Towards a Gay Communism
Page 24
Anal Eroticism and Obscene Language. Money and Shit
To those who want to give the proletariat the religion of a name, a (false) consciousness, a suit-and tie and a halo, a credibility for the respectable, it is legitimate to counterpose a proletariat that is violent and wild, unconscious, autonomous, and the trinity: SHIT, DEVIL, REVOLUTION.75
It is necessary at this point to stress the relationship that exists between the rejection of homosexuality and the repression of the anal component of Eros. In his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud showed the temporary concentration of infantile libido on the anal erogenous zone: the anal phase that lies between oral eroticism and a fixation on the genital zone that is generally definitive. The stabilisation of sexual impulses on the genitals almost always provokes a repression of anal desires, which may even be absolute – except, as a general rule, in ‘cases’ of overt male homosexuality, and a few others.
As Geza Róheim ironically put it, ‘when . . . excretory functions have become “not nice” we have reached a high stage of culture’.76 But even Queen Elizabeth goes to the toilet. The present repression of anal pleasure, coprophilia and urophilia, is the result of a historically specific suppression. The anal desire displayed by every child reveals a potential for pleasure that is latent in every adult, and reflects (in the development of the individual) an atavistic erotic expression of the species, which has been progressively more negated over the millennia, and particularly in the last few centuries of capitalism.
The demand for the restoration of anal pleasure is one of the basic elements in the critique made by the gay movement of the hypostatising of the heterosexual-genital status quo by the dominant ideology. As the French gay liberationists expressed it:
We have to ask the bourgeoisie: What is your relationship with your asshole, apart from having to use it to shit with? Is it part of your body, your speech, your senses, in the same way as your mouth or ears? And if you’ve decided that the only purpose of the anus is to defecate, then why do you use your mouth for other things besides eating?77
In his essay on anal eroticism, Freud shed light on the causal relationship between the unconscious fixation of repressed anal eroticism and certain expressions of character, such an obsessional and sometimes manic attachment to orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy. In concluding his analysis, he added:
If there is any basis in fact for the relation posited here between anal eroticism and this triad of character-traits, one may expect to find no very marked degree of ‘anal character’ in people who have retained the anal zone’s erotogenic character in adult life, as happens, for instance, with certain homosexuals. Unless I am much mistaken, the evidence of experience tallies well on the whole with this inference.78
In my own experience, it is indeed rare to meet gay men who enjoy being fucked and are at the same time obsessively orderly, stingy and stubborn. But that is not the point.
The point is, that if you get fucked, if you know what tremendous enjoyment is to be had from anal sex, then you necessarily become different from the ‘normal’ run of people with a frigid ass. You know yourself more deeply. How right De Sade was in writing:
Ah, did you but know how delicate is one’s enjoyment when a heavy prick fills the behind, when, driven to the balls, it flutters there, palpitating, and, then, withdrawn to the foreskin, it hesitates, and returns, plunges in again, up to the hair! No, no, in the wide world there is no pleasure to rival this one: it is the delight of philosophers, that of heroes, it would be that of the gods were not the parts used in his [sic] divine conjugation the only gods we on earth should reverence!79
Of all the aspects of homosexuality, I would say that the one feared above all by heterosexual men is anal intercourse. This is undoubtedly due not just to the repression of their anal desire, but also to their fear of castration – in essence, the fear of falling off the masculine pedestal into the ‘female’ role. The fear of castration, in every male, is the counterpart of his phallic conception of sexuality as erection. Any male heterosexual goes wild at the idea of ‘not being able to get it up’. If he can’t, his virility goes up in smoke, and so he is deeply worried about this eventuality, as repression has made him identify with the virile model, making him into a wretched guardian of the heterosexual order. The man fears losing his virility because, more than anything else, he fears losing his identity: and he knows very well that behind the boastful facade, this virile identity is fragile indeed, just as the equilibrium in which he balances between rigid phallicism and fear of castration is decidedly unstable.
