Receptive Bodies

By Leo Bersani

Leo Bersani, known for his provocative interrogations of psychoanalysis, sexuality, and the human body, centers his latest book on a surprisingly simple image: a newborn baby simultaneously crying out and drawing its first breath. These twin ideas—absorption and expulsion, the intake of physical and emotional nourishment and the exhalation of breath—form the backbone of Receptive Bodies, a thoughtful new essay collection. These titular bodies range from fetuses in utero to fully eroticized adults, all the way to celestial giants floating in space. Bersani illustrates his exploration of the body’s capacities to receive and resist what is ostensibly alien using a typically eclectic set of sources, from literary icons like Marquis de Sade to cinematic provocateurs such as Bruno Dumont and Lars von Trier. This sharp and wide-ranging book will excite scholars of Freud, Foucault, and film studies, or anyone who has ever stopped to ponder the give and take of human corporeality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226579931

Leo Bersani

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

Book preview

Receptive Bodies

Receptive Bodies

LEO BERSANI

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-57962-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-57976-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-57993-1 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226579931.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bersani, Leo, author.

Title: Receptive bodies / Leo Bersani.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes index. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018000462 | ISBN 9780226579627 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226579764 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226579931 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Human body (Philosophy) | Human body—Erotic aspects. | Sex (Psychology) | Sexual excitement. | Psychoanalysis.

Classification: LCC B105.B64 B4695 2018 | DDC 128/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000462

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Forewarning

1  Merde alors

2  Why Sex?

3  Sensual Sucking and Sociality

4  Force in Progress

5  Receptivity and Being-In

6  Staring

Index

Footnotes

Forewarning

Passion is an obstacle to pleasure. I would like this to be received as a reformulation of Michel Foucault’s opposition, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, of two regimes of subjectivity: one based on a hermeneutics of desire and sexuality and the other on the discovery and practice of new bodily pleasures. In the following inquiries into the vicissitudes of somatic and psychic receptiveness to the world, passion could be thought of as covering various instances of immobilized reception. I begin with the most extreme example of the human subject’s attempt to block all reception, to reduce the other to an enslaved receiver of the subject’s will. If the fascistic masters of Salò—Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 filmic rethinking of the Marquis de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom—receive anything from the young people they imprison, sexually coerce, torture, and murder, it is the suffering they inflict, a suffering reenacted as an intellectual, moral, and erotic excitement in the torturers. Any possibility of receptive exchange is erased by the passion for absolute control.

If, however, this curiously affectless passion reduces the world to unqualified obedience, it also condemns Pasolini’s masters to a rageful suffering in the midst of a murderous orgy, the suffering of never being able to kill enough. The furious orality represented twice in Derek Jarman’s 1987 film The Last of England (briefly discussed in chapter 3) could be thought of as the failure of an analogous human resolution to transform reception into incorporation—as if a non-digestible difference could be chewed and swallowed into sameness. Finally, as I argue in my study of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in chapter 4, Hermione’s physical violence toward Rupert is, as Rupert himself bizarrely acknowledges, the only right response to his unshakeable refusal to become the consenting agent of Hermione’s will.

By beginning my introduction to these essays with instances of a willed nonreceptivity (and by beginning the collection itself with my discussion of Pasolini’s film, the only previously published essay in the book), I mean to emphasize the nonsystematic nature of these analyses of receptive bodies. They are not meant to constitute an exhaustive study of either receptiveness or nonreceptiveness. There is no single argument about receptivity, and I don’t move toward a conclusion of my various arguments. In the type of essayistic writing which I believe I have always practiced (this book ends with a consideration of what I understand essayistic writing to be), an epigraph to my work might be Flaubert’s dictum, One must never conclude ("Il ne faut jamais conclure"). Those readers interested in (the illusion of) starting at the beginning of a more or less systematic development of ideas are invited to begin with chapter 5, which is as close as I get to a genealogy of the receptive body. The human body is, from its intrauterine origin, a body that receives. The dual moment constitutive of reception can be observed most closely in our earliest postnatal life: breathing in and breathing out, ingestion of food and excretion of waste, entering sleep and emerging from sleep into wakefulness. The receptive body is, then, an incomplete category: reception is inseparable from expulsion. I go on in chapter 5 to discuss this double rhythm as it characterizes sexual penetration and, especially, sleep (with a long detour on the perhaps not infrequent fear of sleep).

