilde.) These two categories are rituals and play. Or
synchrony and diachrony. Or sacred and profane. For Agamben, however, the binary couple is
simultaneously both structural (immanent) and poststructural (imminent). This couple, too, is imminently
reversible, but always already on the verge (urge [ap.parently irrepressible]) of becoming a third figure,
refolding in a radical finitude of anonymous possibilities (see Fynsk, "Anonymous Figures" in Infant 165-
74). 21
Let us look more closely and with greater detail in terms of the binary machine (ritual and play)
and the introduction of toys (as exemplars). These terms of ritual and play allow us to grasp how the binary
machine produces thirds in the formlessness of scraps that make, in turn, for singularities. Agamben enters
the discussion by saying, "while rites transform events into structures, play transforms structures into
events" (73). Continuing, he writes:
the function of rites is to adjust the contradiction between mythic past and present, annulling the
interval separating them and reabsorbing all events into the synchronic structure. Play, on the other
hand, furnishes a symmetrically opposed operation: it tends to break the connection between past
and present, and to break down and crumble the whole structure into events. If ritual is therefore a
machine for transforming diachrony into synchrony, play, conversely, is a machine for
transforming synchrony into diachrony. (74; emphasis mine)
The description is that of zigzagging (yes, recall Freud), but it is a great deal more as we will come to see
(yes, rethink Freud). Play breaks down synchrony (or any movement toward a myth of presence,
transcendence). Play "breaks down connection" in time (past and present) and it "crumble[s] the whole
structure." It gives us, as Agamben says earlier in his discussion, "crumbs" and "scraps" (72). It gives us, by
way of these crumbs, toys. In miniaturization. These crumbs, toys, in miniaturization, become games of life
and death, womb and tomb (see 80-81; cf. Derrida on a miniaturization of toy-like coffins in Truth, 184-
253, and Ulmer, Heuretics 147-51. And let us, of course, not forget Freud's discussion in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle of the game fort/da, gone/t.here. [See SE, XVIII: 14-17.])
This whole concept of toy is instructive. Agamben explains:
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The toy is what belonged—once, no longer—to the realm of the sacred or of the practical-
economic. But if this is true, the essence of the toy (that 'soul of the toy' which, Baudelaire tells us,
is what babies vainly seek to grasp when they fidget with their toys, shake them, throw them on
the ground, pull them apart and finally reduce them to shreds) is, then, an eminently historical
thing: indeed it is, so to speak, the Historical in its pure state. For in the toy, as in no other site, can
we grasp the temporality of history in its pure differential and qualitative value. (71; Agamben's
emphasis)
But what is grasped at, again, as objects (of relations) are scraps. Leftover as remainders from the
sacrificial economy ("the realm of the sacred," or the realm of being, or the mother's breast and face). After
all, what we are after is a post-sacrificial economy (the relations of being singular plural, no mama and no
papa). The child delights in breaking down the ap.parent substitute object into further objects, or post-
critical objects. 22 If the child begins with the mother's breast and face and then has to give them up and falls
into mourning and possible melancholy in search for a substitute breast, and then grasps at last onto a toy,
then the transition, as Freud would describe it, is complete. And yet, there can be (some) more. Freud's is
not the limit I am alluding to.
This act of breaking down the toy is not done by the child for the sake of analysis or by all
children, many of whom are eventually prompted by parents (mama and papa) to play with standarized,
pedagogical toys in a steady diachronic manner, as if following canonized cultural scripts of rules imposed
on them, thrusting them into the "practical-economic," back into the sacrificial economy. Toys are designed
by a kapitalist economy to bring children into adulthood, that is, into the history of credit and debt (the
sacrificial economy, immanence). Freud's examplary child, Ernst, however, was one and a half years old
and, according to Freud, invented his own toy and rules—he had a standarized toy, bobbin and string (as an
engineer of state-sponsored toys would), but made his own (as a bricoleur would) according to a psychic
economy of the death drive that, still, may very ultimately parallel the "practical-economic." And yet, there
can be (yet some) more in terms of escaping this sacrificial economy. 23
Anticipating further, I would have to recall that the alternative game, fort/da, while a steady
diachronic substitute, allowing for psychic-homeostasis, is nonetheless virtual. In other words, while it
allows for a diachronic movement—g.one/t.here—it is but a virtual game, as Freud suggests in his notion
of compromise formations. But—and this is the line of flight that I have been partially leading up to—the
child (the father of the man Freud), in its game of absence/presence, teaches us that presence is absence,
and vice versa. Again, we have imminent reversibility. But as I said, there is more: The binary becomes a
site of impossibility [death, negativity, but eventually also a nothing, of which there is nothing negative in
all the remainders, crumbs and scraps, that are far leftover from what it is to be humanistically possible],
and, therefore, out of which can/could come possibilities (compossibility, incompossibilities). But what I
am calling an imminent reversibility can be and usually is seen as an immanence. A moving to a higher life.
To a higher Object. The preposition, in this immanence, takes the highest of Objects. The highest
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community of communities. Heaven. The realm of B/being. The subject(s) of B/being ascend to heaven,
which in death is not at all a loss. Anti-communitarians discovered long ago that the life/death binary is
imminently reversible and then attempted to fix life in death through transcendance. (This is all very
elementary!) This would be the end: As Jean-Luc Nancy writes, "[immanence] is not a loss: on the
contrary, immanence, if it were to come about, would instantly suppress community, or communication, as
such. Death is not only the example of this, it is its truth" (Inoperative 12). What remains at the threshold of
the binary, the zigzagging, in the form of the toys as crumbs and scraps is death as the possibility not only
of immanence—as we have seen—but also of imminence. This makes up what Nancy et al. call the
community without a community. Noncommunities that are
not the space of egos—subjects and substances that are at bottom immortal—but of I's, who are
always others (or else are nothing). If community is revealed in the death of others it is because
death itself is the true community of I's [radical singularities or whatever beings] that are not egos.
It is not a communion that fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher We. It is the community of
others. The genuine community of mortal beings, or death as community, establishes their
impossible communion. Community therefore occupies a singular place: it assumes the
impossibility of it own immanence, the impossibility of a communitarian being in the form of a
subject. In a certain sense community acknowledges and inscribes—this is its peculiar gesture—
the impossibility of community. (15)
This is all very non-Freudian, but I would insist a place where we must take Freud and his zigzagging to be
dis-solved. This is the place of finitude. But I am getting ahead of my thinking. 24
value is
Again, the question of the value of toy. 25 Agamben tells us first (by way of de/negation) that the
[n]ot in a monument, an object of archaeological and scholarly research, which preserves in time
its practical, documentary character ('its material content,' Benjamin would have said); not in an
antique, whose value is a function of its quantitative ageing; not in an archive document, which
draws its value from its place in a chronology and a relationship of proximity and legality with the
past event. (71)
The essence or value of toy—transvaulation of the toy—according to Agamben, "is something quite
singular, which can be grasped only in the temporal dimension of a 'once upon a time' and a 'no more'
(presupposing, however, as the example of the miniature [or the miniaturization of the toy] demonstrates,
that this 'once upon a time' and this 'no more' be understood not only in a diachronic sense, but also in a
synchronic sense)" (71).
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And now, I casuistically stretch what Agmaben says if I do not state otherwise. Perhaps. To make
it fit t.here. This toy—not for the archives—is for and from the future anterior, the what will have been. But
as repeatedly stated, it is not from an immanence (a myth of presence [cf. 75]) but is in an imminence, a
constant-less, an unsubstantial imminent reversibility. It is, as Virginia Woolf would say, from "an
unsubstantial territory" (Waves 185). 26 It is from a relation of beings. It is from conduction. What I am
referring to here conductively is a rewriting of the relay, or relations of being. (In terms of transvaluing the
canon, or canonization, this view of the toy is immense. We will come to see the conditions for the
possibilities of this immensity when moving into the section im-proper on canon as such, next—not that we
have not been discussing canon, here.)
In this binary machine, moving toward singularities, crumbness, 27 there is this strange interplay
between death (absence) and life (presence), creating an in between statelessness. Agamben writes:
"[D]eath's first result is to transform the dead person into a phantom. . . . that is, into a vague, threatening
being who remains in the world of the living and returns to the familiar places of the departed one" (81-82).
Agamben continues:
But the signifying opposition . . . between the world of the dead and the world of the living, is
shattered not only by death. It is threatened by another critical moment, no less to be feared: birth.
Thus here too we see unstable signifiers come into play: just as death does not immediately
produce ancestors, but ghosts, so birth does not immediately produce men and women, but babies,
which in all societies have a special differential status. If the ghost is the living-dead or the half-
dead person, the baby is a dead-living or a half-alive person. (83; emphasis mine)
No matter at what level of division, the differences remain. Agamben makes it clear that he is not
designating the binary itself (diachrony and synchrony, death and life) as the machine of history but "a
differential margin between diachrony and synchrony: history; in other words, human time" (75;
Agamben's emphasis). This is "history unfetered by . . . substantialization" (75), unfettered from the myth
of presence, the immanent. And therefore, Agamben argues this preposition BETWEEN, in informing a
"historiography, cannot presume to identify its own object [emphasis mine] in diachrony"; "it must . . .
renounce the illusion of having its object directly in realia, and instead figure its object in terms of
signifying relations between two correlated and opposed orders: the object of history is not diachrony, but
the opposition between diachrony and synchrony which characterizes every human society" (75; emphasis
mine). Hence, the most conductive linkage possible, the preposition takes but the prepositions as such,
grasping no longer for traditional objects that would be canonized, but scraps and crumbs, crumbness, as
such, that lie in the great excluded middle. It is important not to mistake Agamben's between as a mere
Lacanian petit object a(utre); this between searches for no mere stand-in. Between or be + tween,
etymologically in Middle English signifies literally "by two" or "alongside." 28 For Agamben this between
can/could mis/function as an example, or exemplar (as in para-deigma), or
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that which is shown alongside. . . . Hence the proper place of the example is always besides itself,
in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds. . . . Exemplary is what
is not defined by any property, except by being-called. Not being-red, but being-called-red; not
being-Jacob, but being-called-Jacob defines the example. Being-called . . . is also what can bring
them all back radically into question. (Coming Community 10; emphasis mine)
What Agamben has to suggest by way of conduction about Sigmund Freud is that the middle, "the empty
space," for Freud—in which Freud perpetually rediscovers his own self—absolves him, so to speak, from
"being-Jacob" Freud. It is, after all has been said and undone, the empty space of being-called Jacob that
can bring Freud's essentialist thinking radically into question, which is precisely—I continue to argue—
what Freud is doing, performing, or moving toward, in perpetually recalling himself hysterically and
obsessively in relation to the seduction theory and infantile sexuality. The source of the zigzagging is the
empty space of the chora. /\/\/\/\/\/\/\. This source can serve for bad or for good. The zigzagging is a
potential movement toward living life abundantly, or with exuberance, that is, living a life, as Deleuze
would say, that is not determined by way of a prior subject or object or abjection, living a life, instead, that
is in the making, in the conditions of the possibility of imminence, potentiality, or virtuality. 29 But there is
no guarantee. What Freud has to come to understand in terms of entities and community is that the
architecture of desire can be remembered as not being-fixed, or can be rethought, in paraterms of the
anarchitecture of desire. It is not a necessity—in fact, it is a productive perversity—to think that
architecture, or –texture, must be steepled in such a manner that its folds, or typological foldings, must
direct and thrust all energy inside upward, vertically, as if by way of the myth of immanence, /\/\/\/\/\,
when, to borrow a typological figure from Virginia Woolf, the folds can be wayves, or a plane of
imminence, ~~~~~~~~~~~~, radiating in all directions. The energy of imminence, ~~~~~~, is, however,
not from inside, within, but in be tween, alongside, at the threshold of being becoming. (Event.ually, Freud
will have thought, on the one hand, the impossibility of returning in his zigzags back to immanence and, on
the other, the pleasure of renewing himself and others by wayves of remaking himself and others in terms
of a pure plane of imminence.)
As I have exposed, we can see Freud as a middle to Jacob (death, ghost)/\and/\Mathilde (life,
baby). (Freud is stuck in his obsessive zigzagging steeple-like manner until he begins to move away, as
Deleuze would say, from thinking for IS toward thinking with AND. [Dialogues 57]) There is a specific
perceived threat that Freud has to deal with in terms of the spread of the perverse contagion: His father's
supposed, but then, ap.parently rejected, seduction of Sigmund's sibling and Sigmund's own ap.parent near-
practiced, but fantasized seduction of his daughter Mathilde. (I say "ap.parently" for it is such for Sigmund
as long as he is caught in the zigzagging thinking.)
Therefore, two points: Freud has to perpetually reinvent his relationship with the ghost of his
father-teacher (as I discussed fully in chapter 4) and his daughter-teacher (by way of a perpetual relay of
beings in the future, which I am suggesting here now in terms of imminence). Freud is perpetually
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enouncing the illusion of having his object directly in realia, and perpetually reconfiguring in terms of
signifying rela(y)shuns of beings to reestablish a community without community. Freud is perpetually—I
should say, hysterically—rethinking his relays. Like a child himself facing the loss and threat of the father
and the threat of becoming his father in relation to his own daughter, Freud must discover ways of rewiring
the relays of beings, or object relations. Freud is perpetually becoming in/different and be/tween, that is,
alongside. He is discovering, as Agamben can/could say, the
ease [which] is the proper name of this unrepresentable space [between]. The term 'ease' in fact
designates, according to its etymology, the space adjacent (ad-jacens, adjacentia), the empty space
[the chora] where each can move freely, in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity
borders on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct
relation. (Coming Community 25)
Freud is well on his way to be.coming, as Agamben can/could say, a whatever singularity, or whatever
being, or as Deleuze can/could (through Nietzsche-Foucault), an overcoming of self by way of technologies
of the self, by wayves of folding into "a memory of the future" (Foucault 107). (Let us now properly
re/begin this so-called chapter!)
Cummings on Canon ("Principled Pleasures")
" 'Canon' descends from an ancient Greek work, kanon, meaning a 'reed' or 'rod' used as an
instrument of measurement. In later times kanon developed the secondary sense of 'rule' or 'law,'
and this sense descends as its primary meaning into modern European languages. The sense of the
word important to literary critics first appeared in the fourth century A.D., when 'canon' was used
to signify a list of texts or authors, specifically the books of the Bible and of the early theologians
of Christianity. In this context 'canon' suggested to its users a principle of selection by which some
authors or texts were deemed worthier of preservation than others."
John Guillory, "Canon" in Critical Terms for Literary Study (233).
". . . it was obvious that the forms assumed by the different neuroses echoed the most highly
admired productions of our culture. Thus hysterics are undoubtedly our imaginative artists, even if
they express their phantasies mimetically in the main and without considering their intelligibility
to other people; the ceremonials and prohibitions of obsessional neurotics drives us to suppose that
they have created a private religion of their own; and the delusions of paranoiacs have an
unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers. It is
impossible to escape the conclusion that these patients are, in an asocial fashion, making the very
attempts at solving their conflicts and appeasing their pressing needs, which, when they are carried
out in a fashion that has binding force for the majority, go by the names of poetry, religion, and
philosophy."
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Sigmund Freud, "Psychoanalysis and Religious origins" (225; emphasis mine).
Obsession and its Other (Hysteria), first try: As we read in chapter 4 Freud initially said that rape
and sexual abuse cause hysterical and obsessive subjects and defenses. . . . As Dworkin tells us, "Rape
takes everything away" (Scapegoat 58). In taking everything away, it takes Nothing as well; it takes the
conditions for the possibility of community without community. It leaves us with a Chaste founding
narrative, which leads to infinity, to immanence, to the God of sacrifice, leaving us ap.parently only with
the conditions for the possibility of negation. Played out obsessively or hysterically. (In our narratives.)
Placing everything, including place (topos, atopos), under negation. Leaving us with the desert. What life
remains in the desert? In the academy? Academia? Education? Critique itself? What to read, not to read,
and how to read, think, write rape? Academia? Pedagogy? What to read, not to read, and how to read,
think, write rape?
We live in the desert and must make what we can from the sand. As Dworkin says, we must
accept "the common goal of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand" (Intercourse 29). A
man learns from a woman and the desert. What we can hope for is a woman who lives in the sand. Dworkin
tells us that in Kobe Abé's novel The Woman in the Dunes, "there is the final triumph, the final superiority,
of the sand and the woman, a physical triumph over him, achieved when he tries to rape her in front of the
villagers who have promised to let him go if he lets them watch. She physically beats him and carries him
inside [Abé, 230-32], and he recognizes that there is an intrinsic rightness in her victory, his failure"
(Intercourse 28; cf. Nancy, Sense 22-26). Abé writes:
But the man, beaten and covered with sand, vaguely thought that everything, after all, had gone as
it was written it should. The idea was in a corner of his consciousness, like a sodden
undergarment, where only the beating of his heart was painfully clear. The woman's arms, hot as
fire, were under his armpits, and the odor of her body was a thorn piercing his nose. He abandoned
himself to her hands as if he were a smooth, flat stone in a river bed. It seemed that what remained
of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body. (Woman 232; qtd. in Intercourse 29)
The man, who is a teacher and an entomologist, 30 lives in the hole in the sand dune with the woman. 31 He
cannot escape. He yearns for clean water. Without "hope" (232). But one day he discovers that the "bait of
dried fish [which was a trap for crows, a "contraption"] had become not even that. . . . [O]nly the skin
remained" (232-33; emphasis mined), or the biological tablet on which unconsciousness writes
consciousness (see Freud, SE: XIX, 19-27). There is no reason for the bait to remain, we might conclude,
for the crow, the man himself, has been caught. What the man discovers in the contraption is that water had
formed: "There were only about four inches, but it was more clear by far—indeed it was almost pure—than
the water with the metallic film which was delivered to them daily" (233). The man comes to understand
that the desert sand makes water, the purest water. Hope returns. He laughs a laughter never experienced
before. He stays in the hole, "but it seemed as if he were already outside" (235). He works on the
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contraption, which the woman thought of as a "plaything" (237). He perfects the contraption (for the return
of Da) that had, in a sense, caught him, but now collects the purest of water. The woman becomes pregnant
and eventually must be taken to the hospital (238-39). The man has every opportunity now to escape and to
return home and to teaching, but he remains in the hole in the sand dune. With hope.
"Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable
for existence? Didn't unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed
position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the
sands, competition would soon stop. Actually, in the deserts flowers bloomed and insects and
other animals lived their lives. These creatures were able to escape competition through their great
ability to adjust—for example, the man's beetle family.
While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by
hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow."
Kobe Abe, The Woman in the Dunes 15 (emphasis mine).
" '. . . when we sit together, close,' said Bernard, 'we melt into each other with phrases. We are
edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.'
'I see the beetle,' said Susan. 'It is black, I see; it is green, I see; I am tied down with single words.
But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.'
'Now,' said Bernard, 'let us explore.' [. . .]
The waves broke on the shore."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves 185, 383 (Woolf's emphasis).
Obsession and its Other (Hysteria), second try: As we read in chapter 4 Freud initially said that
rape and sexual abuse cause hysterical and obsessive subjects and defenses. . . . In "Principled Pleasures:
Obsessional Pedagogies or (Ac)counting from Iriving Babbitt to Allan Bloom," Katherine Cummings
writes, "Obsession is one form of pedagogy, becoming a single discursive field and order of production in
relation to hysteria as (its) necessary other. The two neuroses produce two pleasures and two subjects, thus
organizing two bodies of knowledge and deployments of power" (90). She adds:
Both systems are fundamentally opposed by Freud . . . who speculates that obsession and hysteria
equally originate in scenes of seduction, which are tantamount to sexual abuse or rape. The
differences between the two (dis)orders reside in their identical origin, represented in contrastive
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grammars or symptomologies of seduction and further articulated in antithetical modes of defense.
(90)
While opposed, obsessive subjects perform, according to Freud, "only a dialect of the language of hysteria"
(SE, X: 157). (I suggested these differences in chapter 4 and earlier in this chapter, when discussing the
differences between Freud, /\/\/\/\/\/\, and Fliess, ||||||||||||||||||||||.)
The two pleasures and subjects and their bodies of knowledge are what I want to examine now,
before going on to canonized bodies of knowledge, more specifically later in Part 4, in terms of Derrida
(archive fever) and Deleuze-Foucault (absolute relation that is not a relation). I will follow Cummings's
already prepared differentiations concernings the subjects' defenses, or symptoms, which signify how the
subjects experience pleasure:
The hysteric's symptoms evince a "logic of excess" (91). The hysteric is outside or at the threshold
of the binary of obsessional thinking. Cummings's quotes Hélène Cixous: "I see the hysteric saying: 'I want
everything.' . . . She makes demands of the others in a manner that is intolerable to them and that prevents
their functioning as they function (without their restricted little [Cummings says, Obsessional] economy).
She destroys their calculations" (91; qtd from Newly Born 154-55). Hysterics act as if they want everything
that has been excluded reincluded. They want not a restricted, but a general economy. (Recall my saying
that Freud wants both the seduction theory and infantile sexuality as a coherent contradiction of explaining
the material and ideal causes for sexual pathologies. It is this ap.parent confusion or conflation that is
initially, potentially productive in an hysteric's thinking.) In addition, Cummings says, "the hysteric is
theatrical. . . . [S]he is always making a spectacle of herself. Without restraint, 'eccentric,' and transgressive,
the hysteric seduces by pantomiming her prior seduction or embodies the original scene in her symptoms;
as she acts up, they [the symptoms] act out" (91; cf. Russo). (Again, recall that Freud mirrors his patients,
especially Dora, in their various hysterical symptoms. Freud is both theatrical and transgressive, or can be
seen, theorized, as such, while he is also attempting to be an obsessive follower of a researcher's writing
protocol.)
Relying on Luce Irigaray's description of an obsessive against (i.e., alongside) an hysteric,
Cummings writes: "The obsessive" keeps
hysterical improprieties at a distance by reproducing the hysteric as "other" and repressing hysteria
in himself. Because the hysteric embodies the improper for him, the obsessive better reserves the
proper to himself: he is restrained, where she is excessive; firm (solide) as opposed to loose or
fluid; straightforward, where she's proven duplicitous; in line with tradition, not original nor
wayward; and of one mind, where she is "indefintely other in herself" (92; Cummings' emphasis;
paraphrased and qtd. from Irigaray, This Sex 110-13, 28)
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Moreover, Cummings writes: "An obsessive's symptoms are generally manifested in rituals and actions.
Unlike the hysteric, whose symptoms are inscribed upon her body, the obsessional neurotic stands apart
from his disease" (92).
And now, one last definition: An obsessive's "super-ego and torture chamber displace the
hysteric's theatre and spectacular play. Obsessional neurotics worry, struggle, and study. . . . They see
themselves as guardians of tradition, as preservers of the family and (bourgeois) culture" (93). (Recall
Gertrude Baniszewski and Sylvia Likens's pedagogical relationship in The Basement.)
In reference to canon and pedagogy—or bodies of knowledge—Cummings begins with Irigaray's
reading of Plato's obsessional paideia, which has as her/his site "the Republic's cave," or womb-hystera,
which, Cummings claims, "is also Allan Bloom's foundational metaphor" for a necessary pedagogy and
canon (93; see Irigaray, Speculum 243-364). But what happens, or is to be done to, these newly born bodies
in the cave-womb? What pedagogy is to be used on them? For possible answers, we should reread Plato's
myth of the cave (Republic VII, 514-517a), as Cummings does, by way of Irigaray, who, in turn, reads by
way of Deleuze. (And while we are rereading, let us think of the bodies born in the cave as being analogical
with Sylvia locked in the basement [see Millett, Basement 14, 16, 19, in which Millett alludes subtly to
Sylvia's being (in) the "shadows" of the "cave"]).
Irigaray begins:
Socrates tells us that men—hoi anthropoi, sex unspecified—live underground, in a dwelling
formed like a cave. Ground, dwelling, cave, and even, in a different way, form—all these terms
can be read more or less as equivalents of the hystera. Similar associations could in fact be made
for living, dwelling for a certain time or even for all time, in the same place, in the same habitat.
As the story goes, then, men—with no specification of sex—are living in one, same, place. A
place shaped like a cave or a womb. (243)
What is most striking in the introductory statement concerning place (topos) is Irigaray's reading of the
cave as a place of total sameness, placeness. The habitat, or habitus, the éthea, is One and the Same. If
place is the same and there is no differentiation, or rather inclusion of exclusion, then the éthos, or éthoi,
are the self-same. If, however, the place as topos is realize by way of a "new instauration" (Ulmer,
Teletheory 21-25), that is, as chora, receptacle, hystera-womb, then all is reincluded as singularities.
The chained ones in the cave have their back to the Truth on which the economy of the sun shines.
What is seen in the cave is a copy of a copy (244-45). What is seen, as Truth, is One and the same. It is
soon forgotten that the Truth was made. Memory is (what is?) the forgotten. Exclusively forgotten (247-
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48). Irigaray writes: "the philosophy tutor—who is a pederast in fact—will rid the child of" fantasies,
unauthorized, of multiple truths. The tutor, as masculine midwife,
delivers [the child] from the repulsive [feminine] naturalness of [the] womb, to the point when he
spurns it underfoot, under his erection. Moreover, he blocks out all nostalgia, any longing to go
back to something that might have existed beforehand, apparently by occupying his rear. The
order of progression must be rigorously observed at present, or there is a risk of straying down
other paths. Now this is a critical moment in the coming of reason. (Speculum 311)
Behold: The child is born, is stripped of afterbirth and ac/cord, of any memory of the woman, of "vagina"
(247), of hystera, or chora (receptacle) in "An Immaculate Conception" (315; Irigaray's emphasis); for the
tutor of philosophy would protect the child from the "Discourse [or hystera, that] wanders" (292).
Irigaray continues:
The law of this 'new' discourse challenges what was previously designated as 'beings' on the
ground that it had been founded upon the commonality of (so-called) immediate and sensible
certainties. The law lays an interdict upon the return back. . . . And orders man to take the
definitive step away from fantasy, dream, childhood. Away from desire. From hysterical desire at
any rate. For all these are nothing. So that he may turn to wisdom. The wisdom of the master. And
of mastery. (274; Irigaray's emphasis. Qtd in Cummings 93-94)
To repeat: The paraspace of the chora, with its paralogic of (hysterical) conduction, is erased, while the
space of philosophical ideals is made absolute through the principles of discursive, logical discourse
(identification, non-contradiction, and excluded middle). And then "The offspring of truth become
bastards" (292; Irigaray's emphasis). And then what follows, "The End of Childhood" (318; Irigaray's
emphasis). And finally, "Life in Philosophy," which is "Always the Same (He)." Always metaphysics
before ontology. Always the other reduced to the same (319; Irigaray's emphasis; and Levinas, Totality 42-
58). The child as father of the man falls and dies abruptly when reared by Philosophy. (As Deleuze says,
"the history of philosophy is a screwing process (enculage) or, what amounts to the same thing, an
immaculate conception" ["I have nothing" 112-13]. 32 ) A rape without any memory of a rape, sexual
violence.
The wrong "child" dies instead of the Socrates-widwife-Plato's "primary narcissistic
representative" (the little snit that, even partially hidden through so-called Socratic irony, would
obsessively presume to know it all as the same!) whom now must be "killed" daily by the tyrannically
oppressed child who would negate the negation rudely forced on him or her or "it" by the pederast's
pedagogy in the so-called proper name of totality and infinity. And yet, there is Maurice Blanchot's
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ap.parent "primal scene" with the child seeing that there is nothing instead of something, the child's
realization of the disaster. 33 The child takes again its first step interminably.
It is crucial to remember—not to forget, though there is an affirmative forgetting—that, as
Cummings tells us, Plato's myth of the cave is "Allan Bloom's foundational metaphor" for a necessary
pedagogy and canon. There are others: Irving Babbitt, Russell Kirk, E. D. Hirsch, William Bennett, and
Charles Altieri. All, according to Cummings, put forth incipient "pedagogies for (re)producing obsessional
subjects" (94), whereas someone like Charles Eliot, while president of Harvard, had "institutionalized
hysteria" (95). Cummings compiles from her readings of Bloom and company an "outline [of] obsessional
pedagogy" that is designed to produce a body of knowledge (101):
1. "A central curricular core that is both expressive of Western white male culture, as defined by
the middle class, and explicitly proposed as an antidote to foreign cultures, competing ideologies. . .";
2. "A teacher-centered environment. . .";
3. "A tendency to sit on information: to with[h]old . . . while insuring one's continued mastery of
subjects/students. . .";
4. "[T]he demand to 'get back to the basics'. . .";
5. "A demand 'that our students learn to communicate with precision, cogency, and force'. . . ."
(101-02; cf. Freire 59)
Hence, these are what inform a white, middle-class, authoritarian body of knowledge. (And now we have a
list to orient us!)
The hysterical pedagogy, as Cummings suggests, is often portrayed as being practiced by radical
(tenured) professors and students—who are sympathetic with feminists and queers—who "produce
puzzling discourse partly made up of gestures, neologisms, and puns, [which] analysts provide a
metacommentary on and translations of these signifiers that effectively reduce the many idiolects of
hysteria to one masterful and obsessional psychoanalytic discourse" (103; Cummings's hysterical emphasis
as pun). But the conservatives are not totally the blame, for Cummings makes clear that the master in us,
we so-called radicals, "feel anxious if we cannot translate and thus recenter" students' discussions that
appear to be off the wall, in their various hysterical performances. "We [have this] need," Cummings
reminds us, "to formalize students' responses in our own [academic] language, taking back mastery
ourselves" (104). We radicals, in other words, live in a performative contradiction. It is not said, but the
(post-critical) object is not even to parody academic discourse in front of or along with our students, but
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heuretically to invent pastiche after pastiche after pastiche (see Ulmer "Object"; Heuretics 145-47); to use
AND and AND and AND (parataxis) as a verb (Deleuze, Dialogues 57).
Touchings
"For if 'she' [the hysteric] says something, it is not, it is already no longer, identical with what she
means. What she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. It
touches (upon)."
Luce Irigaray, This Sex (29; Irigaray's emphasis).
"In a sense—but what sense—sense is touching. The being-here, side by side, of all these beings-
there (beings-thrown, beings sent, beings-abandoned to the there)."
Jean-Luc Nancy, "Touching," The Sense of the World (63).
"[T]ouch is the basis of human knowledge, also of human community."
Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (31).
I have tried, heretofore, to balance seeing (theorizing) with touching (materializing):
Obsessiveness as hysterically writ, and hystericalness as obsessively writ. How is a singular plural writer to
see and tell this hy/story? of "a community of interrupted [Freudian] myth [of seduction and yet infantile
sexuality] which is [a Freudian] community that in a sense is without community" (Inoperative 71)? Nancy
is very clear about Freud's role in reestablishing myth: "All myths [including Plato's myth of the cave,
"romanticism, communism, and structuralism" (51)] are primal scenes, all primal scenes are myths (it is
still [Plato-]Freud[-Favorinus] playing the role of inventor here)" (45). The myth of the state (the ideal
community), the myth of presence (infinite immanence), and the myth of the absence of myth (59), or the
myth of a body of canonized knowledge—all must be interrupted. Hence, the heretical-heuretic necessity:
"Community without community," Nancy continues, "is to come, in the sense that it is always coming,
endlessly, at the heart of every collectivity (because it never stops coming, it ceaselessly resists collectivity
itself as much as it resists the individual [being-Freud, ego, subjectivity])" (71; Nancy's emphasis. Cf. 57).
Hence, the value of writing (zigzagging, différance). Not allowing a chapter to end, but letting its ocean of
interruptions—its radical finitude—flow over into a variety of wayves—thusly, radiating ~~~~~~~~~~~~s,
tildes—into this chapter, have been my performances of what it is for this singular plural writer to see and
touch upon this hy/story.
(The unconscious mind of the American Heritage Dictionary tells me: "tilde. . . . The diacritical
mark [~] placed over the letter n in Spanish to indicate the palatal nasal sound [ny], as in cañon.")
~~~~~
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"I've told you this before, haven't I?" . . . I have tried to situate a thinking, reading, and writing of a
history of rape in the midst of a community of Freud, his contemporaries, and their commentators. (I have
read Freud and others in terms of imminent reversals in search of an impossible-cum-possible third place,
which I have only suggested in this chapter as a possibility, but will revisit in Part 4 under a continuing
rubric of "Obsession and Its Other [Hystera, third try]." As a means of opening hysteries' thoughts to
readers, my readers to thinking rape, I have gone on "test drives" [Ronell] of various readings and have
offered "tests," while inviting communities without communities of readers to see how test drives should
inform not only test readings or reading tests, but tests themselves, the [ethical] tests that we are always
already confronted with in thinking [rape] history.)
Indeed, as Cathy Caruth says, history of trauma is forever resituated "in our understanding" (11).
Have we not already heard this before in terms of attitudes toward history (Burke) and standpoint theories?
But it is worth being repeated here, especially since Caruth takes up the whole issue of history as trauma
that we cannot, given Freud's textual understandings and experiences, reclaim easily, if at all, since the
event of the trauma is secreted in the unconscious (see Freud, "Negation" SE: XIX, 235-42; Caruth 10-24).
Negation, or repression, turns the event into Nothing. How does anyone ethically write a history of the
negative and of Nothing, of the inessential, nonsubstantial composite that makes the unconscious! How
does anyone write a history of repression, when a history of suppression and oppression are near impossible
in themselves! (cf. Ramadanovic).
History is never singular. It is subject to community. But the most difficult part to realize is that "a
thinking of the subject thwarts a thinking of community," or the possibilities of a community without
community (Nancy, Inoperative 23; cf. Blanchot, Unavowable; Agamben, Coming Community). Which is
composed intermittently of singularities. Which, moreover, is paraconceptually how I am going about
thinking, reading, and writing rape. So my problem of the impossibility of thinking histories of rape is
compounded by the problem of what is called the ethical-political resistant subject. I see no way of working
with subjectivity, for sub-ject along with ob-ject and ab-ject is constituted by way of rape itself. "We,"
therefore, are always already situated in cultures of having been informed by rape. There are many who
would think so. For one, Irigaray minces no words in labeling those in the cave at "The End of Childhood"
as having been subject to "this rape" (Speculum 318). 34 To think "subject" is only to exacerbate the original
problem. But of course, the search goes on for a non-repressed-suppressed-oppressed sub-ject in relation to
other subjects. Subjectivity has the other problem, however, of being thrown into immanence and infinity
(see Nancy, Restlessness 5; cf. Zizek, Tarrying). Subjectivity, given to Spirit, is intractably restless,
because of the negative. Sub-jectivity is given to being rotten with perfection. And yet, in its throwness, the
sub-ject can, if it only will, discover its own.
But Caruth writes not only of "our" being resituated as subjectivities but also as beings
"implicated": She says, "Freud's central insight, in Moses and Monothesism, [is] that history, like trauma, is
never simply one's own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas" (23-24;
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emphasis mine). As I rebegin in Part 4, Rebeginnings, I will take up the possibilities of imPLIcations—
typological folds—and how "we" can be unfolded and then refolded, in terms of anarchitecture and
singularities to remove us from the conditions of sub-jectivity and rape as a constituting act. But for now,
on to several touchings (materializings). I will move thematically by wayves of
~ Kleist, Marquise, No Memory
~ Kipnis, Marx, Hysterical Body of Knowledge
~ Eagleton, Marx, No Laughter
~ Dworkin, Rape Museums.
The first two and the second two mirror each other while the first and third and the second and fourth
respectively mirror each other.
"I had decided long ago that no one would ever rape me again; he or they or I would die. But this
rape was necrophiliac: they wanted to fuck a dead woman. . . . I thought that being forced and
being conscious was better, because then you knew; even if no one ever believed you, you knew.
Most rape experts: how can you face what you can't remember? I tried to hammer through the
amnesia, but nothing broke. I was so hurt."
Andrea Dworkin, "They Took My Body from Me and Used It" (Online)
"The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would . . . seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a
reality that can hence never be fully known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself.
The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but
that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all."
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 17.
Kleist (Marquise, No Memory): I want to turn now to Heinrich Von Kleist's remarkable story "The
Marquise of O--." The narrative of the Marquise's at first seemingly immaculate conception is about having
been raped after fainting and, in her case, having no memory of the event. In this way it is somewhat
similar to Dworkin's account (or "story"). 35 Both narratives apparently have their beginnings in fact.
Heinrich von Kleist began with factual events and then developed them into a strange narrative of a
combined theme at the time of tragic-comedy. Kleist writes as a head note to the story that it is "(Based on
a true incident, the setting of which has been transposed from the north to the south [Italy])" ("Marquise"
68). In introducing the story, David Luke and Migel Reeves suggest that Kleist may have read Michel de
Montaigne's essay "Of Drunkennesse" ("Introduction" to Marquise19; qtd. from Montaigne 246), which has
an almost identical theme and story. I have searched through Montaigne to see if he had written on "Being
Drugged," but to no avail. In any case, the Marquise becomes pregnant but she has no conscious knowledge
of intercourse with anyone. In fact, it take the reader a while to understand what has taken place, though the
characters never admit of such an event.
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The event of the story begins when Russian soldiers attack the fortress of the Marquise's father:
They catch and "beg[i]n to assault [the Marquise] in the most shameful way" (69). She is rescued, however,
by a Russian officer, Count F—. The narrator comments:
To the Marquise he seemed an angel sent from heaven. . . . [He] offered her his arm and led her
into the other wing of the palace which the flames had not yet reached and where, having already
been stricken speechless by her ordeal, she now collapsed in a dead faint. Then – the officer
instructed the Marquise's frightened servants, who presently arrived, to send for a doctor; he
assured them that she would soon recover, replaced his hat and returned to the fighting. (69-70)
As the story unfolds, this passage becomes rather ironic. The rules of war have the Russian officer fighting
off his own men apparently to protect the Marquise from being raped, but "Then – the officer" apparently
only acted to do so to rape her himself. The reader comes to understand the event occurs in the space of the
dash ("Then – the officer") with the narrator suppressing the scene of rape, making for an apparent chaste
story until the Count begins to act out his strange hysterical-obsessive self-chastisement.
Susan Winnett writes of the Marquise's "trauma-induced slumber" (70), which is the result
(aetiology) of the officer's having raped the Marquise. Winnett is thinking of not only the first slumber of
the Marquise's having fainted but also of the second slumber of the Marquise's not understanding why she
is having such strange, unaccountable symptoms. (See Kleist 73). And yet, the whole story is in a fit of
sleep as the various characters and the readers awake to the apparent facts, though never quite
acknowledging them. The Marquise suffers from the classic symptoms of a hysteric, repressing all
memory, yet suffering from reminiscences. The Marquise but assuredly also the Count are caught
respectively in an un/known trauma of repetition and reenactment. The officer-Count F—, "Lieutenant-
Colonel of the – Rifle Corp and Knight of an Order of Merit and various others" (71) is obsessive in his
attempting to fix (to set right) the account of his unacknowledged act of violence toward the Marquise.
Early in the narrative, Count F— is believed to have died in the siege after leaving the Marquise,
but then shows up at her house to shock everyone with his presence (the eternal return) and with his
inexplicable, impulsive, and obsessive offer and demand of marriage to the Marquise. The Count's death
and return to life, with his proposal, parallels the theme of sleeping or unconsciousness to wakefulness. The
entire story is one long deferred account of apparent disclosure, self-chastisement, forgiveness, and then of
a proper marriage. (What makes for a tragi-comedic story at the time is that the story or the characters do
not acknowledge the event of the dash, "—", of rape and takes on the topos of all is well that ends well.)
What keeps the narrative going, therefore, is a perpetual awakening, yet not an awakening of the characters
to what has happened. They paradoxically, as Caruth would say with Freud and Lacan (91-112), awake into
yet another fantastic, dream-like conjecture of sleep itself. For example, the narrator tell us,
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the Marquise, emerging from a long reverie, told her mother: 'If any woman were to tell me that
she had felt just as I did a moment ago when I picked up this teacup, I should say to myself that
she must be with child.' The Commandant's wife said she did not understand, and the Marquise
repeated her statement, saying that she had just experienced a sensation exactly similar to those
she had a few years ago when she had been expecting her second daughter. Her mother remarked
with a laugh that she would no doubt be giving birth to the god of Fantasy. The Marquise replied
in an equally jesting tone that at any rate Morpheus, or one of his attendant dreams, must be the
father. (73-73) 36
While the Marquise is caught in a statelessness of hysteria in her attempt to account for Why she is
having the symptoms of pregnancy, the Count himself also experiences hysterical symptoms. Both
characters, though different in relation to knowing the event, but the same in relation to not being able to
acknowledge it, move hysterically in a zigzag, /\/\/\/\/\/\, in relation to, but around the dash, – – – – – .
Winnett argues that the Count is not only obsessive in his repetition and reenactment but also hysterical in
his inability to live up to his code as a soldier and gentleman. Winnett writes:
[T]he Count suffers from the memory of a rape that means more to him than the rules of war
admit. He alone harbors this memory, but he cannot atone for it alone. In order to make it clear
why he needs to marry the Marquise, he would have to confess the rape. But the confession would
so discredit him that a marriage would be out of the question. In his own way, then, the Count fits
[the] description of an hysteric . . . and demonstrates how the psychic inability to deal with
pathological sexual reticence describes the hysterical male. (76; Showalter, Female 167-94)
This is a story of an attempt to reclaim memory, or a story that remembers itself as an event, and
yet is told "—" not told, by a would-be omniscient narrator. Kleist writes the story, makes it possible, out of
the impossible, the site of the mise en abyme. (Which is to say that the abyss, or chora, speaks the story that
can only otherwise remain silent in the cave.) It must be invented, as all stories are, though invented from
fact, which is a pretext that comes out of the convention of verisimilitude. Which as I said, Kleist most
likely bagan from, in convening over the story. The opening paragraph parallels, at least, Montaigne's
account of a story:
In M—, an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O—, a lady of
unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following
announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find
herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to
disclose his identity to her; and that show was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to
marry him. (68)
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But this is no simple origin, for the story suggests, the telling of it, anyway, that there are (il ya) traces all
the way back. As Freud writes, "Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences" (SE, II: 7). As "we" suffer
mainly from Differancings. But of what? Which rape? What act of sexual violence? Freud and Caruth
might say that what is being remembered latently is the primal rape, or act of sexual violence. (Recall in
chapter 2 the discussion of Elaine Morgan's hypothesis in the Descent of Woman of the primal rape,
unconsciously remembered by women. [Cf. Caruth 18].) The story also says to me that it suffers from
reminiscences and that "we" are composed of cultures of writing that remember and bring us into being
through the abyss of remembrances (of things not lost [perdu] but chaste, of traumas repeated and
reinacted). Of accretions of some paraoriginary event of rape. Or some, as Winnett says, "mad dash of [a
rape] narrative" (67). And yet ever again, of things and stories that can never be told, made fully or mostly
open except by wayves of test drives. Only an obsessive would fully demand to know. But who would
presume to know to tell the obsessive what s/he wants! To be told other/wise! Not being able to remember,
the hysteric must—cannot not—write to reclaim—ethically—what it can never know, unless a god, or
would-be omniscient narrator, of sorts intervenes. And yet, what god would intervene on behalf of an
obsessive (repetitive) reader (writer) of such a recovered story, when the gods themselves are perpetrators!
Freud writes and dives into his post-structured mise en abyme. The chora. Establishing, as Caruth
with Lacan claims, "an ethical relation to the real" (see Caruth 92, 102, 142n.9; Lacan, Four 33-34; cf.
Lacan, Seminar Book VII). He works with, just as Kleist does, searching for "the peculiar way memory
stores information in 'emotional sets'," as Ulmer phrases it, "gathering ideas into categories classified not in
terms of logical properties but common feelings, feelings that are based in eccentric, subjective,
idiosyncratic physiognomic perceptions" (Heuretics 142). Freud, however, was given at times to thinking
by way of Plato's cave, when he thought in terms of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex. But as I have
insisted, he never remained permanently in the cave but equally, if not more so in the chora. It is Freud's
readers, with their own interests, who would keep Freud in the cave.
Curiously enough, Hélène Cixous plays with the set of emotions crisscrossing the body of "The
Marquise de O--." In Third Body, Cixous writes: "Count F. is a marvelous winged dragon" (115). He is the
bird of the annunciation:
He takes off into time and space at lightning speed, darting vertically. He is Impatience. He
snatches life away right in the face, right under the nose, of death. In extremis. He doesn't wait, he
doesn't cringe, he doesn't bide his time over the Marquise von O. with courtliness. For he will not
put up with any delay. He actuates time, he assumes the strength of ten to jostle existence, he takes
the marquise between two fights, embraces her, adores her, impregnates her between two doors, in
a hallway, without hurting her, then rushes off to the palace tower, puts out the fires, urgez [sic.]
his soldiers on to action. He'z thought to be seen in a hundred placez at once. There can be no
pauze in the implementing of hiz dezires, everything must be seized right away. His power is
immediate, absolute, ignited in the blink of an eye, irrezistible. Count F.'s attack and victory
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supply the figures of Kleist's writing: a word fecundates, one must forever be in a state of
ascendancy in order to reach the place where reazon and natural law cease to be in circulation,
where dreams take the form of a female swan named Thinka. Thus the marquise carries in her
womb the trace of a unique and fulgurating passage, the mark of that writing that needs not be
repeated to be understood. (115-16; cf. 124-26, 143-44) 37
The Count and the Marquise, being compared to the Swan and Leda, Thinka, begin to metamorphosiZe,
becoming, for Cixous, "Our third body" (155). 38
The bodies of hysterical as well as obsessive knowledge are ready at hand—repetitively re-
awakening after a night's sleep or a five-minute period of the remembrance of things lost as newly born
post-hysterics: Earl in "Memento Mori" or Leonard Shelby in the film version Memento are constantly
reawakening, obsessively reenacting the event. As Leonard says, "I've told you this before, haven't I?" (Is it
any wonder that Kate Millett is dis/engaged in an "obsession" [Basement 11] with her own dash of the
narrative of Sylvia Likens!)
It is a matter of not only reading the hand of marriage in Kleist's story but also the entire surface,
surfaces, of the (third) body with its various writings in its various cultural, rehacked folds. As Winnett
says, "the Marquise's . . . body takes over the telling of the story [the Count] cannot confess" (78). But as I
must insist, it is not just Kleist's rendering of the twice-told tale but all thrice-told tales, rehacked ones such
as Cixous's third body that take over the telling of the chaste story that our cultures cannot (not) confess.
What I am touching on is not just Kleist's story, but all stories of memento. Recalled and yet re-called as
so-called.
"Doctor-Biographer: Marx, who would disavow the opposition between the social and the psychic
as mere bourgeois psychology, was possessed of a body whose symptoms mocked the social
order; it had become grotesque: open, protruding, extended, secreting; in process, taking on new
forms, shapes; his body the figure of the new society that had failed to emerge. He was producing
more and more body—too much body for a social order dedicated to its concealment."
Laura Kipnis, Ecstasy Unlimited (257, 259).
"What has happened then throughout the thousands of manuscript pages? The unification of
Marx's body, which requires that the polymorphous perversity of capital be put to death for the
benefit of the fulfillment of the desire for genital love, is not possible. The prosecutor is unable to
deduce the birth of a new and beautiful (in)organic body (similar to that of precapitalist forms)
which would be child-socialism, from the pornography of capitalism. If there is a body of capital,
this body is sterile, it engenders nothing: it exceeds the capacity of theoretical discourse as
unification."
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (97-98; Lyotard's emphasis).
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Kipnis (Marx, Hysterical Body of Knowledge): Kipnis, like Lyotard, rehacks a story of Marx,
reexamining the folds that have laid hidden in retold stories of Marx. They both show how obsessive bodies
of (ap.parently canonized) knowledge can go bad, perverse, become a monstrous corpus. Obsessive
(hysterical) bodies can become, as the subtitle of Kipnis's video says, "revolting bodies." While Lyotard
reinscribes Marx, or the mad text of Marx (Libidinal 95), in terms of topological Moebian-labyrinthine-
libidinal skin (1-42), in terms of the libidinal economy of Marx becoming a hermaphrodite (97), Kipnis
rehacks Marx as an hysteric with "carbuncles" popping up all over the surface of his skin-body. Like
Lyotard, Kipnis reads the carbuncles that read themselves to "us." Lyotard and Kipnis "no longer want to
correct Marx, to reread him or to read him in the sense that the little Althusserians would like to 'read
Capital': to interpret it according to 'its truth' " (Lyotard 96; cf. Vitanza, "Abandonment"). Rather, Lyotard
and Kipnis want to read the libidinal body of knowledge that stays in "perpetual postponement" (Lyotard
96).
In furthering, or outing, this investigation, Kipnis has one of her Drag Queens interrupt a scene
and ask the test question: "What's a real body, a natural body? It doesn't exist, there's only the social body,
the body as theater, the body that speaks. But in whose language?" ("Marx," Ecstasy 255). 39 The body that
speaks in the video is Marx's body and it speaks the language of hysteria by way of a skin dis-ease. (Recall
Freud's discussion of skin as the topos of consciousness [SE, XIX: 19-27]. It is easier in this context to
understand why Lyotard is exposing the "great ephemeral skin" of Marx, making it all surface, as if by
removing the negative, all would either be remembered or erased completely. [Libidinal 1-42.])
The cast of characters in the video includes—superimposed semiotically over the screen-skin-
body memories of Marx—Marx's doctor-biographer, a chorus (chora) of three drag queens, a worker (from
every time and age), a Frenchwoman (May 1968), college girls (in a dorm room), Jean-Martin Charcot as
French psychiatric voice (lecturing on hysteria in males), Helene Demuth (maid and Marx's sex object), and
Act Up demonstrators. Marx is interspersed, writing Engels. Kipnis uses the cinema technique of layering,
in "A Historical Tableau" (243, 257), with "characters . . . forced into a visual juxtaposition with history
and the social by being composited into other images (like film projections or stills)" (243). The images
superimposed become the carbuncles festering on Marx's body of mis/knowledge.
Kipnis is saying, thereby, if Marx had taken the body female and male hysteric into consideration
his body of knowledge would have been less exclusive. She says, after all, it is not just dialectical
materialism but "ideas" (267; cf. 271) of third (hysterical) figures that any political (and libidinal) economy
must take into consideration for a revolution (or involution). It was not enough to research and write
Capital (a political-material economy) in the British Museum but was also necessary to have researched
and written Capital in Charcot's lecture hall, with Freud in tow, which would have allowed also for a
recognition that a body has "a theory and a practice," a praxis, and, therefore, a "history" written in and as
"symptoms" (289). What Kipnis attempts to offer her readers/viewers is the body of Marx as a screen of
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what has been excluded: "LIKE THE REVOLUTIONARY, THE ERUPTING SYMPTOMATIC BODY
DISPLAYS MONSTROUS AND UNREADABLE FORMS TO A HORRIFIED SOCIETY" (289; Kipnis's
all capital letters. Cf. Freud's "screen memories," SE, III: 303-22). Such a conductive-combinatory
approach to both mind and body—both as hysterical realities with the mind writing on the skin of the body;
or skin, mind—could have allowed for an understanding of "stupidity" (249; cf. Ronell) and its role in
"thwarting" (249, 251; cf. Nancy, Inoperative 23) revolutions.
hysterical.
Marx, like the Marquise with her symptoms, does not know, yet her body speaks a knowledge
"Marx: Dear Engels: It was good you did not come on Saturday. My story—now fourteen days
old—had reached the crisis point. I could talk a little, and it hurt even to laugh on account of the
big abscess between nose and mouth. . . . Also the violently swollen lips are becoming reduced
closer to their previous dimensions. May the head of the devil go through such fourteen days. All
this stops being a joke. . . .
Drag Queen1: What a problem the body is" (emphasis mine).
Kipnis, Ecstasy Unlimited (259).
"Even laughter may yet have a future."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (74).
Eagleton Reduxed (Marx, No Laughter): For a long time now, I have been carrying around the
idea of writing about a haunting section of Terry Eagleton's Walter Benjamin: Or Towards A Revolutionary
Criticism. The section on Why no humor in tragic Marxism has stuck in my memory from first reading it: "
'Humour' is hardly a familiar concept in Marxism," Eagleton tells us, "least of all in the melancholic
Benjamin" (143). Eagleton opens his discussion with a comparison between Benjamin (Theses on the
Philosophy of History) and Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and his World). Both fought totality or
totalitarianism in his own way (144-55). But any notion of carnival put forth by Bakhtin is, as Eagleton
argues, "a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained work of art. As
Shakespeare's Olivia remarks, there is no slander in an allowed fool" (148). The question becomes for
Eagleton-Benjamin "Can . . . intoxicating liberation be politically directed?" (148). The problem with this
question-argument, based on the notion of appropriation and defusement, is that it can also be used against
traditional sadness and melancholia. It is true, because of all the people who have lost their precious, it is
the Marxists, who are the most practiced in nostalgia and mourning for what is promised to come and yet
does not. Marxism is doubly appropriable: Once by the fascism in us all (the love of power), and again by
the love of loss in all Marxists (the love of ressentiment). 40 But Eagleton argues that both Bakhtin and
Benjamin had productive socialist-communtarian views of comedy, humor, and laughter. 41 They are
exceptional.
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Eagleton, however, is well within such a tradition when he writes:
There has been, so far as I know, no Marxist theory of comedy to date; tragedy has been a
considerably more successful contender for the attention of materialist criticism. And there are
good enough reasons why Marxism has suspected the comic: for what after all could more
securely rivet us in our ideological places, having provisionally jolted us out of them? Brecht's
theatre is comic in a more radical sense. Its comedy lies in its insight that any place is reversible,
any signified may become a signifier, any discourse may be without warning rapped over the
knuckles by some meta-discourse which may then suffer such rapping in its turn. (160; emphasis
mine)
Here again, we are met with the notion of imminent reversibility as problematic ("any place is reversible")
in terms of a materialist rhetoric. Tragedy can become comedy; comedy, tragedy. (Recall how "The
Marquise of O—" is taken by some readers to be comic-tragic.) Yes, it is that way with language and
thinking. Thinka. Without reversibility (or dissoi-logoi)—and this is the point that I have stressed
throughout—we cannot get out of the binary itself (to dissoi-polylogoi). That language is reversible can be
seen as problematic; but that language is, is also its saving pointless of a line of flight. Eagleton continues:
[T]he comic . . . comes down to the double-take; it is thus in the first place a formal matter, not a
question of 'content.' But in that question of comic form everything is at stake: it is here that we
find the profoundest nexus between Brecht's alienation effect and his politics. Brecht's major
achievement here is surely to teach us the deep comedy of meta-language, which in distantiating
its object displays just where it is itself most vulnerable, revealing the vacuum into which another
putative discourse could always rush to take it over. (160)
And to reverse the status quo. Yes, as Jean-François Lyotard points out, "there is no metalinguistic position
from which the whole could be dominated" (Just 43). When we are winning a battle, reversibility can easily
occur, and often does. (There is, as Jean Baudrillard says, a difference between dialectic and imminent
reversibility. 42 But it does not necessarily follow that dialectic should or can remain in the privileged
position.)
Eagleton continues to unfold his argument by way of Brecht:
'The theatre of the scientific age,' Brecht writes, 'is in a position to make dialectics into a source of
enjoyment. The unexpectedness of logically progressive or zigzag development, the instability of
every circumstance, the joke of contradiction and so forth: all of these are ways of enjoying the
liveliness of men, things and processes, and they heighten both our capacity for life and our
pleasure in it.' (160)
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And then, as if to set aside this whole problematics of history (tragedy vs. comedy), Eagleton finds hope in
"Brecht['s view] in history's unruly refusal to conform to its historicist models; for both [Benjamin and
Brecht] history can be patient of a comic emplotment once Ananke or tragic necessity has been unmasked
for the ruling-class lie it so often is" (160). Comedy is about the potential for changing, revolutionizing, the
so-called tragedy of life. Picking up on Freud's theory of the joke, Eagleton recalls "Hitler as housepainter
yesterday and Chancellor today" (161). But the great hope lies in comedy as a source of change: "Marxism
has the humour of dialectics" (161). And "Yet," Eagleton, having worked his way to this point, exclaims,
it is not of course true that all tragic contents are changeable, just as carnival is wrong to believe
that anything can be converted into humour. There is nothing comic about gang rape. . . . [T]ragic
situations are often unchangeable in at least one important respect—unchangeable for those who
are their victims. . . . [T]here are . . . always individual tragedies, tragedies that persist like a
forgotten bruise in the flesh of history, which no transcendence short of a Messiah could
retroactively transform. (161-62; emphasis mine)
Test: When has gang rape become a tragedy of an individual? Is it not of course false that—or that one
would hope for—all tragic contents are unchangeable? Or that anything cannot be converted into humor?
And "Yet," if the bruised skin-flesh does not forget, What is it that we can hope for? Are we still always
already at the moment of the "Not yet"? How do we move from Not yet to Now then? ~~~ Why are we
being given this test? Is it a call for hope? Or is it a mere deflection of the problem?
As a supplement to thinking about Eagleton's position on laughter or humor, read Milan Kundera's
Immortality, in which he discusses through Rubens how classical and traditional painters avoid the open
mouth in laughter, for they see it as either the sign of evil or of a human being's inability to think, to reason,
or to rule hirself (322). In his words:
Faces lost their immobility, mouths became open, only when the painter wished to express evil.
Either the evil of pain: the faces of women bent over the body of Jesus; the open mouth of the
mother in Poussin's Slaughter of the Innocents. Or the evil of vice: Holbein's Adam and Eve. Eve
has a bland face and a half-open mouth revealing teeth that have just bitten into the apple.
Alongside, Adam is a man still before sin: he is beautiful, his face is calm, and his mouth is
closed. In Correggio's Allegories of Sin everyone is smiling! In order to express vice, the painter
must move the innocent calm of the face, to spread the mouth, to deform the features with a smile.
There is only one laughing figure in the picture: a child! But it is not a laugh of happiness, the way
children are portrayed in advertisements for diapers or chocolate! The child is laughing because
it's been corrupted!" (322-23)
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What other instances of open mouths have you read about in Chaste Rape? (Keep a record of all future
references in this and later discussions.)
Nietzsche has written: "For the present, the comedy of existence has not yet 'become conscious' of
itself. For the present, we still live in the age of tragedy, the age of moralities and religions. . . . And again
and again the human race will decree from time to time: 'There is something at which it is absolutely
forbidden henceforth to laugh' " (Gay Science 75).
"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is
no humor in heaven."
Marx Twain 43
"Here, to fight against forgetting means to fight to remember that one forgets as soon as one
believes, draws conclusions, and holds for certain. It means to fight against forgetting the
precariousness of what has been established, of the reestablished past; it is a fight for the sickness
whose recovery is simulated. [. . .] Whenever one represents, one inscribes in memory, and this
might seem a good defense against forgetting. It is, I believe, just the opposite. Only that which
has been inscribed can, in the current sense of the term, be forgotten, because it could be effaced."
Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and "the jews" 10, 26.
Dworkin (Rape Museums): In her ever-shifting grounds of strategies and tactics in Scapegoat,
Andrea Dworkin writes:
There is not only the so-called representation of the female body; there is a language that circles it,
bounds it, characterizes it. Edward [Edwin] Mullins became 'aware that the museums of the world
could be hung exclusively with pictures of women being tortured and raped, and the language of
scholarship would remain the same.' [See The Painted Witch 77.] For women rape is the
paradigmatic act of contempt and violence. Like the pogrom, the reach of rape goes far beyond
any literal rendering of the act. Rape can include assault, battery, robbery, torture, kidnapping,
mutilation, stalking, being prostituted, being pornographized, being sold as a sex slave, murder,
and cannibalism (particularly in vogue among serial killers). And rape is very lonely. Should she
survive, rape can make a woman lonely for the rest other life. Who is one of them, and who is one
of us? Is there an us? (45)
In a follow up to this passage to everything that she has written, Dworkin explains:
'There are not public monument for rape survivors.' [See Herman, Trauma and Recovery 73.] But
there may be some day, because Israeli men get raped; and Israel has a lot of public monuments.
Another part of the Arab code, coexisting with the obligation of the father or brother to kill the
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sister for sexual impurity, is the rape of a defeated foe, soldier, male. Israeli revenge, practiced, for
instance, against an earlier generation of Israeli soldiers: 'Some of my friends were raped next to
my eyes.' Then, later, in a Jordanian prison camp, 'We had groups coming in the middle of the
night, captured, and most of them suffered the trauma of being raped, not by one or two but by
companies. It's a way of disgracing your enemy.' [See Shipler, Arab and Jew 385.] This revenge
vendetta through male-male rape finally creates an injury that demands blood, murder, a viscous
hate. Nothing in Madrid or Oslo or in the Rose Garden of the White House will repair a male-on-
male military rape. Nor will raped men join with raped women of any description—wife, mother,
sister, Jew, feminist. The revenge rape of male Israeli soldiers in captivity is part of the fear, part
of the hate, that drives the Israeli fear of annihilation. Rape takes everything away. (58)
In her "Epilogue" to Scapegoat, Dworkin writes:
One needs rules in courts of law based on how crimes really happen—rape, for instance—and the
development of rules of evidence that are fair from the point of view of the raped, not the raper.
One needs rape museums to put in one place the cogency and significance of the act of rape: a
story told through artifacts and stories. One needs the deep study of prostitution as a paradigm of
scapegoating. (337)
In her own confrontational, in-y/our-face way, Dworkin in her closing paragraph to Scapegoat presents us
with a test: "The past thirty years—1970 to 2000, the time of the so-called second wave of feminism—have
been prologue: the question is, To what? Answer the question" (337).
I am constantly reminded, I constantly return to, Derrida's saying,
[T]he question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It is not the question of a
concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an
archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the
question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want
to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. (Archive Fever 36;
Derrida's emphasis) 44
Part 3: Chaste Media
Chapter 6: Chaste Cinema I?
"New struggles.—After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a
tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves
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for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.—And we—we still have to vanquish
his shadow, too."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Book 3, sec. 108; cf. 125)
"Lord, make me a great composer! Let me celebrate your glory through music—and be celebrated
myself! Make me famous through the world, dear God! Make me immortal! After I die let people
speak my name forever with love for what I wrote! In return I vow I will give you my chastity."
Old Salieri, Amadeus (Scene 19).
"[C]hastity is a flux."
Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues (90).
In search of additional exemplars of chaste representations of rape and an in-depth study of them, I
now turn to (Chaste) cinema and will discuss three films by male directors: Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984,
2002), Henry Fool (Hal Hartley, 1997), and Multiple Maniacs (John Waters, 1970). This discussion will be
reel-eyezed in the para-genre of DVD behind-the-scenes documentaries, specifically, three such
documentaries—one for each film—with discussions by some of the people involved in the making of the
films. In addition, there will be commentaries from people whose writing have helped shape Chaste Rape. I
call this para-genre DVD installations. 1 But I could as well call them "refrains" (Deleuze, Dialogues xiii;
Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 310-50).
The directors and screenwriters of the three films progressively merge canonicity (canonization of
art works and artists), pedagogy (teaching a lesson), and the act/s of Chaste Rape (trafficking in
communicative exchanges by way of women). I say "progressively," for there is no overt, but an implicit
act of rape in Milos Forman's, or Peter Shaffer's, Amadeus. (This film that I will begin with is exceptionally
difficult to deal with, for it has gone through many revisions as a play—in England and the United States
productions—and exists in two versions as a film, one being the Director's Cut, restoring twenty minutes
that had been previously edited from the film, but that in part could be found as text in the printed, official
version of the U.S. play. 2 Amadeus, in its various avatars, should remind us, as I will continue to urge us to
see, that there is a compossible world of Amadeus, with a radical finitude of incompossible worlds of this
much revised story of master and divine rape.) As we progress sem(b)iotically across the three films, rape
becomes less implied and more emphatic, until we get to John Waters's film Multiple Maniacs in which
rape takes three different forms, all represented as perverse "Divine" rapes. All three films, however,
represent rape in a (somewhat, though bizarre) chaste manner. All three films, moreover, are informed with
a deep concern for the absolute (the divine), for immanence, for subjectivity, for immortality, and for a
sacrificial and rather perverse-chaste attitude toward an economy of community predicated on rape. As we
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move through the films, I will stress un/just how the absolute and immanence inform a notion of divine
rape and just how it is possible (compossible, incompossible, in a post-Leibnizean sense) to read these
films other than rape-as-immanent or a representation of immanence itself. As we examine the films and
their incompossibilities, the films will be less totalized and more fragmented or as I would rather say more
powdery. With the death of God, of substance, of subjectivity, of humanism, the desert, of yet another
unkind, will have grown.
In an attempt to balance the overly masculine gender of the cinema-shadows to be cast in this
chapter, I will mirror chapter 7 opposite this chapter; in chapter 7, I discuss the controversial film BeFreier
und Befreite (by Helke Sander, a German female director, 1992) that documents the liberation of women in
Berlin from fascism and yet the mass rape of them by the occupation soldiers in 1945 (hence, as the title in
German suggests in English: the liberators take [took] liberties). Along with Sander's documentary, I will in
passing test drive the equally controversial film Baise-Moi (written and directed by Virginie Despentes and
Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000, based on Despentes's novel, 1995). The French Baise-Moi is rendered in English
as Fuck Me, but in U.S. English it is rendered Rape me. (Both the U.S. film and book bear this name.)
Baise-Moi is the most reactionary film on rape and murder that I could find as an exemplar. And yet, Is it,
so simply put, a reactionary film? Hence, the call for a test drive. The overall mirroring will work in this
manner: Forman-Hartley-Waters-> ||

pulsations rather than by flux. (Sense 24; Nancy's emphasis. Cf. Nancy, Experience 142-47. For
Abé, see Woman 230-32).
There are worlds, not the world. There are senses, not the sense. Pulsations. (Still frames.) Let us
enter into—that we are already in, yet forgotten—the excess of compossible-incompossible worlds. Let us
search in a polyphony (cum cacophony) for the filmic, or third meanings. 3
Quick Cuts
"I took my 'little movie' photographs for years without telling anybody. It all started with my
obsession to have a still [emphasis mine] from one of my older films which was never taken on
the set. I remembered Divine's face in the one moment between rape and miraculous intervention
where he lived up to the spiritual side of his name, but I didn't have the picture to prove it. I took
hundreds of shots off the TV monitor, blundering my way into photography the same way I
blundered into films, until I finally produced the still I wanted.
John Waters, Director's Cut (283).
"No one could scan the cut. . . ."
Avital Ronell, Crack Wars (69).
"[A] finished finitude, infinitely finished . . . occurs in an instant . . . which means not within an
instant, in the present time of an instant, but by a cut in the middle of the instant: the cut of
freedom that unexpectedly comes up in this time and fills it."
Jean-Luc Nancy The Experience of Freedom (118).
In the first two films—Amadeus and Henry Fool—there is a typical bonding, a forming of
community, between men in rivalry or at odds with each other, while in the third—Multiple Maniacs—
there is an atypical diffusion among freaks banding together for apparent mayhem. All three films are
located in homosocial space (Sedgwick). Or so I will say at first. But this space as homosocial is
totalitarian, with the world as controlled by the one, or the masculine itself. It is a world that must become,
as Jean-Luc Nancy would have it, "always the plurality of worlds: a constellation whose compossibility is
identical with its fragmentation, the compactness of a powder of absolute fragments" (Sense 154). Or a
powder of sand grains. ParaFragments. Crumbs. Unlike Leibniz's compossible world that is dominated by
the monad of God Himself (the divine), this world is without an archi-world to direct or limit
incompossible worlds. In such a compossible world, there is not just men, nor men and women—this is not
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to say, however, that there is no man or woman as such—but to say that there are singularities of sexual
pluralities, or what some might call perversions, or third sexes.
Cut to One: In Amadeus, Antonio Salieri is a mediocre artist, yet the much celebrated court
composer, while Mozart is a genius, yet unappreciated (with the exception of Salieri) by his
contemporaries, but is to be remembered and canonized as the great genius-artist of the court, the world,
and heaven (at least, as Salieri recounts for us). While Amadeus is lucky with women, Salieri is not. (For
his part, Salieri as a child promises God to remain chaste if God would only give him great music to write,
but God gives Amadeus both women and angelic music and Salieri nothing, at least, in most of the
revisions [versions, incompossibilities] of the story.) As a result, Salieri curses God and promises to
frustrate His attempts through "Amadeus" (meaning "love of God" or "beloved by God") or, if necessary, to
murder Amadeus (the mad, perverse "love of God").
In both cases, the men share in a love-hate bond (Salieri-God-Amadeus, Salieri-Music-Amadeus,
Salieri-Katherina Cavalieri-Amadeus) and in the success of (the) one. The sharing is emphasized further,
when Salieri demands sex from Constanze (film, scene 74; play, Act 2, Scene 1: 79-80) in exchange for
recommending Amadeus as the teacher of the Princess Elizabeth. But Salieri rejects Constanze and
humiliates her when she returns to accept the bargain, just as he has the Emperor, Joseph II, also reject her
husband, Amadeus, as a teacher of the Princess on the grounds that Amadeus "molested" one, if not more,
of his piano students (film, scene 81; play, Act 2, Scene 2: 82).
This story line, comparable to the story line of Henry Fool, is inextricably entwined with sexual,
though not always practiced, perversions. In some versions, Salieri gives up his chasteness and, against
both God and Amadeus, beds Katherina, who remains, Salieri boasts, his "mistress for many years behind
my good wife's back" (play 81). Though Amadeus had previously seduced Katherina (Act 1, Scene 8: 44,
46-47; Scene 10: 57), Salieri claims, "I soon erased in sweat the sense of his little body, the Creature's,
preceding me" (Act 2, Scene 1: 81). But in the exchange between the two men, the trace/s remain to propel
Salieri into acting against Amadeus. (In the first Installation that follows, I will discuss more fully how a
perverse, Divine Rape brings the two composers together along with their women.)
Old Salieri is the narrator (when confessing his alleged murder of Mozart) of the grand story of
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In the very act of confessing this musical saint's story—in his hospital room—
Old Salieri himself is immortalized, canonized, yet strangely becoming "the patron saint" of "mediocrities
everywhere" (Act 2, Scene 18: 150). In a section that was cut from the script of the film and not re-added in
the Director's Cut, Shaffer has Salieri say:
From now on no one will be able to speak of Mozart without thinking of me. Whenever they say
Mozart with love, they'll have to say Salieri with loathing. And that's my immortality—at last! Our
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names will be tied together for eternity—his in fame and mine in infamy. At least it's better than
the total oblivion he'd planned for me, your merciful God. (Scene 174)
But it is clear from what remains in the text of the play, Salieri is not confessing his sins to Father Vogler;
rather, he is putting forth an apologia (for his life):
[He comes downstage and addresses the audience directly.] This is now the very last hour of my
life. You must understand me. Not forgive. I do not seek forgiveness. I was a good man, as the
world calls good. What use was it to me? Goodness could not make me a good composer! . . . Was
Mozart good? Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art. [Pause] On that dreadful Night . . . my life
acquired a terrible and thrilling purpose. The blocking of God in one of His purest manifestations.
(Act 2, Scene 1: 78)
While Amadeus in its various metamorphoses (incompossibilities) is this and that way and then altogether
otherwise, Henry Fool has a fairly stable story line, which is not to say that there are no deviations from the
script in the film itself (see HF xxvi). What is especially interesting, however, by way of comparisons is
that the character Henry Fool himself in two sections of the film script begins to speak of Leibnizean
compossible and incompossible worlds for the characters of the story (see HF 67, 85) and equally
interesting is that Hartley himself "think[s] of this story in terms of it having many sequels." 4 Let us turn to
the story-film.
Cut to Two: In Henry Fool, Henry walks into town like a Rabelasian man and changes the lives of
Simon Grim and his family (his sister, Fay, and mother, Mary, and several other characters, if not the whole
world indirectly. He takes a room in the basement of the Grim family house. Immediately, Henry boasts of
his writings collectively called "my confessions" (which are in several volumes of manuscripts, and
which—when eventually read by Simon and Angus James, the book publisher—prove to be unremarkable,
mediocre at best, without an audience, and therefore unpublishable [HF 118-21]). However, Simon, a trash
man at the local dump, whom Henry had encouraged to write, had tutored, and had sent to Angus, is silent
about the long, allegedly pornographic, poem he writes (which, after originally published on the Web [HF
102-03, 111] and then in print by Angus, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature seven years later). (Given the
epic proportion of the story, Hartley is able to get away with this kind of exaggeration.) Simon becomes so
in/famous that a young girl whom Simon had given a note to (HF 60) in the local library "warn[s] other
girls [on the Internet] about [his being] a potential rapist" (101) and that even the Pope warns against
reading him (13).
Henry, however, has a real history of statutory rape (a 13 year old girl) for which he spent seven
years in prison (HF 62). He is driven by his sexual impulses: As a case in point, he "rapes" 5 Simon's
mother, Mary (40), who is in a depressed state and on sedatives and who suffers apparently from the loss of
her husband in Viet Nam and from having no interests in living. Mary's daughter, Fay, is depicted at first as
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ather angry and promiscuous, bringing men home to have sex with them while her mother and brother are
downstairs. And Mary's son, Simon, at the beginning is withdrawn, inarticulate, stammering, and possibly
retarded.
Simon's poem, which we never get to read or hear even a part of, has a rather odd influence on
those characters who have read the manuscript in part or in whole: Gnoc (Mr. Deng's daughter), who has
never spoken in her life, begins singing (HF 21-22); Fay says that her period comes early (67); and Mary
commits suicide. 6 Simon comes home and finds his mother in the bathroom, having cut her veins and bled
to death, during which Henry and Fay are having wild sex in his basement apartment. (The two scenes are
cut and folded into each other [92-95]. Everyone is implicated in every scene.)
Eventually, Henry marries Fay, for she is pregnant with their son (HF 107), Ned, and has to take a
position at the local dump (HF 100) to support his family. Simon, however, makes so much money from his
book advance of around $200,000 that he gives up his position at the dump. Both men, like Amadeus and
Salieri, thereby exchange positions of prestige and fame. It is a seesaw effect (with only one round, and yet
perhaps another and still another in this compossible epic) or it is a scale of justice (again, with only one,
and yet with many sub-scenes, balancing) act that drives both films. In any case, both sets of men are
immortalized, canonized.
If there is any saving grace at all in Henry, it takes place one night when Fay is upset with him—
Henry has taken Ned to the "Inferno," a bar and strip joint—and tells Henry not to come home. True to his
nature, Henry returns home to his potential trouble (but) in the basement apartment to sleep where he finds
Pearl (14 years old), who has repeatedly been sexually abused by her stepfather, Warren. In their
exchange, she offers Henry sex in return for his killing Warren (HF 135). He rejects the offer and goes to
Pearl's home to see if Warren's wife, Vicky, who has been physically abused by Warren, is okay and to
speak with her about the sexual abuse of Pearl. While there, Warren awakes and repeatedly beats Henry,
but in a scuffle Henry accidentally causes Warren's death (136-37). There is justice in this scene.
In a rather unexpected ending—rebeginning?—to the film, Simon further bonds with Henry and
balances the scales of justice as well as lives up to his ethical promise to Henry (HF 116-17; 122-27).
Simon knows that Henry has had a great influence on getting him to write his opus. He sees Henry as his
teacher-pedagogue, but with all of its etymological connections. (Part of their exchange—besides
communicating by trafficking in women, both Mary and Fay, Vicky and Pearl—is cemented in Simon's
promise to Henry that, as repayment for all that Henry has given him, he will not sign a book contract for
his poem without requiring the publisher's having also to publish Simon's "confessions"—which of course
the publisher, Angus, flatly refuses to do. Simon—in the famous hospital scene of the birth of Henry's son,
Ned—relates to Henry why he has reneged on the deal. They do not part amicably. Seven years later, Ned
brings the two men together, and Simon, out of a sense of his promise to help and acknowledge his mentor
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and brother-in-law, ends up sending Henry to Sweden in disguise as himself to accept the Nobel Prize in
Literature. In this closing scene the ethical bond between the two appears to be in balance. 7
In both cases—Amadeus and Henry Fool—a mediocre composer or writer becomes attached to
the canonization of the ingenious, great composer-writer. In both cases, the bonding and canonization are
linked conductively with the themes of rape and pedagogy, but more so in the second film. (Rape becomes
progressively more pronounced, and yet remains chaste, as we move from film to film.) In John Waters's
film, rape and canonization take on major perverse, parodic Christian overtones, adding to the theme of
Divine Rape and to its being undercut by parody and pastiche.
Cut to Three: Among the three films, Multiple Maniacs is the most complicated: Quickly put, men
(or clear binary gender distinctions) are less important; third sexes-freaks are. The excluded, the
remainders, are. There are three rapes: Lady Divine is raped in the streets by a male while being pinned
down by a female; Divine is raped anally in a church with a crucifix attached to rosary beads by a female,
Mink Stole; and finally Divine, in a crazy state of mind, is raped by a fifteen-foot (mechanical) Lobster, or
Lobstora (which can be traced back to an actual postcard that advertises Baltimore).
The thematic of canonization (great art, film, to be immortalized) informs this film in its
production, execution, and distribution and in its characters (all outcasts, remainders, multiple maniacs,
freaks in "a Calvacade of Perversions," riding on the prior infamy of Russ Meyers's Two Thousand
Maniacs and Tod Browning's Freaks). Multiple Maniacs is a parodic, underground film that has been
perversely canonized. There is a hilarious scene of Christ feeding the hungry ones with Wonder Bread (a
precursor to Holy Communion [cf. Millett, Basement 98]) and canned tuna (symbolic of Christ himself).
Waters is good at recasting our cultural, or Absolut/e, canonized heroes, in commercials that inform our
contemporary lives.
Divine is God (though yet another, rather Mad God, a.maDeus). The theme of Divine Rape
permeates the entire film, with Divine becoming progressively obsessively hysterical, until s/he, like a
monster (GODzilla in a "B" film within an underground film)—the implications of the foldings in this film
border on being inexplicable—is shot down in the streets by men of the National Guard. The divine freak
"Lady Divine" is dead! Though she continues to cast a shadow in the caves of our memories and in yet
other Waters's films such as Pink Flamingo.
Scanning the Cuts
"He was my idol! I can't remember a time when I didn't know his name! When I was only fourteen
he was already famous. Even in Legnago—the tiniest town in Italy—I knew of him."
Old Salieri, Amadeus (film, Scene 15).
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"OLD SALIERI
Mozart! Mozart! I cannot bear it any longer! I confess! I confess what I did! I'm guilty! I killed
you! Sir I confess! I killed you!"
Old Salieri, Amadeus (Scene 2).
"The madman.—Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours,
ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: 'I seek God! I seek God!' . . . The madman jumped
into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. 'Whither is God?' he cried; 'I will tell you. We
have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. . . . Do we not hear nothing as yet of the
noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine
decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.'
"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 3, sec. 125. (Nietzsche's emphasis).
Installation, DVD One (Amadeus, Canonization): Set, In a workroom. Bookshelves, filled with
books, photocopies, CDs, videos, and curios. On various tables, three computers with screens lit. Against a
wall, a set of old drums covered and nested one over the other. On a wall, a print of Karl Marx and a signed
original print of Andy Warhol's Campbell's Tomato Soup shopping bag. The floor is littered with stacks of
papers and magazines. V.V. sits at a computer, which has a full screen picture of Old Salieri. To his left are
notes and versions of Shaffer's and Forman's scripts. He sits listening to a roundtable of discussants on a
DVD of Amadeus—call it Vitanza's Cut—while composing and interjecting his comments:
PETER SHAFFER: "To me there is something pure about Salieri's pursuit of an eternal Absolute
through music, just as there is something irredeemably impure about his simultaneous pursuit of eternal
fame" ("Introduction," Amadeus xvii).
ANTONIO SALIERI: Yes, "I wanted Fame. . . . I wanted to blaze like a comet across the
firmament of Europe! Yet only in one special way. Music! Absolute music! . . . A note of music is either
right or wrong absolutely! Not even time can alter that: music is God's art" (Amadeus, Act 1, Scene 2: 11).
ℵ Shaffer's plays (Milos's films) interrupt this myth of God's presence—immanence—in music.
JEAN-LUC NANCY: For me, there is something too pure (i.e., too substantially a totalization
refined of remainders) about Salieri's pursuit of an absolute myth of the presence of God in music—in
communion, community—just as there is something equally too pure about Salieri's desiring fame for
himself. He would be—as the myth of the Eighteenth century would have it—he thinks he, not Mozart,
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should be—the incarnation of God, the magic flute of God, on Earth. But he is apparently frustrated by his
God, who favors Mozart. Hence, opting for infamy, he is given to rivalry with God through Mozart. It is
the case—in this case—that the thinking of subjectivity, of fame, or even infamy, of canonization,
"thwarts" community (Inoperative 23). Unless one would insist on sacrifice as the basis for community!
"DOCTOR-BIOGRAPHER" of KARL MARX: "He [Marx] writes with nostalgia and longing for
something thwarted. For something that didn’t happen" (Kipnis, Ecstasy 249; emphasis mine). Why did
this god communism fail him! Fail in founding a new man and community!
ℵ As Nancy summarizes and argues—and Blanchot picks up on—"the word 'communism' stands as an
emblem of the desire to discover or rediscover a place of community" (Nancy, Inoperative 1; Blanchot,
Unavowable 1-3). But "Community," as Nancy says, "has not taken place" (11; Nancy's emphasis). What
has taken this place of communism (or of the canonization of the proletariat) is the idea that man, through
his work, produces his own essence, "and furthermore producing precisely this essence as community. An
absolute immanence of man to man—a humanism—and of community to community—a communism—
[but One that] obstinately subtends [delimits] . . . all forms of oppositional communism [or resistance, seen
as counterrevolutionary]. . . . [I]t is precisely the immanence of man to man . . . that constitutes the
stumbling block to a thinking of community. . . . Essence is set to work in them; through them, it becomes
its own work. This is what we have called 'totalitarianism,' but it might be better named 'immanentism' " (2-
3; Nancy's emphasis).
ℵ Therefore, it does not matter, man or God, God or man, or for that matter, G/goddess or woman. But it
could as easily be, as it has been repeatedly, the man's own essence emanating a Stalinist community,
which would be the rapedeath of community (Inoperative 12).
ℵ For Salieri, of course, it is God emanating through Amadeus directly to him. Hence, GOD -> (ravishes) -
> Amadeus but only indirectly Salieri himself. Shaffer best describes this indirect ravishment of Salieri, as
if he were Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, being raped, impregnated by God Himself, for the second coming. 8
Shaffer has Salieri reading Amadeus's manuscripts: Salieri recalls, "Here again was the very voice of God!"
Then Shaffer gives his stage directions: "The music swells. What we now hear is an amazing collage of
great passages from Mozart's music, ravishing to Salieri and to us. The Court Composer . . . walks around
and around his salon, reading the pages and dropping them on the floor as if in a rough and tumbling sea;
he experiences the point where beauty and great pain coalesce. More pages fall than he can read, scattering
across the floor in a white cascade" (scene 70; emphasis mine). 9
MILAN KUNDERA: Yes, I have written much about the beloved and music, about the failure of
communism, and the trickiness of immortality. I have written a whole novel—Immortality itself—that is
based on a fictive character named Agnes and her gesture and have used it paradigmatically in association
with Bettina née Brentano's confrontation with Goethe's wife, Christiane, and Bettina's subsequent
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attachment to the Maestro himself, Goethe, which to this day has guaranteed Bettina's own canonization
and immortality (45-47, 56-58). The piece de resistance, of course, took place when Bettina jumped into
the lap of Goethe, hugged him, and fell asleep, or so she tells us in her writings. It really does not matter if
this is the way it was, for "she is revealing to us how she wants us to see her" (57). She offers us a
photograph. A quick cut! Her own Director's cut!
JEAN-LUC NANCY: But how are we to read Shaffer's rendering of Amadeus's deathbed scene
and burial. As sacrifice? Or as the beginning of a community without a community, as infinite finitude? As
an exposition but simultaneous ex-scription?
AVITAL RONELL: Or as the occasion for finitude's score!
ℵ There is the notion in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, as Lawrence Kramer reminds us, that
characters die in "the lovedeath," to advance the spectators (who might be another actor or members of the
audience, as in the play Amadeus). Kramer writes: "Their death absorbs, and turns to bliss, the guilt that the
spectator feels for desiring what they do. . . . Only the spectator can both experience and survive the
lovedeath. Only the spectator can both 'have' jouissance like a woman (the imaginary experience) and
'know' it like a man (the survival)" (134-35). This is drama, still, as a sacrificial rapedeath and lovedeath
rite.
JEAN-LUC NANCY: What must be thought, instead, is a community without community, a
community constantly coming, never arriving and staying fixed in music. This community without is based
not on religion and sacrifice (Inoperative 135) nor on any "theologicopolitics" (Sense 89, 91-92, 105-06),
but on finitude.
AVITAL RONELL: Yes, on finitude's score. Let me elbow back in here and say: "Finitude is not
about the end in terms of fulfillment [e.g., jouissance] or teleological accomplishment but about a
suspension, a hiatus in meaning, reopened each time in the here and now, disappearing as it opens,
exposing itself to something so unexpected and possibly new that it persistently eludes its own grasp"
(Finitude's Score 5; Ronell's emphasis).
ℵ Finitude may be a Heideggerian Ereignis (an event), or interruption, or caesura. Or as demonstrated in all
versions of Amadeus, a giggle. A childish giggle. A becoming child of a giggle that interrupts an absolution
of all who are but mediocrities. In a hospital madhouse. As a voiceover at the end of the film (or as the
virtual curtains fall). Seen or experienced as a Wink: As Nancy writes: "This presence of no god could
however carry with it the enticement, the call, the Wink [nod] of an à-dieu: a going to god, or an adieu to
all gods" (Inoperative 137; Nancy's emphasis. Cf. 115, 119). As Salieri exposes himself and all those other
so-called mediocrities, he also ex-scribes himself as in what Deleuze calls a conversation with Amadeus.
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JEAN-LUC NANCY: "[o]ne begins to imagine"—having viewed Amadeus—"that what has been
most genial in Europe, and maybe even its very idea of genius, arose above all out of a formidable
necessity of putting on stage the sense of sense [i.e., to represent the Divine, the very desired community—
communion, communism—itself, which can but end in violence (sexual violence, rape) as a founding event
of community]. . . . No doubt the cycle of dramatic [violent] representations is closed. It is not by chance
that theater today is without any new fable, without mythos, having exhausted the total fable . . . the fable
of the end of fables. . . . The curtain has fallen on the metaphysical scene, on metaphysics as scene of
(re)presentation" (Sense 23).
ℵ Nancy makes clear, the fable in chaste form—nonetheless, an immanentism—lives on and on and on.
(See Weber, Theatricality as Medium.)
JEAN-LUC NANCY: But again, again, how are we to read Shaffer's rendering of Amadeus's
deathbed scene and burial. As sacrifice? Or as the beginning of a community without a community, as
infinite finitude?
AVITAL RONELL: Or again, again, as an occasion for Finitude's Score!
ℵ Ronell and then D. Diane Davis strongly suggest something about Mozart by way of Deleuze, which can
help us in responding to Jean-Luc's enquiry. Ronell's scanners pick up on Deleuze, whose "example for
becoming with regard to Conversation calls in the birds [that] signal the uncanny space that travels between
us when we converse" (Dictations xv-xvi; emphasis mine; cf. Davis, "Finitude's Clamor" 136). 10 Ronell
quotes Deleuze: "It is like Mozart's birds: in this music there is a bird-becoming, but caught in a music-
becoming of the bird, the two forming a single becoming, a single bloc, an a-parallel evolution—not an
exchange, but 'a confidence with no possible interlocutor,' as a commentator on Mozart says; in short, a
conversation" (xvi; Deleuze, Dialogues 3). But what is alluded to in terms of a "conversation"?
ℵ Ronell, in Dictation: On Haunted Writing, answers: "For his part, Deleuze develops an understanding of
Conversation that conditions a commonality in which the 'we' does not work together but between the two.
Writing between themselves they are writing à deux, each witnessing the other in his solitude. . . . The
evolution of a between zone, with which this work tries to negotiate in the cases of [Amadeus and Salieri],
makes it necessary to consider not only what happens between two proper names but also to read the place
which emerges between [Shaffer] and his mutating text. This place, which is a place of testimony, remains
essentially atopical, however, as it does not take place in one or two of the terms but tries to articulate what
there is between, in the dynamic between that sets relations into provisional positions" (xiv-xv; Ronell's
emphasis and bracketed interpolations mine).
JEAN-LUC NANCY: Then, what you are getting at, Victor, with your interpolations
(interruptions, finitudes) is that "we" should read Shaffer's rendering of the final death-bed-writing scene of
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Amadeus's writing "his" Requiem and Salieri's copying it as what Deleuze calls a conversation and what
Ronell calls dictation, or a writing à deux, a writing in between. You have already discussed this writing à
deux and possibly a folie à deux or trois in chapter 4, when discussing the zigzagging of Freud's attitudes
toward the seduction theory and infantile sexuality and Freud's attitude toward Fliess.
AVITAL RONELL: So then, Victor, the conversation between the two composers, with the stand-
in of it as the Requiem, is Finitude's Score. In fact, all the music referred to in the film—not just the mass—
is part of that Score. And yet, as I say in Dictations, none of the conversation between the two is in the film,
for what is in between is "the noncanonic excess of [Mozart's] signature" (ix; interpolation mine). It's not
about the subject Mozart and the signature "Mozart," or "Amadeus," just as it is not about the so-called
successful composer and the unsuccessful composer but what lies in between as noncanonic excess. Which,
yes, the versions of the play and the film are filled with!
ℵ Yes and Yes. It is, as Jean-Luc might say, not just in terms of immanence a story necessarily to be read
or seen, hermeneutically, in the realm of being, but also in paraterms of finitude a parastory to be
anticipateddd-ly listened to—in the realm of relations. (I say "para"story, for it is a radical finitude of
stories that lie alongside, or in between, the so-called stories of Amadeus-Mozart and Salieri, the ones that
would be canonized.) One would have to be hysterical to proffer them. One would have to hear. . . .
PETER SHAFFER: ". . . a high-pitched giggle, which is going to characterize Mozart throughout
the film" (film, scene 25; cf. play 24).
ℵ Yes, the giggle, or Wink (the nod), as Jean-Luc discusses it, an à-dieu, to an absent god. . . . The
parastory, as you might say, Avital, "points to the thirdness that they [Amadeus and Salieri] conceived
between themselves and subjected to consistent morphing" (Dictations xii; emphasis and interpolation
mine). We can hermeneutically-communicatively say that the music is Mozart's and the frame of the story
is Salieri's (or Shaffer's) rendering. But the parastories between them are not in any realm of being, or
immanence. We cannot say that they are theirs. They belong to no subject (they are not substantial). As a
caseless in pointless, Amadeus cannot control t/his giggle. When he attempts to be serious, inevitably,
contrary to his intentions, he but giggles, or butt f/arts, which is how Shaffer introduces Amadeus to Salieri
and to us. Causing consternation around him and for himself. Mouths open agape. Out of the mouth of the
adult, but obscene childish beast, comes giggles. Out of the mouths of Amadeus's fictive contemporaries
comes . . . (silence that assaults our eardrums). The entire framing device that Shaffer constructs for
Salieri's apology is undercut—cut!—cut!—cut!—by the final Amadeusian giggle before all goes finally
black on the stage or screen.
ℵ I must greatly emphasize what I have not yet said enough, for this parastory of finitude's mis-take on
Amadeus's in betweens, his potential tweenings, is not one that can be easily told or read, given what
counts for telling and reading, in terms of being and difference. Hence, the reasons for my referring in the
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introduction to this chapter to the men sharing a homosocial space of trafficking in women, which they do
share in society. No doubt about it. This point, we, indeed, can immediately understand! For the parastory
to be heard and listened to and read, however, would require, as Diane Davis might explain, that the story
of Mozart, "Amadeus," and Salieri—their in be tweens—"would have to be radically redefined: not
according to immanence's registers of being and difference [not that kind of discourse] but according to
finitude's resisters of becoming and différance" ("Finitude's Clamor" 135). And not just the between of the
men, but the tweening of Amadeus and Constanze, as I have suggested, in their perverse fugue-(flux)-like
scatalogical ex-change (play, Act 1, Scene 5; film, Scene: 29), 11 which Salieri cannot even begin to
understand once he sees that this obscene childish twenty-six year old man is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
(Is it not also wonderful that Amadeus is the middle, the in be tween proper, but Oh, so improper, name!)
WAM is driven to lose his (proper) names: Wolfgang and Wolfie. Amadeus and beloved by God. Mozart
and belittled by Father. WAM tweens. Which is precisely what "Divine" (in Multiple Maniacs) attempts.
ℵ And yet, we can hear finitude's clamor of the parastory—the nondialectical tweening back and forth,
zigzagging—if we but retune our ears. One possibility would be to listen not deductively, inductively, or
abductively, but conductively. Recall, as Jean-Luc reminds me to recall, the zigzagging that I performed
theatrically-hysterically-obsessively in my discussions of Freud in relation to (being or becoming) Fliess
(cf. Deleuze, Dialogues 6; Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 304, 317).
DIANE DAVIS: Yes, Victor, "Though finitude is, strictly speaking, unspeakable, it's not
incommunicable: It communicates itself constantly, irrepressibly, as inscription's exscriptions. The saying
continuously haunts the said, coming through in textual disturbances, interruptions in the manifestation of
meaning and being." My gods, have we not ex-perienced enough of these kinds of hauntings and
interruptions in y/our own book, Chaste Rape! You make demands of y/our readers' having to shift, to
zigzag, between academic-immanence's registers of being and difference and finitude's registers of
becoming and différance!
DIANE DAVIS: "Levinas says it comes through [to us] as 'a blinking of meaning' (Otherwise
152). Thanks in part to the purely performative [theatrical] dimension of language, to what Paul de Man
calls the 'text machine'—which is responsible, Ronell writes, 'for effects of meaning generated by sheer
contingency, elements of uncontrol and improvisation' (Stupidity 170)—the exscribed does leave a(n
inassimilable) trace. That is, thanks in part to language's finitude . . . the exscribed does manage to crash
inscription's party, intruding on the festivities by making some ssstatic-y noise, gesturing to us from the
door (from the outside)" (134; cf. Nancy, "Exscription," Birth 319-40).
ℵ Yes, Mozart speaks, but also, as you might say, Diane, "disruptive bursts of the unintelligible" speak
Mozart (134; cf. Davis, Breaking Up).
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DIANE DAVIS: Yes, "This we-who writes [and giggles, winks, nods] doesn't work 'together' (in
the typical sense of collaboration) but between the two, at the limit, where the encounter with the Other
necessarily takes 'you' out: You are written, or as Ronell says, you are 'overwritten' (Stupidity 45) by it"
(137; interpolations mine).
ℵ It may very well be that the giggles are channeled through Amadeus by a mad god (deus)—and yet, an
hysterically mad and obsessively made God—but the giggles are still more than enough excess to ever be
canonized! 12 Or Is this—after all has been possibly undone and redone by Capital—the case? (I will take up
the issue, the replaying of, the Divine by Nancy in my discussion of Multiple Maniacs, in which the newest
Divine is excess itself [ever-] confronting possible ap/propriation, canonization.)
ℵ But for now, let us say that the two—Amadeus and Salieri—minus God—minus immanence—form "a
bloc," as Deleuze would say, "of becoming" (Dialogues 7). Overwriting Finitude's Score. A singular bloc
of birds-cum-wasp and orchid. De-volving in a-parallel mannerisms (2-3).
"If a teacher puts her mind to it, none of her students will succeed."
Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher (9).
"At the center of . . . pedagogy is the fuck."
Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (180).
"Let us take an example as simple as: x starts practicing piano again. Is it an Oedipal return to
childhood? Is it a way of dying. . . . Is it a new borderline, an active line that will bring other
becomings entirely different from becoming or rebecoming a pianist, that will induce a
transformation of all of the preceding assemblages to which x was prisoner? . . . Schizoanalysis, or
pragmatics, has no other meaning: Make a rhizome . . . a becoming, people your desert. So
experiment."
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (250-51).
Installation, DVD Two (Henry Fool, Pedagogy): Set simultaneously at "The World of Donuts" (a
setting in Henry Fool) and in a piano classroom (a setting in The Piano Teacher)!
ℵ Pedagogy is everything in Henry Fool. Piano pedagogy! In a quasi-confessional scene, after Henry has
"raped" Mary and told Simon that he has made "love" with Mary, Simon Grim talks alone in church with
Father Hawkes about Henry:
SIMON: ". . . do you think Henry is . . . dangerous?"
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FATHER HAWKES: "He needs help. Our help. Yours especially."
SIMON: "But what can I do?"
FATHER HAWKES: "The best parts of himself come to the surface when he's helping someone
learn: I've seen this. Let yourself be taught. Show your appreciation for his guidance. In this way, you
know, perhaps. Well. There's hope for everyone. Even. Even Henry" (HF 65).
ℵ Simon willingly thereafter becomes Henry's student, which raises the question of whether or not Simon
is calling Henry's attention away from Mary, his mother, and toward himself. . .
HAL HARTLEY (interrupting): I don't think that in writing and shooting that section, I would
have Simon drawing attention away from Mary. After all, Simon must know, given what Father Hawkes
tells him, that Mary is only one possible student or person that Henry would give attention to, if a student at
all. What constitutes a "student" here? And what constitutes a "lesson" in this film! There is that contrastive
parallel between Mary and Pearl. Let us not forget that Henry gives attention to Pearl as well and attempts
to teach Vicky to leave Warren and then attempts, though fails, to teach Warren, who may be uneducable,
unchangeable except by the Owen Feers of the world, with their right-wing politics. But importantly, Henry
does change in the film just as Simon and Fay change . . .
_. . . Good enough! But there is a huge leap away from the direction I thought this installation was drifting
toward. So okay. The conductive links are among Henry-Mary-Simon. Henry is a naturally born teacher
(pedagogue) and molester (pedophile) while Mary fails as a student and Simon succeeds. (Later, however,
the pedagogical relationship between Henry and Simon is reversed as circumstances change everything.
When Simon's poem becomes noticed and there is a chance it will be published, Simon has the authority
and voice to tell Henry that he must marry his sister, Fay, who is pregnant.)
HAL HARTLEY: "Most of my films have had that kind of bildungsroman quality" ("Responding"
xiii). Henry perhaps changes the most. "One handy phrase I used a lot during the writing was, 'What
happens if the most untrustworthy man in town were the best person in town?' Henry is a completely
unreliable, polymorphously perverse egomaniac, but he's a good man—the most selfless, the most honest,
the most truthful, the strongest. I love telling stories like that, when people just don't fit into the box
correctly" (xx). . . .
HAL HARTLEY: But I still think that one of the central scenes in the film is when Henry comes
home and enters his basement apartment and Pearl is there waiting for him. "I wanted that scene in the
basement between Pearl—who's aged thirteen—and Henry to be really harsh, and I wanted us to at least
fear that Henry is capable of doing something stupid and horrible again" ("Responding" xix; emphasis
mine).
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ℵ Yes, and Henry does not . . . in this scene in the basement . . . live up to his name. Fool! Unlike Gertrude
Baniszewski (The Basement), Henry does the right thing this time. . . . Let us not forget: While Sylvia is
sixteen, Pearl is thirteen. . . . My grandmother was eighty-two. . . . Henry is capable of changing, and yet,
you never know with him, as you say.
ℵ I know that it has been a long time since I've mentioned Sylvia Likens, but she is in everything that I
have written. Here. She is the para-deigma, the alongside. The adjacency.
ℵ Prior to this scene with Father Hawkes, Hal, you write the scene of Henry giving Simon a piano-spelling
lesson. What motivates this pedagogical scene is the previous scene, in which a sheet from Simon's
manuscript is torn by Henry from the book and taped up by Gnoc at the checkout counter in The World of
Donuts, which is a little store and coffee place where people in the neighborhood in Queens hang out.
Vicky reads this page and denounces it as pornographic.
HAL HARTLEY: Yes, people in the film respond to the poem in different ways. While it makes
Gnoc sing (speak) for the first time in her life, it annoys others ("Responding" xvii). We don't see the poem;
and yet, we see it by way of a variety of effects and affects it has on people.
ℵ Then after Vicky's response, you introduce a quick cut to the piano-spelling scene with Henry at a piano,
hitting one note for each possible spelling of the homophones there-their-they're. (This thematic punctum of
the one staccato note is prevalent in the film at strategic moments.)
HENRY FOOL: "See, Simon, there are three kinds of there. There's 'There.' T-H-E-R-E. There are
the donuts. Then there's T-H-E-I-R; which is the possessive. It is their donut. Then, finally, there's 'they're.'
T-H-E-Y-'-R-E. A contraction, meaning they are. They're the donut people. Get it?" (31).
ℵ I don't know about Simon, but I get the DONUT progressively (or regressively) to mean Do Not. (The
transformation is part of the problem of spelling the various homophones for there, which is
philosophically there is, es gibt, il ya. Get it?) There are the do-not people and their do-nots. People are
what they do. Or do not do. Thou shalt not. Therefore, they do not, except to add to the do-not Decalogue.
By telling others to do-not. Hence, there are and they're the do-not people, making up—composing—the
World of Do Nots. These are the people who obsessively engage in the hortatory negative. Against people
like Henry, Simon, and Fay. Who act; suffer; learn. 13 And yet, there is Henry who acts against the
Decalogue; in fact, he thinks it is his vocation to do so. The world of donuts and do nots is not an easy one
to determine, anymore than anything that is happening in Henry Fool. Which is a film not about
interpretation but about experimentation (cf. Deleuze, Dialogues 48-49; Lyotard's "pagus" and "pagani" in
Differend 151-81; and Just Gaming 9-10, 12, 14, 34, 49).
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ℵ On this piano in the Grim house there is a picture of a man dressed in a uniform, perhaps a U.S. Army
uniform. Prior to the spelling-piano lesson, Henry is speaking briefly with Mary. The film directions read:
"He stops and lifts a small framed photo of a soldier off the piano."
HENRY FOOL: "This your husband?"
ℵ The film directions then read: "Violated somehow, she gets up and snatches it out of his hands. She puts
it in a drawer and cringes as Henry plays one note on the piano." Punctum!
MARY GRIM: "Stop that" (22).
ℵ This scene thematically links with the other piano lesson scene of Mary's sitting at the piano and playing
when Simon walks in on her and they exchange a similarly laconic exchange. But we are left with the
question Who is in the photo?
HAL HARTLEY: It is most likely Mary's husband. I've surmised, as a method actor might, that
"the father probably died in the Vietnam War. I thought a lot about how different Mom could have been
and I worked it out that she had once shown some promise as a pianist. I wanted her to be creative because
I thought it was very important to get her and Simon into that scene when she's playing the piano, and he
says, 'That's nice,' and she makes the distinction between 'nice' and 'unremarkable,' which is a harsh reality.
[See HF 77.] I imagined she got knocked up in high school while she was waiting to get into music school,
and then her boyfriend was drafted and got killed so she got stuck with these kids" ("Responding" xvi).
ℵ So Mary stops playing when Simon sees her because her playing is "not remarkable"! In the next scene
Simon takes his manuscript to the publisher Angus, hoping that it will be remarkable and, therefore,
publishable. But while he takes this risk of showing his poem, Mary takes her life by cutting her wrists.
Though in the unfolding events of the film, Simon's poem is rejected by the publisher, Simon's poem
becomes remarkable and the publisher changes his mind! Simon has a future. Mary thought she did not.
She becomes a do not. It is the case, however, that she is totally overwhelmed by her situation—her life is
as her name says, grim—she comes to being a do not.
HAL HARTLEY: Mary "is a total life-negating person" ("Responding" xvii).
ℵ I am tempted to say that Henry also is a do not. Because of his getting Fay pregnant, he has to give up, as
he says, his "vocation" (HF 32, 48). But as Salieri is linked to Mozart, Henry is linked to Simon, who is the
Nobel Prize winner. . . . Like Salieri and Amadeus, Henry and Simon are in a "conversation" together. That
is what is between them. . . . Salieri does something. He's constantly trying. . . . But the whole issue of
whether or not Henry himself is a great writer is indeterminable. In terms of Salieri and Henry, this is not
the issue we should be concerned with.
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HAL HARTLEY: Yes, "I didn't . . . want us to be able to see either Henry's confession or Simon's
poem, because I didn't want us to get involved with judging them. That wasn't really the issue. It could be
that Henry's confession is a great piece of writing even though Simon and the publisher guy dismiss it. I
was much more interested in showing how the value of creative activity is often measured by the particular
kind of reaction it elicits" ("Responding" xii).
HAL HARTLEY: Let me slightly modify what you have said in your comparisons between
Salieri-Amadeus and Henry-Simon. Perhaps it is a different case with Salieri and Mozart. These are real
people with real music. But our attitudes toward them could turn on a dime, contrary to the principle of
canonization. Shaffer-Forman's telling of Salieri's telling brings Salieri to the forefront now. Our ears and
eyes are taught to be obsessive, but they are given to becoming hysterical. Shaffer and Forman's film
Amadeus has taught us of Salieri himself and in a perverse way. If we could all be but patron saints of
mediocrity! This apparently is an option. Simply recall Blake's reading of Satan as the hero of Genesis.
God-Satan-Blake form an assemblage, a bloc. There is something Satanic in both Salieri and Henry. They
are angels but devils. And it's the same with Fay and Mary! They enter the discursive scene and change
how we hear and see the incompossible world of that scene, creating new incompossibilities. And we
should not think of Amadeus and Simon as simply angels (cf. "Responding" xiv). Nor should we think that
Mary must succumb to her end, for she does not in other incompossible worlds.
ℵ Yes. And yet, as we have said, we must be careful of recognition, immanence, the Absolute,
immortality, subjectivity, verticality. Perhaps we can say again that the two sets of men are in the between
zone. Your picking up on the change in the conditions for incompossibilities is what can help us avoid the
myth of immanence. . . . And yes, yes, yes Mary.
ℵ But I must insist that Gertrude is a devil. I know that I run the risk of returning to the myth of
immanence, but it is difficult for me in Gertrude's case to think otherwise than absolute. I must find an ab-
solution! The pull of thinking vertically is too great here. I must find an ab-solution! The exchange that
goes on between Gertrude and Sylvia is a master-slave one without let up. Perhaps the ab-solution is
Millett's point of view as she enters several characters, including in a major way Gertrude herself. But for
me, there is no in between zone. No "conversation." Between Gertrude and Sylvia. Unless we are to see, in
this elaborate comparison, that what they are making together is the product of Sylvia's postumous head.
But this is far too evil to even imagine as something made. But what there is, is Sylvia's laughter in the face
of Gertrude's sick demands. Sylvia's laughter is in part an analogue to Amadeus's giggle. It is a form of
resistance against Gertrude's pedagogy, but Sylvia's smile or laughter is also an expression of finitude.
Perhaps, again, Millett with her extra-ordinary point of view establishes the conditions for a between zone.
A "conversation." Hence, Gertrude-Millett-Sylvia. But yes, Millett's rendering of Sylvia's laughter coming
posthumously from Sylvia's open mouth is finitude's score. The image is a major caesura or interruption.
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And yes, I must hold out hope for an incompossible world in which Gertrude is otherwise than she is (was)
in 1965, in Indianapolis, Indiana.
ℵ As Avi said, finitude is "a suspension, a hiatus in meaning, reopened each time in the here and now,
disappearing as it opens, exposing itself to something so unexpected and possibly new that it persistently
eludes its own grasp." This is what we see in the open mouth. Sylvia's corpse with its open mouth that so
haunts Kate Millett. It is also, though rendered differently, the open mouth that runs throughout Amadeus.
People cannot believe what Amadeus is saying as he moves from being serious to becoming vulgar and
consequently their mouths become agape. And it's the open mouth that runs throughout Jean-Luc's
writings. 14
JEAN-LUC NANCY: It is not only the open mouth; it is also the open sky.
ℵ AND there is. . . .
ℵ I want now to slightly return to the spelling-piano lesson. There is something there that wants to be
explored further: The complexity of and the implications within there. Da. When linked to the verb To Be.
There is. Da-sein. There is this wonderful habit that inhabits many of the scenes with Joseph II in Amadeus.
He has the habit of saying "There it is." Recall the scene that goes like this:
VON STRACK: "Your majesty, Herr Mozart."
JOSEPH: "Yes, what about him?"
VON STRACK; "He's here."
JOSEPH: "Ah-ha. Well. There it is. Good." (film, scene 45) 15
This is Joseph's typical expression of a conclusion to something that is to begin. An event (perhaps
Ereignis). As I read this expression earlier, it is es gebt. It gives (itself)! It is . . . what Jean-Luc refers to as
"the generosity of being" (Experience 147). This is what Amadeus listens to—this generosity—and its
forever remainderless becoming. This is the conversation. Between Amadeus and Salieri in the deathbed
scene, between possibly Millett and Sylvia-Gertrude, and among us all. If we but listen. To. The caesura.
The enjambment. Interrupting and jamming the pull toward the immanent-transcendental signal. This gift is
finitude's score.
ROLAND BARTHES: I have wanted to interrupt this thought for some time. I recall having
written, "I am increasingly convinced, both in writing [composition] and in teaching [pedagogy], that the
fundamental operation of [is] fragmentation, and, if one teaches, digression, or, to put it in a preciously
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ambiguous word, excursions. I should therefore like the speaking and the listening that will be interwoven
here to resemble the comings and going of a child playing beside his mother, leaving her, returning to bring
her a pebble, a piece of string, and thereby tracing around a calm center a whole locus of play within which
the pebble, the string come to matter less than the enthusiastic giving of them" ("Inaugural Lecture" 476-
77).
GIORGIO AGAMBEN: Let us not forget that Vittorio discussed the child in great depth in
chapters 4 and 5. He specifically discussed Freud and the child and Kristeva's view of the centralization of
the child in psychoanalysis as an error, and then went on to discuss Derrida's and my own views of the
child in relation to infancy and history. He gave time to a rethinking of Heraclitus's melancholy child
playing a game of dice.
ℵ Children can best play the game. Or rather to get more to the pointless, those who would become
children can. I am mindful, however, that it was children who Gertrude hailed to acts of sexual violence.
Her own and the neighborhood's children. The children often played out the torture as if it was a game of
double binds (Basement 297). Yes, children, as Freud claimed, can be perpetrators. Children against
children. The Infans has to be against itself first, then others. But this is not about the question of children!
This is about becoming. Children are the most impossible question Marx! Children are the very epitome of
imminently reversibility. But Gertrude's joining in sacred (sacrificial) league with children is not a
becoming. Hers is the State's pretensions of a proper pedagogy (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 24).
Which is designed to negate becoming.
ℵ Becoming children can best play the game.
MILAN KUNDERA: Yes, and your saying such reminds me of Bettina (Brentano) and Goethe
and the whole issue of immortality and attachment and the game. I have written: "In 1807, on the day of
their first meeting, [Bettina] sat herself on [Goethe's] lap, if we can trust her own description. . . . She said,
'I am interested in nothing but you.' Goethe smiled and said the following fateful words to the young
woman: 'You are a charming child.' . . . She felt so good snuggled up against him that soon she fell asleep.
[. . .] Nothing is more useful than to adopt the status of a child: a child can do whatever it likes"
(Immortality 57-58; see 59-74). 16
JOSEPH II: Ah, yes, this, too, reminds me of Mozart and Antoinette. When I introduced Mozart to
my court, I recounted the time when Mozart "was only six years old. He was giving the most brilliant little
concert here. As he got off the stool, he slipped and fell. My sister Antoinette helped him up herself, and do
you know what he did? Jumped straight into her arms and said, 'Will you marry me, yes or no?' " (film,
scene 47).
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ℵ But are these exemplars not the reverse of Salieri-Amadeus! Is not Salieri attaching himself to Amadeus,
and is not Amadeus the child while Salieri is the surrogate, super-ego father! But perhaps, you two, are
suggesting that it is Amadeus, the child, who is attaching himself to Salieri, instead of the other way around
that I have pointed to in the play and film. Hence, the child, again, would be father of the man. It is, after
all, what Salieri himself announces when, as a child, he idolizes Amadeus-the-child (film, scene 15). Who
remains for the most part a child throughout the story-confession. These positions, too, are imminently
reversible: Salieri-Amadeus and Amadeus-Salieri. Referring directly to Deleuze again, I can say that the
bloc of the wasp and the orchid can change positions, refolding into different assemblages. It is, as Deleuze
says, a "double capture since 'what' each becomes changes no less than 'that which' becomes" (Dialogues
2). Salieri becomes part of Amadeus's creative apparatus (a mad deus) at the same time as Amadeus
becomes the creativity of Salieri (a patron saint of mediocrities). 17
. . .
ℵ "Pass on. . ." (Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn 309). Sitting on the sofa, this Sunday morning, I read
the NYTimes Magazine, which was a womb ripe with words, conductive words such as "ink," "corpse,"
"piano," "Mozart," and "Henry Miller"—all sending me to Tropic. When I think of Miller, I think of
Andrea Dworkin and her Mercy. Tropic-Mercy, Mercy-Tropic are back to back on a bookshelf of mine. In
between, of course, could be Leaves of Grass. Thumbing through Tropic, I read across pages. There is so
much there about piano music and players, piano teachers and lessons.
HENRY MILLER: "I remember sitting at the piano in my nightshirt, working away at the pedals
with bare feet. . . . I was on the piano stool and doing a velocity exercise. I always began with Czerny. . . .
Long before I read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus I was composing the music to it, in the
key of sassafras. . . . This vomit of learned truck was stewing in my guts the whole week long, waiting for it
to come Sunday to be set to music. . . . I would get my inspiration, which was to destroy all the existent
forms of harmony and create my own cacophony. . . . One Sunday . . . I composed one of the loveliest
scherzos imaginable—to a louse. . . . Sunday came like a thaw, the birds driven so crazy by the sudden heat
that they flew in and out of the window, immune to the music. One of the German relatives had just arrived
from Hamburg, or Bremen. . . . She used to pat me on the head and tell me I would be another Mozart. I
hated Mozart, and I hate him still and so to get even with her I would play badly, play all the sour notes I
knew. . . . One of the reasons why I never got anywhere with the bloody music is that it was always mixed
up with sex. . . . Lola was my first piano teacher. Lola Niessen. . ." (Tropic of Capricorn 248-50).
ℵ Hal, there is something very anarchistic in Henry Fool's thoughts and actions.
. . .
HAL HARTLEY: Yes, as I say, "he symbolizes anarchy and he brings the blood into our
interactions with each other" ("Responding" xiv). Recall what Henry says to Father Hawkes and Simon.
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HENRY FOOL: "Listen, father, as I was about to tell my friend Simon here, I am, without doubt,
the biggest sinner within a hundred miles of this parish. But still, I've gotta stay up late at night to outdo the
unending parades of mundane little atrocities I see committed everyday right out in the open spaces of this
loud and sunlit culture we call home" (HF 48).
ℵ Henry says, "outdo." This is so ambiguous here. Henry reminds me of Professor Avenarius, a character
in Kundera's Immortality. Avenarius is an anarchist of sorts, but it is too simple to call him such, just as it is
to call Henry an anarchist. What Avenarius does is to play a game, a sort of childish game of introducing
prankish, chance interventions into people's lives. Marx speaks of no longer interpreting the world but
changing it. Avenarius sets out to do just this! But he does primarily one thing. At night while jogging, he
travels through the streets of Paris on foot with a hidden knife in a sheath in his long coat and,
spontaneously, selects an automobile and stabs at its tires. Flattening them (245). The act is best thought of,
according to Avenarius, as totally irrational episodes, being introduced into the world. 18 The Narrative of
the world. Avenarius says, "I dreamed of writing a big book: The Theory of Chance" (225).
ℵ In a metafictional manner during a pause in story-time, Avenarius discusses a character in the novel with
Kundera, arguing over whether the character is symbolic (heuristic) or something else such as chance
(touché, aleatory). Avenarius explains to Kundera "how to perform a perfect subversive act, effective and
yet safe from discovery by the police" (245). What motivates Avenarius is that he believes he is fighting
Diabolum. He has no faith in Marx or others in their attempts to fight evil or as Henry Fool says, "mundane
little atrocities." Banal atrocities. For Avenarius it is his subversive acts that change the world. 19
HAL HARTLEY: So Avenarius would rather rely on chance than some socially-dialectically
engineered way of attacking Diabolum.
ℵ Yes, apparently. . . . Well, one night while Avenarius is out for a jog and a tire slashing, he is mistaken
by a woman as someone who is charging toward her with a knife in hand. She tells the police: "He
threatened me with a knife! He wanted to rape me!" (263). Before being taken away by the police, a man
who is a lawyer walks up and gives him his business card. The man is Paul, a major, connected character in
the story. After handing the card, Paul returns to his car to see that the tires have been cut (264).
In the closing pages of Immortality, Kundera and Avenarius talk about Paul, who gets Avenarius acquitted.
What we know going into this episode by way of the unfolding narrative is that Avenarius was the lover of
Paul's wife. (The coincidences thicken.) Avenarius explains to Avenarius that he does not tell Paul that he
is innocent of attempted rape.
AVENARIUS: "[N]o man will suspect someone known to rape women at knifepoint to be the
lover of his wife. Those two images don't go together."
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MILAN KUNDERA: "Wait a minute," I said. "He really thinks that you wanted to rape women?"
AVENARIUS: "I told you about that."
MILAN KUNDERA: "I thought you were joking."
AVENARIUS: "Surely I wouldn't reveal my secret!" And he added, "Anyway, even if I had told
him the truth he wouldn't have believed me. And even if he had believed me, he would have immediately
lost interest in my case. I was valuable to him only as a rapist."
MILAN KUNDERA: I was strangely moved. "You were ready to go to jail as a rapist, in order not
to betray the game. . . ." And at that moment I understood him at last. If we cannot accept the importance of
the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we
have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy.
Avenarius is playing a game, and for him the game is the only thing of importance in a world without
importance. But he knows that his game will not make anyone laugh. . . . I said, "You play with the world
like a melancholy child who has no little brother."
AVENARIUS: I smiled like a melancholy child. Then I said, "I don't have a little brother, but I
have you" (344). Avenarius-Kundera, Kundera-Avenarius. The metacharacter is the father of the author.
And vice versa.
ℵ Kundera and Avenarius part never to see each other again. Kundera writes: "Avenarius was going to the
basement, where he had parked his Mercedes" (345).
Mat Hinlin: "Do you believe in God?"
Babs (Divine): "I am God."
John Waters, Pink Flamingo in Trash Trio 84-85.
"Only a [Divine] can still save us."
Martin Heidegger, "Der Spiegel Interview" (57; emphasis mine).
Installation, DVD Three (Multiple Maniacs, Chaste Rape in Divine Places): Set in John Waters's
parents front yard in Baltimore, Maryland.
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ℵ To discuss Multiple Maniacs, we need to rebegin with Jean-Luc Nancy's "Divine Places" in The
Inoperative Community. Jean-Luc thinks of God, or gods, not as being, but as place (114). The onto-
theological question What is God? leads but to a deflected transcendence in the name of immanence. This
obsessive desire for an object called God/gods that would be the subject, this thinking of the object relation
to subject, is what thwarts community. Such thinking is insidious and invidious. In dealing even with the
possibilities of God as place, Jean-Luc sees that he must be forever suspicious of falling back into "a
discourse de Deo, of whatever sort" (114). Hence, he chooses "to fragment [his] argument" (114). And
eventually to singularize it.
ℵ But it is important to note that this place is not the traditional topos of philosophical or rhetorical
thinking. It is a place adjacent to any traditional topos. It is the other place—that is not traditionally other—
of contestation and tests. It is an other place of third figures. 20
ℵ In asking the question, "What does 'my God' mean?," Jean-Luc reflects on the nature of the question and
sees it as "interpellative: you, here, now, are entering into a singular relationship with me. This does not
ensure the relationship, nor in any way provide the measure of it. But it proclaims it, and gives it its
chance" (117).
ℵ Jean-Luc turns to a pertinent discussion by Jean-Marie Pontevia on "the cult of the Virgin." Pontevia
sees this "major event" (i.e., the advent of the cult) as "the last example in the West of the birth of a
divinity" (114; qtd from La peinture 69). Jean-Luc chooses to read "last example" as saying "that a divine
birth is always possible, and that it is therefore still possible. But at the same time it means that such a birth
bears no relation to a 'return,' a restoration, or a reinvention of the divine—quite the opposite. . . . The
divinity born in the figure of the Virgin was in no way the return or the reincarnation of a former divinity. It
was the divinity of a new age: of a new age of painting and of woman, as well as of the age in which God
himself would vanish into the Concept. It was a divine sign opposed to God" (114-15; emphasis mine. Cf.
Kristeva, Tales of Love).
JEAN-LUC NANCY: Yes, I guess the important thing here—for I am beginning to see the
indirection you are going in—is that this god that is coming, this new Divine place, among places, is a third
figure.
GIORGIO AGAMBEN: Ah, yes. This will be the coming community.
AVITAL RONELL: The community without a community. One that keeps coming, never
arriving. Always deferred.
ℵ Yes, if there is something like a topos, it is différance, not the old philosophical-rhetorical topos of
difference. To cut to the chase and to risk being chastised, I would venture that this new Divine place is
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something that gets replayed by John Waters in the old forms as a parody and as a series of pastiches—so
as if to critique the myth of immanence itself—but then, this new Divine place is also something entirely
new. As Waters tells us: "Being Catholic always makes you more theatrical" (Shock Value 65). But what
John is talking about and enacting in his Divine films is a theatricality (a theatre model) without
foundations, without substantiality. 21
ℵ First, there is the God, then the cult of the Virgin—both an expression of immanence and infinity. Then
there is what is new in terms of Divine (places)—an ex-position of imminence and finitude, a radically
infinite finitude. So as I see John's film, there's a movement towards a third that is not a 1, 2, and then 3,
etc. This third figure of Divine (places) is adjacent to logos (as in to account for, accountability, reason).
JEAN-LUC NANCY: This third Divine "is precisely what manifests itself and is recognizable
outside of all knowledge about its 'being.' God does not propose himself as a new type of being—or of
absence of being—for us to know. He proposes himself, that is all" (Inoperative 115-16).
ℵ His proposal is a singular one. Not One, but a singular one that is not part of a set of numbers. There is
no knowledge of such a singularity, for it establishes a relationship only momentarily. With ex-position
comes ex-scription.
JEAN-LUC NANCY: Yes, for to know (under the terms of identity, non-contradiction, and
excluded middle); for to expect a permanence would only take us back to the myth of immanence and a
"theologicopolitics," which is the source of a "sacrificial politics" (Sense 89; cf. 91-92, 105-06). God
proposes himself, and yet there is no "he" or "she." Rather, there is the nothing . . . that remains of gods"
(Inoperative 116). After the death of God. But this nothing is not negative. Nor is it something positive.
Rather again, it is what "remains"—call it the remainders—for which there is no proper-improper
vocabulary in the language of reason. Or call it singular. Or call it crumbs. God has crumbled. Or still, call
it, as I offer a list in The Sense of the World, the "fallen pieces, waste, wreckage, jagged bits, remains,
inner organs of slaughtered beasts, shreds, filth, and excrement, on which contemporary art—trash art—
gorges itself" (132). All that has been ex-scribed.
ℵ Yes, we are referring to the excluded middle here—all that has no proper name for itself, other than a
traveling freak show, a "Cavalcade of Perversion" (Multiple Maniacs). Therefore, we are referring—
deferring—to what remains as third Divine places. We can casuistically twist and stretch the language in
such a mannerism, as Michel Foucault has, and refer to this third Divine as a "nonpositive affirmation"
(Language 36). 22
ℵ In terms of sex, it is a third figure of sex. Which gets us to Divine in Multiple Maniacs as well as Pink
Flamingoes and Pink Flamingoes Forever—all, as you might say, are "trash" art, "shock" art (Sense, 132,
133).
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ℵ We can say that Divine is a transgression in the form of a wicked parody of Christianity. But we can also
say that Divine is a wicked pastiche of Christianity. Of a God caught up in being on its way to becoming. In
a space. And yet, Divine is something new in opposition to both God and the cult of the Virgin. Divine is
constantly interrupting and con/testing. 23 On her wayves with others, becoming, devolving, into yet
something else. For example, in the intended sequel to Pink Flamingos, DIVINE says:
son.
There is only one man in my life—my husband, Crackers II, who you may remember is also my
UPI (Appalled): You're talking about incest?
DIVINE: I cannot begin to describe to you the genealogical miracle of producing a grandchild in
my own little oven.
UPI: Is the kid retarded?
DIVINE: Another bourgeois myth handed down by generations of charlatans in the American
Medical Association. My child is living proof of a new strain of heterosexuality." (Flamingoes Forever, in
Trash Trio 189; emphasis mine)
ℵ Divine, as you might say Jean-Luc, "does not behave like a sign. Perhaps ["her"] nature is that of a
Wink, of a gesture that invites or calls" (Inoperative 119). That calls us not home but to thinking. To
uncanny thinking.
JOHN WATERS: I just can't believe, Victor, what you are saying about Divine!
ℵ John, I am not interpreting; I'm, as Deleuze says, experimenting. I'm calling on Divine in mixed wayves
~~~~~~~~.
ℵ Heidegger intuited that only Divine (spaces) could still save us. But Divine (spaces) remains veiled from
the beginning. "In fact, the history of Western thought begins, not by thinking what is most thought-
provoking," Heidegger says, "but by letting it remain forgotten. Western thought thus begins with an
omission, perhaps even a failure. So it seems, as long as we regard oblivion only as a deficiency, something
negative. . . . The beginning of Western thought is not the same as its origin. The beginning is, rather, the
veil that conceals the origin—indeed an unavoidable veil" (What is Called Thinking 152). In other words
everything from the beginning has been kept Chaste. It is not a matter of our raising the veil to chastise. It
is rather a matter of what still remains unthought. Heidegger amusingly gives us this exemplar: "The
sentence 'The triangle is laughing' cannot be said. It can be said, of course, in the sense that it can be
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pronounced as a mere string of words. But it can not be said really, in terms of what it says. The things that
are evoked by 'triangle' and 'laughing' introduce something contradictory into their relation. . . . To be
possible, the proposition must from the start avoid self-contradiction. This is why the law, that
contradiction must be avoided, is considered a basic tenet of the proposition. Only because thinking is
defined as [logos], as an utterance, can the statement about contradiction perform its role as a law of
thought" (155). But you see, John, the triangle of
God Cult of Virgin
Divine (places)
here is laughing. And not only the triangle is laughing, but also the reader. It is a laughing matter. Even if
for some it is a laughter in dis/belief. But this is a laughter, in the third long run, perverse as it is, that will
shatter the law of what has gone for thinking. The generosity of thinking will shatter what goes for
thinking, as it has shattered love (see Nancy, Inoperative 82-109). All triangles are not necessarily
Euclidean; many have attributes, in other compossible geometric worlds, of varying degrees in relation to
angles such as hyperbolic and elliptical geometries. These worlds are imminent.
JOHN WATERS: So you are saying that at the basis of thinking is rape, but there is a way around
this basis and that is parabasis, interruptions, to non-traditional other spaces.
ℵ Yes, actually and figuratively. You have written of Godard's Hail Mary. 24 You have disclosed the
divinity of rape itself not only in your own films, but also in Godard's. The way you have disclosed the
divinity of rape is by wayves of becoming in other compossible worlds. Which allow for rape not to happen
at all or for sexuality, relationships, and rape to be laughable. In your essay on Godard, . . .
JOHN WATERS: Yes, I remember, Victor. I said, "Although the cinematography [in Hail Mary]
is incredible, the acting first-rate and the script guaranteed to bring a smile to anyone with a sense of humor
who was raised a Catholic, it is also very confusing—hardly a crossover art film to be dubbed for the
suburbs. . . . . The film is reverent in its own ironic way. . . . As an ex-Catholic, Hail Mary actually made
me think fondly of religion for the first time in decades. Who knows what effect Hail Mary will have on my
own spirituality? Of all people, I never thought Godard might tempt me back to the Church. Now, at least, I
have a new respect for the outrageousness and originality of the concept Immaculate Conception. Maybe I
won't be as angry as I used to be when I hear childhood Catholic trauma stories, such as the one a friend
named Mary (her real name) told me recently; All through the year in grade school the nuns showed the
class a mysterious hole in the wall at the end of the hall. One by one, each girl was taken to peer in but
forbidden to reveal what they saw. When Mary's time finally came, she apprehensively approached, stuck
her head through, and saw herself reflected in a mirror across from her, framed in a nun's habit. She finally
got to see herself as a nun. Did the good sister accompanying her whisper in her ear, 'Hail Mary'? I wonder"
(Crackpot 138-39).
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ℵ Divine and the Mary of Hail Mary and all the other Marys, in questioning and adding to the Cult of the
Virgin, prepare the wayves for Divine (places).
ℵ I want to turn now to the Divine rape of Divine by Lobstora. (The double articulation of Divine, as
adjective and noun, is awkward, but will become more unclearly clear as we proceed.)
JOHN WATERS: Oh, there you go again!
ℵ This scene, toward the end of the film, is supposed to be a projection of the crazed Divine, who is
foaming at the mouth—wonderful special effects here, John—after having killed several of the characters.
At best, we might argue—given the in-joke of the giant, mechanical lobster—that this is Caca-pitalism
appropriating the crazed Divine and, thus, your film, John, like so many, if not all, studio films, is always
already appropriated. Which of course it is in/appropriated as canonized filth. Yet something—an excess—
still remains. As an exscription.
ℵ The lobster-Divine rape scene has other possibilities in terms of the two previous rape scenes. Let's
recall that the first rape is perpetrated by two members of Divine's Cavalcade of Perversion. A male and
female drag her partially into an alley and, while the female holds her down, the male rapes her. (It is in
this scene that you, John, searched for the still frame of "Divine's face in the one moment between rape and
miraculous intervention where he lived up to the spiritual side of his name" [Director's Cut 283; emphasis
mine].) The second rape is perpetrated by Mink Stole, the religious whore in church, who stalks, sits next
to, and eventually gives Divine what she calls a "rosary job" during the stations of the cross. Popular
episodes from the life of Christ (ranging from the feeding of the multitudes to His crucifixion) are enfolded
into scenes of Mink anally raping Divine with the prosthetic crucifix of the rosary. Rosy Crucifixion! You
cannot get more perverse than this, John. But at the levels of parody and pastiche you are referring to the
sadomasochism embedded in the founding narratives of Catholicism, which are played out analogically in
the assemblages not only of the crucifixion but also of the stations-of-the-cross and the Divine-Mink
"rosary job." 25 Which gets us to the point of seeing this assemblage of entities forming a single becoming, a
single bloc, an a-parallel evolution (or devolution), a double capture, a conversation (between the stations
of the cross and scenes in Multiple Maniacs). Herewith, the single bloc of Chaste CruciFictions:
Christ being crucified, celebrated in the stations of the cross/
Divine being "crucified" by Mink, re-celebrated in Multiple Maniacs.
(Etymology: conversation is "sexual intercourse or intimacy"; and proximity and the unconscious
mind of the Dictionary: convent, conventional, conventual, convergence, conversation, conversazione,
conversion, conversion reaction.)
ℵ Deleuze and Guattari discuss the lobster in A Thousand Plateaus and in such wayves that it might cast
some light or darkness on the third rape in Multiple Maniacs. They write: "God is a Lobster, or a double
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pincer, a double bind" (40). Yet another double articulation! The classic double bind places the female in
the position of being both revered and raped (see Haskell). Divine is both revered and raped repeatedly.
ℵ But more to the pointless here in terms of the third rape, with Lobstora "doing" Divine: Deleuze and
Guattari are in part talking about "the geology of morals" (39-74). If previously by way of Heidegger we
introduced the paralogy of "triangle is laughing," and how the correct thinking of philosophy could not
allow for such an utterance, now we introduce the paralogy of Lobster (God) is raping Divine (God), and
how a proper protocol of reading could never allow for such a linkage. 26 But then it is not simply a matter
of my idiosyncratic linking; it is a matter, John, of your linking three rapes with the third one by way of not
just any lobster but Lobstora, which greatly complicates matters! As I suggested, Lobstora is the sign of
CacaPitalism! It is not that I want to interpret this sequence and this strange (attractor) of Lobstora. (John,
you are not merely critiquing Capitalism, if it can be said that your are "critiquing" anything or anybody!) 27
It is that I want to experiment—or otherwise put, I want to contest in a non-traditional manner and to go on
test drives—with these already experimental constructions across different semiotic as well as symbiotic
systems.
ℵ In a logical and justifiable sense, God raping God (A is A) is quite appropriate, though still
tautological if not paradoxical. And exuberantly laughable! It's time that—at making foundations—the
God/gods "do" God/gods! John, you mock this sacrificial economy without mincing an image or word. Your
humorous economy busts the stations of the cross, wide open.
JOHN WATERS: Really?!
ℵ And yet, John, it is not possible to miss the fact that in having Mink "crucify" Divine, you may be
trafficking in a sacrificial economy yourself. As Georges Bataille says, "The crucifixion . . . is a wound by
which believers communicate with God" (Guilty 31). But Multiple Maniacs is not a critique (not a visual
utterance of a festering wound that leads but to acts of ressentiment) but an exchange or communication of
another un/kind. Let's take the possibility of two forms of communication: One that is a relation of being,
say, between two people (e.g., between a child and its mother, or a child and an adult), and another that is
with the realm of being (God, the impossible, the unknowable). 28 The former, I will eventually elaborate
on; the latter can but lead to pure immanence. Someone is going to be sacrificed. My experiment, my
experience with re-viewings of Multiple Maniacs, is that, John, you are dis/engaging less with parody and
more with pastiche. Hence, you are laughing as a child would at the so-called adult view of life-death-
heaven/or/hell story of Catholicism, or any Protestantism. 29 You are moving toward a third possibility of
ConTesticism.
ℵ But it's been a question of (the inappropriateness of) laughter all the way through to this point. Here are a
few exemplars recalled:
Sylvia-laughter-Gertrude,
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Sarah-laughter-Abrahams,
Marx-laughter-carbuncles,
History/rape-laughter-Eagleton,
Amadeus-giggle-Salieri,
triangle-laughing-philosophy.
It's this middle term that remains, ever remains. At a crucifixion. As noisy as it may intractably become.
But not as a question or a problem. . . . Bataille writes: "I wouldn't give up laughing for anything!" (Guilty
54). As for me, I've not decided yet, if ever. Which does not keep me from laughing! Nor the gods from
giggling and then passing away (see Nietzsche, Zarathustra 294). It is only man and woman who refuse to
laugh. Binaries, with forced excluded middles, make man and woman forget to laugh. And to self-
overcome. 30 Let us not forget the child, which takes us to my final experiment in thinking about multiple
maniacs (or radical singularities).
ℵ But first, Bataille writes: "[T]he suddenness of . . . change (the fall of the adult system—that of grown-
ups—into an infantile one) is always found in laughter. Laughter is reducible, in general, to the laugh of
recognition in the child—which the following line from Vergil calls to mind: incipe, parve puer, risu
cognoscere matrem." ["Begin, young child, to recognize your mother by your laughter" also as "by her
laughter."] (140; Bataille's translation and emphasis).
ℵ This exemplar of the child recognizing its place in its own or its mother's laughter works well for the
Cult that follows the Virgin.
ℵ But will it work or play well for the Cavalcade of Perversions, for the lumpenproletariat, that follows not
recognition of its place, but Divine (places) where there is laughter and giggling? The lumpen/proletariat,
which was, as Marx could have said: "the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass [absolute negation] . . . la
bohème . . . this scum, offal, refuse of all classes." 31 Or which also is, as Mr. David, the barker in Multiple
Maniacs, says: The "real actual filth . . . assorted sluts, fags, dykes, and pimps."
ℵ Suffer the infans.
ℵ What is most intriguing in Multiple Maniacs is the transitional scene between the first and second rape
of Divine. I am referring to the appearance (in[ter]vention) of the Infant of Prague, taking Divine by the
hand from having been raped by the male and female in the streets to the church of St. Cecilia, where she
will be anally raped-"crucified" by Mink. How are we to read this! Divine says, "Had God sent him [the
infant] as some sort of sign?" She concludes: "I put my future in this little saint's hands [who said] 'The
more you honor me, the more I will bless you'." Honor me! Bless you! There are a number of double
entendres in these promises.
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ℵ Should we call on Freud to rethink the relation of child to Divine and rape! In any case, whereas initially
we have here the Virgin as mother, or father, of the son, we now have the infans as father, or mother, of
Divine (places).
"[A] change metaphorically comparable to that which made Euclid's geometry into that of
Riemann. (Valery once confided to a mathematician that he was planning to write—to speak—on
'a Riemann surface.') A change such that to speak (to write) is to cease thinking solely with a view
to unity, and to make the relations of words an essentially dissymmetrical field governed by
discontinuity."
Maurice Blanchot, "Interruption: As on a Riemann surface" in The Infinite Conversation (77).
Cut To Paste: Writing on "a Riemann surface": So long ago, we followed Kate Millett as she
entered the characters and attempted to breathe life into them, talk for and with them. I speculated on what
the various points of view might be, from the discourse of facts to that of meditations, from the figure of an
apostrophe to the paragrammatical (long-ago-lost) de/construction of the middle voice. In this chapter, I
have conversed with the characters and commentators, though very differently from Millett's way. At times,
my approach has been fairly conventional in terms of a montage or collage. 32 Cutting and pasting passages
together. At other times, however, I have attempted to write by wayves ~~~ of a relation of a third kind, a
third interval, a third relation, as Blanchot says, that "inaugurates a relation that would not be one of subject
to subject or of subject to object" (Infinite 69). I am a writer—in dis/respect to my imagined interlocutors
here—who is without any horizon. I have no being or presence in their real, reel, imaginary lives. Speaking
to or with them (Infans in themselves) is like speaking in "a relation of impossibility and strangeness" (71).
. . . Infans to infans. . . . Infans should be heard and not seen. . . .
This is . . . has been . . . not a dialogue or polylogue . . . perhaps a cacophony . . . but a relation of
the third kind. Situated, if situated, in be tween. A place that "we" could abandon ourselves to in dis/order
to think and listen, listen and think. The limit.
Part 3: Chaste Media
Ch. 7, Chaste Cinema II?
"The most celebrated of [interpreters of the play Penthesilea] was Hans Neuenfels, whose
Penthesilea at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin in 1981 was both a multimedia extravaganza and a
sociohistorical exegesis. The men were variously costumed as Prussians, Greeks, and naked
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savages. Achilles was a jovial, compliant, middle-aged beau. The women skipped about by candle-
light in flouncy white gowns, wielding dainty bows and arrows, reminding one reviewer of the
'obscene chastity' of Nazi kitsch. A hysterical Penthesilea burst from this pallid sorority like a
hyena, crawled around on all fours before charging off to demolish Achilles, then came back
lugging three bloody suitcases presumably filled with his remains. During the breaks, while the sets
were changed, a silent film of the love-that-might-have-been was projected onto a screen, complete
with a wedding feast blessed by the Amazon High Priestess."
Joel Agee, Forward, Penthesilea (xxvi-xxvii).
I want now to focus on Helke Sander and her controversial three-and-a-half-hour documentary film
BeFreier und Befreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder ("Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rapes,
Children"). 1 The book version is written—and edited—with Barbara Johr. In discussing this work, I will
refer to the film, which is the mode of presentation that I am most concerned with in Part 3 of Chaste Rape,
and will, when available, cite the discussions by way of the book. Both the film and the book appeared in
1992. Both deal with the mass rapes perpetrated by the Allied forces in Berlin as well as other occupied
towns and villages in Germany between March and May of 1945. The forces included, according to the
authors, mostly Russian soldiers but also included United States, British, and French soldiers. Sander, in a
similar manner as Claude Lanzemann in Shoah, interviews a number of women who had been raped and
their children who were the offspring of the rapes. She also speaks with Russian men and women who
fought in the Battle of Berlin. The film, however, is not solely documentary in style.
I should perhaps somewhat back off from the comparison between Sander and Lanzemann, for
some of Sander's critics find fault with Sander's not asking the right (or the leftest) follow-up questions as
Lanzemann is known for. Moreover, Sander becomes performative-theatrical in her representations of
discussions and scenes (e.g., sitting in back-to-back chairs with one of her interlocutors and using different
colored lens to tint scenes), which some critics find fault with. But of course, Lanzemann is at times
performative, just as Alain Resnais is in Night and Fog. (There is no way for anyone—no matter who s/he
is—to make such a film, or write such a book on the subject, and not get criticized.) As we will see Sander's
critics raise still other issues. (I have limited my discussions of this film [Facts, Statistics, Testimony] to a
special issue of the journal October [72 (Spring 1995)], which includes an introduction to the film and its
issues, criticisms of the film [resistance to it], a response to the critics by Sander herself [counter-resistance],
and a polylogue at the end [meditations].) But we will get to the critics in due time. First, however, I want to
suggest—I can only suggest with "lists," 2 listings, which in the film would be a montage—the amount and
kind of research that Sander puts into the discovery process. I will relate from the documentary a few of the
anecdotal accounts and then examine the "facts" 3 as Sander gathered them and how she inferred from
statistics the numbers of German women who were raped. But it is not just German women raped as the film
makes clear, any more than it was not just Jews who died in the camps. We must respect and acknowledge
the many threads that go into the making of this event of mass rape, murder, and genocide. Sander respects
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and acknowledges the threads by wayves of a thinking discourse. She is concerned with What is called
thinking? in regard to rape. 4
Liberators take Liberties
"The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for
the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and
in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers
went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers
were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not
only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine,
but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks
or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So
sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the
massacre to be the work of 'bestial machinery.'
Yet the Rape of Nanking remains an obscure incident."
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking (6).
Research (Facts, Statistics, Testimony): We must begin with a simple statement of fact—according
to a discursive construction—that the event of mass rape in Berlin, 1945, was kept Chaste for the longest
time. In this case as in lesser cases, mass rape was Chaste Rape. (We might recall at this point our previous
discussions in chapter 5 of the Marquise of O- and her having fainted and being raped by Count F-, the
Russian officer who both liberated her from the attempts by his fellow Russian soldiers to rape her, yet took
liberties himself with her. The uncanniness between this story and the stories in BeFreier is remarkable.
They form a Woolfean-Deleuzean block of moments.) While there were eventually discussions of this event
of mass rape in print in a few books, 5 there had never been, according to Sander, any public discussions of
the rapes before BeFreier und Befreite. The exception was that many mothers related the events of being
raped to their children who were the offspring of the rapes. These stories were exchanged in the seventies
and later. It is not until we get into the second reel of the film and hear Sander's discussions with women that
we can better grasp what was keeping all the rapes Chaste. In one group discussion, German women tell us
precisely why no one talked of the event. Sander prompts them: "With whom did you talk about it later?" 6
Their responses:
"With no one." . . .
(Sander) "Nobody wanted to listen?"
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"Nobody could listen. Nobody wanted to hear it. . . . You couldn't say anything against the Red
Army . . . ."
"That's right. You weren't allowed to say: it was a Russian. I saw that he stole something. You
couldn't say that."
"You were afraid for two things when you confirm that. First the matter as such, what happened to
you and then everything else."
(Sander) "And public opinion?"
"No, public opinion didn't exist in that sense. One could not express one's thoughts."
(Sander) "Had it anything to do with the fact that the liberators from Hitler fascism [sic] couldn't be
rapists at the same time?" . . .
"In the Nazi period we already had to climb down a peg. We just had to shut up. And later it was
just the same."
"First one dictator and then, as I tell it, the next one. Always with the word 'psst.' That was our
word in Germany."
Interestingly enough, however, the event began to manifest itself in sublimated ways. As a case in
point, Sander tells of "the favorite game of a friend of [hers] who . . . together with male and female cousins,
was 'playing at rape.' The girls would run screaming into the woods nearby or roll down the embankments
while the boys ran after them, finally catching and throwing themselves on top of them" ("Remembering"
22). The issue, however, is the absence of "public discussions," for some critics challenge Sander on the
matter of her being the first to bring the event to the attention of the world. Sander does not claim to have
been the first; she claims that the film brought the issue to the public sphere for the first time. Recall from
the above exchange between Sander and the women that "public opinion didn't exist." (As is evident, it is
very difficult for me to even begin discussing Sander's discourse of facts, as she has constructed them, for
there is much contention about her film and book as there was about Susan Brownmiller's Against Our
Will.) 7 But of course, the most crucial issue is that the event of mass rape will not remain chaste or
sublimated, for there is the ever return of that which is repressed or made chaste. The children playing the
game of rape become the fathers of the man-Russian soldiers who raped their mothers. And yet, there is
some thing that keeps the stories Chaste. There is this problem about remembering turning into forgetting. In
fact, Sander's full title for the translated version of the first chapter of BeFreier und Befreite is
"Remembering/Forgetting." Remembering can be read as mourning so as to forget. But
remembering/forgetting can be a self-exoneration that some critics find to be at work in this documentary.
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Or a making Chaste. (And then, there is the problem of Chastising all those who would exonerate
themselves. Chastising can lead to ressentiment.) This problem of remembering/forgetting manifests itself
throughout the film as it would perhaps in any film on this subject.
In this introductory chapter of the book BeFreier und Befreite—translated and included in the
special issue of the journal October—Sander relates a story that she says was "the catalyst" for researching
the event. 8 Sander writes of an old woman, Frau G., who lived in the same building in Berlin and who
accused her and others of publishing communist papers and holding meetings. When confronting the
woman, Sander discovered that Frau G. "had been raped by Russians and that all the other women living in
this building in 1945 had the same experience" ("Remembering" 15). At the heart of this anecdote is revenge
(15). The larger narrative of this anecdote raises a question of whether or not the rapes of German women by
Russians were not a payback for all the rapes committed by the German army in the east against Russian
women. Though this possibility is plausible and compelling, Sander does not accept it so easily as the case
or the only case. (We will return to this issue as we examine other anecdotal evidence.) 9
This telling of the story by mothers to their children further coincided, Sander explains, with the
growth of new women's movements in the late sixties and throughout the seventies, during which "women in
large numbers were . . . informed [by the women's movements] of the silence surrounding violence against
women; although their mothers had encountered it on a far greater scale, they had still kept it [for the most
part] a secret. . . . Since then, discussion has not ceased. This context was important for my work on this
film" (15-16; emphasis mine). 10
Sander in 1987-88 began formulating her questions for research. She wanted to move from
anecdotes such as the one by Frau G., to "real information for the film" (17); wanted to know what the
phrase "many rapes" might mean; wanted to know if the rapes were the result of a "general collapse
following the victory over Germany" or whether "rumors of massive numbers of rapes [had been] merely . . .
whipped up for propaganda purposes" or were owing "to the common brutality of war" (17); and "wanted to
clarify some of the consequences for the women affected" (22). Finally, she says: "The results of our
research made it clear that we were dealing with a singular event, comparable, perhaps, to the entry of the
Japanese into the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937" (17; see Chang, Rape of Nanking). While documenting
and representing her findings, Sander began to compare the mass rapes to contemporary mass rapes that
were frequently told in the news in 1992. In fact, her film begins with this comparison: "This is a film about
rape in wartime. Because I know the circumstances in Berlin best, the film will treat what happened here.
Everyone knew about them, though no one spoke of them, just as in Kuwait and in Yugoslavia today"
(BeFreier 108). 11
Perhaps the best way to proceed is to follow some of the opening interviews and anecdotes. 12 I will
select those that are often commented on and some that have been ignored but are telling. After the opening
scene of rape in wartime, Sander turns to "Mrs. Prof. Dr. Ballowilz" in the archives and asks about data that
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would indicate children born of rape. There are rows of files on metal library shelves. There is much archive
fever here. Ballowilz begins opening file after file for the camera to record the singular events that become
the singular event of mass rape. Sander asks Ballowilz about information concerning children born in 1946.
Children, again, are the index. But this time, the question concerns children who "were fathered by rapists."
Ballowilz answers: "The reports state details about the parents and the identity of the father is recorded. In
1946 3.7% of the fathers were Russian, 1.2% American, 0.7% British and 0.4% French, and in many of the
cases it was added that they were rape cases." In the data there is a distinction made among a woman who
has been raped, or raped repeatedly, or apparently engaged in consensual sex with the enemy for favors or
survival, 13 or who has contacted a venereal disease, which was widespread during the time. Ballowilz begins
to read from individual files, which I will list: "Father
Russian, rape.
Russian, rape.
American.
Russian father.
Unknown American.
Russian, raped repeatedly.
English, gonorrhea.
In the year 1945 the number of Russian fathers was even somewhat higher," Ballowilz continues, "so we can
assume that some of the women were refugees, who were raped while on their way to Berlin. And in 1947 a
markedly smaller number of Russian fathers was reported, so we see from September to December 1945
5.5%, in the whole of 1946 3.7%, and in 1947 1.0% Russian fathers of those children who were born and
admitted to the hospital" (BeFreier 108-09).
Sander asks Ballowilz: "Could you agree that we could take these figures as a prognosis applicable
to the total births in Berlin at that particular time?" Ballowilz answers: "With some reservation, these figures
are based on the total of children born and admitted here in those years. More or less they may be taken as
representative for Berlin" (109).
Later in the second reel of the film, Sander introduces a mathematician—Barbara Johr, her co-
author of the book—very dramatically, with music in the background, building tension in terms of the
question, which is more of a musing than a questioning, concerning numbers, and with long pauses,
evidently for effect, in the reporting. Sander asks: "How many [births as the result of rape] were there?
Barbara Johr, our arithmetician, reaches the following results," which Sander and Johr include in the book
version as a list:
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1. Official statistics for the period between September 1945 and August 1946 show a total of
23,124 births (both live and stillborn). Of these, approximately 5% were "Russian children": 1,156
children.
2. Some 10% of the pregnant women had abortions, of which 90% were successful. Therefore, ten
times as many women had actually been impregnated: 11, 560.
3. About 20% of the raped women became pregnant. Therefore among those of childbearing age,
five times as many were raped: 57,800.
4. In 1945, 600,000 women of childbearing age (18 to 45 years) lived in Berlin. 57,800 of them
were raped. That represents 9.5% of this age group.
5. In 1945, 800,000 girls between the ages of 14 and 18 and women over 45 lived in Berlin. If one
assumes that 9.5% of those in this age group were raped, that would mean that 73,300 of those
younger and older women were affected. (If a 4.75% figure is used, then the number is 36,650.)
6. Conclusions: Of the 1.4 million women and girls in Berlin, between 94,450 and 131,100—and
average of more than 110,000—were raped between early summer and fall of 1945.
("Remembering" 21; BeFreier 54) 14
While the music continues in the background, the film cuts quickly from Johr's statistical figures to two
women walking in a forest. Sander tells the woman with whom she is walking, "I only know of one case
where a woman after having been raped demanded to be recognized as a war casualty. You were the first to
work on these rapes. What can you tell us?" The shift in the film from one scene to the next is exceptionally
strategic, moving from numbers of women in mass rape, pregnancy, and death to the one brave woman who
demanded to be recognized as a casualty of war and, by implication, to receive all the benefits that men in
the war have been receiving. The woman tells us:
It's very significant that so far you have only found this one case. For contrary to the men, whose
imprisonment and wounds have been socially accepted and who receive an allowance this is not the
case for women. Moreover, men can do something about their traumas that has been organized for
them by society. They can go to displaced persons, clubs, veterans groups. They can also write
books and films about it. That means they have possibilities to do something about what they
collectively went through and learn to live with it. Women don't have that possibility. I also see the
problem that for women this desire to hush up the whole thing and pretend it didn't happen was
welcome in as much as in this way it was easier to get on with relatives and men.
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Then in a voice over, we are told: "Many committed suicide. About 4,000 in April alone, although there is
no division [in this category] between men and women." The irony here among ironies is that there is a
division between men and women categorically in terms of who can be a casualty of war, but none in terms
of having committed suicide as the result of the trauma of war. There are many ways to make Rape Chaste.
Perhaps the most telling scene in a long sequence of scenes on categorical exclusion is of a woman
who had been raped by a Russian soldier. When she tells a "former [German] officer Dreiha" of being raped,
he in turn tells her: "If that had happened to my wife, I would shoot her." In recollecting she says: "I wanted
to live, not be killed." 15
"You can't count the dead. There's absolutely no sense in it. Mathematics stops there. Woman or
man, it's the individual that is destroyed. That's why it makes sense to take a personal interest in at
least one individual man or woman. Many may experience death simultaneously but it's always
each person's own individual terror, their own stomach that turns, their own bowels that open in
horror. It made no sense whatsoever to the dead to speculate about what was ghastlier, to be drawn
and quartered by the Church, to be tortured first and then burnt at the stake, to be gassed by the
Nazis, or to be shot by the Stalinists while doing forced labour. People who refuse to acknowledge
that this kind of horror must start somewhere, that it has to be tried out on a small scale before it
can be carried out on a large scale, only confirm Eichmann's thesis that a thousand corpses are
statistics. They only see the past in terms of statistics."
Helke Sander, "A Telephone Conversation With a Friend," in The Three Women K (126-27).
Further Testimony (German and Russian): In the first reel, after Sander opens with files being read
on births owing to rapes and on who the fathers were, she turns to gathering anecdotes and testimony. (We
have already viewed the anecdotal evidence offered by the women who spoke on the lack of "public
opinion," which supports Sander's position that there was no public discussion of the event prior to the film.)
The testimony now unfolds to claim mainly that
• Russian soldiers, in fact, raped and to such an extent that it was a mass event;
• post-war propaganda made it difficult, if not impossible, to say or declare that Russian soldiers
raped German women;
• Russian women who were combatants in Berlin found it difficult to accept testimony of rape but if,
indeed, Russian men raped and German women suffered, then "what happened, happened";
• former Russian officers say rape was not wide spread or that, if wide spread, then, it was because
of the need for a woman;
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• German women with venereal disease believe it was their duty to infect the enemy;
• German soldiers had photographs taken of them, posing as if they were Roman legionaries standing
over or near the barbarians they raped, mutilated, and killed;
• there was much propaganda for revenge rapes and killing but that Russian officers attempted to
stop it as a practice.
I will take the anecdotes sequentially from mostly the first reel and will quote the exchange as carefully as
possible to suggest the interlocutors's own words and to show Sander's interventions into what is said.
After the reading of the files, the opening scene is a shot of a long conference table, with empty
green chairs lined on both sides, creating a vanishing point of two women. One is Sander. We from a
distance can hear her voice over: "Mrs. Hoffmann, I'd like to see an official body dealing with this [event],
to find out the personal and political effects of these rapes, and especially how many women were affected."
She then commences with her first questions of the film:
"In April and May 45 it was much worse you said. What did you go through?
Hoffmann begins: "Well, I witnessed the Red Army's march into Königsberg, and also the way
soldiers and officers behaved there. There was mass raping, they queued up."
(Sander) "You mean every day?"
(Hoffmann) "Yes, at first every day, we were not safe anywhere. There wasn't anybody to protect
us. Anyone protecting us would have been killed himself. And then they got the people out of their
houses . . . me, my mother, other women and girls. Well, and then they threw themselves on us, you
know."
(Sander) "What did you mean by queuing?"
(Hoffmann) "Well, one would grab another chap's belt and say: Hurray up, I want to have her too.
There were sometimes 5 or 6 of them standing in line, so there wasn't any privacy . . . you just get
numb. Somehow you let it engulf you."
(Sander) "How long did this go on?"
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(Hoffmann) "It lasted for about 2 weeks with varying intensity. Then it more or less stopped.
(BeFreier 109-10)
Immediately following the exchange with Hoffman, Sander takes us to a second testimony, this one
with Mrs. Ursula Ludwig. The situation of the telling begins with scenes of feet going down steps that lead
to a cellar. Many German women attempted to hide in cellars from the invading Russian army. The scene is
dark, except for the flashlight that leads us into and through the cellar. Who actually holds the flashlight—if
not a member of the film crew—is left unstated by Sander. Finally, as if the flashlight is searching for
someone, the beam finds a woman clutching jars of preserved food. Once we see her, there is a quick cut to
military film of Russians launching rockets from a truck into what we might infer is Berlin. The editing
brings to mind stock cuts that substitute for actual scenes of sexual acts (figuration for actuality, but in a
shadow narrative). While the rockets are being launched, there is a long voice over:
I was in the cellar on a sort of camp bed to get a bit of shut-eye and I had blackened my face. But
suddenly three Russian soldiers came in. By the look of them they were Mongolians. They had their
firearms and yelled: 'Woman out.' [T]hey pulled me up from the camp bed. I wore a coat and a cap
and a lot of heavy clothes and I wore all the undergarments I had on top of each other and they
pulled me out and dragged me from the cellar. Next they pushed me into a room somewhere
upstairs. It was completely open because a wall had gone but there was a sofa. They threw me
down on the sofa and raped me, all three of them. They took me downstairs again and brought me
to a cellar of a house further down the street. There an officer appeared, quite a young chap.
He was very polite, spoke good German. [He asked] if I would like to go with him to the adjoining
room. It was a sort of potato cellar and he apologized that he too had to rape me. Nothing I could
do. Fair enough. And it happened very quickly. Now it was all over, so I said: But I can't go home
now. It's night and I will be shot in the street. . . . Then he ordered one of his soldiers to take me
home and I accepted gratefully. He took me to my front door and I assumed the others were there.
The funny part was if the word funny weren't in appropriate. . . . My seven slips I had all worn I
had them all in my hand. And so I sat in front of the cellar but it was locked. They had bolted the
door and I sat on the stone steps all night, by myself. (BeFreier 110-12)
The next scene is of an unnamed woman reading from her diary. She tells of the joy of being
liberated from fascism. She was evidently very young at the time and was inviting the Russian soldiers to
rejoice with her. Finally a soldier takes her by the arm and says, "Come woman, come." (This expression is
reported by many of the German women.) But as the soldier commands her, she hears other women crying
for help, saying the soldiers rape and steal from them. So the young girl escapes by running to her mother,
who says: "So it's true after all. . . . We must show them our Jewish identity cards," which had been hidden
in the goat pen. "They will understand." In fact, the woman reading her diary says, "They understood
nothing. They couldn't even read the identity cards" (BeFreier 111-12).
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A fourth testimony is given of a woman (Hildegard Knef, whom we will see again several times)
who says that she so did not want to get raped that she dressed like a boy and "hired herself out as a guard."
Eventually she is discovered to be a female and becomes a prisoner of the Russians. She is repeatedly
questioned by the NKWD (or NKVD, People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which eventually becomes
the KGB). She was asked why she was dressed in men's clothing and responded, "I didn't want to be raped."
Then they would hit her and repeat the question. Hence, the cycle of interrogation. Each time she gave her
explanation, she was told: "German pigs rape, Russian heroes don't" (BeFreier 112-13).
In a transition shot, which will take us to Sander's interviews with the Russians, Sander says: "Few
people know that there were about a million . . . women-soldiers in the Red Army. I now drive to Minsk and
ask them if they ever approached a man and told him: Man, come!?" (BeFreier 114).
Sander first speaks with Valentina Fjodorowna, who served in a women-only regiment. On May
13th she was in Berlin and put her signature on the column of the Reichstag. Sander asks Fjodorowna if she
had heard at that time that many women were raped.
(Sjodorowna shrugs her shoulders and replies) "I can't say anything about such cases. I can only tell
you something else. When my regiment flew to Danzig, we made a stop in a village. We arrived at
a German house. There were a lot of women and small children in the house and they begged us for
bread. They only said 'bread, bread, bread.' We gave them all we had. Also in May 13th in Berlin,
we gave the Germans food. I can't tell you anything else on this subject."
(The translator reports in paraphrased manner) "It is hard for Mrs. Fjodorowna to understand all of
this. She believes it is not a matter of love if violence is used. Personally she has not seen such acts
of violence." Sander asks, "She doesn't know either? Did she never discuss it with anyone? Neither
with women or with men?"
(Fjodorowna) "No, never."
(Then there is a turn in Fjodorowna's responses) "Maybe one should know more about it and maybe
one should know about it much earlier. Now it's too late."
(Sander) "Why do women not hear about it when other women are violated?"
(The translator in a paraphrase) "Mrs. Fjodorowna would keep silent and not say anything."
(Sander) "Why?"
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Fjodorowna becomes befuddled for a few seconds.
(The translator reports) "She would keep silent. It might maker her unhappy for the rest of her life
but she wouldn't talk about it."
(Fjodorowna) "It can't be undone. What happened, happened. Everybody bears his own cross."
(BeFreier 114-16)
Privately. Silently. End of discussion.
But the interviews go on. The next woman questioned is Claudia Gregoriewna, a sharpshooter
during the war, who, the translator paraphrases saying, "Gregoriewna thinks that if women had known that
Russian men raped German women the relationship between women and men would naturally change. It
was war, but even in war a man must control himself. What happened, happened: it can't be undone"
(BeFreier 116-17)
Finally a man, a Russian man, Fjodor Swerew (or Feodor Sverev), is interviewed at length.
(The translator paraphrases) "He believes that to Western women this rape problem is something
different. It wasn't much of a disgrace to them, being deflowered. They don't see that as something
terrible. The relationship between men and women has changed since then."
(Sander) "Since violence is always used by man against woman and never the reverse, I ask what
purpose does he see in male power being expressed sexually against women?"
(Swerew) "It can't be explained in that biologically men are more sexual than women. [There is a
long pause while Sander is objecting to what Swerew is saying.] We can point to examples in the
animal world. There, males are always more active than females. Although occasionally females
are sexually stronger."
(Sander) "This has been scientifically refuted. In fact women are more potent than men."
(Swerew) "If you speak of sexuality only. But when you talk of the origins of the beginning, men
play the bigger part."
(The translator paraphrases) "Mr. Swerew believes that even a woman with a strong sexuality tries
to keep up with the appearance that a man is more active than she. He says he can't say that cases
where women were raped by Russian soldiers was widespread. When a soldier saw a woman who
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could have been his mother, he would not do her any harm. But when a man saw a young woman,
he may have had the urge to rape her." (BeFreier 117-18)
A Russian solider with his wife sitting next to him—Gleb and Anna Dubrowo—is interviewed.
Only the man is interviewed (aka, Fjodorowilsch, but the camera shot is on Anna as much if not more than
on Gleb. Anna is stone faced throughout the brief interview. In addition, there is a camera shot of German
women and men watching the interview on four monitors.
(The translator paraphrases) "Fjodorowilsch says that soldiers who raped German women did so
because of sexual need [the camera pans to Anna] certainly not for revenge [then to the audience of
German women and men]. It would be dishonest if he would say that acts of violence against
German women didn't take place. He can understand young men who spent a long time in the field
but they were men after all. [Then there is a shot of a photograph of Russian solders saluting to the
camera while standing next to a framed picture of Stalin]." (BeFreier 118-19)
Clearly here, Sander is editorializing with these juxtapositions.
The intensity of these interviews with Russians grows as they pass sequentially from women to a
man and then to a man and woman. The intensity continues to grow as Sander next moves to a man, Ivan
Stasewitsch, who was just a "young man" in the war and yet fought. The scene is his artist studio. (I am
going to quote this interview at length, for it illustrates best Sander's techniques of interviewing and it brings
to the surface a number of then and still commonplace stories of what took place.)
(Sander) "I have a photo here of you as a young man. You went to the front when you were
fourteen, and in this photo that shows the train coming from Berlin, you were sixteen. So you were
a child when you went to war and you were a man when you returned [the two pictures along with
others are shown]."
(The Translator paraphrases) "He says he was not a man when the war ended but still a boy. He
knew that the Red Army was warned against intimate relations with German women, whereas, as
he expresses it, there were patriotic German women who infected the Russians with venereal
diseases. The German women considered it their duty. He says that the German women were not
raped, but did it because of their own needs. Several times he witnessed such situations when he
came to German houses with other soldiers. He stayed at the door with a gun. He believes that they
were intimate with the German women."
(Sander) "Did you discuss this afterwards with the men?"
(Slasewitsch) "They didn't tell me anything but discussed it among themselves."
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(Sander) "I simply think that a young man like you were then, that is, curious as well, and also part
of the victorious army, would really know more about it and besides you are an artist and probably
noticed a lot more than the other people."
(The Translator paraphrases) "He only knows of that one time when he was standing guard. The
soldiers were punished for ignoring the orders and so the soldiers tried to be secretive about it."
(The Translator reads from an earlier transcript) "Iwan Stasewitsch said earlier that the soldiers had
looked for such relationships on purpose and entered into them in order not to have to go to the
front and to stay alive. They went into the hospital for medical treatment and so survived the war."
(Sander) "Did I get that right?, that Russian soldiers slept with German women for that purpose to
get infected so that they wouldn't be sent to the eastern front to the war and could survive? That
sexual intercourse was a sort of sabotage? Can we describe it like that?"
(Slasewitsch) "They were infected and went into hospital and could not go to the front. Of course, it
was a sort of sabotage. [There is a look of disbelief on Sander's face.] But the German women also
did it out of patriotism and they sought out the Russian soldiers themselves. One German woman
put 15 Red Army men out of action."
(Sander) "So they told the soldiers there are so many women here, they want to infect you and one
woman can knock out 15 Red Army men."
(Slasewitsch) "If she did it out of patriotism she couldn't say she was raped."
(Sander) "I think that a woman who's sick . . . after all it hurts. To my mind it's not a good way to
conquer the enemy."
(Slasewitsch) "This information was read out to the soldiers by political clerks, regularly. That's
how they warned the men." (BeFreier 119-21)
There is a quick cut to a U.S. Army film prepared for servicemen, telling them to "get to the nearest venereal
prophylaxis station for a treatment." (There is a voice over while a man holds his penis during treatment:
"This is my rifle, this is my gun; one is for killing, one is for fun.") In the film there are instructions for the
complete use of prophylactics. Women, in mug shots, are blamed in every way for venereal disease
(BeFreier 122).
Sander returns to Fjodor, the former Russian Officer.
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(Sander) "You told us that in many German houses you visited you saw photos of atrocities
committed by Germans in Russia. Can you describe that in detail?
(Swerew, voice over) "As an officer I regularly went into houses of Germans and I saw many photo
albums with photos that had been taken in Russia in earlier days. What struck me in these photos
was that indiscriminately whoever was photographed, officer or soldier, they had themselves taken
as Roman legionaries, barbarian murderers [a photo is shown of a German man with a pistol being
aimed at a nude dead woman on her back. then pictures of men hanging and of a German soldier
cutting off the head of a man with a buzz saw].
(Sander, voice over) How often did you see that? [more pictures]
(Swerew) Very often. I stayed in several parts of Germany. In Pommern, Prussia, and I saw such
photos everywhere.
(Sander) Is that 10 times, 20 times, 50 times?
(Swerew) More than a 100 times. [Film footage of a Russian soldier taking such photographs out of
a dead German soldier's pocket].
(Sander) You must have guessed that these photos and the appeals from Ilja Ehrenburg had
something to do with the atrocities that were committed by the Russian troops. [Film footage of
Russian soldiers looking through photographs of atrocities.]
(Translator's paraphrase) "He says that many Russians had an envelope in their pockets and [on
occasion] these envelopes showed [one] picture [of] a small Russian child exhorting its father who
is at the front. 'Daddy, kill a German.' When our undisciplined Soviet soldiers were caught, they
showed these envelopes and maxims and tried to justify themselves with them. 'If you do not kill
the German, he will kill you.' 'If you let the German live, the German will hang a Russian and rape
a Russian woman.' (BeFreier 123-25)
The issue here is one of propaganda and revenge and whether or not the Soviet Army attempted to stop
soldiers from reprisals against the Germans. Dubrowo testifies that Ilja Ehrenburg 16 stopped writing
propaganda when the Russians invaded Germany (BeFreier 125). Swerew testifies that every attempt was
made to punish Russian soldiers who raped (for revenge or not) or who even took a German woman into his
quarters (125). A German man, Herr Schneck, testifies that this is the case (125-26). Mrs. Von Werner
speaks of calm and order where she lived, which was close to the command post. She testifies that German
soldiers were shot when caught raping (126). A German man, Herr Eisermann, recalls:
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"After two, three weeks Marshall Schukow issued very severe orders and whoever was caught or
reported, they only had to utter a threat, would be executed with a machine gun and that was done
in a bunker on the corner of the Karlstreet. We heard the machine gun day and night." (BeFreier
126)
The testimony continues—there is a long line of testifiers—but I will stop with the man who says,
quite dramatically with his body rhythmically moving, his hands gesturing wildly, and his head and eyes
thrust up to the ceiling:
How I laughed when the Germans told this story in hospital: A chap named Fritz, a German, hid his
girl in the cellar and he didn't let her out so no one would do any harm. After a month she escaped
and she rode her bicycle to her neighbor. That's where we caught her and of course the entire male
choir raped her. I shrieked. The whole sick bay roared with laughter and I, Juri Alexejwitsch
Dodelew, who sit here before you also laughed. So much for the theme hatred. Hatred was the
result of this story. Didn't the Germans rape our women? Of course, they did, we read it in the
papers. The automatism worked smoothly. So an eye for an eye. If they did it, so will we do the
same. (BeFreier 128-29; emphasis mine)
The interviews in the first reel begin, as I stated, with two women at the end of a long table. The
women were at the distance in the vanishing point. As Sander moves from one interlocutor to another, from
German to German woman at first and then from Russian to Russian combatant, both women and men, all
the interlocutors figuratively but materially fill the empty seats at that table. These interlocutors, both
German and Russian, Russian and German, become alike in the very distance of the vanishing point.
"The cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world. This is why, very early
on, it looked for bigger and bigger circuits which would unite an actual image with recollection
images, dream-images and world-images."
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 (68).
"When there are photos of these events, the women are usually dead. In these photos they are
violated once more as proof of the bestiality of whatever adversary there was. We see Russian
women raped by Germans. German women raped by Russians. Russian women, German women.
Russian women, German, Russian and so on."
Helke Sander, BeFreier und Befreite (a voice over, while photos are shown, reel one).
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The Master Narrative (A Pre-meditation): As an experiment, I ended the previous section (further
testimony) and opened this one (master narrative) with a summarizing statement and an orienting quotation
that, in part, can be read as my suggesting that the film in its entirety is a master narrative of women as
victims and men as rapists. I could bolster this statement by pointing to the opening statement of the film,
which includes the rapes in "Kuwait and Yogoslavia," and the closing statement of the film, which includes
a scene from Kleist's Penthesilea with passages that call for women to wage war against men until women
are free as they were in the primal times. (I could call this a framing device that contextualizes all the pieces
of testimony, all the editing-montage, all the music and drama and special lenses used into one
transhistorical, master narrative.) My sense, however, is that Sander is not given to constructing such a
master narrative. At least, not given to making this possible master narrative into one that is to stand.
Permanently. She is experimenting with possibilities in everything she does, in film or fiction. She sets
images in motion that incipiently invite viewers (readers) to add or subtract (but by extra-ordinary means to
link, through a variety of circuits) from them in unpredictable ways. What I am suggesting is that to follow
the various catastrophes put out and off by her film is to follow them until being hit by a singular image, a
moment, among moving images (24 frames per second) and finding oneself being taken from the interval
(narration as cause and effect) to the interstices (to stand in the middle), at the limits, the total exhaustion, of
reason. 17
As much as her title, BeFreier und Befreite, with its orthographic changes and puns, suggests
multiple readings of an event, I would then read the film semiotically across the many registers that the film
ex-hibits. In every frame the film inscribes by exscribing. (Or in-hibits by ex-hibiting. Not only do the critics
resist and Sander counter-resist, but the text-film itself also resists.) But this is no film that is informed by a
mere pluralism, or master trope of irony, which would still insist on a set of possible interpretations. This is
a film—as Deleuze refers to, by way of Beckett—that exhibits a "third language," one that is singular and
finds itself at a threshold, in any-space-whatever. Which is a space of the event that is singular. 18 The space
of the singular image in the flux of the film. A space of pure potentiality that would classically contextualize
all the images, that would be the other master trope of synecdoche. Hence, though Sander might begin and
end with a framing device, Sander cannot maintain it as the force of singularities begin to disperse the
unifying structure until it is always already on the verge of falling into a thirdness (see Deleuze, Cinema I
102-22, 197-15; Cinema 2 1-24).
There are enough disturbances in the film to remind me that this attempt at a framing device by
Sander, at least, in part, is not a mere examination of the conditions for the possibility of reading the event as
both universal and individual, or as both grand and petit. To read this film in any other manner is to miss the
pointless that it as an experiment, with a point becoming a line of flight. The documentary becomes filmic. It
just becomes (see Deleuze and Guttari, Thousand 294). In the creation of a third space of singularities. 19 The
very subject matter of a singular event (mass rape) makes a film of singularities, which form no set, but
remain dispersed. Perhaps it is intended, perhaps not; it really does not matter. Once the film reaches a
thirdness, it has a pure potentiality of its own, driving it to become any-space-whatever. The place might be
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Berlin turned into a desert of the real, but it is also Kuwait, and in a neighborhood near three of us. It is any-
space-wherever but any-space-whatever. It is not just in basements or cellars, but also in streets with rapists
lined up, waiting their turn. Rape is even in the place of Chasteness. At least that is how I would see and
read the film. Which is not to interpret it, but to follow it as an experiment at the limits. As an experiment,
however, it is not one being conducted by human beings, but by figures of post-humanity. 20
Which gets me to my pointless—namely, that there is a kind of Deleuzean "conversation" going on
here, in a third language, in this film in other registers that invite us to attempt to rethink the thinking of rape
in terms of the bloc that is formed between the wasp and the orchid. . . . I am fully aware that this suggestion
is jarRinggg. Noisy. . . . This conversation is going on in between what the interlocutors are saying in
correcting each other. I am fully aware that the instability of the wasp and orchid, given the possible analogy
with rapist and victim, can lead to some rather ridiculous discussions if used to deflect the notion of a
conversation—which is a word itself that leads to the eighteenth-century double entendre of sexual
intercourse. (Everything is linked to everything else in a complicity to forget, if not beyond, then alongside
guilt. And yet, it is not that they are linked; it is that they are indeterminate and flow into and out of each
other. But then, there is no future in guilt. But there is at the moment of the limit-experience. At the pointless
of finitude. At the interruption. In the parenthesis, or caesura, or ellipsis. . . . In the filmic. . . . As an
exemplary event, I have in mind the single frame in—but taken out of—the film—a photograph—of the
Russian solider grabbing and pulling up the front wheel of a bicycle being held onto at the handlebars by a
German woman. What is between them, in this tug-of-war, is the bicycle, which in its spatially redistributed
form begins to look like a unicycle falling in order to ascend.
There is something "machinic" about it, functioning immanently and imminently. 21 The soldier and the
woman stare eye-to-eye. What is the soldier saying to the woman? Come, woman, come?! What is the
woman saying to the soldier? Become, soldier, become?! It is a haunting image that I would not even begin
to describe further much less to interpret. The single frame requires, as Deleuze would say, "a point of view
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of variation" [Fold 19-20]. But it is important to keep in mind that, as Deleuze explains, "the point of view is
not what varies with the subject, at least in the first instance; it is, to the contrary, the condition in which an
eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamorphosis), or: something = x (anamorphosis)." Still
continuing, Deleuze writes: "For Leibniz, for Nietzsche, for William and Henry James, and for Whitehead as
well," and I would add for Kate Millett as well [in The Basement], point of view, "perspectivism amounts to
a relativism, but not the relativism we take for granted. It is not a variation of truth according to the subject,
but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject [that becomes the "superject"]. This
is the very idea of Baroque perspective" [20; emphasis mine]. 22 I am not speaking of a film still, or frame,
printed in an article (see October 72 ([Spring 1995] 42) or a book (BeFreier 147); I am speaking of a
particular frame in the film itself, while the camera pans over the photographs and centers on the bicycle,
between the two: Russian soldier and German woman (toward the end of reel one). When 2 does not become
one (I refuse to read the image in terms of the myth of immanence), but when 2 becomes + 1. When 2
becomes 3 (in terms of imminence, pure potentiality). . . . But there are other exemplary frames that move
while staying still pointless at the limit in BeFreier und Befreite, and they are, e.g., shown as photographs in
the film while there is testimony being given in a voice over. I am referring to the photographs of German
combatants as Roman legionaries, standing over their prey or cutting the heads off their prey. Irrational, yet
rational photographic cuts. Placed in the film. At the limit. These are the photographs that the Russian
combatants pick up from the dead and place in their pockets; these are the photographs that Russian
combatants find in the homes of German men and women, find as trophies becoming trophies in any-space-
whatever. These are the photographs that tear open the film, and freeze the frames. These are the
photographs that fall from the film, in motion, and lie on the floor, still, at the limits, before the screen.
These are the photographs that Kate Millett picked up from the floor, photographs that were in the file on
evidence, but that were more than mere evidence. That haunt her to write. These are the photographs that are
irrational cuts that are in and yet are not in the film and that Roland Barthes would invite us to see as the
singular image experienced as the "punctum" [Camera Lucida 27]. Or rather, now the "filmic" ["Third
Meaning" 64-65]. 23 ) But I am also aware that the instability of the wasp and the orchid would manifest itself,
in terms of Sander's film, in such questions as Who is the wasp? and Who the orchid? (If a reader-viewer
approaches the film as a conversation, it is often difficult to tell the difference between victim and
perpetrator. They do become in significant [and yet apparently insignificant] instances imminently
reversible.) . . . I have not lost touch with the recent fact that men are raping men in wars waged yesterday
and now. Yes, these men, raped, are being, what we call, "feminized," turned into a "woman" perhaps worse
than a woman's fate, but it is happening as never before reported to the public sphere and deserves the status
of a singular event. 24 Perhaps it is not as worse as a woman's fate! To determine so, Would we have to return
to a mythical reasoning—or experiment—brought about by the construction of a new Tiresias? with its
consequences! 25 The only way into (not out of) this supposed mess, or the way in that I will propose, is to
move variously toward a third being or becoming. Which after all has been said and undone is precisely
what the filmic is as Barthes has discussed and I have previously considered in earlier chapters. And what
pure potentiality and singularity are as Deleuze has discussed them along with Nancy and Agamben and
Ronell. Which would be wayves into finitude. Which I will take up again in the closing section of Chaste
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Rape. Wherein, I will state that human beings are moving out of binaries into thirds. The conversation
between the wasp and the orchid, as I am proposing as taking place in the film, is a becoming; is, as Deleuze
says, "a double capture, of non-parallel evolution [but involution], of nuptials between two reigns. Nupitals
are always against nature. Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines:
question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal" (Deleuze, Dialogues 2). It is a double capture of film
and the filmic-singularity. It is an event, Ereignis.
"The question that I kept on asking myself while watching this film was, what is actually being
worked through here? Well, there are various kinds of resistances being worked through."
Round Table, Eric Santner, "Further Thoughts" (110).
Resistance: The above is the shortest section I have written thus far. It is an interruption with
interruptions. Fragmented. One caesura after another. But it will spill over, as an enjambment does—which
is against gridlock in th.inking—into this section on resistance, that is, on criticisms of Sander and her film.
From this point on, I will relate in the form of exposition what I consider to be the relevant major criticisms
and then report Sander's counter-criticisms. After which we will move on to meditations, or what I would
also call conversations. These make up a polylogue of commentators about the film and its reception. (It is a
remarkable exchange, for it is possible to see in it an attempt to deal with the complexity of the film at its
many registers and to see as the beginnings of a new zone of betweens.) Again, all of these texts that I am
examining are in a special issue of the journal October.
The criticisms offered by Gertrud Koch, Atina Grossmann, and David J. Levin at no time attempt to
set aside the fact of the mass rapes. They obviously see the rapes as the worst act of inhumanity against
humanity. And yes, they see that it is men raping women. But it is not all that simple—as this subject never
is—for these critics point to implications that are not seen or realized, they believe, in the documentary film
itself, implications that contribute to the Chaste thinking that informs the film. (There are those readers,
however, who would see only the side of the one over the other; such readers are not reading, are avoiding a
point of view of variation.) 26 The criticisms are very specific and build on Koch's arguments. Koch finds two
main themes in the film, subtly presented, but nonetheless powerful in that they drive the overall
assumptions of the film that greatly problematize an otherwise necessary and worthy documentary. The
themes appear to move "in two directions": Those of "primal fertility" (or vitalism) and of what is referred to
as "the 'genocide of love' " (29). Both themes come from two people interviewed by Sander. The former,
Koch says, is by Fjodor Swerew (Feodor Sverev), who speaks of the sexual urges—the desire to procreate—
of the Russian combatants who raped. The latter is by Frau Reshevskaya, who speaks of a strange coupling
of genocide and love.
Koch finds the theme of primal fertility displayed widely throughout the dialogue on the gathering
of statistics and not only in the reflections on quantity (i.e., the precise numbers of women raped) but also on
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the subsequent quality of life, or lack thereof, for these women and their children born of rape. The primal
fertility argument used to explain rape as a phenomenon is that the biological urge for procreation is so great
that men un/just do what men do. Boys will be boys! Koch points, in the interview, to Fjodor Swerew, who
"advocates the customary stereotypical legitimizing thesis for rape as the sexual urges." Swerew explains:
It is so, I suppose: The man can be killed [in war] every moment. And he wants to make a new life.
For him it was all the same: Russian girls, Polish, Checkish [sic].
This is, perhaps, a philosophical aspect about man and woman in that Man is man and he wants to
give a new life, I suppose, so it happens. (BeFreier 136; qtd. by Koch 31. In English in the film and
book.)
This is a rather telling explanation in the film; it does once again show the reader-viewer the kinds of cliched
rationalizations that are brought to bear on the event. Fear of death causes men in war to rape in dis/order to
reproduce quantities of themselves. Along with this kind of rationalization predicated on a vitalist
assumption that attempts to explain Why men in certain situations rape are other arguments equally based on
a discourse of biology, one, Koch points out, that smacks of "a curious jargon, as if ["principal witnesses"]
were still working for the anti-Bolshevik propaganda department or the Institute for Racial and Biological
Hygiene" (30). This arguments based on biology attempts to explain Why men should not shun women who
have been raped as possible, future quality "breeders." Men rape women and then men shun (i.e., rape once
again) these women. One witness, Dr. Lutz, Koch explains, "mounts her argument as a defense of women
against the masculine notion that, as a consequence of rape, the woman as the 'vessel for the child' undergoes
irreparable harm and for that reason must be cast out. In fact, however, she does not abandon the argument's
orientation toward racial hygiene" (30). Dr. Lutz argues:
It went so far, for example, that during my student years it was said that when a dog was incorrectly
mated it was ruined forever as a breeder. Of course, that is ridiculous. The first pups, naturally, are
nothing. But the dog, when newly impregnated by the right partner, is fine once again. And this is
naturally the same for human beings. This is a thing which plays itself out and is done with, and
when newly inseminated can be vouched for again. (BeFreier 176; qtd. by Koch 30)
Lutz is responding to the German men who would do away with their wives or daughters, because raped.
First, rape; then, murder. (Recall the woman who is told by a former German officer that if she had been his
wife, he would have shot her.) But Lutz is saying a great deal more in her pedagogy and not-so-hidden
curriculum. Lutz is, by analogy with dog breeding, saying that the children resulting from rape "are nothing"
(many of these children, now adults, are interviewed in the film) and that the raped women as breeders,
when "impregnated by the right partner," perhaps non-Russian?, but definitely German, are "fine again" and
"can be vouched for again." Now, it is first, rape; then, proper vouchers. It is rape all the way down! Again,
caught in the middle are the children who survived, now adults, and in the film recall openly their fantasies
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about their pedigree. One believed his father was an American only to be disappointed that he was Russian,
while another was proud that her father was not an American but a Russian. At all levels breeding (out) is
the topic! Sander herself writes: "It is one of the ironies of history that a war waged for racial purity laid the
groundwork for interbreeding on a gigantic scale, and that contemporary Europe in fact appears different
than it did fifty years ago" ("Remembering/Forgetting" 20; BeFreier 14).
What Koch makes explicit is the constant zigzagging in the film—from background to
foreground—from the rape and victimage of women to "a hidden [Chaste] vitalistic celebration of men's
procreative capabilities" (31-32). Or from genocide (gynocide) to procreation (in terms of quantity and
quality). There never seems to be a moment when this Gestalt is not at work. In viewing the film, we should
ask, Why is it that these two forces—perhaps better labeled as thanatos and eros—. . . Why are the two
imminently reversible? In the manner that they are! In many ways they are not opposites at all, though we
have been acculturated to see them as opposites. 27 Perhaps it has much to do with the name Eros, which we
will return to in the section on Pagan Meditations.
Opposite the theme of rape and procreation is, Koch says, "the metaphor of the 'genocide of love' "
(32). Frau Reshevskaya speaks in Russian and Warwara Petrowa translates into German: "Sie verurteilten
deutsche Frauen zu diesen Leiden, die sie über sich ergehen lassen mussten. Trotzdem glaube ich nicht, dass
es sexuelle Aspekte des Krieges waren. Es war ein sexueller Genozid, ein Genozid der Liebe" (BeFreier
137; emphasis mine). Koch explains: "Frau Reshevskaya, who coins this poetic metaphor, means that
Russian soldiers raped German women out of revenge for German acts of cruelty and not for sexual reasons"
(32).
Koch argues that because Sander does not "pursue the manner in which the metaphor is to be
understood," the metaphor begins to take on a "dynamic" of its own and to signify "that the massive rapes
annihilated the women as 'people of lovers,' thereby strengthening the impression that German women as a
whole took no part in the political events of the Nazi period and that they would have been able to survive
unhurt if, at the war's end, they had not become the innocent victims of a horrible conqueror" (32). Koch is
very pointed in her accusations of a metaphoric cover up and so I want to call on her own words still further.
She continues:
The metaphor of a 'genocide of love' takes over the film as a whole to become an interpretive
hypothesis. This phrase is used in such an approving way that it cannot—or is not meant to—allow
reflection upon the claim that the Nazi system did not shape women's subjectivity. In May 1945,
although they could not or did not want to reflect on their own role in stabilizing the system,
German women may have had to ask themselves how 'worthy of love' the soldiers returning from
the front were. (32)
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There are two things that Koch is pointing to that bear emphasis: Namely, that these German women, as
victims with their own stories of being raped, are exonerating themselves from their participation in the Nazi
system (hiding that fact, making it Chaste), and that these German women are fooling themselves into
thinking that their husbands-"lovers" returning from the front were both capable and "worthy of love."
Fooling themselves into thinking that they were not at all like the Russian men who had raped them. What
comes out in the interviews with the children of rape is that, in fact, in many cases their mothers for the most
part were incapable of loving or caring, and they themselves were incapable. The legacy of rape informs life
while incapacitating it. Hence, another way of seeing the genocide of love.
Koch's pointing to the "dynamic" of the metaphor itself, with its noisy clamoring, is courageous, for
Koch leaves herself—she is well aware—open to a charge of blaming the victims, that some how or other,
the German women deserved being raped—which is a charge that would but again exonerate, to a degree,
the former perpetrators of fascism and the latter victims of revenge rapes. Those Russians who spoke openly
of the rapes characterized them as "an eye for an eye." Once the dynamic of give-and-take on rape begins, it
is impossible to control the spillover effects. How does anyone tell one perpetrator (German) from the other
(Russian)? But Koch is not saying that the German women deserved what they got. (Both Koch and Sander
find themselves obsessively having to repeat this point.) Koch is saying rather that the stories that German
women tell function as alibis in their testimonies, their biographies, that help cover up their role in Nazi
Germany, and that the metaphor of "The Genocide of Love" in the film and its implications could and did
also help cover up what Sander was attempting to open up. 28
For Koch, the cover up continues in terms of the master narrative that she and others see as
informing the film:
Through the narrative's concentration on the rapes at the end of the war the film conceals the
speakers' divergent positions. The women's sex assumes transhistorical importance, whether the
woman be a Jewess living in hiding or a German interviewed by the Nazi Wochenschau; all women
now seem to be in the same boat. In biographical research one calls such stories that structure
meaning 'master narratives'—and in a certain sense the film itself offers such a master narrative: of
women as the central victims of a masculine war in which they participated altogether passively.
(35; cf. Grossmann 47-48; Levin 72-73)
Master (or grand) narratives, provisional or otherwise, cover up and make Chaste. But there is always
something in their inscription that is an exscription, something "filmic" (Barthes) that deterritorializes them
into their opposite or into petit narratives or even into something that resists being narrated, or resists
interpretation or indictment and brings on, with its failure, experiments in What is called Thinking? 29
Koch's last concern is a brief examination of the closing scene of the film, which has Hildegard
Knef reading from Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea: "Vexoris,/the Ethiopian king, appeared" and, after
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slaughtering the women's men, "took our love/from us by force—they dragged the women from/their
husbands' graves to their disgusting beds" (39; qtd. from Martin Greenberg's translation with slight
modifications, 226-27. Cf. Agee trans., 92-93). The concluding quote of the film, a few lines following those
above, is
And then they held a council
where it was decreed as follows: Women
capable of acting so heroically
needs must be unfettered as the wind
that blows across the open steppes and shall submit
to men no longer. . . . (39; cf. Agee trans., 93-94. BeFreier 213.)
If Sander and Knef had kept on reading in this closing scene through to the end of the play, the film's ending
would be rather tragically solemn. As anyone knows who has read or seen the play, nothing goes right for
Penthesilea after she slays Achilles. Which should remind us of Christa Wolf's "third alternative" of living
and not killing and dying (Cassandra 106-07, 118-19). In both Kleist and Wolf, Penthesilea kills or attempts
to kill and dies. 30 There really is no difference among the accounts in Homer or in Kleist or Wolf, except for
the narrative fact that Achilles is killed in Kleist before Penthesilea turns on herself. It is a horrifying end
with no promise of a rebeginning. Unless we are to view Kleist's version as a pedagogical play of the failure
of too much pride and spirit, as Prothoë announces in the closing lines. It is Artemis, not just the god Mars,
who, as has been surmised in the play itself, that pushes Penthesilea to Thanatos. 31 Ginette Paris reminds us
that Artemis "has a liking for bloody holocausts. It is not only animal sacrifice that is attributed to Artemis.
In the most distant times of Greek religious history, she was associated with the practice of human sacrifice"
(120). But let that not matter, for Sander and Koch toss that event and other possibilities aside for whatever
feminine-militant symbolic value they might get out of Kleist's play. Koch reads the unfortunate use of the
passages as another means of deflecting, forgetting, the overall context of prewar Germany and the rise of
the fascists. She says of Sander's use of the passages and the analog that Sander establishes with them in the
film:
In the beginning there was a paradisiacal primal state. Then the Scythian people were brutally
attacked; all the men, both old and young, were killed, and the women raped. As a result, the
women organized an armed struggle against the invaders and established their own state. This
narrative, a myth from antiquity reinvented by Kleist, can be read in an entirely different way. As
the narrative end to a historical documentary, the respective comparison lies close at hand:
Everything was peaceful, even the sexes lived in harmony [in Germany], until external enemies
[such as the Allies] forced their way in. In fact, that is the very account produced by repression in
the 1950s which had already come into existence at the time of the liberation, that is, by the end of
the war. The 'golden' prehistory of the Nazi system which led to the Second World War is excluded
from the narrative. (40)
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Finally for Koch, the inclusion of
Penthesilea can also be read precisely for the spin its story puts on the mutual submission to
procreative desires. To reproduce their state, the Amazons send out 'brides of Mars' to
burst into the forest where
there men are camped and blow the ripest ones,
who fall, like seeds, when tops of trees are wildly
pitching to and fro, back home to our fields. [Cf. Agee, trans., 97]
And for his part, Achilles wants to have a child with Penthesilea: 'You'll mother me the new god of
our Earth!' (40; cf. Agee trans., 103)
Here again, according to Koch, Sander obsessively links "rape and procreation," which Koch has tried "to
designate as [being expressed in the film in] an ambivalence between vitalistic procreative and aggressive
fantasies" (40). Or possibly through Eros and Thanatos. Koch asks rhetorically, "[D]oes the film not
embrace the repressive and self-exonerating scenarios of German history from which it wanted to free itself
through the mythic exorcism of a feminist-essentialist master narrative characterized by repression and self-
exoneration?" She continues asking rhetorically: "And, in order better to understand the obsessions of the
harmless Dr. Lutz, should we not read the film itself as a document linked to major aspects of women's
socialization history under the Nazis?" (40).
"The main one is the resistance to knowledge that she claims is powerfully present in German
society. Therefore, certain facts need to be acknowledged. Hence the obsessive empiricism, the
preoccupation with numbers. . . . But what other kinds of resistances are ostensibly being worked
through? A crucial one for Sander is the resistance to acknowledging the special status of violence
against women even in the context of a war so clearly dominated, on the German side, by racial
anxieties and racial genocide."
Round Table, Eric Santner, "Further Thoughts" (110).
Counter-Resistance: Sander's response to her critics is offered in an uncomplicated, straight-
forward manner. She responds by saying that she said no such things in the film as claimed by her critics.
She does not take up the whole issue of how her film has been—could have been and was—variously
received. And yet, she is not insensitive to reception. Her response is brief while the film itself is long. She
argues, "my topic was . . . What really happened at the time? Did massive numbers of rapes occur, or was
the belief that they did based on rumors?" (81). She reads the accusations against her in these terms:
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1) I ripped the history of the rapes out of the context of the history of Nazism.
2) I used feminist commonplaces, for example, that all men are rapists instead of embarking on an
analysis of the historical circumstances.
3) I utilized Nazi Wochenschau [newsreel] material without any commentary.
4) I claim to have broken a taboo, a claim that cannot be sustained since adequate information about
the rapes was always available.
5) The title involves irresponsible plays on words because the Germans experienced the end of the
war not as a liberation but as a capitulation. (81-82)
Sander responds, one by one. She says that she began with the assumption that the mass rapes were
"representative acts of revenge for the cruelties committed by Germans in the lands they occupied" (82).
This is important, for if it were proved true, then the context for the rapes would be solely or primarily the
history of Nazism. She says that she no longer believes in the revenge thesis, for combatants other than the
Red Army also raped German women. Moreover, it was not just German women who were raped, but also
"Jewish women in hiding and female forced laborers, nuns, and little girls" (82). Rape was on a large scale
and not limited to Russians raping German women. Sander says, "the question about context . . . always
implies the view that rapes of Nazi women would in some way be justified. The idea that they might also
affect 'innocents' is then removed by a proverb: they reaped what they sowed" (82). She says categorically,
while "some women were also Nazis . . . in general they did not carry out the German atrocities. (Female
concentration camp guards are the known exceptions.)" (82). Hence, from Sander's points of argument, the
context shifts from the history of Nazism to the history of men (of a variety of nations) raping women (of a
variety of nations). 32
Still under the general rubric of context in Sander's counter-arguments is the issue of revenge.
Taking up the issue of vitalism and procreation as cause, she stresses that surprisingly the White Russian
men set aside the notion of the rapes being tied to revenge. "They introduced other grounds: fear of death
(e.g., women were connected to 'life' and 'peace,' although both were only to be had through this brutal act)"
(82). Moreover, Sander argues:
'Sexual desire' was another reason often named. The men made no distinction between German or
Polish women. . . . The men express themselves in terms that often sound strange to Western
European and North American ears. In my opinion, this is because no women's movement existed
in the old Soviet Union, and hardly any knowledge of psychoanalysis or behavior roles; a discourse
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on sex was unavailable. Thus they compare, with a complete naivete, male sexual potency with that
of animals. (82)
In defense of the attacks made by her critics' saying that she did not respond to such loaded statements,
Sander says, she "did not go into them more exhaustively because I presupposed an understanding of the
context on the part of the film's spectators" (82-83). My sense is that while for the most part any rhetor
(Sander or others) can assume that an audience will be able to fill in the missing part of an enthymeme, no
rhetor can do so with the topic of rape. Everyone is held super-responsible for repeating even the most
commonplace arguments. Obsessively. I am inserting this interruption here in my exposition to identify with
Sander and the situation she finds herself in. The thickest description of arguments will even and always be
found lacking. There is something unique or singular about the topos of rape that makes it a battle of all
against all, and not just in terms of men against women, or vice versa. (The ancient topos of the rape of
Helen still lives on today and is often a battleground for testing arguments. Testing, in the sense of
agonistics, or eristics, is driven by testosterone.) Rape undoes everything. In terms of a rhetorical
hermeneutics. And in terms of a material rhetoric. 33
Still under the general rubric of context but taking up the issue of a "genocide of love," Sander
stresses in response: "On the basis of this phrase, Gertrude Koch makes the absurd accusation that by not
commenting on this phrase I stylize the Germans into 'people of lovers' " (83). In her defense, Sander points
out—and as she does, she points more and more to the film and how her critics do not know how to read a
film, and more and more to the political problems of reception—and she points this out at great length and
eloquently—hence I will quote her at great length—that
women report very drily [in the film] about what they experienced at the time. They do not even cry
. . . (which is part of the problem).. . . . That I did not correct but instead let stand certain remarks
made by my interviewees plays a prominent role in the list of accusations. I did not agree with the
content of all that was said to me. . . . I wanted to portray an event and in so doing to refer to the
multifaceted problems involved [and to let it unfold processually]. In order to do so, I had to know
what was thought, what images were constructed. I did not have to emphasize to those better
informed that many of the arguments presented are 'dubious.' . . .
I refer to the fact that German soldiers also raped, not massively, though there were always gang
rapes. (I go into this in a digression.) Many people seem to have difficulty accepting the fact that
compared to the known crimes and the Holocaust the Germans relatively seldom committed the
crime of rape (as if this in any way lessened their guilt!). In this instance, 'seldom' means
acknowledging that the term 'mass rape' acquired a new quantitative dimension following the
events in Germany after the war.
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If German women did not constitute the majority of those raped one might be able to speak more
rationally about the difference between the concepts of 'pogram' and 'Holocaust.' A pogram is
something horrible, but it is limited. The Holocaust was planned extermination. After the events in
Berlin, mass rape is not an occurrence that may be said to have happened only to a few hundred
women. Today, mass rape is to be understood as an occurrence involving several hundred thousand
women simultaneously. The Germans were not involved in this sort of crime. It is not all as simple
as many would like to think.
The film's contribution lies in its outlining of the extent of the rapes. The 'obsessiveness' with
numbers of which I have been accused in New York is correct. It is, however, false to say that I
used these figures, these raped 'millions,' to distract attention from the issue of German guilt.
Although I can understand the distrust on the part of relatives of Holocaust survivors, it is not
justified. (84)
Logically, these distinctions are clearly understandable. Politically, however, they become subject to various
radicals of presentation that are not all accountable for.
laconically states:
Let me pick up the pace of Sander's response. Taking on the list of charges against her, Sander
The rapes were hushed up, and this silence, which had consequences, extended to the social
discourse about the events. It was my astonishment at this silence that motivated me. . . . [W]hy
had there been no public discussion of this? Why must this mean to those struggling bitterly to
learn to remember the consequences of the Hitler regime they had established but who were not
permitted any memory of other events? (84-85)
These are the telling (Chaste Rape) questions of Sander's film, Liberators Take Liberties. And Sander's
critics do not at all deal with them: What is politically acceptable to remember and not to remember
publicly! Berlin, Mon Amour! About the master narrative of all men are potential rapists and all women are,
at least, potential victims of rape, Sander writes: "At no time do I say, 'Every man is a potential rapist' "
(85). 34 About the Nazi Wochenschau material (newsreels), Sander says that surely everyone knows that all
the footage is propaganda on both sides. (Sander's critics may be expecting too little from the commonplace.
And yet, Sander may be expecting too much from the varied audiences with their varied predispositions and
common ignorance of the Wochenschau. Sander's re-descriptive arguments are simply—in this film, but can
such be in a film?—too thin, not thick enough as Gilbert Ryle and Clifford Geertz would pre-scribe them to
be.) About Sander's claim of breaking the taboo, Sanders says that, in fact, there were many books on the
Russians raping German women, but the discussions were "considered Cold War literature" and "the Left
ignored the book[s]." And most descriptive, she says: "When the rapes stopped, they were an open secret"
(86). About the title with its play on words, Sander simply writes: "There are many different kinds of
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interpretations of the war's ending among different sorts of Germans" (87). In many ways, the resistance and
counter-resistance is predictable, since it follows a protocol of responding that is typical of what Kenneth
Burke refers to as a potential problem of "scope and reduction" (Grammar of Motives 59-126). What is less
typical, virtually atypical, are meditations. Not any meditations, but an event of meditations. And as we will
see eventually, pagan meditations.
"A film works with images and sounds. Images relate to sounds and vice versa. I do not work with
footnotes. For me it is important and wonderful to watch a woman who after the first rapes—and in
front of a line of waiting men—looked at the Red Army soldier asleep on her breast and realized
that she had developed maternal feelings toward him. She sees that he is still a child, 'a homesick,
war weary child.' I am amazed at the woman who is now looking for her father among the millions
of old Soviet men.
I try to comprehend how it is that a woman whose mother was raped by two French men can
imagine her father as a Hollywood hero.
I try to comprehend what it means for a young Jewish girl who, having hidden for two years
waiting for the liberation, then had to hide again."
Helke Sander, "A Response to My Critics" (87-88).
Meditations: We have rehearsed the discussions of critics (resistance) and counter-critic (counter-
resistance). Somewhere in between, as the cliché goes, lies a truth. But now I will hint at what I insist on
calling a meditation among meditations—a passage or two, yet three, in the transcript of the Round Table,
published in the journal October, that becomes nearly all betweens. That becomes, as Deleuze would say, a
zone of betweens. It is, as I have experimented with in chapter 6, a "conversation . . . simply an outline of a
becoming" (Deleuze, Dialogues 1-35; Ronell, Dictations ix-xix). These meditations are, at a singular
moment of a break in accusations and criticisms against Sander, and at a singular moment of a rupture in
rhythm, no longer exclusively in binary machines: question-answer, masculine-feminine, German-Russian,
right-left (cf. Deleuze 2). This becoming (of critics and Sander), however, is displaced in the Round Table
participants, who begin with the critics and then who rebegin, through an interruption, to identify with
Sander. This zigzag motion (emotion, then commotion) eventually places them in the zone of betweens. The
two sides of resistance—the critics (formerly wasps) and Sander (formerly orchid), or Santner (formerly
wasp, in the Round Table) and Sander (formerly orchid)—provide the exemplar. The critics form a Sander
image, but in fact there is a critic-becoming of Sander, a Sander-becoming of the critics, a Santner becoming
a Sander (the visual, orthographic resemblance becomes a pointless of con-fusion while reading), a double
capture since what each becomes changes no less than that which becomes. 35
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I am going to point to this break in, sudden interruption of, the flow of discourse in the "Round
Table" discussion that was nothing but an amplification of what Koch and others were putting forth as a
critique of Sander's film. What I think is interesting about that amplification, however, is that it begins with a
consideration of the reception of the film. After about sixteen pages of the discussion there is this opportune
moment (kairostic break) when Adreas Huyssen interrupts the flow and puts forth the conditions for
refolding wayves of rethinking the possibilities of what we might call the problematic of German discourse.
Huyssen says:
I'm going out on a limb, but I would say that consciousness of the complexity of the victim and
perpetrator roles and of how the two categories can mesh and slide is underdeveloped in German
discourse. It's always either/or. Whether it's about German soldiers on the eastern front, about
women, or anything else, the discussion gets stuck in the muck of victim versus perpetrators. There
are historical reasons for that almost traumatic inability to differentiate further. ("Round Table"
106; emphasis mine)
And so then, we might anticipate that the task of thinking is to discover how to get unstuck, not so much,
however, by learning how to differentiate between two, but by situating the discussion somewhere in the
heretofore excluded middle or in between. Not in the excluded element of the binary (not a turn of a simple
negative deconstruction). But in a third position (a more complicated turn to an affirmative deconstruction
outside at the threshold, of the binary, in a meshwork). Let us keep in mind the metaphors of Huyssen's
statement of "limb," "mesh," and "slide." Let us anticipate the task of thinking within a meshwork. 36
As the discussion moves out on a limb, Eric Santner ventures out on a very different limb. We have
two limbs in search of a middle third that has nothing to do with arborescence at all. He says: "It [the
either/or] is very stark in Sander's short story ["A Telephone Conversation with a Friend" In The Three
Women K] which Annette [Michelson] mentioned. At some level, the opposition is reduced to a competition
for funding. Whose memory-work is going to be funded—memory-work about the Holocaust, or memory-
work about women's past and suffering?" (106). So the issue becomes one, if we translate it in terms of
chapters 4 and 5 of Chaste Rape, of an obsessive struggle over canonization and, so to speak, immortality
(memortality). But there is a difference between what Huyssen and Santner are saying. Santner continues:
Moreover, the competition is accentuated because the narrator [of the short story] makes the larger
claim that women's suffering is ultimately the product of Jewish monotheism. Sander's story
suggests that behind the gesture of universalization may lie a sinister historicization, one which
dates the advent of sexual violence with Jewish monotheism! For five thousand years the suffering
has been going on. That is connected, I think, to the way the melodrama of breaking taboos gets
overplayed in this film through [Sander's] self-dramatization as the one who is breaking the silence,
discovering the statistics, and so on. The question arises, who constrained the discourse? (106)
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Again, there is an interesting, though not so unique, turn in Santner's exposition (of an argument); there is in
Santner's thinking a representing of the Jews as prior perpetrators to their own victimage—they are caught in
the Holocaust in their own origination of "sexual violence with Jewish monotheism." In other words,
Santner is saying that the Judaic tradition set the trap and its own people got caught in it! But as Santner sees
Sander's view in the short story and the film, so are women—German women—caught in this same
universalization and historicization of "sexual violence." The German female in the story, Ms. K, points to
"The destructive will in the Five Books of Moses" ("Telephone Conversation" 119). We should not forget,
however, that Sander in the film universalizes the suffering of both German and Jewish women, especially
the Jewish mother and daughter who come out of hiding during the so-called Liberation of Berlin, only to
have to return in hiding. But again Santner would probably say—has said that Sander says—in response that
this universalization has a "sinister historicization" behind it. Again, Santner says that Sander is pointing at
the Jews. All of Santner's interpretation is coming from his reading of the story and he is careful to point out
that he is not necessarily interpreting the film by way of the story. But in Santner's interpretation Sander is
less concerned with men against women and more concerned with Jews against women and vice versa. My
sense, however, is that Sander situates herself critically and then thoughtfully in between each of these two
groups in the story and perhaps in the film. (We will have to see.) 37
In attempting to answer the question of "who constrained the discourse?", Santner continues:
And I think—less in the film and more in the story—there is a sense that what has imposed these
taboos [constraining discourse] has been the competition with the Jews and the task of bearing
witness to Jewish suffering. This connects Sander's project to [Hans Jürgen] Syberberg, who has
been very explicit about this competition. He believes that an obsession with Jewish suffering has
been at the expense of attention paid to German suffering, and that now the time has come for this
to end. He appeals to Germans to let go of the PC-ness that has always forced them to think about
Jewish victims and never their own. I like to say that in German, 'PC' stands for 'proper coping' with
the past. [Syberberg] wants Germany to bracket out these ideological pressures, go through the
ruins, and remember their own suffering. It seems Syberberg ultimately wants to blame the Jews for
making this impossible for the Germans. Such ideas really came to the fore in the mid-eighties with
Bitburg and the Historians' Debate. I would agree with Andreas that the left won that debate, but
after a latency period, the fall of the Wall restarted it. It sounds to me like Sander is taking a very
Syberbergian position in claiming that it's time now to focus just on us." ("Round Table" 106).
Interesting enough, however, Huyssen jumps back into the conversation away from Santner's limb, to his
own, and says: "I would want to defend [Sander] against the charge of complicity with Syberberg" (107).
Quickly, after returning to the whole question of numbers of victims, the conversation turns to
Silvia Kolbowski, who says with others that Sander does not appear to identify with either the right or the
left. Kolbowski says: "There's a way in which you might say she has tried to situate herself in between these
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two discourses [emphasis mine]. Or rather, she tries to occupy another ground" (107; Kolbowski's
emphasis). A few pages later, Santner is saying, "there are times in the film when it seems as if [Sander]
imagines that she is offering a kind of neutral space for remembering. . ." (111; emphasis mine). Similarly he
says that Sander is "offer[ing] a new kind of space for the memory work" (111; emphasis mine). But in the
closing section, there is apparent agreement that Sander's film is "militant and yet occupies a middle ground"
(112). The militancy in great part is determined in this evolving and revolving interpretation by the closing
presentation of the lines from Penthesilea. But the neutral space, the middle ground, the in between is
indeterminate in this involving experimentation by reopening the question concerning Liberators Take
Liberties. It is at (and with) the end of the binary-machine that there are compossible rebeginnings. In what
Virginia Woolf calls "an unsubstantial territory" (Waves 185). At least in (and out of) respect for thinking.
Reading. Writing. Rape.
I am not saying that, in fact, Sander is becoming Woolf. Rather, I am saying that "we" can also
experimentally read Sander as becoming middle, as working in the same post-critical a-positionality as
Deleuze is. As I have pointed out, some of those meditating on her film, in relation to her having opened a
neutral space or a new kind of space, have already begun rethinking what has been already thought about
Liberators Take Liberties. John Rajchman puts Deleuze's task of thinking well in terms of experimentation. I
would put it the same wayves for Sander's task of anti-remembering the past:
From the start Deleuze was a philosopher not of negation but of affirmation—not of mourning and
absence, nor of sad, tired ironies, but of humor and life. [His] a conception of desire itself no longer
based in sacrifice or privation, working instead as a kind of great connection-machine; and against
the melancholy model of the blank page or empty canvas, he proposes a view in which the page or
canvas [or memory screen (screen memories)] is always covered over with too many cliches, too
many probabilities, which must be cleared away in order to find something vital, something new.
[His] is a great art of connection and experimentation. (Deleuze Connection; interpolations mine
13)
"There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense. A thing
is sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something more complicated—depending on the
forces (the gods) which take possession of it."
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche (4).
Pagan Meditations (Eros): I want, as promised, to take up the question Why Eros? There is
something rather problematic in Freud's Eros-Thanatos (or forces of life and death) pairing, just as there is
something equally problematic in Sander's film in the love-genocide pairing. (The two pairs are rather
obviously analogous and telling in their relation to war, rape, and children. A drive to be [the living] dead.)
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Jean-Pierre Vernant tells us: "Thanatos and Eros, Death and Desire are neighbors" ("Feminine Figures" 97;
cf. Zeitlin 143-51; Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor).
I am now briefly going to turn to another force within psychology, Ginette Paris, who takes up the
question of Eros in terms of an ecology of polytheism, pagan gods, which is an ecology of human
personalities that may be in or out of balance. Like others, she views gods figuratively, yet culturally, as
driving forces. Paris writes that we socially make ourselves known by the forces that pull and shape us. She
says, "Greek polytheism was not, as Judeo-Christianism [sic] is, a religion of after-death; it is not a 'religion'
at all, but stands closer to an ecology of the living than to that totalitarianism that underlines the Western
ideal of religion" (3; emphasis mine). A question that I have perpetually been concerned with is living.
Recall Derrida: "Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally"
(Spectres of Marx xvii; Derrida's emphasis). Recall Wolf: "Between killing and dying there is a third
alternative: living" (Cassandra 118).
The stories of the gods are in the form of a mythos, whereas the stories of Freud and of Paris, in
their different renderings, are in the double form of mythos and logos. For Freud, the myths (Oedipus, Eros)
give an impetus and name for his reasoned-rationalized meditations on instinctual drives. For Paris, "A myth
is a support for meditation upon one's relationship with oneself, others, nature, and the sacred. In contrast to
a meditation which, like Buddhist meditation, seeks to find a void, a 'pagan' meditation allows all images, all
possibilities to arise, all the fabulous personages who inhabit us, until, little by little, we perceive the web of
their relations" (4; emphasis mine). As I tried to suggest, the meditations of the Round Table—Huyssen,
Santner, Kolbowski—were at times the works of these "pagani" waging experiments in the pagus, that is, in
the border or in between zone, where genres of discourse are in conflict over the meshwork of their linkages
(cf. Lyotard, Differend 151). Paris engages in similar meshwork. Or I should say meshworks. On our way to
Eros and his replacement in the pairing Eros-Death, I will briefly summarize Paris several possible
meshworks. The first is Aphrodite-Ares.
Each of these meshworks is a separating out and a bringing together of a different god with
Aphrodite. "Aphrodite has many lovers," Paris writes, "and each of these unions represents a different type
of relationship" (79). Each combination makes for a different force from that of Eros-Thanatos. Paris is
experimenting. About Aphrodite-Ares, Paris says, "the couple Aphrodite-Ares is a union of inverse
polarities: [peace and war], desire and aggression, [water and fire], "[hyper-femininity and hyper-
masculinity]" (79). 38 Let us recall that Eros, whom we will get to soon in relation to Aphrodite, when linked
up with Thanatos leads to irrepressible death. But when Aphrodite, instead of Eros, is linked with Ares, there
is peace, or a lessening of aggression. Paris explains that this relationship can best be understood in terms of
Pax Romana, which "was the result of imposed power: the smaller nations did not fight among themselves
because a more powerful nation imposed peace upon them" (80). This may illustrate the relationship, but it
is not ideal by any means. But Paris continues in a different way to illustrate how the pairing is of benefit.
Paris argues, "to the extent that we are Christians, it is difficult for us to conceive of this essential bond
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etween Aphrodite and Ares: Greek wisdom, unlike Christian, implied that the one did not come without the
other. The Christian utopia is so attractive that we cannot admit without anxiety that one cannot have
Aphrodite without Ares, peace without combat, pleasure without suffering" (80). Paris says that reality is
otherwise. One has only to think of the Crusades and the present struggle between the Judeo-Christian
tradition and the Islamic tradition. (Recall Sander's character Mr. K's comments on the originating violence
of the Judeo-Christian tradition and let us not forget that of Islam, both of which are unbalanced in terms of
aggression and violence.) 39
Paris goes on, in terms of cause-effect, to argue that "the suppression of the aggressive pole in the
Christian myth, represented by the myth of Ares, occurred at the same time as the suppression of the
Aphrodisiacal-sexual pole. All schools of psychology seem to point out that the repression of rage and anger
(Ares) drives out also the pleasure, tenderness, and laughter of Aphrodite" (81). More to the topic at hand,
Paris points to
the number of rapes and delinquent aggressions [which grows] in all our cities. This appears to be a
symptom, not of the return of Ares, but of his negation. Repression of the physical expression of
aggressive energies leads to a disordered explosion of violence. Ares is not Aphrodite's rapist but
her lover. Neither with women nor with the elderly does Ares want to fight, but with real
adversaries. Delinquent violence . . . strikes for the sake of striking; he rapes a woman because he
does not know what love is. This violence is a revolt against a world in which the physical,
aggressive energy has no outlet, a world which has been deserted as much by Ares as by Aphrodite.
(81; emphasis mine)
It is the case that negation (repression) is the source of violence. 40 What is repressed eternally returns. But it
is crucial to remember that it is not just a repression of Ares or of Aphrodite, but both. Their life-enhancing
and life-affirming powers exist in between them. But as Paris unfolds her book Pagan Meditations, it is clear
that she sees Aphrodite as key, coupled in many ways with different gods for different effects and affects.
Paris goes to the next ratio of gods, this one between Aphrodite and Adonis. She wryly writes:
"Passing from Ares to Adonis is a bit like passing from the virility of the cowboy to that of a gracious and
emotional Valentino" (87). Adonis is described as "effeminate" (88) and as having "nothing to do with
marriage. His mythic territory is rather that of illicit loves and summer romances which cannot pass the test
of time and the responsibilities of family life. The myth also suggests that the romantic lover, despite the
sexual powers characteristic of his young vitality, does not have the psychological maturity" necessary and,
therefore, is "ephemeral" (88). "The Adonis-type of man survives as long as he is 'protected' by stronger
women," Paris says, "but in a male competitive world he is too vulnerable" (89). Next type.
Finally we get to Eros, which Paris has more to say about and in the context of Freud's having
selected this god to signify the life force. She asks:
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[W]hy speak of Eros when Aphrodite is concerned? Why have we masculinized the divine figure of
Love? Why did Freud ignore Aphrodite to Eros's benefit? Shall we relate his preference for the
myth of Eros over that of Aphrodite to his declaration that the 'libido is male'? And if the libido is
male in a psychology dominated by the myth of Eros, would the inverse reasoning be correct? That
is, in a psychology in which Aphrodite regained her true role, would sexual energy become
feminine again. (90-91)
Each of these questions is, of course, rhetorical. Paris continues to point out in Hesiod (the Theogony) Eros
is a minor, not fully developed god. She says, "Eros is part of Aphrodite's cortege" (92). Eros is a minor
figure, and "submissive" to his mother, sometime reported to be Aphrodite. (His paternity in terms of father
especially is scattered.) While Aphrodite, Paris tells us, "represented the universal principle of sexual
attraction, the young Eros seemed to 'specialize' in . . . uniting Gods and mortals, and love relationships
between males" (92-93). It is the latter that Paris focuses on, for in terms of the Eros of the philosophers,
there is again, as with later the Church, a dissipation of the gods, that is, of mythos, in favor of reason, of
logos. There is an eventual loss of equilibrium (homeostasis) in the binary. Paris gives her account:
[T]he darling of the philosophers, represented more and more the love which unites the pederast
and the pre-adolescent boy. . . . The platonic philosophers seemed to equate . . . bodily love,
heterosexual love, the preference of Aphrodite to Eros, and being of low birth, and . . . homosexual
love, lived within the head and heart rather than through the body, and being of a higher level of
consciousness. . . . This tendency prepared the way for the anti-Aphrodisiacal monotheism of the
Christian theologians as much as for a Freudian psychology. (93)
The ecology of mind and body is upset. In subordinating Aphrodite and women in general, Paris argues, the
philosophical tradition has favored a homosocial space. 41 Paris makes it clear that "a similar disequilibrium
may be found in an exclusively feminine world" (95).
Aphrodite: The Shadow Narrative I
" 'Youth preoccupied with women and resolved to fight': politics as juvenile delinquency. Ortega [y
Gasset] is thinking, as Freud did also, of a connection between fraternal organization and exogamy,
conceived as form of 'marriage by capture.' The band of brothers feel the incest taboo and the lure
of strange women; and adopt military organization (gang organization) for purposes of rape.
Politics as gang bang. The game is juvenile, or, as Freud would say, infantile; and deadly serious; it
is the game of Eros and Thanatos; of sex and war."
Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (15).
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"Then the young slave woman from the Greek camp came over to her, knelt down before her, and
laid Penthesilea's hands against her face. She said: 'Penthesilea. Come join us.' 'Join you? What
does that mean?' 'Come to the mountains. The forest. The caves along the Scamander. Between
killing and dying there is a third alternative: living."
Christa Wolf, Cassandra (118).
While Ginette Paris can allow us heuristically to see her notion of the value of Aphrodite in her
various ratios with male gods over Eros, which in the collective mind of the onto-theological tradition is a
set of ratios that signify inferiority, Paris's own forceful advocacy for Aphrodite makes her blind to the
implications in an account that she gives of Aphrodite's role in the Trojan War, an account that creates a
shadow narrative. To negate Eros, or to negate the negative that Eros represents and thereby to affirm
Aphrodite is only to create a shadow narrative. (Perhaps every mythical, master narrative of history has a
shadow narrative. A dark side. Presenting, yet "absencing" [placing within a shadow], sexual violence. A
shadow narrative can be a double articulation of a dark side and an abgrund [a grounding of absence as
presence, mise en abyme]. Christopher Frayling, in speaking of rape in cinema, relates: "The camera tended
to tilt at the last moment toward a symbolic icon [such as a shining white reproduction of Canova's Eros and
Psyche in the 1932 Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde], or the celluloid image tended discreetly to dissolve seconds
before the ghastly act was committed—in the case of James Whale's Frankenstein, this created the
impression that the little girl had been raped—and the audience had to be satisfied with distorted shadows on
the opposite wall and the retribution of people like us" [174-75; Frayling's emphasis]. Lamenting the loss of
light that would cast a shadow, lamenting the loss of a shadow itself, Jean Baudrillard writes: "Our only
shadow is the one projected onto the wall opposite by atomic radiation. These stencilled silhouettes
produced by the Hiroshima bomb. The atomic shadow, the only one left to us: not the sun's shadow, nor
even the shadows of Plato's cave, but the shadow of the absent, irradiated body, the delineation of the
subject's annihilation, of the disappearance of the original" [Illusion 105]. Gilles Deleuze writes: "History
progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming
differences. It is not less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation: the good
enter into it with all the power of a posited differential or a difference affirmed; they repel shadows into the
shadows and deny only as the consequence of a primary positivity and affirmation" [Difference 268].)
Chaste—shadow—rape narratives.
On one page, as we saw, Ginette Paris can be discussing the loss of balance in Aprhodite's relation
to Ares and how this can contribute to rape in societies (81), and four pages later, as we will now see, Paris
can be talking about Aphrodite and Paris (of Troy) and implicitly the rape of Helen, 42 and have no sense of
the implications of what she is saying. Her whole discussion of this rape is caught up gloriously in terms of
fight in love and courage among lovers.
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In a section titled "Men, War, and Women"—which for me greatly recalls Sander's subtitle of
"War, Rape, and Children"—Ginette Paris is discussing the Aphrodite-Ares ratio and in this section is
relating the narrative of how Aphrodite comes to be "at the origin of the Trojan War" (85): At the wedding
of the god Thetis to the mortal Peleus, one person was not invited and that was the god Eris (who signifies
discord and strife). Eris responds to the insult by casting the "apple of discord" before those present. On the
apple is written "For the Fairest." The apple with its message has its effect on three gods: Hera, Athena, and
Aphrodite. Zeus intervenes and, as usual, he asks a mortal to resolve the discord. Zeus appoints Paris to be
the judge, which means that Paris will be offered gifts by the three gods to entice him to favor one of them.
(Here again we have the topos of a mortal caught among the gods and the forces they represent.) Hera offers
power; Hermes offers glory in battle; and Aphrodite offers Helen of Sparta. Paris favors the latter as the
"Fairest" and offers her the golden apple, for in exchange he will have Helen. (Again, we have the topos of
trafficking in women, but this time between a goddess and a mortal.) Having related the narrative, Ginette
Paris says:
The bond between Aphrodite and Ares, among its many significations, expresses the belief, deeply
rooted amongst the Greeks that, [sic] men fight for women and that the origin of war is
fundamentally a rivalry for them. The most illustrious example is obviously the Iliad. This belief
was so strong among Greeks that even Herodotus . . . felt obliged to explain that 'perhaps' there was
a rivalry for women in the origins of the Trojan War. He recounts many other stories of rapture (of
Europa, for example, and Io) which were believed to have brought about the greatest of the wars
between Europe and Asia. Each rapture marks a progression in the hostilities which eventuate in
war." (85-86; emphasis mine. See Herodotus, Histories 1.1-4)
According to legend and scholarship, it is "the rape of Helen" (or the "abduction" or "rapture," if less
violently descriptive, more Chaste, words are used) 43 that leads to the war and the collapse of Troy and the
founding of Rome with its three foundational rapes (the Vestals, the Sabine Women, and Lucretia). It is the
case, as Ginette Paris points out, that Helen is a commodity to be carried away. What is missing in Ginette
Paris's discussion, however, is some realization that Aphrodite contributes to a rape narrative as the
originating event. If we are to substitute, as she is suggesting, Aphrodite for Eros, for the reasons she gives,
then What would we gain that would be life-enhancing and life-furthering? Either god takes us to death. It
could certainly be argued that out of this rape, and other founding rapes, a new order and life comes, but
Who would want to argue that point! with its chaste rationalization of rape as an exceptional, beneficial
action for the beginning of a new civilization! And if exceptional in this context, then exceptional in the
streets of Berlin in March-May of 1945! Such a rationalization of a founding myth, though only a story, is
more so a canonized story that can and has become daily a pedagogical exemplar for sexual violence. Such
mythological-foundation is the theory; rape, the practice! So then, I have to ask: What really would be the
difference between Eros and Aphrodite? when the shadow narrative of the rape of Helen (i.e., the narrative
that covers up the sexual violence yet portrays it) that she carries with her is fundamentally unacceptable in
its ramifications and with its implications?
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Paris earlier made it clear that rape is caused by the negation of Ares: "the repression of the
physical expression of aggressive energies leads to a disordered explosion of violence" (81). Moreover, she
argued that there needed to be a balance between Ares and Aphrodite. Hence, there would be the non-
suppressed aggressive energies of Ares but there would have to be a necessary equilibrium (homeostasis)
between binaries of Ares and Aphrodite to keep these energies in check. But for some reason or other, Paris
begins to discuss love as "fight," as combat, and that love requires courage in the fight. She says that both
gods "come together in the most physical aspects of courage: Ares and Aphrodite both have this generosity
of the body, without which there would be neither sexual fusion nor aggressive physical opposition" (84).
Then she says, "The fire of Ares and the glory of Aphrodite are both beyond fear, but contain it" (84). So
then, it is both Ares and Aphrodite that must contain each other in an equilibrium. Perhaps they are beyond
fear—which can be exceptionally dangerous—but they can contain their combative expression of love as
fighting in their own mythical relationship. But Aphrodite expresses her love of fighting also through
mortals. Paris writes: "Even if [Aphrodite] does not fight her own battles, she quickly involves the men
around her in combat" (85). (Perhaps she is caught in repression-compulsion, and needs this extra-
mythological outlet.) Aphrodite becomes rather masculine, such as Ares, and finds a surrogate to act out
sexual fantasies with real sexual violence. Perhaps she has lost any sense of equilibrium. Paris warned us:
When speaking of Ares, or male immortals, she says, "a similar disequilibrium may be found in an
exclusively feminine [hyper-feminine] world" (95). But the encounter with Paris (of Troy) is toward the
other; it is a fostering of sexual violence in mortals. Paris makes it clear that Aphrodite "never fights
directly" but through mortals such as Paris and that she is "at the origin of the Trojan War" (85; cf. Meagher
26-31), intervening by having Paris abduct (rape) Helen and thereby contributing to the mass bloodshed and
undoing of so many, where the choices have nothing to do with containment or equilibrium (homeostasis)
but everything to do with killing or dying and not living. There is something so dark in Ginette Paris's
rendering of Aphrodite as a fighter for love. Something combatant that can lead but to killing and more
killing. By way of surrogates. What is so courageous about such fighting! It seems, contrary to Ginette
Paris's description of Aphrodite's values of fighting face to face, as her lover Ares's does with equally
matched combatants, rather cowardly. Or rather, as Paris would say, "delinquent" and "absurd" (81). Clearly
Aphrodite's intervention is death against life. This god (recall Heidegger) is not the one who can help human
beings! There is much less hope being offered by way of Aphrodite (and the doubles, Paris and Paris) and
much more, I would venture to insist, by wayves of Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death. 44 But that is
another story that I leave to my readers (see chapter 3, the Test, for instructions), as I now turn to what
happens when in the feminine world equilibrium (in the binary) is lost to a hyper-feminine (sexual) violence
that becomes as cold as an Apollonian war can and is the norm in today's battles. 45
Baise-Moi: The Shadow Narrative II
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"Few people know that there were about a million . . . women-soldiers in the Red Army. I now
drive to Minsk and ask them if they ever approached a man and told him: Man, come!?"
Helke Sander, BeFreier (114).
"I refer to darkness, shadows. [. . .] Radical evil is not this or that bad deed but the potential for
darkness. And yet this potentiality is also the potentiality for light."
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities (180-81).
In Helke Sander's film BeFreier und Befreite, the Russian soldiers would call to women by saying,
"Come Women, Come!" This was the infamous call to be raped. In Virginie Despentes's novel Baise-Moi
and in the film version with Coralie Trinh Thi, there is a similar, though reversed, command. The phrase
Baise-Moi, to the uninitiated, might literally mean Kiss-Me, but to others the expression would mean Fuck-
Me. In the United States version of the novel and film, the title is rendered to mean Rape-Me. It is, to say the
least, a mean punk and post-punk novel and film. What keeps the work from being successful as a simple,
yet complex, reversal—everything is imminently reversible—of sexual violence perpetrated by men, now
perpetrated against them by two women, is that it is more than an orgy of sexual violence against men. It is
totally indiscriminate violence against anyone and finally for no apparent, even casuistically stretched,
reasons. If the aesthetic of the film, however, is offered as being outside the realm of judgment (Kant), but
offered in the realm of an experiment (Deleuze), the film remains unclear as to what it is or what it is
searching for in its hot and cold mixture of Arian and Apollonian acts of violence. Even the two characters,
Nadine and Manu, are not clear as to who they are in their works and why they are performing them. (The
two characters seem to pause among their acts of violence not only to rehearse possible future events but
also to ask each other how this script of their new life is to be written. The problem is, as disclosed in the
novel, that they are fated to do what they do, as if their lives or irreversible. 46 ) As the violence builds, there
are two possibilities: Either the two women are more male than male, hyper-male. Or they are hyper-
feminine (signaling a total loss of equilibrium [homeostasis] within a binary), as Ginette Paris, in her
discussions of Aphrodite might describe it. In their hyper-subjectivities, they are perhaps neo-Amazons.
They are perhaps, the voice that says, "I'm Andrea, which means manhood. . . . I went out; at night; to smash
a man's face in; I declared war. My nom de guerre is Andrea One; I am reliably told there are many more;
girls named courage who are ready to kill" (Dworkin, Mercy 333). They are perhaps women known as Les
Guérillères. (Perhaps, however, this is to be a parodic film.)
If the film's purpose is to portray an attempt at rethinking, reinventing, experimenting, by way of
autopoesis, what the new female must be to survive masculine violence or what women must do to teach
men that they must stop being violent, then, as this monomanical point of view unfolds, this purpose un/just
destroys itself along with the two women and a long line of apparent innocents. (Surely, this film is parodic.)
The two characters's choice is only to will nothingness. In as much as the film is about the call to come (a
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call to a community of avenging angels, ironic or not), it never realizes the possibilities of becoming. It stays
in the register of mimesis, imitating male violence against women. Virtually competing with such violence.
This film, as well as the novel, is un/just all shadow narrative (this time, all sexual violence). One built on an
Aphrodite-Thanatos principle. In the context of this discussion, Baise-Moi can be seen as a shadow narrative
of Sander's ending (rebeginning) to BeFreier und Befreite, which attempts to negate male sexual violence
and to affirm a call to arms (Hildegard Knef's reading from Kleist's Penthesilea). We have the call and then a
shadowy-mirrored crime spree.
And yet, there is something rather strange about the quasi-conjugation and re-rendering of the verb
Baise-Moi in translations: From to kiss, to fuck, to rape. In the DVD version of the film, there are extras
with blurbs from the (newspaper) critics. One reads: "The title itself, 'Rape Me,' is an ironic statement, an
impossible oxymoron (one cannot be raped if one wills it)." So then, does ironic become ludic, with the two
women playing to the audience, racking up their political points? For women, all the world's a stage of rape.
Or so then, does ironic become resistant, with the two women resisting way beyond second wave feminism?
For men, all the world's a staged fuck, a staged rape.
The first twenty or so minutes of the film attempts to lay the groundwork for Why there is violence
toward men? The character Manu is raped by a gang of men, and Nadine, who is a prostitute, is perpetually
put upon by her Johns. When Manu is raped she resists by not responding to the men's fantasies, which
disgusts them and makes them leave her. The other woman with her acts in the complete opposite manner,
heightening the difference between her and Manu. The contrast of coldness is vivid. Nadine gestures with
shrugs, whatevers; she mostly shrugs people off, but finally begins to snuff them out. Some how or other by
chance Manu and Nadine meet each other and begin to talk and speak of going on the road together. (The
film invites a comparison with Thelma and Louise.) But as the narrative unfolds on the road, on their way to
water—they are headed toward Brittany for a body of water—the initial answers given for Why all this
violence? (recall the two riddles put forth by Millett in The Basement) are completely undercut by the
gratuitous violence against any and everyone, women as well as men. In the novel, a child as well as adults.
There is a scene that originates at an ATM machine, with a woman withdrawing money, and then a cut to
her down the street up against a wall being robbed and shot by Nadine in the neck and head. (The gun is
touching her head. We do not see Nadine. The blood splatters up on the brick wall.) It is all very coldly
done, without any hesitancy. Later when Nadine with Manu reflects on the killing, she recollects feeling bad
for a short while, but feels nothing now. There is a scene with an architect in his house, where the two
women go to seduce him into opening his safe, to rob him of diamonds. It only proves to be another strange
scene—less developed in the film, more fully developed in the novel—in which the architect builds while
the women, "Avenging Angels" (Rape-Me 221), see themselves as having come "to teach you [the architect]
what losing means" (220). It is a resentful scene with those who have lost in life, taking on those who have
succeeded in life. In the novel, the man is colored in less radiant-saintly terms, since he has DeSade on his
bookshelves and a porn film (225, 228). They shoot him in the head and then urinate on his face. There is
scene after scene of such killings. Most memorable and commented on by critics of the film is a scene
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toward the end in a sex club in which both women kill everyone methodically and save a special "killing"
for a man who Manu penetrates with her hand gun and shoots in the anus. 47 This scene is not in the novel.
Perhaps it is traded for another scene that is not the film, in which Nadine shoots a little boy and his
grandmother and then two shop girls (153-60). The little boy was a pest: "He wants another ice cream. He
makes some noise. Must be about five" (156).
The film, while apparently starting as a revenge film, turns into something else. From kiss me, no;
to fuck me, no; to rape me, no; to kill me. It is a film issuing a kiss of death against life. Killing sex, killing
life, the life-force itself. In the novel, there are several passages suggesting in contrast that there is a possible
alternative for the two women, one of avoiding resentful responses, but they fail to take that road, as if it is
not possible for them, as they are locked in a vice of determination (see the character Fatima 176). In this
sense, if I pick up on the ironies of the title—with its various conjugations, I can see the film then as a
statement concerning where rape takes us, to death itself. The universal call in Baise-Moi, Rape-Me, takes
us to death itself. Not only for Nadine and Manu but potentially all of us.
(A Closing, yet reopening parenthesis: Penthesilea's acts of violence in Kleist's play are against
Achilles—not every man—but against her double—and so, then finally against herself as well. When critics
find fault with Penthesilea's actions, they often say that she took on the job of killing Achilles herself,
instead of allowing for justice through her group, her state-community of Amazons. 48 Nothing could stop
Penthesilea from killing her self. Again, I cannot repeat this enough: When the slave girl in Christa Wolf's
Cassandra calls to Penthesilea, "Come join us" [118], leave the killing and dying to others who would will
nothing for themselves, Penthesilea refuses—she has lost all equilibrium—and is killed by Achilles and
mutilated. She ignores the third alternative of Come Live with us. She ignores the call toward community.
But not to stand in contradiction to becoming, as in becoming with Achilles in Kleist, Penthesilea in Wolf's
rendering is refusing to become an assemblage in a community.
And yet again, of course there is the community of the raped and dead, whom we memorialize. At
the end of Baise-Moi, Manu is shot apparently by a man who is protecting himself from her attempt to hold
him up. Nadine hears the exchange of gunfire, leaves the car and runs into the building and kills the man—
empties the clip into him—and takes Manu to the edge of the lake, covers and pours gasoline over her, and
memorializes by cremating her. Nadine attempts to end her own life, but is caught and arrested. To face
death by the state. This time Thelma is dead, but Louise is captured. There are other endings: I cannot stop
thinking of the memorialization in the conclusion of Andrea Dworkin's Mercy:
[T]hen you will remember rape; these are the elements of memory, constant, true, and perpetual
pain; and otherwise you will forget—we are a legion of zombies—because it burns out a piece of
your brain, it's the scorched earth policy for the sweetmeat in your head, the rape recipe, braise,
sear, burn bare, there's a sudden conflagration on the surface of your brain, a piece of one
hemisphere or the other is burned bare, blank, and you lose whatever's there; just gone; whatever;
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so rape's a two-pronged attack, on your body, in you, on your brain, in you; on freedom, on
memory; you might as well bury yourself in the backyard, or throw yourself in a trash can. [321-23;
Dworkin's emphasis]
I cannot stop thinking of the memorialization in the conclusion of Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères:
Moved by a common impulse, we all stood to seek gropingly the even flow, the exultant unity of
the Internationale. And aged grizzled woman soldier sobbed like a child. . . . The great song filled
the hall, burst through the doors and windows and rose to the calm sky. The war is over, the war is
over, said a young working woman next to me. Her face shone. And when it was finished and we
remained there in a kind of embarrassed silence, a woman at the end of the hall cried, Comrades, let
us remember the women who died for liberty. And then we intoned the Funeral march, a slow,
melancholy and yet triumphant air. [144]
So now the women can work through their grief and melancholy by initiating [seriously or parodicly] a
mourning narrative. Being called—either in a pragmatic or ontological vocation—becomes an important
issue in these works. Violence, trauma, melancholy, then apparently mourning.)
Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Mourning Narrative
"Antiquity never ceased to lament the horrors of the Trojan war, as we never cease to lament the
day of Hiroshima; if we want to make history, let us forget that once and for all, though everything
comes from there. The ancient history comes from the end of Troy, as our new history comes from
the end of Hiroshima; let us not forget it."
Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations (40).
"The postwar generations have . . . inherited not guilt so much as the denial of guilt, not losses so
much as lost opportunities to mourn losses. But perhaps more important, along with this negative
legacy of denial and repression postwar generations have inherited the psychic structures that
impeded mourning in the generations of their parents and grandparents. Foremost among such
structures is a thinking in rigid binary oppositions, which form the sociopsychological basis of all
searches for scapegoats."
Eric Santner, Stranded Objects (34; emphasis mine. Qtd by Levin, "Taking Liberties" 77).
"But to learn to live, to learn it from oneself and by oneself, all alone, to teach oneself to live ("I
would like to learn to live finally"), is that not impossible for a living being? Is it not what logic
itself forbids? To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned
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from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of
life. At the internal border or the external border, it is a heterodidactics between life and death."
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (xviii; Derrida's emphasis).
There is a problem with paganism, that is, with thinking by way of the extended, heuristic metaphor
of the gods in terms of paganism. Hence, the notion that Eros needs to be replaced with a female god
(goddess) is no guarantee of a better relation. What is required is a turning away from the one God and from
multiple gods in ratios to a radical multiplicity that is a becoming of an indifferentiation, a radical becoming
woman, which is not an essentialism or even a provisional essentialism in need of a provisional master
narrative that would have a shadow narrative, but a becoming in between, which is a becoming narrative,
which we can find in Virginia Woolf's experimentations of becoming. ("A becoming," Deleuze and Guattari
tell us, "is neither one nor two, nor the relation [ratio] of the two; it is the in-between" [Thousand 293].) As
Woolf was well aware, women must become woman as well. Deleuze and Guattari write: "When Virginia
Woolf was questioned about a specifically women's writing, she was appalled at the idea of writing 'as a
woman.' Rather, writing should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing
and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming"
(Thousand 276). 49
But there can also be a problem with the Freudian mourning narrative. 50 This section is about the
mourning narrative in Hiroshima Mon Amour, but it concerns an experimenting narrative. Virtually, it
concerns the implication of a bloc of two narratives—both mourning and experimenting—forming a
becoming. I will get to this film eventually. What is important here now is just the leading up to it. I must
return to the Question of Eros in relation to Thanatos as worked by way of Deleuze in his discussions of
cinema (in Cinema I and II) and finally in "A Life" (in Pure Immanence). After this leading discussion, we
will see two bodies in bed embracing libidinally two lives (2 X "a life"), asemiotically across two narratives,
while having been super-imposed over two more bodies in the holocaust of Hiroshima embracing two
deaths. One can see these, asemiotically, as linked in an assemblage of in betweens.
Eros (redux): There is the theme of vitalism in Deleuze, which he takes, yet modifies, from Henri
Bergson (What is Philosophy? 213-18). Deleuze attempts to rethink the whole problematic of subjects of
desire under negation (see Butler, Subjects). For Deleuze, what drives the world is a vital force (power,
immanence [imminence], potentiality [dynamis] 51 ); more specifically, what drives life is libido, or Eros. 52
As in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze in the cinema books is attempting to deal with issues beyond the
pleasure principle, with Freud's view of death (Thanatos), negativity. Deleuze and Guattari conclude, so as
to rebegin, by writing of this interference of the No to life (negation, negativity):
[T]here are interferences that cannot be localized. This is because each distinct discipline is, in its
own way, in relation with a negative: even science has a relation with a nonscience that echoes its
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effects. It is not just a question of saying that art must form those of us who are not artists, that it
must awaken us and teach us to feel, and that philosophy must teach us to conceive, or that science
must teach us to know. Such pedagogies are only possible if each of the disciplines is, on its own
behalf, in an essential relationship with the No that concerns it. The plane of philosophy is
prephilosophical insofar as we consider it in itself independently of the concepts that come to
occupy it, but nonphilosophy is found where the plane confronts chaos [or chaosmosis]. Philosophy
needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art
needs nonart and science needs nonscience [Deleuze's emphasis]. They do not need the No as
beginning, or as end [emphasis mine] in which they would be called upon to disappear by being
realized, but at every moment of their becoming or their development. Now if the three Nos are still
distinct in relation to the cerebral plane, they are no longer distinct in relation to the chaos into
which the brain plunges. In this submersion it seems that there is extracted from chaos the shadow
of the 'people to come' [emphasis mine] in the form that art, but also philosophy and science,
summon forth: mass-people, world-people, brain-people, chaos-people. . . . (What is Philosophy?
218)
Here, the shadow of the people to come! But the shadow, this time, which is a doubleness in itself, if not an
incipient tripleness, can be renegating of the a shadow not unlike the shadow that follows closely, but tires
eventually, behind Zarathustra. The shadow says to Zarathustra that it is tired and it wants to go home to
rest. It is tired, for it has chased after Zarathustra, who has an unquenchable desire to light out for the
de/territorializations. Instead, the shadow has a negative, restless desire to be secure. Zarathustra tells his
shadow: "To those who are as restless as you, even a jail will at last seem bliss. . . . Beware lest a narrow
faith imprison you in the end. . . For whatever is narrow and solid seduces and tempts you now" (387).
Deleuze and Guattari's call to the future, the coming community of people, can scare away, frighten, most
people today. Rather than pass over (to become superject, to become singularities), they would will
nothingness (subjectivity), will death, or the shadow, in life (Eros in Thanatos). Or in presence by way of
absence; or roots by way of earth, being earthbound. They would stay, knowingly or not, in the shadow
narrative. Remain in a state of negative Eros. Zarathustra tells his shadow to return to the cave—the Platonic
site of shadows—for Zarathustra says, "even now a shadow seems to lie over me. I want to run alone so that
it may become bright around me again" (Nietzsche 387). I can hear the shadows say, But I would like to
learn to live finally! Out under the shadow of the negative. Zarathustra shows the wayves of leaving the
shadow, leaving a nostalgia for revenge, leaving grave memory, leaving mourning, leaving the spirit of
gravity, so as to live. 53
Deleuze would be somewhat in agreement with Ginette Paris that Eros has lost its way in this
world, or has had its way enough. In Cinema 2, he writes: "If we are sick with Eros, Antonioni said, it is
because Eros is himself sick; and he is sick not just because he is old and worn out in his content, but
because he is caught in the pure form of a time which is torn between an already determined past and a dead-
end future. For Antonioni, there is no other sickness than the chronic. Chronos is sickness itself" (24). 54 In
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his discussions of post-WW II film, Deleuze sees Directors after the Holocaust attempting to rethink Eros as
well as Chronos, not in terms of following a substitute god such as Aphrodite, but in terms of an immanent
(imminent) Libido in its relation to a life and images in cinema. (In dis/respect to Chronos, a predominant
narrative of movement-image becomes time-image, which is a replacement of montage with "montrage"
[41]). Deleuze's thinking is a thinking at the threshold, of the binary of Eros-Thanatos or Aphrodite-
Thanatos and of the unary of (master) narration, with that outside as a third term. (While Deleuze
acknowledges the vocabulary of binary terms, he constructs an outside vocabulary of third terms
[immanence that is imminence, sensation that is not a subjective state, affect that is not feelings, percept that
is not perception, and between that is a preposition cum proposition that produces yet takes no object].) 55
Peter Canning writes:
Libido or Eros is the life force of energy, immanence—a life. Yet Eros or desire is not itself an
image, nor can it be presented as such[;] however it may be that everything, even the 'inorganic' life
of things, is self-made by its power. It is not an intelligible form of subject nor a sensible object. It
is not an image, or then, but the indiscernible passage between images, not affection or sensation
but the transition from one sensation to another, affect through which one affection changes to
another. Libido is an affect through which one life becomes another. (342-43; Deleuze's emphasis)
Eros is a bond(age). A link, holding all things together. Deleuze sees these Directors, experimenting by
forming, inventing, creating new filmic concepts such as "indiscernibility" between subject and object
(Cinema 2 23). Canning describes the old Eros of "bond(age)" as that of "the name of the Father" (343).
Canning's description of the event:
A new order of time [Aion, or Aeon, a child playing with dice] begins when the signifier of the
father, theoretically foreclosed by science but remaining as transcendental category, structure of
understanding, is removed by an act of Deleuzian-Spinozist philosophy, and the real 'absence of
link' emerges in and for itself without representation, an opening in time, becoming outside, future,
launching a process of another nature, and calling for creation of a new kind of love, an immanent
libido without ego or object or subject. For it was finally the transcendental-erotic subject-form that
chained the ego to its object in love and hate, that chained the social images and movements to one
another in delusional consensus, and that thirsted for salvation and transcendence to another world
beyond the world. (343)
What we can see in BeFreier und Befreite is a reportage of the old, sick Eros and a thinking about how to
reach the new; what we do see in Baise-Moi is the old Eros of sexual bondage and violence run amuck.
What the new Directors create is a new Eros of indiscernible passages between images and the transition
from one sensation to another. The new Directors are makers of new concepts, new sensations with their
affects and percepts, which are new experiments in linkages. I have been abstract enough. It is time now to
cut to a few exemplars.
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Exemplars of "A Life": Earlier we spoke of Deleuze's exemplar of the wasp becoming of the orchid
and the orchid becoming of the wasp (Dialogues 2-3). Deleuze in "A Life" speaks of another experimental
linkage, or of immanence (imminence) or becoming, this one in literature. I am going to quote his
description at length:
What is immanence? A life… No one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens [in
Our Mutual Friend]. . . . A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he
lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his
slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma,
this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he
comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between
his life and his death [Eros and Thanatos], there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with
death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure
event freed from the accidents of internal and external life. . . . It is a haecceity no longer of
individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil. . . .
But we shouldn't enclose life in the single moment when individual life confronts universal
death. A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are
measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that
are merely actualized in subjects and objects. This indefinite life does not itself have moments,
close as they may be one to another, but only between-times, between-moments; it doesn't just
come about or come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to
come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness. (28-29; emphasis
mine)
Somewhere in between the man and those helping him lies a pure affect of indiscernibility, that is, of
desubjectivation, a singularization. A becoming of each other. As Millett becomes Sylvia and Gertrude; as
Flaubert becomes "Madame Bovary, c'est moi"; as Brontë becomes Heathcliff; as Cixous becomes Genet.
Deleuze's other exemplars are from Virginia Woof's Mrs. Dalloway and Herman Melville's Moby Dick or
"Bartleby, The Scrivener." 56 All assemblages. All blocks of becoming. As Deleuze says: "We are not in the
world, we become with the world" (What is Philosophy? 169; emphasis mine). Recall Kate Millett becoming
Sylvia and Gertrude. Everything participates with everything else. We live in a participatory radical of
multiverses. It is a passion (an intensity) according to G.H. 57 A realization and actualization of this virtuality
will be experienced by the coming community of people on the new earth (see What is Philosophy? 201-
218; cf. Agamben, Coming).
The mourning narrative that best rethinks becoming, in an experimental manner, is this time in
cinema, Hiroshima Mon Amour. Marguerite Duras's "synopsis" is very precise about how movement-image
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is to be replaced by time-image (from Chronos to Aion, Aeon). 58 (Movement-image would require an
emphasis on cause and effect, whereas time-image would emphasize sensation. Or a third sens.) She
rehearses the situation of the lovers with two places, Hiroshima and Nevers (France). The woman has no
name. We know that she is a French woman who has finished a film of peace in Hiroshima, except for one
last scene. The man is Japanese, an "engineer or architect" (8). 59 They are both married to others. Their
meeting was by "chance" (8). Duras prepares a time-image of Aion through which to introduce the almost-
anonymous characters. Duras writes: "In the beginning of the film . . . we see mutilated bodies—the heads,
the hips—moving—in the throes of love or death [Eros or Thanatos]—and covered successively with the
ashes, the dew, of atomic death—and the sweat of love fulfilled" (8). (It is a doctor strangelove film before
its time. But time is not chronological, but Aionical.) Then the bodies of the French woman and Japanese
man emerge from and become superimposed over the bodies in death. We have a double capture of death
and love, love and death. (Eros is sick.) The woman says, "she has seen everything in Hiroshima." She is
referring to the photographs and displays at the Hiroshima Memorial. But the man rejects "the deceitful
pictures" (8), saying, "You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing" (15). The woman, insists: "I saw everything.
Everything" (15; Duras's emphasis). In the synopsis, Duras explains: "[T]heir initial exchange is allegorical.
In short, an operatic exchange. Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the
impossibility of talking about Hiroshima. The knowledge of Hiroshima being stated à priori by an
exemplary delusion of the mind" (9).
This affair, this one night, Duras says: "takes place in the one city of the world where it is hardest to
imagine it: Hiroshima. . . . Between two people as dissimilar geographically, philosophically, historically,
economically, racially, etc. as it is possible to be. Hiroshima will be the common ground (perhaps the only
one in the world?) where the universal factors of eroticism, love, and unhappiness will appear in an
implacable light" (10).
What we know is only the impossibility of knowing Hiroshima in terms of the French woman's
having seen the memorial at Peace Square in Hiroshima. She is a tourist, making a film about peace for
virtual tourists. She tells the Japanese man: "Like you, I too have tried with all my might not to forget. Like
you, I forgot. Like you, I wanted to have an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and stone. (The
shot of a shadow, 'photographed' on stone, of someone killed at Hiroshima.)" (23; Duras's emphasis). What
we realize about Hiroshima, as a memorial, is that it is the realization of a new grounding (abgrund). The
Japanese man is right in saying that she knows and saw nothing.
The whole first section of film is inundated with tourists visiting the memorial. But there is more to
the film, for out of this impossibility of mourning the loss of the object, the woman and the man, as
incommensurable as they are, nonetheless, invent a life. Incompossibilities. In doing so, the woman and the
man leave behind public mourning and enter an exchange of a story that allows for a becoming. Duras
makes clear that they are in love and that this is not, as we might expect, given the one-night stand scenario,
yet another exemplar of a sickness of Eros. Moreover, because they are in love, the woman can tell her story
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of Nevers. Duras says: "They're both happily married, not looking for a substitute for an unhappy marriage.
It's there, during the act of love, that she begins to tell him about Nevers" (11). But theirs is not a private
mourning. (This film is a double capture of the failure of mourning and the alternative of sensation,
unmourning, and antimemory.)
The woman tells her story of Nevers, which is her home in France in the region of Nièvre (10). She
has never told this story to anyone. Duras's sketch:
Her head was shaved at Nevers in 1944, when she was twenty years old. Her first love was a
German. Killed at the Liberation.
She remained in a cellar in Nevers, with her had shaved. It was only when the bomb was dropped
on Hiroshima that she was presentable enough to leave the cellar and join the delirious crowd in the
streets.
Why did she choose this personal sorrow? No doubt because he too is a person of extremes [i.e., the
Japanese man]. To shave a girl's head because she has loved—really loved—an official enemy of
her country, is the ultimate of horror and stupidity.
We see Nevers, as we've already seen it before in the hotel room. And again they talk of
themselves. And once again an overlapping of Nevers and love of Hiroshima and love. It will all be
mixed, without any preconceived principle, the way such things happen everywhere, every day,
whenever couples newly in love talk. (12)
She had by chance bridged the gap between France and Germany, between the Allies and the Nazis. Because
she collaborated with the enemy, the townspeople shaved her head and her parents placed her in their cellar,
where she was to stay, not unlike Sylvia Likens, for however long it would take. 60 Waiting. Until a singular
moment of Liberation when there is the conjunction of the killing of her lover and the bombing of
Hiroshima. A Life. In the woman's telling of this story, Nevers becomes, in Deleuze's vocabulary, according
to Daniel Smith, a "percept. What the percept makes visible are the invisible"—for heretofore placed in
shadows—. . . makes visible the invisible "forces that populate the universe, that affect us and make us
become: characters pass into the landscape and themselves become part of the compound of sensations"
("Introduction" xxxiv). Become part of the circuitry of what Deleuze calls "the crystal-image, or crystalline
description," a joining of the actual and virtual images (Cinema 2 68-69). These percepts, Smith reminds us,
are what Woolf called 'moments of the world' " and what "Deleuze terms 'haecceities' " ("Introduction"
xxxiv) or Deleuze himself refers to as "sheets of past" (Cinema 2 98-125). The two geographical locations
and events in time (Aion) form, again as Smith would suggest, "assemblages of nonsubjectified affects and
percepts that enter into virtual conjunction" (xxxiv). Creating A Life. It is worth repeating: As Deleuze says,
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"We are not in the world," for when the neuronic circuitry shifts, "we become with the world" (What is
Philosophy? 169; emphasis mine).
The two lovers part. The woman finds another man and out of habit again—she is constantly falling
back into the habitus of the cellar or sitting in shadows (Duras 11, 12)—she has a meaningless relationship
with him. 61 Two strangers that remain strangers. (The scene, which is alluded to, functions in contrast to all
the other scenes that form A Life.) The man that she is in love with returns to her apartment the next day and
announces: "Impossible not to come" (13; film script, 53). Though together again, there are no further
communications between them. Duras muses: "They simply call each other once again. What? Nevers.
Hiroshima. For in fact, in each other's eyes, they are no one. They are names of places, names that are not
names. [They are a community that is not a community.] It is as though, through them, all of Hiroshima was
in love with all of Nevers. She says to him: 'Hiroshima, that's your name" (13; film script, 83). 62 Whereas
initially she knew nothing of Hiroshima, she now at the level of percept and affect, at the level of sensation,
knows the man as Hiroshima; he knows her as Nevers.
Deleuze, in Cinema 2, sees Duras and Resnais thinking in terms of "sheets of past" which are
incommensurable and which are by allusion incompossible worlds. As Deleuze says about Resnais,
"Everything depends on which sheet you are in" (120; cf. 129-31). Deleuze explains:
There are two characters [in Hiroshima Mon Amour] but each has his or her own memory which is
foreign to the other. There is no longer anything at all in common. It is like two incommensurable
regions of past, Hiroshima and Nevers. And while the Japanese refuses the woman entry into his
own region ('I've seen everything . . . everything . . . You've seen nothing in Hiroshima, nothing. .
.'), the woman draws the Japanese into hers, willingly and with his consent, up to a certain point. Is
this not a way for each of them to forget his or her own memory, and make a memory for two, as if
memory was now becoming world, detaching itself from their persons? [. . .] Throughout Resnais'
work we plunge into a memory which overflows the conditions of psychology, memory for two,
memory for several, memory-world, memory-ages of the world.
But the question as a whole remains: what are the sheets of past regions of several memories,
creation of a memory-world, or demonstration of the ages of the world? (117-19; emphasis mine)
It is at this point that Deleuze takes up the paramethod of topological stretchings, which is not unlike
casuistic stretchings, as a means of answering his question. In many ways, or wavyes, the topological
stretchings are comparable to Woolf's expression in Mrs. Dalloway of passing through London, "slic[ing]
like a knife through everything" (11). It is remarkable what a single slice through a sheet of potential
cartographical spatial and temporal paper can do, along with a half-twist of stretching, re(mis)configuring a
map of the city or of the world from two sides (Hiroshima-Nevers) into one side (see Deleuze, Cinema 2
119). The thinking here will reemerge in a discussion of Deleuze's The Fold in chapter 8.
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Finally, Deleuze writes: "Resnais has always said that what interested him was the brain, the brain
as world, as memory, as 'memory of the world.' It is in the most concrete way that Resnais . . . creates a
cinema which has only one single character, Thought" (122).
Sensation (or "Bicycle-less neo-realism"): Deleuze begins Cinema 2 discussing the creators of
concepts in cinema "rediscover[ing] the power of the fixed shot" (22). Antonioni begins to think of doing
"without a bicycle—De Sica's bicycle, naturally" (23). The reference is to the film The Bicycle Thief.
Deleuze writes: "Bicycle-less neo-realism replaces the last quest involving movement (the trip) with a
specific weight of time operating inside characters and excavating them from within (the chronicle)" (23; cf.
17). Antonioni says, "Now that we have today eliminated the problem of the bicycle . . . it is important to see
what there is in the spirit and heart of this man whose bicycle has been stolen, how he has adapted, what has
stayed with him out of all his past experiences of the war, the post-war and everything that has happened in
our country" (qtd. by Deleuze 284-85, n. 40). The bicycle will no longer move in space as a movement-
image (Cinema 1) but in time, Aion as a time-image (Cinema 2), by way of various intensities.
This rider of the bicycle, now without a bicycle that may remain but a memory as in a photograph,
will be made into a mutiplicity—less a subject and more subject to having been made into a mutiplicity.
John Rajchman explains that a multiplicity, such as this one, made from a pragmatics of sens (or sensation),
is outside the binary of public and private. Multiplicity is a third figure and a third sensation. 63 "The problem
of 'making multiplicities' or 'constructing multiplicities' is . . . a problem of life—of 'a life,' . . . an indefinite
life" (83). Singularities. "Singular occurrences." "Something ineffable" (85). A third sens. Of moments that
compose a life (cf. Duras 68).
In part 2 of the Hiroshima Mon Amour film script, Duras describes the scene as such: "(A swarm of
bicycles passes in the street, the noise growing louder, then fading. . . .)" (29; Duras's emphasis). Again later,
interspersed in dialogue: "HE: What's the film you're playing in? She: A film about Peace. What else do you
expect them to make in Hiroshima except a picture about Peace? (A noisy swarm of bicycles passes.) HE: I'd
like to see you again. SHE: (gesturing negatively): At this time tomorrow I'll be on my way back to France"
(34-35; Duras's emphasis). 64 A few scenes later in the midst of the woman's relating the story of Nevers, she
tells the Japanese man: "[M]y mother tells me I have to leave for Paris, by night. She gives me some money.
I leave for Paris, on a bicycle, at night. It's summer. The nights are warm. When I reach Paris two days later
the name of Hiroshima is in all the newspapers. My hair is now a decent length. I'm in the street with the
people" (67).
In these images of the bicycle, there is mobility, flight, in itself, as there is in the dialogue of
leaving the man and returning home. She is leaving, as she left her German lover in Nevers, the Japanese
man. We can actually see her on the bicycle or in the plane physically leaving. But we can hear her also
forgetting, affirmatively forgetting. Leaving in itself. It is not just a physical leaving of Nevers (on a bicycle)
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and then Hiroshima (in a plane), but a series of moments with peculiar affirmations that make for
multiplicities. Or blocs of bicycles in first a movement-image and then, a time-image. She is leaving. And
yet the leaving is less physical as motion, and more psychological as taking leave, taking (forgetting, yet re-
momenting, place. It is not memento, but momenting. She has told the Japanese man the story of Nevers,
which she has never even told her husband. There is a conjunction between them. She and the Japanese man
say repeatedly that they are forgetting each other (68, 73, 83). They are dis/engaging by way of antimemory.
As Deleuze and Guattari chime: "Memory, I hate you" (What is Philosophy? 168). She also says farewell in
a litany to: "Little girl with shaven head, I bequeath you to oblivion. Three-penny story" (80). There is this
repeated refrain of affirmative forgetting and then the making of multiplicities, becomings, a bloc of
percepts and affects: "SHE: Hi-ro-shi-ma. Hi-ro-shi-ma. That's your name. (They look at each other without
seeing each other. Forever.) HE: That's my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers-in France" (83). Both
have dis/engaged by way of unmourning. Both have returned from the dead (cf. Flaxman 42). Both share a
life in a becoming world. Filled with moments. They are done with mourning and any incipient melancholy.
writes:
Unmourning: John Rajchman, commenting on memory, memorials, and mourning-melancholy,
Affect in Spinoza becomes the sensation of what favors or prevents, augments or diminishes, the
powers of life of which we are capable each with one another; and it is in something of this same
'ethical' sense that Deleuze proposes to extract clinical categories (like 'hysteria' or 'perversion' or
'schizophrenia') from their legal and psychiatric contexts and make them a matter of
experimentation in moves of life in art and philosophy, or as categories of a philosophico-aesthetic
'clinic.' Before our Proxac world, Freud tried to understand 'melancholy' (and its relation with the
arts) in terms of the work of mourning concerning loss or absence. But Deleuze thinks there is a
'unmourning' that requires more work, but promises more joy. Considered in philosophico-aesthetic
terms, melancholy might then be said to be the sensation of an unhappy idealization, and the real
antidote to it is to be found not in rememorization and identification, but in active forgetting and
affirmative experimentation with what is yet to come. (Deleuze Connections 132-33)
Antimemory: Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, write:
Becoming is an antimemory. Doubtless, there exists a molecular memory, but as a factor of
integration into a majoritarian or molar system. Memories always have a reterritorialization
function. On the other hand, a vector of deterritorialization is in no way indeterminate; it is directly
plugged into the molecular levels, and the more deterritorialized it is, the stronger is the contact: it
is deterritorialization that makes the aggregate of the molecular components 'hold together.' From
this point of view, one may contrast a childhood block, or a becoming-child, with the childhood
memory: 'a' molecular child is produced . . . 'a' child coexists with us, in a zone of proximity or a
block of becoming, on a line of deterritorialization that carries us both off—as opposed to the child
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we once were, whom we remember or phantasize, the molar child whose future is the adult. 'This
will be childhood, but it must not be my childhood,' writes Virginia Woolf. (Orlando already does
not operate by memories, but by blocks, blocks of ages, block of epochs, blocks of the kingdoms of
nature, blocks of sees, forming so many becomings between things, or so many lines of
deterritorialization.) Wherever we used the word 'memories,' we were saying becoming" (294;
Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis)
There is a re/test that has been awaiting you in chapter 3
Part 4: from the Attic and Basement to the Living Room
Chapter 8: Virtual Rape and Community
"The ultimate twentieth-century passion for penetrating the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void)
through the cobweb of semblances which constitutes our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as
the ultimate 'effect,' sought after from digitalized special effects, through reality TV and amateur
pornography, up to snuff movies. Snuff movies which deliver the 'real thing' are perhaps the ultimate truth
of Virtual Reality."
Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (12).
A (virtual) Rape in Cyberspace
I am referring to Julian Dibbell's now canonized article "A Rape in Cyberspace." 1 This rape, this event—
for it becomes an event—occurs in a virtual community at LambdaMOO, which is a site, located physically-
electronically in a computer server at MIT—"in just a box"—that is virtually one of many MOOs, 2 where people
meet virtually, by dialing up on their computers and going to this virtual site to live virtual lives; build virtual
homes, marriages, families; plan and live in virtual communities. MOOs are similar to chat rooms, but enormously
different in that members of the MOO community can build virtual objects with programming language.
LambdaMOO is a text-oriented MOO. It is both social and educational. Its members use words (or ascii figures)
primarily to signify the objects that they build, objects such as architectural (or architextural) rooms (e.g., living
rooms, meeting rooms, study rooms, seminar rooms, tryst rooms). The members build whole cities and sprawls.
Today, there are other MOOs that allow for graphical representations. 3 Whatever the MOO, textual or graphical, the
real people who take on representations in these MOOs seldom, if ever, see each other face to face (at flesh meets),
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in real life (IRL). Often, the members are no where near each other geographically IRL. They can be continents
apart. And yet, though they are here or there, they are in a virtual space of t.here.
What Dibbell writes about is a virtual rape (sexual violence). It is difficult for most people to entertain the
possibility of the notion, much less the arguments, that rape, indeed, can occur in a virtual place or space. Without
any physical contact whatsoever. I do not mean to suggest that these arguments are necessarily persuasive, just that
they do exist in our cultures and they do persuade some people in judicial settings. What I attempt here, like
Allucquère Roseanne Stone before me, 4 is to deal with the actual/virtual split and the arguments that have been put
forth pro and con in our real communities as well as in the virtual community at LambaMOO. Eventually, I deal
with rape in cyberspace as an architectural problem, as a problem of space itself, of subjects-objects in virtual space,
and how a different architecture—what I call anarchitecture—of thoughts, entities, and buildings can help us rethink
rape and the various spaces it takes place in. I began Chaste Rape with the basement as well as the attic and will now
take up with the question of the living room at LambdaMOO. It is in the living room where the cyber-rape took
place. When Pavis Curtis at MIT began to program LambdaMOO, he modeled the virtual living room on his own
living room. Members-who-are-characters would have to enter LambdaMOO through the closet of Curtis's living
room. (The implications are rather interesting in terms of tiny-simulated sex roles.)
I will also specifically examine the selected follow-up arguments put forth by Dibbell and others in respect
to rape at LambdaMOO as well as other rapes in virtual and in cyberspace. What is most interesting about the event
at LambdMOO is the impact that it had on a virtual community and how the community's response to the event
caused it to rethink community altogether. The event of the rape is significant to me, as I should think it important to
all of us, because the event (of) rape becomes a founding event for a rethinking of community. This virtual
community, at LambdaMOO, at least as a paradigmatic force, has had an impact on how we think about rape (sexual
violence) altogether. In passing, I examine the problems that develop in judicial law when there is less and less of a
differentiation between actual and virtual assaults. The case that I will be most interested in, though only in passing,
is that of the State vs. Maxwell. (As reported by Wendy Kaminer, "Maxwell was charged with aggravated sexual
assault. The victim was a 10-year-old girl known in court documents as S.M. During one phone call, in which
Maxwell posed as her mother's gynecologist, he persuaded S.M. to insert her finger into her vagina. Maxwell never
met his victim, making the charge of aggravated sexual assault unprecedented. But it's not entirely surprising,
considering pervasive concern about electronic or virtual sex involving unsuspecting children" [70].)
What I most specifically do is to introduce the notion of virtuality (in digital or cyberspace) as a means of
rethinking rape in terms of possible-cum-incompossible worlds. We know that G. W. Leibniz's thought through the
paraconcept of possible worlds by way of the story of the rape of Lucretia. This will be my primary example while
dealing with this problem, moving from the architectural space of so-called actuality to virtuality in what
conventionally would be a conclusion but here a set without a set of Rebeginnings.
The above opening discussion of this chapter will deal finally (at this crucial point from actuality to
virtuality) throughout Part 4 with the question of community, how to reestablish community without relying on
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Dibbell's rape narrative of the founding of a virtual community. How to use the paraconcept of possible, yet
incompossible, worlds to re-envision communities, or coming communities. (It is disconcerting to think that the
governance board at LambdaMOO must still to this day, even if only in the shadows of the virtual, be attempting to
resolve among its citizens, netizen-communitarians, this political problem by recapitulating actual laws for virtual
laws.) As an alternative for rethinking virtual communities, I will rely on Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, and
Giorgio Agamben.
We will be concerned specifically with a bloc of becoming known as a Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze bloc with
its thinkings about, becomings of, folds and the Baroque. The immediate purpose in this chapter and the
Rebeginnings of Part 4 will be to rethink the architecture of MUDs/MOOs+. To refold them into Baroque Houses.
In dis/order to refold our thinking about virtual architecture, we will have to refold our notion of archi and of
sufficient reason (continuity) and the possible (determination). We will have had to multiply our principles.
Mutiplicity, however, will also be without sets and subsets. In other refoldings, there is no species in a genus under
surveillance by a set of differentiae. There are radical singularities (hence, everything is possible). From the
Platonic-Aristotelian-Cartesian bloc of becoming with its thinking the principle of sufficient reason and the possible,
therefore, we will have had to refold our thinking to the Leibnizean-Borges-Deleuzean principle of indiscernibles
and the compossible (incompossible). And with them, we will have had to consider a theory of motives that is not
based on necessity but on inclination and inflection. The difference, from a Leibnizean-Borges-Deleuzean view, is
not a contrary: The difference between necessity but also inclination and inflection will have allowed us to
understand a Baroque concept of justice. Why is this important? Because a house of BaroqueMOO that we would
allegorize (our polis, our cyber-societies/cyberieties in the face of anxieties) and that we would build and dwell in
allegorically cum virtually will be inclined to recapitulate the house of all MOOs. And hence, justice will be
continued in its reactionary form. The virtual effects (or as a sensation chain of percept-affect on) the actual; the
actual, the virtual. Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze say: "The world is a virtuality that is actualized monads or souls, but
also a possibility that must be realized in matter or in bodies" (Fold 104). A case in point: In a Cartesian world,
Sextus Tarquin in all of his versions (they are all one!) rapes Lucretia. In Leibnizean possible worlds, in our
BaroqueMOO with a multiplicity of apartments, however, there is a multiplicity of Sextus Tarquins (see Theodicy
368-73). The conditions for the compossibility of justice, therefore, have changed. My motive and inclination for
introducing into this discussion Leibniz's treatment of Sextus and the rape of Lucretia, therefore, is to reopen
(refold) the Question of "A Rape in Cyberspace." The MOOhouses that we build—the possible/compossible
(incompossible) cyberieties that we construct—I am inclined to think—must rethink (refold) the question of A Rape
in Cyberspace. Refold the concept of justice. Creating and Participating in Building a MOO is the establishing of a
Virtual Society. A Virtual Community. With its potentialities for un/working, for being inoperative, for becoming
unavowable. Again, this is a creative act, and yet . . . Societies are founded on rape narratives. Recall again the
Vestal, the Sabine women, and Lucretia. Recall in modern times "the house that Jack built." 5 In Article One (there
must be other articles for other rooms!) of Dibbell's The History of MOOs, there is a founding rape and a cyberietal
response based on certain democratic motives and inclinations. But, apparently, always already a reactionary
judiciary response. And yet once ever again, a recapitulation of history! Must it be so?
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In sum, then, my concerns are with discovering ways—wayves of furls—via a Leibnizean-Borges-
Deleuzean bloc with its notions of the fold and the Baroque to rethink the question of MOO-anarchitechural space,
but also to think of folds and this space that these folds establish as a means of our (singularly and collectively)
political resistance that would not be reactionary. 6 Hence, "we" will, as Deleuze himself has, think of folds as
Foucault had. (In fact, we will continue this inclination until the very end that becomes a new beginning.) We will
examine Deleuze's account of Foucault's third axis . . . moving from the axes of Knowledge and Power to that of
Thought. Which means, like Foucault et al., that "we" will have had to think the paradox of "The inside as an
operation of the outside" (Deleuze Foucault, 97). And yet, "we" will do this incipiently, immanently (imminently).
T/Here we will find a way of rethinking, refolding, the question of designing, refolding, a society/cyberiety, not
without rape—for this, Leibniz's thinking, is no baroque eutopian thinking of cyberiety—but also with the question
of rape without reactionary thinking. What "we" will do initially is to dilute the problem by multiplying the possible
world, radical multiplicities of the world.
But this is not enough, never ever enough! For rape is not only in the particular incompossible world we
live in, but is also the very foundation for all our thinking, or what stands for thinking. Reactionary thinking. 7
Knowing this, I will move on to a scandalous enterprise, restarted by Lyotard in his Libidinal Economy. Yes, Yes,
Yes, the Great Ephemeral Skin! It's "our" half twist! (This is it; watch for it.) That enterprise will have been initially
a taking up with the paradox of repetition and difference (the death principle supporting life), on the one hand, and a
being taken away with radical singularities (no repetition, hence every event unique), on the other. And then, taken
away, we would search for a third arm. Which will be a half twist. The Great Ephemeral Skin! The place with no
negatives. Except with the perpetual negating of negatives. Our one paracreative-experimental act. None other. A
place denegated as in: Not a paper with no twist and therefore an edge; not a paper with a full twist and still an edge
that cuts (rapes); but a paper with a half twist and no edge, no cut, but if a cut (rape), one that does not exclusively
sever one thing from another. The half twist here, to be sure, must not recapitulate the founding principle as rape.
The founding principle, at best (!), must be unfounded. "We" must admit, it is too late for MOOs as MOOs. (I, of
course, casuistically stretch my point.) They have been founded as such on rape. We must, however, be concerned
with recapitulation! And yet, as Nietzsche's Zarathustra warns, not concerned in order "to redeem those who lived in
the past and to recreate all 'it was' " (Thus Spake 251). But in promising you (Ooops, I am not supposed to look into
the camera!) the absence of the "white terror of truth," I cannot promise you the absence, in a MOO, of "the red
cruelty of singularities" (Libidinal 241). Instead, "we" promise you a Red far, far, far Left of being human. MOOs
are no place for human beings, unless human is reconsidered etymologically as the full tasting of nature. (I am not
alluding to furry muckers!) Setting aside all nomoi (laws, customs, consensus)! For a full tasting! Can you, Dear
Reader, attempt such a tasting? (Beyond centermental furry muckers?) A moving from male/female, female/male, to
third atopoi, heterotopias. If not, then, I leave you to work out your redemption and salvation via the road to "it
was."
A MOO is a topos made up of virtual texts. It is metaphor-based. Programmers work with metaphors. Give
a MOO programmer a metaphor and s/he will attempt to simulate it. I will gift (without returns) un/just such a
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metaphor. I will toss one into the discussion. Nothing more; nothing less. The Great Ephemeral Skin as Möbius (half
twist) Strip. So as to forget MOOs in dis/order to un/think a Baroque Möbius Strip MOO. WOO+. Or WOOmb. I
will toss a metaphor into the discussion. A metaphor of bovine flesh that will have been all libidinal surface. Which
will have been affirmatively deconstructed by way of all surfaces, in other words, without any height or depth, but
with all superficial folds. So as to create the conditions for a new compossible cyberworld, what Deleuze would call
"a reorientation of . . . entire thought and a new geography" (The Logic of Sense, 132). This notion of surface,
however, is not superficial in any common sense of the word that would stand contrary to a view of truth in the
lower depths.
To be sure, you, Dear Reader, will only feel cheated, feel frustrated . . . You, too, Programmer. And Why?
Because not eutopian (i.e., totally without rape), and, therefore, disappointing. Enraging? Leading some readers to
continued reactionary thinking? No, this is not salvation-history. (The agenda is a series of rebeginnings. The
possibilities of a narrative with beginning-middle-end leads us only back to the white, epistemic violence, of which
Lyotard speaks, while rebeginnings and more rebeginnings lead to the red cruelty of singularities. 8 The rebeginnings
will require all of us who attend to the tossed metaphor to "dance on the feet of Chance" [Thus Spake 278], and if
need be to dance "with tears in [our] eyes" [220].) The MOO will have become a pagan theatre across a new
geography. Virtually, a new cartography. A WOOmb. Where all along the surface, without height and depth, the
principle of individuation will not exist. All of this will require greater and greater efforts toward non-reactionary
thinking.
"To think means to experiment and to problematize."
Deleuze Foucault (116).
Baroque House: With the above set of white and red promises and this subtitle, Baroque House (which is
not a subordinate and which folds outside the standard protocol of academic discourse, yet stays within it more than
enough, to con-fuse the differences), we might expect now to have a Baroque house described. Or the question
answered, How is a MOO like a Baroque house or vice versa? To be sure, a Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze bloc supplies
us with a sketch (Fold 5). (And Lyotard, along with Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze, reminds us of the shortcomings of the
principle of similitude.)
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And yet, to get an understanding of what a Baroque House might possibly be, Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze do
not just give a simple description without problematizing it. They give a description that is folded and then unfolded
in later pages only to refold it again much later in pages overflowing out of its academic frame on the way to a
radically infinite finitude. What they give, also, are a set of counterprinciples (though not contrary) to the common-
sensical principles of what thinking says a house is or can be. So we will have to start with these counterprinciples to
get to some idea of what should be called Baroque anarchitecture, what a Baroque house or, better, BaroqueMOO
might be. (A house can be a Klein Jar, which is all inside, with no outside, or neither. A MOO can be such a
topological figure also.) And then Baroque justice in the chiaroscuro of the question of rape in cyberspace. (I hear
someone asking: Aren't all MUDs/MOOs already Baroque virtual houses? I would think not necessarily so. The
medium of a MOO does not automatically create the conditions for the compossibility of a Baroque environment.
And again: "Is there an example of [a] BaroqueMOO?" If so, I am not aware of one as I conceive of such an atopos.
And yet, all MUDs/MOOs have the potentiality for becoming a BaroqueMUD/MOO. And then, "Is this not a
contradiction?" Or as Leibniz would say, a vice-diction!)
It is tempting for me to describe particular MOO-experiences as simulated foldings, unfoldings, and
refoldings, for example, as manifested metaphorically in terms of cascading waves of words being illuminated on a
monitor; or in terms of a wavering "liquid identity" (Sandy Stone) of metamorphosing from male to female to
hermaphrodite to other animal, to becoming-animal; or in terms of rhizomatic space. And while these metaphors (as
in a catachresis) are helpful, they do not explain how fundamentally different the paraconcept of the Baroque is for
thinking a BaroqueMOO. And so, I am going to unfold and refold the simulated conversation here of familiarities to
some principles that Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze discuss, namely, that of sufficient reason/continuity and the
possible/determination (Fold 41-58), on the one hand, and the principle of indiscernibles and the
compossible/incompossible (59-75), on the other. (We are making our way to the red cruelty of radical singularities,
but it is a way beyond this present discussion.) With Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze, we will take a look at the
multiplication of principles (67) and the paraconcept of radical singularities (60-61). So my approach—Leibniz-
Borges-Deleuze's approach—will be to call on abstract thinking to unfold state/Imperial thinking about thought so
as to be able to refold it as nomadic thought. It is, as Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze say, a matter of refolding to remember
what has been forgotten. Been cast to Chasteness in the shadow. And perpetually so unto infinity! We will (ever
here) suggest how to experiment and problematize (on our way, however, to affirmative forgetting).
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The principle of sufficient reason (Plato-Descartes) is bound to—in bondage with—the three master
principles of reason (logic, the Great Zero), namely, identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle. Either A is A
or is not B or nothing else. A—in one steady-dominant fold—cannot be both A and B and C, etc. Sufficient reason
could not allow for a refolding (problematizing) because, then, as Socrates-Plato were well aware, we would fall
into infinite regress or, as Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze know, would slide laterally into ramifications of unfoldings and
refoldings. The thinking that goes by sufficient reason, quite ironically, led to nihilism. For Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze,
sufficiency (limit) was . . . is never, never, never enough. Hence, the principle of indiscernibles or Excess (on their
way to red cruelties). Therefore, the sophistical-casuistic thought presents itself: The Compossible (world), yet the
incompossibilities (or monads). Let us take a closer look.
For Leibniz, Adam sinned, and yet he did not sin! In other words-folds, there are the singularities of Adam-
A and Adam-B, who are equal: A = B. Is this a contradiction? Yes, if there is only one possible world, in which
there cannot be such radical singularities. Or if there is only one possible way of thinking about this problem, that
Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze would (cannot not) problematize. Remember: Thinking is the issue here. For Leibniz, there
are, in this unfolding-refolding example, at least, two ways of thinking about this problem and, hence, two possible
worlds. (Actually and Virtually, there is a radically infinite finitude of possible ways. And those ways/wayves are
happening in this very text, Dear Reader, that you are reading, or attempting to read, and no doubt with great
readerly trouble.) Deleuze explains, "Between the worlds there exists a relation other than one of contradiction. . . .
It is a vice-diction, not a contradiction" (59). The contradiction can only exist in one possible world/monad. Here
then, we have the Leibnizean paraconcept of compossible and incompossible. If the possible world is limited by
sufficient reason, the compossible world is limitless (in excess) by indiscernibles, while each of the
Incompossibles/monads is limited. (The possible is informed by a restricted economy; the compossible, by a general
economy, within which, again, there is a radically infinite finitude of monads, or radical singularities, with quasi-
restricted economies. The best of all possible worlds is the white violence of Truth or imposed truth; the
compossible world is the red cruelty!)
In Deleuzean terms, "the world [is] an infinity of converging series, capable of being extended into each
other, around unique points" (60). Allow me to illustrate, refolding back to an earlier attempt, with an example of a
Möbius strip that when constructed from a narrow and long strip of blank paper has two parallel lines drawn on both
sides of it and then, given a half twist, is/are taped together. If we start cutting with a pair of scissors on one line we
will eventually see that we get to the other line (parallel lines do meet in this configuration/space) and will see that,
when finished cutting, we have one strip (circle of paper), which is no longer a Möbius strip and another, which is a
new Möbius strip. The two are joined, looped, or folded into each other. If we, then, cut the new Möbius strip, as we
cut the previous one, we will get another Non-Möbius strip (paper circle) and yet another new Möbius strip, and on
ad infinitum. The Möbius strip is an infinity of converging series, capable of being extended into each other, around
unique points. Möbius strip = the compossible world; the paper circles/folds = monads, the Incompossibilities, each
made up of singularities.
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Now back to Deleuze, with my interpolation: "The result [in other words, of cutting the Möbius strip] is
that another world appears when the obtained series diverge in the neighborhood of singularities" (60; Deleuze's
emphasis). He distinguishes:
Compossibles can be called (1) the totality of converging and extensive series that constitute the world, (2)
the totality of monads that convey the same world (Adam the sinner, Caesar the emperor, Christ the savior .
. .). Incompossibles can be called (1) the series that diverge, and that from then on belong to two possible
worlds, and (2) monads of which each expresses a world different from the other (Caesar the emperor and
Adam the nonsinner). The eventual divergence of series is what allows for the definition of
incompossibility or the relation of vice-diction. (60)
When God creates the world (keep in mind that Deleuze is describing Leibniz's view, not his view which is by far
more heretical than Leibniz's, and then there is Borges's and Lyotard's yet to come), He sets forth "a series of . . .
pure emission of singularities: to be the first man, to live in a garden of paradise, to have a wife created from one's
own rib. And then a fourth: sinning" (60; Deleuze's emphasis). Each of these singularities is held in a double (not
contradictory, but vice-dictory) relationship. They form a bloc of becoming. One line of the narrative is somewhat
fixed like the paper circle cut from the Möbius strip; the other line is not fixed like the new Möbius strip. Their
doubleness converges. (Incompossible converges, in other folds, with the compossible.) Because they converge, a
fifth singularity can appear: "resistance to temptation" (61). Deleuze continues: "It is not simply that it contradicts
the fourth, 'sinning,' such that a choice has to be made between the two. It is that the lines of prolongation that go
from this fifth to the three others are not convergent . . . do not pass through common values." In other words, "It is
neither the same garden, nor the same primeval world, nor even the same gynegenesis. A bifurcation [a vice-diction]
takes place that we at least take for granted, since reason escapes us. We are satisfied to know that one exists. It
always suffices [principle of sufficient reason] to be able to say: that is what makes Adam the nonsinner to be
supposed incompossible [principle of indiscernibles] with this world, since it implies a singularity that diverges from
those of this world" (60; Deleuze's emphasis).
And now from Adam(s) to his-their progeny. (Yes, let us not forget this is all about not forgetting what has
been forgotten and goes by the name of Thinking that there are Adams that are nonsinners in other worlds/monads.
If Compossibility, then, the characters or creatures that we meet, say, in a Borges's tale should be open to our
acceptance. What un/kind of MOO would Borges construct, what un/kind of cybereity and what un/kind of justice?
The conditions for my rethinking this question are to be un/founded in Foucault's telling of Borges's tale of "order"
according to "a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia" [Foucault, Order xv].)
The Baroque House that is The Book: In the above sketch of The Baroque House (an allegory), there are
two floors. The top floor, Deleuze tells us, "has no windows. It is a dark room or chamber decorated only with a
stretched canvas 'diversified by folds,' as if it were a living dermis. Placed on the opaque canvas, these folds, cords,
or springs represent an innate form of knowledge, but when solicited by matter they move into action" (4; emphasis
mine). The bottom floor, which is connected to the upper, is "pierced with windows" and has "souls . . . sensitive,
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animal" (4) . This description is more complex, and we will return to it shortly. For now, however, I want to focus
on another, later description of the House that is The Book. (Lest the reader forget, we are folding, unfolding,
refolding our way/wayves to thinking the thought of BaroqueMOO. And though this "I" alludes to Foucault's
reference to Borges's tale, it will take a while for us to get there and beyond to the Ephemeral Skin, though as can be
seen Leibniz-Deleuze speak of "a living dermis" when describing The Baroque House. We are far from, yet ever
near the Ephemeral Skin.)
Deleuze, in passing, summarizes the "great Baroque staging [and narrative] at the end of [Leibniz's]
Théodicée" (61), in which there
is an architectural dream: an immense pyramid that has a summit but no base, and that is built from an
infinity of apartments, of which each one makes up a world. It has a summit because there is a world that is
the best of all worlds, and it lacks a base because the others are lost in the fog, and finally there remains no
final one that can be called the worst. In every apartment a Sextus bears a number on his forehead. He
mimes a sequence of his life or even his whole life, "as if in a theatrical staging," right next to a thick book.
(61; Leibniz 371-72)
Deleuze continues:
The number appears to refer to the page that tells the story of the life of this Sextus in greater detail, on a
smaller scale, while the other pages probably tell of the other events of the world to which he belongs. Here
is the Baroque combination of what we read and what we see. And, in the other apartments, we discover
other Sextuses and other books. Leaving Jupiter's [or God's] abode [temple], one Sextus will go to Corinth
and become a famous man, while another Sextus will go to Thrace and become king, instead of returning to
Rome and raping Lucretia, as he does in the first apartment. All these singularities diverge from each other,
and each converges with the first (the exit from the temple), only with values that differ from the others. All
these Sextuses are possible, but they are part of incompossible worlds. (61-62)
Here, we have, unlike what we find in Susan Brownmiller's master metaphor for rape in Against Our Will, a view of
a particular man who is a rapist but who also is not. For Brownmiller, all men are rapists. (Clearly, hers is a strategic
essentialists and political position and understandably so. And yet, her strategy is reactionary.) Sextus in one
incompossible world is a rapist; in another, he is not. And then, there is an infinite number of other versions.
Remember: The possible narratives here, not informed by the principle of sufficient reason, are infinite. And a
concept of justice? Is there one, or more, that goes with all this talk here? The simple answer is Yes. However, this,
too, is a question, a thinking, that must be problematized.
A Deleuze-Leibniz-Borges Excursus: Therefore, let's problematize the condition for a question of justice by
recalling Borges, just as Deleuze himself does in relation to what he says about Leibniz. Both Leibniz and Borges
deal in bifurcations. For me, they themselves—the singularities, the incompossibility, of their visions—form a
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ifurcation. (We will have eventually taken a fork in the rhizomatic road.) Deleuze, at a tactical-pivotal point among
others in his discussion, introduces Borges into his exposition of Leibniz's new logic. He says, "Borges, one of
Leibniz's disciples, invoked the Chinese philosopher-architect Ts'ui Pen, the inventor of the 'garden with bifurcating
paths,' a baroque labyrinth whose infinite series converge or diverge, forming a webbing of time embracing all
possibilities." More specifically now, Deleuze quotes Borges: " 'Fang, for example, keeps a secret; a stranger knocks
at his door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, several outcomes are possible: Fang can kill the intruder; the
intruder can kill Fang; both of them can escape from their peril; both can die, etc. In Ts'ui Pen's work, all outcomes
are produced, each being the point of departure for other bifurcations" (62; cf. Borges, Labyrinths 51). The implicit
question in Deleuze's discussion of Borges is Why select Ts'ui Pen, instead of Leibniz as a primary example of
justice/justification? Deleuze's answer: "Borges . . . wanted . . . to have God pass into existence all incompossible
worlds at once instead of choosing one of them, the best" (62).
Yes, this traditional thinking of the best of all possible is the answer to the question of justice that must be
further problematized. Deleuze, of course, explains that "what especially impedes God from making all possibles—
even incompossibles—exist is that this would then be a mendacious God, a trickster God, a deceiving God. . . .
Leibniz, who strongly distrusts the Cartesian argument of the nonmalevolent God, gives him a new basis at the level
of incompossibility: God plays tricks, but he also furnishes the rules of the game" (62-63). At this point, Leibniz, as
Deleuze renders him, must unfold and refold his arguments for the defense or the justification of the way/wayves of
God to all men. (The foldings and pleats of the justification are intricate and they do not advance this present
discussion.) The important thing to remember, however, is that God chooses not only the best of all possible worlds
but also "chooses the best allotment of singularities in possible individuals." Deleuze continues: "Hence we have
rules of the world's composition in a compossible architectonic totality" (66).
What this excursus is about to tell us un/just as Deleuze's on Borges leads us to is that Leibniz is perhaps
situated somewhere between a beneficent God (Cartesian) and a trickster God or no God at all (Nietzsche and
Mallarmé). Nihilism, as Deleuze recounts, presents itself, incipiently in Leibniz. And so, Deleuze asks: "But what
happened in this long history of 'nihilism,' before the world lost its principles [of sufficient reason]?" (67). Or
sufficient justice? His tentative answer:
At a point close to us human Reason had to collapse, like the Kantian refuge, the last refuge of principles. It
falls victim to "neurosis." But still, before, a psychotic episode was necessary. A crisis and collapse of all
theological Reason had to take place. That is where the Baroque assumes its position: Is there some way of
saving the theological ideal at a moment when it is being contested on all sides. . . ? The Baroque solution
is the following: we shall multiply principles—we can always slip a new one out from under our cuffs—
and in this way we will change their use. . . . Principles . . . will be put to a reflective use. A case being
given, we shall invent its principles. It is a transformation from Law to universal Jurisprudence. (67)
Hence, the introduction of "the Leibnizian game" that "is first of all a proliferation of principles: play is
executed through excess and not a lack of principles; the game is that of . . . inventing principles" (67-68). (Of
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course, we find this today in a variety of rhetorical and sophistical venues from Chaim Perelman's The New
Rhetoric to Jean François Lyotard's Just Gaming and The Differend. And find this thinking in a variety of virtual
venues from Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, to
Sherry Turkel, Life on the Screen.) The best that Leibniz can do at the time is to invent multiple Adams and
Sextuses. In a typical atypical characterization, Deleuze writes: "We clearly witness a schizophrenic reconstruction:
God's attorney convenes characters who reconstitute the world with their inner, so-called autoplastic modifications.
Such are the monads, or Leibniz's Selves, automata" (68). But here is the clincher, as Deleuze sees it: "[H]uman
liberty is not itself safeguarded inasmuch as it has to be practiced in this existing world. In human eyes it does not
suffice that [Sextus] may not [rape] in another world, if he is certainly [raping] in this world" (Fold, 69).
"They say he raped them that night. They say he did it with a cunning little doll, fashioned in their
image and imbued with the power to make them do whatever he desired. . . . And though I wasn't there
that night, I think I can assure you that what they say is true, because it all happened right in the living
room—right there amid the well-stocked bookcases and the sofas and the fireplace—of a house I've
come to think of as my second home."
Dr. Bombay (Julian Dibbell), "A Rape in Cyberspace," My Tiny Life (11).
The Question of Justice: We inhabit a world, in which rape is an everyday occurrence, and mostly suffered
by women. We have good reasons to believe that many rapes go unreported, and we do know that they are an
everyday occurrence in the world's prison systems. We for the most part think of rape as a physical, not a figurative,
act. And yet, that view is changing; the difference between the actual and the virtual is disappearing. (Is the
Libidinal Band, the Möbius Band, speeding up, taking us from the world of semiotic signs to the whirl of tensor
signs, i.e., the world in which differences collapse into radical singularities?) This difference between physical and
figurative, however, is still a hotly debated topic. But the fact that it is debated gives support to the notion that the
difference may be disappearing and that the discussion (deliberation) itself ironically speeds up the Möbius band,
which in turn collapses differences even further.
In the now canonized article "A Rape in Cyberspace," which Dibbell—or perhaps I should say, Dr.
Bombay, Dibbell's persona-avatar—examines the issue of difference in terms of judiciary discourse, jurisprudence.
Allegedly a rape occurs in cyberspace, and the argument centers in great part on whether or not the virtual act
constituted a rape. As presented by Bombay, as the first chapter of My Tiny Life, 9 the "facts" of the case are that on
"a Monday night in March [in] the living room [at LambdaMOO, in a mainframe or server] at or about 10 p.m.
Pacific Standard Time . . . exu [in original version, legba], a South American [originally, Haitian] trickster spirit of
indeterminate gender," coded and being typed in by a person in Seattle, and then "Moondreamer [originally,
Starsinger], a nondescript female character" (12-13), in Haverford, Pennsylvania, were both raped by Mr. Bungle, a
puppet, who was manipulated with code by "a young man logging in to the MOO from a New York University
computer" (15). There were a number of "witnesses" in the living room, which was modeled virtually after Pavel
Curtis's own living room in real life. There was a furor over the virtual act. Some—including exu [legba], who made
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a formal motion, and Moondreamer [Starsinger], Kropokin [originally Bakunin], and even HortonWho [originally,
SamIAm] (the "Australian Deleuzean") seconded the motion—wanted "to toad" Mr. Bungle, that is, virtually to
execute his being erased from the memory of the MOO (18). Soon, about 50 members of the virtual community
agreed to the judgment. But as Dr. Bombay tells us: "There was one small but stubborn obstacle [namely] the New
Direction" (18), which was a formal document on matters of policy that had been developed by Pavis Curtis, the
archwizard, Haakon, and "principle architect" of LambdaMOO (19). The policy stated that "the wizards . . . were
pure technicians. . . . [T]hey would make no decisions affecting the social life of the MOO, but only implement
whatever decisions the community as a whole directed them to" (19). In other words, the members of the MOO were
given the right of "inventing [their] own self-governance from scratch" (19; emphasis mine). And yet, there was no
legislation (nomos—customs, rules, laws) for handling The Affair Bungle that—let us not forget—took place in
cyberspace. There was a resolve to act, but no legal way to implement the act.
What follows from that moment on in Dr. Bombay's report is a fall into jurisprudence and what emerges are
different groups formed by a mutual acceptance of a variety of warrants. The language game that the community
generally agreed to, however, was basic, informal argumentation. There were the "Parliamentarian legalist types
[who] argued that unfortunately Bungle could not legitimately be toaded at all, since there were not explicit MOO
rules against rape, or against just about anything else" (19). Next were those composing a "royalist streak" who
wanted to do away with "this New Directions silliness" and to recall "the wizardocracy . . . to the position of swift
and decisive leadership their player class was born to" (19). Then there were "the technolibertarians" and the
"resident anarchists" (19-20). There was a call for a meeting on the third day so as to settle the case, but after a long
meeting nothing was settled (21-24). Mr. Bungle shows up (22). Instead of his appearance acting as a catalyst to fire
up the group, it only emphasizes their apparent hopeless situation. (How does the community or someone toad Mr.
Bungle from the memory of the MOO without his ever returning as the repressed?)
Instead of ending in a state of entropy, something does happen. Present at the meetings were the wizards,
one by the name of Tom Traceback [originally, Joe Feedback], "who'd sat brooding on the sidelines all evening"
(24), trying to decide whether he was going to do something about the case. He finally decides, on his own, to toad
Bungle (25). We are told: "They say that LambdaMOO has never been the same since Mr. Bungle's toading. They
say as well that nothing's really changed. And though it skirts the fuzziest of dream-logics to say that both these
statements are true, the MOO is just the sort of fuzzy, dreamlike place in which such contradictions thrive" (25). The
Moo here is described as Baroque, as having a vice-diction. And the MOO is not the same—and virtually was not
the same since the origination of the problem by the act of cyberrape—for someone has virtually acted out the full
narrative of crime and punishment.
Haakon (Curtis, archwizard), having been away from LambdaMOO, returns to see the "wreckage strewn
across the tiny universe" and consequently adds a statement to New Directions saying that "he would build into the
database a system of petitions and ballots whereby anyone could put to popular vote any social scheme requiring
wizardly powers for its implementation, with the results of the vote to be binding on the wizards" (25).
LambdaMOO was now a pure democracy. And so all's well that ends well. Not so! For a few days after the toading,
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"a strange new character named Dr. Jest" arrives. There is every reason to believe that this new character is "Mr.
Bungle [who] had risen from the grave" (26). Toading was not fatal because all that is necessary for the dead to rise
again is to get a new account from another provider and then return to LambaMOO under a different name. The
return of the repressed is automatic in one form or another. And to this day Mr. Bungle/Dr. Jest sleeps in his room at
LambdaMOO. Waiting to awake.
Lest we think that some good did come from the event in terms of the revision of New Directions, which
established a pure democracy, we need constantly to remind ourselves of the larger event and who constructed this
society. Though it was put into motion by the programming of the arch-wizard, Haakon, the society and its anxieties
were all established by those who composed the cybersociety. The subtitle of Dibbell's article "A Rape in
Cyberspace" reads "How an Evil Clown, a Hatian Trickster Sprint, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a
Database into a Society." And again, How? What Dr. Bombay-Dibbell make clear—though subtly—is that the How
of the event is the "UrBungle" (26). The bungling of the whole matter, which perhaps could only be bungled, is the
founding event for LambdaMOO. First the cyberrape (crime), the attempt at justice (deliberation), the toading (the
punishment determined and executed by one person), and then the regeneration of the Bungle-like character. And let
us not forget the reactionary form that the punishment took and how it was unwittingly engineered, because of the
media (software, hardware, wetware), to repeat itself perpetually. Like Adam, like Sextus, like Bungle, like Jest, etc.
(Let us not forget that LambdaMOO was the original of its kind of experimental MOO, or world.) It can certainly be
argued that the decree added to New Directions should or would solve any future problems in terms of this narrative
repeating itself, but the founding event can never be circumvented. Nor can anyone ever stop a wizard or the
archwizard, as constituted wizards, from repeating the original act of punishment. To be sure, allegedly some good
came from the event in terms of the new MOO commands subsequently made available to members of the society.
Having access to an @gag or @boot command, however, only deflects the problem, which is always already there
waiting in the shadows to happen again and again. And of course, these commands can be used indiscriminately.
Moreover, arriving at consensus itself (homologia) is predetermined by the UrBungle, un/just as a question
determines what its answer could be. Instead of one acting out the punishment, it is the many in the name of one
acting. Lyotard so describes such deliberative (empowering?) Thinking (and I interpolate):
Thought begins with the possible. This is why the logos begins with the politeia and the market. It is as the
voice of writing [typing on the screen], the production of [semiotic] signs with a view to exchange,
monopolized almost all the libido of the citizen-merchant bodies. But I am not saying that the body that
speaks, writes and thinks [types], does not enjoy . . . rather that its charge instead of taking place in
singular intensities, comes to be folded back [reterritorialized, returned] not only onto the need of the
market and the city, but onto the zero [the lack, the Negative, the principle of Exclusion in the name of
Justice] where both are centered, on the zero of money [virtual capital] and discourse. Nihilism . . . brings
the empty méson [virtual community as political sphere] round which the members of the koinonia
gravitate. (Libidinal 162-63; emphasis mine)
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I would continue describing and summating, for the Ur-narrative of LambdaMOO does repeat itself
in terms of "it was." So many commonplace questions are left standing, and yet: Look at the questions! How
they tantalize! If "we" refuse them, "we" are (will be) accused of being neoconservatives. And yet, "we"
must refuse them. If we do not refuse them, they only fold us back onto the Zero. Let us recall Zarathustra
words:
Alas, every prisoner [of a past misdeed] becomes a fool; and the imprisoned will redeems himself [and
herself] foolishly. That time does not run backwards, that is his [her] wrath; "that which was" is the name
of the stone he [she] cannot move. And so, he [she] moves stones out of wrath and displeasure, and he [she]
wreaks revenge on whatever does not feel wrath and displeasure as he [she] does. Thus the will, the
liberator, took to hurting; and on all who can suffer he [she] wreaks revenge for his [her] inability to go
backwards. This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will's ill will against time and its "it was." (Thus
Spake, 251-52; Nietzsche's emphasis)
Charles Stivale has given an excellent account of the continuum of revenge and counter-revenge at
LambdaMOO and how it all spills over into elsewhere. The history of this event of Lambda, as in the sign of
Alpha/Omega, is all human, too pathetically human, without a taste for life/Eros. Rather, without a taste for A Life.
Stivale renders it as "it was."
And yet: We are in a continuum, as we should expect, on this issue of what took place at LambdaMOO. At
least, Dibbell is in a continuum of thought—inviting us to be with him in that continuum—thinking the yet
unthought. When Dibbell returns to the scene of the crime, when he speaks at the conference "Virtue and Virtuality:
Gender, Law, and Cyberspace," at MIT, April 20-21, 1996, he returns to think again about the virtual community at
LambaMOO and its actions taken, but his thinking, as he makes clear, is the result of his prior appearance at Yale
Law School with Katherine MacKinnon, discussing rape in cyberspace and afterwards having dinner with
MacKinnon, who had just published Only Words. During dinner Dibbell confesses he says virtually nothing. He
simply listens. He sits and listens to MacKinnon's occasional appropriation of his views. Dibbell says subsequently
that he is anxiety ridden, for fear that he will be totally appropriated by MacKinnon and her take on words and deeds
(sexual violence) and for fear that he, who works at the Village Voice, would be "out[ed] as a MacKinnonite"
(online). The tone of this reportage is humorous, though Dibbell is serious.
In this remembrance of things past at the conference at MIT, Dibbell revisits his take on community and its
actions taken at LambdaMOO. He writes:
Now, what had Mr. Bungle done, exactly? Well, in a sense, not much. He had typed some words
and caused them to be communicated to the understanding of others. And let me make it clear that
no one present that night was so confused as to doubt that words were the only weapon Mr.
Bungle had wielded. But they also had several additional things to say about what he'd done. They
called it 'uncivil,' they called it 'despicable,' and lastly but most precisely they called it 'virtual
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ape.' And I say precisely because I think the phrase captures as well as any can the ambivalence
with which Bungle's victims seemed to regard his actions—the way their response seemed to
oscillate irresolvably between outrage and mere annoyance, between a tone that equated his
actions with real-life rape and a tone that recognized them as nothing of the sort. And I want to
emphasize that oscillation, because I think that if you don't get it, you don't really get virtual rape
at all.
I think it also helps explain the LambdaMOO community's response to Mr. Bungle, which was
neither to seek redress in the real world (though there were a couple of ways they could have done
that) nor merely to censure him within the MOO. Instead the community decided to cut him off at
the boundary between real life and virtual reality—and so they did, eliminating his account and all
the objects associated with it.
And thus the story ends. . . . (online)
And yet, it does continue for Dibbell as for us. Dibbell writes:
But what about the First Amendment? How did that get in there? Well, I suppose in writing up the
Bungle Affair I probably should have just let the story tell itself, but ultimately I didn't have
enough faith in its accessibility for that. I thought it a little too alien to the average non-MUDder's
experience and felt I should try to inject a little universal relevance into it, to tease from it a
broader significance I wasn't entirely sure it had. And so I closed the piece with some reflections
on the ways my encounter with LambdaMOO's version of virtual reality and with the phenomenon
of virtual rape had begun to unsettle my long
reflexively held understanding of the relationship between word and deed. 'The more seriously I
took the notion of virtual rape,' I wrote, 'the less seriously I was able to take the notion of freedom
of speech, with its tidy division of the
world into the symbolic and the real.'
I was careful to insist that these reflections constituted not so much an argument as a report on a
kind of emergent Information Age mindset—a postmodern return to the premodern logic of the
incantation, ushered in by the operating principle of the computer, whose typed-in commands are
after all a lot like magic words in the way that they simultaneously convey information and
cause things to happen with the immediacy of a trigger pulled. But secretly I wasn't quite sure
what my relationship to this emergent mindset was or ought to be, and it was in the midst of this
uncertainty that the specter of Catherine MacKinnon began to haunt me.
After his dinner with MacKinnon, after time to chew his cud, he begins to think the contrary,
namely, that "Katherine MacKinnon was no Dibbellian." He continues:
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For what had become clear to me as I'd listened to MacKinnon's appreciation of "A Rape in
Cyberspace" was that she really wasn't interested in that oscillation I find so central to the notion
of virtual rape, and indeed of virtual reality in general. She wasn't interested in the way the
victims' rage was tempered by irritation; she wasn't interested in the community's refusal to seek
redress in real life. She was only interested—for fairly obvious reasons—in the extent to which the
people of LambdaMOO had felt Mr. Bungle's actions to be equivalent to real-life rape. In short, as
far as I was concerned, she didn't get it.
But that didn't mean I now found myself thrown back into the camp of those who had attacked me
for taking virtual rape seriously. On the contrary, I now saw in their attitude a kind of mirror
image of MacKinnon's understanding. For they, too, wanted to see only one half of VR's
irreducibly ambiguous truth. For them, the MOO was only a game, and could not be more.
I think the MOO is a game, and I think it is also much more. I think of it, finally, as a kind of
conceptual DMZ—a permanently, radically liminal ground on which the real and the imagined
meet on equal terms. (emphasis mine)
And yet again, the wider community does not appear to remain in a mode of oscillation.
And perhaps, it should not, given differences of circumstances. Still, there are differences of
opinion about an area in the law that is itself caught in between the actual and the virtual. As I
alluded to earlier, Wendy Kaminer in her article "Virtual Rape," writes of a real man by the name
of "Maxwell [who] was . . . charged with aggravated sexual assault. The victim was a 10-year-old
girl known in court documents as S.M. During one phone call, in which Maxwell posed as her
mother's gynecologist, he persuaded S.M. to insert her finger into her vagina" (70). Kaminer
reports:
Maxwell never even met his victim, making the charge of aggravated sexual assault unprecedented.
But it's not entirely surprising, considering pervasive concern about electronic or virtual sex involving
unsuspecting children. This case is a testament to the presumed power of the Internet and law
enforcement's efforts to tame it. The application of sexual assault laws to cases involving children who
are duped over the phone into fondling or penetrating themselves would greatly facilitate the
prosecutions of people who engage in sexually explicit conversations in chat rooms, especially with
minors. So it hardly matters that Maxwell used a telephone instead of a computer. Thirty years ago, he
might have been dismissed as a dirty old man; now he's more likely to remind people of a pedophile
prowling the Net. (70)
But what is missed here is layering. The student at NYU whose MOO name or avatar was "Bungle" used a
computer but one connected to a telephone. Does the computer, the extra layer or filter, add something special? In
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most discussions of place, cyber-place or virtual-space, there is a definite, indefinite topos (locus) where
communications take place between or among people who are participating from their various geographical
locations. For the telephone, hooked to a computer or not, it is cyberspace, which is in the matrix (etymologically,
the womb!). Where, then, did rape in cyberspace take place? If the answer is in the question, that is, in cyberspace,
then the rape took place in the matrix (the womb). It is either in the switches or in the satellite that relays the
conversation. And yet, there is an element of virtuality to this description. In discussions of virtual space, unlike
those on cyberspace, the location is in the brains of those who are participating. 10 Dibbell as well as others is not
really clear in his use of these two terms. The rape occurred, he says in his title, in cyberspace (the womb), but most
of the discussion is in terms of virtuality. Is this just a matter of etymology, a play on words in relation to space?
And nothing more? The etymological womb or the horrible affects in the brain? Or should these distinctions even
matter when it comes down to the "rape" of children or adults at the other end of the line? Which is a great deal
more? In various communities we make laws and argue them in court (including the court of public opinion).
Kaminer, in her discussion of Maxwell, oscillates with her argument, considering both sides of the issue. She writes:
Still, New Jersey's sexual-offense statute was enacted in 1979, long before legislators were terribly
concerned about the Internet. The law defines sexual assault as 'sexual penetration, either by the actor or
upon the actor's instructions.' Penetration involving a child is aggravated sexual assault, with a maximum
sentence of 20 years. Maxwell's victim acted on his instructions and under coercion (at 10 years old, she
was incapable of consenting to phone sex). Joseph Del Russo, the chief assistant prosecutor for the case,
considers the absence of physical or even visual contact between the offender and his victim irrelevant;
Maxwell is 'equally culpable as the guy who gives a girl $5 to lure her into his car and gets her to penetrate
herself digitally,' he explained. (70)
The judge decided not to dismiss the case. Maxwell pleaded guilty and is serving a 12-year sentence. Each person's
inclination determines the outcome. The ever coming community that is a community without a community. But as
we have seen in Dibbell and in communities and their laws, inclinations change. Inclinations make for a virtual
society, constantly caught in the topos: Out of the impossible perpetually comes the possible. virtuality along with
virtuosity is virtue.
In yet another (experimental) caesura, let us momentarily recollect that . . . As it was in the beginning, so it
was at LambdaMOO. Let us dis/continue. Let us go elsewhere. Affirmatively forget. To rethink MOOs. As
anarchitechtural, experimental sites. Far, far from here. Let us refold elliptically to . . .
Consider[ing] the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or
today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day,
fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a
hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he
cannot help envying them their happiness—what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely
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what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal. (Nietzsche, "On the Uses" 60-
61)
. . . And so it was in those days that Cow did come forth, having forsaken
the peace of death in return for the promise of renewed glory . . . and the Dancers of the Cow were
plentiful, fulfilling the ancient rites with their purity and self-cleansing. The Chant did spring forth onto the
Land. . . . The wind did carry the name of Cow to all who listened. "May the Promise of Bovine
Restfulness be with us all. Let Humanity know that Cow has returned." Thus did the cry ring out--over hill,
over dale did the name of Cow extend, until the Universe chanted in rhythm with the Dancers. The Holy
Circle did expand, yea, unto a tumultuous whirlpool of raw emotion and festivity.
. . . And Cow did proclaim with all heartfelt sincerity to those
assembled, "Moo." The four winds blew across the world, taking Cow's
wisdom wherever they went. (Akira)
A(nother) CAESURA: On Our Way from Beyond BaroqueMOO to LibidinalMOO, WOOmb
And so we have arrived at the moment of What? Bovinity? Yes. And yet, No! For we will not bring the
cows home; we will go home with the cows. We, the unhomely ones! What does go home mean? It means a folding
of ourselves into new ethoi and then a new geography.
New Ethoi: In part, the etymology of the word ethos is éthea, which is the name of the place where animals
belong and which is the name of the places/topoi where the barbarians, the non-Greeks go. Where the uncivilized
dwell. (See Scott 142-147.) Going home means, therefore, we will leave the previously assured protection of the
Archi-Wizards simulated living room for . . . Do you think, Dear Reader that I am merely suggesting that we fold
from the Civilized Greek to the Non-Greek! Oh, NO! . . . We will leave the previously assured protection of the
Archi- for the perpetual terror of singularities of the anarchitechture of "a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight
line" (see "Death and the Compass" in Borges Ficciones, 69-70, or Labyrinths 117; cf. Deleuze Logic, 62). We will
be nomadic drifters in the non-Greek space left in the midst of Greek Rationality. Under the thin crust of their
foundations. In their methods of deliberation that only loop back to devour them. We will be not One, nor Two, but
a radically infinite finitude.
A New Geography: And so I have suggested that we must change our architec(h)ture and its overall
geography. Ha! But such a change is not social reengineering as it is commonly offered. I go too far. The only
deliverance I can suggest to Apollonian programmers and diggers is self-overcoming. 11 All things cows! Nothing
cowers! There is no way to end or rebegin this meditation so that everyone will have been happy. And I cannot be
concerned with such silliness. While Borges's narrator awaits me in the straight and narrow, I just want to MOO.
Not cower. MOO. MOO. MOO.
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A new geography will be without heights and depths. There will be no heights of Platonic idealism (no
Ideal forms) and no depths of Freudian, Marxist, and Nietzschean suspicion (no unconscious, ideology) to be
colonized. Deleuze explains: "This is a reorientation of all thought and of what it means to think: there is no longer
depth or height. The Cynical and Stoic sneers against Plato are many. It is always a matter of unseating the Ideas, of
showing that the incorporeal is not high above . . . but is rather at the surface, that it is not the highest cause but the
superficial effect par excellence, and that it is not Essence but event" (Logic, 130; Deleuze's emphasis). Deleuze
points out more so how the realm of the depth ("subversion") "acts in an original [i.e., inventional] way, by means of
its power to organize surfaces and to envelop itself within surfaces. This pulsation sometimes acts through the
formation of a minimum amount of surface, for a maximum amount of matter" (124). What Deleuze gives (gifts) is
an account of a theory/spectacle of how scarcity, lack, and depth are created. And more importantly, how we are
manipulated by loss of access to (all libidinal) surface. Hence, while Platonism and its heritage denies the value of
all surface and depth, a hermeneutics of suspicion—in promising to demystify the surface and make manifest the
depths—reshapes the truth and controls the access to its presentation on the surface. 12 Where we would live.
Everything is permitted on the surface. There are no rules, laws, truths. Everything mixes with everything. There is
no container to contain. There are only the red cruelties of radical singularities. Where, as Deleuze says, there is a
"reorientation of the entire thought and a new geography" (132). In this place, we would be like the Stoics,
establishing ourselves and wrapping ourselves up with the surface, the curtain, the carpet, and the mantle. The
double sense of the surface, the continuity of the reverse and right sides, replace height and depth. There [would be]
nothing behind the curtain except unnamable mixtures, nothing above the carpet except the empty sky." We would
be like "the animal which is on a level with the surface—a tick or louse" (133). We would be like Nietzsche's cows,
grazing the surface.
An announcement: All those held captive by the depths, the netherworlds, all those who are the subterreans
. . . RETURN TO THE SURFACE! RECLAIM THE SURFACE. It is y/ours! So that you might self-overcome.
Remember as Deleuze says: "Deeper than any other ground is the surface and the skin" (Logic 141). Recall as Paul
Valery had said: "The deepest thing in man is his skin" (qtd. by Virilio, Open Sky 105).
In the Meanwhile a Question: Can self-overcoming be simulated anarchitechurally? Yes. Yes. Yes. It is
possible to have an antiOedipal, AntiElectra, MOO. Can it be anaprogrammed? MOO, MOO, MOO, when you,
Dear Programmers and Diggers, figure it out/in, in/out! Collapse the two. Reach for a nonsynthesized third. All
Surface. Unthink and dig topologically. Not topological butterflies, but Cows! Make all things Cow surface. Cow
geography. How to do this? But that's not my problem! Accept this as my gift. To transfer. Transference. To
passover. To self-overcome. Being human, all too human. Become Cow. Becoming Cow. Just flatten out the space
of MOO into all surface. All sur-face. Lose face. Diggers! Dig to the surface! Dig the surface. Dig? Cows have four
stomachs. Dig? (If Kiki Smith can take human organs and turn them into installation art, I can take animal organs
and de-create or de-domesticate them.)
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"Except we turn back and become as cows, we shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. For we ought to learn
what would it profit a man if he gained the whole world and did not learn this one thing: chewing the cud!
He would not get rid of his melancholy—his great melancholy; but today that is called nausea. Who today
does not have his heart, mouth, and eyes full of nausea? You too! You too! But behold these cows!"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (381).
"Among the most grotesque passages in Freud are those on 'fellatio': how the penis stands for a cow's
udder, and the cow's udder for a mother's breast."
Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues (77).
'Our' Metaphor of BaroqueMOO Folding into BovineMOO into WOOmb; Or, Opening the Libidinal
Surface: Open 13 the horn- , bagpipe-like organ and spread out all its surfaces, though they balloon and roll together:
Not only the ovaries with their germinal epithelium, peritoneal epithelium, corpora lutea (with its pronounced
yellow color), and graafian follicles (which surround the surface), but open and spread, expose the uterine cornua,
longitudinally cut and flatten out the fifteen-inch sections, as they taper gradually toward the free end—noticing how
the free part of the horn folds at first downward, forward, and outward, and then folds backward and upward,
forming a spiral band—then the cervical canal, the muscular coat, the mucous membranes, uterine cotyledons . . . all
hundred, either irregularly scattered over the surface or arranged in rows of about a dozen each . . . as though your
dress-maker's scissors were opening the several layers of a finely taylored coat . . . go on to the uterine glands, long
and branched; to the cervix, pale, glandless, and with numerous folds, noticing all along the way and especially at
the external uterine orifice the folds (plicae palmatae) forming rounded prominences arranged circularly, which
project into the cavity of the vagina . . . go on opening and flattening the recto-genital pouch of peritoneum and the
two canals of Gartner, which are about the diameter of a goose quill, finally passing the blade along the way
posteriorly near the external urethral orifice . . . into the vulva, with its thick, multi-layered labia, continuing into the
suburethral diverticulum, the two glandulae vestibulares majores, with their two or three ducts, which open into a
small pouch of the mucous membrane, making your way, flattening the surface . . . all the way . . . giving it, ever
giving it, a half (not a full!) twist!
And this is not all, far from it: Connected are the mammary glands, the udders, normally two in number,
but often with countless more; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay bare the four teats of each udder,
searching for the single duct, which widens superiorly and opens freely into a roomy lactiferous sinus, a.k.a. the
milk cistern; then . . . take note . . . and learn . . . from how the mucous membrane of the sinus forms numerous
folds, which render the cavity multilocular. In the libidinal body of the dead cow, all is fold or can be refolded into
fold, by flattening the surface and ever giving it, along the waves, a half twist. Another. Another. Another Udder.
The cow body, organized—dis/organized?—to . . . . Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc).
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All bodily unity laid phlat . . . a new political economy, libidinal. All Baudrillardian surface. All is
seductive, immanently so! All these opened, half twisted surfaces, "zones," as Lyotard says, "are [to be] joined end
to end in a band which has no back to it, a Möbius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is
one-sided, a Möbian [ephemeral] skin which, rather than being just smooth [as we might have been led to believe],
is on the contrary (is this topologically possible?) covered with roughness, corners, creases, cavities which when it
passes on the "first" turn will be cavities, but perhaps on the "second," lumps" (2-3).
Yes, the band must turn, fold rapidly, accelerating, ever, ever rapidly so that the angles/angels of geometry
become not just Euclidean but elliptical, hyperbolic, etc. spaces! Wherein the Euclidean Synecdoche, container,
becomes a Klein Jar. Turning and turning. Now taking some paraterms from Baudrillard, the language (logos) of
space moves from Duality through Polarity to Digitality. From triangular Oedipus to digital Narcissus (154-173). To
Multiplicity. HA! Programmers, wizards, can you dig? And yet, let us reinsert Baudrillard: "Anatomy is not destiny,
nor is politics: seduction is destiny" (180). And yet, this word "seduction" with its possible resonances backfires.
Terribly. When we last left this word (as in "seduction theory") in chapter 4, we placed it and insisted to keep it in
Freud's zigzagging mis-approach to thinking, just as Dibbell decided after writing "My Dinner with Katherine
MacKinnon" to place value in "resist[ing the] tendency to reduce oscillation and conflict to unambiguous
resolution."
And now and now and now, let's drift towards Foucault's Borges, who/which brought forth Foucault's own
protoMOObook. Seduction calls us to Foucault's Borges. The Ephemeral band speeds up some more, as our hearts
speed onward. Speeding. Ever Speedier. Foucault . . . panting . . . says that his ProtoMOObook
un/kinds.
arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered . . . all the familiar landmarks of my
thought--our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography--breaking up all the
ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing
things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between
the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a "Certain Chinese encyclopaedia" in which it is written that
"animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e)
sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied [and the list goes
absurdly on]." In the wonderment of this [ana]taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the
thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic [seductive] charm of another system of
thought, is the limitation [negating principle] of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that (xv;
Foucault's emphasis)
. . . thinking that a MOO really is a cow! A cow, a MOO. And both, surfacing as the third libidinal-Möbian
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Part 4: from the Attic and Basement to the Living Room
Rebeginnings: From Architecture to AnArchitexture
Obsession and Its Other (Hysteria, third try)
"There is no will with regard to the past. This is why no one wants Troy to have been sacked,
since no one decides what happened but only what will be and is possible; what has happened
cannot not have been. This is why Agathon is right in saying: 'This only is denied even to God, /
The powers to undo what has been done'."
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (1139b.4-11).
For more than thirty years I have been watching flies and wasps and bees in flight, against the
teacher's rules—forty years of laziness, watching hope fly. I am not afraid of the wasp's darting
around, chaotic and Brownian. The teacher of the discourse of method would have been afraid.
Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations (84).
"
Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (474).
Wheres we have been, Wheres we will have been?: Why should we describe or deliberate over
where we have been! According to Aristotle, deliberation, as a speech-act, concerns the future, concerns
what we will have done in the future to avoid the mistakes of the past. (This is the most difficult, because
not fixed, point.less thus far in my thinking, reading, writing about rape; we must forget the past, yet start
from the past. The slogan is Never forget. The incipient counter-slogan is Affirmatively forget. Jacques
Derrida quotes: "Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious
imperative to an entire people" (Archive Fever 76). He responds: "How can one not tremble before this
sentence? I wonder if it is just. Who could ever be assured, by what archive, that it is just, this sentence?"
And finally, he quotes: "Is it possible that the antonym of 'forgetting' is not 'remembering,' but justice?"
(77; Derrida's emphasis). Hence, remembering, forgetting, and the third term justice.
If, as Aristotle says, there is no will with regard to the past—in regard to Troy—only necessity,
then What to do? We cannot redeem the past, for as Nietzsche through Zarathustra has made compellingly
"
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clear, such an attempt is but beginnings of ressentiment for the great "it was—that is the name of the will's
gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. . . . The will cannot will backwards" (Zarathustra 251). My
answer, which would be a refolding of the question, What to do?, is to move from the topoi of will and
necessity to those of contingency. To modal thinkings, readings, and writings, which I have been
dis/engaging in sporadically from the beginnings of Chaste Rape. I have followed the wasps and bees in
flight against the rules of what goes for pedagogy's and teachers' protocol of good writing as well as
thinking and reading. I would continue to have hope, as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres respectively
suggest, in just following the "wasp-becoming of the orchid [and] an orchid-becoming of the wasp"
(Dialogues 2) and "the wasp's flying zigzag" (Rome 85). I have read and written Sigmund Freud and Helke
Sander, as well as others, as in a line of flying zigzag. The antonym of forgetting is justice, which is the
concern of my turn to the Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze bloc. Sextus's confrontation with Jove, about the
injustice of his life, is the beginning of the rethinking, or refolding of thought that is yet unthought,
especially for Lucretia. (And im/potentially Sylvia Likens.)
Hence, as only suggested in chapter 8, which was on MOOs and cyber-virtual rape, I would
continuously move to this other bloc of thinking. I would follow the oxen on their way to being sacrificed,
but I would also, as again in Serres, follow them away from such an economy in their oxen's walk, their
drift, "first one way, then another" (Rome 17). I would further follow, as Serres suggests we might, "the
ordinary boustrophedon of history" (18). Boustrophedon (turning like an ox while plowing-writing). I
would find hope in thinking, "the original story [of rape and Troy, of the Vestals and of the Sabines, and of
Lucretia and of Sylvia Likens would justifiably prefer to] be read in its original writing; the boustrophedon,
following the path of laboring oxen, runs from left to right, then right to left" (18). Such would be the tactic
of imminent reversibility. But now, as previously, I must still further think that we must prefer to negate
this apparent negation of forced labor and sacrifice and rape and take up with a third way, or wayves, by
means of the black box of noise, and read, if we can, the ichnography, the footsteps, the tramping,
tramping, tramping of all footsteps of the oxen, which "contains the possible [i.e., the compossible]" (24). I
would "pay close attention to," in dis/order to think and write, "possible geometrical apparitions when
footprints or marks cross" (24). I would be on the look out for a tramping that would "index the entire space
of sense, the open-ended possibility of their number" (24). It is, if one traces oxen's footsteps from there
through here to t.here, a writing that would be a reading of the fold. 1 A writing that would be, calling on a
conductive connection, cut to paste: Writing on a Riemann surface, whereon hooves become paste, glue, to
make for strange, previously unthought connections. Most of what follows—that does not follow in a
schoolmaster–mistress form of writing—is done casuistically with a half twist of the surface.
I now contingently and hyperbolically-elliptically fold in Michel Foucault, especially Gilles
Deleuze's experimental readings of Foucault and his complementary refoldings of Serres, to get to the
future—to keep the future open—in paraterms of still more folds.
In writing-experimenting with Foucault, Deleuze says:
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To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside. The general topology of
thought, which had already begun 'in the neighborhood' of the particular features, now ends up in
the folding of the outside into the inside. . . . To think means to be embedded in the present-time
stratum that serves as a limit: what can I see and what can I say today? But this involves thinking
of the past as it is condensed in the inside, in the relation to oneself (there is a Greek in me, or a
Christian, and so on). We will then think the past against the present and resist the latter, not in
favour of a return but 'in favour, I hope, of a time to come' (Nietzsche), that is, by making the past
active and the present to the outside so that something new will finally come about, so that
thinking, always, may reach thought. Thought thinks its own history (the past), but in order to free
itself from what it thinks (the present) and be able finally to 'think otherwise' (the future).
(Foucault 118-19; cf. Grosz, Architecture 56-72)
In writing-experimenting, Serres calls on the female kneading dough:
The woman continues to fold, to stretch, to fold again, without making a mark. . . . Let us assume
now that a fine-pointed stylus digs a point in this square here, follows it in its stretching out, its
folding over, follows it like this ten or twenty times, through thirty stages of aging; it will write a
little history, a monument or a local remainder, of this always-disappearing involution. We could
attempt to read its trajectory or the trace it has left. But it is illegible. It is not a letter or a phrase . .
. it is the flight of a fly or a crazy wasp. Each leap is clear and determined, yet the whole path
seems problematic. This baker, unlike God, writes a curve with straight lines; she writes the
incomprehensible in luminary fragments. And that is why she does not write. And that is why we
simple blind people, simplistic, short-sighted, have not imagined implication, inclusion, fold; we
have never known what a tissue is, never noticed or listened to women, never known what a
melange might be, and never understood, or even imagined, time. We have aligned it with analytic
sequences. We have never looked at this trajectory and tried to read it.
Time is the baker's writing, or her absent writing. . . . It is everywhere and yet nobody looks at it,
everywhere present and ignored. (Rome 82-83)
It is not conceptual starting places determined by topoi, or e/utopia, therefore, that I would want to
think, read, write rape from, or semiotically across, but it would be perpetually restarting aplaces
determined by atopoi or what the bloc of thinking instigated by Serres-Foucault-Deleuze call "multitudes
[that] are inclusive, agglutinative" (Serres, Rome 179) and "heterotopias" (Foucault, Order xvii-xviii;
"Other Spaces" 24). It is not just a matter of time (from Chronos to Aeon); it is doubly a matter of
subjectivity. As I said in chapter 8, in dis/order to get out of "the white terror of truth" (Oneness, a single
geometry by which to measure all things, sub-jectivity, ob-jectivity, ab-jectivity), it is perversely necessary
to embrace "the red cruelty of singularities" (heterotopias of singularities, superjects, superfolds) (Lyotard,
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Libidinal 241). And as I would say now, in re/folding to get out of "the black box" (total actuality, noise), it
would be preferable to embrace the "white multiplicities" (total possibilities, chaos); or rather, perhaps it
would be preferable to dis/embrace both and dwell in the middle groundless of the flying of the wasp
(Serres, Rome 9-37, 38-88), making, nonetheless, intermittent forays, sorties, into the white multiplicities
and the black box. Such has been my attempt, heretofore, and will have continued to be in terms of a
network of hysterical "connections" (Ulmer, Heuretics 36) and what Foucault-Deleuze would call
hysterical "statements" (Foucault, Archaeology; Order; Deleuze, Foucault). 2 From now on, this attempt will
become more exPLIcit in its imPLIcity. Let us move from archive (anarchive) to architecture
(anarchitecture).
"I do not know, says Livy, where tracing back to the origin or to the foundation of Rome will lead
me. I do not have faith in historians, lost written archives, or the oral tradition. The
Quellenforschung never ceases; it goes back to Valerious Antias, to Claudius Quadrigarius, or to
Fabius Pictor, to Cincius Alimentus, and so on. Hooves of oxen following hooves of oxen—we
never get out of texts, turning our backs on the dark origin [i.e., black box]. The written text leads
me into the plain; the oral tradition calls me to the hills. The historian is Hercules with his
thousand labors, his confusion and incertitude. You who are reading me, do not think that all
tracks always go this way; listen to the oxen bellowing in the dark of early morning. An uneasy
search for sources or the quest for the foundation of origin."
Michel Serres, Rome (13-14).
Derrida (Archive Fever): Beginning, Jacques Derrida writes: "Let us not begin at the beginning,
nor even at the archive" (Archive 1). Examining the etymology of "archive," he recalls, place,
commencement and commandment, a commencing at a "there where authority, social order are exercised,
in this place from which order is given" (1), a commanding to remember (1-2). Moreover, "archive" has the
meaning of "a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those
who commanded. . . . [I]t is at their home, in that place which is their house . . . that official documents are
filed. The archons are first of all the documents' guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of
what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They
have the power to interpret the archives" (2; Derrida's emphasis). There, we have, as Derrida writes, "the
dwelling" that "marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean
from the secret to the nonsecret" (3). It is the case and it is this particular case that we will want to note that
this there does not become t.here (which would signify, again, that there is no collapsing of these
differences in space, but a power that but keeps them separate: Private and Public back into Private. One
has to have acceptable credentials and often such letters of cachet are limited to the few. 3 Derrida is quick,
parenthetically, to give an example: "(It is what is happening, right here, when a house, the Freuds' last
house, becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to another.)" (3). There is the problem, as
Derrida explains, that can occur "At the intersection of the topological and the nomological, of the place
and the law, of the substrate and the authority, a scene of domiciliation becomes at once visible and
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invisible" (3; emphasis mine). 4 And there is also always the problem of "Consignation [which] aims to
coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an
ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret
which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner" (3; Derrida's emphasis). How is the
Secretary of the Freud Archives to gather everything? Is he or she to follow Freud's own thinkings (5)? And
What just might Freud's (unequivocal) thinkings be!
Janet Malcolm, in her reporting of the gossip according to various (would-be) Freudians, quotes
K. R. Eissler saying:
After the Second World War, at a time when there was little interest in Sigmund Freud's life
history, a small group of psychoanalysts . . . became alarmed by the fact that a large number of
letters by Freud had been lost as a result of the ravages brought about by the war. It was feared
that if no measures were taken, the surviving documentation of Freud's life would be dispersed all
over the world, and most of it would be lost to future research. The need for a Sigmund Freud
Archives was thus recognized. (In the Freud Archives 6)
As I recounted in chapter 4, Eissler appointed Jeffrey Masson Secretary of the Freud Archives, which are
situated in the Freud family home, but Masson would not hold to canonical thinking about Freud, and
consequently, Eissler fires him. This is the series of moments when Eissler, who is obsessed with upholding
the good name of the Freud archives, meets head on with Masson, who is obsessed, yet hysterical in his
renderings of what he takes to be the secret of Freud's assault on the truth. As I tried to show at great
length, obsessively, yet hysterically, we would serve the archives more productively, if we would but keep
them open. For the future. After all, Freud, like Serres's oxen, thinks and writes from left to right, then right
to left, and repeats thereafter, in a zigzagging mannerism. This would be the house cum archive that
Sigmund built.
And yet, if the archive requires, Derrida tells us, "consignation in an external place which assures
the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression, then we must also
remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according
to Freud, indissociable from the death drive" (11-12). Derrida tells us that there is something in the archive,
according to Freud, that is "anarchivic" or "archiviolithic" (10). The film that I think exemplifies this
principle, as I have discussed it in chapters 1, 4, and 5, is Memento. Leonard Shelby suffers from archive
fever, which drives him to redeem the past by killing, eventually, just anyone, when he cynically realizes
that he cannot get back to the origin of the crime to see precisely and really who raped and murdered his
wife and who took not only his precious but also his memory from him. But Derrida also tells us there is
something in the archive that is anarchic or anarchaic: "[T]he word 'archiv,' [sic] . . . appears already in the
Studies of Hysteria" (92). While the archive has the drive toward obsessive-compulsive repetition, it also
manifests the desire toward hysterical, anarchic compossible singularities. And this latter, as I take Derrida
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to be suggesting, is the hope of the archives in terms of futures. The video that I think exemplifies this
principle, as I have discussed it in chapter 5, is Laura Kipnis's "Marx: The Video." Kipnis as well as Jean
François Lyotard (Libidinal Economy 95-114) depicts not only an obsessive-compulsive Marx in the
British Museum archives but also a hysterical one cum two on its way to a third figure of hermaphrodite.
Becoming the third sex. Open to countless sexes. The archive of canonical sexes, we might interject, is not,
therefore, a question of the past, Derrida says, but "a question of the future" (36; cf. 49-50, 68). A question
that is to be kept open. As Ann Fausto-Sterling says, there are one, two, three, four, five and we are still
counting . . . sexes (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 295-96; Vitanza, Negation 380.n40).
Finally—rather, Rebeginningly—Derrida turns to Freud's discussion of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva
(Freud SE, IX) for an exemplar. Gradiva, as Freud explains, is "the girl who steps along" (11). It is this
fictive-"real" female and her peculiar gait in Jensen's story and in Freud's reading that become the issue of
the archive and its potential to remain open. "A young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold," Freud summarizes,
had discovered in a museum of antiquities in Rome a relief which had so immensely attracted him
that he was greatly pleased at obtaining an excellent plaster cast of it which he could hang in his
study in a German university town and gaze at with interest. The sculpture represented a fully-
grown girl stepping along, with her flowing dress a little pulled up so as to reveal her sandalled
feet. One foot rested squarely on the ground; the other, lifted form the ground in the act of
following after, touched it only with the tips of her toes, while the sole and heel rose almost
perpendicularly. It was probably the unusual and peculiarly charming gait thus presented that
attracted the sculptor's notice and that still, after so many centuries, riveted the eyes of its
archaeological admirer. (10; emphasis mine)
There is one singular, peculiar aspect of this relief that strikes Hanold. It is the "gait." Besides experiencing
the studium in respect to the overall relief, as Roland Barthes might say, Hanold is also experiencing a
punctum (Camera Lucida 26-27). Fixed on this image, Hanold begins to wonder " 'whether Gradiva's gait
as she stepped along had been reproduced by the sculptor in a life-like manner' " (11-12). He is obsessed
with the question of whether the origin of this gait is a fiction or reality. He is obsessed with wanting to
enter the archives and to find the origin of the gait, so much so that he begins to test reality by observing
real women walking to see if he can find the gait. Then in the first turn of events, unexpectedly, he dreams
and finds "himself in ancient Pompeii on the day of the eruption of Vesuvious and witnesse[s] . . . Gradiva
at no great distance from him" (12). Hanold cries to her. She stops to look at him, but then continues
walking in her inexplicable gait to the temple. There, resting on the steps, she is covered by the ash falling
from the volcano (12-13). In having entered the dream, Hanold leaves the past of the relief of Gradiva and
becomes a contemporary of Gradiva. When he awakes, he is strung out between the apparent actual time of
Gradiva's past and the virtual time of his dream. Freud says that Hanold begins to "mourn . . . for her as
someone who was lost" (13). Thus far, Hanold's testing reality has failed. But Jensen's story and Freud's
discussion continue, in yet another test and turn of events, moving from dream back to actuality, taking
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Hanold to Pompeii, where he sees (or does he?) "the unmistakable Gradiva of his relief come out of a house
and step trippingly over the lava stepping stones to the other side of the street" (16). Hanold recalls that he
had "travelled" directly to "Pompeii, without stopping in Rome or Naples, in order to see whether he could
find any traces of her. And 'traces' literally; for which her peculiar gait she must have left behind an imprint
of her toes in the ashes distinct from all the rest" (17; emphasis mine). Freud through Jensen and Hanold
continues "to dig deeper" (49, 51) to get to the archaeological truth. (Or does he dig and get closer to a
"truth"? Freud apparently resolves to his own satisfaction the problem of the character's dream and its
relation to the future.)
As Derrida asks, however, "Is fiction outdone here?" by Freud and psychoanalysis? "Does
[fiction] lack knowledge? Did Jensen know less about this than Freud? And Hanold?" (100). In a note to
these questions (fn. 23), Derrida opens up the rhetorical questions, pointing to Freud's various, subsequent
emendations to the story that raised doubt about having resolved to his own satisfaction the problem of the
character's dream. Derrida explains: "One can always dream or speculate around this secret account.
Speculation begins there—and belief. But of the secret itself, there can be no archive, by definition. The
secret is the very ash of the archive, the place where it no longer even makes sense to say 'the very ash' or
'right on the ash.' There is no sense in searching for the secret of what anyone may have know. A fortiori a
character, Hanold the archaeologist" (100). Derrida continues speculating on not only "the inviolable secret
of Gradiva, of Hanold, of Jensen, and then of Freud" but also, focusing more directly, on what Freud
himself "may have wanted to keep secret" (100-101), may have burned "without even an ash" (101). Let us
not forget that Freud was fond of Italy, not only Pompeii but also (the conquest of) Rome (see Swales,
"Freud, Minna Bernays").
Serres returns to Rome, the book of foundations, and begins to talk not of archaeology (the
"science" of digging deep for the truth) but of ichnography (the study of "the mark of the step, the
footprint" [Rome 22; cf. Serres, Genesis 9-26]). Haunted yet fortified by the impossibility of origins—in
terms of Livy's history of Rome—Serres learns to follow footprints. He says, "We will undoubtedly never
know if there is one word of truth in that [story of Romulus and Remus], truth in the sense of a history that
is naïve; we will undoubtedly never know when myth gently descended to earth, the earth of phenomena.
Did Livy know? Livy hesitates; he tells the tale prudently, reporting traditions" (10). He turns to footsteps:
[T]he oxen grazing in the thick grass go everywhere. They don't go diligently, as if subjugated to
the plow, from the left to right and then back, as in morals and politics; they divagate, that's all,
moving all over the space, their tracks leaving a graph that is crazily complex. Fairly quickly this
design must fill up the whole plain, the whole of its surface as well as the little local details. Under
the vegetation, the prairie, is nothing but the tracing of their steps.
Decidedly, this legend is written in Greek. The oxen, who leave behind them the boustrophedon
when they labor, here leave a prairie thick with ichnographic signs. . . . The boustrophedon is a turning in
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two directions, but ichnography goes in all directions; it is the design left on the ground by the herd when it
rambles, when each brute beast drawn by the turf, the odor of flowers, or bothered, driven, teased by flies,
dazed by a shadow, or going to lick another's neck, wanders without knowing where or why. Imagine the
earth of the field, under the grasses, after a day of the herd's wandering. Imagine the earth of Rome after a
thousand years of trampling by Romans. Imagine the earth of the forum after the hammering of the mob's
feet. And now decipher this ichnography. Here is the last tableau of the Herculean field, here is the first
tableau of Rome; these tableaux prescribed all directions, all meanings. There is prescription of all meaning
before the inscription of a single meaning. At the beginning is ichnography. That is to say, the integral, the
sum, the summary, the totality, the stock, the mine, the ensemble of meanings. The possible, the capacity.
(22-23)
Ichnography is in—and yet, outside folded in—a time of writing before the excluded third, or
middle, before the boustrophedon, before archaeology. Gradiva's is a stepping gait of writing before the
boustrophedon. Ichnography is "what comes out of the black box. . . . The bellowing of oxen. . . . What
comes out of the black box? Noise. Voices, cries, pleas—a brouhaha" (31). What comes out of the black
box? The black box is the source of the archive. There are those, rotten with perfection, suffering from the
fever and the death drive, who would make the archive systematic. What comes out of the black box?
The ox bellows; it is the next victim at the altar set up for Hercules. After all, oxen are going to die
from then on; they die in substitution for violence immemorial, for everyday violence. They low
with regret at the time of their separation; they low at the moment of sacrifice, knife at the throat.
Attacked, overwhelmed, and victimized, Cacus cries out; besieged, surrounded, and attacked by
the shepherds, Hercules cries out; he calls out for help, and Evander arrives to save him by making
him sacred. What comes out of the black box is the victimized voice, a pitiful cry. I did say
victimized. The ox on the altar takes the place of Hercules; Hercules amid the herdsmen took the
place of Cacus. Each one in turn takes the place of all the rest; that is the original meaning of the
word victim [Serres's emphasis]. The victim is a substitute, a replacement; the victim is vicar-ious,
the victim's place is a vicarious place. . . . Let's start again. Hercules is a robber. Hercules is
robbed. He is a murderer who is going to be murdered. He is deified. He take on all values: a base
man, a hero, a god. Cacus is a robber. Cacus is robbed. As much robber and robbed as the hero
himself, and just as confident of this strength. . . . The tracks cross and crisscross in every
direction, and the word tells all, murmuring [emphasis mine], perhaps, like Carmenta. The voice
of the prophetess says one thing for another, says this instead of that; it signifies by substitution.
The truth is never anything but a stability among substitutions, an invariance amid their change.
(31-32)
The truth of the archive is never anything but a stability among substitutions, an invariance amid their
change. These above direct quotes are long, non-traditional, and often require an apology to the reader. But
the footsteps of the oxen and the gods and the men and women and the termites are transversally long and
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tireless. In reading these long quotes with near conjugated catalogs of this and that here and there from
Serres, we are not far from a Leibniz-Borges-Foucault-Serres-Deleuze bloc of neo-baroque writings that
read like attempts at the paralogies of monadologies and theodicies. What comes out of the black box,
monad? "[O]ne Sextus will go to Corinth and become a famous man, while another Sextus will go to
Thrace and become king, instead of returning to Rome and raping Lucretia, as he does in the first
apartment" (Deleuze, Fold 61-62). The black box. Which would be wheres we are going, tramping,
tramping, tramping. In this vagabond style. On the road.
What follows is not so much What follows, but where we move transversally across the far,
farscape of what it means to be extra-human (a superject in a superfold).
"[T]he genealogist sets out to study the beginning—numberless beginnings whose faint traces and
hints of color are readily seen by an historical eye. The analysis of decent permits the dissociation
of the self, its recognition and displacement as an empty synthesis, in liberating a profusion of lost
events."
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (146; emphasis mine).
Deleuze (Foucault, "A New Archivist"): What would it mean to be a "new" archivist! (This is not
a question, but an ex-claymation.) And while we are at it, What would it mean in terms of a "new"
memory! The old archive that was and still remains alongside memory will but continue. It is the archive of
memory that perhaps began with the building of a termitarium. Termites, as Serres suggests, began to roll-
up balls of clay and deposited them all along the Mediterranean coastline. (How does one write the ragged
edges of this coastline! any longer, when it is a Transalpine writing that is insisted on by the pedagogues
and, therefore, the protocols of writing!) The termites carry the balls to a site and deposit them. Return,
carry, deposit. They eternally return. The termites are patient. As Serres thinks: "The waves of termites do
not stop" (Rome 2). The wayves ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ cannot stop, but return, carry, deposit. The
termites are patient. Serres adds: "These termites are the guardians of the possible. They sow a time of
waiting, while the crystal next to them solidifies law and repetition" (3; Genesis 22-25). Termites and
thinking are patient. In their waiting. Termites thinking, thinking termites, require patience. Eventually,
perhaps, the termitarium becomes the seven hills of Rome. But first, Alba had to be destroyed. Troy
destroyed. There had to be, if memory serves us right, a dance of the tarantulas, 5 which continues to this
day and, if I were a dance forecaster, I might be able to say, continues through tomorrow. But it is not a
necessity to be, it need not will to continue to be. After the dance, after the hatred is brought back to full
affect, then Alba is destroyed. Helen is abducted. (We will return to abduction.) Penthesilea is killed and
mutilated. (She chooses to kill or die, and not to live.) Troy is destroyed. The Vestals. The Sabines. And
then, Lucretia. Eros and Thanatos. It continues, though not by necessity or will. It is rapes all the way
down. Or should I say, it is Chaste Rapes all the way down. Make two points and plot a line of rapes. Start
anywhere in an archive, say, with Romulus and Remus—"legendary sons of violence and rape, sons of the
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god of war and a chaste, primitive priestess" (Rome, 9)—and we get "Romulus kills Remus, and Rome is
founded" (9).
What would it mean to be a "new" archivist! Perhaps we have never been primary achivists except
by way of destroying cities and abducting women. Serres appears to tell us—he does tell us, in his own
word, "naively"—that the archive is "the black box." 6 He tells his readers: "I want to recount the
foundation; I want to know what it signifies, to understand the gesture and, if possible, the city itself. I will
do it naively; I arrive at the banks of the Tiber without ideas, without methods, unarmed, alone" (Rome 9).
And yet, there is always the guide book for tourists of antiquities. For Serres, as well as for Norman O.
Brown, the guide book is Livy's History of Rome. But then, Serres asks, "Did Livy know? Livy hesitates;
he tells the tale prudently, reporting traditions" (10). So(w), Serres, with, and yet, without, a written
guidebook, begins to follow the trampings in the sky and all along the surface of the ground and well into
the caves:
Hercules reads tracks. . . . Hercules at first stays silent, then hears the voice of oxen. The reading
of Hercules precedes that of Evander [inventor of writing]; the god knows how to read a meaning
[sens, which indicates both meaning and direction] that man did not put there. The hooves of oxen
mark out and keep a meaning in the mud and dust. It is a question both of meaning and of
direction in space. The oxen in the cavern, Cacus's black box [Cacus lives in a cave, or cavern],
make us think, by the races they have left, that they are not there; they make us think, by their
sound, that they are. The origin of sense is there and is absent. It is black—it both is and is not.
Well before the writing of Evander—of man, of the good man, of historical man, who is
accomplished because he writes—the sacred oxen of Hercules left tracks in space; before the
language of Evander, the brute beast lends its voice. The first mark on the soft earth, the first
bellowing in the tenuous air of dawn, by the beast, before man—prehistory. Already meaning has
happened; it comes right out of the black box [the cave, the matrix]. Already the mistaken sense
bars it and forbids a return to the source. Already the voice calls out to meaning and leads back to
the origin—in the cavern full of shadow where Cacus is murdered. From this mouth of shadow
surge the resulting scratches on the earth; from this source of deaf shadow comes our memory.
The writing of the beast is already found to be false; it says nothing yet, but nonetheless it already
misleads us. The voice of the beast leads us back to the origin, back to murder. The murder of
Cacus by Hercules. Evander, or writing—I mean the human, the historical—does not make
mistakes; it builds an altar or temple, even the greatest of altars, Ara Maxima, on the site of the
murder. And this was the first sacrifice—when oxen were killed instead of Hercules.
Taking the auguries, before our first gesture, before the first word, before the first chariot tracks
across the space, the soil of Rome, taking the auguries, before men act, requires recognizing
sounds and tracks in places where we believe that only our sounds and our tracks signify. It
requires recognizing with humility that there is meaning in the world before Evander writes it,
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efore Carmenta cries it out. Before the voice and writing, oxen leave hoofprints in the mud and
dust and bellow within the cave. Before there are men in cities, there are the fights of vultures.
There is noise in the world before we give ours voice, before the crowd begins to grumble. . . .
There is sense in space before the sense that signifies. . . . Certainly we cannot say anything
reasonable about it yet; but we cannot do anything without reaching with both hands into the
original sense [both meaning and direction]. Inauguration [in + augury, fore-telling] is this
prehistory. (Rome 12-13)
What would it mean to be a "new" archivist, or anarchivist?! Brown, somewhat similar to Serres, has
written in his section "Nature" in Love's Body,
Human history begins in caves. . . . The history of mankind goes from the natural cave to the
artificial cave, from the underground cave to the above-ground underground. . . . Troy, the
archetypal city, is the archetypal maze. The spiral is the entrails; and the entrails are 'the palace.' . .
. The mazes in Medieval Europe, called walls of Troy, were the scene of dancing games called the
game of Troy: a penetration of the maze, to win or capture a maiden. The game of Troy, a military
game of evolutions by two groups on horseback, a mock battle of alternate flight and pursuit; just
like the Cretan labyrinth, says Virgil. The game of Troy is the siege of Troy, to capture a maiden.
(38-40)
All the documents, all of Kate Millett's conversations in The Basement, all the banging on the walls with
the shovel by Sylvia Likens, all the scratchings on the wall of the cellar by the unnamed French woman of
Hiroshima, Mon Amour, tell us of the capture and recapture and rape-Troy-dance, dance-Troy-rape, of
Sylvia in the cave. We have but to read these sounds in the muted air. Sylvia's history begins and ends in
the cave (from womb to basement to tomb); the unnamed French woman's history, however, begins in the
cave and ends in living. Or at least it is nice to think so. There is (no) flying away into the sunset at the end
(rebeginning?) of the film. The sunset or sunrise can still remain eclipsed for so many by the atomic blast.
With the dead from the blast, living on. Serres, however, speaks into the cave: "Antiquity never ceased to
lament the horrors of the Trojan war, as we never cease to lament the day of Hiroshima; if we want to make
history, let us forget that once and for all, though everything comes from there. The ancient history comes
from the end of Troy, as our new history comes from the end of Hiroshima; let us not forget it" (Rome 40;
emphasis mine).
What would it mean to be a "new" archivist, or anarchivist? Deleuze says, "A new archivist has
been appointed" (Foucault 1). Deleuze is obviously pointing to Foucault. In turn—but there are many
turns—Foucault points to Flaubert. The new archivist or anarchivist would be exemplified in Flaubert's
writing The Temptation of St. Anthony. Which, as Foucault says in "Fantasia of the Library," is Flaubert's
erecting his "art within the archive" (Language 92). And which Foucault again says is Flaubert's "library
[that] is opened, catalogued, sectioned, repeated, and rearranged in a new space" (105; emphasis mine). In
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which there is only "the indefinite murmur of writing" (93). New monsters appear in this space, monsters
that had not even been thought by the necessity of having to de-monster them (94). (As St. Anthony reads,
the monsters come out of the book and surround him in this new space.) This space, Foucault writes, is "an
extremely complicated space" (95; emphasis mine). This space houses "a murmuring which repeats,
recounts, and redoubles itself endlessly, which has undergone an uncanny process of amplification and
thickening, in which our language is today lodged and hidden" (55). There is something heard but mute.
Something visible yet invisible. It is the task of the archivist to "make a new start" (109) in this space.
Make a new start with the monsters. With the counter-memory that they all mis/represent. Make
rebeginnings with more rebeginnings. Following the murmurs.
For Foucault, something happens toward the end of the eighteenth century. Language (langue,
logos) takes on an autonomous character. It is in the nineteenth century, that language through literature
takes on a life of its own. Expressing its own experiences. As Foucault states: "Man had been a figure
occurring between two modes of language" (Order 386). Man has spoken his own experiences; now, it is
the counter-memory that speaks its own experiences. Donald Bouchard suggests that the counter-memory
of language expresses its own "history of otherness: violence, transgression, madness, sexuality, death, and
finitude" (preface, Language 8). These experiences of language "penetrate into the domain of discursive
thought" (8). These experiences can be seen as the eternal return of the repressed. But they are "neither
visible nor hidden" (Archaeology 109). These experiences of language create third paraconceptual
rebeginning atopoi such as a nonpositive-affirmative spaces. (Heterotopia.) Outside of, at the threshold of,
the binary negative-positive space comes the nonpositive-affirmative space. Foucault explains:
This philosophy of nonpositive affirmation is . . . what Blanchot was defining through his
principle of 'contestation.' Contestation does not imply a generalized negation, but an affirmation
that affirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity. Rather than being a process of thought [such as
passive nihilism] for denying existences or values, contestation is the act which carries them all to
their limits and, from there, to the Limit where an ontological decision achieves its end; to contest
is to proceed until one reaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit
defines being. There, at the transgressed limit, the 'yes' of contestation reverberates. (Language 36;
cf. Bataille, Inner Experience 102)
Contestation is a transgression without negation: "Transgression opens onto a . . . constantly affirmed world
. . . without shadow or twilight, without that serpentine 'no' that bites into fruits and lodges their
contradictions at their core. It is the solar inversion of satanic denial. It was originally linked to the divine. .
. . [I]t opens the space where the divine functions" (37). With the reintroduction of the divine (but in a non-
nostalgic manner), 7 Foucault points to contestation as "the instantaneous play of the limit and of
transgression [itself as] the essential test for a thought which centers on the 'origin' [archive], for that form
of thought to which Nietzsche dedicated us from the beginning of his works and one which would be . . . a
Critique and an Ontology, an understanding that comprehends both finitude and being" (37-38; emphasis
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mine). Contestation speaks of a paracritique by way, by wayves, of tests. But again, not tests predicated on
the possibilities of true or false, not yes or no, but on nonpositive affirmations. The archive speaks from
these newly opened spaces. Instead of the author speaking, language speaks from these spaces. (But this is
not a logos speaking from a transcendental realm but from a set without a set of discursive formations. It is
important to keep in mind that Foucault quite systematically moves from this historical event in his
discussions of counter-memory to practices. Therefore, it is a question of practice, which we will
eventually get to in terms of attempting to "read" the counter-memories.)
In dealing with the (open) question, What is an author?, Foucault picks up on this space to speak
of a different notion of author, one that develops perhaps in the nineteenth century. If not new monsters,
then it would become new writing monstres that would, in a manner of speaking, demonstre newly
discovered monsters. Foucault points to Freud and Marx as exemplars of what he refers to as "a singular
type of author who should not be confused with 'great' literary authors [perhaps such as Flaubert], or the
authors of canonical religious texts, and the founders of sciences. Somewhat arbitrarily, we might call them
'initiators of discursive practices' " (Language 131). Freud and Marx "cleared," Foucault continues, "a space
for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remains within the field of
discourse they initiated" (132). 8 What both Freud and Marx instituted was the notion of the subject as a
discursive formation. 9 Instead of just writing their texts, Freud and Marx "both established [with their
discourse] the endless possibility of discourse" (131). They "not only made possible a certain number of
analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but . . . made possible a certain number of differences. They
cleared a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within
the field of discourse they initiated" (132). Foucault, however, says:
the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of
an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its system of
dependencies. . . . [W]e should ask: under what conditions and through what forms can an entity
like the subject appear in the order of discourse; what positions does it occupy; what functions
does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse? In short, the subject (and
its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analysed as a complex and variable
function of discourse. (138; cf. Deleuze, Foucault 87-91)
On questions concerning the status of the subject, the author, "we would hear little more than the murmur
of indifference [i.e., indifferentiae]" 10 (138). For Foucault, the source is "an anonymous field" (122).
Deleuze in his book Foucault takes up this space cleared by Foucault as well as by Freud and
Marx. Foucault is concerned with a "reading" of this murmur that cannot be read. At best, he clears a
paraconceptual space for it. Foucault is forever clearing topological spaces: Real, utopic, and heterotopic
(see "Of Other Spaces"). As we move more and more into the third space of heterotopia, we begin to see
that for Foucault the author or subjectivity is eclipsed by the murmur. 11 He attempts, as he says in The
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Archaeology of Knowledge, "to define a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological
theme" (16). He says: "The analysis of statements operates . . . without reference to a cogito" (122). And
yet, there are discursive formations, or what Foucault refers to as "statements" or "statement-events" (79-
87, 106-17). The statement-event speaks from the third person such as "it is said" or "it is raining," etc.
(122; cf. Deleuze, Foucault 55).
Foucault distinguishes among propositions, phrases, and statements. While human beings establish
and make propositions and phrases, discursive formations originate statements. "A statement belongs to a
discursive formation as a sentence belongs to a text, and a proposition to a deductive whole. But whereas
the regularity of a sentence is defined by the laws of a language (langue), and that of a proposition by the
laws of logic, the regularity of statements is defined by the discursive formation itself" (116). Statements
are subject, nonetheless, in the archive to the system of their functioning (see 129-30). Most importantly,
The description of statements does not attempt to evade verbal performances in order to discover
behind them or below their apparent surface a hidden element, a secret meaning that lies buried
within them, or which emerges through them without saying so; and yet the statement is not
immediately visible; it is not given in such a manifest way as a grammatical or logical structure. . .
. The statement is neither visible nor hidden. (109; emphasis mine)
Foucault continues, "Although the statement cannot be hidden, it is not visible either; it is not presented to
the perception as the manifest bearer of its limits and characteristics. It requires a certain change of
viewpoint and attitude to be recognized and examined in itself. Perhaps it is like the over-familiar that
constantly eludes one" (110-11). These statements comprise the archive (129-31).
As Deleuze writes, "The new archivist proclaims that henceforth he will deal only with statements.
He will not concern himself with what previous archivists have treated in a thousand different ways:
propositions and phrases" (Foucault 1). How, then, would a statement present itself? (Especially a
statement concerning Chaste Rape!) It is the case, as Deleuze points out, that the new "archivist [Foucault]
deliberately refuses to give examples. He believes that he never stopped giving them in the past, even if at
the time he was unaware that they were examples. Now the only formal example he analyses is intended to
be disquieting: a series of letters" (2; emphasis mine). What Foucault gives is this scandalous exemplar:
"The keyboard of a typewriter is not a statement; but the same series of letters, A, Z, E, R, T, listed in a
typewriting manual, is the statement of the alphabetical order adopted by French typewriters" (Archaeology
86). The What? and the How? of a statement is impossible to understand semiotically across sentences,
propositions, or speech acts. It is impossible. In thinking (about) the statement, I am brought to other
similar formulas of statements such as Herman Melville's Bartleby who speaks, "I would prefer not to."
This appears to be a sentence, and yet as many point out it is not a sentence, nor a proposition, but a rare
singular statement, on the verge of becoming its own language (see Blanchot, Writing 11-12; Deleuze,
Essays 68-90; Agamben, Potentialities 243-71, Coming Community 35-37; Derrida, Gift 74-76). I am
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ought to yet another almost so-proper (name) statement, G.L.U.e, to which I will return. There are still
other exemplars ready at hand. They are pure enunciations, as Giorgio Agamben says, that do "not refer to
[any] text of what is uttered but to its taking place" (Remnant 137-38), its presencing (see, e.g.,
Potentialities 39-47; cf. Heidegger, On Time and Being 1-24).
But I would like, briefly, to return to a possible rebeginning statement, one that I mentioned so
long ago at the re/beginning of Chaste Rape. Recall the writing, branding, on the abdomen of Sylvia Likens
in The Basement. The children in their writing-branding use two curlicues of a hot iron to write "S" on
Sylvia's abdomen (283-84). The effect would render the "S" approximately in this fashion, "§". The
children intend to brand an "S" but make the mistake, however, of branding a "3"! Whether it is a single
letter on the abdomen to signify "slave" or three slaves (the three "S"s of the girls, who were all
contingently substitutable for Sylvia), or whether it is to signify "sacrifice," or whether together in relation
to the other alphabetic characters and sentence on the abdomen it is to signify "I am a pro3titute and proud
of it"—whether it is to signify at all—does not matter. The accident of the child-writer (specifically,
Rickie) not knowing how to spell "prostitute" (or what it even might mean) and the accident of the absence
of an "S" and the mistake of trying to confabulate an "S" by making two curlicues in opposite directions—
all these and some other unaccounted for accidents are what make for a rare singular statement. This is
writing by the infans. This accident cum statement in The Basement is a writing of in-fancy. 12 The child
writes "Pro3titute." 13 While Freud might be given to interpreting this accident in terms of a paraphraxis, we
will not, since this is an offspring of Freud's possible thinkings of hermeneutics but in terms now of a
discursive formation, which is not to be interpreted. At all. But then, What are we to do with such a
discursive formation, this statement-event? It is horror + something else. It is not just a question of What to
do about this horrific everyday event, but a questioning of what to think about the "+". Sylvia, in her sexual
exclusion and torture, has become, if we start at the level of etymological reading, a prostitute, pro +
stature, a forward placement, or a being placed forward. For hire. Given what Gertrude says, Sylvia and her
sexuality, her life force, is placed for ridicule. For abjection. Sylvia is, as a prostitute, lexicographically, a
subject, a being thrown below. But double thrown, and cancelled out, for she has been denied her own
(eigen) nature, life. As Serres says: "Sub-ject: that is to say, thrown to the ground, trampled underfoot,
lying under the crowd or the group" (Rome 26). The children tramp on what they sub-ject into calling a
tramp. There is this writing all over the surface of Sylvia. But then with the introduction of the "3" for the
"S," in "pro3titute," with the introduction of moving from a subject to a passing through object and abject,
by wayves, however, of an accident, Sylvia can be seen as becoming a third figure, a whatever being or
singularity. She has become, as Millett makes it possible for us to see in her "conversations," the exemplary
being of Agamben's "pure singularities [that] communicate only in the empty space of the example"—
which is precisely what Millett accomplishes through or by wayves of in-habiting the empty example of
Sylvia—"without being tied by any common property, by any identity. [Pure singularities] are expropriated
of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself, the sign ε. Trickster or fakes, assistants or 'toons,
[sexual predator or sexually violated], they are the exemplars of the coming community" (Coming
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Community 10-11). 14 They signal the counter-memory, the hystery of otherness: again, "violence,
transgression, madness, sexuality, death, and finitude" (preface, Language 8). From an intended "S" to an
accidental "3" to an exemplary "ε." Epsilon. The statement now reads "S, 3, ε." This is the imprint of the
"new body of [in]humanity" (see Coming Community 49-51). 15 Sylvia is physically written to the outside
of the community of homo sacer (Agamben) to that community that is not a community but only appears
repeatedly in its presencing. In between. In Limbo (Coming Community 5-7). What "S, 3, ε." says, if it
says anything, in its presencing, is presently unreadable. Sylvia is re-leased in as much as the prisoner is
released at the end of Kafka's In the Penal Colony. Sylvia is released posthumously by Millett's writing. Let
us not bother about what "S, 3, ε" might mean, for while it is a statement for us, it is the stuff of another
logos in Limbo, where children create and decreate with a language that adults have set aside—
misplaced—a capacity to follow. It is not just a matter of suffering the infans, but living with their
languages. In writing the disaster of their languages. They—the infans—must return and are returning to
their "limbo" (cf. Blanchot, Writing 67). To their own proper aplace (eigen) (cf. Heidegger, What is Called
Thinking? 50; Agamben, Impotentialities 117). 16 Their own counter-memory.
How again would a statement present itself? Taking Place. Greg Ulmer, aka, GLUE, does not
refuse to give examples (exemplars) of what he might or could call statements. When Ulmer dis/engages in
chorography (choragraphy), exemplary statements abound. And yet, it is not Ulmer—though it may be
G.L.U.e—giving examples. Examples give, or gift, themselves by taking place in the empty space between
language and the archive (see Agamben, Remnant 146), in the empty space left alongside, or at the
threshold of what goes for meaning, propositions, phrases, speech-acts (Agamben, Coming Community 9-
11). Examples of statements are remnants, remainders, leftovers, pot-latch-luck, from traditional logos and
mythos. These examples presence themselves in accidents or in language inviting-instructing writers to
write the paradigm, para-deigma. To write all the potential meanings—without choosing between or among
them—so as to bring forth a writing of the accident (see Ulmer, Heuretics 48). But perhaps there is a
difference here between Foucault and Ulmer in writing the "meanings," and yet, it is not necessarily
"meanings" that are being written in a chorography. Instead, it is a realizing of the impotentiality of
compossibility (with a rebeginning of realizing its incompossibilities) of parameanings (cf. Serres, Genesis
44). As Ulmer tells us, there is yet an interpretation of the chorography "Derrida at Little Bighorn." 17
Which does not mean that someone who is rotten with perfection will not attempt one or any interpretation,
and in doing so, there will no longer be, for that interpreter, "Derrida at Little Bighorn." If not meaning,
then, perhaps chorography allows us to ease drop on Foucault's "murmur" or poach near the Plato-Derrida-
Ulmer bloc of writings in relation to Khora. 18
G.L.U.e is a peculiar attachment, strange attractor, to Ulmer. Who answers the question "Why
Glue?" with an answer that is a not an answer, opening up potentiality:
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In Glas Derrida devotes considerable attention to the phenomenon of agglutination, and speaks of
the gl and the glu. This theory resonated with the phrase used by peers to tease me in grade school
(generating Elmer's Glue from Ulmer). My interest in arts using collage equaled my interest in
theory: the art of collage has been defined as the art of gluing. One negative review described
Applied Grammatology as 'sticking to Derrida like glue.'
My initials are G.L.U. + the French silent e. The properties of glue are suggestive of my concern
with group formation, with a certain kind of community creation. I have not done a full
examination of the vehicle. I use glue online, usually in a MOO setting, but also in e-mail.
Students often remind me about how glue is made. I have not thought about the implications of
that yet. 19 (Ulmer's emphasis)
As to the imPLIcations of how glue or G.L.U.e is made from horses or oxen's hooves, we need only recall
the connections with Serres's discussions of oxen tramping and tramping the un/kind of writing they do,
ichnography, which in itself is a chorography. Tramping an originary form of graphing. (It is Ich No write,
a subject not-writing, a noone-writing. A post-subjectivity-writing. A whatever-exemplary-writing.) Nor
should we neglect writing the rest of the paradigm (all of the possible, incompossible meanings) here in
terms of Serres's notion of
multitudes [that] are inclusive, agglutinative. They are included. . . . They are open. To be open is
to be in such a space. When [these multiplicites] exclude a third, they are closed. They enter into a
hard undeformable space. To exclude is to be closed. As soon as there is an excluded third,
inclusion is not reciprocal. The one who closes is either the excluded third or the third man,
inventing at the door a game other than the game inside. (Rome 179-80)
The Ichnos, "the mark of the step, the footprint" (22) is everywhere but mostly in the empty space of an
exemplary writing. (Recall in chapter 1, the swollen foot broaching the subject.)
Although Ulmer does not work with Foucault directly, he does link up with that para-universe or –
multiverse of a network of statements in discourse formations and practices that we find throughout
Foucault's discussions in The Archaeology. Foucault is interested in a statement as "a strange event" (28),
unlike other discourse events around this uncanny event. He wants to read what is excluded by, made
impossible by, the logic of propositions, phrases, and speech-acts. He is interested in "relations between
statements . . . relations between groups of statements . . . relations between statements and groups of
statement and events of a quite different kind" (29). Foucault is interested in their overall "connexion" [sic]
(33; cf. 4-5, 11, 75, 207) or "interconnexion" (35). Following this view of the relations among statements,
Foucault says, "One would no longer seek an architecture of concepts sufficiently general and abstract to
embrace all others and to introduce them into the same deductive structure; one would try to analyse the
interplay of their appearances and dispersion" (35; emphasis mine). Foucault thinks, "it is legitimate in the
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first instance to suppose that a certain thematic is capable of linking, and animating a group of discourses,
like an organism with its own needs, its own internal force, and its own capacity for survival" (35;
emphasis mine).
Similarly—and rather heretically, while heuristically and heuretically—Ulmer uncovers what
remains silent because of the exclusionary value of academic writing. He is interested, therefore, in
"associational networks" (Heuretics 18; cf. 216). He is interested in "connectionism" (36), in moving "from
linear indexical to network associational, from alphabetic to electronic cognitive styles" of thinking and
writing (36). He is interested in "replac[ing] topos itself (not just one particular setting but place as such)
with chora" (33; cf. 48, 69-70). He is interested in taking place. Ulmer-G.L.U.e is less interested in
hermeneutics (interpreting, as taught and stressed in the academy), but more so in euretics (inventing the
new, experimenting) (Teletheory 19). Ulmer writes: "Euretics, in short, does not interpret art; it uses art for
the making of theory" (20). Most clearly delineated with Foucault, Ulmer writes: "The usefulness of the
mise en abyme [the embeddings] of choral work [i.e., choral thinking, writing, reading] is that it allows one
to show what cannot be stated directly in propositions" (Heuretics 148; emphasis mine). Or in phrases, or in
speech-acts. Hence, Ulmer attempts to reason by wayves of memory, reminiscences of times past (lost) but
also of times future (not yet invented), rather than by traditional logic. He reasons by wayves of the hysteric
(hysteryses, yeses, affirming in the text what is not in the text of the world yet or not seen as being there)
rather than by way of obsessive forms of logic (37). Not A is A, but A is B is C is D is . . . Z, in
numberless, yet finite, combinations and permutations unto
A, Z, E, R, T;
S, 3, ε;
G.L.U.e.
(If I could, I would add the image of the bicycle, as I referred to it in chapter 7, as a photograph in Helke
Sander's Liberators Take Liberties, or a frame of the melted, blast-heat-restructured bicycle in the museum
at Hiroshima in Duras's film. There are no letters to extract from either image, which remains in this case
"forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash,
sparkle or shimmer" [Deleuze, Foucault 52].) But this is not about the mere inclusion of alphabetic
thinking, reading, writing. Not about "A" and whatever follows, or rather whatever does not follow, non
sequitur, paralogies. "A" is all the remnants. Which can speak but only in a mute voice. "A" is writing the
paradigm. The uncovering, as Foucault says, of the statements that are Chaste yet not hidden. The
uncovering of the modals and the contingencies. Therefore, or rather W.hereon, Ulmer would reason by
way of conduction. Intuitions. Artificial stupidity (Heuretics 37-38). 20 But to get to conduction, Ulmer first
reviews deduction, induction, but most assuredly abduction. Thinking by way, and at times by wayves, of
the detective who would but abduct. Are not pulp fiction detectives always abductors! Yet, a detective cum
euretician who would have no sub-jectivity.
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Let us take a side-glance. Abduction lives a double life unto death. It is a double articulation on its
wayves to a third art.iculashun, conduction. Abduction, in Derrida-Ulmer's thinking is itself a choral word,
which "sets a series [of associations] going, a movement or passage through language, a spreading memory,
drawing to itself an associated range of meanings. The choral word produces the paradigm, the
combinatorial of possibilities, from which the inventor selects, and the selections made . . . do not limit the
subsequent influences of the series" (Heuretics 227). ABDUCTION. The choral word. The puncept. What
are the associations? Let us experiment, not interpret.
Here—before w.here—we have the double meaning, the yoking of rape (sexual violence) and
logic (an inference reaching for the conditions of infallibilism by way of the excluded third). For the
longest, rape was rendered by way of the word abducted or abduction. The exemplar was most often the
abduction of Helen. It was not until recently that a translator rendered the Greek word for abduction into
"rape". 21 (Proximity and the unconscious mind of the Dictionary: abbreviation, ABC, abdicate, abdomen,
abduct, abecedarian, abed, Abel, aberrant.) Follow the associations and y/ou're with what we have,
heretofore, thought, written, read.
Besides the meaning of rape, we can associate the word abduction, as Ulmer has, with C. S.
Peirce's notion of abduction as a form of logical inference; Umberto Eco speaks of three kinds of abduction
(see Eco and Sebeok, The Sign of Three). This is the form of thinking invented by the detective C. August
Dupin in E. A. Poe's tales and later picked up by Sir Conon Doyle. 22
Eco's examination of three forms of abduction—i.e., his exemplars—are quite instructive in
picking up on an association we made earlier from Serres, namely, the oxen tramping their hooves across
the European landscape, used by Serres metaphorically, chorally (?), for an originary, inventive "writing"
called Ichnography (chorography?); and from Freud-Derrida, namely, Gradiva's gait and steps in the ashes;
and in picking up on an association Ulmer made from his choral name G.L.U.e, which is made from horses'
(and oxen's) hooves. Eco, in his chapter "Horns, Hooves, Insteps: Some Hypotheses on Three Types of
Abduction," speaks of "hypothesis or overcoded abduction," "undercoded abduction," and "creative
abduction." The latter says "the law must be invented ex novo," creating a "meta-abduction," which is the
means by which someone cum many create "revolutionary" thought (206-07). His prime exemplar for the
latter is from Voltaire's Zadig (or "Zadig ou la destinée"). What Voltaire's Zadig reads, and Eco after him,
in terms of signs in this tale are dogs and horses' foot-hoof prints. The reading of the signs masterfully
illustrate the various ways of establishing inferences by way of abduction. What Eco through Voltaire
"proves [is] that every text-interpreter makes abductions among many possible readings of a text" (213).
What Eco makes clear, however, is that when Peirce begins to establish this third possible way of thinking
and employing creative abduction, Pierce links up abduction, nonetheless, with deduction. The game of
reading and then testing, the game known as experimentally thinking about strange signs, for the scientist
has to move "from fact to laws" (219-20). Hence, the necessity for the linkage with deduction! But Eco
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makes it also clear that in "reading" the strange signs "Detectives are rewarded by society for their
impudence in betting by meta-abduction, whereas scientists are socially rewarded for their patience in
testing their abductions. . . . In fictional possible worlds things go better" (220; emphasis mine).
(Unfortunately, Eco leaves much unsaid here, begging a series of questions. 23 ) Abduction for us here means
at least a metaphorical raping (negating) of language and its possibilities, but more importantly its
incompossibilities.
As I recounted in chapter 4, Freud drew a link—actually, cause and effect—between a person's
being raped and suffering her or his life in hysteria, or hysterical episodes. Often, people who suffer from
hysteria—whether or not the cause is having been raped (i.e., penetrated in a hole of the body) or suffering
from sexual violence (folded all across the surface of the body unto mutilation and then death of their
being)—lose the differences emotionally, or conflate them, between being male and female. There is for
them a con-fusion of sexes and genders (see, e.g., Link-Heer; Showalter, Female Malady 167-94; Kroker
and Kroker, Hysterical Male; Kipnis, "Marx: The Video").
Wheres are we now? I am moving by way of connections and intuitions from abduction-rape
eventually to conduction—the paralogic of electronic networks—but now by way of a middle term that
Freud calls "hysterical conversion" (SE, II: 203-13). One of Freud's favorite analogies is based on
electricity, just as Ulmer's is (e.g., electronic cognition, an electronic academic writing, or "electracy"
rather than literacy). Serres also calls on this same analogy at times in negative terms of semiconductors:
"The semiconductor retains only one meaning or its opposite. The meaning of history first of all calls for its
opposite. Hercules, robber and robbed, murderer and god; Cacus, thief and victim; Horatius, cowardly and
courageous; Romulus, murderer and glorious king. The meaning of history is that full; history does not
make a choice or moralize. It is integral" (Rome 16). Not following the analogy of the semiconductor—
letting only one meaning through—Ulmer asks us to write the paradigm, all the possible meanings in an
integrated set or circuit. (This unkind of integrated writing, of course, could crash the electrical circuits.
Hence, the apparent necessity for resistors, and as Freud has also says, "switching," to suggest an analogue
between a circuit breaker and psychological projections [SE, XVIII: 226-27].) The difference here might be
seen as between academic protocols of writing and experimental aprotocols of writing. Or as prescriptive
wayves of thinking, as writing that is a reading, would have it, "the paradox of the future (post) anterior
(modo)" (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 81).
Freud, in his discussion, begins with the analogy "of identifying nervous excitation with
electricity" or "an electrical system" (SE, II: 203). 24 At greater length, Freud's analogy reads:
If the tension in such a system becomes excessively high, there is danger of a break occurring at
weak points in the insulation. Electrical phenomena then appear at abnormal points; or, if two
wires lie close beside each other, there is a short circuit. Since a permanent change has been
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produced at these points, the disturbance thus brought about may constantly recur if the tension is
sufficiently increased. An abnormal 'facilitation' has taken place. (203)
"Hysterical conversion" comes about, therefore, when, so to speak, the insulation wears thin or bare, with
live wires touching, and there is what Freud refers to as "abnormal affective reactions" or "abnormal
reflexes" (205, 206). But Freud makes a systematic distinction between normal and abnormal people with
respective reflexes. "There are resistances [resistors] in normal people [i.e., people who are "free from
'nerves' "] against the passage of cerebral excitation to the vegetative organs. These resistances correspond
to the insulation of electrical conducting lines" (204) The passage being referred to is from brain to other
organs (heart [palpitations], digestive tract [diarrhea]). For people who are abnormal, easily excitable,
because the insulation is thin or in places exposed, there are abnormal reflexes, some debilitating. Usually
these are people with psychical traumas suffering from hysterical attacks. For normal people who are
affected by excitation, conversion is a rather easy process, one of talking about their problems as in telling
a priest in a "Roman Catholic confessional" (211). Conversion can be as simple as sneezing (206):
excitation, tension, and then an achoooooo. Conversion can be as complex as releasing the irrational nature
of the impulse for revenge and becoming conscious of it (205-06, 207). Freud says that Goethe "discharged
[the desire for revenge] in creative artistic activity [sublimation]" (207).
While there are many degrees along the continuum of possible normal and abnormal reflexes with
hysterical conversions, Freud gives two primary exemplars of sexual traumas that lead to conversions. The
first is of a young boy of twelve years old who was genetically predisposed to neurosis. He came home one
day from school "complain[ing] of difficulty in swallowing and headache" (211), which did not go away
but continued for several weeks. "The boy refused food and vomited when it was pressed on him" (212).
When eventually under Freud's supervision, the boy, with the help of his mother, told the following story:
"While he was on this way home from school [that same day] he had gone into a urinal, and a man had held
out his penis to him and asked him to take it into his mouth. He had run away in terror, and nothing else
had happened to him. But he was ill from that instant. As soon as he had made his confession he recovered
completely" (212). The hysterical conversion here is caused by the visual and auditory trauma of the man's
actions on the boy and then his confessing it: Affective idea, sexual trauma, somatic phenomenon, talking
cure, bringing about the hysterical conversion.
In a second exemplar, "A girl of seventeen had her first hysterical attack (which was followed by a
number of others) when a cat jumped on her shoulder in the dark" (213). It was inferred (abducted) that the
cat induced "fright" (213). But after a while, it became known, Freud says, "that the girl, who was
particularly good-looking and was not properly looked after, and recently had a number of more or less
brutal attempts made on her, and had herself been sexually excited, by them. (Here we have the factor of
disposition.) A few days before, a young man had attacked her on the same dark staircase and she had
escaped from him with difficulty. This was the actual psychical trauma, which the cat did no more than
make manifest. But it is to be feared that in many such cases the cat is regarded as the causa efficiens"
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(213; emphasis mine). Freud leaves unsaid here that the explanation to the girl (or to him) brought about
the full conversion.
It is crucial to understand that there are two possible, interconnected conversions in hystory of one
traumatic event. One is abbreviated and increases, the other is complete and diminishes. For the partial one,
"The excitation arising from the affective idea is 'converted' . . . into a somatic phenomenon" and does not
pass over into a final conversion of relief, having expended the energy (206); for the complete one, the
excitation arises and is "transformed into peripheral nervous excitation" and "flows away as soon as it is
generated. The 'hysterical conversion' is then complete" (207).
Thus far, we have opened up the word abduction in terms of both rape and logic (they are
inextricably entwined) and then we further opened up abduction-rape in terms of Freud's discussion of
"hysterical conversion" (also entwined). The link between rape and hysteria were formerly established in
chapters 4 and 5. Hysterical conversion, based on the analogy of electricity, involves a discussion in Freud
of conduction. The relay from abduction-rape _ abduction-logic _ hysteria has eventually arrived at the
analogy-ratio of high tension or surge in electrical system is to breakdown at weak points in insulation of
electronic conductive lines (short circuit) as nervous excitation (with abnormal reflex) is to hysteria (or
hysterical conversion).
What I want now in continuing these relays of semiconductors is to let flow in this hysterical
medium a variety of semiconductor conversions, but this time, from hysterical-rape-abduction logic (that
would only block the resolution of a conversion) into _ hysterical-conductive conversions (that would
allow for a radiating free from a body all that would haunt it beyond repair). There is a specter of rape that
haunts the body politic. My analogy here is that the cat that frightened, yet made manifest the trauma
somatically, for the young girl, can become—it insists on becoming—Ulmer's and G.L.U.e's heuristic cum
heuretic of CATTt, which asks the analysand (object abjected) to run through the gamut of
C = Contrast (opposition, inversion, differentiation)
A = Analogy (figuration, displacement)
T = Theory (repetition, literalization)
T = Target (apPLIcation, purpose)
t = Tale (secondary elaboration, representability). (Heuretics 8)
Thinking through the CATTt can increase the probability of making manifest and thereby locating the
network of associations that will bring about the hysterical conversion. (This whole attempt, let us not
forget, is about How to live. A Life. As many as possible interconnected.) In part, conversion
(lexicographically, etymologically) deals with logic and the law (property, propriety)—specifically with,
the interchange of a subject with its predicate, or as I will analogically and casuistically stretch the meaning
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of conversion in law, specifically with, the interchange of abduction for conduction. (It all depends on a
pre-fix, a prescription.)
Abduction is like conversion in many ways if we simply think of the abduction of someone's
property—under masculine notions of law—such as Helen of Sparta (Menelaus) into Helen of Troy (Paris).
Menelaus's excitement converts (or undergoes a hysterical conversion) into taking his brothers with him in
a chase after Helen-Paris, all the way to Troy. Menelaus desires revenge. But then, Paris had undergone an
excitation upon seeing Helen, which converts into abducting-raping her. And then, Helen herself, who is
represented so well by Mario Untersteiner in his depiction of her excitation when confronted with
disjunctive logic. To go or not to go? 25 While initially such an abduction-conversion comes out of rape and
leads back to rape (this is the story in its one most authorized version, awaiting multiPLIcation—
conversion—into otherwise versions), hereafter, such a conversion will leave rape narratives altogether for
other incompossible worlds. The fewer the better. The excitation-conversion must move on to other
contingent and modal wayves of thinking, reading, writing rape. As new Romes, new books of yet other
foundations.
But first, we must leave the law that demands inscription, writing, and reading footprints
according to the law of logic. I am wanting, perhaps more than G.L.U.e, to set aside the secular god known
as the detective for a superject, or anarchi-ject. But I do not necessarily leave the semiotic square of the
popcycle, which includes family, entertainment, school, discipline (Heuretics 195). I can see especially the
value of setting aside, if at all possible, various philosophical logics moving from thing to rule, or rule to
case, or case to thing, for taking up with and flowing by wayves of an electronic logic moving from thing to
thing, from singularity to singularity (194-95). But I would not mind also taking up, in another hysterical
conversion, with a Lacanian-Kristevan semiotic square of the master, the teacher, the analyst, and the
hysteric (see Kristeva, Revolution 88; "New Type of Intellectual"; and Vitanza, "Open Letter" 250-80).
Ulmer has this to say about the detective's knowing the world by way of abduction and what
abduction is based on:
The detective, thematizing or personifying the Hermeneutic code, achieves insight by means of
abduction (as C. S. Peirce called it). An abductor comes upon a 'result,' the observed facts of a
situation (the first position, the time of looking). Poe's Dupin . . . assumed nothing, and letting the
object dictate the inquiry and keeping the whole in mind, proved that impossibilities were really
possible. . . . What was 'surprising' or unexpected in the observed phenomena was rendered
'necessary' by the hypothesis. The observation—details, fragments construed as clues—seen but
not yet understood was rendered intelligible by an informed guess, through evaluating it in terms
of a rule.
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The difference between the detective's abduction and the philosopher's induction and deduction is
that the detective reasons with memory rather than argument. In memory information is organized
associationally, so that the 'address' of an item is another item related to the first item by its
content. . . Knowledge is not in a place, it is not there, except as a 'ghost'—as the pattern of
activity of the whole. (215-16)
But here is the rub. What Poe's Dupin, as well as most, if not all fictional and real detectives, have in mind,
in memory reading, is cultural codes that they inhabit (habitus). Ulmer writes:
For the detective working in everyday life, the 'rule' for the abduction comes from what Barthes
called the Cultural or Referential code, the doxa or opinion organizing the common sense of a
culture, its general knowledge or proverbial wisdom (including the 'explanatory' concepts of
School discourse that E. D. Hirsch named 'cultural literacy'). By knowing the topoi of the culture
and subcultures peculiar to the environment of the crime the detective could formulate an
hypothesis (case) that would then be tested against the observed facts (induction). (217)
What finally Ulmer is advocating, therefore, is not abduction (the hermeneutic code) but conduction (the
heuretic code) that invites experimental thinking, writing, reading. (I am well aware that I am breaking
away from Ulmer's partial reliance on cultural literacy as a bridging device to reach cultural electracy. I am
leaving a great part of Teletheory behind and taking up with only a partial reading of Heuretics. I am
advocating a strong reading of Ulmer's hyperrhetoric, while remaining faithful to conduction. But then, I do
only what G.L.U.e. itself has done: bricolage, decoupage, montage [see Ulmer, "Object of Post-
Criticism"].) Ulmer, like Serres, sets aside the detective's thinking by way of abduction. Serres is perhaps
more explicit about throwing off the detective and its ways of thinking. In referring to "Dupin," Serres says,
"Since the time when Remus [and others murdered to found Rome] have come to rest in peace, there is
prescription" (Rome 20). Prescription is the irreversible, and can be seen as the very opposite of imminent
reversibility. "Inventor of the principle of sufficient reason," Serres writes, "Leibniz calls laws of justice the
rules of invariance and stability by which things as well as statements are compensated" (Troubadour 138).
Serres asks suspiciously, "Does this reparative reason conserve some trace in science or rationalism of the
vengeful eye for an eye" (138). His answer is yes: "Justice is founded on it. If there were never prescription
[i.e., the irreversible, stopping that form of justice that demands an eye for an eye], inextinguishable
vengeance would rage. [Rape for rape.] The blinding, sticky emotion would return. The philosophy of
history must be founded on prescription" (Rome 20; emphasis mine). Let us not forget that in Teletheory,
Ulmer rebegins with a new philosophy of history out of Hayden White's experiments and does not found it
on reason (induction, deduction, abduction) but on electricity (conduction) (18-21). Serres continues:
"Inscription, writing, and footprint reveal victim and murderer." Literacy is violence, sexual violence? "But
they [inscription, etc.] flatter above all the police champions; they put on a pedestal the one . . . who is
more intelligent, more refined, more circumspect, and more prudent than any inspector Dupin could be
thought to be. We have arrived, alas, at philosophy that plagiarizes the detective novel" (Rome 20;
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emphasis mine). Along with literacy, even hysteria, hysterical thinking, can become a means of asking
for—demanding and rationalizing—revenge. Freud said as much in one other of his exemplars (SE, II:
207). It is, however, through hysterical conversion that ressentiment can be set aside.
Abduction as rape also follows cultural codes, as writers from Simone de Bouvoir to Andrea
Dworkin have insisted, though abduction may very well owe something to natural codes that would pretend
not to be cultural codes themselves. Either way, abduction must be—if not refused by an act of will (as if it
could be)—set alongside conduction. What is wanted, in line with Serres's sayings, is not inscription,
writing, and footprint that reveal victim and rapist, but prescription, a forgetfulness, which we have alluded
to earlier in several different ways, and which can be seen in terms of Freud's hysterics, their hysteries, or
hystories. 26
It may be that hysteria is a form of resistance. (I am aware that in 1980s-90s feminist thinking, it
was perceived to be resistance itself. But there were collaborative thinkers such as Cathérine Clement and
Hélène Cixous who differed on whether or not hysteria could be turned into anything other than a neo-
conservative, reactionary way of feminist being. [See Newly Born Woman.]) 27 But if thought of in terms of
conduction as in basic electrical circuitry, hysteria can take on rather knowledgeable-powerful and most
important thoughtful (outwardly unthought.full) wayves of avoiding rape after the ultimate act of sub-
jection (negation).
"There is a sense in space before the sense that signifies."
Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations (12-13).
". . . in the interior of the exterior, and inversely."
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (11).
Deleuze (Foucault, "Foldings"): It is just a matter of refolding the world in such a way as to bring
forth new senses (re-directions)—not that late human beings need to fold anything, but something needs be
given them while they are becoming unfolded into some third figure. There is a thinking from the outside,
if only human beings could get to that outside in thinking the yet unthought. This is the paraproject of many
thinkers, heretofore, discussed and worked and played through. Foucault calls on the distinction between
"exteriority" (where light and language are respectively seeing and speaking 28 ) and "outside" (the aplace of
force or forces) (Deleuze, Foucault 86-87). These forces are "always in relation with other forces" (86).
These forces are not in a realm of Being/beings (in forms of immanence, infinity), but in a relation of
beings (imminence, finitude). Deleuze writes: "If seeing and speaking are forms of exteriority, thinking
addresses itself to an outside that has no form. To think is to reach the non-stratified. Seeing is thinking,
and speaking is thinking, but thinking occurs in the interstice, or the disjunction between seeing and
speaking" (87; emphasis mine). Again, it is at an in between, an excluded middle, where the remnants await
our visitation so that they can enunciate through us. But perhaps this is more Derridean in an approach that
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is quite different, yet complementary to Deleuze's approaching of the problem of the outside. I think so.
Elizabeth Grosz thinks so:
Where Derrida could be described as the philosopher who insists on bringing the outside, the
expelled, repressed, or excluded, into the inside of by showing the constitutive trace it must leave
on that which must expel it, . . . Deleuze could be understood as the philosopher who evacuates
the inside (whether of a subject, an organism, or a text, forcing it to confront its outside,
evacuating it and thereby unloosing its systematicity or organization, its usual or habitual
functioning, allowing a part, function, or feature to spin off or mutate into a new organization or
system, to endlessly deflect, become, make. (Architecture from the Outside 72-73)
Grosz turns to the Foucault-Deleuze bloc:
Thought is a confrontation or encounter with an outside. Deleuze deals with this notion of the
outside primarily in two texts, Foucault and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Following a tradition
perhaps initiated by Nietzsche, and following a zigzagging path through Artaud to Blanchot,
Deleuze sees in Foucault, as we ourselves may see in Deleuze, the culmination of this
confrontation between thought and its outside, between thought and the unthought. (66; emphasis
mine)
Let us recall Serres's depiction of a female (figure) kneading dough, making a "new escutcheon,"
"successive coats of arms." Kneading:
Noble quarterings: bars, bends, saltires, fesses, pale and field, chevrons, checky, lozengy, costs,
barrulets. This baker does not stop; she doesn't choose one coat of arms, one set of colors, or one
flag. . . A new fold, an extra folding over, adds to age like a new quarter. If Penelope were a baker
rising at dawn, she would age with each fold; instead she weaves time, but in another direction, as
if the three Fates had returned from hell, reversing the death instinct. . . . Analysis cuts; the baker
folds. . . . The baker writes on an into the palimpsest of flour and water; she leans on the tablet,
imprints on its soft wax, matrix, mold, the white breast of the virgin mother. (Rome, 81)
And yet, no one reads this writing. No one reads that the female-(figure-Penelope)-writing is a
dis/engagement by way of imminent reversibility. Serres says: "Time is the baker's writing, or her absent
writing. . . . It is everywhere and yet nobody looks at it, everywhere present and ignored" (Rome 81). Is our
not reading what the female (figure) has written owing to its being neither visible nor hidden? But we can
see it, even though we cannot read it. While we can see, yet not speak-read, what is written as a statement
on Sylvia's abdomen, we cannot see nor speak the white breast of the virgin mother. Or can we? But I will
contingently assume that we can, given that the white breast is the outside that is folded in, disturbing
thinking. When mothers in church breast feed their infant, the church goers are so disturbed. What remains
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now is to find a way to bring the outside of the statement branded on Sylvia's abdomen and to fold it all in,
disturbing our thinking. We are of course already deeply disturbed by the sentence ("I am a
prostitute/pro3titute and proud of it"), but how disturbed by the statement would we be if we could read "S,
3, _." (I think that in great part, however, this is precisely the unkind of fold that Millett has k/needingly
accomplished in The Basement to reestablish the conditions for the compossibility of both the showing and
the telling to become seen and heard by us. [She has called on all the semiconductors to relay the various
modals and contingencies that can speak the additional statements (Gertrude is evil, Gertrude is a victim of
men, Gertrude is a bad mother, a good mother, and all that Gertrude wanted out of life was a White Castle
hamburger. Etceteras.) and that can allow us to hear what is be.coming spoken.] It is just a matter of going
back and reading countless times what she has kneaded for us countless times. Millett struggles—if I may
assume, that she struggles like a Deleuzean—against what functions to thwart the reading of the statement.
[Cf. Grosz 63.] Like the female [figure], Millett kneads-writes on Aristotle's wax [see De anima 429b.30],
writes nothing but the potentiality to not write [Cf. Agamben, Coming Community 36-37; Potentialities
259]. But perhaps all this writing is saved for future human beings. Who will have learned to think and read
what has lain unthought.)
Foucault-Deleuze are about folding the outside in, disturbing what goes for the disciplinary status
quo. They are writing an imminent reversibility. Refolding everything outside in, bringing in composing
forces to reshape what lies potentially inside. In many wayves, these refoldings are similar to hysterical
conversions. Thinking, or being thought by, the outside has changed human beings, raising their by-now
classic anxiety of being thrown, sub-jected, into this world. As Deleuze says, other forces are reshaping
"the human compound" (Foucault 88). In the classical age, "all the forces of man are referred back to a
force of 'representation' that . . . makes up God and not man" (88; Deleuze's emphasis). It is this particular
fold of being that thwarts human being. "In order for man," Deleuze continues, "to appear as a specific
compound, the forces that create him enter into a relation with new forces which evade that of
representation, even to the point of deposing it. . . . These dark forces of finitude are not initially human but
enter into a relation with the forces of man in order to bring him down to his own finitude, and
communicate to him a history which he then proceeds to make his own" (88; Deleuze's emphasis).
Now all that remains, with human beings' having been born between two images of language, is
whether or not, Deleuze muses, "we can imagine a third draw, the forces of man will enter into a relation
with other forces again in such a way as to make up something else that will no longer be either God or
man" (88-89; emphasis mine). Deleuze puts it more precisely: "In brief, the relation between composing
forces and the outside continually changes the compound form, in other relations, as it is taken up and
transformed by new compositions [incompossibilities within a compossibility]. We must take quite literally
the idea that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides: he is a composition appearing only
between two others, a classical past that never knew him, and a future that will no longer know him" (89).
Deleuze projects that human being is subjected to forces today that have created assemblages of " 'man-
machine' systems" that are a composition that is in "union with silicon instead of carbon" (89). Once in a
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third—i.e., silicon, composition—then all of the outside with its resistances, will make up a new vitalism
(93), a new entity such as super-ject, or what I would call more generally an anarchi-ject. This is what,
Deleuze says, Nietzsche means by the coming, self-overcoming übermensch (92). Human beings'
potentiality is perhaps unlimited after all has been said and undone (93), though such a conclusion has been
so popularized in our cultures of science and cyberpunk fiction that it is easily dismissed. There is always
something in the inside that would thwart thinking from the outside, whatever it might become as a
community.
But the unthought, nonetheless, contingently thinks by having its forces taking place within human
being. Deleuze surveys Foucault's own pessimism, which does not at all prevent Foucault from pushing on
to the next wayves of thinking about a replacement for sub-jectivity. Deleuze points to Foucault's third axis
of Thought. First it was Knowledge and then Power; now, Thought that is Unthought, or in Deleuze's
words: "the relation with the outside, that absolute relation, as Blanchot says, which is also a non-relation
(Thought)" (96). Deleuze continues: "The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by
peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other
than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside" (96-97; Deleuze's emphasis). Foucault-Deleuze
write with topological imPLIcations. Deleuze says:
[I]n all his work Foucault seems haunted by this theme of an inside which is merely the fold of the
outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea. On the subject of the Renaissance madman who is
put to sea in his boat, Foucault wrote:
he is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely [. . .] a prisoner in the midst of what is
the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par
excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. [Madness and Civilization 11]
Thought has no other being than this madman himself. (Foucault 97)
Which is that "double" (98) that Foucault finds within the thinking human being. The double is the other in
thinking itself. (Recall that the philosopher is never alone while on his or her way to language but
encounters "the existence of another language that also speaks and that he is unable to dominate"
[Language 42].) The double is what we have been talking about. But it is the movement to a third figure, or
to threes that we have also been talking about. Knowledge-Power-Unthought. Knowledge-Power-Self
(overcoming). Now we are going apparently from double, to threes, to fours. And then back to thirds in
paraterms of moments, a life.
Never tiring of building on the double or inventing around it, Foucault-Deleuze take sub-jectivity
through four folds, until "there never remains anything of the subject, since he is to be created on each
occasion, like a focal point of resistance" (105; emphasis mine). On each occasion. Or through a series of
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moments. There are these opportune moments, in kairos, when the subject, or rather singularity, comes into
being by folding an outside into an inside, or the singularity, the thinker-madman, is put in the interior of
the exterior, and inversely. There is consequently—or topically, coincidentally—a series without a set that
brings into being a life, a life, a life, a singular life. For Deleuze, all this happens on a plane of pure
immanence (imminence). 29 The moments are crises that are hysterical conversions and that are brought
about through resistance (resistors and semiconductors that at times misfire and let flow more than the
system can deal with, except for kairotic moments) in dis/order to keep the system (i.e., paraelectrical
circuit) from blowing and burning up. Hysterical conversion is wayves of establishing, Foucault-Deleuze
would say, the inclination of subjectivity (as singularities, moments, a life, a life, a singular life immanent
[imminent] to a human being) to "struggle for . . . the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis"
(106). This conversion is a set without a set of wayves opening up to the outside in the inside to modals and
contingencies. Hysterical conversions, with the help of resistors, in a conductive line, are a simple fold of
imminent reversibility. Male to Female; F to M. Approaching con-fusion. Performed rapidly, though
momentarily. But this would be only an initial series of moments approaching a "third figure" (113) that is
on its way, in its own wayves, such as they are, to the coming community.
What Foucault-Deleuze are so ad/ept at performing is thinking itself. Deleuze writes that Foucault
"writes a history of thinking [as Heidegger does], but a history of thought as such" (116). Deleuze, as usual
putting his own imprint on Foucault, says: "To think means to experiment and to problematize. . . . In the
field of knowledge as problem thinking is first of all seeing and speaking, but thinking is carried out in the
space between the two, in the interstice or disjunction between seeing and speaking" (116; emphasis mine).
The aplace of the excluded middle, third. We arrived at this point.less—this filmic history of thinking—in
our musings in chapter 7 about the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, when at the beginning and ending, we
read in the interstices of the two lovers, in the middle of Nevers and Hiroshima, new Rebeginnings for
thinking otherwise, for experiencing, in an Eros sick world, a "nascent love" (Duras 10). The lovers'
meeting was a chance event. As Duras says, it is "a banal tale, one that happens thousands of times
everyday. . . . But [this time] where? Hiroshima" (9; emphasis mine). 30
Yes, the lovers meet by chance, but this time it is a convergence of the outside of a pure
immanence (imminence) of a life being refolded inside a banal tale. Thinking here becomes, Deleuze
would say, "a line that continues to link up random events in a mixture of chance and dependency. . . .
[T]hinking here takes on new figures: drawing out particular features; linking events; and on each occasion
inventing the series that move from the neighbourhood of one particular feature to the next" (117). What is
drawn out, linked, and reinvented as a series for the characters who both become neighborhoods themselves
. . . remember that the French woman says, "Hi-ro-shi-ma. Hi-ro-shi-ma. That's your name" while the
Japanese man says, "That's my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers-in France" (83) . . . What is
drawn out, linked, and reinvented as a series . . . are the moments of the events of VE-day (with the
neighborhoods of Nevers and Paris) and VJ-day (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but this series is without any
morality, ressentiment. The linkage tells us, Deleuze would say, that we should
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think the past against the present and resist the latter, not in favour of a return but 'in favour, I
hope, of a time to come' (Nietzsche), that is, by making the past active and present to the outside
so that something new will finally come about, so that thinking, always, may reach thought.
Thought thinks its own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the
present) and be able finally to 'think otherwise' (the future). (119)
Thinking is then thinking otherwise to will and necessity; it is thinking the outside of modals and
contingencies.
Refusing To Be Female, Refusing To Be Male
"For me the number three is important, but simply from the numerical, not the esoteric point of
view: one is unity, two is double, duality, and three is the rest. When you've come to three, you
have three million—it's the same thing as three."
Marcel Duchamp, in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (47).
Dworkin (Woman Hating)-Stoltenberg (Refusing To Be a Man): What we have been leading
towards is a sexuality or sexualities that are without ressentiment, without resentful thinking that lead to
resentful actions, so as to get to the conditions of the compossibilities of 1001 sexes, singularities. To get
to. Whatever singularities. Exemplary singularities. For every person a sex. As Deleuze and Guattari say,
"Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. . . . Not one
or even two sexes, but n sexes. . . . [T]o each its own sexes" (Anti-Oedipus 296; D&G's boldface and
emphasis).
We need to rebegin with Andrea Dworkin, who writes: "Man, in conceptualizing, has reduced
phenomena to two, when phenomena are more complex and subtle than intellect can imagine" (Woman
Hating 165). But as Dworkin is well aware, men began with one, one sex. As Aristotle says, "The female is
. . . a mutilated male" (Generation of Animals, 737a.27-28). But then men evolved to the concept of two, a
polar reality. M/F. Etceteras: You know the drill. (Oops, I am looking into the camera again.) But have you
seen Shinka Tsukamoto's Tetsuo (Ironman)? which explains this phenomenon so well. He knows the fetish
of the drill.
Against the dominant culture (nomos) and arguing for nature (physis), Dworkin writes: "We are,
clearly, a multi-sexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the
elements called male and female are not discrete" (183; Dworkin's emphasis). Dworkin looks for a model
other than one or two. She turns to mythological characters, but settles on a variety of androgynies. In her
chapter "Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community," she concludes, "The discovery is . . . that
'man' and 'woman' are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian,
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inappropriate to human becoming" (174). She subsequently rethinks sex and sexuality. Based on
documented research and thought as intuitive unthought, she notes little differences biologically between
male and female (what the woman has can be found in the form of vestigial parts and organ in the male,
and vice versa), she exclaims that "there is no reason not to postulate that humans once were
androgynous—hermaphroditic and androgynous," and notes that "chromosomal sex is not only XX or XY.
There are other chromosomal formations," "a person can have the gonads of one sex, and the secondary
sexual characteristics of the other sex" (176-77). Etceteras. We are all sexed by wayves of Etceteras.
My insistence on relating this information by way of Dworkin and not by Luce Irrigaray (This Sex
Which Is Not One), Judith Butler (Gender Trouble), Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies) is rather simple.
While Dworkin talked about this point in the very late 1960s and into 1970s—she published Women
Hating in 1974—she is not recognized nor referred to by the other major feminists. This shrill, rather
embarrassing feminist, embarrassing for some, is not cited. She is excluded from the conversation. 31 But
then, she is not also an academic! Nor is she—I would insist—resentful. Like Millett, Dworkin's thinking is
exemplary.
There is more, however, which I would rather speculate on, in this series of rebeginnings, and that
is the possible conductive links, on the one hand, between the French woman and the Japanese man, in
Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and on the other, between Dworkin and John Stoltenberg. We already have
spoken of the shift from sex to a becoming-relationship in the film, the love that moves beyond what
Antonioni calls a sickness of Eros. I am not suggesting that I am going to draw out an extended
comparison; I am suggesting that you, the reader, need to imagine or investigate what that conductive link
might not so much mean, but rather what it might suggest about sexuality in terms of third sexes and their
relationships as a possible model for a new community not founded on negation (negativity, rape).
Stoltenberg, in "Living with Andrea Dworkin" writes about walking out of a poetry meeting in
1974 and seeing Dworkin, whom he had met previously, and about beginning "to talk, then talk deeply."
He adds: "[O]ur conversation has continued until today." 32 At length he tells us:
That spring [of the meeting] Andrea's first book, Woman Hating, was published. One day she
visited me at my Upper West Side apartment, thrilled to have received her first author's copies.
She gave me one, and I read it immediately, enthralled and laughing and laughing out loud with
joy. I especially remember where Andrea writes that ' "man" and "woman" are fictions,
caricatures, cultural constructs' and that 'we are . . . a multisexed species.' As I described it 15
years later in my own first book, 'that liberating recognition saved my life' [Refusing 29].
Who can explain how anyone recognizes that they have fallen in love and that life apart is simply
unthinkable? All I know is that's what happened to me. Our conversations seemed to want to go on
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forever—so we decided to live together. In August 1993 we celebrated our 19th anniversary—
with orchestra beats to Angels in America. (Online)
Two things remain to be said. The title "Living with" should remind us that in great part the concern of
Chaste Rape is How to live. Is this a beginning, alternative model, exemplar of How to live? In many
wayves, Stoltenberg is suggesting yes, that this is one possible model for a beginning community. Dworkin
had suggested as much in her chapter "Androgyny, Fucking, and Community" (Woman Hating). The
second thing is that Stoltenberg and Dworkin insist on identifying themselves "as gay and lesbian. . . .
[Y]es, Andrea and I live together and love each other and we are each other's life partner, and yes we are
both out." They made this statement in an interview and gave the interviewer the right to take photographs,
which then ended up "sensationalized in Penthouse" (Online).
In Refusing to be a Man, Stoltenberg includes "an address to college students" (25). To open with
a variety of possible neighborhoods, he appropriately gives the students a test:
In the human species, how many sexes are there?
Answer A: There are two sexes.
Answer B: There are three sexes.
Answer C: There are four sexes.
Answer D: There are seven sexes.
Answer E: There are as many sexes as there are people. (25; Stoltenberg's emphasis)
The suggested possible neighborhoods here, however, are incompossible ones cum radical multiplicities.
So, How would you answer this test question?
Throughout the address to students, Stoltenberg takes Dworkin's lead, moving from an imaginary-
eutopian notion of multiple sexualities to saying that such creatures of a 1001 sexualities are not imaginary
but "in fact, are us—in every way except socially and politically. The way they are born is the way we are
born" (27-28; emphasis mine). It might be possible for us to say that Andrea and John live in the chora, the
matrix, the receptacle. They have completely undergone an hysterical re-conversion (back to Plato's
Symposium and before) in terms of conductive logic and linking. They have become, in a word,
hermaphroditic. They have embraced the mythos of androgyny on its way (back) to third figures.
"the third-instructed (one)": Becoming Troubadours
Michel Serres opens his book The Troubadour of Knowledge—which is an involutionary book on
a radical pedagogy—by introducing a configuration (perhaps a heuretic figure)—of a "Harlequin, emperor,
. . . for a press conference" (xiii). 33 The audience is awaiting him to tell of his adventures, but he refuses to
speak of anything. Finally someone questions the Harlequin, emperor: "You who say that everywhere
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everything is just as it is here, can you also make us believe that your cape is the same in every part, for
example in front as it is on the back?" (xiii). The emperor's clothing is "a motley composite made of pieces,
of rags or scraps of every size, in a thousand forms and different colors" (xiii). Still refusing to answer any
questions, the Harlequin, emperor is faced with the audience's ever-growing ridicule, and so he thinks that
his only possibility is to remove his clothes. He takes off his cape, but then there is a layer of the same,
which he takes off, and then again, there is a layer of the same—this apparent return of the same keeps on
returning—until the Harlequin, emperor gets down to "another colorfully patterned body stocking spotted
like an ocelot" (xiv-xv)—pauses for a while, still receiving more ridicule—until yet again he takes this off
and is naked. But the audience's then sees that the Harlequin, emperor is tattooed with still more of the
same: He "exhibits a colorfully patterned skin, more a medley of colors than skin. . . . Even the Harlequin's
skin . . . is a harlequin's coat" (xv). There is a question from the audience as to whether or not the emperor-
Harlequin can flay his own skin. But then, the audience begins to see the truth of the emperor (who has no
clothes): Serres writes: "Harlequin is a hermaphrodite, a mixed body, male and female. . . . The naked
androgyne mixes genders so that it is impossible to locate the vicinities, the places, or borders where the
sexes stop and begin: a man lost in a female, a female mixed with a male. This is how he or she shows
him/herself: as a monster" (xvi).
The Harlequin serves as an exemplar of the excluded third person. As the discussion continues,
Serres focuses on what he calls "the third-instructed (one)," which is a literal translation of the title in
French (Let Tiers-Instruit). The translator, however, thinks that this is too strange in English and so opts for
the image of the historical Troubadour who "traveled through medieval Provence" teaching (ix; cf.
Agamben, Language and Death 66-81). The central focus of The Troubadour of Knowledge is education,
specifically, pedagogy, with the goal of producing more Harlequins. Illustrating what such a paraprogram
of education and pedagogy might be, Serres takes the reader through a series of conductive paralogical
connections, with the child, or adult, in the educational process passing through a rebirth canal (the third
[middle] place), or the chora. As the child, or adult, repasses through the chora, s/he must undergo "four
major pedagogical tests or exposures," which include such as choosing to live or to die (11); being taught to
write, especially left-handed writers, who should be forced to become an ambidextrous person (16); being
taught to not only write with a pen but also with a keyboard (there are echoes of AZERT here [16-17]);
being taught the minuet of the third place with its implications for a third philosophy (28)—all of these
rather peculiar pedagogies of the third are a "bringing up" (as the section is titled), a lifting of sub-jectivity
to a higher form such as a super-ject. While the initial section deals with pedagogy and sub-jectivity, the
second deals with pedagogy and canonical thinking, reading, writing.
Serres speaks of the Copernican revolution, implying a movement away from and an improvement
on the Ptolemaic system. And yet, he insists on and reminds us of the Keplerian addendum "that the general
movement of the stars follow elliptical orbits that together . . . refer to the solar donor of power and light;
but each, in addition, refers to a second focus, of which no one ever speaks, as efficacious and necessary as
the first, a sort of second black sun. To the white, brilliant, and unique sun [i.e., white multiplicities]
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correspond several dark foci [i.e., black box] that can be gathered into a sort of ring-shaped zone that is
exposed, I mean to say posed, away from the Sun" (37). This Keplerian addendum of black holes is the
outside, or adjacency, of canonical knowledge. While the Copernican system and the Keplerian addendum
form a pole, neither is in the middle, or center. "[T]he real center of each orbit lies precisely in a third place,
just between these two foci. . . . No, neither the Sun nor the Earth is in the center, but, rather, a third lost
zone" (37). This third is "Nonknowledge" and makes up "the program of the Third Instruction" (38). The
Troubadours made up "a poem whose . . . verse fragments were borrowed from various authors [and] was
called a centon" (38). Continuing with these hysterical, conductive linkages, Serres tells us that cento (of
centon) "referred to a patch-up piece of cloth, a scrap of composite fabric. Harlequin's coat has returned, the
comedian at the center of the stage and of this book" (38). We now have a patchwork of centers that
"speaks of the singular and the multiple simultaneously" (39). Taking the noncanonical, Keplerian
addendum in mind, Serres begins to speak of a third pedagogy and canon that fosters an unheard of view of
multiple subjects centers and still more multiple sexes (40-41, 46-47).
Learning, for Serres, is
crossbreeding. . . . [A]ll pedagogy takes up the begetting and birthing of a child anew: born left-
handed, he learns to use his right hand, remains left-handed, is reborn right-handed, at the
confluence of both directions; born Gascon, he remains and becomes French, in fact a half-breed;
French, he travels and becomes French, in fact a half-breed; French, he travels and becomes
Spanish, Italian, English, or German; if he marries and learns their culture and their language, he is
a quadroon, octoroon, soul and body combined. His mind resembles Harlequin's iridescent coat.
(49; emphasis mine)
As Serres might agree, we cum they must learn to speak as infans. Again. As Agamben has re-minded us,
we cum third persons (mixed sex, race, class, etc.) are "the human being [who] is the speaking being, the
living being who has language, because the human being is capable of not having language, because it is
capable of its own in-fancy" (146). We cum they have the potentiality of impotentiality and thereby to
become—through involution—creatures of compossibility (with com-possible abilities). And yet, we suffer
through the negation of all other alternatives, alter-natives. Sylvia Likens is our exemplar cum their
exemplar of the dominant pedagogy of negation.
The Deleuzean Millennium, The New Earth
"Esperable uberty? Etymological intuition assures us that esperable, a coinage—perhaps Peirce
himself, yet not to be found in any modern dictionary—must mean 'expected' or 'hoped for.'
Uberty, a vocable that has all but vanished from modern English, was first attested, from 1412, in
an obscure work by the 'Monk of Bury,' John Lydgate's Two Merchants; it appears to be
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equivalent to 'rich grown, fruitfulness, fertility; copiousness, abundance; or roughly, what Italians
used to call ubertà."
Thomas A. Sebeok, "One, Two, Three Spells UBERTY" (1).
"[O]nly an architect can save us."
Robert Pogue Harrison, "Hic Jacet" (393).
Incompossible anarchitectures (Leibniz and folding, living spaces): We cum they have moved
from the attic to the basement to the asylum and then to the living room, where the constituting rape in
virtual space took place. A Da Sein moment! Along the way they have stopped off at attempted eutopias
and strange places. (Each in its own wayves is an archive with an anarchive.) And have spent intermittently
time (Aeon) in the chora as manifested in chorography, ichnography. Now we cum they will visit the old
on its wayves to becoming new (third) world—a new Earth, as Deleuze and Guattari put forth a taking
place of such a "new earth" on its own (Anti-Oedipus 131, 299, 318-19, 321-22). But it is apparently a long
wayves from Anti-Oedipus to The Fold (1972 to 1988). But what is time as Aeon? When it is duration that
brings forth a new Earth!
As awkward, yet as telling, as these shifts in my writing from first-person plural are to third-
person singularities cum pluralities, I will stop them to make it easier for the readers to sail over the
wavyes—which have become ever so choppy—through the various rebeginnings here. (See Nancy, Being
Singular Plural).
In recent times, perhaps no one, except for Jacques Derrida, in philosophy, has had a similar, if not
greater, impact on thinkers of architecture than Deleuze. It is primarily The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
(in French, Le Pli) that has moved so many people to think the unthought of what I would call
anarchitecture. 34 John Rajchman makes clearly unclear what impact Deleuze has had on him as well as
others:
Making a philosophy would become a matter of architecture in the way a novel, a painting or a
piece of music is, where the plan of construction must be always built anew, since it is never given
in advance through a preset system or unbending rules. Philosophies would become free,
impermanent constructions superimposed on one another like strata in a city. For once the
architectonic is loosened up, the twin questions that we find in all philosophy—how to construct a
work, how to construct a life—acquire new shapes. The constructed work becomes less organic,
the constructed life less perfect, and the characters in the resulting drama more flexible, without
univocal roles, working through provisional alliances, broken and reconciled. They then start to
investigate 'virtualities' unseen in the present, to experiment with what may yet happen, and
constructing a philosophy become an art of necessarily temporary inquiry into what at a given
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time and place we might yet think in our thought, see or do in our visions or actions—an exercise
in building new spaces for thought in the midst of things. (Constructions 2)
But Deleuze and Guattari add to the perversity of thought, resonating in others who would advocate a
Deleuzean anarchitecture, when they write, "All begins not with flesh but with the house. That is why
architecture is the first of the arts" (What is Philosophy? 186; Taylor, Hiding). So if we follow this line of
flight, this imminently-perversely, negatively deconstructed statement—this invention—it is the body (skin
and flesh) that is a function of the house (adobe, habitus, oikos); and not the body, the house. The house
becomes the skin, the first layer of skin that informs the body. Sylvia Likens and the French woman in
Hiroshima, Mon Amour, are functions of the basement and cellar that they inhabit. 35 Of the hole in the
ground. That is the house. Therein, the human being becomes a function of the humic. Harrison tells us:
I would expect a humic architecture of this sort to be palpably haunted by the earth in which the
existential and historical past ultimately come to rest. By that I do not mean that it should be
funereal, commemorative, or self-consciously pious toward the has-been, but that its buildings
should sink into and emerge out of the recesses of mortal time, especially the underworld of the
dead, in which the spirit of place ultimately resides. If a house, a building, or a city is not in some
sense haunted in its architectural features—if the earth's placed historicity and containment of the
dead do not visibly pervade its articulated forms and constitutive matter—then that house,
building, or city is dead to the world. Dead to the world means cut off from the earth and closed
off from the dead. For that is one of the ironies of our life worlds: they receive their animation
from the ones that underlie them. (407; cf. Harries, Ethical Foundation 270-367)
It is Sylvia and the French woman and so many women who have died in basements and in cellars and in
holes in the ground that must not be forgotten in our anarchitecture. Which is humic architecture. And yet,
it is their rape there in the basement (their Da Sein) that haunts us, determines us, as an us. We must invent
a way that will allow us to acknowledge this our relationship yet live lightly on this earth with them and us.
(Kate Millett as well as Deleuze suggests becoming them. Becoming raped.) Then and only then can we
begin to think of living a life. As a corollary, there is, as we have heard tell, the man who is pulled down
into the hole in the sand of the desert to live with The Woman of the Dunes:
[T]he man, beaten and covered with sand, vaguely thought that everything, after all, had gone as it
was written it should. The idea was in a corner of his consciousness, like a sodden undergarment,
where only the beating of his heart was painfully clear. . . . He abandoned himself to her hands as
if he were a smooth, flat stone in a river bed. It seemed that what remained of him had turned into
a liquid and melted into her body. (232; emphasis mine)
As I indicated in chapter 8, Deleuze turns Leibniz's view of monadology and the Baroque fold—
something in themselves so new in their time, so radically theretofore unheard of in philosophy proper—
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into a neo-Baroque view that is not vertical in anyway. Deleuze casuistically stretches the Baroque from
Leibniz to Borges back to himself. Deleuze tell us that we must invent by wayves of "conceptual personae"
(What is Philosophy? 61-83). We should, as he does, enter the conceptual framework and persona of
Leibniz and rethink the Baroque fold, and realize that it is not a matter any longer of the "Best" of all
possible worlds. Nor, in terms of what we have been thinking in reading and writing rape, the "Worst."
Rather, it is a matter of the transvaluation of matter itself into thinking by wayves of Neo-Baroque folds. It
is a matter of knowing "how to lighten the earth itself, as though one were to insert oneself into it like a
surfer in a wave" (Rajchman, Constructions 47; cf. Conley, "A Plea For Leibniz" xv).
Deleuze, to this end for new beginnings, therefore, does not think representation and subjectivity
and cause, which are all vertical, metaphysically heavy and grave concepts. (And lest this is not abundantly
clear, this is not a new beginning! It is new beginningS.) Rather, Deleuze thinks difference and repetition,
which are light and joyful (see Lechte, Fifty 101-105), in as much as he is interested in the multiplication of
principles (a passion that moves him from Leibniz to think of inventing as the creation of conceptual
persona, which are a new series that is not a series of lives). Moreover, he is interested in the constitution of
the fold (but which is without a traditional principle of stasis), in the new object and consequently the new
subject, in the betweeness of the fold (as two folds folded into each other, making eventually for a triad of
the fold), and in inflection and inclusion (respectively the event and the new predication that places a series
in a line and makes for a new notion of possibility (compossibility) in terms of contingencies
(incompossibilites).
But here now, I must add—and this can be a shock of an affect of a sensation—that Deleuze also
says—given what I said he said about the humic—"Folds replace holes" in the ground or in walls (Fold
27). 36 Folds replace basements and cellars and a photographic mouth (full open, agape), but not the holds of
ships of fools (who are "put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely" [Foucault, Madness 11]). Folds, as
Rajchman suggests through Deleuze, are as folds unfolding, refolding, unfolding-refolding, as in a game of
chance, not based, however, on probability (Pascal's wager), but on games of chance as accident (what
Aristotle called tuché, or what Mallarme alluded to in a throw of the dice never abolishes hazard).
Rajchman explains further: "[I]n the baroque, 'holes' only indicate more subtle foldings, and the principle is
that there are no voids," there is no lack, no metaphysical negative or absence, nor abgrund, but a "virtuality
in a space . . . of something that exceeds the space and that it cannot integrally frame" (Constructions 35).
What could be more baroque!
This is worth resaying: "Folds replace holes." In topology, there are two configurations that get the
most attention: Doughnuts (Do-Nots) and Spheres. (Recall the Do-nut/Do-not people in chapter 6.) In
Deleuze as well as in several anarchitects, doughnuts are reconfigured into spheres without a fixed point
that are imminently about to fly away. These are spheres that are point.less and that are without any notion
of a sphere of influence. These topological spheres-folds, these topological triads of the fold, are lines of
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ecomings always in the "midst" (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 293; qtd. by Rajchman 35). Always in
the in between. Moving from imminently reversibility to lines of f/light.
Most importantly, then, as I suggested in the "Foreword" to Chaste Rape, Deleuze is after neither a
grounding as Grund nor as Abgrund, though Deleuze, with Guattari at times, works with Abgrund in terms
of holes in, say, Thousand Plateaus (see 167-91), where they both do work with doughnuts (Do-Nots), but
in as much as they approach the body-head system, not to reproach it, but to fold out of the face system
"something absolutely inhuman about the face" (171). They explain:
The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. . . . To the point that human
beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to
become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning
to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that
get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude
the organization of the face. (171)
To escape the trees with their roots buried deep into the earth, to escape the face with its w/holes buried
deep in the semiotics of the face-head and its roots buried deep in the face-brain-head, this something
inhuman in human beings metamorphosizes from a doughnut, from a doer of the negative (negativity) to a
sphere without fixed points. 37 In attempting to escape Earth, Deleuze is attempting to escape the spirit of
gravity, in dis/order for "becomings-animal," becoming-bird, to become light; Deleuze, in his thinking of
escaping Grund and Abgrund by becomings, is after a third term—possibly, Neitzsche's weightless bird,
possibly Ava (see Rajchman, Constructions 43; cf. Nietzsche, Zarathustra 303-07). And I would add,
incompossibly, Philomela-becoming-a-nightingale. Becoming-Sylvia-Becoming-nightingale, Becoming-
the-French-Woman-Becoming-nightingale. Deleuze therefore, like Nietzsche, would not want the spirit of
gravity, assigned to the events of the basement or cellar, to pull the two women and us down, but would
want to allow for the spirit of the bird flying, would want to allow for lines of flight. 38 Which would change
the very conditions of the possibilities for heaviness to the conditions of compossibility (incompossibilities)
for lightness and then, as Rajchman says, "we would no longer inhabit the two-story baroque house" (33)
and, as I would add, we would no longer inhabit the basement and cellar. This thinking, reading, writing
rape has all been about habitus. Changing habits, but also architectural habitus.
There is much more in The Fold that I leave un-exposed. (What is said of the MOO is not
necessarily excluded from the cow, as I previously explored in chapter 8 and to which I will
anarchitecturally and eventually return.) This is not at attempt at exposition, but at serializations. (Hence,
this will continue to flow with strange nondiscursive interjections and constructions.) There are a few
principles that Deleuze is fond of and I would fold them into each other to make for a conductive dyad on
its way to a triad of folds (knowing that such a fold will be on its fourth + consecutive wayves).
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In the section "Pleats of Matter," Deleuze recalls Leibniz-Serres's Harlequin. He says,
When Leibniz invokes Harlequin's layers of clothing, he means that his underwear is not the same
as his outer garments. That is why metamorphosis or 'metaschematism' pertains to more than mere
change of dimension: every animal is double—but as a heterogeneous or heteromorphic creature,
just as the butterfly is folded into the caterpillar that will soon unfold. The double will even be
simultaneous to the degree that the ovule is not a mere envelope but furnishes one part whose
other is in the male element. (Fold 9; emphasis mine. See Leibniz, New Essays 329, 490)
The Japanese man, with the woman in the dunes, who had attempted to rape the her, but is beaten off by
her and pulled into the hole in the desert sand—the Japanese man, who in his thought is likened to a
"sodden undergarment," just unfolds—i.e., increases (Fold 8)—into a posthuman being in a new
domesticity with the woman. In a hole in the ground. Where he folds—i.e., diminishes, reduces, "to
withdraw into the recesses of a world" (Fold 9). His former being dies in dis/order to live life. Living a life.
In his new grounding. Perpetually becoming smooth and becoming woman. A new affection. A new, third
sens (with new directions). 39
There is a Harlequin in all the men as well as in the Gertrude Baniszewskis of this world, waiting
to unfold. Waiting to become the third instructed. (What is the difference between this woman in the dunes
and Gertrude in her house on New York Street? Perhaps Gertrude, a female, never folded, like the Japanese
man, who unfolded into becoming woman.)
The Harlequin in all men as well as in the Gertrude Baniszewskis of this particular incompossible
world that we dwell in is a new object that affects a new subject. Deleuze writes: "This new object we can
call objectile. . . . The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold—to a relation
of form-matter—but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous
variation of matter as a continuous development of form. . . . The object here is manneristic, not
essentializing: it becomes an event" (19; emphasis mine). Deleuze says that the new object affects a new
subject. Agamben would add that this new object, as manneristic, is a third objectile cum subjectile, which
has unfolded (increased) from genus-(generic)-species-(individual) to a manare. A Baroque mannerism. He
writes: "manare . . . refers to being in its rising forth. This is not, in terms of the division that dominates
Western ontology, either an essence or an existence, but a manner of rising forth; not a being that is in this
or that mode, but a being that is its [own] mode of being and thus, while remaining singular and not
indifferent, is multiple and valid for all" (Coming Community 27-28; Agamben's emphasis). This rising or
flying forth, this line of flight, this being its own (in ancient terms of éthea), is precisely what Nietzsche is
after through the teachings of Zarathustra (see Bk 3).
Concerning the new subject, Deleuze says, "[T]he transformation of the object refers to a
correlative transformation of the subject: the subject is not a sub-ject but, as Whitehead says, a 'superject.'
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Just as the object becomes objectile, the subject becomes a superject" (20). And the difference in and by
wayves of this new subject? Deleuze writes:
A needed relation exists between variation and point of view: not simply because of the variety of
points of view (though, as we shall observe, such a variety does exist), but in the first place
because every point of view is a point of view on variation. The point of view is not what varies
with the subject, at least in the first instance; it is, to the contrary, the condition in which an
eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamorphosis), or: something = x (anamorphosis). For
Leibniz, for Nietzsche, for William and Henry James, and for Whitehead as well, perspectivism
amounts to a relativism, but not the relativism we take for granted. It is not a variation of truth
according to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject.
This is the Baroque perspective. (Fold 19-20)
About the new subject, Agamben would say that "Perhaps the only way to understand this [new self
predicated on manare, a manner of rising forth], a way that does not, however, treat existence as a property,
is to think of it" in terms of
a habitus, an ethos. Being engendered from one's own manner of being is, in effect, the very
definition of habit (this is why the Greeks spoke of a second nature): That manner is ethical that
does not befall us and does not found us but engenders us. And this being engendered from one's
own [i.e., éthos but in its éthea] manner is the only happiness really possible for humans [i.e., our
accepting an originary, not secondary, nature handed to us by authority].
But a manner of rising forth is also the place of whatever singularity, its principium
individuationis. For the being that is its own manner this is not, in effect, so much a property that
determines and identifies it as an essence, but rather an improperty. (Coming Community 29;
Agamben's emphasis. See Potentialities 196-99)
This its own or one's own that I keep referring to is outside of nature-essence (physis) or culture-existence
(nomos) but very precisely, in a third term, is located in an éthea, one's wildness. 40 It is, as Zarathustra
would state, an affirmation of life, a nonpositive affirmation of living. It is not a "wilding," but an
affirmation of living one's own life in a nonresentful manner. It is a manner of rising forth to accept "It
was" (Zarathustra 251). It is not, however, as it is often taken to be, a new relativism, an old-new
individualism that would signal permission "to do your own thing," which would be but a Chaste form of
once again repeating actions predicated on the negative (negativity). As Lawrence Lampert argues,
Nietzsche's thought is a new weighing from a center of gravity supplied by the affirmative will
that wills eternal return. The imagery of weighing the world, characteristic of all four chapters
prior to Zarathustra's actual willing of eternal return (III. 9-12), shows that his final victory, his
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ecoming a 'bird,' is not mere freedom from gravity, no mere 'explosion into the air,' to use Hegel's
relevant criticism of those who would escape the gravity of their own setting in the historical.
Zarathustra's 'heaviest' thought gives a new gravity to human actions; it does not simply oppose all
gravity with an unbearable lightness of being. (197; see Kundera, Unbearable; The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting)
This impropriety of a new subject, or superject, of becoming-bird, of a whatever singularity—that would
return to our originary nature, setting aside the traditional secondary nature of Platonism, negative
Christianity, the State, Daddy/Mommy—is the potential of no longer being thrown—down or up—the
potential rather to become-bird, becoming Mozart's bird (Deleuze, Dialogues 3) by wayves of
contingencies, from any direction to any other direction, dancing and then eventually flying—in the
absence of the onto-theological's spirit of gravity—which I will take up in the following sections on
incompossible narratives and anarchijects. 41 But for now, we can say, as Deleuze says, "[e]verything moves
as if the pleats of matter possessed no [properties of] reason in themselves [but improprieties]. It is because
the Fold is always between two folds, and because the between-two-folds seems to move about
everywhere" (13) or, as Deleuze elsewhere says, from Pascal Auge, to "any-space-whatever" (Cinema 1
109). The superject is in the space of indeterminacy, the space without the negative (negativity). And
therefore pure impotentiality. This subject has the double nature—proper and improper—of potentiality and
impotentiality. Negative being and nonpositive affirmative becoming. In a spirit of lightness.
But we should not leave this section for the next, while something remains and wants to be said.
Harrison, in saying that "only an architect can save us"—in a follow up to Heidegger's statement about only
a god can save us—and let us not forget our followings in chapter 7 of Ginette Paris and what she has said
about the gods Eros and Aphrodite—. . . Harrison, in saying this about the architect, also reflects:
[I]t is in the earth itself that it is 'written' that we have our 'place here.' Dig up its fossils, unearth
its graves, excavate its cities, and read the scripts for yourselves. [Let us recall Serres's
Ichnography.] They all say the same thing: hic jacet. To this I would have added that it may well
be the case that man, in his species being, is not determined to be upon the earth, but that the same
cannot be said for humanity. Humanity is not a species. As Vico reminds us, and as the word's
etymon itself indicates, it is a connection with the humus. The Neanderthals belonged to a
different species than us, yet the fact that they buried their dead is evidence enough that their mode
of being was human. If one day we colonize other worlds then we might be able to say,
empirically and definitively, that man was not determined to be upon this earth after all. But such
a man, when and if he comes to exist, will no longer be human, at least not in the sense in which
Vico talked of homo humandi, or in which his giants pointed to 'this earth' and 'these oaks' as their
place of belonging. (406; Harrison's emphasis).
But this is not enough for us, for Harrison, who must add, as I promised to return to, the cow:
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I see no reason why architecture, for all its past delinquencies, could not lead the way to a fully
modern redemption of our debt to the earth and hence to a new economy of habitation [habitus,
éthos, éthea]. Such an architecture would take its measure from our humic natures rather than from
the empty expanse of a false transcendence. . . . We do not need an architecture of the milk carton
that poses as the origin of its contents but an architecture of the cow, as it were, which brings to
bear in its lineaments and materials the unde and the quo of life itself. . . . In short, we need an
architecture not so much of the humanistic (in the grand modernist sense) as of the humic.
07)
I would expect a humic architecture of this sort to be palpably haunted by the earth. . . . (406-
Yes, "an architecture of the cow"!
"Sadism demands a story [and] depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another
person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in linear time with a beginning
and an end."
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (14).
"Thus the architect is potential insofar as he has the potential to not-build."
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities (179).
Incompossible anarchitextures (incompossible narratives): We have been on a long excursion and
it is now conductively-improperly proper to return to Aristotle's claim concerning Troy. Aristotle would
freeze a camera shot of us in time in regard to the events at Troy, as I stated in the opening of this chapter
that is not a chapter, this "Rebeginnings." (That single shot of a possible photograph historically turns into a
punctum for us!) "There is no will with regard to the past. This is why no one wants Troy to have been
sacked, since no one decides what happened but only what will be and is possible; what has happened
cannot not have been" (Nicomachean Ethics 1139b.1-13). But I would create lines of flux and flight in
terms of will and contingency to establish a way out of this problem, which in great part, is a problem of
thinking, reading, and writing rape. In a very specific way, it is a problem of and with, which expresses
itself in, exasperation—this problem of rape, the worst form of negation. But the problem—this
Aristotelian problem—can be dealt with. There is a way to work through the apparent necessity of
Aristotle's principle of irreversible time. It is a matter, of pleated matter, as Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze have
taught us—that when exasperated, when held down by gravity, we should multiply our principles. And I
would attempt to suggest to do so as an attempter or experimenter. 42 As Avital Ronell would say, I would
take us on a test drive. I would call on, as I have repeatedly taken advantage of, the fuller lineage of flight
known as the Leibniz-Nietzsche-Borges-Heidegger-Foucault-Deleuze-Nancy-Ronell-Grosz-Agamben bloc.
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(These are not all proper, but improperly proper or properly improper, names.) There is a close tie between
to exasperate and to exacerbate. 43
Xasperation. (Proximity and the unconscious mind of the Dictionary: examination, example,
exanthema, exarch, exasperation, ex cathedra, excavate, exceed, excel.) There is enough anger, irritation,
and increasing of hatred between people on this subject of rape. Even in its form of being Chaste Rape.
Instead of increasing the gravity and intensity of the emotions and ressentiment, I would increase, by
wayves of multiply principles, the lightness and intensity of lines of flight. But there is, in parallel wavy
fashion, the denotation in Xasperation of ragged, jagged, in "to make rough." Xasperations can lead to
waves and ever-new wayves.
In the novel Baise-Moi (Rape-Me), there is a character called Fatima who, at first, seemingly
exemplifies, to a some degree, what Manu and Nadine should do to survive after their having been raped,
after their having gone on a killing spree. (In some ways, Fatima is like the slave woman, in Christa Wolf's
Cassandra, who asks Penthesilea to come join them in a third alternative. To live [118]. She at times
unfolds herself in terms of what Leibniz-Deleuze call amplitude or what Kenneth Burke would call scope
and reduction. She increases her amplitude to avoid being revengeful and consequently "forever
damnable," and yet at other times, she decreases it. [See Fold 71.]) Fatima was "raped" by (was forced into
incest with) her father when she was eleven. The implied author says of Fatima:
She speaks in a low voice, even a very calm one. It's serious and monotone, candid, modest. This
softens the brutality of the words without toning them down. Behind that monotone, her serious
voice is something like metal. As she speaks, she keeps her eyes lowered most of the time, then
raises them and looks deep into the eyes of whom she's talking to. And she pays attention, as if she
can see into the soul of her listener, detect the least grimace of disgust or the vilest ruse. Without
judging or being surprised by it. Ready to see everything when it comes to those who are like her
[those who have been raped]. She's like some tried and tested ruler whose suffering has given her
only immense wisdom and tireless strength. A kind of queenly resignation, no bitterness. (176)
In this novel there is little amplitude and an excess logic of revenge that is understandable and at times
forgivable, and yet, that has no life-furthering value. When asked by Manu if she tells her "little story a
lot," Fatima responds: "No. I haven't talked much about it since, I've learned my lesson. 'Course, I don't
meet cop killers that often" (177). To explain: Fatima first meets Manu and Nadine when the police is
arresting her. Manu and Nadine killed the policemen and in a sense set Fatima free. There is a bond among
violent ones under threat of their lives. How can there be any alternative third way of living, when they kill!
Again, killing is their bond.
Still ever cutting to the chase, Manu responds to Fatima:
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'Fuck, must be so cool to do it with your father!'
Fatima withdraws suddenly. Her face closes up and she doesn't answer. Manu leans toward her,
lets out a loud exhale and adds, 'Fuck, take a look at my father and you'd understand how much
your story flips me out. . . . He was the living end, that man. But then he was married to my
mother. Even if you liked goats, you wouldn't want to slip it to her, she's too much of a stupid
cow. Dullsville. . . .
She looks at Fatima, fills their three glasses and finishes by saying, 'You know, as for me, the time
I got left's precious, so I can't waste it being diplomatic.'
Short moment of silence. Fatima relaxes again and asks, 'Any chance of your getting away with
it?' (178)
This question hangs over the novel and the film. But its implications also hang in a variety of ways over the
problem of past events and their relation to justice. Agamben reads Aristotle, in his exemplar of Troy, as
being informed by the principle of the irrevocability of the past (or the irreversibility of the past)
(Potentialities 262; cf. 267). Menelaus, Helen, Paris, Agamemnon, Ulysses, etc., along with Manu, Nadine,
Fatima—all of them seem locked into the past, seem fated to be there and to remain in the past without an
appeal. To be there in death against life and not able of getting away from this predicament. It is as if time
is informed by a logic of perpetual revenge itself. (Anaxamander's to apeiron strongly suggests as much.)
And as I have restated, this speculation concerning time is backed up by good reasons put forth by
Nietzsche on redemption and resentful thinking (Zarathustra 249-59).
The next day after the conversation with Fatima, Manu and Nadine go, in a sense, to extort and
then to murder the architect. Fatima sent them on that mission of revenge. Thinking, but knowing better,
that the two of them, if not the three, could (not) get away with it. Would have to face justice and
punishment. Once in the house, in the living room, Manu tells the architect, like Gertrude tells Sylvia, "we
just came to teach you" (220). "What losing means" (220). (The logic of revenge apparently is, If we lose,
you lose. Everyone loses.) Of all the things not equally distributed in the world, like some Cartesian joke,
there is losing. In the form of death against life. Manu and Nadine teach the architect losing. Some how or
other, everyone, a priori to this scene and thereafter, loses. Are born losers. To time past.
I am so reminded of what Wolf's Cassandra says toward the end—or the rebeginnings that would
but "found a new Troy elsewhere" (138)—after having confronted Penthesilea, who responded with a threat
of violence toward her. Cassandra thinks:
It would not have taken much for us to fly at each other's throat.
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I had forgotten all that until now. Because I did not want to admit that a woman could crave death.
And because her death made ash of everything we had known of her before. We had to recognize
that there are no limits to the atrocities people can inflict on one another; that we are capable of
rummaging through someone else's entrails and of cracking his skull, trying to find out what
causes the most pain. I say 'we,' and of all the 'we's' I eventually said, this is still the one that
challenges me most. It is so much easier to say 'Achilles the brute' than to say this 'we.' (119)
As Livy-Brown-Duras-Renais-Wolf-Serres expound, Rome's foundations are prescribed by Troy's, and
ours, by Hiroshima's. It is rape-founding narratives all the way down and semiotically all the way across
our works and days.
Agamben so confronts this problem of irrevocability (prescription) like no one before him, though
there are those before him, who were as much attempters as he is. "We" stand on each other's
multiplications of principles to reach down to rethink the problem of irrevocability (irreversibility).
Agamben enters, going back to Leibniz, to the "Palace of Destinies" (aka, the "Halls of Justice") in the
Theodicy (368-73), where so many have returned to, and sends, not an avenging angel, but Bartleby, the
scrivener, whereas Leibniz would have sent Sextus Tarquinius, the man who rapes Lucretia, but it would
have done no good, for Sextus, nonetheless, wanted to be king of Rome; whereas Leibniz does send, in
Sextus's place, Theodorus, who sees the various incompossible worlds that were lost.
In sending Bartleby to the Palace-Hall, Agamben is sending him as an attempter and experimenter
(Nietzsche's Versucher). As an ex-copyist but now a new messenger. A giver of statements. In his case, the
befuddling statement, "I would prefer not to." It has been a long wayves from A.Z.E.R.T. to "I would prefer
not to." Which is an introduction of noise into the systematic thinking of irrevocability. But while this
statement is noise, it is well on its way of becoming a new principle. A multiplication of principles.
Let us begin in terms of Sextus Tarquinius and then move on to Bartleby. Leibniz, as an
experimenter himself, "pretend[s] that Sextus" goes "to Delphi to consult the Oracle of Apollo" (367),
where he is told his outcome if he insists on being King of Rome: "A beggared outcast of the city's rage /
Beside a foreign shore cut short thy age" (367). Unsatisfied with what he is told, Sextus "seeks out Jupiter
at Dodona. He makes sacrifices and then he exhibits his complaints. Why have you condemned me, O great
God, to be wicked and unhappy? Change my lot" (369-70). Jupiter responds: "If you will renounce Rome,
the Parcae shall spin for you different fates, you shall become wise, you shall be happy" (370). Sextus,
forever damnable, "abandon[s] himself to his fate" (370). And in doing so, as we know, rapes Lucretia. (He
had been forewarned, but he does it anyway.) The story has an extra pleat to it: Theodorus, who is a high
priest to Jupiter, asks the god Why he did not give Sextus "a different will" (370). Jupiter answers by
sending Theodorus to Pallas, who, he says, will inform Theodorus of "what I was bound to do" (370).
Theodorus goes to the Palace of Destinies and Pallas touches his face with an olive-branch, placing him in
a position of seeing not only Pallas but also what she, the daughter of Jupiter, wants him to see in terms of
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possible (incompossible) worlds. Pallas makes appear the various apartments that rise in a pyramid to
infinity. In each of these worlds-apartments he carries who he is but also who he could have been, what was
not. In the various worlds, Theodorus sees "a very happy and noble Sextus, in another a Sextus content
with a mediocre state, a Sextus, indeed, of every kind and endless diversity of forms" (371). He is taken
into one of these incompossible worlds: "Sextus . . . could be heard saying that he would obey the God.
And lo! he goes to a city lying between two seas, resembling Corinth. He buys there a small garden;
cultivating it, he finds a treasure; he becomes a rich man, enjoying affection and esteem; he dies at a great
age, beloved of the whole city" (371). But finally Pallas shows Theodorus, "in ecstasy" (372), the
incompossible world at infinity: "Here is Sextus as he is, and as he will be in reality. He issues from the
temple in rage"—where we last left him before the change in venues—"he scorns the counsel of the Gods.
You see him going to Rome, bringing confusion everywhere, violating the wife [Lucretia] of this friend
[Collatinus]. There he is driven out with his father, beaten, unhappy" (372). Now the answer to the
question, Why this world?
If Jupiter had placed here a Sextus happy at Corinth or King in Thrace, it would be no longer this
world. And nevertheless he could not have failed to choose this world, which surpasses in
perfection all the others, and which forms the apex of the pyramid. Else would Jupiter have
renounced his wisdom, he would have banished me, me his daughter. You see that my father did
not make Sextus wicked; he was so from all eternity, he was so always and freely. My father only
granted him the existence which his wisdom could not refuse to the world where he is included: he
made him pass from the region of the possible to that of the actual beings. The crime of Sextus
serves for great things: it renders Rome free; thence will arise a great empire, which will show
noble examples to mankind. (372-73)
And that pretty much concludes (fatally rebegins), in a major detour to a justification of this rape, the
Theodicy. Much analog ink on parchment-paper and many digitized pixels of light on monitors have been
written against this so-called best of all incom-possible worlds.
In terms of thinking, reading, and writing rape, this is Chaste thinking on Leibniz's part as well as
his many followers. What is of the utmost importance, as Stephanie Jed makes clear, is that
If we look . . . at the legend of the rape of Lucretia from the perspective of its formation and
transmission, new kinds of data for the understanding of this rape can emerge. The focus can shift
from 'what actually occurred' when Tarquin [Sextus Taquinius] entered Lucretia's room to our
own agency in making this rape occur over and over again. By including ourselves at the end of
the narrative, we can assume responsibility for the continued reproduction of the rape of Lucretia.
From the perspective of the legend's transmission, we can begin to see this rape not as an
inevitable prologue to Rome's liberation [the act that inaugurates the founding of the Republic] but
as a historical figuration, formed and reformed to serve various interests and needs in different
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historical moments. Moreover, we can document in the reading and writing practices of the
fifteenth-century humanists a kind of 'chaste thinking' [that] conceals the historicity of each
reproduction of this rape. (6-7; cf. Matthes)
Jed argues, as I do, that we must "dismantle the narratological connection between rape and republican
liberty" (9). She explicates the implications of the narrative of Sextus's going to Rome, as put forth by Livy
in the "records about the 'background' of the trial" (7). We are told that Sextus's "desire to rape Lucretia is
formed in the occasion of a chastity contest (which Lucretia has won)" (7). Won! There is a contest among
the men, and Lucretia's husband tells Sextus and others that his wife is the best. While her husband is away,
Sextus visits, tricks, and rapes Lucretia, who then calls in her husband, father, and Brutus. As she begins to
speak, she tells us, Jed says, that "her father has trained ["disciplined"] her to follow a narrative sequence of
chastity, rape, corruption, and self-castigation. In this way, she is inscribed in a language that invites sexual
violence" (7). Hence, she kills herself with a knife to the breast (I am a violated one, and yet proud as I go
to my death), which Brutus pulls from her breast, declaring that he will expel the Tarquins and found a
Republic (I am "the castigator of tears" and I found a new direction for Rome) (Jed 9-10; cf. Serres, Rome
139-91).
My concern is that we must not only follow Jed's direction in "dismantling the narratological
connection between rape and republican liberty" (9), but we must also do one more thing as Agamben
suggests, and that is not only to be an advocate for and to attempt to redeem What was—and without
ressentiment—as Jed herself asks us to do, but also to be an advocate for What was not. To write What was
not. To write, as Ulmer says, the paradigm. For possible (incompossible) worlds that were never actualized.
Instead of resending Theodorus or Jesus Christ to the Palace of Destinies, Agamben would send Herman
Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener. In dis/order to be such an advocate—i.e., a Bartleby as such—Agamben
says we must multiply principles. But again, as Deleuze would add to this Leibnizean principle, we must
augment (our) amplitude (Fold 71, 73-74). Instead of one best over all other possible worlds, we must
augment in parallel manner incompossible worlds within an anarchitectural palace, which would not be a
pyramid to infinity, but to a radically infinite finitude. And thereby we would perpetually reinvent the
conditions, not by evacuating everything, but by adding one And after another And after another And. In
writing the paradigm. We would bring a certain uncertain lightness to earth-thinking, to the grounding that
is not a grounding. We would move from narrative (cause/effect) to serialization (affects and sensations).
We would dis/engage, as Deleuze has suggested in post WWII cinematic terms, in preferring the time-
image (Aeon) over the movement image (a totality), in preferring irrational cuts and incommensurable
relations among words and assemblages, and false continuity over what goes for the status quo
(Negotiations 63-67). But I am not talking of any avant-garde writing. Rather, I am talking about these
serializations and assemblages across the various incompossible worlds produced by multiplication and
amplification. Instead of one Lucretia in one possible world, there would be among a whole series of
incompossible worlds, many Lucretias. There would be no best of these, as I said; there would be no
contradiction either, only, as Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze have said, vice-dictions. And yet, I would prefer not
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to keep these serializations left only separate in these various, radically finite series of worlds. I would, as
Borges shows us the wayves, prefer not to have fixed subjects, sub-jects, fixed twice over, but would prefer
to have entities cum singularities who in one incompossible world go through as many foldings and
unfoldings as possible, not just from grub to butterfly but to whatever remains "lovable." We would want
"the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is" (see Agamben, Coming 2).
To achieve these new rebeginnings, Deleuze and Agamben call on Bartleby as the exemplar of the
outside thinker, reader, and writer. Bartleby is sent to the Palace of Destinies and instead of saying I will
not, or I will, locking himself into being forever damnable, he says perversely, I would prefer not to, that is,
not to think, write, and read with this notion of God and "best," with this logic of definitional-necessity.
With this principle of the irrevocable. I would thereby, by wayves of a logic of preference, he says, change
the conditions for possible thinking, reading, and writing. It is not that Bartleby would rewrite the Theodicy
(the justification of the ways of God to man). Bartleby refuses both to copy (Leibniz) nor to write (rewrite
Leibniz), given what writing—in terms of a priori inscription—goes far. He dis/engages in a radical
passivity or in an action of passivity in relation to this text. As Agamben says, "Bartleby, a scribe who does
not simply cease writing but 'prefers not to,' . . . writes nothing but its potentiality to not-write" (Coming
Community 37). What Bartleby brings forth, in his own, in a rising forth, is not a reference to a text, not to
the law, which he refuses to copy, but to incompossible worlds taking place. Bartleby is the third man (of
indifferentiation) coupled with Chora (the third woman); he is a man without references (qualities), without
content (see Musil; Agamben, Man Without Content). He is, according to Agamben, an exemplary
whatever being, or whatever singularity (Coming 35-38). He appears plica ex plica (Deleuze, Fold 10).
Most simply put, Bartleby refuses to write out of potentiality (out of the eternal return of copying), which
wants to think the best of all possible judiciary worlds, which by definition must exclude what was not;
rather, he writes out of impotentiality, which is without the qualities of best and worst and opens up what
was not. (This is the closed logic of the best of all possible worlds that Bartleby enters when he goes to the
Palace of Destinies.) Bartleby would prefer to write impotentially the remainders, the remnants that go into
composing the clothes Harlequin wears and that were created by a writing of potentiality, which spins out
congregations by way of segregation. (This is the radically open logic of thirds that Bartleby reintegrates
and claims but not in the proper names of Heaven or Hell, Good or Evil, but beyond them in the improper
name of Limbo. As Agamben says, Bartleby goes to the Palace, like Christ, "not to redeem what was, but to
save what was not" [Potentialities 270].) It is no longer the architecture of the upper or lower floors, attics
or basements, but an anarchitecture of Limbo. Bartleby incipiently establishes the conditions for
reintegrating what was not, all that could not fit into the space, all that exceeded what potentiality could
accommodate. The Palace of Destinies becomes Limbo, where all whatever singularities come from, where
all incompossibilities comes from (cf. Agamben, Coming 5-7). In another register and relay, we can say
that Bartleby would be the Muselmann, the one who does not, so much, prefer not to speak, but who, so
much more, cannot in any way speak, except but by wayves of statements. Enunciations.
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"Ichnos, in Greek, is the mark of the step, the footprint. . . . Imagine the earth of the field, under
the grasses, after a day on the herd's wandering. Imagine the earth of Rome after a thousand years
of trampling by Romans. Imagine the earth of the forum after the hammering of the mob's feet. . . .
There is prescription of all meaning before the inscription of a single meaning. At the beginning is
ichnography. That is to say, the integral, the sum, the summary, the totality, the stock, the mine,
the ensemble of meanings. The possible, the capacity. Each defined meaning is only a
scenography—that is to say, an outline drawn from a particular site. From one point of view the
narrative tells us that Cacus is the bad guy, that Evander is the good guy; from another, the story
will tell of Evus and Cacander; from still another, it will have other and still other outlines—that is
what the meaning of history comes to: scenes. Scenes, and thus sites, from which to see
representations. But the first tableau, the original legend, the legend that permits us to read the
narrative of foundation, installs ichnography to begin with. Here, first off, is the total picture of the
possible. History flows from it better than from a source. The black box is ichnography itself."
Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations (22-23; emphasis mine).
Incompossible anarchijects (incompossible superjects): From multiple inclusive, agglutinative
points of views, without excluded thirds, there are multiple . . .
Adams and Eves,
Helens and Parises,
Lucretias and Sextuses
Sylvias and Gertrudes. . . All our parental mythos-poetic lineage.
The thing is, is that the what was not has always already been available not just in the Palace of Destinies,
but also in calling into question the Forum of Being with its, heretofore, possible variations, which are
determined by the negative, which in turn determines the possible mythoi (or founding stories) that human
beings can have. First, we would have to ask the question of Why do we need founding stories? Secondly,
Why would we need founding stories based on rapes? We have been questioning both of these. This has
been the now arrived at purpose of this book.less. The world, as we have repeatedly told ourselves, is
created ex nihilo. It is this world that must be decreated (denegated). In having created it from nothing, we
let the negative tarry with us far too long and too exclusively. (It is the case that there is a difference
between nothing and negativity, but it is the negative that has controlled and impoverished nothing. Hence,
the necessary return—I use the word "necessary" perversely here—to nothing in terms of returning to
potentiality (dynamis) that is near exclusively determined by the Being of nothing cum negativity so that
we can re-embrace impotentiality (adynamis). There is in Being a capacity for what is false to become true.
Agamben is convinced that anthropological change can be brought about by way of
experimenting. (Agamben's being convinced does not exclude the possibility that such changes will lead to
self-overcomings of subjectivity on its own.) In the section called "The Experiment, or On Decreation," in
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Potentialities, Agamben recalls Walter Lüssi, "who invented the concept of an experiment without truth,
that is, an experience characterized by the disappearance of all relation to truth" (260). Agamben adds:
"These experiments do not simply concern the truth or falsity of hypotheses, the occurrence or
nonoccurrence of something, as in scientific experiments; rather, they call into question Being itself, before
or beyond its determination as true or false. These experiments are without truth, for truth is what is at issue
in them" (260). After taking us through various historical cum hysterical experiments with their
conversions, Agamben posits:
[W]e must consider these 'experiments without truth' with the greatest seriousness. Whoever
submits himself to these experiments jeopardizes not so much the truth of his own statements as
the very mode of his existence; he undergoes an anthropological change that is just as decisive in
the context of the individual's natural history as the liberation of the hand by the erect position was
for the primate or as was, for the reptile, the transformation of limbs that changed it into a bird.
(260; emphasis mine)
Limbs that changed into a bird! Becoming bird. Becoming Nietzsche's Ava. 44 (In a relay we started earlier,
we can now say: From Limbo, to limbs, to birds flying.) Moving from gravity to lightness and what lies as
a new truth in between. But more to the point.less here, I must further implicate, fold in dis/order to unfold
the paracept of an experiment, or test, without truth, and quote:
To be capable, in pure potentiality, to bear the 'no more than' beyond Being and Nothing, fully
experiencing the impotent possibility that exceeds both—this is the trial [or test] that Bartleby
announces [in his enunciation of I would prefer not to]. The green screen that isolates his desk
traces the borders of an experimental laboratory in which potentiality, three decades before
Nietzsche and in a sense that is altogether different from his, frees itself of the principle of reason.
Emancipating itself from Being and non-Being alike, potentiality thus creates its own ontology.
(259)
Its own ontology. Instead of ex nihilo, human being can dis/engage by wayves of decreation or by wayves
of ex plicatio (see Rajchman, Constructions 36). By(e) wayves of the paraconcepts of –plex (for weaving)
and –pli (for folding) (15; Deleuze, Fold 10). By Multiplying principles, we can say: Change the texture
and the folds in making matter and forces, change the world.
This would not be, however, in this discussion of anarchitecture, the changing of the carton but of
the cow itself. (This would be, however, a folding of the cow's womb/s into an all-libidinal-band surface as
an experiment in anarchitectural MOOs on their wayves to becoming WOOmbs, as I did in chapter 8, or as
Kiki Smith turns human organs into installations in her projects. Or as anarchitects creating new wombs
[see Palumbo].) This is an anthropological change. (But "this would not be" could be refolded and unfolded
differently, while searching for even newer third figures.) Change the carton, change the cow. (This can be
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a post-humanist change.) In any case.less, it is not a matter of teaching the architect to lose with the carton
or to win with the cow, but to dis/engage in multiplicities 45 —which will take us to a mixture of trampled
and white multiplicities of cultural conceptual personae. Let us begin with one such persona that is not one,
namely, Helen—the multiplicities of Helen that are all but forgotten.
Replaying, paraphrasing, interpolating, quoting what Foucault says about society and sex, I would
say that What is "peculiar" about all cultures-societies is not that they "consign" Helen to the shadows but
that they have "dedicated" themselves to founding all their thinking, reading, writing of not sex, but of
Helen's abduction-rape "ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" (History of Sexuality 35; Foucault's
emphasis). Robert Meagher, in Helen: Myth, Legend, and the Culture of Misogyny, argues that, while there
are many Helens, there is One. In his opening discussion of the first Helen, he quotes Nikos Kazantzakis:
"Only one woman exits in the world, one woman with countless faces" (70; Last Temptation 457). The
particular woman being referred to in the context of Kazantzakis's novel is Mary Magdalene, who, in
Christ's dream world, is dead. But the Angel tells Christ, who is rebelling against God the Father for having
murdered Mary, that there is yet another Mary, sister of Lazarus, who "is Magdalene herself, but with
another face" (457). It is by figuration, Helen-Marys all the way down. But it is a figuration that begins
with One and then becomes a simple multiplicity. Is this thinking subjected also to the principle of
irrevocability? No. It, too, is imminently reversible in privileging multiplicity over One, while waiting for a
third thinking of what Serres refers to "Learning [as] crossbreeding. Strange and original, already a mixture
of the genes of his father and mother, the child evolves only through new crossings; all pedagogy takes up
the begetting and birthing of a child anew" (Troubadours 49). But Serres says this for males, not just
women. I would add, with a third, that this cross-instruction needs to be said most emphatically in terms of
Woolf's Orlando. 46 But an Orlando that moves not just from male to female, chiasmicly, but with every
in/compossible refiguration, a different sex. Endlessly. We must refuse Helen and especially our abductions
of (our inferences from) her. As One cum Many. Rather, as radical multiplicities. What I am alluding to is
the simple matter of fact (fashion, face, facticity, Dasein, thrownness as impotentiality) that there are a
multitude of Helens in the archive that do not even go to Troy. It is not a matter of two points with a line
drawn from Sparta to Troy. It is an extra pleated matter of lines of flight, of deterritorializations (Deleuze
and Guattari, Thousands 3). There is, as Serres would say, the third instructed multiplicity of Helen. As
Kazantzakis notes—even Martin Scorsese picks up on it (see Zizek, Sublime Object 114)—Christ is not
One, but a hysterical person in One (or in a fixed three, with a bird that needs to fly awayves unfixing,
hysterizing the world). Christ is both hysterical—lost in terms of who he is as he hears the call of the
Logos—and a schizo, which is to say that Christ is not only not One, but also is crossing (while
ad/dressing) sexual boundaries that even depart from the traditional two into thirds. 47 In crossing, it is not
from one to two points on a map, but it is to the line of flight in the middle itself, to perpetual thirds.
But there is no need to hysterize—but otherwise to open up the conditions for the
incompossibilities of—Helens. But these potential Helens, as Agamben might say, have to be written as
nothing but the potentiality to not be Helen. There are multiple Helens in antiquity and modernity even in
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the textual archive, though as a multitude, they keep coming out of One because they are written out of
potentiality (Aristotelian possibility and actuality), and not out of the potentiality to not be Helen. Helen
has to be written out of impotentiality to be able to get to all that was not Helen, as they await virtually in
the Palace of Destiny, which is the archive that awaits us, to be actualized in mythomorphic renderings. If
thinking, reading, and writing Helen keeps to the principle of irrevocability, then there is only the eternal
return of the same—which, as many modernists will claim, cannot be represented in the Symbolic, to which
I agree, but also have to say that this is not the point.less. It is the case as many do argue, especially
Matthew Gumpert in Grafting Helen, that the convention of mimesis, "as a crisis of sudden reversal," and
anamnesis, as a back and forth, in the Odyssey brings about an
obsessive referring back to Troy. The here-and-now of the Iliad is always pointing toward a future
that has always already happened; its narrative is a present tense always threatening to become a
future perfect. Helen will return to Sparta; Achilles will perish at Troy; Troy itself will one day be
no more. These things have not yet happened in the Iliad, and yet, paradoxically, they have already
receded into a future that is already past. The Odyssey, too, is fractured by this kind of temporal
instability, but in the opposite direction: this epic is dominated everywhere by the dynamic of
memory. . . . In the Odyssey Troy has already happened; Troy is past: that is the single, great,
unforgettable fact. At the same time, Troy continues to live on. Troy will not recede into the past:
no one can forget it; it everywhere threatens to undo the primacy and coherence of the present.
The Odyssey owes its particular poignancy to the way in which its gestures toward the past while
refusing to acknowledge it—as something past. One could put that another way: on the one hand
the Odyssey indulges its audience in the fiction that it follows the Iliad; at the same time, on the
other hand, it ties itself at every moment to an ongoing Iliad, the one narrative sutured to the other.
(25; Gumpert's emphasis)
This obsessive referring back is, as Gumpert says, "teichoskopia, perpetually reinacted' (xi). This is an
absolutely brilliant insight and is comparable to what Aristotle says in the Nichomachean Ethics concerning
the principle of the irrevocable past. This is the problem that remains here, along with others that will
always present themselves: It is the problem of the paradox of imminent reversibility. As I have said, the
principles of multiplying principles and of amplitude can deal with this problem. But I am getting ahead of
myself. Let us pause and restart with the multitude of One and then light out for the more radical principles
of multiplicities, as lines of flight from the same.
Mihoko Suzuki, in Metamorphoses of Helen, has begun to trace the variations of the theme of
Helen and her whereabouts. There is the Helen who goes to Troy and that contributes or does not contribute
to the fall of Troy (Homer); there is the Helen as active subject who "contests the literary tradition about
her, blaming it on Stesichorus" (13; Plato, Phaedrus 243a-b); there is the Helen who claims she was not
abducted-raped by Paris but went willingly (14; Herodotus, Bk 1); there is the Helen who contests "the
authority of Homer and does not go to Troy but to Egypt (14; Herodotus, Bk 2); there is the Helen who
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goes to Egypt but who Hera created as a phantom and also sent to Troy (15; Euripides, The Trojan
Women); there is the Helen who is a "passive object" (15; Gorgias, Encomium), and there are the Helens . .
. How many Helens are necessary? . . . still counting. Reading these various narratives and their tactics and
different destinations, I think of Leibniz's Palace of Destinies—what I will know call the anarchive. I think
of what was not but that can be found here in these incipient incompossible worlds.
Suzuki, from a feminist point of view, critiques the story of Helen as a scapegoat, a mere pretext
for war, and overall a "mystification." Helen is one more form of Eve (17). She locates in a second Helen
(Briseis) a demystification of both Helen and Briseis as scapegoats. Helen is not the cause of the war (29-
43). Suzuki's is a rebeginning (cf. Clader; Austin).
Gumpert continues what Suzuki and others have argued, though with some differences. His
argument, more pointed than Suzuki's, is that Grafting Helen (his Derridean title) "reads the abduction—or
flight—of Helen as a figure for the cultural appropriation of Homer. It tells the story of how the West has
labored to make Helen belong or make the past at home in the present" (xi). Gumpert moves from Helen of
Ancient Greece to Modern France. Incidently, Suzuki had introduced more generally the cult of
nationalism that wanted to find its various beginnings in Troy, by claiming decent from a particular hero.
She cites and quotes at length from Jean's Seznec's The Survival of the Pagan Gods:
Only the Germans and French could boast undisputed descent from Hector himself, but others—
Bretons, Flemings, Scandinavians, Normans, Italians, and Spaniards—also found ways of
asserting their own relationship with him, to justify either their pride or their ambitions. . . . [T]he
Bretons were said to be decendents of Brutus, first king of Brittany; the Spaniards of Hesperus, the
Italians of Italus, the men of Barbant of Brabo, the Tuscans of Tuscus, the Burgundians of
Hercules the Great of Libya." (qtd. 12; Seznec 24-25)
It is the rape of Helen, variously grafted (written, transplanted, and exchanged), that becomes for France—
but the whole of the Western world—its founding principle. Though Helen is written and quartered
obsessively, she remains always One. Gumpert takes us through the various strategies that were called upon
"for reading the past into the present. Mimesis, Anamnesis, Supplement, Speculation, Epideixis, and Deixis
in part 1 and Idolatry, Translation, Genealogy, Cosmetics, Miscegenation, and Prostitution in part 2 are all
variations on graft, strategies for recuperating the past and for concealing that act of recuperation" (xii). We
have seen this strategy explained before by Foucault (Archaeology 109; History of Sexuality 3-13). Rape is
grafted on everything in terms of the dictionary's grafted-1 (transplanted or implanted in) and grafted-2 (by
deriving profit or advantage) (cf. Gumpert xiii-xiv). Helen, in being passed around from writer to writer of
mythomorphic discourses, is repeatedly raped by each and everyone. It is the case as Andrea Dworkin
claims, that "rape takes everything away" (Scapegoat 58), but it is also the case that rape, nonetheless,
unites everything. (Graphing = uniting.)
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By way of commodification. Helen, as Gumpert adds, has exchange value, which can never be
fixed, but floated. "The Trojan war," Gumpert speculates, "can be approached as a matter of trade gone
awry" (63). It all starts with the Judgment of Paris. Aphrodite extorts from Paris the answer she wants to
the question of Who is fairest of them all? by promising him a lustful merger with Helen if only he should
pick her as the fairest (62-64). Paris does, and then everyone is involved in a trade war to this very day.
Trading Helen. What is amazing is the conglomerate of businesses Helen has evolved into with their
various brand names. Gumpert locates these under the topic Cosmetics: Helen; Helen, the Portrait;
Helen, the Dream; Helen, the Gaze; Helen, the Letter; Helen, the Popular Figure; Helen, the Poem; Helen,
the Myth; Helen, the Body, or Imitation as Necrophilia (178-92). It is Eros and Thanatos repeatedly.
But this is the multiplication of the One. What would be the multiplication of principles according
to a radical many? As I look back over this moment of strife and the apple of discord and then the double
extortion, I wonder what would have happened, if only, yet with greater amplitude, Paris would have said
Pallas is the fairest? Pallas, who holds the keys to the Palace of Destinies? The Anarchive? Only the gods
would know what Aphrodite might have done—as we have seen, she is a hot head—but I must wonder,
What would have been the outcome? I cannot help but think it would have been the best-perverse of all
possible mergers for everyone. Helen would have stayed with Menelaus, unless of course, Pallas, having
been initially judged by Paris the fairest of them all, decided to open up the strife and discord to all the
players. I am writing this while on the road, just as any mythomorphic writer would write it as s/he goes.
Once Paris has selected Pallis, she could open up the black box and the radical white multiplicities of
Paris's various destinies, incompossible worlds, in which he could select Hera in one with all its
multiplicities and Aphrodite in another with all her destinies. Neither Hera nor Aphrodite would necessarily
know about this ruse of a multiplicity of fairest ones cum a radical multitude. As Jean-François Lyotard
explains, there is no "metalinguistic position" even for the gods. "The gods," Lyotard explains, "are not all-
knowing. They just have their stories, that humans do not know [unless Pallis intervenes]. And humans
have their own stories. And these two sets of stories are, if you will, not two blocks but two centers that
send out their elements to negotiate, if one can call it that, on the boundaries. . . . One does not know whom
one is speaking to; one must be very prudent; one must negotiate; one must ruse; and one must be on the
lookout when one has won" (Just Gaming 43; cf. Deleuze, Negotiations 127). The important thing here is
that such a move in the game of the compossible would not only be an embracing of the principle of
multiplication of incompossible worlds for Helen but also for all concerned. For all that was not. Why One,
when following the principle of multiplication, the world could be All, a radical All of infinite finitudes!
(We must do away with Ockham's Razor and its scholastic tendencies by limiting the razor's principle of
subtraction to only a few, yet necessary, incompossible worlds. Baroque thinking will always—
perversely—return to spill over outside the frame. A rising forth. In the face of The Wasteland, there is
Spring and All!)
What is required as a pedagogy to teach such inventive writings of mythomorphic discourse—
such writings of what was not—is not only Serres's "the instructed third" but also Lyotard's apedagogy
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("Nanterre, Here, Now" 58-59). And ruses after third sophistic ruses. (But this, then, is only a rebeginnings
list of incompossible pedagogies.)
The Coming (AnArchi-) Community
"What then should we choose? Weight or lightness?
Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided
into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One
half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We
might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one
difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?
Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative.
Was he correct or not? That is the question [That is the test!] The only certainty is: the
lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable of Lightness of Being (5-6).
I began this book.less years ago, though it has been only two years of constant writing. In what
follows, you will find what I began with, when I started breaking ground, excavating the basement, the
cavern. ("A fold," Deleuze writes, "is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of
matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point which is never a part, but a simple
extremity of the line" [Fold 6].) Why did I not see this difference between points—that control the line
from one privileged point to the next—and a line—that refuses the geometry of points, moving not
necessarily in a point.less way, but in a series of labyrinthine mannerisms that "resembles a sheet of paper
divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements" (6). This book.less should be read as if on
a single, folded sheet of paper. It has been, and remains to be, written as such. On a single, folded sheet of
paper.
There was the moment in a life of writing Chaste Rape when I began to see that beginnings are
always rebeginnings especially in dealings with the problem of rape. Alice Sebold, in Lucky, made this
evident to me. The problem of rape became the eternal return of the same. It is not a matter of six degrees
of separation anymore. It is a matter of all touching all. One Sunday, I picked up the newspaper to see an
article in the Life section that was on Sebold and a new film Irreversible by the French director Gasper
Noé. The book and the film had something in common. Rape and subsequent acts of more violence that
made rape and its evolving narrative fundamentally irreversible. In Lucky and Irreversible, there was
someone's history entwined with others' histories that were all irrevocable. Christopher Kelly, the author of
the news article quotes Sebold: " 'I live in a world where the two truths coexist; where both hell and hope
lie in the palm of my hand.' " Kelly comments: "Hers is a rape narrative that matter-of-factly argues that
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healing is impossible. The best thing a rape survivor can do, according to Sebold, is to bear her scars as she
stumbles forward" (1G). There is something epical about bearing her scars. To the milkmaid? To her
daughters? To another rape victim? For whom she becomes a mentor? For Sebold, it all began in the 1980s
when she was a first-year student at Syracuse University, where she was raped. And yet, it began in
Syracuse, Sicily, and nearby, as well as scattered beyond, throughout that oldest of impossible,
incompossible worlds, centuries before. The points, lined up, are rape . . . rape . . . rape . . . making a
narrative that is a continuum.
There was the moment in a life of writing Chaste Rape when I began to see that beginnings are
always rebeginnings especially in dealings with the problem of rape. I am not, in reflections, just thinking
about the problem of women as well as some men who, having been raped, are being raped once ever again
when entering the criminal justice system, nor am I just thinking of the problem of writing about rape as
possibly trafficking in rape itself ever again—both of which were and remain my concerns. (Lucky traffics
less, Irreversible traffics more.) Rather, the problem of rape was and ever remains an even more
catastrophic one of eternal return—even rebeginnings themselves—as being logically and humanisticly and
experientially and intimately entwined with revenge. While this Nietzschean principle of return develops an
ethic, it is open to a sense (direction) of developing both ethics and justice. And yet, justice so easily
becomes an alibi for revenge. Anyway—as much as I knew much of this series of complications and then
forgot it only to recall it again in reading Thus Spake and The Genealogy of Morals—I found myself stuck
once ever again with the problem of rape and justice.
Years ago, I read Milan Kundera's thoughts about this problem of the eternal return. He deals with
it negatively (if everything happens but once, there is no return, and consequently everything is "inan[ely]
irreparable" [Unbearable 4].) He deals with it affirmatively (if everything happens recursively "an infinite
number of times, . . . the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make" (5; cf.
Nietzsche, Gay Science 273-74, or No. 341). With the negative aspect, there is a lightness; with the
affirmative, an unbearable burden. Kundera asks—before exploring fictionally the question in an
experimental novel—"What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?" (5). Kundera ends with an image
of lightness (butterfly) and of heaviness (music from below) (314). Ends in a perpetual rebeginning of a
paradox. Unbearable lightness.
In what remains, I will take up a few principles that have guided me, when lost, through my
thinking, but now, and ever again, only in retrospect.
There is prescription of all meaning before the inscription of a single meaning. At the beginning is
ichnography. That is to say, the integral, the sum, the summary, the totality, the stock, the mine,
the ensemble of meanings. The possible, the capacity. (22-23; emphasis mine)
Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations (23).
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Chora is not thinkable on its own but only within a field, a diegesis, considered as my premises.
'Premises' in logic are propositions that support a conclusion. . . . 'Premises' may also refer to a
tract of land—a building together with its grounds. . . . [T]he luck of these two premises—one
logical, the other architectural, combined in the phrase the 'ground of reason'. . . . Here is a
principle of chorography: do not chose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose
by using all the meanings (write the paradigm).
Gregory Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (48; Ulmer's emphasis)
Prescription-Inscription: Remembering, Forgetting, Justice! Serres points us to a principle in
French law called "prescription" (Troubadour 39), which stands in response to Leibniz's "rules of
invariance and stability by which things as well as statements are compensated" (138). It is a Leibnizean
sufficient reason that compensates. It is prescription that must deal with the reactionary nature of
invariance, stability, and compensation. In the principle of reason there is a principle of equivalence or
equity. Serres explains:
The principle of reason or, rather, of putting someone in the right . . . comes from nothing else:
nothing, it says, is without reason. This nothing comes from res, a word from Roman law that
designates the legal case a trial debates and on which it rules: the cause. Before signifying
causality, the term res bespeaks accusation. One must put right as in a reciprocity, as if reason
came in second. Nothing without a reason and a thing without cause express not so much
absurdity or contradiction as a disparity in balance on the scale of justice: to this nothing, to this
something, which seem suspended in the air, without support, one must, in compensation, add or
subtract a tare that returns the beam . . . to the horizon, the tare to reason. We do not know how to
think something in isolation, hung without attachment or floating without weight: the verb to think
itself derives from slope and weight, from this compensation. How can we think without
compensation, without the rational tare? Thus reason does justice for the thing, thus the cause
makes it right. (137; Serres's emphasis)
The principles of reason are identification (A is A), non-contradiction, and excluded middle. All three,
including the principle of the excluded middle, or third person, are A in balance with A. When there is a
loss of balance, an injustice, or un-justice, according to these assumed principles, there is a need for "a
tare," Serres writes, "to return [us] to the correct horizontal and planar, position" (137). The concept of a
"tare" is the justification (compensation) for the container that is added in weight to the content; it is the
difference (subtraction) between gross and net weight. But the question becomes one of
What to place [in terms of a tare] on the other pan to redeem the harm done to this nothing that did
not even achieve existence and to that, otherwise qualified, which remained in virtual or potential
worlds? Reason justifies the existence of what is by compensating the potential or nothingness.
Measured or weighed by this yardstick, existence, whose troubled name still indicates a departure
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from equilibrium, equals reason added to nothingness, a rigorous equation. (137-38; emphasis
mine)
Existence = reason + nothing. (Or existence = species in a genus + differentiae.) This is being in a
reactionary relationship (negativity) with Being (Nothing). We know in saying what something is by way
of what it is not. What is by way of What is not. Of course the biggest tare that anyone could imagine to
add to the pan is Jupiter or God. To get to the best of all possible worlds. What is not are all the other
impossible worlds, or excluded thirds, which are but remainders. We allow for Males and begrudgingly for
females, but not at all for such monsters as hermaphrodites, merms, ferms, etc.
This thinking by way of negation is certainly a way of perpetuating Sextus as rapist and Lucretia
as raped, Lucretia who undergoes self-mortification and becomes, given Brutus's actions, the raped body
that founds Republican Rome with its sense (direction) of vengeful justice. Rape lives on in memoriam.
Like the principles of logic, we have a narrative that is a tautology. A mythos of rape begets another
mythos of rape with a promise of an eternal return. This is a way that does not allow for the other wayves
of possible (incompossible) worlds in which he and she and them are not, those worlds that forever wait,
excluded, from actuality.
Let us not forget that what we are talking about is What is thinking? Reading? Writing? Rape?
Serres at this point obviously must ask:
What does one call thinking then? Compensating what is not by means of reason, bringing the
rational tare between existence and nothingness or the possible, as if reason constituted the
relation of being to nonbeing, or as if it justified what is based on what is not. Thus it touches on a
quasi-divine creation and supposes a mortal familiarity with nothingness or the possible. This
rational thinking, this weight or compensatory proportion, fulfills the ontological lack exactly.
Reason avenges nothingness. (138; emphasis mine)
Ontological lack. Serres finally asks again: "Inventor of the principle of sufficient reason, Leibniz calls
laws of justice the rules of invariance and stability by which things as well as statements are compensated.
Does this reparative reason conserve some trace in science or rationalism of the vengeful eye for an eye?"
(138; emphasis mine). Most assuredly, it does. And it assures us, by way of "the balance of terror" (139),
mutual self-destruction, keeping things informed by the crazy logic of equilibrium, "all along the eternal
return" (139).
Serres begins to get at what we are continuously wrestling with here, when he writes:
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Vengeance and its apparent justice, founding the eternal return, keep the complete memory of
exact reason intact, through reversible and cyclical time. They know nothing of duration, that
irreversible time that goes in one direction without ever being able to turn back. Forgetting
intervenes during the course of duration; where anamnesis neither restores nor compensates exact
or intact memory, the whole effect is never equal to complete and total reason; this new time
creates a lack in sufficiency, a flaw in or an excess of reason. (139; emphasis mine)
Here, forgetting keeps the future open for living a life. (We have never wanted to close the archive, but to
keep it open for future, affirmative forgetting.) Serres says, "In French law, this lack, excess, or flaw is
called prescription" (139; Serres's emphasis). What duration + prescription bring is an affirmative
forgetfulness and hence a forgiveness. Prescription creates the conditions for the possibilities of wiping
away debts and precludes any public action against someone in civil and criminal cases. (We call it a
statute of limitations [lack or excess] in the U.S.) Serres situates prescription as a "third position between
law and nonlaw" (140). Prescription is in "the irreversible domain of history and opposes its annual or
thirty-year lapses of time to the invariable and inviolable rules. More than limiting them it annuls the laws
that are in force concerning charges, debts, property, offenses, and crimes. . . . [T]ime like a baptismal
river, makes you innocent. . . . Prescription . . . forgets and ends up being silent, in the same way that time
cares nothing for the principle of contradiction" (140). Finding two mythoi to think perversely with, Serres
writes:
It is said that the river Forgetting runs in the Underworld: prescription returns it to the earth,
whose sons, seated on the banks of rivers, often lose their memory at the same time as their
reason. There is no world more atrocious than the one where nature delivers itself over to the
eternal return and pushes forgetting and mercy back into the Underworld. Prescription brings it
back or puts it on its feet: real and sweet is the world where the rivers run toward the mouths of
forgetting and the ghost of truth is pushed back to the Underworld. (140)
Like a cavern being unfolded into a cavern, prescription unfolds the conditions for the possibilities of
forgetting into the earth.
We are trying to understand not only the implications of prescription but also inscription, which
we have yet discussed as fully as the former. Let us not forget, therefore, that what we are talking about is
What is thinking? Reading? Writing? Rape? Serres at this point obviously must ask: What is inscription?
What is its relation to prescription? He answers:
[P]rescription is written at the top, as a preamble or preliminary, as an epigraph to every text
[archi-text cum anarchi-tectural writing, or anarchi-text]. When you write in the morning, once the
hour strikes . . . know that before the blank page, in its top margin, prescription always already
precedes you. By definition, it alone exists before. Written at the top of the page but rubbed out
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and leaving the page intact, free, virgin, white, innocent. In the third position: inscribed, effaced.
(142)
Serres tells us:
Serres's exemplar is that of the good Samaritan. (It could be Bartleby, but it is the good Samaritan.)
For two millennia at least, everyone remembers but everyone has forgotten that the samaritans had
the worst of roles, that of hateful, implacable, irreconcilable enemies. The parable of the good
Samaritan enounces a contradiction: such a man cannot pass for good. Everyone remembers this,
everyone has forgotten it: prescription certainly exists and it has succeeded.
On the blank page that we face when we begin writing,
Prescription asks for forgetting, but it has already written memory [or one meaning alone],
because it has left its trace. It remembers being written but prescribes forgetting. [Prescription]
invents anew, as in a third place, memory-forgetting, the memory kept sheltered but at the same
time effaced, intellectually unvarying in the black box of history, but passionately, essentially,
historically, wisely lost; a new invariant through variations, stability through instabilities, another
foundation of the law stronger than the dreary eternal return [a new meaning comes forth]. (140;
emphasis and interpolations mine)
Prescription is what makes inscription (writing) anew, makes for the invention of new incompossible
worlds. Makes for What was not. Makes for writing the paradigm.
While we started so long and so many pages ago, in our title—what we took to be our entitlement
to inscribe, to write, a critique of—"Chaste Rape"—rape as the foundation of rhetorical-cultures that was
neither visible nor hidden from our colleagues, we now see the relation prescription prior to inscription, of
pre(in)scription. "Chaste" (forgotten) "Rape" (violence remembered) is a forgotten remembered, or is now
a memory-forgetting. A memory kept sheltered but at the same time effaced.
In dis/order "not to write," Serres writes, "any longer . . . We will no longer write philosophy
except by prescription" (143; emphasis mine). We will write on a blank wax tablet. As Agamben reminds
us, "thought, in its essence, is pure potentiality; in other words, it is also the potentiality to not think, and, as
such, as possible or material intellect, Aristotle compares it to a writing tablet on which nothing is written"
(Coming 36-37; Aristotle, De Anima Bk III, ch. 4, 429b.30). Bartleby refuses to inscribe, to copy. What
this means is that "the perfect act of writing," Agamben says, "comes not from a power to write [to
inscribe], but from an impotence," an impotentiality, to not-write. I can only, at this point.less in time, take
what Serres is saying as what Agamben is saying: We must learn to write as Bartleby writes, which is to
write "nothing but its potentiality to not-write" (Coming 37)—which is a potentiality prior to inscription,
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prior to the so-called best of all possible worlds. A potentiality to not-write is to write all that was not. By
writing the paradigm. When it is possible for the rest of us to write in philosophy another mythomorphic
narrative that is not a narrative, which is without rape and, therefore, not founded on rape and revenge with
more rape—a rape for a rape—then the coming community that is not a community (the inoperative, or
unavowable community) will come. But again, such a community has already come, because that
community wrote this text of which I am not the author. 48
Immanent (imminent) Reversibility: I began with this topos of reversibility, too. It follows a logic
of point + line + point. Something graphically like this: •------• . Tic-toc. This configuration can be taken in
at least two ways: One by the mythos of eternal-cyclical return (the movement of Chronos replays itself but
without variation, unless Chronos is modified in terms of chaos theory with its movement of fractals);
another by arborescence, which in repeating its seasonable-cyclical branchings, controls the flow of the
line(s). While in this point and line scheme we have repetition, we do not have difference. As Deleuze and
Guattari say: "What constitutes arborescence is the submission of the line to the point[s]. . . A line of
becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes
between points, it comes up through the middle. . . . A point is always a point of origin. But a line of
becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination; to speak of the
absence of an origin, to make the absence of an origin the origin, is a bad play on words [abgrund]. A line
of becoming has only a middle" (Thousand 293). The return of the excluded middle. The eternal return of
the repressed, suppressed, oppressed.
The two points and a line are to becoming-between (or –middle) as the rising forth of irreversible
time (duration) is to reversible time (eternal return) as I discussed it in the previous section.
In this architectural configuration, thinking, reading, writing do not break new ground (grund or
abgrund) because the ground is already broken and configured as striated space in terms of groundings
present or not present (mise en abyme). But I do place some hope, as I indicated for long stretches of
thinking and writing as reading, in the early chapters, in a principle of immanent (imminent) reversibility,
or a negative deconstruction (M/F to F/M as eternal return). I was thinking that—surely!—such quick
reversals, as tensors—sometimes as quick and as intense as the Libidinal (Moebius) Band/Skin can
become, in its turnings, in its Keplerian arcs, would eventually lead to nonpositive affirmative
deconstructions, altogether outside the binary thinking by wayves of conductively linking to a third-figural
thinking, reading, and writing rape. What is compelling, however, is that now it is possible to see—have we
not always seen this, as Lyotard quips?—that reversibility (from Thanatos to Eros) can also bring back
revenge. Unjust as a Nichomachean Erotics can. 49 (There are no guarantees.) "We" were supplementary
(M/F); now "you" will be supplementary (F/M). We need to get to the third person in conjugating the
paradigm. When the cabin boy Pip, in Melville's Moby Dick (335), falls overboard, down to the bottom of
the ocean, he returns to say to all aboard: I see, thou sees, he-she-it sees; we see, you see, they see. Such
revaluations await imminent transvaluation. And again while I hope that such a transvaluation of value will
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occur, I do not believe human beings will effectuate such a revolution (involution). To think so would beg
the question. Pip—after all has been conjugated and undone—walks upon the shore and writes that
message of human . . . being nothing but its potentiality to not-be. That message that Pip gives to Michel
Foucault to give us is "that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (Order
387). Pip is as mad a philosopher as we can find in literature. He is as much aboard a ship of fools (recall
Foucault) as any. He is other than "human." But this face drawn and then erased in the sand (of time,
Chronos, tic-toc) is only one incompossibility—and not a very popular one with those people who talk
about the violence of rhetoric—among many other imcompossibilities that still remain as What is not. We
really need not worry about begging questions or contradicting ourselves. Such scoffs would now be but
vice-dictions. Freud zigzags. Perhaps that was the best he could do for all of us, while waiting for another
to invent thirds. Let us not forget, however, that zigzag thinking is the very duration enduring-becoming of
third figures.
What I have thus far written strongly suggests that irreversibility (irrevocability?) has much to
promise us as thinkers, readers, writers of rape. But let us not forget what Kundera says about just how
mysterious reversibility, this eternal return itself, can be. Heaviness or Lightness? As Georges Bataille said
to us—that Oedipus should never have answered the riddle, anthropos 50 —that Oedipus should have
forgotten the question proffered by the sphinx—we should say to ourselves, we, too, should forget, in
relation to this disjunctive question. We should realize that if we refuse to answer this and other similar
disjunctive questions, we will have been on our wayves to becoming haecceity, with memories of a
haecceity. We will be out of indefinite time (Aeon the ephemeral, the indeterminate) and definite time
(Chronos, a time of the determinate). We will be in their difference, their in-differentiae. As Deleuze and
Guattari describe this statelessness: We will be in a time that "has neither beginning nor end, origin nor
destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines" (Thousand 263). ----------------
------- ------------------------------- ------------ ----------------------------- --------- ----------------- --------------------
---------------- n It is a writing that is point.less----------------- It is a writing of the Antimemory. An "Anti-"
that is not contra to, but alongside, at the threshold of ---------------------- -------------------- ------- -------------
-- ---- ------- ------------------- But this line is not a vertical line such as //////////////////////////////. Which is but
a serialization by serial killers, sacrificers, potentially not unlike Abraham. But again, it can be the line of
the zigzag /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Irreversibility: I mentioned this earlier. It returned in a newspaper thrown on my lawn. On a
Sunday morning. It was a news story in the Life and Arts section. It was in part about Gasper Noé's film
Irréversible, which is a narrative told in reverse, just as Memento is told in reverse. Both are about rape and
murder, extreme sexual violence, and re-membering: In Memento it is the character Leonard Shelby trying
to remember but always three or so minutes later forgetting everything and having to restart again. In his
quest for revenge. An eye for an eye. (There is a lot of looping of scenes in Memento.) In Irréversible, it is
the film itself apparently trying to re-member, but again in reverse, forgetting in a final (but initial) scene
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what had been. Or so the film appears to be saying. Irréversible begins with the ending: Two men being
arrested, one of which is being carried off on a stretcher. They are Re: Vengers. It ends with the beginning:
Max, the female, lying on the grass in an idyllic scene, but with a write-over: "Time [Chronos] destroys
Everything." 51 The very initial shot is of Max on an orange towel, lying on the greenest of grass, reading a
book, and with children running and playing around her. The shot is vertical with her upside down and
then, in an arc shot, righted. Midway in the film, where the fulcrum or lever, maintaining the pans of blind
justice, might be located, Max is at a party with Marcus, her lover, and with Pierre, her former lover. They
are happy and playful but then there is a quarrel. She leaves and, while on the street, from which she
departs to cross over, takes an underpass. Into hell. Shot in all reds. There she is raped and sodomized and
her face is bashed in repeatedly in a nine-minute scene with the camera running and capturing it all in a
single, uncut shot. The scene at the beginning of the film, which is the end, is of Marcus and Pierre taking
revenge on the man who allegedly attacked Alex. (As I see the film, the man is most likely not the man
who raped Alex. But in revenge, what does that matter! Any stand-in will do, as Rene Girard has made
clear. The beginning is the end of all the characters. Time has destroyed everything. Rape-time has undone
everything.
As Aristotle says about Troy, he could say about Paris, France: None of the sacking and raping
and bashing of faces can be recalled. All is subject to the principle of irrevocability. But it is even more
complicated, and yet, even more precise. The official press book for Irréversible offers this text,
summarizing the film:
Irreversible � Because time destroys everything � because some acts are irreparable � because
man is an animal � because the desire for vengeance is a natural impulse � because most crimes
remain unpunished � because the loss of a loved one destroys like lightning � because love is
the source of life � because all history is written in sperm and blood � because in a good world
� because premonitions do not alter the course of events � because time reveals everything �
the best and the worst.
Is this the inscription that determines the film? These predications, qualities? Or can it also function as a
prescription, something written at the top on a blank, wax tablet? "Because time reveals everything _ The
best and the worst." God's the best and the worst of all possible worlds? No, this is an inscription (one value
divided into two), not a prescription (all that can be thought to be compossible). Therein, in that difference,
lies the test. Or ------ Does the test lie in the in-different? Or in-difference. At the surface of the wax tablet?
This press book, with its statements, so reminds me of—I am remembering—the presocratic
fragments. Which are the very para-deigma of thinking as testing, testing as thinking—which, as Agamben
writes, is the improper "proper place of the example . . . always beside itself, in the empty space in which
its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds" (Coming 10). In this case, testing as thinking, reading,
writing rape (sexual violence). As it variously unfolds. This press book, with its fragments, reminds me of
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Anaxamander's fragment, his celebrated (celibate) principle of the indeterminate—to apeiron—but as
rendered by the attempter and experimenter Nietzsche, in his anecdotal testaments (Philosophy in the
Tragic Age of the Greeks 25, 45-50). In writing about selected presocratic figures, Nietzsche gives three
anecdotes for each. (Once he gets to three, he has thousands.) Nietzsche's is not inscriptions, but coming-
prescriptions. He writes the conditions for compossibility (with its incompossibilities). While Anaxamander
is a "true pessimist" (45-46), Heraclitus is in-different (50-69). Anaxamander is to best and worst or to one
and many as Heraclitus is to in-difference, in-differentiae. Heaviness or lightness? The test: What do you,
my Dear Reader, choose? Do not be mislaid, misdirected, by a sense of the political over the so-called
aesthetic.
Nietzsche writes about Heraclitus:
Man is necessity down to his last fibre, and totally 'unfree,' that is if one means by freedom the
foolish demand to be able to change one essentia arbitrarily, like a garment—a demand which
every serious philosophy has rejected with the proper scorn. [Recall Leibniz and Serres and
Lyotard in relation to the emperor, Harlequin.] . . . Heraclitus . . . had no reason why he had to
prove (as Leibnitz did [sic]) that this is the best of all possible worlds. It is enough for him that it
is the beautiful innocent game of the aeon. Man, generally speaking, is for Heraclitus an irrational
creature which is no contradiction of the fact that in all aspects of his nature the law of sovereign
reason is fulfilled. He does not occupy an especially favored position in nature, whose loftiest
phenomenon is fire, as exemplified by the celestial bodies. By no means is simple-minded man an
equal lofty phenomenon. Insofar as he shares, of necessity, in fire, he has a plus of rationality;
insofar as he consists of water and earth, his reason is in a bad way. There is no obligation on man
to recognize the logos just because he is man. But why does water, why does earth exist? This, for
Heraclitus, is a much more serious question than why human beings are so stupid and so wicked.
The same immanent lawful order and justice reveals itself in the highest and in the wrongest man
[sic]. But if we press upon Heraclitus the question why fire is not always fire, why it is sometimes
water and sometimes earth, he could only say, 'It is a game. Don't take is so pathetically and—
above all—don't make morality of it!' Heraclitus only describes the world as it is and takes the
same contemplative pleasure in it that an artist does when he looks at his own work in progress.
Gloomy, melancholy, tearful, sinister, bilious, pessimistic, generally hateful: only those can find
him thus who have good cause to be dissatisfied with his natural history of mankind. But he would
consider such people negligible, together with their antipathies and sympathies, their hatreds and
their loves. (63-64; Nietzsche's emphasis, my interpolation)
But Nietzsche writes not only about such thirds as Anaxamander and Heraclitus but goes on to
other thirds as well, making them all incipient thirds (Thales, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles,
Democritus, Socrates). All men on their way to becoming something other than men or the other of women.
Something of a third figure.
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"[T]hus I taught you, my friends."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (251).
Multiply Principles: When confronted with disjunctions, with two philosophers, write a third one.
When confronted with whatever it is, write a third one. When stuck, multiple y.our principles. Multiply
multiples. Incompossibilities. Do not think of simply and only reversing the particular incompossibility; for
it can, more often than not, lead to naught. To revenge. "Man would rather will nothingness than not will"
(Genealogy of Morals 163; Nietzsche's emphasis). But it is, as Nietzsche continues elsewhere, more
complicated and easily misacted—this willing. Nietzsche's Zarathustra teaches us:
To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all 'it was' into a 'thus I willed it'—that alone
should I call redemption. Will—that is the name of the liberator and joy-bringer; thus I taught you,
my friends. But now learn this too: the will itself is still a prisoner. Willing liberates; but what is it
that puts even the liberator himself in fetters? 'It was'—that is the name of the will's gnashing of
teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator
of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time's
covetousness, that is the will's loneliest melancholy" (251; emphasis mine).
Rather, think, write, read nothing but y.our potentiality to not-think, not-write, not-read. What was not. We
have sent Bartleby to the Palace of Destinies, to call the principle of irrevocability into question and
thereby to redeem What was not.
"In a tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a
place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and
dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky."
Alice Sebold, Lucky: A Memoir (cover, hardback edition).
"I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven wasn't perfect. But
I came to believe that if I watched closely, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth."
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (20).
"Like the freed convict in Kafka's Penal Colony, who has survived the destruction of the machine
that was to have executed him, these beings [unbaptized children in Limbo] have left the world of
guilt and justice behind them: The light that rains down on them is that irreparable light of the
dawn following the novissima dies of judgment. But the life that begins on earth after the last day
is simply human life."
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (7).
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Irreparable: But what if all of the above principles, along with Bartleby, should fail (might fail,
even ought to fail)? What if we are stuck within Aristotle's logic of the irrevocable? If so, then there is
always the irreparable. Agamben says: "The Irreparable is that things are just as they are, in this or that
mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being. States of things are irreparable, whatever they may
be: sad or happy, atrocious or blessed. How you are, how the world is—that is the Irreparable" (Coming
90). But this notion of the Irreparable does not mean there is no hope. There is a topological loop worked
into the folding of the problem, or the problematizing of the fold. Agamben says: "We can have hope only
in what is without remedy" (Coming 102). I keep thinking of Alain Resnais's shots of the archive in Night
and Fog, but more so I keep thinking of Agamben's discussion of Auschwitz, enunciation, and the archive.
There is such a hopeful passage toward the end (or rebeginnings) of Remnants:
Between the obsessive memory of tradition, which knows only what has been said, and the
exaggerated thoughtlessness of oblivion, which cares only for what was never said, the archive is
the unsaid or sayable inscribed in everything said by virtue of being enunciated; it is the fragment
of memory that is always forgotten in the act of saying 'I.' It is in this 'historical a priori,'
suspended between langue and parole, that Foucault establishes his construction site and founds
archaeology as 'the general theme of a description that questions the already-said at the level of its
existence' [Archaeology 131]—that is, as the system of relations between the unsaid and the said
in every act of speech, between the enunciative function and the discourse in which it exerts itself,
between the outside and the inside of language. (144; emphases mine)
This is a description of obsession and its hysterical other, or the hysterical third try (above), in which we
placed and still place in, as a taking place of, hope. The What remained unsaid, the What was not, will have
been said, will have become a being in the coming community, will have become in a series of lines of
flight. There is the condition of the compossibility (of the archive, of the Palace of Destinies) of a rebirth of
sub-jectivity in a superject, in an anarchi-ject or in some walking dead who knows and who speaks, who
testifies to not only what has been, but what is to come. This rebirth is compossible, as Agamben says, in
terms of human being, in terms of s/he cum it 52 who "is capable of not having language, because it is
capable of its own in-fancy" (146). Human being, between two images of language, can appear out of
Auschwitz, out of "the most radical negation of contingency," as the Muselmann (148) can appear—
compear—as Primo Livi's paradox of the Muselmann. Agamben writes: " 'The Muselmann is the complete
witness.' It implies two contradictory propositions: 1) 'the Muselmann is the non-human, the one who could
never bear witness,' and 2) 'the one who cannot bear witness is the true witness, the absolute witness' "
(150; cf. 159-71). From Bartleby to the Muselmann to the ashes, the stones, the bones, the specters, the
non-human—all speak. And yet, it is, more so, the "silent murmur" in the archive (Foucault, Archaeology
27-28) or it is "the animal in flight that we seem to hear rustling away in our words" (Agamben, Language
107) that speaks. But as Agamben says, "the voice, the human voice, does not exist" in language (107).
Again, the voice is not human. By way of the negative, we can but say "it is" not human, non-human. "It is"
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intractable (108). "It" speaks statements that are not readable. How we respond to "it" in language "is
ethics" (107).
We walk through the woods: suddenly we hear the flapping of wings or the wind in the grass. A
pheasant lifts off and then disappears instantly among the trees, a porcupine buries in the thick
underbrush, the dry leaves crackles as a snake slithers away. Not the encounter, but this flight of
invisible animals is thought. Not, it was not our voice. We came as close as possible to language,
we almost brushed against it, held it in suspense: but we never reached our encounter and now we
turn back, untroubled, toward home.
So, language is our voice, our language. As you now speak, that is ethics. (108)
The nonhuman taking place toward the coming community, murmurs and rustles awayves:
From the between of potentiality and impotentiality;
From beyond good and evil;
to and from Limbo.
". . . beyond perdition and salvation" (Coming 6). Hence, the Irreparable.
Endnotes
Foreword
1. A little humor—lightness—when needed! The last three "Why I am" statements are, of course, from
Nietzsche's section titles to Ecce Homo.
2. In many cases, I must write a sentence in the passive voice. Normally, an editor would have insisted that I
should have written, e.g., "How I wrote this book." But doubly, I must write a sentence in a radically passive
voice, or mid-voice. This writing is not just a matter of active and passive voices, but this writing is most
justly about a radically passive writing, one that is situated between active and passive. As readers progress
through the reading of this book, they will begin to grasp what such a third voice might variously mean but
more importantly how it is the voice of an attempter, in the obsolete sense of the assayer, essayer.
Experimenter. Versucher.
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3. This diagram of atypical-typical, meandering narrative movement is from Sterne's Tristram Shandy. I will
reinclude it in the final section, "Rebeginnings." But then, it informs all of the chapters. Cf. Borges's
infamous line: " 'I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along that line so many
philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so, too. Scharlach, when in some
other incarnation you hunt me, pretend to commit (or do commit) a crime at A, then a second crime at B,
eight kilometres from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometres from A and B, half-way between the two.
Wait for me afterwards at D, two kilometres from A and C, again halfway between both. Kill me at D, as
you are now going to kill me at Triste-le-Roy' " ("Death and the Compass," in Labyrinths 117). After writing
a complete draft of this book, I discovered Mark Taylor's Hiding. Actually, it was in a two-day conversation
with Mark that I discovered his book and then began reading it through Jack Miles's wonderful introduction
"How to Read This Book" to Hiding. Miles writes: "To read this book right, you have to read it wrong.
Reading a book wrong is getting lost in what is superficial or merely charming about it—its interesting
examples, its striking illustrations, its literary style . . . and so forth—and failing to come to grips with its
central argument. But that's just the right way to read this book. Its surface fascinations are considerable.
Enjoy them. Don't try to link them into a thesis that you can accept or rebut. Don't read [Chaste Rape] as a
book, in short. Instead, take it as a [thinking] trip. For most serious workings of nonfiction, that would be a
mistake. For this one, it won't be" (Hiding, 1).
4. I had initially planned to have sections in this book on rape in art and in music. But that perhaps is the
subject of yet another book. I had in mind to elaborate on the work done in art history by Diane Wolfthal
(Images of Rape) and the novel by Alexandra Lapierre (Artemisia) and in music by Lawrence Kramer (After
the Lovedeath) and Dworkin (ch. 1 of Intercourse).
5. This is the second instance, in this Foreword, that I have used the word "bloc." I mean by it a bloc of
becoming or a line of flight. As we progress through Chaste Rape, these two expressions will take on a
variety of meanings in the context of various experiments in thinking, reading, and writing rape. They are
Deleuzean (see Dialogues for a quick explanation, or just continue to read on for an unfolding of the terms).
6. Two writers who do question rape as foundation, but are not listened to, are N. O. Brown, Love's Body,
and Serres, Rome.
7. The idiom to lose face can be somewhat misleading here, though not necessarily so. In using this idiom, I
do mean, losing credibility. No one can write about rape and not be forever questioned in terms of authority,
ethos, purpose. So like Foucault, "I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face"
(Archaeology 17). I have no face for my readers! Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand (167-74) and Abé,
The Face of Another.
8. See my full discussion of Isocrates in Negation (139-90). Jed has demonstrated how the Florentine
Humanists engaged in coverups (how they secretized and sanitized the corpus). Isocrates, or those who
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would represent him, do the same. In the Panegyricus, Isocrates invests an inordinate amount of time in
discussing the myth of Demeter (as well as her daughter Korê [aka Persephone]) so as to purchase favor for
Athens. (If Theseus was the founder of Athens, Demeter, the goddess of corn, is the sustainer of Athenian
life.) Isocrates relates the myth of Demeter:
When Demeter came to our land, in her wandering after the rape of Korê, and, . . . gave these two
gifts, the greatest in the world—the fruits of the earth, which have enabled us to rise above the life
of the beasts, and the holy rite . . . –our city was not only so beloved of the gods but also so
devoted to mankind that . . . she did not begrudge them to the rest of the world, but shared with all
men what she had received. (Vol 1: 135; or ll. 28-29; emphasis mine)
Isocrates then continues by attempting to establish the grounds, or proof, for his genealogy, which
traces and legitimizes Athens by having Demeter as its source of life. (As Page DuBois points out,
Demeter is the goddess of production and reproduction. DuBois, though she does not explicitly reach my
conclusion, nonetheless, can be extrapolated as saying that the land must be plowed, by way of mutual
consent or by way of sexual violation, i.e., raped, in order to re/produce food. [See Sowing 49, 52-55, 59-
61.])
Here then, in Isocrates's narrative-argument, we begin with Demeter, after the "rape" of her
daughter. Demeter gives "two gifts" to human beings who will be the Athenians. In this narrative, which
originates with rape—for Demeter would not be wandering unless her daughter had been raped—in this
narrative, we have rape and gifts, both of which are ways of taking and taming women, both of which are
means of exchange and communication. (I have in mind Mauss's Gift, Levi-Strauss's Elementary
Structures, Bataille's Death and Sensuality [197-220], Rubin's "Traffic," and Irigaray's This Sex [170-91]
studies in the "trafficking in women.") The rape of Korê and the violation of the land, and then the gifts
from Demeter in the form of corn, signify a sublimated, political economy—which I would say, then,
makes up part of the narrative (exchange) logic of the founding and the legitimization of Athens.
This political economy, however, continues, as Isocrates's narrative-argument takes on imperialist
tones; for as Isocrates states, Athens "did not begrudge [the two gifts] to the rest of the world": "For most
of the Hellenic cities, in memory of our ancient services, send us each year the first-fruits of the harvest,
and those who neglect to do so have often been admonished by the Pythian priestess to pay us our due
portion of their crops" (137; or l. 31). Hence, we now move from rape and gifts to sharecropping. But the
development of this rape narrative still continues, as Isocrates carries it out to its logical conclusion,
namely, the justification of imperialism and war. Isocrates tells us, in his account of the greatness of
Athens, that
seeing the barbarians in possession of most of the country, while the Hellenes were confined
within a narrow space and, because of the scarcity of the land, were conspiring and making raids
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against each other, and were perishing . . . --our city . . . was not content to let these things be as
they were, but sent out leaders to the several states, who, enlisting the neediest of the people, and
placing themselves at their head, overcame the barbarians in war, founded many cities on either
continent, settled colonies in all the islands. (139; ll. 34-36)
Now, the full narrative moves from rape, to gifts, to sharecropping, and finally to imperialism and
war. The cause/effect of the narrative-argument inevitably follows from the original act of rape.
I am well aware, as I have suggested, that a reader can claim that I am being anachronistic here;
that it had to be this way. I, however, cannot agree. And why not? Because, today, we still celebrate
Isocrates as the great Humanist and teacher. When we celebrate him, we perpetuate the rape narrative, just
as Isocrates did, and just as the Florentine Humanist did in dis/respect to Lucretia. This cycle of
perpetuation and perpetration must be perpetually denegated.
I want to give two other example from Isocrates. First, there was Demeter; now there is Helen, as
she is also used in the Panegyricus. Here, Helen, like Demeter and Korê, is used for the justification and
legitimization of continued war against the barbarians. Isocrates writes:
. . . it is disgraceful for us, when our fathers who engaged in the Trojan expedition because of the
rape of one woman, all shared so deeply in the indignation of the wronged they that they did not stop
waging war until they had laid in ruins the city of him who had dared to commit the crime,--it is disgraceful
for us, I say, now that all Hellas is being continually outraged, to take not a single step to wreak a common
vengeance. . . . For this war is the only war which is better than peace; it will be more like a sacred mission
than a military expedition; and it will profit equally both those who. . . . (Vol. I: 237; or ll. 181-82;
emphasis mine)
The final example is from Isocrates's defense of "Helen." From my—not Isocrates's—point of
view, the defense is ironic; for Isocrates spends precious little time discussing—specifically, defending—
Helen. Instead, Helen becomes an abstraction in the form of a genealogy, but a genealogy that is tied
together by the theme of rape, one rape (realized or intended) after another, and a genealogy that has as its
sole purpose the legitimization of men and the Greeks. In this so-called defense, Helen is all but (the)
Forgotten.
First, of course, there is the Zeus-Leda linkage (Vol. III: 69; or secs. 16-17), which produced
Helen (cf. Keuls 51). After establishing Helen's genealogical connection with the god, Isocrates begins a
long discussion of the Theseus-Helen connection. (Theseus, while he is the founder of Athens's political
institutions, is perhaps second to Zeus as Athens's leading rapist [cf. Keuls 57-62]). Theseus desired Helen
so greatly that, with the help of Perithoüs, he "seized her by force" (71). (Peirithoüs, who in turn desired
Persephonê [Korê], enlists the help of Theseus to have her. They are partners in crime.)
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As the discourse continues, after talk of these double "abductions," Isocrates becomes self-
conscious enough to be concerned with whether the discourse "is an encomium of Helen or an accusation
of Theseus," but Isocrates concludes that Theseus "was lacking in naught, but had attained consummate
virtue" (72-73). All that he says, then, is that this is not an accusation of Theseus, but a praise of him. But
still, What of Helen? Without any sense of self-consciousness, Isocrates writes: "And it seems to me
appropriate to speak of Theseus at still greater length; for I think this will be the strongest assurance for
those who wish to praise Helen, if we can show that those who loved and admired her were themselves
more deserving of admiration than other men" (73; or sec. 22). This speaking at greater length is from
pages 69 to 83 (or sections 18 to 39). Helen is again all but forgotten, while Isocrates uses her to make
Theseus look good. Men are valued, or measured, by way of Helen; this is what trafficking in women, in
part, means.
After discussing Zeus's and Theseus's connections with Helen, Isocrates, then, begins his discussion
of Alexander (aka Paris). (In this so-called defense, Helen repeatedly changes hands like a coin.) The short
of the discussion is Isocrates's saying that Alexander desired Helen not for herself, "but because he was
eager to become a son of Zeus" (84-85; or sec. 43). Foundations, lineage, genealogy, legitimization--all are
everything. However, if these foundations are determined by rape itself, trafficking in women, etc., what
have we wrought? At the very end of his so-called defense of Helen, Isocrates says:
Far more has been passed over than has been said. Apart from the arts and philosophic studies and
all the other benefits that one might attribute to her and to the Trojan War, we would be justified
in considering that it is owing to Helen that we are not the slaves of the barbarians. For we shall
find that it was because of her that the Greeks became united in harmonious accord and organized
a common expedition against the barbarians, and that it was then for the first time that Europe set
up a trophy of victory over Asia. (97; or sec. 67)
I would agree, though not as Isocrates intended most likely, that "far more has been passed over."
What we are being told here, in addition, is that the "arts" and "philosophic studies" are founded on (the
abduction/rape of) Helen; what we are being told here is that "because of her [rape]," the Greeks have
continuing, legitimate grounds for Panhellenism.
9. Woolf, Waves 185. Woolf plays a major role, though not by any means exclusive, in Deleuze's thinking
on new grounds and the new earth. See his general discussion, with Guattari, e.g., in Thousand Plateaus 342-
50. I refer to Deleuze's use of Woolf, as well as other thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, throughout my
discussions.
10. For the distinction between studium and punctum, see Barthes, Camera Lucida 43-60. Or simply read on
to the next section, The Basement.
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11. The word and paracept "abandonment" is far from what is written in Dante's hell, as in abandon all hope.
In fact, it means there is hope in abandonment, at least, in the sense of its use here. Which alludes to the
mystery of what was not and still can become. The word is used frequently by Jean-Luc Nancy and
Agamben, and plays in a few occasions a significant part in the forthcoming discussions in several chapters
of Chaste Rape.
The Basement
1. All quotations from The Basement will be from the 1979 edition unless otherwise noted.
2. I have placed the word "description" partially in italics so as to call attention to the embedded word
"scripts." I am referring, in general, to scripts as units that make up narratives as Shank and Abelson have
used them for linguistic, discourse analysis (e.g., their "restaurant script"), and, in particular, as Marcus,
Hesford, et al., have used them as rape scripts that are "cultural scripts" and therefore subject to change
(Marcus 389). Along with "description," I have used such words and phrases as "transcript," scripted,
scripted theme, and scripted group. I comment more directly in chapter 1 on the political importance of
scripts as Marcus uses them.
3. After I wrote about Millett's The Basement, I discovered Jeanne Perreault's excellent chapter in Writing
Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography. While we both write about Millett's telling by way of
identifying with and becoming the characters of the murder case in order "to speak" their various accounts,
I concentrate, in addition, on the connections among telling, pedagogy, canon, cultural product, and
sacrifice.
4. In the Satyricon and, therefore, in Eliot's poem, the Sibyl of Cumae actually says, "I want to die." I have
changed the answer to "I want [to live]" so as to stress Christa Wolf's triad of to kill, to die, to live (the
latter being Wolf's third alternative) and so as to stress Sylvia Liken's desire to resist in order to live. As I
will point out, the level of resistance moves from (or as Freud might say, Beyond) her mind and body to the
impressions that Likens has left, far left, not as memories but as remainders, in the inorganic world itself.
Like the Sibyl, Sylvia (the names are so visually close) lives in a cage. That Millett sculpts cages is
appropriate thematically. Also see her discussion of "the three great cages" in Sexual Politics 22.
5. Freud in his many analogies calls on the basement in terms of architecture, class, and childhood
sexuality. See his parable of "The Basement and First Floor" in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
(Part III), SE, XVI: 352-54, 378.
379

