4: The Body, or the Mass Grave of Signs

A Sex is a mass grave of Signs
The Sign is a disembodied Sex

The Marked Body

The entire contemporary history of the body is the history of its demarcation, the network of marks and signs that have since covered it, divided it up, annihilated its difference and its radical ambivalence in order to organise it into a structural material for sign-exchange, equal to the sphere of objects, to resolve its playful virtuality and its symbolic exchange (not to be confused with sexuality) into sexuality taken as a determining agency, a phallic agency entirely organised around the fetishisation of the phallus as the general equivalent. In this sense, the body is, under the sign of sexuality as it is currently understood, that is, under the sign of its `liberation', caught up in a process whose functioning and strategy themselves derive from political economics.

Fashion, advertising, nude-look, nude theatre, strip-tease: the play-script of erection and castration is everywhere. It has an absolute variety and an absolute monotony. Ankle boots and thigh boots, a short coat under a long coat, over the elbow gloves and stocking-tops on the thigh, hair over the eyes or the stripper's G-string, but also bracelets, necklaces, rings, belts, jewels and chains -- the scenario is the same everywhere: a mark that takes on the force of a sign and thereby even a perverse erotic function, a boundary to figure castration which parodies castration as the symbolic articulation of lack, under the structural form of a bar articulating two full terms (which then on either side play the part of the signifier and the signified in the classical economy of the sign). The bar makes a zone of the body work as its corresponding terms here. This is not an erogenous zone at all, but an erotic, eroticised zone, a fragment erected into the phallic signifier of a sexuality that has become a pure and simple concept, a pure and simple signified.

In this fundamental schema, analogous to that of the linguistic sign, castration is signified (it passes into the state of a sign) and therefore subject to misrecognition [méconnaissance]. The nude and the not-nude play in a structural opposition and thus contribute to the designation of the
[p. 102]
fetish. The image of the stocking top on the thigh derives its erotic potential not from the proximity of the real genital and its positive promise (from this naïve functionalist perspective, the naked thigh would have to play the same role), but from the apprehension surrounding the genitals (the panic of recognising castration) being arrested in a staged castration. The innocuous mark, the line of the stocking above which, instead of lack, ambivalence and the chasm, there is nothing more than a sexual plenitude. The naked thigh and, metonymically, the entire body has become a phallic effigy by means of this caesura, a fetishistic object to be contemplated and manipulated, deprived of all its menace. [50] As in fetishism, desire can then be fulfilled at the cost of warding off castration and the death drive.

Eroticisation always consists in the erectility of a fragment of the barred body, in a phallic phantasmatisation of everything beyond the bar in the position of the signifier and the simultaneous reduction of sexuality to the rank of the signified (represented value). A reassuring structural conjuring operation enables the subject to be recovered as phallus, to identify himself with and reappropriate this fragment of the body, or the entire positivised, fetishised body in the fulfilment of a desire that will for ever misconstrue his proper loss.

We can read this operation in the slightest detail. The tight-fitting bracelet round the arm or the ankle, the belt, the necklace and the ring establish the foot, the waist, the neck or the finger as erectile parts. Ultimately there is no further need for a mark or a visible sign: stripped of signs, it is nevertheless on the basis of a phantasmatic separation, thus tricking and eluding castration, that the body's eroticity functions exclusively in nudity. Even if the body is not structuralised by some mark (a jewel, some make-up or a wound can all work to this end), even if it is not fragmented, the bar is always there as the clothes come off, signalling the emergence of the body as phallus, even if, or, rather, especially if, it is a woman's body: this is the whole art of strip-tease, which we will come back to later.

We should reinterpret so-called Freudian `symbolism' in this sense. It is not by virtue of their protuberant form that the foot, finger, nose or some other part of the body may act as metaphors for the penis (in accordance with a schema of analogy between these diverse signifiers and the real penis): rather, their phallic value rests solely on the basis of phantasmatic cut that erects them (the `castrated' penis is a penis because it is castrated). Full, phallicised terms marked out by the bar that makes them autonomous. Everything beyond this bar is the phallus, everything is resolved into a phallic equivalent, even the female genitals, or any gaping organ or object traditionally listed as a symbol of the `feminine'. The body is not arranged into masculine or feminine symbols: at a much deeper level, it is the site of the drama and the denial of castration, illustrated by the Chinese custom (cited by Freud in `Fetishism' [in Standard Edition, ed. and tr. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 21, 1961]) where, beginning by mutilating a woman's foot, they
[p. 103]
then venerate the mutilated foot as a fetish. The entire body is susceptible to innumerable forms of marking and mutilation, [51] followed by phallic veneration (erotic exaltation). This, rather than the anamorphosis of the genital organs, is where the body's secret lies.

In this way, rouged lips are phallic (face paint and make-up are pre-eminent in the arsenal of the body's structural enhancement).

A made-up mouth no longer speaks, its beatified lips, half open, half closed, are no longer used for speaking, eating, vomiting or kissing. Beyond these always ambivalent exchange functions -- introjection and rejection -- and on the basis of their denegation, the perverse erotic and cultural function is established. This fascinating mouth, like an artificial sign, like cultural labour, the game and the rules of the game, neither speaks nor eats, and no-one kisses it. The painted mouth, objectified like a jewel, derives its intense erotic value not, as one might imagine, from accentuating its role as an erotogenic orifice, but conversely from its closure -- paint being as it were the trace of the phallic, the mark that institutes its phallic exchange-value: an erectile mouth, a sexual tumescence whereby woman becomes erect and man's desire will be received in its own image. [52]

Mediated by this structural labour, desire, implacable as it is when it is based on loss, on the void between one and the other, becomes negotiable in terms of signs and exchanged phallic values, indexed on a general phallic equivalent where each party operates in accordance with a contract and converts its own enjoyment into cash in terms of a phallic accumulation: a perfect situation for a political economy of desire.

The same holds true for the gaze. The strand of hair falling over the eye (and every other ocular erotic artifact) implements the denegation of the gaze as the unending dimension of castration and, at the same time, as an amorous offering. When the eyes are metamorphosed by make-up, there is an ecstatic reduction of the threat and the gaze of the other where the subject may be reflected in his proper lack, but where he may also be vertiginously eliminated if these eyes open on him. These sophisticated eyes, these Medusa's [53] eyes, gaze at nobody, they don't open onto anything. Caught in the labour of the sign, they possess the sign's redundancy: they revel in their own fascination, and their seduction derives from this perverse onanism.

We could go on: what is true of these privileged sites of symbolic exchange (the mouth and the gaze) is also true of any part of the body whatever when it is caught in the process of erotic signification. But the most beautiful object, which always epitomises this mise-en-scène and seems to be the key to the vault of the political economy of the body, is the female body. The female body unveiled in the thousand variants of eroticism is obviously the emergence of the phallus, the fetish-object, an immense labour of phallic simulation at the same time as the endlessly repeated spectacle of castration. With the immense diffusion of images in
[p. 104]
the meticulous ritual of the strip-tease, the smooth and faultless potency [puissance] of the exhibited female body always functions as a phallic display, a potency medusified, paralysed, by a relentless phallic demand (hence the profound imaginary affinity between the escalation of the erotic and productivist growth).

