Uncle Fester

“From the moment that Sade delivered its first words and marked out, in a single discourse, the boundaries of what suddenly became its kingdom, the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night where God is absent, and where all of our actions are addressed to this absence in a profanation which at once identifies it, dissipates it, exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its transgression.”

That’s from Michel Foucault’s Aesthetics: Method and Epistomology.

That’s nicely gaseous, but Sade didn’t really mark out the language of sexuality. It’s a really stupid claim to make, and you’d only make it if you knew that your fans were all flying with their bullshit-detectors switched off.  

Michel Foucault

Nor can you really say that the language of sexuality lifts us into the night where god is absent. After all, people who believe in gods don’t think their gods, or the one they believe in, are absent, while people who don’t believe in gods may not be worrying much about the absence of other people’s god’s.

Not when they’re getting busy with the language of sexuality.

But when he wrote about the profanation that at once identifies the absence of God, dissipates the absence of God, exhausts itself in the absence of God, and restores the absence of God to the empty purity of the absence of God’s transgression, Foucault raised a really interesting question: when you translate French foutaise into English bullshit, how can you tell if the two meaninglessnesses are the same?

(I dunno. Ask a swan.)

Continuing our series on complete vacuous wibble on bdsm by Freud-inspired writers from twentieth century France, this one is concerned with “masochism”. Take it away, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari!

D & G: Deleuze is on the left, demonstrating the 1970s French idea of a comb-over. Guattari, on the right, accessorises

“What is certain is that the masochist has made himself a BwO [Body without Organs] under such conditions that the BwO can no longer be populated by anything but intensities of pain, pain waves. It is false to say that the masochist is looking for pain but just as false to say that he is looking for pleasure in a particularly suspensive or roundabout way. The masochist is looking for a kind of BwO that only pain can fill, or travel over, due to the very conditions under which that BwO was constituted. Pains are populations, packs, modes of king-masochist-in-the-desert that he engenders and augments .”

From A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, The Althone Press, London, 1988, page 152.

Leaving aside the question of whether things like “king-Masochist-in-the-desert” actually mean anything, and the question of whether it means anything to say that pains are modes of king-masochist-in-the-desert, there’s a bigger problem when D & G talk about “masochism”.

Particularly nasty weather! “Leda and the Swan”: photo by Ralph Gibson

In their writings, words like “sadism” and “masochism” are sometimes used to mean “resemblance to the character or works of Sade, or Sacher-Masoch”, and sometimes used in some of the many other common meanings, some of which have something to do with sexual desires and tastes and some of which do not. Deleuze and Guattari slip from one meaning to another without ever indicating what either word is intended to mean at any particular moment.

But once you’ve written that a body without organs can only be populated by pain waves, and you didn’t immediately groan and delete it, then it hardly matters what you think you mean.

Oh bugger it, let’s have another hot swan.

“Ahh, tickle your arse with a feather,” ejaculated Zeus. Sculpture by Igor Zeinalov

I’m nearly finished revising the bdsm book. So I’ll be a bit busy for a couple of days, getting it done. I’ll be back to Raylene’s story shortly. I know it’s stopped at a dramatic moment, but we’ll get there.. 

In the meantime, and for your amusement,  here are three pieces of utter wibble written about bdsm by French writers of different Freudian schools. We never asked them to. Anyway, let’s start with Jacques Lacan! 

“How can those terrified fingers push/  The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?”  Leda fucked by Zeus, who’d transformed himself into a swan for the purpose. Little-known water-fowl fact: swans have penises. (So, by the way, do mallards, including Donald Duck. Lucky Daisy.)

“One might think that Kant is there under the pressure of what he hears too closely, not of Sade, but of that mysticism that is Sade’s home, in the sigh that chokes at what it foresees, to have seen that his God is without figure: Grimmigkeit? Sade says: Supreme Being in spitefulness.

But pfutt! Schwärmereien: black swarms, we drive you out, to return you to the function of the presence of the Sadean ghost.”

That’s from “Kant avec Sade”, by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Any paragraph of it is much like any other. 