6. This is the first time that I use the expression "imminently reversibility." I purposefully use imminent
instead of immanent. I continue with this difference throughout.
7. I take the term "Oedi-pedagogy" from Avital Ronell (Finitude's Score).
8. In the new Introduction to the 1991 edition of The Basement, Millett writes:
Gertrude was a paradox, a contradiction, a mistake in the column of figures; how can you blame
patriarchal institutions when they are enforced by a woman? Just the point: no system of
oppression operates without collaborators. Gertrude is a kapo, an agent. Victim herself originally
but in time, a true believer in her own unworthiness and in betraying her kind, no less a victimizer.
Back then this was still bad news around the feminist campfire; I remember my friend Ti-Grace's
ironic warning over the phone that there would be hell to pay on the ideological front. But we
always knew this I protested, it even figures [sic]; sure, she chuckled, it's just a point some don't
feel ready to concede publicly. If women in the movement could not bear to bring themselves to
read of Sylvia's suffering, they could bear still less to face Gertrude's complicity." (5)
9. What intensifies the dramatic exchange between Gertrude and Sylvia is the fact that Millett, in her
meditations, embodies the dialectic of pedagogy and resistance by becoming both primary characters, that
is, both Sylvia and Gertrude. Millett tells us, "I was Sylvia Likens. She was me" (63) and "I become
Gertrude. I invent her, conceive her, enter into her" (290). Millett also spends time deliberating over why
Jenny laughs ("the reflexive laugh") at her sister when others laugh at her and how this laughter is a sign of
her complicity (see 245-47). Millett also speculates on the theatre of cruel laughter (21).
Part 1: Broaching the Abject
Chapter 1: How to think, to read, to write rape?
1. Lest there be some counterproductive, yet productive, confusion here, the reference in Lyotard to
"always immanent" should not be taken to mean immanence spelled with an "a." (Cf. Lyotard's discussion
in Just Gaming 110-11.) As I continue to progress into a discussion of imminent reversibility—though
some thinkers (e.g., Deleuze) call on the word immanent for a reversibility—I will try to make clear that
they are using the traditional form of the word immanence while they mean to rehabilitate it in terms of
imminence. See note 6 below.
2. The neologism of "be(a)stest" combines best, monster, and test. I construct these neologisms and strange
expresshuns throughout and do not feel that it is necessary to explain each.
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3. In reference to Deleuze and point of view, see Cinema 1 (72-76), where Deleuze discusses this third
position pointless of view in terms of Pasolini's construction of a "free indirect proposition." The first
position of point of view would be direct discourse; second, indirect. It is the third, however, that folds the
two points of view, that of the Sylvia and that of a paraphraser such as any commentator on Sylvia, into the
free indirect style, which is an in between position.
4. See the anonymous article of male rape on male, "My Mentor, My Rapist." (I discuss this article at the
end of chapter 4.)
5. Cf. with Warner's readings of Against Our Will, Porter; Hartmann and Ross; Shorter.
6. Again, imminent reversibility continues to become an issue in my discussion at this point. While
reversibility can cause immense problems in political work, it can, as I will argue, both solve and dissolve
problems. I do not think that reversibility can be stopped or wished away. But it can be used tactically.
Unlike banal strategies, imminent reversibility is a fatal strategy. The expression imminent reversibility is
employed by many but perhaps no one as significantly as Jean Baudrillard and so differently. Baudrillard
plays reversibility off of dialectic. For Baudrillard reversibility does not move to a third term of
transcendence as dialectic does; hence, his use of imminent instead of immanent. See, e.g., Baudrillard Live
(57ff., 85, 106, 150, 177, 183-85, 192); Fatal Strategies 128-37. I take a simple Derridean negative
deconstruction, or a mirror image, as demonstrating imminent reversibility. I take Andrea Dworkin to be
using imminent reversibility throughout most of her novel Mercy. But the paracept imminent reversibility
here has a history that goes through numerous conversions, especially in the final "Rebeginnings" section
of Chaste Rape.
7. DeMan's notion of infinite rhetoricity is informed by his reading of C. S. Peirce. There is a major
difference of opinion among critics on how Peirce is to be read. While deMan and many others work with a
poststructuralist reading, Lauretis works with something closer to a "realist" reading (see Technologies 38-
42). It is the predispositions toward reading Peirce that determine, in great part, as Hesford might say, the
differences between "the materialist 'real' (historical reality) and the psychoanalytic 'Real' (that which
resists symbolization)" (196). It is these two "r/Reals" that will become the issue in my discussion of
Freud's distinction between "the seduction theory" and "infantile sexuality" (the Oedipus complex). On a
discussion of deMan and reading, see Ronell, "The Rhetoric of Testing," in Stupidity 95-163.
8. Andrea Dworkin's novel Mercy deals with the problem of "Andrea" at a young age taking responsibility
for what happens to her. As the novel progresses, however, "Andrea" begins to stop reading her role as
being complicit. But Mercy is the most difficult of novels to read, given Dworkin's penchant for writing
parodies of Walt Whitman and Henry Miller. Further complicating the reading is Dworkin's working out
the problems of killing or living and her penchant for turning tables and imminent reversibility. (I will
return to this work as I advance the discussion.)
381

