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| To cut, ♥ psychologia - inne (książki, artykuły), [EN] artykuły, nssi (non-suicidal self injury) + masochism |
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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume14 number 3 december 2009 We shall therefore star the text, separating, in the manner of a minor earthquake, the blocks of signification of which reading grasps only the smooth surface ... Roland Barthes, S/Z, An Essay 13 Yes. Reading is a form of cutting too. A special form of masochism hinges on the problem of a reflexive pronoun – in the movement from I like to be hurt to I like to hurt myself, lost is the logic of intersubjective desire (the implied ‘‘by you’’ of masochism proper), and gained is the signifier that represents me to the statement (my own ‘‘myself’’). In this movement, a supplement appears: the doubled I/ myself found only in the second instance. Agent of desire in iteration one becomes agent of desiring annihilation in iteration two, but, significantly, what is effected in the second sentence is a split – the gashing cut of the diagonal slash that forever holds apart I/myself. Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation of the corpus gives flesh to the latter utterance: ‘‘I am addressed to my body from my body.’’ 1 The relational and gendered assumptions in traditional masochistic pathologies (so important for all accounts of the phenomenon, from Sigmund Freud and Richard von Krafft-Ebing to Gilles Deleuze) are infinitely troubled when the violence of the gesture occurs on this primary solipsistic level. What is a masochism, after all, that admits no other parties to its pact because its first wound is to any semblance of the non-otherness of myself? This question ought rightly to seem as though it cuts into the smooth surface of this paper, for it is only through the ragged fissure left in the wake of such a rend that any semblance of an argument can emerge – the problem of the cut is that it makes impossible the boundaries by which one eugenie brinkema TO CUT, TO SPLIT, TO TOUCH, TO EAT, AS OF ABODYORATEXT secretary and dans ma peau articulates the cut. Where, after all, is the wound? In the bloody borders where it ceases to mean or in the space left in its void, present only in radical abstention? Where, precisely, as well, is our definition of masochism? It is an identical problem. The films I will examine hold open the term as a problematic, filling it in (or refusing to do so) as the subject of the work itself. To offer definition is to give precise meaning and also to precisely outline or delimit – a visual or architectural problem – but also the word means to have precision and clarity in a photographic or other image, and that too will become important. We approach the definition of masochism in this last crucial instance: as a blockage to vision, as fuzzy, unreadable, imprecise in its optical signification. ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/09/030131^15 2009 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki DOI:10.1080/09697250903407658 131 to cut, to split, to touch, to eat In this essay, masochism remains a wound – open, irresistible in its refusal to close. For taken with any conceptual specificity – pathological, theological, metaphorical – masochism is sutured shut, the stitches tightly binding meaning to the scar, but in the process filling in the wound, insisting on nylon borders so carefully drawn and woven. If it is an absorbable stitch – call it history – so much the worse, for evidence of the surgical touch will literally disappear into the skin, erasing its own narrative of artificial suture. Stitches bind the opposing sides of a wound to prevent leaking blood, to hurry along the illusory wholeness of the body – leaks, those slippery vestiges of the originary trauma, are thusly closed off. Perhaps this is the unconscious of injury, the real of the lesion. We must hold masochism stubbornly open – gaping in its lack of definition, its refusal of the needle and thread – to admit its own relation to the cut, the split, the very wound it makes for theory as much as for bodies. For even taken in its own paradoxical reduction – pleasure in pain – such a formulation only serves to make a wound where none previously was. The term, after all, acquires meaning only by emptying all its terms of it – pleasure cannot mean what it means, pain cannot mean what it means, for the term itself to mean. A split must occur for such a definition of sense to take on a definition of clarity. Such a split is possible only by severing the subject of the ´nonciation from the subject of the ´nonc´, as in Jacques Lacan’s reading of the statement ‘‘I am lying,’’ in which he argues that ‘‘despite its paradox, [the state- ment] is perfectly valid. Indeed, the I of the enunciation is not the same as the I of the statement, that is to say, the shifter which, in the statement, designates him.’’ 2 This is the very same split necessitated for the subject of I like to hurt myself, such that myself and I do not line up in the declaring, nor does the avowed speaker map onto the avowed disintegrator of the spoken utterance. Lest you think this definitional and enuncia- tive split is an aftershock or