by blonderengel » Thu Nov 05, 2009 4:22 pm
Perhaps we can press into service, for the purpose of adding another dimension to this discussion, Tantra and de Sade…some of what follows are merely “minder” notes, something to work out/on in subsequent rounds, or not at all.
Indian religious thinkers were among the first to realize that spirituality is essentially an embodied phenomenon and that embodiment is essentially spiritual. They realized, in other words, that spirit is never found independent of a living body and that a living body is never devoid of spirit. Some went so far as to say that the two are so intertwined that each is but a mode of a single body-mind, a unity that can be seen as either consciousness or as matter, provided that one always bears in mind that both consciousness and matter are artificial constructs, nothing but heuristic models.
As any seasoned meditator knows, the entire body is filled with consciousness, with sensations of various types. For the sake of convenience, one may distinguish them according to bodily location or according to sense organs, and in some contexts making such distinctions may serve some purpose. But even if such distinctions are not made, a meditator becomes thoroughly aware that body and consciousness are so interconnected as to be best felt as a single field of fluid phenomena that cannot accurately be called either solely material or solely spiritual, that cannot be understood at all but can only be experienced as a flow of ever-changing currents.
Some traditions of thought (and they can be found throughout the ancient and the modern world) seek to separate spirit and matter and to give primacy to one or the other. Some Hellenistic thinkers did this, often with the result of privileging soul to such an extent that the body was regarded as a prison, a naturally defiled and intrinsically unpleasant sheath that prevented the soul from fully enjoying its own purity and beauty and freedom. Some neo-Platonists thought this way in the Hellenistic world, and some Brahmans and Jainas and Bauddhas thought this way in India and in East Asia. It is not unusual, when this outlook is adopted, to regard sexuality with deep suspicion, as an essentially material and therefore impure lure that keeps the ignorant soul imprisoned in decadent flesh. Elizabeth Abbot writes about this _A History of Celibacy_. (She also chronicles how celibate movements based on this dualistic view of the relationship of Soul and Matter often, but not always, turn into movements of men given to misogyny and women prone to misandry.)
In contrast to the dualists, soul-body monists tend to celebrate sensuality and sexuality as natural psychophysical forces that can be denied or repressed only at one's peril. Especially those who have loved in this way (such as the Muslim poet Rumi and various Jewish mystics) regard sexuality as the most powerful metaphor available to describe the feeling of unity between self and other, between soul and matter, between creator and creation. The works of such people are filled with soaring lyrical celebration of embodiment, combined with a deep appreciation of the fact that embodiment constantly changes form, leading to what people think of as death, the cessation of one form as it becomes the material out of which another form arises to take its –temporary-- place.
For them, resistance to change (fear of death) becomes the only trap. Mystical poets often celebrate love and sexuality, and in so doing portray the sexual attraction of lovers as a path to the transcendental. No doubt many of them have had this experience, even if they have chosen never to express it in actual sexual union with a lover. When the work of such mystics is popularized, thereby falling into the hands of people who are still preoccupied with selfish and egocentric thoughts, great confusion can result. For this reason, many sexually celebratory traditions (such as tantra in India) have been transmitted only secretly and only to people who have proven to be quite mature and refined and prepared to make good use of the teachings.
--begin rant
Secret traditions, no matter how carefully they are protected, tend to leak, and sooner or later the secrets are no longer confined to the initiated. ("mystic" derives from a classical Greek word meaning someone who has been initiated into a secret, a mystery.) They then cease to be mystical and become public, although usually in grotesquely vulgarized forms. Our own culture, the culture of modernity, has come about as a result of the almost total conquest of refinement by coarse vulgarity. Scraps and traces of once-mystical teachings are now the property of everyone and can be found in casual discussions in bistros, arcade games, Hollywood films, teevee situation comedies, the routines of stand-up comics in smoke-filled taverns, the lyrics of music to which strippers remove their clothes before slobbering men interested in power and pleasure, and even on the bumper stickers of cars. In Indian mythology, this is the kali-yuga, the era of kali, named after the name given to the unlucky throw of the dice that marks the thrower as a loser. We live in the age of losers.
It is a characteristic of the kali-yuga that everything becomes a commodity. Everything is for sale. Everything has a price. Everything becomes a potential source of entertainment; nothing is sacred, and no one is spared a turn in the laughing-stock. In the kali-yuga sex is nothing but a joke, and celibacy is nothing but a joke; spirituality is a joke, religion is a joke, morality is a joke and beauty is a joke--and so are secularism, materialism, wantonness, and ugliness. We are a people conquered by our own frivolity, destroyed by our own shallowness, overpowered by own fundamental lack of respect for ourselves or for anyone else. We have become an angry race of tormented hell beings, incapable of doing anything more creative than mocking one another, taunting one another, blaming one another for our own stupidity and the misfortunes it engenders.