9. I have already expressed my paraposition on deconstruction (with commentary from Derrida, Spivak,
and Cixous) and feminisms in Negation (207-33).
10. For a discussion of Pharmakon, see Derrida, Dissemination.
11. Zizek reads Lacan not as part of the poststructuralist or postmodernist movement but as a thinker who is
espousing a view that "is perhaps the most radical contemporary version of the Enlightenment" (7). As
Zizek points out, there is very little, if any difference, between the purpose of and the subsequent
frustrations (of realists) found in both psychoanalysis and materialanalysis: "the moment we see it 'as it
really is,' this being [i.e., this thing that is "the paradox of being"] dissolves itself into nothingness or, more
precisely, it changes into another kind of reality" (28). Scripts as well as thinking by way of or in response
to them can be seen as closed to change or as a locus for change in themselves. What counts as thinking
rape is at stake here. Ultimately in my unfolding discussion toward a newer beginning in Part 4, I am
relying less on Zizek and more on Giorgio Agamben in Means Without Ends and "the coming politics"
(12).
12. The video is available for rental (for a fixed number of days) or for purchase from Women Make
Movies (http://www.wmm.com/).
13. The distinctions among oral, literate, and electronic cultures are best described by Havelock (The Muse
Learns to Write) and Ulmer (Teletheory; Heuretics; Internet Invention). Most amazing in terms of
performing electronic culture is Ronell (The Telephone Book).
14. The implosion of time and space, the loss of ethos (or subjectivity, agency), logos (reason), pathos
(community) is best described by Baudrillard (Transparency of Evil) and Virilio (Open Sky). Positive
discussions of this loss, or rather rethinkings of it in terms of community are put forth by Blanchot (The
Unavowable Community), Nancy (The Inoperative Community; The Sense of the World; The Experience
of Freedom), and Agamben (The Coming Community; Means Without Ends).
15. Nolan's story was published in Esquire (March 2001), but can be found on the Web at
http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/
2001/001323_mfr_memento_1.html .
16. There are, as I count them, nine sections to Rape Stories. Each section is titled by Strosser herself in a
designation of time, which I have placed in italics. I open each with only the starting monologue.
• The video opens in black with audio in the background: "In 1979 I was raped. These are my
stories."
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• Section 1, in color, is of a lone woman viewed at a distance walking in an Urban, quasi-industrial
setting. There are two separate shots. The voice over begins, "The earliest memory I have of rape
fear was when I was about six or seven years old and we lived in the country."
Title shot: Rape Stories
• Section 2, in color, is of a woman (in a talking-head view) beginning, "Now ten years later
[1979], I still think of the rapist. Actually, I don't think about the rapist but think about rapists in
general or about being rape. . . . But I do think about the rapist, too. What happened to him?"
• Section 3, in b/w and the longest section, begins, "Two Saturdays ago" [1979] with another
talking-head camera view supposedly of Strosser (or a different woman altogether playing
Strosser [?]), speaking into a microphone, saying, "Okay, well, two Saturdays ago, I was up late
with Susan. . . ." The speaker gives a full account of her going outside to buy cigarettes and
returning and letting a man who was a stranger into the building and then the elevator with her and
of being raped by him while he held a knife to her throat.
• Section 4, in color, is of two women in jogging shorts, with the shot limited to a frontal view of
their tee-shirts and shorts with arms moving as they are apparently jogging. This section begins,
"The day after the rape I wore sunglasses all the time. I was afraid to meet other peoples' eyes,
because my look was frightened, accusing. I felt transparent through the eyes."
• Section 5, in b/w, takes place in a room, perhaps a laundry basement, with a woman walking
around holding a clamped light, while she momentarily picks up a cat, and then returns to walking
around. The voice over says, "For a long time I never entered a room without looking for another
way out. If I couldn't see it, I wouldn't go in."
• Section 6, in color with a steady camera shot at night, takes place inside a car in the flow of
traffic with street lights passing. The voice over says, "Right after the rape I was working as an
assistant editor on a documentary film about high-fashion models called Beautiful Baby,
Beautiful. All the editors were women. And we worked in a nice apartment on Central Park West.
So it was an extremely secure kind of environment."
• Section 7, in color, same woman with camera shot as in section 2, saying, "I still have this
nightmare about the rape. Sometimes. The nightmare is that I'm in my lobby."
383

• Section 8, in color, women in a pool floating with face up. The voice over says, "On the night of
the rape, after I was released from the emergency room, I went home and sat in a hot bath tub.
And tired to soak off the rapist."
• Section 9, in color, same woman with camera shots as in sections 2 and 7, saying, "One day it
occurred to me that I would feel a lot better if I got rid of the rapist. So I started fantasizing about
killing the rapist."
• The credits are shown with the background audio of an elevator opening and people walking in
and out.
17. http://www.wmm.com/Catalog/pages/c167.htm
18. Barthes makes it clear that there is a difference between not only film and the filmic but also between
the novel and novelistic: "The filmic is not the same as the film, is as far removed from the film as the
novelistic is from the novel (I can write in the novelistic without ever writing novels)" (65). What I am
getting at is that Strosser's film signals for us a becoming by way of "useless expenditure" (Barthes Image
Music Text 55; Bataille, Accursed Share), becoming "lovable" (see Barthes 59; Agamben Coming
Community 2), becoming radical singularities and "whatever beings" (Agamben 1-2). In this third sense,
then, the film is not just for the present community of wanting revenge or not wanting it, but also, if not
more so, for the coming political community of the obtuse or whatever beings.
19. The New Statesman version is apparently no longer available at the original site, but can be found at
these two sites: http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/other/rape.html and
http://www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/Dworkin.htm.
The Guardian version can still be found at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4026844,00.html.
http://www.igc.apc.org/Womensnet/dworkin/ (Dworkin's Web site). All sites last viewed on 11 October
2001.
20. In my use of the test, I am thoroughly influenced by Avital Ronell in introducing and discussing this
Kafka tale with me and in her own prior use of the test in Stupidity and in her forthcoming book on the test.
I continue this theme of the test throughout Chaste Rape.
21. Dworkin speaks of the state of "silence" that the victim of rape has been put in. And if she speaks or
reports having been raped, she is not heard. See Scapegoat 46-58.
Chapter 2: Thinking, Reading, Writing Rape
384