residual trace, it is rather the essence of masochism (but an anti- essentialist essence, a becoming-into). Thus, in place of a definition that would bind too tightly our slashed skin, we must hold the word itself open as a field for the play of its meaningful meaningless paradox. The word must remain wound. Doubting Thomas insisted he must put his fingers inside Christ’s wound to know the resurrection was real; Christ’s invitation to touch and believe produces a haptic truth, a penetrative ethics. But the present project has far more resonance with the anonymous sculpture Christ Showing the Wound in his Side from the 1420s, where the terracotta figure holds open his gash with both his hands, and demonstrates and insists on its deep openness. What is so striking about this work is that Christ’s eyes do not defiantly meet the spectator, nor do they entreat to the world as the words do to Thomas: touch, and believe. It is a stunningly indifferent Christ who gazes down at where his fingers dig deeply into his flesh, turning inwards at the very moment his body offers its own mysteries to rival those of heaven. What does he see, head tilted to the right, eyelids drawn by the gravity of the image, but a vision of his fingers disappearing into the darkened maw of the newly offered vacuole. There is a horrific claw-like quality to his right hand, whose too-long fingers weight into the wound and then fall in their remainder against his hip with a cruel thick bend at the wrist – the image is too heavy on that side; these fingers pull open, they form the wound as they verify it. This gesture has none of the pedagogical significance of outward-facing Christs – it is neither Gnostic nor put to the services of realism; it admits of no other. It only confesses the cut. This paper will argue that a distinction between the cut and the split has a crucial significance for a reading of female masochism – a distended term that as yet has no substance and is itself a disruptive, open sore – not through a process of reading (which is already on the side of the cut), but through an encounter with two films that stage this very division. That is, the films under consideration here present the problematic meeting of women and masochism as a question of the phenomenon of cutting, in all its various guises. Cutting predominantly appears, however, in the movement away from it, anamorphotically delimited in where it is not in the films. In Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (2002), 13 2 brinkema it is the expelled piece of the female psychical history, the pathologized bad object version of redemptive performed sado-masochism. In numerous other films, it appears as the fetishized iteration of masochistic desire – in Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste [The Piano Teacher] (2001), for example, it comprises the private realm of a public identity and national history. At the other line of the boundary, not yet sutured or stitched closed, in Marina de Van’s Dans ma peau [In My Skin] (2002), it is the traumatic impulse that sets the scene for chaotic self- annihilation, and it is in this film, in particular, that the cut becomes the split, with radical implications for both the cinematic subject and the cinematic spectator, themselves forever rent apart. The two films that will be examined in depth in this paper – Secretary and Dans ma peau – delimit the antipodality of the cut and the split. Although they were released the same year and are very similar in numerous and surprising (or perhaps not so) ways, they are eventually ripped asunder by the jagged edge of this paper, in the form of its own theoretical edging and cutting. Secretary begins not with the body but with the text (in the form of the textual machine), and with the indeterminacy between the two. The opening credits occur over the violent punctua- tions of a typewriter abstracted in close-up. The quickness of the machine-gun-like metal keys, metal strikes, cut into the tape; the text does not exist independently of the printed iteration and registers before signification the strike of the body. Cut to – and now more than ever the significance of that cinematic gesture appears – an image of a lithe professional woman walking into an office bound in a neck brace apparatus that links the arms in a sultry parody of a crucifixion. Each task of the office (stapling some papers, making some coffee) becomes pregnant with the delicate bends and distentions of the woman. When the film cuts to the title ‘‘6 months earlier’’ and we see a frumpy stocking on an unremarkable calf, generic expectations retro- actively ensure that the ugly duckling transfor- mation is a fait accompli. Secretary thus begins by introducing Lee Holloway in a before-and-after split that will eventually come full circle. ‘‘I got out of the institution on the day of my sister’s wedding,’’ her voiceover informs, and we come to learn that Lee’s reaction to the strictures of bourgeois family life (complete with a drunken, abusive father) is to hurt herself – through knives, other instruments of inscription, a hot kettle, etc. Cutting itself is a supplement in Secretary,asitis added to, not taken from, Mary Gaitskill’s short story on which the remainder of the narrative is ostensibly based. 