The erotic privilege of the female body works for women just as much as for men. In fact, a single perverse structure works for everyone: centred on the denial of castration, it works with the female body as with the immanence of castration. [54] Thus the logical progression of the system (here once again homologous to political economy) leads to an erotic recrudescence of the female body because it best lends itself to phallic general equivalence, being deprived of a penis. The male body is not subject to the same erotic return (far from it) because it permits neither the fascinating reminder of castration, nor the spectacle of constantly overcoming it. It can never really become a smooth, closed and perfect object since it is stamped with the `true' mark (the one the general system valorises) and in consequence is less susceptible to demarcation, to this long task of phallic formation. Of course, it is by no means certain that one day it too may be actualised as a phallic variation. We are approaching a new order where there is no erectile advertising nor any erectile nudity: it is at this cost that there can be a controlled transfer of erectility across the entire spectrum of objects, including the female body. At the limit, the erection itself is not incompatible with the system. [55]

We must see how, in woman's erotic `privilege', historical and social subjection operate. Not by some mechanism of `alienation' like a double of social alienation, but by trying to see if the same process of misrecognition [méconnaissance] works towards all political discrimination as towards sexual difference in fetishism, resulting in a fetishism of class or of the dominated group, along with a sexual overvaluation so as to better stave off the crucial examination that it conducts of the order of power. If such reflections are accurate then all signifying material of the erotic order is made up of nothing but the outfits of slaves (chains, collars, whips, etc.), savages (negritude, bronzed skin, nudity, tattooing) and all the signs of the dominated classes and races. This is how it is for the woman in her body, annexed to a phallic order which, when expressed in political terms, condemns her to a non-existence. [56]

Secondary Nudity

Any body or part of the body can operate functionally in the same way, provided that it is subject to the same erotic discipline: it is necessary and sufficient that it be as closed and as smooth as possible, faultless, without orifice and `lacking' nothing, every erogenous difference being conjured up by the structural bar that will design(ate) this body (in the double sense of `designate' and `design'), visible in clothing, jewellery or make-up, invisible
[p. 105]
but always present in complete nudity, since it then envelops the body like a second skin.

The ubiquity of phrases such as `almost naked', `naked without being naked, as if you were naked' and the tights in which `you are more naked than is natural' in the discourse of advertising is characteristic of this. This is all in order to reconcile the naturalist ideal of living `in touch with' your body with the commercial imperative of surplus-value. It is much more interesting, however, to note that in this discourse nudity is defined as secondary nudity, the nudity of tights X or Y, of the veil so transparent that `their transparency even affects you'. Moreover, this nudity is very often relayed by the mirror -- in any case, it is in this reduplication that the woman is united with `the body of her dreams: her own'. And for once the advertising myth is absolutely right: there is no nudity other than that which is reduplicated in signs, which envelops itself in its signified truth and reconstructs, like a mirror, the fundamental rule of the body as erotic matter, the nudity of becoming, in order to be phallically celebrated, the diaphanous, smooth, depilated substance of a glorious and unsexed body.

The James Bond film Goldfinger provides a perfect example of this. In it, a woman is painted in gold, all her orifices are blocked up in a radical make-up, making her body a flawless phallus (that the make-up should be gold only emphasises the homology with political economy), which of course amounts to death. The nude gold-varnished play girl will die by having incarnated to an absurd extent the phantasm of the erotic, but this is the case for every skin in functional aesthetics, in the mass culture of the body. `Body hugging' tights, girdles, stockings, gloves, dresses and clothes, not to mention sun-tans: the leitmotiv of the `second skin' and the transparent pellicle always come to vitrify the body.

The skin itself is defined not as `nudity' but as an erogenous zone, a sensuous medium of contact and exchange, a metabolism of absorption and excretion. The body does not stop at this porous skin, full of holes and orifices; only metaphysics institutes it as the borderline of the body. This body is denied in the interests of a second, non-porous skin that neither exudes nor excretes, [57] that is, neither hot nor cold (it is `cool' and `warm': optimally air-conditioned), with no proper density (a clear or, in French, `transparent' complexion), and above all without orifices (it is smooth). As functional as a cellophane wrapper. All these qualities (coolness, suppleness, transparency, one-piece) are qualities of closure, a zero degree resulting from the denegation of ambivalent extremes. The same goes for the `youth' of the body, which will neutralise the old--young paradigm in an eternal youth of simulation.

The vitrification of nudity is related to the obsessional function of the protective wax or plastic coating of objects and the labour of scrubbing and cleaning intended to keep them in a constant state of propriety, of flawless abstraction. In both cases, vitrification and protection, it is a matter of blocking secretions (patina, oxidisation, dust), preventing them from collapsing and maintaining them in a sort of abstract immortality.
[p. 106]

`Design(at)ed' nudity implies that there is nothing behind the lattice of signs that it weaves, especially not a body: neither a body of labour, nor a body of pleasure; neither an erogenous body nor a broken body. It formally exceeds all that in a simulacrum of the pacified body, just like Brigitte Bardot, who is `beautiful because she fits her dress exactly' -- a functional equation without any unknown factors. As opposed to the rent skin and torn muscles of the anatomical body, the modern body comes much more under the heading of the inflatable, a theme illustrated by a cartoon strip in Lui where we see a stripper, her clothes scattered on the floor around her, making one final gesture: she `uncorks' her navel and deflates immediately, leaving only a small heap of skin on the stage.

A utopia of nudity, of the body present in its truth: this is at most the ideology of the body that can be represented. The Indian (I no longer know which one) said: `The naked body is an expressionless mask hiding each of our true natures.' By this he meant that the body only has meaning when it is marked, covered in inscriptions. Alphonse Allais' Rajah, a fanatic for denotation and truth, translated this contrariwise: not content to have made the dancing girl undress, he flays her alive.

The body is not at all the surface of being, a virginal beach without tracks, nature. It has only taken on this `original' value through repression: and so, to liberate the body as such in accordance with naturalist illusions is to liberate it as repressed. Even in nudity, the body turns back on itself, shrouding itself with an ethereal and ineluctable censorship: the second skin. For the skin, like every sign that takes on the value of a sign, is doubled through signification: it is always already the second skin, not the final skin, but always the only one.

In the redundancy of the nudity-sign, which works towards a reconstruction of the body as a phantasm of totalisation, we again find the infinite speculation of the conscious subject through its mirror-image, capturing and bringing a formal resolution to the insurmountable division of the subject in this reduplication. The signs inscribed on the body, where the death drive is also tangentially inscribed, merely repeat the metaphysical operations of the conscious subject on corporeal material. `By beating our skins we beat metaphysics back into our brains', as Artaud said.

Closure of the mirror, phallic reduplication of the mark: in both cases the subject is seduced by itself. It seduces its own desire and conjures it up in its own body, doubled in signs. Behind the exchange of signs, behind the labour of the code which functions as a fortification of the phallic, the subject can hide away and recover its strength: shying away from the desire of the other (from its own lack), and, as it were, to see (to see oneself) without being seen. The logic of the sign meets the logic of perversion.