The absolute male, insofar as he is a mutilated being, is exclusively ‘active’. And any heterosexual man, who prides himself on identifying absolutely with the male, considers the ‘passive role’ as shameful, abject and ‘effeminate’. For people of this kind, to be fucked means to ‘be ruined’. But if we remove the negative connotation of being ‘taken from behind’, so typically and neurotically masculine, then being fucked can be seen as the great pleasure that it is, a meeting and fusion of bodies, a gay entertainment, delicious both in the ass itself and in the mind. As a general rule, the more fear a man has of being fucked, the more he himself fucks badly, with scant consideration for the other person, who is reduced to a mere hole, a receptacle for his blind phallic egoism. Someone who likes being fucked, on the other hand, will himself know how to fuck ‘artfully’. He knows how to give pleasure, as he knows how to receive it, and he unblocks the restricted fixation of stereotyped roles. To fuck then truly does become a relation of reciprocity, an intersubjective act.
The psychoanalytic conception of the sexual ‘object’ derives from the male heterosexual’s sadly crippled view of sexual intercourse. And if Rank indicated the origin of neurosis in the condition of the foetus in the maternal womb, we would go even further, and see in heterosexual coitus itself, from which life proceeds and specifically in the male supremacist and neurotic manner in which this is generally conducted, one of the primary causes of the universal neurosis that afflicts our species.
Heterosexual males also fear the excremental aura of anal intercourse. ‘But Love has pitched its mansion in / The place of excrement’ (Yeats).80 We gays know this very well, and our condition is most close to the joyous redemption of shit – if we have not already attained this. Even as far as shit is concerned, too, the repressive disgust conceals a rich enjoyment.
Many of the pejorative expressions used by straight people to put down homosexuals refer to the anal erogenous zone. In his essay on the use of obscene language by militants of the (former) extra-parliamentary left, Mauro Bertocchi emphasises how, in the use of such vocabulary:
The terms selected generally display a strong inhibition or obstacle, and certain recurrent identifications can be observed. The sexual organs, both male and female, are synonymous with stupidity, intellectual and political inadequacy [e.g. ‘cunt’ or ‘prick’ in the English equivalent], with bad actions, politically ‘incorrect’ practices, anger and bad temper (e.g. ‘cock-up’, ‘balls-up’ or to ‘fuck something up’). Impotence and the passive sexual condition, e.g. passive homosexuality, on the other hand, are synonymous with bad luck, disability or being cheated, swindled or damaged by one’s own incapacity (e.g. ‘to be buggered’, or expressions such as ‘get stuffed’, ‘asshole’, ‘up yours’, etc). Active homosexuality, on the other hand, is the symbol of shrewd ability, in the same way as heterosexual activity (e.g. to ‘bugger’ someone, ‘fuck someone up’, etc).’81
Active homosexuality, then, is seen in the perspective of the ‘double male’. All the expressions that Bertocchi discusses derive from attitudes of aggression and disdain towards women and queens. But we know very well that verbal – and not only verbal – violence and disrespect represent the extraversion under a negative sign of a repressed and unconscious desire. (But unconscious up to what point?) Freud stressed that: ‘An invitation to a caress of the anal zone is still used today, as it was in ancient times, to express defiance or defiant sco
rn, and thus in reality signifies an act of tenderness that has been overtaken by repression’.82
The presence of anal and scatological desires, in other words, is discovered by analysis of the terms involved in their negation: shit!