3 Like all fantasy scenes, the Gaitskill ‘‘Secretary’’ bears little on the filmic instantiation, but instead comprises the most formal proscenium around the characters in which they are offered the opportunity to play- act as they like. Two models of writing are presented in Secretary, two models of writing that insistently return in Dans ma peau and are crucial for the theorization of female masochism in this paper. When Lee first exposes the mechanisms of her scarification, she has just seen her father become drunk at her sister’s wedding, the latter event being at least as nausea-inducing as the more obvious former. Upstairs in her unchanged childhood bedroom, giddy in its rejection of time’s forward progress, she pulls from under her bed a decorated box, wrapped in heart-stamped cloth – though the shape of the box clearly inscribes it as such, it is even more so the hidden under-the-bed location that marks this box as Lee’s version of a secreted-away diary. Upon opening the fetish treasure chest, she lays out its members one by one: iodine, a razor, a series of undifferentiated implements for cutting, digging, scarring. She sharpens the leg of a ballerina figurine and presses it deeply into her skin, and though this time she does not puncture the surface, there is little doubt that the white imprint of point against plane is familiar and signifies, even as it makes a mark too light to read. (A small revenge, this little gap, this little cut, a small revenge.) Her writing on the skin, aligned with the private fantasy world of a young girl’s diary, is counterpoised to the harsh metallic insistence of the typewriter keys that Lee perfects in community college, and which lead inevitably to her meeting with Mr E. Edward Grey, a meeting marked with the ineluctable contingency of fairy tales and the overdetermined inevitability 13 3 to cut, to split, to touch, to eat of their retroactive telling: Once upon a time, I already knew the ending. Answering an ad simply for ‘‘Secretary Wanted’’ (the notice as pure Freudian drive), Lee becomes acquainted with E. Edward, muted sadist and successful lawyer. After their first encounter, he sweeps a collection of red pens into a drawer; they will reemerge only once the affair requires their wounding foreplay. Cutting in this film is first and foremost a hermeneutic knot indicated in the gesture of editing, of piecing a text into bits, each of which signals a desire ignited and a punishment impending. Editing is the preeminent form of the cut because it is a process of simultaneous reading and (new, newly changed, but perhaps in very small ways) writing; like the annotation, like a criticism of bits and pieces, editing stars, marks, even mars, the text. For example: V. Fascist, Blunt signifier, you are too obviously what you are. A perverse inversion of Yahweh: you are that you are. Failed sadist: you are that you fail to be the law you enforce. ...and so forth. The lawyer himself is the antithesis of the edit: the extraneous extra ‘‘E’’ of his name, empty signifier for his unnamable practices, indicates where the cut failed to effect an absence, but merely doubled its placement – Humbert Humbert at least had the decency of repetition, instead of the assumed blank forcing its comple- tion on the other. With his red pen, later, Edward finds errors; in the first case, the error is an extra letter, like the very error of the editor’s name: ‘‘genderr’’ reads one memo, typed by Lee. Edward’s red pen is Lee’s reddened knife – the cutting of the skin and the cutting of the text are, in this film, both substitutes for the heart of the matter, the organ of theatricality in sado- masochism proper. In other words, there are two scenes of writing here, but both are themselves failures, sublimations for the real work of sexual performance. Insisting that Lee ‘‘look at it’’ – a reverse injunction of her earlier typing teacher never to look at the page as one types – Edward verbally rips Lee to shreds. To which she responds by cutting up her skirt, offering token pieces of fabric in place of the wounded, parsed memo. Edward finally confronts Lee about her kit of Band-Aids, iodine, and razors; he insists to her, like any analyst, that she must feel free to tell him anything. Gazing intensely into her eyes, he informs her that she will no longer do that thing, that it is past – the imperative here functioning as a form of writing a woman’s history for her. The letter returns – we know from Edgar Allan Poe via Lacan that it always arrives at its destination – in an order to Lee to ‘‘come into my office and bring that letter,’’ which issues forth the climactic scene. Edward commands Lee to place the offending paper on his desk, bend over, and read it aloud. Right after this scene, crucially, Lee will throw away her diary, her kit of tools, her signifying system of I. Every In logic, it would be the universal quantifier 8, shorthand symbol for longhand meaning, inflect- ing in a painful somersault its own difficult negation: every, all, even none. II. woman The particular cuts in. Barred, blocked every, the teasing dance of undoing meaning. She cannot be all. Partial, she weaves the universal out of the sentence, unmaking like Penelope the very substance of her time. First: cut the