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September 26, 2004
I've been struggling with Pierre Klossowski's book on Nietzsche, 'Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle', and his conception of the conflicts between the impulses of the body and consciousness.
An example?
We have an impossible sexual longing for young girls leading to an art of bodies, which re-creates a sexual passion that invents new desires.
Hans Bellmer,
Little girls are not sexually available for middle aged men in our society. So what male artists do is envision and manufacture art works (eg., dolls) in their image. These can then be probed with aggressive fingers and captured rapaciously by a conscious male gaze.
What results is dread, an inner turmoil of conflicting desires, and twisted longing. It is not right to desire young girls nor to desire to mutiliate their bodies. So Bellmer's expression of these obsessional desires in images is kept hidden, only shown to a few surrealists in the art world.
This all changed when the internet was invented and porn was everywhere.
I do not want to give this a psychoanalytic interpretation of repressed unconcious desire versus the ego as moral conscience. I want to consider it in terms of an obsessional image produced instinctively by the life of the impulses. An example of such an image is Bellmer's dolls:
Hans Bellmer
Such an image Klossowski calls a phantasme. By this he means that we have obsessional impulses or desires that seek to express themselves.
Klossowsski calls the conscious or willed expression (by Bellmer and Newton) of the phantasme a simulacra. A simulacra presupposes a set of sterotypes, which are the codes of everyday life. These sterotypes invert or betray the intensities of the bodies' chaotic impulses.
What is troubling about Klossowski is that there is no ethics involved. What the bodily desires are is accepted as okay, no matter what they are. Our bodily desires appear to be accepted as natural.
Does that mean it is okay to desire young girls, or to mutilate their bodies? Does it mean that it is our coded morality, which says these desires are wrong, that needs to rebelled against? Is this what Klossowski's idea of the combat against culture means?
This rejection of the ethical (the good) from art troubles me. There is something deeply wrong about the male gaze.
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the dolls were an attack on the insistent propaganda of normalcy and the cult of the perfect body in German culture. . . . [Bellmer] speaks directly to the dark underside of sexuality in the human makeup, the dominant-submissive, sado-masochistic, voyeuristic, even pedophilic impulses that hover often unacknowledged at the edge of consciousness.