In “Animal Sex” Grosz deconstructs the connection between pleasure and death through analyzing the work of two theorist, Roger Caillois and Alphonso Lingis. Grosz is clearly aware of the work of the theorists we have studied up to this point. She addresses the importance of acknowledging the implications of erotic pleasure for understanding sexual difference, that male and female sexualities are not necessarily distinct different species, nor should they only be understood in relation to each other (p. 188). The point of this chapter is to addresses what seems entirely other to women’s pleasure and desire – at men, at insects. Grosz aims to at least say what female pleasure is not and to dispel accounts that connect women and women’s sexuality too closely with mens’ or animals’ sexualities (p. 189). The author chose Caillois and Lingis because of the huge gap between their precise studies and the subsequently vast area they cover.
Caillios work focuses on the connection between pleasure and death as a simple reality through studying the praying mantis, specifically the female praying mantis’ affinity for eating her partner before, after or during sex. A key concept for Caillois is the inherently excessive expenditure of structural, anatomical or behavior traits that go above and beyond the survival needs of an organism; for example, peacocks feathers or the camouflage of a caterpillar, or the libido of human sexuality and desire (p. 190). Praying mantises are particularly interesting to study because of their close association with femininity and female sexuality through myth and humans through appearance. In anthropomorphizing the insects behaviors, praying mantises become linked with fundamentally paranoid projections, the femme fatale, the mother who castrates her son, the reverse of the prominent masculine founded psychoanalysis; for the praying mantis is the female lover who threatens the phallus not the other way around (p.191). Pleasure and death are linked together by the praying mantis (and black widow spider) by making sex something to die for (for the praying mantis, something it can do while technically dead). This places woman in the category of non-human, or “the living threat of death” (p.194).
Lingis separates bodily needs with bodily desires, specifically lust or erotic desire. Body image created through corporeal gratification, a need, supplies the subject with an experience of its own body and the ways in which its body is perceived by others (p.194). The libido or erotic desire is a troubling of the body image. In Caillois’s world, it is the erotic desire that is the excess; it surpasses what is necessary for survival. Lingis describes desire as an ever increasing hunger that likes to maintain itself at the level of craving (p.195), insatiable equaling excess.
Lingis refers to carnal desire as horizontal-lateral contamination of one erotogenic zone to another (p. 197). The relations (of two or more interacting zones or regions on one or more people/things) can not be understood in the terms of complementary, unifying or the merger of the two because each remains in its site and functions in its own ways (p. 197). With the coming together of two or more surfaces (and there is be a coming together of some sort) results in an intensification of both surfaces. It is through this conjunction the body is given up to the intensities that overtake it, seeking the otherness to bring these intensities into play (p. 198). It is not about only giving the other pleasure, but always giving itself pleasure (p. 198).
Moving into sadomasochism specifically as pain being brought into the realm of erotic desire for the intense sensuality it produces, the processes of pleasurable intensities produced can not be differentiated by those by which painful intensity is produced (p. 199). The role of the other in erotic desire is nontrivial; it is not a passive object. The other “solicits, beckons, implores, provokes and demands. The other lures, oscillates, presenting everything it has to offer” (p. 199). Life/pleasure and death/un-pleasure are complementary in opposition. Organisms that split cells are reproducing asexually can be seen as immortal. Therefore sex necessitates the death experience, or death brings sex as the alternative (p. 201). Lingis understands the link between horror and lust; the transformative effects of erotic attachments are echoed in the seeping out beyond boundaries and the dissolution of lines of bodily organization prompted by orgasmic dissolution (p. 202). Grosz makes the connection of the abject through, “something about the compulsive incitements of sexuality that may bring one to the brink of disgust and to the abject, no only accepting but seeking out activities, objects and bodily regions one might in other contexts disdain” (p. 202). It is important to acknowledge and theorize how understanding subjectivity and desire goes beyond the opposition of pleasure and death (p. 203).
4 comments:
I was struck in particular by the part on page 201 where Grosz writes the sex drive. I am not that familiar with this concept, but her discussion of single-celled organisms stood out for me. Are they considered immortal because the same DNA survives throughout generations? Don't cells eventually die?
It might be interesting in relation to this article, and Grosz attempts at transforming the hydraulic of the Freudian model of sexual discharge, to bring up Leo Bersani’s reading of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality:
(This is from Bersani’s essay Is the Rectum a Grave? p.217) “…on the one hand Freud outlines a normative sexual development that finds its natural goal in the post-Oedipal, genitally centered desire for someone of the opposite sex, while on the other hand he suggests not only the irrelevance of the object in sexuality but also, and even more radically, a shattering of the psychic structures themselves that are the precondition for the very establishment of a relation to others. In that curiously insistent, if intermittent, attempt to get at the “essence” of sexual pleasure – an attempt that punctuates and interrupts the more secure narrative outline of the history of the history of desire in the Three Essays – Freud keeps returning to a line of speculation in which the opposition between pleasure and pain becomes irrelevant, in which the sexual emerges as the jouissance of exploded limits, as the ecstatic suffering into which the human organism momentarily plunges when it is “pressed” beyond a certain threshold of endurance.”
It seems at least to be possible to read parts of Freud’s theory on sexuality in a Kristevian way, where pleasure and pain become indistinguishable, and where exploding limits is experienced as jouissance. Interestingly, I find this interpretation of Freudian sexuality very similar to Grosz’s (through Lingis) musings about desire: “Lust cannot know itself… it does not discover, but immerses itself, insisting on a certain formlessness, indeterminacy, the very excess of materiality…” (196) And: "We cannot readily differentiate the processes by which pleasurable intensities are engendered from those by which painful intensity is produced.” (199)
Finally, I want to throw in one more quote from Bersani, from the same essay (and I know we’re not reading this article, but I think it is too interesting!):
“Phallocentrism is exactly that: not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has obviously also led to that, everywhere and in all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women.”
He is talking about denial of the value of radical disintegration and humiliation of the self. I think this is interesting in relation to Grosz’s writings of desire since she denies bodily totality and promotes a sort of carnal self-disintegration through pleasure, but she doesn’t want to talk about consciousness, and more importantly, she doesn’t want to talk about loss of consciousness of the self: self-abolition. Carnal desire is horizontal not vertical, and the relationship between the erotogenic zones should be understood in terms of jealousy, not of domination and control. At the same time as she is avoiding mastery and power relationships, isn't she also avoiding powerlessness – which Bersani’s suggests is symptomatic to phallocentrism?
I was very interested in the correlation between the social imagination of sex and desire and that of death. Particularly the revisiting of Freud's pleasure
principle and death drive as constituting a closed hydraulic system of equilibrium. Reconceiving these drives and principles with the kinds of thinking of the libidinal offered by Lingis should effect a great shift in the ways in which sex and desire are not only know but enacted.
It appears from this excerpt that Caillois is actually arguing the same thing as Grosz, rather than, as she put it, making "implicit likanges" (pg 193) between sex and death. Caillois describes the anthropomorphic conception of the mantis, another way perhaps of saying, the paranoid projection implicit in that perception. I'm curious about the "plain examples" of the death-phallus in everday life: "weapons on the model of the phallus". I imagine the logic behind shaping a gun or cannon in such a way has more to do with the particular dynamics of shooting something with force in a certain direction. On this note one could reference hypodermic needles, watering hoses for plants, leaf blowers, drinking fountain kiosks, hair dryers and flashlights (none particularly associated with death, unless I guess you want them to be).
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