Intermission: A Joke In Eros?
"I began writing with no precise goal, animated chiefly by a desire to forget, at least for the time being, the things I can be or do personally."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?”
The erotic is fundamentally hilarious; otherwise, we would not make love. In the same way that something is comedic and thus transgressive if its sudden diversion of energy is unexpected, so too is something erotic if its diversion is unexpected too; this is to say, good sex is like a good joke: it should come nicely as a surprise every time, even if we have heard the same joke before.
In a similar way, a good erotic story is like a good joke book: it should arouse laughter. Consider this passage from Story Of The Eye (1928), the infamous erotic novella by the French philosopher, Georges Bataille: “She wiped herself evenly with a handkerchief as she stood over my head with one foot on the small bench, and I vigorously rubbed my cock through the trousers while writhing amorously on the floor.”
On my first reading, I had to laugh at this passage: at its audacity, at its sheer intention, and its token of truth too; I thought of Bataille when he wrote this, smiling as well, perhaps, because he wrote such a thing and threw it into the world.
As he later wrote in the introduction to his 1962 book, Erotism: Death And Sensuality, “We use the word eroticism every time a human being behaves in a way strongly contrasted with everyday standards and behaviour. Eroticism shows the other side of a facade of unimpeachable propriety. Behind the facade are revealed the feelings, parts of the body and habits we are normally ashamed of.”
In other words, eroticism is a transgression—something is where it should not be; and the transgression startles us to attention, demanding itself to be seen and sometimes to be laughed at as well. However, there are degrees of transgression in the same way that there are funny and unfunny jokes. A joke that is too literal is not funny; a joke that is too shocking is not funny either. But a funny joke will be able to justify its exposition by its punchline—its foreplay with its orgasm.
On this point, I am reminded of an old Lacanian joke, which the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, included in his 2006 book, How To Read Lacan, “a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a seed but a man. When he is cured [...] and is allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. 'My dear fellow,' says his doctor, 'you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.' 'Of course I know that,' replies the patient, 'but does the chicken know it?'”
The gradual climb of psychic energy, which is stirred up by the joke, and which increases with the exposition, is suddenly diverted to an unexpected and clever punchline; this is where comedic transgression has similarities to erotic transgression—energy is diverted from where it is expected to go, like a catharsis, like an orgasm, like a miniature death which brings us closer to life, via similar methods of transgression.
Take another example—this passage from Anaïs Nin’s Little Birds (1979): “She was palpitating with fear, and it was like the palpitation of desire. As the condemned man was flung into space and death, the penis gave a great leap inside of her, gushing out its warm life. The crowd crushed the man against her. She almost ceased breathing, and as her fear became pleasure, wild pleasure at feeling life while a man was dying, she fainted.”
The orgasm here is a synonym for death; or, as the Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, wrote in his 1922 book, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, as translated by C. J. M. Hubback, “If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say ‘The goal of all life is death’, and, casting back, ‘The inanimate was there before the animate.’ […] There is as it were an oscillating rhythm in the life of organisms: the one group of instincts presses forward to reach the final goal of life as quickly as possible, the other flies back at a certain point on the way only to traverse the same stretch once more from a given spot and thus to prolong the duration of the journey.”
In other words, by laughing at a joke, or orgasming from sexual climax, we experience a moment of jouissance, as the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, in Seminar XVII The Other Side Of Psychoanalysis (1991)—in the translation by Russell Grigg—comments: “the path toward death is nothing other than what is called jouissance.”
This it to say, for both Lacan and his predecessor, Freud, the experience of the living subject is mediated between our instincts to both return to immanent nothingness and yet to reproduce out of such nothingness a brief polarity—to be discontinued by death; to be continued by sex as brief and overflowing life. This dual polarity is summarised as jouissance, or surplus-enjoyment at a price.
Hence, in laughing at a joke, we are destroyed by its subversion and thus its pleasure; in orgasming from sex, we are also destroyed by its release and thus its rapture. We lose ourselves to a death-like moment, or to an impulsive seizure of life, and thus to a loss of self which returns us closer to biological zero—a premonition of mission complete in the humanity of mission failure.