It is important here to make a radical distinction between the labour of inscription and the mark at the level of the body in `primitive' societies and that which takes place in our current system. They are too easily mixed up in the category of the `symbolic expression' of the body. As if the body had
[p. 107]
always been what it is, as if archaic tattooing had the same meaning as make-up, as if, beyond all the revolutions of the mode of production, there existed an unexchanged mode of signification at the basis of every age extending even into the sphere of political economy. In archaic society, as opposed to our own, where signs are exchanged under the regime of the general equivalent, where they have an exchange-value in a system of phallic abstraction and of the imaginary saturation of the subject, marking the body as a masking practice, all have the function of immediately actualising symbolic exchange, gift-exchange with the gods or within the group. Here, negotiation is not a negotiation of identity by the subject behind the mask, nor the manipulation of the sign: on the contrary, it consumes the subject's identity and, like the subject, enters the game of possession and dispossession, the entire body becoming, just like gods and women, material for symbolic exchange. Finally, within this standard schema of signification, our transcendental Signifier/Signified, our Phallus/ Subjectivity, which governs our entire political economy of the body, has not yet emerged. When the Indian (perhaps the same one) says `everything is a face to me', in response to the white man's questions as to why he is naked, he is saying that his entire body (which, as we have seen is never nude) is given over to symbolic exchange, while for us, nudity has a tendency to be reduced to a single face and a single look. For the Indian, bodies gaze at each other and exchange all their signs. These signs are consumed in an incessant relaying and refer neither to a transcendental law of value, nor to a private appropriation of the subject. For us, the body is sealed in signs, increasing its value through a calculus of signs that it exchanges under the law of equivalence and the reproduction of the subject. The subject is no longer eliminated in the exchange, it speculates. The subject, not the savage, is enmeshed in fetishism: through the investment [faire-valoir] of its body, it is the subject that is fetishised by the law of value.

Strip-tease

Bernardin (manager of the Crazy Horse Saloon):

You neither strip nor tease ... you parody ... I am a hoaxer: you give the impression of giving the naked truth, there could not be a greater hoax.

This is the opposite of life, because when she is nude, she has many more adornments than when she is dressed. Bodies are made up with extremely beautiful special foundations, leaving the skin satin smooth ... She has gloves that cut off on her arms, which is always so beautiful, green, red or black stockings on her legs, also cut off at the thigh ....

Dream strip-tease: the space-woman. She was dancing in the void. Because the more slowly a woman dies, the more erotic it is. So I believe that this would reach its apex with a woman in a state of weightlessness.

Beach nudity has nothing to do with stage nudity. On stage the women are goddesses, they are untouchable .... The wave of nudity sweeping through the
[p. 108]
theatre and elsewhere is superficial, it is limited to a mental act: I am going to take my clothes off, I am going to show nude actors and actresses. Precisely these limits make it uninteresting. Other people present reality: here, I am only suggesting the impossible.

The reality of sex which is flaunted everywhere, diminishes the subjectivity of eroticism.

Iridescent under intense lights, embellished by a voluminous orange wig, the whole thing set off with jewels, Usha Barock, an Austrian-Polish half-caste, will continue the tradition of the Crazy Horse: creating what you cannot hold in your arms.

The strip-tease is a dance, perhaps the only one, and definitely the most original in the contemporary Western world. Its secret is a woman's autoerotic celebration of her own body, which becomes desirable in exact proportion to the intensity of this celebration. Without this narcissistic mirage that is the substance of every gesture, without this gestural repertoire of caresses that come to envelop the body, making it into an emblem as a phallic object, there would be no erotic effect. A sublime masturbation whose slow pace, as Bernardin said, is fundamental. This slow pace marks the fact that the gestures with which the girl covers herself (stripping, caressing, even as far as mimicking orgasm [jouissance]), come from `the other'. Her gestures weave a phantom sexual partner around her. By the same token, however, the other is excluded, since she replaces it and appropriates its gestures for herself following a work of condensation which is not in fact far removed from dream-processes. The whole erotic secret (and labour) of the strip lies in this evocation and revocation of the other, through gestures so slow as to be poetic, as is slow motion film of explosions or falls, because something in this, before being completed, has time to pass you by, which, if such a thing exists, constitutes the perfection of desire. [58]

The only good strip is the one that reflects the body in the mirror of gestures and follows this rigorous narcissistic abstraction: the gestural repertoire being the mobile equivalent of the panoply of signs and marks at work in situations such as erectile stagings of the body at every level of fashion, make-up and advertising. [59] The bad strip is obviously a pure undressing, which simply restores a state of nudity, the alleged finality of the spectacle, lacking any hypnosis of the body, in order to give it directly over to the audience's lusts. It is not that the bad strip is unable to capture the audience's desire -- on the contrary -- but because the girl was unable to recreate her body as an object for herself, because she was unable to effect this transubstantiation of profane (realist, naturalist) nudity into sacred nudity, where a body describes its own contours, feels itself (but always across a kind of subtle void, a sensual distance, of a circumlocution which, once again, as in the dream, reflects the fact that gestures are like a mirror, that the body is turned back on itself by this mirror of gestures).

The bad strip is threatened by nudity or immobility (or the absence of `rhythm', the awkward gesture): all that remains on the stage is a woman and an `obscene' (in the strict sense of the term) body, rather than the
[p. 109]
closed sphere of a body which, by means of this aura of gestures, design(ate)s itself as a phallus and specifies itself as a sign of desire. To succeed is not at all to `make love with the audience' as is generally thought, it is rather precisely the opposite. The stripper is a goddess according to Bernardin, and the prohibition cast over her, which she traces around herself, does not signify that you cannot take anything from her (cannot pass into sexual acting-out, this repressive situation belongs to the bad strip), but rather that you cannot give her anything, because she gives herself everything, hence the complete transcendence that makes her fascinating.

The slow pace of the gestures comes from the priesthood and from transubstantiation. Not bread and wine in this case, but the transubstantiation of the body into the phallus. Every piece of clothing that falls brings her no closer to nudity, to the naked `truth' of sex (although the entire spectacle is also fuelled by the voyeuristic drive, haunted by a violent laying bare and the rape-drive, but these phantasms run counter to the spectacle). As her clothes fall, she design(ate)s what she strips down as a phallus -- she unveils herself-as-other and the same game becomes profound, the body emerging more and more as a phallic effigy to the rhythm of the strip. This is not then a game of stripping signs away in order to reveal a sexual `depth', but, on the contrary, an ascending play of the construction of signs -- each mark deriving an erotic force by means of its labour as a sign, that is, by means of the reversal it effects of what has never been (loss and castration) into what it design(ate)s instead to take its place: the phallus. [60] This is why the strip-tease is slow: it ought to go as fast as possible if it is simply a matter of preparing for sex. It is slow because it is discourse, the construction of signs, the meticulous elaboration of deferred meaning. The gaze too testifies to this phallic transfiguration. A fixed gaze is an essential asset of the good stripper. This is commonly interpreted as a distantiation technique, a coolness intended to mark the limits of this erotic situation. Yes and no: the fixed gaze that merely marks a prohibition would once more turn the strip into a kind of repressive pornodrama. That is not a good strip, the mastery of the gaze has nothing to do with a willed `cool': if it is cool, as with mannequins, it is on condition that cool is redefined as a very specific quality of the whole contemporary media and body culture, and no longer belongs to the order of the hot and the cold. This gaze is the neutralised gaze of auto-erotic fascination, of the woman-object gazing at herself with her eyes wide open, then closing her eyes on herself. This is not the effect of desire undergoing censorship, it is the peak of perfection and perversion. It is the fulfilment of the entire sexual system that has it that a woman is never more completely herself, and therefore never so seductive, as when she accepts giving herself pleasure first of all, taking pleasure in herself, having no other desire or transcendence than that of her own image.