--end rant
I became interested in the parallel between the sexual DISCIPLINE (i.e., the externalization/extension of *thought* in the erotic realm, i.e., masochism) and the ritual
discipline of the imagination itself, *without limits* (Blake is without limits...Coleridge had his limits). This state of being without limits extends into Sadism. The combination of the imaginative discipline without limits (sadism) and the extension of thought/self/ego into the erotic (masochism) give us sadomasochism and its psychological implications. The Marquis de Sade presents acts of being consumed, primarily, with the intellectual imagination (very classically Romantic...only without limit, thus "libertine."). The Libertine's primary motive, in opposition to that of the Romantic Ideal counterpart, is to serve the Self so totally and completely that one actually moves beyond the Self.
In _Philosophy in the Boudoir_, de Sade deploys sodomy as the main figure for an intellectual transcendence through sex. Of course, as always, the prime motivator is a libertine politics, one that kept the Marquis in the Bastille, jailed both by the crown and the Revolution itself (he was taken out of jail and made a judge by the Revolutionaries, but when they discovered he was against capital punishment, they put him right back in). That he's still regarded as dangerously corrupting to many minds is, in my view, a good thing...esp. when those minds argue his works should remain "hidden away on the highest shelf in a family home, and too strong meat for a reading-group discussion."
In arguing for a politics of the Self over Nature, God, or State, de Sade inserts intervals of frenzied, dangerous sex between much longer intervals of libertine philosophy. While the position on women--"that women were born to be fucked"--is arguable as to how we interpret it, his argument in _Philosophy_ is directed at aristocratic propriety, against frigidity *brought on* by propriety--this is demonstrable when the Marquis brings in the hired hand to help the "tutors" educate Eugenie, the Virgin.
While there are no sentimental overtones of the lower class whatsoever (just the opposite in fact), the Marquis seems to indicate that because we all are *capable* of fucking, we all ought to fuck democratically.
But back to sodomy.
Whatever one decides is the Marquis' position on women (which is hard to say in _Philosophy_ because all the characters are typal, none realistic--they all represent only one or two characteristics of the whole human being), can know that, at least in _Philosophy_, the cunt isn't the main hole being used for sex--but the asshole. When Dolmance, the voice of authority and "true libertinage" in the book, says
All men, all women, resemble each other; sane reflection tells us
so. Tis a cruel trick, this intoxication; does it enhance life?
No. Tis a voluntary deprivation of life's joy, a fever or madness.
Perhaps if we were to always love this adorable object, it could be
excused; but how many of these liaisons are in truth eternal? Next
to none.
he is speaking of libertinage in general, but he repeats throughout that the highest form of fucking (and the Madame agrees) is sodomy--and it is the most natural as well, for it helps keep down an already overpopulated nature. Sodomy is also the most sublime as it has men and women "resemble each other", as well as the fact that the asshole is round to fit the cylindrical member, rather than oval-shaped. Dolmance comments
Every time we discover a new continent, we find sodomy there. Were
we to reach the moon, we would doubtless find sodomy there as well!
O delicious predilection, child of Nature and of pleasure, you will
be found wherever men are, and they will erect altars to you!...
[speaking of the sodomist]...This man's nature, once again unlike
that of others, will be softer, more pliant, subtler; in him you
will detect all the vices and virtues native to women, you might
even find their weaknesses there...tis the delight of philosophers,
of heroes, and would be that of the gods, were not the bodily parts
used in this sacred communion the only gods fit for earth to
revere!
The project of the sodomist was the very project of Wallace Stevens--to render a monarchical God nonexistent by defying his order to "go forth and multiply." Furthermore, the sodomist in de Sade is not the homosexual or even the necessarily "feminine"-- he is simply less the brute. Sodomy affords the pleasures of sex without the mad bent toward procreation, without the goal-orientation; it is the pinnacle rite of psychological consumption (as opposed to devouring). The body and the mind, the sex parts and the gods, are in union in this act precisely because there is no longer a mind (purpose) or merely a body (machine to fulfill "purpose"), but an androgynous unit whose ritual is to extend pleasure into purpose. All other things "typical" of a woman or of a man are secondary to the sodomist's act—because the Madame agrees with this act, sodomy is not exclusively a male activity as it is represented in _Philosophy_.
