The day trippers, with their napkins already tied around their necks, looked up at her in astonishment: “Embè?”)
REPRISALS AGAINST DEFENSELESS WOMEN, whose fault is precisely that, being soft, whiny, whimpering, disgustingly fragile women, deserving of subjugation precisely because they already are subjugated (oppression is always a confirmation of oppression), also constitute a reactive movement and a violent protest against the maternal monopoly during childhood. When, that is, the female figure who now appears so weak was actually extremely powerful. A true goddess. To think about it carefully, that monopoly of care was sweet, tender, a labor of love, the object of infinite yearning . . . but there is an impulse to make a sharp break from it. It is love as such that is targeted as an object of scorn. Some need a brutal act to successfully break away from it; they fear otherwise that they will remain entangled forever in that saccharine universe, stuck in that gooey oatmeal that smells of mother’s milk. It is an angry bite to the mother’s breast. By brutalizing that breast, we escape from the figure that dominated the most important years of our lives. We take vengeance on our mother by devastating the wombs of women, sparing only the one from which we emerged, and perhaps not even that one. It belonged, after all, to a whore.
When you reach the point of calling your mother a whore, then you can say that your upbringing is complete. The circle is unbroken.
AT FIRST THERE ARE ONLY WOMEN, or a single woman. Then out of this woman another woman is born, or else a man is born, but he, in order to come into the world as a man, must make himself different from his mother, twist and turn, make a special effort, exert an act of will, otherwise from women only women would continue to be born, as one might logically expect. In order to become a man, then, it’s not enough to emerge from your mother’s belly. You must also disavow that belly, ensure that this origin is erased, as if you had been born out of nothingness.
It’s not enough to flee the womb, you must also punish it. The incredible resentment that is fostered toward the feminine sex . . .
A MOTHER HAS TWO BREASTS, one good, one bad. One gives you milk, the other denies you milk. One is gratifying and the other is frustrating. At a certain point, though, you realize that it is the same breast, a single breast that one time satiates your hunger, the next time leaves you wanting more. Your frustration derives in fact from the pleasure that you have experienced, and that you are confident you will experience again, but instead, you are denied. It is the mother herself who behaves like this, not just her breast. Therefore the same person may be just as much the object of love and gratitude as of resentment and rage: in each of the two states, the other is implicit. Satisfaction underpins frustration, frustration is what it is only because it has experienced satisfaction.
We are accustomed to expressing love, need, and anger as an inextricable whole, and have done so since we first began sucking milk from the maternal breast. Love is barely distinguishable from other stirrings of the soul, it really doesn’t exist in a pure, unalloyed state, it is manifested through feelings considered to be its opposite, such as hatred and aggression, sorrow, guilt, and scorn.
TAKING VENGEANCE on the false promises of the female body. Yes, taking vengeance is the right terminology. Of all the women who go by on the street, it seems that their bodies are speaking to you, inviting you to take them, it’s the individual parts of that body, the breasts, the buttocks, the legs, the lips, that promise great pleasures, a festive, unbridled welcome . . . Sure, but then? What happens then? Nothing happens. Those women and girls, brimming over with all sorts of attractions, whom it would cost nothing to offer you a small portion of their body, a few square inches all considered, for ten minutes, but even five minutes would do, what do they do? Nothing, they do nothing, they just keep walking . . . they shrink into the distance, they vanish for all time, minding their own business. They pay no mind, perhaps they never even notice the trail of promises they’ve scattered behind them. And the same is true of the high school girls, the shopgirls, the young women on motorbikes and scooters, the girls at the beach, the schoolteachers, the female lawyers in their snug-fitting skirtsuits . . .
(NOW, while all the rest of the things inside me almost always stir only indifference and apathy, the same cannot be said of a woman’s presence. An awakening occurs, an awakening of something, not necessarily something agreeable, in fact, quite the contrary . . .