The ideal body, as outlined in this statute, is that of the mannequin. The mannequin offers the model of every phallic instrumentalisation of the
[p. 110]
body. The word itself states this: manne-ken, `little man', the child or the penis. The woman wraps her own body in a sophisticated manipulation, a flawless and intense narcissistic discipline, which effectively makes it the paradigm of seduction. And doubtless it is here, in this perverse process that turns her and her sacralised body into a living phallus, that we find the real castration of woman (also of man, but according to a model which tends to crystallise around the woman). To be castrated is to be covered with phallic substitutes. The woman is covered in them, she is summoned to produce a phallus from her body, on pain of perhaps not being desirable. And if women are not fetishists it is because they perform this labour of continual fetishisation on themselves, they become dolls. We know that the doll is a fetish produced in order to be continually dressed and undressed, dressed up and dressed down. It is this play of covering and uncovering that gives the doll its childhood symbolic value, it is in this play, conversely, that every object-- and symbolic relation regresses when the woman turns herself into a doll, becomes her own fetish and the fetish of the other. [61] As Freud says: 'pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallise the last moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic (`Fetishism', in Standard Edition, Vol. 21, p. 155).

Thus the fascination of the strip-tease as a spectacle of castration derives from the immanence of discovering, or rather seeking and never managing to discover, or better still searching by all available means without ever discovering, that there is nothing there. `An aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female genitals remains a stigma indelibile of the repression that has taken place' (ibid., p. 154). The experience of this unthinkable absence, which subsequently remains constitutive of every `revelation', every `unveiling' (and in particular the sexual status of `truth'), the obsession with the hole is changed into the converse fascination with the phallus. From this mystery of the denied, barred, gaping void, a whole population of fetishes surges forth (objects, phantasms, body-objects). The fetishised woman's body itself comes to bar the point of absence from which it arose, it comes to bar this vertigo in all its erotic presence, a `token of a triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it' (ibid., p. 154).

There is nothing behind this succession of veils, there never has been, and the impulse which is always pressing forward in order to discover this is strictly speaking the process of castration; not the recognition of lack, but the fascinating vertigo of this nihilating substance. The entire march of the West, ending in a vertiginous compulsion for realism, is affected by this myopia of castration. Pretending to restore the `ground of things', we unconsciously `eye up' the void. Instead of a recognition of castration, we establish all kinds of phallic alibis; then, following a fascinated compulsion, we seek to dismiss these alibis one by one in order to uncover the `truth', which is always castration, but which is in the last instance always revealed to be castration denied.
[p. 111]

Planned Narcissism

All this leads us to repeat the question of narcissism in terms of social control. There is a passage in Freud that brings out everything we have been discussing up to this point:

Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed on them in their choice of object. Strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to that of the man's love for them. Nor does their need lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved; and the man who fulfils this condition is the one who finds favour with them.... Such women have the greatest fascination for men, not only for aesthetic reasons, since as a rule they are the most beautiful, but also because of a combination of interesting psychological factors. (`On narcissism: An introduction', in Standard Edition, Vol. 14, 1957, pp. 88-9)

There follows a question `of children, cats, and certain animals' which `we env[y] ... for maintaining ... an unassailable libidinal position', and for the `narcissistic consistency ... they manage' (ibid., p. 89). In the current system of erotics, however, it is not a question of primary narcissism bound to a sort of `polymorphous perversity'. It is rather a matter of the displacement of `[the narcissism] enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego [onto] the ego-ideal', or, more precisely, the projection of the `narcissistic perfection of ... childhood' (ibid., p. 94) as the ideal ego which, as we know, is bound up with repression and sublimation. The gratification the woman takes from her body and the rhetoric of beauty reflect, in fact, a fierce discipline, an ethics which parallels the one that governs the economic order. Neither can one distinguish, in the framework of this functional aesthetics of the body, the process by which the subject submits to its narcissistic ideal ego from that by which society enjoins the subject to conform to this ideal, leaving it no other alternative but to love itself, to invent itself and invest itself in accordance with socially imposed rules. This narcissism is therefore radically distinct from that of the cat or the child in that it is placed under the sign of value. This is a planned narcissism, a managed and functional exaltation of beauty as the exploitation and exchange of signs. Self-seduction is only apparently gratuitous; in fact its every detail is finalised by the norm of the optimal management of the body on the market of signs. Modern erotics, whatever phantasms are in play in it, is organised around a rational economy of value, differentiating it absolutely from primary or infantile narcissism.

Thus fashion and advertising sketch the auto-erotic Carte du Tendre [62] and plan its exploration: you are responsible for your body and must invest in it and make it yield benefits -- not in accordance with the order of enjoyment -- but with the signs reflected and mediated by mass models, and in accordance with an organisation chart of prestige, etc. A strange strategy is operative here; there is a diversion and transfer of investments from the body and the erogenous zones towards staging the body and erotogeneity. From now on, narcissistic seduction becomes associated with
[p. 112]
the body or with parts of the body objectified by a technique, by objects, gestures and a play of marks and signs. This neo-narcissism is associated with the manipulation of the body as value. This is a planned economy of the body based on a schema of libidinal and symbolic destructuration, an administered dismantling and restructuration of investments, a `reappropriation' of the body according to models of management and hence under the control of meaning, transferring the fulfilment of desire onto the code. [63] All this is established as a `synthetic' narcissism which must be distinguished from the two classical forms of narcissism:

1. Primary, fusional narcissism.

2. Secondary narcissism: the investment of the body as distinct, the mirror of the ego. Integration of the ego by specular recognition and the gaze of the other.

3. Tertiary, `synthetic', narcissism: rewriting the body, deconstructed as a `personalised' Eros, that is, indexed on collective functional models. The homogenised body as the site of the industrial production of signs and differences, mobilised under the sign of programmatic seduction. The interception of ambivalence in the interests of a total positivisation of the body as the schema of seduction, satisfaction and prestige. The body as a summation of partial objects, the subject of which is the second person plural of consumption. [64] The interception of the subject's relation to its proper lack in its body, by the body which has itself become the medium of totalisation. This was made admirably apparent in the film Le Mépris, with Brigitte Bardot, examining her own body in a mirror, offering each part of it to the erotic approval of the other, the finished product being a formal addition as object: `So, d'you love every bit of me?' The body becomes a total system of signs arranged by models under the general equivalent of the phallic cult, just as capital becomes the total system of exchange-value under the general equivalent of money.

Incestuous Manipulation

The current `liberation' of the body necessarily undergoes this narcissism. The `liberated' body is a body where law and prohibition, which once used to censor sex and the body from the outside, are somehow interiorised as a narcissistic variable. External constraints have changed into the constituency of the sign, a closed simulation. And if, in the Name-of-the-Father, the puritan law was initially and in a violent manner brought to bear on genital sexuality, the current phase corresponds to a mutation of all these characteristics:

1. It is no longer a violent repression, it has been pacified.

2. It is no longer fundamentally oriented towards genital sexuality, but is subsequently sanctioned by morality. This infinitely more subtle and radical stage of repression and control is oriented towards the level of symbolic exchange itself. That is to say, that repression, overcoming secondary sexuation (genitality and the social bisexual model) reaches
[p. 113]
primary sexuation (erogenous difference and ambivalence, the subject's relation to his own lack on which the virtuality of all symbolic exchange is based). [65]

3. It no longer takes place in the Name-of-the-Father, but in some way in the Name-of-the-Mother. Because symbolic exchange is based on incest prohibition, every abolition (censorship, repression, destructuration) at this level of symbolic exchange signifies a process of incestuous regression. We have seen that the eroticisation of the phallic manipulation of the body is characterised as fetishisation: now, fetishistic perversion is defined by the fact that it has never gotten over the desire for the mother, making the fetish the replacement for what the fetishist lacked. All the labour of the perverse subject consists in settling into the mirage of himself as the living phallus of the mother so as to find a fulfilment of desire there: this is in fact the fulfilment of the desire for the mother (whereas traditional genital repression signifies the fulfilment of the word of the Father). We can see that this creates a strictly incestuous situation: the subject is no longer divided (he no longer abandons his phallic identity) and no longer divides (he no longer relinquishes any part of himself in a relation of symbolic exchange). This is fully defined by identification with the mother's phallus. Exactly the same process as in incest, where it never leaves the family.