Chapter 5 ends with a discussion of a philosopher I have only recently discovered and whose work (in particular, the three-volume Spherology) interests me very much: Peter Sloterdijk. In Bubbles, the first volume of Spherology, Sloterdijk insists on the importance of supplementing the three relational stages proposed by psychoanalytic theory with three pre-oral relational models: the placental, the acoustic, and the respiratory. To rediscover, most notably, extensions of placental relationality in our adult lives would, Sloterdijk persuasively argues, provide a life-enhancing alternative to the conflict-ridden subject-object relational model dominant in Western philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Lars von Trier’s magnificent film Melancholia will provide our most spectacular case of receptiveness. The planet Melancholia has mysteriously left its orbit in space and is headed toward Earth. Although the film’s prologue lets the spectator know that Melancholia will strike and destroy Earth, the characters are, until late in the film, uncertain about whether the planet will hit Earth or narrowly miss it. They will—uncertainly, tragically—receive Melancholia; only one figure welcomes its coming. Justine, whose wedding banquet occupies the first half of the film, seems from the very start to have a mysterious affinity with the planet hurtling toward Earth. In one extraordinary scene she appears to be offering her naked body to the enveloping light of the approaching star. Melancholia has become her cosmic groom, replacing the pitiable human she has just married. Melancholia will allow us to speculate on a nonhuman receptivity perhaps lodged within the human body since the beginning of human life. Receptivity has a cosmic dimension. If, as cosmologists claim, our organism still carries atoms from the Big Bang, an impersonal cosmic being coexists with the mind and the person each of us has become in the course of human evolution. We are psychologically motivated to move; but we are also propelled mindlessly, atomically. It is this pre- or extra-human pure thrusting forward in space to which Justine recognizes that she belongs and which, in Hermione and ultimately in Gudrun, Lawrence anatomizes as an unstoppable destructive movement toward and, ideally, through others. Lawrence psychically metaphorizes this movement as murderous will.

›››‹‹‹

It is more than doubtful that our entire relational life could be modeled on the self-extensive connectedness that defines our intrauterine beginnings. Becoming an individual in our postnatal life is to discover otherness, that is, our difference from the human and nonhuman objects that are the necessarily alien world into which the individual subject is born. How could we be merely receptive to the massive influx of stimuli that would, as I argued in The Freudian Body, destroy us if we failed to take pleasure in being nearly overwhelmed by them? In chapter 3 I revisit those speculations from my 1986 book with, however, an important qualification. If we survive by masochistically receiving a mass of stimuli that would otherwise break down the fragile ego structures of early childhood, this early pleasure in pain should probably also be thought of as our first active resistance to the world. That resistance initiates an eroticized aggressiveness toward the world which will help us to understand Freud’s tantalizing but undeveloped claim in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual drive.

The early twentieth-century American thinker George Herbert Mead provides a philosophical elucidation of the indissoluble bond between reception and resistance. Setting out to explain and to justify his claim for the sociality in nature, Mead (whose complex argument I follow in some detail in chapter 3) gives a brilliant account of the interrelatedness of objects and human subjects. Objects resist our manipulation of them. This is obvious enough; Mead’s originality is to claim that in pressing against an object we arouse in ourselves the object’s attitude of counterpressure. There is continuity of the experience of pressure in the organism and of resistance in the physical object.¹ We respond, both in immediate contacts with objects and at a distance from them, to our own responses to the effects that resistant objects have on us. And objects, Mead profoundly suggests, acquire depth, or a kind of innerness, by virtue of their calling out in the human organism the object’s resistance to that organism. I attempt to unravel Mead’s intricate phenomenology of the play between receptivity and resistance in what he describes as a dialogue, or negotiation, between the human subject and objects. For Mead, that internal dialogue constitutes what we call rational thought.