Very much like the Buddhist koan, the practice of the libertine--to not restrict one's self to from *any* experience, even murder--is to actually eradicate the notion of crime itself. Once done, crime will cease to be:
The aspect of crime does not apply; consider: for an action that
serves one by harming to be a crime, it must be shown that the
injured person is more precious to Nature than he who performs
the deed in response to her impulses. Since all individuals are
of equal disinterest to her, she could never favour one above the
other; hence, the deed that serves one by harming another is of
no consequence to Nature whatsoever.
This is a "Negative Hermeneutic" at work: we will probably not kill, not because Nature forbids it or encourages it, but because there is no "natural" barrier to cross, nothing to transgress. Servitude and criminal transgression are boring notions--as well as pity and Brotherhood. But ultimately, to kill is to reduce the possibilities for enjoying oneself.
This becomes the motive for not killing. Psychologically speaking, it is guilt that causes us to repeat the actions that caused the guilt in the first place. Remove guilt, and you remove the motive for most of those actions. (Like pressing on a toothache--remove the tooth and you cease to think about whether you should or should not press on a tooth.)
The final goal of the libertinage of _Philosophy_, for which the pornography fails to be pornography and succeeds in being representations of the mind/the imagination exercising its given *right* to imagine anything it possibly can (which is, as demonstrated by the outrageously large members of the characters, as well as the impossible amount of time spent fucking, always better than the real thing itself)...the final charge in the book is to be *in control*. Interestingly enough, concerning the criticism of the Marquis' view of women, this charge is directed towards the female--
Generally, we recognize two sorts of cruelty: that resulting from
stupidity which, never reasoned, never rationalized [note here
again the eroticization of thought], turns the
thoughtless individual into a ferocious beast. This cruelty can
afford no pleasure...
[thus killing, even without the metaphysical sense of "murder,"
is actually discouraged]
...since he who is inclined to it is incapable of discrimination.
Such a creature's brutalities are seldom dangerous; it is always
a simple matter to find protection against them. The other species
of cruelty, fruit of extreme organic sensitivity [the Marquis has
referred to "female cruelty, which is always more active than the
male, by reason of the excessive sensitivity of woman's organs"...
it is hard to know when he is kidding and not], is known only to
those of an extremely delicate nature; the limits to which it drives
them are determined by intelligence and acuteness of feeling; this
delicacy, so finely wrought, so impressionable, responds best of
all, and without delay, to cruelty; it awakens in cruelty, cruelty
liberates it. ....
....Now, it is a second type of cruelty which you will most often
find in women. Study them well and you will see that it is their
sensitivity that leads them to cruelty; that is it their extremely
active imagination, the sharpness of their intelligence that
renders them criminal and vicious...
The Marquis is not speaking here of the petty imagination often attributed to women, but to the typal imagination itself, the Stevens-like rage to order that the Marquis insists must be liberated in all people. Intelligence, imagination, and the organs of the body are in union here. Of course, "cruelty" itself as it applies in the sadomasochistic text becomes, as does sodomy, a structural figure in itself. "Cruelty" is *any* exercise of the imagination in a world that has confined the imagination to either peasant idiocy or to aristocratic airs. "Cruelty" is a figure in de Sade for the necessary assertion of self-interest--it is an enlightened cruelty, as opposed to the bestial cruelty of the brute, who only uses his body, or even opposed to the mother, who uses none of hers. The rape and torture of the mother at the end of the book is represented as any rape or torture has been represented in a history of religion or mythology, but de Sade exposes the genteel devices that have been used to mask the visceral, the physical potential of those myths.
Notice the puns:
Eugenie: Come, come, Mama dearest; quiet now, it’s done.
Dolmance: [Emerging with an enormous erection from Madame
de Saint-Ange's hands] Eugenie, allow me to see
to the hag's arse; that portal belongs to me.
Madame de Saint-Ange: You 're too maladroit, Dolmance, you'll make a martyr of her.
Finally, de Sade uses the perverse as the *only* arena in which the perverse strategies of the moralist can be exposed:
...never mistresses, always whores; scorning love, worshiping pure pleasure.
The mistress is tucked away and used for sex, usually in a sickly, "polite" context--like the word itself. The whore, however, is the unhidden, the one who fucks by choice, who refuses to be within her society's boundaries--as is the "mistress". The "tutoring" of the virgin Eugenie in fact is made plain--she goes from being a virgin to a whore in one day, without the degrading process of social normalization and maritalization--without being owned either by her society or her husband. Once the imagination is exposed to the limits, there is no going back for her.