Today, generally speaking, the same goes for the body: if the law of the Father or puritan morality has been (relatively speaking) avoided here, it is according to a libidinal economy characterised by the destructuration of the symbolic and the raising of the incest barrier. This general model of the fulfilment of desire, circulated by the mass-media, always comes with an obsessional and anxious quality that is utterly different from the basically hysterical puritan neurosis. It is no longer a matter of an anxiety bound up with Oedipal prohibition, but of an anxiety bound up with the fact, even at the breast of satisfaction and multiplied phallic enjoyment, in the `heart' [66] of the gratifying, tolerant, soothing, permissive society, of being only the living marionette of the desire for the mother. A deeper anxiety than that of genital frustration, since it entails the abolition of the symbolic and of exchange, as well as the incestuous position where the subject comes to lack even his own lack. This anxiety is translated into and betrayed everywhere today as the phobic obsession with manipulation.

We are all, at every level, living with this subtle form of repression and alienation: its sources are elusive, its presence insidious and total, and the forms that a struggle might take remain undiscovered and perhaps cannot be found. This is because manipulation refers to the original manipulation of the subject by the mother as much as by his own phallus. We can no longer stand against this fusional and manipulatory plenitude, this dispossession, as we could against the transcendental law of the Father. Every future revolution must take account of this fundamental condition and, between the law of the Father and the desire for the mother, between the `cycle' of repression and transgression and the cycle of regression and manipulation, rediscover the form of the articulation of the symbolic. [67]
[p. 114]

Models of the Body

1. For medicine, the body of reference is the corpse. In other words, the corpse is the ideal limit of the body in its relation to the system of medicine. The accomplished practice of the corpse produces and reproduces medicine under the sign of the preservation of life.

2. For religion, the ideal reference of the body is the animal (instincts and appetites of the `flesh'). The corpse as a mass grave, and its reincarnation beyond death as a carnal metaphor.

3. For the system of political economy, the ideal type of the body is the robot. The robot is the accomplished model of the functional `liberation' of the body as labour power, it is the extrapolation of absolute, asexual, rational productivity (this may be a cerebral robot: the computer is always the extrapolation of the brain and labour power).

4. For the system of the political economy of the sign, the reference model of the body is the mannequin (along with all its variations). Contemporary with the robot (this is the ideal pair of science fiction: Barbarella), the mannequin also represents a totally functionalised body under the law of value, but this time as the site of the production of the value-sign. It is no longer labour power, but models of signification that are produced -- not only sexual models of fulfilment, but sexuality itself as a model.

Behind the ideality of its ends (health, resurrection, rational productivity, liberated sexuality), every system thus alternately reveals the reductive phantasm on which it is articulated, and the delirious vision of the body that provides its strategy. Corpse, animal, machine and mannequin -- these are the negative ideal types of the body, the fantastic reductions under which it is produced and written into successive systems.

The strange thing is that the body is nothing other than the models in which different systems have enclosed it, and at the same time every other thing: their radical alternative, the irreducible difference that denies them. We may still call the body this inverse virtuality. For this however -- for the body as material of symbolic exchange -- there is no model, no code, no ideal type, no controlling phantasm, since there could not be a system of the body as anti-object.

Phallus Exchange Standard

Since the Industrial Revolution, a single immense mutation has enveloped material goods, language and sexuality (the body), in accordance with a process that marks either the progressive generalisation of political economy, or the entrenchment of the law of value.

1. Products become commodities: use-value and exchange-value. Intended on the one hand for the abstract finality of the `needs' that they
[p. 115]
`satisfy', and on the other hand to the structural form that governs their production and exchange.

2. Language becomes a means of communication, a field of signification. It is arranged into signifiers and signifieds. Just like the separation of the commodity into a referential finality, language as a medium has the goal of expression, and is separated into the order of signifieds and a structural form that governs the exchange of signifiers: the code of langue.

In both cases, the passage to a functional finality, the rational assignation of an `objective' content (use-value or signified-referent), seals the assignation of a structural form that is the form of political economy itself. In the `neo-capitalist' (techno-- and semiocratic) framework, this form is systematised at the expense of `objective' reference: signifieds and use-values progressively disappear to the great advantage of the operation of the code and exchange-value.

At the term of this process, a term which today remains only an outline for us, the two `sectors' of production and signification are merging. Products and commodities are produced as signs and messages and are regulated on the basis of the abstract configuration of language: transporting contents, values, finalities (their signifieds), they circulate according to an abstract general form organised by models. Commodities and messages both culminate in the same sign-status. Thereby, moreover, their reference is blurred in the face of the play of signifiers which can also in this way attain structural perfection. With the acceleration and proliferation of messages, information, signs and models, it is in fashion as a total cycle that the linear world of the commodity will reach completion.

The body and sexuality can be analysed in terms of everything that preceded it (use-value and exchange-value; signifier and signified).

1. We can show how sexuality is reduced, in its current mode of `liberation', to use-value (the satisfaction of `sexual needs') and exchange-value (the play and calculation of the erotic signs governed by the circulation of models). We can also show that sexuality becomes separated as a function: from the collective function of the reproduction of the species, it passes to the individual functions of physiological equilibrium (part of a general hygiene), mental equilibrium, `self-expression' or the expression of subjectivity, unconscious emanations, the ethics of sexual pleasure (what else?). In any case, sexuality becomes an element of the economy of the subject, an objective finality of the subject itself obedient to an order of finalities (whatever they might be).

2. The more it is functionalised (the more it submits to some transcendent reference that speaks through it, even if it were its own idealised principle, the libido, the signified's last subterfuge), the more sexuality takes on a structural form (like the products of industry or the language of communication). It reverts to the great oppositions (male/female) in whose disjunctions it is imprisoned, and crystallises around the exercise of a particular sexual model, attested to by a particular sexual organ, and closes the play of the body's signifiers.
[p. 116]

3. The Male/Female structure becomes confused with the privilege granted to the genital function (whether reproductive or erotic). The privilege of genitality over all the body's erogenous virtualities reverberates in the structure of a male dominated social order, for structure hinges on biological difference. This is not merely in order to maintain a genuine difference, but, on the contrary, to establish a general equivalence, the Phallus becoming the absolute signifier around which all erogenous possibilities come to be measured, arranged, abstracted, and become equivalent. The Phallus exchange standard governs contemporary sexuality in its entirety, including its `revolution'.

4. The emergence of the phallus as the general equivalent of sexuality, combined with the emergence of sexuality itself as the general equivalent of the virtualities of symbolic exchange, delineates the emergence of a political economy of the body which is established on the ruins of the body's symbolic economy. In the context of a general liberalisation, revelling in the current sexual `revolution' is only the expression of the accession of the body and sexuality to the stage of political economy, a sign of their integration with the law of value and general equivalence.

5. From both angles -- the promotion of sexuality as function or the promotion of sexuality as structural discourse -- the subject turns out to be back with the fundamental norm of political economy: it thinks itself and locates itself sexually in terms of equilibrium (an equilibrium of functions under the sign of the identity of the ego) and coherence (the structural coherence of a discourse under the sign of the infinite reproduction of the code).