To stiffen in the presence of a woman, as an uncomfortable reaction to the woman’s physical proximity, or even just to her mental presence. The former might be possible to avoid with some basic precautions, the latter, unfortunately, less so.
It wasn’t only fear and it wasn’t only arousal, and yet the effect was the same, that is, to feel that I was growing petrified, that my respiration was slowing down and even stopping, that my voice was freezing in my throat, my member was stiffening, I was turning to ice . . .)
FOR SOME MEN, the idea that women might avoid their fate, the fate, that is, of being possessed, is intolerable. If they do escape, then they must be killed. First raped, then killed. Raping them, in a certain sense, turns them back into women, gives them back their feminine prerogative. In their turn, they become capable of recognizing a woman’s attractions only after killing her: like Achilles with Penthesilea. The death of a reluctant woman restores her to the femininity she was trying to get out of.
To kill is an extreme way of making someone yours. It is in principle a form of acquisition. If I desire someone, I can make them wholly mine by taking their life. I’m the last one to have had them, and in this radical form, the only one. Of the right that only I can exercise I deprive all others forever, which is the requisite of any full ownership. To rape a woman is not enough to take ownership of her: only with her death is the mere usufruct rejoined with the naked ownership. You enter into possession of the entire person only when it ceases to exist. In the corpse.
This explains why so many ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends murder their women. When the women refuse to get back together with them or even just to make love with them, they have no other way of possessing them than to kill them.
THE RAPIST-MURDERER DESTROYS what he meant to take possession of. His crime lies midway between simple violence and robbery, mixing hostility toward its object and desire for the same object. You might think that he wants to take possession of a woman in order to destroy her. But it’s more likely that he destroys her because only by doing so can he boast that he possesses her.
And so, to kill a woman to get rid of her, or to get her back.
6
ASYMMETRY I
In the CR/M, we came to know everything about the murderers, even the brand of their tennis shoes; about the victims, aside from the generic and oft-repeated emphasis on their modest social extraction, nothing.
ASYMMETRY II
General law: we often think that others feel for us what actually we feel for them. We muddle and confuse grammatical persons: the one who is the object of desire is mistaken for its subject. In this way, we can fool ourselves into thinking that just because we desire a woman, she in turn feels desire, that the desire to be possessed actually begins with her. Take me! you seem to think the woman says, whom you’re staring at in a frenzy to take her. That is why we tend to attribute sexual availability to a pretty woman: because she is attractive, we imagine that she is attracted.
ASYMMETRY III
If what you seek is equality and the parity of rights and duties, forget about sex. It’s not what you want to look at. A very honorable principle, equality—but utter nonsense when it comes to sex. Everything in sex is asymmetrical. Excessive, unbalanced. And everything is a losing bet, an exuberant fiasco. In erotic relations, the thing that dominates gleefully is injustice—at least until you run headlong into the penal code.
It’s a question of being either a slave to another’s body, or else its master.
The sexual shiver of injustice derives, by a reversal of terms, from the unjust shiver of sexuality.
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Only a few elect spirits in this world are capable of drawing pleasure from egalitarianism. An absolute leveling of conditions instantly lowers all desire. Yes, perhaps the occasional saint, some deep thinker in love with pure abstraction . . . Everyone else, however, takes at least as much joy from disparity as they do misery: they hate being in disparity, and yet they yearn for it, to abide in disparity, at least temporarily slaves or masters of something or someone, and they experience delight not only when they get to be on top. Even the one being dominated may take pleasure in the disproportionate upper hand held by the other, indeed, perhaps, the image of someone being subjugated is the better depiction of the state of bliss: a work of portrayal verging on the impossible even for the greatest of artists, who in fact are obliged to avail themselves of metaphors. This position is best and most fittingly exemplified by the inamorato, the swooning lover, as well as the acolyte, the true believer, the die-hard fan, the son with his mother, the adept with his teacher: all these figures are grateful to those who loom over them, showering them with their strength, and so abandon themselves trustingly to the pleasure that they draw from that relationship, without reservations, without complaint. As if standing in a warm August rain . . .