“Grimmigkeit”, by the way, means ferocity, while “Schwärmereien” means rapturous or fanatical intensities, but is a pun on “Schwärmen”, meaning swarms. There may also be an allusion to “Schwänen” (swans), as black swans are celebrated in philosophical circles for disproving the proposition that all swans are white. Lacan was celebrated for his wit, in Lacanian circles.

Lacan preserved Freud’s incoherent definition of “sadism”, failing to distinguish between sexual practices and violence enacted for non-sexual reasons.

The psychoanalyst as James Bond villain: Jacques Lacan

Lacan’s own career offers an example of this confusion. Lacan treated his followers with contempt that was, arguably, justified by the quality of the work they admired, but in addition he mentally and physically abused vulnerable patients, which is perhaps less forgivable. Lacan’s abuse escalated to open, violent beatings of mentally ill people.

Other psychoanalysts described Lacan’s assaults on patients as “sadistic”. 

In reality it’s unlikely that Lacan derived any sexual satisfactions from beating his patients. He was not a “sadist”; he was simply an unpleasant bully whose violence went unchecked because he headed a cult.

One picture of Lacan is enough for any blog. So let’s go out on a picture of a prick. A swan’s penis. Pfutt, indeed!

Another in the Great Moments in Science series.

Research carried out in the 1980s attributed “sadism” to brain damage. The basis was a research project whose study group was dead men who, when they were alive, had committed murders involving dismemberment. The funny thing was that the murders didn’t necessarily have any sexual motive at all, so it was a very strange leap of … logic? or something else, perhaps bigotry … to link it to bdsm.  

Ah, the Abnormal brain. Let’s use that one!

Anyway, the study involved slicing up the brains of dead men who’d committed genuinely horrific crimes, and reporting on structural and other abnormalities. They found that murderous insanity often was linked with brain damage, and they published their results as “Sexual sadism: Brain, blood and behaviour.” (In 1988.)

The observation that murderous insanity may be related to brain damage is not startling; generalising this finding to what they called “sadists” is, on the other hand, not only not science, it’s completely off-the-scale bonkers. 

It’s like studying heterosexuality by taking CAT scans of serial rapists. And they wouldn’t do that: why, that would obviously be silly.

It’s time to share a Great Moment in Science.

One explanation for bdsm desire was supplied by Dr Karl Abraham, one of Freud’s disciples. It’s a snappy little theory, and we’ll get to it in a second. 

These days, if somebody says, “Freud said…” or “According to psychoanalytic theory”, I hear the equivalent of “My astrologer tells me…” I try to be polite and not roll my eyes, and I wait till it’s over before returning the conversation to something sensible.

But Freud was taken terribly seriously for much of the twentieth century, which is probably the most interesting thing about psychoanalysis: it gave us the business model and many of the doctrines for scientology and similar movements/cults.

“By carrying the typed correspondence in her teeth, the masochistic subject achieves complete dental sexual satisfaction.”

Anyway, Abraham’s idea was that what he called “sadomasochism” was caused by teething. You see, babies focus on their mouths during teething, and because eating is both enjoyable and destructive they associate the oral aggression of biting their rusks with sexual pleasure.

Abraham knew that babies take sexual pleasure from eating because Freud had ruled that eighteen-month-old babies locate their sexual feelings in their mouths, and if Freud said it, then it must be true. (This is what being a disciple means.) 

It followed that babies whose teething was unusually difficult or unusually enjoyable become “sadomasochists” in later life.

And that, my kinky brothers and sisters, is where we come from. And people who had braces on their teeth are all into bondage.

Abraham’s sadomasochistic teeth should, by rights, be resting in the lumber room of science along with phrenological heads and homeopathy kits, but as recently as 1992 a pair of psychoanalytic dentists – yes, I know; they were psychoanalytic dentists – claimed to have carried out anatomical analysis of the jaw muscles and teeth that supported Abraham’s sadomasochistic teeth theory. 

Anyway, Karl Abraham’s kinky teeth march on. The show’s never really over. 

Captain Jack Harkness: Who sees a screwdriver and thinks, ooh, this could be a little more … sonic?

The Ninth Doctor: Well, who sees dentists, and thinks, they really need to be  a bit … psychoanalytic?