1. Deleuze and Guattari write: "Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming
is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it
corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or
producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead
back to, 'appearing,' 'being,' equaling,' or 'producing' " (Thousand Plateaus 239).
2. The reference to Brontë and Heathcliff is Wurthering Heights (122); to Cixous and Genet is Newly Born
Woman (99). For additional discussion that touches on becoming by Herman Melville, see Deleuze's
"Bartleby; or, the Formula" in Essays Critical (68-90).
3. For a full discussion of sexuality without sex, see Foucault's Part 5, "Right of Death and Power over
Life," in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (135-59).
4. Millett, in her "Introduction" to the 1991 edition of The Basement (twelve years later) has this to say
about sacrifice:
This is the chill [sic (child?)] of an evil essentially collective, social, cultural, even political. It is
the site of an old crime, old as the first stone, old as rape and beatings: it is not just murder, it is
ritual killing; therefore the subtitle, Meditations on a Human Sacrifice. Maybe this is the real myth
of the scapegoat; it was the daughter after all who was slaughtered, not the son [e.g., Jacob-Issac].
And for her, the actual victim, a patriarchal god provided no substitute. One looks into the
brambles in vain and sees instead the lord of the flies. (2-3)
5. Cf. Millett's discussion of Sylvia as "scapegoat" (Basement 267). Also, see Millett-Sylvia, losing any
sense of holding on to life for much longer, thinks, God, who has Gertrude as His messenger, "might want
her to sacrifice herself one more time in His name. If I'm too stubborn to learn" (298).
6. Cf. Kurosawa, in Rashomon, who has the dead husband of the raped wife come back from the grave to
avenge himself, not his wife. (See Brownmiller, Against 304-05.)
7. Althusser writes: "A wild practice [is to be taken] in the sense in which Freud spoke of a wild analysis
[see SE 1962, 11: 221-27], one which does not provide the theoretical credentials for its operations and
which raises screams from the philosophy of 'interpretation' of the world, which might be called the
philosophy of denegation. A wild practice, if you will, but what did not begin by being wild?" (Lenin and
Philosophy 66).
8. For an excellent collection of discussions on Freud and Dora, see Bernheimer and Kahane.
385

9. Either way there is death. Charles Scott, however, makes an important distinction between two forms of
ekstasis: "Nietzsche finds ecstasis in the structure of time: an individual stands out of the present by
promising a future yet to be and by remembering a past that is no longer. His is a temporal ecstasis,
whereas the ascetic priest's is an ecstasy of standing out of time into a timeless reality. The latter
transcendental ecstasy denies the temporality of its own occurrence—denies its life—in its ideal of
transcendence" (47). Nietzsche's view of "ecstasis" has come to be known at the future anterior, or the what
will have been. See Vitanza, Negation (307-42). Kristeva would find Nietzsche's view as an acceptable
form of revolutionary discourse.
10. See Kristeva's discussions of artists writing to overcome abjection in three works: Horrors, Revolution,
and Tales of Love. Also, see Lechte's "Art, Love, and Melancholy." I would add that what we can
additionally hope for is a straying into the evolution or revolution of the pagus (which is a border zone
where experimentation within the Symbolic is a way of life [Lyotard, Differend 151]) or of the "dépays
(uncountry)" (which, like the pagus, is a third place, perhaps outside the double bind, where life thrives
without negation, negativity [Cixous, Three Steps 131]), or into the "involution" of becoming-animal
(Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 238; see 232-309).
11. In another take of the child resisting, rejecting, the symbolic, Kristeva writes:
Nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who 'I' do not
want to listen, 'I' do not assimilate it, 'I' expel it. But since the food is not an 'other' for 'me,' who
am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion
through which 'I' claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that
they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that
they see that 'I' am in the process of becoming [emphasis mine] an other at the expense of my own
death. During the course in which 'I' become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of
vomit. (Horror 3; Kristeva's emphasis)
This passage begins to explain abjection in more positive terms, for in it Kristeva is putting forth her view
of the child undergoing a death, or withdrawal from the S/symbolic, which she describes as the child's
being "in the process of becoming." See Oliver, "Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions"; John Lechte, "Art,
Love, and Melancholy."
Most interesting is Wigley's discussion of disgust, via Kant and Derrida, in Architecture of Deconstruction
(123-47). Perhaps the Kristeva's child's need to vomit can be traced back to Kant's discussion in Education
(35; cited in Wigley 141). Also see Derrida's "Economimesis," which Wigley bases his discussion on.
12. Some thinkers come close to arguing that redemption of a past event—without concomitant
victimage—cannot be realized; that (human) history itself is founded on the very principle of victimage.
386