Just as `design(at)ed' objects -- seized by the political economy of the sign -- obey an imperative of deprivation that reflects an ascetic economy of calculated functions; just as the sign in general has a functional tendency to divest itself in order to translate, as closely as possible, the adequation (of the signifier and the signified) which is its law and its reality principle, so the body seized by political economy also tends towards a formal nudity as if towards its absolute imperative. This nudity embodies all the labour of inscription and marks, fashion and make-up at the same time as the whole idealist perspective of `liberation' makes no `discoveries' or `rediscoveries' concerning the body: it translates the logical metamorphosis of the body in the historical process of our societies. It translates the modern status of the body in its relation to political economy. Just as the divestment of objects characterises their assignation to a function, that is to say, their neutralisation by the function, so the body's nudity defines its assignation to the sex/ function, its assignment to sex as function, that is to say, the reciprocal neutralisation of the body and sex.

Demagogy of the Body

Under the sign of the sexual revolution, the transfiguration of the pulsion as revolutionary substance and the unconscious as the subject of history.
[p. 117]

Liberating the primary processes as the `poetic' principle of social reality, liberating the unconscious as use-value, such is the imaginary that crystallises under the slogan of the body. Sex and the body are able to bear all these hopes because, repressed under whatever order used to cover our `historic' societies, they have become metaphors of radical negativity. They want to make these metaphors pass into the state of a revolutionary fact. Error: to take the side of the body is a trap. We cannot take the side of the primary processes, this remains a secondary illusion. [68]

At best, the body will remain, theoretically too, eternally ambivalent: object and anti-object -- cutting across and annulling the disciplines that claim to unify it; site and non-site -- the site of the unconscious as the non-site of the subject, and so on. Even after the partition of the body into the anatomical and the erogenous, contemporary psychoanalysis (Leclaire) continues to set down the movement of desire in its name, under the regime of the letter. Always the body, since there are no words to express the non-site: the best is doubtless still that which, throughout a long history, has designated what has no, or does not take, place: the repressed. We must, however, be aware of the risks this inherited word involves. The subversive privilege the body was given since it was always in a state of repression is now coming to an end in the process of its emancipation [69] (not entirely due to the actions of a repressive politics of desublimation; psychoanalysis too plays its part in the officialisation of sex and the body: here again we find an inextricable confusion between sex and the body as the crucial event of the subject, as process, labour, and also as an historical advent in the order of concepts and values). We must ask ourselves if this body we are `liberating' does not forever denegate the symbolic potentialities of the old repressed body, if the body `everybody's talking about' is not precisely the converse of the speaking body. In the current system, the body as the site of the primary processes is contrasted to the body as secondary process: erotic use-- and exchange-value, a rationalisation under the sign of value. The pulsional body menaced by desire is contrasted to the semiurgic, structural body, theatricised in nudity, functionalised by operational sexuality.

The secondary body of sexual emancipation and `repressive desublimation' is set under the sign of Eros alone. There is a confusion with sex and the mere principle of Eros, that is to say, a neutralisation of one by the other with the ex-inscription of the death-drive. The pleasure principle is thus established as the rationality of a `liberated' subjectivity, a `new political economy' of the subject. `Eros redefines reason in his own terms. Reasonable is what sustains the order of gratification' (Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation [London: Sphere, 1970], p. 180). From now on, `liberated' subjectivity is exhausted in inscribing itself as positivity in the exercise of Eros, the pleasure principle, which is simply the reification of the libido as the model of fulfilment. There is a new reason here, opening the way to an unlimited finality of the subject, and so there is no longer any difference between sexual `escalation' and the schema of indefinite societal
[p. 118]
growth, of the `liberation' of the forces of production; both evolve according to the same movement, both equally destined for failure in accordance with the irrevocable reflux of a death drive they thought they could conjure away.

The body organised under the sign of Eros represents a more advanced phase of political economy. Here the reabsorption of symbolic exchange is as radical as the alienation of human labour in the classical system of political economy. If Marx has described the historical phase where the alienation of labour power and the logic of the commodity necessarily resulted in a reification of consciousness, today we could say that the inscription of the body (and of all symbolic domains) into the logic of the sign is necessarily doubled by a reification of the unconscious.

Instead of being cut through by desire, nudity operates as the equivalent to and staging of desire. Instead of sex cutting through the body, it operates as the signifier and the equivalent of sex. Instead of ambivalence dividing sexuality, it operates throughout the structural combination of the `male' and the `female' as the equivalent of this ambivalence! The sexual duopoly operates as the scenario of difference. The libido is structurally divided into two terms and operates as the reductive equivalent of the death drive. In this way nudity, sex, the unconscious, etc., instead of opening up a more profound difference, are linked metonymically to one another as a constellation of representative equivalents in order to define, term by term, a discourse of sex as value. This is the same operation as in psycho-metaphysics, where the subject, as ideal referent, is nothing in fact but circulation, a metonymic exchange interrupted by terms of consciousness, will, representation, etc.

Apologue

-- So ultimately, why are there two sexes?

-- What are you complaining about? Do you want twelve of them or just one?

A modern novel

The margin could be wider: why not zero or an infinity of sexes? The question of the `total' is absurd here (whereas we can logically ask `why not six fingers on each hand?'). It is absurd because sexualisation is precisely the partition that cuts across every subject, making the `one' or `several' unthinkable. The `two' also becomes unthinkable, however, since the `two' is already a total (besides, the above dialogue operates on the figure of the `two'). Now sex, understood radically, cannot accede to the stage of the sum total nor to a calculable status: it is a difference, and the two `sides' of difference, which are not terms, cannot be added together nor become parts of a series. They cannot be calculated on the basis of units.

By contrast, the dialogue is logical in the context of the imposed bisexual model (Male/Female) since from the outset it sets sex up as two structurally
[p. 119]
opposed terms. The possibility of an absurd passage to the limit of serial numeration, to sex as accumulation, is implied by the bisexual structure from the moment male and female are set up as whole terms.

In this way the ambivalence of sex is reduced by bivalence (the two poles and their sexual roles). Today, when bivalence is undergoing the metamorphoses of the `sexual revolution', and where we see, as they say, a blurring of the differences between the male and the female, the ambivalence of sex is reduced by the ambiguity of the unisex.

Against the metaphor of the sex principle.

Today, our way lit by Freud, we know very well, too well, how to discern the sublimation and secondary rationalisation of the pulsional processes behind any given social practice, ethics or politics. It has become a cultural cliché to decode every discourse in terms of repression and phantasmatic determination.

This is only right, however: they are now only terms, and the unconscious is merely a language to which to refer. Sexual discourse too becomes entirely phantasmatic when sex itself, the critical reduction of moral and social mystification that it used to be, becomes the mode of rationalisation of a problem situated at the level of the total symbolic destruction of social relations, an examination the sexualist discourse contributes to locking away under a security code. It is easy today to read in the Sunday papers that frigidity in so many women is due to their overbearing fixation on the father, and that they punish themselves for this by prohibiting pleasure: this psychoanalytic `truth' now becomes a part of culture and social rationalisation (hence the ever increasing impasse in the analytic cure).

The sexual or analytic interpretation has no privilege. It too can become the phantasm of the definitive truth, and immediately therefore can also become the revolutionary theme. This is what is happening today -- the collusion between the revolution and psychoanalysis results from the same imaginary and the same distortion as the `bourgeois' recuperation of psychoanalysis; both result from the inscription of sex and the unconscious as the determining agency, that is to say, their reduction to a rationalist causality.

There is mystification from the moment there is a rationalisation in the name of some agency or other, as soon as the sexual is sublimated and rationalised into the political, the social and the moral, but equally as soon as the symbolic is censored and sublimated into a dominant sexual parole.