“I cut the rope but she was quite dead. We laid her out on the carpet. Simone saw I was getting a hard-on and she started tossing me off: I too stretched out on the carpet.”
On the subject of transgression, the erotic is essentially a becoming; no one is necessarily erotic but becomes so. But this is not new to say; once again, there are degrees to transgression and thus eroticism—the clearest are moral transgressions.
The eroticism of evil, for instance, is transgression for its own sake—a bad joke carried too far—in which the moral transgression outweighs the sexual content of the act; for Anaïs Nin, this is incest; for Marquis de Sade, this is torture; for Georges Bataille, this is mutilation.
It is difficult to read certain stories or passages from these writers: the erotic crosses into the perverse, into a moral transgression which enflames the senses, paralyses the mind and displaces the expectation so far gone that the Real of the description becomes too much—it is no longer wholly erotic, however though it may capture the semblance of the erotic in its confrontation with our moral limits.
Or more specifically, as when Nin writes of cruel incestuousness in Delta Of Venus (1970), or when de Sade writes of perverse atrocities in The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), and when Bataille writes of plucked eyeballs in Story Of The Eye (1928), there is an element of sheer horror, or an absolute expression of perversion—of going too far—which embodies in the transgressive act an extremity of action, now confronted at its moral limit, and which shocks us out of arousal.
As Bataille further writes in Erotism: Death And Sensuality (1962), “Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. […] The face and its beauty must be profaned, first by uncovering the woman's secret parts, and then by putting the male organ into them. No one doubts the ugliness of the sexual act. Just as death does in sacrifice, the ugliness of the sexual union makes for anguish. But the greater the anguish—within the measure of the partners' strength—the stronger the realisation of exceeding the bounds and the greater the accompanying rush of joy. […] Beauty has a cardinal importance, for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the essence of eroticism. Humanity implies the taboos, and in eroticism it and they are transgressed. Humanity is transgressed, profaned and besmirched. The greater the beauty, the more it is befouled."
Therefore, every transgressive outcome is ugliness; however, to befoul something is one thing, but the most shocking erotica—without cleverness—is unfunny at the least and horrific at the most. The diversion of our libido—or our energy for everything we might call life—is broken against a cruel expectation, and in its worst instances, it produces no laughter from us and therefore cannot be called erotic, for it sublimates into a sexuality beyond the animal and the human—the productive and the unproductive—and into sexuality of seeking death.
If sexual unproductivity is the transgression at the heart of human eroticism itself—otherwise known as sex-for-itself, or pleasure beyond its own principle, or an immolation before reproduction—it at least acknowledges a desire for continuity, for warmth, for the image of other pleasures beyond tomorrow, which cannot occur in the finality of death, of destruction, of ending the life of others.
But there is exception in horror: in the final vision of Bataille’s Story Of The Eye (1928), the element of horror is made so absurd, so surreal, and yet so unabashedly meant to arouse us, that it becomes too ridiculous to treat soberly, and so one must laugh against expectation, and through its catharsis, recognise how pitifully this erotic sense of life has pursued death in its full course: unproductively, to no end, which could no less be meaningfully called the ultimate transgression, and yet, it rests as only an empty expression for a signifier now without its sign, without life, and thus inhuman.
Something is erotic only if it stirs a human reaction—eroticism is the promise of sex with a human touch. It is a physical omen for death, and a foretaste of epic cruelty, but eroticism cannot exist in cruelty, although cruelty exists in the erotic: sex is a death we share with each other—not inflicting upon but sharing—as if the burden were momentarily lessened by the continuity of ourselves, now entwined together.
“It really was totally out of the question for Simone to lift her dress and place her bare behind in the dish of raw balls.”
Bataille writes that “Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism—to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.”
In reading the love poems of Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, one finds another sense of the erotic: the transgression of the senses. If moral transgression as an intellectual source of the erotic—namely, that the brain recoils at the paroxysm created by the immoral act and struggles to comprehend it—then sensual transgression is an emotional source: we flinch at the image of pure carnal desire, or against the transgression of austere passion.