Bertocchi sees it as important to establish the significance assumed by the use of such expressions in the very complex discourse constructed by so-called revolutionary groups:
What does a sentence like the following really mean: ‘Comrades, it’s no fucking good going ahead with these four shitty queers, we’ll only end up getting buggered’? The meaning is clearly contradictory and shows two different levels, one dominant and the other subordinate, one strictly political and ideological, the other sexually abusive, referring to male and female erogenous zones and degrading them into mere organs and orifices, and referring to basic functions (ejaculation, excretion) to give them connotations of disgust, satisfaction and aggression.83
But what I see as still more interesting is that these expressions ultimately communicate, beneath the male supremacist and violent attitude, a latent desire that is homosexual, anal and scatological. Anyone who is subject to the suppression of homoeroticism, femininity, anality and coprophilia that is perpetrated by the dominant subculture, finds himself forced to express and thus communicate his own unconscious and forbidden desires, which are inherent to the sphere of Eros, by way of ‘signifiers’ which, in the appearance and meaning given them by consciousness, express their rejection, negation and condemnation. In this case, as in so many others, psychoanalysis furnishes revolutionary criticism with the instruments needed to fill the gap between phenomenal appearance and reality: and we know that, from a Marxist position, ‘science’ is distinguished precisely by this capacity to descend from the appearance of phenomena to their intrinsic reality.
In our case, the question is to individuate the homosexual, transsexual, anal and scatological desire that lies behind the bombastic surface of these anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-coprophile pornographic expressions. Once again, Bertocchi notes:
Busone [bugger], frocio [queer], culattone [bum-boy] are among the most common and widely used insults. On the other hand, the erotic fixation on the genitals, and above all on the phallus, gives rise to such frequent expressions as che sborrata! [lit. what a cumshot!], signifying political success, enthusiasm, self-assertion, in the conception that equates male genital orgasm with total success.84
Mauro Bertocchi also underlines the close affinity between the abusive sexual vocabulary used by the left, and the traditional anti-woman and anti-gay language of fascism.
We must finally turn to investigate the relations between the capitalist sublimation of anality in money (‘pecunia olet’, Ferenczi recalls)85 and the repression of homosexuality.
Norman O. Brown detects in Luther the emblematic connection between anality and capitalist rationality, insofar as his historical figure, in addition to his thought (so rich in explicit anal references) and indeed the whole complex process of the Reformation, reflect the rise of the mercantile bourgeoisie in fifteenth century Europe.86
San Francisco’s Museum of Erotic Art holds a caricature of Martin Luther dating from the time of the Counter-Reformation, which depicts him with a tiny homosexual companion, bent on anal sex, right in the middle of his head: unknowingly, by way of the petty vulgarity of this ‘slander’, Catholic propaganda against Luther clearly underlines the central place occupied by anality (and homosexuality?) in the thought of the reformist monk.
For Luther, this Earth is dominated by the Devil: Satan’s anus is enthroned at the centre of the world, filling it with excrement and farts (all those sinners, popes, usury, hypocrites dedicated to ‘good works’, etc.). Luther clearly bases his own negative and disdainful notion of the Devil (whom he may have had the occasion to meet personally) on the repressed problematic of scatological (as well as homosexual) desire. And yet, as he himself admits, the fundamental assumption of the Protestant religion (the doctrine of justification by way of faith) came to his mind ‘on the privy in the tower’.87 Norman O. Brown carefully emphasizes the non-causality of this excremental site: ‘Psychoanalysis, alas! cannot agree that it is of no significance that the religious experience which inaugurated Protestant theology took place in the privy.’88 Martin Luther probably did not acknowledge that the innovatory religious discovery destined to immortalise him came to him from the Devil: it was Satan who suggested it to him while he was sitting on his own throne.
When he encountered the Devil, Luther’s response was to treat him aggressively (and to fart in his face), and to order him, blinded with hate, to ‘“lick (or kiss) my posteriors” or to “defecate in his pants and hang them round his neck”, and threats to “defecate in his face” or to “throw him into my anus, where he belongs”’.89 These insults to the Devil, like those of heterosexual males who insult us gays, display in the very insult their repressed desire. It is not hard to understand how in reality their injunctions, threats and injuries, the coprolalia to which they give vent, express a homosexual-coprophilic wish distorted by repression and yet communicated under the blind and negative sign of aggression.