One is unlikely to attain equality and equilibrium by going to bed with someone. I wonder what someone really desires when they desire such a thing. If what they’re looking for is 50 percent control of all shares, if they’re interested in getting 50 percent of the profits, then let them start a company. But the most beady-eyed accountant with a green eyeshade and bifocals riding low on the nose would be hard put to balance profits and losses, who profits and what they gain, and to draw up a final balance sheet for an act of intercourse: those reckonings would always and inevitably be found to add up to zero. In sex, no one in the final analysis gets anything, except perhaps for a taste of their own annihilation. Splashes, flashes of annihilation. The only moments that are truly worth living are moments of abandonment, of loss, of boundless possession, and of the utterly gratuitous, of being useful and idiotic slaves to another’s body, even if you receive a big fat nothing in exchange.
ASYMMETRY IV
The only way that any equilibrium could be restored is if women gave birth to girls and men gave birth to boys. Instead, they’re all born to a woman. It is hard to imagine two peoples in incessant and permanent conflict when one of those peoples was—and always will be—given birth by the other, and therefore will depend on them for their own very existence.
7
ACOCK IS A TOOL with all the sensitivity of a hammer. And in fact during a rape it can be substituted by other objects that serve the same purpose: to humiliate and cause suffering. Just as in consensual sex, various stand-ins or proxies or prosthetics can be used to give and receive pleasure, similarly in a rape, bottles or clubs or broom handles (from some wartime accounts: grenades, mortar shells, and, where there was a hint of blasphemous excess, crucifixes) can be used to inflict suffering. In such cases, the only reasons that these are considered acts of sexual violence is because they concern certain areas of the body. In the CR/M, the objects used were an ashtray and a car jack.
(IN CERTAIN POLICE DEPARTMENTS the preprinted form to be filled out in case of a criminal complaint of rape includes a box to be checked off next to the phrases “insertion of objects into the vagina” and “insertion of objects into the rectum”).
THE ONLY PERSON who can claim to be the master, the owner of something is he who is free to destroy it. As in the legendary contests of profligacy and squandering recorded by anthropologists, where tribal chiefs face off, ready to smash to pieces everything in their possession, the supremacy of wealth is acknowledged only at the moment in which you destroy it. An owner answers to nobody where his property is concerned, and proof of that fact can be seen in his willingness to do without it.
He squanders, dissipates, wastes, and purchases, only to destroy immediately that which he has purchased, and that is the true luxury of possession: to discard what you have just made your own. Both moments are pleasurable and brutal: through robbery you accumulate, rapaciously you squander the booty, the plunder, the swag, you devour your prey, you devastate your assets, disposing of jewelry, slave girls, horses, foodstuffs, groaning banqueting tables, Indian brides, kidnapped girls, executed prisoners, dynamited bridges, the jigsaw puzzle you just finished which is voluptuously thrown in the air and returned to the state of chaos whence it came, the cash from the cracked safe pissed away on narcotics and whores. Two moments in the metabolism of power, to acquire and discard, to steal just to burn and leave charred . . . It’s a sort of party, a feast, a meal, a pigout, a house set on fire just to enjoy the show. Tout doit disparaître! announce the nihilistic signs advertising sales in Paris shops: Everything Must Go! These signs aren’t so much urging you to buy as to sweep away, liquidate, eliminate . . . After all, what else does the verb “consume” mean, if not that? Away, away, away with everything. Even what you love; above all else, what you love.