For instance, in Sonnet XI, from the collection of one hundred sonnets he wrote for his third wife, Matilde Urrutia Cerda, Neruda offers his honest moment:
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
His honesty is transgressive; the gentleness of his desire is eroticism too; we are drawn—almost to laughter—by the purity of his desire to devour his beloved wife, out of love and lust, as if it were the simplest instinct for him to follow.
In a lighter fashion from Sonnet XL:
I love your pure gifts, your skin like whole stones,
your nails, offerings, in the suns of your fingers,
your mouth brimming with all joys.
In reading his veneration, one suspects that the source of transgression lies in ourselves too, as much as it does Neruda, for inevitably what is transgressive is a matter of opinion—of time and place—but nevertheless validated by our very recoil, subtly or not, to the brutality of another human being in love or being thrown by desire and violence for another.
This suspicion arises in poems like this—in its expression of sincere desire, to which I wince gently, and laugh with a small quiver, because I can understand this human desire too: the erotic is both a mirror and discrimination to our own desires and erotic dreams—we dream of being loved in certain ways, but the erotic is not necessarily made for love.
“Something bizarre and quite baffling had happened: this time, the insect had perched on the corpse's eye and was agitating its long nightmarish legs on the strange orb.”
There is a third method of transgression; if we have explored, within a short time, the expressions of the intellectual and the sensual methods of the erotic, then another exists in the transgressive imagination: we might also trespass the partial images of our own minds.
As the French film critic, André Bazin, reflected in his 1946 essay Entomology Of The Pin-Up Girl, as translated by Hugh Gray for What Is Cinema? (2004), “An adequate physique, a young and vigorous body, provokingly firm breasts still do not define the pin-up girl for us. She must also conceal that bosom, which we are not supposed to get a peep at. The clever kind of censorship which clothing can exercise is perhaps more essential than the most unmistakable anatomic affirmation […] and clearly distinguishes her from the salaciously erotic or pornographic postcard. […] today Rita Hayworth need only take off her gloves to draw admiring whistles from a hall full of Americans.”
Retrieving from Bataille the notion of the sexual act as inherently ugly, and the idea that beauty and its defilement—or sex against its own purpose and for our own ends—is the source of eroticism, then the hint of ugliness, or the mere gesture of its potential, is carried by ourselves in the tease or seduction: if the orgasm did not exist, we would have created it.
If the other two transgressions are reactive, then the imagination is proactive, insofar as it has created a personality out of reality, and thus becomes fulfilling to its own suggestion. It requires no effort of moral hatred nor mortal love; it is entirely fantastic and therefore closer to the structure of dreams.
As Bazin reflects on such images in the strip tease and cinema, in his 1957 essay, Marginal Notes On Eroticism In The Cinema, from the same 2004 collection, “it is essential that the woman herself does the undressing. She could not be undressed by a partner without provoking the jealousy of the entire male audience. In reality, the strip tease is based on the polarization and simulation of desire in the spectators, each one potentially possessing the woman who pretends to offer herself […] In the cinema, on the other hand, even a nude woman can be approached by a partner, openly desired, and actually caressed; because […] the cinema unreels in an imaginary space which demands participation and identification. The actor winning the woman gratifies me by proxy. His seductiveness, his good looks, his daring do not compete with my desires—they fulfill them.”
The erotic acts of transgression are carried by emissaries of image; ergo, we are voyeurs in the closet sense of our imaginations: we imagine that we could replicate these images too—and thus our sacrilege is both shared and unique for us to own. The mere allusion is enough in the pin-up; the symbolic closeness is enough in the cinema; we already desire at the outset—the erotic is the coming to fulfillment of the desires we do not know and yet crave, such that we would imagine them otherwise. In other words, if we are not loved enough, we fantasise about the love we lack; even if cinema had not existed, we would have always loved and yearned for it.