Take, for example, Kenneth Burke who unlike Nietzsche accepts the negative as a necessary condition of
human being. (See Gregory Desilet for an excellent discussion of Burke and Nietzsche on the problem of
the negative and victimage. Also, for a discussion of Burke and Girard, see Chris Allen Carter's Kenneth
Burke and the Scapegoat Process.) For Burke, when human beings take on language (i.e., the symbolic, the
negative), their actions are no longer mere motion but highly symbolic-moralistic-dramatic actions. Which
are primarily based on negative essentializing, on exclusionary re/actions. Human beings are rotten with
perfection and cannot not exclude that which is determined to be impure. This summation of human beings
is typical of anthropological studies.
In The Rhetoric of Religion, when Burke studies the creation myth at the beginning of Genesis, he
finds "an irreversible narrative sequence" (4): In short, he finds: if drama (which is essentially human and,
therefore, unavoidable), then conflict; if conflict, then victimage and tragedy. The driving force here is the
us/them dyad, the us being not-them.
Rape, for many, is the drama of drama, the steps leading to conflict-"rape"-victimage-tragedy; and
rape certainly is, as I will eventually point out the actual-symbolic drama of establishing order in The
History of Rhetoric. With greater complexity, Burke finds these
. . . steps
In the Iron Law of History
That welds Order and Sacrifice:
Order leads to Guilt
(for who can keep commandments!)
Guilt needs Redemption
(for who would not be cleansed!)
Redemption needs Redeemer
(which is to say, a Victim!).
Order
Through Guilt
To victimage
(hence: Cult of the Kill). . . . (4-5; cf. 314)
What would stand as order, as explicitly stated here, is purchased by way of perpetual violence. Indeed,
human beings are "rotten with perfection" (300). Burke, in Language as Symbolic Action, associates
human being's logic of perfection with Freud's notion of "destiny compulsion" or "repetition compulsion"
(16-20). Burke offers solutions to such violence in terms of self-mortification, identification, perspectives
by incongruity, comic frames, and so on.
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13. For me, similarity as a cause for violence is still a novel argument, for I have spent most of my time
thinking about violence in terms of—as Burke, Derrida, Lyotard respectively would have it—Difference,
Différance, Differend. But there is something to what Girard is arguing. Jean Baudrillard says, "The
uncertainty to which we are subject results, paradoxically, from an excess of positivity, from an ineluctable
drop in the level of negativity" (Transparency 44). In other words, as the negative withdraws, similarity
grows and we can no longer certify differences; consequently, all things implode into a non-differentiated
One. Whereas difference creates the conditions for an epistemic violence of inclusion by exclusion, or
congregation by segregation, similarity creates the conditions, as Hegel would describe it, for the night
when all cows are black. If all cows are black, however, then we cannot, as Evans-Pritchard admonishes us,
"look to the cows."
The allusion is to Girard's admonition by way of example concerning anthropologist E. E. Evans-
Pritchard's admonition, in turn, on studying the Nuers, "a bovine society in their midst that parallels their
own [society] and is structured in the same fashion." In other words, the whole idea is that if we wish to
understand the Nuers, we need to understand their symbiotic relationship with cattle. Girard writes: "The
Nuer vocabulary is rich in words describing the ways of cattle and covering the economic and practical, as
well as the poetic and ritualistic, aspects of these beasts. . . . The quarrels between various subgroups of the
tribes frequently involve cattle. All fines and interest payments are computed in terms of head of cattle, and
dowries are apportioned in herds" (3).
14. For Tobin Siebers, the difference between language/reality centers on the differences between
Nietzsche and Girard, which in many ways is the same difference between Derrida (Nietzsche) and Girard.
Girard removes any possibility of doubting the connection, for he alludes quite directly to Derrida having
rewritten Nietzsche's "work as a grammatology" (125). Siebers establishes the difference of language/reality
further:
Girard concludes that Nietzsche's theory focuses on the subtle and civilized language of
resentment to the exclusion of the far more dangerous desire for vengeance. In a sense, Girard
accuses Nietzsche of being overly concerned with the modern representations of revenge, of which
resentment is only one, and not with the real object of humanity's problems. The concern with
resentment reveals that Nietzsche has been duped by a fascination with the language of revenge,
whose mystifying nature always tries to lead its pursuers off the track by offering them interesting
diversions. Resentment is the interesting diversion offered to modern philosophy by violence,
while real vengeance advances its death grip on us in the form of nuclear politics and terrorism.
Resentment, for Girard, is the spirit of revenge half suppressed. Accordingly, Nietzsche's idea that
only the reemergence of revenge will call a halt to modern resentment is revenge's diabolical joke.
(126; emphasis mine).
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15. Kristeva has coined the term "herethics," by which she means a woman's—specifically, a mother's—
sense of ethics. I want to suggest that herethics can complement Stoltenberg's critique of rapist ethics and
transvaluation of masculinity. Kristeva heretically revalues the mother's subject-object relation with the
child. In discussing herethics, let us recall that Kristeva, too, speaks of the double bind that we-human
beings find ourselves in. Kristeva locates the beginning of the double bind with our entrance into the
S/symbolic (language, culture, law), for as soon as we move from the Imaginary to the S/symbolic we resist
and reject it. But women especially find themselves in the position of embracing yet doubly having to resist
not only the S/symbolic but also the mother.
In "Stabat Mater" Kristeva explains that the subject position of "mother" is highly problematic,
though not as problematic as "woman" (234), which receives more attention by feminists. About the
positionality of "mother," Kristeva says:
We [i.e., "women and men"] live in a civilization where the consecrated (religious or secular)
representation of femininity is absorbed by motherhood. If, however, one looks at it more closely,
this motherhood is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory; what
is more, it involves less an idealized archaic mother than the idealization of the relationship that
binds us to her, one that cannot be localized—an idealization of primary narcissism. Now, when
feminism demands a new representation of femininity, it seems to identify motherhood with that
idealized misconception and, because it rejects the image and its misuse, feminism circumvents
the real experience that fantasy overshadows. The result?—a negation or rejection of motherhood
by some avant-garde feminist groups. Or else an acceptance—conscious or not—of its traditional
representations by the great mass of people, women and men. (234; emphasis mine)
Kristeva is arguing that this "idealization of the relationship that binds us to" our Mother who art in heaven
is none other than the Virgin Mother of Christianity--she who is a virgin, yet the mother of the Son of God.
(The story in itself, of course, is about another chaste [founding] rape.) After a careful and detailed analysis
of this idealization of a representation of femininity that is absorbed by the Mother and of the problems that
this absorption constructs for both women and men--owing to the negative ethic that it leaves us with--
Kristeva calls for a new ethic, herethics, one that "gives [women] the possibility—but not the certainty—of
reaching out to the other, the ethical" (259-60), one that reestablishes a life-furthering relationship in the
face of mortality.
In her concluding remarks to "Stabat Mater," Kristeva is concerned for "a motherhood that today
remains, after the Virgin, without a discourse." She is concerned for
the need of an ethics for this 'second' sex, which, as one asserts it, is reawakening. . . . [I]f ethics
amounts to not avoiding the embarrassing and inevitable problematics of the law [the S/symbolic]
but giving it flesh, language, and jouissance—in that case its reformulation demands the
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contribution of women. Of women who harbor the desire to reproduce (to have stability). Of
women who are available so that our speaking species, which knows it is mortal, might withstand
death. Of mothers. For an heretical ethics separated from morality, an herethics, is perhaps no
more than that which in life makes bonds, thoughts, and therefore the thought of death, bearable:
herethics is undeath [a-mort], love . . . Eia mater, fons amoris. . . . So let us again listen to the
Stabat Mater, and the music, all the music . . . it swallows up the goddesses and removes their
necessity. (262-63; Kristeva's emphasis)
Such an herethics is one that, as I have been exclaiming, allows for both an éthea (i.e., an ethos that must
resist) and an éthos (an ethos that is our habitus, the place where we go to die, but in order to live in the
facelessness of dying). Both ethoi allow for a peculiarity to manifest itself against (not only contra to but
also along side), balancing a necessary resistance. I am thinking of the relationship in this manner: subject-
symbolic-éthos and object-semiotic-éthea. This is a fragile balancing that would stave off a fall into
abjection. Death. A fragile balancing that would be "undeath."
16. The text of Gibson's Agrippa is on a floppy disk that when inserted into an IBM or Macintosh computer
automatically scrolls for about fifteen minutes, giving the reader time to process the narrative. While the
text scrools, however, a virus on the disk destroys the text. It is a one-read book.
17. Both Siebers (80-97) and McKenna (93-94) draw the same conclusions concerning language and
gender. On the issue of gender and women, I would add, however, that Girard does not categorically
exclude women from the subject positions of perpetrators of violence: In his discussion of Euripides'
tragedy The Bacchae, he writes: "The abolishment of sexual differences, which appears in the ritual
bacchanal as a celebration of love and brotherhood, becomes in the tragedy an act of hostility. The women
take up the most violent masculine activities, hunting and warfare. They deride men for their weakness and
femininity. Dionysus, in the guise of a long-haired adolescent, personally takes a hand in fomenting the
disorder" (Violence 127-28). But admittedly, this is drama, not a discussion of woman, and the real issue
here is the confusion of boundaries between the sexes, a confusion that brings about too much similarity
and hence violence. And yet again, Girard is very exact about the relationship between sex and violence in
terms of menstrual blood (34-35) and about the symbolization of menstrual blood might "respond to some
half-suppressed desire to place the blame for all forms of violence on women. By means of this taboo
[against menstrual blood] a transfer of violence has been effected and a monopoly established that is clearly
detrimental to the female sex" (36).
I am left wondering, however, just how conservative and reactionary both Girard's and perhaps De
Laurentis's positions are in relation to intersexes such as hermaphrodites, merms, ferms, etc. The boundary
of the binary M/F or F/M that both thinkers advocate from is valorized over any third positions in regard to
gender or sex.
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18. Dworkin similarly couples by incongruity both Walt Whitman and "Andrea" in Mercy.
19. Girard refers to Simone Weil as avoiding the Old Testament, "She was prevented from doing so by
loyalty to her intellectual milieu. All her teachers, like the philosopher Alain, were hellenizing humanists
and instilled in her the sacred horror vis-à-vis the Bible that characterizes modern humanism and anti-
humanism" (Things Hidden 245).
20. Part of Girard's insistence on the non-sacrificial reading and especially the part about willing to die for
another is to neutralize the "accusation of masochism that the demystification merchants cast at the Christian
concept of devotion unto death" (Things Hidden 243). This accusation can only prove to be an unacknowledged
alibi for not seeing the transvaluing of non-sacrificial reading and writing.
21. This whole judicial case reminds me of Lyotard's discussion of the differend. (See Differend 3-31.) When
Solomon decides first to divide the object of litigation (Things Hidden 238)—because of the impossibility, at
that point, to determine who is the real mother—he is confronted with the conditions of the differend and
imposes them, if only momentarily, on the real mother and the child. But it differs from the classic Lyotardian
differend in that it is a differend that does wrong to all parties, including the false mother, the king, and the
kingdom. (The goal as Lyotard would have it is to search for new idioms so that all involved experience a sense
of justice.) When the false mother wants the child divided, however, the conditions for the differend are broken
and justice is served and the kingdom maintains its integrity. For Girard, if there is to be a new idiom, it is to
come from a sense of judgment and justice based on non-sacrificial readings of litigants and their objects under
dispute.
I can say now that the sacrificial economy as put forth by anyone, but especially Georges Bataille, is
highly problematic. I was half right to write of the problematic of ressentiment in Negation, but I was half
wrong to write of the productivity of various ramifications of Bataille's view of the economy of sacrifice. It was
not until I had read more fully and carefully Jean-Luc Nancy's discussions in The Inoperative Community that I
realized
Bataille went through the experience of realizing that the nostalgia for a communal being was at the
same time the desire for a work of death. He was haunted, as we know by the idea that a human
sacrifice should seal the destiny of the secret community of Acéphale. He no doubt understood at the
time, as he was later to write, that the truth of sacrifice required in the last analysis the suicide of the
sacrificer. In dying, the latter would be able to rejoin the being of the victim plunged into the bloody
secret of common life. And thus he understood that the properly divine truth—the operative and
resurrectional truth of death—was not the truth of the community of finite beings but that, on the
contrary, it rushed headlong into the infinity of immanence [emphasis mine]. This disastrous puerility,
so to speak—of the death work, of death considered as the work of common life. And it is this
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absurdity, which is at bottom an excess of meaning, an absolute concentration of the will to meaning,
that must have dictated Bataille's withdrawal from communitarian enterprises." (Inoperative 17)
The possible double bind, and yet with a slippery slope here, of course, is community as finitude that becomes
community as the infinity of immanence. The above allusion of Nancy's is to Bataille's writing about his own
willingness to be the object of a sacrifice. It has been Nancy's paraproject along with others, after Bataille, and
yet with the knowledge of Bataille's inner experience, to rethink community.
One other rethought: It is not the Christian Divine in Girard, if it in fact is there in Girard, that I am
referring to in my discussions of Girard and non-sacrificial readings, but it is the end of sacrifice (rather, the
sacred and mimetic rivalry) itself. Dworkin would agree that "a work of death" should be put aside. As I
proceed with my paraproject, I will, with the help of Nancy and Agamben and others, take up the issue of the
coming community and globally yet conductively in terms of the de/basement: sexual violence, pedagogy,
canonization.
22. Dworkin is presenting these connections and the aetiology of sacrificing women not as any consciously
deliberated decision behind closed, smoke-filled rooms. Not as some carefully coordinated conspiracy. The
fathers did not convene and say that they needed to send their sons off to Vietnam and then, after the war, that
they needed to recover and protect their posteriors from their rebellious sons by channeling their sons' search for
power-phallus toward women, that is, toward reaping power by raping women. They did not convene and say
that the best way to prepare their sons, the best pedagogy, would be pornographic textbooks, that is, pictures
and films of women being sexually abused, raped. And that pornography should be protected as free speech.
These connections and causes of congregations by way of segregation (and rape) had the habit of cultural
history behind them.
Later we will see that Jeffrey Masson does present the conscious, eventually deliberated decision to
coerce Freud to set aside the seduction theory. Though Freud initially favored the seduction theory (sexual
violence, rape) in support of his determining an aetiology of hysteria, the refusal of his colleagues at the Society
for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna to agree with Freud, and then to shun him, so much influenced Freud
that, as Masson concludes, "in 1905 Freud publicly retracted the seduction theory" (Assault 12). Thereafter,
Freud replaces the seduction theory with the Oedipal complex. With this displacement the psychoanalytic
movement is born.
There are always many forces at work in shaping levels of conspiracies. It would be too catastrophic
and costly for all of us if someone were to mistake Dworkin, as I demonstrated in the last chapter, as
manifesting or mimicking—and I will use Masson's words again—"the fantasies of hysterical women who
invented stories and told lies" (Assault 11). If so, then yet another important truth will have been left behind
while, nonetheless, remaining with us.
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There is no reason to believe that someone like Dworkin will relent as Freud did. In Letters from a War
Zone, a general, sweeping list of how pornography and rape are used against women. Pornography as
pedagogy: In the form of manuals, "recipe books," video games, to turn young men against women, in one case,
to help men to introduce and prepare women for slavery in prostitution (see 315-22). In Dworkin's
Pornography, yet more evidence abounds, connecting power with pornography and rape (see Ch. 1, on the
various kinds of power that men have over women). But beyond Dworkin's work on the connection of power,
pornography, and rape, in the war zone that women find themselves in, see Graziano (157-58), especially his
discussions of the picana eléctrica as penis and phallus in the Argentine "Dirty Wars" (158-65). It is the case
that rape of women and men is consciously and deliberately used in war as a weapon (e.g., see Ghiglieri 80-109;
Chang; Allen; MacKinnon, "Turning Rape"). The list of sources continues.
23. And yet, the differences can be between to die or to live. As I have emphasized throughout, disjunctions can
be imminently reversible. Hence, historically, human beings continue to argue over them. In this strange case,
however, the reversibility becomes a triversibility, making to live highly problematic in terms of the crucial,
cultural issue of euthanasia. The historical arguments among to kill, to die, to live become the whole issue of
what is also called mercy killing. But to turn the problem back to our topic, on war, Cicero and Augustine,
among others, used the triad of terms to justify killing in a war.
24. The allusions are to Brown's Love's Body and Cixous's The Third Body.
25. "And Yet" for me, because it suggests not only contrast but also time to come, leaves the now, in search of
the future in the past. (What was not but can be.) It is a prolepsis. It is "it is" and "there is." Es gibt. And Yet . . .
is the wayves to the coming community (see Nancy; Agamben). Which requires a break with the past that
refused—refuses—a different future by creating différance and differends. For a place outside the past, the
nostalgic past, for a place without without altogether, Wolf writes:
For the Greeks there is no alternative but either truth or lies, right or wrong, victory or defeat, friend or
enemy, life or death. They think differently than we do. What cannot be seen, smelled, heard, touched,
does not exist. It is the other alternative that they crush between their clear-cut distinctions, the third
alternative, which in their view, does not exist, the smiling vital force that is able to generate itself
from itself over and over: the undivided, spirit in life, life in spirit. (106-07; emphasis mine)
26. Poe writes: "To look at a star by glances—to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior
portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star
distinctly—is to have the best appreciation of its lustre—a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn
our vision fully upon it." Poe's statement is written through the voice of Dupin in "The Murders of the Rue
Morgue." Similarly, to Hoaxie Poe, I continue to quote—without quote marks and with my own
interpolations—the rest of what Jameson says about indirection. I have creatively détourned!
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27. See chapters 4 and 5, Chaste Rape.
28. Bateson, of course, is the one who provides the concept of the double bind to Girard. I have waited to
mention Bateson until this point, for I wanted to avoid clouding the issues that Girard develops. Bateson in his
own right could be incorporated here into this already too long of an (obsessive) set of parallels and para-
arguments. Perhaps another time and place. I have discussed the possibilities of schizophrenia as a
revolutionary (virtually, involutionary) process in terms of Deleuze and Guattari (Anti-Oedipus, 2 volumes) in
Negation. I will return to here in passing toward in Part 4 to its possibilities. But first, I must discuss two other
neurotic—hysterical and obsessive—styles.
29. Part of this processual unfolding of the question has been, for example, my discussion of Millett's points of
view in The Basement, from apparently third-person omniscient and indirect free style through meditating by
becoming the characters and through the middle voice to non-sacrificial writings and readings.
30. I can say at this point that impotentiality is a concept that I take from Giorgio Agamben, who took it from
his rereading of Aristotle (see Potentialities 177-84). The paraconcept of impotentiality is crucial as a third term
for thinking community (as, e.g., developed by Blanchot, Bataille, Nancy, Agamben), to which I will return as
promised. It is a third term that can cast further light and darkness on the third term to live (which accompanies
to die or to kill).
Part 2: Oedipal Canonization
Chapter 4: Oedi-Pedagogy
1. As mentioned in the Foreword, An Obtuse (TryAngler) Stylus. See Barthes, "The Third Meaning" 56-
65. And also as I have mentioned, the paralogic here is conduction (Ulmer), which Freud himself began to
employ very early in his writings, along with Josef Breuer, in Studies on Hysteria (see SE, II: 193-95, 198-
99, 203-05).
2. Michel Foucault in an interview says that parents in the Nineteenth century took "care of the sexuality of
their children" for both reasons of "morality" and "pleasure." When asked, "A pleasure in what sense?,"
Foucault answers: "Sexual excitement and sexual satisfaction." And then is asked: "For the parents
themselves?" He answers: "Yes. Call it rape, if you like. There are texts which are very close to a
systemization of rape. Rape by the parents of the sexual activity of their children. To intervene in this
personal, secret activity, which masturbation was, does not represent something neutral for the parents. It is
not only a matter of power, or authority, or ethics; it's also a pleasure" (Politics, 9).
3. The Victorian Period, as this exemplar suggests, had a peculiar way of talking about sexuality and by no
means was it a way of talking out of repression. Again, Foucault, in the opening pages of volume one of
The History of Sexuality, tell us, "Under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so
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that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that
aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respit" (20). Moreover, "What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is
not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad
infinitum, while explaining it as the secret" (35; Foucault's emphasis). Cf. Deleuze, Foucault 47-69. This
description, as I point out in the Foreword to and the "Rebeginnings" section of Chaste Rape, is the epitome
of what "Chaste" might mean. Though Foucault uses the metaphor of shadows here, I will nonetheless in
chapter 7 use the metaphors as a way may thinkers will exemplify Chaste Rape.
4. As reported to Malcolm (134; see Malcolm's quotes from Swales's curriculum vitae, 91-93, 95-96).
5. As Malcolm tells the story of the first suit, "On April 15, 1982, Jeffrey Masson filed a thirteen-million-
dollar lawsuit in the Superior Court of California, naming Eissler, the Archives, the New-Land Foundation,
and Muriel Gardiner and her grandson Hal Harvey, the director of the Foundation, as defendants. [Masson's
attorney] charged Eissler and company with wrongful discharge, breach of implied covenant, breach of
duty, negligent misrepresentation, interference with contractual relations, conspiracy, intentional infliction
of emotional distress, and libel. . . . The suit never came to trial. . . . Masson decided to accept a settlement
financed by Muriel Gardiner. . . . He would receive a hundred and fifth thousand dollars" (140-41). The
second suit was brought against Malcolm herself, The New Yorker, and the publisher Knopf, by Masson,
who charged that Malcolm changed in her New Yorker, 1983, articles (which now comprise the book In the
Freud Archives) what he said to her during their interviews. Under dispute were only 5 quotations. The
case was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
6. I can disclose now, after having quoted Rose at length, that she finds fault with Millett's statement that I
quote to open the section on Masson. Rose writes, contrary to Millett's statement, "Freud never dealt with
children." But she continues, saying that the statement "can perhaps now be passed over, because there is
something more important going on in which the debate between psychoanalysis and feminism seems to be
taking on a new and more sharply focused form" (186). This inclusion of the quote by Rose and myself
should illustrate the importance of "facts" but also should caution the reader of facts to look beyond them in
terms of political and rhetorical-philosophical interests. For Millett's readings of Freud, see Sexual Politics
(176-202).
7. I am well aware how ironic my statement about a lack of resistance might sound, given the very role of
resistance in psychoanalysis. I find little, if any, real resistance, however, being put forth by Frederick
Crews and Co. (See, e.g., Unauthorized Freud). The responses more often than not read as reactionary.
Roustang, however, comes closest to identifying the problem of sameness in mirroring, though he does not
suggest a way out of the problem of imitation (mimesis). Kristeva similarly in Desire locates the problem
of imitation. Peter Swales, as brilliant as he is, outwits Freud himself, by attempting to read Freud better
than Freud could read himself. But finally it is Freud who is par excellent at outwitting himself and,
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consequently, becomes a communitarian embodiment of singular resistance. Of great help, besides Nancy
on community as resistance, is Derrida, in Resistances of Psychoanalysis.
8. See Masson, Assault 76, for a fuller discussion of masturbation as the cause of stomach and menstrual
pain. Freud wrote about Eckstein not just in the letters to Fliess but in The Interpretation of Dreams under
another name, that of Irma (See SE, IV: 106-21).
9. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. Hereafter, Complete Letters.
10. Masson, Assault 80, points to a letter that Freud wrote to Fliess, May 30, 1893, as the earliest evidence
of Freud's locating sexual abuse as the cause of hysteria (see Complete Letters 50). Also, Masson (81)
points to the discussion of Katharina (Studies on Hysteria, which did not get published until May 1895) as
another early indication of the connection between sexual abuse and hysteria (see Complete Letters 54-55).
Also, for Masson's continuing discussion, see Assault 84-85.
11. For "deferred action" (or belatedness, Nachträglichkeit), see Rainer Nägele in Reading After Freud. He
makes clear how deferred action is a "temporality" in which " 'after' becomes constitutive of the 'before' "
(1). See especially Nägele's discussion in Ch. 7 of Freud's analysis of time in the Wolfman's dream. (Cf.
Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 26-38.) Also note that Nägele dismisses Masson's Assault as
belated and "simply false." See 216, n. 16. Besides Nägele's discussion, see Derrida's on différance and
deferring in Writing and Difference (196-231) and Margins of Philosophy (1-27). In "Rebeginnings,"
which is the dis/closing section of Part 4, in Chaste Rape, we will take up the issue of deferral in terms of
the archive, which Derrida has much to say about in Archive Fever.
12. As previously stated, I purposefully change Deleuze and Guattari's the plane of immanence to the plane
of imminence. While Deleuze from the beginning of his writings has attempted to rehabilitate traditional
philosophical terms and concepts such as immanence and empiricism, I am changing the old terms to new
ones. In the case of immanence to imminence, I do so, in order to avoid confusion with Jean-Luc Nancy
and Avital Ronell's use of the phrase myth of immanence (or presence as some sort of naïve essentialism)
and their favoring of imminence (or potentiality, dynamis) along with Giorgio Agamben's use of
potentiality and potenza. Hence, I would also change the title of Deleuze's Pure Immanence to Imminence
as I do in chapter Five.
13. Freud destroyed virtually all, if not all, of Fliess's letters. See Masson 73, 216-17.
14. See Robert, 133-67, who gives an account of Freud's novel on Moses.
15. Allen Esterson has a helpful explanation of Freud's technique of reconstructing the "phantasies" and
their fragments, which Freud discusses in Studies on Hysteria (written with Breuer). First there is "the
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pressure technique" (SE, II: 109-10, 268-70), which involves Freud's placing "his hand on the patient's
forehead and encourag[ing] him or her to report any images or ideas that came to mind. In the event that
nothing occurred to the patient, Freud took this as a sign of resistance and repeated the pressure on the
forehead while insisting that a picture or an idea would emerge. In this manner he endeavoured to set in
motion a chain of associations which he believed would lead eventually to the pathogenic idea" (3; SE, II:
270-72). Then there is the analytical and interpretive techniques of "put[ting] these [fragments] together
once more into the organization which [Freud] presumes to have existed; i.e. to piece together the
fragments to produce a coherent event or narrative, rather like the process of solving a picture puzzle" (3;
SE, II: 291). Freud in his letter of May 25, 1897, Draft M "The Architecture of Hysteria" (enclosed with
letter), to Fliess discusses "fantasies" in a long paragraph (see Complete Letters 247).
16. But is this not always the case whether in formal logic or in informal story-telling (whether for a truth
claim or for mere amusement)! But the difference in "always the case" is the difference between, on the
hand, the logics of induction, deduction, abduction and, on the other hand, the paralogics of conduction. (I
am using "paralogics" here is a positive sense of "false criticism" and not in a negative sense of non
sequitur.) But I want to stress here that the method of connection that Masson is using is only a near
conductive method. In fact, I would split the difference and say that it is both an abduction (detective story)
and a conduction (heuretic story). See my Foreword to Chaste Rape and Ulmer's discussion in Heuretics,
especially of false criticism (11-15).
17. My concerns here with calling on Ulmer's work are only those of dropping in and quickly using some
of his heuretic paramethods so as to set the stage later, in Part 4, for a fuller exposition and application. My
sense—I can say here without going into a lengthy exposition—is that Masson might be best understood in
Freud-Ulmer's terms as being situated somewhere in his emplotment between analysis of his Freud and a
dreamwork on his Freud. Ulmer, expanding on Freud, writes: "There is a certain equivalence in 'false
criticism' . . . between dreamwork and analysis, promising that inventions may be written—generated—
without having to be 'thought' first" (Heuretics 14-15). Every work has its false criticism. A primary
example in relation to Freud (as a generative resource) can be seen in the Freud-Surrealism-Derrida
generative sequence. As Ulmer reminds us, the surrealist used Freud, but not Freud; they generated out of
Freud's works a "false criticism." By Freud Ulmer would mean "the wide image" of Freud, the four or five
interrelated images that make up Freud or anyone else. Within every work, Ulmer says in terms of Freud's
wide image, there is a "false criticism" or "false dream." That this criticism is "false" does not make it
incorrect, as we usually mean by the word "false." It means instead that there is latent in every work (such
as those by Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche) another criticism or dream waiting to be composed. Just as the
Surrealist found a false criticism in Freud, Derrida found a false criticism in the Surrealist. (See Ulmer 3-
15; cf. Ulmer Internet Invention).
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18. Shoshana Felman has written of Freud and Jacques Lacan beyond Oedipus. See Felman, Jacques Lacan
99-159. As a corrective, I would suggest Lyotard's discussion of Oedipus and ancient receptions of the
Sophocles's play. For Lyotard, the audience could but laugh at Oedipus. See Just Gaming 42.
19. Again, the Masson Affair, more than any other perhaps, best illustrates incipiently How to generate
"false" criticisms out of Freud's (dream and analytical) works. What remains, will ever remain, is "our"
exposition of the limits of these false criticisms. But we must be fully aware that there is great danger in
these expositions, for they are always on the verge of becoming the stuff of immanence and sovereignty.
20. I take the term "emplotment" from Hayden White, Tropics 70. I would venture to say at this point that
Masson's emplotment is tragic moving toward comedy; a mode of explanation that is idiographic moving
toward organicist; a mode of ideological implication that is conservative moving toward liberal. It is the
case, as it must be, that Masson condenses his materials, displaces them, in order to represent his distortion
and offer us his secondary revision or elaboration of Freud's assault on truth. The emplotment is an
argument for the reader to act on.
21. Freud's image of the architecture of hysteria (Masson, Complete Letters 247):
22. Later in chapter 5, this partnership (hysterical and paranoiac) will be paradigmatic of two notions of
canon as well as pedagogy.
23. In many ways, my discussion of Masson's not-so-hidden reading of Freud's letters to Fliess will appear
as an apparent digression from my previously announced purpose. But while it is (as a parabasis), it is not;
for it is this very "domination of the Same and the One" (Levinas and Derrida) that I will call on and
examine in a later section on Freud's home schooling (Greek and Jew) and in chapter 6 on Chaste Cinema
(in respect to my exemplars of Mozart and Salieri, in Amadeus, and Henry Fool and Simon, in Henry
Fool). The problem in relation to pedagogy and canonization is that of homosocial space or sociality, which
traffics in women (e.g., Ekstein) only to establish friendship, community, which can be only reactionary
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and suffer from Ressentiment. It is this Same or homosociality that favors the Greek notion of Being, that
is, the Heideggerian realm of Being and disregards the other and thereby forgets the late Heideggerian and
early Nancyian-Agambean sociality of a relation of beings.
24. Besides burying, we should hear encrypting. See Abraham and Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word;
and The Shell and the Kernel.
25. Masson quotes Bonaparte's saying, " 'Freud a percé à jour le "mensonge" des hystériques. La séduction
regulière par le père est un "fantasme." ' " (Freud dragged into the light the 'lie' of hysterics. The frequent
seduction by the father is a 'fantasy.')." Masson points out, "In fact, as we can see from reading the letter [of
September 21], Freud did not say that this was a lie, yet this is how it was to be understood by generations
of psychoanalysts" (112). While Bonaparte et al. see themselves as advocates for Freud, Masson sees
himself as an advocate for Freud as well (cf. Eissler Freud). No doubt, there are multiple Freuds. Mimetic
rivalry runs wild in de/facing the tantalizing object.
26. Janet Malcolm makes much of her conversation with Masson on this detail of some suffer from
seduction (rape), while others do not. Malcolm relates Masson's having recounted a question to analysts: "
'Now, look, ladies and gentlemen, do you really believe that there's no difference between a fantasy and a
reality?' And they said, 'Well, you know, Freud has said it very clearly: there is no important distinction to
be made. In the end, it doesn't matter whether it's fantasy or reality.' So I said, 'What do you do with
something like Auschwitz? . . . You're not going to tell me that there are different ways of experiencing
Auschwitz, are you?' And they said, 'Yes, we are.' And then Sam Ritvo . . . said, 'Let me tell you a story. I
had a patient who came out of Auschwitz at the age of fifteen, and during his analysis he told me,
"Auschwitz made a man of me" ' " (Malcolm 54-55; Malcolm's emphasis).
27. Recall Girard's discussion of "twins are impure" (Violence 58). Later I will make reference to Esau and
Jacob (Genesis, ch. 25.24).
28. The translations of these letters are somewhat different in the later collection The Correspondence of
Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi (see 221-22, 227, 243).
29. I am of course not—lest there be some gross misunderstanding—at all suggesting that this back and
forth movement—actual hysterical spasmodic thrusts and anti-thrusts—of the mother's body parallels with
Freud's zigzagging movements in Masson's readings of the Freud-to-Fliess letters.
30. Dworkin uses the end of the Viet-Nam War as the watershed for the fathers' not wanting the sons to
"turn" on them in a rage of counterviolence. The fathers say simply do it to them, that is, to women. But of
course fathers have been doing "it" all along to both women and sons, e.g., Eckstein and Robert Fliess. But
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the point here in returning to Dworkin's call for nonsacrificial readings is to take up the Levinasian issue of
the dominance of the same over the other, which constitutes a pedagogy that is not life-furthering.
31. See note 11, this chapter.
32. I have in mind, e.g., the uncanny psychoanalytic work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, which is
best exemplified in The Shell and the Kernel.
33. Given proximity, I should probably say that this is, I think, not an allusion to Abraham and Torok.
34. I am cautious in making this statement. Robert says, "the myth of Abraham and Isaac was not relevant
to the situation. In the neurotic disorders of his patients he found no basis for such a parallel. . . . What
[Freud] observed with the help of his special method was not a contest over a child between a human father
and a divine father; what he observed was a flesh and blood parents arousing intense desires in a child. The
myth of Oedipus, which Freud as a consummate humanist had at his disposal, was excellently suited to
illustrating this situation" (n. 3, 208-09). In the life of Freud, however, as Krüll makes compelling, there is
a basis for such a parallel, at least, until Freud moves on to Oedipus and finally Moses, a much grander
father substitute.
35. Freud continues to be attacked for his apparently less than rigorous inductive style of reaching for the
truth (see, e.g., Von Eckardt, "Can Intuitive Proof Suffice" as well as other articles in Crews, Unauthorized
Freud 71-142. For a summary of earlier critiques, see Mahony, Freud as a Writer 9-14).
36. Julia Kristeva, "Place Names" in Desire, 275, helps me make this point. See her discussion of naming
and of Freud's relation to his father. I will pick up on what Kristeva has to say later in my discussion.
37. Krüll cites proof that the nurse mentioned is not Zajíc, but Wittek. Masson, however, who insists on
Zajíc. See his note in the Complete Letters 270. I will stay with Krüll's choice since I am quoting from her.
38. There is a whole other discussion that is seldom, if ever, fully figured into a discussion of Freud, rape,
and hysteria. When figured in, we get, on the one hand, the impossible-possible discursive set of "A child is
being beaten" and "Father, don't you see that I am burning" (Freud, SE, XVII: 175-204; V, ch. 7. Lacan,
Book VII: Ethics) and, on the other, "A child is being killed" (Leclaire, A Child is Being Killed 1975). But
we also get the additional differences springing forth from Giorgio Agamben's Infancy and History (1978),
Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster (1980), and Christopher Fynsk's Infant Figures (2000). For Leclaire,
it is the child within that must die before there can be life lived abundantly. Children who become primary
narcissistic representatives for their parent's desires (that their children grow up to be "someone") often
struggle through out their lives to kill off these representatives of the infans within them, which are in
extreme cases unconscious. These children cannot live up to the expectations of their parent's desires.
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According to Leclaire, the child, in dis/order to be reborn, must become Abraham and slay, or sacrifice, this
child imposed on hir by the parents (3). A failure to do so leads but to death in life. To muteness. Leclaire
says, "The primary narcissistic child fully deserves to be called infans. It does not and never will speak.
Precisely to the extent that one begins to kill it can one begin to speak. To the extent that one goes on
killing it can one go on truly to speak, and to desire" (10). We might explain this matter of the parent's
desire by Jacob Freud's desire imposed unconsciously on Sigmund, in this case, a father's "desire . . .
always marked by some unfinished act of mourning" (12). The imposition may be slight such as a move
from Frieberg to Vienna. Nata Minor in Leclaire's A Child hints of such a Freudian move to Vienna (71-83)
as the very cause of Sigmund's death, neurosis, and the necessity for him to slay his father but also his
father's child within him. But it could have been anything that we have surmised already or yet to have
inferred. This imposition is a matter of education by seduction, but by way of killing Sigmund, making him
dead yet still biologically alive. (Think of it as another form of soul murder.) In working through the
problem of the infans, Sigmund Freud writes the paradigm and thereby creates psychoanalysis. In order to
survive, Freud had to slay this impossible possible parental desire. It is not, therefore, exclusively a matter
of slaying the father of the oedipal child-Sigmund, but a slaying of the child, or primary narcissistic
representative, imposed by the father (5-6). It is appropriate that I repeat elements of what I have written
here, for it is the writing of the death wish, of the disaster. Freud, we can say, was suffering possibly from
his father's own primary narcissism. But as we know, Freud read his relationship strictly on Oedipal
grounds. I am not, however, as Blanchot would remind me, a member of the culture of psychoanalysis and,
therefore, should steer clear of such pronouncements, though I am engaging in a mere rhetorical-critical
reading of Freud and seduction. (As I progress into Kristeva's discussion and the rest of this chapter, I will
further elaborate on the infans as put forth by Leclaire, Blanchot, and Fynsk.)
39. For discussions of Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (SE, XIV: 239-58) and their creative affective
potential, see Kristeva, Black Sun; Agamben, Stanzas; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power.
40. The word and concept "child" (infants, infancy, and infans) "misfires," to use a characterization that
Gayatri Spivak uses in respect to the word "woman." "Child," like "woman" or "man," is a concept-
metaphor. (See Spivak, "Feminism" 217). See my more fully developed discussion on naming in Negation
207-33.
41. A Caveat: Be careful in answering this question, given my discussion in chapter 1 on Dworkin's
article "They Took My Body."
Chapter 5: Canon, Obsessive/Hysteric
1. I have parts and chapter headings only because the dissertation-book-writing protocol require them!
Hence, so-called chapter 4 continues into, spills over with its obsessive concerns of dis/order into so-called
chapter 5, which improperly begins discussing pedagogy and hysteria (rape) in the so-called middle.
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2. Throughout I will on occasion use the triad of homeostasis, autopoesis, and virtual, which I take from
Katherine Hayles's "Boundary Disputes." I am less interested in the first two paraterms in the system than
in the third, which, as I reinscribe it, stresses potentialities (compossibility with its incompossibilities). As I
progress in my discussions throughout, I will pick up variously on the virtual, with its many possible
meanings, but more so its many ways of suggesting the creation of concepts through experimentation (see
Deleuze and Guttari, What is Philosophy? and Guattari's Chaosmosis).
3. Cf. Shoshana Felman in Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight 69-97. The whole issue of moving
beyond Oedipus or of deOedipalization is one of the most politically interesting themes. I have written on
this matter in Negation. Cf. Zizek, Ticklish Subject; Rickert. " 'Hands Up, You're Free'."
4. A great deal more wants to be said about Freud's notion of skin as the mem/brain of consciousness and
the writing on skin. Let us not forget Millett (recall Sylvia's being written on her skin in The Basement) and
Dworkin (recall the discussion of "skinless" in Intercourse 21-34, and numerous passages in Mercy with the
"Andrea"'s body being skinned in rape). I will take up this issue of skin later in Part 4 of Chaste Rape.
5. Ulmer makes exceptionally clear—and this clarity further evokes what Nancy might be referring to—
that the choral word "desert" has much hope to promise us (see Heuretics 226-43).
6. Though it is tempting to address the issue of the serious versus the ludic here, I can only make note of it.
The literature of critical studies and near orthodox Marxism attempts in every possible way (often
pathologically) to deflect the ludic. E.g., Ebert's "red feminism" (see Ludic Feminism and "For a Red
Pedagogy.") But such futile attempts are, nonetheless, understandable, especially when I recall Georges
Bataille's statement: "What is more frightening for human kind than play?" (Guilty 77). In a recent article,
Albert Rouzie writes:
Extreme forms of ludic postmodernism in composition studies—such as Victor Vitanza's "third
sophistic rhetoric"—base their theories principally on Baudrillard's concepts of seduction and
hyper-reality, and promote ideas that challenge the existence of or at least any access to material
realities, making activist intervention ineffective and, more seriously, making them complicitious
with dominant hegemonic thought structures. (647)
(See Ballif, Davis, Mountford, "Toward an Ethics of Listening.")
7. Quite ironically, given the problems of identity and recollection, Luria misreads her source, thinking that
Benjamin, not Jünger, is the author of the phrase. But to point this out is not to blame, for the source itself
reports the "originating" source in a confusing manner. See Buck-Morss 32-33.
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8. Still the best discussion of such a camera, camcorder cum digital video camera, is Ronell's in Finitude's
Score ("TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle" 305-27). Ronell works with George
Holliday's video tape of the beating of Rodney King and its appearance on television. Here again (see note
6 above) life as simulation by way of video (videocy), as pointed out my Ulmer, in terms of Baudrillard, in
the United States is a mirage on the desert (of the real). See Ulmer, Heuretics 230; cf. Zizek, Welcome to
the Desert of the Real.
9. The word abandoned, or abandonment, is a rather simple word, or is it? Readers often take is in the most
negative sense. Unfortunately for many readers it only suggests giving up hope, throwing in the towel. But
it, like other words, is rather complex. See Nancy (Inoperative, xxxii-xxxiii, 58, 135-36); Blanchot, The
Unavowable Community (throughout); Agamben (Homo Sacer, 28-29, 58-62, 82-83, 104-11). See my
"Hermeneutics of Abandonment," in which I examine Marx's attempt, in playing God, to correct errors,
mistakes in thinking and action by his predecessors, in his Eighteenth Brumaire.
10. Cf. Jacques Lacan in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, who writes that he
does not speak to "idiots" but to "nonidiots": the former are composed of the public who attends his
seminars and who has no pretension of supposing to know, while the latter de/compose Lacan's so-called
colleagues, "those who are savvy, to the nonidiots, to the supposed analysts" (3), or "the subjects supposed
to know" (43). As the subtitle of Television suggests, what Lacan has to say is a critique of his colleagues
by way of a new ethics of psychoanalysis. (Cf. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII The Ethics
of Psychoanalysis 1959-60.)
11. The construction "searching" (as private a notion it may be) is to signify an attempt to locate absolutely
the cause for the effect. I would invite the reader, however, to think of the "se" in the manner of Agamben's
discussion of "*Se" in Potentialities (116-37). Agamben focuses on the meaning of "*Se" as having the
"semantic value in the sense of what is proper to a group, as in the Latin suesco, 'to accustom oneself,'
consuetudo, 'habit,' and sodalis, 'companion'; the Greek hethos (and ethos), 'custom, habit, dwelling place';
the Sanskrit svadha, 'character, habit'; and the Gothic sidus (cf. the German Sitte), 'custom,' as well as in the
sense of what stands by itself, separated, as in solus, 'alone,' and secdeo, 'to separate.' It is semantically and
etymologically linked to the Greek idios, 'proper' (hence idioomai, 'I appropriate'," etc. (116). Agamben
continues by working "*Se" through Hegel's Absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis (appropriation,
expropriation, and finitude as human being's ethos, or as that which is proper to human being). For one
interpretation of Freud's reaching for a third figure, see Kristeva, Black Sun 23.
12. Of course, everything that I have said about Freud situating himself between would be questioned by,
e.g., Patrick Mahony, given his On Defining Freud's Discourse, in which he takes an early piece (on
"Katharina's Case History") and a late piece ("Analysis Terminable and Interminable") and compares them
as moving grandly from optimism to pessimism. I would still have to say that this gradation is not my
choice for situation Freud as a writer and myself as a reader of his writing. For me, Freud is situated in
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etween these two extremes but not in the form of a hybrid of any kind (not a pessimistic optimist). I would
be so daring now to compare Freud to Andrea Dworkin and vice versa, in relation to the question
concerning pessimism and optimism: Dworkin says: "Optimism is what you do, how you live. I write,
which is a quintessential act of optimism. It sometimes means the triumph of faith over experience, a belief
in communication, in community, in change, and, for me, in beauty. The power and beauty of language. I
act with other women to create social change: activism is optimism. I've always believed in art and politics
as keys to transformation. Emotional authenticity and, if you will, social progress towards fairness and
equality" ("Fighting Talk"). I am well aware of Dworkin's asides on and quotes from Freud in Scapegoat
(43, 82, 96), but these very citations (quotes that I take to be extremely ambivalent, overdetermined) are
only invitations to imminently reversible readings themselves.
13. I have lifted this quote from Nancy (The Sense of the World 167). Since I am following in part his
discussions on community and singularity, this passage from Woolf is perfect for placing in between my
discussion of Freud and his homeostasis-cum-autopoesis. This in between is the virtual (the
incompossibilities of the compossible). My use of the coined word "wayves" is to signify both waves
becoming successive ways, or possibilities. (Each wayves becoming a singular event, not paraphrasable,
not repeatable.) But also the currency of the coined word can mean a zigzagging or folding of self into self.
Being, e.g., both male and female and then a third figure. (See Hayles, "Boundary Disputes.") Orlando,
once a man, sleeps a long time and awakes to be a woman, living both sides. The contradictory coherent
opposite (of imminently reversible) possibility of this quote from Woolf is to be found in Kobo Abé's The
Woman in the Dunes. The entomologist-teacher be.comes under the power of a sand-dune woman. While
Woolf deals with the temporality of the waves of water, Abé, with the waves of sand. Both center on the
changing relations of male and female. The virtual is about the conditions for the possibility of change,
though Hayles sees such change as problematic to materialist thinking and acting. See her extended
discussion in How We Became Posthuman 1-49. As I proceed, I will turn to Deleuze's discussion of
Foucault and folds to further clarify what I am about t.here.
14. I am referring to several scenes in the documentary film by Terry Zwigoff Crumb (Sony), to which I
will return shortly in terms of play along with work.
15. Deleuze and Guattari spell Aion as Aeon in Thousand Plateaus. In The Logic of Sense, however,
Deleuze renders the word Aion (162-68). In line with the latter and other discussants, I will keep the
spelling consistently Aion.
16. This whole discussion, of course, is reminiscent of discussions on Anaximander's To Apeiron, the
indefinite, the undifferentiated (see Anaximander in Freeman, Fr. 1; Nietzsche, Philosophy 45-50).
17. Woolf is playing with the increase of the in between or ellipses in toc and tic in Orlando: The
intertwining of the two times occur at the moment she is on the ground, saying that she has "found her
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mate. . . It is the moor. I am nature's bride" (122). Lying there she hears a beating in the ground, "Tick-tock,
tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil, or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she listened,
she thought it changed to the trot of a horse's hoofs" (123). She sees "a man on horseback. He started. The
horse stopped. 'Madame,' the man cried, leaping to the ground, 'you're hurt!' 'I'm dead, sir!' she replied."
Then a wide paragraph jump. "A few minutes later, they became engaged." Another paragraph jump. "The
morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name" (123). The discussion that continues is a
mirroring of each other. The jumps in time, in the paragraph jumps, signal life lived intensely, but the
narrative time is equally intense and abundant, as I suggested in the quote previously, with Orlando seeing
and saying what Marmaduke sees and says with a perfect modulation from one to the next and back again
and again.
18. Derrida's is a lengthy unfolding of tentative conclusions, which I report rather quickly here.
19. Derrida's argument here is similar to his argument in "Structure, Sign, and Play" in Writing and
Difference, where he writes about mythomorphic discourse (that of Levi-Strauss's bricoleur) as the
source.less of epistemic discourse (that of the Engineer).
20. For the potentially of can, see Agamben, Potentialities 177-84. I can hear some reader saying that this
potentiality (dynamis, potenza) sounds like The Little Engine that Said I Can. Yes!, which is quite
appropriate for the child except when it is being harnessed to work and play exclusively in Kapitalist time.
For Hegel's metaphor of the growth of philosophy from child to adult, see "Introduction," Hegel's Lectures.
21. Agamben is obviously aware that the structuralist couple is highly problematic in its establishing a
myth of immanence. Agamben, as I take him, is moving toward a plane of imminence. Potentiality.
Without negation and disavowal but with nothing, which is not negative. But I can only in passing suggest
this trajectory. Surely, however, this con-figuration and its incredible credibility has been explained and is
ready at hand in the works of Bataille, Deleuze, Guattari, J-L. Nancy, Blanchot, Ronell, etc., including
Agamben himself—all of whom I will incrementally and greatly revisit for final, re/beginning discussions
in Part 4 of Chaste Rape.
22. What I am saying about the child and the object-toy can be read as a major departure from Freud's
developed view of identity and identification. I mean it to be a departure. As we progress here, I will make
it more clear that the attachment to objects is what creates the subject of history that I am attempting to
move away from. See Freud's view of "identification" and "identity" by way of oral incorporation in New
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, SE, XXII: 63; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,
XXVIII, 105. Ulmer in "The Object of Post-Criticism" can be seen as extending Agamben's description of
what happens to the object when placed beyond negation and disavowal.
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23. E.g., I have in mind Greg Ulmer's heuretic approach to "miniaturization" (Heuretics 147) of Derrida's
reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, specifically, Freud's grandson's fort/da, in terms of
Ulmer's sought after "fort of Beau Geste." Recall that Freud takes the playing with a toy and turns it into
the theory of an obsessive ritual of pain (gone) and yet pleasure (t.here). This is the game that becomes the
theory. Ulmer takes the ritual and returns to Fort Da to play with a toy so as to engage in "choral work . . .
that allows [him] to show what cannot be stated directly in propositions" (148; emphasis mine). His is the
game that becomes the paratheory, that is, the way of seeing things between or alongside. Ulmer says,
"This da or there is the eureka I seek in the fort of Beau Geste, Fort Zinderneuf as the diegetic metaphor of
chora. The da (Derri-da) is in the abyss of the fort at Zinderneuf" (148; Ulmer's emphasis). For a figure of
Fort Da, see 171.
24. See Blanchot, Disaster; Fynsk, Infant Figures; Ronell, Finitude's Score; D. Davis, Inessential Solidarity.
25. I am deliberately omitting both definite and indefinite, particular and universal, a and the before toy to
place it in a different relationship. Since out of Chronos, toy as described by Agamben is Aion. Toy is in
what Agamben refers to as Playland. It can be somewhat misleading, however, to think of toy as
indeterminate and confuse indeterminate with indefinite. They are separate, with the indeterminate as a
third space. Toy, as I will eventually say, is a postcritical object, a second [third] object outside of subject-
object relations.
26. Woolf, in Orlando, depicts just how a toy can be in an unsubstantial (becoming) world:
Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses call it)—the thing one is
looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much more important and yet
remains the same thing. If one looks at the Serpentine in this state of mind, the waves soon
become just as big as the waves on the Atlantic; the toy boats become indistinguishable from
ocean liners. So Orlando mistook the toy boat for her husband's brig; and the wave she had made
with her toe for a mountain of water off Cape Horn; and as she watched the toy boat climb the
ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop's ship climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and
a white crest with a thousand deaths in it arched over it; and through the thousand deaths it went
and disappeared—'It's sunk!' she cried out in an agony—and then, behold, there it was again
sailing along safe and sound among the ducks on the other side of the Atlantic." (141-42; emphasis
mine)
27. Crumbness: In terms of toys and crumbs and scraps, I am reminded of Robert Crumb. In the Zwigoff
film Crumb, we encounter the toy that becomes a ludic manner of survival. Crumb recounts how he first
sees Bugs Bunny and how he immediately developed a libidinal attachment to Bugs. (If Walt Disney only
knew! But perhaps he did! Some say he did! But Who knows?) Crumb recounts:
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When I was about 5 or 6, I was sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny. I cut out this Bugs Bunny off
the cover of a comic book and carried it around with me, right here in my pocket and took it out to
look at it periodically, and it got all wrinkled up from handling it so much that I asked my mother
to iron it on the ironing board, to flatten it out, and she did. I's deeply disappointed because it got
all brown when she ironed it and became brittle and crumbled apart. ("What is it about Bugs
Bunny?") I don't know. I had this sexual attraction to cute cartoon characters. You tell me. I don't
know.
Crumb is the biggest PUT-ON: E.g., if we examine what Crumb is saying to the camera man asking
questions, we get:
• Bugs (Bugger) Bunny (Buns)
• He keeps Bugs Bunny in his pocket! (Is that a pickle or is it your Bugs Bunny!)
• He likes to take it out and look at it but it gets so wrinkled up from handling it so much ("Ah,
what's up [or down], Doc?" takes on more meanings than can be counted!)
• His mother's ironing "it" out flat for him!
• It's turning brown from his mother's repeated ironings!
• And crumb.ling (Crumb's representation of Bugs Bunny crumbles! And yet, Crumb has
internalized Bugs Bunny as well as Felix the Kat!
28. I am thankful to my colleague Robert Reddick for pointing out the etymology of the word between. I
should add now having gone through a long discussion of the word between (in be tween, tweening, etc.)
that others have worked with this word in terms of a third spaces. Besides Agamben, see.e.g., Musil's The
Man Without Qualities 301, in which the main character, Ulrich, calls himself an "essayist," who lives in
between; Nancy's Inoperative Community 29, in which he discusses co-appear and compearance as the in
between, where singularities dwell; and Homo Bhabha's "Interrogating Identity" 7. Also see Thomas Carl
Wall (on Agamben), Radical Passivity 115-62; Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces 181, 215; Vitanza's "In-
Between: Writing on the Midway."
29. In working with Deleuze here, I am calling on Deleuze's Hume as reinvented, or casuistically stretched,
in Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity and Pure Immanence. As I have previously stated, I am rewriting
Deleuze's "immanence" into "imminence," in order to be in concert with Jean-Luc Nancy and Avital
Ronell's discussions of the myth of immanence and the problem of infinity. In changing the word
"immanence," I am also acknowledging that Deleuze is recalling old philosophical words such as
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immanence along with new and fresh empiricism. Instead of going for new words, he wishes to rehabilitate
the old ones, which I find no fault with, but which I must deal with here to avoid counterproductive
misunderstandings!
30. Curiously in the opening section of The Woman in the Dunes, the narrator reports on various
speculations for the missing man who stays with the woman in the dunes. The narrator reports:
The theory had been advanced that the man, tired of life, had committed suicide. One of his
colleagues, who was an amateur psychoanalyst, held to this view. He claimed that in a grown man
enthusiasm for such a useless pastime as collecting insects was evidence enough of a mental quirk.
Even in children, unusual preoccupation with insect collecting frequently indicates an Oedipus
complex. In order to compensate for his unsatisfied desires, the child enjoys sticking pins into
insects, which he need never fear will escape. And the fact that he does not leave off once he has
grown up is quite definitely a sign that the condition has become worse. Thus it is far from
accidental that entomologists frequently have an acute desire for acquisitions and that they are
extremely reclusive, kleptomaniac, homosexual. From this point to suicide out of weariness with
the world is but a step. (4, 6)
The narrator apparently concludes: "Yet, since no body had actually been discovered, all of these ingenious
speculations were groundless" (6).
31. Dworkin's assessment:
Sand is the element, the woman is the human being surviving in it; to him, they are dangerous, the
hole, the trap; he is afraid of what it is to be sunk in them, without a consciousness in reserve to
separate him and keep him afloat, above; they are life; and the woman is life's logic and purpose—
otherwise it has no logic, no purpose. In this vision of sex, while the man is by contemporary
standards emasculated by the failed rape, in fact rape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to
accomplish it. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: to the sand—to life
moving without regard for their specialness or individuality, their fiefdoms of personality and
power; to the necessities of the woman's life in the dunes—work, sex, a home, the common goal
of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand. (Intercourse 29)
32. Deleuze also says:
I would imagine myself approaching an author from behind, and making him a child, who would
indeed be his and would, nonetheless, be monstrous. That the child would be his was very
important because the author had to say, in effect, everything I made him say. But that the child
should be monstrous was also a requisite because it was necessary to go through all kinds of
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decenterings, slidings, splittings, secret discharges which have given me much pleasure. I consider
my book on Bergson to be typical in that respect. . . . Nietzsche . . . He's the one who screws you
behind your back. He gives you a perverse taste that neither Marx nor Freud have ever given you:
the desire for everyone to say simple things in his own name, to speak through affects, intensities,
experiences, experiments. (112-13)
Deleuze's discussion predates Irigaray's. It first appeared in 1973 as an appendix to Michel Cressole's attack
on Deleuze in the book Deleuze ("Lettre à Michel Cressole," 107-18). In its reprinted and translated form in
Semiotext(e), the title is changed to "I have nothing to admit."
But a test: Is Deleuze's use of the metaphor of screwing like Plato's or Irigaray's Plato. If so or not
so, then Why? After you have read this note, read the previous one on and from Dworkin. Then reread this
one. This part is not a test! (On Deleuze's reading of Plato's Cave, see The Logic of Sense [253-79], which
was first published in 1969.)
33. I discussed the infans in chapter 4 at length. But here in this note, I would add, as Blanchot makes
unclearly clear, all children into adulthood are always already dead. Blanchot's "primal scene" in Writing
the Disaster adds to the complexity of death with the child, looking one day into his heretofore "play space"
and coming to see "affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first
of all nothing beyond" (72). The child comes to understand "the finitude of language" (74). Having said
this, however, I am well aware that this negative knowledge does not, nor should not, stop us cold in
understanding Cummings's views on hysterical and obsessive pedagogies and bodies of knowledge, for not
all children, as far as anyone—snit or otherwise—might be able to determine, see or act on (tearlessly)
what Blanchot's child sees. And yet, I must report it here, for as Blanchot stresses there is
the patience of the disaster [that] leads us to expect nothing of the 'cosmic' and perhaps nothing of
the world, or, on the contrary, very much of the world, if we succeed in disengaging it from the
idea of order, of regularity guaranteed by law. For the 'disaster,' a rip forever ripping apart, seems
to say to us: there is not, to begin with, law, prohibition, and then transgression, but rather there is
transgression in the absence of any prohibition, which eventually freezes into Law, the Principle
of Meaning. . . . The disaster: break with the star, break with every form of totality, never denying,
however, the dialectical necessity of a fulfillment; the disaster: prophecy which announces nothing
but the refusal of the prophetic as simply an event to come, but which nonetheless opens,
nonetheless discovers the patience of vigilant language." (75)
34. In my Foreword, I have dealt with the issue of cultures of rape, for example, through a reading of
Isocrates's histories of (rhetorical) cultures as being founded on events of rape; through N. O. Brown's
Love's Body; and through Jed's Chaste Thinking; as well as other thinkers and their works.
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35. I have discussed Dworkin's news article-story on being drugged and raped in chapter 1.
36. The theme of awaking and telling is combined with the theme of telling the truth in a sarcasm couched
in a theme of sleep and relating it with unintentional irony. The Marquise's father, the Commandant, gives
his wife a newspaper with the Marquise's statement in it addressed to the unknown man who had made her
pregnant (68, 99). The mother reads it in astonishment and asks her husband what he thinks of it. He
answers: " 'Oh, she is innocent!' 'What!" exclaimed his wife, astonished beyond measure, 'innocent?' 'She
did it in her sleep,' said the Commandant, without looking up. 'In her sleep!' replied his wife. 'And you are
telling me that such a monstrous occurrence—' 'Silly woman!' exclaimed the Commandant, pushing his
papers together and leaving the room" (99; emphasis mine). Cf. Mortimer.
37. Cixous purposefully and thematically spells with Zs in this passage. See Third Body 124.
38. Kleist writes that when the Count is in a "feverish delirium brought on by his wound he had kept
confusing his visions of her [the Marquise] with the sight of a swan, which, as a boy, he had watched on the
uncle's estate; that he had been particularly moved by one memory, of an occasion on which he had once
thrown some mud at this swan, whereupon it had silently dived under the surface and re-emerged, washed
clean by the water; that she had always seemed to be swimming about on a fiery surface and that he had
called out to her 'Tinka!', which had been the swan's name, but that he had not been able to lure her towards
him" (82). Cixous makes much of this reference is terms of the power of metamorphosis into a third body.
Let us not forget that "third" is referred to repeatedly in the story, which is a reference to the third child that
is growing in the Marquise's body. Hence, in part, anyway, Cixous's third body.
39. "Marx: The Video" is, in fact, a video available from Video Data Bank. The script for the video is in
Ecstasy Unlimited.
40. In introducing "Marx: The Video," Paul Smith writes of Kipnis's "pessimism . . . in the sense that its
fundamental proposition is that the oppositional discourse of Marxism, with its stress on political economy,
is shot through with an unexamined discourse of the [libidinal] body; the body and sexuality are thus
offered as that which exceeds this oppositional discourse" (Ecstasy xvii).
41. It is easy to understand why Nancy and Blanchot as well as Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard find little of
value in Marxisms as they are thought and practiced. But finding little does not make them any more less
hopeful and joyful in terms of revolution (or rather involution). Nancy and Blanchot's view of community
(literary communism, communication) is of a community, as I have spelled out above, is a community that
is constantly rebeginning; it is a community that is without communion (transcendence and immanence).
Humor in life and joy in politics—Why separate the two!—is perhaps best captured in the Deleuzean spirit
of the Italian Autonomy: Michael Hardt recalls it, "revolution [involution] is a desiring [joyful] machine"
(7).
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All of the above, however, take their lead from Nietzsche and his discussions on the spirit of gravity. (See
Thus Spake 153, 219-22, 303-07; The Gay Science 202, 257; Beyond Good and Evil 231-33. Cf. Kundera,
Unbearable Lightness; Book of Laughter. The best discussion of laughter as a mode of resistance is Diane
Davis's Breaking Up [at] Totality.)
42. See endnote 3, chapter 1.
43. The context for this quote is the last frame of Art Spiegelman's "Cracking Jokes." The most sensitive
treatment of the joke and its perpetually imminent reversibility is by Kundera in his novel The Joke.
44. This passage from Archive Fever ends with the verb "to come," which is here a verb of deferral
comparable to the one Nancy uses in discussing community: ". . . is to come, in the sense that it is always
coming, endlessly, at the heart of every collectivity (because it never stops coming, it ceaselessly resists
collectivity)" (Inoperative 71). To come clearly and repetitively has the role of no end—it is a serialization
of rebeginnings—of keeping the question of both archive and community open so as to avoid the problem
of the myth of presence, or transcendence and immanence.
Part 3: Chaste Media
Chapter 6: Chaste Cinema I?
1. There is only, in actuality, added footage of the behind-the-scenes-making of Amadeus (both versions),
with interactive menus, production notes, cast/director highlights, theatrical trailers, scene access,
languages, subtitles. Hal Hartley and John Waters's films do not have this kind of added footage. While
writing Chaste Rape, I discovered that movie critic Roger Ebert proposed what he calls "do-it-yourself
audio tracks: DIY DVD commentaries." Ebert suggests that filmgoers record their own MP3 files and trade
them over the Internet. Patrick Stein, following this suggestion, has developed a Web site as home for such
files: dvdtracks.com/. I would invite readers of Chaste Rape to add to the behind-the-scene discussions in
this chapter by making their audio files and by distributing them to this site or others. (See Sternbergh "Do-
It-Yourself.")
2. See Shaffer's the preface and film introduction to Amadeus (the play), for the history, versions, of the
play. When commenting on Amadeus, I will designate the citation to the play in terms of Act, Scene, and
page numbers. I will also intermittently cite passages from the film script (by scene number).
3. The filmic here refers to Barthes's third meaning (sense), which I discuss in chapter 1. My discussion of
mirrors and the desert seems to preclude the possibility, incompossibility, of "the desert of the real," which
is referred to in the film Matrix. I set this possibility aside for a fuller treatment in chapter 8 when I discuss
411

virtual rape, or actual rape slipping over to the desert of the real, yet virtual rape. We are ever moving from
real through reel to virtual rape in Chaste Rape. (Cf. Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real 15.)
4. Hartley continues: "At the very beginning, I was thinking of Henry Fool being part of an epic series of
movies about Henry. So when Fay lets Henry go off to Sweden at the end of the film, it opens up all sorts
of possibilities" ("Responding" xviii). In fact, on the table of contents page, the screenplay is referred to as
"Henry Fool, I."
5. Henry "rapes" Simon's mother. I enclose the word rape in quotes, for Hartley in the script and film itself
slightly undercuts and makes ambiguous the accusations from within the characters' perspectives. E.g.,
when Henry in later scenes returns to the Grim house and sees Fay—who says, "Oh, shit! Not you
again!"—Mary blurts out, "Beast! Fiend! Rapist!" (HF 46). Immediately, however, Fay says to her mother:
"Oh, shut up, Mom!" The directions read and the action is "Fay stomps back upstairs. Mary slams her door
shut. Simon runs out after Henry." In the next scene, Simon and Henry discuss the situation: Simon,
following Henry, says, "Henry, wait up!" Henry says, "I am not a rapist!" At that moment the two of them
are interrupted by Officer Buñuel, Henry's parole officer (46-47). The event of Henry having "raped" Mary
is never referred to again. Complicating the incident is a span of possibilities and interpretations of what
took place among the various incidences of Henry's having raped Susan (prior to the film) and having gone
to prison for seven years, Henry's "rape" of Mary, and Henry's helping Pearl, who is being sexually abused
by Warren. Hartley suggests in the film with this span of possibilities that Henry is progressing away from
his propensity to rape. In any case, rape remains chaste in the film.
6. The cause and effect here for Mary's suicide is set forth by a series of scenes, which I will pick up on
later in the second Installation. It is strongly suggested that Mary's loss of her husband is the primary
source for her desperate act.
7. It is difficult, however, in the closing shots of the film to tell whether or not Henry is running toward or
away from the plane on the tarmac that is waiting to fly him to Sweden. In an interview, Hartley says the
film has an ending, purposefully left open for the audience. See Hartley, "Responding" xx-xxi.
8. In Amadeus (Act 1, Scene 6: 30), Salieri prays to God to "enter" him, yet He does not. See Schreber,
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.
9. In this scene of ravishment (the American Heritage Dictionary says: to ravish: "1. To seize and carry
away by force. 2. To rape; violate. 3. To overwhelm with emotion; enrapture"), there are double entendres
throughout. Shaffer continues them throughout the play and film. E.g., Amadeus boasts to his Majesty
Joseph II, about how long he can keep it up, how long he can keep music ravishing the listeners:
I have a scene in the second act—it starts as a
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duet, just a man and wife quarreling. Suddenly the wife's
scheming little maid comes in unexpectedly—a very funny situ-
ation. Duet turns into trio. Then the husband's equally scream-
ing valet comes in. Trio turns into quartet. Then a stupid old
gardener—quartet becomes quintet, and so on. On and on, sex-
tet, septet, octet! How long do you think I can sustain that?
JOSEPH
I have no idea.
MOZART
Guess! Guess, Majesty. Imagine the longest time such a thing
could last, then double it.
JOSEPH
Well, six or seven minutes! maybe eight!
MOZART
Twenty, sire! How about twenty? Twenty minutes of continuous
music. No recitatives.
In response to the Absolute, elevated themes of gods and legends, in the film, Amadeus responds to
Von Swieten: "Elevated? What does that mean? Elevated! The only thing a man should elevate is—oh,
excuse me. I'm sorry. I'm stupid" (Script, The Empoerior's Study - Day- 1780's, Scene 113). In the play,
Amadeus says: "Oh, elevated! Elevated! . . . The only thing a man should elevate is his doodle" (Act 2,
Scene 4: 89).
10. At this point the discussion openly turns toward the Deleuzean paracept of becoming (becoming as in
becoming child, becoming wasp or orchid, becoming woman, becoming minoritarian). Though I call on
this word throughout, I do not limit its meaning in the body of the text. After all, why make the body of the
text a body with organs! About becoming, see Deleuze, Dialogues 2-3; cf. 29-31; Deleuze and Guattari,
Thousand Plateaus 232-309.)
11. I am referring to the scene in which Amadeus is talking to Constanze in perverse-reverse strings of
phrases and sentences, while Salieri remains in hiding, listening with mouth agape at this person, he yet
does not know it is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Mozart, in reverse word order, tells Constanze to Eat my shit. It is not until we get to Divine, in
Pink Flamingos, that it is God who eats, in this context, Mozart's shit. (This closing scene to Pink
413