thread; next, unweave it according to the pattern. III. adores Adorare: to address, salute, worship, orate in praise of. Or- for mouth. For tongue, teeth, lips, spit, words. Love begins with the mouth. To bite, suck, lick, chew, whisper. As kissing the hand, as of a sovereign. IV. a Little a returns – it can only return – as a missing piece of the real. Fully detached, it hovers in the smallness of its specificity. Every woman does not adore every fascist. Shadow of the every, the tiny detail is not all, existential quantifier 9: some, one, at least one. 13 4 brinkema adolescent skin-cuts. That renunciation is made possible by the other scene of writing that will come to dominate, the system of sexual promises avowed on the mistakes of her typography, on the mistakes of text and paper, second substitutions for the skin. As Lee reads the typed letter – ‘‘I am grateful to you for referring me ...’’ – on the word ‘‘referring,’’ the first blow is struck. (This is true, with this specificity of language, on ‘‘referring,’’ in the original Gaitskill story as well.) She stops, and enters a long pause. Her reading continues at his insistence, and again, at ‘‘referring,’’ the second blow rings out, his hand fat and fast against her ass. The significance of ‘‘referring’’ as the locus of the initial strike is crucial, for this scene functions as a relay, referring to past and future points in the story, but itself functioning only as a cipher. That is, any attempt to read this scene misses precisely what metonymic displacement is effected in the deferral and suspension of the gesture. For this scene is about writing – a writing on the body – a writing less about indexical inscription, as with the writing in cuts, and more about the writing of the typewriter’s indented trace or residue of ink (this is the bruise). As opposed to digging deeper for meaning, it is relayed, or ‘‘referred,’’ to the surface through broken vessels, meaning erupting from below to hover purple under the surface of the unbroken skin. When Edward is done spanking Lee, she runs to the bathroom to look in the mirror at her bruised and swollen side. Though it appears as though what is written on her body is the signifying order of the sadist’s desire, what returns from the mirror is a map of Lee’s own erotics. And come full circle – the referred past returns – we now find ourselves in the film precisely where we began, with Lee delicately ensconced in shackles, playfully exemplifying what Susan Cook calls the film’s ‘‘commercial S/M antics.’’ 4 After some time, their performative affair slows, and it is only resumed when Lee’s envelope containing a dead worm arrives on Edward’s desk, a punishment that is returned, perhaps, only because its desire arrived finally in its literal form: the blank, empty letter. The affair culminates in what appears to be a mockery of heterosexual union, an indication that the other life for Lee, marriage to her high school sweetheart, is not to be. As Lee insists to Edward that she loves him and refuses to accept his order that they stop seeing each other, she wears the wedding dress intended for that other scene. He orders her to sit at his desk, feet on the floor, hands palms down, and wait. The resulting ten minutes of the film are comical, to be sure, as the media camp out to report on the strange girl’s hunger strike and members of Lee’s family and community attempt to talk her out of her desire (from the supportive ‘‘There’s a long history of this in Catholicism. You are part of a great tradition’’ to the feminist-activist ‘‘Why don’t you read about women’s struggle first?’’). In the end, Edward returns to collect his urine- soaked martyr and carries her upstairs to bathe her and make love in what is no longer a parody of, but is now a sentimental replacement for, the wedding night. Indeed, Secretary ends far less radically than we might imagine or hope: Lee and Edward are married, albeit with a honeymoon involving ropes and bondage, and settle into naughty suburbia in which they have each other and have clearly not given up their kinky play. In Frances Restuccia’s Lacanian reading of the film, the contractless S/M relation gives way to the formal binding of the marriage contract in Lee’s transformation of ‘‘symptoms into enjoyment’’; Restuccia allows that there is ‘‘a certain dopey, saccharine quality to the now legalized S/M relationship.’’ 5 What distresses, perhaps, about Secretary is how very little Lee’s ritualized masochism changes underlying struc- tures that might be demanded by a, say, feminist (as opposed to romantic comedy) generic frame- work. Masochism is formulated to be yet another lifestyle option along the classical liberal lines of free choice, and one that is consistent, no less, with heterosexual marriage, capitalist production, and suburban location and cultural capital benefits. Transgression is therefore mobilized not to undermine norms but to proliferate possibilities for a commodified identity. Linda Singer’s analysis of ‘‘Sex and the Logic of Late Capitalism’’ reads S/M in general as a category of ‘‘specialized sexualities’’ made available by the market to produce and sustain ‘‘a sense of apparent freedom through the proliferation 13 5 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |