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[*249]
Bataille writes that "the profound complicity of law and the
violation of law" defines eroticism.
[221] The psychoanalysts Laplanche and Pontalis insist that the "language
of desire [is] necessarily marked by prohibition." [222] Indeed, in sexuality, Freud observed
that "some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of the libido to its
height." [223] Freud questioned why prohibition increases desire in the realm of
the erotic, but not in all other realms. For example, he compares desire for
wine to desire for sex:
One
thinks, for instance, of the relation of the wine-drinker to wine. Is it not a
fact that wine always affords the drinker the same toxic satisfaction - one that
in poetry has so often been likened to the erotic and that science as well may
regard as comparable?... Do we ever find a
drinker impelled to go to another country where ... alcohol is
prohibited, in order to stimulate his dwindling pleasure in it by these
obstacles? Nothing of the sort... . Why is the relation of the lover to his
sexual object so very different?
[224]
How does Freud answer this question? The appeal of the taboo holds
special force in sex according to Freud because our sexuality is founded in
taboo – the frustrated incestuous desire that children feel for their parents. [225] Sexual prohibitions exert a special hold on us because they allow
us unconsciously to revisit our forbidden oedipal longings. To exploit its
pleasures to the fullest, we need to experience sexuality as forbidden.
[*250]
years,
as "cigarette smoking was pushed to the extremes of acceptable
behavior" a new fetish sprang to life for so-called "smoxploitation" films, [226] movies marketed for their erotic appeal, yet featuring "fully
clothed, attractive women who do nothing but smoke."
[227] This story suggests that prohibition not only intensifies the allure of
certain sexual scenarios, but can conjure up sex out of whole cloth.
According to psychoanalytic theory, the structure of sexuality
makes it inevitable that regulations of sex will be inherently (albeit only
partially) counterproductive. The Freudian insight gives force to an argument
made by Catharine MacKinnon against obscenity law. To MacKinnon, the social
condemnation surrounding obscenity may be part of its allure:
It seems essential to the kick of pornography that it be to some degree against the rules ... . Thus obscenity law, like the law of rape, preserves the value of, without restricting the ability to get, that which it purports to both devalue and to prohibit. Obscenity law helps keep pornography sexy by putting state power - force, hierarchy - behind its purported prohibition on what men can have sexual access to. [228]
"the frontier of the taboo keeps vanishing as one crosses it... . More and more violence has become necessary to keep the progressively desensitized consumer aroused to the illusion that sex is (and he is) daring and dangerous." [229]
(Of course, MacKinnon does not explain adequately how her own regulation of pornography will escape this trap.)