Flamingos is the infamous one that Waters has had to repent for, jokingly or not.) The whole issue,
however, of the new God eating waste, the remainders, is rather unique. As Milan Kundera, in such an
autobiographical-fictive and scholarly manner tells us in The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I as a child, grasped the incompatibility of God
and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man
was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image—and God has
intestines!—or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.
The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master
Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus 'ate and drank, but did not
defecate.'
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if
need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the
Creator of man. (245-46; emphasis mine)
It is the case that with the coming of Divine, who claims that she is the filthest person alive, we human
beings are no longer responsible for the greatest sin of the introduction of waste into the world! It is
metaphysically appropriate that Divine eats dog shit. Basically her own shit.
Recall Amadeus, the mad God, speaking perverse strings. Amadeus, referring to the
"Fartsbishop," tells Constanze that where they are in the palace, "everything goes backward" and that no
one will understand what he is saying or that she would want to complain about. Constanze does not want
to play Amadeus's game. But he says it is a serious game. After getting her full, serious attention by asking
her to marry him because he loves her, he then tells her,
Tish-I'm tee. What's that?
Constanze: What?
Mozart: Tish-I'm-tee.
Constanze: Eat
Mozart: Yes.
Constanze: Eat my –ah! (film, scene 29)
414

Hence, the metaphysical appropriateness of this perversity: Divine as God = Dog as Divine. In a negative
deconstructive spelling lesson, everything makes new sense.
12. About a mad God (Deus) and the crucifixion, See Foucault, Madness 78-84.
13. But of course these are the major characters. What is remarkable—though a simple dramatic
convention—is how much Amy changes from hanging out with Warren and hitting Simon over the head
with a bottle to hanging out with Simon and for hitting Simon up for his thoughts concerning poetry. (cf.
Hartley, "Responding" xiv-xv.)
14. This image-theme of the open mouth as an expression of finitude deserves a chapter of its own. It is the
mouth open attempting to express what cannot be but ex-posed. Yet ex-scribed. Or as Christopher Fynsk
might write, cannot be but what remains at a crucifixion (Infant 11). And yet, silently. Chastely. I have
discussed the photograph of the open mouth in regard to Sylvia and Millett (Basement 24-25) in my
opening section of Chaste Rape. Sylvia's open mouth displays evidence that she has attempted to bite and
chew (i.e., to consume) herself. As for the image-theme in Amadeus, it is best located in the text of the
play. (For a variety of uses, see, e.g., 90, 140, 144.) Nancy calls on it, e.g., in Experience (90, 114, 145);
and, similarly, Kundera, in Immortality (e.g., 322-23). Also see again, Fynsk, in Infant (17-20).
15. The lines are different in the play version (see Act 1, Scene 7: 33).
16. The relationship between Bettina Brentano and Goethe is rather infamous. The letters that Bettina wrote
to Goethe and that he encouraged are hysterical discourse. They are letters that are, as Friedrich Kittler
suggests, mere chatter or hysterical discourse becoming-literature. Goethe edited, polished, and saved the
letters each day that he received them. Kittler tells us
Bettina published Goethe's Correspondence with a Child, and she did it to finance a monument to
her god that she herself had designed. Goethe sits on a throne, cloak buttoned around his neck, his
gaze directed toward the clouds. Next to him Bettina, a graceful childlike menad standing on her
little head, and the inscription: 'Turn your tiny feet toward heaven only without care!' She who
once threw her dress over her head so as not to be recognized by the people of Frankfort, or so as
to be recognized by the spirits, remains Bettina in marble, too; a menad with no shame in the
presence of shame. ("Writing" 62)
In part, the metacharacter Bettina becomes the child of the father. For Betinna-Goethe's letter writing and
the postal system, see Siegert, Relays 62-73.
17. I have used a slot and substitution in regards Deleuze's sentence in Dialogue following the sentence that
I have quoted. (See Dialogues 2). Hence, an assemblage of sorts!
415

18. Kundera, in a line of exposition, discusses Aristotle's rejection of episodes in the Poetics. It is Kundera's
aim to rehabilitate the concept and figure, which informs Immortality. He writes: "It is precisely . . . that we
realize the relativity of the concept of the episode, a relatively Aristotle did not think through: for nobody
can guarantee that some totally episodic event may not contain within itself a power that someday could
unexpectedly turn it into a cause of further events. When I say someday, it can even be after death; this was
precisely Bettina's triumph, for she became part of Goethe's life story when he was no longer alive. We can
thus complete Aristotle's definition of the episode and state: no episode is a priori condemned to remain as
episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or
later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure" (305).
Aristotle is obsessive in the Poetics, while Kundera introduces a dose of hysteria to this work. The
impact of episodes that are latent stories, as he suggests, on canonization and immortality and the always
already potential of that impact on continuously deflecting the narrative into different directions (or into
various incompossibilities) are immense.
19. The primary paradigm that is informing the narrative fluxes of Immortality is that of Heraclitus's child
playing a game. In the fluxes of Kundera's Immortality there is a child who for some unknown reason sits
in the middle of the road, causing cars to crash and for people to die. One of the main characters in the
novel dies. The child is not hurt.
20. See Nancy, Sense 111.
21. Nancy is aware of a need and desire for the missing third possibility. He writes: "Perhaps neither
affirmation nor negation may be substituted for the question. It could be a question of another disposition,
one that has no logical name" (Experience 165).
22. I am here putting together the acts of contestation and testing, both of which reopen and keep open a
question, to avoid reactionary processes of thought. Foucault, in speaking of Blanchot, writes: "This
philosophy of nonpositive affirmation is, I believe, what Blanchot was defining through his principle of
'contestation.' Rather than being a process of thought for denying existences or values, contestation is the
act which carries them all to their limits and, from there, to the Limit where an ontological decision
achieves its end; to contest is to proceed until one reaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and
where the limit defines being. There, at the transgressed limit, the 'yes' of contestation reverberates, leaving
without echo the hee haw of Nietzsche's braying ass" (Language 36). Testing is an act of reading that I take
from Ronell (Testing). Foucault points not only to Blanchot as the thinker of contestation, but also Bataille
points to Blanchot as well. See Bataille, Inner Experience 10-12, and 101-57.
416

Again, I am not writing of the traditional other, that which is, for the lack of a better phrase,
supposedly covered by "affirmative action." The traditional other is not merely outside of the being of
majority and therefore a being of minority. I am deferring to another non-traditional place, Divine place, of
becoming minority. The object is not to get more and more into the majority of CacaPitalism, for nothing
could be more false. The pointless is to get outside of a community predicated on kapitalism or
communism, etc., and therefore out of a realm of being into a relation of being (or rather becoming),
nothing but a radical other, or finitude. Therefore, Con/Test/ation is not predicated on testosterone or
estrogen, or on XY or XX chromosomes. Con/Test/ation is, "literally" and figuratively, about third sexes.
Hence, Divine says: "My child is living proof of a new strain of heterosexuality." (Flamingoes Forever, in
Trash Trio 189; emphasis mine). But such a new strain—meant comically by Waters—is only a beginning
turn against (alongside) heterosexuality. As Anne Fausto-Sterling has made evident, there are more than
two sexes or even more than two sexualities. There are male, female, hermaphrodite, merm, ferm, etc.
Sex (biology) is not kapitalistic nor communistic; it is not predicated on a restricted economy, but
is one of many, a radical many, of a set without a set of sexes and sexualities. Cf. Derrida and McDonald.
23. For the literalists, John Waters says: "Underneath all this cockeyed glamour lives a serious actor [Harris
Glenn Milstead] who wants nothing more than to work every day. . . . Divine is certainly no transvestite.
He says he sometimes dreads getting in drag but realizes these flamboyant outfits are his 'work clothes.'
The only time he goes through the drag ordeal is for a play, movie, or personal appearance. Thank God, he
is also not a female impersonator—I can hardly imagine him making people suffer through Judy Garland or
Carol Channing imitations. Divine is simply an actor who usually is cast as a woman. He seems
comfortable living his 'interpretation of a man' and says he is quite satisfied with his natural 'plumbing' "
(Shock 145). Cf. Mueller, "Divine" in Ask 220-22.
24. The film Hail Mary was received in Europe and the U.S. as blasphemous. Waters tells us: "Pope John
Paul II . . . denounced the film and led a special prayer ceremony 'to repair the outrage inflicted on the Holy
Virgin' " (Crackpot 134-35). Needless to say, because the Pope was upset, many who never saw the film
demonstrated similar public responses.
24. The question of whether or not Waters is constructing a parody or a pastiche of the crucifixion is one
that I leave open as widely as I can, but provisionally answer by saying that Waters's constructions are both
a parody and a pastiche and yet something new, which will become clear in the unfolding discussion. By
comparison, I point to Francis Bacon's paintings of the crucifixion and Christopher Fynsk's discussion of
them. Fynsk writes: "The motif of crucifixion punctuates Bacon's works from its beginnings through its
final period. Its persistence is especially striking for the fact that Bacon strips it of any Christian resonance,
or brutally subverts that resonance by linking the motif to more archaic mythological themes. And since
Bacon denies his figures any allegorical significance beyond a rudimentary allusion to the 'ways things are,'
417

we are cautioned from taking it as merely a grim or bitter parody, an ironic statement of some kind" (Infant
Figures 15).
26. Yes, it is the case that I am alluding to Lyotard's notion of it is necessary to link but not how to link (in
Differend), and that I am call on Ulmer's principles of conduction (Heuretics) in making these paralogic
linkages. Besides the paralogies constructed by Waters, we have in my insertion of Deleuze and Guattari's
statement concerning God is a Lobster, the paralogy of geology of morals (echoing Nietzsche's genealogy
of morals).
27. The scene of Lobstora's raping Divine was not Waters's original intention. He had planned that Divine
would be charged with the death of Sharon Tate and others. But when Charles Manson and his group were
captured and charged with the crimes, Waters had to rethink the ending. Hence, a giant lobster, Lobstora.
Cf. Cookie Mueller (an actor in Multiple Maniacs), who has written about rape. See "Abduction and Rape"
in Ask, 102-13.
28. This distinction between two communications, I completely take from Bataille, Guilty 139. The manner
in which Bataille draws out this distinction applies well to what I am experiencing in my experimental
relation with Multiple Maniacs. Since in chapter 3 of Chaste Rape, "The Test," I recommended that the
readers study the section on "The Divinity of Laughter" in Guilty, I will leave to the readers the task of
thinking through the connections.
29. Here's a slight modification by addition (paralogy) and placement (adjacency): Let us recall Tiresias,
becoming the middle term between two sets of copulating snakes, between two sets of being both female
and male, and between two gods. As mythical versions have it, s/he was blinded by both Hera and Athena
(see Loraux, Experiences 10-11). By Hera, for Tiresias sides with Zeus that men have more pleasure in sex
than women; in a completely different version, by Athena, for Tiresias looks upon her body. If we initially
think of the Lobstora rape scene in terms of Divine's being like—or rather becoming—Tiresias, we might
come to see "Divine"-the-character caught between two gods (or forces, or double pincers) and, hence,
mis/appropriately "Divine," like Tiresias, is both male and female. Having a conversation. In the in be
tween (by twos, moving toward a third). Deleuze writes: "A thing is sometimes this, sometimes that,
sometimes something more complicated—depending on the forces (the gods) which take possession of it"
(Nietzsche 4).)
Divine-Tiresias epitomizes in this reflexive situation, as Deleuze would say, a double capture but I
would have to add a double capture (God and Divine) within a double capture (Divine and Tiresias) within
yet another double (male and female). The signs chime up and down the signifying chain, while there are
all those outside the chain that remain. And yet, given the inexactness of this exemplar that is not an
analogy but a paralogy, some remains do intrude in the form of a noisy annunciation. Is it not always this
way! Both Mary and Joseph are without answers, when confronted with the paralogy of immaculate
418

conception. Divine, in "her" divine madness, intuits the future, but "she" is not telling anymore than God or
the Virgin could or would before Divine's advent. So it goes! While waiting for the third.
But it is seeing itself that causes the problem for Tiresias (see Loraux 218-26.) And yet, this event
is not necessarily something that can be explained, but cannot but be seen, perhaps technologically
tweened, to be able to intuit what remains. (It's that way with strange attractors.) In sum: Seeing does not
admit of our explaining this matter any further. Except perhaps through laughter and humor. Hence, the
value of Godard's Hail Mary.
30. There is of course in some Feminisms, the laugh of the medusa, which is a laughter that mocks and
brings down phallocratic discourse. Often, however, such laughter only reinstalls a feminine phallocratic
discourse of its own. (See Vitanza, Negation 207-33; cf. Davis, Breaking 136-208). As I have previously
stated, Diane Davis's Breaking Up [at] Totality is the best study of and experiment with laughter available
to readers. Also, see Michelle Ballif's Seduction, Sophistry, and the Woman with the Rhetorical Figure for
a rethinking of phallocratic discourse in relation to "woman" and the "feminine."
31. Marx does say precisely what I have quoted. See Eighteenth Brumaire 75. But obviously I am changing
the context and the meaning of lumpenproletariat, which I insist on seeing as third figures. I have my
disagreements with Eagleton on how to read the figure. I agree with Jeffrey Mehlman. I have added the
slash in lumpen/proletariat to signify my difference with Marx and Eagleton.
Let us return to Terry Eagleton who writes: "Jeffrey Mehlman sees the elegant dialectical schemas of
Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as fissured by an uncouth, irreducible cackle of farce:
the farce of Bonaparte himself, the non-representative, Bonaparte prises a crack in that conceptual
architecture through which floods a heterogeneous swarm of lumpenproletarians, a flood that threatens to
swamp Marx's own orderly text under the semiotic excess it lends to his language. The upshot, Mehlman
comments '[is] a Marx more profoundly anarchical than Anarchism ever dreamed' " (in Walter Benjamin
162; emphasis mine). See Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition. I have previously and in greater depth
argued for Mehlman's position and have extended it in Negation (391). Also, see my "Hermeneutics of
Abandonment." Hence, I am arguing here that the giggles-laughter that I identify in Amadeus, Henry Fool,
and now Multiple Maniacs is the non-canonical excess, a third figure, or Divine (places).
32. Cutting and pasting together, of course, is a well-tried method that often appears to be methodless. I
have in mind such cutups as W. S. Burroughs and N. O. Brown.
Chapter 7, Chaste Cinema II?
1. The title is filled with puns. Levin writes:
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The word 'Befreier' designates a liberator (or liberators), but the film's title spells "Befreier" with a
capital "f," thus drawing attention to the word 'Freier' contained within it. In antiquated German,
'Freier' designates a suitor (or suitors), one who would seek the hand of a maiden; in modern
German it designates a john or johns (in the sense of a prostitute's customer). . . . [H]ere then,
sexual relations and sexual exploitation are manifestly inscribed within liberation. . . . [T]he title
can be understood to mean 'Liberators and Liberated,' 'Liberators and Wooed,' 'Wooers and
Liberated,' 'Johns and Liberated,' 'Johns and Wooed,' and so on. The film sets out to explore the
terrain opened up by these rather disparate meanings." (65)
2. In placing the word lists in quotations, I hope to make emphasize that there is nothing objective in listing
or in Helke Sander's sequencing of interlocutors. Montage in film, or juxtaposition, as I suggest, is highly
rhetorical and suggestive of meaning. Nothing is more rhetorical than the claim to be objective or
disinterested or distanced from the facts! For a discussion of Sander's use of montage, see Levin 71.
3. I place the word facts in quotations to emphasize the danger of taking facts as in themselves true. Like
many, I take facts—the "hard facts" (see the book BeFreier und Befreite 11) that Helke Sander would
discover—as discursive constructions owing to the rules and regimens of verifiability. A fact is true or false
and provable as such through these rules. However, such discourse constructions with rules of verifiability
are part of a language game, among other games, that are ideologically constructed. Facts are always already
interpretations, always already have histories. In reference to Sander's pursuit of the facts, Atina Grossmann
finds Sander at best "naïve" and Dr. Richling, in the film, as equally naïve at the blackboard explaining the
facts to Sander. Grossmann sees this scene as "border[ing] on parody" (44). On the whole problematic of
reporting facts and experiences as truthful, Grossmann cites Joan Scott, "The Evidence of Experience,"
Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 773-97.
4. Part of the problem that I am faced with in writing about this film and Sander's concerns is the very
complexity of her thoughts in regards to rape, war, children, feminism. Her book The Three Women K is
one of the most remarkable discourses on thinking about human relations in terms of being a German female
in post-WW II Germany, being a female in a patriarchal world, being not only with men but also with
women. This work of fiction is a whole other work to discuss. Sander's thinking in this book, as I will try to
suggest in this chapter in my subsections on "Resistance" and "Counter-Resistance," has been picked up by
other feminists as extremely dangerous. Sander comes across to me as a very courageous thinker, thinking
what wants to be thought out loud. The book lends itself, because of its complexity of thought and its
apparent ironies, to easy distortion, if I can even call up that word in relation to Sander's writing interests. If
at times Sander appears to be naïve in relation to the discourse of facts, she in this work of fiction, which
allows her perhaps the discursive freedom to think, is free from the discourse, informed by an ideology of
approaching objectivity, that would pretend to report the facts and nothing but the facts.
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5. See James Burke, The Big Rape (Frankfurt a. M.: Friedrich Rudl Verlegr Union, 1951) and Cornelius
Ryan, The Last Battle (London: Collins, 1966). I take these references from Grossman 62, note 43.
6. The film is of course in German, with sections in Russian. I am taking the translations from the subtitles,
which are seldom precise. Since there are two languages being spoken, there are translations within
translations, which often are not rendered in direct speech but in indirect speech, e.g., by the translator to
Sander herself who apparently does not know Russian. (When the translator translates by way of indirect
discourse, I state this fact in my presenting of the exchange.) Additionally part of the problem is that the
exchange between Sander and her interlocutors is often simultaneous speech, that is, speech over speech. As
for myself, I have called on colleagues who translate German to English to help me through especially
difficult, noisy sections of the film. But the problem of the film, as in any film made across cultures and
ages, is that viewers need to be cautious also in reading the body language being put forth by the
interlocutors. The Russians express themselves with much body language that at times appears to be an
evasion of the question or in one case and over-elaboration of the question.
7. See my discussions of Brownmiller in chapters 1 and 2.
8. Liebman and Michelson write that for Sander the event was a " 'Zeitereignis,' an event whose enormity
makes it almost unique in history. She is probably right in doing so. We know of no rapes of comparable
scale in all of recorded history" ("After the Fall" 12). Sander says that the rape of Nanking is comparable.
9. See Brownmiller's discussion of revenge rapes during WWII (Against 48-78).
10. I have emphasized the word "context," for it becomes an important issue raised by Sander's later critics.
We should keep in mind that during the eighties and nineties there were, as Liebman and Michelson remind
us, the "historical scandals and media spectacles provoked" by" 'Bitburg,' 'Historikerstreit,' the 'Jenninger
Affair' " ("After the Fall" 6-8). See Liebman and Michelson's references to these events that establish a
context for the reception of Sander's film. Cf. Lyotard, The Differend (3), which begins with the whole issue
of Historikerstreit, specifically, that angle put forth by Faurisson.
11. For a frequently cited discussion of rape during the wars in Yugoslavia, see MacKinnon, "Turning
Rape."
12. I give details from the film, often describing and quoting the scenes at length; for BeFreier und Befreite,
while easily borrowed from the Goethe Institute Library, in Chicago, is very difficult to locate from any
other source. Just like copies of Millett's The Basement, BeFreier und Befreite exists in very few copies, if
not even many fewer copies. The version of the film that I borrowed from the Goethe Institute is printed in
two cassettes, or reels. I refer to the scenes as being in one or the other, or attempt to locate them in the book
version.
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13. The possibility of "consensual" sex in the event, of course, is ridiculous. Any women who did engage in
the exchange of sexual favors for whatever they needed to survive were branded as collaborators. The film
in the second reel shows photos of French women being paraded or marched through the streets, who had
their heads shaved and their clothes marked with the Nazi swastika. In some cases, there are photos of
women being marched through the street nude. Having said this, I must point the prospective viewer of the
film to the scenes in the second reel of the film of the war brides, women with children by . . . I can only
infer … Americans. A whole ship of them is shown arriving in the United States.
14. In the film version when the statistics are given, Johr refers to Dr. Reichling has supportive of the
numbers and inferences drawn from them. Reichling appears toward the middle of the second reel in a
discussion of the figures with Sander.
15. In chapters 1 and 2, I make references to Christa Wolf's "third alternative": To kill or To Die. No, To
Live. (See Wolf, Casandra 106-07.)
16. The Russian officer Fjodor Swerew tells Sander that Ilya Ehrenburg wrote articles for the newspaper,
"which were to arouse feelings of hatred against the enemy" and which were to inform Russian troops of
what could happen to them or to their women if they did not kill Germans. Other writers were Simonow,
Wanda Wassilievskaja, Alexej Tolstoi. (About Ehrenburg's articles, see Grossmann 50-53.)
17. Tom Conley in his subtitle to the article "The Film Event" makes a distinction between "interval" and
"interstice." In chapter 6, I discussed Kundera's criticism of Aristotle's refusal to accept the "episode" (which
is without apparent cause and effect) and Kundera's revalorizing of it, which I am attempting to accomplish
here as well in terms of Sander's film. The interstice and the episode (principally the same) are the excluded
middles. The muddle. The remainders. They are the a-space, atopos, of whatever-being, of singularity, of a
Deleuzian event. What this discussion of mine should lead to eventually is that in the film (or any expression
of human production) there is a community, communion (in this case, if not all cases, founded on brutality
and inhumanity) but in the filmic there is (es gibt) incipiently a communitarianism as espoused by Barthes,
Deleuze, Nancy, Blanchot, Agamben, Ronell, and Davis. Respectively, there is both the film and the filmic,
the latter becoming the sight of a new politics of the future as Barthes says in "The Third Meaning [Sense]"
(62-63). For additional discussions of a single frame in a film, see Waters, Director's Cut, and Adair,
Flickers.
18. In this section on a third language, I am guided by Tom Conley's discussion in "The Film Event" and by
Deleuze's "L'épuisé." The film event is the filmic. For a full discussion of the phrase "any-space-whatever,"
see Deleuze, Cinema I 102-22. I am purposefully drawing implications here between Pascal Auge's and
Deleuze's varied notion of "any-space-whatever" and Giorgio Agamben's "whatever being" and space
(Coming Community). Both spaces and beings are thirds.
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19. For Jean-François Lyotard the petit narrative can be a singular event. But I wish to avoid the newer
currency of the petit narrative as being simply a smaller, more local rendition of a grand narrative. Hence,
my third term emphasizes a singular event.
20. The notion of a post-humanity is in terms of cinema here, but I am speaking broadly in terms of a post-
Humanism, with human beings as no longer the measure of all things. In the Deleuze's discussions of the
shift from the movement-image to the time-image, there is a collapsing into "indiscernibility which will
endow the camera with a rich array of functions, and entail a new conception of the frame and reframings.
Hitchcock's premonition will come true: a camera-consciousness which would no longer be defined by the
movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into. And it becomes
questioning, responding, objecting, provoking, theorematizing, hypothesizing, experimenting, in accordance
with the open list of logical conjunctions ('or,' 'therefore,' 'if,' 'because,' 'actually,' 'although'), or in
accordance with the functions of thought in cinéma-vérité, which as [Jean] Rouch, says, means rather truth
of cinema [vérité du cinéma]" (Cinema 2 23). But these logical connections, though used, are not always
used "logically" but paralogically, conductively.
21. The word "machinic" is intended as Deleuze and Guattari variously discuss it in Anti-Oedipus (283-96).
That bicycle is becoming a unicycle, something molar becoming molecular. It is a man-bicycle-woman
refolding and becoming a "machinic assemblage" (see Thousand Plateaus 88).
22. This is my first mention of "superject," which in this passage Deleuze takes from A. N. Whitehead. The
importance here, as I will develop in the remainder of the Chaste Rape is that, as Deleuze argues, both
objects and subjects are undergoing a change, metamorphosis, into, as I keep saying, thirds, or third figures,
which a few people before have seen. (See Vitanza, "Threes" and "Two Gestures: While Waiting for a
Third.") In my discussion of Deleuze's "point of view on variation" I am indebted to Tom Conley's article
"Conspiracy Crisis," which reminded me of that discussion in The Fold.
23. The inclusion of the photographs into the film and the potential impact that they have, turning the film
into the filmic, reminds me of Chris Marker's film La Jetée, which is virtually all photographs in film
(cinema), except for the famous scene of the woman's eyes animated. This film, then, would be the purest
form of filmic films, which for the sake of discernibility to uncover indiscernibility, Marker has to include
the eyes (of all human things in cinema) moving. It is the eyes that are preceded and followed by and that
are surrounded by the world gone filmic.
24. Much work still remains on the reporting of violence and especially sexual violence in the media. See
Herman and Chomsky; and Jones. I do not set up these two as exemplary by any means. Jones raises the
dilemma of Which is worse? Rape for women or Death for men? He points out how the numbers are freely
given in terms of women raped but none is given in terms of the young men who are lined up and killed in
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the Kosovo War. As if there is a difference, for women report being raped is being "killed." It is talked of as
"soul murder." And yet Sander interviews a woman who had reported to a former German officer being
raped by a Russian soldier, and he tells her if this had happened to his wife, he would have shot her. The
woman says that she wanted to live. But the "registers" of different meaning seem to have something in
common here among these differences: namely, men raping and killing. But we have not yet talked any or
near enough about Dworkin's Mercy, Sander's use of Kleist's Penthesilea, and Wittig's Les Guérillères.
25. The counter-argument, and a compelling one, that I am suggesting here, is that it is men on both sides
who are raping. That men get raped is beside the point, for it is men who rape men, not women who rape
men. Phylis Chesler has made this very counter-argument: "Yes, fascist/nationalist Croat and Moslem male
soldiers raped women too, with as much ferocity, although on a smaller scale. Some people say: 'You see,
both sides did it.' No, 'both sides' did not do it. Only men raped women, women did not rape men; only men,
not women, did the killing." I will return to this counter-argument, for it has grave implications in another
register when discussing Sander's film, but can suggest what I will say by returning now to Dworkin's
discussion of such rapes as undoing everything. The point, as I take Dworkin's suggestion to be, is not that
male-male rape is worse than male-female rape; the pointless is that it leads to an endless cycle of revenge
that never ends and only escalates to mass rape as a permanent way of dying. Dworkin writes: "Nothing in
Madrid or Oslo or in the Rose Garden of the White House will repair a male-on-male military rape. Nor will
raped men join with raped women of any description—wife, mother sister, Jew, feminist. The revenge rape
of male Israeli soldiers in captivity is part of the fear, part of the hate, that drives the Israeli fear of
annihilation. Rape takes everything away" (Scapegoat 58) and leaves only dying and death. Sex as death;
death as sex—not the little death but the permanent death in life and then only death. It is the end of the
conversation and the continuation and rebeginning of the worst expressions of the killing of sex, the life
force itself—thanatos reigning against eros—as Kate Millett makes clear in The Basement (14-15). But
again, as I will return to it, the issue is Eros (the divine figure of love) and his (Why male?) intimate link
with thanatos (death), to which I will return in the Pagan Meditations section of this chapter.
26. What I think that is most pathetic about a reading—which evidently Sander participated in—is Wiltrud
Rosenzweig's "Some Very Personal Thoughts," which amount to an attempt to close down, but one that
backfires by only opening up, the discussion to even wider speculations against Sander. Rosenzweig
("Personal Thoughts") deals only in an expressionist form of ad feminem. What she fails to see is that Koch,
indeed, takes part—I will use Rosenzweig's own words—in "a new debate about the delayed social
consequences and political effects of these mass rapes" (80). All involved need not ingratiate themselves, as
Rosenzweig does, with the author-film-maker at the exclusion of any possible critique that would eventually
lead to a "conversation." But then Rosenzweig does fill out the spectrum of a point of view of variation.
Perhaps this is the reason that the editors included her piece in the issue of October and why any sceptics,
such as myself, should accept such sentimental statements such as offered by Rosenzweig in defense of
Sander, who is really better equipped to carry on with her part of the cycle of arguments. While Rosenzweig
cannot express a spectrum of a point of view of variation, the editors can.
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But there is more, for it is not until the "Round Table," which I will discuss under the rubric of
"Meditations," that the discussion of the film breaks open to what I would see as filling out the spectrum of a
point of view of variation. In this "Round Table," Andreas Huyssen goes "out on a limb" (106) and the
discussion opens up to a discussion of Sander's placing herself in between two discourses.
27. I am alluding to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (SE: XVIII). But I am equally alluding to
Bataille's The Tears of Eros.
28. Koch is most forthright on these issues in the following argument:
The filmic construction of documented interviews in Liberators Take Liberties blindly repeats one
of the contemporary master narratives with which women use biographical interviews to obscure
their participation in the Nazi system. Thus, they begin the account of their lives under national
Socialism not in 1933, but only at the beginning of the war, for example with the bomb attacks on
the 'home front.' In such accounts, the war indeed becomes the father of all horrors and the causes
need not be named. In fact, this master narrative was a favorite of both men and women in the
fifties. While the women were haunted by the bombings and hungry nights in the air-raid shelters,
the men told of their forced marches on the eastern front and captivity. The narrative structure of
the film confirms in a specific way the repressive structure that it deplores in that the women are
released from the entire history of National Socialism and their participation is that the women
treated rapes very differently, depending on their political views, the extent to which their own
femininity as a primary identity was traditionally determined, or whether their feminine identity
was experienced as an externally prescribed role affording them distance from what had happened.
("Blood" 36)
29. Resistance is a keyless term here: I am not only talking in terms of the critics' resistance of Sander's film
and not only of Sander's counter-resistance of her critics, but also of a third resistances to be found in this
exchange as well as others and in the film itself. It is the thirds that, by now should be evident, I am most
interested with.
30. Deleuze (Essays Critical and Clinical 79) offers a rather different reading of Penthesilea and her actions
in the context of a discussion of Bartleby. Deleuze writes: "Choosing is the Promethean sin par excellence.
This was the case with Kleist's Penthesilea, an Ahab-woman who, like her indiscernible double Achilles, had
chosen her enemy, in defiance of the law of the Amazons forbidding the preference of one enemy over
another. The priestess and the Amazons consider this a betrayaI that madness sanctions in a cannibal
identification." Along these same lines of flight, Deleuze again speaks of Penthesilea's "demonic element"
that "leads her into a dog-becoming." After all, it is her dogs, her dog-becoming, that tears Achilles into
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shreds and pieces of meat to be cannibalized (Dialogues 42; cf. Thousand 268). I will return to this
description in the closing section of Chaste Rape, "Rebeginnings."
31. Agee writes: "Penthesilea's frenzy and subsequent exhausted trance betrays all the symbolic signs of
possession by her nation's goddess, Artemis. The murder of Achilles is a sacrifice that consummates, before
the eyes of all the Amazons, the raison d'état on which their nation is founded. That nation is neither a
feminist heaven nor a culturally inferior, degenerate society, as some would have it, but, for all its
revolutionary uniqueness, a state, and as such, just like the Greek state, and just like Kleist's Prussia or
France, an embodiment of the unnatural, alienated, impersonal existence, opposed to freedom and ignorant
of love" (xxviii). Agee is following Thomas Wichmann's analysis in Henrich von Kleist (Stuttgart, 1988):
127-40.
32. Whether or not Sander's counter-resistance is compelling to her critics is another issue. After watching
the film several times and reading Sander's arguments, I find this particular argument about context and its
relation to German women exonerating themselves from German-Nazi history not compelling at all. Sander
is trying to confuse degree of rapes (numbers) with kinds of rapes (precisely who was doing the raping). Her
own film testifies to the massive numbers of Russian combatants raping the massive number of German
women. That other combatants "raped"—both German and other women—is factually verifiable. That there
were different notions of what constituted rape by the various members of the Allies is in passing a subject
of discussion in the film, but a subject that is not picked up on at all in this overall discussion between
Sander and her critics. (If "we" agree with Catherine MacKinnon on coercion and consent, then the
discussion in the film about what constitutes rape is specious. [See Toward a Feminine Theory of the State
171-83.]) The argument, however, that Sander in part wants to make is that of "mass rape," that of an event,
that of a Zeitereignis. It has two contexts in terms of scope and reduction. There is the general context of
military and civil rape the world over; and there is the specific context of military rape in Berlin in 1945. But
the numbers are not at all there in terms of the Allies as a whole, i.e., men as a whole in terms of the Allies,
to set aside the context of the history of Nazism and the history of revenge. That, however, anyone in any
context—just one person, no matter whom—is raped is obviously not acceptable. Sander makes this clear in
her story "Telephone Conversation" in The Three Women K 126-27. The game of numbers is double-edged
as Sander also fully understands. The context and issue here between Sander and her critics, however, is
strictly not about numbers but is more political in terms of how this story of the mass rapes is going to be
told and in terms of whom it will accuse and whom it will exonerate. In other words, what is at stake is
Whose interests are being served? My sense is that the women raped—their interests and their children's—
are not necessarily always being served. (I must say, however, that Sander's suggestion that women raped in
this war, the battle for Berlin, or any war or in general the war against the sexes should be compensated by
the government just as German combatants were and are compensated is to the point, and an ingenuous one.)
33. Cf. The reception of Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will by women of all colors and classes, which I
discussed in chapter 1. While I say in the above discussion and throughout that "rape undoes everything," I
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have not at all forgotten that I have said that rape is historically the narrative of founding community. To
think, read, and write about rape is to event.ually to find oneself in this contra-diction, or paradox, or this
impossibility.
34. I was astonished to read Sander making such a naïve statement. I have read enough of her fiction to
know that she is not naïve. I can only assume that she is being rhetorically strategic when she makes
statements such as this one. I can see how Sander attempts rhetorically to say, by way of seeming hyperbole
and by way of experimental tactical claims, what she thinks wants and needs to be said to open up what has
remained hidden by chaste thinking. I can see this as her political strategy.
35. I am purposefully following and performing a slot-and-substitution formula here with Deleuze's prose in
Dialogues (2).
36. I take the term "meshwork" from Manuel De Landa (see "Meshworks"), which, as De Landa says, is
another term for what Deleuze and Guttari refer to as "smooth space," which is the opposite of "striated
space" (see Thousand Plateaus 353, 369-73, 474-500).
37. It is again, for me, a matter of scope and reduction, but also, if not more now, a matter of getting out of
these binaries, which we will eventually get to. In Sander's story, the female refuses to support her male
friend's suggestion to help seek funding for a project of an "orthodox Jew" ("Telephone Conversation"118),
for such support would only take money away from German women. The theme and motive behind the story
can be seen, as Santner insists, to be competition for resources. But there is more going on in the story as
well, specifically, in the relationship between the woman and the man. When female character says that she
could not place special interest in the project of the "orthodox Jew" her male friend immediately terminates
the discussion by angrily saying, " 'women's' [there is a long pause] 'pet issues' didn't interest him any more."
Sanders then writes: "She got the impression that he had only just managed to stop himself from saying
'women's shit' or 'women's crap' " (120-21). She says, "Twenty years of women's liberation and now made it
possible for a colleague to ask her, as a colleague, to do them a favour. But she still had no right to expect
anyone to contend with her right to hold differing views. Indeed, [she] was not even sure that what she felt
really did boil down to a differing view at all. That was precisely what she would have liked to work out
with him" (121-22).
As I read the story, it is about reception. It is Sander's pointing to how the whole issue of
remembering has a set of taboos placed on it that allow for only one way to receive discussions on
remembering. As the story progresses the point becomes more clear when the female narrator recalls her
male friend's having said, "the mere fact that she had even thought of supporting a women's project instead
of the Jewish project ranked her among those who placed the crimes against the one on a par with the crimes
against the other. Under no circumstances would he allow the one to be confused with the other" (124). In
the ending, the story becomes more and more one of reception. The narrator again says, "She wanted to
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weigh up the pros and cons with [her male friend] and look at the problem from all angles" (128). But he
basically refuses to talk with her. (The two have a history of these breakups that are resolved by the female
initiating their return to being civil. The man never attempts to repair any of the differences and bad
feelings.) And near the end, the narrator makes still more clear the issue of reception: "When would it be
permissible to talk about 'Jewish pet issues' with the same impunity as it seems already possible to talk about
'women's pet issues'?" (129).
38. Paris does not maintain the attributes of "Aphrodite-Ares" in logical parallel structure; hence, I have
turned them around, making them parallel, in brackets.
39. These distinctions that Paris is making can be read as rather naïve and simplistic displacing many
exceptions, but if we take them as a heuristic to think through the problems of war, rape, children , then we
may not only come to understand meshworks but also the problem from varying viewpoints. This particular
paring of Aphrodite-Ares would not necessarily go wrong for the Romans, though when they, according to
Paris, begin to lose the paring, or the balance in the ratio, they become decadent and fall. But the Germans in
the 1930s and 40s were no Romans to begin with. Ares, that is, Arian violence, fits well with the Nazis, but
Paris would say that it was an Ares, in German aggression, without the combining counter-force of
Aphrodite, in Greek feminine love. And that she would say would be the difference.
40. I have variously argued this point about negation in my book Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of
Rhetoric. What Paris is saying in terms of psychology, Georges Bataille is saying in terms of economics.
Energy must be wasted. If it is repressed in a restricted economy, it will be explosive, leading to greater and
greater wars. If it is expressed in terms of waste without return, grossly or artfully, in terms of a general
economy, it possibly can be lived with. (See Bataille, The Accursed Share.)
41. Paris's argument—though it is difficult to determine—is not necessarily against the practice and life style
of homosexuality (gay or lesbian), but contingently so, if it subordinates a woman or women. The same, she
would most likely argue, would be the case in the practice of heterosexuality, turning women into the
subordinate sex.
42. (Ginette) Paris and Paris (of Troy)! Here is another possible confusion in names between the author and
another personage she writes about. I am referring to the previous confusion in names that I discussed
between Kate Millett and her friend with the same first name, Catherine, who is a photographer, and again
between Millett and St. Catherine in the cartoon Ripley's "Believe It or Not" discussed in Politics of Cruelty.
Millett calls attention to this confusion itself. In many ways, this con-fusion and identification by way of a
name—Kate Millett sees, I am Catherine, these other Catherines—is a near perfect contributing factor to
identification with the an/other. But this is not a mere identification but a possible becoming, one that is
incipient in Ginette Paris's text. (See my discussion in chapter 2.)
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43. I have discussed the rape of Helen and her defense by Gorgias in Negation 235-306. Helen, abducted, or
captured for marriage (stolen for the property that is hers) fits into the kinds of "rape" listed by Brownmiller
(see the list in the index, Against 465; about Helen, see 33). I previously discussed Sylvia Likens and the
number of ways that she was "raped" according to Brownmiller's list (see my opening section, The
Basement).
44. Brown gives a more compelling account of the problems with Eros in both Life Against Death and in
Love's Body. Brown's third volume, however, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, especially the last
chapter, touches on everything that Paris is writing about and rereads Freud in terms of Bataille and sees
Eros-Thanatos as one, not two elements at odds with each other, and touches on every topic thus far dealt
with in Chaste Rape. (See chapter 3, Chaste Rape, for a test question.)
45. Ginette Paris speaks of this kind of Apollonian war (81). Also she, toward the end of her discussion of
the rape of Helen and the Trojan War, discusses how war fosters rape. She mentions events in WWI as well
as alludes to WWII, specifically the French and the German soldiers (86-87).
46. It can be argued, of course, that the film is itself searching for What women might do in a rape culture,
but the film even undercuts such a process of thinking. Le Cain has speculated on the metafictional character
of the film, with the characters as reverse projections of the Directors's trying to make the film. Here are two
sets of dialogues between Nadine and Manu:
Nadine: Fuck, we're useless. Where are the witty lines?
Manu: We've got the moves, that's something.
Nadine: We're not that bad, I think.
Manu: I mean the people are dying. The dialogue has to be up to it.
Nadine: Good and crucial, like!
Manu: We can't write it in advance.
Nadine: You're right.
Manu: That's totally unethical!
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Eventually one of them admits that they "lack imagination." In realizing their inevitable end—which they
have written in advance—they want, perhaps like Thelma and Louise, to take their "lovedeath" (see Kramer)
into their own hands:
Manu: I've thought about taking a jump or burning alive. Self-immolation is pretty pretentious.
After we finish in the Vosges, let's do the jump without the bungee. It's a miracle we're still on the
loose. I want it to end as good as it began. You know with a great punchline, like.
Nadine: You'll have to push me. I couldn't do it on my own. . . .
Manu: Don't worry. I'll push you.
Nadine: We'll need to leave the press something. 'They jumped without the bungee.'
Manu: Yes, we need to work on communication.
Despentes, in writing the novel, is more explicit in the omniscient point of view, suggesting metaphorically
that the women are fated; if so, they are fated by a death wish. The forces of death against life are
everywhere in the novel. For the metaphor of the spider and web, fate, see 155, 238. Emphatically, the novel
ends: "Those things that had to happen. You think you can escape them" (244).
47. See Reynaud, who writes as a feminist about the killing of the child in the shop scene and the killing of
the man in the sex club. About the former, Reynaud says it is not allowed in the film, for the viewing public
would never allow for it. About the latter, Reynaud's says that it is offered as a substitute for the child
killing. After all, the man is depicted as a bigot and, therefore, it is okay for Manu to kill the bigot! About
the shooting of the male bigot in the anus, Reynaud's refrain is "Why did it make me think of the death of
Garcia Lorca?" and as a proposed answer she wonders if that scene discloses in the film a rage of
homophobia in the women. Her conclusion is that the two directors "have given feminist filmmaking a bad
name."
48. See Deleuze, Essays Critical 79; Thousand 244. However, cf. Agee xxvii. I am not losing sight of the
possibility that in Kleist's play Achilles becomes woman while Penthesilea becomes dog (see Thousand
268). However, in Christa Wolf's Cassandra the death of Penthesilea is not a becoming with Achilles, but a
refusal to become community, when the slave girl calls her to form an assemblage, a new community of
minor(atarian) people.
49. As Gayatri Spivak says, the word "woman" misfires (See Spivak, "Feminism" 217). The word "woman"
is both an essentialist category and a concept-metaphor. Deleuze and Guattari write: "[T]he woman as a
molar entity has to become-woman in order that the man also becomes- or can become-woman. It is, of
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course, indispensable for women to conduct a molar politics, with a view to winning back their own
organism, their own history, their own subjectivity: 'we as women . . .' makes its appearance as a subject of
enunciation. But it is dangerous to confine oneself to such a subject, which does not function without drying
up a spring or stopping a flow. The song of life is often intoned by the driest of women . . . moved by
ressentiment. . . . It is no more adequate to say that each sex contains the other and must develop the
opposite pole in itself. Bisexuality is no better a concept than the separateness of the sexes. It is deplorable to
miniaturize, internalize the binary machine [emphasis mine] as it is to exacerbate it; it does not extricate us
from it. It is thus necessary conceive of a molecular women's politics that slips into molar confrontations,
and passes under or through them" (Thousand 275-76).
50. See Freud, "Mourning and Melancholy" in SE, XIV: 237-58. In terms of the claim that the Germans
suffer from the inability to mourn the war, see Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich: The Inability to
Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, especially Ch. 1, section 9, "Is There Another Way to Mourn?,"
and also Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany.
51. See, e.g., Rajchman's two book, Constructions and The Deleuze Connection; Daniel Smith,
"Introduction" to Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical xi-liii. For the connection between cinema's
influence on philosophy, according to Deleuze, see Flaxman, ed. The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the
Philosophy of Cinema.
52. The mere mentioning of vitalism can be in certain disciplines and fields the kiss of death. The terms
vitalism is not singular but radically multiple. It is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid the concept. For
Deleuze and Guattari, vitalism can mean many different things, which would require a book of its own. Cf.
Butler, Subjects of Desire, who starts with Aristotle's statement that all men desire (have an appetite) to
know. This vocabulary of drives and libido, though used by Deleuze and Guattari, can be rather problematic,
for they do have alternate vocabularies, as Guattari makes obvious:
To speak of machines rather than drives, Fluxes rather than libido, existential Territories rather than
the instances of the self and of transference, incorporeal Universes rather than unconscious
complexes and sublimation, chaosmic entities rather than signifiers—fitting ontological dimensions
together in a circular manner rather than dividing the world up into infrastructure and
superstructure—may not simply be a matter of vocabulary! Conceptual tools open and close fields
of the possible, they catalyze Universes of virtuality. Their pragmatic fallout is often unforeseeable,
distant and different. Who knows what will be taken up by others, for other uses, or what
bifurcations they will lead to!" (Guattari, Chaosmosis 126)
As I continue in this discussion, I try to be careful with these distinctions.
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53. The shadow has many implications, possible refoldings. I point to the one under-negation so as to echo
back to the problematic shadow narrative. In terms of the coming community, recall in previous chapters my
discussions of Nancy, Blanchot, and Agamben. In terms of the negative, as disclosed in the long quote from
the conclusion of What is Philosophy?, see Agamben's Language and Death: The Place of Negativity,
especially Agamben's discussion of the seventh and eighth days (66-106). Moreover, see Nancy's discussion
of the negative in Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. And my Negation.
The source of the two other implications of the shadow that I have in mind, especially in respect to
Zarathustra's wanting to walk in the full light without a shadow in back of him, can be found in Deleuze's
discussions in Cinema I (111-22). He discusses the relationships among shadows, light, and color in film.
Zarathustra wants to leave the shadow (expressionism) into the light (lyricism, abstractionism). It is only in
the third position of colors that there is a total absorption of both shadow and light, or the combination in
terms of a face or personage or again subjectivity; a total absorption and loss of subjectivity itself into a
überject (super-ject) outside of subject-object (shadow) relations.
54. Michelangelo Antonioni, speaking of his characters' preoccupation with sex, says: "But this
preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy, that is, if it were kept within
human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering him. And whenever something
bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse, and he is unhappy. The tragedy in
L'Avventura stems directly from an erotic impulse of this type—unhappy, miserable, futile" (qtd. in
Chatman, Antonioni 56; emphasis mine; qtd. from Antonioni, "A Talk With" 51). Besides The Adventure,
other films with this theme are The Night, The Eclipse, and The Red Desert.
55. For sensation and its two types, affect and percept, see Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 163-
99; Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections 134-35. What becomes additionally difficult in terms of mixed
vocabularies is that there are other thinkers who, wanting to avoid traditional vocabularies, develop their
own, which are in competition or possible conflict with Deleuze and Guattari's. E.g., see Agamben's notions
of potentiality (potenza) in Potentialities and The Coming Community.
56. See Daniel Smith's "Introduction" to Essays Critical for additional exemplars in literature. See "On the
Superiority of Anglo-American Literature" in Dialogues 36-76.
57. The allusion here is to Clarise Lispector's The Passion According to G.H., in which the character
becomes roach and becomes, thereby, indifferentiated into "a vastness" (96-97). I discussed this work and its
implications for the histories of rhetorics, cultures-communities, to come, in Negation.
58. The best discussion that I have read of Hiroshima Mon Amour is Cathy Caruth's in Unclaimed
Experience. I am indebted to her reading of memory and how it is reworked in the film.
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59. The man-as-architect is also found in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. Sandro, who is so
preoccupied with sex (suffers from what Antonioni calls eros sickness), cannot successfully design for life.
He is at odds with his calling in life, and consequently with living.
60. Recall earlier other doubly articulated sheets of past: The loves that also occurred during Liberation in
March through May of 1945 in Berlin. Sander in BeFreier und Befreite makes it clear that there were
German women who fell in love with the enemy (Russians or U.S., British, French allies)—which was read
as collaboration with the enemy—only to lose their love. In the film there is also film footage of French
women who at about the same time but in France were being paraded through the streets with their heads
shaved and nude or worse, for they had fallen in love with the enemy (Germans).
61. In the script, Duras makes clear that there is a liaison, but in the film Resnais only through editing
suggests it.
62. When Duras says that the woman and the Japanese man in Hiroshima Mon Amour "are no one," there is
a strong invitation, with that description, for the reader to see the two characters as modern-day Ulysses. See
Deleuze, who writes that "No One [is] the crushed and mechanized man [and woman] of the great
metropolises, but from which one expects, perhaps, the emergence of the Man [and Woman] of the Future or
New World Man [and Woman]" ("Bartleby" in Essays: Critical and Clinical 74).
63. I am respectively referring to Rajchman's Deleuze Connections 80, and to Barthes's "Third meaning
[Sens]."
64. In the film, the swarm of bicycles are motor propelled. The woman's bicycle in Nevers on the
way to Paris is a traditional bicycle, human propelled.
Part 4: from the Attic and Basement to the Living Room
Chapter 8: Virtual Rape and Community
1. The text is titled "A Rape in Cyberspace; or, How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Sprit, Two Wizards, and A
Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society." This initial version is published in The Village Voice (December
23, 1993). The updated version, with additional thoughts added toward the conclusion of the original and with a
renaming of the characters, is in Dibbell's My Tiny Life 11-30. My references to the essay will be from the latter.
Cf. Michals, "Cyber-Rape."
2. A MOO is an acronym for mud-object oriented, or multi-object oriented.
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3. See David Hudson's "Bigger than tinysex 2," in which he discusses Dibbell's trip to MIT to see Pavel Curtis and
the server Curtis oversees, where LambdaMOO is. The trip is made in between the original publication of "Rape in
Cyberspace" and the writing of My Tiny Life. The article is quite amusing, with Dibbell, at last, seeing the server,
and saying, "Just a box."
4. See Stone, The War of Desire. Cf. Turkle, Life on the Screen.
5. The allusion is to Jack the Ripper. See Christopher Frayling, "The House that Jack Built."
6. My point here is that the issue is not just a mere concern with the architecture of electronic discourse or MOOs,
but an ethico-political concern. Archi-tecture must be changed to Anarchi-TechTure, which is a neologism for
denegating the Archi and the Techne of a philosophical, closed, Euclidean space. This paper (this is paper that is to
be made into a topological structure), then, concerns the ethics and politics of the MooScape, and is so concerned
that it would radically change the very conditions of the possibilities of Architecture in terms of Anarchitechture,
nullifying the Archi, while refusing to take as a means of change an ethics and politics that would be reactionary and
thereby only repeat the Archi. My take is to build on but to depart from the work of Badiou, Boundas.
7. Cf. Hollier on Bataille and architecture.
8. As I state, I borrow these terms of "white" and "red" from Lyotard. This white/red distinction may appear to be a
binary; it is not, for there is a second element not included here, that of the binary or polar opposites. The sequence
with the missing term would read: (1) White Truth (Unity or what would go for truth in a dominant discourse) (2)
Polarity as White and Black, Male and Female, etc. (two sides, with one privileged over the other, but with possible
reversals) (3) and Red Terror (radical singularities without the anchor of a 'real' or fictional unity or polarity). The
position of White Truth, I would venture to say, is totally unacceptable by most us. The position of Polarity, which
we probably will not agree on, especially allows in a so-called democratic framework for reactionary states of
thinking structured in the name of justice. It is the Third position that is not a classic or modern position that I have
been exploring as an alternative to the 1 and 2. For an interesting parallel, which I will take up in Rebeginnings, see
Serres's distinction, in Rome: The Book of Foundations, between white multiplicities (total possibility) and black
box (total actuality).
9. In many way, or wayves, this final chapter of Chaste Rape is transitional, is an attempt to overcome self,
subjectivity, and a community predicated on subjectivity. The possible parallel between Dibbell's My Tiny Life and
the discussions in chapter 7 on Deleuze's "A Life" are promising. MOO-life, as virtual life, can parallel a life on the
plane of immanence. The question that possibly remains is, Is there a moment? in the deliberations over What to do
with Bungle when the community at LambdaMOO comes "to the point where . . . there is a moment that is only that
of a life playing with death[?] The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases
a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of
what happens: a 'Homo tantum' with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude [when] it is a
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haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil"
(Deleuze, Pure Immanence 28-29).
10. For a collection of readings on this difference between cyberspace and virtual reality, see CyberReader, Ed.
Vitanza, chapter 1.
11. The phrase "Apollonian programmers" is offered as a healthy challenge to programmers. Normally and
understandably, a reference to anything Apollonian is taken as part of the vocabulary of a Nietzschean Apollonian-
Dionysian split or fusion, which is one context that I intend here. However, when I say "healthy challenge," I am
also referring to the other conditions of Apollo, who, though often seen as the god of mastery and control, is also,
like Dionysius, "a god," according to Perniola, "who aroused in his followers ... a raving delirium." Apollo
represented the "principle of enigma [i.e.,] the coincidence of the rational and the irrational." Perniola continues to
say: "The nature of Apollo can only be defined using an oxymoron: terrible serenity, non-participant possession,
delirious moderation, sobria ebrietas" (15-16). Apollonian programmers model thyselphs after such a oxymoron
(after a Möbius strip). And How? By Self-Overcoming! (See Nietzsche Genealogy of Morals, 3.27)
12. Paul Ricoeur named Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche the "hermeneuts of suspicion." I disagree with his
characterization of Nietzsche. Deleuze also does: "Nietzsche was able to rediscover depth only after conquering the
surfaces. But he did not remain at the surface, for the surface struck him as that which had to be assessed from the
renewed perspective of an eye peering out from the depths. Nietzsche takes little interest in what happened after
Plato, maintaining that it was necessarily the continuation of a long decadence. We have the impression, however,
that there arises, in conformity to this method, a third image of philosophers. In relation to them, Nietzsche's
pronouncement is particularly apt: how profound these Greeks were as a consequence of their being superficial!"
(Logic of Sense, 129).
13. This is my beginning of a pastiche of Lyotard's opening paragraphs in Libidinal Economy. It is an appropriation.
It is the creation, in one sense, of a body without organs (Deleuze and Félix Guattari), a laying flat of the political
body (Lyotard), and a topological restructuring of the body so that it will be all surface (Baudrillard). It is the taking
of a virtual cow that MOOs and turning into a flat surface.
Rebeginnings: From Architecture to AnArchitexture
1. In the various "followings" here and in terms of Serres's insistence on the movement of the
boustrophedon (the plowing of the earth from right to left back to left, etc.), I am aware of Page duBois's
discussions in Sowing the Body, especially 49-85, 130-66. Since I am moving out of the male and female
distinction in these Rebeginnings toward third sexes, I can be read, not so much as duBois reads Derrida
(see170-71), as being for the most part indifferent to a male appropriation of maternity. As I will get further
into these Rebeginnings, I will set aside fixed sexuality altogether as a means of negating negation. I will
set aside, as I have suggested earlier, genus-species-differentiae thinking altogether. Differentiae will
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ecome indifferentiae, or différance and differend opening up the paralogic of modals and contingencies
for a compossibility and, therefore, incompossibilities that will allow us then to revisit the scene of plowing
and writing. It is the only way, at present, that I can intuit how to avoid both the phallic father and the
phallic mother. To avoid male as A and the female as not-A. Or vice versa in a negative deconstruction, or
simple reversibility. I would bring in the plowing and the writing of the excluded middle more so. This
would be the intuited destruction so as to ward off the devastation of misogyny and sexual violence.
2. I am inserting "hysterical" before connections and statements in dis/order to allude to the differences
between hysterical and obsessive thinking. Hysterics, Freud says, suffer mostly from remembrances (SE, II:
7). Hysteria disperses, creates fluxes, keeps us oscillating, which means hysteria maintains the conditions
for the possibility of keeping the question of thinking, reading, writing rape open to the future. Moreover,
hysteria keeps the principle of identity open to those sexes outside the binary of M/F. I am referring to third
sexes.
3. See note 1 (Archive 4) in which Derrida further exemplifies the problem of acquisition as revealed by
Sonia Combe in Forbdden Archives.
4. The peculiar problem of something in the archives being both visible yet invisible is the primary concern
of Foucault (see vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality 1-35; Deleuze, Foucault 15-18, 53).
5. The reference to tarantulas is to Nietzsche, Thus Spake 211-14.
6. I am not going to define "the black box" but will suggest that it is Maxwell's demon in the box, or that it
is Cacus's cave, or that it is noise (everything stuffed into one placelessness). I could say, anachronistically,
that it is the black box often found and read after a plane crash. Better than a definition is the sens of it
(meaning but direction as well). The black box holds inside all of the excluded middle.
7. It would be helpful at this point to recall the discussion in chapter 6 on John Waters's Divine and on
Jean-Luc Nancy's discussion of the divine.
8. Whether or not a literary author (such as Flaubert) or a scientist (such as Kepler) can be included as an
initiator of a discursive practice is not the issue for me here as I build a bridge from Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice and Deleuze's discussion of Foucault's notions of a new archivist. I think, indeed, that
Flaubert and Kepler introduced new discursive practices. Both Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have
said as much.
9. Foucault defines discursive formations or practices as "a body of anonymous, historical rules, always
determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic,
geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative function" (Archaeology 117).
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10. Here differentiae alludes to the setting aside of the species (human being) and Genus (author) with its
differentiae. The indifference, or indifferentiae, are what has been, heretofore, on the outside, or the
threshold, of being said. Statement-events are the remainders of species-genus analytics that, while
repressed, return to form their own languages. Foucault writes:
In a language stripped of dialectics, at the heart of what it says but also at the root of its
possibilities, the philosopher is aware that 'we are not everything'; he learns as well that even the
philosopher does not inhabit the whole of his language like a secret and perfectly fluent god. Next
to himself, he discovers the existence of another language that also speaks and that he is unable to
dominate, one that strives, fails, and falls silent and that he cannot manipulate, the language he
spoke at one time and that has now separated itself from him, not gravitating in a space
increasingly silent." (Language 41-42)
11. The murmur is also variously discussed in Order (120), Language (55, 93), Archaeology (27-28), and in
Deleuze's Foucault (7).
12, I am here referring back to the literature on the infans that I took up with in chapter 4. Agamben, in
Remnants, adds an additional way of thinking about the infans. He writes: "The human being is the
speaking being, the living being who has language, because the human being is capable of not having
language, because it is capable of its own in-fancy" (146).
13. "Pro3titute," as I stated in the section The Basement, gives itself to looking like a logo, a brand,
especially since it was branded on Sylvia. Once seen as a statement, one can only imagine its object. Millett
imagines its object cum abject. And yet, writes, as Rickie does, whatever so more.
14. No doubt the inclusion of Sylvia in this list along with characters in a " 'toon" (cartoon) is jarring.
(Overly noisy.) But I mean the inclusion no more jarring than Millett's inclusion of St. Catherine as she was
depicted in Ripley's "Believe It or Not" comic. I discuss this inclusion fully in chapter. 2. See Millett's
discussion in The Politics of Cruelty 150-53.
15. As I stated in the opening section The Basement, the "S" can be interpreted in a Lacanian way as a
barred Subject in a signifying chain. I leave this to others to work out. But another interest is Agamben's
discussion of Emile Benveniste's theory of enunciation and Foucault's notion of a statement. Agamben
writes: "If enunciation . . . does not refer to the text of what is uttered but to its taking place, if it is nothing
other than language's pure reference to itself as actual discourse, in what sense is it possible to speak of a
'semantics' of enunciation? To be sure, the isolation of the domain of enunciation first makes it possible to
distinguish in a statement between what is said and its taking place" (Remnants 137-38; emphasis mine).
Again: "As Foucault writes, . . . 'the statement is not . . . a structure. . . ; it is a function of existence'
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[Archaeology 86]. In other words: enunciation is not a thing determined by real, definite properties; it is,
rather, pure existence, the fact that a certain being—language—takes place" (139). As Agamben continues,
he sees Foucault "claim[ing] as its territory the pure taking place of these proposition and discourses, that
is, the outside of language, the brute fact of its existence" (139). Enunciations and statements—like
Agamben's para-deigma, whatever being, or exemplary being—are at the threshold, or outside, of the
inside. Enunciations and statements do not fit into a genus-species analytics, they do not fit into either la
langue or le parole but in between the two (144). Enunciations and statements are the great remnants of the
excluded third, the other, other remnants (159). Making full circle, I would say that the enunciations-
statements are like Lacan's third place of lalangue, which is in between la langue and le parole.
16. There is a learning that comes from an experience—an experience such as Sylvia's and her torturers-
rapers, the other children, that can get written in their own experience of language and that is not unlike
what is experienced in language by some, very few, adults. In this long pause, I am thinking of Agamben's
discussion of Montaigne's and then later Rousseau's fall from a horse and into unconsciousness. Agamben
points to a passage in Montaigne of so slight an accident (a fall and an experiencing of it) as his own:
Agamben quotes Montaigne:
This discourse of so slight an accident is but vaine and frivolous were not the instructions I have
drawne from thence for my use: for truly, for a man to acquainte himselfe with death, I find no
better way than to approach unto it. . . . This is not my doctrine, it is but my study and not another
man's lesson, but mine owne (Agamben, Infancy and History 39; for a slightly different
translation, see Montaigne Complete Essays 272)
Much of what Montagine says in "Of Practice" (or "De L'Exercitation") is about the connecting of thoughts
by way of accidents, which reminds me of Ulmer's paramethod of conduction. Montagine even describes
the fall from the horse as if struck by lightening (electricity). But this happened to Paul while on the road.
And that is yet another mystory. What I am suggesting is that what the children write accidentally across
Sylvia's abdomen can only make sense (direction) to them, for it signals their own. If, however, their own is
our own, then, what would be the status of such evil practiced on Sylvia! I must be thinking of the lord of
the flies experiment!
17. Ulmer's "Derrida at the Little Bighorn" in Teletheory (209-43); and Part Two through Four of Heuretics
(45-243).
18. The movement here as Derrida writes in On the Name is from logos through mythos to khora (90). For
the Khora, see Plato, Timeaus; Derrida, On the Name 89-127; Ulmer, Heuretics 61-78.
19. Ulmer's explanation can be found at www.altx.com/ebr/ebr2/media/glue.html.
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20. Chorography—this non-traditional form of writing—Ulmer says,
is learning how tow rite an intuition, and this writing is what distinguishes electronic logic
(conduction) from the abductive (Baker Street) reasoning of the detective. In conjunction the
intuitions are not left in the thinker's body but simulated in a machine, augmented by a prosthesis
(whether electronic or paper). This (indispensable) augmentation of ideological categories in a
machine is known in chorography as 'artificial stupidity,' which is the term used to indicate that a
database includes a computerized unconscious. . . . In argumentative writing the reader deals with
a product or end result of a reasoning process, whereas in hypermedia the process replaces the
product. . . . Argument provided one path and suppressed everything else (even if the oppositional
position was presented in a show of objectivity, the goal of the enthymeme was to convince the
reader that the solution offered to the problem was the only one possible). . . . The chorographer,
then, writes with paradigms (sets), not arguments. (Heuretics 38)
21. See George Kennedy's translation of Gorgias "Encomium of Helen" in The Older Sophists (51). Abduct
or abduction, of course, has been a general way of talking about rape. As I pointed out earlier, Brownmiller,
in here categories of rape, includes abduction (a carrying away by force). Today, in the use of abducted or
abduction, there is a departing from the term and act of rape.
22. I am not suggesting that E. A. Poe originated abduction, for it exists in earlier, quite sophisticated
forms. See, as I have suggested through Umberto Eco, Voltaire's Zadig. As for Peirce's reading of Poe's use
of abduction, see Harrowitz.
23. Yes, in fictional worlds, that is the case. And as I will eventually say in possible-cum-incompossible
worlds things tend to go much better than in the one, true possible that science has limited us to. In Eco's
sentence there are too many begged questions in reportage of the distinction between fiction and science. If
we agree with Eco, we end up with a differend:
As distinguished from a litigation, a differend . . . would be a case of conflict, between (at least)
two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both
arguments. One side's legitimacy does not imply the other's lack of legitimacy. However, applying
a single rule of judgment to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a
litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule).
Damages result from an injury which is inflicted upon the rules of a genre of discourse but which
is reparable according to those rules. A wrong results." (Differend xi)
After all, we are thinking, with Foucault, about propositions-phrases against (contra to, yet alongside)
statements. When phrases are in dispute with a statement, we cannot, without begging a question, use the
rules of phrases against the rules of statements. As Ulmer, in forming a bloc with Lyotard, says, we "cannot
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negotiate the differend by means of argument" (Heuretics 215), or litigation, but we can negotiate (239) by
writing the paradigm (48), which would be a way of bearing witness to new idioms (Differend xi-xvi).
These new idioms would/could lead to a thinking of incompossible worlds. None of this is to say that
scientists could not work from what Ulmer calls "revolutionary . . . new laws" (218); such a possibility has
been accounted for by both Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.
24. See Bass for a similar, but more complicated, reading of Freud's use of the analogy based on electricity
in relation to Kant's thinking in The Conflict of the Faculties. Bass takes special note of passages by Freud
in a letter to Fliess (Masson, Complete Letters 390), by Breuer in Studies on Hysteria (SE, II: 193-94) and
again by Freud in "Some Neurotic Mechanisms. . ." (SE, XVIII: 225-27).
25. As if Helen has a choice in being abducted! Untersteiner depicts Helen as attempting to decide to go or
not to go with Paris, but she cannot decide. Untersteiner says: "Epistemology, [in] the realm of the
practical, becomes will, decision, which was realised in a [kairos] endowed with the property of breaking
up the cycle of the antitheses [i.e. the irreconcilable differences of Being (physis) and Not-Being, going not
going] and creating something new, irrational" (166; interpolations mine). See my reading of Untersteiner's
reading of Helen's reading of the logos in Negation (242-44).
26. I am, without any in-depth discussion, linking feminist hystories with Ulmer's mystories
(mystoriography and middle voice, herstory, mystery, my story, envois [see Teletheory 82-112; also, my
"An Open Letter"].)
27. Clément's The Lives and Legends of Jacque Lacan, as I have argued elsewhere, is a writing of hysteria,
reminiscences, just as Schneiderman's Jacque Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero can be read equally
as hysterical reminiscences. Clément et al. cannot simply decide not to dis/engage in hysterical discourse. It
often presents itself to an "author" as part of a hysterical conversion of sorts. Nor can Clément et al. avoid
engaging in what amounts to reactionary thinking as in Opera; or, The Undoing of Women. See Avital
Ronell's Finitude's Score (19-40) for a critique of Clément's book.
28. Simply recall the opening scene of Duras's Hiroshima, Mon Amour, with the separation of light-images
and the (empty) voice over (cf. Deleuze, Foucault 64-65).
29. Much of this sporadic coming into a relation of beings is comparable, if not near identical, with Jean-
Luc Nancy's discussions of singularities touching or tying and untying [see Sense of the World 110-17].
For Nancy, all this happens through imminence.
The various strings of "a life" are my allusions to Deleuze's "Immanence: A Life" in Pure Immanence. I
discussed this work in chapter 7 and am suggesting it here as an exemplar for also understanding Foucault-
Deleuze's movement from God-man (infinity) to man (finity) to a third figure, which would be "a life."
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30. Duras explains further: "Their embrace—so banal, so commonplace—take place in the one city of the
world where it is hardest to imagine it: Hiroshima. Nothing is 'given' at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every
word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning. And this is one of the principal goals
of the film: to have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese
themselves, but make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily
be special and 'wonderful,' one that will be more credible than if it had occurred anywhere else in the
world, a place that death had not preserved" (9; cf. 83).
31. See Gail Schwab's "Sexual Difference as Model: An Ethics for the Global Future." There is again no
mention of Dworkin. I could include a far too lengthy series of citations here that do not at all acknowledge
Dworkin's thinking on sexuality and various replacement models. Perhaps she is too non-theoretical, not
high-theory, and therefore not worthy of including. Who knows! She and Kate Millett still remain the best
of the best in terms of thinking, reading, and writing rape. They are our mentors. I must point out, however,
that Dworkin does appear to call on Eros as the god that might serve as a new model of sexuality. But
which god that has to be settled on is not the point here, which is to search for alternative models available
in mythology and, most importantly, to look through multiple versions of the tales of these gods.
32. "Living with Andrea Dworkin" is online. (See www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/
LivingWithAndrea.html).
33. Serres takes the figure of the Harlequin from Leibniz (see New Essays on Human Understanding 329,
490, and in the back of the book xliv, lviii). Leibniz is calling on the Harlequin, which was in a popular
pantomime, called Harlequin, Emperor of the Moon. Many of the principles put forth in the Serres's
representation of the Harlequin are the same as in the pantomime (e.g., "everywhere everything is just as it
is here" [xiii]). However, Serres more fully develops the theme of Harlequin and adds the description of
him as a hermaphrodite. For another reference to Harlequin and a hermaphrodite, see Lyotard, Libidinal
Economy (97, 261).
34. See, e.g., Grosz, Architecture; Cache, Earth Moves; Lynn, Folds; Imperiale, New Flatness; Palumbo,
New Wombs.
This term "anarchitecture" is also used by the "Anarchitecture Group." See Lebbeus Woods. Palumbo
writes: "Woods's contestation is total: architecture is an instrument of battle, against power, against gravity,
against time, against everything. An architecture that is programmatically anarchic ('Anarchitecture'), a
political act of liberation from hierarchy and, in general, liberation from all closures, all determinations of
form and substance. Architecture as an instrument of cultural, social and political revolution" (38).
441

35. The French woman in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, says: "Hands become useless in cellars. They scrape.
They rub the skin off . . . against the walls" (Duras 55). The skin is actually scraped off, uniting with, the
walls of the cellar. The mother and father place their daughter in the cellar, creating something like a family
crypt (oikesis), which she has to be resurrected from. This crypt, where women, the feminine, is buried
alive, is discussed rather fully by Wigley for Derrida, in Architecture of Deconstruction (see 123-47).
36. Holes, black and white holes, are a major feature of the plateau called "Year Zero: Faciality" in
Thousand Plateaus 167-91. Test: What significance does this Deleuzean enunciation have for Serres's
White multiPLIcities and black box?
37. What might it mean to lose one's face. One answer lies in Kobo Abe's The Face of Another. Test: How
is Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the loss of the face to something inhuman within the face similar to
and different from Abe's character who actually loses his face?
38. For a discussion on this Zarathustran teaching, which Deleuze works from, see Lampert's discussion in
Nietzsche's Teachings (16, 197, 199, 243-44).
39. The reference to new directions here is to those "new directions" established at LambdaMOO, which
was the scene of cyberrape. See Dibbell's "Rape in Cyberspace" and my discussion of it in chapter 8.
40. There are so many ways to explain "its own" or "one's own." One quite clear explanation, linking up the
concept that is not a concept to Heidegger is Agamben, who takes the term through a discussion of fashion-
face(eidos)-facticity-Dasein linking it all up with the impropriety of propriety. See "The Passion of
Facticity" in Potentialities (185-204).
41. Thrownness and my setting it aside (via Serres and partially here via Deleuze) is a concept that is not a
concept that I would throw away and yet keep. In terms of a superject, or anarchiject, Having said this, I
must point also to thrownness that is a powerlessness that, nonetheless, is powerful, an adynamis that is
dynamic. Agamben, in Potentialities (199-201), speaks of it as potentia passiva, or as Thomas Wall
discusses it from Blanchot, a radical passivity. See Wall's Radical Passivity; Blanchot's Writing the
Disaster (11). The exemplar of such action that is passive (not to be confused with passive aggression) is
Bartleby, The Scrivener. See Agamben, The Coming Community 35-38 and Potentialities 243-71; Blanchot
(above); Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical 68-90. Therefore, if my reader sees that I am contradicting
myself—against sub-jectivity that is thrownness and for superject, anarchiject, that is not a being thrown
under, or to the ground (grund)—then so be it! Facticity, Face, Dasein, its own, so be it, is that way,
wayves. I am "against" thrownness in that I am "alongside" it, adjacent to it. I simply and falsely (I am
dis/engaging by wayves of a false criticism) writing the paradigms of grund, abgrund, and Ava
(lightness)—all of them. From grund, as any form of thrownness, I easily switch, when writing, to Ava
(without being thrown to the ground, but in the air, flying like a Mozart bird).
442

42. I take the double-characterization of attempter and experimenter (Nietzsche-Deleuze's Versucher) from
Rajchman, Constructions 43).
43. This could be "exacerbated." Test: What is the difference? A clue: What is the difference in the
enunciation, in the sounds? Okay, well, I favor "exacerbate" here for it has the sound of "exhaling" as in a
last gasp before a final silence.
44. Concerning the lightness, the bird, and architecture, Palumbo explains projects by Coop Himme(l)blau
and others:
[T]he relationship between building and ground is complicated, the building refuses to take root, it
rebels against the laws of gravity, it collapses and breaks up, recomposes into precarious
equilibriums, in a form ready to change again, centreless, without an axis perpendicular to the
ground or an evident order between the parts, a continuous challenge to the formal and structural
capacities of materials, because a secret perspective is hidden on high, the inebriation of flight is
hidden by the vertigo of the fall.
What should we think of the crystalline silhouette perched like a strange bird on the roof of Coop
Himme(l)blau, except that it might take wing at any moment? The extreme incarnation is obtained
by wavering the boundaries: instead of an unstable form, this is a form in the process of becoming,
or on the point of mutating, changing axis, dilating, folding, liquefying. The dynamism of the
body is translated into the uprooting of the form from stability and traditional order in search of a
state of indefiniteness and transformation. (52; emphasis mine)
45. As Rajchman says Deleuze avers: "the Multiple comes first, before the One" (15). Deleuze and
Guattari's principle of multiplicity states, "it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive,
'multiplicity,' that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object" (Thousand 8). And as
Serres says in the true-parable about the third, Nil Island, it is not a matter of winning or losing; rather, it is
a matter of sharing, prolonging the sharing (Troubadours 130-31).
46. I am not unmindful here of the possible pun on Christ (Chi), cross, and crossbreeding.
47. Of course, all this is hysterically funny and is a turn way from gravitas to lightness. After all, Christ
rises forth on the third day. Of particular interest also is Zizek's discussion of "Rossetti's famous painting
'Ecce Ancilla Domini,' showing Mary at the very moment of interpellation—when the Archangel Gabriel
reveals to her her mission: to conceive immaculately and to give birth to the son of God. How does Mary
react to this astonishing message, to this original 'Hail Mary'? The painting shows her frightened, with a
443

ad conscience, withdrawing from the archangel into a corner, as if asking herself 'Why was I selected for
this stupid mission? Why me?" (Sublime 113). Cf. Godard's Hail Mary, which does more of the same.
48. This whole sentence is an inscription guided by Serres's prescription on 142 that is not his prescription
but that of the coming community. I take his sentence, his book, as Agamben's books, as wax tablets.
49. The allusions here with the Libidinal Band, tensors, etc., are to Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, which is a
book that is point.less in that it is not a book, but a set of "libidinal installments" (256).
50. See Hollier (85). Cf. Vitanza, Negation 359-60, n14.
51. The film Irréversible, a summary of the scenes:
a. Credits shown, but in reverse as all sequencing is.
b. Scene from Noe's previous film, I Stand Alone, with the butcher saying: "There are no bad
deeds. Just deeds."
c. The police arrest two men (one on a stretcher). There is much homophobic invective.
d. Two men are cruising to gay night club called "the Rectum." Marcus with Pierre is looking for
Le Ténia (literally the Tape Worm). The scene is shot in red light. The search ends in the beating
of a man with a fire extinguisher.
e. Marcus and Pierre are looking for a night club. They have just been told that Alex has been
raped and her face kicked in by Le Ténia.
f. Alex, in the street, takes an underpass to avoid crossing the street. She encounters a man—
perhaps a pimp—beating on a prostitute. Alex is in the way. Le Ténia pulls a knife on her, rapes
and sodomizes her. (The scene is nine minutes long. The camera is fixed on the rape.)
g. Alex is with Marcus and Pierre at a party. Alex quarrels with Marcus and Alex leaves. There are
shots of them prior to the party, dressing for the party.
h. There is a love scene, blissful sex. We find out that Alex is pregnant.
i. Opens with a tranquil, idyllic scene with Alex lying in the grass. There is a note over the scene:
"Time destroys everything."
444

52. Ereignis. Agamben, from Heidegger's Being and Time, writes-interpolates: "it is [it = Ereignis] only
nameable as a pronoun, as It (Es) and as That (Jenes) 'which has sent the various forms of epochal Being,'
but that, in itself, is 'ahistorical, or more precisely, without destiny' . . ." (Language and Death 102;
Heidegger qtd. from BT 41).
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