It is clear that the Devil (or whoever) could not refrain from torturing Luther night and day; Satan indeed goads and torments those who, in treating him ill, attack only themselves, ranting against their own deep desire. As Freud put it, ‘the devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life’.90 According to Baudelaire, however, ‘the finest trick of the Devil is to persuade people that he does not exist’. Freud’s opinion would thus itself be Satanic to the core.
In any case, it is precisely the repression of the instincts, the rejection of (homo)sexuality and anality, that made Luther the enemy of Satan. And this is in spite of the fact that he knew full well how he was carnally governed by the Devil as lord of this earthly life, this perverse world in which the reformer demanded chastisements greater than those that had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. The contradiction of Lutheranism (‘the devil possesses me, but I oppose his rule with all my strength’) finds an escape route in the religious hope of a second coming of the redeeming Christ. So it is that God and the Devil come to be opposed, casting a light on those who – like us – do not know ‘if God is the devil or the devil God’.91
Above all else, Luther had to oppose God to the devil so as not to fall into the shit and the Satanic embrace, he had to be able to find a means of pure, spiritual fideistic escape that would bear him suspended through the air. His religion had necessarily to take a form that, well aware of being strictly chained to money, to ‘things’, and to the Earth (while unaware that money in fact just tied it to shit), elaborated a ‘spiritual’ ideological compromise – a historic compromise – that elevated him, in appearance, above the shit fetish into which the Earth was transforming. The capitalist world is not shit, and it is not the paradise of the coprophiles whom it indeed represses; it is rather the monstrous shit fetish. And when someone says, ‘these goods are shit, this pâté is shitty’, he fails to realize that shit isn’t as disgusting as a lot of canned goods, and that there is also a part of faeces, its delicious and exquisite core, that is comparable only to the most costly pâté de foie gras. In 1872, Rimbaud wrote to Verlaine:
Work is further from me than my fingernail is from my eye. Shit for me! Shit for me! Shit for me! Shit for me? Shit for me! Shit for me! Shit for me! Shit for me! […] Only when you see me positively eating shit will you no longer find that I’m too expensive to feed!92
The distorted scatological notion of the Devil thus led Luther to found the specific religion of capitalism (the real domination of capital subsequently leads to an entente cordiale between Catholics and Protestants), of the universe of usurers and money traders that he saw as the real emanation of the Devil. For our monk, in fact, the world of the mercantile bourgeoisie was the realm of Satan; and yet, this was truly the world that had adhered to the Reformation and made it its own. ‘To see th
e Devil as lord of this world is to see the world as a manure heap, to see universal filth: “Scatet totus orbis,” says Luther. The avarice of Leipzig is the Devil’s work and by the same “filthy”.’93
Erich Fromm, Brown adds,
in one of his real contributions to psychoanalytical theory, showed the connection between Freud’s anal character – with its orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy – and the sociological type of the capitalist as delineated by Sombart and Max Weber. And Weber, of course, followed by Troeltsch, Tawney, and others, postulated a farreaching connection between the capitalist spirit and the ethic of Protestantism.94
Psychoanalysis has repeatedly recognised the connection between money and shit. In Freud’s words, ‘the connections between the complexes of interest in money and of defaecation, which seem so dissimilar, appear to be the most extensive of all’.95 The Lumf (turd) complex96 scatologically determines people’s attachment to money: ‘What the psychoanalytical paradox is asserting is that “things” which are possessed and accumulated, property and the universal precipitate of property, money, are in their essential nature excremental’.97 Many cults and myths of antiquity, and several superstitions today, explicitly place money in a very close relation with the products of excretion. The phylogenic origin of the symbol, in fact, is frequently intuited, and at times it can be discerned by ontogenic study. Ferenczi attributed to psychoanalysis ‘the task of separately investigating the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of symbolism, and then establishing their mutual relation’.98 Psychoanalysis recognises that,