Zhuang-Zi's Butcher

`Hey!' Prince When-Hui said to him, `how can your art reach such a level?' The butcher put his knife down and said, `I love the Tao and so I progress in my art. At the start of my career, I saw only the ox. After three years' experience, I no longer saw the ox. Now my mind works more than my eyes do. My senses no longer act, only my mind. I knew the natural conformation of the ox and only attacked it at the interstices. If I do not damage the arteries, veins, muscles and
[p. 120]
nerves, then I shouldn't damage the major bones! A good butcher uses one knife in a year since he cuts only flesh. An ordinary butcher uses one knife in a month since he shatters bones with it. I have used the same knife for nineteen years. It has carved up many thousands of oxen and its cutting edge seems as if it has been newly sharpened. Strictly speaking, the joints of the bones have gaps in them and the cutting edge of the knife has no width. Whoever knows how to drive the extremely fine blade into the gaps manages his knife with ease because it is working in empty spaces. That is why I have used my knife for nineteen years and its cutting edge always appears newly sharpened. Every time I have cut the joints of the bones, I notice particular difficulties to be solved and I hold my breath, fix my gaze and work slowly. I wield my knife very gently and the joints separate as easily as we disturb the earth on the ground. I am taking up my knife again and getting back to work.' (Zhuang-Zi, The Principle of Hygiene III)

A perfect example of analysis and its prodigious operationality when it exceeds the full, substantial and opaque vision of the object (`at the start ... I saw only the ox'), the anatomical vision of the body as a full edifice of bone, flesh and organs, unified by external representations, that can be carved up at will. This is the body on which the ordinary butcher labours, cutting by brute force, getting as far as to be able to recognise the articulation of the void and the structure of the void where the body is articulated (`[I] only attacked it at the interstices'). Zhuang-Zi's butcherknife is not a mass passing though a mass, it is itself the void (`with ease because it is working in empty spaces'). The knife that works in line with the analytic mind does not therefore work in spaces filled by oxen to which the senses and the eyes attest, but in accordance with the internal logical organisation of the rhythm and the intervals. If it does not wear out, it is because it does not set out to conquer a substance of the density of flesh and bone -- because it is pure difference operating on difference -- in order to disassemble a body (a practical operation) which, as we can clearly see, rests on a symbolic economy which is neither `objective' knowledge nor a relation of forces, but a structure of exchange: the knife and the body are exchanged, the knife articulates the body's lack and thereby deconstructs it in accordance with its own rhythm.

This knife is also Leclaire's letter. The latter comes to divide a particular site on the body erotogenically in accordance with the logic of desire. A receptive, hard wearing and `useless' [inusable] symbolic inscription, when the letter, due to its extremely fine thread, disjoins the anatomical body and works in the void articulated by the body. This instead of the poor butcher's full discourse that merely cuts anatomically and according to material evidence.

The millenial brother of Lichtenberg's knife, [70] the logical paradox of which (the knife with no blade which is missing a handle) sets up the symbolic configuration of an absent phallus instead of the full phallus and its f(ph)antas(ma)tic evidence. This knife does not work on the body, it resolves it, circling it attentively and dreamily (free-floating attention: `I hold my breath, fix my gaze and work slowly'), proceeding anagrammatically, that is to say, it does not advance from one term to another, from one
[p. 121]
organ, juxtaposed and connected to another like words by the thread of a functional syntax: this is how the bad butcher and the linguist of signification proceed. Here, the thread of meaning is quite different: it splits the manifest body and follows the body beneath the body, like the anagram which follows the model of the dispersal and resolution of a first term or corpus whose secret is another articulation than that which runs beneath discourse and traces something (a name, a formula) whose absence haunts the text. It is this formula of the body which defies the anatomical body, that the knife describes and resolves. It is certain that the efficacy of the sign, its symbolic efficacy in primitive societies, far from being `magical', is bound up with this extremely precise labour of anagrammatical resolution. Hence the architecture of the erogenous body, which is only ever the anagrammatic articulation of a formula `lost without ever having been', a formula whose thread of desire reforms the disjunctive synthesis that it retraces without saying: desire itself is nothing other than the resolution of the signifier in the orphic dispersal of the body, in the anagrammatical dispersal of the poem, according to the musical rhythm of the knife of Zhuang-Zi's butcher.
[p. 124]

4: The Body, or the Mass Grave of Signs

Note from page 102: 1. The genitals themselves, the object-sex, are never fetishised, only the phallus as the general equivalent; just as in political economy, the product or the commodity in itself is never fetishised, but rather the form of exchange-value and its general equivalent.

Note from page 103: 2. There is an affinity between the ceremonial of signs surrounding the erotic body and the ceremonial of suffering that surrounds sado-masochistic perversion. The marks of `fetishism' (necklaces, bracelets, chains) always mimic and evoke the marks of sadomasochism (mutilation, wounds, cuts). These two perversions electively crystallise around this system of marks.
Certain marks (and only these are suggestive) render the body more nude than if it were really nude. Here the body's nudity is the perverse nudity associated with the ceremonial. These marks may be clothes or accessories, but also gestures, music or technique. All perversions need effects in the widest sense of the term. In sadomasochism suffering becomes the emblem of the body, just as jewels or rouge may in fetishist passion.
All perversions revel in something: in the erotic system we are describing, the body revels in indulgence, self-seduction; in sado-masochism, it revels in suffering (painful auto-eroticism). There is, however, an affinity between the two, since whether the other suffers or indulges in himself, he is radically objectified. Every perversion acts out death.

Note from page 103: 3. The sexual act is often only possible at the cost of this perversion: the other's body is phantasised as a mannequin, a phallus-mannequin, a phallic fetish, cherished, caressed and possessed as the phantasiser's own penis.

Note from page 103: 4. Against the thesis of the phallic mother who terrifies because she is phallic, Freud said that the paralysis produced by the Medusa's head worked because the snakes that replaced her hair came, as many times as there were snakes, to deny castration. Whoever wished to annul castration was repeatedly reminded of it through this reversal (A. Green). The same goes for the fascination with make-up and the strip-tease: each fragment of the body highlighted or phallically enhanced by the mark also happens to deny castration, which nevertheless re-emerges everywhere in the very separation of these part-objects so that, like the fetish-object, they only ever appear to `testify to and veil the castrated genitals' (Lacan).

Note from page 104: 5. If the line of the stocking is more erotic than the shawl covering the eye or the line of the glove on the arm, it is not due to the promiscuity of the genitals: it is simply because castration is played out and denied here at close range, as near as possible and in the greatest possible immanence. Thus in Freud it is the last perceived object, the closest to the discovery of the absence of the penis in women that will become the fetish-object.

Note from page 104: 6. Only the annulment of phallus-value and the irruption of the radical play of difference remain unthinkable and inadmissible.

Note from page 104: 7. That said, the fact that one of the terms of sexual binomialism, the male, although it has become the marked term and although this in turn has become the general equivalent in the system, this structure which to us appears ineluctable is in fact without biological foundation: like every great structure, its goal is precisely to break with nature (Lévi-Strauss). We can imagine a culture where the terms are reversed: a male strip-tease in a matriarchal culture. All that is required is that the female become the marked term and operate as the general equivalent. We must see, however, that even if these terms are alternated (which largely encapsulates women's `liberation'), the structure remains unchanged as does the refusal of castration and phallic abstraction. So we can see that the real problem is not whether the system carries within it any possibility for structural alteration, but rather lies in a radical alternative, which puts into question the very abstraction of this political economy of sex, based on making one of the terms a general equivalent and on the misrecognition [méconnaissance] of castration and the symbolic economy.