“Now I stood up and, while Simone lay on her side, I drew her thighs apart, and found myself facing something I imagine I had been waiting for in the same way that a guillotine awaits for a neck to slice.'“
There is an element of continuity in eroticism; the erotic is never solitary. We transgress like Bonnie and Clyde, or like the Ericksons, or like the grand orgies of old Rome: in coming together, a brief continuity occurs in surrendering our egos to each other—in coitus, in embrace, in a kiss, and thus our little and shared suicide pact.
As Bataille describes, “The final aim of eroticism is fusion, all barriers gone, but its first stirrings are characterised by the presence of a desirable object. […] A pretty girl stripped naked is sometimes an erotic symbol. The object of desire is different from eroticism itself; it is not eroticism in its completeness, but eroticism working through it. […] The development of these signs has the following consequence: eroticism which is a fusion, which shifts interest away from and beyond the person and his limits, is nevertheless expressed by an object. We are faced with the paradox of an object which implies the abolition of the limits of all objects, of an erotic object.”
Do not forget: laughter is communal; we may laugh at the same joke together, losing ourselves in the same instance, to a common transgression, and thus to a union unavailable to ourselves alone—a moment which we may spend a lifetime in search of again.
A joke is told by a comedian, or written by an author, and our laughter is a link between us and them: a cause for annihilation, a gesture to the momentary loss of ourselves, or to a discontinuity-turned-continuity. In that moment, we are no longer ourselves, if only, but become a composite of ourselves and another, of a transgression against selfhood itself, motivated by the transgression of our freedom to be individual.
This is a transgression which bears repitition; it might be retroactively discovered as the inherent drive for all unproductive sexual desires, and thus the erotic itself, as the only transgression worth committing: unconsciously, we are always in search of a good way to die, or to suspend our lives for a moment, in the release of all our other potentials for life—for this cause we choose to die for.
Irrespective of the transgression, there is always a violation of limits and what is sensible to us; we are opened to the new and sheer possibility of the erotic act—to the possibility of becoming other—and yet we are unable to recover what we have seen: there can never be any lasting transgression nor fusion of beings, except fleeting sensations, which strive to be searched for again and again.
As de Sade writes in The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), “"There are," said Curval, "but two or three crimes to perform in this world, and they, once done, there’s no more to be said; all the rest is inferior, you cease any longer to feel. Ah, how many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out of the universe, make a general darkness, or use that star to burn the world! oh, that would be a crime, oh yes, and not a little misdemeanor such as are all the ones we perform who are limited in a whole year’s time to metamorphosing a dozen creatures into lumps of clay."”
Transgression is a cul-de-sac for desire; eventually, one can only circle the block over and over. However, for Bataille, the thought of transgression is more powerful than any act of transgression itself. As he explains, “What I have been saying enables us to grasp in those words the unity of the domain of eroticism open to us through a conscious refusal to limit ourselves within our individual personalities. Eroticism opens the way to death. Death opens the way to the denial of our individual lives. Without doing violence to our inner selves, are we able to bear a negation that carries us to the farthest bounds of possibility?”
In other words, the ultimate transgression is not moral, intellectual, sensual nor imaginative: the only recurring and thus meaningful transgression is the premise of transgression itself as a potential method to surpass our own limits, or ourselves as sovereign individuals—the heads of our bodies—which we might transgress against in theoretical negation and find fulfilment in their potential annihilation. It is therefore less significant to say that we have transgressed than to admit that we could transgress, because in the possibility lies the greatest number of transgressions.
Moreover, we must admit that eroticism does not exist at the moment of consummation and neither at the point of orgasm; it always exists at the precipice before, at the mere gesture, portent and thought; it lies on the edge of ecstasy, which lies outside of reality, because at the very moment of orgasm, the moment is over and death has simultaneously occurred together and been forgotten alone.
But this is committed unconsciously; we cannot laugh at an expected joke if the punchline is expected; it is only within the moment of diverging energy, this closeness with little death, that we seize it and find reason to laugh at our minor dance. In this way, sex is like death: we hope to make it good while it lasts; likewise, a good joke is like death: it kills us—we desire to laugh nonetheless—but it is better than the alternative.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.
Amazing!!