Mead’s analysis, for all its complexity, has as its object the most ordinary communication between the external world and the subject’s internal world. In chapter 6 I conclude these essays with another extreme example of nonreceptivity (two very different examples of which thus constitute the conceptual bookends of this collection). Bruno Dumont’s 1999 film Humanité is perhaps his strongest evidence for the claim he has made that film is an extraordinary way of doing philosophy. By way of a police investigation into the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl in a village in northwestern France, Humanité becomes a filmic speculation on the enigma of human violence.

Except for his asking early in the film, How can anyone do that? the speculation is conducted wordlessly by Pharaon, the police lieutenant investigating the crime. Furthermore, speculation inadequately qualifies Pharaon’s response to the murder. For Pharaon, the world that accommodates such acts not only resists all attempts to understand it, but, strictly speaking, it is a world that cannot even be looked at, or watched. It can only be stared at—a visual mode joltingly at odds with cinema’s customary privileged looking, probing, and detecting. Pharaon stares, and my essay on Humanité is in large measure a phenomenological analysis of the stare. And yet, if the world has become for Pharaon a place that can no longer be seen or understood (understanding is a promise inherent in seeing), it can perhaps be related to otherwise. Human and nonhuman bodies and objects can be touched, if, like Pharaon, we practice a nonviolent penetration, a contact we might also call a penetrative touching.

›››‹‹‹

Having indulged in a grumpy attack on the presumed need for prefaces in my reluctant preface (titled Against Prefaces?) to my 2005 book Thoughts and Things, I naturally hope that readers of the present collection will benefit from my compliance with the prefatory mandate in critical writing. It has, however, occurred to me that even the most traditionally structured preface is not unambiguously helpful. A preface is a promise—but aren’t our promises always tainted by a warning? In preparing us for what lies ahead, the most preface-friendly author can’t help but make us somewhat nervous. To fulfill a promise is, inevitably, to encounter contingencies that will inflect (at the limit, betray) that for which the maker of the promise has confidently, generously prepared us. Even when the preface to a piece of writing has been written after the writing has been completed (which is usually the case), the author, in the interest of providing a kind of pre-intelligibility to what awaits the reader, inevitably neglects or forgets certain aspects or moments that were present in the full deployment of the preface’s argument. I’m thinking of those moments when the argument has more or less significantly swerved from the involuntarily duplicitous clarifications to which the preface will reduce it.

Readers are right to be somewhat fearful in entering the terrain that has been cleared for them. Crossing the terrain will be—perhaps should be—more hazardous than the brief journey leading to it. We are justified in being suspicious of whatever comfort is the result of that preliminary journey. And that affective mix may be exactly what the good preface produces. Prefaces succeed if they encourage a blend of security and suspicion that gives to the act of reading the at once pleasurable and painful tension of a mind at work.

But enough! Let’s end and start, just a bit perversely, with Samuel Beckett’s brave promise of failure in the face of his discouraged recognition of having always failed to keep that promise: Worstward Ho!

1

Merde alors

Et le scélérat, en enconnant Adélaïde, se figurait comme le duc qu’il foutait sa fille assassinée: incroyable égarement de l’esprit du libertin, qui ne peut rien entendre, rien voir, qu’il ne veuille à l’instant l’imiter!

« Marquis de Sade, Les 120 journées de Sodome »

The vagina is a logical defect in nature. By and large, the Duke warns his female slaves just before the orgies of sex, violence, and storytelling get under way in The 120 Days of Sodom, offer your fronts very little to our sight; remember that this loathsome part, which only the alienation of her wits could have permitted Nature to create, is always the one we find most repugnant.¹ Sadean misogyny is based on the libertine’s view of the female genitalia as a scandalous offense to reason. Nature orders us to live only for the pleasure of our senses at the same time that she continues to produce millions of creatures sexually equipped to repel us.

This repulsion need not be explained in the most familiar Freudian terms. It is unnecessary to think of the libertine’s distaste for the vagina as a disguised fantasy of female castration. Instead, it is a logical consequence of some rigorous speculation about sexual intensities. The most intense Sadean—and sadistic—sexuality depends on symmetry, and with women, Sade’s men enjoy the diminished pleasures of asymmetrical sex. In arguing that it is always better to have sex with boys than with girls, the Bishop in The 120 Days explains, "Consider the problem from the point of view of evil, evil almost always being pleasure’s true and major charm; considered thus, the crime must appear greater