Note from page 105: 8. Except for the noble excretion of tears, but with incredible precautions! Cf. this admirable text for a cosmetics firm called Longcil; `when an emotion overwhelms you to the point that only looks can translate its depth, at this moment more than any other, you don't want your eye-shadow to betray you. At this moment more than any other, Longcil is irreplaceable ... especially in moments like these, it takes care of your looks to protect and improve them ... so that now you need only put on your make-up and not give it a second thought.'

Note from page 108: 9. The gestural narrative, or, technically speaking, the `bump and grind', realises here what Bataille called the `ruse of opposition' [feinte du contraire]: because it is continuously covered and concealed by the same gestures that denude it, the body here acquires its poetic meaning by force of ambivalence. On the other hand, we see how naïve nudists and others are, their `superficial beach nudity' that Bernardin speaks of, who believe they are laying reality entirely bare and fall into the equivalence of the sign: reality is nothing more than the equivalent signifier to a natural signified. This naturalist unveiling is only ever a `mental act', as Bernardin put it so well, it is an ideology. In this sense the strip, through its perverse play and its sophisticated ambivalence, is as opposed to `liberation through nudity' as it is to a liberal-rationalist ideology. The `escalation of the nude' is the escalation of rationalism, the rights of man, formal liberation, liberal demagogy, and petty-bourgeois free-thinking. This realistic aberration was put perfectly back into its place by a little girl's words when she was offered a doll that pisses: `My little sister can do that too. Couldn't you give me a real one?'

Note from page 108: 10. A play of transparent veils can play the same role as this play of gestures. Advertising is of the same order when it frequently puts two or several women on stage. It is only in appearance that this is a homosexual thematic, since it is in fact a variant of the narcissistic model of self-seduction, a play of reduplications centred on the self by means of the detour of a sexual simulation (which may be homosexual besides: there are only ever men in advertising to act as a narcissistic warning, to help the woman to take pleasure in herself).

Note from page 109: 11. Even when the last piece of clothing falls away, the integral strip does not alter its logic. We know that gestures are enough to trace an enchanted line around the body, a much more subtle marker than panties. In any case, it is not a sexual organ that this structural marker (panties or gesture) bars, but the very sexualisation that crosses the body: the spectacle of the organ and, at the limit, of the orgasm do not therefore eliminate this at all.

Note from page 110: 12. The perverse desire is the normal desire imposed by the social model. If the woman avoids auto-erotic regression, she is no longer an object of desire, she becomes a subject of desire, and thereby resistant to the structure of the perverse desire. But she too could very well seek to fulfil her desire in the fetishistic neutralisation of the desire of the other, so that the perverse structure (that kind of division of the labour of desire between the subject and the object which is the secret of perversion and its erotic yield) remains unchanged. The only alternative is that everyone should break down this phallic fortress and open up the perverse structure which surrounds the sexual system; instead of fixing their eyes on a phallic identity, on its absence in the place of the other, leave the white magic of phallic identification in order to recognise their own perilous ambivalence, so that the play of desire as symbolic exchange becomes possible once more.

Note from page 111: 13. [In the seventeenth century a certain Mlle de Scudéry imagined a map [carte] of the country or kingdom she conceived and called Tendre, following the contemporary usage of the word tendre to designate the `tender emotions' and sentiments, as opposed to the `military virtues' of strength, toughness, coldness and cruelty, etc. (Le Petit Robert). -- tr.]

Note from page 112: 14. If we refer to the function of the letter in Leclaire's work, an erotic function of differential inscription and the annulment of difference, we can see that the current system is characterised by the abolition of the opening function of the letter and by augmenting its closure property. The literal function has broken with the alphabet of desire (symbolic inscription disappeared to the great advantage of structural inscription) in favour of the alphabet of the code. Even in analysis, the ambivalence of the letter has been replaced by an equivalence within the system of the code, its literal function as (linguistic) value. The letter is then reduplicated and reflects itself like a full sign, it is fetishistically invested as a single line instead and in place of erogenous difference. The letter is invested as a phallus in which all differences are eliminated. The scansion of the subject by the letter in enjoyment is eliminated in favour of the fulfilment of desire in the fetishised letter alone. Thus not only the anatomical body is opposed to Leclaire's erogenous body, but also and especially the semiurgic body, made up of a lexis of full, coded signifiers, signifying models of the fulfilment of desire.

Note from page 112: 15. The subject of consumption, in particular the consumption of the body, is neither the ego, nor the unconscious subject, it is the second person plural, the `you' of advertising, i. e. the intercepted, fragmented subject reconstituted by the dominant models, `personalised' and brought into play in the sign-exchange. Being no more than the simulation model of the second person of exchange, the `you' is effectively no-one, only a fictive term maintained by the discourse of the model. This `you' is no longer the one that speaks, but the effect of the division of the code, a phantom that appeared in the mirror of signs.

Note from page 113: 16. We really must appreciate that the `liberation' and `revolution' of the body works essentially at the level of secondary sexualisation, i. e. a bisexual rationalisation of sex. They are therefore operative in a late phase, where a puritan repression used to be, while at the same time they are caught at the level of contemporary, symbolic, repression. This revolution is `one war too late' as regards the mode of repression. Put better (or worse), there is an insidious and widespread progression of primary repression which, by the mere fact of the `sexual revolution', disturbingly merges with the `gentle' repression under the sign of the management of narcissism discussed above.

Note from page 113: 17. [In this passage, Baudrillard is punning on the maternal function of the breast [sein] and being `in the midst' or `at the heart of' [au sein de] the `maternal' society he here claims has displaced that of the law of the Father. -- tr.]

Note from page 113: 18. This presupposes a type of exchange that has remained outside the dominance of incest prohibition and the law of the Father (such as the type of economic and linguistic exchange that we are familiar with), which is based on value and culminates in the system of exchange-value. This type of exchange exists: it is symbolic exchange which, by contrast, is based on the annulment of value, and hence cancels the prohibition on which it is based and overcomes the law of the Father. Symbolic exchange is neither a regression within the law (towards incest), nor a pure and simple transgression (always dependent on the law), it is the revolution of this law.

Note from page 117: 19. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure [Paris: Klincksieck, 1971], p. 23.

Note from page 117: 20. After the history of the body's negativity comes the history of its positivity. The ambiguity of the current `revolution' derives entirely from the fact that centuries of repression have based the body on value. Repressed, the body is charged with a transgressive virtuality of all values. Similarly however, we must understand that a long lasting and inextricable confusion between the body and a series of `materialist' values (health, well-being, sexuality, liberty) has been at work in the shadows of repression. The concept of the body has grown up in the shadow of a certain transcendental materialism which has slowly matured in the shadow of idealism as its revitalising solution, even bringing about its resurrection in accordance with determinate finalities, and operates as a dynamic element in the equilibrium of the new system of values. Nudity becomes the emblem of radical subjectivity. The body becomes the standard of the pulsions. But this liberation has something of the ambiguity of every liberation, in that it is here liberated as value. Just as labour is never `liberated' as anything other than labour power in a system of forces of production and exchange-value, subjectivity is only ever liberated as a phantasm and sign-value in the framework of planned signification, a systematics of signification whose coincidence with the systematics of production is clear enough. In the final analysis, subjectivity is only ever `liberated' in the sense that it is once again seized by political economy.

Note from page 120: 21. And the opposite of Ockham's razor, which castrates and traces the taut thread of abstraction and reason.