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How can we best explain this paradox, which one critic called the
"perverse human tendency to transform prohibition into temptation?" [204] Some scholars have argued that this dynamic arises from the nature
of prohibition itself, its peculiar dependence on its own violation.
[205] As Foucault writes, "limit and transgression depend on each other ...
[A] limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable... ."
[206]
[*247]
In fact, the existence of the legal limit seems to make its transgression more alluring, implicating our "lust for the forbidden." [207] Foucault explains:
"In ... our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering the sacred ... but also a way of recomposing its empty form, its absence, through which it becomes all the more scintillating." [208]
Chaucer's Wife of Bath is more to the point. She said, "Forbede us thing, and that desiren we." [209]
But which comes first: desire or prohibition? To answer with certainty is impossible, but Freud suggests the answer may be desire. Describing his inquiry into tribal taboos, Freud writes:
"Taboo is a very primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an authority) and directed against the strongest desires of man." [210]
Of
course, this makes sense: "Whatever is expressly forbidden must be an
object of desire."
[211]
Yet, some theorists have posited that prohibition produces desire. [212] At the very least, Freud observes that prohibition could heighten a pre-existing longing. [213] In fact, Freud is at times susceptible to an interpretation that the order may be entirely reversed, that prohibition precedes desire and not vice versa: Again, in Totem and Taboo, Freud remarked on the inherent capacity of a taboo to arouse temptation. Freud's general approach to the personality also suggests this structure; as one contemporary critic explains: In Freud,
"the super-ego is ... wrought from the sexualization of a prohibition and only secondarily becomes the prohibition of sexuality." [214]
[*248]
Even though the question of which came first seems unanswerable, the answer may be unimportant. Once in place, the two are locked in a dialectical dance:
Prohibitions escalate desire, desire calls for greater
prohibitions, and so on.
[215] As Freud observed, "desire is mentally increased by frustration of
it."
[216]
In psychoanalytic theory, prohibition curiously preserves rather than obliterates the desire it suppresses. [217] In fact, the pleasure of repeating and observing a prohibition may come to replace the satisfaction of violating it: The enforcement of the prohibition is an occasion for the reliving of the prohibited desire, made all the more pleasurable because it is relived under the veil of condemnation. [218] (Many have observed the salaciousness of the censor; the leering, suggestive ebullience that can accompany a vigorous censorship campaign.)
In this way, prohibition and desire depend on one another. As Judith Butler writes,
"The prohibition does not seek the obliteration of prohibited desire; on the contrary, prohibition pursues the reproduction of prohibited desire and becomes itself intensified through the renunciations it effects... . The prohibition not only sustains, but is sustained by, the desire that it forces into renunciation." [219]
This theory has unpleasant implications when considered in the context of our cultural preoccupation with child molestation. It would suggest that the heightened anxiety about child sexual abuse is closely related to repressed pedophilic desire.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a child welfare advocate and the chair of the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley, has argued that