Pathology is the correct lens through which to view and understand physiology. You can best understand how an organism functions when it stops functioning. And the same is true of the mind: when it breaks down, falls apart, or spins out of control, racing into the void, that’s when you can see how it’s built. The exceptional state is the only one that tells us something interesting. But there is no need to cross over into the territory of pathology to perceive the nexus between sexuality and destruction, separated by the thinnest of veils, if by anything at all. Suffering, desire, hatred, attraction, and pleasure rarely appear to be distinctly separate, least of all in the context of intercourse, indeed, it is only through an intertwining of them all that an event takes place which would otherwise be inexplicable or grotesque. People subject themselves to practices that, if considered outside the context of that specific ceremony, and viewed with even a smidgen of detachment, would be ridiculous or disgusting; assuming postures that are incredibly aggressive, the poses of two wild animals fighting to the death. Lucretius’s phenomenology still scandalizes because it shows in a crude manner, devoid of flattery or niceties, the rabid frenzy of lovers: but no one can seriously cast doubt on the accuracy of this description.
Quod petiere, premunt arte faciuntque dolorem
corporis et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis
osculaque adfigunt, quia non est pura voluptas
et stimuli subsunt, qui instigant laedere id ipsum,
quod cumque est, rabies unde illaec germina surgunt.
The parts they sought, those they squeeze so tight,
And pain the creature’s body, close their teeth
Often against her lips, and smite with kiss
Mouth into mouth, because this same delight
Is not unmixed; and underneath are stings
Which goad a man to hurt the very thing,
Whate’er it be, from whence arise for him
Those germs of madness.
IN MUCH THE SAME WAY that you can leap directly over love in the sex act, you can also skip the act entirely and move directly to the cruelty, to the destructive frenzy implicit in the act, which only needed to be extracted and purified and made manifest, without wasting any more time on those genital manipulations, those sideshows typical of oversexed kids. After all, sex is just a drooling digression, a futile pastime, perhaps really an excuse to distract us from the real task at hand. An idle amusement, in other words. But if the objective is to penetrate a body, wouldn’t it be easier to just go ahead and use a knife? Cut open that body at any point you choose? Sadism wouldn’t be very interesting at all if it didn’t help bring to light that buried element. To break the sensual hesitations and sweep away all that emotional equivocation. After all, what you’re looking to do is hurt someone, period. Let’s be done with all the hemming and hawing. Once you’ve unearthed all the violent implications of sex and cleansed them of their sentimental implications, they appear as so many steel objects, gleaming, simple, chilly, a
nd sharp-edged; and it’s not as if the sadist brought them along in a special satchel: they’d always been there. Right there, next to the bed. The toolbox of suffering is within reach of one and all. A bed is ideally suited for resting, reading, making love, dreaming, fighting, and torture. Another person’s pain arouses a sadist not only because he is, in fact, sadistic, but because he is also, at the same time, a masochist, he identifies with his victims and thrills to their pain. He takes twice the pleasure: in the pain that he inflicts and the pain that, through a third party, a proxy, he inflicts upon himself.
I HAVE READ OVER and over again Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and I still haven’t understood it, or perhaps I should say, I don’t understand if I’ve understood it. And if I have, then I’m not sure to what extent I agree with the author, and whether I’ve ever experienced in my life what the author describes in such painstaking detail: that revulsion toward the sex act, the disgust prompted by the sex act, that is, the very same act that we all desire more than any other and which, nonetheless, Tolstoy tells us, is the cause of the deepest revulsion.
If there is a form of sex act in which this repugnance manifests itself in full, that would be rape. Careful though, the disgust is not just for the victim, but also and especially the rapist. His sexual violence does not express attraction for the body he is appropriating by force, but rather a paradoxical repulsion. Desire thus reveals its distinctively destructive bow wave: while experiencing attraction to something and, at the same time, finding it disgusting, it angrily demands that that thing be wiped off the face of the earth. In order to react to the humiliation of feeling fascinated and therefore in a certain sense bound and dominated by something repugnant, one mistreats it and destroys it. To a rapist, there is nothing wonderful about a woman’s body; quite the opposite, it’s a filthy sewer, and he can feel himself sinking into it. Her genitals are repugnant, her moaning mouth is repugnant, her lips, above and below, are repugnant, her breasts are disgustingly soft, her tears are contaminants . . .
The Catholic School Page 110
